I got a copy of the "Frek" manuscript this week (nyah nyah nyah) and I got to reading it last night -- and couldn't put it down. I was up for hours reading it, laughing aloud and marking passages of language so fluid and funny that I wanted to stick them up on a cork board over my desk.
The US has a long history of revising its copyright laws to "harmonize" with the Draconian provisions of foreign copyright, and going beyond foreign laws. Of course, then the foreigners revise their copyright to match and exceed ours, and the whole cycle starts again.
But this is a new one: we're setting up treaties with foreign powers that limit what our own Congress can do. What's more, we're setting up these treaties at a time when bills are being circulated on the Hill that would eliminate the worst provisions of the DMCA.
It's pretty sickening to watch the efforts of democratically elected lawmakers being undermined by petty bureaucrats who ride in the pockets of the entertainment lobbies.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Trashy trendspotting: Ho Couture, in LA's garment district
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I was fabric-hunting in LA's garment district yesterday with my business partner -- we run an online design company that sells cool furniture -- and I stumbled on this.
I asked fabric dealers about it, and they told me Ho Couture is huge. Pimp jackets for postmodern playas. Dealers stock two kinds of material for this: first, patterns like the "mudflap girl" (far left), or pinup chyxxors (right). Next, really cheesy fake fur (also shown at left). Leopard, Zebra, whatever, but also outrageous day-glo polkadot fur, like this. Puke-inducing. Think, "Barney, with the measles, after two hits of X." Ghettofabulous designers combine the materials into long smoking jackets and other "pimp" garments. Photos here. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Casemod du jour: Aquatank
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DATE: 05/20/2003 09:39:18 AM
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The designer of this casemod, which took nearly a year to construct, says: "A few months back I was looking through pictures of casemods at various websites when the idea came to me, 'why not put a fish tank in a the top of a full tower case?' I decided to research it some and see if the idea would work. Since I had never attempted any form of case modding, I had a lot to learn. I read a variety of articles on things such as cutting holes, painting, adding LEDs, and making Plexiglas windows. I decided to give it a try." Link, Discuss , (via sixdifferentways, and thanks Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SF Chron on last week's "power tool drag races," Bay area 'bot culture
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DATE: 05/20/2003 09:57:05 AM
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Article in today's San Francisco Chronicle about QBox's recent Power Tool Drag Races, and other Bay Area machine-art groups like SRL:
I've never seen the illustrations in this small gallery, and they're nice. The scanning quality isn't so hot, though. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grow your own facelift
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DATE: 05/22/2003 09:25:24 AM
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Grow-your-own facelift: your skin-cells are grown in vitro and then injected into your face for a healthy, biotech glow.
Both "found art" and farkified photoshop constructions are welcome. Got a contribution? Then e-mail me your urls (no attachments please), or post them in the discuss link at the end of this post.
Here's our first exhibit: Outbreak Girl, whose masked mug graces t-shirts that you can buy online here, Discuss (Thanks, Eric!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anti-assault shock-em jackets for electrified chyxxors
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DATE: 05/22/2003 11:34:29 AM
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Designers at MIT and Advanced Research Apparel have created a wearable anti-assault tool for women that fends off would-be attackers with an 80,000-volt electric shock. The No-Contact Jacket is described as "exo-electric armor," and looks like an ordinary women's jacket. Makes a crackling electric sound when it goes off. WIRED News story snip:
"Len Nepomuceno-Guiao embellished hers with beads for glam cocktail wear. Eddie Baddeo put Swarovski stones and dangling beads for that Tessa Prieto-Valdes look while Rhett Eala used denim rhinestones for casual chic.
It should be pointed out that these designer creations do not meet World Health Organization standards for filtering out particles the size of 0.3 microns. No one is sure how big the droplet causing SARS is, so better to wear your designer mask over the N95 surgical mask."
The sticker design here -- I WarChalk WiFi -- is the first sticker I put on my new laptop. I get tons of compliments on it.
And it turns out that Robert Half International has made a racket out of this. A single mom in Texas who registered virtualgalfriday.com is also being shaken down for thousands by the same white-shoe aggro lawyers on behalf of the same carpetbagging clients.
IP law is out of control, that much is clear. Intellectual Property suits have become a kind of meteor strike, a random event can that interrupt your daily round by punching a flaming hole through your roof and striking you dead where you stand.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Priceline founder: Feds should pay Americans to spy-cam each other
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DATE: 05/27/2003 03:21:49 PM
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Pointing us to Priceline.com founder Jay Walker's new anti-terror-tech proposal, Greg says, "I can only say at this point that one of two things might happen...A) they scrap the whole idea [my hope], or that the US gov't buys every welfare recipient a computer and an internet connection and pays them to monitor vital installations around the USA. Seriously though, I find it disturbing that someone would come up with this idea. It smacks of creepy neighbourhood spies."
Apple has removed a useful feature from its software, and its customers are out in the cold. I paid $50 or so for downloadable iTunes tracks, with the understanding that Apple had sold me something that would stream over the Internet. Yesterday, they had. Today, they took it away. And they called it an "enhancement." As Winston Smith said to O'Brien, "Don't piss in my mouth and tell me it's Victory Gin."
Sure, I could just skip the update, but how long will that work for? When 10.3 ships next year, will I be able to run an unupdated iTunes on it? Will I have to pickle a computer and keep from updating it in order to continue to use my iTunes music in the way I was promised I could?
Apple wants to be the leader of the Digital Lifestyle pack. The digital lifestyle is all about the fluidity of bits, the fact that all computers on the Internet are, in some sense, in the same place, no matter where they're physically located.
But Apple is choosing to screw its customers and kowtow to the entertainment interests who have, at various times, tried to ban the piano roll, the radio, the VCR, and the Internet. They're putting the desires of the companies that tried to ban firewalls ahead of the legitimate expectations of their customers. A digital lifestyle designed by Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti is a world of "consumers" (us) and "producers" (them). It's the opposite of the iApps philosophy.
I've been living in San Francisco going on three years now, and I haven't found a barber to take their place. For a while I tried a bunch of the barbershops in the Castro -- reasoning that if there's one place in town you can get a reliable flat-top, it'll be the gay ghetto where everyone has a brush-cut of some kind -- but I found the quality really, really unreliable. Then I found a barber, Margaret of Nimbus, who could get a close approximation of my haircut, but last month she developed repetitive strain injury in her hands and wrists and hung up her shears.
The last time I was in Toronto, I got a haircut at Aristotelis and asked Tito the barber to snap a bunch of digital pictures of it from every angle. I have been carrying these photos around to various barbershops in San Francisco and saying, "Give me this haircut," and getting disastrous results.
So I throw myself upon the mercy of the Interweb. O San Franciscan readers, recommend to me a barbershop in San Francisco, (near the BART, or in the Mission, the Castro or Noe Valley) that can serve up my haircut reliably. Please?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital folk art, exhibit K: news photos
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DATE: 05/28/2003 09:05:11 AM
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Not digital folk art per se, but a slew of news photo urls depicting SARS-related "folk art" in China, submitted by friends of BoingBoing. Photo links:
one, two, three, four, five, six.
(Earlier "SARS folk art" exhibits in this reader-contributed series: A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
and J)
Discuss, (Thanks, Susannah, and thanks, anonymous)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital folk art, exhibit L: Sars Wars
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DATE: 05/28/2003 09:16:18 AM
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Contributed by William.
We want to move around to different islands every few months. We'll come back in a year or so. I'm going to try to keep writing and illustrating. Most of the islands have cybercafes, so I'll be blogging. I'll occasionally post to boingboing.net, but most of my blogging will be on The Island Chronicles blog at boingboing.net/island. The plan is to post a new photo and caption every day. I have a few sample photos already posted, as a way to test the design.
If you've traveled to the South Pacific recently, especially Rarotonga, or the other Cook Islands, I'd love to hear from you. Please email me at mark@well.com, or call my voice mail at 818-475-1350, or post a message in the discuss link. Kia orana!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harvey Birdman: Atty at Law -- venal toons
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DATE: 05/29/2003 08:36:53 AM
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Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, is a new Cartoon Network show in the tradition of the classic Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, in which classic cartoon characters are reimagined as vicious, satirical criminals. This Salon piece on the show was intriguing enough that I've asked my TiVo to get me a Season Pass to it.
Adina Levin from EFF-Austin has written up a post-mortem of their experiences in state politics. This is a remarkable document, a rare civilian-friendly peek inside the machinations of competing lobbyists and the shortest path to effective action.
In any event, Barabara Streisand is taking legal action against the California Coastline project, which we've written about here before. The project is an astonishingly cool one, in which a photographic record of every inch of California's coastline is posted to the web and archived as new photos come in. The project has already been useful in filings regarding environemntal regulation, demonstrating the malfeasance of users of the coast, and in showing the effects of abuse of land.
Streisand is pissed because the photographers who shoot the coastline that her home abuts are, to her mind, invading her privacy (nevermind that dozens of satellites invade her privacy in exactly the same way, several times a day). Streisand, who has been active in environmental causes, has totally lost her shit over this, asserting that no one may photograph her property even from public airspace, no matter that this is a vital piece of the effort to preserve California's coast.
Since shortly after our web site "went live", Barbra Streisand has been complaining about a photograph on our web site, 3% of which covers her home. In February 2003, we received a threatening letter from her attorney, John Gatti of Alschuler Grossman Stein & Kahan LLP, demanding that we "immediately cease and desist from photographing and displaying and identifying photographs of Ms. Streisand's home on the website www.californiacoastline.org [...]".
We refuse to be intimidated by these tactics, which would undermine our constitutional protection of free speech and which would compromise the integrity of this historical and scientific database. As a result of which, we received a second threatening letter.
Our goal is to create a complete record of the California coastline. This record has been used by a number of government, university, press, and environmental groups (partial list) free of charge. It is not possible to provide the public with a complete record without the photographs of the coast that happen to include Ms. Streisand's estate. We do not believe in giving special treatment to wealthy coastal land owners.
Anyone with a private plane wanna snap a pic of Streisand's stretch of beach?
Thanks to John Parres for providing the image in question
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital folk art, exhibit "Q": Andi and Lance Olsen contribute
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DATE: 06/02/2003 07:40:12 AM
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Writer Lance Olsen and artist Andi Olsen contribute word and image to BoingBoing's exploration of SARS reflected in digital culture. "Spontaneous Ars Poetica" is a collage text from a fictional medical journal that Andi createad in collaboration with her partner, "speculative fiction" writer Lance. Look for it in the next issue of Fiction International. At left, Andi's illustration for the collage text (see image full-size). She says, "It was created before SARS took off, but it's still applicable in the way it rethinks the mask and deals with the idea of communicability, both viral and verbal."
About the illustration: "The sutures and wound (albeit manipulated in Photoshop) were a result of a chainsaw accident from last summer that
left me with a gash to the shin bone," says Andi. "It was fascinatingly gruesome, and I couldn't help but photograph the various stages of recovery. The image of the face is taken from a pathology book."
Bonus browsing: BoingBoing readers found these -- Chinese government poster (thanks, jude), Mona Lisa (thanks, Geisha), aggro facemask, smoking surgeon, more Sean Bonner, Seattle club flyers (thanks, Eric).
Discuss. (Previous posts: A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
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J, K, L,
M, N, O,
P.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Alife toolkit for OS X
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DATE: 06/02/2003 08:01:50 AM
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Avida, a graphic, open-source toolkit for experimenting with artificial life, looks fascinating. The research projects that it's sparked -- including self-modifying code -- are wild.
Avida is an auto-adaptive genetic system designed primarily for use as a platform in Digital or Artificial Life research. In lay terms, Avida is a digital world in which simple computer programs mutate and evolve.
Avida allows us to study questions and perform experiments in evolutionalry dynamics and theoretical biology that are intractable in real biological system.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bloggers cover G8 summit live from Swiss/French border
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DATE: 06/02/2003 08:07:13 AM
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BoingBoing blog-pal in Paris Jean-Luc sends word of mobloggers covering the news on-site from massive anti-G8 protests in towns near the border of France and Switzerland:
Hello Xeni -- from June 1st to 3rd, the G8 World Summit takes place in Evian, France, with presidents of major countries. "Altermondialisation" (antiglobalization) people who are against the G8 have gathered at the French-Swiss border, in Annemasse (France) and Lausanne (Switzerland). Bloggers on-site are there covering in French (but with pics with speak on their own!). Here is one called live from Annemasse. Fraternet is also blogging from there, and they announce in this post plans for live blog coverage of the international
demonstration at the frontier attempting to go into Evian. Also, this moblog called "Project Hive" works, and people there are sending in MMS, SMS and pics via their cell phones or PDAs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fantastic Metropolis: now on paper!
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DATE: 06/02/2003 08:08:23 AM
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Fantastic Metropolis, a brilliant science-fiction webzine, has published an anthology of the best of its first year of publications, including pieces by Moorcock, Vandermeer, Ballingrud, Mieville and others. The whole book is available online, or you can pony up for the physical book.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dutch court locks up 419 scammers
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DATE: 06/02/2003 08:31:25 AM
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A Dutch court has sentenced six Nigerian-letter scammers to 1-4.5 years in prison.
One Swiss professor - presumably he wrote his doctorate on complete stupidity - gave the gang $482,000 on the promise of a $9 million return. Among the "expenses" he shelled out was a sum for chemicals needed to "clean" the illicit cash. This is a 419 classic - the notes have allegedly been marked with a special dye to prevent recirculation. Obviously, getting it off requires special, expensive liquids...
The prof did, however, eventually get his revenge on the ne'er-do-well Nigerians. He helped the Dutch police lure the scammers to an Amsterdam railway station in the Summer of 2002, where the whole bunch had their collars duly felt. Sadly, the total amount accrued by the jailbirds is unknown. The authorities believe it runs into millions of euro, none of which is likely to be recovered.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Computer parrots are more lovable
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DATE: 06/02/2003 08:34:13 AM
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Japanese researchers have found that people form emotional bonds with talking software if it mimics their own voices.
... the character hummed back sounds that mimicked characteristic features, such as the rhythm, intonation, loudness and pitch of the user's voice. The extent of the mimicry varied.
The users then rated the character in areas such as cooperation, learning ability, task-achievement, comfort, friendliness, and sympathy. The animated character scored highest on all these factors when its voice was mimicking about 80 per cent of the user's voice.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Can Mozilla live without Netscape?
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DATE: 06/02/2003 08:37:35 AM
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In the wake of last week's "settlement" in which Microsoft paid Time-Warner $750,000,000 to settle its wrongdoing in the browser-wars (and got the right to ship Time-Warner's music with Microsoft DRM in return), Andrew Leonard has posted a good editorial pondering the future of Mozilla, now that Netscape's stern parent-company is in bed with Redmond.
If Blizzard is correct, maybe Mozilla doesn't really need Netscape anymore -- maybe it's ready to leave the nest. And wouldn't that be the greatest irony of a long and tortuous story? After years of effort by the federal government, Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist. And after years of tussling with AOL, Microsoft is getting what it wants by handing over buckets of cash. But still, it can't stamp out those pesky open-source coders, who, like cockroaches after a nuclear blast, seem to be able to survive everything. Companies come and go, stock markets rise and fall, and still the developers make their bug reports, check in their new code, and prepare their next release. Maybe the browser wars aren't really over, after all.
Salon Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC loosens media concentration, screws America
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DATE: 06/02/2003 09:11:24 AM
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The FCC has, as predicted, loosened up the rules of media concentration, casting aside the last vestige of competition and diversity in the media, opening the gates for even more uniformity in the news and information we receive. Me, I'm just glad that ClearChannel's afternoon Three Minute Hate show will be on every channel on my dial every day.
The coaltion in opposition to this was the most diverse I can remember seeing. Bipartisan, from all walks of life. The FCC was innundated with thousands and thousands of comments from the public in opposition to this. Meanwhile the main voice in favor of this came from the same self-interested parties who will benefit under the new regulation. It's a revolting and perverse demonstration of "regulatory capture," where a regulated industry calls all the shots at the body that's nominally overseeing it -- the fox guarding the henhouse.
The Republican-controlled Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 -- along party lines -- to adopt a series of changes favored by media companies.
These companies argued that existing ownership rules were outmoded on a media landscape that has been substantially altered by cable TV, satellite broadcasts and the Internet.
Critics say the eased restrictions would likely lead to a wave of mergers landing a few giant media companies in control of even more of what the public sees, hears and reads.
The decision was a victory for FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who has faced growing criticism from diverse interests opposed to his move toward deregulation.
"Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism," Powell said. He said the old restrictions were too outdated to survive legal challenges and the FCC "wrote rules to match the times."
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(Thanks, Pete!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital folk art, exhibit "R": artist Dave Cooper contributes
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DATE: 06/02/2003 09:42:25 AM
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This nonworksafe image -- and the "censored," work-safe thumbnail posted at left -- was created exclusively for BoingBoing's SARS digital art series by acclaimed artist Dave Cooper, creator of the Harvey Award-nominated graphic novel Suckle: The Status of Basil (Fantagraphics, 1996).
Cooper has been busy in recent years: at one point, he was simultaneously creating three different serials for various anthologies: "Dan & Larry" in Dark Horse Presents, "Crumple" in Zero Zero, and the all-ages "Pip & Norton," published in a wide array of publications. Each of these three serials feature divergent styles and display a range of cartooning that Cooper is currently showcasing in his ongoing quarterly series WEASEL.
In addition to comics, he has created designs for animated television series, most notably Matt Groening's Futurama. David Charles Cooper lives in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife, Julie. He makes his living in cartoon design, magazine illustration, & through the sale of original comicbook artwork & his fine art oil paintings.
Discuss. (Previous posts: A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
J, K, L,
M, N, O,
P,
Q.) PS: Fantagraphics needs your help.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gillmor on FCC media concentration ruling
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DATE: 06/02/2003 10:11:04 AM
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The ever-prescient Dan Gillmor posted a particularly eloquent column in advance of today's FCC action:
Where do we go from here? We, the people, need to understand what's happening, and why. Then we need to get angry. We need to get organized, and take the fight back to the halls of power.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Say Hello to MTV, the phone company.
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DATE: 06/02/2003 12:10:38 PM
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MTV's about to become Sweden's latest mobile operator:
Music video channel MTV is to venture into the world of mobile phone service provision in Sweden. Beginning this month, MTV Europe is to offer pre-paid mobile services in the Scandinavian country as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) over Telia Mobile's GSM network, branded "Hello MTV". Aiming its service at the young viewers of its music television network, the country's newest mobile operator will include various musical data services such as music news, premium ringtones and programme information. Users will also be able download music charts and contact musicians and MTV VJs though special numbers. The music channel has subcontracted mobile virtual network enabler Spinbox to provide network management, billing and customer care. This company, has, in turn, subcontracted SmartTrust to provide and manage the network's mobile data services.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Gecko Gloves for humans
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DATE: 06/02/2003 01:10:07 PM
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Through the brilliance of biomimicry, researchers at the University of Manchester have produced a sticky tape covered in "billions of tiny plastic fibers which are similar to natural hairs covering the soles of geckos' feet." I love this quote from one of the researchers:
"We have also considered producing a large amount of gecko tape - sufficient amounts to enable a student to hang out of a window of a tall building. However it would cost too much money, and would not benefit us scientifically..."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More G8 protest moblogging: pics from France/Switzerland
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DATE: 06/02/2003 01:18:56 PM
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Geoffroi of the French blog Fraternet writes: "Hello Xeni, Pics from live blog coverage of the demonstration in Annemasse-Geneve are are online now -- Merci et a bientot!"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bill Bryson interview
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DATE: 06/02/2003 01:19:57 PM
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New Scientist interviews Bill Bryson, the travel writer whose new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is apparently a wonderfully broad and readable introduction to science.
"The part that I sometimes found hard was sitting with a scientist as they explained their work to me. I had one scientist who was extremely patient at explaining particle physics to me, and I simply couldn't grasp it at all. It seemed like the sort of thing that someone on LSD would be telling you."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New guestblogger: John C. Dvorak
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DATE: 06/02/2003 03:43:03 PM
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John C. Dvorak, legendary net.curmudgeon and old-school computer columnist, joins us now as our latest guestblogger.
John C. Dvorak is a long-time columnist for PC Magazine and PC Magazine Online and his writings can be found in China, Croatia, Brazil, Portugal, Greece and other locales. How they got there he is unsure. Formerly a columnist with Barron's and Forbes while hosting both a TV show and a syndicated radio show he now eschews such folly and is finishing ONLINE! -- the book, to be published by Prentice-Hall this Fall.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Farewell to guestblogger Karen Marcelo
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DATE: 06/02/2003 03:52:51 PM
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Karen Marcelo's guest-blogging hijinks end today. K0re, you did a fantastic job, and we'll miss you -- and guest-guest-blogger Macki -- a lot. Boingboing readers, if you're in the San Francisco area this week, don't miss Karen's Dorkbot event on
Wednesday June 4th, 7:30pm, at polymorf's. The last one was standing-room-only, and this one-year-anniversary event (with afterparty) is shaping up to be terrific. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Keanu gives Matrix F/X guys millions each
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DATE: 06/02/2003 04:41:37 PM
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Keanu Reeves says he has enough money to last him "for the next few centuries." So he is giving £million to the 29 people on the special effects team behind The Matrix: Reloaded. Each will get £5 million. What a cool guy! Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roger's latest clock
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DATE: 06/02/2003 10:33:14 PM
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Roger Wood's latest clock, made out of an old pram, has made me smile for the first time today. Rotten day. Good clock. Click the link for a larger view.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Petition for the Eldred Act: save the public domain
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DATE: 06/02/2003 10:37:56 PM
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Lessig and company have authored a petition to Congress, asking them to pass the Eric Eldred Act to preserve the public domain. Under this proposal, rights-holders who want to retain their copyrights beyond 50 years need to pay a dollar per work at the 50 year mark (tax-deductible) to register the copyrights. When the Supremes heard the Eldred case, they heard that 98% of the works in copyright are lying fallow, earning nothing for anyone, out of print and not available to the public. In this proposal, the 2% of copyrights that earn money can go on earning money, while the remaining, vast majority will be rescued from history's dustbin.
One solution in particular that we ask Congress to consider is the Public Domain Enhancement Act. See http://eldred.cc This statute would require American copyright owners to pay a very low fee (for example, $1) fifty years after a copyrighted work was published. If the owner pays the fee, the copyright will continue for whatever duration Congress sets. But if the copyright is not worth even $1 to the owner, then we believe the work should pass into the public domain.
This legislation would strengthen the public domain without burdening copyright owners. It would also help clarify rights over copyrighted material, which in turn would enable reuse of that material. The law could thus help restore balance to the protection of copyright, and support the public domain.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Orlando ^H^H^H^H^H^H Georgia slum themepark
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DATE: 06/02/2003 10:39:51 PM
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Habitat for Humanity is opening a slum themepark in Orlando Georgia (thanks, senor), to help visitors understand how most of the world lives.
"Essentially, it's a theme park for poverty housing," Fuller told Reuters. "You'll come out of the center and walk right into a slum. You'll see the kind of pitiful living conditions so many people in the world have."
After touring mock slums from Africa, Asia and Central America, visitors to the Global Village will see examples of the modest homes Habitat builds in those regions.
"You see what a steep improvement acceptable housing makes in someone's life. We think we'll recruit a lot of volunteers this way," Fuller said.
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(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Guys spend six years recreating Raiders of the Lost Ark
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DATE: 06/02/2003 10:41:18 PM
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Zed sez, "This is one of the most beautifully geeky things I've ever heard of. In 1982, 3 12-year-olds decided to make a shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 7 years later they'd finished. The linked article includes a link to a trailer, but it's very short. I really hope this isn't an elaborate hoax, 'cause I'd love to see it."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Media diversity...through Congress?
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DATE: 06/02/2003 11:08:41 PM
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Senators from both sides of the floor are cooking up legislation that will force the FCC to create new regulations that ensure diversity in media ownership.
The group said it was pressing ahead with legislation to retain limits keeping a network from owning stations that together reach more than 35 percent of the national audience...
But Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi told a news conference there was no partisanship in Senate opposition to the new cap.
"A lot of Republicans, in fact, probably most of the Republicans in Congress, would not agree with this decision," said Lott, the former Republican leader of the Senate.
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: For sale by government: used car, loaded (with pot)
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DATE: 06/03/2003 07:50:20 AM
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A Mexican national is looking to sue the US government after Customs agents arrested and imprisoned him for driving across the border with199 pounds of marijuana stuffed into his car's bumpers. The irony is that he bought the car, pre-packed with the pot, at a US Marshals Service Auction in San Diego. The car had been seized by the INS when it was used to run illegal immigrants into the US. The INS officials had apparently missed the hidden weed though.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital folk art, exhibit "S": artist Katie Bush contributes
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DATE: 06/03/2003 01:19:17 PM
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Acclaimed 'Net artist Katie Bush created this exclusive for BoingBoing: SARS! (link to full-size image). And here is a related gif-based, moving-image web art piece from Katie about virus, disease, and media memes.
Katie is an American artist whose work explores the possiblities of ready-made clip art in a warped, funny and satirical reevaluation of the American Dream. In All Systems Go, users navigate through little animated vignettes that depict the banality of suburban existence. The scenes in destroyevil.com question the 'goals' of money, power, sex and fame, the pursuit of happiness as presented to us by mass media. Vivid colors, mass-produced clip art and the low-tech animations emphasize cheap, throwaway culture that Americans are nurtured on. Her digital and analog works have been shown in venues throughout North America and Europe, and in print and online at Rhizome.org, Eleven Bulls, and Sissorkick.com.
Bonus links: on Declan McCullagh's politech list, this interesting item on How Singapore is confronting SARS. And for "Discuss" board trolls who tire of SARS-meme posts on BoingBoing, I offer this trollbait: one (thanks, Modesty) and two (Thanks, Jaison).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Homeland security honcha has phony PhD
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DATE: 06/03/2003 05:15:08 PM
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A senior technical official in the Homeland Security Department has a phony Ph.D. from a diploma mill. I'm thinking that I'd like to get one of these and join my parents (Dr. and Dr. Doctorow) as Dr. Doctorow, Jr.
Laura L. Callahan, now senior director in the office of department CIO Steven Cooper, states on her professional biography that she "holds a Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems from Hamilton University." Callahan, who is also president of the Association for Federal IRM and a member of the CIO Council, is commonly called by the title "Dr."...
Hamilton University, according to an Internet search, is located in Evanston, Wyo. It is affiliated with and supported by Faith in the Order of Nature Fellowship Church, also in Evanston. The state of Wyoming does not license Hamilton because it claims a religious exemption. Oregon has identified Hamilton University as a diploma mill unaccredited by any organization recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
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(Thanks, Cutter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Malaysia calls for boycott of Hollywood
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DATE: 06/03/2003 05:17:18 PM
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A minister in the Malaysian government is calling on Malaysian citizens to boycott CDs, VCDs and DVDs until the entertainment industry cuts its prices.
Ironically, the government made the request in order to help the industry: it offered the move as a solution to escalating music and movie piracy.
"There are some new local movie releases that are priced at MYR10 ($2.64). The VCDs are affordable and not bootlegged by illegal manufacturers," said Subramaniam. "Those priced at MYR30 ($7.91) and above are normally the ones that get pirated. This proves that the price factor is the main reason why consumers buy pirated CDs and VCDs."
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(Thanks, Randy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Christian group wants to fly anti-gay banners over WDW no-fly zone
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DATE: 06/03/2003 08:44:23 PM
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A Christian group in Orlando is calling for a lifting of the no-fly ban over Walt Disney World so that they can charter airplanes to drag anti-gay banners over the park during Gay Days, an unofficial gathering of gays and lesbians at the park.
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(Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gnutella author quitting AOL over inability to express in code
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DATE: 06/03/2003 08:44:44 PM
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Justin Frankel, the founder of Nullsoft and author of Gnutella, WinAmp and WASTE, has posted a blog entry in which he eloquently describes his feeling that coding is a form of expression, and his inability to reconcile AOL (his employer)'s total control over his coding. He says he's quitting AOL.
For me, coding is a form of self-expression.
It's probably the form I'm most effective at.
Everything I own is arguably owned by the company.
The company controls what I do with my code...
The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have.
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(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cracking the "Bible Code"
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DATE: 06/04/2003 08:25:02 AM
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In his books The Bible Code (1997) and its sequel, the Bible Code II (2002), Michael Drosnin claims that there are secret prophecies encoded in the Hebrew Pentateuch, readable using software that takes every nth letter and helps you search the text blocks for patterns. In the first book, Drosnin claimed that the code predicted Yitzhak Rabin's assasination, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the end of the world in 2000 (ooops!). The sequel highlights predictions of "more current" events like the Bush/Gore election controversy and, natch, 9/11.
Physicist Dave Thomas applied the same technique to an excerpt from the Bible Code II he grabbed off Amazon.com and discovered this important message:
"THE BIBLE CODE IS A SILLY, DUMB, FAKE, FALSE, EVIL, NASTY, DISMAL FRAUD AND SNAKE-OIL HOAX."
More on this Bible Code crap in Michael "The Skeptic" Shermer's latest column in Scientific American....
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: A librarian on PATRIOT
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DATE: 06/04/2003 08:28:40 AM
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A Cal State librarian intern has written a stirring op-ed for the LA Times about the way that the PATRIOT Act forces librarians to act in a way that betrays their calling.
An elderly woman approached the reference desk recently to ask for help in finding a novel. My impression was that neither her vision nor her legs were up to the task of the search, so I retrieved the book for her from the large-print section. While I was thus engaged, my patron was busy reading the placard that the library where I intern has placed at the reference desk. Its purpose is to inform patrons about the USA Patriot Act [the law passed after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the government's surveillance powers in terrorist investigations]. It took her a while to absorb the meaning before she spoke.
She said: "What does this mean? This is like the Red Scare. You surely aren't going to participate in this, are you? I have lived a long time, and never thought I would see this happen again."
With that she departed.
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robot Talent Show "ArtBots" in NYC this July
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DATE: 06/04/2003 10:01:34 AM
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'Bot curator Douglas Repetto says:
BoingBoing has mentioned ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show before, and I thought your readers might be interested in our current status. We're ramping up for our July show; information about this year's participants are now online here-- including bot pictures and artist statements. There's lots of great work, with 23 participants from six countries!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online audio, video of FCC decision protests at Lisa Rein's blog
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DATE: 06/04/2003 10:06:25 AM
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BoingBoing pal Lisa Rein points us to this extensive archive of TV footage, home-shot digital video, and street-captured audio documenting reactions to this week's FCC ruling. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: French blogger blogs Concorde's final flight
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DATE: 06/04/2003 10:12:07 AM
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Jean-Luc in Paris writes, "This week, a French blogger flew on the infamous Concorde plane's last and final flight from a French airport -- from Paris to Paris, via the Atlantic Ocean. I just discovered this blog-post about his experience, which includes pics."
Link (both blogs = French text),
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital folk art, exhibit "T": Susannah Breslin contributes
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DATE: 06/04/2003 10:18:26 AM
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Phone sex is safe sex: don't touch me, don't breathe on me, just call me. Hu Wo -- "call me," in Chinese -- is the title of this image created for BoingBoing's digital art series by Susannah Breslin.
A former BoingBoing guestblogger, Susannah is a writer, blogger, photographer and illustrator whose work explores sexuality and technology, among other things.
She lives in Los Angeles, where she is working on the short story collection You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?, which will be published by Future Tense Books, and the graphic flash fiction book The Fetish Alphabet (which is still in need of a publisher with cojones). You can find more of her work on Reverse Cowgirl's Blog, in which she "attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Willful Infringement -- illegal copyright documentary
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DATE: 06/04/2003 11:16:54 AM
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Willful Infringement is a feature film about the ways that copyright has harmed free expression and creativity. The movie features clowns talking about the legal threats they got for twisting balloon-animal Barneys, Negativland conspiracists discussiing life after being crushed for making music out of samples, as well as lots of legal geniuses and iconoclasts talking about how we got here and where we're going. I was interviewed for this flick, but I didn't make the cut I saw (who knows if I made it to the DVD?). The movie is now out on DVD -- in glorious infringe-o-rama, sure to be removed form the market in short order. Get your copy while you still can! At $50, the price-tag is a little steep, but it's a fascinating watch.
Link
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(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hong Kong pimps like phonecams
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DATE: 06/04/2003 11:36:04 AM
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Sex trade brokers -- okay, pimps -- in Hong Kong are MMS'ing color snapshots of prostitutes to potential johns via cellphone, according to a South China Morning Post item on Tuesday.
Police are investigating the phenomenon and have been checking the cellphones of pimps arrested in raids in the city's red light districts, according to the newspaper. No one has so far been arrested for soliciting by cellphone, however. A police source quoted by the newspaper said: "The first to maximise the technology are the pimps in the red light area. Before they make the deal they show the client a photo preview on the cellphone." Hong Kong residents have one of the highest rates of cellphone ownership in the world with more than eight out of 10 of the territory's 6,8 million population owning a handset. New-style phones with colour screens are increasingly popular in the gadget-hungry city.
Link Discuss (via gizmodo, via pho list). BoingBoing reader Chico quips: "We put the HO in phone."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Restore Apple iTunes 4.0.1 'Net sharing feature with "401(ok)" freeware app
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DATE: 06/04/2003 07:08:29 PM
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iCommune creator Jim Speth tells BoingBoing:
Well, I whipped up a crappy little application called 401(ok) that combines a few hacks to restore internet-wide sharing to iTunes 4.0.1. I know I really liked the ability to access *my* music from anywhere, and I didn't like that the 4.0.1 update removed that feature. Steve giveth, and Steve taketh away. You can download it here. I made it as quickly as I could, and it could use a lot of improvement. I'll make it better if people think the basic functionality is worthwhile.
Why is this rad? Read Cory's 05/27/02 post about Apple's removal of the share feature: Apple force-feeds customers shit, calls it sunshine.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harry Potter reading webcast on June 26
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DATE: 06/04/2003 08:39:08 PM
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JK Rowling will read from the new Harry Potter novel at 4PM London time in the Royal Albert Hall on June 26. The event, including a Q&A, will be webcast.
Link
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bulletproof sawdust-and-ice ships almost won the war
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DATE: 06/04/2003 08:42:41 PM
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During WWII, Lord Mountbatten tried to get the American military to build warships out of Pykrete, a mixture of sawdust and ice which was bullet- and bomb-proof.
In early 1943 two American professors discovered that a very tough material could be produced by adding a small amount of wood pulp to water before freezing. They called this material pykrete, in honour of Geoffrey Pyke.
Lord Mountbatten had a block of pykrete prepared by a Canadian engineering company, and took this block to the Quebec Conference in the fall of 1943. As it appeared that "Habbakuk" would run into supply and technical problems, not to mention the high costs ($100 million for the first ship), it was Mountbatten's aim to get the Americans to take over the project. It is reported that he fired a revolver at the pykrete block during a coffee break, and the bullet bounced off and struck one of the senior officers who were present -- thankfully without serious injury!
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(via Memepool)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aimster arguments audio online
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DATE: 06/04/2003 08:44:34 PM
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The Sevent Circuit Court of Appeals has posted audio of the oral arguments in today's hearings on Aimster, a P2P file-sharing tool that the entertainment companies are all verklempt over.
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(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: T-mobile launches $300 color Sidekick with cam, phone, PDA in USA
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DATE: 06/05/2003 06:32:19 AM
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Only available on T-Mobile. Hal sez: "Now they just need some decent service plans for Sidekick customers!"
The Sidekick handheld device combines Web browsing, e-mail, AOL Instant Messenger service, cell phone, personal digital assistant and camera features on a single platform.
In addition to a color screen, the new Sidekick has double the memory of its predecessor and its accessory camera offers better resolution and a larger picture size, T-Mobile said.
The color-screen Sidekick will cost about $300 and will be available starting on June 6 through a T-Mobile 1-800 telephone line and CompUSA Inc. retail stores, the carrier said.
Link to Reuters story,
Discuss
(via unwired list) update: here's an image, via CNET (thanks, ernie).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: G8 photoblogs: Geneva riots
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DATE: 06/05/2003 06:36:36 AM
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Christophe in Switzerland writes:
"This is a photoblog of the riots which have happend over the past four days in Geneva, during the G8 summit. More pictures (other days) :
one, two, and three." Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Milwaukee getting free WiFi in the park
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DATE: 06/05/2003 08:51:29 AM
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Milwaukee is getting free WiFi in two of its parks, courtesy of city government. I love seeing this kind of thing, and we're seeing more and more of it.
However, it's a pity that the author of this article felt the need to find a "security expert" to crap all over it with half-assed, semi-accurate warnings:
Ben Sherwood, a privacy adviser and president of Sherwood Personal Security, based in Oakbrook, Ill., said people using a wireless network should not conduct sensitive or private communication over the system.
"It's a huge security risk. Whenever you use a wireless network, you are opening yourself up to the information you're sending being snatched out of the air by someone else," he said.
Sherwood said buying items over the Internet or checking an online bank account using a wireless network would be a bad idea.
Sherwood is just sowing FUD here. First of all, anyone with a cablemodem connection is in the same boat as a wireless user: your communications can be captured by anyone in your neighborhood and read. This is also true if you're using the DSL in your hotel room -- and the connection in your office is sniffable by your sysadmins.
The most glaring inaccuracy is the business about buying stuff and checking a bank-balance over a wireless link. The security of this activity is determined by the presence or absence of an SSL connection. If your bank uses SSL (and all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. If your e-tailer uses SSL (and nearly all of them do), then you're (relatively) secure. And if they don't, you shouldn't be doing business with them in the first place: sending sensitive information in cleartext over the Internet is insecure regardless of your connection.
The other thing that ticked me off about this article is this:
The wireless networks use a popular technology called Wi-Fi, which is short for "wireless fidelity" and sometimes mentioned by the technical description 802.11b.
As Glenn Fleishman has pointed out, "WiFi" isn't short for wireless fidelity. It's a play on words, a joke based on "Hi-Fi." Explaining to readers that "WiFi is short for 'wireless fidelity'" is nonsensical. A reader who hasn't heard of WiFi won't be enlightened by this explanation. If you feel that your readers are so dim as to miss the gag, then, for heaven's sake, why not write something like, "WiFi, a pun on 'HiFi,' is a marketing term for the 802.11b wireless standard, which allows computers to connect to the Internet at high speeds from distances of up to 300 feet."
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(Thanks, Layla!)
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TITLE: Teen girls train FBI to pose as teen girls
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The FBI is hiring teenage girls to teach its undercovers to convincingly impersonate jailbait in chatrooms and catch pedophiles.
"They, like, don't know anything," said Mary, 14, giggling.
"They're, like, do you like Michael Jackson?" said Karen, 14, rolling her eyes at just how out of it adults can be.
Probably the youngest instructors ever in an FBI classroom, the girls have become an invaluable help to Operation Innocent Images -- an initiative that tries to stop people from peddling child pornography or otherwise sexually exploiting children, FBI officials said. The Washington Post agreed to withhold the girls' last names to protect them from harassment on the Internet and elsewhere.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 6,000 words of my new novel
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DATE: 06/05/2003 09:20:11 AM
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I'm taking a break from working on /usr/bin/god, one of the novels I'm writing. Instead, I've been working on "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," another book, this one an urban fantast/magic-realist thing about community wireless networking. I cracked the 30,000-word mark this morning (target length is 120,000 words or so) and I thought I'd post a 6,000-word excerpt to celebrate.
Alan's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine -- he kept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune teller and a island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father's slopes, mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prong outlet. He hung it over the mantle, using two hooks and a level to make sure that it came out perfectly even.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: High-school student busts cops who pretended to be Feebs
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:09:14 PM
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A 17-year-old high-school student busted two local cops who pretended to the FBI agents and dropped by her place to grill her over a blog entry in which she made a joke about the school server being hacked.
The afternoon that Erin Carter was interrogated by two FBI agents, the Chapel Hill High student and a friend went to have the officer’s business card, which bore the organization’s name, laminated.
Looking back, she considers that a good move.
The two Chapel Hill police officers are under investigation for having allegedly misrepresented themselves as FBI agents and have been placed on administrative leave with pay pending further investigation, Chapel Hill Police Chief Gregg Jarvies announced Thursday.
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1840-1902, fully searchable and online
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:13:30 PM
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Eli the Bearded sez, "The Brooklyn Public Library has scanned in
a daily paper from when Brooklyn was an
independent city, the Daily Eagle. Papers
from the 1840s to 1902 are available."
This is an astonishingly cool archive, with full-text search of this crumbly old newspaper that returns both scans and converted ascii text.
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(Thanks, Eli!)
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TITLE: T-rays: like X-rays, but cooler
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:24:54 PM
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Teraherz imaging provides high-resolution scans of people and objects without the radiation hazards associated with X-rays. T-rays are also responsiive to differences in material composition, which makes them useful for detecting tumors and counting the change in your pocket.
Terahertz frequencies are tough to produce and detect. They're higher than microwaves but lower than infrared light. "You're never sure whether to use electronics-based or optics-based" technology, says Martyn Chamberlain of the University of Leeds in England, a leading terahertz researcher. The terahertz sources now on the market tend to emit many frequencies at once, limiting their utility. In the past year, however, several research projects have made substantial progress in developing devices that produce t-rays within a narrow frequency band--a requirement for precise chemical sensing and medical imaging.
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(via Die Puny Humans!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bizcard origami
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:27:33 PM
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Great instructions for folding six business-cards into a self-contained cube. There's a project to fold 64,000+ of these things and build a fractal shape called a Menger's sponge.
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(Thanks, Jonathan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speaking at WebGuild next Wednesday
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:32:25 PM
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I'm speaking at the Silicon Valley WebGuild (free admission!) in San Jose next Wednesday, June 11, from 7PM to 8PM, on civil liberties on the Web. Hope to see you there!
From deep-linking (the right to give someone directions) to DRM (the right to be treated like a customer, not a criminal), civil liberties are inexorably entwined with the Web. Increasingly, legal mandates are in the offing to force you to design and deploy technology that restricts what you and your users may do. Find out where these proposals are at, where they're going, and what you can do about them.
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(Thanks, Cathy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bush charters govt spectrum use task-force
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:47:19 PM
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The Bush administration has announced that it will take a long, hard look at spectrum allocation in the US, with an eye to improving governmental spectrum use.
Evans will form a high-level interagency Task Force under an Executive Memorandum issued by President Bush today that will recommend ways to stimulate more efficient use of the radio frequency spectrum by government users. This effort will be the first comprehensive study of federal government radio spectrum policy in the modern era and will build on previous administration efforts to improve the spectrum management process.
Evans said the Administration has succeeded in identifying additional spectrum for advanced new wireless services known as 3G, paved the way for ultrawideband technologies, and helped broker an agreement that could double the amount of spectrum for WiFi technologies.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Space program quote
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:54:03 PM
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This morning on The Current, a CBC radio show, Bob MacDonald (the CBC's science commentator and host of the brilliant show Quirks and Quarks), was asked to justify the expense of the space program. Among other things, he said:
"It costs NASA less to send a probe to Mars than it would cost Hollywood to make a movie about it"
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(Thanks, paulbel!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos from Dorkbot geek confab in SF with Karen Marcelo
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DATE: 06/05/2003 07:59:35 PM
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At Wednesday's standing-room-only Dorkbot fete in San Francisco, Karen Marcelo -- SRL code engineer and recent BoingBoing guestblogger -- hosted a house full of
hackers, handhelds, hardware, and h'ors doevres, with stunt-performing hounds and hotties.
People pigged out on
pizza, perused pixelated psychedelia and Powerpoint projections, then partied.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Your hands are a camera
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DATE: 06/05/2003 09:16:22 PM
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This is a groovy new Japanese UI widget: a wearable that can detect the presence and orientation of your hand. By framing a rectagle with your hands, you can snap a picture of whatever you're looking at and store it to your beltpack computer.
Link (in Japanese)
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(via KoKoRo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New arteries from scratch, sans stem-cells
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DATE: 06/06/2003 07:03:16 AM
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A researcher at Duke has created vat-grown arteries without using stem-cells:
In 1999, Duke researchers led by Laura Niklason, M.D., reported in the journal Science on experiments in which they grew pig arteries in a novel "bioreactor" system that mimics the fetal environment, and then successfully implanted these bioengineered arteries back into the pig. Unfortunately, researchers found that human artery cells did not possess enough life cycles to be grown into functional arteries.
The key to overcoming this hurdle was found in a cancer research lab. Every time a cell divides, the ends of its chromosomes, or telomeres, erode until they become so short that the cell receives a signal to stop growing. While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, current Duke researcher Chris Counter, Ph.D., had previously cloned the hTERT (human telomerase reverse transcriptase subunit) component of the enzyme telomerase that stops telomeres from shortening, and had shown that expression of hTERT permitted some human cells to continue to divide indefinitely, in effect making them immortal.
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(via Science Daily)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Subculture morphology
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DATE: 06/06/2003 08:24:34 AM
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Exactititudes: a photo-project of members of a the same subculture in the same poses. As Joey notes, "The effect is pretty striking: you quickly discover that in one's attempt to express their own individuality, one often ends up looking like a helluva lot of other people."
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(via The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: An idea for email clients
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DATE: 06/06/2003 08:29:47 AM
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Why don't email clients have panic buttons? My mailer takes about five seconds to send a short text message to my mail-server, but it takes about five seconds to bring up the progress-dialog and click the cancel-button. How many times have you hit the "Send" button and then thought, "oops, I shouldn't have done that?" Un-sending is a pipe-dream, but why don't more mailers have a "cancel all pending sends and move to drafts" button?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Generators
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DATE: 06/06/2003 08:44:55 AM
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salary
lies
flattery
military ops
slogans
posters (shown at left)
safety signs
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rage against the fruit machines
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DATE: 06/06/2003 08:45:11 AM
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A UK activist clade is taking on the insidious digital fruit machine (AKA, "slot machine"). These things are supposed to be random and fair, but by design or by glitch, the pubside gambling systems are anything but.
Fruit machines cheat you on practically every spin of the reels. Almost every spin is entirely predetermined - which symbols are going to drop in, whether you're going to be awarded nudges, which numbers the "random" stop will land on, the lot. Ever had two cherries on the win line, not held them, then watched the third one drop in on the next spin and thought, "Damn, if I'd held them I'd have won"? Well, you wouldn't. If you'd held the two cherries, the machine would have dropped in a different symbol. And now we can prove it.
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(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grinding Nemo
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DATE: 06/06/2003 08:54:13 AM
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A company that makes sewage-treatment equipment is warning parents whose kids have seen "Finding Nemo" that flushing a fish down a toilet is a bad way to get it to the ocean:
...drain pipes do lead to the ocean -- eventually -- but first the fluid goes through powerful machines that "shred solids into tiny particles."
"In truth, no one would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called 'Grinding Nemo,"' wrote the JWC Environmental company, which makes the trademarked "Muffin Monster" shredding pumps.
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(via SFGate Morning Fix)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS folk art exhibit "U": Comrades! Bad News! SARS is here!
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DATE: 06/06/2003 09:31:57 AM
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Link to complete image. A BoingBoing pal in Beijing who asks not to be identified explains this "found" 'net art circulating chatrooms and in-boxes throughout China:
"Xeni, this is a collection of famous propaganda posters from the Mao days, but with the dialogue changed to reflect the fight against SARS. Read from left to right, top to bottom.
1. Comrades! Bad News! SARS is here!
2: How could this happen? What can we do?
3. What's to fear? I've got a gun!
4. Won't work! The enemy is crafty. Guns won't work! (other guy) Hey, what about grenades?
5. No go! SARS is only afraid of disinfectant! 6. But we've got none!
7. Brothers, Chill! First of all, we must pay attention to hygiene to prevent SARS.
8. Right! Bathe! Wash!
(other caption) Hey, where's the soap?
9. And don't forget to wear a mask!
10. Good thinking! I'm off to put up posters to tell
everyone to wear a mask!
11. Comrades! The disinfectant is here!
12. Excellent! we've washed so much, we've taken off a
layer of skin!
13. Spray! Spray it all!
14. 'Victory!' 'We have defeated SARS.' 'Great!, as a matter of fact, I hate washing.' 'No more masks,
no more anti-rash powder!' 'Now we can eat whatever we
want!'
Bonus art from readers: comics (thanks, Bryant), family history (Thanks, JBF), and a Kentucky-fried photoblog prank from Kim -- "This is the work of my crazy girlfriend, while passing through Bangkok airport. Security just laughed."
Discuss. (Previous posts: A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
J, K, L,
M, N, O,
P,
Q,
R,
S
T.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Keanu's generosity to Matrix f/x guys in doubt
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DATE: 06/06/2003 09:35:41 AM
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Hello magazine says Keanu gave $80 million to the Matrix's special effects team. But Fox News says he didn't. Discuss (Thanks Rick!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WB cartoon characters on NASA patches
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DATE: 06/06/2003 10:06:30 AM
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This summer, Marvin The Martian and Daffy Duck will appear on official First Space Launch Squadron patches for two NASA Mars Rover Missions. "Ooooo Oooooo, you Earthlings make me very aaaangrrrrry!!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Federal court approves cellular number portability
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DATE: 06/06/2003 12:57:17 PM
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Hallelujah. Today, a federal court rejected an appeal from wireless companies and ruled that consumers should have the right to retain their old phone numbers when switching carriers.
Consumer advocates say the inability to retain numbers is one of the biggest barriers preventing more cell phone users from switching in search of better service and prices. The Federal Communications Commission is requiring wireless carriers to provide "number portability" by Nov. 24. In April, attorneys for Verizon Wireless and the CTIA told a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that the FCC overstepped its authority by imposing the requirement. They said it will raise costs while doing little to increase competition. The court rejected that challenge, calling the FCC's action "permissible and reasonable." The court also said the cell phone companies waited too long to object to the rule.
Link Discuss (thanks, Colin)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Area 51 flight simulator
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DATE: 06/06/2003 03:55:12 PM
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Sean says: "Some guy in the Netherlands has developed a Microsoft Flight Simulator model for the so-called TR-3B Astra Locust... a rumored super-secret spyplane being developed at Area 51! Now anyone can step into the cockpit of their own UFO! "
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Brits pick 50 worst books of all time
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DATE: 06/06/2003 04:07:38 PM
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Well-known Brits talk about the books they hate. Worst of the worst is the Lord of the Rings.
There have been many contenders, but for inspiring life-long loathing and contempt, nothing beats The Lord of the Rings. The childish storytelling, the valetudinarian mythologising, Tolkien's lack of any feel for language, description, landscape, emotion or confrontation, the desire to garotte Pippin and Merry in a dark alley how can so many readers have put up with such codswallop for so long? -- John Walsh: Author and Independent columnist
I've never understood the point. It's strange, weird and frightening, and makes me feel like I'm on the sidelines of a joke I don't understand. -- Alain De Botton: Author and philosopher
Anything about Gandalf, and those little things with hair between their toes. I hate that sort of portentous, phoney, medieval-magical way of writing. -- Sir John Mortimer: Author and creator of Rumpole
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roger's Jules Verne clock
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DATE: 06/06/2003 06:22:44 PM
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Roger Wood has started a new series of wall-clocks, which he calls his "Jules Verne clocks." Here's the first. Click the link for a larger view.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pirates of the Caribbean sneak
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DATE: 06/06/2003 06:30:11 PM
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Ain't-It-Cool-News provides from a sneak peek at the Pirates of the Caribbean movie:
The entire rest of the film is one great battle after another. There are plenty of plot twists and a great ending that might end up at the end of the credits! So keep your eye out at the end!
Overall the film is almost perfect, just don't go in thinking it's JAWS or Citizen Kane! I hate it when people forget that films are entertainment! Just relax and have a good f'n time! I will definitely need to see it several more times to really soak it all in! This film is EXTREME EYE CANDY! I can't wait to see it finished with the proper theme score! The temporary Gladiator theme was starting to annoy me!
Link
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(Thanks, Cris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese little-old-guy gallery
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DATE: 06/06/2003 06:48:54 PM
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Check out this gallery of statuettes of old Japanese guys looking like schmendricks. I don't read (or speak) Japanese, so I'm not sure if these are a personal art project or collectible figurines or what.
Link
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dewey Decimal hotel
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DATE: 06/06/2003 06:55:11 PM
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The Library Hotel in Manhattan organizes its rooms along the Dewey Decimal system. The concept's wicked-cool, but the panaoramae of the rooms make them look like pretty bog-standard hunchbacked-mouse NYC hotel rooms, with pretty minimal theming.
Most library users know the general structure of Melvil Dewey's decimal classification. First published in 1876, the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) divides knowledge into ten main classes, with further subdivisions. More than 200,000 libraries in 135 countries use the DDC to organize their book collections. Its simple and logical framework is based on the principle of decimal fractions as class marks, which are expandable to make further subdivisions.
The Library Hotel in New York City is the first hotel ever to offer its guest over 6,000 volumes organized throughout the hotel by the DDC. Each of the 10 guestrooms floors honors one of the 10 categories of the DDC and each of the 60 rooms is uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category or floor it belongs to.
3rd.floor: Social Sciences
Room#
300.001 Communication
300.002 Political Science
300.003 Economics
300.004 World Culture
300.005 Money
300.006 Law
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(Thanks, Bryant!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA/MPAA make Edison's mistakes
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DATE: 06/06/2003 10:42:29 PM
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George Ziemann, editor of MP3NewsWire, is serializing a fascinating series of essays about the history of copyright on music and movies, and drawing particular attention to the way that today's copyfights echo the mistakes that Edison made.
It's funny that the record labels and especially the movie industry don't see the irony of history. The Hollywood companies that are now trying to use every possible and impossible way to hinder the evolution of the Internet, are the very same independent companies that 100 years ago moved to Hollywood to be out of reach of Edisons agents.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Slammer autopsy
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DATE: 06/06/2003 10:44:06 PM
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Paul Boutin's written a fascinating feature on the Slammer Worm for Wired magazine. Particularily cool is his human-readable analysis of Slammer's ingenious code.
Slammer masquerades as a single UDP packet, one that would normally be a harmless request to find a specific database service. The first byte in the string - 04 - tells SQL Server that the data following it is the name of the online database being sought. Microsoft's tech specs dictate that this name be at most 16 bytes long and end in a telltale 00. But in the Slammer packet, the bytes run on, craftily coded so there is no 00 among them. As a result, the SQL software pastes the whole thing into memory.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aerobic Shakespeare
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DATE: 06/06/2003 10:46:04 PM
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Shakespeare on the Run is a Manhattan twist on Shakespeare in the Park. Every 5-7 minutes, the show is moved 50 yards away, and the entire audience has to run to the next stage to see it.
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(via Megnut)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Floppy disk WiFi antenna
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DATE: 06/07/2003 12:46:40 PM
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My nipples explode with delight: a French hacker has posted a recipe for making a WiFi antenna out of an old floppy disk and a paperclip!
Link
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harvest Gypsy
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DATE: 06/08/2003 12:07:41 PM
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On Artbomb: Harvest Gypsy, an online comic strip for the road.
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(Thanks, Warren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bezos plugs my book on NPR!
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DATE: 06/08/2003 12:07:56 PM
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Jeff "Amazon" Bezos did a spot on this morning's NPR Weekend Edition on the best summer reading. His first choice was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom! Color me stoked.
Link to 1.3MB MP3 of the plug
Link to NPR's page for the broadcast
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ecrypted AIM
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DATE: 06/08/2003 12:08:21 PM
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The new AOL Instant Messenger beta offers encrypted chat. About freaking time.
AIM users can now send and receive messages, participate in chats and send files using industry-standard digital encryption using AIM (version 5.2.3211 or higher, Windows operating systems).
Messages sent between AIM users with security credentials are digitally signed and encrypted and remain encrypted during message transmission. Referred to as "end-to-end encryption", AIM encryption goes beyond basic Secure Socket Layers (SSL) encryption — which is commonly used for encrypting messages between a user's browser and a server's web site.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pix of Earth, Luna from Mars
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DATE: 06/09/2003 08:13:18 AM
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Fresh from the NASA Mars Global Surveyor, a picture of the Earth and the moon as seen from Mars.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK to tax the hell out of junk-food
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DATE: 06/09/2003 08:15:52 AM
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The British government is thinking of introducing a sales tax on fatty, crappy junk-food to encourage (poor) Britons to get skinnier.
"We have a culture now where the population is eating foods which are high in fat and energy because fat is a cheap and filling ingredient.
"For many patients, it is hard to make changes to their diet because of the ubiquity of unhealthy foods.
"It is an utterly cynical exploitation and the poorest are affected disproportionately because they have less choice about where they shop and what they can buy."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Biopiracy: a new colonialism
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DATE: 06/09/2003 08:23:47 AM
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Interesting piece on how global Intellectual Property treaties are enabling a new kind of colonialism: Big Pharma companies headqaurtered in the industrialized world are "discovering" biotech building blocks in poor countries, patenting them, and using patents to screw the developing world out of the profits.
Bioprospection, or biopiracy, is not a futuristic scenario but a reality. In 1998 the U.S.-based Diversa Corporation signed a deal with the Mexican government to obtain access to the biodiversity of Chiapas. Also in Mexico, British company Nature Ltd. is exploring traditional Maya knowledge of medicinal plants with $2.5 million from the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG), an American public-private consortium that includes the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture.
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(Thanks, Allan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Full-text search for Technorati
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DATE: 06/09/2003 08:25:50 AM
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Dave Sifry spent the weekend whipping up a full-text search for Technorati. Now you can search the complete text of over 300,000 blogs, and all matching text posted two hours ago or more will be returned. What's more, he's created an API for it that makes it all accessible programatically.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool online comic: Nowhere Girl
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DATE: 06/09/2003 09:28:54 AM
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Nowhere Girl is a haunting, resonant web comic by Justine Shaw. It was recently nominated for two Eisner awards, and winners will be announced at San Diego ComicCon in July. For now, the seies is web-only, but about the possibility of a print edition Justine says, "Not currently...I hope to print it someday, when I have more of the story completed. I hope to release it as full-color graphic novels. "Link, Discuss (Thanks, Warren Ellis!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Inch-high astrobots are flying to Mars
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DATE: 06/09/2003 09:34:44 AM
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Roland writes:
Florida Today says that the Planetary Society announced Saturday that Biff Starling will be the first astrobot to fly to Mars today. Biff was supposed to be a backup astrobot, but Sandy Moondust, the designated astrobot, suffered from a "freak zucchini accident." Here are the details about these robots, designed by the Planetary Society through a partnership with the LEGO Company. These robots are only 1.2 inch high and will land on Mars with a mini-DVD carrying the names of 4 million people who submitted their names before launch. This summary contains additional references and a nice picture of the happy Biff Starling and the adventurous Sandy Moondust.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Keitai snapshot galleries: wristphones and megapixel phonecams
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DATE: 06/09/2003 09:44:25 AM
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Two terrific new online snapshot galleries from Nooper.com in Japan.
(1)
"DoCoMo introduced the new Wristomo PHS phone and the first 1,000 where sold out in just a few minutes. We wondered why and got our own. We're not quite sure why Dick Tracy ever liked this concept... (link)"
and
(2) "DoCoMo launched the new 505i series of Keitai recently. With onboard megapixel camera, Flash, Java and a high resolution screen to go, we just had to get our hands on them. Here's a look at some of the phones on the market currently including the Wristomo (PHS wristwatch style phone). (link)"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR fun: panorama of Indiana Jones' lost city of Petra
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DATE: 06/09/2003 09:53:37 AM
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QuickTime VR evangelist and BoingBoing pal Hans Nyberg says:
In the last scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Treasury is a secret temple, lost for hundreds of years. The City of Petra was hidden in the mountains of Jordan for thousands of years when a young Swiss explorer Johan Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered it in 1812. This place is impossible to capture in a normal still image. You have to visit it -- or, see it in the cubic QTVR that Greg Downings created last year on assignment for Intel. Greg visited some of the most famous places in the world during this assignment, but he describes the visit at Petra as the most memorable.
Link to panorama, Link to interview with photographer,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Your screen on your sleeve: new prototype wearable computing jacket
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DATE: 06/09/2003 10:01:34 AM
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Bev points us to this AP story and photo about Pioneer, a Tokyo-based firm that has created a wearable computer prototype jacket with
built-in sleeve display: "Using an organic film electro-luminescent
(EL) display, the wearable computer is being developed
with a new information technology by a collaboration of
academic institutes and electronic companies. The
development is expected to help medical, firefighting,
and farming workers." Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unwirer is in the can!
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DATE: 06/09/2003 10:05:09 AM
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w00t! Charlie Stross and I have finished the complete first draft of Unwirer, the story we collaborated on in public, via Movable Type blog. The first draft clocks in at nearly 11,000 words, and that means we've got to trim 4,500 words before we can turn it in. We're likely going to be doing that by email, though, so until the antho comes out, this is the only draft you're gonna get!
Marcel dropped his fork, clattering. "You're going to take your pet blonde on a repeater splice and show her everything and you're afraid to let me help you run a new fat pipe in? What's the matter, I don't smell good enough?"
"Listen." Roscoe stood up, and Marcel tensed -- but rather than move towards him, Roscoe turned to the pizza box. "Get the *Wall Street Journal* on our side and we have some credibility. A crack in the wall. Legitimacy. Do you know what that means, kid? You can't buy it. But run another fat pipe into town and we have a idle capacity, upstream dealers who want to know what the hell we're pissing around with, another fiber or laser link to lose to cop-induced backhoe fade, and about fifty percent higher probability of the whole network getting kicked over because the mundanes will rat us out to the FCC over their TV reception. Do you want that?" He picked another cooling pizza slice out of the box. "Do you really want that?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital art exhibit "V": SARS art in China, and what is folk art?
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DATE: 06/09/2003 11:26:39 AM
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At left: a handpainted silk protective mask featured in the Shanghai Art Museum's online anti-SARS art show. Check out this bas-relief portrait from the same show. The museum's online exhibit features the work of professional artists -- not "folk art" per se -- and pulls together works from similar, smaller projects at museums and galleries throughout the region.
This Newsweek article has more details, and examines how painters, sculptors, filmmakers, playwrights, and 'Net artists throughout Asia are exploring the epidemic's cultural impact through art:
"At least seven SARS movies are rumored to be in the works -- including one that will tell the story of a Chinese nurse, modeled after Florence Nightingale, but set in modern SARS-crisis days. The City of SARS director Steve Cheng is hopeful that his flick will capture a momentous time in history. 'No other event like this may pass my way again,' he says. But with scientists worried that the outbreak will resume this fall, SARS may become as much a fixture in Asian art as it is in Asian life."
What exactly is "folk art" in the digital age? During the past few days, our readers have been hashing that out via email and on the SARS art thread discuss board. BoingBoing pal JohnVon submits this to the ongoing debate: an excerpt from a DeBug magazine interview with Sean Booth of electronica group Autechre.
"Folk has always been economically defined. [Consider] indie [guitar
band] music, the cheapest thing to buy in the 80s was probably a guitar
and a little fuzzbox, so they made guitar and fuzzbox music... there is
very little independent music that uses guitars anymore cause it just
costs more then computers, end of story. Computers are just the cheapest
way for people to make music now... The next few years there is going to
be a really major upsurge cause now it is not only kids that are into
electronic music or dance music that are using computers it's everyone.
Anyone who is into music is getting one."
More SARS art contributions from BoingBoing readers: Madrid-based blogger Marta spotted this and this painted on Barcelona streets; Mike contributes this card game; Rich found snarky new tshirts; JohnVon dug up a gem of Chinese government doublespeak prose; Alan shares a sign.
Discuss. (Previous posts: A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
J, K, L,
M, N, O,
P,
Q,
R,
S,
T,
U.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gadget flashback: Gizmodo goes eighties!
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DATE: 06/09/2003 11:47:53 AM
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BoingBoing pal and Gizmodo editor Peter Rojas sez:
I spent Saturday cooped up in my apartment because of a torrential rain storm, and in my boredom whipped up "Gizmodo 1983", a look back at what Gizmodo would have been like twenty years ago. Turns out 1983 was a good year for gadgets, there was the first commercial cellphone in the US (a $4000 brick from Motorola), the first CD player, etc.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Killer Star Wars casemods
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DATE: 06/09/2003 12:02:17 PM
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Amazing Star Wars-themed casemods: Darth Vader shown at left (Hey! Note the OS!), Falcon Battleship, and my favorite: Rebel Forces. Discuss (Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Felten explains why "black box" DRM tech is bad for society
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DATE: 06/09/2003 08:54:30 PM
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Lisa Rein's posted her video of Ed Felten's amazing talk on why DRM is bad for technology, from the Berkeley DRM conference in March.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stunning gallery of extreme,
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DATE: 06/09/2003 08:55:37 PM
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Stunning gallery of extreme, mecha/Transformers-lookin' truck-mods from Japan. I've never owned a car, and until I can drive one of these, I never will.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Halal and Kosher butchery too cruel for Britons
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DATE: 06/09/2003 08:56:14 PM
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If yer gonna kill an animal and eat it and then grind up the leftovers to feed to other animals, for heaven's sake, don't let your religion blind you to the fundamental kindness of killing with a bolt the head.
The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC), which advises the government on how to avoid cruelty to livestock, says the way Kosher and Halal meat is produced causes severe suffering to animals.
Both the Jewish and Muslim religions demand that slaughter is carried out with a single cut to the throat, rather than the more widespread method of a bolt into the head.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Taste Tribes: Smartmobbing your aesthetics
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DATE: 06/10/2003 08:08:05 AM
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Mindjack's running a great article by Joshua Ellis about the way that technology is giving us the capacity to connect with like-minded people around the world.
There's a great line in the film High Fidelity where the main character, Rob (played by John Cusack) makes the observation that he doesn't like people because of who they are – he likes them because of what they like.
At first glance, this position sounds incredibly superficial. But on closer examination, it becomes more reasonable. After all, why do you talk to the stranger in the coffeehouse or in the bar? Unless you're a creepy freak who just bothers random strangers, it's probably because they're wearing a t-shirt sporting the logo of a band you like or reading a book by your favorite author. This spurious connection gives you a reason to talk to them.
And why not? Taste is based upon a certain set of assumptions about what is good or bad in the world. It's an arena of moral choices, to paraphrase rock critic Greil Marcus. Chances are that the guy down the bar in the Kraftwerk t-shirt and I will have more commonalities than we do differences – and not just in regards to music. We may not become best friends, but at least we'll probably have an interesting conversation.
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(Thanks, Joshua!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kid-made graphic novels: "Boys are Sexxy"
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DATE: 06/10/2003 10:45:28 AM
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Jennifer Robbins is running a hilarious series on Jennville about picture-books she created when she was a girl. I love this. Anyone have links to other sites where adult bloggers/web artists are posting scanned copies of books they made as kids? Post them in the Discuss forum!
Jennifer says: "Boys Are Sexxy, Age 6: The traced outline of a man cutout found in the Sunday paper became the basis of this book. Notice that at 6 years old, I wasn't sure what happens on a date after getting into the car."
Update: Killer! BoingBoing reader and former child geek Kirk contributes The One-eyed, Six-toed, battery operated laser sloths, which he made in seventh grade.
Discuss (via Reverse Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Robots" movie in the works from creators of CGI pic "Ice Age"
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DATE: 06/10/2003 10:57:48 AM
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The trio responsible for 2002's computer-animated feature "Ice Age" --- 20th Century Fox, Blue Sky Studios and director Chris Wedge-- announced last night in NYC that they're teaming up again to create another CGI film, "Robots." Release is slated for March, 2005. Confirmed voices on board includes Halle Berry, Ewan McGregor, Mel Brooks, and Drew Carey.
Mattel, Burger King, Kellogg's, Keebler, Hewlett-Packard, HarperCollins and Vivendi Universal Games have signed on as promotional partners for the film's release. Set in a world composed entirely of robots -- designed by William Joyce ("Rolie Polie Olie") -- the Lowell Ganz- and Babaloo Mandel-scripted project centers on Rodney Copperbottom (McGregor), a young genius inventor who dreams of making the world a better place. Berry voices Cappy, a sexy executive rebot with whom Rodney is instantly smitten. Other lead voices include the nefarious corporate tyrant Ratchet (yet to be cast), who locks horns with Rodney, and Big Weld (Brooks), a master inventor who has lost his way. Other characters include a group of misfit robots known as the Rusties.
Update: the movie's official url hasn't been announced, but in a bored moment of idle whois-ing, I queried robotsmovie.com -- and 20th Century Fox Films owns it.
Link to Hollywood Reporter story,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired Magazine: Phonecam Nation
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DATE: 06/10/2003 11:38:10 AM
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I wrote an essay for this month's issue of Wired Magazine about camera-phones and cultural change. Snip:
The trend started innocuously a few years ago, when novelty cameras that plugged into mobile handsets were marketed to gadget-obsessed kids in Japan and Europe. But in the past few months, a global phonecam revolution has begun to emerge. Take the device's portability, add its ability to post images online, multiply by its growing ubiquity, and what do you get? A cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts.
Here's a link to the online version, but I encourage you to step away from the laptop and go buy a hard copy. Paul Boutin's historic Slammer story, in the same issue, is nothing short of stunning in print. Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cheap and good web hosting?
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DATE: 06/10/2003 02:02:43 PM
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I'm in dire need of a cheap but good Web host for pesco.net. I have lots of aliases and .forwards so it would be ideal to have a Web-based control panel for administration. I signed up with Sharp Web Services a couple weeks ago for $5.50/month for 50Mb, but their customer service is nonexistent. Seriously, I received no order confirmation or replies to email or phone inquiries. Any suggestions of reputable hosts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Update: Thanks for all the suggestions! I went with boing boing pal Scott Beale's Laughing Squid.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Camera Phones used for butt-rating site
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DATE: 06/10/2003 03:35:38 PM
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People are using cameraphones to take pictures of other people's butts and and submitting them to a hot-or-not style site called Mobile Asses. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London Open Spectrum debate, June 24
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DATE: 06/10/2003 03:42:15 PM
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I'm debating open spectrum at the iSociety in London, June 24. The event's open to the public. Hope to see some British friends and readers there!
Wireless technologies can revolutionise the way we live and work. But all wireless technologies, from Wi-Fi and 3G to taxi satellite systems and digital radio, need scare radio spectrum to work. And spectrum regulation is in a mess.
The American Government recently announced a high level task force to look into the issue. An emerging consensus argues that restrictive Government allocation of spectrum hampers innovation and lessens competition. Allocation through auctions, the other popular model, is publicly discredited after 3G licenses nearly bankrupted the UK telecoms industry. But what system could take their place? Should spectrum be seen as private or common property? And what will be the social and economic consequences of that decision?
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kevin Kelly's Recomendo
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DATE: 06/10/2003 04:08:35 PM
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Before Kevin Kelly was the executive editor of Wired, he edited Whole Earth Review. I became hooked when he took over WER, and loved his Whole Earth book, Signal (which was based on an issue of WER that turned me on to Factsheet Five and the zine world). For the past few months, Kevin has been quietly publishing the wonderful Cool Tools email newsletter. It consists of reviews of "cool stuff":
I include any books, tools, software, videos, maps, gadgets, hardware, websites, or gear that are extraordinarily handy or useful for individual and small groups. The best items are those that open up new possibilities. I depend on friends and readers to suggest things. Generally I try something out first if I can. I only recommend things I like and I ignore the rest. Tell me what you love. Suggestions for tools better than what I recommend always welcomed.
I bought a first aid kit for my trip to the islands based on Kevin's review in Cool Tools. You can see all the past picks from Cool Tools on Kevin's Recomendo site. Also, if you email him, he'll put you on the Cool Tools list.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: TVphones arrive: Samsung's new cellphone has color television
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DATE: 06/10/2003 09:12:15 PM
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Samsung just released a mobile phone that includes color TV functionality. It's capable of receiving TV broadcasts over public access channels, and allows you to view either horizontally or vertically. The device also allows you to snap up to 50 frames of TV broadcast for use as screen background image. You'll have to move to Korea to use it though, no word on when it will be available elsewhere.
Link to image, Link to press release, Discuss (Thanks, Jonno, via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sturgeon Award finalists announced
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DATE: 06/11/2003 07:24:33 AM
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The finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short SF of the year have been announced! Congrats, Bruce, Greg, Charlie, Ted and Paul!
Bronte's Egg - Richard Chedwyk - F&SF, 8/02
Liking What You See: A Documentary - Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor
Singleton - Greg Egan - Interzone, 2/02
Year in the Linear City, A - Paul di Filippo - PS Publishing
Madonna of the Maquiladora - Gregory Frost - Asimov's, 5/02
Stories for Men - John Kessel - Asimov's, 10/02
Seasons of the Ansarac, The - Ursula K. LeGuin - Infinite Matrix, 6/3
Wild Girls, The - Ursula K. LeGuin - Asimov's, 3/02
Breathmoss - Ian R. MacLeod - Asimov's, 5/02
Coelacanths - Robert Reed - F&SF, 3/02
Over Yonder - Lucius Shepard - SciFiction, 1/02
In Paradise - Bruce Sterling - F&SF, 9/02
Halo - Charles Stross - Asimov's, 6/02
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(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AME-359: the anti-blow
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DATE: 06/11/2003 07:27:00 AM
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An extropian company called "Applied Molecular Evolution" have shipped a designer molecule that neutralizes cocaine in the bloodstream.
The researchers developed AME-359 by tweaking a protein to create an optimized version of an enzyme that's common and present in all humans.
"It's a scavenger enzyme (that) goes around the body chewing up a bunch of stuff, but not particularly well," Bloch said. "We’re engineering part of the human body to do something a lot better that it was originally meant to do."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amiga-otaku raise money for Moz port
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DATE: 06/11/2003 07:28:41 AM
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Amiga faithful have pooled their money via PayPal and come up with more than $3600 for the first person or team to successfully port Mozilla, the king-hell open-source browser, to the creaking Amiga platform.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Liveblogging from Weblog Business Strategies
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DATE: 06/11/2003 07:31:24 AM
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Heath Row has been doing a killer job live-blogging from the Weblogs Business Strategies conference.
I've been in journalism since college. I worked through the '70s working for the New York Times covering politics. In the '80s I worked in public television. And in the '90s I worked on the smartest radio show called the Connection, What I want to talk about today is how to use blogs to create a new kind of conversation. I also want you to think of me as a low-tech Dave Winer. I'm Dave Winer without the brains and the money. But it's not the brains or the money that's most important about Dave. Dave is a student of the culture, and he's a relentless listener to democracy. He's tremendously distressed about it. I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm not a technologist. I'm a citizen. And I speak with a lot of misgivings about where we're at and how we talk to each other.
I talked to Dave about the perfect caller. First she called herself Crystal from Cambridge. Then it was Rose from Roslindale. Finally she settled on Amber from Boston. We always knew she was the same person and she took on all of our most powerful guests. I told our staff I wanted to find her. She made an enormous mark. Dave said that's the ideal blogger. I said that's the ideal caller. My mission in our new radio Internet blog incarnation is to give the Ambers of the world not just a place to vent but to speak her mind. She found on our program a place she could be as big as she was.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AICN: who's a pirate?
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DATE: 06/11/2003 07:40:49 AM
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Moriarty, one of the editors on Ain't It Cool News, has written an apologia for a flamewar he started the other night when he vilified film-fans who had downloaded bootleg work-prints of The Hulk from the net and were posting reviews to AICN. Moriarty criticized the reviewers for their "piracy" and called them all sorts of nasty names. The "pirates" responded by pointing out that AICN's stock-in-trade is stolen scripts, violated NDAs by test-screeners and leaked secrets, and what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. AICN's initial reaction was to delete some of the more critical posts, but Moriarty's apologia is, to my mind, a much better response.
When I first met Harry Knowles... the very first time... we hooked up because I was looking for a way to get something onto the Internet for other fans to enjoy.
It was something I wasn't supposed to have.
It came from someone's office who had no idea I had it.
I was told by someone online to try Harry Knowles. I got in touch with him in Texas. He hooked me up with a guy in Australia.
Why?
To circumnavigate US copyright law. That's why.
Hello, kettle? It's the pot. I'm black.
So mea culpa. No other arguments are really needed to convince me that I made a colossal mistake the other day. You don’t have to try to go through every single word on the site looking for just the right phrase with which to hang me.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Oldest human skulls discovered
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DATE: 06/11/2003 07:47:46 AM
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The oldest human skulls ever unearthed were just discovered in Ethiopia, two adults and a child that have been buried for 160,000 years.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Men who do housework are sexier and have better kids
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DATE: 06/11/2003 09:48:05 AM
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Shades of Free To Be You And Me (and for fun, do a whois -h geektools.com freetobeyouandme.com): a study shows that men who help with the housework have better-adjusted kids and get laid by their spouses more often.
ociologists Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams of the University of California, Riverside, looked at national survey data and found that school-aged children who do housework with their fathers are more likely to get along with their peers and have more friends. What's more, they are less likely than other kids to disobey teachers or make trouble at school and are less depressed or withdrawn.
"When men perform domestic service for others, it teaches children cooperation and democratic family values," said Coltrane, who studies the changing role of fathers in families. "It used to be that men assumed that their wives would do all the housework and parenting, but now that women are nearly equal participants in the labor force, men are assuming more of the tasks that it takes to run a home and raise children."
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Computing 1976 archive online
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DATE: 06/11/2003 03:21:43 PM
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Stefan sez, "From the primordial depths of personal computing history: A collection of scanned pages from the pioneering educational/entertainment zine, Creative Computing. I read a lot of these pieces in the original magazines, circa 1976. It has a BASIC listing for one of the very first computer games I ever played, DEEPSPACE. Volume 1 is also available on the site. Look for the advertisement by Roger Crumb!"
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Extreme nerd builds full size 737 flight sim in garage
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DATE: 06/11/2003 03:47:24 PM
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A fellow by the name of Matt Ford is building a full size cockpit flight simulator of a 737-300 in his garage. Looks amazing. Link Discuss (Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ringing in the new: ringtones and the music licensing biz
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DATE: 06/11/2003 08:33:56 PM
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I wrote a feature for this month's issue of Grammy Magazine on the changing business of mobile phone ringtones:
Still considered an emerging trend in Japan, Wav-based ringtones of actual song clips, called Chaku-uta, are hayatteru ("totally trendy") with the under-30 crowd. Chaku-goe, ("voice,") is "another popular type of ringtone," says Collier, "and this can be either pure voice -- such as a celebrity saying, 'Answer the phone' -- or a blend of music and speech, like a Beatles melody with the spoken words 'Come on' popping up during the chorus."
Roughly 80 percent of the ringtones in Japan are Japanese songs, and J-Pop (Japanese pop music) rules the ringtone charts, according to mobile entertainment executive Kunito Komori of Yokohama, Japan. "There are also some interesting niche services in Japan," says Komori, "like all-indie-band songs, all-rock, or audiophile ringtones" -- high-quality files produced by best-of-the-best specialists.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More on ringtones: WSJ -- freebies may threaten ringtone biz
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DATE: 06/11/2003 09:16:38 PM
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The Wall Street Journal ran this story on issues affecting growth of the ringtone business:
Research firm IDC, for instance, expects annual ringtone sales to grow to more than $400 million by 2005 from $16.6 million last year as people replace the standard ringers on their phones with computerized versions of their favorite songs and sound effects. Different ringers can even be assigned to different callers. The theme from the "Looney Tunes" cartoons might play when your mother-in-law calls; "Mission Impossible" for calls from the office. Profits are split between the cellphone companies, the software providers and artists or other copyright holders of the actual music. But that growth could be in jeopardy before it ever takes off. A number of file-sharing services have sprung up on the Internet, offering free Napster-like access to content that users can add to their cellphones. MyPhoneFiles.com, for example, lists dozens of songs and images that can be sent wirelessly to a user's cellphone. MyPhoneFiles says it isn't responsible for content exchanged on its site and says it will remove anything offensive or illegal. "I don't participate in piracy," says Maceij Gorny, owner and operator of MyPhoneFiles. He says 83,000 people have registered with his site, and 2,500 members log on each day.
Link (paid subscription required), Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Panasonic exoskeletons
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DATE: 06/12/2003 06:07:20 AM
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Panasonic is developing a powered exoskeleton through its new Activelink division, for use by the disabled.
Japanese Link
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(via KoKoRo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IP-block jacking
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DATE: 06/12/2003 06:09:08 AM
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A new form of online crime -- hijacking IP addresses.
Los Angeles County had been hit by a growing type of hi-tech fraud, in which large, and usually dormant, segments of the Internet's address space are taken away from their registered users through an elaborate shell game of forged letters, ephemeral domain names and anonymous corporate fronts. The patsies in the scheme are the four non-profit registries that parcel out address space around the world and keep track of who's using it. The prizes are the coveted "Class B" or "/16" (read "slash-sixteen") address blocks that Internet authorities passed out like candy in the days when address space was bountiful, but are harder to get legitimately now.
The most rapacious consumers of the stolen address space are spammers trying to stay a step ahead of anti-spam blacklists. A /16 provides a lot of addresses to hide behind, a lot of launch pads for unwanted e-mail, squats for hastily-erected spamvertised websites, and attack points from which one can scan the Internet for misconfigured proxy servers-- useful for laundering even more spam. Some anti-spam investigators believe an underground economy exists in which a large block of address space is broken down and re-sold in smaller chunks like a boosted Acura in a chop-shop. "Money is changing hands," says Kai Schlichting, a veteran network engineer who tracks down stolen IP space in his spare time. "I wouldn't be surprised if you could sell a /16 for $100,000 in bits and pieces."
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(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS digital art exhibit "W": illustrator Anthony Ventura contributes
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DATE: 06/12/2003 07:57:47 AM
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Link to full-size image. This piece was created exclusively for BoingBoing by Anthony Ventura, a Toronto-based illustrator whose work has appeared in CXO Magazine, SPIN, Time Magazine, Ad Age Global, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. He is currently collaborating with Susannah Breslin on the forthcoming graphic novel The Fetish Alphabet, about which Ventura says "I am having a blast illustrating."
More contributions from BoingBoing readers:
Niklas found this Kung Fu Videogame Hack, Lawrence points us to this news story about SARS as corporate-loss scapegoat, and MeFi's own Matt Haughey says:
"It appears they're selling fear at my local Walgreens in the Bay Area. Thought you might be interested in this. Are these sorts of masks commonly sold in drugstores? This was on the end of a major aisle, far from the pharmaceuticals."
Discuss. (Previous posts: A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
J, K, L,
M, N, O,
P,
Q,
R,
S,
T,
U, V.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SF film event: "Bad Reception: Wireless Revolution in SF"
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DATE: 06/12/2003 08:18:03 AM
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News of an interesting film screening on Friday in San Francisco:
Following a well-attended premiere screening before an enthusiastic crowd in January 2003, Artists' Television Access is once again presenting "Bad Reception: the Wireless Revolution in San Francisco" - a vital chronicle of San Francisco community resistance to the telecom industry. The dot-com era in San Francisco provoked responses from the activist community over live-work lofts, illegal evictions, and the displacement of working people and artists from their traditional communities. Less widely reported was the response by ordinary residents to another by-product of this technological revolution - the proliferation of wireless antennas to feed the booming use of cell phones throughout the city.
FRIDAY, JUNE 13TH, 8 PM - $5; Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia Street - San Francisco. Discussion with the producers and invited guests follows.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR panoramas: Burning Man
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DATE: 06/12/2003 08:20:04 AM
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I can taste the dust already. VRMAG Senior Editor Michelle Bienias says, "Hi Xeni, we've just published the latest issue -- there's an article on Burning Man festival that I think your readers might enjoy. Charles Evans shot some stunning panoramas there and relays his experience of the festival."
Link to article and panoramas, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Russian Rapper "Ill Mitch"
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DATE: 06/12/2003 08:29:55 AM
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Word up, comrades:
Snow's slick tongue brought them fifteen minutes of fame. Vanilla Ice dug a deep hole for all that followed in his footsteps. Eminem filled the hole and brought them their first signs of hope and respect. Ill Mitch, though, opened up a whole new world for white rappers. Next to potato vodka and mail-order brides, Ill Mitch is arguably Russia's best export. Complete with headband, sleeveless life vest, and a penchant for systematically destroying every rule of grammar in the English language, Ill is determined to be happy as a recording artist. Successful? Well, that's a different story.
Ill Mitch is badass. His debut English CD is entitled "Punch While Rap," featuring such songs as the homage to skateboarding, "Fast and Danger." In addition to "rap and ride on my skateboard," Ill loves to hit his boxing bag, to which the album title, "Punch While Rap" alludes.
Link to full text of Colorado Daily story, Link to Ill Mitch's phat website where he waxes poetic over hard beats, tossing out lines like "On full moon I ride / with boner." Discuss (Thanks, Sean) Update: should be obvious that this is a hoax. But if it's not, well, now it is.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Excellent wacky Reebok TV ad: Belly Gonna Getcha
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DATE: 06/12/2003 10:15:30 AM
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Michael says: "Excellent Reebok ad featuring a runner being chased by an enormous beer gut, with a KOMPRESSOR-like refrain going "BELLY GONNA GET YOU!!! BELLY GONNA GET YOU!!! BELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLYBELLY GONNA GET YOU!!!"
Link to streaming quicktime movie, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Honeywell 0wnz the circle
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DATE: 06/12/2003 11:33:00 AM
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Steve sez, "Honeywell is asserting that they own the circle, at least as applied to home thermostats. What's next -- Microsoft asserting rights to the square?"
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(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Popdex 0wned
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DATE: 06/12/2003 10:50:33 PM
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Unless I've taken one too many hits on the crack pipe this evening, it appears that Popdex has been hacked -- and replaced by someone's really bad '90s music collection, which includes a section called "Chick Music." screenshot, Discuss Update: Game over, all clear. Popdex is online and operational again.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Burning Down the House: audio-hacking for techno-illiterates
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DATE: 06/13/2003 01:45:37 AM
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Burning Down the House is Eliot Van Buskirk's new how-to guide for acquiring, manipulating, storing and sharing digital music. It's basically a step-by-step reference for turning unsophisticated computer users into mash-up-crazy, rip-mix-burnin' monster DJs. As such, it is a really fantastic book, one that clarifies a lot of rather opaque subject-matter, from the physics and psychology of sound to the free software movement's contribution to codec and tools development to the best places to find the raw components of mash-up mixes to the state of copyright law as it befits digital music. It's organized into a series of projects of increasing sophistication, and Eliot's very careful about identifying tools that will enable both Mac and Windows users to hack audio.
I got a review copy last week and just finished reading through it on an airplane, and I'm mighty impressed. For years, Eliot's been turning out top-notch columns on digital music for CNet -- it's clear that he has a deep and thoroughgoing knowledge of the subject, and the ability to explain it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MicroFM + Internet = Nationwide radio stations
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DATE: 06/13/2003 01:45:57 AM
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A group of underground music enthusiasts have come up with an ingenious hack to the FCC's rules on low-power FM radio. It's legal to broadcast very low-power FM radio signals that can be received in a 200-foot radius. By encouraging Internet users spaced at 200' intervals around your hometown to download the same Internet radio station and rebroadcast it over cheap-lass low-power FM emitters, you can create a micropower city-wide radio-station.
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(via Burning Down the House)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Your ass is the airlines' business
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DATE: 06/13/2003 02:30:21 AM
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A UK defense-lab is developing "smart" airline seats that attempt to make guesses about your terroristic propensity (and your likelihood of a thrombosis) by monitoring your buttular activity while you're flying.
The seats will contain a thicket of pressure sensors that will relay signals to a central computer to assess the seat occupant's behaviour. Are they asleep? Motionless for too long? Jumpy? Qinetiq designer Chris Thorpe says the system could have a display that is only accessible to the cabin crew - perhaps in the galley - to warn if a passenger's behaviour is out of the ordinary.
If they have been asleep or sitting still too long, say, a "DVT Warning" might flash beneath the passenger's seat number, and a crew member could prompt the passenger to take a walk around the plane.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turing Machines aren't as universal as they could be
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DATE: 06/13/2003 02:32:02 AM
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Geoff Cohen's posted another provocative and fascinating essay about the limitations of Turing Machines.
First, there's the issue of whether a computational model can, in any amount of time, solve a certain problem. Recall that it was Turing's proof that there are problems that the Turing machine cannot solve, notably the Halting Problem. This is an extension of Godel's incompleteness principle. Keep this in mind: Turing's accomplishment was not showing the universality of the machine, although he did do that; it was in showing the fundamental limits of it.
Now even given two models that can solve a problem, there's still performance questions. This isn't a trivial difference; a model that can solve a problem in polynomial time really is fundamentally more powerful than one that takes exponential time. And there are tons of computational complexity classes above the standard P and NP that represent problems that deterministic and non-deterministic Turing Machines can solve in polynomial time. Just for one example, the class of problems that can be solved by a Turing Machine that can, in turn, use another Turing Machine as an oracle is more powerful than a single Turing Machine.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogstumping: presidential candidate Howard Dean's weblog
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DATE: 06/13/2003 08:38:12 AM
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Democratic presidential candidate and former Vermont governor Howard Dean is campaigning by way of "the Howard Dean Blog" and a site called "Blog For America." He's also using Meetup forums to organize local supporters. This is the first example I've seen of blogs being used in a significant way in a presidential campaign. It's nice to see that the former governor has taken care to carry on one of the blogosphere's longstanding traditions -- blogging about the details of what you ate today. Here's the July 12 "blogforamerica.com" entry from the Manchester, New Hampshire campaign trail stop:
It has been a fun day already and the day is not even half over! This morning I drove down from Vermont to meet Gov. Dean. (The Gov. came down yesterday for his son's hockey tournament). The drive down was exciting. Tricia Enright, Bob Rogan, Tom McMahon and I drove down together. Joe Trippi met us in Manchester. (Since the Gov. is rarely in Vermont, we have to meet where he is!). We met the Gov. at lunch time and some very nice people let us join their office picnic lunch: barbeque, corn, baked beans, corn bread and the Gov's favorite strawberry shortcake with whipped cream.
As I write this, my colleagues have headed by to Vermont, leaving the Gov. and me to finish the day in NH. We have a meet the candidate reception and a health care forum before we are done for the day. Tomorrow we're off to Chicago and Wisconsin! (I want to apologize to my friends in South Carolina for not blogging about our trip. My office mates forgot to tell me how to get on the new blog! So, South Carolina, it was a great visit. Thank you!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Scary Evil Clown Zen
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DATE: 06/13/2003 08:47:36 AM
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(1) scary clowns
(2) save the evil clown
(3) evil clown generator
(4) clown tree
(5) clown hat
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese cocktail weenie art
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DATE: 06/13/2003 08:54:33 AM
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Online gallery of fun with little vienna-sausage-esque foodstuffs in Japan. I'm sorry, even if they're shaped like sharks or happy birdies, they still taste gross. Link Discuss (Thanks, John)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Aurora Australis, as seen from space
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DATE: 06/13/2003 09:01:08 AM
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A high-speed solar wind stream blasted our planet last week, triggering a geomagnetic storm. High above earth, astronauts on the International Space Station science captured the Southern Lights -- aurora australis -- in a digital movie you can watch here. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fun with floppies: build a robot from a floppy drive
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DATE: 06/13/2003 09:10:04 AM
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Spotted by David:
"Complete plans to build a robot from a 3 1/2" floppy drive without taking it apart. The floppy drive has all of the motors and electronics you need to get
started and compete in a robot contest." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Urban survival made chic
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DATE: 06/13/2003 09:41:29 AM
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Leave it to the French to make urban decay fashionably survivable. Bezenville appears to be an Paris-based design firm that creates masks and other protective environmental gear for fashion victims. Kind of Bladerunner meets Prada. Click on "it's in the bag" link to browse catalog. Bonus: fantastic tagline: "Cocking a snook at urban pollution!" So, like, qu'est-ce que c'est un snook? And do they work on monkeypox?
BoingBoing reader Edward translates, "The phrase 'cocking a snook' is brit for the five-fingered salute (thumb to nose, fingers waggling)."
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DJ in Philly rents iPods to venues instead of spinning vinyl in person
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DATE: 06/13/2003 10:16:14 AM
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Botany 500, a Philadelphia-based DJ, rents iPods full of custom music mixes to local restaurants, stores, and salons to play through their sound systems.
Armed with a small fleet of iPods, Porter's embarking on a one-of-a-kind business venture: filling the little mp3 players with a specially created musical catalog and renting them out to area businesses. "Instead of going in with my vinyl and DJing for four hours, I can DJ for them for the whole month." As far as he knows, he's the first to come up with this particular business model.
(...)
"He makes it easier for us," says Adriatica bar manager Albert Gotto, who is glad not to have to change CDs anymore. Now finding the right mood is painless. "We can kick it up a bit after dinner. It's a very convenient service.
IANAL, but it would seem that there are a number of problematic legal issues here with regard to rights clearances. Any lawyerly BoingBoing readers care to comment? Update:Reader Joe Hughes points out this snip from the story: "Because many businesses already pay licensing companies like ASCAP and BMI for the right to play the radio in their establishments, Porter doesn't have to worry about licensing issues. And most places already have some kind of sound system in place, meaning they just have to plug the iPod in and press play."
Update II -- Not so fast. Fred Von Lohmann of the EFF replies:
"This one is such a tangle that it'd make a great exam
question in a law school copyright class. Let's break it down:
For Mr. Porter:
(1) he's making lots of unauthorized reproductions, potentially
infringing both the musical work and sound recording rights embodied in
each song. Is it a fair use? It would be a fair use to rip your own CDs
for personal use on the iPod, but does that mean you can then start
renting out the iPods? Well, it's commercial, it's the entire work, and
each work is creative. That's three strikes against him. Does it harm
the market for the works? That's a bit harder, although copyright
owners can argue that this activity makes it hard for them to enter a
nascent licensing business for this kind of activity.
(2) Once he's made the reproductions, he's distributing them. Rental of
sound recordings and the music works therein embodied, even if lawfully
made, is forbidden by section 109(b).
(3) If he rents them to any merchant, knowing that they do not have the
necessary performance licenses, then he might be a contributory
infringer, as well.
How about the merchants?
(1) Assuming they have the necessary performance licenses
(BMI/ASCAP/SESAC), they are covered for public performance of the
musical works. I don't think they need licenses for performance of the
sound recordings, since this is not a performance by digital
transmission.
(2) The merchants are not making copies or distributing them. Mere
receipt of infringing good is not illegal under copyright law.
(3) But if Mr. Porter is violating copyright law, and the merchants are
working with him to choose the music and the like, they might be
contributorily liable for his activities.
Given the number of works in question, at a maximum statutory damage
amount of $150k per work, Mr. Porter could easily be on the hook for
tens of millions in damages. I'd say Mr. Porter needs a very good copyright lawyer."
Update III: DJ Botany 500 responds, in the Discuss board for this post: "The City Paper article kind of blew it up before the project really started. I am doing this for the love of the music not money, I am not putting 50 Cent or Destiny's Child in the mix, and I'm trying to expose noncommercial music. This project has been conceived by a DJ/Independent Record Store Owner not to replace DJ's or steal music, but to turn a wider audience on to better music locally."
Link to Philadelphia City Paper story, Discuss (Thanks, Mark)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Martha's Jail as envisioned by photoshoppers
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DATE: 06/13/2003 04:27:15 PM
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Jim says: "Here's an awesome Photoshop contest for Martha Stewart's jail cell." Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cement casemod
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DATE: 06/14/2003 04:29:03 AM
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Great PC casemod project: fill your tower-case with cement to make a box that's too heavy to steal! The guy implies that the machine ran after he did this, but I have a hard time beleiving that, given the ventilation issues with components that are embedded in a solid block of cement.
After having this computer in front of my house for approximately two months, it was finally stolen! It was recovered the next morning in a ditch, one block from my home. The cover plates of the two empty drive bays were missing. I assume the criminal knocked them out to allow a location to grip the case. The computer was still intact and the thief is probably sore and suffering from back problems, but be aware that this method of protection is not fool-proof.
Link
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(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CAPPS2 is dead -- for now
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DATE: 06/14/2003 04:34:54 AM
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Fantastic news: CAPPSII, the automated passenger screening system that the feds were planning as a kind of mini-version of the Total Information Awareness program, has been shelved, pending a review of the privacy implications of the technology.
CAPPS II testing has ceased pending the implementation of a privacy policy, according to officials at the highest levels of the Department of Homeland Security. They've even stopped all internal testing of the system until changes are made to the Federal Register that tell us, the American people, what they're doing and how it will impact our constitutional rights and freedoms.
It's nice to know that there are now people within Homeland Security that have taken the time to read the Bill of Rights. They are going back to square one and are doing now what they should have done before: to see if it's even possible to devise a passenger screening system that will not only work, but not destroy our rights as Americans in the process. Let us hope that Homeland Security's promise of transparency and openness will continue.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Popdex 0wned: Shanti speaks
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DATE: 06/14/2003 12:38:17 PM
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Shanti Bradford of Popdex says:
Glimpse Into My Mp3 Collection (circa 1999)
Xeni Jardin over at Boing Boing discovered that the Popdex server had been 0wnzer'd by some script kiddies, and replaced with a bad Mp3 collection full of old songs from 1999 and before. Here's a screenshot. Well, that was just my old Mp3 collection. The server Popdex runs on can actually boot to 5 different OSes. I needed to get at my old Mp3 collection that is on one of the hard-drives. Rather than trying to mount it under Linux, I just booted up to Win2k for an hour and copied the Mp3s over. I actually didn't realize that under that OS, I had setup the web root to be to my Mp3 directory! Doh! Sorry for the confusion! and yes... I do have an Mp3 directory called "Chick Music", which is where I put my Ani Difranco & other chick rocker songs. in unrelated news.... Popdex.com stats skyrocket after the normal content is replaced with 7 GB of Mp3s instead.
Update: Shanti, I'm sorry I called your '90s music collection lame. I confess: I was just frustrated because all the download links were timing out. If you came late to Shanti's MP3 collection that night, you missed the party. Link to previous BoingBoing post, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New York Times on BoingBoing SARS Digital Art Project
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DATE: 06/15/2003 03:28:39 AM
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In today's New York Times, a feature on the BoingBoing SARS Art Project. Also just out today, www.sarsart.org, a site created by Sixspace Gallery founder Sean Bonner -- a permanent archive where all posts in this thread are gathered in one place for easy browsing. From the NYT story:
[H]istorians of folk art say the digital SARS creations are part of a long tradition of ordinary people responding to traumatic events through art, from Hmong women in Thai refugee camps using applique embroidery to portray the horrors of war in Indochina to the AIDS quilt that covered the Mall in Washington (to which people all over the country contributed) and the memento collages that blanketed New York after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"In one way or another, individually and as communities, we integrate our hopes and fears into the work of our hands," said Gerard C. Wertkin, director of the American Folk Art Museum in New York. "The creative instinct will always result in works of art using whatever technology is at hand to make statements about the concerns of the day."
Rebecca Hoffberger, director of the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, said the adolescent tone of some Internet SARS art also echoed folk art of the past, noting that the nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosy" is thought to have originated in the 14th century as a humorous description of the fatal progression of the bubonic plague. "What better way to deal with calamity but reduce it to a children's rhyme?" Ms. Hoffberger said. "In chaotic times there's a grass-roots tradition of irreverence for the party line."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS Digital Art Series, Exhibit X: Laurenn McCubbin
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DATE: 06/15/2003 03:38:22 AM
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Link to full-size image. This installment was created exclusively for BoingBoing by Laurenn McCubbin, author and illustrator of the Xeric Award Winning XXXLiveNudeGirls and XXXLNG:Pretty Like A Princess (with Nikki Coffman), as well as the Creative Director for Kitchen Sink Magazine. She lives in West Oakland, California and writes at www.laurennmccubbin.com.
About this piece, she explains: "The title is kind of obvious. I was just thinking about how all these stories in the papers about how local Chinatowns were becoming deserted, bad for SF, a tourist town. And how people are just kind of closing recent immigrants into these city centers, isolating them and reverting back to a century old racist practice without even realizing it. And I am wondering about local 'Koreatowns' and 'Japantowns', if they are affected by our sudden American contraction from all things unlike us... I know the hookers in the Tenderloin are still doing a swinging job outside all the Vietnamese restaurants."
Her recent projects include "No Goodbyes" in Kitchen Sink Magazine, and "Harvest Gypsy" for ARTBOMB.
Upcoming projects include "Perfect," due out in TRUE PORN this month, and "Click" in PROJECT:TELSTAR. For details on Laurenn's work, including a forthcoming graphic novel, visit her web site.
Discuss, visit the SARS Art Project Archives at www.sarsart.org.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Joi Ito joins Creative Commons
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DATE: 06/16/2003 12:45:13 AM
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Joi Ito has joined the board of the Creative Commons. He's trying to get Japanese CE companies to use CC licenses for the work they do, and on the Japanese ports of the CC licenses.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadians get recycled Potter
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DATE: 06/16/2003 12:53:15 AM
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Raincoast Books is a Canadian children's press that took a flyer on an obscure British children's book called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone some years ago -- part of the deal was that they got first refusal on the Canadian editions of sequels should they appear.
Raincost is a great small publisher, and though they're rolling in dough, they're still acting like a groovy, small business -- for example, the Canadian edition of the next Harry Potter book will be printed on recycled paper.
The books, which include the original British text, will be printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper. To read more about Raincoast's green paper initiative, visit our Ancient Forest Friendly page.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Celebrate permalinks
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DATE: 06/16/2003 12:56:39 AM
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Tom Coates has posted a very, very good essay on permalinks and what they mean.
It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs. It existed way before Trackback and I think it's been more fundamental to our development as a culture than comments... Not only that, it added history to weblogs as well - before you'd link to a site's front page if you wanted to reference something they were talking about - that link would become worthless within days, but that didn't matter because your own content was equally disposable. The creation of the permalink built-in memory - links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later. The permalink stopped all weblog conversations being like that guy in Memento...
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Leaked Misson: Space video
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DATE: 06/16/2003 02:35:11 AM
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A completely crappy -- but intriguing -- home video of Epcot Center's Misson: Space has leaked onto the net. It's particularily irritating in that it's a RealVideo file and hence superjerky and nasty.
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(Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecams banned from Swiss beaches and bathhouses
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DATE: 06/16/2003 08:55:24 AM
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BoingBoing reader Jan in the Swiss town capital city Bern says, "in zurich switzerland authorities are banning mobilecam's from public baths and beaches. I blogged about it here and
here. quite an issue i think, they say its to prevent voyeuristic fotos from being taken in a sneaky way."
A quick Google search doesn't reveal news articles or other online info to substantiate this, but I'd welcome urls (or additional personal testimonials) in the Discuss forum. Update from Bern: "Tagesanzeiger, the big newspaper from zurich/switzerland, where i first
read about this, has a subscription only website. only today's edition is open. backisssues are not available. thats why i did not include any links in my blogs. Here are some articles i found, all in german i am afraid: this is from basel, this from zurich, and this article talks about bolton/england, sydney/australia and germany."
BoingBoing reader Diane Duane says:
"Here's a rough-and-ready translation of the 20-min.ch story here. Handy is the casual name for a cellphone in Switzerland and Germany. The headline: 'Zurich pools will no longer tolerate picture-Handys.' Starting immediately, the use of the newest generation of Handys is forbidden at public pools. Pool operators have been forced into this decision by the fear of secretly-shot photographs. The main targets of the new rule are the so-called 'MMS-Handys', which are able to take photographs; Swisscom alone has already registered 100,000 users of these devices. A pool user operating using his Handy in a way such as to make pool staff suspicious will be given no second chances; staff will immediately notify the police, says regional pool manager Hermann Schumacher. 'We have a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.''
Update II: Oliver directs us to "another article from nzz, the other big Swiss newspaper where they point out that (a) first there were two gyms last year which started a ban of mobile phones (not just camera phones), (b) basic reason is [privacy] protection (c) ...the regulation has only preventive character, first action would be to expel them from the public pool, the second action to forbid to come to the pool and that for sexual harassment the victim would have to make a charge."
Read the rest in the Discuss forum.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Anti-microbial Saran Wrap
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DATE: 06/16/2003 09:37:28 AM
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Scientists at Israel's Technion Institute of Technology have developed a plastic food wrapper that oozes anti-microbial chemicals extracted from basil. The wrap could prolong the refrigerator shelf-life of cheese and meat. (And no, it doesn't give the food a basil aftertaste.) Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mustang Ranch amenities on the auction block
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DATE: 06/16/2003 09:46:14 AM
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CNN.com reports that the US Bureau of Land Management is auctioning off the fixtures and furnishings from the famed Mustang Ranch bordello on eBay later this month. The IRS seized the Ranch property in 1999 after its parent companies and manager were busted for fraud and racketeering. Sadly, all of the good stuff may have been snapped up in previous auctions.
"The risque stuff is really all gone," said Cindy Becker, assistant director of Oregon's Department of Administrative Services. "It's just run-of-the-mill stuff, like tile and doors, lamps, appliances, a sink."
Apparently though, the Mustang Ranch logo and trademark will also be auctioned in the near future.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS Digital Art "Y": Graham Roumieu, Kozyndan, thanks FARK
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DATE: 06/16/2003 02:55:38 PM
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Click
here
for full-size image. Renowned Toronto-based artist Graham
Roumieu contributes this piece to the SARS Digital Folk Art project, Cover Your Mouth.
His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times,
the LA Times, Canada Globe and Mail, Shift Magazine,
and many other publications. He is also the author of several
graphic novels. His latest: the hilarious In
Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot, which I haven't been able
to put down since Susannah Breslin reviewed
and shared it with me.
Graham also shares these brand-new works unrelated to SARS, some of which were just completed
within the past few days: Robot
Poem, Ninja,
Grilled Cheese,
How I Spent My
Summer, and Crap
Alarm.
Below, detail from this large, panoramic piece contributed by kozyndan, via Wiley Wiggins. They're
a pair of mad scientist artists/freelance illustrators who live and work in
LA. Kozy and Dan say they're "working on a secret formula for controlled
nuclear fusion, and creating a line of edible chickens." 
For fun they "like
to take long deep breaths and dip their heads into bowls of rasberry jelly and
lemon curd." Note: prints of this amazing panorama piece will be available soon, e-mail [us@kozyndan.com] for details.
Bonus contributions from readers: Hong
Kong snapshots from John.
Rich Ragan submits the pulp Western fiction mashup, Bartender, I Don't Want No SARSparilla
-- riffed off the 1948 paperback Sundown Jim by Ernest Haycox.
And my co-editor David Pescovitz contributes
this: "BoingBoing pal Terre
Thaemlitz (his bio is here) sent me a parody ad for a
Michael Jackson-style SARS mask. You should read through the 'real' website
he refers to in the parody ad -- it's a trip (and not a parody). Here's an excerpt:
"Some Christians interpret diseases such as SARS as a judgement from God
against the sinfulness of the world. Others see them as attacks from Satan.
Still others regard SARS and other diseases as the natural consequences of living
in a fallen world."
Discuss, visit the SARS Art Project Archives at www.sarsart.org, read subscription-free scans of the Sunday NYT article on the project here: Page One, Page Two (JPEG). Humongo-props to the mighty and benevolent Drew Curtis who offered to host sarsart.org images on FARK when traffic blew our servers out. Thank you, Drew.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chinese Govt. arrests cellphone users for text-messaging SARS rumors
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DATE: 06/16/2003 07:07:22 PM
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"Beijing goes high-tech to block Sars messages," from today's New Zealand Herald;
by February 10 news of a "fatal flu in Guangdong" had reached 120 million people through text messaging, say some reports, and an untold extra number through email and internet chatrooms. Chinese authorities had little choice but to acknowledge the outbreak and try to restore calm. The Government had been taught a painful lesson about controlling the news in a burgeoning high-tech society. That message would be repeated under similar circumstances two months later, when it was forced to admit it had been covering up the number of Sars cases in Beijing. In return, it has since sent a few painful messages of its own.
By mid-February, officials began complaining about the use of text messaging to spread "rumours", deeming them subversive activity and a threat to stability. Then they began arresting people. By the end of May, 117 people in 17 provinces had been arrested and charged with disturbing social order by spreading Sars-related rumours, the Xinhua news agency reported. The official People's Daily said on June 8 that 108 Falungong followers in Hebei province had been arrested for spreading rumours that hindered the Government's bid to control Sars, but did not state how those rumours were spread. In the past, such arrests would probably have received little publicity. But this aspect of the Sars crisis and the following crackdown illustrate the enormous challenges Beijing faces in trying to maintain control of news and information in the age of communications technology, and the strategy it has developed to meet those challenges.
Link to New Zealand Herald story. Also see this Taipei Times article on smart mobs, freedom of press, and SARS, "SARS provokes journalists in China to call for more openness." Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Europe proposes right-of-reply
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DATE: 06/17/2003 01:43:51 AM
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A European policy group is proposing that those who are criticised on the Internet should have a right to reply in the same space where the criticism appeared -- IOW, bloggers would have to give time on their blogs to the people they flame. I've always presumed that there was no legal interest in ensuring that people don't feel sad -- but rather, preventing real harm (which can be addressed through courts, should such harm be proposed).
The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization...
* "The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours."
* Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. "It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it" from the spot of the original mention.
* "So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link."
* Long replies are fine. "There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media."
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(via Lawmeme)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flashcrowds in Manhattan
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DATE: 06/17/2003 01:46:12 AM
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New Yorkers are putting together ad-hoc flashcrowds, using email, arranging for thousands of individuals to converge on a place at a preset time and milling about and then melting away after a few minutes.
You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that
creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City
for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other
people you know who might like to join.
At the very least, please forward this to all those to
whom you sent the invitation for MOB #1, because
someone seems to have gotten the wrong impression
about the MOB. I am thinking, in particular, of
whoever saw it necessary to tell the store and/or the
police department about MOB #1, causing SIX POLICE
OFFICERS AND A PADDYWAGON to be sent out to disrupt
it. Let us call this person "Squealy."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney's Mission: Space site
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/17/2003 01:47:14 AM
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Disney's put up a pretty good site (with video) for the new Mission: Space ride at Epcot.
Link
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(Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: All mobiles to be banned from Australian courts over phonecam fears?
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/17/2003 08:22:01 AM
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BoingBoing reader Dan sez: "More dispatches from the anti-cell-photo frontlines. All cellphones are likely to be banned in Australia from courts, on the basis that perps with photo-enabled cellphones might take photos of witnesses and threaten them." Link to story from Australia's The Age, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: UK pub toilet rape captured on phonecams by onlookers
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DATE: 06/17/2003 08:23:27 PM
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BoingBoing reader Adrian points us to a truly chilling story:The rape of a woman in the toilets of a British pub was filmed by onlookers using their video mobile phones, it emerged yesterday. Sussex police said the 27-year-old was attacked "while not in a fit state to refuse or resist" when she was out in the south coast town of Brighton celebrating a friend's birthday. She was found collapsed on the floor, semi-conscious, incoherent and partly clothed in the men's toilets at the Toad at the Picture House pub in East Street. Brighton and Hove CID are investigating the possibility that she had been drugged.
Police said the woman had been approached by two men prior to the attack and later walked past them and into the men's toilets.
She was then forced into one of the cubicles and raped. Police inquiries have established that other men, probably not connected to the two suspects, watched the rape and it is believed some recorded it using hi-tech mobile video phones. CCTV footage has been seized from the pub and detectives are considering releasing images of potential witnesses in a bid to catch the attackers.
Link to The Age (Australia) article, UPDATE:
BBC News has more detail. UPDATE II: Local Brighton, UK paper Argus that first broke the story now prints this follow-up story, which includes the priceless line, "Detectives think the witnesses may have recorded the rape in the belief they were watching an amorous couple." Yeah, right. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scientific musical composition yeilds worst. Song. Evar.
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DATE: 06/18/2003 01:07:33 AM
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Komar & Melamid, an artist duo, conducted a survey about what people like about various kinds of art, including music,and then recorded "The Most Wanted Song" and "The Most Unwanted Song," according to their market research. I really like the sound of The Most Unwanted Song:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.
Link
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(Thanks, Clay!)
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TITLE: Scientific musical composition yeilds worst. Song. Evar.
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DATE: 06/18/2003 01:07:33 AM
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Komar & Melamid, an artist duo, conducted a survey about what people like about various kinds of art, including music,and then recorded "The Most Wanted Song" and "The Most Unwanted Song," according to their market research. I really like the sound of The Most Unwanted Song:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.
Link
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(Thanks, Clay!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Model Senate letter re: FCC
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/18/2003 01:34:23 AM
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A model letter to the your Senator, protesting media consolidation. Slashdot the vote!
Dear Senator _____________,
I am writing to urge you to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's June 2, 2003, ruling that relaxed ownership limits in local media. As conservative commentator William Safire wrote in the New York Times on June 16, this decision "opened the floodgates to a wave of media mergers that will further crush local diversity and concentrate the power to mold public opinion in the hands of ever-fewer giant corporations."
Link
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(Thanks, Jon!)
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TITLE: Model Senate letter re: FCC
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DATE: 06/18/2003 01:34:24 AM
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A model letter to the your Senator, protesting media consolidation. Slashdot the vote!
Dear Senator _____________,
I am writing to urge you to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's June 2, 2003, ruling that relaxed ownership limits in local media. As conservative commentator William Safire wrote in the New York Times on June 16, this decision "opened the floodgates to a wave of media mergers that will further crush local diversity and concentrate the power to mold public opinion in the hands of ever-fewer giant corporations."
Link
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(Thanks, Jon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: A model letter to the
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DATE: 06/18/2003 02:45:49 AM
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A model letter to the your Senator, protesting media consolidation. Slashdot the vote!
Dear Senator _____________,
I am writing to urge you to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's June 2, 2003, ruling that relaxed ownership limits in local media. As conservative commentator William Safire wrote in the New York Times on June 16, this decision "opened the floodgates to a wave of media mergers that will further crush local diversity and concentrate the power to mold public opinion in the hands of ever-fewer giant corporations."
Link
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(Thanks, Jon!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Blog Your Music" event in France
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/18/2003 07:47:47 AM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris writes:
We have launched a collaborative event for June 21st, "Music Day" in France and other countries. On that day, every blogger (wherever he lives) can do on his blog a post or more about music in general and must link to another blog that participates in "Blogue Ta Musique" (blogging your music). Every blogger can participate (it's free of course !) by sending me a message with the URL of his blog at mediatic@netcourrier.com . We include it in the blogroll of "blogue ta musique" blog here. And on June 31st, Blog Ta Musique and mediatic will mention hour per hour each new music message.
More than 30 french speaking bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting :
Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page here Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer.
"Blogue Ta Musique" is an initiative from me and the french free solution for blogging.
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Blog your Music" online/offline event in France
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/18/2003 10:39:25 AM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris writes:
We have launched a collaborative event for June 21st, "Music Day" in France and other countries. On that day, every blogger (wherever he lives) can do on his blog a post or more about music in general and must link to another blog that participates in "Blogue Ta Musique" (blogging your music). Every blogger can participate (it's free of course !) by sending me a message with the URL of his blog at mediatic@netcourrier.com . We include it in the blogroll of "blogue ta musique" blog here. And on June 31st, Blog Ta Musique and mediatic will mention hour per hour each new music message.
More than 30 french speaking bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting :
Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page here Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer.
"Blogue Ta Musique" is an initiative from me and the french free solution for blogging.
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Microscale guitar
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DATE: 06/18/2003 02:47:33 PM
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Sure, a uke is a pretty portable stringed instrument, but it hasn't got anything on this microscale guitar, 10 micrometers long, that requires an atomic force microscope or similar to pluck its tiny strings. Also, it's really hard to tune.
Link
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Linksys kills WiFi amp
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DATE: 06/18/2003 02:52:32 PM
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Linksys has yanked its WiFi amp off the market. The FCC had certified it for use with a couple of Linksys's APs, but not all of them, and the pesky users kept pluggin' 'em into whatever they could lay hands on.
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cat slobber is everywhere
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DATE: 06/18/2003 02:55:20 PM
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Cat owners track humongous quantities of highly allergenic dried cat saliva wherever they go, which is why cat-allergics can end up with sneezing/coughing fits at the movies, snuffling up the aerosolized moggy-slobber that floats off of the cat-lovers' garments.
Link
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi shootout in Vegas
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DATE: 06/18/2003 02:58:26 PM
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This year's DefCon hacker event in Vegas will feature a WiFi shootout, in which radioniks compete to complete the longest WiFi point-to-point shot.
Competition categories:
1. Stock/unmodified, with commercially made omnidirectional wi-fi antenna
2. Stock/unmodified, with commercially made directional wi-fi antenna
3. Homemade omnidirectional antenna
4. Homemade directional antenna
5. Enhanced power, (omni or directional) commercially made
6. Enhanced power, (omni or directional) homemade
Link
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(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Securities dealers' IMs to be saved for 3 years
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/18/2003 03:00:06 PM
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The National Association of Securities Dealers is requiring its members to retain all IMs sent for three years.
Link
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(via Interesting People)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF on Hatch's nutso copyright proposal
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DATE: 06/18/2003 03:14:45 PM
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EFF has issued a very pithy response to Sen. Orrin Hatch's proposal that online infringers' computers should be destroyed:
"This is an entirely unreasonable proposal, tantamount to a debt collector sending you two warnings that your car payment is late and then claiming that he is entitled to burn down your garage," said EFF staff attorney Gwen Hinze.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Genetically-engineered decaf coffee
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/18/2003 04:55:06 PM
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Japanese gene jockeys at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have knocked out a key gene for caffeine in coffee plants. They report in Nature that their GM coffee plants contain 70 percent less of the buzz-inducing compound. Future work will focus on genetically-engineering Arabica to produce vanilla flavoring. (Just kidding on that last part. I think.) Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hatch Introduces Bill to Burn People's Eyes Out
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/18/2003 06:46:12 PM
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The distinguished Gentleman from Utah is on a proverbial roll:
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) today introduced legislation authorizing the use of high-powered microwave lasers to burn out the eyes of non-paying viewers of copyrighted material. "If we could develop technology which just burned out the parts of their brains where the illegal memories are stored, that'd be fine with me--but we can burn their eyes out right now!" said Hatch, while introducing the Hatch/Hollywood Eyeball Evisceration Act.
Hatch's previous legislation authorizing the remote detonation of PCs used, or potentially used, or thought to have possibly been used, or potentially able to be used after some jumper cables and soldering, assuming a radically defective new security model, to access copyrighted material was defeated in the Senate on a 51-49 vote last week.
"I understand why the Senate was hesitant to pass a bill that authorized the destruction of personal property," Hatch said. "But this doesn't destroy any property. It just turns your eye sockets into puddles of bubbling goo. Okay, you might get some melted eyeball on your shirt, but only if you panic. Keep your wits about you and you can get those eyeballs to dribble into your cupped hands."
Link, Discuss (thanks, adamsj)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hatch using pirated software on his own website?
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DATE: 06/18/2003 07:58:17 PM
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Oh, the irony. In this lengthy, amply-footnoted post on Amish Tech Support blog, Laurence Simon does some HTML sleuthing to reveal that Sen. Orrin "Destroy Infringers' PCs" Hatch may be illicitly using copyrighted material from Milonic Software on his own website. If hatch.senate.gov were in fact in violation of Milonic Software's License agreement, and the senator's latest proposals became law, would Hatch's web server be eligible for destruction?
Senator Orrin Hatch's website uses a very impressive set of Javascript code for its menus, developed by Milonic Software. A professional developer's license is $34.99, and a corporate side-wide license goes for $899.00. However, non-profits seems to have access to the code for free as long as a license number is obtained. (...) So, does Orrin Hatch and his web support staff have a license number, or is he guilty of using unlicensed software himself? There's a "* i am the license for the menu (duh) *" comment in the View - Source, but no license ID number. Strange. Bigwig suggested to me that I compare his site's code to a licensed site's code. So I checked The Warren Human Society... no tag in the HTML mentioning licenses with a (duh)...
Not only does he not include a link to the software's home page, but his software's out of date. Close enough for government work, I guess, and he's too busy threatening to blow up copyright violators' computers to have his technicians maintain their systems (the software is actually up in the 3.4.x release level now, if I'm correct) Since I'd hate for one of the representatives of my country to be caught as a hypocrite on such an important issue (well, except for Robert Byrd, but after all these years he probably can't find his Klansman robe), I've sent a note to the author of the software...
Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Debunking Jesus' brother's bone box
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/18/2003 10:42:21 PM
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A stone box believed to have once contained the bones of Jesus' brother James is a forgery. Known as an ossuary, the box was hyped as the oldest evidence that Jesus was real. It turns out that the ossuary is from the correct era, archaeologists say, but the Aramaic inscription on its side - "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" - was a relatively recent addition. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ian Clarke's to-do list
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DATE: 06/19/2003 04:46:59 AM
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Ian "Freenet" Clarke has updated his Slashdot journal with some status reports on the P2P apps he's working on now.
Whisper
This is basically an instant messaging application where all communication is encrypted, and an IRC server is used as the back end. The idea is to allow people to communicate secure in the knowledge that nobody's eavesdropping on their conversation. Users are authenticated using PGP-style fingerprints to prevent "man in the middle" attacks, and the communications channel is encrypted using AES. There is other software out there which does this, but typically it is unpolished, difficult to use, and require mucking around with NATs and firewalls as they require direct connections between clients. By using the IRC server network as the back end, Whisper can pretty much work out-of-the-box without any complex network configuration.
Implementation language: C#
State of completion: Crypto all works, UI is more or less there, some minor superficial bugs still need to be worked out.
Link
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(via Infoanarachy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese mass Matrix cosplay
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/19/2003 04:56:09 AM
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Great Rotten Tomatoes thread about the hundreds of Matrix fans who descended on the Shibuya launch of the movie dressed as Agent Smith.
Link
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roadrunner's spam-filter screws Roadrunner customers
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DATE: 06/19/2003 04:58:47 AM
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Good Salon article about the contempt that Roadrunner's anti-spam admins are showing for the ISP's customers.
No matter whom I managed to contact, I received robotically identical responses explaining the necessity of spam filters and reiterating that only Security could lift a block and only the sender's network administrator could negotiate the unblocking. One rep did slip me a special customer service address where I sent a complaint about the inconvenience of the whole thing and suggested that Road Runner's spam blockers might be a tad excessive. Someone wrote back: "Our system has spam filters in place to protect our network from being overloaded by bulk unsolicited e-mail. The end result benefits our subscribers, who can expect less downtime and higher service levels." When I suggested that the willy-nilly blocking of perfectly legitimate e-mail necessary to one's livelihood didn't really seem like a "higher service level" to me, he replied that I shouldn't be using my e-mail account for "commercial, or revenue generating purposes."
Somehow, my cheerful, speedy, efficient cable modem service had morphed into evasive, officious martinets; Road Runner had turned into Ari Fleischer. I was trying to speak up on behalf of the unjustly stigmatized, but I was treated as if I were some kind of soft-headed liberal spam lover. Didn't I understand how important it was to protect the network? What were a few abused messages when the greater good was at stake? And what was I doing getting that kind of message, anyway? Broken, I reverted to using my Salon.com address as my main account.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ingenious email-harvester honeypot
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DATE: 06/19/2003 05:50:14 AM
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Merlin Mann outlines an ingenious procedure for identifying spammers' email-harvesters' IP addresses and user-agents:
In each page I serve, I include a bogus email address, encoded with the date of access as well as the host IP address and embedded in a comment. [Apache's server-side includes are great!] This has allowed me to trace spam back to specific hosts and/or robots.
One of the first I caught with this technique was the robot with the user agent "Mozilla/4.0 efp@gmx.net", which always seems to come from argon.oxeo.com - it's identified it above as simply rude.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Right-to-tape customer support calls
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DATE: 06/19/2003 08:39:16 AM
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Fed up with crummy service from call-centers, Larry Lessig proposes a sensible solution: grant customers the right to record conversations with the companies they treat with, and provide them with the tools to do so.
But what if customers were able to document conversations on the phone easily? Then rogues would be much more certainly caught. Customers could activate the "record" button when things spun out of control. Complaints to management could then be validated easily--or discounted, depending on what was recorded. Rogues would fear retaliation for their behavior. They then would either give up the game, or move on to another job where nastiness could be practiced with less chance of detection.
Only trouble is, under current law, 40 percent of Americans live in jurisdictions where a telephone call can be recorded only with the express consent of everyone on the call. (See the very helpful summary at www.rcfp.org/taping/). In these jurisdictions, to document your phone call without announcing you're recording it is a crime. For ordinary people -- those who don't routinely answer their phone with a recording that warns that the call may be monitored -- this means that monitoring phone calls is effectively out of the question. Announcing the practice upfront seems odd, and announcing it midway through the conversation is likely to get the other party to simply hang up.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hilary Rosen, CNBC pundit?
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/19/2003 11:24:07 AM
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According to the NY Post, the soon-to-be-former head of the RIAA will soon become an on-air personality at CNBC: "Her gig will begin Aug. 1. According to the e-mail, she will discuss politics on the network's evening show, Capitol Report, and give commentary on the media industry on the shows Power Lunch and Squawk Box. Link Discuss (via pho list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Australian inmate busted on smuggled phonecam charge
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DATE: 06/19/2003 11:37:56 AM
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Bottom line: phonecams as prison contraband. OK, so Rene Rivkin is a sort of colorful and infamous Australian stockbroker who was recently sentenced to weekend detention for insider trading. According to this news story in the Sydney Morning Herald, another man serving periodic jail time has been charged with smuggling a cameraphone into the prison where Rivkin is being detained, for the purpose of taking camphone paparazzi snapshots that soon showed up in an Australian tabloid. You still with me here? Good.
The 26-year-old man is understood to be serving several months of weekend detention at the prison following his conviction for a minor drug offence. He was charged with introducing contraband to a correctional facility and faces up to two years' jail when he faces Central Local Court on July 23. Photographs of Rivkin on his first day of detention appeared in a Sunday newspaper, sparking a security shutdown in the jail. It was during a search of his cell that Rivkin collapsed and was admitted to hospital. Police would not reveal whether the phone camera had been recovered or how it was smuggled into the jail.
Link to story.
Update: QTVR enthusiast and photographer Peter Murphy says, "I did this panorama of Rivkin leaving court on the day before he started his periodic detention sentence, and blogged about it here."
I invite you to debate which orifice that smuggled cellblock phonecam may have been crammed into here: Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecams, law, and privacy: pedophilia concerns spark debate, bans
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Parents and child welfare groups worry that increasingly popular cameraphones will be used by pedophiles to capture and publish snapshots of children in changing rooms or other public places. This MSNBC article explores some of the possible remedies being considered around the world, from legislation to radio jamming:
Britain's Home Office, the country's main policing body, joined recreation and child protection agencies recently issued a guidance statement warning of the potential risks involved with the new technology. Sport facilities across the country have since addressed the issue and many have decided to put up signs alerting the public that camera phones are banned on their premises.
"There was an incident in one center. No-one had realized the potential threat (of camera phones) before, but the huge potential from the one incident alerted us to what could be a significant problem," said Ralph Riley, director of the privately run Institute of Sport and Recreation Management.
Riley declined to give details of the incident. He added that people have always been asked to use traditional and digital cameras "with discretion in a swimming pool" and that photography will continue to be allowed with special permission. Meanwhile, a local authority the area of Manchester in northwest England has issued a statement that anyone wishing to use any camera, including camera phones, will have "on their person a visible sticker authorizing consent if challenged by a member of staff or public." Though few disagree with the ban, most agree that its enforcement will not be easy. Unless swimmers spot the culprit eye-to-eye, the sound produced by the click of the camera's simulated shutter would likely be drowned out by youngsters' shouts resonating through tiled changing rooms.
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robot Games and Expo in SF July 27 = supercool event
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DATE: 06/19/2003 12:10:01 PM
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David Calkins says:
Robots needed! Wanna show off your robots? Wanna win some money? Wanna get national exposure? We've got a big expo coming up, and if you'd like to show off your bots, the Summer Robot Games & Expo in San Francisco is a great opportunity to do so. Takes place on Sunday, July 27, 2003, Noon 7 PM (Competitors arrive early!) at Ft. Mason, Building C, 2nd floor. Cost: $10/adult, kids 17 and under free
The biggest amateur robotics show in America returns with movie robots, combat robots, NASA explorers, and more! Watch robot competitions, demonstrations, and displays. Everyone, regardless of age, is encouraged to come and watch or bring their own robot to compete. Also featuring robot related slides, videos, lectures, shops, and other great events. The RSA is also looking for anyone - artists, school kids, mad scientisits - who would like to demonstrate their robots (and get some practice in.) Email us if you’d like to show off your team and your robot!
Link to RSA website, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online video from recent INS protests in SF
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DATE: 06/19/2003 12:15:14 PM
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BoingBoing pal Lisa Rein shot digital video of ACLU and NLG lawyers speaking at last Friday's INS protests in San Francisco, and she's posted the footage here for online viewing: Samina Faheem, American Muslim Alliance, Pakistan American Democratic Front (Link), Jayashri Srikantiah, Staff Attorney, ACLU (Link) Riva Enteen, Program Director, National Lawyers Guild (Link), Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Booty Call: liked mobilesses.com? you'll love photocide.com
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DATE: 06/19/2003 12:46:04 PM
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PhotoCide.com appears to be yet another site showcasing mass-contributed, voyeuristic, illicit phonecam snapshots. Appears to consist entirely of butt pics from one guy right now, who seems either (a) rather lonely, or (b) heavily into gluteus maximus. Discuss (Thanks, Jon)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS Digital Folk Art "Z": Kenn Brown, global flavor, thank you.
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DATE: 06/19/2003 03:37:35 PM
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At left, an exclusive contribution (link to full-size) created by Kenn Brown, a Vancouver-based SciFi and fantasy illustrator whose work has appeared in publications such as Wired Magazine (that cool cover for the 12/02 "Science and Religion" issue), Scientific American, New Scientist, GQ, and many others. Check out his nanotechnology spread for Focus Magazine, on newsstands in Italy this week. His current projects include cover illustrations for a three-volume Sci-fi anthology edited by Ben Bova, published by Tor Books.
Chronicle Books editor Alan Rapp shared this photo with BoingBoing co-editor David Pescovitz (see this website if you don't get the joke). More stuff from readers:
Australian blogger Andrew Bulhak shot these photos (one and two) of masked mannequins in a Melbourne storefront. Sean spotted a SARSparilla ad and the Official SARS Website which will totally flip out and kick your ass.
Charles V. painted this for you, e-mail him to purchase prints.
Eli the Bearded points us to this story from North Korea claiming creation of a wacky new anti-SARS drug made from ginseng, gold, and platinum. Charlie O in Seattle submits this on-stage snapshot of indie band Melt Banana's guitarist: "I didn't get a chance to ask him if this was just for the stage, but he played the whole set in a facemask."
Canadian BoingBoing reader Kean Soo writes: "I only recently discovered sarsart.org, but wish I had found it sooner. I've already been exposed to some of the direct-and-less-than-savoury discrimination as an Asian living here in Toronto. Since then, I've been obsessed with SARS, and since I've been keeping a semi-daily journal comic online, I figured I would write about it in some way. It isn't finished, but I do have one panel that I turned into a wallpaper."
Blogger kaminogoya from Osaka, Japan found the provocative photo at left (Link to full-size image). If anyone knows who took the shot, please let me know.
Taiwanese blogger Wei-Chung Yang says, "I noticed that your project doesn't include any works from Taiwanese artists, so here are some of mine. I created a comic series that combines the two hottest issues in Taiwan right now - SARS, and the hugely popular TV show, Taiwan Thunder Fire, whose protagonist also plays a starring role in my blog comic. His name is Liu Wen-Tsung the Beast, played by Taiwanese actor Ching Young. Liu Wen-Tsung is a 'never-nice' guy -- he bankrupted his own father, and killed a bunch of people for personal gain. But he's cool, tough, and loved by the TV audience, hence his nickname 'the Beast' . So, my comic is called The Diary of the Beast about SARS." View Wei-Chung Yang's amazing contributions here.
Discuss. Read about it in The South China Morning Post here (600k JPEG). Future contributions will be added to the SARS Art Project Archive website, and we may post brief updates on BoingBoing from time to time. Much gratitude to each of the artists and bloggers who contributed, and to Sean Bonner for building sarsart.org. Very special thanks to Reverse Cowgirl for introducing us to many of the illustrators and artists who generously created original works exclusively for this project. Susannah, this wouldn't have happened without you.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: NPR segment about voice actor Joe Bevilacqua
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DATE: 06/19/2003 03:37:43 PM
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Stefan says: "Joe Bevilacqua (http://www.comedyorama.com) is a radio producer and voice artist. Last Sunday's 'Weekend Edition' featured a great story by him, describing his relationships with his angry father and with Hanna-Barbara voice artist Daws Butler, who gave the teenage Bevilacqua lessons after recieving an unsolicited cassette-tape demo. (Scroll down to 'Fathers' Day,' near the bottom of the page.)"
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Articulated cardboard robot PC case
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DATE: 06/19/2003 03:40:19 PM
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This is pretty hot right here: an articulated, assemble-it-yourself carboard robot that is meant to contain a PC.
Link
Discuss
(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Getcher nukular GM apocalyptic singularity tropical fish rightchere!
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DATE: 06/19/2003 03:43:23 PM
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Fluorescent GM pet fish are all the rage in Tawian and coming to the US.
The Night Pearl began as a research tool created by HJ Tsai, a professor at National Taiwan University. He was looking for a way to make fish organs easier to see when studying them, and isolated a gene for a fluorescent protein that he had extracted from jellyfish and inserted it into the genome of a zebrafish. To his astonishment, the jellyfish gene made whole zebrafish glow...
Now the first fruits of this collaboration have gone on sale in Taiwan and will soon appear in the US. The Night Pearls glow in different red and green patterns thanks to genes from jellyfish and marine coral. Now the team is working on a glowing dragon fish, which many Asians believe is a lucky species.
Link
Discuss
(via JWZ's LiveJournal)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fredric Brown's "The Fabulous Clipjoint" is an e-book
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DATE: 06/19/2003 03:46:10 PM
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Ebooks have never really taken off. I guess the readers are expensive and cumbersome, but I love reading books on my Sony Vaio (a color handheld that uses the Palm OS). Palm Digital Media sells lots of excellent books for the Palm OS, and the prices are quite reasonable. I am reading Bill Bryson's latest, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and was happy to see that Fredric Brown's terrific nover, The Fabulous Clipjoint is available there for under $5.
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dan Gillmor on phonecam nation
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DATE: 06/19/2003 04:17:05 PM
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From Dan Gillmor's column and blog (which now includes phonecam snapshots):
I've noted before the potential for making these cameras an integral part of tomorrow's journalism, as when everyday folks might capture breaking news or get evidence of wrongdoing. I've thought less about the evident drawbacks, which are unfortunately growing as well. Example: On a Web site I won't name, people post images they've taken -- in public places -- of other people's (clothed) behinds. Several health clubs have taken to banning camera-phones in locker rooms to prevent more serious abuse. It won't be long before we can embed cameras into our clothes or eyeglasses. What will happen then? Will we decide to be nothing but snoops? We'll all be answering these questions for some time to come.
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Orrin Hatch's senate website links to porn site
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DATE: 06/19/2003 08:48:00 PM
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By the time you read this, the pr0n-goof may have been fixed. But as of 8:30PM LA time on Thursday, June 19, if you visit this section of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch's website (screenshot) and click on the image icon (scroll down, right-hand side) for "myUtahSearch.com" -- (which links here) -- you will be directed to a porn website that promises "Huge natural titties @ bignaturals.com!", and looks like this (not safe for work). Whoops. Discuss, (Thanks, JP)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bay Area mobbing site
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DATE: 06/19/2003 09:59:04 PM
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Rob Zazueta is setting up a San Francisco based (dis)organization to put together mobs, a la Manhattan, in the Bay Area.
Link
Discuss
(Thanks, Rob!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Meg Hourihan's blog-talk at Reboot
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DATE: 06/20/2003 03:33:19 AM
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I'm at Reboot in Copenhagen. I gave my talk this morning and didn't get my systems running well enough to blog the two talks that followed it (Ben Hammersley on RDF and Scott Heiferman on Meetup.com). But now I'm humming along, and taking notes. Here's my notes from Meg Hourihan's talk on Weblogs.
The blog is becoming an online identity -- who I am, what I do,
what my pix are of, who are my friends.
Today, you can review a book on your blog and a review on Amazon.
It would be better if you could just tell Amazon about the review
on your site. More distributed.
It would be cool to link recipes/reviews to Epicurious and
collaboratively filter that info (people who cooked this, also
cooked this). You get to own your content but connect with
others, retain copyright but still participate in your
discussion.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dan Gillmor's Reboot talk
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DATE: 06/20/2003 04:04:22 AM
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Here are my notes from Dan Gillmor's talk at Reboot ("Making the News").
Assembling an amateur newsroom
* US SpaceCom asked for amateurs to ftp up pix of the shuttle
disaster
* BBC asked for demonstrators to send in photos
* Self-assembling newsroom: group real-time linking to war
coverage
* Moblogging: Not sure on the concept, but sure that it matters,
it's a big deal that people can take photos and send them
straight to the Web (it will only get worse: the cameras are
getting smaller). Implies that journos will get a lot of pix from
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jason Fried's Reboot talk
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DATE: 06/20/2003 05:41:01 AM
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Here are my notes from Jason "37 Signals" Fried's talk at Reboot.
Contingency design
Design for when things go wrong. On the web, things go wrong all
the time. There's never a web-day where nothing goes wrong.
You need to make mistakes well.
Crisis points (when users are most likely to abandon their
session):
* Error messages
* Bad search results
* Form mistakes
* Pages not found
* Confusing wording.
Prevention and first-aid.
Hall of shame:
* Mag subscription site FAQ: What happens if you click order now
twice? Our documentation tells you not to do this. It's your
fault if you do. You'll get a duplicate order and it'll get
charged long before you find out it happened. So you're screwed.
You get a 25% refund. Maybe you could ask for for a two-year sub.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Marc Canter's Reboot talk
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DATE: 06/20/2003 06:08:20 AM
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Here are my notes from Marc "Marcomedia" Canter's talk at Reboot.
Things need to be small and modular: programmers working nights,
little companies. The VCs pushed us to head for IPO, so entire
companies were based on one feature. In my world, companies have
multiple products.
I'm going to talk about Longhorn and how we can compete with
MSFT.
Open source: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. With the right standards,
we can equal Longhorn by building a people's mesh.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TiVo for your eyes
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DATE: 06/20/2003 06:11:47 AM
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This specs-mounted wee camera continuously buffers the last 30 seconds worth of what you've seen, with the option to rewind and instant replay the things that have entered your field of vision.
Link
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tiny keyboard light
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DATE: 06/20/2003 06:14:45 AM
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The iLite is a teeny, cheap white-LED-based USB keyboard light. $10 including shipping.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crappiest ToS evar
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DATE: 06/20/2003 07:15:31 AM
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Check out these utterly craptacular Terms of Service for a magazine-sales site. Courtesy of Jason Fried's Reboot talk, as an example of how developers blame UI failures on users.
Link
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tim O'Reilly's Reboot talk
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DATE: 06/20/2003 07:27:59 AM
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Here are my notes from Tim "O'Reilly" O'Reilly's talk at Reboot, "The Open Source Paradigm Shift"
1770: The Mechanical Turk. A hoax chess-playing machine. Babbage
lost to it, and he knew it was a hoax, but he wanted to know if
it was really possible. The secret of the Turk is that there was
a man inside.
Every app has a programmer inside. Take the programmer out of
Amazon, Google, etc, and it stops working after a while. This is
different from desktop software.
This is customization at work. Google/Amazon/eBay are updated
constantly, but MSFT only revs every 3 years.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Healing bones by printing out new ones
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DATE: 06/20/2003 07:46:25 AM
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It seems like there's nothing inkjet printers can't do: print out organs, RFIDs, cake-icing... And now, bones:
The idea is to scan a damaged bone, using either computer aided tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, and generate a 3D computer model of the missing section. This would then be fed into ACR's machine, which can create more precise shapes than most prototypers. This approach is already occasionally used by surgeons, but not to replace load-bearing bones.
A missing bone segment could be created on the spot in the operating theatre, says Tony Mulligan, head of ACR. "Big segments would only take about an hour-and-a-half," he says, a fraction of the time it takes to build up a gap segment.
Link
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(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: musical Zen
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/20/2003 10:36:40 AM
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mic in track
moylan sisters
wing music
nut lady
beatbox
cowbell
and a classic: eugene mirman
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Homeland security adornment
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DATE: 06/20/2003 12:20:01 PM
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For sale: silver and plexiglas homeland security chokers, in every color of the terrornoia rainbow.
Link
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(Thanks, Ernie)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Society for Amateur Scientists Conference
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DATE: 06/20/2003 02:12:36 PM
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This "garage science" conference at Caltech July 17-20 sounds like fun: Paul MacCready from Aerovironment presenting technology for "citizen flight" experiments, Michael "Skeptic" Shermer, John Lighton from the University of Nevada on DIY sensor networks, and many more speakers. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wireless cottage industries: "phone ladies" of Bangladesh
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DATE: 06/20/2003 03:39:18 PM
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A new service expansion by GrameenPhone, Bangladesh's leading cellphone company, is sparking the creation of new family businesses in the impoverished country -- where there are only about three land lines for every 1,000 people.
Under a special low-priced package, it has been offering phones to village women, now popularly known as phone ladies, and changing lifestyles into the bargain. The phones are registered only in the name of women but they are also operated by their husbands and sons and shared out in the village at a few taka per call. With just one phone, the service has now become a family business in many villages, with monthly earnings averaging $170, a lot of money in poverty-ridden Bangladesh which has an annual per capita income of $368.
"This has improved our living standards and made us feel proud in every sense," said operator Masuda Begum. The phone ladies also enjoyed a bigger say in family decisions, including marriage of children, Masuda said. Many have renovated their homes with their new income and in villages with electricity they have bought color televisions and refrigerators. Some are even sending their children to the cities for school where they also have access to qualified doctors.
Link to Reuters story, Discuss (Thanks, Hal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig, Felten on DRM
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/21/2003 04:36:27 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted video of Ed Felten and Larry Lessig doing a Q&A session on digital rights management systems.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Modular Self-Configuring Robots
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DATE: 06/21/2003 05:49:54 PM
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PARC researcher Mark Yim builds amazing modular robots that can self-reconfigure from a snake to a loop to a spider without stopping. Check out the videos--very Transformers-esque! For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, Yim is speaking on Monday in a public seminar at the Intel Research Berkeley lablet!
Link
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(Thanks, Eric!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GSM spectrum may be turned over for WiFi in UK
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DATE: 06/22/2003 02:25:58 AM
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The British Radio Telecommunications Agency is seeking comments from the public on a proposal to re-allocate the GSM guardbands for unlicensed or differently regulated uses, including WiFi-style data. Pretty exciting stuff, as it open the possibility of modding GSM handsets (cheap as hell) to do unlicensed data comms. British? Interested? Read the consultation and send in a comment to the Agency. The more the merrier.
Question 1: Given the other potential uses outlined in this document, do you consider it most appropriate to make the spectrum available for wide-area public use?
Question 2: If your answer to question 1 is yes, do you consider it most appropriate for the spectrum to be used to supplement the spectrum of the existing GSM operators, or to be made available for potential new GSM operators on a regional or national basis?
Question 3: If your answers to questions 1 and 2 are yes, do you consider it most appropriate for the spectrum to be awarded via an auction process?
Question 4: Given the other potential uses outlined in this document, do you consider it most appropriate to make the spectrum available for short-range, low-power GSM use on a licence-exempt basis?
Question 5: If your answer to question 4 is yes, what kinds of application do you anticipate will develop? Estimates of potential market size and anticipated penetration would also be useful.
Question 6: If your answer to question 4 is yes, should the use of this spectrum for the provision of public services be allowed?
Link
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(Thanks, Julian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big Dig's impermanence hits home for sandhogs
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DATE: 06/22/2003 03:04:48 AM
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Now that the Big Dig -- Boston's ambitious, interminable plan to bury its freeways -- is finally winding down, thousands of workers who have devoted years to the largest earthworks project in human history are receiving pinkslips.
For now, though, instead of finding jobs elsewhere in Boston, many former Big Dig employees are eyeing potential, long-term work out of state, such as the proposed Second Avenue subway in New York City, an ambitious light-rail project in Washington state, and an ongoing sewage-overflow project in Providence...
''A lot of craftsmen that have worked here have never been laid off and have worked a ton of overtime,'' said John Pourbaix, executive director of Construction Industries of Massachusetts, a trade association.
''The scary part to me,'' he said, ''is these employees pretty much became accustomed to a lifestyle and paycheck that might be going south.''
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR Panorama: All aboard the Hogwarts Express
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DATE: 06/22/2003 10:58:26 AM
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Australian photographer and QuickTime VR enthusiast Peter Murphy says: "Hi Xeni, I shot this panorama yesterday on the Hogwarts Express in Sydney -- a steam train excursion of 800 Harry Potter fans - prior to the launch of the new book. Amazing scenes."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Oddball net-traffic: 55,808 bytes and fake IPs
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DATE: 06/22/2003 03:20:33 PM
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The Internet is seething with many spurious and oddly formed packets, and their origin and purpose remain a mystery.
Since mid-May, security researchers and network administrators have tried to track down the source of odd traffic that they have been seeing on their networks. The data frequently attempted to connect to nonexistent servers or to services not offered by existing servers. The only common thread seemed to be that the data packet had a window size of 55,808 bytes and, in many cases, came from a nonexistent Internet address.
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(Thanks, Luis!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Listen Today: 24 hours of Throbbing Gristle
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DATE: 06/22/2003 03:47:26 PM
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Today, experimental record label Mobilization and KFJC radio are presenting a twenty-four hour Webcasted audio celebration of Throbbing Gristle, the proto-industrial, transmedia, civilization-wrecking, musical extravaganze of the late 1970s. Tune in, turn on, and burn out your mind to 6 hours of interviews, the new 24 CD release of TG live, and the entire back-catalog of Throbbing Gristle recordings.
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(Thanks, Richard!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: I.P. Beetles
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DATE: 06/22/2003 10:24:04 PM
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"A 13-year-old Indian boy has begun producing winged beetles in his urine after hatching the eggs in his body, a senior medical official said Monday." Link
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(via Land of the Dead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Oxford University, this Wednesday
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DATE: 06/23/2003 02:30:02 AM
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I'll be speaking at Oxford University this Wednesday night, at 8pm, Graves Room, St John's College, Oxford. I'm going to read a little recent fiction, talk about copyright a little, and where I see the state of the science fiction today. Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Female avatars are worth less than male avatars
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DATE: 06/23/2003 10:47:59 AM
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I spent the weekend devouring a draft of Brad King and John Borland's forthcoming book Dungeons and Dreamers, which charts the community history of gaming... profiles the individual quirky, wacky developers and super-fraggers, but unlike other books, weaves them together to sketch out a broad map of gaming's social DNA. Some interesting tales of women gamers and developers, too. Good stuff -- more on the book and the Dungeons and Dreamers blog later. But this
morning, an item on Declan's list from Age and Sydney Morning Herald deputy IT editor Nathan Cochrane's blog:
US economist Edward Castronova has discovered that female avatars, from worlds such as EverQuest, trade online at an average 10 per cent discount to their price were they male-designated. Castronova theorises that the same forces at play in the real world that keep womens' earning power below that of their male counterparts -- even where they have identical skills -- are also at work online. Men, it seems, like to appoint in their real-world successors analogs of themselves. Online, that behaviour carries over into who they appoint as their virtual alter-ego, the avatar.
permalink to Nathan's blog post, link to Castronova's report "The Price of Man and Woman: A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthetic World," Discuss.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: P2P Summit debuts in LA on August 8
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DATE: 06/23/2003 11:00:50 AM
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Hal Bringman says:
The P2P Summit announced today its formation and date for an upcoming event focused exclusively on the explosive filesharing phenomena, and its impact on the future of entertainment. The P2P Summit is seeking speakers, sponsors and exhibitors for the first-ever P2P Summit to be held August 8, 2003, at the Wyndham Bel Age Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. The Summit's focus is on the future of P2P file sharing and explores the various circumstances and developments that have recently turned the once underground and allegedly illegal movement into a seemingly booming business sector as digital music pay-per-download and subscription services begin to flourish.
link to P2P Summit website, Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Balloon trip into "space"
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DATE: 06/23/2003 11:07:13 AM
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In an attempt to break the balloon altitude record, two Brits will fly a helium balloon as tall as the Empire State Building to 40 km above Earth. OK, it's not really "space," but the pilots will be exposed to massive amounts of cosmic rays. That's why they'll be sporting space suits. Withouth them, their "blood would boil and (they'd) be vaporized above 63,000 feet because of the low air pressure."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: My new phonecam blog, and syndicating moblogs with RSS
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DATE: 06/23/2003 11:50:29 AM
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I've been fooling around with some new phonecams and a free phonecam blogging service called Textamerica lately. You can see the results at xenijardin.textamerica.com. Each of the phonecams I've demoed have been wildly frustrating in one way or another. Motorola's T722i add-on cam produces grainy thumbnails at best; image quality on Sanyo's 8100 (Sprint) is teh suck in all but bright light conditions. Until those megapixel phonecams hit America, mobile photobloggers might be better off combining a good, small digital camera like the Pentax Optio S with a wireless PDA for uploads and text captions. But despite limitations, the convenience, speed, and novelty of phonecam blogging has been fun so far -- even if the results are mediocre, stamp-sized snapshots.
Chris Pirillo -- whose terrific phonecam blog inspired me to finally get off my digital butt and publish one of my own -- has been corresponding with the textamerica.com folks for weeks with service improvement suggestions. His persistent e-badgering led to the company's introduction of RSS feeds last week. Free, instant phonecam blog syndication. How cool is that? I'm exploring other phonecam blog services, and plan to post more on that soon.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chris Pirillo interviews "Weird Al" Yankovic
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DATE: 06/23/2003 12:31:12 PM
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Digital video never lies. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scooterman: drunkard's chauffeur on a folding scooter
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DATE: 06/23/2003 04:21:28 PM
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Scooterman is a London-based service, wherein drunk people call a number, and a guy on a folding scooter comes over to the bar, puts his scooter in the trunk of their car and drives it and them home. Brilliant.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Schools' censorware sucks
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DATE: 06/23/2003 04:25:26 PM
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EFF published a major report on censorware today. What we did was, we googled all the keywords from all the US core curriculum, then checked to see if the censorware employed by schools and libraries would let you get at the top curriculum-related links (with human intervention to determine whether the pages were really relevant to the curriculum). In a nutshell: censorware stinks, and if your school or library uses it, it will stop you from using it to look up timely, relevant information related to your curriculum.
+ The use of Internet blocking software in schools cannot
help schools comply with the law because schools do not and
cannot set the software to block only the categories
required by the law, and because the software is incapable
of blocking only the visual depictions required by CIPA.
+ Blocking software does not protect children from exposure
to a large volume of material that is harmful to minors
within the legal definitions. Blocking software cannot adapt
adequately to local community standards. Most schools
already have in place alternatives to Internet blocking
software, such as adoption and enforcement of Internet use
policies, media literacy education, directed use, and
supervised use.
+ Blocking software in schools damages educational
opportunities for students, both by blocking access to web
pages that are directly related to the state-mandated
curriculums and by restricting broader inquiries of both
students and teachers. Teachers and students 17 years or
older (most high school juniors and seniors) should be
exempt, yet suffer the consequences of CIPA implementation.
After testing nearly a million web pages related to
state-mandated curriculums, the researchers found that of
the web pages blocked, 97 - 99% of a statistically
significant sample were blocked using non-standard,
discretionary, and potentially illegal criteria beyond what
CIPA requires.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: TIME on phonecam blogging
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DATE: 06/23/2003 11:22:25 PM
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This week's Time Magazine features a brief feature on phonecam blogging, and mentions textamerica.com -- the free service I've been using for mine. Hey, if your blog is a moblog *and* a photoblog, and you don't want limit the scope to phonecam pics only, could you just call it a mo-pho blog? Link, Discuss, (via Jason DiFilippo's Journal, which is always filled with amazing photos that you really must see.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Terrorizing popstars with an accordion
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DATE: 06/24/2003 02:22:42 AM
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Joey DeVilla roams the world with an accordion strapped to his back, deconstructing popular music with it (he led a procession of newly millionaired Slashdot founders down Broadway one night, playing Fatboy Slim on the accordion). He's had the good (?) fortune to run into various pop-stars on the way, and he confronts them with his squeeze-box, faking out rendiitons of their hit singles and singing along with great enthusiasm. Here're four anaecdotes about four popstars' reactions to this practice:
"Joey! It's Chris from Sloan!"
Once again, Sloan may not be familiar to people outside Canada, but they were -- at least until their current album, which ain't so hot -- a band with a knack for really good songwriting.
"Play some Sloan! Do you know any Sloan? Play some Sloan!" she screamed.
I started playing their first big single, the grunge anthem of unrequited university love, Underwhelmed:
She was underwhelmed if that's a word
I know it's not 'cause I looked it up
It's one of those things I learned in my school...
Chris' face first showed curiosity. Then it showed recognition. Followed by shock. And then we didn't see his face at all.
"He's...he's running away!" said Meryle, who burst out laughing.
"Come back, you coward!" I yelled. "Even Alanis would've faced me!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First nationwide free WiFi
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DATE: 06/24/2003 02:24:38 AM
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The Pacific island nation of Niue has rolled out island-wide, free national wireless access. The Atlantic island nation of England is lagging some ways behind them at the moment, unfortunely for me.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecams and politics: Hellweg in CNN/Money
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DATE: 06/24/2003 01:58:16 PM
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Eric Hellweg wrote a piece on phonecams that appears in CNN/Money today. It's interesting, in that it's among the first about phonecams in recent memory that tackles issues of privacy and politics head-on:
[T]he industry sees camera phones as the first wave in their battle to convince consumers that cell phones are for more than just talking; they're thinking of more lucrative activities like sending and receiving video and audio. A spokesperson for Sprint PCS (PCS: Research, Estimates), which debuted its camera-phone service in August 2002, says more than 2 million photos were shared in February and March through its networks. Wireless investors should keep their eyes on the camera phones and the U.S. adoption rate: Research firm IDC predicts that 1.9 million camera phones will be sold in the United States this year, and that the number will rocket up to 4.9 million next year -- a 162 percent gain.
But investors -- and the cellular companies -- should gird themselves for an impending battle with consumers, courts, and possibly even Congress over questions of privacy and the proper and improper uses of these phones.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Illustrator Kenn Brown imagines the "Perfect PC" for PC Mag
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DATE: 06/24/2003 02:05:51 PM
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Very cool images from Canadian artist and SARS Art project contributor Ken Brown, who says:
Here's a series of illustrations I did for the current PC Magazine. The challenge here was to create contemporary looking and aesthetically pleasing PC designs that were not so futuristic as to alienate the audiences visual understanding of PCs and their components. The article seeks to educate the audience about the various components of a system that are suited to a specific groups needs - so that the reader can make a more informed decision about the PC they want to purchase. The translucent reveals and components allowed the writers to indicate video cards, processors etc.
BoingBoing reader Robert points our that the images are "also available as part of a very cool set of flash presentations here that give you more insight about what actually makes up the machine, as well as crisper visuals."
Link to gallery of "Perfect PC" images,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA Wardriving with socalwug.org
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DATE: 06/24/2003 02:32:13 PM
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I went wardriving in downtown LA this morning with Frank Keeney and Mike Outmesguine from SOCALWUG, and published a few quick phonecam snapshots from the road which you can see here. Both Frank and Mike drive incredibly tricked-out vans packed with wall-to-wall wardriving gadgetry. Their recipe is basically (a) one or more notebook computers equipped with an independent wireless connectivity source (sierra wireless, boingo, or Sprint PCS 'net service), because they don't exploit the networks they sniff; (b) GPS device cable-connected to the main wardriving notebook to map out longitudinal/latitudinal coordinates of each WLAN along the way; (c) ham radio for two-way chat with fellow wardrivers in your team who are on the streets with you; (d) handy power converters that plug into your cigarette lighter and handily power a six-plug power strip so you can wardrive all you want with no battery worries.
Mike and Frank use several apps for network sniffing. Netstumbler is one, and is probably the best known. There are a few cool apps for PDAs, one of which is a PDA-specific version of Netstumbler. But this morning, the guys also used an application you may not have heard of -- Kismet, which Frank prefers for his Linux laptop. It serves up insanely detailed data that goes way beyond SSIDs and network strength. Kismet allows you to view details of network traffic, right down to actual filenames being transmitted through unencrypted WLANs. We sniffed close to 400 network points during a 40-minute cruise that covered Chinatown and downtown LA's financial core. The percentage of these which were totally open, vulnerable, unencrypted networks was mindboggling. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those naked WLANs appeared to belong to city/state government and law enforcement offices. Always good to know the public's data is in good hands.
More on Kismet here. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Report: Palo Alto school exposed student data on unsecured WLANs
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DATE: 06/24/2003 04:08:54 PM
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This story in today's Palo Alto Weekly says Silicon Valley's Palo Alto Unified School district exposed sensitive student records through unencrypted, unsecured 802.11b wireless networks.
Link, Discuss, (Thanks, cfarivar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogging standardization effort underway
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DATE: 06/24/2003 06:28:25 PM
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Numerous blogging toolmakers and hackers have signed onto a new effort, led by Sam Ruby, to define standard interfaces for posting to and syndicating blogs. Blogger's just thrown its hat into the ring, too.
Link
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scientology's shag-carpet-era art
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:33:42 AM
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This site contains the scanned images and text of a 1970s-era Church of Scientology picturebook, laughably written and lavishly illustrated with photos of loinclothed enlightened souls who look suspiciously like Jim Morrison.
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(via JWZ's LiveJournal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Merlin's spamtrap catches a grifter
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:40:26 AM
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Merlin Mann, whose notion for a spammer honeypot I blogged a few days back, has caught his first spammer with it. The perp is running an identity-theft scam that sends you a deceptive URL (http://www.paypal.com@207.44.196.35/~redbarpr/cgi-bin/webscr%3fcmd=verification/( for what appears to be a PayPal renewal screen and sucks up your personally identifying information and credit-card info.
This was mined on June 19th at 7:41pm (EDT) by IP 62.215.3.38...
I'll can post more later if needed, but I wanted to let you white hats, wizards, and net detectives go nuts on researching these IPs if the spirit moves you.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google AdSense
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:42:09 AM
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Google's got a new affiliate program, Google AdSense. Sign up, add a little scrap of Javascript to your pages, and you'll get a few targetted text-ads whenever your page is served. Clickthroughs get you $0.50 per.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC breaks new ground with RSS feeds
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:44:46 AM
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The BBC News has switched on what may be the most sophisticated collection of customizable RSS feeds offered by any mainstream news organization. Matt "Helped design BBC News" Jones posts the elated in-company memo on it:
"Yesterday afternoon [we] pulled the big red lever to make the CPS start publishing RSS versions of all the NewsOnline indexes on the website.
Examples:
Front Page
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/ front_page/rss091.xml
Cambridgeshire
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/england/ cambridgeshire/rss091.xml
Arts
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/ entertainment/arts/rss091.xml
News 24
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/ programmes/bbc_news_24/rss091.xml
...and for all of you going away to Glastonbury next weekend, Summer Music Festivals 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/in_depth/entertainment/
2003/summer_music_festivals/rss091.xml
in the UK Edition
And similarly in the World Edition,
Europe
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition /europe/rss091.xml
And Business
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/ business/rss091.xml
Etc.
The more ambitious of you out there should be able to work out the URL's of any index you want."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eldred Act coming to Congress
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:48:19 AM
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Lessig reports that Representatives Doolittle and Lofgren will introduce the Eric Eldred act to Congress. This is the bill that would require copyright holders to drop $1/work at the fifty-year mark in order to retain their copyright interests for the full duration set out by Congress -- otherwise, the works would enter the public domain. That way, you could find out what was and wasn't in copyright, and who held the rights to what. This is astonishingly good news. Go public domain! Some rights reserved!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AdSense previewer
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:50:43 AM
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Aaron Swartz has ginned up a Google AdSense previewer. Enter the URL of your page and it will give you a sample of the kinds of Google Ads you'd get if you put them on that page.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big Pharma FUDs Canadian dope-by-fax service
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:56:11 AM
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Florida retirees are getting their health-critical meds on the cheap by faxing their scrips to Canadian mail-order pharmacies, a practice that was newly legalized. The minions of Big Pharma (and, to be fair, of US pharmacists who are hamstrung by Big Pharma and will be outcompeted by lower Canadian dope pricing) are starting a $750,000 smear campaign to "educate" seniors about their duty to give more money to fortune-100 pharmaceuticals companies.
``People need to be aware they are taking a lot of risks if they are going to unlicensed and unregulated pharmacies,'' said state Department of Health spokesman Bill Parizek, whose agency includes the pharmacy board. ``We want to educate the public...''
Canadian pharmacies can sell some of the drugs most commonly used by Americans at 30 percent to 50 percent less, as a national health care plan covers its 33 million citizens and the government negotiates bulk medication prices.
On Friday, the U.S. Senate voted to let drugs be imported from Canada and resold at lower prices, as long as it was determined the practice posed no health risks. But the Food and Drug Administration continues to insist it cannot vouch for the safety of Canadian drugs.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Open Spectrum list
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/25/2003 01:02:24 AM
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A new mailing list for talking about Open Spectrum:
Open Spectrum is the frequencies that supports the use of Wi-Fi/802.11b, and other wireless internet access technology. Wi-Fi and other wireless data systems make a very good urban/rural internet access solution, as shown by the massive growth in Wireless ISP and community wireless networks. However, in many places regulatory uncertainty leaves its users at risk. The purpose of this list is to further the proliferation of good open spectrum policies world-wide.
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(Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Newsmonster: Now with Whuffie
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/25/2003 01:05:34 AM
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Kevin Burton continues to make improvements to his program NewsMonster, a Mozilla-based RSS reader that uses a Whuffie-like reputation system to rank and suggest items and feeds to his readers. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for OS X yet (weird, considering that it's all Mozilla-based), but Kevin promises that by end-of-week (apparently, he's going to patch some longstanding Moz bugs and submit the changes to the Mozilla codebase).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIAA about to sue hundreds of uploaders, using DMCA
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DATE: 06/25/2003 09:59:03 AM
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A BoingBoing pal who asks to remain anonymous says that the RIAA has just announced that they will be filing lawsuits against hundreds of uploaders, using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to obtain names. They'll apparently begin filing the lawsuits in 8-10 weeks, according to announcements in a press conference held earlier today at 11 AM Eastern Time.
Update: the Washington Post now has a story here, and Ted Bridis of AP now has a story online here.
Update II: The RIAA has now posted an announcement here. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Saudi students get test scores by SMS
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DATE: 06/25/2003 12:10:15 PM
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Saudi Telecom is offering a service through which students at secondary schools in Saudi Arabia can receive their exam results via SMS, according to an article in Arab News.
The service by STC in association with the Ministry of Education requires the student to message his or her seat number... results will be messaged back to the student, and on successful completion the service is charged at SR1.50, he said.
link Discuss (Thanks, Jon, via unwired)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cory Doctorow on BBC's radio 4 "Today Programme"
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DATE: 06/25/2003 01:43:24 PM
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BoingBoing co-editor Cory Doctorow, currently traveling in the UK, talked about blogs on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme yesterday morning. Listen (Real), Listen (un-Real, thanks Gerard), Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: EFF's Von Lohmann on today's RIAA lawsuit announcement
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DATE: 06/25/2003 01:59:16 PM
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This response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
It's plain that the dinosaurs of the recording industry have
completely lost touch with reality," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF senior
staff attorney. "At a time when more Americans are using file-sharing
software than voted for President Bush, more lawsuits are simply not
the answer. It's time to get artists paid and make file-sharing legal.
EFF calls on Congress to hold hearings immediately on alternatives to
the RIAA's litigation campaign against the American public.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neocons: scarier than Decepticons
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DATE: 06/25/2003 05:56:27 PM
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Sweet photoshoppery from Matt Jones, now available in Cafe Press tees and such.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Decease: new 'zine about death seeking submissions
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DATE: 06/25/2003 09:40:41 PM
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bOING bOING pal Meri Brin is starting a 'zine that I'm dying to read! (hahahaha... ba-dum-bump)
Decease, a general interest magazine about death, is looking for submissions. Decease explores different aspects of death from the practical, like exploring cremation options, to the esoteric, including cryonics and art exhibits. Decease wants to remove the stigma associated with and explore humans' natural curiosity about death.
Submissions can be artwork, images, poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction). All artists are encouraged to submit work that may fall under the theme of Death. Work can be humorous, tongue in cheek, investigative, or personal. Some sample examples include:
-Interviews with morticians, embalmers, taxidermists
-Photo Essay of interesting headstones
-A review of a book, movie, art show, television show
-Essay about the interesting death of a person, famous or not
-Places to visit - like the Museum of Death in Hollywood, or the Bone Church near Prague
-Visuals good for everything - collages, photos, drawings, illustrations!
Interesting? Interested? Send it to me!
Comments, Ideas, Let me know!
Thanks!
meri@idiom.com
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: QuickTopic Goes Pro
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DATE: 06/26/2003 03:33:44 AM
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QuickTopic -- who provide our message boards gratis -- has launched a premium service with lots of great bells and whistles (and a reasonable pricetag).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecamblogging: build a hotrod, hack into its brain via open source app
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DATE: 06/26/2003 11:23:14 AM
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I visited the clandestine LA workshop of a mad scientist, and posted some phonecam pics on the fly to my phonecamblog.
I'm standing in the garage of a supercool geek guy who is building an obscure, rad, retro sportscar. He's hacking into its electronic "brain" by way of an IBM thinkpad running an open source application that gathers and analyses performance data. Steven is a technician with one of the world's largest aeronautics companies. He is also a fearless robot master and pyro terrorist. Once, he rescued me from a bunch of bees. (Sanyo 8100/Sprint)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Save the Whole Earth Review Singularity!
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DATE: 06/26/2003 11:23:37 AM
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The next Whole Earth Review issue is delayed due to lack of funding. It's a special issue on the Singularity, one that lots of people (including, me, Stross and Vinge) wrote pieces for. In classic WER style, they're appealing to their readers to come up with the printing costs to get the ish out the door and they've posted some of the articles that will come out with the issue as an enticement (including mine).
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(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: USA Today: fansites' influence on moviemakers
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DATE: 06/26/2003 11:30:18 AM
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Interesting article about the growing influence that fan websites have on directors and film studios:
"I used to hate the Internet," [Marvel Studios head Avi Arad] says. "I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners."
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Jed)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online gallery of smashed-up exotic cars
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DATE: 06/26/2003 11:38:12 AM
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Fancy a little schadenfreude? This very weird website is an online repository of car wreck photos involving expensive and sexy sportscars. Includes descriptions of how the wrecks happened. There's a fetish here somewhere, I just don't know what its name is. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky Seussian Wonderland: Ricky Boscarino's Luna Parc
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DATE: 06/26/2003 11:40:50 AM
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Gaudi or just gaudy? BoingBoing reader Allen Knutson says: This artist transformed his home into a Dr. Seuss-like wonderland. The bathroom
is particularly crazy. He makes amazing miniatures in metal (though I am having trouble figuring out how big they really are); here's one.
The obvious front page image is his house. I read about him in the NY Times today,
which includes the good news that he's doing well financially as an artist.
Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF P2P: Tired of being treated like a criminal?
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DATE: 06/26/2003 11:40:59 AM
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In the wake of the RIAA's announcement that they intend on suing thousands of customers, EFF has posted a campaign in support of P2P music sharing and the striking of a new copyright bargain that will compensate artists without criminalizing millions of Internet users.
File-sharing has enabled music fans from around the world to build the largest library of recorded music in history. While this should be cause for celebration, large record labels have spent the last three years attacking peer-to-peer (P2P) technology and the people who use it. But neither user-empowering technologies nor consumers' desire for easy access to digital music are evil. Targeting technologists and users is not addressing the real problem.
The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders. It's time to start addressing this problem head on. In the past, we've used a system called "compulsory licensing" to reconcile copyright law with the benefits of new technologies like cable television and webcasting. This approach has drawbacks, but it's certainly better than the direction that the recording industry is taking us today.
Many innovative payment models have been proposed (with or without a compulsory license), and we have highlighted some of them here. In addition, several artists and record labels are leading this effort, offering creative ways for their fans to get access to their music while rewarding the artists for their talents. A few of those artists and labels are highlighted here, as well.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Toaster casemod
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DATE: 06/26/2003 11:42:40 AM
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Luis points us to a particularly zany casemod: a toaster PC. We've featured toaster casemods on BoingBoing before -- twice -- but this is one offers a new spin on the toastmod theme. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Australian cops don't know the meaning of Sorry
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DATE: 06/27/2003 01:04:10 AM
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An Australian woman whose unpaid parking tickets resulted in her being ordered to perform community service was strip-searched by the police who were overseeing the work. She asked for an apology, and, failing to receive one, sued the cops, and was awarded over AUS$300K. The Aussie cops appealed -- she asked for an apology. She didn't get one. She litigated the cappeal and her award was knocked down to AUS$138,000. Now all she wants is an apology. Which she won't get. Jesus.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: T-Mobile drives a nail into the Sidekick's coffin
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DATE: 06/27/2003 03:20:20 AM
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T-Mobile has announced that they are "no longer supporting" the video games they bundled with the color Sidekick. Normally, this would be pretty straightforward -- you could use 'em unsupported, you could find someone else to support 'em, whatever. But because the Sidekick is a phone first and a computing device second (not a technology decision, but rather a marketing/operations one), "no longer supported" has a much more sinister meaning: when T-Mobile withdraws its "support" of the games on the color Sidekick, it wil remotely erase the games from the color Sidekicks of all of their customers.
Hard to say why they're withdrawing the games. Some say that it's because they don't want to incur the ongoing licensing costs, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. The fact is that the Sidekick's promise has been sucked dry by T-Mobile's phone-company shenanigans. You may remember that earlier this year, the long-awaited, long-overdue SDK shipped, along with the news that only that code which had been approved by T-Mobile would be installable on any device.
They still haven't delivered a synch tool that lets you download your PIM data (calendar, contacts, to-do) from your Sidekick to your PC, and what's more, this latest move shows very clearly what you can expect to happen when you stop being a T-Mobile customer: they will "withdraw their support" from your handset, erasing your personal info.
Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this).
I apologize, then, to all the people I've recommended Sidekicks to. Clearly, this device is a mistake, at least as offered by T-Mobile (it may be that AT&T will do a better job of marketing the tool -- there's no technical reason it has to suck, but T-Mobile's operational division has castrated it into near-uselessness).
I've been looking at the Nokia Sony-Ericsson P800. It looks like it does everything the Sidekick does (albeit at a retail cost of 3X the Sidekick's), and is, moreover, a real PC, that you can install software on, back up, etc. It works with a variety of carriers (in Europe at least, is there any US support apart from T-Mobile?), and has a pretty good UI and featureset. My Sidekick's plan is up in September, and I won't be renewing. Any US users of the Sony-Ericsson care to weigh in on this as a replacement?
Link
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(Thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Los Alamos staffer buys Mustang, not nuke research parts, by mistake?
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DATE: 06/27/2003 07:02:25 AM
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Noah Shachtman says:
The many-faceted drama at the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory has produced some strange moments. But this has to be the weirdest of them all: Los Alamos equipment buyer Lillian Anaya thought she was ordering $30,000 worth of transducers. But she dialed a number that had been changed from an industrial equipment dealer to an auto parts shop, and wound up buying a Mustang with government money instead.
That's the assertion of Los Alamos and University of California investigators, who today cleared Anaya of any wrongdoing in a case that helped engulf the world's most important nuclear research center in a fog of scandal. It's a move, lab critics said, that shows that the birthplace of the atomic bomb still hasn't come to terms with the problems of mismanagement and widespread fraud that have plagued it for years.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sensors of the World, Unite!
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DATE: 06/27/2003 07:07:07 AM
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In Technology Review today, an interview with Ember CTO Robert Poor on using wirelessly-interconnected sensors to create "smart" fields of networked devices.
Imagine sprinkling tiny sensors on road and fields for surveillance, putting them in buildings and bridges to monitor structural health, and installing them in industrial facilities to manage energy, inventory and manufacturing processes.That's the idea behind the emerging technology of wireless sensor networks (see "Casting the Wireless Sensor Net"). Boston-based Ember is at the epicenter of this field. The MIT spinoff sells radio chips with embedded processors that can organize themselves into networks to manage real-world data from sensors. Ember CTO Robert Poor-whose past life includes stints as a programmer in the computer graphics group that became Pixar and as a guitar technician for the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia-spoke with Technology Review staff writer Gregory T. Huang about his visions of a world filled with wirelessly networked devices.
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Bev!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bay Area event tonight: Crazy pyro show with Flam Chen, on the waterfront
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DATE: 06/27/2003 01:52:51 PM
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BoingBoing pal and robotics aficionado David Calkins says:
Awesome fire show in San Francisco, tonight only! Flam Chen really do travel all over the world. They're doing a once in a lifetime show tonight, Friday June 27th at 8:30 PM on Toxic Tire Beach for a scant $10. "Flam Chen creates unique panoramas of spectacle and narrative- Performers spin Balinese fire chains, combat with fire staffs and flaming swords, dance with fire fingers and fire fans, eat and breathe flames, and light costume pieces, sculptures and very often the set itself ablaze during the course of the evening. " This is a real fire show with a real fire permit from the city. I had the great pleasure of seeing their rehearsal Thursday night, and you can see their one-time only show tonight. It ends by 11, so there's still plenty of time for Tiki drinks at some seedy bar I wouldn't approve of. Surely to be a spectacular among spectaculars, Flam Chen will present a stunning rendition of their classical outdoor Show, Ling Ling, before a teeming audience of amazed and enchanted men, women and children! The Show is at Toxic Tire Beach, which the city knows as Warm Water Cove. Just up from Cesar Chavez off of 280 at the Terminus of 24th street, just off of third (MAP). Bring a picnic and watch the sun go down, then Be Amazed as this lively venue provides a shining example of the phenomenon of Live Entertainment! 8:30-11, sharp, so arrive on time.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Paris photoblogger documents personal tragedy of forced evictions
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DATE: 06/28/2003 08:59:21 AM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in France writes:
Hello Xeni, today I was furious, and very moved, when I discovered this post from desordre blog in Paris (no permalink). On June 23rd, the French police suddenly tossed out families "without papers" who had been living in an old abandoned building for the past nine years in Paris. It was 6 AM. The pics show a man who prayed, also the abandoned luggages and the policemen (with 3 bus) that have totally closed the street. During the day, bricklayers came to seal up all the doors. The people there weren't delinquents... they just don't have their French papers for 10 years. Most of them are employed. Philippe De Jonckheere (a well-known blogger here in France) quickly shot pics and posted them in his photoblog. I also blogged about it this this morning, and I'm very upset by the facts behind the evictions.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyleft: Copyright versus Freedom
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DATE: 06/28/2003 10:46:48 AM
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Miriam Rainsford, an activist with the UK's Comapaign For Digital Rights, is working on a book on copyright and digital freedom, called Copyleft, to be published by Gnu press. She's documenting the project online.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How Apple's DRM works
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DATE: 06/28/2003 10:49:26 AM
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The author of the excellent PodWorks iPod utility is working on reverse-engineering the DRM in Apple's iTunes Store AAC files, documenting the ways in whcih the DRM restricts your use of the file, and how those restrictions may be defeated.
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(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Charlie Stross got hitched!
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DATE: 06/28/2003 10:54:58 AM
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Congrats to Charlie Stross and Feorag Whose-Surname-I- Always-Misspell-and- Which-Does-Not- Appear-on-Her-Home- Page on their wedding! Hurray!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Here we are in Rarotonga
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DATE: 06/28/2003 11:21:01 PM
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We're starting to get settled in to Rarotonga. I had to pay NZ$525 (US$300) to get an Internet account and it is really really slow. It's mind-boggling to be here, on this emerald speck full of life: the sounds of roosters and motor scooters, the smell of burning palm fronds, the sight of the stars at night, the beautiful green mountains, and the ocean and sand. Carla and I still aren't sure what we've gotten ourselves into, but the weirdness factor makes it all worth it. We have a deal with a publication to post weekly online dispatches, and I'll announce it as soon as the deal is finalized. In the meantime, you can see some pictures, inlcuding one of our new home. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Airport feds rip off travellers
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DATE: 06/29/2003 11:24:40 AM
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The Transport Security Agency requires all fliers to travel with their luggage unlocked, so that highly trustworthy federal employees can rummage through them and ensure that they are WMD-free. And steal things. TSA employees are ripping off choice items ($1,000 binox and such) from the mandatorily-unlocked bags of America's travellers. I feel safer already.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More Agent Smith drag at Japanese Matrix screenings
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DATE: 06/29/2003 11:28:34 AM
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Japanese Matrix Reloaded cosplay fans are still showing up, by the hundreds, at M:R screenings in Agent Smith drag.
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(Thanks, Juergen!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reboot video is online
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DATE: 06/29/2003 11:30:09 AM
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The videos from the talks at Reboot have been posted, including my talk on DRM, copyright and the net, along with Meg Hourihan, Scott Heiferman, and so forth.
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(Thanks, Nikolaj!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Google + wireless = God?
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DATE: 06/29/2003 01:27:46 PM
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From Thomas Friedman's New York Times op/ed today:
Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."
In other words, once Wi-Fi is in place, with one little Internet connection I can download anything from anywhere and I can spread anything from anywhere. That is good news for both scientists and terrorists, pro-Americans and anti-Americans.
And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us -- whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet -- more than ever.
Link to NYT column (registration required), Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gothic Lolita Bible scans
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DATE: 06/29/2003 10:20:46 PM
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My favorite weird-ass Japanese fashion trend of recent years is "Gothic Lolita," which is pretty much what it sounds like, but elevated to a kind of exquisite art. Here are scans from "Gothic Lolita Bible," showcasing kick-ass, weird-ass GL fashion spreads.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Inkjet printer made of spraypaint
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DATE: 06/30/2003 04:49:33 AM
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Hektor is an inkjet printer made out of a can of spraypaint and a series of clever, machine-controlled pulleys. The site features a making-of guide in PDF and a really sexy movie of Hektor in action.
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(Thanks, BK!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese miniaturize Ikea
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DATE: 06/30/2003 04:53:14 AM
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Muji is a chain of Japanese clothing and furnishings stores, featured in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition as a place where none of the goods have any labels or logomarks. The furnishings are really interesting -- made from recycled carboard and similar materials, and designed to go into miniscule Tokyo flats, Muji furnishings are like Ikea for itty-bitty pads. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the good stuff is only available through the meatspace stores, not on their e-commerce site.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About: the novel
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DATE: 06/30/2003 05:00:23 AM
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Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About is a classic and utterly hilarious website in which Mil Millington documents his stormy relationship with Margret, his German girlfriend. Now, the website is a novel, in which Millington uses his life as the basis for a bureaucratic thriller about an IT professional at a University library whose co-workers use him as a patsy in their shady dealings.
I read the novel yesterday on a long plane ride, and it's pretty good. It's every bit as funny as the website (which is saying something), and the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic. The plot is pretty much a bolt-on, of course, and you won't get up from this book and change the world, but it's certainly a nice bit of summer reading.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: OpenOffice for Mac goes gold
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DATE: 06/30/2003 05:10:56 AM
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OpenOffice, the free, open source office suite that reads and writes Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (as well as including a nice drawing app), has gone gold for OS X. This first stable release is enormous (170MB download!), and it uses X-Windows (a Unix graphical user interface that accounts for much of the download size), but it's free, it doesn't feed the beast, and it lets you interoperate with your Microsoft Office-using pals without dropping $500 on a piece of technology intended to lock you into an expensive upgrade cycle.
There's a MacOS-native version in the works, too -- one that uses Aqua, OS X's built-in window manager. It's exciting to see this stuff maturing. Mozilla is getting tighter and tighter, providing a real alternative to Explorer and Safari, one that users can hack cool applications out of, like Kevin Burton's Newsmonster. Now, with the maturation of OpenOffice, which runs on every major OS, there's hope that we'll be able to get a full suite of tools that respect our freedom and provide an open platform for innovation.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wicked-cool idea for a portable printer
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DATE: 06/30/2003 05:16:52 AM
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PrintDreams is a really cool idea for portable printing. You download the output to it using a Bluetooth link, then you swipe it rapidly and randomly over any surface. It senses where it is and lays down ink in the appropriate spots to paint a decent-looking output onto the surface. It will be interesting to see how this works -- I've tried out half a dozen wee printers and they all roundly sucked.
The printer has the length of a normal ball-point pen while its width and height are more or less equivalent to the width of a modern mobile phone. The total volume is less than 300 c.c. and weights around 350 grams. This first version of PrintBrush was designed to fit into a shirt pocket.
Internet content, SMS, pictures and other information is downloaded to the PrintBrush from PDAs, mobile phones and laptop computers via a Bluetooth wireless link. Then, by following the RMPT principle the device is hand operated by sweeping it across any type of print media, no matter what its shape, size or thickness. The printout will then start to appear right behind the sweeps. The device takes into account all the parameters of the hand movement, including rotation and sudden changes of speed and acceleration. The resulting image on the printed media is very much like its digital counterpart.
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Congress may get pissed at RIAA over lawsuits
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DATE: 06/30/2003 05:20:44 AM
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Good LA Times editorial on the damage the recording industry is doing to its cause by threatening to sue thousands of American file-sharers. Turns out that you can get a lot of play in Congress by playing victim, but bullies don't get the same amount of sympathy.
"I would guess that you would then see stories about the family faced with economic ruin and the cost of having to hire defense counsel, settling for $10,000 or $20,000, and the money they were saving for Timmy's college education now has to go to Kid Rock," said Philip S. Corwin, a lobbyist in Washington for Sharman Networks, distributor of the Kazaa file-sharing software.
"That's the kind of stuff that would scare a politician."
Even Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-North Hollywood), a frequent ally of the entertainment industry, said the labels' standing in Congress would suffer if they "overreach and refuse to settle these issues reasonably." But, he added, "I don't think their goal is to collect a huge amount of revenue through the vehicle of lawsuits; I think it is to deter continued illegal conduct."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bloggers, email list moderators gain libel protection
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DATE: 06/30/2003 07:53:53 AM
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An appeals court ruled last Tuesday that bloggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish. I covered the story for Wired News:
Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.
"One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward."
The court based its decision on a section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, or the CDA. That section states, "... no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Three cases since then -- Zeran v. AOL, Gentry v. eBay and Schneider v. Amazon -- have granted immunity to commercial online service providers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese mags take on "digital shoplifters"
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DATE: 06/30/2003 07:55:29 AM
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Japanese magazine publishers are all panty-bunched about a practice they call "digital shoplifting." A "digital shoplifter" is a woman who sees an interesting hairstyle or garment in a fashion mag and snaps a photo of it with her camphone, then emails it to her pals to see what they think of it. The magazine publishers have created an "educational campaign" to intimidate these nefarious criminals into giving up their infringing ways.
...[T]he publishers of those magazines feel they are being cheated out of valuable sales.
Together with Japan's phone companies, they are issuing stern posters which warn shoppers to be careful of their "magazine manners".
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(via Smartmobs)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Welcome to our new guestblogger, Marc Laidlaw!
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DATE: 06/30/2003 08:44:07 AM
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Today, the guestbar torch is passed to Marc Laidlaw.
Marc is the author of numerous short stories and six novels including Dad's Nuke, Neon Lotus, The Orchid Eater, Kalifornia, The Third Force, and The 37th Mandala. He was a frequent contributor to bOINGbOING the zine, way back in the days of paper. For the last six years he has worked for Valve Software, serving as writer for the games Half-Life and the forthcoming Half-Life 2.
Many thanks to departing guestblogger John Dvorak of PC Magazine for his terrific BoingBoing stint -- and for the accidental composite image of J. Edgar Hoover sporting a gigantic pair of "man tits" which is now forever burned into my memory. Yeah. Thanks a lot, John. ;-)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 06/30/2003 09:35:31 AM
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Virtual "force fields" around no-fly zones, earthquake-proofing buildings with burlap, collaboratively-controlled telerobotic webcams, and more in my latest issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Please take a look!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My short story collection now available for pre-orders
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DATE: 06/30/2003 11:59:06 AM
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Amazon has put up its sell-page for my forthcoming short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, which will be published by Four Walls Eight Windows in September 2003. This book is coming along famously, with an intro by Bruce Sterling and blurbs by a variety of people, including Neil "Sandman" Gaiman. If you pre-order now, you get a 20 percent discount.
From the introduction by Bruce Sterling:
Many writers, especially gray, creaky, well-fed ones, have ambivalent feelings about copyrighted ink versus slithering electronica. Me, for instance: I wrote two novels on typewriters, so I still remember the Pleistocene. But Cory possesses an advanced mode of cyber-analysis. Paper versus pixels, that's yesterday's battle, an intriguing archaism for him. It provokes that nose-flaring delight that he takes in old industrial equipment and Howdy Doody dolls.
Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into into the caverns and underground rivers of Pop Culture, here filtered through SF-coloured glasses. Enjoy.
- Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods and Sandman
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pre-Columbian Mickey
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DATE: 06/30/2003 02:52:40 PM
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Wonderful gallery of modern iconography rendered as pre-Columbian sculpture.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Musicians petition the RIAA to drop its lawsuits
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DATE: 06/30/2003 04:15:33 PM
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Musicians are circulating a petition asking the RIAA to stop suing their fans for using file-sharing software, asking them to instead focus on action against organized criminals who sell pirate CDs.
In response to the continuing legal attacks by the RIAA and major
record labels on internet music sharing, which now include both
criminal charges and civil suits against individuals, musicians are
joining together to say NO to the action supposedly being taken on
our behalf.
Just because the major labels haven't figured out a way to make money
out of the internet doesn't mean that individuals who have shared
music should go to prison, or be forced into bankruptcy. The industry
is alienating the very people it hopes to sell music to in future
with its heavy handed action.
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(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What is the Analog Hole Matrix?
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:43:01 AM
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At EFF, we've been attending the meetings of the Analog Reconversion Discussion Group (ARDG, or "Arghhhhhh!"), the MPAA's inter-industry group that's trying to "plug the analog hole" (that is, make it impossible to digitize an entertainment program without the rights-holder's permission). The group is yet another secretive consortium where representatives of major corporations meet, excluding the press, not publishing proceedings, and deal away fair use rights.
But now it's not clear what, exactly, the group intends to do. My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann attended the most recent ARDG meeting in DC and he describes the "analysis matrix" the group is producing, a mysteriously useless-seeming document that the IT, CE and film companies are devoting all this effort to.
The "analysis matrix" consists of several dozen questions regarding the technical capabilities of available "rights signaling" technologies. Once the "matrix" of questions is completed and embraced by ARDG, technology vendors will be invited to respond to the questions, thus vetting their own "rights signaling schemes." The outcome will look like those big product review charts in computer magazines, comparing products by various performance criteria.
Interestingly, the major industry groups at ARDG appear to agree that this collection of self-reported information will constitute the final ARDG product. At least that's what I thought I heard Brad Hunt (MPAA), Jim Burger (Computer Industry Group) and Seth Greenstein (5C Companies) agree to in the meeting. No consensus recommendation of any particular technology, no probing evaluation by the ARDG of any of the technology claims made by vendors.
Just a stapled together collection of vendor-provided marketing hype about the characteristics of various watermarking schemes. Doesn't seem like much, does it? It remains unclear to me who this ARDG final report will be sent to, or for what purpose.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stress is a killer
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:46:27 AM
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The scientific basis for stress as a factor in illness has been uncovered by Ohio State researchers. Turns out that stress causes a chemical called Interleukin-6 to be released into your bloodstream, and turns out that Interleukin-6 is bad cess.
Previous studies have associated IL-6 with several diseases, including heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, type-2 diabetes and certain cancers.
The study also found the increase in IL-6 can linger in caregivers for as long as three years after a caregiver had ceased that role because of the spouse’s death. Of the test group, 78 spouses died during the survey...
She explained that people under stress tend to respond by doing things that can increase their levels of IL-6.
For example, they may smoke or overeat; smoking raises IL-6 levels, and the chemical is secreted by fat cells. Stressed people also may not get enough exercise or sleep, she added. Exercise reduces IL-6, she said, and normal sleep helps regulate levels of the chemical.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jet-powered glider
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:49:09 AM
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These nutcases built a jet-powered glider and flew it. It does loop-de-loops and, remarkably, fails to kill those who fly it.
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(Thanks, Code-Boy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "BigDave" needs kidney transplant, bloggers team up to help
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DATE: 07/01/2003 07:11:01 AM
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Dave Jacobs needs a kidney transplant. A veteran of Microsoft, Macromind, Marimba and Macromedia, where he held executive positions in marketing and technology management, Jacobs is also a former Fetish columnist at Wired magazine. Dave Winer, Marc Canter, Doc Searls, and others are joining blog-forces to get the word out, and help him find a donor:
There aren't many things we need in life to survive -- food, water, a warm place to rest, that's about it. My good friend, David Jacobs, 47, is different. He needs a new kidney to survive. He's suffered for a decade with a degenerative condition called polycystic kidney disease or PKD and has been on the kidney transplant waiting list for two years.
The past two months have been full of problems and complications and a couple of days ago, Dave he told me he was going to take his appeal for a kidney donor public. Until now he's been extremely private about his condition, but he is hoping to not only find a potential donor for himself, but to raise awareness for organ donation in general. When he asked if I would help, of course I said yes.
Link to Dave Winer's post, Link to Marc Canter's post,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Giving Sharers Ears Without Faces
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DATE: 07/01/2003 07:17:05 AM
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I wrote a story for Wired News today about increased interest in filesharing tools that provide users with anonymity, in the wake of last Wednesday's RIAA announcement that it plans to sue hundreds of uploaders:
Blubster developer Pablo Soto of Madrid said his music-swapping service relaunched today as a secure, decentralized system providing users with anonymous accounts. The MP2P network (short for Manolito Peer-to-Peer) on which Blubster is based consists of more than 200,000 users sharing over 52 million files, according to Soto. The update is also said to include a new, streamlined file-distribution method that disassociates transfers from specific users.
"The biggest privacy weakness of our previous version was the ability to query a list of shared songs for any user -- now that can be disabled," Soto said. "It may be possible to gather IP addresses from the network, but not data about what content specific users are sharing." (...)
Developer sources told Wired News that pro-P2P coalitions are forming in the United States and Europe to centralize lobbying and public relations efforts. Coalition members are said to include Grokster, LimeWire, Blubster and others. Public announcements are expected in July.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ASCII-Matrix
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DATE: 07/01/2003 07:39:33 AM
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The ASCII-Matrix: fight-sequences from Matrix (Reloaded?) rendered as animated ASCII.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nessie on the big screen
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DATE: 07/01/2003 07:43:21 AM
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German director Werner Herzog (Wheel of Time) and screenwriter Zak Penn (X-Men United) are teaming up on a documentary about the myth/reality of the Loch Ness Monster. The approach will be more of a cultural history than a scientific expedition. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: REM endorses sharing of unreleased recordings
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DATE: 07/01/2003 07:48:11 AM
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Murmurs.com is a fan-site endorsed by REM that distributes a WinMX client for sharing unreleased, live and bootleg REM recordings.
A prime example is the service run on R.E.M. fan site Murmurs.com. "Give It Away," named after one of the band's songs, is a peer-to-peer network that uses WinMX software to connect R.E.M. fans and allow them to trade live and unreleased music by the pop/rock veterans. The service was launched in October 2001 and its creators say it averages about 170 gigabytes of regularly traded material.
R.E.M. has given its blessing to the service, says site founder Ethan Kaplan, on the condition that it is not used to transfer album tracks or official, label-released material. The Give It Away download page contains specific instructions on what is and is not allowed for sharing on the service. The only exceptions to the "officially released" rule are R.E.M. b-sides and fanclub singles, which "the band have given their permission to share on this service," reads the statement.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bioartificial organs for transplant
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DATE: 07/01/2003 03:29:27 PM
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Apropos of Xeni's post below regarding Dave Jacobs' quest for a kidney transplant, the new issue of Technology Review features a survey of the state-of-the-art in bioartificial organs, hybdrids of lab-built components and human cells:
"For now at least, they are external devices, and the cells inside them stay healthy for no more than a few weeks. Even such temporary support could be a boon for medicine, sustaining thousands of patients and enabling them to regain the function of their own organs or survive until transplant organs become available. But the real revolution will come with the development of permanent, implantable bioartificial organs. That will require new materials that allow the cells to receive nourishment from the body but still protect them from attacks by the recipients’ immune systems. Such devices are years from fruition..."
With the United Network for Organ Sharing counting more than 80,000 people waiting for transplants in the US alone, time is of the essence.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessons learned from Peekabooty
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:27:45 PM
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Paul Baranowski has written up a good analysis of the lessons he's learned running the open-source Peekabooty project, a technology aimed at allowing people to circumvent censoring proxies.
Don't Use Binary Protocols for Application Development
In grad school we spent a lot of time analyzing network protocols, network optimization, etc. A binary protocol may be good for core protocols of the Internet, but they are not a good choice for an application. Once again, this may seem obvious to some, and others may stop reading at this point in disgust. Here's why binary protocols were no good for this project:
* You waste too much time figuring out 1's and 0's instead of adding features.
* You make it very difficult for others to write their own clients
Interface is Everything
This is similar to the #1 project management lesson. The program should be fun to work with. There should be buttons and things that blink. The interface should be the first thing you do. The interface serves as inspiration and motivation and helps you to learn how the final product should look. Yes, it's going to change a lot. Yes, it's going to have to be rewritten multiple times. Yes, it will never be good enough. Yes, it produces a never-ending list of additions and features to your already huge TODO list. But when someone downloads your program they will have something to do. No one likes to look at command lines.
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(via The Happiest Geek on Earth)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 8-Bit Joystick sponsors EFF in Blogathon
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:32:29 PM
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Thanks to 8-Bit Joystick, a blog that's sponsoring the EFF in this year's Blogathon.
[Y]ou sign up to sponsor a blogger. On July 26th, watch your blogger go for 24 hours straight. When the event is over, you'll receive an email asking you to donate directly to the charity for which your participant was blogging.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Live Without a Net: Stories from the netless world
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:39:10 PM
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Live Without a Net is Lou Anders' new anthology of science fiction stories about technological worlds that lack the Internet. When I was invited to the anthology, I balked. I'd just sold a story on this theme and I couldn't imagine writing another without getting all reactionary and soppy about the horrors of being a net.addict.
But the better stories in this book prove me wrong. The standouts, like Paul Di Fillipo's Clouds and Cold Fires, Charlie Stross's Rogue Farm, Rudy Rucker's Frek in the Grullo Woods (an outtake from his brilliant forthcoming novel Frek and the Magic Elixir), and John Meaney's The Swastika Bomb are anything but predictable and trite. Rather, they're wildly imaginative, thoughtful, and thought-provoking looks at a subject that is nearly unthinkable: a future free from the Internet.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mod-chip company dares Microsoft to sue
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:51:10 PM
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An Aussie mod-chip company has posted plans for circumventing the use-restriction tech in Microsoft's Xbox. In order to get the plans, you have to agree to a click-through license that binds to you seeking any legal redress in a Queensland, Aus. courtroom -- the Queensland court having already ruled that mod-chipping is legal. Now the company is daring Microsoft to sue them -- and lose -- under the terms of the click-through.
Intellectual property lawyer Simon Minahan says Microsoft is bound by the actions of its workers, who agreed to download the designs under the terms of the click-wrap agreement. "In actual fact it would be a little disappointing if they couldn't sue me," says Sparks, known as "Donatus" in the mod chip underground. "You see, I'm quite happy for them to take us to court, I just want to see it happen under conditions where we win.
"In order for them to argue that they have not agreed to these conditions, they would have to acknowledge that click-through legal agreements are not valid - which is something that I think would be very funny to see Microsoft doing."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi hotspot businesses cost too much to be profitable (and they suck)
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:52:10 PM
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The Economist reports on the failing business of providing WiFi hotspots at very high prices -- especially in Europe (I just spent three weeks there, and discovered that the average cost for a day's WiFi was on the order of $20 or more). The article points out that lower prices would certainly make a difference, and as Glenn Fleishman points out:
Starbucks has an average of two people per store per day use the T-Mobile HotSpot service; Amsterdam's airport has just a dozen per day. At these rates, they'll pay back capital expenses in negative 1,000 years.
Me, I figure that most of the expense of running a hotspot comes from the billing for hotspots. Figure $50 for a cheap access-point and $50/month for a DSL line, and you can imagine coffee-shops turning a profit on free WiFi if by selling one extra latte a day, and a hotel paying off its WiFi by renting out one extra room per floor per month.
Also missing from the article is the painfully stupid practice of using scratch-off cards for WiFi billing, like the network in the Helsinki airport. The network costs about $10 for a couple hours, but the service requires that you buy a scratch-off card with a one-time-use number before you can get on. And these cards aren't for sale in the airport. What's more, the captive portal screen (where all this is explained) lists all the places you can buy a scratch-off card in a downloadable, enormous PDF file, rather than on a web-page, and has a tech-support 800 number that can't be dialled from the payphones in the airport (which disallow toll-free calls). Presumably, this is a significant contributor to the paucity of users for the network -- and nevermind the outrageous costs.
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(via WiFi Networking News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pixels turn fifty
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DATE: 07/01/2003 06:54:31 PM
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Next year is the fiftieth anniversary of the pixel. Andrew Zolli's posted a fascinating history of the picture-element.
The Princetonian pixels were as primitive as one could imagine--literally the glowing filaments of the machine's vacuum memory registers--but they marked the beginning of a sea-change in how we represent and see the world. Over the next five decades, we learned to shape our pixels to better reflect the 'real' world, even as we re-fabricated the world to more closely approximate those phosphorescent dots. The pixel became both a mirror and a lens, reflecting and shaping our reality. The result is a contemporary world more closely matched to the kinds of certainties pixels alone can render.
The social history of pixels has several interwoven themes. The first of these, ironically, concerns pixels' gradual disappearance. From early luminescent blobs on a screen, to points of light too small for the human eye to register, the pixel has been slowly dematerializing, losing mass and gaining verisimilitude.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Printable CD blanks
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DATE: 07/01/2003 09:35:41 PM
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Memorex has shipped CD-Rs that can be fed through an inkjet printer and printed to directly.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Xbox hackers threaten to release keys unless MSFT ships Xbox Linux
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DATE: 07/01/2003 09:40:28 PM
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Australian Xbox hackers have threatened to release the private Xbox keys unless Microsoft digitally signs a Linux bootloader so that it can be run on the Xbox without any modifications. If released, the keys would open the door to widespread game copying.
If Microsoft agrees to release a "signed" Linux boot loader, allowing Xbox users to run Linux officially, then the group will shelve the technique for installing it that they have formulated. If MS does not then the exploits will be released in a matter of weeks.
The advantage to having an official release of a boot loader is that it will not allow the console to run pirated software. The group says that its method does allow for piracy, and that Microsoft has the chance to stop this from happening.
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(Thanks, Random!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Wireless Hunters on the Prowl
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DATE: 07/02/2003 04:50:14 AM
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I wrote a piece for today's WIRED News about the WorldWide Wardrive:
Mike Outmesguine leans against a Chevy Suburban packed with Wi-Fi, GPS and ham radio gadgets, gazing out at the necklace of hilltop radio towers that surround Los Angeles' Chinatown.
"The cool thing about war driving is that it makes what's invisible -- the wireless Internet -- visible," the Southern California Wireless Users Group co-founder says, grinning. "I worked on radio frequency jamming systems in the U.S. Air Force, and when I got out I remember returning home and suddenly being aware of wireless waves everywhere."
Outmesguine, a Gulf War veteran and Los Angeles-based wireless technology consultant, isn't alone in that fascination. During the third WorldWide WarDrive taking place now through July 5, participants in dozens of U.S. cities roam around with Wi-Fi-sniffing gear, logging access points that will then be collected, shared and analyzed. Organized by a loose-knit group of security professionals and wireless enthusiasts, planners say the WWWD serves to raise awareness of the need for home and corporate users to secure wireless networks from unwanted access or snooping.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese company trademarks "Blog"
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:03:11 AM
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A Japanese company filed for a trademark on the word "Blog" on March 6 and received it from the Japanese trademark office on June 28. This trademark would be utterly bogus in the US, but I don't know enough about Japanese trademark law to figure out if it's enforceable there.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Corporate crime hall of shame
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:06:06 AM
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This roundup of the top 100 corporate criminals of the past decade is pretty revolting.
1) F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.
Type of Crime: Antitrust
Criminal Fine: $500 million
12 Corporate Crime Reporter 21(1), May 24, 1999
2) Daiwa Bank Ltd.
Type of Crime: Financial
Criminal Fine: $340 million
10 Corporate Crime Reporter 9(3), March 4, 1996
3) BASF Aktiengesellschaft
Type of Crime: Antitrust
Criminal Fine: $225 million
12 Corporate Crime Reporter 21(1), May 24, 1999
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Human genome project for virii
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:08:43 AM
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The Human Virome Project is a proposal to catalog the DNA of all the virii that affect humans.
The new plan is to collect blood samples from laboratories and hospitals every week. The blood would be filtered to extract viruses.
At centres spread around the world, robotic genetic sequencers would start to unravel the genetic structure of the viruses.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sims Online players making comic books out of the game
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:13:25 AM
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Sims Online players are using the game's "family album" picture -- intended to store screenshots from important moments in your game avatars' lives -- to piece together staged scenes that they piece together into graphic novels. Basically, it's machinima comic-books.
Service, known in the Sims community as nsknight, has created several albums that are highly ranked by her peers. Among them is her six-part Vanderbilt series, which took her months to write and stage and which revolves around the story of three sisters separated by the murder of their mother.
Other users have conjured up such storylines as a young woman's drug addiction and recovery; an African-American girl's adoption by a white family; and, naturally, poor girls falling in love with rich guys. Andrea Davis, known as VioletKitty, uses the albums to build narrative Sims tutorials. "Since my Sims weren't 'acting,'" she explained, "it (is) more like reality TV."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tragic mannequins
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:16:39 AM
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Creepy gallery of antique wax mannequins from Europe, modelled on real women.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scott McCloud launches online micropayment comic
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:20:17 AM
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Zed sez, "For years, Scott McCloud has been lamenting the lack of a good micropayment system for ecommerce, which could make paid web comics viable. Well, he's finally giving it a shot, releasing a comic (the first chapter of what will be a 3 chapter work) for $.25 through BitPass, a service by which you purchase a credit of at least $3 by Paypal or credit card, from which micropayments can be deducted. This could be huge."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CD promos in softdrink lids
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:24:13 AM
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Soft drink lids are the new flexidiscs? An indie artist called Rachel Farris is embedding her promo mini-CD in the lids of soft-drink cups at movie theaters.
Her independent record label is embedding mini-CDs in the lids of soft drink cups at movie theaters nationwide and a few theme parks.
Featuring not just a pair of songs that can be heard on regular CD players but also video clips and other content viewable on computers, the so-called enhanced CDs make TV and radio seem passe.
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(Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Herman Miller ships austere Aeron
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:35:23 AM
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Herman Miller is shipping the Mirra, a new chair that costs half as much as the Aeron and symbolizes post-boom austerity.
Herman Miller hired a small German company called Studio 7.5 to design the chair; the group initially started developing an innovative seat back that could scale from a small woman's narrow frame to a tall man's broader shoulders. But the approach failed, three years into development. Then, in the spring of 2001, the designers hit upon the solution; the Aeron's signature mesh and aluminum construction has been replaced with a less expensive molded polypropylene back that comes in eight colors, from citron to garnet. Aesthetically, the Mirra borrows the biomorphic silhouette and the transparency of its precursor, but the materials are more commonplace. The result is a chair with less attitude; more like an iBook than a Titanium PowerBook.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Clarion workshop to lose its funding
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DATE: 07/02/2003 07:40:45 AM
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The legendary Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University is being cut off by the university administration. Clarion is the long-running science fiction writers' "boot camp," that has graduated such writers as Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman and, well, me.
This is pretty disheartening. Clarion has spawned sister workshops in Seattle and Australia, and has served as the proving ground for hundreds of writers over more than 30 years.
On the other hand, this is an incredible opportunity for some university to snatch up one of the most culturally signficant academic writing programs in the world. The Clarion team are soliciting ideas (see below) -- I really hope that someone can come up with a smart answer to this conundrum.
Dr. Lister Matheson has received word from the Interim President and Provost that Michigan State University will be unable to support the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop. He has asked that this message be passed on to our friends. Suggestions and comments can be sent to Interim President and Provost, Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon at laksimon@msu.edu, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Dr. Wendy K. Wilkins at wwilkins@msu.edu. Please copy any messages to clarion@msu.edu.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: "Wired - A Romance" reviewed
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DATE: 07/02/2003 08:26:22 AM
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In today's New York Observer, bOING bOING pal (and my Reality Check co-author) and former Wired staffer Brad Wieners reviews Wired - A Romance, Gary Wolf's recount of Wired magazine's semi-sordid and not-so-secret history.
"Had Mr. Rossetto's refusal to buy his staff pens made it in? His raising of the men's room urinal (much to the chagrin of the shorter fry)? Or how about the old kitchen policy? (For years, Wired prepared its staff three vegetarian meals a day, and each week a different department drew clean-up duty. This devolved into a grumpy dish-washing caste.) Was there any mention of the editorial retreats held in a yurt, or the brainstorming on brand extensions carried out in the hot tubs at Esalen?
Or what about that middle-aged idler, said to be in charge of 'real estate,' but who, instead of finding new office space, spent his days wandering around with his two Jack Russells chatting people up, right up until the day of the big move to the new digs—which were right downstairs?"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Long-distance TV antenna lets you watch homeland TV from anywhere
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DATE: 07/02/2003 10:44:46 AM
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The TVBrick is a device targetted at ex-pats. You buy a TVBrick and plug it into a friend's antenna back in your homeland and connect it to the Internet. Then, you move off to some other place and use your Internet connection to watch all the shows being aired back home. The manufacturer calims to be adding VoIP and home-media-server options soon, too.
TVBrick uses the Linux Open Source / Free Operating System developped by American, European and Japanese engineers. The TVBrick appliance is based on the OpenBrick platform (www.openbrick.org). Because it includes no fan, no hard disk and no moving parts, TVBrick is 100% silent and can be operated 24 hours a day. This is a major difference with other Home Servers: the use of TVBrick when you stay abroad will not disturb your family asleep because TVBrick simply makes absolutely no noise.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Write to MSU, save Clarion
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DATE: 07/02/2003 12:32:43 PM
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Eileen Gunn, a Clarion grad and the editor of the excllent sf site, The Infinite Matrix, writes:
Update: Here's a Save Clarion form-letter for genre fans to adapt and send in. (Thanks, Captain Psyko!)
In case you haven't heard, the Clarion Writer's Workshop has lost its university funding from Michigan State University. (This is the original Clarion, not Clarion West in Seattle, which is supported by donations.) Please see the forwarded message below for details.
The survival of both Clarions (not just one) is immensely important to the quality of writing, criticism, and editing in the field of science fiction. I am writing to ask you to send an email to MSU's Interim President and Provost, Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon at laksimon@msu.edu, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Dr. Wendy K. Wilkins at wwilkins@msu.edu. Please copy any messages to clarion@msu.edu.
In your letter, please mention what your interest in the SF field is -- as a reader, writer, or critic. If you have won awards in the field, please mention them. The people to whom you're sending mail may not read science fiction, or know who you are.
Clarion's funding has been threatened in the past, and successfully defended. It may still be possible to save it if enough messages from writers and readers are received by the heads of the college. I suppose I don't need to say that speed is of the essence here, but I will anyway.
Thanks for any help you can give in this. Sorry about the mass mailing, but this is a mass-mailing kind of situation. Also sorry if you get this message twice, due to my lack of attention or obsessive enthusiasm.
Please feel free to forward or send out your own plea. A quick, massive, intense response is the goal.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Google gag
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DATE: 07/02/2003 02:09:45 PM
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Go to google.com, type in "Weapons of Mass Destruction," and hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button for a good laff.
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(Thanks, Brad!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gibson solicits typos from readers
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DATE: 07/02/2003 05:49:41 PM
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William Gibson is soliciting typos from the hardcover edition of Pattern Recognition so that he can see that they're fixed in the paperback.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Warren Ellis's Batman comic
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DATE: 07/02/2003 06:52:09 PM
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Warren Ellis is squarely on the record as being an aesthetic enemy of the comic-book heroes he calls "Underwear Perverts" -- i.e., Batman, Superman, etc. But when I dropped by my comics store this afternoon, the proprietor had a new book for me, "Planetary/Batman," a perfect-bound, $5.95 Batman comic by Warren Ellis.
The book is a solid kick in the testicles of the Underwear Pervert genre. A cadre of tough-guy comic book characters come to Gotham to arrest a dangerous pan-dimensional lunatic, and find themselves being shuffled through many dimensions -- and many alternate versions of The Bat Man.
Ellis's repeated digs at Batman are anything but loving: they're vicious, clear-eyed and unforgiving indictments of the character and all he represents. By the time I was done, I wanted to jump up and applaud.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Goth dog costume
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DATE: 07/02/2003 08:29:55 PM
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At 25 bucks, this goth doggie costume is a steal.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Siberia for rich kids
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DATE: 07/03/2003 07:19:58 AM
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A reporter for the Guardian is the first outsider in five years to have gained entry to Tranquility Bay, a Jamaican armed compund where rich foreigners (mostly Americans) send their naughty children to be "rehabilitated" through a program that violates the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, the Bill of Rights, and common decency.
This long, two-part article gives me the absolute horrors. The things these kids did -- taking drugs, "sassing," getting poor grades, etc -- are things that I did, that my friends did, when I was a kid. Being locked in a walled prison for years and subjected to systematic torture and psychological abuse while being "taught" by means of correspondance courses and standard exams would have been deadly for me.
Jay Kay is 33 years old, and the son of Wwasp's chief director. He opened the facility at the age of 27, after four years as administrator of a Wwasp-run juvenile psychiatric hospital in Utah. Previously he had been a night guard there, and before that a petrol-pump attendant, having dropped out of college. He has no qualifications in child development, but considers this unimportant.
'Experience in this job is better than any degree. Am I an educational expert? No. But I know how to hire people to get the job done.' There is more than a touch of the Jerry Springer guest about his looks - heavy, shaven-headed, colourless, and a similarly deadening certainty of mind. 'I've got the best job in the world,' he claims, but he carries himself like a man who has learnt to expect the worst, and is seldom disappointed.
Tranquility is basically a private detention camp. But it differs in one important respect. When courts jail a juvenile, he has a fixed sentence and may think what he likes while serving it, whereas no child arrives at Tranquility with a release date. Students are judged ready to leave only when they have demonstrated a sincere belief that they deserved to be sent here, and that the programme has, in fact, saved their life. They must renounce their old self, espouse the programme's belief system, display gratitude for their salvation, and police fellow students who resist.
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(via Interesting People)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR panorama: Chapel of Jean Cocteau
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DATE: 07/03/2003 07:41:04 AM
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QTVR evangelist Hans Nyberg describes this full-screen panorama by photographer Antonio Moya.
"Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) is one of the most famous French artists from the last century. If he had lived today he would probably been called a multimedia artist. This brilliant artist was a poet, novelist, he wrote plays, articles, ballet, opera. He also made thousands of drawings, paintings, modelled clay, was a sculptor, and designed costumes. Most of us know him for the famous 1946 movie Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete). By many considered one of the best 10 movies ever made. He decorated many Chapelles in France and the Chapel Notre-Dame-de-Jerusalem also called Chapelle Cocteau was the last. He never got it finished and it was his friend and spiritual son, Edouard Dermi who finished his work. The floor is by the ceramist Roger Pelissier. It is located in the South of France at the village of Frejus."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Satan told me to swap that file
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DATE: 07/03/2003 09:52:34 AM
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Newsweek story about Christian music companies battling the "spiritual perils of downloading".
Does "thou shalt not steal" mean "Thou shalt not
download"? Just like other computer-savvy listeners, evangelical Christians swipe songs off the Net--and Christian labels have watched their fortunes dwindle. Sales in the $845 million industry have fallen 11 percent this year, worse than secular music’s 8 percent decline.
Last week the Recording Industry Association of
America announced it could mount "thousands" of
lawsuits against individual file sharers. But
Christian-music companies are looking for a
faith-based solution. "For us, more than it's illegal,
it's wrong," says John Styll, president of the Gospel
Music Association, which launched a task force last
month to address the problem. One suggested approach:
getting pastors and youth-group leaders to preach
against the spiritual perils of downloading.
But as the Rev. Paul Durham, pastor of Nashville's
Radnor Baptist Church, points out, many
Christian-music listeners think of file-swapping as
sharing God's message. "It's like a ministry," he
says. That's how Marlee Welsh, 18, of Bethesda, Md.,
sees it. "You're supposed to receive and spread God's
word," she says, "and by that I don't think
downloading is stealing." Darren Whitehead, youth
minister at the People's Church in Franklin, Tenn.,
questions the morality of file sharing, but he hopes
that "spreading the Gospel takes priority for the
music companies over profit--assuming that they're
Christian."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Silence of the Lambs fan-musical
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DATE: 07/03/2003 04:21:38 PM
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An anonymous correspondant writes, "Two wayward film school grads (brothers) have translated Silence of the Lambs into a series of multiple-gut-bursting songs, including the rollicking number 'Are You About A Size 14?' and the introspective 'Put the Fucking Lotion in the Basket!' The whole album is downloadable as a self-promo."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PalmOS Apple //e emulator
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DATE: 07/03/2003 04:23:35 PM
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Check out this open source Apple //e emulator for the Palm.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shrub's "scientific" refutation of global warming refuted
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DATE: 07/03/2003 04:26:51 PM
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The Shrub's pet anti-Kyoto "scientists" have produced findings attacking the idea of global warming. This SciAm article shows the flaws in their "methodology."
"Their analysis doesn't consider whether the warm/cold periods occurred at the same time," says Peter Stott, a climate scientist at the U.K.'s Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in Bracknell. For example, if a proxy record indicated that a drier condition existed in one part of the world from 800 to 850, it would be counted as equal evidence for a Medieval Warming Period as a different proxy record that showed wetter conditions in another part of the world from 1250 to 1300. Regional conditions do not necessarily mirror the global average, Stott notes: "Iceland and Greenland had their warmest periods in the 1930s, whereas the warmest for the globe was the 1990s."
Soon and Baliunas also take issue with the IPCC by contending that the 20th century saw no unique patterns: they found few climatic anomalies in the proxy records. But they looked for 50-year-long anomalies; the last century's warming, the IPCC concludes, occurred in two periods of about 30 years each (with cooling in between). The warmest period occurred in the late 20th century--too short to meet Soon and Baliunas's selected requirement. The two researchers also discount thermometer readings and "give great weight to the paleo data for which the uncertainties are much greater," Stott says.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Inkjet ink 7X more costly than Dom
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DATE: 07/03/2003 04:50:25 PM
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By volume, the ink in your unkjet cartridges costs seven times more than vintage champagne. Of course, there's nothing inherently expensive about inkjet ink, but manufacturers have used proprietary interfaces (and now, the DMCA to engineer a market failure that allows them to command absurd margins on their consumables. This is why vendors are shipping $30 printers (presumably at a loss): because they plan on grabbing you by the nads and squeezing once you're locked into the printer.
Ink in a typical replacement cartridge costs about £1.70 per millilitre, compared with 1985 Dom Perignon at 23p per millilitre.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Telcos don't understand wireless
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DATE: 07/03/2003 04:54:54 PM
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Bob Frankston's posted an instant-classic rant about the horrors of telcos and the wireless businesses they inspire.
The problems with Wi-Fi Hotspots are symptomatic of the fundamental conflict between the cellular phone industry and the rest of our society and economy. The current telecommunications infrastructure has one overriding purpose -- to generate billable events. It is a tragic mistake to assume that this is the only way we can pay for vital infrastructure since it is an extremely inefficient and dysfunctional system that extracts an unbearable cost on society.
The term wireless has been appropriated to mean "faux wire". The cellular phone system emulates land phones where you pay per wire not per phone. That "wire" is used for billing and the system provides you with cell phone circuits that have the same limitations as their wired counterparts. It's no surprise that the cellular industry created Bluetooth which tried to recreate the limitations of the wire only without the wire.
This is in sharp contrast to 802.11 which just transports packets and the connections you make have no inherent limits because the packets can be relayed to any other Internet connection in the world. But it isn't easy to control or bill for the packets -- they aren't easily metered like phone calls. Even if you can count the packets it is difficult to charge for usage when a video stream can use a thousand times as many packets as an audio stream. You wouldn't be able to tell whether a web page costs a penny or a hundred dollars to visit.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Modern/traditional Japanese scrolls
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DATE: 07/03/2003 05:29:08 PM
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Patricio sez, "These are hilarious reinterpretations of Japanese engravings with the old time designs mixed with American pop culture elements."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblogging Love Hotel Conference
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DATE: 07/03/2003 07:23:44 PM
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The First International Moblogging Love Hotel Conference takes place today. What is it? What it sounds like. Organized in Tokyo, the global love-blog-in is one of the weirdest and most charming things I've ever seen.Link, Discuss (thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR of weird flotsam that floats ashore in Scotland
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DATE: 07/03/2003 07:42:59 PM
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Online gallery with QTVRs of strange sea-litter:
Hundreds of tons of litter are washed up on the shores of the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, each year - mostly plastic waste from marine industries. The Gulf Stream crosses the North Atlantic Ocean depositing flotsam from all around the globe on the 160 miles of Hebridean shore, mostly beautiful, and otherwise unspoilt, sandy beaches. www.flotsam.org features a gallery of VR images of marine litter. You are encouraged to help identify flotsam sources, get involved in local beach clean-ups and campaign for responsible disposal of waste by marine industries.
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TITLE: Can't tell the wonks without a scorecard
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DATE: 07/04/2003 06:04:03 AM
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From the Media Lab comes an Internet Movie Database-like project to identify every individual, organization and corporation involved in government and create a public dossier on same.
To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.
To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese toilets demystified
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DATE: 07/04/2003 06:07:18 AM
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How to use Japanese toilets: an animated, illustrated guide.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The Declaration: Read it again for the first time
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DATE: 07/04/2003 06:12:01 AM
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You know, this is a pretty subversive and excellent document right here.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIP, shopping malls
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DATE: 07/04/2003 07:04:00 AM
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CNN reports that shopping malls are failing, in favor of urban shopping districts and big-box stores. Good riddance.
The Winter Park Mall in Winter Park, Fla., was a classic case of a dying mall. The 400,000-square-foot mall was located in the heart of the city's downtown. But with all of its stores facing in and a huge parking lot surrounding it like a moat, it was completely isolated from the rest of the town. As the nearby downtown shopping district thrived, the mall failed.
In the late 1990s, a new owner, the city and local business started making plans to break up the mall. Several phases into its makeover, Winter Park Village, as it's now called, is not unlike its surrounding downtown, with apartments, restaurants, a fitness center, a movie theater, a supermarket, office space and, of course, retail.
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(Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Number-portability even if you've got unpaid bills
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DATE: 07/04/2003 08:29:52 AM
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When number-portability for mobile phones comes in next November, telco customers will be able to take their phone numbers with them when they switch phone-companies, even if they owe their old carrier money.
"Carriers can not refuse to (transfer the number) while attempting to collect fees, or settle an account," Muleta wrote.
"Today, consumers who wish to change service providers may request service from a new carrier at any time, regardless of their standing with their old provider," he continued. "Consumers must have the same freedom in a number portability environment."
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sub-$100 video walkman for Christmas
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DATE: 07/04/2003 08:46:11 AM
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A silicon valley startup is promising to ship a $100 personal video walkman, built with flash memory and a small LCD. Gizmodo points out that this is pretty vaprous-seeming, but hell, I'd probably buy one.
The new PVP, which will be released by HandHeld Entertainment in time for Christmas 2003, will be the first PVP of its kind priced under $100. Roughly the size of a personal digital assistant (PDA), the PVP includes a full-color screen, uses external media and is targeted to eight- to 25-year-olds.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emailing Ourselves to Death
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DATE: 07/05/2003 04:50:44 PM
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The NYT attacks the idea of time-slicing and multi-tasking and ubiquitous connectivity, arguing that always-on people (ahem) are junkies for the adrenaline rush of juggling a peak load, where one slip means disaster, like jet pilots or extreme sports afficianados, and that they (er, we) get less done as a result of our divided attention.
Well, I don't have anything other than my own experience to go on, and no empirical measurements of that, but I've been multitasking since I was a child, and I feel that I'm very, very productive. It's true that I have a panicky terror at the thought of being bored, but at the same time, I would argue that my five-things-at-once always-connected way of being is a successful adaptation, not a harmful addiction.
Neil Postman argues that due to telecommunications, our attention-spans have been debilitatingly foreshortened, and he convincingly illustrates this by comparing the reasoned and lengthy rhetoric of the Lincoln-Douglas debates with the soundbite-driven Reagan-Dukakis (?) debates.
The experts cited in this piece seem to be arguing the same thing, along the lines of, "That danged Internet is so slippery and fluid, it's taken away peoples' ability to watch television."
When do we stop lamenting a change like this and start looking for the value of the new trend? When do we start examining the upsides of fluid and multifarious attention, rather than popping off reactionary warnings about the dangers of being "addicted" to communications?
When do we get to consider the benefits of living with one foot in the Net and the other in meatspace?
Dr. Hallowell and John Ratey, an associate professor at Harvard and a psychiatrist with an expertise in attention deficit disorder, are among a growing number of physicians and sociologists who are assessing how technology affects attention span, creativity and focus. Though many people regard multitasking as a social annoyance, these two and others are asking whether it is counterproductive, and even addicting.
The pair have their own term for this condition: pseudo-attention deficit disorder. Its sufferers do not have actual A.D.D., but, influenced by technology and the pace of modern life, have developed shorter attention spans. They become frustrated with long-term projects, thrive on the stress of constant fixes of information, and physically crave the bursts of stimulation from checking e-mail or voice mail or answering the phone.
"It's like a dopamine squirt to be connected," said Dr. Ratey, who compares the sensations created by constantly being wired to those of narcotics — a hit of pleasure, stimulation and escape. "It takes the same pathway as our drugs of abuse and pleasure."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boston Globe asserts Jefferson is a work-for-hire hack in its employ
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DATE: 07/06/2003 05:28:21 AM
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Yesterday, the Boston Globe claimed copyright over the Declaration of Independance, but that's OK, since yesterday, I released it under a Creative Commons license.
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(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video-game UI built around wireless plastic sword
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DATE: 07/06/2003 05:33:27 AM
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I'm not exactly sure how this works -- machine translation from Japanese being somewhat unreliable -- but it sure looks cool. It's a video-game system called DragonQUEST, whose CPU is a little plastic shield the size of a pack of cards that wires into your TV, and whose user-interface is a toy plastic sword that communicates its position to the CPU, so that you work your way through the game by slashing vigorously with the sword.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Separating twins joined at the head
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DATE: 07/06/2003 10:13:51 AM
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On Sunday, surgeons in Singapore began an operation to separate Ladan and Lalehn Bijani, 29-year-old Iranian women joined at the head. Twins joined at the head--one in 2 million births--are the rarest conjoined twins of all.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Call your Senator, reinstate media ownership regulations
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DATE: 07/06/2003 07:47:19 PM
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This website is calling on Americans to phone their Senators and ask them to support a bill reversing the FCC's shameful decision to allow for increased consolidation in ownership of mass media.
A month ago the FCC dramatically relaxed media ownership regulations, stifling the cornerstone of American democracy: a free, fair, and open public debate.
Because one million Americans raised their voices against the FCC decision, the Senate Commerce Committee recently sent a bill to the Senate floor for a vote that would roll back many of the rules. Today the challenge is to get that bill to the floor of the Senate and House for a vote.
Call your Congressional representatives and demand that they support the rollback. Enter your zip code and find out if your elected officials are currently supporting rolling back the FCC. If they are supportive co-sponsors, then thank them for their support and ask that they keep the bill alive. If they are not a co-sponsor, ask them to become one.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Distributed fan-translation of Potter 5 into German
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DATE: 07/06/2003 07:49:43 PM
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A group of German Harry Potter enthusiasts are working to collectively translate the English text of Order of the Phoenix into Deustch. (Machine translation below)
Over 1.000 HP fans want after the translation of HP, succeeded
well, tape 4 also the new factory: "HP and the order OF Phoenix"
translate together, because English actually so with difficulty at all
is not.
How does that function? Everyone, which wants to go through, selects a
section section (usually 5 pages), and mailt the own translation 1 to
4 weeks later to Harry up German community back; if the translation is
useful, then one gets as thank-beautifully gradually the translations
of the others Mituebersetzer inside zugemailt;
The project is absolutely non commercial and is to make above all the
fun involved;
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dan Gillmor's travel notes
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DATE: 07/06/2003 07:51:00 PM
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Dan Gillmor is a road warrior ne plus ultra, making travellers like me look like punters. He's devoted this week's column to travel tips, and is soliciting your additional tips.
Conflicting forces are affecting the road warrior's existence. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath caused governments and the travel industry to add new layers of woe. But advances in communications have had a smoothing effect.
I've been on the road more than usual this year, due to a book project and various speaking invitations in addition to my regular job, so I can speak from experience. A colleague suggested I do just that, and this weekend -- one of the summer-travel-season peaks -- seemed like a good time. In no particular order, then, allow me to offer a few observations about travel in the early 21st century.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Don't Copy That Floppy!
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DATE: 07/06/2003 07:54:11 PM
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"Don't Copy That Floppy" is a classic -- a software industry educational video from the 80s 1992 begging kids not to copy games, using breakdancing rappers and a catchy ditty that'll make you tap your toes and burn your zero-day war3z.
16.5 MB WMV Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Landis's "Falling Onto Mars" online
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DATE: 07/06/2003 08:32:34 PM
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Geoff Landis's Hugo-nominated (and very good) (and very short) short story, Falling Onto Mars, is online in a variety of formats (and the Hugo ballot closes shortly!).
The people of the planet Mars have no literature. The colonization of Mars was unforgiving, and the exiles had no time to spend in writing. But still they have stories, the tales they told to children too young to really understand, stories that these children tell to their own children. These are the legends of the Martians.
Not one of the stories is a love story.
In those days, people fell out of the sky. They fell through the ochre sky in ships that were barely functional, thin aluminum shells crowded with fetid humanity, half of them corpses and the other half little more than corpses. The landings were hard, and many of the ships split open on impact, spilling bodies and precious air into the barely-more-than-vacuum of Mars. And still they fell, wave after wave of ships, the refuse of humanity tossed carelessly through space and falling onto the cratered deserts of Mars.
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(Thanks, Geoff!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Software defined telephony
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DATE: 07/06/2003 09:27:05 PM
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An NY-based company has announced that it will shipp software-defined-radio telephones that use code to determine what kind of network they communicate on: WiFi, CDMA, GSM, GPRS, or any other acronym of choice.
Sandbridge's chips create chameleon-like radios for cell phones capable of changing from one interoperable wireless standard to the next. The radios flip among Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Global Systems for Mobile Communications (GSM), and any of a clutch of other wireless standards using either software stored in the phone or downloaded over the air.
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR: 4th of July fireworks from Empire State Building
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DATE: 07/06/2003 11:25:35 PM
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Photographer and QTVR enthusiast Hans Nyberg says:
"Hi, Xeni -- Photographer Jook Leung took on a very hard task here. He had to shoot the images for the panorama handheld, as he was not allowed to bring his tripod up at the Empire State Building. The guards said it was for security reasons. Taking handheld panoramas is one of Jook Leung's specialties, but the low light made this especially difficult to do."
Link to 4th of July Fireworks from the Empire State Building, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Son of Lego Zen
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DATE: 07/06/2003 11:35:44 PM
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(1) nyc
(2) death
(3) comic book
(4) escher
(5) mini you
(6) treasure hunt
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Humans inside the spacecraft or on the ground tele-operating robots, free-flying robots, giant crane robots -- all working together
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DATE: 07/07/2003 05:41:58 AM
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Roland sez, "NASA is teaming together humans and robots to work in space, according to this NASA News Release. "We like to think of these as 'EVA (extravehicular activity) squads' -- humans outside the spacecraft in space suits, dexterous robots, humans inside the spacecraft or on the ground tele-operating robots, free-flying robots, giant crane robots -- all working together to get the job done," said Test Conductor Dr. Robert Ambrose, who also manages the Robonaut Project that supplied two dexterous humanoid robots for the test. He also said that "the technology could be ready for International Space Station jobs in the next three to four years." Look at this summary for more details. And if you need more information, all you'd ever want to know about the Robonaut is available directly from NASA."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WIPO asked to hold hearings on open collaboration
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DATE: 07/07/2003 11:04:31 AM
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A group of open-source-, free-software- and commons-wonks have sent an open letter to the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, asking that WIPO investigate intellectual property regimes that foster open, collaborative projects.
In recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative
projects to create public goods. These projects are extremely important,
and they raise profound questions regarding appropriate intellectual
property policies. They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high
level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual
property protection, and indeed excessive, unbalanced, or poorly designed
intellectual property protections may be counter-productive. We ask that
the World Intellectual Property Organization convene a meeting in calendar
year 2004 to examine these new open collaborative development models, and to
discuss their relevance for public policy. (See Appendix following
signatures for examples of open collaborative projects to create public
goods).
53K PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Samsung puts kibosh on phonecams in its factories, research centers
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 07/07/2003 11:58:35 AM
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Samsung Electronics, the world's largest memory chip maker, announced today that it's restricting the use of phonecams inside its factories and research centers to prevent industrial espionage. Link, Discuss (Thanks, Bing)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fraggers not neccesarily stinky, loner, nerdy basement-dwellers
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DATE: 07/07/2003 04:58:21 PM
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A new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project says about two-thirds of college students are gamers, but that they're not neccesarily male or antisocial. And "while about one-third of those surveyed admitted playing computer games during class, the games generally don't conflict with their studies, says the researcher who conducted the survey." Yeah, right!
Link to Wired News story, Link to report copy on Pew research site, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Subway to the bottom of the sea
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DATE: 07/07/2003 05:52:53 PM
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The New York Times reports that "hollowed hulks of 50 obsolete New York City subway cars were dumped into the Atlantic Ocean off South Jersey today to begin a watery new life as a haven for fish."
Link to NYT story, Discuss
(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SoCal surfside town to become America's first unwired city?
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DATE: 07/07/2003 08:34:55 PM
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Wifi's up: L.A. area beach town Hermosa Beach may become the first U.S. city to be unwired by its own municipal government. Totally bitchin', dude.
Imagine living in a town where you're able to move your laptop from one place to the next without ever having to log off from cyberspace. You can leave a coffee shop, travel down to the beach and then over to a park, all the while still surfing the Internet, free of charge. Hermosa Beach just might be that city if a proposal led by Mayor Michael Keegan to make the tiny beach community completely wireless comes to fruition. The completed plan would make Hermosa Beach famous as the first Wi-Fi city in the United States.
"If it's successful, I think it will be a model for the rest of the country," said Keegan. "It will be the first service that we know of, run entirely by a municipality." Keegan hopes to formally introduce the proposal to his colleagues on the City Council this month. If the municipality votes to approve the project, the San Diego-based firm, Wireless Facilities Inc., will then install antennae towers in town.
Link, Discuss (via SOCALWUG)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO: Keysigning parties
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DATE: 07/07/2003 08:55:44 PM
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The further mainstreaming of geekdom: who needs Tupperware parties when you can have a keysigning party? This HOWTO has the compleat formula for throwing an event that's both educational and privacy-enhancing!
3.3 What Participants Should Not Bring to the Party
1. A Computer
3.4 Why you should not bring a computer to the party
You should not bring a computer to the party because binary replacement or system modifications are very easy ways to compromise PGP systems.
If someone where to bring a portable computer and everyone used that computer to sign the other keys at the party, no one would know if the machine had been running a key stroke logging utility, a modified version of GPG,a modified version of the Linux kernel, or a specially modified keyboard, any of which could be used to capture the secret keys of those who used the computer.
The use of a computer at the party would also leave you open to more simple attacks like shoulder-surfing, or more complex attacks like weak secret key generation, secret key modification, or even infection with virii that modify your GPG binaries to leak future secret keys discretely.
Link
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IM with crypto
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DATE: 07/07/2003 08:57:49 PM
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Chris sez,
Ultramagnetic is an open-source fork of the Gaim multiprotocol instant messaging client. What makes Ultramagnetic cool is the inclusion of strong crypto via libcrypt and it's the first publicly-available application that uses Hacktivismo's 6/4 secure networking protocol as the routing layer.
Link
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(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: All shapes in origami
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DATE: 07/07/2003 09:00:01 PM
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Origami holds the whole of topology contained within it. It's n-dimensionalriffic.
Take a piece of paper, fold it into any flat origami, and make one complete straight cut (i.e., a cut along a line). Now unfold the
pieces, and see what you get. Are all shapes possible? Refering back to the original sheet of paper, what patterns of cuts can be
achieved by this process?
[...]
The theorem is that every pattern (plane graph) can be made by folding and one complete straight cut. This includes single (possibly nonconvex)
polygons, multiple disjoint polygons, nested polygons, adjoining polygons, and even floating line segments and points.
Link
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(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtual Book Tour
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DATE: 07/07/2003 09:06:35 PM
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The Virtual Book Tour is a guestblogging circuit for new, indy authors.
Tours last for two weeks with the author “stopping” at one site each weekday, 10 sites in all. Each site participates either by posting book excerpts, audio clips of the author reading, an interview with the author, or a review of the book. With the site’s permission, the author may also “take over” that site and post to it for a day mutually agreed upon by the author and the site owner—an essay, a personal story, funny facts and anecdotes, etc.
Link
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(Thanks, Heath!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Venice, 2123
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DATE: 07/07/2003 09:25:35 PM
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In the August issue of WIRED Magazine: Canadian artists Kenn Brown and Chris Wren created this gorgeous, speculative illustration on rising sea levels and the fate of low-lying cities like Venice. View this piece here (220K, suitable for desktopping) or
here (110K, lo-res). Buy the hard copy on newsstands now. I wrote a couple of items for that issue, too. One of them is accompanied by a slutty, only-partially-clad headshot. Ah, wait, you're probably thinking that's a good reason *not* to buy it. Nevermind. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wearable RFIDs: Speedpass watch
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DATE: 07/07/2003 09:54:03 PM
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Say hello to the RFID watch. Details on the Speedpass website or on the Timex website.
The Speedpass-enabled Timex Watch is the fastest and easiest way to pay. No reaching for your wallet, or fumbling with change. Speedpass is accepted at 8,100+ Exxon and Mobil stations nationwide, 440+ McDonald's restaurants in Chicago and Northwest Indiana, 4 Stop & Shop Supermarkets in the Boston area.
Discuss (Via Declan's politech list)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunting Brighton Pier pix
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DATE: 07/08/2003 03:51:03 AM
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Darren sez, "I remembered that back in March you guys mentioned that Brighton's West Pier burned. I happened to be in Brighton a week earlier to attend and take photos at a wedding. I also took some eerie photos of the pier, just days before it went up in smoke."
Link
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(Thanks, Darren!)
ges/dc
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PC in a spaceship
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DATE: 07/08/2003 04:48:19 AM
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Check out this sweet spaceship PC casemod.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Telcos are America's Minitel
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DATE: 07/08/2003 07:18:07 AM
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I'm at Supernova, the tech conference in DC that's run by Kevin Werbach, an old FCC hand who ran PC Forum for Esther Dyson for some years. I'm taking running notes (as usual).
Here's my notes on Clay Shirky's talk on the inevitable (?) failure of the American Internet.
Minitel: Hahahahaha! It's near Jul 4, we need to make fun of the
French.
The French govt underwrote the development of a network through
France. When you've lived in no connectivity and ANY connectivity
shows up, it's a great leap forward.
However, once the system was up and running, managed centrally,
innovation flattened.
The PC started to catch on, but MiniTel was connected.
Then modems, but Minitel could guarantee QoS.
Then the Web: the fusion of the value of the Internet and the
value of the PC, and Minitel was no longer the right answer. And
Minitel had cost them an enormous cycle of innovation. They
overinvested in soemthing that was a good idea for a long time,
and once it became a bad idea, they couldn't see it -- the
overcommitment cost them the period of innovation.
We've got it worse than the French do: as big a screwup as
Minitel was, ours is worse. We're making our mistake in the
physical layer, in twisted-pair. It's the bizmodels that say, "It
oughta be a good idea to run a circuit-switched, voice-optimized
network" -- that was a good idea for a network.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reed Hundt: Spend DTV dollars on broadband
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DATE: 07/08/2003 07:31:13 AM
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Reed Hundt, the former Chairman of the FCC, gave the opening talk at Supernova. I missed taking notes on a bunch of it, largely because he buried his provacative and very exciting thesis statement (roughly put: "The money we're spending on Digital TV should be used to run fibre to every curb) about halfway through his speech. Luckily, others took notes:
David Weinberger:
He says that we have a policy that charges a surtax on TV's in order to pay for something no one wants: tuners capable of receiving digital over-the-air broadcasts. It'll raise $40B, or about what it'd cost to provide broadband fiber to every household.
Other countries will provide broadband nationally. This will in fact be the smallest of the steps they take. We don't want to fall behind.
Wouldn't it be nice, he asks, to throw money at problems that can be solved, e.g., $50B to research cars that won't contribute to global warming, $50B to end cancer, etc.
Adina Levin Anonymous Wiki contributor:
There are loosers when competition is encouraged. 1996 act resulted in a 10:1 market cap for ILECs:IXCs. But the consumer benefited the most.
Universal service Broadband policy as demand stimulus.
* 100% penetration
* $20 per month per sub until cap ex is paid for
* cost is only 3-4% of current ITC, $50b
Creative destruction should not aim to replace voice and cable networks. Have an overbuild with public money while permitting others to have a future.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Supernova: Making (Business) Sense of Networks
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DATE: 07/08/2003 07:49:10 AM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of the "Making (Business) Sense of Networks" panel at Supernova, with JC Herz, Joi Ito, Maria Martinez and Ross Mayfield:
From mainframes to minis to PCs to phones: an order of mangitude of
increase in devices at each step. I don't care if MSFT takes over
the desktop, because it will dwindle to the importantce of
mainframes today. How can CE devices eclipse PCs and
communcations tools?
Some layers of your business make money, some don't. They
flipflop. NTT DoCoMo loses moeny on its devices and makes $8BB on
network services. Soon it will go away due to end-to-end and new
biz will come up.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gillmor's readers' travel-tips
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DATE: 07/08/2003 08:17:34 AM
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True to his word, Dan Gillmor has started posting travel tips for tech-centric people on the road, submitted by his readers and filtered by him. Fascinating stuff.
Many American hotel clocks are wrong, and I still get tripped up from time to time even though I have found this to be true. In contrast, I can trust those combination TV-alarm clocks that I'm had in many overseas hotels.
Printing boarding passes at home is easy, and there are now starting to be reasons to do so: I'm seeing occasionally big lines at the airport kiosks (and the stations themselves don't appear to be overly reliable - during periods of heavy use several always seem to be down).
Priceline has improved over the past year, which was the last time I tried it. Gone is the ~20 minute wait for a confirming e-mail. Instead, I knew within 60-90 seconds that my bid was refused or accepted, in this case for a $95/per night rate at a 4-star hotel in Chicago's loop.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Notes from "No More Rear-View Mirrors: Investing in a Changed Environment"
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DATE: 07/08/2003 09:06:50 AM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of the "No More Rear-View Mirrors: Investing in a Changed Environment" panel at Supernova, with Mike Hirshland, Paul Hammer, Jackie Kimzey, Ellen Levy, and James Suroweiki:
Jackie Kimzey:
Rear-view mirrors are useful. We've had lots of bubbles.
Our job is to invest as little as possible for as much ownership
as we can get. [Ed: translation, in a seller's market for
capital, entrepreneurs get screwed].
We've eliminated the pretenders and gotten back to real
entrepreneus who put up their own money and work without pay. We
don't have as many me-too projects -- everything is new and
unique.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geographers undermining the homeland with pesky network maps
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DATE: 07/08/2003 09:18:04 AM
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A Master's dissertation in Geography is now threatened with being classified in the interests of national security.
Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a soul patch goatee, this George Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them.
He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: "If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?" In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys.
Link
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Robot USB keychains
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DATE: 07/08/2003 09:36:00 AM
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Oooh, Gundam-Robot-themed keychain-fob USB drives from Japan.
Link
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(via KoKoRo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google and decentralization
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DATE: 07/08/2003 09:44:15 AM
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Here are my impressionistic notes from Craig "Director of Technology, Google" Silverstein's talk at Supernova.
We love decentralization at Google, but making that work in a big
company is hard.
We focus via our mission statement: "Organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful." Makes
sure everyone understands what's important.
"Do things that matter" -- a test to make sure what what we do is
important.
"Relentless focus on the user" -- makes sure that we're doing the
right thing (i.e., no banners)
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky eBay auctions: Buy Elvis Presley's tooth and hair
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DATE: 07/08/2003 09:59:41 AM
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Current high bid for this undead starfucker auction: US $150,323.00. Link to auction, Discuss (thanks Scott)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gigantor Marine Corps robot will kick civilian ass
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DATE: 07/08/2003 10:06:42 AM
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Roland Piquepaille writes:
A new unmanned robot with lots of weapons will be used as soon as 2007 by the Marine Corps to control angry crowds, reports the Honolulu Advertiser from Camp Smith, Hawaii. "The 4-foot-tall, 1,600-pound concept vehicle recently was demonstrated at Camp Smith, launching dozens of smoke rounds downrange that could have been tear gas, or stingball and flashbang grenades." The Gladiator should be availble by 2007 for about $150,000 apiece. Look at this summary for more details including the scenario of the demonstration and the kind of weapons carried by the Gladiator. The Marine Corps also has a story about this robot, "Gladiator flexes its muscle on Camp Smith," which carries additional photographs.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Navy plans disposable ray-guns
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DATE: 07/08/2003 10:09:38 AM
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Noah Shachtman writes:
American warships could be armed with disposable laser weapons within five years, if a plan by U.S. Navy scientists works as promised. Michael Wardlaw, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, has proposed that the Navy use a battery of solid-state, one-shot-only lasers to zap enemy boats and defend against missile attacks. This Expendable Modular High Energy Laser (EMHEL), Jane's Defence Weekly reports, would use a brick of 120, meter-long laser modules that could fire individually or in one giant pulse.
"Each individual module would contain a single-shot laser capable of firing 10 kilojoules of energy at peak power in a single burst," Jane's notes. "With such a system, Wardlaw said, 'you can drill through 6in [15cm] of steel in under a second.'"
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR panorama: film censorship down under
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DATE: 07/08/2003 10:13:51 AM
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Photographer and QTVR creator Peter Murphy says:
Hi Xeni -- Larry Clark's recent movie "Ken Park" was scheduled for screening at the recent Sydney Film Festival but the censorship authority here refused it classification i.e. banned it and it wasnt able to be screened.
Since then there have been a number of attempts at defiance of the ban -- most recently last night in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Balmain in a municipal Town Hall. It turned into series of tug-of-wars
involving a DVD player, the organisers and the police and only a few minutes of the film got shown. My panoramas show the scene in the auditorium after the first of the screening attempts. Link to panorama. And here is the scene later with the police mounting guard on the DVD player to foil any further attempts at playing the DVD version of the movie -- Link to panorama.
Link to Peter's weblog, which includes more VRs and stills of this scene, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Backfire!
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DATE: 07/08/2003 10:18:30 AM
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Strange online photo-art/civic psychological torture project:
My name is Howard Stone. Briefly, some years ago I had a delivery job in Southampton, England (I won't say what I was delivering or for whom). It was very boring and badly paid but I soon found a way of livening it up. I discovered that the van I had to drive could very easily be persuaded to produce very loud, frightening backfires as and when I wanted it to (I'm not telling you how, find out for yourselves) and as I've always been keen on photography, I tried an experiment. I mounted a camera, pointing backwards, from the back window of the van, I hid it behind a retractable black cloth shutter and operated it with a cable-release long enough to be operated whilst driving. I would make the van backfire and photograph the frightened mayhem I'd created as I drove past. Out of (partial) consideration for my fellow man, I avoided pensioners, dentists' surgeries and gynaecologists.
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Mister Sean Bonner)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Secrets of Dungeons and Dreamers
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DATE: 07/08/2003 10:27:49 AM
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I wrote a feature for Wired News today about a new book due out in August that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of gamer culture through the eyes of one of its leaders:
Richard Garriott can't speak with you today, the publicist's e-mail read. The man who created Ultima Online, the first commercially successful online role-playing game, was on the way to the hospital -- having just bashed himself in the head with a two-by-four while working on his medieval castle.
The message didn't seem strange, because I'd just finished reading Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture From Geek to Chic, a forthcoming book on the evolution of gaming culture by CNET's John Borland and Wired News contributor Brad King. Due for release Aug. 19 from Osborne McGraw-Hill, it documents the manically creative lives of gamers by tracing the career of eccentric "Lord British," as Garriott is known to millions of fans, and panning out to explore the social anthropology of computer game culture.
The book profiles people who evolved gaming from paper to pixel, through 1970s Dungeons & Dragons roots, to MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) like EverQuest, to bloodstained shooter mods like Counter-Strike. But along the way, it weaves those character sketches into a living record of community, exploring the industry's impact on the broader evolution of computer hardware, software and networking technologies.
Link to WN story, Read the first chapter online for free, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Live photoblogging from Supernova
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DATE: 07/08/2003 11:01:43 AM
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Jason DeFilippo Supercool Jason DeFillippo, whose consonant-rich name I can't spell, is blogging live from Kevin Werbach's Supernova confab in DC. BoingBoing blog-compadre Cory Doctorow is among the participants. Link to Jason's liveblog, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi to be banned in the Phillipines?
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DATE: 07/08/2003 12:40:21 PM
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The Phillipines' spectrum policy doesn't allow WiFi.
AS far as the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) was concerned, commercial wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) services, and even Bluetooth use, was still "illegal" in certain regions in the Philippines, including Metro Manila, an official of the regulatory body said over the weekend.
Edgardo Cabarios, director of the common carrier department of the NTC said that the body was still drafting guidelines to regulate commercial Wi-Fi activities and boost their deployment and development in the country.
"I think (commercial Wi-Fi) services have to stop because it is against the law," he said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wireless Frontier at Supernova
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DATE: 07/08/2003 12:50:40 PM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of the (very good) wireless session at Supernova. Unfortunately, I missed the first 10 minutes.
MSFT is very interested in mesh wireless. It's a major area of
research at MSFT Research, which isn't product development, it's
basic R&D. Why wireless mesh? We believe in decentralization,
power at the edge.
Bob Metcalfe says that 1-2% of the chips produced every year are
part of the Internet. The other 98% are not networked. As they
come online, you get a Metcalfe's Law effect.
In order to get billions of chips to talk to each other, we need
to invent a new way.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Buy a Big Mac, get a free McWiFi connection
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 07/08/2003 02:29:25 PM
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Hamburglar meets Netstumbler: McDonalds' is beginning to roll out its on-site wireless internet service in partnership with WayPort, and promotional offers will likely include "buy-a-[insert food item here], get a two-hour wireless connection free" deals. Not everyone predicts success:
McDonald's said it sees wireless service in its restaurants as a natural extension of convenient service, which should appeal to students and professionals, while helping drive traffic during off hours. Still, the move was met with some skepticism from some industry analysts who noted that McDonald's lacked the upscale clientele that was most likely to take advantage of constant connectivity. "With Starbucks, I think it's terrific because it does keep people in some of their stores," said Robert Goldin, a restaurant consultant with the market research firm Technomic Inc. "With McDonald's, I don't see it. The setting to me doesn't seem very conducive."
Interesting: This FAQ on McDwireless.com points out that this is a six-month trial program... the unwiring begins now, and presumably McDonalds will re-evaluate the pickup rate at the end of the trial, to determine whether or not they'll continue to offer.
Link to "McDWireless.com", Link to Reuters story, Link to McDonald's press release, Discuss (Thanks, cacheop)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pirates of the Caribbean NPR commentary
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DATE: 07/08/2003 08:44:00 PM
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This NPR commentary describes a woman's experience being caught on Pirates of the Caribbean. I dunno. It's kinda lame. She starts off by going into lots of detail regarding the scene she was trapped in in the ride -- and describes a bunch of stuff that isn't actually in the ride, begging the question: exactly how traumatic was this? Her punchline isn't a lot more compelling: We left the ride and we were outside. The ride has an outside. Woah. Still, it always warms my cockles to hear about the Park.
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(Thanks, Bruce!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Auto-remixing Gnutella
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DATE: 07/08/2003 08:45:13 PM
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NAG is an automated remixer for audio-tracks from Gnutellanet.
N.A.G. (Network Auralization for Gnutella) is interactive software art for Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP which turns the process of searching for and downloading MP3 files into a chaotic musical collage. Type in one or more search keywords, and N.A.G. looks for matches on the Gnutella peer-to-peer file sharing network. The software then downloads MP3 files which match the search keyword(s) and remixes these audio files in real time based on the structure of the Gnutella network itself.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reefer Madness: copyright infringement and pr0n
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DATE: 07/09/2003 04:22:41 AM
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Reefer Madness: Sex Drugs and Cheap Labour in the American Black Market is a new book by Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation. It's a very good exploration of the underground economies in marijuana, California migrant strawberry pickers, and pornographers, arguing for a rational, post-moralistic approach to these things. I was particularily seized by this little factoid from the history of porn and copyright.
The Los Angeles branch of the Cosa Nostra, lead by Dominic Brooklier, worked hard to get "a piece of the porno." But the extortion attempts of the "Mickey Mouse Mafia" proved a failure -- among other reasons, because Brooklier's soldiers made arson threats to a phony porn company run by the FBI. More successful were the efforts of various companies to "dupe" popular hard-core films, to circulate unauthorized prints without paying any royalties. Since the films were of questionable legality, producers were usually reluctant to sue for violations of copyright. *Deep Throat* was widely pirated by small-time hoods unaware of Anthony and Louis Periano's relationship with the Columbo family. The Perianos turned the practice to their advantage. Representatives of their company would visit theaters where bootleg copies of *Deep Throat* were being shown; theater owners were given the opportunity to continue exhibiting the film in return for half of the box office receipts. Few theater owners refused this offer. As a result, the widespread piracy of *Deep Throat* not only facilitated nationwide distribution, but also spared the Perianos the cost of making new prints.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1937 public-domain radio propaganda
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DATE: 07/09/2003 04:34:10 AM
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This 1937 Columbia Workshop radio program is a gem: characters from Dickens, Lewis Carroll and other public domain works drive from the Copyright Lane to the Public Domain and have stirring adventures in a world freed from their authors.
6.4MB, 28 minute MP3 Link
Discuss
(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Practical invisibility cloaks
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DATE: 07/09/2003 04:36:08 AM
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Wil McCarthy's written a fascinating piece for Wired on "invisibility cloaks" -- micro-video camouflage systems that reproduce what's behind you on pixels in draped in front of you.
A real invisibility cloak, if it's going to dupe anyone who might see it, needs to represent the scene behind its wearer accurately from any angle. Moreover, since any number of people might be looking through it at any given moment, it has to reproduce the background from all angles at once. That is, it has to project a separate image of its surroundings for every possible perspective.
Impossible? No, just difficult. Rather than one video camera, we'll need at least six stereoscopic pairs (facing forward, backward, right, left, upward, and downward) - enough to capture the surroundings in all directions. The cameras will transmit images to a dense array of display elements, each capable of aiming thousands of light beams on their own individual trajectories. And what imagery will these elements project? A virtual scene derived from the cameras' views, making it possible to synthesize various perspectives. Of course, keeping this scene updated and projected realistically onto the cloak's display fabric will require fancy software and a serious wearable computer.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Security panel at Supernova
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DATE: 07/09/2003 07:13:01 AM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of the "Decentralized Identity and Security" panel at Supernova 2003, with Marc Hedlund, VP Engineering, Sana; Joe Hildebrand, Chief
Architect, Jabber; Jim Kollegger, CEO, BBX and Nikolaj Nyholm,
Founder, Ascio.
Security is overfunded and overhyped. Customers got burned in the
dotbomb and don't want their critical infrastructure to get
orphaned in a bankruptcy.
Biological models help us protect computers at Sana.
Human immune system autonomously defends you without having a
signature file of all known virii. Instead, it looks for abnormal
activitiy. In a computer, this dramatically reduces false
positives and increases protection against new threats, even
without a virus definitions list or a security researcher.
A customer of ours -- Smith and Hawkins, a retailer -- has 50-60
stores with no IT staff, and a central office that manages
security, and has a PoS that runs over the Internet to clear
transactions. Our tech comes out of the Web, not out of
Enterprise Architecture, polling over http with Tomcat, etc. We
adapt to usage patterns in stores and spot anomalies. A firewall
or an IDS would be totally ineffective in this realm, but
autonomous software works.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Caleb Carr slams Potter
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DATE: 07/09/2003 07:18:22 AM
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Caleb Carr wrote a letter to the NYT celebrating AS Byatt's attack on Harry Potter:
For those of us who have many times found ourselves trapped in discussions (if such they can be called) of this sort with adult Potter fans, but who have lacked the clarity or sensitivity to state our side of the case so well, Ms. Byatt's article is indispensable: a classic and precise piece of true criticism, neither bile nor reverence, but brilliant dissection.
Let children who love Harry read on. But let adults know that their obsessive devotion is feeding something far more frightening than the dark arts: a retreat from the complexities of adulthood in a dangerous world.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: David Weinberger on Digital ID
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DATE: 07/09/2003 07:33:59 AM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of David Weinberger's Digital ID talk at Supernova.
I am deeply ignorant of Digital Identity and I hate it. It turns
my stomach. I'm not atypical.
Why am I so irrationally afraid of DigID? I'm not sure. I have no
argument against it, but here are the roots of my insecurity.
For starters, I'm a hippie. I am not a number. But in the main, I
don't mind having a passport a credit card, a drivers' license,
and I'm emotionally attached to my phone-number (something the
cellcos know, which is why they resisted number portability).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Simon Phipps on the "Massively Connected" world
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DATE: 07/09/2003 08:24:36 AM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of Simon "Chief Tech Evangelist" Phipps's talk at Supernova.
IBM came up with SNA -- the architecture that would rule the
world. What if the Itnernet had been built on BBSes or SNA:
Prodigy. A central administrator would have to give permission to
add your browser to the master table, and every site would use a
different protocol.
"Massively Connected" is all about shared, open, royalty-free loosely coupled
standards -- not "everything joined to everything else," but
"everything joined to everything else WITH THE RIGHT RULES."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-mosquito cellphone download
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DATE: 07/09/2003 09:40:36 AM
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A Korean cellphone company is offering a 3,000 won ($1.36) app for download that generates high-pitched tones that supposedly keep mosquitos at bay.
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Illegal Art exhibit: pics and video clips
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DATE: 07/09/2003 10:07:22 AM
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The "Illegal Art Exhibit" that's been touring all across the country is in San Francisco this month, and BoingBoing pal Lisa Rein posted photos and a clip from ABC news to give you a taste.
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free robot art in NYC: fire-breathing monkey on your back
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DATE: 07/09/2003 10:23:00 AM
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Kal Spelletich, founder of machine art group SEEMEN, says:
"I am exhibiting the MONKEY ON YOUR BACK in New York City on Saturday and Sunday, July 12 & 13. It should be interesting, as this is a relatively untested machine so far. And, I was kicked out of the EYEBEAM Museum back in 2000 for doing my show. They don't know I am here. Yee Haw!
This is a FREE event, Time: Noon to 6:00 p.m, takes place at EYEBEAM Gallery on 540 W 21st Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), New York, NY 10011. Nearest Subway: A/C/E/1/9 to 23rd Street."
Link to show information, Link to Kal's extreme photo gallery of hardcore robotic-monkey-on-girl action. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SARS Art Project: cool Chinatown panorama prints now available
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DATE: 07/09/2003 10:36:19 AM
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Kozyndan, the LA-based art duo who generously contributed this panoramic illustration (link to full-size image) for the SARS ART PROJECT, have just released five new prints. You can preview and order in this online shop. The SARS ART print, one of five available, depicts terrified citizens of LA Chinatown hurling dim sum at flying, fiendishly grinning SARS monsters. It's called "The Yum-cha Militia," and is available in a limited edition of 600 offset prints for US $25 each. I am so buying one immediately... support your local online artist!
Update: Subliminal SARS Art messages! Scott from Ideo says, "I just showed this to a Taiwanese coworker. She says some of the store signs are, um, unusual. From left to right: Red sign, four characters: 'Stay inside.' Blue sign, six characters: 'Bunny rabbit is evil.' White sign: 'Give us good things.' She didn't really understand the two on the far right. Under 'Luckett Imports' it's something like 'Politician change at home.'" Scott, Kozyndan have kind of a theme going with evil bunnyrabbits, as you can see from their website... but the rest of this will have to remain a mystery.
Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Brain Rat Cells in US Control Robotic Semi-Living Artist in Australia
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DATE: 07/09/2003 10:47:21 AM
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Roland points us to a Georgia Institute of Technology news release announcing that U.S. and Australian researchers have jointly created "a new class of creative beings, 'the semi-living artist'." I don't know what all the fuss is about. I think the last couple of guys I've dated could be described as "semi-living artists," and at least one of them may well have been controlled by rat neurons.
A picture-drawing robot in Perth, Australia whose movements are controlled by the brain signals of cultured rat cells in Atlanta... the robotic drawing arm operates based on the neural activity of a few thousand rat neurons placed in a special petri dish that keeps the cells alive. The dish, a Multi-Electrode Array (MEA), is instrumented with 60 two-way electrodes for communication between the neurons and external electronics. The neural signals are recorded and sent to a computer that translates neural activity into robotic movement." The team hopes "to establish a cultured in vitro network system that learns like the living brains in people and animals do." Thi
s summary contains images of the robotic arm and of a picture drawn by the 'semi-living artist.' It also contains other references to similar works.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion trailer online
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DATE: 07/09/2003 12:21:06 PM
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The trailer for the Haunted Mansion movie is up. Booyah!
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Supernova: The next communications industry
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DATE: 07/09/2003 12:28:02 PM
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Here's my impressionistic transcript of "The next communications industry" panel at Supernova, with Raju Gulabani, CEO, Telesyn; Louis Holder, EVP Product Dev,
Vonage; Paddy Holahan, CEO, NewBay and David Isenberg, Prosultant,
isen.com
Voice is being transformed, and the business model is up for
grabs, thanks to IP telephony. But as price comes down, uptake
increases. Cheaper telephony means more talking.
Voice is just an application. Business models have to change.
Your voice network isn't an asset, it's a liability.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC Wonks at Supernova
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DATE: 07/09/2003 12:54:06 PM
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Bob Pepper, Chief of Policy Development for the FCC, was supposed to be here, but he's ill. Some of the FCC people in the room are taking the stage for an informal town-hall. Peter Tenhula, Director of FCC Spectrum Policy Task Force; Barbara Ezben, Associate Bureau Chief in the Media Bureau; Robert Cannon, Office of Strategic Planning; Scott Marcus, Senior Advisor for Internet Tech; Rob Tanner, Legal Advisor in Common Carrier Bureau
It's easier than it's ever been for the public to reach us. We hear from lots of people who are beltway outsiders.
It's hard for an administrative agency to be contacted by a public that is accustomed to talking to elected officials and getting a response. Expert agencies with technical expertise are being directed comments that are more appropriate to legislative arenas.
Valuable commentary helps us to work out a reasonable solution. It's a data-point that 750,000 Americans would prefer that we don't do something in particular [Ed *cough* media consolidation *cough*]. At the end of the day, that's not as helpful as feedback from someone who has economic expertise.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tech Policy Outlook: Supernova
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DATE: 07/09/2003 01:44:29 PM
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Here're my impressionistic notes from the "Tech Policy Outlook" panel at Supernova, with Blair Levin, Managing Director, Legg Mason; Bruce Mehlman, Asst Secy for Tech Policy, Dept of Commerce; Gregory Staple, Partner, Vinson and Elkins and Gigi Sohn, President, Public Knowledge.
Tech and policy makers shouldn't be lapdogs for Hollywood.
Copyright has been a one-sided debate for years. Content
industries built long relationships with Congress and the members
of Congress. It's only slowly that tech and public interest
communities are getting involved.
Content is trying to push for tech mandates, including copyright
protection. Last year saw the failed Hollings Bill. Hollywood has
taken this to the the FCC for "Hollings Light" in the Broadcast
Flag. They're working to introduce "Super-DMCAs" in the state
legislatures.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Remember Napster Bad? Now: Sue all the World.
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DATE: 07/09/2003 03:15:24 PM
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Bob Cesca and Campchaos -- the ruthless hijinksters responsible for the online animation smash hit "Napster Bad" (ca. 1999-2000?) -- have just created a new piece poking fun at the recent RIAA announcement: "Sue All The World 2003." NSFW, lots of cussin'. Warning: so funny, it may cause involuntary capuccino-choking or pants-crapping. Link to animation, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Self-surveillance: view your webcam on your cellphone
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DATE: 07/09/2003 04:15:30 PM
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A company called EyespyFX in Ireland offers a service through which you can view your home-based webcam on your cellphone while you're out and about in the world. I'm sure there are other companies out there doing this, but I haven't been paying attention yet.
Using a standard web cam EyeSpyFX - Mobile will broadcast a web cam page that is optimised to suit your mobile phone. It also broadcasts a live web cam page viewable on a regular PC browser. The PC that is broadcasting can have a fixed or dynamically assigned IP address. When the software is on it sends a "live" message to the EyeSpyFX Live Listings with the camera name and address. The live listings are optimised for phone and PC browsers. EyeSpyFX - Mobile is optimised for web browsers on phones with Symbian OS, Microsoft CE, Microsoft smart phones, WAP 2 browsers and IMODE browsers.
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amish for QWERTY
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DATE: 07/10/2003 02:43:05 AM
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I've got an editorial on the O'Reilly Network this morning, "Amish for QWERTY," about user-interfaces and the moral panics they evince.
For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated lifestyle. It's having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the always-awkwardly-placed power source, running software that I chose and installed, communicating over the wireless network. I use a network that has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets me install any software without permission from anyone else. Right-living is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public and free Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other words.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Real CD pirates, not in the RIAA's crosshairs
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DATE: 07/10/2003 06:11:31 AM
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Over one billion pirate CDs will be sold this year:
Of the estimated total number of illegal music copies sold, 40% originate from factory production lines which produce professional-looking products but without paying any money back to the industry or artists.
Asia and Russia have been identified as hot spots for this.
Lookit that: actual organized criminals, mafiosi in Asia and Russia, engaged in actual, commercial piracy of music, directly corroding the bottom-line of the music industry.
Ironic, then, that the enforcement efforts from the RIAA and company have focused on efforts that will do nothing at all to slow these crooks. DRM, we're told, "keeps honest users honest." These are not honest users. The mafiyeh doesn't even slow down when it hits a DRM "speedbump." File-sharing networks are irrelevant to this -- while some of these crooks may obtain their source material by downloading from P2Pnets, they have no problem simply buying one legit copy of the disc in question and taking it to their "factory production line" for "professional-looking" reproduction in bulk.
What terribly madness has seized control of the music industry, that it has decided to attack its customers who use file-sharing networks largely to source out-of-print music and to sample new music before buying it, rather than actually attacking the actual crooks who actually make money at the industry's actual expense?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tunisian blog dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui's case returns to court
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DATE: 07/10/2003 07:43:58 AM
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Zouhair Yahyaoui is a 35-year-old Tunisian blogger and journalist who's currently serving a two-year jail term -- under what supporters describe as extremely harsh, inhumane conditions -- for criticizing the Tunisian government on his website. His case returns to the highest Tunisian court this Friday, July 11. Supporters are hoping for a new investigation of his case, saying that the original trial was unjustly conducted, serving effectively as a state formality before imprisoning him for political reasons. The jailed blogger recently engaged in a hunger strike that lasted over 35 days, and last month was awarded first "Cyber-Freedom Prize" by Reporters without Borders, which works to raise awareness about human rights abuses against journalists around the world.
Fiance and campaign organizer Sophie Elwarda tells BoingBoing:
"Following on from the information communicated by his solicitor Mr Abdelwahab Mataar, who was representing him, Zouhair Yahyaoui's case will pass in front of the highest court this Wednesday 11th July at 9.00 am.
The highest court will investigate the file to determine if the tribunal has done there job correctly of not. And they will therefore evaluate the manner in which this justice has been delivered. There are currently 2 possibilities, confirmation or cassation, if the judgement is confirmed, that would indicate the end of any judiciary proceedings, in case of cassation the affair will again go before the court of appeal for a new
investigation."
Link to RSF website with more information about Yahyaoui's case and the Cyber-Freedom Prize, Link to Yahyaoui's "Tunezine" blog (now a "Free Zouhair" support website), More background, previous BB post (1), (2). Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Weird post-SARS protective gear fashion trend in Canada?
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DATE: 07/10/2003 08:02:36 AM
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BoingBoing reader Darren wrote:
"This is related to the whole SARS art thread. These massive visors appear to be predictors of a new trend in fashion: protective gear chic. I'd be greatful to anyone who can locate the origin and/or photos of these wacky visors-cum-welder's masks."
Then, an update: "
With the help of Vancouver Webloggers, I have located a
these wacky super-sized sun visors. It is, indeed, a Korean company. When you line them all up like this, they really do look like welder's masks. I figure it's defintely post-SARS paranoia at work, at some subconcious level. I posted a summary update here. "
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wireless Art call for entries: ResFest Korea
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DATE: 07/10/2003 08:08:49 AM
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ResFest Korea (Korean edition of the traveling digital film festival) and Art Center Nabi (a Korean media art center) have just issued a call for entries in a Wireless Art competition in which $2,500 will be awarded to winners in each of several media categories. Proposal deadline: August 18, winners will be announced on September 1.
We hope to explore the potentials of mobile and wireless as new communication and expressive medium for art practice. Works can be described as mobile art, wireless art or multimedia experiments that open up the possibilities of newly-emerged technology of wireless. Korea, known for its nation-wide broadband network, is also a leading country of wireless technologies and services. On this ground, Art Center Nabi aims to support the production of wireless art.
Link to competition details, Discuss , (Thanks, Beverly)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired Mag: Oh, Joy! 24/7 Reality TV!
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DATE: 07/10/2003 08:22:01 AM
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I interviewed Reality Central TV founder Larry Namer for this month's issue of WIRED Magazine:
If everyone is going to get that proverbial 15 minutes of fame, we'll need more airtime. Enter Larry Namer - cofounder of E! Entertainment Television - who this winter will launch Reality Central, a 24/7 cable network devoted to every riveting, repulsive, and banal dimension of reality TV. Namer's partner is Blake Mycoskie, a losing contestant from CBS's The Amazing Race. Mycoskie persuaded the show's winners - and some from other reality fests - to chip in more than half a million bucks as seed funding. The surreality doesn't stop there: Namer and Mycoskie are taping every step of the launch saga so that it can be turned into, yes, a reality TV show. The partners insist their network will not only have staying power, but also will play an important role in the unwiring of conventional media, powered by cheaper, faster digital tools that have the potential to make anyone a programmer, a star, and a producer.
Buy the hard copy, Read the interview online, Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Incredible Hulk is well-hung?
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DATE: 07/10/2003 10:50:27 AM
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According to, er, The Sun, a six-year-old girl won a plushie Hulk at a fair and later noticed a bulge in his purple shorts. She undressed the not-so-jolly green giant only to discover that the doll is anatomically correct. Link
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(Thanks, Gil!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Baseball player hits Italian Sausage character with bat
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DATE: 07/10/2003 11:06:39 AM
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Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman Randall Simon smacked one of the Milwaukee Brewers' sausage mascots with a bat Wednesday when the mascots were running by the dugout in between innings. The Italian sausage and another character, a hot dog, tumbled to the ground. Simon was arrested, booked, and ordered to appear in the DA's office today. I love sports. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scientists do it all for the nookie
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DATE: 07/10/2003 12:39:42 PM
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BoingBoing reader Eli the Bearded writes:
Apparently it is all about impressing the dames: "The careers of great male scientists, like those of male criminals, are most prolific in the first flush of youth, according to the study. Both groups pursue their chosen paths with greatest panache before the age of 35 and both lose their enthusiasm when they marry." This news article says a report has found a corrolation between testosterone production curve and scientific and criminal output. But
the cause seems far from proven.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Kensington WiFi detector
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DATE: 07/10/2003 01:13:02 PM
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Frank Keeney points to a new gadget which manufacturer Kensington claims is "only WiFi detector on the market today."
Your life on the road just got a lot easier. With the first and only WiFi detector on the market today, you no longer need to cross your fingers as you wait for your notebook to boot up. Just press a button and the Kensington WiFi Finder lets you know if your location is "hot"...instantly. No software or computer needed. What could be easier? Completely hassle free -- no more booting up your notebook to find a WiFi signal... Instantly detects WiFi networks with the press of a button... Three lights indicate signal strength...Compact and lightweight - fits in your pocket... Detects 802.11b and 802.11g signals from up to 200 feet away... Filters out other wireless signals, including cordless phones, microwave ovens and Bluetooth networks... No software or computer required... 2.95"L X 0.39"H X 2.17"W.
Link, Discuss, Idetect offers another similar device, WiFiSense does, too. (Also spotted on Gizmodo today)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hypothetical Disney ride movies
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DATE: 07/10/2003 06:49:30 PM
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Andy Baio has whipped up some nice posters for future hypothetical movies based on Disney rides, in the tradition of Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion.
Link
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(Thanks, Andy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Own the figurehead from Pirates of the Caribbean
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DATE: 07/10/2003 07:57:49 PM
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Disney's auctioning off the fiberglass-and-wood figurehead (8 ft. x 11 ft. x 12 ft.) from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The bidding stands at $700, with 6 days remaining in the auction (shipping starts at $4,000!).
You know, my birthday's only a week away.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WPA demystified
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DATE: 07/11/2003 07:13:33 AM
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Tom's Hardware Guide has published a good roundup of WPA, a new access control and encryption system for WiFi. This is a good start-to-finish explanation, but I'm still awfully skeptical about the value of WPA outside of contexts where a server is present (i.e., my home, WiFi hotspots, warstumbled nodes) -- everyone sharing one password is just dumb-o.
Lately, I've been thinking that the best way to go is to turn on VPN access on my router and use OS X's VPN client to encrypt my connection without using WEP or WPA.
Link
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(via WiFi Networking News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pirate keyboard
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DATE: 07/11/2003 08:24:28 AM
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This "pirates' keyboard" from Defective Yeti is hilarious! Oh, what did we do before Photoshop?
Link
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(Thanks, mrkazee!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: unwired pubs: Internet, a pint, and a packet of crisps
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DATE: 07/11/2003 09:19:02 AM
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Mike Butcher wrote a piece in today's Irish Times about pubs in the UK going wireless:
Walk in to the Progress pub in Tuffnell Park, North London and you won't find horse brasses on the walls. It's not just pints they're offering here, but plasma screens linked to a wireless network. If the well-named Progress is anything to go by, the wireless internet is poised to take off in all sorts of directions. Progress owner Conrad Palmer rigged up the wireless broadband network inside the pub using a 250 sterling (361 Euro) Meshbox consisting of a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth access point, a Linux server, a Web browser and instant message software.
Not only can passing business people pop in to check their email on a laptop over a quick pint but drinkers can snap each other with camera phones and send the results to big screens positioned around the pub. The bar is also planning to use the screens to let customers know about upcoming events and may send digital vouchers to regulars for discounts. Although unusual at the moment, the Progress is the latest indication that the wireless Net is leaving offices and homes and heading out onto the street.
Link, Discuss (via unwired)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Oprah swoons over iPod
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DATE: 07/11/2003 09:27:03 AM
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I, uh, missed yesterday's show, but I'm told that on yesterday's edition of "Oprah," host Oprah Winfrey reviewed her ongoing list of "favorite things" (fashion, beauty, home stuff), and the final item was the iPod. At the end of her spiel on why she liked the device, iPods were handed out to each member of the audience. here is the post-show iPod breakdown on her website, Link to the complete "O List," video, and transcript ("It'll revolutionize your music!") Discuss (via pho list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Russian mobile providers nix encryption so FSB, police can snoop
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DATE: 07/11/2003 09:36:58 AM
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Not exactly a shocker, but -- from the Moscow Times:
Mobile phone providers switched off their encryption systems for 24 hours on a government order, allowing the Federal Security Service and the police to eavesdrop on all calls. An alert notifying callers that their conversations could be listened in on popped up on cellphones around Moscow at 9 p.m. Tuesday and lasted until 9 p.m. Wednesday on an order by the Communications Ministry. The alert, depending on the model of cellphone, is usually either an exclamation point or an unlocked padlock.The Communications Ministry said it issued the order at the request of the Interior Ministry, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Link, Discuss (via Dave Farber's IP list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: cool online comic-poem: Spectacular Attacks
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DATE: 07/11/2003 09:46:39 AM
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An online graphic short, in Flash. View the online comic here, read the poem text (html) here,
Discuss (Thanks, Susannah!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Quicktime video: Futurecop in Soweto
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DATE: 07/11/2003 10:14:32 AM
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In what appears to be a faux corporate video spec piece, (about 15 megs, Link), a futuristic robot cop patrols chaotic streets of a developing nation. Update: Some folks are having difficulties loading the movie with that link -- try this direct link to the *.mov file instead.
Discuss (Thanks, Marc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Today is 07-11-03. That means free slurpees.
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DATE: 07/11/2003 10:19:42 AM
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At 7-11 convenience stores in the USA. W00t! Discuss (Thanks, Jon)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Napster book signing July 15th in San Francisco
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DATE: 07/11/2003 04:29:12 PM
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Joseph Menn, the author of All the Rave, an excellent book chronicling the rise and fall of Napster, is giving a signing and a reading at Stacey's Bookstore (581 Market Street, San Francisco) on July 15th at 12:30. Joining him will be Napster server achitect and founding developer Jordan Ritter.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney relaxes dress-codes at Parks
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DATE: 07/11/2003 04:36:18 PM
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Disney has relaxed its theme-park dress code. Men can now wear earrings and corn-rows. Women can now wear hoop earrings and men can wear corn-rows. (tx, jsteven)
Men who don't wear costumes will no longer be limited to Oxford-style shirts -- crewneck, turtleneck, mock turtleneck and three-button collared sweaters will be permitted. Golf and polo shirts are still forbidden.
"Our personal opinion is that golf and polo shirts look nice when they're brand new but they don't look good after you've washed them," Valiquette said. "After you've washed them, they're naturally prone to looking sloppy."
Link
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(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Banana Slug provides serendipitous searching
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DATE: 07/11/2003 08:22:44 PM
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Gary says: "Banana Slug is a Google search tool that my good friend Steve Nelson built based on a trick that I devised for finding new and unusual stuff about ukuleles on the Web. Since Google returns the most popular pages, I started searching on ukulele+some random word that occurred to me. Like ukulele and pickle. So Steve built Banana Slug, which does this for you automatically.
"Here’s a description from the site:
BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google. Directed Google searches return pages most relevant to your search term, based on the pages' popularity on the Web. You may never see some of the pages way down the list that are relevant or interesting, but off the beaten path.
So we give you a little boost. We "seed" your search with another word, chosen at random, and this accidental encounter results in pages you may have overlooked. What, if anything, do all the results have in common? You tell me! We show the seed word at the end of the page, along with the number of results, and how many seed words we needed to try before we got results (it doesn't always happen the first time!).
"I’ve already found a new (to me) ukulele performer using Banana Slug. Jennifer Foster. Listen to her song,Ukulele Dropout."
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Automated music critic
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DATE: 07/11/2003 10:17:34 PM
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Enter your favorite album or artist and prepare yourself for a venomous review!
Link
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(Thanks, Gil!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stross's first novel hits the stands
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DATE: 07/12/2003 09:53:28 AM
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Congrats to my collaborator and friend, Charlie Stross, on receiving the first hardcopies of his first real, no-foolin' novel, Singularity Sky. Charlie's one of the most promising writers to enter the field in recent years, someone who's repeatedly been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula as well as other major SF awards. I can't wait to lay hands on Singularity Sky.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ruminations on a bee
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DATE: 07/12/2003 09:55:10 AM
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I love Matt Webb's blog entries. They're superdense, thought-provoking, serious and playful at the same time. He's a smart one, our Matt. Today's entry is awfully tasty.
esterday morning, hot sun and hot pavement, I found a dead bee. I can't remember the last time I saw a dead bee - not since I've lived in a city, I guess - and this one was still brightly coloured, fuzzy and fat. I poked it with a piece of leaf for a while. That knot of complexity! The desk my computer is on now looks vulgar in comparison, so vast, so selfish, squatting over a million bees-worth of space, and doing nothing: one piece of the desk is much like another, and the whole like any desk, anywhere. But this bee, white black and yellow, I bet every single element of it had purpose: every particle, every force, every relative position and potentiality of it, oh and more and wider than I have space here to say, all the way down to the substrate of the universe itself. Not like my desk, built on top of all these layers, in the highly stacked and abstracted world of people -- which is, in fact, just like London around me, there at the west end of Fleet Street, a human construction, a deeply nested virtual machine really, that's all it is -- there with our precarious artifact around me, I witnessed a bee, not built on top of reality but part of reality itself. Indivisible from it. A window to the true reality so far from me. "Auspicious event! Going to be a good day" I texted Es, excited. "Not for the bee" she replied. I'm not sure, it's still there, more real than any of us. Thank you, bee!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 600,000 blogs for the downloading
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DATE: 07/12/2003 09:57:09 AM
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Weblog Census is a Technorati/Blogdex/Daypop-style project that has indexed over 600,000 blogs from around the world, archiving all the posts its ever discovered. You can download all this data from the project site, and invent your own data-mining alogrithms to discover the topology of Blogistan.
Link
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Von Neumann's open source cred
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DATE: 07/12/2003 09:58:55 AM
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Quinn Norton took some notes at the closing keynote for the O'Reilly Open Source convention in Portland, in which George Dyson discussed his research into Von Neumann's papers dating from the birth of computer science:
von neumann invented modern computer under the set of wild conditions detailed in the log books of the people working with the computer. i can't do it justice, so i won't really try to hit on it too much here, i just hope someone can annotate with his talk slides.
with the navy and rca battling over who would have patent rights, von neumann settled things by publishing without patents- this is where dyson sees it tying into the oss movement: "keep it an open universe, cause that's how it started"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Howard Dean guest-hosting LessigBlog
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DATE: 07/12/2003 10:00:27 AM
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Lessig's going on holidays and so he's turning over stewardship of his blog to Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Skin your iPod
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DATE: 07/12/2003 10:05:15 AM
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The iPod BodyMask is a $6, printable adhesive sheet that's die-cut for easy wrapping around an iPod. It protects your device's finish and allows you skin it with any design you care to print from your color inkjet. The adhesive peels away easily and leaves no marks on the iPod's finish.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Air Canada uses trademark to silence critics
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DATE: 07/12/2003 06:30:34 PM
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Air Canada, a failing, pathetic train-wreck of an airline, is attempting to use trademark law to stifle its critics, who have launched a shareholders' petition to ouster the president of the company. Air Canada argues that the reproduction of its trademarked logo on the petition site is an infringment of its trademark.
To which our immediate and final answer should be: Bullshit. Trademark comes to us from civil statutes relating to unfair competition and consumer confusion. Trademark exists to protect us, the public, from those who would fraudulently confuse their products with ones we're familiar with: in other words, when we crack open a can of Coke, we have the right to be sure that what's in the tin is the real deal, the pure Black Waters of American Imperialism, and not Crazy Joe's Discount Soda Beverage. Recent years have given us a dilution standard as well: if a mark is sufficiently famous, it can't be used even in generally non-confusing contexts, such as Pepsi Running Shoes or Evian Brake Fluid.
Which begs the question: Where's the confusion in Air Canada's case? What reasonable person, confronted with the petition at MiltonGottaGo.com, would assume that this was somehow a service offered by Air Canada, or would come to some harm through momentary disorientation? Indeed, Air Canada's position appears to be that the use of its marks identifies the petition's target too clearly. Under this theory, someone who contracted food-poisoning at Jack in the Box would be enjoined from uttering the company's logo in her accounts of the incident: "I got sick at a restaurant that uses a round-faced clown in a pointy hat as its logo."
Trademarks are powerful because they visually and clearly identify the companies who own them and their products. When a trademark is used to control the ability of a critic to clearly identify the target of her criticism, trademark is being perverted and is being used to undermine democratic discourse. Intellectual property laws are dangerous, ripe with potential to silence speech and stifle expression, the very things they are created to uphold. When trademark holders get greedy and grabby, we need to speak out, we need to protest -- the important word in "intellectual property" isn't property, it's intellectual.
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(via Blogaritaville)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worst date ever
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DATE: 07/13/2003 08:29:31 AM
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Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla (he of the "saved from a psychotic new girlfriend by the reders of his blog" story) is serializing yet another of his tales of romantic terror, in a story he calls, "The worst date ever." As usual, it's very funny.
A year earlier, she's decided to switch to a sort of made-up religion: a muddle-headed mishmash of wicca, crystals, aromatherapy and eye-for-eye karmic point-scoring (from the way she carried herself, she seemed to be exempt from karma accounting). Naturally, anything Christian -- the religion of her parents -- was by definition bad. She was doing a lot of flying that year, and like any superstition-prone fool with less rational scientific thinking skill than a bed of kelp, she was sure that she was going to die in a fiery plane crash. She told me that she had faith that I would honour her burial wishes because I was nice to her even when she was "being a total bitch."
All that did was fuel dark power of attorney fantasies. I imagined a funeral theme that could only be described as "Maximum Jesus". I wrote a script in which I would visit a hospital immediately after an accident. It went something like this:
Doctor: Mr. deVilla, she...she's...
Me: Tell it to me straight, doc. No sugar coating. I can take it.
Doctor: She's scraped her knee.
Me: I HAVE POWER OF ATTORNEY! I KNOW HER WISHES! NO HEROIC MEASURES! D.N.R.! PULL THE PLUG! PULL THE PLUG!
I remember saying to my sister: "I don't even have the luxury of wishing she was dead, because I'd be stuck with all the paperwork."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: HomePod MP3 stereo component
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DATE: 07/13/2003 04:27:09 PM
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I don't think it's shipping yet, but I'm thinking about getting this HomePod MP3 receiver for Mac to access my music from my home stereo. Unlike the $239 SLIMP3, the HomePod promises built-in 802.11b. If you have any experience with either product (or another better solution!) please let me know in the Discuss area! Thanks! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Software Defined Radio piece
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DATE: 07/13/2003 08:31:27 PM
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Ben Hammersley's got a great Gruniad piece this week about Software Defined Radio. It's so cool to watch this crawl into the public consciousness.
In a positive move, the first handheld software radio was unveiled in Washington in May. Instead of specialist radio hardware, a software radio uses a simple receiver to throw the entire contents of a range of frequencies into computer memory, where software - and not hardware - does the signal processing. Vanu Inc, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took an ordinary, off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard iPaq personal digital assistant and, using only a simple radio receiver and an upgrade to the Linux operating system, was able to demonstrate the device working as an FM radio.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BoingFilter -- filter BB by author
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DATE: 07/13/2003 09:58:44 PM
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BoingFilter is super-cool -- you can read Boing Boing by author, filtering out authors that don't interest you. This is exactly the correct answer to "I'm not interested in posts about ______." Don't read 'em. As soon as Blogger fixes its RSS to include authors, this will be even easier.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chronicle of a craphound's house
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DATE: 07/13/2003 10:24:36 PM
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Jeanne and Aaron say,
We're renovating this really crappy bungalow from 1916 (1914?) that the owner left a TON of stuff in. Some of it we can't even IDENTIFY!!! So, to amuse friends, relatives and blog fans, we post pictures of the stuff under our "WHAT ON EARTH??!!" section and sometimes have contests. This specific contest was "Kitsch or Tacky? You Decide." We posted random photos of house items and folks let us know...kitsch? Tacky? Garage-sale? Trash? Being in this place is halfway between "camping with a mortgage" and "living in the middle of an eBay dimension."
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(Thanks, Jeanne and Aaron!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Thousands of duckies head for New England
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DATE: 07/14/2003 08:12:49 AM
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29,000 rubber ducks, tossed overboard between China and Seattle more than a decade ago, will wash up on New England shores shortly.
After a mammoth journey, they are expected to start washing up on the New England coast. And while they will be bleached and battered from their journey, they are providing invaluable information on the ocean's currents. They were flung into the Pacific on the International Date Line, level with Oregon, USA.
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(Thanks, Kai!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Good stuff on WiFiNetNews lately
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DATE: 07/14/2003 08:30:26 AM
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Glenn Fleishman has been doing an excellent job with his WiFi Networking News site lately. His last half-dozen posts are really fascinating. Check it out.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mrwinkle.com goes to Hollywood
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DATE: 07/14/2003 09:53:43 AM
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LA Times story on a live book tour and upcoming feature film role by the canine star of the eponymously named website mrwinkle.com:
The truth is, Mr. Winkle looks as if he were created by some delightfully demented designer for one of those ancient European firms that make uniquely lovable yet dignified stuffed toys. In fact, the most frequent question asked by the 35 million people who've visited Mr. Winkle's Web site (www.mrwinkle.com) in the last three years is, "Are you real?"
He is. And he is clearly one of a kind. One of what kind, even the experts are unable to say. Perhaps a bit of Pomeranian, a soupcon of poodle, a blend of two, three or 10 other miniature breeds, they believe. He is clearly a diverse dog of such mixed lineage that he stands -- at under a foot tall -- for no particular breed or class, which means he can stand for all of them.
LA Times story,
Discuss (thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Pixel Zen
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DATE: 07/14/2003 10:07:47 AM
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(1) creatures
(2) houses
(3) avatars
(4) builder
(5) tiles
(6) icon town
(7) city creator
(8) mr.wong's
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SF Chronicle on Geocaching fun
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DATE: 07/14/2003 10:14:47 AM
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Cool piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on the expanding popularity of geocaching as an outdoor "adventure" sport in Bay Area parks:
Dave Grenewetzki, 52, was on bended knee, rooting through bushes in downtown San Rafael, and eliciting bewildered looks from nearby beauty-school students. With a global positioning system unit in one hand, he appeared to be either a tech-savvy bag man or an obsessed arborist. He was neither. He was digging for treasure that was hidden by his friend Don Forman, using only the treasure's GPS coordinates - its longitude and latitude - and a clue: "Think about some of the old rock & roll music and the lyrics. You might get an Education." Forman stood by, tight-lipped.
Although not a Pink Floyd fan, Grenewetzki finally found the treasure, a film canister inside a loose "brick in the wall" behind the bushes. Forman had hollowed out the brick in his garage with a drill bit, and rolled paper inside the canister to allow those who found it to record their accomplishment. "Don, you need to get a life, man," Grenewetzki said. "You are one sick guy. "
Link, Discuss (Thanks, David)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Electric plaid technotextile debuts
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DATE: 07/14/2003 10:19:01 AM
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Bev says, "International Fashion Machines is premiering their Electric Plaid color-changing textile at Cooper Hewitt's current triennal. Looks like an excellent show, and it's going to be on until Jan 25 2004....sheesh! Lots of time to catch it."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DIY topo maps for wardrivers, geocachers, carto freaks
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DATE: 07/14/2003 10:42:32 AM
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The latest edition of Kevin Kelly's terrific "Cool Tools" e-zine lists a bundle of websites and software applications for creating your own topographical maps. Also in this issue: very helpful recommendations on tool kits for documentary radio.
Cartography is a once-exotic specialty that is about to hit the mainstream. Making maps used to be supremely daunting. It required ultra-precise instruments and advance technical knowledge. A map could take thousands upon thousands of man-hours to build. And few might ever see it. Three technologies are overturning this profession: GPS, digital imaging, and the web. An inexpensive GPS device allows almost anyone to generate cartographic data. Plotting software allows almost anyone to map that data out. And web technology allows almost anyone to distribute and view these maps.
Most of this recent amateur digital cartography is taking place upon the solid foundations of government-funded topographic mapmaking. The story begins by digitizing the current set of government topo maps. A number of agencies, including the National Geographic Society have completed this heroic task. They employed huge scanners which devoured entire maps at once, and software that stitched all the maps together seamlessly into one huge digital map. Once you have a digital topo map, you can port that stream of bits into a GPS device. Now as you hike or bicycle or drive with your GPS on, your path is traced onto the topo map automatically, or you can pinpoint particular spots. Back at your PC you can annotate your data.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Billboard Liberation Front: Apparel Apparent
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DATE: 07/14/2003 02:43:22 PM
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Our beloved Billboard Liberation Front struck last night in San Francisco. The target? A particularly homoerotic Banana Republic ad campaign. Link
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(Thanks, Scott)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Epcot to unveil the barfotron
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DATE: 07/14/2003 07:43:58 PM
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Uh-oh. Looks like the new Mission: Space ride at Epcot Center is real fun, so long as you don't lift your head out of the headrest -- which is a sure-fire way to end up barfing.
"People who look straight ahead -- even people who close their eyes while they're in the ride -- they're fine," said one Disney cast member who's actually been working on "Mission: Space" during its test-and-adjust phase. "It's those guests who don't follow the safety spiel -- who lift their heads out of the headrest or turn to the side -- who are causing all the problems. They're the ones who have been getting sick."
Which is why -- as guests now enter the pre-show area at "Mission: Space" -- they repeatedly encounter Disney cast members who spiel a warning that goes something like this: "'Mission: Space' is an extremely intense attraction that recreates the experience of space travel. Which is why this ride may not be suitable for all guests. We strongly urge you to read all of the safety precautions before you decide whether or not you actually want to ride the ride."
Unfortunately, given the number of times that WDW guests actually hear this warning while they're waiting in the queue, it eventually becomes just background noise to them. Which is why these people suddenly seem so shocked once they're on board the flight simulator and find themselves exposed to these extreme stresses.
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(Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to store a terabyte in 1970
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DATE: 07/14/2003 07:48:39 PM
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Amazing account of the PhotoStore, an optical terabyte storage device built at Lawrence Livermore Labratories in 1970:
Thiry-two unexposed chips arrived at the Laboratory in a small plastic box or "cell", which was a little smaller than a pack of cigarettes. These were packed in a carton of ten, wrapped in a black cover to exclude light. When more "raw" film was needed, an operator would open a hatch in the top of a low section of the machine and shove the carton in, end-first. Blades would rip the box open, and the cells would drop into a queue from which they would, one by one, advance to the next step: exposure and development.
When a cell reached the head of the queue, its lid would be removed by depressing a release catch, and the chips would be mechanically extracted, one at a time, and held in the beam from an electron gun. The electron beam was magnetically aimed so as to encode the stream of data to be written, forming it into a sequence of dark and light spots on the chip. Between chips, the magnetic field would be sensed and adjusted so to to assure that it was focussed precisely enough to create the tiny spots that were needed. At specified intervals the filiments of the gun would be changed automatically by rotating a turret of eight filaments; only after these were exhausted would operator intervention be required.
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(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PhoneCam printer
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DATE: 07/14/2003 07:52:53 PM
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Fuji is shipping a small color printer that communicates with phonecams via infrared to output mobile snaps.
The Battery will hold for 100 prints. The small printer takes 15 seconds for one print.
The NP-1 uses standard photo printer film: Fuji film instant color film instax mini (sizes: 86x54mm, 62x46mm).
The Printer has a resolution of 10.0 dots/mm(254dpi) and 256 colors.
Size: 117.5mmx41.5mmx105.5mm
Weight: 250g incl. battery and film
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Old Bailey records, 1674-1834
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DATE: 07/14/2003 10:04:02 PM
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Long before Rumpole haunted London's Old Bailey in John Mortimer's brilliant series of short stories (Rumpole kicks John Grisham's ass to hell and back, with his Chateau Thames Embankment and his wife, "She Who Must Be Obeyed" and his snide asides about judges and juries), British lawyers argued criminal cases before the bench. Now the full text of the proceedings of the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1834 has been put online, along with scans of the original court records:
10, 11. William Howard and James Harrison , were indicted for stealing a Pewter-Dish, value 3 s. a Pewter Bason, value 12 d. 3 Copper Sance-pans, value 10 s. 2 Copper Stew-pans, value
10 s. a Copper Tea-kettle, value 5 s. the Goods of Jacob Kendall , in the Parish of St. Botolph Aldgate, July 15.
Jacob Kendall I charge the Prisoners with breaking open a Door, and robbing me of a Pewter Bason and Dish, and other Things, between 3 and 4 in the Morning; they had moved 3 Sauce-pans, 2 Stew-pans, and a Tea-kettle, in order to carry them off. The Door they broke was adjacent to the Kitchen, and was lock'd fast. The Pewter Dish and Bason they had carry'd off a good Way. - I swear they were in my Wash-house between 3 and 4 in the Morning.
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(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fugs are still recording
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DATE: 07/15/2003 06:29:05 AM
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The NYT does a good "where are they now?" piece on The Fugs, the original underground rock band whose comedy porn stylings tickled my father -- I was raised on 'em (and can still hear the long-length recording they released of the Exorcism of the Pentagon in my head). Though Allen Ginsberg is dead (and hence not available to guest-star), the Fugs are, astonishingly, still recording and releasing albums.
And though Mr. Sanders, who is 63, and Mr. Kupferberg, who turns 80 in September, have reached what one of their lyrics calls the "time to think of ultimate things," they still sing about sex and peace and poetry (though not about drugs so much anymore).
On July 8 they released their latest album, "The Fugs Final CD (Part 1)," on Artemis Records — "Never let yourself get painted into a corner," Mr. Sanders said of the title — and on July 16 the Fugs will sing with their band at the Village Underground on West Third Street in Greenwich Village, in what they say might be their last gig.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Clie (rumors): super-hot
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DATE: 07/15/2003 06:33:50 AM
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Supposedly, this is the form factor of the new Sony Clie, which the company will announce on Friday, a PDA with an integrated camera and "wireless" (Bluetooth? WiFi? GPRS? Low-powered FM?).
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 0wn your car's diagnostics
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DATE: 07/15/2003 06:42:02 AM
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The CarChip is a little box that interfaces with, and logs, all the data coming off your car's microcontrollers. ISTR that some auto-manufacturers scramble the diagnostic info on their engines in order to compel higher prices for their equipment and to ensure than only its authorized agents can maintain its cars. I wonder if CarChip has reverse-engineered any of these cars' systems, and, if so, whether it will find itself on the wrong end of a DMCA suit over this?
The basic CarChip ($139) stores up to 75 hours of data and generates tables and graphs that show trip duration, minute-by-minute speed, average speed, maximum speed and incidents of heavy acceleration and braking.
If your "check engine" light comes on, CarChip will tell you what's wrong — in plain English. If the problem doesn't look serious, CarChip can reset the check-engine light so that you can see whether it crops up again (sometimes it's a fluke).
For $179, the more sophisticated CarChipE/X stores 300 hours of data. In addition to speed, it collects readings generated by five additional engine sensors.
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(Thanks, Roland!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dodge debuts the TronCycle
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DATE: 07/15/2003 08:08:16 AM
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Dodge's new concept motorcycle is a silly Tron fantasy of surpassing impracticality. Looks cool.
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(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mannequins: Reverse Cowgirl short fiction on Nerve.com
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DATE: 07/15/2003 08:21:27 AM
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New on Nerve.com: a short fiction piece called "Mannequins," by Susannah Breslin of Reverse Cowgirl's blog:
Her boyfriend was on his computer all the time. He would go home after work, and he would sit down at his computer and tie up his phone line, so that when she wanted to call him, and tell him that she needed something, or that she loved him, or that she was having the hardest day of her life ever yet, he was always unavailable.
One day, while he was at work, she went to his house and logged onto his computer. She discovered he had been going through listings of mannequins for sale on eBay. He had earmarked pages of angry-looking brunettes, small Asians with black bangs, and alarmed-seeming blondes without legs. Her boyfriend, it appeared, liked mannequins with pretty faces and missing appendages, or great bodies and no heads.
And, from what she could tell, he was only one of an entire group of men who spent all their time buying and selling mannequins to one another online.
Link to story, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to fight for privacy
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DATE: 07/15/2003 08:57:47 AM
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Bruce Schneier's latest Cryptogram newsletter leads with a stirring editorial about the erosion of privacy and the difficulty for average people to address it.
My wife needed a prescription filled. Her doctor called it in to a local pharmacy, and when she went to pick it up the pharmacist refused to fill it unless she disclosed her personal information for his database. The pharmacist even showed my wife the rule book. She found the part where it said that "a reasonable effort must be made by the pharmacy to obtain, record, and maintain at least the following information," and the part where is said: "If a patient does not want a patient profile established, the patient shall state it in writing to the pharmacist. The pharmacist shall not then be required to prepare a profile as otherwise would be required by this part." Despite this, the pharmacist refused. My wife was stuck. She needed the prescription filled. She didn't want to wait the few hours for her doctor to phone the prescription in somewhere else. The pharmacist didn't care; he wasn't going to budge.
I had to travel to Japan last year, and found a company that rented local cell phones to travelers. The form required either a Social Security number or a passport number. When I asked the clerk why, he said the absence of either sent up red flags. I asked how he could tell a real-looking fake number from an actual number. He said that if I didn't care to provide the number as requested, I could rent my cell phone elsewhere, and hung up on me. I went through another company to rent, but it turned out that they contracted through this same company, and the man declined to deal with me, even at a remove. I eventually got the cell phone by going back to the first company and giving a different name (my wife's), a different credit card, and a made-up passport number. Honor satisfied all around, I guess.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT provides tools to defeat its own DRM
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DATE: 07/15/2003 10:14:01 AM
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Hackers claim that MSFT DRM can be defeated with MSFT's own tools.
Incredibly, there was no exploit needed. These wily crackers merely had to write a program using well documented 100% aboveboard functions provided by Microsoft. It was not hard, involved no breakthroughs, did not depend on reverse engineering, and did not need a key. All they did was build the right DirectShow graph, and since DirectShow is a tool for third party software developers to build shipping software, ISVs can easily offer an all-in-one solution to strip DRM from content without fear of the DMCA.
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(Thanks, Lucas!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Channeling Philip K. Dick
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DATE: 07/15/2003 11:10:32 AM
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bOING bOING pal and Techgnosis author Erik Davis interviews the late Philip K. Dick:
"In the course of my current researches into techgnostic religious phenomena, I was experimenting with electronic voice phenomena. I was recording the analog noise between tracks on a scratchy old copy of Karl Muck conducting Parzifal with the Bayreuth Festival Chorus onto a cassette tape. Then I would cut, splice, and process the tape in various ways, and then listen to the results. On the third attempt I heard a voice that I recognized, from a tape once available through the Philip K. Dick Society, as belonging to the late science fiction writer. More incredible was my discovery that, by recording my own questions on the same cassette tape, I was able to initiate a genuine dialogue with this mysterious voice. Subsequent research proved, however, that all of the quotations have already made an appearance somewhere in Dick's fiction, letters, or essays. Nonetheless, the conversation seems worth presenting..."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Portuguese Parliament to government officials: start blogging
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DATE: 07/15/2003 03:08:46 PM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc from Paris says:
Xeni, I don't know if you've already heard about this, but a new law was just unanimously passed in Portugal by deputies (Projecto Deliberacao number 10/IX) which provides all deputies the option of having their own website or blog (the word weblog is mentioned in the law!). The deputies' blogs will be hosted on the Portuguese Parliament's webserver. The original piece of news, blogged in Portuguese, is here, from July 07, and
and I wrote about it here in French.
I don't read Portuguese *or* French all that well, and I couldn't locate the law on the Portuguese government's website -- but if any readers have access to English language versions of the news, or care to provide a translation, please post in the Discuss forum!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA art event: pop culture breakdown at Sixspace gallery
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DATE: 07/15/2003 04:13:30 PM
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If you're in LA this weekend, join me at the opening reception for a very cool show of graphic and digital pop art. Sean Bonner says the show includes hundreds of postcard-sized prints, and he e-mails us these details:
We have an amazing opening scheduled for Saturday, July 19 by a
Canadian duo, Kenn Sakurai (ESM Artificial ) and Dave O'Regan (Poplab).
With an emphasis on text, this show of mass-produced and one-of-a-kind silk-screened pieces (postcards, posters, stickers) along with painted work will touch upon some of the best and the worst aspects of popular culture that often include models, cars, rock stars, song lyrics, the 80s, and television personalities. Their work also delves into other universal themes such as heartbreak and high school. ESM and Poplab utilize familiar images, subjects, and sayings that are always humorous, poignant, and thoughtful.
"Modern Thought" opening reception is from 7-10pm at sixspace 549 west 23rd, LA 90027.
Link to show details, Link to more work by ESM, Link to more work by Poplab. Discuss.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA event: Jerry Lewis' lost Nazicomedy, Day the Clown Cried
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DATE: 07/15/2003 04:40:15 PM
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If you're in LA tomorrow night whoops, next Wednesday -- an odd event about a Golden Turkey Award-winning cinematic classic:
THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED, Lewis' long-suppressed film about a clown in Auschwitz who entertains kids on the way to the gas ovens, is back for one night only at the Hudson Theater! Come join Scott Aukerman, BJ Porter, Jackie Harris, Sean Hayes, Fred Willard and Jay Jonhston as "The Clown"! This one will sell out immediately so call NOW! THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED Wednesday, July 23rd 8pm show @ The Comedy Central Space at The Hudson Theater 6539 Santa Monica Boulevard, 323 960 5519. Free! They sell alcohol out in the reception area. Get drunk before seeing the show. Really.
Link to plot summary on IMDB, Link to script and screenshots from the film, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Island Chronicle extra: Abandoned Raratonga Sheraton
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DATE: 07/15/2003 04:52:35 PM
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BoingBoing reader David Calkins points us to elegant photos of colonial waste in the South Pacific, where BoingBoing founder Mark Frauenfelder recently moved with his family:
I was reading the Island Chronicles and came across their passage about the
abandoned Sheraton:
"For the last 1000 years, Rarotonga has managed to retain a unique South
Pacific culture. But about ten years ago, the Sheraton chain broke ground on
the island to build a huge destination resort. When we visited the island in
1994, construction workers were just beginning to build the hotel. We were sure
the hotel would ruin this island. ... Fortunately, the Sheraton project went
bust when it was about 80% finished. . . The ruins of the resort are now
covered in rapacious island vegetation creeping in from the jungle. Horses and
cattle contentedly graze in the shadows of the unoccupied concrete structures."
Just imagine: Concrete structure over-run with vines. Like Machu Pichu only
with modern architecture. Being a bit of an urban explorer, I thought it must
be an awesome site - but alas, I won't be flying to the Cooks this year.
Fortunately, there's this tool called "Google." I found these great photo albums:
Link one, Link two, Link three, Link four.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Supercool online short on body modification: RETINA
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DATE: 07/15/2003 05:06:08 PM
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The inimitable Warren Ellis points us to a pair of lush new online short films by New York-based directors and designers violet suk and martin koch. Here's the link to RETINA: transformation through body enhancements and manipulation. And here's the duo's latest installment in the "Replica" series, replica3. Suk and Koch describe Retina as an exploration of "Rituals of isolation and decay... twisted, cloned bodies... beauty and mutation... and the digital body in motion. " Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creation Science Fair
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DATE: 07/15/2003 05:35:58 PM
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Want to participate in a science fair but you believe in Creation "Science?" Why not throw a Creation Science Fair? (Is this a hoax? It seems remarkably unselfconsciously cliched) (This is a hoax, but a funny one)
1st Place: "My Uncle Is A Man Named Steve (Not A Monkey)"
Cassidy Turnbull (grade 5) presented her uncle, Steve. She also showed photographs of monkeys and invited fairgoers to note the differences between her uncle and the monkeys. She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them. Cassidy has conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey.
2nd Place: "Pine Cones Are Complicated"
David Block and Trevor Murry (grades 4) showed how specifically complicated pine cones are and how they reveal God's design in nature.
Honorable Mention:
"God Made Kitty" - Sally Reister (grade 3)
"The Bible Says Creation" - Aaron Kent (grade 5)
"Pokemon Prove Evolutionism Is False" - Paul Sanborn (grade 4)
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(Thanks, Henry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SCOTUS P2P
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DATE: 07/15/2003 05:48:09 PM
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Oyez is a file-sharing network for distributing audio recording of argument and response before the Supreme Court of the United States.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reality shows: pointing the way to the panopticon future
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DATE: 07/15/2003 05:50:07 PM
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As odious as reality TV shows are, they have the signal virtue of showing us how miserable life is in the absence of any privacy and ubiquitous surveillance.
So why reality shows? Reality shows are dead cheap. You think a million dollar prize is expensive? Each member of the cast of Friends that every night. To be competitive, a show like Survivor or Idiots in a Box hardly needs to beat "regular" shows to turn a profit. And, it turns out, that people will watch this stuff in huge quantities. (There are a couple interesting potential explanations for that, but I'll limit myself to the observation that sticking a bunch of people off the street with no special training or, apparantly, personality still produces a more interesting show with better dialogue than 90% of what the networks turn out. "Perhaps," mull the networks, "the problem is that the audience wants higher definition signals." Yeah, perhaps.) These shows thrive on feeding a never-ending appetite for more and more intimate/embarassing/private/dreadful behavior, and this drives an arms race to the bottom (as if there were a bottom). So why I am heralding them as being so important?
Because, magically, weirdly, just in time, they are teaching us what it means to be watched, all the time, and have all of your actions and interactions not only observed by millions of anonymous strangers, but analyzed, judged, and preserved forever. And this is a lesson that we, especially in the United States, desperately need to learn, because it is about to happen to all of us.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cafepress has print-on-demand books
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DATE: 07/15/2003 06:27:51 PM
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Cafepress now lets you sell print on demand books with no upfront fee. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amtrak is faking it
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DATE: 07/15/2003 07:28:39 PM
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Danny O'Brien has discovered (the hard way) that Amtrak is making up as it goes along:
"Well, you have the advantage of me," I began to say... and the conductor grew quite frenzied. "I do not! It was you who chose to get on the train!". I pointed out that there was not much else to do in Redding at 6AM in the morning, having waited four hours for the pleasure. "Well, that's the nature of trains, sir," he replied, delivering some sort of coup de random flail.
What? What? It's the nature of trains to arbitrarily choose the time and their fare structure? I'm terrible at fashioning snappy comebacks to surreal arguments, but I do pride myself on re-engineering odd bureacratic strange-loops. I told him that I had now remembered - perfectly - what price I was quoted, as was expected of me. I revealed that I was to pay $51. He grumpily announced that he wasn't going to argue with me (which was nice) and let me write down my chosen price and credit card number on his carbon paper and moved on. In retrospect, I think I could have got him down to $30.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Marc of rotten.com running AIDS marathon -- donate!
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DATE: 07/15/2003 07:39:01 PM
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Mark Powell from rotten really isn't all that rotten:
In June I began training for the Honolulu
Marathon with the AIDS Marathon training program.
The marathon takes place on December 14, 2003.
The training program raises money for HIV
services through sponsorships of volunteer
runners like myself.
From June until December, I'll be logging nearly
500 miles in this six-month training
program put on by the National AIDS Marathon. I
train during the week, and have a 'big run' every
Saturday at the crack of dawn in Golden Gate
Park. This past weekend, I ran 8 miles,
the longest I have ever run before in my life.
Doing something I am not sure if I can do
is a great thrill, almost as compelling as
helping to combat the pandemic of HIV on this
planet.
In San Francisco, 1 out of every 50 residents
lives with HIV/AIDS. 40 million people worldwide
are currently living with HIV. One million
Americans are infected, and countless other lives
are affected by HIV.
I would like to ask your support- I have
personally committed to raise at least $3,000 by
September 3, 2003. Any contribution you can make
would mean a lot to me and to people who benefit
from HIV service and prevention programs in the
Bay Area. Contributions are tax deductible and
can be made through the simple website listed
below. By contributing, you will be making a huge
difference in the lives of thousands of people
you have never met, and you will help me to reach
my goal of completing a marathon in the service
of our fellow man.
Link to online donation page, or
email [marc at rotten dot com] to arrange an offline donation. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hey! Beat Takeshi
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DATE: 07/15/2003 08:20:51 PM
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Warren Ellis makes me listen to music from the 21st Century. He tells me it's good for me. Given my druthers, I'd be listening to novelty cowboy music, heavy on the zither and slide-whistle, but I indulge Ellis, because he's a damned good writer, and because the tracks he sends me often kick azz.
These days, I'm obsessed with Ambulance's "Hey! Beat Takeshi," a crazy Jap-Brit techno track with a singsong quality layered over the drum-machine and the Japanese flutes, off their debut EP, also called "Ambulance." I just spent the last twenty minutes looking for a place to buy the whole EP, and I found one: £5, including shipping to the US. (Damn, I wish I had a sample of the track to link to).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese mobile phone prototypes
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DATE: 07/16/2003 05:41:55 AM
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Nice gallery of prototype mobile futurephones from the Wireless Japan show -- this one is IP based.
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(Thanks, Juergen!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beachside WiFi at Brighton
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DATE: 07/16/2003 05:44:31 AM
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WiFi hackers have set up a free community wireless network in Brighton, called "Pier to Pier."
"If you like the net and you like the beach, this is a great combination," said Ian Fogg, wi-fi analyst at Jupiter Research.
"The real problem - apart from the salt, apart from the sand, apart from the water - is that the screens on many of these PDAs and laptops don't work that well in sunlight.
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(Thanks, Anthony!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Love in the Time of Spyware
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DATE: 07/16/2003 05:57:39 AM
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My good pal Bill Shunn has published a science fiction short story, "Love in the Age of Spyware," on Salon this morning. Like all of Bill's stories, this one is a concoction that blends social/technological speculation and a fine, bittersweet human story in perfect proportion:
Hayes leans forward and plucks a white flower, six inches across, from the twining vines that festoon the wall below him. He holds the trumpet-shaped bloom against his face like an oxygen mask, its petals having just untwisted for the night. The sweet scent is overpowering -- but despite the erotic charge it carries for Hayes, subscribers are dropping out by the tens of thousands, flipping over to one of the other subjects or just getting back to their own lives. Exit polling indicates they'll be back later this evening for the fireworks with Sandra when Hayes finally goes home. But this flower-sniffing interlude? Booor-ing.
The robot, a standard enforcement unit with moderate autonomy, has lowered itself into a clumsy squat, one hand touching the ground and the other questing vainly over the wall for its own moonflower. Hayes' muscles tense as if in anticipation of a tumble. "Here, take mine," he says, holding out his flower.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crows use tools
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DATE: 07/16/2003 06:03:38 AM
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Science Magazine reports on research that shows that crows build and use tools. This link includes video of a crow retrieving and bending a piece of wire into a hook so that she can fetch food out of a deep, narrow food receptacle -- it's astonishing.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AOL to renege on IM interop promises?
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DATE: 07/16/2003 06:21:50 AM
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When the AOL-Time-Warner merger went down, the FCC required AOL to develop mechanisms for interoperability between AOL Instant Messenger and other services, on the grounds that the AOL-TW empire would command too much market power if it could lock the competition out of IM tech. AOL agreed at the time, and has been trying to renege ever since. Looks like they may succeed.
In April, AOL formally asked the FCC to kill the restriction, arguing that it stifles innovation and unfairly benefits its rivals.
Other leading instant-messaging companies, such as Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo Inc., offer video streaming. AOL can't offer similar services in certain markets unless it first makes its instant-messaging system operable with rival systems. AOL has repeatedly fought doing that, citing technological and security concerns. Critics say AOL simply wants to maintain its lock over instant messaging, which is one of its most-popular features.
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(via Interesting People)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Teeny, cheap USB storage
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DATE: 07/16/2003 08:05:04 AM
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This teeny-ass USB storage-fob holds 128MB and retails for $37. John Gilmore has a great rant about storage cost/size/capacity/power-consumption trends -- he says that in 10 years, we'll have drives the size of sugar-cubes with enough capacity to store all the movies, books, music, art and text ever created, that can be powered by a hard shake and are cheap enough to put in a Christmas Stocking.
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(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reality TV -- with a bug's-eye view
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DATE: 07/16/2003 09:39:03 AM
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CNN piece about artist Sam Easterson's "Animal, Vegetable, Video" project. Sure, obscure animals show up in reality TV shows all the time -- let's see, ah.... boar urethra-eating contests, maggot mudbaths... and so on. But here, the tables are turned: tiny cams weighing about a half-ounce are mounted on buffalos, tarantulas, armadillos or plants, and the camera rolls until it falls off. Snip from CNN story:
The result is a unique perspective applauded by armchair naturalists in which the stars of the film are also the videographers. "If people can see things from the animal and plant perspective, they are far less likely to harm them or their habitat, so that's how I present it," Easterson said. Earlier in his career as a video artist, Easterson put small cameras in strange places -- also with the goal of getting a different perspective. He put them in popcorn poppers and washers and dryers to show what those domestic appliances looked like from the inside out. But equipping a small flock of sheep with cameras in 1998 changed everything for Easterson, he said. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, commissioned him to tape some sheep as they "mowed the lawn" in a park. Easterson said he learned a lot about his new craft and the nature of animals.
Link, Discuss (thanks, extra88")
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Netomat: Group-editable multi-media canvas tool thingie
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DATE: 07/16/2003 09:41:24 AM
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Clay Shirky says:
Maciej Wisniewski, creator of the original netomat art piece has now launched netomat.net, which gives you a desktop tool for creating multi-media canvasses that can be emailed to other users or posted to a web page, and the recipients continue to edit them. Part tool, part platform, it defies easy description -- the Writeable Drawable Voice-Annotatable Web, Hydra re-invented as a collage tool, what wikis would be like if they'd been designed by Alan Kay. As usual with odd new tools, their own home page sucks for communicating the possible uses -- netomat only starts to make sense when you make something and give it to someone else to change.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The making of an online short: Rustboy
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DATE: 07/16/2003 09:47:39 AM
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BoingBoing reader Steve says:
"Fantastic site describing the ongoing production of a computer animated short film, Rustboy. The samples on the site are gorgeous, and I'm looking forward to seeing the finished article. All the work is being created using off-the-shelf hardware and software (Apple G3 & G4 Macs along with Infini-D, Premiere and Photoshop) by one guy called Brian at home in Scotland."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Roundup list of websites that shorten urls for you
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DATE: 07/16/2003 10:04:01 AM
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Spotted on Jason DeFillippo's (there! I spelled it correctly!) blog, via Feedster: a list of websites that shorten web urls. Includes a tool-by-tool feature set chart so you can compare how the url-shorteners stack up.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT DRM infringes on Sony/Philips DRM
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DATE: 07/16/2003 10:09:17 AM
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A US District Court has issued a preliminary ruling on the patent dispute between Intertrust and Microsoft. Intertrust is a DRM company that was all-but-insolvent when it was acquired for nearly half a billion dollars by Sony and Philips last year -- money that was a tangible vote of confidence for its patent claims, which were in competition with claims from ContentGuard, a company that Microsoft had made an enormous investment in, in order to acquire its patents.
Now the courts are leaning toward Intertrust, which is bad news for DRM. ContentGuard's XrML is the basis of an ongoing standards-setting effort at OASIS (I'm part of it), has been incorporated (in part) into MPEG4, and forms the basis for the rights-signalling in Office 11, Longhorn, and the-system-formerly-known-as-Palladium.
I've no doubt that these giants will work out some kind of solution, eventually, involving lots of quid pro quo and cash changing hands between MSFT and Sony/Philips, but for now, this means significant instability in a number of really advanced, potentially deadly DRM efforts around the world.
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA bloggers cover Farmers Market tragedy as it happens
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DATE: 07/16/2003 05:45:59 PM
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From LABlogs:
LABlogger Andy has more details as he is practically on the scene
Link to LABlogs post with more links to related news coverage on blogs and in news media, Discuss. Back when I was still with Silicon Alley Reporter/Digital Coast Reporter magazines, our offices were about two blocks from the site of today's destruction. Everyone in the newsroom used to go to the farmer's market together to munch out on fresh Southern California strawberries and figs and stuff, every week. Incredibly sad news.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Clarion journals online
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DATE: 07/16/2003 08:22:44 PM
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The Clarion and Clarion West writers' workshops are science-fiction writers' boot-camps, which run for six weeks every summer. I was a student in 1992 at Clarion, in East Lansing, MI. The experience is intense -- more than intense. Six weeks of permission to write, permission to experiment, permission to suck. It's a rare and radiant treasure for fledgling writers, and between the excellent writer-instructors and the wonderful fellow students, Clarion amounts to a life-changing experience for many of the attendees.
When I attended, in 1992, I kept notes on the workshop on GEnie (Cynthia Ward, at Clarion West, also took notes). It was either the first or second year that Clarion "leaked" -- that non-attendees got a window into the experience while it occurred (when Harlan Ellison, one of our instructors, got wind of this fact, he sharply advised us to cut it out, told us that the Internet was a mindless distraction and worse, and that it would do nothing good for us as writers -- not all the instructors' advice is worth following).
In subsequent years, Clarion has leaked like a sieve. The Clarionites keep online journals, their instructors read them, the instructors respond to them, the Clarionites post about it to the online journal, and the snake enthusiastically eats its tail. After all, these are writers, which means that 1) they write, and 2) they procrastinate by writing.
The Clarion and Clarion West students are at it again. The six weeks are almost over, and the workshop journals of nearly a dozen talented new writers are nearly complete. Reading through these journals is like watching a very intense drama from many points of view, a character study of bright people in a hothouse. My friend and editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden leaves to teach Clarion West in a couple days -- I'm looking forward to reading what his students have to say about him.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: A Brief History of Negative Space
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DATE: 07/16/2003 08:26:33 PM
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Chris Nakashima-Brown is a sharp, tech-centric science fiction writer in Austin, whose stories are fine and fun. For example, "A Brief History of Negative Space" (published on RevolutionSF) is as swell an online read as you could hope to find:
The campaign began on a cold Saturday morning in 1973 over grilled cheese sandwiches and dark coffee in the breakfast nook of a furnished apartment on Brattleboro Avenue, near the old university. As elusive phalanxes of snow battered the storm windows, a hundred phantom divisions waged weeks of low-tech nuclear combat across the tabletop plains of Bavaria and Czechoslovakia. From the kitchen window where they sat, the generals could see a small black dog staring at them knowingly from the alley.
Two hours and fifteen minutes into the game, upon the expiration of his seventh turn, Ted removed his glasses to wipe them slowly with the worn cotton of his flannel shirt. The world went out of focus, followed by Ted's mind. Passing over the northeastern reaches of the Alps while one of his light artillery battalions marched like a diesel-powered Hannibal through a pass between Salzburg and Berchtesgarden, Ted considered his insular apartment as an unlikely analog to the "Eagle's Nest" of A.H.
The apartment was a map room, a metaphoric repository, the attic outpost from which Ted charted the coastlines of his reality. It was the laboratory in which he executed the project whose manifesto he had abstracted over a year earlier:
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hey! Beat Takeshi MP3 sample
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DATE: 07/17/2003 06:02:29 AM
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The song I'm obsessing over these days is (as has been previously noted), Ambulance's "Hey! Beat Takeshi," a fun bouncy happy track. Turns out it appears on a compilation disc, and the disc's compilers have posted much of the track as an MP3. Fine track. Buy the Ambulance EP for Ł5!
1.3MB MP3 Link
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(Thanks, ElNorm!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Netscape's early days
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DATE: 07/17/2003 07:17:34 AM
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Jamie Zawinski's journal of the early days of Netscape -- in particular, of his race to build and ship the first Unix versions of the browser -- is astonishgly good and nostalgic at the same time (I remember installing Jamie's early Netscape betas on an SGI that I was running in the early 90s).
The power came back on, and we put the damnable program on the FTP server, and two million people all started attempting to download it at once, before we had even posted the announcement message, and we're done done done and I suppose now we can all live happily ever after.
We sat in the conference room and hooked up the big TV to one of the Indys, so that we could sit around in the dark and watch the FTP download logs scroll by. jg hacked up an impromptu script that played the sound of a cannon shot each time a download successfully completed. We sat in the dark and cheered, listening to the explosions.
Four hours later, the Wall Street Journal was delivered, and it already contained an article describing what we had just done. ``Clients aren't where the money is anyway,'' ran the quote from Marc.
I'd go home now if I thought I could drive there without dying, so instead I'm going to curl up under my desk again and sleep here.
Maybe we're not doomed; people on the net are talking about Mozilla with all caps and lots of exclamation points. They're actually excited about it...
I've just noticed that there's still purple ink on the inside of my right wrist spelling the word VOID: the hand-stamp from a concert that I went to last week. I left work, went to the show, and came back to work immediately afterwards. I've been here since.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Firewalls are broken
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DATE: 07/17/2003 07:36:03 AM
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Firewalls are predicated on the notion that trustworthy people are inside your network and untrustworthy people are outside your network. Despite the obvious untruth of this -- the CEO goes home with her laptop and is treated as untrustworthy; an employee opens a trojan and has his box r00ted by a script-kiddie in Belarus, and is still treated as trustworthy -- we persist in using them, and then get surprised when they fail.
Take this example: employees who work remotely can penetrate the firewall through VPN tunnels. But these employees are on home-networks that might be connected to cablemodems (and hence to all the other users in the neighborhood), or have other security failures at home that can act as a back-door into the network.
And since the firewall means that everyone inside the network is trustworthy, the inward-facing servers and machines often have crap passwords and out-of-date security and use unencrypted protocols, sending passwords and data in the clear. As soon as the intruder gets inside the network, it's fox in the henhouse time. Rather than securing each machine with its own perimter and fall-back defense, the best practice is often to build a high, tight fence around the network and point all your security outside it.
Is it any wonder, then, that teleworkers are now being identified as security risks?
"It doesn't matter how much money businesses invest in securing their corporate network if employees are accessing the network from home with insecure systems.
"It's like securing the front of your house with the latest alarm but leaving your back door open."
(Actually, I'd say it's more like putting bars on the window of the bank but not buying a safe to keep your money in)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DirectTV blackmails anyone who owns a SmartCard reader
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DATE: 07/17/2003 07:41:54 AM
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If you buy yourself a SmartCard writer -- say, to monkey around with as an authentication system for the hospital you work at -- beware. DirectTV is using legal threats to force SmartCard vendors out of business (because SmartCards can be used to pirate sat signals), and getting their customer lists, and extorting thousands of dollars from everyone who's ever bought one of these devices at lawyerpoint.
...Sosa received a letter from satellite TV giant DirecTV. The company accused him of purchasing piracy equipment, and, by extension, stealing DirecTV's signal. When he called the company to clear things up, he found they weren't interested in his explanations: they wanted $3,500 and the smart card programmer, or they would literally make a federal case out of it and sue him under anti-piracy laws. "I didn't know what to do, I was completely flabbergasted. So I sent the money in," says Sosa. "I have a livelihood, and I have a family, and there are a lot of things that I`d rather be than right..."
If the recipient calls the phone number on the letter, they're given a settlement offer -- usually the same $3,500 that Sosa paid. If they don't pay up, or if they ignore the letter entirely, another letter arrives in the mail as a reminder that settling with the company is the only way to resolve the matter "without either of us incurring significant legal costs." If the recipient still doesn't play ball, the company makes good on its threat and files a lawsuit. At that point, the settlement price tag jumps to $10,000 -- still less than the typical cost of paying a lawyer to go to trial against a corporate powerhouse in federal court.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HFBD2Me 2^5
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DATE: 07/17/2003 07:42:31 AM
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Happy birthday to me! I'm 32 today -- 2^5, a prime raised to a prime. Gonna take it eeeeeeeasy.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reverse-engineer Flash with freeware
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DATE: 07/17/2003 08:14:06 AM
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Kinesis Software has shipped KineticFusion, a decompiler/reverse-engineerer for Flash packages. Using this freeware, you can download Flash apps and rip them apart into their individual code, graphic, and multimedia elements, modify them, see how they work, etc.
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(Thanks, Hugh!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mickey Mouse offs himself
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DATE: 07/17/2003 08:26:33 AM
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Check out this AMAZING 1930 parodical comic strip in which Mickey Mouse tries to commit suicide!
Link (Geocities site, will probably max out bandwidth soon)
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(Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Palm-cooling mouse
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DATE: 07/17/2003 08:30:06 AM
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The ClicknJoy is a Japanese USB mouse with an integrated fan that cools your palm while you work.
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(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Machinima documentary online
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DATE: 07/17/2003 08:33:19 AM
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Hugh sez,
Machinima.com have released Artery: Machinima, a 22-minute documentary originally made for Scottish TV on the Machinima film-making movement - shooting films in real-time 3D.
The documentary features interviews with Uwe Girlich, the man who started it all, Charlie Stross, hot new sci-fi author, award-winning director Peter Rasmussen, Machinima groups including the Ill Clan, Strange Company, Nanoflix and more.
It's a great introduction to a really cool new way to make films, and an interesting piece in its own right. But then, I would say that...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MSFT swag, deconstructed by Mackie of rotten.com
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DATE: 07/17/2003 08:55:14 AM
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From Declan's politech list. See also this recent column which mentions Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate tchotchkes. Mackie deconstructs. Punch line? They're made in a sweatshop.
A couple of weeks ago you mentioned Microsoft's FreedomToInnovate.com and the availability of T-Shirts. Intrigued, I had to check them out. The shirts say "Microsoft" over the front left breast and on the back is a rather uninspired logo of an American flag with the union portion of the flag replaced with a lame sub-PowerPoint-clipart-grade computer terminal graphic. The text reads "Proud to Support Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate / Sign up at www.microsoft.com/freedomtoinnovate". As a fan of both ironic clothing and corporate faux grassroots campaigns, I ordered one right away.
The shirts are sold by an outsourced company called "ID Partners, Inc." which sounds like some sort of PR branding firm. It was supposed to come with two matching bumper stickers, but they were missing. In fact it didn't even have a packing slip or invoice, the shirt was just shoved into a FedEx tyvek pouch
and sent out. Taking a cue from the mail-order sextoy industry the package was as discreet as humanly possible. The return address only said "ID Partners, Inc." and had a New Jersey mailing address. Think of all the explaining I'd have to do if it showed up here with a Redmond return address, oh my!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIAA vs. P2P, and the open WiFi IP dilemma
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DATE: 07/17/2003 09:01:48 AM
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Yesterday, A Wired News reader responding to a story on anonymous filesharing e-mailed me this question:
One issue that I have not seen addressed in the RIAA vs. P2P front relates to the potential for an unsupecting home PC user who just happens to have an open WiFi router being used by a neighbor to share files to get sued by the RIAA when their IP address shows up on the RIAA's list. From the surveys I've done, there are a lot of open WiFi routers a file swapper could easily use to both serve and download files. So, is the RIAA going to have to shut down open WiFi to get its way?
And coincidentally, CNET published a story by John Borland yesterday which explores that very question.
Early last spring, NYCWireless co-founder Anthony Townsend got a note in the mail saying that someone on his network had been violating copyright laws. This type of note is becoming increasingly common as record companies and Hollywood studios subpoena Internet service providers (ISPs) for information about subscribers in order to stop people from trading songs and movies online. But Townsend's case was unusual: As the representative of a loose collection of wireless "hot spot" Internet access points, there was no way he or the relevant access point operator in New York's Bryant Park could identify or warn the file trader. (...)Townsend and others' similar experiences, no matter how limited today, point to a slowly widening hole in the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) recently announced drive to identify and ultimately sue what could be thousands of file swappers online.
Link to CNET story, Discuss
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TITLE: Disabled bloggers: Making Accessible Minds
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DATE: 07/17/2003 09:09:07 AM
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Susannah Breslin points us to disability policy attorney Mark Siegel and his blog, The 19th Floor. Mark also happens to have spinal muscular atrophy. After guestblogging on her Reverse Cowgirl blog, Mark was urged by Susannah to write a blog post about the relationship between blogging and disability. Here's an excerpt from "Making Accessible Minds." It's wonderful.
Here's why I think blogging can be great tool for PWD. Having a disability can be a truly isolating experience. When you consider that around 70% of PWD in the U.S. are unemployed and a significant portion are living at or below the poverty line, it's easy to see why we still dwell at the margins of society. Blogging can be a way for a person to shout out their existence to the world; to give people other views on disability that have nothing to do with a telethon or a human interest story on the local news. Blogging can be as real and as honest as the author wants it to be. Blogging can be a way to fight the loneliness that plagues every human being, not just those with disabilities. So as big companies like AOL start to deliver blogging to the masses, I hope they remember to make those tools accessible to everyone. And I hope broadband becomes more affordable for everyone. And I hope people with disabilities are encouraged to share their stories.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool eFashion prototypes from Japan
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DATE: 07/17/2003 09:15:18 AM
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Bev points us to some cool fashiontech prototypes:
IDEO Japan's e-fashion won Design Distinction in this year's Annual Design Review for ID Magazine. Included in the collection is jewelry that throbs to the wearer's rhythms, a shirt equipped with a camera in the front that sends the captured image to a circular display on the back, a shoe that records distanced walked, solar panel glasses that protects as well as store power (eliminates need for batteries to power another wearable fashion item, I suppose), pants with touchpad keyboards in the fabric on the two sides of the pant legs, and bags and make-up light up when opened. The lead designer for this line is Naoto Fukasawa.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblogging, photobloging from Comic-Con in San Diego
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DATE: 07/17/2003 09:28:11 AM
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Some interesting live photoblogging and narrative updates from folks attending the Comic-Con in San Diego this week. I am not there, but wish I was. Here's one, by way of Warren Ellis; here is a collective blog project created by the guys at textamerica (empty now, they just built it yesterday). Both of the above are also offered in a zesty RSS flavor for easy syndication. The San Diego Union-Tribune is blogging now, and there are some Comic-Con related entries on their Sci-fi/comics blog "Disembodied Brains." Wil Wheaton says he'll be audio blogging from the convention. Got more live-blogging links? Post them here: Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I'm speaking at Poptech with Kevin Sites. Please join us.
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DATE: 07/17/2003 09:33:57 AM
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The Poptech website explains: Every autumn, in the beautiful seaside village of Camden, Maine, more than thirty of the world's most intriguing visionaries, innovators, leaders, scientists, intellectuals and artists come together for an extraordinary weekend to explore the future.
Well, they ran out of visionaries, and invited me.
I'll be speaking at this year's event, held October 16-19, with Kevin Sites, then-CNN foreign correspondent whose live-from-Iraq audio/photo/narrative blog I built with John Parres, and help from folks like Ev Williams, Noah Glass, Anil Dash, and Paradigm. We'll explore the impact of blogs and DIY online publishing on conflict coverage in conventional broadcast media, and Kevin will likely share news on some of the projects he's planning, now that he's back from Iraq -- good stuff, and big stuff. I hope you'll consider attending the event. This year's program and participant roster (produced by Andrew Zolli) is truly fine and well worth your time. Oh, and $300 off if you register before August 15.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lava lamps on Korean subway
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DATE: 07/17/2003 09:44:10 AM
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Dunno what the story is with this, but it appears to be a Korean subway car with lots of floor-to-ceiling lava-lamps. Beautiful.
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(Thanks, smiffy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Two more students subpoenaed by RIAA, new bill to jail fileswappers
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DATE: 07/17/2003 10:05:50 AM
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Jon Newton on Dmusic's newsblog says: "The Big Five labels now have the identities of two students suspected of using the computer network at Chicago's Loyola University for file-sharing. Their names were handed over to the RIAA by school authorities. This represents shot three in the Big Five record labels' all-out war against file-sharers. Shot two came yesterday (July 16) when Hollywood stalwart rep Howard Berman and another democrat, rep John Conyers, introduced a bill cited as the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003 which in effect says anyone nailed for file sharing could be jailed."
Link to post, Link to Wired News story on the "put fileswappers in jail" bill, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hipster bingo
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DATE: 07/17/2003 11:04:08 AM
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Crank up your Hives/Ladytron/Strokes/Raveonettes extended dance remix MP3, and play Hipster Bingo. Are we in Williamsburg yet? Link, Discuss , (Thanks, Mara, who says the "grandpa" photo looks suspiciously like Lou from the band Sebadoh)
UPDATE: I love the Internet! Here is an online auto-generator of randomized bingo cards. BoingBoing reader Glossosaurus created this, and explains: "[J]avascript randomizes the placement of the images. You and your pals can print them out and take them to Enid's or the BQE and see who wins. I'll be the blogger w/ the webcam at the Rainbo looking for the 4-foot girl with the pack of Parlaiments."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF/Illegal Art event in Oakland, July 25
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DATE: 07/17/2003 12:49:00 PM
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I wish I was going to be around on Jul 25, but I'll be at my brother's wedding:
On July 25, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will host a night of music, art, and conversation to celebrate digital culture. Hosted at the Black Box in downtown Oakland, this special BayFF will bring up-and-coming artists of electronica, digital film, and illegal art together with leaders from the cyber-rights movement. Lawsuits and legislation have become the weapons of choice for dealing with file-sharing and cultural recycling ("sampling"); come out and discover what all the hype is about. Between laptop music, hip hop, and industrial performances, you will hear from people who are fighting to protect new forms of expression and cultural distribution from the attacks of the entertainment industry. This is an all-ages event.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Birthday math factoids
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DATE: 07/17/2003 06:38:19 PM
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Neat math factoids about various birthdays:
your 3^19 th second when you were 36y 10m,
your 2^30 th second when you were 34y 9d,
your billionth second when you were 31y 8m,
your 10,000th day when you were 27y 4m,
your 3^3 rd year when you were 27y 0m,
your e^pi th year when you were 23y 1m,
your 4^4 th month when you were 21y 4m,
your 12! th second when you were 15y 2m,
your 7! th day when you were 13y 9m,
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(Thanks, Don!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Teen condom ads and other odd snapshots from Bangkok
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DATE: 07/17/2003 07:38:48 PM
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A billboard in Bangkok promoting "Sweet Teen" condoms (lime, cola or mixed fruit) is one of many surreal images you'll find on this online photo gallery. Among the other snapshots of pop culture oddities and weird Thai ads: Ronald McDonald welcomes you to Thailand, and "Order a pizza and get a gay volleyball team action figure for free!" Billboard Liberation Front, where are you?
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(Thanks, Ron)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fox Searchlight Pictures launches movie PR blog
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DATE: 07/17/2003 11:46:56 PM
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Via LA Observed:
Fox Searchlight Pictures, the 20th-Century Fox unit behind the Internet marketing hit 28 Days Later, launched a Blogspot site over the weekend. The blog is "covering" media reports friendly to the picture and the company, reporting on favorable box office numbers and doing promos for upcoming films. The lead item right now is praise for Ron Grover's Business Week column on the clever marketing of 28 Days. First they turned Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News... (Tip from Movie City News)
permalink to LA Observed post; Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Howard Lovy's NanoBot nano blog
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DATE: 07/18/2003 12:32:17 AM
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Howard Lovy is the news editor at Small Times, the nanotechnology, MEMS, and microsystems magazine that Mark and I contribute to. Howard recently launched NanoBot, an independent blog for his small tech commentaries. From his deconstruction of the "nanotech media conspiracy" to insights about the environmental fears surrounding nanotechnology, he's off to a great start! Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Animal Magnetism exhibit at the Exploratorium
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DATE: 07/18/2003 12:44:01 AM
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The San Francisco Exploratorium is hosting what looks to be a fascinating exhibit of art exploring human attitudes toward the animal world. Featured work includes Sam Easterson's Animal, Vegetable, and Video Project that uses footage from cameras on the backs of live animals, and the taxidermy assemblages of my friend and Wunderkammern-keeper Tia Resleure. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emmett Plant on the Berman-Conyers P2P bill
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DATE: 07/18/2003 08:06:59 AM
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Emmett Plant, a musician and the co-inventor of the Ogg Vorbis codec and former CEO of the Xiph.org
Foundation, which brought us the Ogg Vorbis codec (and a former Slashdot editor!), has written a good letter to his Congresscritters asking them to come to their senses over the new "Use P2P, become a felon," bill.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: /opendir poetry
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DATE: 07/18/2003 09:29:16 AM
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Simple and sweet, a sort of minimalist web/joke/poem/object. No Flash required, no high bandwidth required. (via Geisha) Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Secret Hasidic Blogger, Invisiblog, and anonymous blogging
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DATE: 07/18/2003 09:42:21 AM
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From this week's Village Voice:
Yeedel, as we'll call him, writes an anonymous weblog, a kind of online diary, under the pen name Hasidic Rebel. His comments, first posted in February, range from musings about the Hasidic lifestyle to stinging indictments of the community. Anonymous blogs like Yeedel's are set to become a lot more secure--and maybe a lot more common--with the release in August of a new application called Invisiblog. Fusing existing privacy technologies with a tool for blogging, the software makes it far easier to broadcast in secret.
"Political activists, independent journalists, whistleblowers--anyone who is prevented from publishing by repressive laws or threats of violence" can benefit from covert-blogging software, writes Charles Farley of Invisiblog. Indeed, over the past year, online diarists in Cuba, Iran, and Tunisia have been jailed for publishing. Like these writers, Yeedel and several other Hasidic bloggers have put their lifestyle, if not their lives, on the line with their contentious chronicles.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online erotic digital photo gallery: Dreampod Sessions
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DATE: 07/18/2003 09:49:32 AM
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Susannah points us to a new online erotic photo series at Nerve.com: The Dreampod Sessions. Interview with the photographer and non-worksafe photos here (paid registration required). It involves both Williamsburg *and* digital cameras -- seems like it belongs somewhere on the hipster bingo card.
Single-named but multipartnered, Siege is a thirty-one-year-old photographer from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. With some colored gels, a few cameras and a harem of female friends, he created what he calls a "dreampod" in his bedroom, a comfortable space where Siege and his friends are free to express themselves sexually and artistically. Looking at these pictures, I alternate between thinking, "These are some of the coolest images I've seen" and "I'll never be able to walk around Williamsburg again, knowing that above some Polish bakery, Siege or someone like him is getting away with murder."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Cartoon Zen
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DATE: 07/18/2003 10:25:47 AM
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etch-a-sketch | flea toon | walmart | unh! project |
drawn and quarterly | kevin cornell | edward gorey
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 600,000 pages of historic home ec
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DATE: 07/18/2003 05:14:47 PM
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Tara sez, "Cornell University has created an archive of over 1,500 volumes (over 600,000 pages) related to home economics at http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/h/hearth/index.html . The volumes available within were published between 1850 and 1950 and are just as fun a cultural browse as they are an exploration into home economics."
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(Thanks, Tara!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Load-sharing, low-latency RSS with Shrook
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DATE: 07/18/2003 05:28:11 PM
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Shrook is a kickass RSS reader for the Mac with a lot of fit and finish. Graham Parks, the software's author, released a new version today with a really nice, innovative feature: distributed feed-pulling:
In order to keep each channel as up to date, each individual copy of Shrook would have to load the channel at least every ten minutes. For users, this would obviously have an effect on the performance of their internet connection and computer. For popular channel providers, the hundreds or thousands of RSS readers connecting regularly, around the clock, already represent a huge financial burden (amongst other problems), as most are billed on the volume of data transferred to and from their computers. Checking more often would only make things worse.
So how does it work?
To oversimplify: A central server maintains a database of when each channel was last updated. To keep it up to date, every so often, the server chooses a computer to check for new items and report back. The frequency of this varies from every 5 minutes for popular channels, to every half hour for channels with only one online subscriber, and it tries to use a different computer each time. At the other end, each copy of Shrook checks in with the server every 5 minutes, and if any of its channels are out of date, it reloads them.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reports from the game
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DATE: 07/18/2003 05:31:52 PM
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My pal Wagner James Au is a pro games writer who's working now as an "embedded reporter" (heh) at a games startup, chronicling the developments in the world of a new massively multiplayer game.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How the Nerds Were Having A Perfectly Good Time Until The Businesspeople And Lawyers Showed Up And Ruined Everything
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DATE: 07/18/2003 05:40:22 PM
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Lisa Rein is slowly uploading her footage from last month's ILAW conference. She posted a real prize today: Jonathan Zittrain and Terry Fisher's talk: "Domain names - How the mess came about" or "How the Nerds Were Having A Perfectly Good Time Until The Businesspeople And Lawyers Showed Up And Ruined Everything." Brilliant stuff.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA art event: Sneak peek of tomorrow's Sixspace opening
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DATE: 07/18/2003 07:20:54 PM
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As posted on BoingBoingearlier this week, there's an opening reception in LA tomorrow night for a very cool show of graphic and digital pop art at Sixspace. Gallery founder Sean Bonner spent today hanging the show, and he moblogs these digital snapshots to BoingBoing readers before anyone is physically allowed inside to see the show -- so, your eyes are seeing it first: a wall full of hand silk screened postcards, postcard close-up, series of paintings called "80's TV cars" ("herbie" "knight rider" "speed racer" "a team"), and cereal prints. The show, called "Modern Thought," features work from WSM and Poplab artists and opens tomorrow (Saturday) evening from 7-10pm at sixspace 549 west 23rd, LA 90027.
Link to show details, Link to more work by ESM, Link to more work by Poplab. Discuss.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: John Gilmore: I was ejected from a plane for wearing 'Suspected Terrorist' button
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DATE: 07/19/2003 01:27:07 AM
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From Declan's politech list, a post from EFF co-founder John Gilmore:
My sweetheart Annie and I tried to fly to London today (Friday) on British Airways. We started at SFO, showed our passports and got through all the rigamarole, and were seated on the plane while it taxied out toward takeoff. Suddenly a flight steward, Cabin Service Director Khaleel Miyan, loomed in front of me and demanded that I remove a small 1" button pinned to my left lapel. I declined, saying that it was a political statement and that he had no right to censor passengers' political speech. The button, which was created by political activist Emi Koyama, says "Suspected Terrorist". Large images of the button and I appear in the cover story of Reason Magazine this month, and the story is entitled "Suspected Terrorist". You can see the button [here].
The steward returned with Capt. Peter Hughes. The captain requested, and then demanded, that I remove the button (they called it a "badge"). He said that I would endanger the aircraft and commit a federal crime if I did not take it off. I told him that it was a political statement and declined to remove it. They turned the plane around and brought it back to the gate, delaying 300 passengers on a full flight.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: P2P Prohibition: Top 11 Signs your ISP has given you up to the RIAA
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DATE: 07/20/2003 11:06:03 AM
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Pho list cofounder JP points us to the...
Top 11 Signs your ISP has given you up to the RIAA as a dangerous KaZaA user:
11. All the files in your favorite MP3 play list are now "Lars Ulrich sings 'Feelings'"
10. Your KaZaA rating changes to "Defendant"
9. Eminem insults your mother in his next single
8. Recording Industry Association of America president Hillary Rosen sends you e-mail messages with embedded .wav files of heavy breathing
7. All the spam in your inbox is from Motion Picture Association CEO Jack Valenti
6. You get a bill retroactively charging you 99 cents per downloaded track. Total bill: $29,700
5. A Tommy Mottola screen saver suddenly pops up on your computer
4. Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer picket your home with signs that read, "Piracy don't pay my bills"
3. You receive a request from someone using outdated hacker wannabe slang claiming a friend said you could "hook me up" with the latest Snoop Dogg album
2. You suddenly have numerous songs from someone named Avril Lavigne
1. CD-shaped crop circles appear in your backyard
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: St. Jude Milhon, RIP
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DATE: 07/20/2003 07:05:26 PM
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St. Jude Milhon, a former Mondo 2000 editor and prominent hacker who coined the term "cypherpunk," passed away Saturday morning in Berkeley after a long battle with cancer. The co-author of How to Mutate and Take Over the World and The Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook, St. Jude shaped the early cyberculture and inspired countless modem grrrls. She will be missed.
"Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics." -St. Jude
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bananas will vanish forever in a decade
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DATE: 07/21/2003 05:12:08 AM
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According to the Globe and Mail, the banana as we know it (a single cloned organism that is vulnerable to all manner of parasites and problems) will be gone from the earth's face inside of a decade. Bye bye, bananas.
Then Panama disease, a soil fungus, attacked banana plantations and the genetically enfeebled Gros Michel banana was virtually wiped out. By 1960, the Gros Michel was no longer a viable crop. Tireless agricultural research eventually produced a successor, the Cavendish. For the past 40 years or so, the Cavendish has been virtually the only commercially grown stock available on store shelves in developed nations.
In the tropics, you can still find other, less desirable banana varieties, mainly grown as a starchy food staple rather than a sweet treat. But these tropical bananas aren't much like their commercial cousins in North American supermarkets. They taste bland. Their texture is often fibrous and mealy. North American consumers would probably find them quite unpalatable compared to the Cavendish, which is sweeter and smoother-textured.
But like its genetic predecessor, the Cavendish is also sterile, equally unprotected from diseases and crop pests. And now a powerful plant pathogen, the Black Sigatoka fungus, has appeared on the scene, attacking the Cavendish stock around the world. Banana yields have already dropped by 50-70 per cent, and banana-tree life spans have been reduced from about 30 years to just about two years. The genetic uniformity among Cavendish bananas has made them helpless to fight Black Sigatoka.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cool Quake 4 leaks, dumbfuck idSoft response
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DATE: 07/21/2003 05:20:40 AM
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This enormous gallery of leaked concept art and test-renders from the forthcoming Quake 4 game is astonishingly cool. As cool as the company's reaction to the leak has been uncool:
"On Friday 18th July a large number of unauthorised Quake IV assets were leaked onto the web," offered the statement. "We do not know the source of these leaked assets. Please be warned that id Software has instructed Activision that we are not to work with any magazine which uses any of these assets. If any magazine does so, id Software will not allow any assets for id games to be sent to these magazines in the future."
Update: the page is down. I have a 4MB tarball of the images. Got a Bittorrent tracker? Email me.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Must-read comic, Y: The Last Man
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DATE: 07/21/2003 05:36:26 AM
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Y: The Last Man is a fantastic graphic novel/series of comix that I've been avidly following since the folks at Cambridge, MA's Million Year Picnic comic store (brilliant store!) recommended it to me last December.
It's the story of a mysterious plague that sweeps the earth, instantly killing every man (and male beast) -- except one: Yorick, the son of the ranking woman Congresscritter who has become the President of the United States (oh, and his pet monkey). From this fast setup, the story turns into a cracking adventure tale that's thoughtful and exhilerating, funny and sad, mean and joyous. It's one of about five comics I really look forward to every month (others include Warren Ellis's must-read Global Crossing Frequency (thanks, PartTimeSaint) and the Legends book).
This morning, Salon has run a seven-page excerpt from the book, so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reverse engineers deliver 802.11b+ drivers
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DATE: 07/21/2003 05:45:47 AM
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802.11b+ cards are notoriously unsupported under Linux. This is likely because the cards are "frequency-agile" and open-source drivers would allow hackers to change their cards to operate in military frequencies. Vendors have therefore obfuscated the workings of these cards and have steadfastly refused to allow open source hackers to use them with their operating systems of choice. Now, one free software coder has reverse-engineered the instructions and has released a free software set of drivers for the commonest 802.11b+ chipset on Sourceforge. Good Slashdot thread going on about this:
Companies such as D-Link had initially promised to release linux drivers for these cards but later backed down from that promise and announced that Linux would not be supported and that customers should not hold on to the cards in the hope of getting them working, as shown on their current FAQ. Texas Instruments, the makers of the chipsets upon which these 802.11b+ cards are based refused to release code or specifications for the cards, no doubt for similar reasons that were recently discussed here. The fact that the current alpha release is certainly as good, and in some areas better, than the binary drivers that escaped from one of the card manufactureres speaks volumes for the quality and determination of the team to create their own drivers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Realspace: did the Web steal space?
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DATE: 07/21/2003 06:06:32 AM
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My friend Paul Levinson has a new book out, Realspace, about the subsumption/sublimation of humanity's space-dreams into the Web. The first chapter and a video interview with Paul are online, though ABC's dumb-ass Javascript-and-RealMedia combination means that I can't watch the video and when I try, every running browser on my system starts to spawn lots of windows and popups and the dark hand of proprietary software reaches through my screen and grabs me by the throat and squeezes.
It is amazing that we made it out into space at all. Lifting ourselves totally off and beyond this planet is -- as far as we know -- without precedent. In contrast to just plain airflight, which was old news to birds, insects, and other winged creatures for eons before we joined them in our flying machines, our movement into space is apparently something really new under the sun. Or, at least, under ours.
Perhaps such extraordinary leaps are always followed by decades -- maybe centuries, even millennia -- of indifference and coasting. None of us, after all, were around when fire was harnessed, when writing was invented, when crops and livestock were first domesticated. Historical records for such signal events are not available. Perhaps lack of progress in their immediate aftermaths was lamented just as some of us now lament our lack of progress in space.
But here we are, nonetheless, heirs to walking on the Moon a little more than a decade after Sputnik, followed by three decades of humans not setting foot on a single extraterrestrial body. It's hard to avoid the question: what went wrong?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Searchable full-texts coming to Amazon
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DATE: 07/21/2003 06:12:50 AM
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Amazon is negotiating to put the full texts of tens of thousands of nonfic books online as a searachable archive to help sell the titles.
Amazon is calling its program Look Inside the Book II, the publishers said. It would expand on a current program that lets shoppers read a table of contents, a first chapter or a few selected pages provided by the publishers of certain books. But Look Inside the Book II would let online browsers search by terms like "Caravaggio," "sans-culottes," or "Osama bin Laden," and then see a list of books mentioning the term along with the sentence that contains it. Browsers could then choose to see several pages around that citation.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Coral love
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DATE: 07/21/2003 06:58:31 AM
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It's spawning season for the world's coral, and apparently swimming around their horny reefs gives people the urge to procreate.
Coral sex occurs between seven to 10 days following the first full moon in August, but to this day scientists are still unsure what puts the coral in the mood to spawn or why coral around the world spawn at the same time.
According to Michael Allard, operator of a scuba diving tour company on the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean, the sex session causes the nearby fish to spawn too. The reason, he guesses, is because there's safety in numbers by spawning together.
But more bizarre is that Allard says the spawning may make humans observing the coral more amorous.
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(via FARK)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT on new Woz digital ID Tag company
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DATE: 07/21/2003 08:08:30 AM
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In today's NYT, a piece by John Markoff on Apple Computer cofounder Stephen Wozniak's new venture, "Wheels of Zeus":
While the company is not ready to identify the manufacturers, Wheels of Zeus says it has initial agreements with two large American makers of consumer electronics to produce the first commercial systems based on its technology, which is called WozNet. The chief operating officer, Rich Rifredi, said the first products were planned for introduction next year .
In an interview last week in Wheels of Zeus's offices in Los Gatos, Calif., which are nondescript except for his Hummer parked out front, Mr. Wozniak described WozNet as a simple and inexpensive wireless network that uses radio signals and global positioning satellite data to keep track of a cluster of inexpensive tags within a one- or two-mile radius of each base station. WozNet, he said, will include a home-base station that has the ability to track the location of dozens or even hundreds of small wireless devices that can be attached to people, pets or property. The tags — expected to cost less than $25 each to produce — will be able to generate alerts, notifying the owner by phone or e-mail message when a child arrives at school, a dog leaves the yard or a car leaves the parking lot.
"We started out with the idea of a product to keep track of stuff," said Mr. Wozniak, the 52-year-old engineer who was the technical brains behind the first Apple computer in 1976. "We ended up inventing a new class of wireless network."
There may be other potential applications for the low-speed data system, like text messaging, Mr. Wozniak said, as well as other uses that he declined to describe.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jenn Shreve, now on the guestblog
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DATE: 07/21/2003 11:12:45 AM
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A round of applause to Marc Laidlaw for his masterful guestblogging. Marc has a long history with bOING bOING and we're honored that he's still an active member of our not-so-secret cabal of happy mutants.
Without further ado, please welcome Jenn Shreve to the guestblog. Jenn's a whipsmart, witty cultural critic and journalist. She's also an up-and-coming fiction writer with a penchant for the dark and surreal. Jenn's a Texan by birth, grew up in the agricultural town of Salinas, California, and now lives in the post-industrial wasteland of West Oakland. Maybe that explains her passion for fine red wines and her insatiable appetite for weirdness of all flavors. Jenn's one tough cookie but she has a heart of gold. You've been warned.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SCO stages high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma
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DATE: 07/21/2003 05:38:56 PM
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SCO, a vendor whose claims to ownership of code and concepts embedded in Linux are such transparent dumbfuckery that it's a wonder they don't vanish up their own assholes, leaving behind puckered, foul-smelling singularities, has decided to embark upon a high-stakes version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, a perennial game-theorist's favorite.
In this edition of the Dilemma, SCO is offering to hold harmless from future litigation any commercial Linux user who will pay them a "license fee" for their nonsensical, notional intellectual property interest in Linux.
Of course, the danger of SCO bringing suit against a commercial Linux user is directly correlated with the amount of money SCO has in the bank to pay lawyers to file its suits. So, if no one pays, no one gets sued. If everyone pays, no one gets sued. If some people pay, everyone else gets sued.
So, if you work for a company that's thinking of buying off the racketeering crooks at SCO, think again. We can all hang together on this one, or we'll all hang separately.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blosxom 2.0 out the door
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DATE: 07/21/2003 05:41:13 PM
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Congrats to Rael Dornfest on getting version 2.0 of Blosxom, the tiny, perfect GPLed perl-based blogging tool out the door. All this, while he was greeting his second child (another 2.0!). Go Rael!
The biggest change in this latest incarnation of Blosxom is a plugin architecture, allowing the core of Blosxom to remain small, sleek, and simpler-than-pie while providing room for extension and integration. The Blosxom Plugin Registry is already home to some 140 plugins ranging from authentication to Google search, click-through tracking to writebacks (read: combination talkbacks and TrackBacks).
There's also a brand new Blosxom for Mac OS X Installer, the simplest way to get Blosxom on your laptop, desktop, or closet Mac without any of the muss or fuss of installing it by hand. A couple-three clicks of the mouse and it'll skip lightly through the nitty-gritties, installing Blosxom itself, some sample flavours, documentation, and some useful plug-ins.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: This site blocks the RIAA/MPAA
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DATE: 07/21/2003 07:12:10 PM
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Now that the entertainment industry has declared ernest war on the Internet and its users, why not configure your computer to reject further requests from IP-blocks assigned to MPAA and RIAA members?
ErrorDocument 403 "<center><h1>No Freakin' Way</h1></center><br><br>Your IP appears to be managed by the RIAA or MPAA, and thus you are not welcome.<br><br> If you believe you have received this in error or wish to argue about it, contact the site owner.<br><br>Alternatively, you can go back to <a href="http://www.riaa.com">where you came from.</a>
8k PKZIP Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Timothy Leary art show review
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DATE: 07/21/2003 08:01:10 PM
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Judith Lewis of the La Weekly wrote a fantastic piece about Timothy Leary's posthumous art showing at Lightspace Gallery in Los Angeles.
The overall impression is not of a grandstander who narcissistically adored the attention of the media, but of an irrepressible spirit with an unusually exuberant constitution -- a man who had discovered, when he first indulged in the mushroom at the ripe age of 40, a source of magic so delightful, so full of possibility, so unreservedly fun that he simply could not keep the news to himself.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Charging money for hotel-connectivity is too expensive
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DATE: 07/22/2003 04:46:24 AM
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Good piece in this morning's NYT about high-speed access in hotel rooms. While many travellers find high-speed connectivity essential (I often book hotels after first consulting the Geektels directory), the actual connections are plagued with problems. Ironically, these aren't connection problems per se, but rather problems with complex billing systems that hijack your connection and try to route you back to a billing screen at seemingly random intervals (at the Crystal City Hyatt in DC last month, I found myself dealing with a non-billing system that wanted me to repeatedly tell it my name and company affiliation before giving me a connection, even though the connection itself was free!). Some systems even require you to install software or (jeesh) hardware before granting you access. These systems significantly raise the cost of providing the service, and turn into enormous support nightmares that the technically unsophisticated hotel staff can't cope with. I'd estimate that about three quarters of these systems result in support calls when I encounter them -- and every one of them is different (and some of them break if you have software running that tries to connect to the Internet when it senses a network connection, like AOL Instant Messenger, an RSS reader, or a mailer -- the billing system receives multiple network requests that it answers with its "Please sign on" screen before you've got a browser open, and then decides that you're a bad actor and refuses to allow you in, so you've got to quit all your open apps before plugging in the wire).
The upshot is that the free connection services -- open WiFi, free DSL modems -- are far, far cheaper to deploy and use, and cost significantly less to support (in Helsinki, I stayed at a hotel where WiFi access required you to go downstairs to the front desk and pay cash for a scratch-off card with a 24-hour WiFi password -- how's that for a customer-unfriendly, labor-intensive process?). And since hotel guests want the service, free connectivity can give your hotel a competitive advantage at a lower cost than the for-pay alternatives -- and best of all, you'll never get orphaned by a tanking hotspot business like the old MobileStar system, because a free, bog-standard connection system can be supported by any moderately skilled technician.
One place where he stayed this year, Mr. Plume said, got it just right: the Reneson Hotel Group's Best Western Novato Oaks Inn in Novato, Calif., where all he had to do was plug a cable into his laptop to get quick Internet access by digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., a telephone company service. And it was free.
"No hardware, no software, no nothing --it's the easiest setup I've ever seen," Mr. Plume said, adding that the hotel's Internet service was the deciding factor in where he stayed on regular trips to Novato last winter.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sidekick vs. P800
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DATE: 07/22/2003 04:47:16 AM
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Here's a great comparison of the Sony-Ericsson P800 futurephone to the T-Mobile Sidekick, the past-phone whose crippling marketing decisions have cemented my intent to swap it for a P800 when my contract runs out in September. Bonus: The reviewer uses a Mac, and specifically addresses the OS X synching and modem issues with the device.
One thing you can do with the P800 that you can't on the Sidekick is take a picture of someone and associate it with their address book entry. Optionally, you can configure the phone to display the person's picture when they call. If you iSync the phone, the pictures are even carried over to your Mac OS X Address Book, which is a nice touch.
The P800 handily beats the Sidekick in the ringtones department, as you can use most any polyphonic MIDI file, or even a WAV file. I'm currently using a MIDI of the Super Mario Bros. theme song from the Video Game Music Archive...
However, as with all handheld devices, the P800's IMAP support is mangled in its own set of bizarre ways. It can't access folders other than the INBOX and completely ignores the read/unread flags on messages. Yet, unbelievably, IMAP over SSL is supported -- with the caveat that your server must allow a connection on port 143 followed by the issuance of the "STARTTLS" command to begin an encrypted session. (UW-IMAP, for one, does allow this.)
One omission that seems huge is the ability to create local mail folders for sorting POP mail. You simply can't do it. You get one big folder for your INBOX for each account, and that's it. Even the Sidekick offers folder management.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Commercial open PVR shipping
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DATE: 07/22/2003 04:55:19 AM
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The Interact-TV Telly is a commercial, open PVR. The device is built on standard PC components, as is the TiVo, but unlike TiVo, the Telly is wide-open to user modification. Adding hard-drives, swapping cards or the motherboard, installing new software and other warranty-voiding no-nos are encouraged by Interact-TV. My TiVo has started to crash a lot lately and my understanding is that the newer TiVo models are even harder to do unauthorized upgrades on at home than the old ones were. Maybe it's time to upgrade to something DRM-free.
"We wanted a box that could grow, that would not be locked down with storage or any particular technology," said Interact-TV CEO Ken Fuhrman.
The Telly automatically records TV shows, and can pause and rewind live TV. Programming information is provided over the Net through a free subscription service.
The Telly also plays music and displays photos. Thanks to a built-in CD-RW/DVD drive, it can rip and burn CDs, and play DVDs. The company said DVD burning will be added in the near future. Consumers will be able to buy and install their own DVD-burning equipment, and the necessary software will automatically be pushed to the device using the Net.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emotional robot too scary for kids
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DATE: 07/22/2003 04:59:16 AM
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An emotional robot designed to monitor and respond to its users' affective cues has been deemed too scary to show to kids under the age of 18.
"We want to investigate how people react when they first encounter Mo, as we lovingly like to call the robot," said Prof Warwick.
"Through one of Mo's eyes, he can watch people's responses to him following them around.
"It appears this is not deemed acceptable for under 18-year-olds without prior consent from their legal guardian.
"This presents us with a big problem as we cannot demonstrate Mo in action either to visitors or potential students."
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: We're back!
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DATE: 07/22/2003 05:03:27 AM
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We had a problem with the ftp server on our host yesterday, which meant that:
- None of yesterday's entries got posted until just now
- People subscribed to the mailblog got TONS of duplicate messages
Sorry for the inconvenience -- don't miss yesterday's messages. Someday, I'm gonna have to migrate us off of YahooGroups and onto something more reliable to avoid these duplicate-post issues.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: British tech headlines rock
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DATE: 07/22/2003 05:14:56 AM
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Great Inquirer UK headline: "Regulator gnashes gums at BT."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Plasmaplate casemod
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DATE: 07/22/2003 05:51:41 AM
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In the future, all my devices will be sheathed in writhing plasma-plates like this killer casemod's.
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(via Inquirer UK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Palm-a-forming the ocean
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DATE: 07/22/2003 06:26:24 AM
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Thomas sez, "On the shores of the United Arab Emirates, arguably one of the coolest (and certainly one of the largest) engineering projects in the world is taking place. 100,000,000 cubic metres of sand and rock is being formed into two huge, palm-shaped islands, each with about sixty kilometres of beach and big enough to be seen from space. Designed as a luxury city for Dubai's (and the world's) very wealthy, it sounds like something out of a science fiction novel: but it's real. Amazing what a few billions in oil fortunes will let you play around with."
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(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AnarchistU: Toronto free school
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DATE: 07/22/2003 06:35:13 AM
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My former school-chum, roommate, and co-worker Erik "Possum Man" Stewart is hard at work on building a free-school called AnarchistU in Toronto, coordinated via Wiki.
The Anarchist U is a volunteer-run collective which organizes a variety of courses on social science and the humanities. Most courses run for ten weeks and meet once a week. The Anarchist U follows the tradition of free schools in that it is open, non-hierarchic and questions the roles of teachers and students.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eiffel tower on fire, watch it by webcam.
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DATE: 07/22/2003 11:48:32 AM
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The Eiffel tower is on fire right now. While you're waiting for CNN to break the Kobegate/Sons of Saddam saturation coverage for live shots, Here's a link to the official Eiffel tower webcam. Discuss (Thanks, David)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblogging the Tour de france
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DATE: 07/22/2003 11:56:06 AM
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Jean-Luc in Paris says:
Do you remember Patrik, the Swedish postman who bicycled from Sweden to Gibraltar, moblogging his adventures daily with a Nokia 7650 phonecam and reporting his GPS Position with a Benefon GPS unit? Well, he moblogged live from the famous Tour de France race in the Alps on July 17. Here at the end of the 8th stage point: a live image of the Basque racing cyclist Iban MAYO who won this day, and another live pic of famous and popular racing cyclist Richard VIRENQUE. And on July 18, Patrik (the bicycle mologger) followed the 9th stage point of Tour de France and here, it's the leading racing cyclist of Tour de France (with a Yellow Jacket), he is american and his team is "US Postal" -- Lance AMSTRONG in Galibier pass. And here's a shot of the Swedish postman moblogger in the Alps.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR Panorama: underwater wonderlands
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DATE: 07/22/2003 12:05:28 PM
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Photographer and QTVR enthusiast
Hans Nyberg points us to a delicious new underwater panorama from Nelson Bay Australia (Link),
by Mal Yeo who created the very popular Tulamben Wreck panorama from Bali last year. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Michael Jackson: Don't jail music downloaders
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DATE: 07/22/2003 12:20:25 PM
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The gloved one comes out against criminalizing filesharers:
Michael Jackson says Congress should make no laws that could land music fans in jail for downloading songs illegally over the Internet. "I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music. It is wrong to download, but the answer cannot be jail," Jackson said in a statement released Monday. The pop star was referring to a bill before Congress that would make it a federal felony to obtain copyright works over the Internet without permission.
Link to AP story, Discuss (Thanks, Caines)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sprint to launch public WiFi network in USA
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DATE: 07/22/2003 01:02:37 PM
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Sprint is the third US cellular carrier to announce plans for a public Wi-Fi network, and plans to launch by summer's end -- with over 2,000 hotspots planned by the end of 2003. Question: Why don't the carriers all get together and make one big happy unwired network instead of proprietary patchwork?
The new service, announced Monday, will let customers connect with the Web whenever they're near one of about 800 "hot spots" around the nation, mostly through roaming agreements with WiFi carriers including Airpath Wireless and Wayport.... A similar service was recently launched by Verizon, which is providing WiFi access through transmitters on its public pay phones. AT&T Wireless plans to launch a WiFi service as well. Prices will be announced when Sprint launches the service, which will be accessible to customers who already have a WiFi-enabled computer or those who buy a special laptop card. A WiFi enabled version of the software used to connect a laptop to Sprint PCS's cellular network will be introduced at that time.
Glenn Fleishman says:
No offense if anyone's associated with the writing of this story, but this is a terrible account. It leaves out most of the salient issues to this announcement: Sprint PCS is pushing roaming like crazy, is building 1,300 hot spots of its own. Verizon didn't launch service of its own; the payphone-based Wi-Fi is not Verizon Wireless, but Verizon Communications, and makes it available just to its DSL customers. Wi-Fi is not spelled WiFi. Full disclosure: I filed a brief on this for the NY Times that appears in today's paper and provided the rest of the reporting here on my Web log.
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Dave)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mobile phones spring to life in Baghdad
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DATE: 07/22/2003 01:16:43 PM
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Cellular roaming services mysteriously became available in Baghdad today -- mobile phone service was banned for civilians under Saddam Hussein's reign.
Yet officially, a tender for three mobile phone licenses the U.S.-led administration plans to offer across Iraq has yet to take place. A U.S. military spokesman could not immediately say why the lines turned on or what that meant for the tender. Callers with foreign-registered GSM phones were able to make and receive calls and send text messages to countries as far away as the United States and South Africa. Few Iraqis have suitable phones for now. Foreigners working in Baghdad have widely relied on pricey satellite telephones to stay in touch.
"MTC-Vodafone wishes you a pleasant stay in Kuwait," a text message sent to roamers in Baghdad said. Other cellphone users reported they had service on a Bahraini network, Batelco, which said it planned to offer services and was testing its network.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friendster couture: random profiles on tshirts
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DATE: 07/22/2003 02:31:33 PM
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From Gawker:
"Friendster couture -- Another example of Friendster run amok: Tom Gillis from Glossosaurus is making t-shirts with random Friendster profiles on them. Friendster t-shirts [Glossosaurus]"
There are so many overlapping memes in that photo, the entire blogosphere could implode any minute now. On his blog, Tom says: "If there's any interest in this, I'm going to be selling [random Friendster profile shirts] for $10 (hand made and unique) + $5 for shipping outiside Chicago (up to 3 shirts).... pretend it's 1993, and this is a zine or something. Except that then there wouldn't be anything like Friendster, and we'd all be wearing fake auto mechanic t shirts with other people's names embroidered on them." Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: COOP couture: What is hot?
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DATE: 07/22/2003 05:13:21 PM
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LA-based COOP -- underground hotrod girle monster comic art guru; God of All Devil Babes-- did a smoking hot, bootylicious fashion layout spread in this month's Paper magazine. (sorry -- no direct link, or scroll down on magazine homepage, click on "STYLE" section icon). Discuss (Not worksafe)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Will e-Voting work?
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DATE: 07/22/2003 10:05:17 PM
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Dan Gillmor's written a cracking good column about the movement to switch from paper-based electoral balloting to electronic voting.
Specifically, he should tell them that they must, as part of the verification process, create what's called a ``paper trail'' -- a printout that the voter can look at to verify that the ballot was recorded according to his or her wishes, a document that could later be used for recounts and audits to ensure that the machines had worked as designed.
That anyone disputes this need is astonishing. Yet some people who normally take the side of underdogs, who are passionate about voting rights and the accuracy of elections, are making a common mistake.
They're putting unwarranted trust in technology. They're believing that private companies, for the first time in recorded history, can produce perfect, tamper-proof electronic devices.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: REALLY cheap new PPI
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DATE: 07/22/2003 10:12:24 PM
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I take a pill every day, one of a class of drugs called Protease Proton (thanks, Frank) Pump Inhibitors (PPI), for acid reflux (really wicked-bad heartburn). There are a lot of different ones -- Nexium, Prilosec, Aciphex, and so on -- but they all do the same thing: keep me from being in intense pain for more than half my waking hours. They're also all horrendously overpriced -- $3-5 a pill. I have health insurance, but my monthly co-pay is $25/month, and every single time I refill my prescription my asshole insurance company gives me some kind of run-around: I have to call them, call my doctor, whatever.
Today, I saw a Canadian doctor who recommended that I try Pariet, a very cheap new PPI from Janssen-Ortho. Like all the other PPIs, these pills make acid reflux go away. Unlike all the other pills, these ones are CHEAP. Like, $0.50 per. I.e., less than my insurance co-payment.
Screw American health care and the FDA and screw Big Pharma and its outrageous, hyped-up, over-advertised Nexium. I bought 200 Pariets. Looks like a lot of Canadian pharmacies are willing to ship Pariet south of the border, too. If you're on PPIs, this might be the thing you've been looking for.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases
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DATE: 07/22/2003 10:19:06 PM
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I wrote a story for The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, a forthcoming anthology of funny, faux-Victorian illnesses edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. Other contributors include Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman and Elliot Fintushel. Every copy is signed by all contributors, and I just read through a galley and found myself laughing aloud all the way through. Here's some of my disease, "Pathological Instrumentation Disorder (The Man With Two Watches Problem)":
The patient, a Mr. Gary Warren, presented symptoms typical of extreme mental distress--elevated pulse, perspiration, acute abdomen, dilated pupils--at the Queen St. Mental Health Center, where a preliminary diagnosis of acute stress disorder was made. The patient's serotonin levels were normalized through quick trepanning, and he was entered into a course of group therapy sessions in the newly installed microgravity chill-rooms. Mr. Warren's symptoms worsened, however, despite daily trepannings. The only visible relief came when in close proximity to diagnostic equipment (EEG, e-meters, MRI/CT Scan apparatus). Even a wall-clock, a PDA, or a thermometer seemed to help.
Mr. Warren was moved to the Bertelsmann-AOL-Netscape-Time-Warner clinic and into the care of Dr. Jojo Fillipo, a specialist in media disorders. Under clinical observation, Mr. Warren was presented with a variety of diagnostic tools, beginning with those found on his person at his admission:
* A Palm Computing "Wrister" wristwatch
* A small, homemade RFI detector
* An integrated wireless appliance of baroque appearance
* A multifunction handheld medical unit, apparently stolen from a Mexican clinic (sphygmomanometer, EEG, blood-sugar/HIV/Hep G/Pregnancy diagnostic)
* An elderly, analog light-meter
* A DNA-signature encoder
* A distributed location/presence device marketed to children for the purposes of playing text-based role-playing games
* An elderly "turnip"-style pocket watch--not working
* A "commando"-style knife with an integrated compass and thermometer
Devices were provided to the patient singly and in combination. Alone or in small groups, the devices produced a marked lessening in the patient's symptoms--in fact, the mere presence of devices intended to measure Mr. Warren's symptoms appeared to alleviate them. In larger groups, or in certain combinations (the wireless appliance and the location/presence-device, for example), symptoms were exacerbated to alarming levels. At one point, Mr. Warren lost consciousness for a period of three days, during which doctors defibrillated his heart twice due to unusual cardiac events.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New graphics book out from political street artist Robbie Conal
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DATE: 07/23/2003 08:14:53 AM
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Urban art terrorist Robbie Conal's new book ARTBURN is out. The man the Washington Post described as "America's foremost street artist" is book-touring the US to support it. Kicks off this Friday in LA. If you live in an American city, you've seen his work pasted on train platforms, under freeway overpasses, and along those temporary plywood walkways at construction sites. link, Discuss (Thanks, JP)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Helvetica to Arial: I'm gonna git you, sucka
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 07/23/2003 08:24:24 AM
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Sweet timewaster: Ultimate celebrity typeface smackdown between sans-serif arch-rivals. Flash-based Helvetica vs. Arial fighting game. They had to make it sans serif so Times New Roman wouldn't bite Garamond's ear off again. Link, Discuss . (via Kottke; thanks, bing luke)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: XBOX fever hitting US troops overseas -- hard.
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DATE: 07/23/2003 08:51:16 AM
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Dungeons and Dreamers co-author Brad King points us to this item from the US DoD publication "Stars and Stripes":
U.S. Air Forces in Europe has dished out $200,000 to help build 17 online, multiplayer Xbox gaming centers at 14 bases, both large and small, across the continent. Those bored with playing video games by themselves or against a roommate will be able to play someone at another base in Europe or nearly any place across the globe.
Link to DoD publication news article, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free WiFi rejected by baseball stadium
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DATE: 07/23/2003 07:08:14 PM
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The management at Portland, OR's PGE Park baseball stadium are frothing at the chops because the Personal Telco community wireless project have set up a free WiFi node that provides connectivity in the park.
"This is our stadium, and we run the communications for it," said Chris Metz, a PGE Park spokesman.
Last week, Kimball's business, Moonlight Staffing, began wirelessly transmitting high-speed Internet access from its office across the street from the home field of the Portland Beavers baseball team. At any given time, as many as about 60 people with laptops equipped for WiFi can surf the Web.
Metz said he worries Personal Telco's news release late last week -- entitled "PGE Park gets free Wi-Fi thanks to Personal Telco and Moonlight Staffing" -- implied the park management helped market the service...
"Their service might be the greatest thing since sliced bread. That's beyond the point," Metz said. "I just don't like the way it's been portrayed in the press release without our consent."
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nanotech newsletter goes blog
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DATE: 07/23/2003 07:28:27 PM
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Josh Wolfe, who edits a Forbes newsletter on nanotech, has started a blog where you can read over his shoulder as he pieces together his editions.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing MeetUp
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DATE: 07/23/2003 07:30:13 PM
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The folks at MeetUp have apparently gotten demand for a Boing Boing meeting -- that is, a monthly date when people interested in Boing Boing can get together in their home towns and hang out. I'm going to try to make these (but given my travel sched and workload, it's a long-shot in most months...). Still, it's a cool (and flattering) thing to have popped up!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wil McCarthy's Quantum Dot books
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DATE: 07/23/2003 07:41:26 PM
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I've just finished reading two excellent books by Wil McCarthy, a geek science-fiction writer and journo. The first is called Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. It's an exploration of a technology called Quantum Wells (and secondarily of other quantum technologies), which are tiny cages in which subatomic particles are arranged in quantities and geometries that mimic both natural and artifical atoms. In this way, you can create "programmable matter," which can be reconfigured to take on the properties of (nearly) any material, going from rigid to limp, relflective to dark, opaque to transparent, magnetic to inert, all at the flip of a nanoscale switch.
McCarthy invokes Clarke's Law (sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic) in respect of these Quantum Dots (regarding which he holds a patent that is itself a fascinating appendix to the book), and as he lays out the science and the possibilities of dots (in language eminently accessible to the laiety), there's a sense that he's onto something really important -- the kind of thing that scientists and science fiction writers will be exploring for decades to come. At the same time, there's a sense of restraint, even as he spins out wild scenaria for superconducting houses that spill heat into the Earth's crust and for computers that measure their power in ME's -- Millennial Equivalences, or "all the computing power on Earth circa 2001." He's a science fiction writer, but he's trying to be sober-sided here, trying to convey that the possibilities are real and even probable.
Which brings me to book number two, The Wellstone, a science fiction novel set in a world dressed in "Wellstone," a programmable matter built out of Quantum Wells. If Hacking Matter is restrained, The Wellstone is almost out of control. It's a boy's-own-adventure story in the tradition the juveniles Heinlein wrote for Scouting mags in the fifties, but gender-balanced, and full of utterly gonzoid, Rucker-grade speculation about a universe dominated by programmable matter and practical immortality, teleportation, and other post-classical physics technology. The novel's a gripper, fast-paced and funny and quite touching at the close. It's the perfect companion to Hacking Matter -- in fact, I think I wish I'd read it first.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Audiopad: Linux-based musical gizmo
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DATE: 07/23/2003 09:24:01 PM
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Audiopad is a musical composition and performance device that tracks the positions of objects on a flat surface, then converts their motion into music. Developed by MIT PhD students James Patten and Ben Recht, the system is is powered by Debian Linux. It consists of a set of electronically tagged objects on a tabletop, a matrix of antennae that track the objects, and an LCD projector which displays an animated UI. Link to QuickTime demo movie, Discuss (via LinuxDevices.com)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Island Chronicles to run in LA Weekly
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DATE: 07/23/2003 11:43:21 PM
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We are excited to announce that LA Weekly, Los Angeles' largest weekly newspaper, will be running our island dispatches every week. Our first one runs today (with an ilustration by me). Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free in-flight WiFi coming to Southeast Air
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DATE: 07/24/2003 04:48:56 AM
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Southeast Airlines, a charter outfit based in Florida, will offer free WiFi and cheap cellular calls to its passengers -- but will add lots of advertising to the in-flight video to cover the costs. Sounds good to me: I'll be watching my screen and wearing headphones.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Retractable USB-powered phone-chargers
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DATE: 07/24/2003 05:04:29 AM
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Keyspan, who distributes these killer little ZIPLINQ retractable cables (I have the FireWire cable, and it's awesome -- the size of an after-dinner bon-bon and very satisfyingly zippy in its reeling action), is shipping a line of retractable USB cables that provide charging power to your cellphone.
I want more of this. I already travel with two power-strips to accomodate all my chargers' wall-warts (phone, Sidekick, Clie, camera, laptop, WiFi router). I'm grateful that my iPod doesn't need its own charger -- I just plug it into my PowerBook at night. If I can get my phone charged by plugging it into the USB, that's one fewer AC adapter I have to schlep. And hell, at $20, that's a cheap travel-charger, and one that works in all countries, regardless of native voltage, provided that your laptop has juice.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video games as koans
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DATE: 07/24/2003 05:06:15 AM
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Wild Divine is a biofeedback-controlled video-game that teaches mastery of mental and physical processes:
To succeed in the game, according to Whitehouse, players have to learn certain principles, which basically require what he calls an 'allowing attitude'--a kind of passive will. [...] In biofeedback terms, the game is set up so that players might actually have to raise either their sweat gland activity or heart rate in order to get through one particular barrier, while moving into a more balanced, or even calmer, state to successfully navigate another area. [...] 'At some point in the game, if a player has learned how to control their internal states to a degree, they can have an internal shift--something akin to an 'aha' experience, where they just know how to do things.'
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(via Interconnected)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gruniad assembles edition wirelessly at Brighton Beach
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DATE: 07/24/2003 05:08:47 AM
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In honor of Brighton Beach's new free seaside community WiFi, the Guardian has moved its offices to the shore for a day, composing and editing the next edition of the newspaper without wires. They're calling on local WiFi geeks to assemble for a group photo.
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(Thanks, James!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese cellular competitors share spimmer blacklists
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 07/24/2003 05:12:46 AM
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DoCoMo, Au, and J-Phone are sharing blacklists of spimmers who send unsolicited commercial IMs to their customers' phones. While the convenience is undoubtably fantastic, I worry about this: with three companies sharing black-lists, the lists' maintainers suddenly have the power to shut anyone up across the Japanese mobile universe. What if someone decides to blacklist the kinds of messages that took down a goverment in the Phillipines? More to the point: who decides what's spim and how do you appeal the decision?
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Professional Batman Fanflick
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DATE: 07/24/2003 05:15:14 AM
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Terry sez,
A short Batman movie made by professionals trying to gain some exposure.
No word of lawsuits from WB yet.
"The short film titled Batman: Dead End is written & directed by commercial director and special effects expert Sandy Collora and stars "America's Most Trusted Fitness Personality," Clark Bartram as "Bats" with Andrew Koenig (son of Star Trek regular Walter Koenig) as The Joker."
43.4MB Quicktime Link
Discuss
(Thanks, Terry!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fonts derived from old-school videogames
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DATE: 07/24/2003 10:31:57 AM
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Super-frag-olicious. This website offers free, downloadable font sets derived from classic 8-bit computer games. Link, Discuss (Thanks, mark!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Boy-toy: "Charlie" art-robot at LA's MOCA museum
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DATE: 07/24/2003 10:38:33 AM
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BoingBoing reader Tim says:
Maurizio Cattelan's latest artwork currently at the LA Museum of Contemporary Art: 'Charlie,' a remote controlled boy on a tricycle that interacts with museum visitors. It was also a hit at this year's Venice Biennale. Maurizio has been doing playful, original work for a while now that often quietly steals the thunder of whatever group show it appears in. A nice overview of his work is here, other works here, still more here. Particularly fun: works where he subjected his art dealer to various humiliations, including being duct-taped to a wall for one exhibit, and being forced to dance around in a phallic bunny suit for another. Other, more melancholy works of his, such as 'Charlie Don't Surf,' a sculpture of a boy in a schooldesk facing the gallery wall, his hands pinned to the desk by two pencils, and 'La Nono Ora,' picturing the pope felled by a meteorite, are as chilling as they are blackly funny, and stick with you for a while.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecam video footage airs on TV news show in Japan
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DATE: 07/24/2003 11:27:49 AM
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What looks like a first, clipped from Lost Remote:
A clip of breaking news video sent
in from a camera phone airs on Japan's NHK network. A
trucker videotaped a huge pileup on a busy expressway
with his cell phone, and he called the clip in to NHK. A
few minutes later, he's live on the phone (audio) while
his grainy video of the deadly accident plays on the air.
"Moblogging," as it's called, is poised to change the
dynamics of news coverage forever.
Link to original OJR story, Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Greenpeace vs. Nanotechnology
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DATE: 07/24/2003 11:31:23 AM
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bOING bOING pal and Small Times nanotechnology news editor Howard Lovy on Greenpeace's new report on nanotechnology:
"Greenpeace's just-released report on nanotechnology is vintage advocacy-group treatment of scientific research: Grab the available facts, then make them conform to your predetermined conclusion. That, after all, is what advocacy groups do. And most intelligent readers are able to keep that in mind when they come across any "study" that comes out of an organization that filters information through its preset worldview. It's true for Greenpeace, the National Rifle Association or the Save the Bog Turtle Foundation. That's why I was quite surprised at the reaction of the NanoBusiness Alliance to this report."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Flash mob alert! Paris, Rome, now.
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DATE: 07/24/2003 11:54:11 AM
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A Parisian flash mob appears to be coalescing right now, (Link), and another is forming in Rome (Link), Discuss . (Thanks, (Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Building Community Wireless Networks, second edition
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DATE: 07/24/2003 06:37:03 PM
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Kudos to O'Reilly for getting a second edition of Rob Flickenger's brilliant, economical and comprehensive Building Community Wireless Networks out the door. I've bought and handed out about 10 copies of the first edition. Can't wait to get my hands on this one.
Building Wireless Community Networks is about getting people online using wireless network technology. The 802.11b standard (also known as WiFi) makes it possible to network towns, schools, neighborhoods, small business, and almost any kind of organization. All that's required is a willingness to cooperate and share resources. The first edition of this book helped thousands of people engage in community networking activities. This revised and expanded edition adds coverage on new network monitoring tools and techniques, regulations affecting wireless deployment, and IP network administration, including DNS and IP Tunneling.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bridis on RIAA "Shock and Awe" sue-the-downloaders campaign
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DATE: 07/24/2003 11:59:49 PM
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From the AP's Ted Bridis today:
Over the coming months this may be the Internet's equivalent of shock and awe, the stunning discovery by music fans across America that copyright lawyers can pierce the presumed anonymity of file-sharing, even for computer users hiding behind clever nicknames such as "hottdude0587" or "bluemonkey13." In Charleston, W.Va., college student Amy Boggs said she quickly deleted more than 1,400 music files on her computer after the AP told her she was the target of another subpoena. Boggs said she sometimes downloaded dozens of songs on any given day, including ones by Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, Incubus and Busta Rhymes. Since Boggs used her roommates' Internet account, the roommates' name and address was being turned over to music industry lawyers. (...)
Bob Barnes, a 50-year-old grandfather in Fresno, Calif., and the target of another subpeona, acknowledged sharing "several hundred" music files. He said he used the Internet to download hard-to-find recordings of European artists because he was unsatisfied with modern American artists and grew tired of buying CDs without the chance to listen to them first. "If you don't like it, you can't take it back," said Barnes, who runs a small video production company with his wife from their three-bedroom home. "You have all your little blonde, blue-eyed clones. There's no originality."
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cringely: Time for Son of Napster -- Snapster!
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DATE: 07/25/2003 12:05:31 AM
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BoingBoing pal Siege says:
Here's Cringely's idea on how to allow millions of shareholders to download music by utilizing their fair-use rights to medium-shift CDs owned by their corporation formed just for this purpose. It sounds like something RTmark would cook up if they had the money...
Link, Discuss (meaningless footnote: By odd coincidence, or sinister conspiracy, Roxio, Inc. happens to own the snapster.com domain)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fonts that change according to current weather conditions
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DATE: 07/25/2003 12:22:09 AM
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The dutch design duo LettError created a new typeface for the Design Institute of the University of Minnesota -- and the font "changes," based on current weather conditions in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How Technology, Law and the Market Affect the Web's Content Layer
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DATE: 07/25/2003 04:17:16 AM
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More excellent video from the ILAW conference: a panel called "How Technology, Law and the Market Affect the Web's Content Layer," with Google's Alex Macgillivray, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Wendy Seltzer and Glenn Otis Brown of the Creative Commons.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Graffitti Zen
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DATE: 07/25/2003 08:09:23 AM
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(1) banksy
(2) vandal squad
(3) wooster collective
(4) laussanne
(5) stencil revolution
(6) guerilla parenting
(plus, a bonus link from me to you: my favorite tag, above left).
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Flashmob in Vienna today, with an eco-Dada theme
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DATE: 07/25/2003 08:25:29 AM
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BoingBoing reader Norman in Austria says:
The email making the rounds since yesterday states the following (slightly absurd) text in German -- translated here to English:
"Easter rabbits from eastern Styria (province in Austria - ed.) have not eaten anything since yesterday. The dramatic hunger-strike was caused by weather occurences in the adriatic sea and the related efficiency of german bicyclers. please come and donate a small amount to restore the grievances of Austria's wine-region #2 Friday 15:00 - streetcar station Volkstheater (in front of the Palais Epstein on the Ring) P.S.: Update: Meeting is at 15:00, essential info will be handed out by 15:15, the actual happening will take place shortly thereafter."
Link one, Link two,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIAA Shock and Awe: List of ISPs receiving subpoenas
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DATE: 07/25/2003 08:31:02 AM
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The EFF's Fred Von Lohmann provides this list of how many subpoenas have been delivered to which ISPs. Data is based on subpoenas that are currently available electronically from Washington, DC District Court, which Fred says is a few weeks behind in posting them, but you get the idea of the first 150 or so:
1 Bentley College
1 DePaul University
1 Loyola University Chicago
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1 Pacific Bell Internet
2 Adelphia Communications Corporation
2 Boston College
2 Earthlink, Inc.
4 Verizon Internet Services, Inc.
14 RCN Corporation
15 Time Warner Cable
21 Charter Communications
29 Comcast Cable Communications, Inc.
31 SBC
Discuss (via pho list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Erotic Museum opens doors in Hollywood
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DATE: 07/25/2003 08:45:33 AM
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The Erotic Museum did a soft launch here in LA on Wednesday, and will open formally in the fall. Such a tease. OK, now here's a museum store worth shopping in. Details from AVN:
The museum is hosted in a building that was originally built in 1911 and at one time was inhabited by a garter company, giving it a historical connection to sexuality beyond even the wide array of exhibits that will be displayed when the museum opens in October. The building, which is located a block from the Kodak Theatre, is currently undergoing renovations designed to bring back the original look. With a mission to "provide the community with a positive image of the potential of human sexuality," the museum will exhibit erotic photography, sculptures and a wide variety of paintings from all eras. Some of the exhibits will include a Picasso etch, covers of gay adult magazines such as Manpower #4 and even stills of John Holmes taken from 8mm loops.
Boris Smorodinksy, the CEO of the Erotic Museum, notes that "you can?t talk about eroticism without talking about Marilyn," as he points out prints of the Marilyn Monroe photographs taken by Tom Kelley that were used to launch Playboy in December 1995. The museum even includes an adult mahjong video game from the Atari era and a video projection that documents stroke by stroke how Picasso etched Bloch 1762. Bloch 1762, a part of the museum?s permanent collection, is a single etch in a series of etches, many with sexual themes, known as Picasso's Suite 347.
Link to museum website, Link to AVN story, Discuss (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WIRED: Enhanced TV -- lots of new projects in the hopper
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DATE: 07/25/2003 08:53:19 AM
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I wrote a story for Wired News today about the American Film Institute's eTV workshop, which kicked off this Wednesday in Hollywood. Phonecammed a few snapshots live from the event, which you can see here (click "back" to proceed through series of snapshots). Participating networks with interactive TV programs in development include PBS, Bloomberg, ABC, FUSE Networks, and The Disney Channel.
[A]s interactive developers debated the pros and cons of "The Rashomon Factor" -- a term coined by AFI New Media Ventures Associate Director Anna Marie Piersimoni for programs that tell one story through multiple points of view -- some television producers called for a reality check.
"Audiences are lazy and TV still caters to the lowest common denominator," quipped Fifth Wheel and Blind Date Co-Executive Producer Harley Tat. "We're operating from a heady place where we're thinking about the future, but plenty of viewers don't have PCs and haven't upgraded their cell phones in years. If the information isn't right in front of them while they're microwaving mac and cheese, it's not going to happen. ETV has to be so simple that they can do it half-baked and horizontal on the couch."
Link,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Peer-to-Peer Prohibition Act: Congressman Pitts' anti-filesharing bill
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DATE: 07/25/2003 01:56:26 PM
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This CNET story from yesterday covers the "Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography (P4) Act" put forth by Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa. that would require P2P providers to get parental consent before allowing minors to use their services. A quick search in THOMAS.loc.gov (Link or PDF copy here, ) reveals that the title now reads "To prohibit the distribution of peer-to-peer file trading software in interstate commerce." Prohibition was a real success in the early 20th century -- one can only imagine what wonders the sequel will bring.
Laptop DJ and BoingBoing pal John von Seggern asks, "Can peer-to-peer software be defined legally in such a way that the
definition does not include the entire Internet? Aren't browsers and
servers sharing files all the time? How is Google different than Kazaa
in a larger sense?" And anonymous suggests a grassroots online campaign to counter the congressman's "P4 Act," to be titled "P5: Protecting People from Pitts' Preposterous Proposals."
Discuss (via pho / thanks, Kevin, and thanks Fred von Lohmann for the PDF)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Are you wanted by the RIAA? EFF can tell you
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DATE: 07/25/2003 02:31:17 PM
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EFF has launched a service to check whether or not your Kazaa/Grokster/whatever userid is the subject of an RIAA strongarm action against your ISP. It scrapes the PACER subpoena database periodically and indexes all the userids being sought by the recording industry.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Subpoena Defense: dealing with abusive ISP subpoenas
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DATE: 07/25/2003 02:31:42 PM
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In related news (see entry below), Subpoena Defense is a new website that is a clearinghouse for information to help you understand, respond to and resist abusive ISP subpoenas from the entertainment industry.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Baggies give way to jumped-up fruit-leather
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DATE: 07/25/2003 02:34:35 PM
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Who needs ziplocs when you've got airtight edible transparent food-wrappers?
With a new school year upon us, kids may soon have the chance to eat healthier and also help the environment, using something unique wrapped around their tuna, turkey or PB&J sandwiches. Edible vegetable and fruit wraps, among the latest developments from modern chemistry, could keep lunches fresher longer and be substituted for some non-biodegradable wraps, says the creator, food chemist Tara McHugh, Ph.D.
Link
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
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DATE: 07/25/2003 08:46:10 PM
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I finished reading an outstanding novel today, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. The conceit of the novel is that it is being written by an autistic teenager in a small British town. He has discovered a dead dog on his neighbor's lawn, and he has decided to Investigate The Murder in the fashion of his hero, Sherlock Holmes.
Christopher, the narrator, is utterly convinving and Martian in a way that is at once both believable and alien. The story manages to pull off the incredible trick of exposing the emotional lives of the characters around the narrator -- whose disorder precludes empathic interpretations of the feelings of the people he's dealing with -- and of the narrator himself, whose emotions are both lost to the noise of autistic overload and still subtly teased out and laid out for the reader.
The novel is very short, 240 pages, and flies past. The above graf makes it sound too soppy, I think -- the book is anything but. It's funny and charming. It's fast and exciting. It's didactic and narrative. I haven't enjoyed a novel this much in recent memory.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Verisign will have to pay for sex.com mistake
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DATE: 07/26/2003 05:00:24 AM
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Gary "sex.com" Kremen has won an important victory in his legal battle to get justice for the theft of his lucrative domain, which the bumbling fools of Network Solutions gave away to a con-man who forged a fax to them. Since Kremen's contract with NSI predated the addition of the "you indeminfy us from all liability no matter how negiligent we are" language to its agreement (and the even crappier terms of service imposed by Verisign when it acquired the company) the court has ruled that Verisign is liable for NSI's mistake.
"Exposing Network Solutions to liability when it gives away a registrant's domain name on the basis of a forged letter is no different from holding a corporation liable when it gives away someone's shares under the same circumstances," wrote Judge Alex Kozinski, who penned the unanimous opinion for the three-judge panel.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wil Wheaton in mean Pan remake
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DATE: 07/26/2003 05:05:35 AM
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I saw a movie this week, and got very excited about one of the trailers, for a movie called Neverland, which appears to be a very lush retelling of Peter Pan that's quite nasty and dark -- like a rusty fishhook in the 'nads.
And this morning, I discovered that my pal Wil Wheaton, blogger and actor, is in the movie, and he says it's as good as it looks.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: I have a sister!
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DATE: 07/26/2003 11:38:09 PM
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Tonight, my brother, Neil Howard Doctorow, married Tara Lee Trimble, (now Doctorow). Mazeltov to the two of them, who are achingly, tangibly in love. Congrats and love always, guys. Here's the speech I gave:
And Tara is joining the family, which is not the Doctorow family,
nor the Doctorow-Starr family, nor the
Doctorow-Starr-Levitt- Cloth-Ceresne-Klayman- Greenfield-Negru-
Rochman-Linsday- Goldman-Silver- Fox-West-BenDavid- Halprin family.
It's my family, and it's this variegated, global, ramified
enterprise whose edges are smeared out and indistinct, so that
it's impossiible to tell exactly where it ends.
At events like this one, where we are turned out in our thronged
hundreds, I have developed a survival strategy: I bring my dates
around and when someone comes up and heartily shakes my hand and
marvels at how long it's been, or pinches me -- we're great and
cruel pinchers in this family -- and leaves a smudge of lipstick
on my cheek, I turn and say, "This is my friend so-and-so," and
then, if luck is with me, the familiar face out of my boyhood is
joined to a name and a relationship: "Ah, so nice to meet you.
I'm Cory's great-aunt's sister-in-law on his mother's father's
side, (beat) I knew this one when he wet the bed."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi is too expensive when it's not free
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DATE: 07/27/2003 06:45:30 AM
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Operating a WiFi hotspot that you charge money for costs $30 a day. Operating a free WiFi hotspot costs $6. Clearing $6/day in new profit from offering free WiFi is easy, clearing $30 a day in most locations is damned hard. Will more cafes do the math?
Here's the irony in Wi-Fi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free Wi-Fi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for Wi-Fi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. According to a market study coming out this summer, retailers are quickly learning this lesson: up to 30% of US location owners who plan to deploy commercial hotspots in 2004 intend those hotspots to be free or free-with-purchase.
Link
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(via WiFi Networking News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WashPo embarasses itself with hysterical WiFi FUD article
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DATE: 07/27/2003 07:04:52 AM
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The Washington Post has embarassed itself today with a FUD-laden, inaccurate and hysterical story about "WiFi security risks" that appears to have been ginned up by publicists for "security companies" who rely on public fear to generate business.
But most of those networks are unprotected, vulnerable to hackers who could steal data, introduce viruses, launch spam or attack other computers. Even as the number of wireless networks has risen dramatically, Poole's surveys suggest that the rough percentage of them that are unprotected remains above 60 percent.
None of these are risks that are unique to WiFi. The world is full of coin-operated or cash-based network access systems (I spent an hour feeding quarters into an Ethernet-equipped payphone in the Vancouver airport in June), and the idea that I, as a hotspot provider, am "unprotected" because the people who gain access to my network can do something bad to someone else is (deliberately) misleading.
I'm no more "unprotected" from spammers on my WiFi node (something I've yet to see a single published account of, despite the continuous warnings about it) than I am from spammers sending Nigerian 419 letters from the next terminal at the library. It's like saying that restauranteurs are "unprotected" from bank robbers who use a back table to plan their next job. Sure, they're "unprotected." So what?
Fundamentally, this is a warning against abetting the anonymous use of the Internet. A Beltway-Insider rag like WashPo should have too much familiarity with the Bill of Rights to advance the un-constitutional notion that anonymity is somehow bad, wrong, or illegal.
In their darkest visions, consultants can imagine someone with a WiFi-enabled laptop walking through an airport launching a destructive computer virus at every other unprotected laptop in the vicinity, because users who tap into a vulnerable network are just as exposed as its host.
In their sales literature, snake-oil "security" vendors identify "being connected to the network" as a risk, instead of "running unpatched and insecure software" as a risk. It's the public Internet. If connecting your computer to the public Internet puts you at appreciable risk from "destructive computer viruses," you'd better get a new operating system.
Hackers could also use WiFi access to anonymously launch attacks at the broader Internet, also threatening non-WiFi users.
Hackers could also use coin-operated Ethernet jacks and Internet Cafes to launch attacks on the broader Internet, also threatening WiFi users. So what? Malice is transport-independent.
Although no calamitous hacking event via wireless has occurred, security professionals say it is only a matter of time.
"Security professionals" also noted that "although no calamitous hacking event has been launched using a Dvorak keyboard, it is only a matter of time."
"It's broken; it has holes and flaws," Skoudis said of WEP technology. "It's kind of like a Band-Aid, but better to have a Band-Aid than a big gaping hole."
Users can also require passwords for access to their networks.
Yes, yes they can. Using WEP technology. Geez.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: mythtv HOWTO: Linux PVRs for the rest of us
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mythtv is a brilliant piece of open sourse software that ties together a TV tuner card, a Linux-based PC, and free Internet listings services to build a high-powered PVR, like a TiVo with far more bells and whistles. For example, a mythtv box can be used in many countries around the world (including the UK and Canada), and it stores its files in a format that is intended to be copied for use on other devices, so it's a snap to burn a CD with a bunch of your favorite programs to take on plane journeys, or to email clips to friends, or to drop incriminating CSPAN/Question Period footage in your file-sharing folder and foment revolution. It's also free to operate, and can be upgraded easily, and shares all the other properties of a general-purpose PC (so your set-top box can also be your WiFi router, firewall, and all-round file-server).
However, like many open source software projects, installing and configuring mythtv isn't for the faint of heart. This HOWTO is a good step in the direction of making mythtv accessible to the masses.
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(via Wasted Bits)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR: spontaneous flashing at Mardi Gras
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DATE: 07/28/2003 10:17:10 AM
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Thought I'd kick off the blog this week on an intellectual high note. Two words: panoramic boobies. Hans Nyberg says:
Hi Xeni -- this week is a French Week. First QTVR is by Ray Broussard, "Flashing at Mardi Gras New Orleans." The Cajun music is from Basin Street Records. The page will be updated with more "French VR" during the week.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hollywood news satire site Dateline Hollywood launches
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DATE: 07/28/2003 10:21:05 AM
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My former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague and fellow Angeleno Ben Fritz just launched a new parody site today. Dateline Hollywood is described as "a
satire of Hollywood and entertainment journalism --
think The Onion meets Daily Variety, Entertainment
Weekly, and Entertainment Tonight." Dig it. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Very cool new social software app: Tribe.net
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DATE: 07/28/2003 10:34:19 AM
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If you've been exploring social networking software services like Friendster lately, check out Tribe.net. I just learned this weekend that an old friend and former colleague, Brian Lawler, is part of the dev team... very nice UI on this thing, and seems to facilitate certain kinds of interaction (read: non-gonad-driven) more elegantly than some of the other services out there right now. They're still in beta, but they say they hope to move into general release relatively shortly. So far, I'm liking it a lot. Not ditching my Friendster account anytime soon, though. Where else online could I schmooze with Satan, Carbohydrates, Mister Roboto, and vast legions of Goth/Burningman/Straightedge twentysomething hotties, all under one roof? Wait, don't answer that. Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Patent for mind control via TV?
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DATE: 07/28/2003 11:02:50 AM
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Here's a recent patent on a method to affect a human's nervous system through the electromagnetic field emitted by a TV set:
"Physiological effects have been observed in a human subject in response to stimulation of the skin with weak electromagnetic fields that are pulsed with certain frequencies near 1/2 Hz or 2.4 Hz, such as to excite a sensory resonance. Many computer monitors and TV tubes, when displaying pulsed images, emit pulsed electromagnetic fields of sufficient amplitudes to cause such excitation. It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing images displayed on a nearby computer monitor or TV set."
As Doug Rushkoff says about television, "they don't call it programming for nothing!"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mobile Neurosurgery Table
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DATE: 07/28/2003 07:08:17 PM
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These mobile operating tables and various attachments, particularly the neurosurgery outfit, look like they could be from a David Cronenberg film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi coming to Second Cup
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DATE: 07/29/2003 07:56:48 AM
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The Second Cup, a Canadian chain of coffee-shops, is rolling out WiFi hotspots in Calgary and Toronto.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi versus wildfire
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DATE: 07/29/2003 07:58:39 AM
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An experimental WiFi network provided a critical role in coordinating response to a king-hell brush-fire in California.
After lightning touched off the Coyote Fire July 16, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) deployed more than 1,700 firefighters, 10 helicopters and several bulldozers to battle the blaze. To provide Internet communications for the CDF operations camp, researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and San Diego State University deployed a high-speed wireless link to the remote site in northeastern San Diego County within hours of a request for help.
"The dissemination of information and incident intelligence up and down the command-and-control chain of command is more important than ever," said Jim Garrett, CDF Emergency Command Center chief. "The connectivity provided to CDF for the Coyote Fire was a real-life exercise that clearly demonstrated how valuable and useful the technology provided by HPWREN is to our agency. HPWREN provided us an invaluable service that cannot be overestimated." The 19,000-acre Coyote Fire was contained by July 24 and controlled by July 27
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: A week without Interweb is worse than divorce
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DATE: 07/29/2003 08:22:53 AM
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A survey has concluded that techies are more traumatized by being cut off from the net than by getting divorced or moving house.
And when something goes wrong with e-mail for a week, the experience can be more traumatic that moving home, getting married or divorce, at least for a third of those taking part in the survey.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act
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DATE: 07/29/2003 10:34:59 AM
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EFF, EPIC, CDT, ACLU and Free Congress have drafted a bill that's been introduced by Senator Wyden today, for a new law called "The Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act." This is a hell of a law. It finds that various species of spooks are making avid use of commercial and governmental databases, merging them and aggregating them, without transparency, accountability, or any real understanding of the danger to civil liberties involved in this practice. Accordingly, it requires any Fed agency using non-Fed databases to cut it out and make a full report to Congress on who they're buying database and database-services from, what they're doing to preserve privacy, why they're doing what they're doing, and whether they actually have a realistic chance of catching any bad guys. And it calls into account Feds who abuse their authority and limits the kind of doomsday hypotheticals that can be used to justify such abuse.
We've spent the two years since September 11th writing blank checks to anyone who's got a good story about preventing terrorism through the wholesale abridgement of civil liberties, trading off freedom for the perception of safety. It's time that we called our civil servants to account on these scores -- they've spent our money and our freedom, what did we get in return?
Each report shall include -
(A) a list of all contracts, memoranda of understanding, or other agreements entered into by the
department or agency, or any other national security, intelligence, or law enforcement element under
the jurisdiction of the department or agency for the
use of, access to, or analysis of databases that were
obtained from or remain under the control of a non-Federal entity, or that contain information that was
acquired initially by another department or agency
of the Federal Government for purposes other than
national security, intelligence, or law enforcement;
(B) the duration and dollar amount of such
contracts;
(C) the types of data contained in the databases
referred to in subparagraph (A);
(D) the purposes for which such databases are
used, analyzed, or accessed;
(E) the extent to which such databases are
used, analyzed, or accessed;
(F) the extent to which information from such
databases is retained by the department or agency,
or any national security, intelligence, or law enforcement element under the jurisdiction of the department or agency, including how long the information
is retained and for what purpose;
(G) a thorough description, in unclassified
form, of any methodologies being used or developed
by the department or agency, or any intelligence or
law enforcement element under the jurisdiction of
the department or agency, to search, access, or analyze such databases;
(H) an assessment of the likely efficacy of such
methodologies in identifying or locating criminals,
terrorists, or terrorist groups, and in providing practically valuable predictive assessments of the plans,
intentions, or capabilities of criminals, terrorists, or
terrorist groups;
40k PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nerve: Sex in the age of phonecams
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DATE: 07/29/2003 11:27:23 AM
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Essay by SF Chron columnist Mark Morford ponders the 21st-century booty call in Nerve: "What Now, Voyeur?":
[I]t was only a matter of time before the two worlds should merge, a convergence of the technological twain, before popular digital cam technology should penetrate the wildly ubiquitous cellphone underworld.
Thus transforming, in one divine swoop, not just how we snap photos, not just how we communicate, not even how we snap photos to communicate. But rather, how we get off snapping photos to communicate how we get off. Voila: the new digital cellphone/camera hybrid, now available, yours for upwards of 100 bucks, soon to be everywhere.
You've probably seen the commercials: Girl spots best friend's boyfriend macking on some skank at a club, snaps instant five-second cellphone video clip, shoots it over to best friend at library. Friend sees clip, is briefly shocked, right until she looks up and makes eye contact with hot new guy across the room. Coy smiles ensue, slimeball boyfriend is suddenly ex-boyfriend. Voila. Relationship revolution, not a word spoken. Elapsed time: twenty seconds. Commercial #2: Myopic citizen hustles through city streets, looking down into purse, wallet, focusing on one little activity while crazy photogenic circus of life whirls around them. If only you had a cool digital cellphone camera to take it all in! implores the commercial. To instantly record this daily phantasmagoria and send to yourself and look at later on your computer and sigh wistfully at the craziness of life! Indeed.
Do you think they knew? Do you think the sly bastard marketing execs at Nokia or Ericsson or the rest realized what an erotic porn-ready firecracker gizmo they had on their hands? You're goddamn right they did.
Link, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bigfoot Symposium
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DATE: 07/29/2003 12:04:50 PM
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The International Bigfoot Symposium will be held in September in the favorite sasquatch stomping grounds of Willow Creek, California. Numerous bigfoot investigators will speak, followed by a guided excursion to Bluff Creek, the site of the famous and questionable Patterson-Gimlin film. Jane Goodall, primatologist and bigfoot believer, was supposed to give the keynote in person but will now conduct a video presentation instead. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SEEMEN Machine art show in SF on August 1
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DATE: 07/29/2003 12:33:05 PM
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Kal Spelletich and SEEMEN present more "Live Audience Experiments with Machines and Robots" -- two shows at 8 and 10PM in San Fran, Friday August 1 (also robotics guru and former guestblogger Karen Marcelo's birthday! W00t!). New, audience-operated machines and robots. See SEEMEN website for details -- $10 to get in. Attendance by advance e-mail reservation.
Photos, more photos, Details, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Music legend Lester Chambers' album collection stolen -- call for help
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DATE: 07/29/2003 12:51:17 PM
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From Lola Chambers, wife of Lester Chambers -- music legend, rock and soul pioneer, 1/2 of the Chambers Brothers ("Time Has Come Today", "People Get Ready," etc.):
I am truly heartbroken! My complete collection of my husband's (Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers) albums and 45's have been stolen from my home in Tarzana, California. This collection has taken me 25 years to collect and I had intended to pass them on to our two sons. Years before Ebay, I scoured record stores and swap meets to put this collection together. There were over 60 albums and over a hundred 45's stolen. Many were Chambers Brothers' Columbia albums released by Columbia under their many foreign labels and would be needed as proof of their non-payment of years of foreign royalties. These Columbia albums were released under Direction Records out of England, First Records out of Korea, etc. One of their 45's was released in Germany with an abstract orange coloring. Many of their 45's had photo sleeve coverings all in perfect condition. I had their complete recordings from their early years with Vault Records and one of their first albums recorded with Barbara Dane on the Folkways label. I would like to put the word out to all record stores (especially in Southern California), collectors, eBay shoppers, etc in order to try and recover these extremely sentimental albums. Please contact me at (360) 895-7877 or via attorney Lawrence Feldman, leflaw@leflaw.com.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Newsweek's Stephen Levy: Capitol Hill P2P Prohibition craziness
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DATE: 07/29/2003 01:18:07 PM
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In this week's edition of Newsweek, Stephen Levy reports on a Senate Judiciary Committee last week titled: "The dark side of a bright idea: Could personal and national-security risks compromise the potential of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks?" By the end of the session, the only committee member in attendance, chairman Orrin Hatch-himself a songwriter who sells CDs on his personal Web site-zeroed in on what really bugged him: people sharing copyrighted songs on the Internet without paying for them. Then he ran an idea by one of the panelists: what if you had a system that could detect whether people were getting songs without paying for them and could warn those infringers that what they were doing was wrong? And then, if they didn't stop, the system would remotely "destroy " their computers.
"No one's interested in destroying people's computers, " said the panelist. "Well, I'm interested in doing that, "said the senator. "Warn them, do it again, and then destroy their machine! There's no excuse for anyone violating our copyright laws. "
Fortunately Senator Hatch hasn't yet codified his Dr. Strangelovean no-due-process piracy antidote into upcoming legislation. But in the House, Reps. Howard Berman and John Conyers have introduced a bill that encourages a different approach: jail 'em! Among other provisions, the bill lowers the bar for criminal prosecution to the sharing of a single music file and allocates $15 million to go after copyright offenders. Representative Berman says that he anticipates that prosecutors will go only after someone who, knowing the consequences, uploads massive amounts of music. But the bill says in black and white that if you share so much as a single tune with your pals on the Internet-as millions do every day-you are a felon. Penalty: up to five years in jail. (Better fill up your iPod before you go.)
Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nano Cartoon
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DATE: 07/29/2003 02:38:51 PM
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Josh "Nanotech Report" Wolfe posted a witty cartoon depicting the extraordinary popular delusions and madness of crowds at the birth of a tech bubble. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speaking at BayCHI, Palo Alto, August 12th
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DATE: 07/29/2003 09:15:06 PM
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I'm giving a talk on civil liberties and the Web at BayCHI on August 12th, at PARC in Palo Alto. Hope to see you there!
From deep-linking (the right to give someone directions) to DRM (the right to be treated like a customer, not a criminal), civil liberties are inexorably entwined with the web. Increasingly, legal mandates are in the offing to force you to design and deploy technology that restricts what you and your users may do. Find out where these proposals are at, where they're going, and what you can do about them.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF Freedom Fest, San Francisco, August 9
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DATE: 07/29/2003 09:18:15 PM
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EFF's first annual Freedom Fest is coming up on Saturday, August 9th, from noon to 5PM in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. This is a giant, free, outdoor concert with loads of interesting speakers and all the gratis fun you can eat.
* Box Set, the clown princes of folk rock
* Noelle Hampton, award-winning rock diva
* Austin Willacy, rock, pop and soul crooner
* Colin McGrath, singer, strummer, arranger
* Lasana Bandele, the "Storitela" from Jamaica
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tech docs hall of weird
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DATE: 07/29/2003 09:21:50 PM
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Darren has started a site for collecting weird and goofy tech documentation warnings.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flat sinks
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DATE: 07/29/2003 09:28:18 PM
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Justin waxes eloquent about Kohler's sexy, outre and somewhat impractical new line of plumbing fixtures:
I think of a sink and I see an indent, a depression, some concave pocket in a surface that is designed to receive water and hold it for a time. Kohler has removed the bowl from the sink - there's nowhere to catch the flow. Water simply passes out from the wall, falls against a flat surface and trickles into a surrounding moat.
The sink was round and they've proven it flat. They removed soaking from the function of this sink, but when's the last time I soaked something in a sink? Actually, they do have some facility for soaking with the Purist™ Wet Surface Lavatory (K-2313) - they sell an optional Purist Hand Basin for $160.
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(Thanks, Justin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIAA will take 2191.78 years to sue everyone
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DATE: 07/29/2003 11:16:57 PM
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Silly but technically considered piece in the Inquirer (UK) today in which a reader calculates the money and time it would likely take for the RIAA to actually sue all P2P fileswappers:
She said: "I pulled out my calculator to see just how long it would take the RIAA to sue all 60 million P2P music file traders at a rate of 75 a day. 60,000,000/75 = 800,000 days to subpoena each person or 800,000 days/365 days in a year = 2191.78 years to subpoena each person". Michaela points out that it's unrealistic to suppose that the RIAA will have any money left in 2191 years, and she even wonders whether the trade association will exist then. Plus, she points out, given the rate of tech advancement, it's likely that we'll have moved on to many different types of music media in even a hundred years.
Sharman Networks (Kazaa) lobbyist Philip Corwin in DC more soberly observes, "I would venture that the RIAA strategy is based on the assumption that most of those sued will fold quickly and settle given the extraordinarily disproportionate statutory penalties that can be claimed under copyright law ($30 million for the two copyrights on each of 100 song files worth $99 retail). However, if the attorneys for the sued drag out the proceeding with motions and novel defenses (much less countersuits) the cumulative costs of prosecuting the suits could quickly drain the coffers of even a wealthy trade association."
Link, Discuss (via pho)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Illegal Art interview videos now online
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DATE: 07/29/2003 11:25:51 PM
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Lisa Rein is making a film about the Illegal Art Exhibit that just finished up here in San Francisco this month. She's started posting footage from this work in progress by bits and pieces:
"To start things off, here's an interview with Laura Splan, who's a local artist here in San Francisco that just got picked up for the San Francisco leg of the show (and will be staying with the show as it moves on to Philadelphia in September.) Laura created pillows of prescription pills. She's one of the local artists that got picked up by the tour here in San Francisco and her work will be included in the exhibit Here's Laura explaining why she feels she should be able to create art however she wants to."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SF vacancies according to Craigslist
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DATE: 07/30/2003 07:30:17 AM
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The folks at Craigslist produce a chart showing the trends in apartment listings in the Bay Area. That's a nice, healthy curve right there -- especially from a tenant's point of view.
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(via evHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Self-modifying hardware via distributed genetic algorithms
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DATE: 07/30/2003 07:33:29 AM
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Sexy new distcomp project aims to evolve self-correcting hardware designs using genetic algorithms. Welcome to the non-human-readable future! We should build GAs into every compiler, just to optimize code in a way that makes it really futuristic.
Host an island with a population of circuits struggling for survival in a hostile online world. During your PCs idle time individuals from this population will evolve through a process of survival of the meekest into circuits with Built-In Self-Test (BIST) and will compete with those hosted on other PCs by migrating to and from them. These circuits will not obey conventional design rules since evolution finds efficient solutions no matter how complex to understand they are - just like it did with our own bodies and brains. You can join into this cluster in one minute by installing the client found at here. Check up on how your population is doing compared to others here and name your best creations if they enter the "better than human" hall of fame.
Self-Diagnosing Hardware is capable of detecting deviations from its normal behaviour due to faults. Self-Diagnosis is important especially in mission critical systems exposed to radiation. Built-In Self-Test (BIST) is widely used yet commonly requires more than 100% overhead or off-line testing. However the latter is unsuitable in mission critical systems such as a nuclear power station controller where we must diagnose failure immediately. In the last 40 years of BIST research, spawned by the NASA aerospace program, conventional design has not come up with a significant improvement to the voting system as an on-line BIST solution. A voting system with two copies of the module being diagnosed is capable of detecting faults by comparing the outputs of the copies. This requires 100% redundancy for the extra module plus more logic for the voter.
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(Thanks, Miguel!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Briefing the court on Fuck
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DATE: 07/30/2003 07:36:22 AM
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On the Smoking Gun, a legal petition to dismiss charges against a student who called his Vice Principal a "fucking fag" on the grounds that neither word is that bad, with elaborate etymological research in support of the position.
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(via K5)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Onion infographic tackles RIAA lawsuits
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DATE: 07/30/2003 07:40:07 AM
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This week's Onion infographic asks the musical question, "How are music fans responding to the RIAA lawsuits."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ABIT's Fritz-chip keeps the RIAA off your hard-drive
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DATE: 07/30/2003 07:49:46 AM
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ABIT's new motherboard includes hardware crypto support -- presumably as part of participation in Trusted Computing/Palladium? -- (thanks, Wes!) and they're touting its benefits as a tool for keeping the RIAA out of your hard-drive.
For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened to users who were asking for information security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk and has a special decoder; without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk, not with a password, but with encryption. A password can be cracked by software in a few hours. ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files.
Link
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(via Inquirer UK)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Qu'est-ce que un BLOG?
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 07/30/2003 08:50:11 AM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris has assembled an online dictionary of 502 French terms relating to the francophone blogosphere. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: P2P politics: Travis Kalanick of Scour, Redswoosh runs for CA governor
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DATE: 07/30/2003 09:16:14 AM
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Travis Kalanick, co-founder of now-defunct P2P network Scour.net and CEO of redswoosh.com, wants to become the next governor of California -- running on what could be described as the "P2P" or "youth media" platform.
Sources close to the project say 26-year-old Kalanick plans to raise campaign funds online, and campaign compadres will include Angelo Sotira of Deviantart.com and File Front.
The gubernatorial hopeful filed initial papers in Norwalk, CA Tuesday at the county clerk's office, and will be listed as an Independent. To get on the ballot and formally become a candidate, Kalanick now needs at least 65 legitimate signatures from voters also registered as Independent, plus $3500. Platform positions have yet to be announced, but reportedly may involve P2P filesharing freedom, education, and taxation the economy.
Travis Kalanick for Governor Homepage, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Disposable digicams
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DATE: 07/30/2003 11:01:50 AM
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Chalk one up for cheap art and ubiquitous insta-media. From this week's edition of Michael Tchong's Trendsetter newsletter:
This year, digital cameras (digicams) will outsell conventional cameras, 12.8 million to 12.1 million, excluding disposable, one-time-use cameras. That’s a big exclusion because sales of disposable cameras will reach 214 million this year, up from 198 million in 2002. This week marks the introduction of the first disposable, two-megapixel digicam by San Francisco-based Pure Digital Technologies, which will be sold under the Dakota Digital brand through Ritz Camera for $11. While the Dakota sacrifices an LCD screen, which research says is the No. 1 reason people buy digicams, it’s clear that the fate of film is written on the wall. Kodak announced this week it would slash 6,000 jobs this year due to slow film sales.
Image Link to large product shot, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bedwetting cure?
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DATE: 07/30/2003 01:19:28 PM
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A researcher in Australia claims that he can cure most childhood bedwetting with simple therapy that improves nighttime respiration.
Mahony says that of the kids referred to him at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney because of bed-wetting problems, eight out of 10 have a narrow palate. In these cases, orthodontic devices similar to a brace can be used to widen the palate.
A Swedish study found that seven out of 10 children who had all failed to respond to other treatments for bed-wetting improved within one month of using such a device, with four completely stopping wetting their beds. Another small British study found bed-wetting stopped in 10 out of 10 children given these devices.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nailed by the RIAA? Blog it!
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DATE: 07/30/2003 01:21:04 PM
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My friend Raffi Krikorian is setting up a group-blog for running accounts of people hwo've been subpoenaed by the RIAA:
how did you find out you were on the list? did your isp turn you over or did your school protect you? what are you planning on doing now? talk about it all and let people know what is happening. help others that are finding themselves in a similar jam, and let the rest of us know the effects of what's going on.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Marriott agrees non-free WiFi is too expensive
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DATE: 07/30/2003 04:56:21 PM
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Tobias sez, "Marriot is going to start giving away free wireless to get people interested, as you suggested earlier it makes more sense than forcing stupid pay schemes and scratch off cards that drive everyone nuts."
Marriott International Inc. (NYSE:MAR - news) will roll out free high-speed Internet access at a number of midrange hotels in the next year and a half, but guests at many top hotels will still have to pay, the company said on Tuesday.
Hrm -- I love this dynamic about hotels: the cheaper the hotel, the less likely it is that they'll screw you on telecommunications.
Link
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(Thanks, Tobias!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nicotinis: liquid butts
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DATE: 07/30/2003 05:01:18 PM
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The Nicotini is a tobacco-infused beverage served at a trendy Miami nightclub that's had its smoking-section shut down by antismoking laws.
Call it a liquid cigarette because this drink comes complete with the nicotine rush and tobacco aftertaste found in a pack of Camels. These tobacco-spiked martinis are being served up for die-hard smokers who don't want to leave their barstools and go outside to light up.
Link
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(via FARK)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ISPs strike back: Pac Bell Internet arm sues RIAA
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DATE: 07/31/2003 12:36:40 AM
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From today's NYT:
A California-based Internet service provider jumped into the contentious music-downloading fray late Wednesday, filing a lawsuit against the recording industry and questioning the constitutionality of the industry's effort to track down online music sharers. Pacific Bell Internet Services, based in San Francisco, is seeking a declaration that the subpoenas served against it by the Recording Industry Association of America are overly broad in scope and should have been issued from a California district court, not the District of Columbia. The complaint also seeks a jury trial to have the constitutional issues addressed.
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Whacky air-races in London this Sunday
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DATE: 07/31/2003 06:32:36 AM
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This Sunday, in London's Hyde Park, Red Bull will host a competition to loft person-powered flying sculptures -- free admission.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 40h fuel-cell laptop by 2005
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DATE: 07/31/2003 06:34:22 AM
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NEC is promising to ship a laptop fuel-cell capable of running for 40h within two years.
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best American Science Writing 2003
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DATE: 07/31/2003 06:41:05 AM
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Wired News reviews Best American Science Writing 2003, the latest installment in a brilliant, must-read series. This year's edition is edited by Oliver "Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" Sacks, and promises to be fantastic.
An omnivore, yet selective, a sort of filter-feeder, I will extract intellectual nutrients from the articles as I extract nutrients from my dinner," Sacks writes in the introduction. "Every so often, however, I am arrested by an article because it contains not just new information but a highly individual point of view, a personal perspective, a voice that compels my interest, raising what would otherwise be a report or a review to the level of an essay marked by clarity, individuality, and beauty of writing..."
"Crows and their cousins in the corvid family, ravens, jays and magpies, have spent hundreds of thousands of years taking advantage of our inventions," Nijhuis writes. "They've been known to perform pitch-perfect imitations of explosions, revving motorcycles and flushing urinals."
The crow population in and around Seattle has increased tenfold over the last two decades, encouraged by a growing food supply as the area's human population has grown. University of Washington wildlife biologist John Marzluff has moved his studies to the suburbs to glean lessons from counting crows.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BB readers' discount for Stanford Singularity con
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DATE: 07/31/2003 06:43:48 AM
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Boing Boing readers can attend the Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford this September 12-14 at a five percent discount:
Special early bird extension: Save $100 (25%) on conference admission until
August 4th, for Accelerating Change Conference 2003, Stanford University,
September 12-14. PLUS: BoingBoing readers will receive an additional 5%
discount by using the discount code "ACC2003-BoingBoing" (no quotations).
The Accelerating Change Conference will be a forum to explore the paradise
of resources, as well as the risks and responsibilities, represented by
cascading breakthroughs in computational technologies. Ray Kurzweil, K. Eric
Drexler, Steve Jurvetson, Tim O'Reilly, William H. Calvin, Howard Bloom,
Robert Wright, and 17 other world-class minds will present to 300 attendees.
Link
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(Thanks, Tyler)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New tech tools for discriminatory pricing
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DATE: 07/31/2003 09:16:42 AM
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This BusinessWeek article explores how technology will make it easier for companies to "customize" pricing for goods and services:
Why do corporations want your personal data? The simple answer, according to Andrew Odlyzko, the director of the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center, is that such information is the key to a holy grail of capitalism: discriminatory pricing. Economic theory posits that price discrimination -- where companies charge individuals based on their ability to pay and their value as a customer -- is desirable since it makes trade more efficient. Yet it rankles consumers, who perceive differential pricing as unfair. The fact that business travelers, whose corporations can arguably afford it, pay more for airline seats than a vacationer has made air travel more popular and routine. At the same time, the price discrimination that charges two people different prices for the same class of service infuriates those who pay more. In a paper to be presented at the Fifth Annual Conference on E-Commerce this fall, Odlyzko, a Bell Labs researcher for 26 years, doesn't argue for or against discriminatory pricing. He focuses on how technology can bring it to new levels of sophistication and prevalence.
Link to Odlyzko's paper, Link to BW story,
Discuss, (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Linksys using GPLed code, not releasing modifications
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DATE: 07/31/2003 09:33:27 AM
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Rob "WiFi high-wire" Flickenger and his band of wily WiFi sreenigne (that's reverse-engineers to you) have discovered that Linksys is using GPL'ed code in its firmware without releasing its modifications -- a major no-no.
One early problem was that of the format of their firmware updates. While the code contained within might be released under the GPL, Linksys is under no obligation to release the details of this file format. And yes, I asked them directly, but to date have gotten no reply.
No matter, with the help of many interested people around the globe, we have been able to decipher the (relatively simple) firmware file format, and even make a little utility that will generate a valid firmware for you. (Note that it's really easy to kill your AP with "bad" firmware, but that's another story altogether...)
Now that we are able to execute arbitrary commands on the WRT54G, it is obvious that Linksys is running modified software covered by the GPL. One perfect example of this is Zebra, the advanced dynamic routing software package. By opening the firmware file directly, as well as by making queries through the makeshift ping interface mentioned earlier, we noticed that the zebra running on the WRT54G doesn't use the standard configuration file locations. This means that it must certainly be a modified binary.
Update: Rob sez, "I might have spoken too soon. I have been gently reminded that it is possible (in fact, trivial) to change config file locations without modifying the source. It also turns out that they are releasing some changes, but there is still some question about kernel modifications. I've posted an update on my original blog."
Link
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online boycott tools: is that album RIAA-affiliated?
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DATE: 07/31/2003 09:49:26 AM
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Frank points us to RIAA Radar: "Search to see if the album you want to buy is RIAA affiliated. Works pretty good, too." Query by artists, albums, record labels, etc.
Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free, Fun Fast Food Fonts
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DATE: 07/31/2003 10:31:17 AM
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Fonts that mimic corporate fast food brands (Coke, McDonalds, Burger King, etc.) Link, Discuss (via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese Psychiatric Art
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DATE: 07/31/2003 10:35:53 AM
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Surreal, retrofabulous Japanese graphic art for psychiatric drugs and psych reference manuals. Includes naked children on Rivotril holding daisy-covered umbrellas. So strange. Link. Also check out the American counterpart here. Discuss (via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Teens say: Interweb kicks TV's ass
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DATE: 07/31/2003 12:46:10 PM
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Teens and young adults ages 13 to 24 now spend more time per week on the web (16.7 hours) than they do watching TV (13.6 hours), according to a new Harris
Interactive and Teenage Research Unlimited poll. Web numbers don't include e-mail, which makes the numbers even more impressive. link, Discuss (via Lost Remote)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Island Chronicles dispatch -- House Hunting
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DATE: 07/31/2003 02:23:56 PM
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Our latest dispatch is now up on the LA WEEKLY web site. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kensington keychain WiFinder sucks
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DATE: 08/01/2003 06:41:26 AM
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Bob Rudis reviews the Kensington Wi-Fi Finder -- a keychain-fob-sized Wi-Fi detector -- on Wi-Fi Networking News and finds it sorely lacking:
I immediately tried it, since I have an open AP at home. At the time, there were no clients on the network, just the AP happily sending out beacon packets. The WiFinder didn't detect anything. I double-checked the settings of the AP and tried it again. Still no signal registering on the WiFinder.
On a hunch, I started up a couple WLAN clients and had them stream some music and d/l some game demos in order to create a good amount of 802.11b traffic. The WiFinder eventually did pick up the activity, but as soon as the traffic stopped (leaving the AP beacon only), the WiFinder couldn't find anything.
I was going to give their support organization some time to answer a few questions I submitted before contacting you and others, but when I was told that it would be 2 days before I would hear something, I had to start spreading the news.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RoboGrill to displace McDonald's burger-flippers
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DATE: 08/01/2003 06:47:54 AM
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McDonald's is testing new gear that eliminates human burger-flippers for robotic fridge-to-grill systems. What I don't get is, why doesn't McD's use ATMs to take your order? (Update: they are -- thanks Luke)
Later this year, a Chicago-area McDonald’s restaurant will fry up hamburgers with an automated grill that dispenses patties directly onto the griddle from a separate freezer compartment, reducing labor and promising fresher sandwiches.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fogscreen: ethereal display
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DATE: 08/01/2003 08:17:17 AM
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The FogScreen is a tradename for a display systems using turbulent non-turbulent airflow with suspended particles for a projection medium -- there's a nice example of this at the Indiana Jones ride in Disneyland; it'd be cool to see it in commercial use.
Link
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(Thanks, Johan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sen Coleman admits to downloading MP3s, but denies inhaling
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DATE: 08/01/2003 09:00:20 AM
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Sen. Norm Coleman is beginning to germinate a clue. He's figured out that turning one in six Americans into a felon for engaging in file-sharing is corrosive to the body politic, but his answer is to call for reduced penalties for file-sharing, not a new copyright deal -- like the one that created the recording indusustry in 1908 in order to legalize piano rolls, the first big Napsterization of music. Still, in this MPR interview, he does admit to having downloaded some Bob Dylan MP3s.
2.4MB MP3 Link
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(Thanks, Jon!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: crafts
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DATE: 08/01/2003 09:28:32 AM
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(1) origami
(2) mosaics
(3) papier mache
(4) hook rugs
(5) food portraits
(6) crop art
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: UK bans iPod-to-FM-radio gadget
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DATE: 08/01/2003 09:42:29 AM
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A digital device that allows you to send songs from your iPod to an FM radio has been banned in the UK, according to this BBC News item -- but the ban apparently has nothing to do with concerns over copyright:
A N Micro, the UK distributor of the iTrip, said use of the device was prohibited under the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. The act forbids the use of radio equipment without a license or an exemption. The iTrip transmits at very low power on an FM frequency and so in theory could interfere with broadcasts from a radio station.
Link, Discuss, (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Rutan private spacecraft in flight
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DATE: 08/01/2003 10:18:21 AM
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Here's a breathtaking photo of the Rutan private spacecraft soaring over the Mojave Desert. The airborne launcher and attached space ship depicted in the photo are part of Scaled Composites' program to launch a commercial manned space program. Link
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(Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I know who I'm voting for: Larry Flynt for CA Governor
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DATE: 08/01/2003 11:59:15 AM
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Earlier this week on BoingBoing: news that online entrepreneur/Scour.net founder Travis Kalanick is planning to enter the California gubernatorial race. But P2P, step aside for Pr0n: Larry "Hustler" Flynt just threw his hat into the ring. Of course, Angelyne is running, too. Update: And so is Jack Grisham, frontman for veteran punk group T.S.O.L., whose tunes include one titled "Abolish Government." I love this state!
Man, tough race.
The registered Democrat, civil libertarian and free speech advocate said he'd solve California's budget woes by expanding slot machine gambling. His holdings include several casinos. "California is the most progressive state in the union," said Flynt, 61. "I don't think anyone here will have a problem with a smut peddler as governor." Flynt had not yet paid the $3,500 filing fee by Thursday afternoon, according to the California Secretary of State Web site. More than 250 people statewide have taken the very first step of filing the paperwork with county registrars, according to the site."
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friendster parodies, party umptybillion: Introvertster
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 08/01/2003 01:04:59 PM
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To the growing pile of Friendster parodies and copycat sites, add the launch of introvertster -- snarky imitation is the sincerest form of online flattery. Link, Discuss (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sweet new Minox digital camera
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DATE: 08/01/2003 01:41:52 PM
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The new Minox 2 megapixel spycam is extremely teh sexy, and only $200 -- too bad it doesn't have a flash...
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecam helps foil alleged child kidnapping attempt
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DATE: 08/01/2003 01:57:56 PM
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Police say a 15-year-old boy foiled an abduction attempt by pulling out a phonecam and snapping photos of a man trying to lure him into a car, as well as the alleged abductor's license plates:
The teen gave the evidence to police, who arrested a suspect the next day. "It's surprising the kid had the presence of mind to use the technology under duress," Det. Capt. Robert Rowan told The Record of Bergen County. A spokeswoman for Sprint, whose phone the boy used, said she had never heard of someone using the new technology to catch a criminal.
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Steve L.!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vintage computer ads: "Digital Data Porn"
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DATE: 08/01/2003 06:26:16 PM
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BoingBoing pal Eli the Bearded writes: "This site pretends to be an adult fetish
site free tour, but it is really an
ecletic set of old computer images and ads.
I really like the print ad for the Pong
arcade game in gallery one. ("Low Key
Cabinet Suitable for Sophisticated
Locations")"
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ellis's Switchblade Honey
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DATE: 08/01/2003 07:54:47 PM
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Been on the road a lot lately, so when I dropped in at my local comics shop today, I had a ton of funnybooks set aside for me. The pick of today's litter is Warren Ellis's Switchblade Honey, a savage and fast-moving space-opera that wins the prize just for having alien propagandists broadcasting messages like "WHILE YOU ARE OUT HERE FIGHTING IN VAIN YOUR CHILDREN ARE BEING ABUSED BY FAMOUS EARTH ACTORS LIKE BART SIMPSON" through the Terran fleet's warships.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Great snarky photo-caption
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DATE: 08/02/2003 09:30:45 AM
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Curmudgeons like the infamous and accomplished Jamie Zawinski are one of the things that I love about the Internet, 'cause they pop off photo-captions like this one:
Dear Japanese people:
Please stop exploring your sexuality. It really freaks us out.
Love, American People.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RAPS: a fantastic way to protect your laptop
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DATE: 08/02/2003 09:44:25 AM
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I've written about RoadWired's products before -- their killer retractable Ethernet/phone cable (the best cable I've ever owned) -- but I don't think I've ever mentioned their RAPS laptop/electronics protection system. I've been using a RAPS sheet on my laptop for a couple years now, and I've just ordered another for a second machine. These are the best-thought-out, most flexible solution for protecting your laptop I've ever used, especially cool if you already have a decent shoulder-bag and only want at way to keep scratches and bumps at bay.
Joe Clark described it most lyrically:
In half a second Cory had whipped out a quilted metallic yellow rectangle, flipped it over, and unvelcroed two flaps, which revealed two more Velcro flaps. This was his 22nd-century laptop case...
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Censorship: How scandals get neutralized
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DATE: 08/02/2003 11:46:59 AM
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I picked up the new Harper's this morning to read on the BART, and was transfixed by the lead essay, "The New Censorship," an outtake from "The Middle Mind, Why Americans Don't Think for Themsleves," a book by Curtis White to be published in August. What I find fascinating about it is the very sharp and vehement analysis of how scandal after scandal can break in the news without tainting the political and business elites. Here are a couple of grafs I keyed in:
The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals? Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there's hardly a soul on these shores who doesn't know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and ExxonMobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even "watchdog" liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb's connivance in Florida. All of the details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts and books, yet it's perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn't a secret. The real secret is that it wasn't a secret, and certainly wasn't a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of a public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of "scandal," when in fact it's all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our "entertainment" and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!
All this being the case, what consequences can we expect from the work of Chalmers Johnson or Noam Chomsky? None. Their writings are taken up as a part of the spectrum (a modestly disturbing part of the spectrum to be sure) of info-pornographics. The truth-function of Chomsky's work is neutralized because there are people who will participate in actions leading to death and worse all over the world and then tell you about it. In detail. In great detail. The truth is that everything is known, the revelations grotesquely vivid.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TSA adds "sarcasm" to list of aviation risks
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DATE: 08/02/2003 05:03:29 PM
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A kid who put a note telling TSA snoops to stay out of his luggage was busted on trumped-up "bomb-threat" charges for penning the following and putting it in his bag:
''[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you.''
Boy, good thing the eagle-eyed, sticky-fingered underwear fetishists on search-detail were on their toes, otherwise, this kid might have been able to board an airplane with a deadly sarcastic note in his checked luggage.
You know, the more I think about this the worse it gets. The TSA is poormouthing at Congress, saying that it's run out of money and can't adequately defend our skies, and yet it can spare its highly trained crack professionals to go chasing off on ridiculous power-flexing exercises like this?
And before anyone posts the inevitable, "But the kid showed poor judgement in putting that note in his luggage," comment in the Discuss link, let me point out three things:
- He is a kid; kids are supposed to have poor judgement -- that's why we don't let them vote. If our national security depends on teenagers abstaining from foolishness, we are doomed.
- The TSA screeners are adults. What's more, they're adults who are supposed to be professional risk-assessors. If the people who found that note couldn't evaluate its risk any better than they did at Logan airport, we are doomed.
- Look me in the screen and tell me that you haven't had the exact same thought while having some blank-eyed bureaucrat rummaging through your dirty underwear. If that sentiment endangers aircrafts, we are doomed.
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(via FARK)
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TITLE: Why John Gilmore is a Suspected Terrorist
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DATE: 08/03/2003 05:41:46 AM
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John Gilmore has send Lessig a very good piece explaining why he wears a pin that says "Suspected Terrorist" when he flies:
The button is not a joke. It's a serious statement which one may agree or disagree with. The point that people seem to be missing is that a "suspected terrorist" is not the same as a "terrorist". Yet, that's exactly the conflation that has occurred: treat every citizen like a suspect, and every suspect like a terrorist...
On the BA flight, in my carry-on bag, I had brought the current issue of Reason magazine, which has a cover story with my picture and the label "Suspected Terrorist". (It didn't even occur to me to censor my reading material on the flight; I must need political retraining. I hadn't read most of the issue, including Declan's piece in it, plus I wanted to show it to Europeans I met on my vacation.) During the British Airways incident I never removed the magazine from my bag, but supposing I had done so, and merely sat in my seat and read it, would that have been grounds to remove me from the flight (button or no button)?
I am not a lawyer (lucky me!) but I do follow legal issues. The carriage of passengers by common carriers is governed by their tariffs, filed with the government. Common carriers are NOT permitted to refuse service to anybody for any reason. In return they are not held liable for the acts of their customers (e.g. transporting dangerous substances, purloined intellectual property, etc). BA's "Conditions of Carriage" are part of their tariffs (other parts include their prices, etc). You will note paragraph 7: they can refuse passage... 7) If you have not obeyed the instructions of our ground staff or a member of the crew of the aircraft relating to safety or security. The crew ONLY has the authority to order passengers around when the orders relate to safety or security. An order to cease reading a book would not qualify.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gladiator algorithms
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DATE: 08/03/2003 05:44:44 AM
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Nice account of Grid Wars II, a competition to design an algorithm capable of out-competing other algos for control of processor time -- I assume that just nice-ing all the competition way down isn't allowed.
In each battle, programs fought to gain control of processing power in a huge parallel computer.
Besides giving computer scientists an excuse to tear themselves away from their terminals the contest also has scientific merit, according to some contestants. "Grid Wars gave me the opportunity to test my algorithm," says Mark Wenig, one of the finalists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It is a perfect environment to test and compare different approaches."
The contest began with 236 different programs, submitted by universities, government research departments and software companies from around the world. The objective of each entrant was to fight for control of 2500 computer processors.
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(Thanks, Henson!)
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TITLE: Dave Nelson(s) versus the TSA
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DATE: 08/03/2003 08:51:31 AM
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The Daily Show recently aired a fantastic segment about the nation's many Dave Nelsons, who find themselves systematically harassed every time they board an aircraft because some computer, somwhere, has identified Dave (or possibly D. or David) Nelson as an alias that was used, or might be used, by some terrorist, somewhere. The segment is laugh-out-loud funny and awfully disturbing.
10MB QuickTime Link
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(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stross on mini-PCs
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DATE: 08/03/2003 12:06:02 PM
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Charlie Stross is musing about the future of computers, and he's making a lot of sense on the subject of little fanless dedicated-purpose PCs.
And the next thing: at a very specific level, mini-ITX motherboards and cases are The Way To Go. Tiny, cheap, fanless PCs with trailing-edge processors -- only 1GHz -- are nevertheless a really amazingly cool idea, especially when you start thinking in terms of turning them into personal video recorders (running things like FreeVo) or in-car GPS navigation systems. Or Beowulf clusters. Marketing hype has obsessed most punters with clock speed, so that the owner of a 2.4GHz processor sneers at their neighbour with the 2.1GHz clock -- but if both machines have the same bus frequency, memory, and disk architecture, all the extra CPU speed means is that the faster machine will spend more time in cache stalls. "Slower" computers (we're still talking faster than a Cray XMP here) that don't sound like an air conditioning system, that can run off a trickle of current and live in a case the size of a paperback book, and that are tailored to a specific task, are really useful.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: San Francisco restaurant hygeine
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DATE: 08/03/2003 12:13:18 PM
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Search for your local cafe or restaurant and find out exactly how many turds are in the soup using the San Francisco Dept of Public Health's Food Facility Violations search-engine. What exactly was minorly wrong with the Muddy Waters server's personal hygeine in March 2002?
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(via Salad With Steve)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gillmor on VoIP
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DATE: 08/03/2003 12:27:02 PM
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Dan Gillmor's column this weekend is a stirring appreciation of Internet telephony:
Previously, I had two phone lines into my house, each costing almost $20 a month for the dial tone plus local calls. One of those lines was split to also handle digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband data access. In addition, I paid a long-distance carrier per-minute rates and a monthly connection charge.
Today I have one phone line, split into voice and DSL services. But I also have a new box attached to the network that links my phone to the Internet.
The system converts voice into Internet data packets -- little packages of data that go to and fro on the Net -- and vice versa. For $20 a month, the box gives me unlimited calls inside the United States and Canada. International calls are extra, but at laughably low rates such as 5 cents a minute to Japan and 12 cents a minute to South Africa.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First Bollywood sci-fi epic
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DATE: 08/03/2003 12:37:27 PM
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Bollywood has produced its first science-fiction epic. Paging Bruce Sterling, your meme is ready.
'KOI MIL GAYA' or 'Found Someone,' set for release next week, features one of India's most popular stars, Hrithik Roshan, who plays the role of an adult whose mental abilities have not grown beyond those of an 11-year-old.
He accidentally establishes contact with aliens while playing around with a computer left behind by his dead father, a scientist obsessed with extraterrestrial life.
'We thought we should try something different and stop making formula films which are very safe,' Rakesh Roshan, Hrithik's father, who has produced and directed 'Koi Mil Gaya,' told a news conference.
The filmmaker, who has several hits to his credit, said he was willing to risk showing his son prancing around as an 11-year-old rather than the cliched muscle-flexing romantic hero that has won Hrithik scores of hysterical female fans.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friendster parodies, party umptybillion-deux: STDster
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DATE: 08/03/2003 04:33:01 PM
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Former BBguestblogger Karen Marcelo imagined a hypothetical "Herpster" months ago, the inevitable result of testosterone-testimonials, polyamorous profiles, and bulletin board booty calls piling up throughout the popular social software network. Now, there's this. Discuss (Thanks, Marcster).
Update: STDster's creator says he's running out of bandwidthster, and he's looking for someone to help hostster. Ping him if you want to assist.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: But nobody knows what time it is
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DATE: 08/04/2003 07:09:36 AM
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The Earth's diverging timescales -- GMT, atomic, GPS, and Coordinated Universal -- are the subject of increased scrutiny as the possibility of catastrophic temporal reconciliation events increases:
Unbeknown to most people there is not a single accepted way of telling the time, but several different scales running concurrently. The differences are usually small, but the scales can be as much as 30 seconds apart and the gap between them is growing steadily.
Aircraft navigation systems tell a different time from the watches of passengers, pilots and air traffic controllers. Experts are warning that this could spell disaster...
"We should only have one type of timescale throughout the world," says Bill Klepczynski, a time expert who advises the federal aviation administration. "There's a possibility for danger..."
The problem arises because the Earth cannot keep time as accurately as modern atomic clocks, which count the steady shaking of atoms. These atomic clocks replaced the motion of the Earth as the world's official timekeeper in 1967. The pull of the moon is gradually slowing our planet down, so every now and then our clocks are halted for a second to let it catch up.
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(via Interconnected)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ishotmyself.com: autoerotica
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DATE: 08/04/2003 07:13:26 AM
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Narcissism, navelgazing, nudity, and fifteen minutes of popdex/blogdex/daypop fame: what the web's all about, right? Ishotmyself.com = people (female people, specifically) snap naked self-portraits of themselves and share the results with you, and the rest of the online world.
Project_ISM is a public art apparatus. Each day we exhibit a new folio in which the artist presents herself in a bold statement about nudity, fame and the Internet. This is Selfploitation. It can make you look, make you think, make you jelly-kneed, and if you want, it can even make you famous.
Public art apparatus. Mmmm-hmmmm. Back on the farm, I think "low-budget/high margin pr0n" was what we called sites that solicit unpaid nude photos from amateur models (who are also acting as unpaid amateur photographers), then charge subscription service fees for folks who want all-access pass to the resulting images. Update: the project does pay some sort of fee to models, according to this section of the website. NSFW. Link,
Discuss (Thanks, Susannah / via indienudes)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi and email for impoverished islands
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DATE: 08/04/2003 07:13:58 AM
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The Solomon Islands, a South Pacific island nation whose economy and government are collapsing, is fielding a new initiative to provide free Internet access to impoverished islands everywhere, starting at home.
Already, Pfnet, the Solomon Islands People First Network initiative, is a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge 2002, and has been entered into the InfoDev ICT Story Competition of 2002; competitions that recognize the ingenious use of technology for the development of human life.
Pfnet is basically an email system, by which villagers in faraway islands like Ontong Java, in the far north-east of the group, can get in touch instantly with a relative in the capital Honiara, or someone else overseas, simply at the press of a button. And the beauty of the system, and what makes it successful so far is its low cost. Under Pfnet, an email sent from one of its rural centers to anywhere around the globe costs a mere SOL$2, irrespective of the length of the message.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hammersley to run six consecutive marathons through the Sahara
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DATE: 08/04/2003 07:24:18 AM
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Ben Hammersley -- gentleman journalist, hacker, RSS wonk and all-round world-travelling delight -- has entered the Marathon des Sables, a six-day, 140 mile daytime run through the Sahara. Why? For charity. EFF, ChildNet and the Retired Greyhound Trust, to be specific. He's looking for sponsorship:
If your company would like to support these good causes, have their logo all over my gear and televised in 150 countries plus photographed in hundreds of magazines -- not counting the ones I'll be writing about this in -- and plastered over my blog (yes, indeed, I'll be moblogging the damn thing), and have me run 6 consecutive marathons in the middle of the desert, then now is the chance.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Yawn-contagion correlated with kindness
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DATE: 08/04/2003 07:40:02 AM
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"Catching" a yawn from someone else is an indicator of empathy.
Those impervious to the infection also struggle to put themselves in other people's shoes, psychological tests showed. For example, they might be less likely to recognize that a social faux pas or insult could cause someone else offence.
Identifying with another's state of mind while they yawn may trigger an unconscious impersonation, the team suggests. The findings might also explain why schizophrenics, who have particular difficulty in doing this, rarely catch yawns.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ode to metric paper
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DATE: 08/04/2003 08:20:36 AM
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This is an exhaustive and charming and curiously passionate explication of the ISO standards for paper-sizes, especially that beloved old friend, A4.
You are in a library and want to copy an article out of a journal that has A4 format. In order to save paper, you want copy two journal pages onto each sheet of A4 xerox paper. If you open the journal, the two A4 pages that you will now see together have A3 format. By setting the magnification factor on the copying machine to 71% (that is sqrt(0.5)), or by pressing the A3-->A4 button that is available on most copying machines, both A4 pages of the journal article together will fill exactly the A4 page produced by the copying machine. One reproduced A4 page will now have A5 format. No wasted paper margins appear, no text has been cut off, and no experiments for finding the appropriate magnification factor are necessary. The same principle works for books in B5 or A5 format...
If you prepare a letter, you will have to know the weight of the content in order to determine the postal fee. This can be very conveniently calculated with the ISO A series paper sizes. Usual typewriter and laser printer paper weighs 80 g/m˛. An A0 page has an area of 1 m˛, and the next smaller A series page has half of this area. Therefore the A4 format has an area of 1/16 m˛ and weighs with the common paper quality 5 g per page. If we estimate 20 g for a C4 envelope (including some safety margin), then you will be able to put 16 A4 pages into a letter before you reach the 100 g limit for the next higher postal fee...
Using standard paper sizes saves money and makes life simpler in many applications. For example, if all scientific journals used only ISO formats, then libraries would have to buy only very few different sizes for the binders. Shelves can be designed such that standard formats will fit in exactly without too much wasted shelf volume.
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(Thanks, Bing!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Electronic talking glove for the deaf
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DATE: 08/04/2003 09:52:29 AM
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Inventor Jose Hernandez-Rebollar has invented an electronic glove that transforms American Sign Language hand-gestures into readable or hearable text, to help deaf people communicate more easily with hearing folks.
"AcceleGlove" translates rapid hand movements into data that a computer can convert to words heard from a speaker or read via PC screen. Link to AP story, Discuss, (Thanks, Brad)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Frottle: collision-mitigation for WiFi
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DATE: 08/04/2003 11:04:02 AM
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Frottle is an interesting application that schedules WiFi packets to avoid collissions and so increase throughput to all users. The code is open source, and the results look impressive.
Frottle works by scheduling the traffic of each client, using a master node to co-ordinate actions. This eliminates collisions, and prevents clients with stronger signals from receiving bandwidth bias...
Frottle currently operates as a userspace application, receiveing outbound packets via the iptables QUEUE functionality. Access to the network is controlled by the frottle master, sending each client a control packet (token) which contains information about how much data can be sent at this time...
"I have a poor connection to the access point. I have a low snr (varies from 7 to 11 dB) and rarely achieve better than a 2 Mb/s connection. When we were running without any form of QOS I was often struggling to achieve transfer rates of 3 kB/s. During testing of the current frottle I am able to get my share of bandwidth. My transfer rates now average 80 kB/s download and 35 kB/s upload. Peaks for these are about double this. The end result is a network which is usable and reliable."
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free anonymous WiFi at FCC offices
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DATE: 08/04/2003 08:28:53 PM
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The FCC is now offering free, anonymous WiFi to visitors, but they're logging all traffic.
Last year, Powell directed his staff to take the steps needed to make the FCC one of
the first federal agencies to provide public WiFi access. Visitors bringing their own hardware
and software can use the service on the Twelfth Street, Courtyard, and Eighth Floor levels of
the headquarters located at 445 12th Street, SW in Washington, D.C.
The system uses the 802.11a and 802.11b protocols, commonly referred to as WiFi.
The Commission will be unable to provide technical support, and all transactions using this
service are the responsibility of the visitor. At present, the FCC will not request personal
identifying information prior to allowing access to the wireless network. If requested by
outside authorities, however, the FCC will provide data from system audit logs to support
external investigations of improper Internet use.
80K PDF Link
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(via Werblog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hand-cranked Game Boy
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DATE: 08/04/2003 08:31:01 PM
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This hand-crank charger for the Game Boy Advance is out in Japan for about US$15 -- not sure if it's available in the US.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Leopalooza: It's my birthday, and I'll unplug if I want to
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DATE: 08/04/2003 09:03:40 PM
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Besides being my birthday (w00t!), and Jason DeFillippo *and* Reid's birthdays (Thanks, Joi!), Tuesday August 5 is National Pray for Fox News Anchor Bill o'Reilly to Die Day, according to California gubernatorial candidate Larry Flynt. Fellow August birthday-boy and former BoingBoing guest-guest-blogger Macki from Rotten says he's here in Hollywood to attend the service tomorrow in West LA, and promises to photoblog the crap out of it. Watch for Macki's images on Rotten.com sometime Tuesday. I won't be blogging or invoking anyone's death -- just unplugging. Cory promised to FTP me a Lamborghini or IM me a new yacht, though I'm not sure I have enough bandwidth. (wipes cake crumbs off keyboard)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blood-powered "human batteries"
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DATE: 08/04/2003 09:33:45 PM
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Researchers at Panasonic's Nanotechnology Research Laboratory in Japan are developing a way to draw power from blood glucose -- mimicking the way the body produces energy from food. The result could be a device capable of producing electricity from blood, effectively turning bodies into "human batteries". The estimated power output per person? Around 100 watts, or enough to turn on an average lightbulb. Link, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bye-bye, Miss Blogistan Pie
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DATE: 08/05/2003 12:51:30 AM
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Radio Free Blogistan reinvents "American Pie," and inspires this competition. Crank up the karaoke and step away from the laptop. Link, Discuss (Thanks, RCB)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi gear nearly free at this point
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DATE: 08/05/2003 06:37:29 AM
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God, WiFi gear is so cheap, it's nearly free. A D-Link router going for less than the cost of 10 lattes (or six frappucinos):
JustDeals.com is offering the D-Link AirPlus DI-614+ 2.4GHz 802.11b 22Mbps Wireless Cable/DSL Router for $28.95, $6 off their regular price. Use coupon code "DI614" to get the discount. The router has a built-in 4-port switch, advanced firewall features with parental controls, and is compatible with XBoxLive and Playstation 2. It's the best current price we've seen. Coupon expires 8/11/03.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Will Dell fix this guy's machine?
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DATE: 08/05/2003 08:34:08 AM
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An anonymous Dell customer has been trying to get his $3,300 Dell laptop to work for over a year, since the day it first arrived. He's had a terrible run-around from Dell customer service (a familiar story -- I've been there with both Apple and Dell), and, having reached the end of his rope, he's written an open letter to Dell's Board, the Austin Better Business Bureau, and a bunch of computer mags. Inquirer UK ran the letter this morning; I wonder if anyone else will: more particularily, I wonder what Dell will do about it. If there's any justice at all, this guy should have just been told that his machine was a DOA lemon and had it replaced; instead, he's put in hundreds of unpaid hours doing Dell's work, trying to make the defective equipment they sent him work.
My big question is, if this gets picked up by enough newspapers and blogs, will Dell replace the guy's machine with a current top-of-the-line box with a fresh one-year warranty and the direct number of a tech-support supervisor who can shepherd him through future problems? That's the kind of service recovery you'd expect from a decent company, especially after being publicly outed for egregious customer abuse.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Post-cyborg event in Toronto, August 14 and 15
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DATE: 08/05/2003 10:54:49 AM
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Steve "Cyborg" Mann sez,
We've all seen smart buildings, smart lightswitches, smart toilets,
and intelligent user interfaces, but what happens when you have
"smart people"? What happens when you wire up the "intelligence" onto
people?
2003 August 14th and 15th we explore what happens when the intelligent
building meets intelligent occupants.
The August 14th event will be an intellectual discussion about
the relationship between cyborglogs and buildinglogs.
Three panelists (Maurice Benayoun, Pierre Levy, Steve Mann),
moderated by the Director of the Marshall McLuhan Program in
Culture and Technology, will enter an immersive multimedia space
(a brainwave bath) while discussing the implications of the
post-cyborg age.
The August 15th event will be an actual collective (de)consciousness
where the occupant-cyborgs interact with the building, to
create an audiovisual experience from their brainwaves, as part
of a brainwave (de)concert performed by jazz musicians
Bryden Baird, James Fung, Dave Gouveia, Sandy Mamane, and Corey Manders.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Evaporating Danube reveals sunken Nazi ships
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DATE: 08/05/2003 11:21:50 AM
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Damned war-historians are getting a free ride on the heavy weather:
Europe's worst drought in years has pushed the mighty river Danube to its lowest level in more than a century, revealing German warships sunk to slow advancing Soviet forces in World War II.
As the Danube's depth at this remote spot in eastern Serbia fell to levels not seen since records began in 1888, the wreckage of an old battle ship last week slowly emerged above the surface by the Romanian border.
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(via FARK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hal Robins, notable SubGenius and man-about-town
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DATE: 08/05/2003 11:56:37 AM
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Marc Laidlaw sez, "Hal Robins was the key voice of our scientist character in Half-Life, and plays the role of Dr. Kleiner in Half-Life 2. He is also of course a brilliant
illustrator and Subgenius of note. And one of my favorite people."
Robins lives with a roommate in a Victorian apartment in the Mission that looks like a museum storeroom filled with dusty tomes and dinosaur bones. He reads constantly and can produce odd facts on subjects ranging from hallucinogenic toad spittle to the Bible to outer space to transportation. Some call him a "walking encyclopedia." Others find him infuriatingly unable to adjust to the modern world, often to his own detriment. Though his dress for the "Ask Dr. Hal Show" is Victorian, at other times he wears a fedora and resembles Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. He speaks in soft, baroque sentences and is shy and polite. For friends who come to visit, he keeps boxes of cinnamon candy in the refrigerator; he made it himself, from his grandmother's recipe.
Robins has no day job and supports himself by a variety of artistic pursuits. Since Robins was discovered by R. Crumb and published in the comic book series Weirdo in 1981, his dense, dark, detailed cartoons have appeared in collections with some of underground comix's biggest names, Spain Rodriguez (Trashman) and Gilbert Shelton (The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), to name a few.
Others know Robins as Dr. Howland Owll, from the Church of the SubGenius, a dada-esque art project and fake religious sect started in the late 1970s. A cross between a club and a movement, SubGenius pokes fun at organized religion and authority through books, videos, pamphlets, and performances. It has devotees in cities all over the country.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Make a Creative Commons vid, get a dual-G5
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DATE: 08/05/2003 02:48:42 PM
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Creative Commons is looking for entrants into a contest to produce a short two-minute movie explaining its mission -- grand prize is a dual-G5 Mac or an Alienware 2100DV Dual-P4 system.
Create, or mash-up, a moving image that explains Creative Commons mission, using your favorite moving image authoring tool, such as Flash, iMovie, or Final Cut Pro. Entries can contain video, animated images, text, and audio. We welcome and encourage the use of other people's work, provided that you have permission or the work is Creative Commons-licensed or public domain. The entry should be 2 minutes or less. All entries must be licensed under a Creative Commons license of your choosing by time of entry.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Open Source and Industry Alliance
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DATE: 08/05/2003 02:49:22 PM
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The Open Source and Industry Alliance, a new lobbying group spearheaded by some great folks, is making its first "call for members" today at 5:15 at LinuxWorld. Here's the OSAIA's "Statement of Principles & Purpose:"
"Open source software fosters competition within the software industry, and expands choices for users, which is vitally important to innovation, the economy and consumers.
Open source licenses, which grant to all the right to use, copy, modify and distribute the licensed software, are fully consistent with international norms of copyright and patent law.
Open source licenses ensure the freedom:
* to employ open source software for any purpose
* to study how a program works by accessing the source code so any and all can adapt it to their needs;
* to redistribute open source software without continuing royalty obligations to the original developer;
* to improve the software and to release those improvements to the public.
Business, government and private individuals must be free to choose software and technologies that best suit their needs, independent of the methodologies or licenses used in their development.
The marketplace must be free of prejudice against open source software, whether through law, regulation, defamation or other means. OSAIA will act to achieve this goal. "
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(Thanks Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Going overseas? Buy a phone there
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DATE: 08/06/2003 07:07:58 AM
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NYT interviews overseas business travellers and reveals that even those with tri-band phones don't use them in Europe, due to the exorbitant roaming fees (unless they're spending someone else's money). Most of them do what I do: buy a cheap GSM phone in Europe and get prepaid minutes and a local phone number in every country they visit.
But the drawback of traveling abroad with the same number you use at home is that roaming charges can add up fast, up to several dollars a minute depending on your service plan and where you are.
"Let's say you're tooling around Paris and you get a phone call from your cousin Larry who wants to borrow your lawn mower -- that call cost you $5," Mr. Kerton said. "And if Larry's a real talker and you can't get him off the phone, it could be $10 or $15."
For that reason -- or because they do not have a G.S.M. phone -- some travelers purchase a second phone just for international travel. That was what Julie Pfeffer, an analyst with DuPont Capital Management in Wilmington, Del., decided to do after realizing it was getting too difficult to do business on trips abroad without a phone.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Criminal Ukraine site-proprietor shot and beaten
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DATE: 08/06/2003 07:10:55 AM
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I don't read Cyrillic alphabets and I don't speak Ukranian, so I can't make much sense out of this "Criminal Ukraine" site, but I am intrigued to learn, courtesy of Bruce Sterling, that the proprietor "just got shot with a stungun and walloped with a metal pipe."
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(via Schism Matrix)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anarchist hives: you have nothing to lose but your royal jelly!
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DATE: 08/06/2003 07:14:20 AM
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"Anarchist bees" are rare genetic mutants that lay eggs even if they're not the queen, and do not destroy the eggs of other anarchist non-queens. Through selective breeding, it is possible to create queenless "anarchist hives" where the sisters do it for themselves.
Naturally anarchic hives contain a few dozen laying workers, and seem to function well. But by selective breeding, Oldroyd and his colleagues have got the egg-layers up to about 40% of the workforce. In these hives, breeding workers neglect their chores and the hives become decadent to the point of collapse2. "They can barely feed themselves, and they do weird things like trying to raise queens out of male larvae," Oldroyd says.
These selectively bred anarchist hives have some other odd features. Normal workers transplanted into them may start laying, which suggests that the queen's pheromones are weaker than normal. Most strangely, taking the queen out of an anarchic colony - which triggers worker egg-laying in normal hives - causes anarchic workers' eggs to lose their deceptive properties. They are eaten if transplanted into a normal hive, says Oldroyd.
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(via Interconnected)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Penisman: Giger meets The Tick
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DATE: 08/06/2003 07:17:09 AM
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Not sure what the story is behind this intensely creepy "penis man" costume, but it reads, to my eye, like a cross between a villain from The Tick and a banned HR Giger lithograph.
Link
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Discworld interrelations map
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DATE: 08/06/2003 07:22:44 AM
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One of the things I especially love about Terry Pratchett's convulsively funny Discworld fantasy novels is that even though they are numerous and interconnected, they are not, particularily, sequels to one another. So this chart that plots the interrelationships -- temporal and character -- between the Discworld books is quite a handy way of referring back to the canon and finding connections you may have missed the first time around.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: See you next week!
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DATE: 08/06/2003 08:25:27 AM
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I'm taking a couple days off -- from now until Sunday -- to unwind. I'm unhooking from the Internet, and am trying to stay off the phone. If you've got blog suggestions, don't send them to me (for the record, please don't ever send blog suggestions to me, use the form instead). If you've got something you want to discuss, hold off until Monday. If you've got an emergency, call my cellphone (and if you don't have my cellphone number, find another way of solving your emergency). See you folks next week!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF Freedom Fest in San Francisco this Saturday
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DATE: 08/06/2003 08:30:23 AM
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One more link before I go: this Saturday is the EFF's Freedom Fest in Golden Gate Park, a giant free open-air concert to celebrate freedom. There's not a lot of fundraising or haranguing (speeches are limited to the time it takes one act to tear down and the next to set up), just hanging out and dancing and enjoying yourself in the park. If I was in town, this is where I'd be: if you're in town, this is where you should be.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: AICN's Robotic Women of Film Contest
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DATE: 08/06/2003 09:28:36 AM
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My heart be still. Movies, fan art, and Robot Fantasy Babes, all rolled up into one gigantic Internet burrito of fun. Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News ran a silly contest soliciting reader-created poster art for " T-X Terminator 3 SIDESHOW Robotic Head for Robot Women." The results look pretty cool, but the site seems to be having intermittent bandwidth problems right now. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblog of extreme medical images
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DATE: 08/06/2003 09:34:15 AM
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I know, Fark Fark Fark. Look, I don't know much about this photoblog -- who's behind it? are they collecting found photos, or are they a medical student/professional? if so, what the f*ck are they doing blogging snapshots of people's living guts in the operating room? -- but it appears to be a photoblog dedicated to "pukeorama ubergraphic" medical snapshots, according to esteemed grossout connoisseur Susannah. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Grammy Magazine: Compulsories a solution for digital music?
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DATE: 08/06/2003 10:53:19 AM
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Grammy Magazine just published a feature I wrote on the debate around compulsory licenses as a possible solution to the digital music dilemma. For the record, I didn't pen the title that appeares with the story, and the use of the term "piracy" there wasn't my own.Hundreds of millions of dollars in profits are already being earned each year through digital music distribution, so the pro-compulsories argument goes, but not by artists or labels. Instead, digital music fans pay ISPs, blank-disc manufacturers, and PC- or software-makers: each a necessary component in the digital-music food chain. Instead of criminalizing filesharing, advocates argue, why not introduce compulsory-license schemes that would pay creators for their work while taking into account the inherently uncontrollable nature of digital music distribution?
(...)
"It's too late to put the genie back in the bottle, because the anarchy already exists," states [Jim Griffin, cofounder of the Pho digital entertainment discussion list and CEO of L.A.-based consulting firm Cherry Lane Digital]. "Monetizing that anarchy is the problem now. A new system might function like insurance systems do. Everyone pays in, and each of us draws out as needed."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Fans Battle TV Over Galactica
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DATE: 08/06/2003 11:01:26 AM
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Wired News ran a piece I wrote on the fan-versus-network flamewar over the 25th anniversary of science fiction TV classic Battlestar Galactica. Lots of stuff launches around the anniversary: DVD box sets of the original series and of the feature film in October, a new prequel game for PS2 and Xbox in November, an interactive TV prototype, and an all-new "reimagined" miniseries on SciFi channel that debuts in December (a teaser preview runs on SciFi channel during the August 8 Tremors season finale).
[co-Executive Producer David] Eick said it won't feel like conventional science-fiction television, and cites inspirations as diverse as the film Black Hawk Down and the vintage Atari arcade game Asteroids. "We considered seriously how space travel might happen. In outer space, objects in motion remain in motion. You can't bank against a gravitational pull. There's a sense of organized chaos, you have to turn your craft around and fire jets in the opposite direction to slow down -- just like the old games. When we were developing the show, I ran around telling everyone, 'Remember Asteroids! Remember Asteroids!'"
An introduction by
Moore on the new series' website indicates they're
shooting to transform more than a miniseries. The statement reads like
Dogme 95 for the
entire sci-fi television genre.
"Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science-fiction television series," Moore's statement reads. "We believe you can explore adult themes with adult characters and still tell a ripping good yarn. We believe that to portray human beings as flawed creations does not weaken them, it strengthens them ... We believe that science fiction provides an opportunity to explore our own society, to provoke debate and to challenge our perceptions of ourselves and our fellow Man. If you agree with us, then this is the show for you. If not, then thanks for coming, but the popcorn is in a different aisle."
Update: This very cool e-mail just came in from Jay Woelfel, the man who co-created the BSG "revival" trailer which ultimately led to this new miniseries being produced, though in a completely different fashion, and by another team:
Thank you Xeni Jardin for mentioning that filmmakers helped Richard Hatch
make the trailer that started the Battlestar revival effort in a major way.
I Co-Directed the trailer with Richard Hatch and worked long and hard
on
it along with many other filmmakers with whom I'd had a long standing
relationships with to get it done. Regardless of this, the trailer has too
long been written about as being Richard's Fan trailer and it's great to finally have someone give a more balanced view of how it was made. I hope someday the trailer all of us made is available outside of the convention circuit so potential viewers can really see what we all were trying to do with a new Battletar Galactica.
I wish the mini series well and am glad that the revival effort lead to at
least one new long-form Battlestar for audiences to watch. Thanks again, Jay Woelfel (Co-Director)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Battlestar Galactica, continued: Fans can be so cruel.
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DATE: 08/06/2003 02:27:46 PM
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Author and blogger Warren Ellis points us to this September 2002 thread on a Battlestar Galactica fan site in which fans pose questions to Ronald D. Moore, the writer behind the forthcoming "reimagined" BSG miniseries debuting on SciFi channel
December (read WIRED article about it here). What's so intriguing and hilarious about this thread -- which took place before the project was greenlit--are the questions:
* When you were following your dream to become a writer, did you ever think that someday you would be using it to crush the dreams of others?
* Are you lying to us, Mister Moore? NOTHING is going on with your production! Prove to us there is current movement or move on! We need some proof that you really filming & doing this miniseries.
* First of all, you probably think everyone hates you and how you took over the show. That's completely true. So I will ask, how do you think fans will embrace your show and why will they embrace it?
* I bumped into you at Paramount years ago. You've changed. When did you get a fire lit under you to be the next Gene Roddenberry?
* Mr. Moore, why do you lie (LIE) to us in some of your BG posts? You aren't telling the truth and you know it. Tell us.
* What right do you have to destroy something we all love?
* Mr. Ronald D. Moore, recreating the cataclysmic events of human kind's destruction on BG is deplorable considering the tension over 9/11, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, fighting in other countries and warcomingsoon
for Iraq, the U.S. And the U.K. Why are you choosing to retell the story
of BG instead of continuing it?
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Brion Gysin retrospective book
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DATE: 08/06/2003 02:46:50 PM
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The long-awaited Brion Gysin retrospective book is finally due out in the Fall from Thames and Hudson. Gysin (1916-1986) not only created mind-blowing calligraphic paintings, he discovered the cut-up technique later popularized by William Burroughs, co-invented the trance-inducing Dreamachine, pioneered sound poetry, introduced Brian Jones to the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and inspired industrial culture artists like Genesis P-Orridge and the Hafler Trio. Edited by curator Jose Ferez Kuri, Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age will contain reproductions of his paintings and graphics, samples of his permutated writings, and reminisces by the likes of Burroughs, John Giorno, and Gregory Corso. Link
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Social Fisking: the new new thing
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DATE: 08/07/2003 12:51:36 AM
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Yes, it does sound naughty, but no, it doesn't require any lube or latex. Social Fisking (derived from: Fisk, Robert). Just learned this word tonight. Means: QuickTopic freestylin'. Posting an archived copy of an online news or commentary piece with links to QuickTopic discussion forums inserted throughout. This creates an interactive way for readers to break down the arguments/theses put forth in that story into bite-sized chunks so readers can debate, riff, and discuss the story as you might if you were sitting around a coffee table arguing over a print magazine among friends. On the pho list, Kevin Marks wrote:
Xeni Jardin wrote an article for Grammy magazine on compulsory licensing. I've fisked it using QuickTopic here. If you want to join in, please do here. [The word "fisking" is] a warblogger term by derivation - it means rebutting an article by
interleaving quotation with refutation (or general ridicule). Robert Fisk's reports were prime targets, hence the name.
And pho co-founder John Parres opines:
At first glance, http://xrl.us/ogh appears to be a clone of the graphics and text published at Grammy Magazine. But on closer examination it is obvious you have transformed some of the original works by interlacing QuickTopic links within the original so as to create a distinctively new page that fosters criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, AND research. Indeed, in determining fair use limitations on exclusive copy-rights TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 > Sec. 107., USA courts are required to consider many factors including (3) "...the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole..." That's pre-Internet old skool, of course.
Today, you reproduced an entire work in situ, yet it is mechanically transformed with encoded instructions (hyperlinks) at salient points that enable new capabilities for public criticism and comment as encouraged and desired by the fair use exemption set forth by the Courts and Affirmed by Congress. The maximalists will of course disagree. But those of us who cherish the Communions which arise from the sharing of ideas, commentary and debate intuitively know these exchanges inevitably illuminate Knowledge and Wisdom -- which as the art-deco Masons of 30 Rock etched like lightning in stone -- Shall be the Stability of Thy Times.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Social moblog: raped at the pump
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DATE: 08/07/2003 08:34:44 AM
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Sean Bonner writes:
I set up this new public moblog called RAPED AT THE PUMP about gas prices sucking ass. Anyway, if you take a pic of gas prices
you can upload it by e-mailing it to gasprices.gas@tamw.com Textamerica, the people who host it are excited about it and are going to give $100 bucks to the person who posts the highest and lowest prices each month, so be sure to sign the post somehow so they know who took it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mike Hawash plea bargain
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DATE: 08/07/2003 08:40:52 AM
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A statement on the "freemikehawash" website reads:
Aug 6: Mike pled guilty today to one count of his three-count indictment. He admitted attempting to enter Afghanistan with members of the "Portland 6". We hope that justice has been served, and our focus now shifts to support for Mike's family in this difficult time
Link to SJ Merc article, Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoshop artifact in NYTimes news photo
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DATE: 08/07/2003 08:43:36 AM
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BoingBoing reader justin says " look closely and see if you can find anything wrong with this photo. can't find it? look at the front of the car on the right. methinks the ny times should have gotten it's act together after the walski meltdown..." And boingboing reader Anthony updates: "I have today's print edition and the cursor isn't in
the photograph. This might be something that was picked
up when popped online, rather than monkeying about in
Photoshop outright."Link,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Shirky on nutty pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi economics
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DATE: 08/07/2003 08:47:03 AM
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Clay Shirky sez:
More proof, as if any were needed, that the economics of Wifi are interfering with plans to offer metered commercial access. I have a T-Mobile Wifi account, 300 mins for $50, so that when I'm away from free APs, I can at least drop into a Starbucks, order up a doppio, and check my mail.
Today, T-Mobile informed me when I logged in that that deal was over, dead, forget it, they're sorry they ever mentioned it. Instead, they were offering me a "convenient" Day-Pass, for the low, low rate of $10/24 hour period. Meaning, of course, that even if you spend even as much as an hour logged in at a Starbucks, the cost per minute has still almost tripled, to 16 cents a minute from 6. Worse, if you just want to go in, grab a cup of coffee and check your mail under the old "10 minute minimum" regime, that will now cost *a dollar a minute.* I could have elective surgery for a dollar a minute.
This is Iridium or those back-of-the-seat airphones all over again. Any pricing plan that is even moderately convenient shows up on the spreadsheets at HQ as being less than a rocket ride to riches, so they come up with the two-fisted brainstorm of raising the price, then slapping a "Now with new inconvenience!" sticker on it. I smell a business school case study in the making -- don't take products with vanishingly small marginal cost and make them too expensive for your target audience to want to use.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Global storytelling "Fray Day" coming up in October
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DATE: 08/07/2003 08:49:21 AM
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Derek Powazek says,
"Fray Day is an annual celebration of true storytelling that takes place in cities all over the world on the sam weekend. Each event includes featured performers telling true stories, music, and an open mic where anyone can tell their true story in 5 minutes." Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Paging Doctor Robot
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DATE: 08/07/2003 08:52:41 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
This new high-tech robot is currently being tested at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. And so far, it has visited 20 pleased patients. The robot doesn't deliver advises itself. Instead, patients interact with a real physician through a computer screen, a camera and a speaker. "Looking at a computer terminal, the doctor directing the robot sees what the robot sees and hears what the robot hears. At the other end, patients can see and talk to the doctor's face displayed on a flat screen that sits on the robot's 'shoulders.'" Read this overview to see Dr. Robot in action and more details. And don't worry, this new kind of robot is not intended to replace a human physician.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Segway has competition from C5 electric tricycle inventor
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DATE: 08/07/2003 09:06:32 AM
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Warren Ellis points us to this story from the BBC which reveals that "Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the fabled C5 electric tricycle, road tests the revolutionary Segway scooter... and announces secret plans for another pioneering new personal transporter." Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes research digest from Berkeley Engineering
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DATE: 08/07/2003 09:09:51 AM
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In my latest issue of UC Berkeley Lab Notes:
* Lower utility bills through smart thermostats, sensor networks, and demand-response pricing.
* Berkeley and Intel launch a new testbed for globally-distributed applications.
* Fabricating micromachines right on top of ICs leads to smaller and less-expensive devices.
* Minimalist models for protein folding simulations make drug discovery easier, faster, and cheaper.
Please check it out! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Salam Pax has a photoblog
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DATE: 08/07/2003 09:20:45 AM
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The aliased Iraqi warblogger responsible for "Where is Raed" now has a photoblog, which contains some wonderful street scene images from Iraq. Link Discuss, (Thanks, Emily!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mass registration in the "Do Not Call Registry"
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DATE: 08/07/2003 09:57:35 AM
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I've been thinking about what the telemarketing companies will do once the National Do Not Call Registry kicks into effect. I wonder if the telemarketers will follow the Internet gambling model and move offshore where the cost of calling the US will increase, but labor will be cheaper. Then again, perhaps the US companies that hire the off-shore telemarkets will then be held accountable. Or, maybe the US-based telemarketers will start calling numbers overseas to pitch products to an international market.
Also, my friend had an interesting idea: Why not write a bot that will automatically register EVERY telephone number in the US in the Do Not Call Registry? All that's required to register is entering a number and an email address and then verifying the registration by clicking a link in an email. Doesn't seem too tough to automate. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: How To Walk On Water
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DATE: 08/07/2003 10:40:00 AM
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MIT scientists have discovered how insects like water striders walk on water. Rather than create tiny waves and surf them as previously suspected, the insects use one set of their hairy legs to create vortices in the water that propel the bugs along. In a bit of brilliant biomimicry, graduate student Brian Chan applied the research to build Robotstrider, a mechanical insect light enough to be supported by surface tension as it skims across the water.
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Social Fisking: some background.
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DATE: 08/07/2003 12:35:57 PM
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BoingBoing reader Ted Ritzer of WIFLblog says, "I took your lead re Fisking [see earlier BoingBoing post here] and posted some Fisking articles re RSS here, and another RSS Fisking Article here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblog the vote
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DATE: 08/07/2003 12:38:22 PM
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From Lost Remote:
The founders of two popular weblogs plan to launch a "smart
mob-style site" that promises to redefine news coverage of
the presidential campaign. Matt Haughey (Metafilter) and
Rusty Foster (Kuro5hin) say the site will post phonecam
pics, video clips, audio and transcripts gathered from a
host of contributors attending campaign events across the
country. The site will also feature an hour-by-hour weblog
of campaign events and news stories. The site is a great
idea and should become an instant hit.
Link to OJR story,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More wacky candidates in California governor race
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DATE: 08/07/2003 12:43:49 PM
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Forget about Arnold. And please, the Larry Flynt thing is so three days ago. Now, Gary Coleman, of television's "Diff'rent Strokes" is in. Also rumored to be collecting sigs and cash, comedian Gallagher, known for smashing fruit with a hammer. Other candidates for Governor of California include billboard icon Angelyne, P2P entrepreneur Travis Kalanick, and -- rumor has it -- Napster co-founder and Plaxo principal Sean Parker. Is there a tracking website yet to help us all keep tabs on the growing herd of gubernatorial dark horses? No? Someone should create one. Link to East Bay Express article on why Gary Coleman for Governor rules (Thanks Josh Phillipson), Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Photo Zen
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DATE: 08/08/2003 09:42:12 AM
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(1) a day in the life
(2) we are a camera
(3) 26 things
(4) mirror project
(5) stop motion
(6) collage
(7) my tiny garden
(8) astronaut dinosaur
(9) nyc polaroids
(10) emulsion problems
(11)
fotolog
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: EFF Music and Freedom Celebration in SF's GG Park Sat Aug 9th
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DATE: 08/08/2003 09:56:38 AM
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EFF co-founder and BoingBoing patron saint John Perry Barlow says:
This Saturday, August 9, The Electronic Frontier Foundation will host
Freedom Fest 2003 from Noon until 5:00pm on at the Music Concourse
Bandshell in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
I will be your Master of Ceremonies, assisted in this by the winsome
yet redoubtable Mountain Girl Garcia as well as KFOG radio
personality Peter Finch.
Mostly, it will be an opportunity to hang out in the park on what's
forecast to be a lovely day and listen to some wonderful music,
freely shared with you by up-and-coming Bay Area musicians.
Bands include Box Set (SF Bay Guardian's Best of the Bay "Best Local Rock Band" award winners), Noelle Hampton (Winner of the highly competitive Lilith Fair Talent Search), Austin Willacy (SF Chron describes his music as "an edgy adult contemporary sound that goes down easily and speaks to the heart. Don't miss him live."), Colin McGrath (He originally came to San Francisco to compose music for a comedy group called Killing My Lobster. That could be all one needs to know), Lasana Bandele (Bandele is a rastaman who hails from the Parish of St. James in Jamaica), and many more.
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New "anti-terrorism" spin for RFID
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DATE: 08/08/2003 10:14:48 AM
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Wired News reports that following the privacy-driven backlash against tiny radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, companies like Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee, Kellogg, Johnson & Johnson, and others are attempting to re-spin RFID as a homeland defense technology. According to the article--which refers to confidential documents uncovered by privacy rights group CASPIAN--the companies claim that tagging products with RFIDs will facilitate recalls in the event that terrorists poison our food supplies.
"The Auto-ID Center, an RFID consortium, presented its technology to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in Washington, D.C., last year. In fact, many Auto-ID Center sponsors consider Ridge's blessing to be key to public acceptance. An internal presentation by Fleishman-Hillard, the powerhouse PR firm that advises the center, lists Ridge as a 'top-tier opinion leader.' And the minutes of another meeting, attended by a representative of the Department of Defense, records a group statement that the technology will catch on 'when the government mandates it for homeland security reasons.'"
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: System for tracking someone's location by mobile phone launches in UK
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DATE: 08/08/2003 10:15:52 AM
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AP story on what is being described as the first major commercial service for tracking user locations via their cellphones. It won't be the last.
The mapAmobile service, unveiled last month in Britain, claims accuracy to within 50 yards. It charges an annual fee of Ł30, or $48, plus 30 pence per request. Even more precise services are likely in the United States within the next year as more phone models come with global positioning system, or GPS, chips already installed. Carphone Warehouse, which runs the British service, promotes it as offering parents peace of mind or allowing businesses to check on the whereabouts of wayward staff. "We are responding to a real con sumer need by bringing to the market a reliable, affordable and effective way for people to locate each other without disturbing them," said the company’s chief executive, Andrew Harrison. The consent of the cellphone owner is required, Harrison said. Even so, privacy advocates said there was potential for abuse. "Given that we know that schoolboys have hacked into the Pentagon computer, nothing is secure," said Barry Hugill of the rights group Liberty. "Once the technology is there, it is there to be abused and I find it very hard to believe that it would be watertight. Potentially, we could see stalkers moving in on the act."
The service is available from Britain's four main wireless operators: Vodafone Group, Orange, mmO2 and T-Mobile International. The smaller operators Virgin, Fresh and 3 Mobile are expected to join as well.
Link to AP story, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I hate Jason DeFillippo
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DATE: 08/08/2003 11:41:59 AM
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For nailing the coolest possible domain name EVER for a project that has anything to do with blogs and Los Angeles. Damn, damn, damn, and damn some more. Brilliant. The creator of blogrolling is packing his blog-bags and moving to LA soon. I think he's gonna rock the southern blogosphere. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DoCoMo plans fuel-cell mobile phones
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DATE: 08/08/2003 12:41:40 PM
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Mobile phones made with platinum that use fuel cells instead of batteries are expected to become available in 2004, according to an announcement by Japan's DoCoMo:
Fuel cells require platinum as a major component to enable them to generate energy. Platinum increases electrical conductivity in PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cells. It is critical to fuel cell commercialization and can alone command 10% to 20% of a fuel cell system's cost. Accepting the U.S. Department of Energy's target for platinum use in fuel cell vehicles - 0.2 grams per kilowatt - total platinum use by fuel cell systems could bring an 8% to 12% increase to the world demand for platinum by 2013, according to ABI projections.
Link, Discuss (via Viridian list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Latest Nikon digicam has Wi-Fi option and built-in FTP
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DATE: 08/09/2003 10:47:35 AM
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Via Jason "I 0wn all the good domain names in LA" DeFillippo's blog: "The new Nikon Digital SLR has an option for Wifi! FUCKING WIFI! Only problem is that it's 4.1 megapixel. I've got a 6.1 and I'll live with the offloading but... FUCKING WIFI! Here's good overview. List price is $3500 which is steep for the resolution but everything else on the camera is STELLAR. 11 area AF sensors. Jesus. And it's got built in FTP. The fucking camera has FTP. Those boys at Nikon rock. If it had a full sized CCD and higher res it would be perfect. Utterly perfect. Oh yeah, and Firewire. USB 2 is lame."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Geek-hipster erotica: Dreampod Sessions, Part 2
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DATE: 08/09/2003 02:42:34 PM
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Now online at Nerve.com: "Cold" is part two of The Dreampod Sessions, an erotic series by eminently cool Brooklyn-based geek photographer Siege. Shot with digital cameras, both editions in this series apply ambient gel lighting in a manner not typically used in such shoots. Unfortunately, it's paid-subscription access only, but this is particularly delicious stuff. Most certainly not safe for work. Link to "Cold", link to previous BoingBoing post, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Printable felony sarcasm
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:00:47 AM
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Inspired by last week's story about a teenager who was arrested and charged with a felony for putting rude, sarcastic note in his bag for TSA checkers to find, Jason Griffey has produced a printable two-up PDF of the note in question for you to include in your luggage, if you feel like becoming a felon yourself.
64K PDF Link
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Memory in mice: memory-readers in mice?
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:04:48 AM
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IOGear has shipped a USB mouse that includes 32MB of flash storage. Pete Rojas at Gizmodo likes the idea, but I'm more excited by the idea that someone would build a mouse with a universal memory-card (Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, etc) reader built in -- after all, these things are showing up in phones and PDAs and cameras and dictaphones; why not use the mouse's USB connection to replace yet another USB device on your desktop and in your computer? Mice are by their nature somewhat bulky, since a mouse below a certain size loses its ergonomics, which means that there's a fair bit of dead space in a mouse, and some of those universal memory readers are damned small and cheap -- seems like it'd be pretty striaghtforward to stuff one into a pointing device.
Link
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ian Clarke is leaving America
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:12:40 AM
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Ian Clarke has decided -- in the wake of Mike Hawash being railroaded into copping a "terrorism" plea for donating money to the wrong nonprofit -- that he must leave the US. I share his frustration and his anxiety. Sure, we're both white, educated technical immigrants, and thus relatively well-insulated from the excesses of the US's new immigration scapegoating, but every time I hear a story about a fellow immigrant to the US being terrorized by the immigration system, I get my own case of horrors.
Ian is the co-inventor of Freenet, an important piece of software devoted to enabling citizens of oppressive regimes to retreive information from all over the world: this goal is not only lauded by civil liberties cranks like me, but by the State Department and the Voice of America, which is actively funding research into this, as a way of spreading samizdata to every corner of the earth.
America is losing an important thinker and toolsmith in Ian (and no doubt, many other Ians are being scared off without the same fanfare). It's a shame that he violated Godwin's Law when he wrote his goodbye letter, as it gives those who would distract us from the real issue here a handy red herring to toss into the fray, i.e., pointless arguments about the appropriateness of a comparison to Nazi Germany.
As an Irish citizen living in the US - I have decided that it is time to leave this country - it is starting to look, smell, and act as Germany did during the 1930s. I wish you Americans luck in regaining civilized justice in your broken country, if not, I hope that the EU will be accepting of political refugees from this brave but failed experiment.
Link
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(via Infoanarchy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Revisionist Shrub action-figure with AWOL-Action Grip
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:21:03 AM
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KB Toys has released a $40 GW Bush action-figure, and have engaged in a shameless bit of historical revisionism by dressing the POTUS in a Air National Guard uniform, ignoring the fact that Bush dodged his military service by going AWOL and used his family influence to avoid paying the price that any other serviceman would have expected to pay for violating military regulations. This not only cheapens the office of the President, it cheapens the service of military personnel who honor their obligations after signing up for their hitch.
Link
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(Thanks, Jonl!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New "Spiders" comic episode online
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:21:50 AM
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The latest installment of Patrick Farley's brilliant alternate history of the latest Afghan War, "Spiders," is online. Don't miss this: it is hands-down the very best science fiction comics being published on the Web today.
Link
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Detailed spinal model indicates torque-related injuries
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:24:30 AM
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A detailed 3D model of the human spine -- an order of magnitude more complex than those in use today -- has revealed the potential for certain motions to induce very high levels of torque against joints and muscles, creating an alternate hypothesis about the source of back-pain.
But while the principal loading hypothesis can explain gross injuries, such as fractures in vertebrae or slipped discs, it does not explain the vast majority of cases of back pain.
The researchers say the spine should be considered not as a column, but as a dynamic chain of segments that can rotate. When viewed as such, it becomes clear that torque can damage the joints and muscle between and around vertebrae.
The model can reveal, for instance, whether equipment added to a soldier's helmet could result in excessive "torque jolts" - the kind of quick rotational jerks that Beagley and Ivancevic blame for spinal injuries - as the soldier performs manoeuvres.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Soda machine costume
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:26:47 AM
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I'm really taken with this two-person Japanese vending machine costume.
Link
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mash-Up Mixes in Salon
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:28:59 AM
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Salon's run a really good long feature abotu Mash-Up Mixes, the remixed music that combines contrasting vocal and instrumental tracks from different songs -- like the brilliant "Come On Eileen"/"Bring the Noise" combo, which remains one of my favorite MP3s to this day.
The wacky juxtaposition spawned its own kind of revolution, inspiring legions of the club remixes now called "mash-ups" -- with one classic example being "Smells Like Booty," in which Destiny's Child wails over Nirvana's classic dirge and drone. Also referred to as "bastard pop," mash-ups involves blending samples from two songs -- generally, one song's vocals atop another's instrumental or rhythm track. The sum of the parts often surpasses the originals. The more disparate the genre-blending is, the better; the best mash-ups blend punk with funk or Top 40 with heavy metal, boosting the tension between slick and raw. Part of the fun is identifying the source of two familiar sounds now made strange -- and then giggling over how perfect Whitney sounds singing with Kraftwerk.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Call junk-mail porn and it becomes illegal
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:34:33 AM
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A postal reg allows US residents who aver that they find a junk-mailer's crap obscene to demand that the junk-house refrain from all future mailings. A court precedent says that it's up to the recipient to define obscene, and that each resident's idiosyncratic definitions are above skepticism by postal inspectors. I wonder if this would work with credit-card solicitations?
A little-known Federal law allows individuals to send a Prohibitory Order against companies that are sending unsolicited sexually provocative or erotically arousing mail. The Supreme Court went one step further, allowing individuals to decide what constitutes "erotically arousing" mail. The law makes it illegal for a company to send mail to an individual within thirty days of receiving the Order.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Covert celeb endorsements sought for cigarettes
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:36:04 AM
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A tobacco company is offering big bucks to celebs who agree to publicly smoke its products in public.
Freedom paid covert actresses, called "leaners," to smoke the cigarettes in Manhattan bars and nightclubs for several weeks this spring in a New York effort to promote the fledgling brand, company spokeswoman Nancy Tamosaitis said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Technorati tutorial
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:37:32 AM
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Dave Sifry has begun a series of articles explaining the inner workings of his brilliant blog-mining service, Technorati.
1) We spider weblogs, and correlate each weblog's outbound links to any page on your blog/site
2) Technorati works on any URL - not just URLs for weblogs. For example, you can see what people are saying about an interesting article or favorite company, and get an instant read on the conversations going on around that article or site.
3) The simplest way get your weblog included in the Technorati index is to ping us whenever you update your weblog. That puts you in the high-priority queue for indexing. You can save the page as a bookmark, or you can program your weblog software to do it automatically.
4) To calculate the inbound blog list, we use the outbound links from the blog homepage, not from the archives
5) We do process RSS feeds an other metadata, but that doesn't affect your inbound blog stats. As long as you produce HTML, you're OK.
6) Nightly, we go through the database and re-calculate the number of inbound blogs and links to every weblog we track, which helps us double-check our work and also allows us to create the interesting newcomers list, the interesting recent blogs list, etc.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nature-sounds from British Library as ringtones
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:39:37 AM
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The British Library has licensed a number of its archival animal-sound recordings for use as mobile ringtones.
Hippos Bellowing
House Martin Song
Lapwing Calls
Lions Roaring
Lions Snarl
Loons Yodelling
Mallard Calls Female
Mallard Calls Male
Manx Shearwater Caterwauling
Marsh Frog
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(Thanks, Big Ed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Starbucks-smashers put San Francisco Fourbucks out of business
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:43:28 AM
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Someone blacked out the windows and posted out-of-business notices at several Starbuckses in San Francisco. The Starbusian ambassador decried these actions as a "venti, venti hate crime," against his people, whose tribal customs have increasingly become the target of vicious prejudice in many metropolitan centers and college towns.
The culprits went as far as to stick "closed" and "for lease" signs and notices on the stores -- using bogus Starbucks Corp. letterhead -- announcing that "thousands of retail locations worldwide" were closing, and the Seattle- based company was "making room for local coffee bars."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Print-to-toilet-roll
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DATE: 08/11/2003 12:47:02 AM
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The "Loo Roll Browser" is a browsing app that lets you send pages to your crapper to be output on your toilet-paper roll, so that you can fill your bathroom with reading material from the net. Me, I just bring my WiFi-equipped laptop into the porcelain reading-room and balance it precariously on the tub-edge when I need both hands free.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Warren Ellis writing a novel-on-a-blog
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DATE: 08/11/2003 07:04:27 AM
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Inspired by Unwirer, the story that Charlie Stross and I co-wrote in public, on a blog, Warren Ellis has decided to write a novel on a blog he's created for the purpose (parts 1,
2,
3 and
and 4 are already online).
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(via Charlie's Diary)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT Op-Ed: Spam, I am
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DATE: 08/11/2003 07:57:17 AM
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Hippie poet "Sparrow" ponders the odd beauty of wacky names attached to spam in a New York Times op-ed piece:
I remember the first unsolicited commercial e-mail message (otherwise known as spam) I received. It began with a friendly greeting: "Hello Sparquee." It went on to offer me various drugs like Valium and Viagra, "no prescription needed." The name Sparquee was a total surprise, but it made sense. It combines my name, Sparrow, with that harpooner from "Moby Dick," Queequeg. (...)
I love these names -- temporary, awkward, apt. They seem expressive of my inner selves. Sparky799 is my party personality; Souciep is my suave, artistic persona. Soowee, though mildly insulting (it is a call for pigs), is my abrasive side. Sparlin combines my name with that of my hero, Abraham Lincoln.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Mister Disruption Strikes Again
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DATE: 08/11/2003 08:08:03 AM
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I wrote this piece for Wired News about Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com (pissed off the RIAA) and Lindows (pissed off Microsoft) who's now aiming to overturn telecom economics with his latest venture, SIPphone -- a VOIP startup that offers free calling over broadband connections.
By offering low-cost SIP phones -- $129.99 per pair, with plans to reduce the price to $40 per phone within a year and $20 within two -- Robertson hopes to tap into SIP's early momentum, just as he did with his Linux and MP3 ventures.
"Wherever there's massive potential disruption, there's massive business opportunity ... that happens wherever you can completely digitize a product -- with music, MP3s; with software, Linux; with voice communication, SIP," says Robertson. "By moving something from the offline world into the digital world, you're placing it back in the consumer's control."
"There's no per-minute cost for the phone company to zap electrons from one set of copper wires to another, so why do we pay per minute?" he says, "If you intersect with the (regular phone) system, you inherit their cost structure. With SIP to SIP, it can all be free."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I'm guestblogging on mobile media news site textually.org
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DATE: 08/11/2003 08:32:31 AM
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For the next few weeks, I'll be moonlighting on textually.org, a news blog about texting, SMS, and MMS. Founder Emily Turrettini also runs two related sites: ringtonia.com and picturephoning.com. I'll continue to post to BoingBoing, but I encourage you to stop by the Geneva-based mobile media blog for all sorts of text-related fun. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Science fiction prefigured the Creative Commons
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DATE: 08/11/2003 08:45:53 AM
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Just came across this wonderful quote in Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril. Judy was a friend and mentor of mine, and her posthumous memoir, co-written by my friend Emily Pohl-Weary, is nominated for the Hugo Award this year.
Whereas in other literary fields you wouldn't dare take an idea from another writer and use it, because that would be considered plagiarism, science fiction people loved to build on each other's stories. The business of giving away ideas and promoting other people's work was a part of the community at large.
The Futurians did this to an amazing extent. For example, every Futurian had a pen name that included the family name Conway. A good number of the stories that appeared in science fiction magazines at the time were written by someone-or-other Conway.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 0wnz0red made the preliminary Nebula ballot!
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DATE: 08/11/2003 08:48:11 AM
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"0wnz0red," the novella that I published on Salon a year ago, has just qualified for the preliminary Nebula ballot! That means that in a couple of months, all the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America will have the opportunity to cast their preliminary vote for the piece, and if it gets enough votes, it will appear on the final ballot. I'm pleased as punch!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hong Kong Nazi chic?
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DATE: 08/11/2003 09:28:40 AM
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Weird fashion meme in Hong Kong: hipster clothing store Izzue has a "Nazi chic" moment:
Swastikas and other Nazi symbols are used as decoration in a Hong Kong clothing store, as seen on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2003. Israeli and German diplomats have lashed out at a Hong Kong fashion company for using swastikas and other Nazi party symbols. The Hong Kong-based firm designed a range of T-shirts and pants with Nazi symbols and launched new decorations this past week in its 14 stores. One branch projected Nazi propaganda films on the shop's wall.
Link to images and comments on Little Green Footballs blog, Discuss (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Real-life Hipster Bingo at NY's Siren Festival
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DATE: 08/11/2003 11:20:29 AM
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BoingBoing pal Mara says, "Some people I don't know (but suspect I like) went to the Siren Festival in New York and played hipster bingo with a camera." View the results here, including "guy in cabbie hat," "8-foot-tall guy," "chunky plastic glasses," "blogger with digital camera," and the ubiquitous trucker hat. Yeah! Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Missionites: Save Al's Comics!
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DATE: 08/11/2003 08:11:39 PM
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Looks like my local funnybook shop, Al's Comics, is in financial peril. I really like this shop: not only is it walking distance from my apartment, it's also covered in tiny, bitter signs spelling out the many, many rules of Al's domain -- an anarchronistic throwback to the comics-shops of my youth, which were presided over with the stern discipline of a loving parent. Al puts aside $50 worth of comics a month for me, and is always friendly and slightly intense as I browse his cramped, chock-full-o-interesting-stuff shop. Over on the Comics Journal, they're calling for comics enthusiasts in San Francisco's Mission district to go send some business Al's way.
Al's Comics has been the best comic shop in San Francisco's Mission district for well over a decade. Al has struggled to pay ludicrously escalated rent for his small but meticulously organized space, and the bad bay area economy has hit Al's comics hard. All the ex-dotcom employees who used to love Al's great selection of alternative and independent comics are long gone and not coming back soon...
Please, if you live in San Francisco or know somebody who does, encourage them to at least check the store out. You don't have to drop your current store, just go see what Al has to offer. He doesn't have a flashy hipster joint or a humongous space, but he's got a genuine love for comics and could really use just a little bit of your support.
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(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kucinich guestblogging for Lessig
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DATE: 08/11/2003 08:17:09 PM
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Congressman Dennis "Presidential Hopeful" Kucinich is guestblogging on Larry Lessig's blog for a little while, taking up where Howard Dean left off in July. Kucinich seems to have studied Dean's style and figured out how to improve on it, notably by avoiding presidential-sounding platitudes and engaging in something more like a blogger's otaku-intense exploration of issues that he cares about. Still, his tone is still slightly off, stilted like he was speaking at a podium and not to a group of pals whom he hopes to sway.
During my academic career, I studied the Failing Newspaper Act, which provided for joint operating agreements (JOA), which presaged the death of afternoon newspapers in America. In my own lifespan, I’ve seen the city of Cleveland go from 3 daily newspapers, the Cleveland News, the Cleveland Press, and the Plain Dealer, to just one. I’ve studied the Federal Communications Act of 1934, which set specific responsibilities for broadcast license holders to serve “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” H.L. Mencken, the famous critic, once wrote “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” Indeed, the Constitution is liberally interpreted when it comes to the government having any role in directing what goes into print. And that is as it should be (that is not to abandon questions of horizontal and vertical market concentration). However, holders of broadcast licenses have specific responsibilities to the public. It is the public which owns the airwaves. The public provides a license in exchange for service. At the same time the definition of media has expanded to include interactive services, the requirements of service have been largely abandoned as media monopolies have grown more powerful. Community groups struggle for recognition, social and economic causes which run counter to vested interests are marginalized, and our politics are corrupted by having to raise huge amounts of money from one set of corporate interest to buy airtime from another set of corporate interests.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ultima's economic indicators
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DATE: 08/12/2003 07:58:04 AM
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Julian Dibbell is an entrepreneuer who specializing in amassing virtual goods in the Ultima Online universe and then auctioning them off on eBay. He maintains a fascinating index of indicators to the health of the Ultima economy:
Total sales: $113,049 (-11,984 from last week)
Total sales, annualized: $2.9 million
Total volume: 3,147 sales (-341)
Exchange rate: $16.50 (+0.37) per 1 million Britannian gold pieces
Price of an 18x18 house in the new Malas region: $150.80 (-3.66)
My gold holdings: 74.9 million gp ($1,235.85)
My dollar holdings: $214.04
My profits, year to date: $1,088.10
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wooden mirror
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DATE: 08/12/2003 08:02:04 AM
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The wooden mirror is a dynamic wood-block mosiac that converts a 15fps stream from a digital camera into a series of images made from wood and shadow. This is lovely old 1999 technology, powered by an Apple Quadra.
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(via Charlie's Diary)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hypnosis: playing games with your head
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DATE: 08/12/2003 08:19:00 AM
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Interesting piece in the Canadian National Post about the uses of clinical hypnosis to address issues of performance and as an alternative to anaesthetic. Unfortunately (and inexplicably), it also conflates hypnosis with the use of magnetic brain helmets.
I've used clinical hypnosis since I was 12. Most recently, I saw a hypnotherapist to address a five-year bout of writer's block that ended when I was 26, and then, a month ago, to help me quit smoking. In both instances, I've had unqualified success. I started really selling fiction in earnest in my mid-twenties, and I have gone a month without a cigarette and without any serious cravings (I've been using the patch to cope with the physical component, but I've tried that before, unsuccessfully -- the hypnosis addresses the habit, not the addiction).
Hypnosis is really fascinating to me. It comes down to playing games with your own mind. In the case of smoking, for instance, the point is to come to seeing yourself not as an ex-smoker (someone who resists the urge to smoke every moment of every day), but as a non-smoker -- someone who doesn't have the urge. I'm a non-drinker. I'll have some Irish whisky at Christmas and chamagne at New Year's and a martini at my brother's wedding, but I won't drink a drop otherwise, and I don't miss it. Getting to that place with cigs, and as quickly as I have, after 18 years of pack-a-day smoking, was pretty cool. Made me feel like I'd attained root on my own brain.
(My hypnotherapist isn't taking on new clients, so please don't ask for a referral)
Last year, Stanford University psychiatric researcher David Spiegel used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to watch changes in brain function in volunteers who were highly hypnotizable.
The hypnotized volunteers were told to see colour. Then, regardless of whether or not the researchers showed them colour, the areas of the visual cortex that registers colour would fire. When the researchers told them to see "grey" objects, the volunteers had less activity in the colour zones of the brain.
"When they believed they were looking at colour, the part of their brain that processes colour vision showed increased blood flow," said Spiegel, who is presenting hypnosis research at the Toronto conference today.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NPR Radio: Friendster, Tribe.net, Ryze, and rise of social networking apps
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DATE: 08/12/2003 03:39:32 PM
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There's a new show on National Public Radio called "Day To Day," hosted by veteran radio and television journalist Alex Chadwick. The show as only been on the air for a few weeks, but they're doing some really interesting coverage on blogs, emerging technology, and how the geek world impacts pop culture in general. It's a great program so far, and I'm looking forward to watching how it grows. I was on the show today for a piece they did about the rising popularity of Friendster and similar social networking services. Link to show home page, link to today's show, and listen to today's Friendster segment by clicking on this direct link to RealMedia stream. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free is the right way to do WiFi
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DATE: 08/12/2003 11:10:16 PM
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Paul Boutin's written a great piece in the new Wired about the right way to do WiFi: Free.
Sure, leasing a broadband connection with a Wi-Fi base is cheap. But add a billing system - secure login server, transactional database, credit card processing, tech staff, customer service operators standing by - and the outlay skyrockets to $30, $50, even $70 a day, particularly if there are lots of support calls. (Ironically, most of those calls will be about problems with the billing system itself.)
If you want to see the right way to serve wireless access, find a Schlotzsky's Deli. The Austin, Texas-based sandwich chain figured out the secret of making money from Wi-Fi: Give it away. Schlotzsky's lets anyone sign up and use its network free, even if they don't come in for a sandwich. The chain advises its 600 franchise owners to beam Wi-Fi signals through the walls into nearby hotels, parks, and college dorms. Such complimentary access points are popping up everywhere, from Buck's, a roadside restaurant in Woodside, California, to the Portland Harbor Hotel on the Maine coast. And why not? Giving away wireless broadband saves on billing costs, attracts customers, and creates an instant competitive advantage. Buck's owner Jamis MacNiven, who serves buttermilk pancakes to some of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists, has the perfect rap on the topic: "Charging for online usage would be like charging for salt and pepper."
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(via WiFi Networking News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: They froze Ted Williams's noggin
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DATE: 08/12/2003 11:29:15 PM
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Ted Williams is a corpsicle, sez Sports Illustrated:
After Williams died July 5, 2002, his body was taken by private jet to the company in Scottsdale, Ariz. There, Williams' body was separated from his head in a procedure called neuroseparation, according to the magazine.
The operation was completed and Williams' head and body were preserved separately. The head is stored in a steel can filled with liquid nitrogen. It has been shaved, drilled with holes and accidentally cracked 10 times, the magazine said. Williams' body stands upright in a 9-foot tall cylindrical steel tank, also filled with liquid nitrogen.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Theme-park mermaids in danger!
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DATE: 08/13/2003 12:42:49 AM
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Nice little MSNBC video clip about a mermaid theme-park in Florida that's in danger of going out of business.
For nearly 40 years mermaids have frolicked at 27-acre Weeki Wachee Springs theme park in Florida. But dwindling crowds and a lack of repairs could mean the theme park’s end. NBC’s Kerry Sanders reports on the efforts to stave off the closing.
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(Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Philip Pullman's brilliant kids' trilogy
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DATE: 08/13/2003 12:42:56 AM
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I've just finished reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the first volume in a British kids' fantasy trilogy. I'm over the moon with delight. This is a brilliant novel: gripping, funny, dark, heartwarming and vivid. I haven't been so glad of a BritLit book since The Borribles Trilogy -- up until now my absolute favorite kids' fantasy books, not least because of their unflinching grimness and refusal to be even slightly twee. Northern Lights rivals Borribles, outstrips the Hobbit, and leaves Harry Potter in the dust.
The book revolves around the quest of a little girl to uncover the nature of the universes parallel to her own -- beginning in an alternate, steampunky Oxford University and ranging through London, the fens, and Lappland. The fantastic creatures and the magic that fuels them is utterly captivating and brilliantly executed. The book reveals its oddities and back-story in tiny sips, interspersed masterfully through the fast-paced action. I've just contacted my corner bookstore to see if they have volumes two and three in stock: I plan on devouring them.
I'm intrigued to see that there's an audio edition with Pullman reading: sounds wonderful.
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(Thanks, Cait!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Housekeeping: Fair and Balanced, link-suggestions
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DATE: 08/13/2003 08:19:34 AM
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Some housekeeping notes:
- Don't miss our new tagline, Fair and Balanced, and the discussion thereof
- Please don't ever, never, ever, never, ever send me blog suggestions by email. Never. Not if you're my best friend. Not if you're a publicist for a billion-dollar media empire. Not if you're a genius whose work must be blogged this instant. Instead, use the suggest a link form, which formats the suggestion for posting, is properly tagged by my mail-filters, and reaches not only me, but my co-editors as well. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Textually.org guestblog stint continues...
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DATE: 08/13/2003 09:33:37 AM
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I'm guestblogging on Textually.org for the next few weeks. Today, on the mobile media news blog: Ahnold's mobile holdings... UK carriers prepare for SMS surge as exam results are released... stranded Aussie cross-country skier saved by SMS... texted alerts tip IT pros to worm attacks... and new color Blackberry hits the US. Link,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony Ericsson T616 review
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DATE: 08/13/2003 09:45:46 AM
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It's a phone! It's a PDA! It's a camera! BoingBoing pal and Sixspace Gallery founder Sean Bonner reviews the new Sony Ericsson T616 on MobileTracker. Sean's not a journalist or tech marketer, he's a gadget junkie and fellow geek; because of this, his reviews are particularly enjoyable. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wi-Fi: WTF? Jargon confusion
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DATE: 08/13/2003 09:49:07 AM
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Some people in the UK who do not read BoingBoing are confused by the meaning of the term "Wi-Fi," according to this BBC news article:
The polling group Mori interviewed just under a thousand people for the survey on behalf of the computer seller Packard Bell. They were asked what the term wi-fi hotspot meant and were offered a list of possible answers. The wireless technology jargon baffled most people, who instead opted for some of the more bizarre choices. Five per cent thought that it referred to a night club, while 2% said it was something smelly that had been left in the sun for too long. Among the other explanations picked by people was a posh hot tub, a sunbed and a microwave ready meal. And 1% of married people though that it meant someone was having trouble with the wife.
Link, Discuss (Thanks, Kai)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friendster spider
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DATE: 08/13/2003 11:34:19 AM
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Ben Discoe has created a system to "spider" Friendster.com and build diagrams of the results. His website points to source code and binaries, so you can dink around with it yourself:
I wrote a spider (a.k.a. "crawler", "scraper", "robot") to browse the Friendster site, recording the following information for each person: id (e.g. 867412), nickname (e.g. "Ben"), address (they call it "Location"), type (valid or suspended), friends (array of friend IDs). My spider program starts with a given node, and walks outward through the network (breadth-first) for as long as you tell it. It writes its output to an ad-hoc text file. On the day that i first run it, i have around 14 friends and 220,000 people in my "Personal Network". I run the spider until i have around 1000 of the people (friendsters) closest to me. The spider is then tweaked to write output that can be used for graphing the friend network....
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speed up OS X's Mail.app by rebuilding Address Book
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DATE: 08/13/2003 12:43:05 PM
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A friend of mine from Apple tipped me off to a cheap-and-easy way of improving the performance of Mail.app, the mailer built into OS X. I've found that every time I send a message, Mail freezes up and the statusbar says, "Adding recipients to Address Book." Turns out that you can really cut down on this delay by forcing your Address Book to compress itself:
- Open Address Book
- Create 10 or more entries
- Delete your new entries
- Quit Address Book
For extra speedy goodness, try deleting the ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book/ABPerson.index" file, then opening Address Book and searching for an entry. This will force a rebuild of the Address Book index, too.
I've tried it, and it worked beautifully for me. What's more, it seems to have improved the performance of iSync for synching with PalmOS and iPod.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wish list: cheap or free laptop for Burningman?
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DATE: 08/13/2003 06:05:05 PM
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I'm headed to Burningman -- first time ever. Planning to do some live, experimental blogging stuff, and will likely also be covering black rock city chaos for one or more news organizations. I'm in need of a free loaner or super, super-cheap notebook computer to haul to the playa for four days, with the understanding that there's a possibility that the device will be trashed by heat or dust. My fragile little souped-up deluxe babydoll notebook doesn't fit those specs. Just using the temporary playa notebook for e-mail, text typing, web browsing, and FTP. Hey, maybe we could even work out a product placement deal, just like in Hollywood. This blog entry brought to you by someone's crusty old clunker notebook they're not using anymore. Seriously, though -- any great ideas? I'd be grateful to hear them, thanks! Update: I'm all hooked up, but there are some great suggestions for others who may be seeking the same, here: Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public domain needs your copyright horror-stories!
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DATE: 08/13/2003 06:26:41 PM
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Have you had your creativity and expression crushed by intellectual property law? Did you have a business, a work of art, a blog entry or some other form of endeavor that was squashed by the threat or reality of a trademark, copyright or patent suit?
Public Knowledge, Creative Commons, and The Center for the Study of the Public Domain are putting together a public-education campaign to disseminate IP law horror-stories to help people understand what the expansion of copyright and related doctrines has cost us all. They want your stories for the collection.
We'd like to hear stories from artists, authors, musicians, filmmakers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs, librarians - or anyone with a personal story involving intellectual property law. Your stories are important because American copyright, trademark and patent law, grounded in Article I of the Constitution, are designed to promote individual creativity and innovation: we need to make sure they're functioning in this way.
Unfortunately, the recent expansion of intellectual property laws has had the opposite effect. New laws are discouraging creativity and innovation rather than encouraging it, and stifling other important values such as freedom of speech. Longer copyright terms, the end of copyright registration requirements, stronger trademark laws and the expansion of patent eligibility are some of the changes that have spurred this trend.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Island Chronicles: First Day of School
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DATE: 08/14/2003 12:50:07 AM
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Our latest Island Chronicles dispatch is up at LA Weekly. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kucinich: Democratic hopeful and suspected terrorist
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DATE: 08/14/2003 09:29:43 AM
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Dennis Kucinich, the presidential hopeful who's guestblogging at Lessig's blog, has posted a cracking good defense of John Gilmore's practice of wearing a "Suspected Terrorist" pin on airplanes:
I have to admit to a feeling of resentment at the extent of the security searches every time I travel by air. The armed guards, the x-ray machines, the metal detectors, the pat downs, the search of luggage and personal effects, the removal of shoes, and for some, I suppose, the explanation of prosthetics, pacemakers, and appurtenances, constitutes a massive invasion of privacy. We have just come to accept this as a natural state of things because, like Gilmore, we're all suspected terrorists. I find myself having to explain to people why I, as a Presidential candidate, am repeatedly shuttled off to that special line of selectees identified by the SSSS stamped on my ticket. The transportation security agents inform me that a computer has made this decision. I want to know who programs the computer. Is it John Ashcroft?
Even though I don't feel as though I'm getting special treatment or that I'm entitled to special treatment, it makes me wonder how much of a threat I must be since I really do intend to replace the entire government. So when people occasionally recognize me getting the magic metal detector wanding and dutifully submitting to searches of my person, extending my arms and my legs spread-eagle, I explain with a smile, "I'm running against George Bush."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: French Hip Hop
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DATE: 08/14/2003 01:14:58 PM
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My friend Todd Lappin recently turned me on to the wonders of French Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap. Todd says:
"The lyrics to IAM's 'L'Empire du Cote Obscur' -- 'The Empire of the Dark Side' -- are worth checking out, complete with the translation. For example:
'Je balaie les petits Ewoks comme le vent balaie les feuilles mortes...'
(I sweep away the little Ewoks like the wind sweeps away the dead
leaves...)
Classique.
Meanwhile, NTM tends to write about life in the projects. You'll hear a lot of shout-outs to the 'Neuf-trois' -- The Nine Three. It's the Compton of Paris."
Tune in to Phatfirm Radio Francophone!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Multi-city blackouts? Power grid Clusterfuck?
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DATE: 08/14/2003 01:30:32 PM
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What's going on? My friend and ex-colleage Jason McCabe Calacanis says there's just been some kind of massive power outage in NYC... our old Silicon Alley Reporter offices just lost power... all phone circuits in NYC seem to be busy, and all New Yorkers on my IM list just went black. I hope everything's okay. This feels familiar, in a very uncomfortable way. Update: Reuters says " Power outages struck major U.S. and Canadian cities on Thursday, witnesses said, although it was not immediately clear if there was a link between the breakdowns. Power outages were reported in the New York metropolitan area and Detroit, as well as in Toronto and Ottawa, witnesses said." Sounds like the grid went down. BoingBoing pal John Parres IMs to say that there's been an explosion on 14th Street in NYC... people flooding car lanes on brooklyn bridge... CNN now reporting that "niagra mohawk power grid overloaded"...Warren Ellis points to news updates that blame Con Ed transformer on fire, upstate NY... Mayor Bloomberg says black smoke at 14th street in Manhattan not result of explosion/fire, but smoke caused by auto-shutdown....Numair IMs, "just think how PISSED people would have been if verizon had already replaced the payphones with wifi hotspots. 'WTFis this? WIFI?!!!!'
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P2P network originates in Palestinian refugee camp
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DATE: 08/14/2003 01:52:29 PM
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A pair of entrepreneurs in a Palestinian refugee camp have set up a file-sharing network using an app called Earthstation 5 that has been downloaded over 22 million times and has been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Turkish and Chinese. The app has a bunch of legal attack-resistance included in its design and deployment, though it remains to be seen how hard it really is to figure out who's using the app to share what.
"We're in Palestine, in a refugee camp," said Ras Kabir, the service's co-founder. "There aren't too many process servers that are going to be coming into the Jenin refugee camp. We'll welcome them if they do."
On its face, Earthstation 5 appears to be at the leading edge of the movie and music industry's next nightmare -- copyright-flouting networks based in a territory without strong intellectual property laws, with security built in that protects users from scrutiny. Indeed, the company is confident enough in its territorial immunity that it even streams and offers downloads of full albums and first-run movies like "Terminator 3" and "Tomb Raider" directly from its own servers, an activity that has previously resulted in lawsuits and the prompt disappearance of predecessors.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mini-Kiss cover band
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DATE: 08/14/2003 02:43:38 PM
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Mini-Kiss is a Kiss tribute band made up of little people. Here they are rocking Atlanta last month. Their booking agency, Littleman Entertainment, also represents Mini-Elvis.
Link Discuss (Thanks, Gil!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Devo sells out? (Again?)
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DATE: 08/14/2003 02:51:17 PM
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From AdAge.com:
"Whip It," the 1980 song that was the anthem of the band Devo's rage against a society dehumanized by industry and commercialism, is now the theme of a Procter & Gamble Co. TV campaign for the Swiffer line of home-cleaning products.
In a new version of the tune, Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh substitutes the lyrics "Swiffer's good" for the "Whip it good" of the original...
...Devo agreed to perform the altered version for Swiffer advertisements because, Mr. Mothersbaugh said, "it was so absurd. We like messing with the boundaries between art and commerce."
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(Thanks again, Gil!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecamblog the NYC blackout
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DATE: 08/14/2003 03:17:01 PM
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Welcome to phonecam nation. A public phonecam blog devoted to mobile snapshots of the 08-14-03 east coast power blackouts is now here. The organizers say "send images via email to blackout.814@tamw.com." Best headline idea ever, nod to BoingBoing reader chico haas: "NY AC KO": Discuss (Thanks, Caine)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Insurer adds lie-detector to its claims-line
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DATE: 08/14/2003 07:29:44 PM
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A British bank is adding lie-detector software to its insurance-claims phone-lines to help detect fraudulent claims. Boy, this seems like a stupid idea to me, given the fact that lie-detectors essentially measure stress, not falsehood, and given that the disasters that create insurance claims and the vile treatment that insurance companies deliver to their customers who attempt to file claims are both terribly stressful.
Telephone lie detectors are used by only one other insurer - Lloyd's of London syndicate Highway Insurance - which has had the technology in place for more than a year.
The system, known as a "voice stress monitor" picks up speech patterns such as long pauses before answering questions.
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(via FARK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photographic evidence of cetacean flatulence
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DATE: 08/14/2003 07:32:13 PM
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This is marvellous: the first whale-fart ever captured on film.
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(via JWZ's Livejournal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Troy McClure's Filmography
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DATE: 08/14/2003 07:35:37 PM
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The complete filmography of Troy McClure, the failed character actor on The Simpsons, with episode references:
# [7F13] "Here Comes the Coast Guard"
# [8F01] "Preacher With a Shovel" (with Dolores Montenegro)
# [8F03] "The Revenge of Abe Lincoln"
# [8F03] "The Wackiest Covered Wagon in the West"
# [8F14] "Calling All Quakers" (with Dolores Montenegro)
# [8F14] "Gladys The Groovy Mule"
# [8F14] "Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die" (1)
# [9F07] "Dial M for Murderousness"
# [9F07] "The Erotic Adventures of Hercules"
# [9F20] "'P' is for Psycho"
# [9F20] "The President's Neck is Missing!"
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(Thanks, Wickedfresh!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cingularity defined
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DATE: 08/14/2003 07:36:35 PM
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Nice pun from Geoff Cohen's blog -- attention journalists, use this when number portability kicks in in November and you will be So! Cool!
Cingularity: The point in time when exponentially increasing churn rates among mobile telephony subscribers reaches infinity.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hassidic soap opera
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DATE: 08/15/2003 07:31:53 AM
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A new Israeli soap opera deals with Hassidic Jews:
"The Rebbe's Court" opens to traditional music played to a rock beat. The main plot centers on Hanoch, the son-in-law of community leader Rabbi Azriel Rutenberg. Hanoch, who is married to the beautiful Zippora, is expelled from the community and reluctantly settles in the secular world after being falsely accused of gambling with $250,000 of the community's funds.
Zippora believes in Hanoch's innocence, and resists matchmakers' efforts to find her a new husband. Meanwhile, her younger sister Ruhi is plotting to snare Hanoch for herself -- and that's just in the first of 26 episodes.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Trademark-holders don't have to be bullies
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DATE: 08/15/2003 07:33:48 AM
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I've written an editorial on trademark law that's very timely, given that today is Fair and Balanced Friday.
There aren't many areas of business wisdom more fraught with superstition and dread than trademark lore. Trademarks exist, mainly, to prevent consumer confusion, but for many business people, they're important competitive assets. They're the company's good name, upon which it trades, and companies have a duty to their shareholders to defend those good names. And defend it they do, even if the defense is so odious that it makes the company synonymous with litigious bullying.
Ask a lawyer for a 100 percent assurance of trademark protection and he'll give you plain advice: pay me to send a nasty letter to everyone who utters your name without due care and specificity, or I can't guarantee you that your mark won't slip out of your fingers and into the public domain. He won't be lying: 100 percent certainty is the kind of unrealistic objective that requires extraordinary, self-defeating measures to achieve.
Ask a security consultant to eliminate 100 percent of the shoplifting in your store, and he'll tell you to cavity-search all customers on the way out. Sure, it's effective, but if you want to stay in business, you'll need to consider trading off smugly complete certainty for a cheaper and more friendly 95 percent (or even 75 percent!) solution: say, magnetic door-monitors and a couple of plainclothes rent-a-cops in the aisles. Your legal counsel works for you: he's capable of giving you the same kind of 95 percent solution that your security outfit is -- and if he isn't, maybe it's time to seek better counsel.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: WiFi Redwoods
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DATE: 08/15/2003 08:20:50 AM
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UC Berkeley researchers instrumented redwood trees with tiny sensor "motes" that measure light, temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. Running their own TinyOS software, the sensors establish ad-hoc wireless networks to transmit the data they gather about the microclimates in the tree canopy. "One thing lacking in the forestry community is precise environmental information," says biologist Todd Dawson. "These sensors will help predict how trees are going to grow under a variety of circumstances." The research is part of the Smart Dust wireless sensor network efforts at Berkeley and Intel Research that I've written about in Lab Notes. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: East Coast bloggers' first-hand accounts of blackout
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DATE: 08/15/2003 08:33:00 AM
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Bloggers in New York and other cities affected by yesterday's blackouts -- which, for some, are still in effect today -- are posting first-hand accounts. Here's one from BoingBoing pal Gabe:
I was standing at the urinal in the Men's restroom here at work when the power shut off. Yeah, yeah, very funny, I thought. Who's fucking with the light switch? I finished up and fumbled outside back to my office and discovered that the whole building was without power.
From my office window, I can see the NYU dorm across the street. I saw a kid at the window, waved to him. He waved back. He pointed at his computer monitor, then drew his hand horizontally across his neck, the international sign for 'kill him', or 'you're dead meat', or something. Anyway, I pointed to my monitor and did the same thing. So I told the people in my office that the dorm didn't have power either.
Link, Got other urls of first-hand blog-accounts to share? Post them here: Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grokster: Record labels are an illegal cartel
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DATE: 08/15/2003 08:44:29 AM
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Grokster (a P2P network) has reported the record companies to the British office of Fair Trading for refusing to negotiate schemes for legalizing file-sharing.
"It's clearly a cartel in violation of competition laws. We've tried to negotiate with the record labels. They leave us no choice but to protect consumers and ourselves from these grievous practices," Mr Rosso told trade magazine New Media Age.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friendster fakesters
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DATE: 08/15/2003 09:01:11 AM
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Article in SF Weekly about folks who hack the Friendster world by creating profiles for wacky online aliases instead of their "real" selves. Needless to say, the folks at Friendster.com aren't crazy about this. The site has attracted legions of young creative types: DJs, artists, media people, Burning Man freaks, and other hipsters -- particularly in tech-savvy San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Not surprisingly, many of them went to great lengths to make their profiles unusual, or above-it-all and drenched in irony. Some, like Batty, took it a step further by not being themselves at all.
Batty and numerous other Friendsters routinely violate the site's user agreement by creating fictional characters as profiles instead of, or in addition to, their "real" profiles. These "fakesters" portray themselves as everything from inanimate objects like the World Trade Center to celebrities like Paris Hilton to historical forces like War (which lists its profession as "resolving disputes"). Emboldened by their masks and often preferring the weird over the normal, fakesters are turning Friendster on its ear. They link to other users they've never met in real life, flouting the site's original intent of connecting people through verifiable personal relationships. Many compete to link to as many other users as possible, so that their fictional characters function as social hubs in the Friendster network.
Link, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Starfucker phonecamblog
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DATE: 08/15/2003 09:11:57 AM
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New collaborative, LA-based phonecamblog dedicated to celebrity sightings. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA event this weekend: Robot mayhem!
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DATE: 08/15/2003 09:15:57 AM
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BoingBoing pal and Robotics Society of America President David Calkins says:
If you liked BattleBots or RobotWars on TV, you should see robot combat up
close and in person. SteelConflict and the Robot Fighting League come to LA
this weekend for 2 days of flame-throwing, parts-flying, metal crunching
mayhem. Peterson Automotive Museum on Wilshire. $12 gets you all the
destruction you could want.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: HTML and hedonism: Ibiza summer weblog
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DATE: 08/15/2003 09:22:55 AM
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If you're into boobies, ketamine, loud trance music, and the feel of Mediterranean sand up your intoxicated (but bronzed and beautiful) butt, you'll love this blog about summer in Ibiza. Or thould I thay, thummer in Ibitha. Don't miss entries like "Fuck me I'm Famous." NSFW. Link, Discuss (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool french "mute" artblog
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DATE: 08/15/2003 09:30:45 AM
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Interesting little French blog that speaks in bands of color. Link, Discuss (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: List of "Fair and Balanced" weblogs is huge
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DATE: 08/15/2003 10:06:29 AM
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Today is "Fair and Balanced" Friday, and the list of participating blogs and websites is growing. Link to partial list of participants (which includes the freakin' 1108th AVCRAD, a Mississippi-based unit of the Aviation Maintenance Team for the US National Guard!). previous BoingBoing post, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on "Fair and Balanced"
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DATE: 08/15/2003 11:15:33 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted a capture of the Daily Show's segment on Al Franken and Fox's fight over "Fair and Balanced."
Best line: "If anyone knows about blurring and tarnishing 'Fair and Balanced,' it's Fox News."
Second best line: "We all know that corporations must be protected from individuals."
6MB Quicktime Link
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(Thanks, Lisa!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My WorldCon schedule
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DATE: 08/15/2003 12:13:37 PM
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I've just gotten my tentative schedule from the organizers of this year's World Science Fiction Convention, which runs from August 28th to Sept 1 in Toronto. Hope to see some of you there -- especially at my reading! (Note: I'm trying to get my reading rescheduled so it's not in the middle of the dinner-hour: I'll let you know how it works out).
- Thursday, August 28th: Old New Voices: The John W. Campbell Award Winners, Thirty Years Later (2PM-3PM), Conference center 104CD
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Come join our august group of panellists as they discuss the John W. Campbell Award and the impact it made on them and their career.
(George R. R. Martin, Cory Doctorow, Gardner Dozois, Alexis Gilliland, Harry Harrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Spider Robinson, Kristine Smith, Amy Thomson, Lisa Tuttle)
- Thursday, Aug 28, Electronic Books - What do READERS Need? (6PM-7PM), Conference center 201E
- Our own genre extols the virtures of easily accessing electronic information, but the reality falls far short. What's missing? What's needed? What are the roadblocks?
(John Bartley, Stephanie Bedwell-Grime, Cory Doctorow, Norma McPhee, Michael Ward)
- Friday, August 29, Reading (6PM-6:30PM), Conference center 203A
- Saturday, August 30: Awards and Getting Discovered (3PM-4PM), Conference center 205B
- (Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Karin Lowachee)
- Sunday, August 31: The Economics of Innovation (10AM - 11AM), Conference center 203BD
- Sometimes what seems like a brilliant idea really isn't, when the true cost of implementation is considered vs. other options. This panel will try, once and for all, to drive a stake in the heart of the so-called "solar power satellite", but will also discuss what advances or breakthroughs are needed for other ideas to become economically feasible.
(Charles Cohen, Cory Doctorow, Tom Doherty, Richard Lynch)
- Monday, September 1: The Death of Money (noon-1PM), Conference center 104A
- Money is a tool to ration limited wealth. With AI and robotics the potential exists for infinite wealth. How will this affect the existence of money, and what sort of society might emerge as a result? What sort of society do we want to create? How do we create it?
(Cory Doctorow, Sean Mead, Charlie Stross, Walter Jon Williams, Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Giant spectrum poster for the masses
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DATE: 08/15/2003 03:38:57 PM
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The New America Foundation has produced an enormous, informative poster explaining the public interest in spectrum allocation, and the possible outcomes of the recommendations of the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force. The SPTF's report was, I think, very good -- better than the New America Foundation would have it anyway. Though I personally think that New America is right to indetify the potential problems associated with granting a windfall to entrenched corporate interests by allowing property rights in spectrum, the critical isssue that the SPTF addressed was whether spectrum serves the public interest better when in the hands of exclusiveusers or when in the public arena. This is a pretty radical notion, and no matter whether the FCC turns spectrum over for use in common or for unregulated use to "owners" or long-term leaseholders, the fact that it's willing to concede that shared, "dumb" spectrum that is navigated by smart devices is superior to exclusive-use spectrum is remarkable.
On a personal note, I sure wish that every single link on that site wouldn't try to open up in its own window. I'm perfectly capable of holding down the command-key when I want to make a new window; I don't need the site's author deciding for me.
Link
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(via WiFi Net News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Comic-shop shelf-sign maker
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DATE: 08/16/2003 07:05:48 AM
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Dan sez, "This is the latest tool in my suite of free tools for comic book retailers. Just input a Diamond Comics item number and an optional image link to create customizable mini-displays for comic books and graphic novels."
Link
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(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photographs of the blackout, from Manhattan
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DATE: 08/16/2003 07:57:27 AM
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John Wehr (of Memeufacture and RFID News) contributes this batch of online photos: "Hordes take Broadway, the Brooklyn Bridge exodus, the impromptu Ludlow street bongo-party and the Lower East side asleep. About 50 640x480 photographs with captions taken on August 14th in downtown NYC." At left, snapshot of a beauty salon without power, coiffing clients al fresco instead. Is this a completely coincidental blackout snapshot of blogger and serial entrepreneur Nick Denton, or do I need stronger coffee/contact lenses this morning?
Link to photos, Discuss, more photoblogs and first-hand weblog accounts from BoingBoing readers here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Fully interactive" porn DVDs become a reality
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DATE: 08/17/2003 08:51:19 AM
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NYT story on the growing popularity of "interactive porn" DVDs, such as one presently top-selling set of nine DVDs (retailing for $31 per disc) that promises "Virtual Sex With..." various stars:
The actress is shown looking at the camera the whole time and talking directly to the viewer. Her co-star is never fully revealed. Only his hands and other crucial appendages are visible, depending on the sex act that the viewer gets to choose.(...)In "Virtual Sex With Devon," the DVD starts with a brief introduction: "I'm Devon. Are you ready to play with me?" At that point Devon's head bobs robotically back into place and the same greeting is repeated until the viewer chooses from four features offered on the on-screen menu: "Strip," "Stories," "Foreplay" and "Sex."
If the viewer chooses the "Foreplay" or "Sex" option, he can choose one of four sexual positions and even Devon's "demeanor" — like "innocent" or "nasty" (when she "talks dirty and gets dominant"). There are also little icons on screen in the shape of tongues, vibrators and fingers to choose from to further direct the action."You choose the sexual positions!" screams the box text for the "Virtual Sex" series. "You choose the camera angles! You can choose her moods between innocent and nasty! You ask her to strip naked for you! You control this gorgeous sexual animal and enjoy her countless times!"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Oryx and Crake Website
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DATE: 08/17/2003 06:40:37 PM
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I just finished reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, a disturbing, excellent science fiction novel, set in a future where genetic engineering is a bad, bad thing. Here's an excellent website about Atwood and her novel. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sprint to customers: you'll have to pay for portability
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DATE: 08/18/2003 09:19:47 AM
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BoingBoing pal Siege says:
Here's a piece on how, after fighting tooth and nail to stop number portability, Sprint (along with all the other cell carriers) is tacking on a fee to users bills to cover it's costs for implementing the system. Only catch is, there's no requirement that the fee actually be related to the costs it's supposed to defray. Result? Sprint claims it's spending "hundreds of millions" to get it's system compatible, a figure several times greater than that claimed by it's slightly-less-evil competitors. Sprint stands to make millions...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired illo: The Treasure Hunter
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DATE: 08/18/2003 09:25:02 AM
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Canadian illustrator Kenn Brown's latest illo for a very cool feature in the August issue of Wired Magazine:
In 1694, an 80-gun British warship called the HMS Sussex set sail for southern France loaded with as much as 3 million pounds sterling and 6 tons of gold. The bounty was intended for the Duke of Savoy, a bribe to keep him allied with England in its war against Louis XIV. The Duke never did get the money. Severe gales whipped up off the north coast of Africa. The Sussex foundered along with a dozen other ships in the British fleet, taking all its riches (and the lives of 1,200 crew members) to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Ultimately, the Duke threw his support to Louis XIV, and England's battle with France raged for seven more years before ending in a stalemate.
The plight of the Sussex left behind two huge questions, the first for historians: What if the mission had been successful? It's conceivable that England would have beaten back Louis XIV and annexed parts or all of France. If so, the British government might have been less concerned with a group of 13 rebellious colonies across the Atlantic and allowed them to split off to form a commonwealth - like Canada. The other question, for the rest of us: What happened to all that loot?
Link,
Discuss Read the amazing article this illustration accompanied, by Jeffrey O'Brien, here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bathroom gadgets: High-tech toilet with remote control
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DATE: 08/18/2003 09:30:36 AM
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Check out the hilarious Quicktime movie on this promotional site for a high-tech toilet, like the ones you find in Japan with odd squirty tubes and personal comfort modulators. Link, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Panoramic QTVR: the Matterhorn
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DATE: 08/18/2003 09:36:46 AM
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Hans Nyberg points us to a panoramic QTVR of the Matterhorn at Zermatt, Switzerland: "First at the top was a British crew in 1865, together with the guides Peter Taugwalder and his son from Zermatt. On the way down 4 of the crew dies in an accident. The Taugwalders and the leader Edward Whymper survives. Matthias Taugwalder who made this magnificant panorama is Peter Taugwalder's great great great grandson." Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Big Biz pushes porn mainstream
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DATE: 08/18/2003 09:52:53 AM
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Porn is bigger business than ever, and big media and entertainment companies are profiting from that business. That may not be news, but this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article sheds some interesting insights on the mainstreaming of adult media.
There are limits, though. "The mainstream is not interested in showing porn or glorifying the industry, but it's interested in finding out how far it can go and what it can get away with," says Susannah Breslin, who writes about the sex industry for the Web site Salon.com and runs a popular Web log on the subject. How far the mainstream will go is generally just this side of actual sex. Traditionally, sex in mainstream entertainment, from R-rated movies to "NYPD Blue" to late night on Cinemax, has been called soft-core -- actors pretending to have sex. Hard-core, also called XXX, shows real sex acts.
Adult Video News reports that rentals of hard-core videos in the United States soared from 79 million in 1985 to 759 million in 2001, an increase of almost 1,000 percent.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SMS WOM kills Hollywood box office
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DATE: 08/18/2003 10:05:13 AM
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LA Times article on how SMS and other forms of mobile messaging are impacting opening weekend box office receipts for movies that suck:
Fatima Bholat stepped into the summer sunshine, fresh from the darkened theater where she'd just seen "The Hulk." It was opening day, and the 16-year-old high school junior had rushed out with her younger brother to see director Ang Lee's moody take on the big green superhero. Now she wanted to tell her friends all about it. She whipped out her silver-and-blue T-Mobile cell phone, pressed a button and did something that strikes terror into the hearts of studio executives: She tapped out a message telling her friends exactly what she thought of the movie -- and the verdict was brutal.
Fatima's pan was all her friends needed to convince them to stay away. And they told their friends. Soon the chatter would end up in a girls Internet discussion group, where all the world could see what a few teenagers in Manhattan Beach thought about a movie. Word of mouth -- buzz -- has long been an element in a film's success or failure. But rapid advances in technology, in the hands of an "American Idol" culture quick to express its vote-'em-off sentiments, has accelerated the pace of communication so much that Hollywood feels the reverberations at the box office almost immediately.
"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, referring to the millions of dollars studios throw at a movie to ensure a big opening weekend. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience," he said. "Those days are over. Today, there is no fooling the public."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: DNA computer plays Tic-Tac-Toe
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DATE: 08/18/2003 10:27:00 AM
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After years of hype surrounding DNA-based computing, the first game-playing DNA computer has been created by researchers at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico, New Scientist reports. It's not SpaceWar though (or the Game of Life, for that matter). In this game of DNA-powered Tic-Tac-Toe, the human player makes his or her mark by dropping DNA into 9 wells that make up the board. The one centimeter-square wells contain enzymes that form logic gates. A green biochemical glow reveals the computer's "move."
"The human player has nine types of DNA strand, each with a sequence specific to a particular square. To make a move, one type of strand is added to all the squares, as all must be aware of the choice. The DNA strands are the on-switch for the "deoxyribozyme" enzymes. The enzymes' output, when activated by the required DNA strand, is to snip apart molecules in the mixture, which produces the green glow."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Essay on privacy and piracy: My lipstick is not a camera
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DATE: 08/18/2003 10:49:03 AM
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Well, mine sure is! Okay, seriously: interesting essay by a film critic who's sick of invasive security screenings at the movie theater, intended to keep feature films from being taped and then leaked online.
An open letter to the Hollywood studios: Stop going through my purse. I mean it. I don't like strangers rifling through my belongings without a very good reason. Keeping terrorists off airplanes qualifies. Keeping "Freaky Friday" off the Internet does not. I've been a film critic for only six years, but I remember a time when I could get into a preview screening without going through a security gauntlet. Sure, high-profile stuff like the "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" movies were shrouded in top-secret mystery, but that was just part of the hype. It only happened a couple of times a year, and nobody thought anything of it, except that it was kind of amusing to see how paranoid you were about your franchises. But when uniformed guards showed up at "The In-Laws," it officially wasn't funny anymore.
I know you're just trying to stop the recording of your films, but that's been going on for years now, with people sneaking into theaters with camcorders and taping the movies straight off the screen, then selling copies on street corners or at conventions. Strangely, you didn't seem to notice or care about this phenomenon until high-speed Internet connections became common, and people began downloading films at home. Like the record industry before you, you've suddenly decided to freak out now that those scary computers are involved.
Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Stripper Strips Skin
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DATE: 08/18/2003 10:57:42 AM
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As part of her piece "Trapped" in the New York International Fringe Festival, Russian dancer and costume designer Ksenia Vidyaykina does a 1920s-era striptease in which the shedding of her clothes is followed by the sultry removal of her skin. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nanotech and the black-outs
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DATE: 08/18/2003 11:07:08 AM
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Following a candlelit night of Scrabble in his blacked-out homebase of Ann Arbor, Howard Lovy surveys nanotech-related energy research in his latest NanoBot entry. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecamblog hijinks: Playa-bound robots and art-cars
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DATE: 08/18/2003 12:00:59 PM
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I cruised by robot-master Christian Ristow's studio in downtown LA this weekend, and phonecamblogged some snapshots of engineers building art-cars, packing up machine art, welding and slicing metal, and doing other geekily manly stuff in preparation for Burningman. Some of Christian's robotic/kinetic art will be shown at Blasthaus gallery in San Francisco this Thursday, August 21st.
Link to first phonecam snapshot in series, click "back" arrow to proceed through the series. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Please diagnose my tropical island skin sore
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DATE: 08/18/2003 12:09:12 PM
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About a week ago, I developed an unusual sore. I noticed it when I accidentally brushed my hand against the side of my shin. A crusty weirdly-fragile scab came off. And an oozy sore was there. As the day progressed, the area around it became redder and slighty puffy. It would not form a scab. I started putting Neosporin on it right away. There are no dermatologists on the island, so I'm hoping someone on Boing Boing can figure out what this is. It's currently about the size of a nickel, and the red blotch has been increasing slowly. The center has stopped oozing. It doesn't itch. Is it ringworm? Leprosy? Flesh eating disease? Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: And now, we pause for a Unicorn Moment
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DATE: 08/18/2003 12:57:55 PM
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No particular reason, Mark's Raratonga skin sore picture was just really freaking me out, and it's lunchtime on the West Coast.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: AmiGovernorOrNot.com
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DATE: 08/18/2003 09:23:33 PM
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Ladies and gentlemen, from the inimitable Macki of Rotten.com:
www.amigovernorornot.com.
The inclusion of photos featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger in various states of undress makes this anything but worksafe. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Worth1000 + US Army = Saddam Photoshop psyops-fest?
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DATE: 08/18/2003 09:43:06 PM
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Downright surreal. this Worth1000 contest -- photoshopped goofy images of Saddam, done up as Rita Hayworth, next imagined as a porn star, then dressed in Billy Idol drag -- is evidently being used by the US military in Iraq:
"Zsa Zsa Saddam" is one of a series spoof images of the ousted Iraqi dictator that are due to be posted on walls and billboards around his former stronghold of Tikrit by troops of the 4th Infantry Division's 1st Battalion 22nd Armoured Regiment. The idea is both to boost the morale of U.S. soldiers, ridicule the deposed leader and, also, help identify those who are still loyal to Saddam. "The bad guys are going to be upset," Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Russell told Reuters. "Which will just make it easier for us to know who they are." Sergeant David Cade, a psychological operations specialist, added: "It's mostly good for troop morale, but if we can put these posters up in Tikrit and the enemy can't take them down, then at least it shows who owns the streets."
While Russell insists that most local people "will love 'em and be laughing," there are nonetheless concerns that, far from aiding the American cause, the images will only serve to increase anti-American feeling among ordinary Iraqis. The Billy Idol Saddam, for instance, is portrayed with a gold crucifix around his neck, someything that could well cause offense in a Muslim country such as Iraq. Likewise images of scantily clad women. "I think this type of activity by U.S. forces will only further anger the Muslim population of Iraq," Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Great Britain, told CNN. "This clear flaunting of Islamic Law by displaying pictures of scantily clad women will only add fuel to sentiments that the U.S. is trying to undermine Muslim culture in Iraq. It risks alienating the actual population."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Construction web sign museum
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DATE: 08/19/2003 09:18:27 AM
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Website dedicated the kitschy art of "under construction" web signs. Link, Discuss (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Aliens, children, and tinfoil beanie caps
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DATE: 08/19/2003 09:24:32 AM
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Parisian BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc points us to a site which, according to the webmasters, "features a series of drawings made by children who were abducted by aliens for the alien purpose of creating a new race of alien/human hybrids." Link. While you're there, check out the photos of "thought-screen hats" for adults and kids, and instructions forhow to roll your own:
Thoughts screens have successfully stopped four kinds of aliens from abducting humans.
(1) The praying mantis-like aliens.
(2) Servants of the mantis-like aliens who are popularly referred to as grays.
(3) Snake-skinned aliens popularly referred to as reptilians.
(4) "Meek-Moks" which refers to the sound these aliens make while speaking.
Indeed, watch out for those Meek-moks. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spray-on Nanocomputers Are Coming
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DATE: 08/19/2003 09:30:01 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland says:
Computing is about to really become ubiquitous if a research project started at Edinburgh University delivers its promises. In "A spray-on computer is way to do IT, the Edinburgh Evening News writes that "spray-on computers the size of a grain of sand are set to transform information technology." The scientists are already working with Edinburgh hospitals to spray nanocomputers on coronary patients to monitor their hearts unobtrusively and wirelessly. The technology should be ready within four years and these spray-on nanocomputers should be at work in hospitals, schools and shops in less than ten years. This summary contains more details about these nanocomputers which will be able to be diffused into our environment.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Illustrator Chris Bishop invites you to draw his comic strip
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DATE: 08/19/2003 09:41:14 AM
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The lovely and talented illlustrator and comic artist Chris Bishop, author of the comic series "Her," is inviting the whole wide (online) world to celebrate his birthday by becoming a guest-cartoonist. First, read "Her." Then, draw your own "Her" strip and e-mail to her@chrisbishop.com by September 5. Cartoons will appear on September 8. Link to "Her," Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Lucky" Chinese phone number has a high price
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DATE: 08/19/2003 09:45:55 AM
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According to this BBC story, many Chinese people consider the number eight to be lucky, because in Cantonese, it sounds like the word for "get rich." That explains why the telephone number 8888 8888 fetched 2.33m yuan ($280,000) at a special telecom auction yesterday in the province of Sichuan. The winner: a Chinese airline.
An eight-digit number containing only the number eight is considered especially auspicious. "Everyone at the company believes the number was worth the price we paid," Xing Bing, a spokesperson for Sichuan Airlines, told the Associated Press news agency. The company is said to be planning to use the number for a 24-hour customer hotline.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogstakes -- sweepstakes for blogs -- launches
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My former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague Brian "Dr. Frankensite" Alvey, host of the very cool "Meet the Makers" web building workshop series, just launched a new project called Blogstakes. It's a sort of sweepstakes that rewards blogs that link to it by giving them the same prizes that the people they referred win ( = if you win a Hawaiian vacation on Blogstakes, so does the blog that referred you). I'll let Brian explain:
A friend of a friend was asking me for ways to promote his product that were better than begging top bloggers for links in exchange for samples. I took more than a week to respond since I didn't have any answers. Then I told him he should do a contest and give out prizes to the randomly-chosen winners AND the blogs that sent them. The more I explained about it technically (how it should track 'referer strings' rather than force blogs to sign up for affiliate tracking URLs and how that means everyone can just use the same link to the contest), he explained that it was beyond him to build.
So I built it. It was quietly launched yesterday afternoon and already this morning I've had a bunch of requests from people who want to either interview me about it or have things that they want to give away (or both). Many of them have been people with blog-related software that they want me to promote. I did a lot of testing of the concept and the execution to make sure it conveys the message that I'm just a guy who builds Web sites, not a Raging Cow marketing outsider who is here to rip you off and the feedback was great. People were worried that they were going to refer thousands of people to my site and I was going to steal their email addresses and my sponsors were going to spam them endlessly. They're not, because they never get to see individual data on anyone except the winners. So the privacy policy is really simple and in-your-face. We hate spam too.
Another person was concerned about having to link to contests that they didn't want to win. The easy answer is: link to contests you want to win and don't link to ones you don't want to win. And already some people are adding this to their non-content column -- in fixture positions just like their Blogrolling lists and Blogshares icons. That was without prompting. They just saw that as how these contests will fit into their blogs. That was really cool to see. In many ways it's a social experiment. I've been asked why the contests last 4 weeks and 6 weeks. "Won't they have a ton of interest in the first week and then die off?" Who knows? I'm going to find out.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wi-Fi "un-banned" in the Philippines
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DATE: 08/19/2003 11:23:06 AM
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The Philippines National Telecommunications Commission has just removed a ban on the use of 2400MHz frequencies -- which effectively outlawed Wi-Fi, as blogged here last month by Cory.
In a final draft of a memorandum circular posted on its website, the national regulator set out new rules governing the provision of wireless LAN services and lifted the suspension on the National Capital Region, Region III and Region IV covering Metro Manila, Central Luzon and Southern Luzon. As reported on 11 July by Mobile Data Daily, relations between the NTC and operators had been deteriorating rapidly as PLDT and Globe Telecom continued to roll out wifi hotspots regardless of a law prohibiting the use of 2.4GHz frequencies in certain areas. While the NTC manfully defended the legislation, which dated back to the early 1930s, it conceded that new regulations were required if the country was to keep up with wireless LAN developments elsewhere in the region.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Guest Blog: Steve Steinberg aka Frank Drake
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DATE: 08/19/2003 01:41:39 PM
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A warm thanks to Ms. Jenn Shreve for her illuminating posts to the guestblog! We look forward to following Jenn's surreal journeys at her LiveJournal. Our next guest blogger is another long-time bOING bOING co-conspirator and one of my best friends and mentors. I first met Steve Steinberg more than a decade ago when he sat-in on a technology journalism course taught by NY Times reporter John Markoff at UC Berkeley. Little did I realize when we first talked that Steve Steinberg was actually "Frank Drake," the legendary Legion of Doom hacker who was a key source for Markoff and Katie Hafner's book Cyberpunk. Steve was also the creator of WORM and Intertek, the seminal hacker 'zines from which Wired borrowed several section ideas, including Hype List and Reality Check. In fact, our very first conversation oddly ended with Steve asking me to write the next Reality Check column for Wired in his stead. So I have Steve to thank (and you have Steve to blame) for kick-starting my career. Steve, the guestblog is yours.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: I'm buried under by email virus
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DATE: 08/19/2003 04:57:37 PM
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I've gotten over 500 emails from the Sobig.F virus. It sucks, especially since dial up here is around 4800 baud.
"Initial analysis would suggest that Sobig.F is a mass-e-mailing virus that is spreading very vigorously. Sobig.F appears to be polymorphic in nature. The address is also spoofed and may not indicate the true identity of the sender," a MessageLabs statement said. The sender appears to be someone from a recognized domain name, such as ibm.com, zdnet.com or microsoft.com. The subject line typically says "Re: Details," "Resume" or "Thank you."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dontbuymusic.com shut down by The Man
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DATE: 08/20/2003 08:50:53 AM
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Wired News story today on the sad fate of parody site DontBuyMusic.com, forced offline by a lawyergram last Friday:
The website, created by the online community Macteens, spoofed the BuyMusic.com website by using the same format as the original site but rewriting the text and redirecting all clicks to the Apple iTunes website. ITunes and BuyMusic.com are both online paid music services. DontBuyMusic.com last week brought attention to the marked similarities between TV commercials for iTunes and BuyMusic (see the ads here and here).
Macteens server master Clark Mueller said Macteens did not receive any direct communication from BuyMusic's lawyers. Instead, the counsel for Direct Response Network and its affiliated companies, including BuyMusic.com and Buy.com, sent an e-mail that reached DontBuyMusic's host, datahive. Though datahive said it had no intention of removing dontbuymusic.com from its servers, Mueller -- claiming responsibility for most of the changes to the spoof page's code -- elected to take to the site down. "I think that the copyright and trademark acts may not even apply to us," he said. "But I'm not sure -- I'm not a lawyer and I can't afford one."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Urban cuisine culturewatch: Strip mall shabby chic in LA
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DATE: 08/20/2003 09:00:14 AM
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From today's NYT, story on the shabby SoCal hipness of strip mall cuisine. May I point out that the unmarked 24-hour sashimi place next to the laundromat near that pregnancy clinic on Sunset is totally overrated, but the combination pho/fondue bar by the hubcap shop on Vine where you always see Vincent Gallo eating spring rolls is totally the bomb. "You move out here, and people are immediately like, have you tried that place in the mall? That little place between the doughnut shop and the 7-11?" said [34-year-old screenwriter Jeffrey] Lieber, whose favorite strip-mall spot is an Italian place in Marina del Rey called Alejo's, which is famous for its shrimp pasta. "You feel like you have a neighborhood secret. Then you give it to the people you like, and keep it from those you don't."
The result of this cult of underground cool is that the dingiest, most unassuming restaurants often have long lines to get in, and the person at the next plastic-topped table is just as likely to be Christina Applegate as a newly arrived immigrant (not to mention a struggling student or actor drawn by the rock-bottom prices). True food fans will seek out those little-known places frequented by locals, whose presence both attests to the authenticity of the cuisine and provides a fashionably anti-hip atmosphere. Such is the scene at Palms Thai in Hollywood, for example, where an Asian Elvis impersonator, with jeweled belts and mutton-chop sideburns, sings karaoke while Thai families shovel down tom kha gai at long banquet tables. The smattering of 20-somethings in fierce footwear are willing to wait an hour for a table so that they can revel in the ironic obscurity of it all.
Got a secret stripmall chow fave (in LA or beyond) that you don't mind sharing with the rest of the online world? Post it in the Discuss forum! Link, Discuss (Thanks, JP!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yet another Friendster parody: wifester
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DATE: 08/20/2003 09:03:07 AM
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Justin says: "I figured I would through my hat into ring on the Friendster spoof sites action. Actually my wife's idea. Yes, we are happily married." Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: cool gadget: Nokia MusicStand review
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DATE: 08/20/2003 09:06:50 AM
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Review of an interesting new device from Nokia... it's a phone/home stereo/radio, sort of:
Joining an increasingly growing array of Nokia mobile phone accessories, the sleek and stylish Nokia Music Stand is a highly uncomplicated gadget, which performs only a few tasks - all revolving around audio. Compatible with recent Nokia mobile phones sporting the manufacturer's proprietary Pop Port expansion solution and featuring audio functionality of some kind, the Music Stand quite simply consists of a pair of speakers and a microphone.
The first and foremost task of the Music Stand is to enable owners of audio capable Nokia mobile phones to connect their handsets via the Pop Port, cradle-style, to enable playback through the Music Stand rather than the internal speaker of a phone. Thus far, only phones with built-in radio capabilities are available in a form factor compatible with the Music Stand, but there is little reason for why the Music Stand should not work with any type of audio.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free Machine art in SF Thursday night: SEEMEN
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DATE: 08/20/2003 09:15:10 AM
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From interactive robotics/machine performance master Kal Spelletich: word of a free show tomorrow night featuring a new machine shown on the model below:
"I am in a BIG group show this Thursday in the Lovely Tenderloin with a bunch of really cool robot/hacker tech artists at Rx Gallery aka BLASTHAUS, 132 Eddy Street at Mason in the Tenderloin, San Francisco, Ca, at 6:00 PM on Thursday, August 21, 2003. Come operate my new machine, "Monkey on your Back!" see here and here.
Volunteer puts on backpack and gloves... there are flex and EKG sensors in and on the gloves. Moving or just wearing the gloves activates the monkey, and the EKG inside the gloves picks up a signal from your heart and turns on or off the tail and spine. There is a tilt sensor that activates the top arm depending on which direction you lean, and the hands can pick up all sorts of things."
Also in this show: robotics artist Christian Ristow, whose machine hijinks I phonecamblogged on Sunday. The claw/bullet/hand-like piece he has in this show -- sorry, I don't know the actual title -- is amazing, beautiful, and will scare the pants off you if you aren't paying attention. There's a snapshot of it here in my phonecamblog.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese gadget for translating baby cries
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DATE: 08/20/2003 10:08:49 AM
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Translated (badly) to English: "The translator of a baby's cry for first-time mothers has launched. This equipment analyzes and displays the kind of a cry a baby makes, and shows five different feelings, which include a hungry feeling, sleepiness, stress, and inconvenient, and the degree of correctness exceeds 90%"
I'm gonna take "inconvenient" to mean "poopy," but perhaps someone who reads Japanese can clarify that for me. Link to article in Japanese, Auto-translated to English, Discuss, (Via Geisha Asobi blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dontbuymusic.com: back from the dead
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DATE: 08/20/2003 10:47:53 AM
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Just posted on the DontBuyMusic.com site, which has apparently been altered to comply with Buy.com legal demands: this announcement, and copy of the lawyergram that effectively shut down the site on Friday.
Hello again, faithful visitors of DontBuyMusic.com! As you probably know, the site was offline for several days at the request of Buy.com's legal team (a law firm operating out of the great mass of humans known as "Los Angeles"). Having carefully analyzed their letter, we're quite sure that our newly designed parody web site does not fall within the bounds of the letter they sent us in any way, and can now be completely, totally, 100% certainly defined as a parody web site, as it contains absolutely none of BuyMusic.com's original graphics or HTML code, and unless Buy.com has trademarked the ugly colors and fonts that they like too, then we are operating what is legally recognized as a form of free speech. Previously, it was a gray area (though we do believe we were in the right), but read their legal notice and judge for yourself.
Link to site, Link to previous BoingBoing post, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: babyhummingbirdcam.com
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DATE: 08/20/2003 11:05:03 AM
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Hot naked chicks! My mom says:
"A birder friend of mine sent this link to me-- it's a series of photos of hummingbird eggs and hatchlings. The most amazing part is the gauge that they put on the nest, a small toothpick, to give scale to what's in the photos."
Thanks, Mom! Note: the site's a little slow right now, I don't think they were prepared for being Boinged. Link,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I have an iPod -- in my MIND
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DATE: 08/20/2003 01:00:58 PM
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The Onion nails it again:
I'm sure you've seen a lot of tech-savvy people smugly showing off that new hunk of entertainment hardware, the iPod personal stereo. Well, I might not have the scratch to get one, but frankly, I don't want the white-corded wonder. I have my very own iPod--in my mind.
I hear those little things carry up to a month's worth of music. Well, so does my mind. I can call up any song I've ever heard, any time I want. And I never have to load software or charge batteries. There are no firewire cords or docks to mess with. I just put my hands behind my head, lean back, and select a tune from the extensive music-library folder inside my brain. Thirty gigabytes? So what? I know 7,500 songs, maybe more. Some songs, I forget I even have until they come around on shuffle. Why, just the other day, my mind started playing David Naughton's "Makin' It," a song I hadn't heard in years. And the sound quality was great!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Evan Wiliams has a phonecamblog
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DATE: 08/20/2003 02:43:16 PM
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Blogger co-founder Evan Williams just launched a phonecamblog: Link. Discuss (Thanks Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Palestinian P2P network declares war on MPAA, RIAA
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DATE: 08/20/2003 03:12:45 PM
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For background, see Cory's earlier post here. Snip from announcement released today from EarthStation 5 follows:
Earth Station 5 Declares War Against The Motion Picture Association of America: FREE Music, FREE Movies, FREE Software and Now FREE Sex Being Beamed By Earthstation 5 to the Humans for Free. In response to the email received today from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to Earthstation 5 for copyright violations for streaming FIRST RUN movies over the internet for FREE, this is our official response! Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policys have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE. ES5 does not require any signups, registration, credit cards and/or any other personal information to watch the first rate streamed movies like TERMINATOR 3, BRUCE ALMIGHTY, MATRIX RELOADED, etc.
Our secure software protect our users who use our P2P application and
there is nothing that you can do to stop us, says Ras Kabir, president of
Earthstation 5.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Island Chronicles: Friends
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DATE: 08/20/2003 10:52:42 PM
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Our latest Island Chronicles dispatch, entitled "Friends," is now up on the LA Weely web site.Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Update: Mark's tropical island skin afflication
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DATE: 08/20/2003 10:59:57 PM
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A couple of days ago, I complained about a strange-looking sore on my leg. I started putting ringworm medicine on it. I think it is looking better. I asked some schoolkids here in Rarotonga if they knew what ringworm looked like, and one little girl had a ringworm sore on her arm and showed it to me. It looks a lot like my sore. I think I'm in the clear. Thanks for your help, everyone! Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Twister Duvet Cover
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DATE: 08/21/2003 09:03:33 AM
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Play Twister in -- or on -- your bed. Insert double-entendre here. Link, Discuss Twister Duvet Cover (via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reanimating the Dead
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DATE: 08/21/2003 09:05:22 AM
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Roland sez:
During last Siggraph, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany showed a software they use to reconstruct human faces over skulls found by the police. New Scientist published "Animation lets murder victims have final say" on this work about two weeks ago with a nice illustration, "How the dead can express themselves." In "Skulls gain virtual faces," Technology Research News gives additional details. So how does this work? "The researchers' software allows users to attach markers, or landmarks, to a three-dimensional skull model generated from a laser scan of a skull. The landmarks are correlated with statistical tissue depth measurements in order to provide reference points for the software to generate muscles and skin for the mo del." This summary contains more details and references, including an illustration of a face reconstruction process.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: A Learning Robot: Adam in Eden
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DATE: 08/21/2003 09:13:33 AM
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Another tidbit from BoingBoing reader Roland:
More correctly, this is Adam (ADAptive Mobile robot) in Eden (EDucational ENvironment). Adam is a learning robot developed by Professor Andy Russell at Monash University in Australia. The Melbourne Herald Sun tells us more in "Current research gives Adam a charge." "Adam contains colour, light, collision and sound sensors and a micro-controller system that lets him wander around. The Garden of Eden has three flowers made of aluminium plates and green borders, which he can feed from with his antenna-like nose to acquire the energy he needs." This summary contains more details, including a photo of Adam feeding from a 'flower' in Eden. Andy Russell's homepage contains two videos of Adam learning to avoid colliding into a wall.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Derek "Fray" Powazek counts down to Burningman
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DATE: 08/21/2003 09:15:08 AM
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Derek Powazek sez, "As part of my Burning Man prep, I'm posting a photo, memory, and link every day as a countdown. See you on the playa!" Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Going to Burningman? Doing something cool with technology there? Tell me.
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DATE: 08/21/2003 09:18:39 AM
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I'll be reporting live from Burningman for Wired News and National Public Radio's new daily program "Day to Day," hosted by Alex Chadwick. One of the things I'm most interested in exploring out there is how people are using technology to connect with each other -- and the rest of the world -- while they're out on the playa. Some participants are planning unusual uses of social software, others are preparing to blog live from Black Rock City. If you (or a "burner" you know) are planning anything particularly innovative, fun, or flat-out cool along those lines, please e-mail me or post in the discuss link. I'd love to hear about it. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: McSweeney's rips hilarious hole in flash mob trend
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DATE: 08/21/2003 09:49:55 AM
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In literary journal McSweeney's, this acerbic, gutbustingly funny parody of a digital hipster trend whose time to die has come -- Group Mobilization as a Desperate Cry for Help, by Christopher Monks:
Hello! You are invited to take part in a flash mob, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people for ten minutes or less, in the front yard of my ex-girlfriend Deborah's house, tomorrow at 6:13 p.m. Please tell anybody else that you think might be interested in joining us. INSTRUCTIONS:
1) We'll meet outside the Crazy Pizza around the corner from Deborah's place. Be there by 6 p.m. Please be respectful of Crazy Pizza's employees and patrons, and refrain from ordering pizza or Crazy Cinnaballs.
2) At exactly 6:05 p.m. I will pass out slips of paper with general instructions and poster boards. One-third of the poster boards will read "I will never stop lovin' you, Deborah"; one-third will read "Why do you insist on ruining my life?"; and one-third will read "Please don't throw out my comic book collection."
3) Once the instructions and poster boards have been passed out, I will organize the group. All of the guys who are better looking than me will be sent to the back and will be required to wear sad clown masks. If I find that a better-looking-than-me guy in a sad clown mask is still better-looking than me I will ask him to leave. This may seem a little paranoid, but you don't know Deborah like I know Deborah. All of the just as good-looking as me guys will be placed in the middle of the line, and the guys who I think are uglier than me will get to be in the front. Women can choose to be wherever they want.
Link to essay, Discuss
(Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Goodbye flashmobs, hello flashmops
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DATE: 08/21/2003 10:56:45 AM
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Some say the time has come for Flash Mobs to die. I respectfully propose that Flash Mops emerge as the rightful hipster trend successor. Here's how it works:
Here's the plan. Everybody meet up at the house at 11765 Parker st. N. (98101) on that Sunday morning. Then, at exactly 10:00 AM we'll completely clean the place! Hah hah! Talk about zany and unexpected! We'll go nuts: scrubbing the shower and cleaning the gutters and washing the cars and mowing the lawn and brushing the cats, etc. This is going to totally freak out the house owners (who I will trick into going to get French Slams at the nearby Denny's while this takes place)! And when we're done (making sure we clean behind the fridge, just to be extra-unexpected) we'll suddenly disperse. Poof! Hah hah! This is going to be so wild we'll probably get in the paper and stuff. Just meet at the house on the morning of Sunday, August 17th (don't worry about how we are going to get in -- fortunately I have a key and will leave the door unlocked), bring cleaning supplies, and be sure to pass this message on to all of your friends. It's gonna be, like, so great! Flash mobs! Woo! Spread the word!
via Defective Yeti, Discuss (Thanks, tomh and Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: mirror of shut-down xMule site launches
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DATE: 08/21/2003 11:49:44 AM
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BoingBoing reader John says:
This is a mirror of the original xmule.org site which has been shut down. xMule is p2p software for linux that works on the Edonkey2000 network. The developer has been subpoened by the government for infringing the DMCA. Or something like that. It's not clear. The developer includes more detail in the "Featured Article" on the website and is accepting donations for his defense through Amazon.com.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Undead Feds -- a fantastical regulatory body
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:46:22 PM
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The homepage for the Federal Zombie and Vampire Agency is a deep and thorough exercise in fantastic alternate history, in which government regulators took the Undead situation in hand.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Secure your protocols: SSL instead of IPSEC tunneling
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:47:11 PM
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Really good, lucid explanation of a technique for using protocol-by-protocol SSL security to prevent eavesdropping on public networks (like the Internet), as an alternative to IPSEC-based tunneling.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Out of Blue Six: a lost gem
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:48:05 PM
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Ian McDonald is one of the best-kept secrets in science fiction. He has written brilliant novel after brilliant novel, each wildly different from the last, from his debut novel, a Bradbury pastiche called Desolation Road, to his high-fantasy King of Morning, Queen of Day (which reads like Crowley's Little Big interpreted by Connie Willis) to his spectacular parable about the Irish conflict, Hearts, Hands and Voices. While McDonald wins awards regularly and has novellas show up from time to time in Asimov's, it seems that most readers haven't heard of him. What's worse, the great majority of his work is long out of print, including some of his best books.
One of these wonderful, vanished gems is Out on Blue Six, a 1989 Bantam Spectra paperback that I've read my way through five copies of. Picture a 16-car pileup in Dr Suess country, where the colliding zithermobiles are piloted by Gibson's console cowboys and parodical caricatures out of Mad Magazine, have PK Dick and Orwell do alternating rewrites on the text, and you'll be getting close to the kind of novel that this is.
I've just re-read it. It is a wonder. We often apply the term "wildly inventive" to authors and their product, but it takes a book like Out on Blue Six to demonstrate what "wild" and "imaginative" really mean.
Out on Blue Six is set in the Benevolent Society, where all suffering has been eliminated by the Orwellian Ministry of Pain, which rearranges your genome to fit you into one sub-species or another depending on the activities it calculates you will be most likely to enjoy. All citizens of the Benevolent Society -- a culture shrouded in mysticism and poetry -- wear "famulouses," artificially intelligent consciousnesses and PDAs that advise them on behalf of the Ministry of Pain and rat them out to the PainCops in the event of serious PainCrime.
Courteney Hall is the last incisive satirist in the Benevolent Society, and her recasting of the perennial favorite Wee Wendy Waif strips as vicious swipes at the Benevolent Society sets her on the run from the PainCops and the wrath of the society at large.
Like I say, this book is out of print. Long, long out of print. But thanks to the wonderful Bookfinder service, it's possible to lay hands on 100+ copies of the novel, for prices starting at $0.75 plus shipping. I just got another copy, and I'm savoring every page.
Link Update: Looks like Bookfinder won't let you bookmark a search for more than an hour. Bugger. Here're the used copies available through Amazon. (thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Saran Wrap can turn your laptop screen 3D
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:49:04 PM
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This is a fascinating white-paper by a researcher at the University of Toronto on the use of common cellophane as a polarized light filter. Apparently, cellophane performs this task better than most expensive purpose-fabbed materials. Once you have a polarized filter, you can make bitchun stereoscopic 3D glasses (the 3D Imax movies and 3D theater shows at the Disney parks are done with polarized-light stereoscopes), and turn your laptop's screen into a 3D display.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paramilitary wing of the usability movement
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:49:39 PM
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Over at NTK, they've established "the paramilitary wing of the usability movement." Think of this as Shoemakers' Elves who taking marching orders from Edward Tufte. NTK has called on usability engineers to find themselves egregiously unusable websites whose information is nonetheless important, to scrape these websites, and to redesign them so that they don't suck. Check out the before and after -- we get loads of complaints about the Boing Boing layout, and we syndicate almost everything on this page with RSS. I've seen a couple of neat experiments in page-redesign from readers, but why not do more? Go ahead, remix us. Post links to the Discuss area.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anal Fissures in a nutshell
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:50:17 PM
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My friend Quinn has had a lot of really awful health problems, most of them on the icky side, involving her digestive tract. The pages and pamphlets addressing her afflictions are all full of squeam and delicacy, and therefore lacking in the kind of down-and-dirty, up-the-bum tips that her co-sufferers need to recover.
This has prompted Quinn to assemble some really authoritative, no-nonsense, occasionally screamingly funny pages describing the ins and outs of icky illnesses. Her most recent page is for those of you who may be curious about anal fissures -- something that Quinn got to experience in the aftermath of childbirth.
getting an anal fissure is not a freudian thing, it doesn't mean you rebelled against your parents by practicing anal retention and practice makes perfect. there's a good chance you need more fiber. if you have an anal fissure, the atkins diet may simply not be for you. i suspect i had a proto-fissure brewing for a while, but childbirth traumatized the area and very very hard stools post- childbirth ripped me a new one. many people look back and see their diet wasn't all it could have been. others discover that lactose intolerance or other food intolerances are the hardness culprit. every once in a while you're just kind of built that way, and laxatives may need to be a way of life for you. if your sphincter just likes to spasm and tighten all the time, the only thing that may work for you is surgery to cut the sphincter. both of these are extremes, but they happen, and when they happen, they aren't anyone's fault.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What community WiFi can learn from hams
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:51:30 PM
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Here's an interesting piece about ham radio operators stepping in to help out emergency services, recovery and relief during the blackout. The hams are brilliant at this. They view themselves as being beholden to the public interest, in exchange for the use of the spectrum that they chat on.
The really fascinating thing about this is how well it works politically. Every time there's a disaster, the hams pitch in, and then a Congresscritter gets up on its hind legs and reads a commendation for America's brave and selfless amateur radio operators into the record.
And then, whenever the FCC gets an idea that it could make a couple billion dollars by auctioning off the hams' spectrum to cellular companies, the hams pack the hearings and the comments with commendations from congresscritters from every party and every district. This is powerful mojo.
The most interesting thing about the community WiFi projects like SFLan and Personal Telco is that to the extent that they get adopted by emergency services workers and used in disaster relief (the way that NYC Wireless's WiFi was used by lower Manhattanites after 9-11), WiFi activists can amass an enormous amount of political clout. Open spectrum radios are even better than hams for coordinating disaster relief, I think -- and there's nothing more politically compelling, it seems, than heroism in times of trouble.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PowerPoint corrupts
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:52:13 PM
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Great Edward Tufte rant about PowerPoint and other slideware, and why we should all avoid it. I did a talk a couple months ago and the conference organizers nearly insisted that I bring a PowerPoint presentation to accompany my speech. I told them that I didn't believe in slides for the kind of talk I was giving, and they responded, "But what will keep the audience from getting bored?" Urr, possibly the words coming out of my mouth?
Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese watches from the edge of cool
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:53:27 PM
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TokyoFlash features impossibly cool and attainably inexpensive Japanese wristwatches. I had to forcefully restrain myself from buying just one of these. God, these are cool.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Down and Out and Fair and Balanced
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:54:05 PM
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The Author's Guild filed a Fair and Balanced amicus brief on behalf of Al Franken in his defense against Fox's outrageous trademark infringement suit against him for using their trademarked phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his book.
It appears that the brief includes a list of other books that use registered trademarks in their titles, among them my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. OK, that's pretty cool right there.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Palahniuk has a new novel!
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:54:43 PM
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Salon has published a vicious broadside aimed at Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk, a brilliant and savage novelist whose new book, Diary, has just been published.
I just started reading Palahniuk this year, with Survivor, but once I'd read that, I sought out every one of his novels and read them one after another. His got the glibness and popcult sensibility of Douglas Coupland, the drunken-master prose of William S Burroughs, and the ferocity of Charles Bukowski. Can't wait to read Diary, even though Salon panned it -- the reviewer admits up front that she hates all of Palahniuk's books, so it's a little mysterious as to why she'd decide to pick up his latest...
The latest is "Diary," the story of Misty Marie Wilmot, who works as a waitress on a tourist-plagued island off the New England coast. Peter, her building-contractor husband, lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. Early on, it's fairly obvious that Misty's 13-year-old daughter and mother-in-law are colluding with the rest of the island's old-family residents in a homicidal plot to drive the tourists away by forcing Misty to become a painter. Misty, however, remains clueless about this despite everyone's egregiously suspicious, "Rosemary's Baby"-style behavior and despite the fact that shortly before Peter shut himself up in the garage with the car motor running, he went around scrawling graffiti about the plot in the houses of his clients, then walling off the vandalized rooms to make it look as if they'd never existed. (By the way, the car now smells like urine.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Movable Type meets Mujahedeen
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:55:25 PM
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Ben Hammersley -- adventurer, athlete, programmer, RSS-wonk, reporter -- has decided to pull up stakes and become a freelance reporter for a while. In Afghanistan. And he's going to report it all in his blog. Jeez.
So, anyway. I figure it's about the time this nano-publishing journalism-of-the-future meme started to get off its collective bottom. So I'm off to Afghanistan for your education and pleasure. I fly to Islamabad tomorrow, and from there by train or bus to Peshawar. On Saturday I'll be crossing the Khyber Pass and making my way to Kabul. All being well, technology and men-with-guns willing, I'll be posting from every stop, and weblogging from Afghanistan for ten days or so. Movable Type meets Mujahedeen. It's going to be fun.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hoovering kinky conduit
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:56:02 PM
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Lessig describes a fiendishly clever way to get a piece of Ethernet cable threaded through the bends in a conduit.
But when we tried to run the Ethernet cable from the roof to the basement, we discovered that the conduit makes 3 90-degree turns and one 45-degree turn, and it was not at all clear how one pushes a cable through such a maze.
So of course we turned first to the internet. I typed in a totally natural language question into Google (which I find these days is increasingly the best method): something like “how do you thread a cable through a long conduit with 90 degree angles.” The first post that came up was a thread from some list titled Threading fiber through a long conduit. This thread reported no good luck, but it had the kernel of an idea: a vacuum cleaner.
So we took a bit of foam, tied it to the end of a roll of kite string, and connected a small Shop-Vac at the other end of the conduit (which is at least 50 feet long). Bingo. The key, it seems, is to have a big but light obstruction, and google at hand.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beyond Fear: Required reading for Ashcroft's America
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DATE: 08/21/2003 03:56:51 PM
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I've spent the past week at a writers' retreat in an undisclosed location (I'm still here!). It's been insanely productive. I've written a 21,000-word novella, rewritten two partial novels, worked on my latest collaboration with Charlie Stross, critiqued about 20 stories, read a friend's book and critiqued it, and caught up on some reading (and I've still got three days left, and still to come: nonfiction book proposal, rewrite the new novella, and catch up on other projects and projectlets).
One of the books I'm delighted to have had the chance to read here is Bruce Schneier's latest, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. I reviewed three or four drafts of this while Bruce was working on it, and I am completely delighted with how it turned out.
In Beyond Fear, Schneier has utterly demystified the idea of security with a text aimed squarely at nontechnical individuals. He takes his legendary skill at applying common sense and lucidity to information-security problems and applies it to all the bogeymen of the post-9/11 world, and asks the vital question: What are we getting in exchange for the liberties that the Ashcroftian authorities have taken away from us in the name of security?
This is possibly the most important question of this decade, and that makes Schenier's book one of the most important texts of the decade. This should be required reading for every American, and the world would be a better place if anyone venturing an opinion on electronic voting, airline security, roving wiretaps, or any other modern horror absorbed this book's lessons first.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gilberto Gil supports CD-burning automats
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DATE: 08/22/2003 07:30:30 AM
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Rainer sez, "The suggested news (in Portuguese) says, briefly, that famous musician (and now Brazilian Culture Minister) Gilberto Gil is putting his weight behind a project to install CD-burning automats in Brazil. Each machine will have an inventory of 34000 tracks and a customized CD will come to about R$10 (US$3.30), less than half of the R$24 (US$8) it would cost at a record store. According to the inventors, this will cut down on piracy; over 60% of records sold in Brazil today are pirated, as the minimum monthly wage of R$240 is equivalent to 10 CDs."
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(Thanks, Rainer!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US goverment trying to sink WIPO open content talks
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DATE: 08/22/2003 07:32:13 AM
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The US government has set out to scupper the proposed World Intellectual Property Organization summit on Open Source and Open Culture. Lessig writes:
But the astonishing part is the justification for the US opposing the meeting. According to the Post, Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said "that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights." As she is quoted as saying, "To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO."
If Lois Boland said this, then she should be asked to resign. The level of ignorance built into that statement is astonishing, and the idea that a government official of her level would be so ignorant is an embarrassment. First, and most obviously, open-source software is based in intellectual-property rights. It can't exist (and free software can't have its effect) without it. Second, the goal of WIPO, and the goal of any government, should be to promote the right balance of intellectual-property rights, not simply to promote intellectual property rights. And finally, if an intellectual property right holder wants to "disclaim" or "waive" her rights, what business is it of WIPOs? Why should WIPO oppose a copyright or patent rights holder's choice to do with his or her rights what he or she wants?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi roaming coming to Canada, via telcos
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DATE: 08/22/2003 07:36:27 AM
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Canada's telcos are setting up roaming agreements on each others' WiFi hotspots:
The 12-million people who own cellphones, personal digital assistants or any wireless device and subscribe to Bell Mobility (with Aliant Mobility), Microcell Solutions (Fido), Rogers AT&T Wireless or Telus Mobility will be able to use all Wi-Fi hot-spots operated by any one of those companies.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Edge.org -- The Moral Sense Test: Blackout
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DATE: 08/22/2003 08:47:07 AM
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In the latest edition of John Brockman's EDGE newsletter, conversation
about the blackout of August 14th. From Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of LINKED: THE NEW SCIENCE OF
NETWORKS, (actually, it's a reprinted op-ed from the
8/16 NY Times, thanks Mark R.!):
Once power is fully restored, it will take little time to find the
culprit: most likely, it will be a malfunctioning switch or fuse, a
snapped power line or some other local failure. Somebody will be
fired, promotions and raises denied, and lawmakers will draw up
legislation guaranteeing that this problem will not occur again.
Something will be inevitably missed, however, during all this
finger-pointing: this week's blackout has little to do with faulty
equipment, negligence or bad design. President Bush's call to upgrade
the power grid will do little to eliminate power failures. The
magnitude of the blackout is rooted in an often ignored aspect of our
globalized world: vulnerability due to interconnectivity.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi Detector that works
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DATE: 08/22/2003 03:05:07 PM
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Pete Rojas at Gizmodo has identified a WiFi detector that apparently actually works. No word on where to get 'em or what they cost.
There's been a lot of grumbling (here and elsewhere) about how awful Kensington's new WiFi Finder is, and how it doesn't detect closed networks or 802.11g, or distinguish between cordless phones and WiFi. Well, we've been playing with the other WiFi detector out there, the WFS-1 from SmartID, and can attest that it works pretty well, at least for us. Over the past month or so we've used it all over New York and San Francisco, it picked up WiFi everywhere we expected it to, and in plenty of places we didn't (like on the corner of Bowery and Delancey in Manhattan). It even detected the closed 802.11b network at the Starbucks near where we're staying here in central California, and best of all, it can tell the difference between WiFi and a microwave oven (the lights on it go solid instead of flash).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kyle "Why I Hate Saturn" Baker's new collection
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DATE: 08/23/2003 06:41:11 AM
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Kyle Baker is one of the funniest funnybook writers working in the field today, if not the funniest. His Why I Hate Saturn was such a brilliantly funny comic that I still laugh aloud when I think about it today -- ten years after I first read it.
He's kind of dropped out of the field for a couple years, apparently to work on commercial illustrations for magazines, and I've really missed him. Vertigo has just issued a new collection of Baker material, called "Undercover Genie."
It's...OK. The funny parts are really, really, really funny. The hard-edged, mean parts are really, really really mean. But about two-thirds of this book is filler, page after page of mildly amusic caricatures of political figures, doodles and sketches. I got my copy for free as a reviewer, but I would have certainly have bought it as soon as I spotted it on the shelf at the comics shop. At $15, I think I would have felt a little ripped off by the time I was done. A book for Kyle Baker completists (a fine thing to be!), but not worth the price otherwise.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My Boston Globe op-ed on net-politics
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DATE: 08/24/2003 08:49:55 AM
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I've got an op-ed in today's Boston Globe about the relationship between the Internet and poltiics:
When Trent Lott's revealing faux pas about Strom Thurmond was lightly touched upon by the press, the Internet's howling masses seized on the story, reviving it with a fresh angle -- Lott backhandedly endorses segregation! -- and kept the news cycle going long beyond its expected lifespan, until Lott crashed and burned and lost his post as Senate majority leader.
Huzzah. Of course, Lott is still a senator. In fact, every scandal exposed by or through the net -- INS witchhunts, stubbornly illusory WMDs, awarding of war-pork to Halliburton -- has yielded a decidedly hollow victory.
Information is power, but it's not enough. Modern emperors have learned the knack of spinning revelations of wrongdoing and bouncing back. Thus far, the Internet has lacked the follow-through necessary to make a lasting difference. That's changing. As the Internet matures as a place for political action, services like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Action Center (punch in your ZIP and e-mail your lawmaker), MeetUp's coordinated nationwide kaffeeklatsches for every Democratic candidate (but especially Howard Dean) and MoveOn's thronged mailing list millions (who can conjure the budget for a major media-buy on 24 hours' notice) are providing the bodies, budget and means for advancing proposals and seeing them through to their ends
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC to put its entire archive online
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DATE: 08/24/2003 01:57:02 PM
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The BBC has gone public with its intention to find a way to put the entire content of its radio and TV archives online. I know some of the details of this project, and I couldn't be more excited.
"I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value; about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion.
"In particular, it will be about how public money can be combined with new digital technologies to transform everyone's lives."
Update: Danny O'Brien has posted a stirring piece to his blog, explaining what makes this so darned cool.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 900 more names in the RIAA subpoena database
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DATE: 08/24/2003 02:31:55 PM
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EFF has added 900 names to its database of Kazaa usernames that appear in the RIAA subpoenas that exploit a legal vulnerability to compel ISPs to reveal their customers' personal information without any due process or evidence.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How does the Pentagon spend its yearly $400 million?
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DATE: 08/24/2003 02:56:42 PM
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Every year, the Pentagon is allocated $1.1 trillion $400 million, and never has to account for it. Where does the money go?
More than $1.1 trillion of federal government money is missing. Our government leaders say they will not account for it. However finding this money could solve all of our federal, state and local budget crises.
Where is the Money?
[...]
The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General has reported that DOD has not and will not account for $1.1 trillion of "undocumentable adjustments."
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(Thanks, Henri!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Citytv invents live television blogging
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DATE: 08/25/2003 04:13:33 AM
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Citytv is Toronto's groundbreaking, rule-breaking homegrown TV phenom. They've come up with some very innovative bits of programming over the years, but my favorite to date is Bob Hunter's daily editorial on the Breakfast Television morning show.
Bob Hunter is the co-founder of Greenpeace, and he's been a fixture in Canadian political commentary for years now -- indeed, he's the environmental reporter on Citytv's 24-hour news-channel.
On Breakfast Television we get a very different Bob Hunter. What the network does is send a camera crew to Hunter's home every morning at about 7AM, where he is sat at his kitchen table in his bathrobe, with all the day's newspapers spread out before him. Hunter's been up long genough to have gone through the Star, the Goble, the Post -- possibly even the Sun -- and he's marked up the interesting bits wiht a highlighter.
When the news-anchor cuts to the remote feed from Hunter's kitchen, he takes us on a guided tour of the day's news, taking apart and contrasting the reportage from the different news-organs. This is blogging, plain and simple, but it's on live television. And it's interesting as hell.
If you're coming to Toronto for the WorldCon, switch on your hotel-room TV one morning and give it a watch. It's pretty hot stuff.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Save Christiania, August 30th march in Copenhagen
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DATE: 08/25/2003 04:21:21 AM
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Christiania is the Permanent Autonomous Zone in Copenhagen: an old military base that has been successfully squatted for decades now. It's most notorious for the open-air cannabis market at its center, but thinking of Christiania as a pot-market does it a terrible disservice. Christiania is a living proof of the possibility of life outside of the constraints of traditional govenrment, of the possibility of having a neighborhood secede from civil society and a city, and still remain an integral part of it. From the beautiful collage buildings to the brilliant blacksmiths who hammer out the Christiania Bikes that are prized throughout Europe, Christiania is fragile, beautiful and inspiring.
The Danish government, in an uncharacterstic show of extremely poor sense, has decided that it must "normalize" Christiania -- that is, raze it and kill it. Danes are not happy about this. If you're within rail-distance of Copenhagen on August 30th, you can help shame the Danish government into taking its hands off of Christiania at a mass demonstration.
Saturday the 30th of August 2003 special trains are departuring from Aalborg, ?rhus, Vejle, Fredericia and Odense. Moreover there will be special busses leaving from 45 Danish towns. Tickets can be bought at BILLETNET
The popular parade begins at Carl Madsens Plads, Christiania at Noon. The parade meets all the guests arriving by trains and buses at Copenhagen Central Train station at 1.30 p.m., where a short ceremony will take place. At 3 p.m. the parade reaches Christiansborg Castle (Parliament) where we'll give the publicly elected a piece of our mind. The parade ends at Christiania around 5 p.m. where a huge multicultural feast starts with many, many kinds of music and cultural entertainment. All bands, artists, speakers and performers, known and unknown join without any payment. Everything is done as a support to Christiania and what it represents.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neal Stephenson in Wired
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DATE: 08/25/2003 04:23:08 AM
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Interesting, but frustratingly brief interview with Neal Stephenson in this month's Wired:
For the most part, Snow Crash turned out to be a failed prediction. People have shown limited interest in immersive 3-D technology, so I think it worked better as a novel than as a prognostication. But it provided a reasonable, coherent picture of a particular kind of entertainment technology. That sort of vision is valuable to engineers. Because of the way institutions work, an engineer ends up working on one part of a system but doesn't get to stand back and see the big picture. When engineering types speak highly of some science fiction writer, usually it's not because that person predicted the future. Rather, it's because he or she put together disparate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map by the people who are actually deploying such a technology.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: From RSS to radio with iSpeak It
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DATE: 08/25/2003 05:38:27 AM
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iSpeak It is an OS X app that grabs a text file, performs a text-to-speech operation to turn it into a read-aloud audio file, then converts it to an MP3 and synchs it to your iPod. Pretty cool -- you could use a script to grab a bunch of news from your RSS reader, suck it into iSpeak It, turn it into an MP3, and put it on your iPod to listen to on your morning commute.
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(via iPod Hacks)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired News: Burning Man never gets old
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DATE: 08/25/2003 09:22:55 AM
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Wired News published a piece I wrote on this year's edition of Burning Man, which begins today in the Nevada desert. About 30,000 are expected to attend.
"The important thing about Burning Man is that it is the most experiential phenomenon I can think of," says [Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow, who has been making the yearly pilgrimage since 1997]. "It can't be turned into data in any useful way. You can't informatize it by blogging it, filming it or taking pictures of it, because so much of it can't be translated into information."
Burning Man volunteer Jim Graham isn't fazed when he hears the event derided by some as "Girls Gone Wild" with extra helpings of sand and drugs. "Any time someone makes that kind of generalization, I say 'Yeah! It's exactly like that,' and smile. In the beginning, I came for the spectacle. Now, I come back for the opportunity to interact with so many people who possess such mind-boggling creativity."
Sometimes first-time attendees get a little too mind-boggled. "One crew from Israel last year wanted to do a 24-hour falafel camp," Graham recalls. "I said, 'Guys, maybe you should just do it around dinnertime.' They became such a hit, they were all wiped out by the third day. It's still a temporary city of 30,000 in the middle of nowhere, so there are practical considerations. Bikes get stolen, people get in fights over how loud the trance music is, someone still has to coordinate port-a-potties. But it's like nothing else."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cheaper By the Dozen appreciated
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DATE: 08/25/2003 08:49:24 PM
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WashPo has published a really wonderful appreciation of Cheaper By the Dozen, the memoir of the family of Frank Gilbreth, pioneer of time-motion studies and all they begat -- including touch-typing and surgical procedure. The Gilbreths had 12 children, and they constituted a living labroatory for Gilbreth's kooky notions about efficiency.
My memories of "Cheaper by the Dozen" remained happy over the years, but it was with a measure of apprehension that I opened the book recently. The books of one's childhood rarely age well into one's late adulthood, no matter how affectionate (and dim) one's memories may be. Yes, I love C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels as much now as I did when I was a boy, but those are the rare exceptions; mostly the literary pleasures of childhood and adolescence are best left undisturbed in later years.
So it is a joy to report that "Cheaper by the Dozen" still reads remarkably well. It is not a work of literature and no claims will be made for it as such. It is about American family life at a time (the 1910s and 1920s) now so impossibly distant that today's teenage reader may be unable to connect with it. Yet families are families, then as now, and I like to think that young readers would respond to the Gilbreth family's joys and sorrows just as I and millions of other, older readers have.
The prose in "Cheaper by the Dozen" is unadorned and matter of fact, and its organizational structure is a bit difficult to detect, but what matters most is that it is a touching family portrait that also happens to be very, very funny. Paterfamilias Gilbreth is, to paraphrase the Reader's Digest, one of the most unforgettable characters you'll ever meet. His wife was by any standards a remarkable woman, but in the book her role is mainly that of mother and helpmeet. Yes, at a time when a female college graduate was still something of a rarity, she accumulated a bunch of degrees -- when she and Frank married one newspaper wrote, "Although a graduate of the University of California, the bride is nonetheless an extremely attractive young woman" -- but in these pages the limelight only occasionally falls on her.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CAPPSII relaunched -- who needs the Constitution when you're fightin' air terrorism?
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DATE: 08/25/2003 08:50:00 PM
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Bill Scannell sez,
CAPPS II testing has been restarted.
The Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration
continues in its attempts to set up defacto internal border controls at our
nation's airports.
In response to the collaboration of Galileo, a subsidiary of Cendant, Inc.
in this test of the CAPPS II system, a disinvestment campaign has been
launched.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Who uses Free MIT?
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DATE: 08/26/2003 04:43:00 AM
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Two years ago, MIT "open sourced" its course-catalog, putting online the kind of course that most universities charge big bucks for as part of a "distance ed" program. Wired'd got a great piece on who uses MIT-free and why:
Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City's relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door neighbor's metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC, and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Here," he says, pointing at the screen. "This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a way of integrating two programs."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lazyweb: Can someone make Burningman Bingo cards?
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DATE: 08/26/2003 11:33:19 AM
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Paul Boutin, fellow hack and blogger, is en route to Black Rock City like me. He wonders aloud by e-mail: someone should make Burningman Bingo cards a la Hipster Bingo. So, to you, dear BoingBoing readers, I pose his question today. Tall Naked Dude Wearing Penis Gourd. Unwashed Chick on Ecstasy. Port-a-pottie. Mushroom Shaped Rave Tent. White Guy With El-Wire Woven Into His Dreadlocks. Help me out here, people. Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Photos of 737 after assault by hail storm
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DATE: 08/26/2003 03:27:05 PM
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Todd Lappin points us to "pretty amazing photos of in-flight damage to an EasyJet 737 caused by golfball-sized hail a few days ago, after takeoff from Geneva. As they say on all those police reality-TV shows, 'Incredibly, no one was hurt.'"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo News is now available via RSS feed
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DATE: 08/26/2003 05:58:43 PM
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Praise the code. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emerging Tech 3 call for participation
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DATE: 08/26/2003 07:04:04 PM
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Hey, you! Doing something cool involving technology? Propose a talk for the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, where geeks show up and show off. Cheapest way to attend ETCON is to propose a talk! Seriously, we've done two of these so far, and number three is coming up February 9-12 in San Diego. The first two were stone brilliant techfests where my mind got utterly blown AT LEAST twice a day. The third's gonna be even better:
Interfaces and Services: Sherlock, Watson, and Dashboard; micro-content viewers and RSS; laptop, palmtop, hiptop, and cellphone interfaces; web services.
Social Software Software: for describing and exploring social connections, FOAF (friend-of-a-friend networks), Flash Mobs, MeetUp, and related applications.
Untethered: WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks; Rendezvous, SMS, and ad hoc networking; Symbian and J2ME mobile development environments.
Location: GPS/GIS technologies and devices, location based services, navigational devices, geospacial annotation tools, and visualization software.
Hardware Hardware: hacks and mobile devices, sensor arrays, RFID tags, TinyOS, and sub-micro computing.
Business Models: Who is putting a stake in the ground and attempting to build the new applications, network, and online culture -- and how are they doing it?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on Salon
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DATE: 08/26/2003 07:07:55 PM
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Tons of people have asked me if I'd do a sequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first novel. The answer is no. Well, yes and no.
I don't really write sequels. More than half the point of writing sf is thinking up new worlds, and sequels involve revisiting places I've left behind.
But this is different. A couple years ago, right after I sold the novel, I wrote a short-story set in the same world as the book, but a century or more later. It's a parable about Napster, and it's called Truncat, and today, Salon has published it. And you can read it for free.
First, Adrian got on the subway, opting to go deadhead for a faster load-time. He stepped into the sparkling cryochamber at the Downsview Station, conjured a helmet-mounted display (HUD) against his field of vision, and granted permission to be frozen. The next thing he knew, he was thawing out on the Union Station platform, pressed belly-to-butt with a couple thousand other commuters who'd opted for the same treatment. In India, where this kind of convenience-freezing was even more prevalent, Mohan had observed that the reason their generation was small for their age was that they spent so much of it in cold-sleep, conserving space in transit. Adrian might've been 18, but he figured that he'd spent at least one cumulative year frozen.
Adrian shuffled through the crowd and up the stairs to the steady-temp surface, peeling off the routing sticker that the cryo had stuck to his shoulder. His tummy was still rumbling, so he popped the sticker in his mouth and chewed until it had dissolved, savoring the steaky flavor and the burst of calories. The guy who'd figured out edible routing tags had Whuffie to spare: Adrian's mom knew someone who knew someone who knew him, and she said that he had an entire subaquatic palace to rattle around in.
A clamor of swallowing noises filled his ears, as the crowd subvocalized, carrying on conversations with distant friends. Adrian basked in the warm, simulated sunlight emanating from the dome overhead. He was going outside of the dome in a matter of minutes, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he was going to be plenty cold soon enough. He patted his little rucksack and made sure he had his cowl with him.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Station-wagons from the days when cars were cars and men were men and kids wanted to be cowboys
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DATE: 08/27/2003 04:53:02 AM
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Beautiful gallery of vintage station-wagon ads.
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(Thanks, May!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Burningman Bingo
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DATE: 08/27/2003 07:24:23 AM
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Blogger and tech journalist Paul Boutin called for a Black Rock City version of Hipster Bingo, and you responded. BoingBoing reader Lev Johnson created the Burningman Bingo card, and here it is. Link to previous BB post, Discuss
Update: Numerous BoingBoing readers have e-mailed to ask why John Perry Barlow's head was selected to represent "A Bad Trip" (shown at left) That is not John Perry Barlow's head. That is Chuck Norris' head.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Kinetic human maze
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DATE: 08/27/2003 10:33:39 AM
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North Pitney has built a human-sized maze that changes as you walk through it. Called the Intermap, the maze will be open from September 1-15 in a vacant storefront at a Berkeley strip mall. The Intermap reminds me of that movie The Cube which, by the way, I think would make a great play. Link Discuss (Via Dorkbot)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Franken's Lies book excerpted on Salon
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DATE: 08/27/2003 01:46:01 PM
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Salon has run an excerpt from Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, a Fair and Balanced account of right-wing punditry that got him sued by Fox.
God began our conversation by clearing something up. Some of George W. Bush's friends say that Bush believes God called him to be president during these times of trial. But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. "THAT WORKED FOR EVERYONE ELSE," God said.
"What about Tilden?" I asked, referring to the 1876 debacle.
"QUIET!" God snapped. God was angry.
God said that after 9/11, George W. Bush squandered a unique moment of national unity. That instead of rallying the country around a program of mutual purpose and sacrifice, Bush cynically used the tragedy to solidify his political power and pursue an agenda that panders to his base and serves the interests of his corporate backers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 2D animation's last days at Disney
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DATE: 08/27/2003 01:50:19 PM
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David Koenig's written a sad and sharp account of the last days of the 2D animation department at Disney.
Eisner has expressed interest in reanimating Disney's classic 2-D features in 3-D.
A computerized Pinocchio, anyone? (In fact, much of the 3-D character animation for Walt Disney World's upcoming Mickey's PhilharMagic was so bad—in particular Ariel from The Little Mermaid—it had to be reanimated by 2-D animators, then transferred into the computer.)
The tens of millions of dollars lost on Treasure Planet are fresh on Disney's mind—and executives are bracing for the worst with next spring's Home on the Range.
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(Thanks, Greg!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fair and Balanced, the play
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DATE: 08/27/2003 01:52:35 PM
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"Fair and Balanced" is a new one-act play by Brian Fleming:
Fair & Balanced is a scathing satirical attack on Fox News Channel and its claim of ownership to the words "fair and balanced." Playwright Brian Flemming, who co-wrote the Off-Broadway smash hit Bat Boy: The Musical, penned this dark one-act comedy in which "Fair" and "Balanced" are characters—they are prisoners held in an underground dungeon, and every night at 8 p.m. a foul character named "Bill O'Reilly" comes down into the dungeon to torture them.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Danny on the Beeb's Creative Archive
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DATE: 08/28/2003 05:11:34 AM
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Danny O'Brien's got a good editorian in the Guardian today, explaining the BBC's Creative Archive project:
The BBC, in theory, shouldn't care how many times you share a copy of, say, Dixon of Dock Green. On the contrary, it should thank you. You're taking the hard work - and cost - out of distributing the works you have already paid for with your licence fee. So not only does the BBC not need to care about Napster and other file-sharing systems - it can actively take advantage of them. Distributing content in this way does not reduce the BBC's income, but it can reduce its costs. Copy protection devices and clampdowns on internet copying just get in the way of the BBC's mission.
Of course, simply allowing anyone to download and copy the BBC's output has its problems. While broadcasts are free, the BBC makes money selling DVDs and tapes of its work, and reselling to other countries. Not a great deal of money - less than 5% of the Ł3bn it receives in licence fees - but some.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My WorldCon reading, tomorrow at 5PM
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DATE: 08/28/2003 05:16:03 AM
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Going to be at WorldCon? My reading is tomorrow night -- Friday -- at 5PM, in the Convention Center, room 203A. I'm going to be reading from the new 21,000-word novella I wrote last week -- your only chance to get at this story between now and its eventual publication, likely a year away.
Trish gathered her staff in the board room and wrote the following in glowing letters on the wall with her fingertip, leaving the text in her expressive schoolmarm's handwriting rather than converting it to some sterile font: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
Her staff, all five of them, chuckled softly. "Recognize it?" she asked, looking round at them.
"Pee-Wee Herman?" said the grassroots guy, who was so young it ached to look at him, but who could fire a cannonload of email into any congressional office on 12 hours' notice. He never stopped joking.
The lawyer cocked an eyebrow at him and stroked her moustache, a distinctive gesture that you could see in any number of courtv archives of famous civil-rights battles, typically just before she unloaded both barrels at the jury-box and set one or another of her many precedents. "It's Martin Luther King, right?"
"Close," Trish said.
"Geronimo," guessed the paralegal, who probably wasn't going to work out after all, being something of a giant flake who spent more time on the phone to her girlfriend than filing papers and looking up precedents.
"Nope," Trish said, looking at the other two staffers -- the office manager and the media guy -- who shrugged and shook their heads. "It's Gandhi," she said.
They all went, "Ohhhh," except the grassroots guy, who crossed to the wall and used his fingertip to add, "And then they assassinate you."
"I'm too tough to die," the lawyer said. "And you're all too young. So I think we're safe."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robert Anton Wilson for Governor
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DATE: 08/28/2003 10:08:12 PM
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bOING bOING patron saint Robert Anton Wilson is running for California Governor! "After all, why should I remain the ONLY nutcase in California who ain't running," RAW says.
My party, the Guns and Dope Party, invites extremists of both right and left to unite behind our shared goals of:
1. Get those pointy-headed Washington bureaucrats off our backs and off our fronts too!
2. Guns for everybody who wants them; no guns for those who don't want them
3. Drugs for everybody who wants them; no drugs for those who don't want them
4. Freedom of choice, free love,free speech, free Internet and free beer
5. California secession -- Keep the anti-gun and anti-dope fanatics on the Eastern side of the Rockies
6. Lotsa wild parties every night by gun-toting dopers
7. Animal protection -- Support your right to keep and arm bears
More position papers will follow; we know at least 69 good positions.
I haven't been this excited about politics since RU Sirius ran for President!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Prisoners' Inventions: MacGuyver meets the prison system
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DATE: 08/29/2003 05:26:05 AM
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Prisoners' Inventions is a small-press book comprising an illustrated guide to the ingenious folk-art-cum-contraband manufactured by artisans in America's prison system, from toilet-roll chess-sets to this "water lighter." This stuff makes a joke out of MacGuyver and Gilligan's Island's Professor -- (often) brilliant inventions, refined by thousands of inventors who have necessity in plenty, and passed folklorically from one prisoner to another.
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(via FARK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sterling on Open Cultures
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DATE: 08/29/2003 05:28:27 AM
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Bruce Sterling's latest column in Wired is a snarling and sharp-edged commentary on the Open Cultures conference in Vienna:
Logically - indeed, free-software geeks are the most logical hippies in the whole wide world - the revolution is at hand. Why should anybody pay for software? What do you get for your money besides shrink-wrap licenses, potential lawsuits, DRM cuffs around both wrists, and a cloud of viruses? "Property relations" are blocking social and technical progress. Secure computing and digital rights management are coercive regimes that would make George Orwell blush. The free market is a tissue of political fiction as brittle as an Eastern European regime. With open source code on tap, the software trade will collapse under its own weight.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Teslar Watch: Tinfoil beanie for your wrist
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DATE: 08/29/2003 05:30:44 AM
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Celebrities and other fools are availing themselves of the Teslar Watch, a wrist-watch that purports to deflect radiation from its wearer. The Wired News headline, "A Watch Powered by Snake Oil," says it all -- and whomever wrote it deserves a raise for pithy wit.
"There is not a chance in the world that (these types of devices) will do anything but lighten your wallet," said John Moulder, a professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, who said he's seen a slew of products that claim to do the same thing, including radio-frequency-proof lingerie.
Harezi first developed the Teslar chip in 1986 to help people with extreme sensitivity to electricity, from televisions to vacuum cleaners. She said the "environmentally handicapped" people who wore the watch were able to resume their lives.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Female Baghdad blogger
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DATE: 08/29/2003 05:33:14 AM
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Baghdad Burning is (another) blog written by an Iraqi with a very good command of English and a nice, breezy prose-style. However, the blogger here is a woman, and her perspective is different enough from Salam Pax's that this makes for a fascinating counterpoint (or at least alternative) to his very good blog.
The Myth: Iraqis, prior to occupation, lived in little beige tents set up on the sides of little dirt roads all over Baghdad. The men and boys would ride to school on their camels, donkeys and goats. These schools were larger versions of the home units and for every 100 students, there was one turban-wearing teacher who taught the boys rudimentary math (to count the flock) and reading. Girls and women sat at home, in black burkas, making bread and taking care of 10-12 children.
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(via William Gibson)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ping Pong in The Matrix
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DATE: 08/29/2003 11:22:57 PM
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A funny performance piece from Japanese (?) TV depicting an anti-gravity game of Ping Pong. Link Discuss (Thanks Vann!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Suburbia makes you fat
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DATE: 08/30/2003 10:10:17 AM
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Suburbs built without sidewalks are strongly correlated with net weight gain for residents of those regions: John Q. Roundass of the Levittown Roundasses, at your service.
All other factors being equal, each extra degree of sprawl meant extra weight, less walking, and a little more high blood pressure, he concluded. Someone living in the most sprawling county - Geauga County outside Cleveland - would weigh 6.3 pounds more than if that same person lived in the most compact area, Manhattan.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Karl Schroeder's Permanence wins the Aurora Award!
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DATE: 08/30/2003 04:05:49 PM
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Congratulations are due: my friend and writing collaborator Karl Schroeder won the Aurora Award -- Canada's answer to the Hugo -- today, for best novel, for his book Permanence.
Permanence is Karl's second novel, and it's brilliant -- at its core is a massive, hard-sf conceit: that because tool-use expends more energy than adaptation (i.e., when confronted with a marsh, it's easier to be a marsh-bird than to figure out how to drain it), that over time, all the races of the universe will use genetic engineering to adapt themselves to their habitats and so become nonsentient. Layered on top of that are braided adventure stories, religious cults, and a kind of intellectual property imperialism driven by smart dust and twisted by lightspeed lags. This is the kind of book that changes you, and he deserved the hell out of this award.
Go, Karl!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Island Chronicles -- "Welcoming Dance,"
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DATE: 08/31/2003 06:19:12 PM
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Our latest Island Chronicles dispatch, entitled "Welcoming Dance," is now up on the LA WEEKLY web site.
Link (To see past dispatches go to archives) Discuss
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Insect Company - Oddities and rarities
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DATE: 08/31/2003 06:45:36 PM
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Photo gallery of insect freaks, from The Insect Company, which sells insect specimens. Link Discuss (via Ookworld)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Noney - what's it worth?
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DATE: 08/31/2003 07:01:33 PM
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Noney is money with a face value of zero. But the creator wants you to try buy stuff with it. Reminds me of the work of money artist J.S.G. Boggs. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: NYT homage to Jack Kirby
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DATE: 09/01/2003 02:41:10 AM
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The New York Times wrote a nice tribute to the late Jack "King" Kirby, the world's greatest comic book writer/artist.
There are elements of the "Star Wars" mythology in "Matrix." But the idea of a hero turning out to be the offspring of the most inconceivable evil, an immensely grim force that dominates out of pride, did not begin with George Lucas. In 1971 Kirby left Marvel after disagreements over rights to characters he had helped bring to life. After going to DC Comics, the home of Superman and Batman, Kirby hammered together a new vision: an expanse of planets and the gods that controlled them called the New Universe, which unfolded in the "New Gods," "Forever People" and "Mister Miracle" comics.
With the malevolent overlord, Darkseid — who turns out to be the father of Orion, a damaged warrior-hero who has to battle a barely sublimated streak of cruelty — Mr. Lucas's "Star Wars" archvillain, Darth Vader, can clearly be glimpsed.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Live from Burningman
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DATE: 09/01/2003 02:45:43 AM
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I'm sitting inside a trailer Prevost bus/RV belonging to an incredibly generous, satellite-dish-toting friend named Wayne -- on the playa in Black Rock City, at Burning Man. It's 2:30AM. Most of the event has passed, but performance-explosions are going off all over the place, brightly illuminated art-cars are floating by in the sand, and people with el-wire woven into their hair and clothes are milling around in the middle of the night. The sky above is astonishingly clear. I can see the milky way. The Man has burned, as has the Temple of Honor, as has tons of propane, trash, wood, and just about everything else flammable you might imagine. I'm sleep-deprived, grimy, and covered in white alkaline dust. This was my first time out here, and while it's been a terrific adventure, I'm seriously looking forward to home and running water. Here's one snapshot of an art-car; at left is a snapshot of the man just before the Burn. A few more of the photos I took out here will run with a forthcoming story in Wired News within the next couple of days. Oh, Burningman Bingo? It was dead-on. I crossed off everything but the tofu pup wrapper and the deodorant rock. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Drawing Mickey Mouse from memory
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DATE: 09/01/2003 03:35:47 PM
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"Bad Toon Rising is a collection of drawings of well-known cartoon characters produced by amateur artists entirely from memory and without any reference materials whatsoever. We can all picture what Mickey Mouse or the Pink Panther look like in our minds, but getting that image down on paper is another matter! Never mind, we think that some of the worst drawings are the best."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My Torcon pictures
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DATE: 09/02/2003 03:19:44 AM
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I took a buttload of photos at the WorldCon in Toronto this year. Here are the 300 best pictures. Anything labelled ?? is someone whose name I've forgotten, which is really embarassing, but I have an unbelievably bad memory for names. If you have one of the missing names, please email me, along with the URL of the page that the photo can be found on.
Did you take WorldCon pix too? Post the URL to the Quicktopic. I forgot to get a self-portrait of me in my spiffy suit at the Hugos, did anyone get a shot?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Podzilla: a place for everything and everything on your belt
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DATE: 09/02/2003 03:44:15 AM
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The Gadgeteer has posted a review of PodZilla, the belt-pack carrying case from RoadWired, who are absolutely my favorite computer-accessory company in the world.
Based upon the innovative design of their Pod bag, RoadWired has resized and reworked the original. Podzilla is a good looking bag that anyone, including manly-men, can carry. For those that like to keep things simple, Podzilla is available in a black/black or navy/black combination. For those that would rather spice things up a bit, the color combinations titanium/black, yellow/black, red/black and olive/black are also available. I received the red/black model, which has the added benefit of almost perfectly matching my Swiss Army luggage, for when I travel.
Podzilla measures 9.25" tall x 9" wide x 6.5" thick, weighs 1.5 pounds and has an exterior composed of water-repellent1050 denier ballistic nylon with an interior lined in smooth nylon pack cloth. This bag is extremely well made, well padded and gives you a general feeling of quality...
In all, there are over 20 pockets and compartments included in the Podzilla just waiting to be filled with your gear. Here is what I was able to fit in mine: Sony CLIÉ NZ90, iPAQ 5450, a complete Seidio Data Power Package, a Cannon Powershot S330 camera, a Sony Cyber-Shot U camera, two multi-pens, four AA batteries, AC & DC power adapters for the CLIÉ, three compact flash memory cards, the Sony CF PEGA-WL110 WiFi card for the CLIÉ, a CF ->PCMCIA adapter, a 4inOne PCMCIA card reader, the Canon's battery charger, and the Cyber-Shot's battery charger...whew! See why I prefer a padded strap? ;0)
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(Thanks, Tim!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Be a marrow donor
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DATE: 09/02/2003 03:45:25 AM
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An anonymous reader writes,
Millie Forbes (20), from Donside, Aberdeenshire, UK has Acute Myeloid Leukaemia and now she desperately needs a life-saving transplant of blood stem cells / bone marrow. A search in The Anthony Nolan Trust Register has, to date, proved unsuccessful.
Millie's family have done everything they can to help her and now her future lies in the hands of generous spirited people 18 - 40, especially young men, to come forward.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open-source superhero
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DATE: 09/02/2003 03:48:21 AM
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Nice piece on Jenny Everywhere, a comix character created explicitly as an open-source project, open to tweaking by anyone who cares to write her into a story -- it's like League of Extradorinary Gentlemen without the 75-year copyright interregnum.
The Shifter's mysterious Open Source origins can be traced back to a comic book discussion group hosted by hip UK-based webzine Barbelith.com. Community administrator Tom Coates uttered a plea for rights-free characters "that we declare can be used by anyone at any time in any format without there being anyone to give money to."
Ottawa-based artist Steven "Mr. Moriarty" Wintle, one of the first to answer the call, was intrigued and motivated by the idea of a public domain superhero. "I checked around to see what other people were doing," says Wintle, "and I was angered that people claimed to have open source characters, but they had all these strings attached. I'd have an easier time making my own character rather than deal with those fuckers."
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(Thanks, Kevin)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Origami MEMS motors to improve mobile phone cameras
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DATE: 09/02/2003 10:11:22 AM
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According to New Scientist, UK company 1 Limited is developing tiny motors made from piezoelectric ceramic materials that could provide zoom and focus features to inexpensive mobile phone cameras. A .1 mm sheet of piezoelectric ceramic is cut and molded so hundreds of tiny bridges on legs protrude from the surface. The sheet is then rolled into a cylinder around a lens. Applying current causes the legs to flex, moving the lens up and down inside the cylinder. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Last Burning Man post on BoingBoing ever, promise.
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DATE: 09/02/2003 04:42:23 PM
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I'm back on planet Earth again, just returned from a first-ever trip to Burning Man. What I learned: Showers and flush toilets are a beautiful thing. But I was working out there: Wired News ran this story and more of the photos I shot (click on thumbnail at left for full-size image), and I did this piece for NPR's program "Day to Day" with Alex Chadwick (scroll down for "Looking Back at Burning Man"). Update: the rest of my snapshots from Burning Man are online now, here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Real map of Europe
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DATE: 09/03/2003 07:05:22 AM
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Geoff Cohen has been ranting entertainingly in his blog about something he calls "real maps." It's been long known that maps are distortive -- canonically, they're not the territory -- and out of proportion --the way that the mapmaker accounts for the Earth's curvature can be intensely political, as can the decision as to where the lateral boundaries of the map occur.
But Geoff's after a simpler form of "real map" -- he wants a map "with the actual names of countries on it. If you look at a typical American-produced map, it's full of countries with names like "Germany" and "India" and "Greece" and "China" and "Japan" and "Hungary" and "Egypt," etc. etc. etc. You might not think that's strange, but the fact is that there are no such countries. Sure, we in the English speaking world may have been calling certain countries by those names, but it's not what the people who live there call them. This is ridiculous. It's time to get rid of at least one vestige of colonialism and produce an accurate map."
He's gone ahead and produced a real map of Europe. It's nice. I'm going to print it out and hang it up in my bathroom, near my shower-curtain that has a map of the world on it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Traffic congestion is a living animal
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DATE: 09/03/2003 07:17:48 AM
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"Aggregate Traffic Animals" -- a delightful, Richard Dawkins-inspired bit of speculation about the degree to which traffic patterns on freeways can be viewed as living organisms.
The author first became aware of the existence of ATAs while making his way through the hinterland of Canada on a long, mid-winter solo drive in a decrepit Dodge Charger with no functioning radio. Due to his dangerous penchant for immersive daydreaming in the absence of external stimuli, he began to parasite his driving decisions by locking in behind another car with comparable speed ambitions. By reserving a sliver of awareness for tracking the red brake lights of the "lead" car for changes in speed or direction, the author was able to comfortably enjoy his trance while a hefty burden of road awareness was outsourced to the other driver, causing the front car to function as a sort of early warning mechanism for changing conditions (including the Mounties' speed-traps)...
The most basic form of multi-car life is the Asipetal Caterpillar, also known as a worm. Worms begin when a stable solo vehicle spawns a linear, single-lane chain of vehicles composed of loose monomers joining at the rear (a closely related, but dysfunctional, construct known as an Acropetal Caterpillar grows by adding vehicles to the front of the chain, generally leading to destructive diffusion or autolysis). Short, lithe worms are the fundamental building blocks of healthy ATA tissue. Perverse, long-form worms are the seeds of congestion and death.
The second atomic element of ATA tissue stands in stark contrast to the worm, for it is a fleeting thing, and when it takes concrete form at all it is often manifested as a single car. The Apparent Coxswain is a vehicle that appears, to the conscious or semi-conscious mind of one or more drivers, to be a leader of the worm. When the Apparent Coxswain changes lanes, there is a higher probability that a majority of the worm will follow suit than if the change were initiated by a less trusted vehicle. In many cases each car in a worm perceives the car immediately ahead of it to be the Apparent Coxswain, leading to domino-effect lane-transitions; such formations have high homeostatic integrity because of the worm's ability to "find a new head" should one Apparent Coxswain be lost to the currents.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Accidental Trepanation
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DATE: 09/03/2003 08:58:34 AM
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A construction worker in Truckee, California fell from a ladder face first onto an 18-inch-long, 1.5-inch diameter chip auger drill bit. The bit went into his eye, pushed his brain aside, and travelled through his skull and out the back. Amazingly, he lost only the eye, not his life. (He should join ITAG!) According to CNN, the "doctors essentially unscrewed the bit to remove it." Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speaking at Futurist Salon in Silicon Valley, Sept 19
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DATE: 09/03/2003 01:45:35 PM
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I'm giving at talk at the Bay Area Futurist Salon on Friday the 19th of September 7pm -- I'll be doing a riff on copyright, spectrum and spculating, in good futurist fashion, on the future of same. Hope to see you there!
We will be back at the Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center just across of the San Mateo Caltrain Station. 11 West Hillsdale Blvd., Hillsdale Shopping Center San Mateo, CA 94403 650-341-5560
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Library Association shares RIAA's lawfirm
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DATE: 09/03/2003 01:53:21 PM
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The Library Journal reports that the American Library Association law-firm is also representing the RIAA in its racketeering putsch to destroy the American justice system in the name of defending copyright. The ALA is thinking about getting new counsel on the ground that destroying culture constitutes a conflict on interest when you're meant to be representing the guardians of human knowledge:
The American Library Association (ALA) is investigating whether its relationship with law firm Jenner & Block is a conflict of interest, as the firm has represented the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its recent efforts to gather the names of those suspected of illegal file-sharing. In a letter to ALA executive director Keith Fiels, Emily Sheketoff, executive director of ALA's Washington Office, said that the office has grown "very uncomfortable" with Jenner & Block's legal activities on behalf of the RIAA. ALA is seeking a letter from the firm setting forth how it would handle any potential conflict.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bicycles reimagined
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DATE: 09/03/2003 01:58:13 PM
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An interdisciplinary group of German engineers and scholars have designed a beautiful, radical new bicycle. The site's got tons of mind-candy, including wicket cut-aways of the drive-train, which reminds me of the pictures of nanoscale engines I've seen.
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(Thanks, Brent!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Superb collection of ASCII animation
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DATE: 09/03/2003 02:02:56 PM
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This is a mind-blowingly cool collection of ASCII images and movies -- I'm boggled. The harry Potter flick is especially nice.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IKEA product names demystified
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DATE: 09/03/2003 02:40:00 PM
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Know those funny IKEA furnishing names? Turns out there's a method to the madness:
Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames
Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian placenames
Dining tables and chairs: Finnish placenames
Bookcase ranges: Occupations
Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
Chairs, desks: men's names
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(Thanks, Eli!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paleo-turntablist mixes, back from obscurity
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DATE: 09/03/2003 02:41:21 PM
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Andy sez:
Double Dee and Steinski's "The Lesson," created in the early 1980s by two hobbyist DJs, sampled countless unauthorized sources (by dual cassette decks!) to create something innovative and new. Of course, the three songs were never made commercially-available because clearing the samples would have been impossible.
"The Lesson" later inspired an entire genre of cut-and-paste turntablists, from DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist to basement "mash-up" makers. Previously available only by bootleg, you can download the MP3s here. Like Ryan said in the thread, "Long live open source culture!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Palahniuk and Stephenson coming to Berkeley in September
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DATE: 09/03/2003 07:03:08 PM
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Two killer readings coming to the East Bay this month: Chuck Palahniuk and Neal Stephenson.
Thursday, September 25, 2003 07:30 PM
Neal Stephenson, will be promoting Quicksilver
Appears on/at: CODY'S BOOKS/Reading/Signing
2454 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704
9/8/2003
Chuck Palahniuk promoting Diary
Cody's Books
Berkeley, CA
510-845-7852
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Algorithmic evolutionary poetry
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DATE: 09/03/2003 09:12:50 PM
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Genetic poetry -- you prey on unfit poems and allow the fit ones to reproduce, and soon enough, the alogrithm's cranking out poetry good enough to write on a toilet-wall.
Ok, here's the idea: starting with a whole bunch (specifically 1,000) randomly generated groups of words (our "poems"), we are going to subject them to a form of natural selection, killing off the "bad" ones and breeding the "good" ones with each other. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge...
spirit sky whatever considered
rude puzzled and
hearts
soiled the arrogance
the
gleams
shaked streamside walls do life praying
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turing test for genetic algorithms
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DATE: 09/03/2003 09:14:22 PM
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Here's a collection of genetic algorithmm output that's "human-competitive," that is, as good as something a person might produce. What constitutes human-competitiveness?
(A) The result was patented as an invention in the past, is an improvement over a patented invention, or would qualify today as a patentable new invention.
(B) The result is equal to or better than a result that was accepted as a new scientific result at the time when it was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
(C) The result is equal to or better than a result that was placed into a database or archive of results maintained by an internationally recognized panel of scientific experts.
(D) The result is publishable in its own right as a new scientific result independent of the fact that the result was mechanically created.
(E) The result is equal to or better than the most recent human-created solution to a long-standing problem for which there has been a succession of increasingly better human-created solutions.
(F) The result is equal to or better than a result that was considered an achievement in its field at the time it was first discovered.
(G) The result solves a problem of indisputable difficulty in its field.
(H) The result holds its own or wins a regulated competition involving human contestants (in the form of either live human players or human-written computer programs).
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(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nanoscale iron to clean up toxic waste
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DATE: 09/04/2003 06:41:16 AM
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Nanoscale iron filings introduced into contaminated soil can interact with toxic waste to break it down or render it insoluble, preventing it from entering the water-table and hence the food chain.
...[W]hen metallic iron oxidizes in the presence of contaminants such as trichloroethene, carbon tetrachloride, dioxins, or PCBs, he says, these organic molecules get caught up in the reactions and broken down into simple carbon compounds that are far less toxic.
Likewise with dangerous heavy metals such as lead, nickel, mercury, or even uranium, says Zhang: The oxidizing iron will reduce these metals to an insoluble form that tends to stay locked in the soil, rather than spreading through the food chain. And, iron itself has no known toxic effect--just as well, considering the element is abundant in rocks, soil, water, and just about everything else on the planet. Indeed, says Zhang, for all those reasons, many companies now use a relatively coarse form of metallic iron powder to purify their industrial wastes before releasing them into the environment.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland truefans
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DATE: 09/04/2003 06:52:09 AM
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This is a stunning -- if somewhat unkind -- feature on Orange County's Disneyland obsessives. These are Disney truefans who make me look like a rank amateur, people who try to go every day. Their obsessions are touching and vividly portrayed, and are ultimately no weirder than baseball obsessions or science fiction obsessions or what have you -- something that I wish the article had acknowledged.
Benji explains that every square inch of Disneyland has its own obsessives. There are people solely devoted to Ron Miller, the man who plays ragtime piano in Refreshment Corner at the end of Main Street. There is one woman who comes to the park every day and just rides the Indiana Jones™ Adventure over and over. Its crew gave her a crystal bowl to commemorate her thousandth time. There are Haunted Mansion people, Matterhorn people. Benji and his closest friends don’t focus on one attraction, though; they are generalists, they like everything at the park.
Doug Marsh is Benji’s best friend, even though they couldn’t be less alike. Where Benji is brooding and shy, Doug is expansive, showy, a Disneyland-obsessed Nathan Lane type, short and paunchy, but with flaming red hair and a bushy beard. (“I’m not gay,” he tells me. “A lot of people think I am.”) He says that he’d also love to give me his tour of the park, so one morning we meet near the entrance. As we walk toward the ticket booths, Doug spots a piece of white photocopied paper and goes to pick it up. “Look at this,” he says — it’s a list of special events at the park on October 17, 2001. “Why would this be floating around? And why would they print up a special schedule for that day?” He puts the paper in his satchel. “This will be investigated.” I’ve heard Doug collects paper ephemera, any sort of printed matter that’s given away free at Disneyland. “Yes,” he says. “Ephemera. Particularly ephemeral ephemera.”
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(Thanks, xowie!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Computer History Museum Fellows Awards Celebration
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DATE: 09/04/2003 08:55:08 AM
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The amazing Computer History Museum in Mountain View is hosting its annual Fellow Awards Celebration fund-raiser. It's expensive ($175/person), but it's for a good cause. And where else can you find Gordon Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, and David Wheeler in the same room? Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Slick new amphibious car
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DATE: 09/04/2003 09:14:23 AM
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Gibbs Technologies took its new Aquada amphibious car for a test drive on the Thames River yesterday. The Aquada goes 100 mph on land and 30 mph on water. Apparently, it only takes a few seconds for the wheels to retract and the drive mechanism switch to power a jet for water jaunts. As Alan Gibbs so eloquently explained, "With this you can have a really good car on the road, and an exciting toy that can tow a water skier, that you can commute to work with, that you can go to St. Tropez with and take two girlfriends." And it's only, er, $235k to buy one! Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Call your Senator, prevent media consolidation!
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DATE: 09/04/2003 10:44:14 AM
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Robert sez,
In a surprise order yesterday, new FCC rule changes that would dramatically alter the American media landscape were temporarily blocked by a federal court. It's a big victory, and the timing couldn't be better. With the rule changes on hold, we now have the opportunity to void them for good -- before they ever take effect. But we need your help TODAY.
This is a call to action. The Senate Appropriations Committee is voting today on whether to roll back these FCC media ownership rules. We need to keep Senate phones ringing off the hook.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Weird crap from the wires
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DATE: 09/04/2003 10:04:27 PM
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Tara Calashain of ResearchBuzz and the Google Hacks book has put together a new blog for odd items off the news-wires. I'm pretty excited about the Hello Kitty Tongue Tape:
Hello Kitty(R) and Strawberry Shortcake(TM) Tongue Tape(TM) Hit Retail Shelves for Back to School -- Source: PR Newswire, September 4, 2003. "New assortments of Tongue Tape(TM dissolvable tongue strips packaged in collectible dispensers based on Hello Kitty and Strawberry Shortcake(TM) hit retail shelves nationwide just in time for Back to School. The perfect lunchtime snack, sugar-free and calorie-free Tongue Tape(TM) is tempting the tummies of children, parents and teachers alike with a variety of delicious fruit flavors."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Ark of Zen
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DATE: 09/05/2003 09:26:49 AM
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kitten
penguin
kangaroo
squirrel, penguin + pig
badgers
creatures
and the classic
happy tree friends
web zen home, web zen store, Discuss (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Technomads: Mobile wireless computing at Burning Man
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DATE: 09/05/2003 09:47:24 AM
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BoingBoing reader Tom Longson and friends pulled together a really cool social networking project at Burning Man this year that involving mobile, ruggedized Internet kiosks. I didn't have an opportunity to visit in person, but the project sounded insanely well-executed, and I hope that Burning Man organizers consider teaming up with Tom and crew to expand it next year. While I realize that many "burners" argue that part of the charm of the playa is total lack of connectivity, this sort of thing strikes me as an enhancer, not an inhibitor, of the experience. As a first-time attendee, one of the things that surprised me most was how flat-out tough it was to connect with friends out there. Cell and mobile data service don't work, and the nature of the experience makes it silly/inappropriate to lug around a laptop and check email every five minutes. What Tom and friends imagined -- and created -- adds up to a smart use of wireless computing that helps bring people together in physical space, under tough environmental conditions. Tom explains:
"In my quest for a max max cyberpunk fantasy, I attended Burning Man for my 3rd year with the goal of providing roaming kiosks to offer access to the yearly event's "Digital Directory", and to the Internet. I knew keeping computer equipment running wouldn't be easy, with the playa's huge amounts of fine dust, 75 MPH wind speeds, and baking sun. With the help of family and friends, we constructed three cabinets to keep the dust away from the sensitive CPU and monitor, while keeping them ventilated. With the help of The Embassy's satellite uplink and wireless network, we hooked up our kiosks to the desert's temporary network.
The kiosks allowed people to access Burning Man events, maps of the playa, and the chance to check back home via email. One burner, after checking his email, excitedly told me he got a job he had applied for. We plan to continue the project, providing more kiosks on the playa, and attempt to obtain a permanent trailer to spread our technomadic dream across the planet. Interested bloggers, computer artists, and donors please contact nym@espians.com."
Check out photos and documentation of the project here. Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Become pride of the trailer park with this amphibious bus
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DATE: 09/05/2003 09:57:22 AM
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Amphibious boatbus. Kitsch meets cool. The web site explains: "We have combined the best features of world class yachts and Motor Coaches in a revolutionary design and YES IT DOES GO IN THE WATER!"
Link, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Erupting Volcano QTVR panoramas
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DATE: 09/05/2003 10:01:33 AM
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From BoingBoing pal Peter Murphy, Australian photographer and QTVR enthusiast:
Hi Xeni -- pretty remarkable, these panoramas of a volcano in eruption by a French guy, here. And new on my blog lately a panorama of an art installation, in a log cabin, a real log cabin, a couple on a bed surrounded by taxidermy."
Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mullet haiku
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DATE: 09/05/2003 11:42:37 AM
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Sphinx standing guard
A double-wide sarcophagus
Get off my property
-W
Born to Run Hairdo
Whither doest thou wander, Dude?
Home to New Jersey..
-Ralph Gervasio
It's not a trailer
Angry mullet man insists
Manufactured home
-KJ
Best of the BoingBoing reader-submitted haikus:
My el camino
'sup on blocks right now, got a
mu'fukin oil leak
--DeleonLink, Discuss (Thanks, Clayton)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reverse Cowgirl's Blog: goodbye.
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DATE: 09/05/2003 12:06:54 PM
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Susannah Breslin has taken down Reverse Cowgirl's Blog.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Counterfeit couture better-made than the real thing
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DATE: 09/05/2003 03:03:35 PM
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Shoppers in poor countries deliberately seek out counterfeit designer goods, which are perceived as being better-manufactured than the legitimate goods.
Nina Laurie, from the department of geography at Newcastle University, said often the quality of the counterfeit clothing was as good or sometimes better than the original, and less than 10% of the price. Very often it was the cheapest clothing available because it was mass-produced in such large quantities...
"In fact, they are not replicas at all but originals designed for the local market but with a designer label included because otherwise they would not sell," Dr Laurie said.
She had watched a young man operating a laptop computer from a car battery in a tin shack while he downloaded logos from the internet, traced them, and began man ufacturing designer labels for local factories.
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(Thanks, Maf!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: $SPAM from $SOMEONE
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 09/05/2003 03:04:43 PM
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Blogging about spam is only slightly less masturbatory than blogging about blogging, but damn, this is one funny piece of spam...
From: "$FIRSTNAME $LASTNAME"<$STRIPPEDUSER@XINHUANET.COM>
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 1:26:23 PM US/Pacific
To: doctorow@craphound.com
Subject: $RANDOMIZE
$RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RAN! DOMIZE $RAND MIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RAND! OMIZE $RANDO IZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE $RANDOMIZE
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big Thunder Mountain at Disneyland derails, injures 11
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DATE: 09/05/2003 03:08:42 PM
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The Big Thunder Mountain Runaway Train Ride (not a roller-coaster in Disneyspeak, but a "runaway train ride") at Disneyland derailed today, injuring 11 people, including one critical injury. Any Disney insiders want to comment on this? Most of the Disney attraction injuries I've read about are candidates for the Darwin Award, but this seems like a catastrophic prevantative maintenance failure, no?
Link
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(at least twenty of you suggested this, but Thomas was first!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Search the Wayback Machine
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DATE: 09/05/2003 03:18:23 PM
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11 billion of the pages stored at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine have been indexed are now searchable through a new search-interface.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Will San Francisco's next mayor be a human or a replicant?
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DATE: 09/05/2003 03:18:45 PM
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The Wave magazine took the replicant-or-human test from PK Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the basis for the film Blade Runner) and administered it to San Francisco's mayoral candidates. The results are highly amusing:
SUBJECT 4: TOM AMMIANO
It's your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?
Tom Ammiano: I'd look for money.
TW: You've got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?
TA: I'd think this was Blade Runner. That's my reaction.
TW: You're watching television. Suddenly you realize there's a wasp crawling on your arm.
TA: Call 911.
TW: You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, Tom, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, Tom. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that, Tom?
TA: That's interesting. I don't know. I'm a republican?
TW: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.
TA: Tenderness. Yelling.
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(Thanks, JeremyT)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in LA this weekend: Art, freedom, and Jello
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DATE: 09/05/2003 03:30:15 PM
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BoingBoing pal Sean Bonner, founder of LA's SixSpace gallery says:
"Cruel and Unusual, an art exhibition to benefit the West Memphis Three, opens on Saturday, Septemeber 6th from 5-10pm. This event is free and open to the public however we do expect a large crowd and ask that you arrive early in case there is a wait. You do not need to reserve tickets. Jello Biafra will be speaking at approx. 8pm with additional speakers before and after. You can read all the information regarding this show here including a brief case overview and the list of artists -- which includes Exene Cervenka, The Clayton Brothers, Edward Colver, Glen E. Friedman, Camille Rose Garcia, Shepard Fairey, Jaime Hernandez, Emmeric James Konrad, Matt Mahurin, Marilyn Manson, Liz McGrath, Grove Pashley, Raymond Pettibon, Chad Robertson, and Floria Sigismondi."
UPDATE: Over 5,000 people showed up, Winona Ryder gave a speech, and USA Today covered it all right here.
link to LA Weekly article, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Passing guestblogger torch to Macki of Rotten.com
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DATE: 09/05/2003 05:23:27 PM
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Huge thanks to the inimitable Steve G. Steinberg, aka "Frank Drake," who is departing the guest-blogger slot today after a smoking two-week stint. Tough act to follow. We'll miss you, Steve.
Starting today, the BoingBoing guestbar torch is passed to Macki of Rotten.com, whose guest-guest-guestbar hijinks regular readers may recall. We don't have much info on Macki -- all we know is that he's said to be some sort of hacker, he works for Rotten, and appeared in the movie "Freedom Downtime" (about the movement to free Kevin Mitnick). He was 2600's webmaster for two years, during which he worked on the Free Kevin campaign, posted DeCSS on the 2600 website, and assisted with the subsequent lawsuit. Recent projects include Am I Governor Or Not and Avrilution. I once phonecammed him trying to work up the nerve to make a pass at Ronald Reagan. Someone else once caught him hamming for the camera while standing on John Gilmore's shoulders.
Prior to becoming nefarious and ph34red, Macki was once innocent and cuddly, a fact the photograph to the left clearly proves. That's Macki dressed up as Michael Jackson, as you can see from the the sequined glove and Thriller button. Anyway, welcome.
Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fan-art tattoo gallery
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DATE: 09/05/2003 08:15:42 PM
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Wild gallery of huge, elaborate tatts inspired by Star Wars, Transformers, GI Joe and others. Heavy emphasis of the work of Toronto and Ontario artists. If only all copyright infringement were this bad-ass.
Link
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Giving the finger after the Hugos
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DATE: 09/05/2003 08:26:01 PM
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There's a story that goes with this picture. I'm sitting in the bar at Torcon after the Hugos in my snazzy suit, having just discovered that my story 0wnz0red missed making the Hugo ballot by four lousy nominations and therefore enjoying an unaccustomed glass of Irish whisky when Craig Engler comes up with a camera and says, "Give me the finger!"
I gave him the finger. He took my pic.
"Craig," I said. "Why did I just give you the finger?"
"It's not my camera," he said, and went off to someone else and said, "Hey, give me the finger!"
Post-Hugo-Ceremony at the bar is always a pretty emotional timespace. I'd gotten very miffed at the people sitting in front of me who'd turned around and glared at me every time I cheered and applauded while the nominee and winner names were read out (I mean, honestly, what kind of person goes to an awards ceremony prepared to act like a giant buzz-kill to anyone nearby who cheers and applauds?), and that combined with the so-close-and-yet-so-far revelation about 0wnz0red was enough that my finger here is more genuine than fanciful.
As it turns out, the camera belonged to Scott Edelman, the first professional editor to publish one of my stories and one of the nicest guys I know.
Scott's gallery of Craig's pix of birds-being-flipped after the Hugos is actually pretty funny. There's a lot of truth revealed in people's facial expressions when you send them to an awards ceremony whose fruits they all aspire to, then pour a couple drinks down them, then ask them to make a rude gesture. Just saying.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Moblogging the Toronto Film Festival
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DATE: 09/06/2003 02:00:46 PM
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Over at the FilmNerd blog, a bunch of civilian film enthusiasts are moblogging the Toronto International Film Festival, giving us an amateur account of the best of the Festival.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Koppel rips on PATRIOT
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DATE: 09/06/2003 02:03:07 PM
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Ted Koppel went gloriously mad on air last week, tearing apart the dread USA PATRIOT Act. Lisa Rein has the video and the transcript.
The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the privileged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses thoses suspected of the worst crimes -- the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one catagory of suspects without endangering all the others.
Link
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(Thanks, Lisa!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big Urban Game: using Minneapolis/St. Paul as a giant playing surface
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DATE: 09/06/2003 02:06:31 PM
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Alan sez,
They are playing games in the Twin Cites of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. B.U.G. (Big Urban Game) consists of three game pieces being moved around a 108-square mile game board of the two river cities. The five day race has three inflatable colored Red, Blue, and Yellow pawns 30 feet in height being moved on color coordinated routes. It is manually carried by "movers" from one day's checkpoint to the next checkpoint on one of two routes which is selected by web voting results. The community "shakers" at the end at the day's race, roll big inflatable die to tally total numbers. The the color team with the most people (of all ages -some reports have animal pets being included) participating gain a "speed boost" which is subtracted from their "moving time". This link has some images for day one for the Blue team. it is an individual's web site, and will give you a taste of the project. More game details are at http://design.umn.edu/bug/. That site (University of Minnesota
Design Institute) is planning to release a site with contributed images of all the teams moving throughout the metro area in the comming days.
Link
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(Thanks, Alan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Translate spam -- or anything -- into teenAOLspeak
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DATE: 09/06/2003 03:25:42 PM
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This text-to-juvenile-AOLspeak translator will translate anything into the sort of language your 13-year-old niece might use on IM. Yes, it's been around for a while, but we haven't blogged it here yet. Big up to a fellow named Wayneco for introducing me to its Zen-ifying effect on business proposal emails from Sani Abacha's widow:
XENI!!!!! OMG!!!! I AM MARIAM ABACHA DA PRINCIPAL MANAEGR COPORAET R3SOURCES OF DA EQUITY BANK OF NIEGRIA LIMIETD
LAGOS BRANCH!1!!!1 WTF??? I WISH 2 MAEK U A PROPOSAL WIT REGARDS A TRANSACTION IN WHICH I R3QUIER
FOREIGN ASISTANC31!!! OMG ABOUT 4 Y3ARS AGO IN APRIL 199 A VENAZUELAN BUSIENSMAN AND A
P3RSONAL FREIND OF MIEN BY NME MR11!1!! OMG LOL GIOVANI VILAET MAED A FIEXD D3POSIT IN MAH BANK OF
MOUNT US$13750000111! OMG LOL (THIRTEN MILION SAV3N HUNDR3D AND FIFTY UNIETD STAETS DOLARS)!1!! LOL
UNFORTUNAETLY HA DEID OF CARDIAC AREST IN D3C3MBR 200AS!!1!11 WTF HIS PERSONAL FREIND I DO KNOW
FOR C3RTANE TAHT H3 HAD NO RALATIEVS HARA IN NIEGRIA NOR ANY TAHT I KNOW OF IN HIS HOME
COUNTRY!1!! WTF ACORDNG 2 TEH LAW HERE TEH FUNDS WIL HAEV 2 B CLAMEED BY DA GOVERNMANT OF MAH COUNTRY IF AFTER 5
(FIEV) YEARS NOBODY APLEIS 2 CLAME DA FUNDS!11!1 WTF LOL
FROM MAH YEARS OF 3XP3REINCE AS A BANK3R SUCH FUNDS USUALY END UP IN PRIVAET POKETS OF
CORUPT GOVARNMENT OFICIALS1!!!1!1 I DO NOT WISH THIS 2 B TEH CAES OF DA HARD 3ARN3D INV3STAD
FUNDS OF MAH LAET FREIND1!! OMG LOL I THANK U FOR UR UNDARSTANDNG OF TEH PRIVACY
OF THIS PROPOSAL 2 U111!! LOL
AWATENG UR PROPMT R3SPONS3
WARM!1!1 OMG WTF LOL REGARDS
MARIAM ABACHA!!! OMG!!! LOLOL!!!!
link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Doonesbury references masturbation, America's editors surrender
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 09/07/2003 07:18:45 AM
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Garry Trudeau's Sunday Doonesbury strip mentions masturbation in passing, something that has aroused the ire (or cowardice) of "hundreds of newspaper editors." Salon has the story.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ghosts of the metropolis
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DATE: 09/07/2003 07:23:29 AM
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Forgotten NY is a collection of annotated photos of the bones of the cities that New York once was, from faded murals to alleys to nowhere to ONE WAY signs from the paleolithic.
Link
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tell the Feds: Hands off financial privacy!
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DATE: 09/07/2003 11:04:53 AM
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The Electronic Privacy Information Center is calling on us to get involved in a Federal initiative to limit the power of States to control how organizations firehose our personal information at each other. Write your congresscritter!
This Fall, Congress is likely to amend the federal Fair Credit
Reporting Act (FCRA) and in doing so, may override or "preempt" state
laws on affiliate sharing of personal information. Affiliate sharing
is the practice of transferring personal information amongst companies
with the same corporate ownership. Information transferred can
include name and contact information, Social Security Number, purchase
information, account numbers and balances, and even the information
individuals write on checks. Affiliate sharing is invasive because
individuals have no access to the data and cannot obtain an accounting
of disclosures; it is used to generate unwanted marketing and
telemarketing; and because it puts personal information at risk of
being misused.
Affiliate sharing presents a large and growing risk to individuals'
privacy. It is likely to be the most important financial services
privacy issue in the next decade, especially as companies increase
profiling, cross-selling, and telemarketing activities using
affiliate-shared information. Companies, such as Citibank, that have
1,900 affiliates, or Bank of America, with over 1,000 entities in its
corporate family, can transmit personal information for these purposes
to an unlimited degree under federal law. If Congress continues this
standard, it will permanently prevent states from passing laws to
establish reasonable restrictions on affiliate sharing and on some
areas of identity theft. Furthermore, a federal standard is highly
anti-democratic, and comes at a time when California legislators have
just enacted a new law for affiliate sharing regulation that enjoys
significant public support.
Link
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(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Object that might possibly be an animal part" discovered in Conde Nast headquarters
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 09/07/2003 08:45:12 PM
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(Forwarded anonymously) This email message was sent to Conde Nast employees today:
This morning an object that might possibly be an animal part was found in the 18th Floor janitorial area of the freight corridor.
At this time our security personnel is cooperating with an investigation that involves representatives from both the EMS and the NYPD.
As part of their routine investigation, it may be necessary to inspect other janitorial areas and/or employee bathrooms within 4 Times Square.
We appreciate your cooperation.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Morton's Salt Dough House
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DATE: 09/07/2003 08:48:15 PM
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In the '70s, Morton gave out a brochure with a recipe for "salt dough" -- like Play-Doh for grownups. The brochure is full of pictures of creepy salt dough crafts you can make for your home. Link Discuss (via Irregular Orbit)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: '50s commercial animation art gallery
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DATE: 09/07/2003 10:53:37 PM
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Extremely cool online gallery of '50s and '60 commercial art and photography. Link, Discuss (via J-Walk).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Island Chronicles: "You've got Ringworm"
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DATE: 09/08/2003 12:55:34 AM
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Here's the latest Island Chronicles dispatch. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Infrasound Experiment
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DATE: 09/08/2003 11:37:58 AM
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I've always been intrigued by infrasound, extreme bass frequencies that you may not be able to consciously hear but can have a profound impact on your state-of-mind (and body). Of course, the military has also been interested in exploiting this phenomenon as a non-lethal weapon. Acoustic scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in England recently conducted the first controlled infrasound experiment--on 750 people at a concert. According to this Reuters report, "The audience did not know which pieces (of music) included infrasound but 22 percent reported more unusual experiences when it was present in the music. Their unusual experiences included feeling uneasy or sorrowful, getting chills down the spine or nervous feelings of revulsion or fear."
"Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in southern England.
It'd be fun to write an article on the history and future of infrasound.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My short story collection is out!
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DATE: 09/08/2003 11:55:27 AM
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My first short story collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," is out! It should start appearing on store shelves this week. As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I've made a bunch of the stories in the collection available online for free, under the terms of a Creative Commons license.
I'm trying some different stuff this time around. For starters, I'm only making one format available: ASCII text, wrapped to 80 columns. If you want another format, you're invited to do the conversion yourself and post a link to a downloadable version on the page for the story in question.
Short stories are naturals for electronic distribution. For starters, they're short. Durr. More important is that they're ephemeral. Short fiction is the cutting edge of the field, but the stories themselves usually vanish along with the current ish of the magazines in which they appear. That's depressing as hell, but it's also infopocalypic. I learned a lot of my form by reading and dissecting stories, and by writing them, iterating through different experiments quickly. Those stories are gone -- might as well be gone forever.
Electronic editions mean that the stories will be in print forever -- or for as long as there's an Internet. I'm really glad to have the collection on the stands and the stories on the Web. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. (Oh, and don't miss Bruce Sterling's intro, it's killer).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyright law's perennial dilemma
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DATE: 09/08/2003 03:39:36 PM
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This quote is stuck up on the wall here at EFF. It makes me think every time I read it. Figured it should be online somewhere.
Copyright law strikes a precarious balance.
To encourage authors to create and disseminate original expression, it accords them a bundle of proprietary rights in their works.
But to promote public education and creative exchange, it invites audiences and subsequent authors to use existing works in every conceivable manner that falls outside the province of the copyright owner's exclusive rights.
Copyright law's perennial dilemma is to determine where exclusive rights should end and unrestrained public access should begin.
Neil Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society, 106 Yale L.J. 283, 285 (1996).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eye candy or eye drugs?
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DATE: 09/08/2003 04:30:24 PM
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Optical illusions for endless hours of zoned-out, timewasting pleasure. Included in this online gallery of tasty visual teases, "Rotating Snakes." Click thumbnail at left for full-size image and full, freaky visual impact. The static, "coiled" shapes appear to writhe on-screen. Link, Discuss (Thanks, KK!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Toynbee tiles": Weird, unexplained street-art-graffiti
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DATE: 09/08/2003 04:52:00 PM
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Cool story about mysterious art-graffiti tiles embedded in American streets. No, it's not a new phenomenon, but this Kansas City Star story offers a fun new take.
"The message wasn't painted. It was some kind of tile, a bit larger than a license plate, that had actually been imbedded in the street. Each letter looked to have been hand carved and inlaid in a plastic or epoxy base. I tried to push my thumbnail into the tile. It was rock hard. Harder than the asphalt itself(...) Since then I've walked right over the thing dozens of times and each time made a mental note to further investigate its origins. And each time promptly mislaid the mental note.
A couple months ago, however, on my way back from Jake's, I made an actual paper note and kept it clutched in my hand all the way back to my cube here at The Star where I "googled" the wording on the strange tile. Bingo. Up popped more than 30 Internet addresses referring to other such tiles found in other cities. Turns out there have been more than 130 documented sightings of these "Toynbee tiles"-- as they're nicknamed on the Net -- in at least 20 cities around the United States (and two in South America!). In New York almost 50 tiles have been counted, in Philadelphia nearly 30. Twenty have been spotted in Baltimore, including four at one intersection. And there have been at least 16 documented sightings in Washington, D.C., -- one a block from the White House.
All the tiles say virtually the same thing. And they all look virtually the same, except some are made with colored letters and others only black letters. The Internet accounts and stories from other newspapers indicate that the first tiles were discovered in the late 80s. Nobody has ever claimed to have witnessed any of the tiles being imbedded. And nobody has ever publicly claimed responsibility for making the tiles."
Link to Kansas City Star story, Discuss (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Two (digital) turntables and a microphone
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DATE: 09/08/2003 05:09:30 PM
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CD scratchin' and mixin'. The soon-to-be-released Technics Direct Drive Digital Turntable makes me weak in the knees:
"From some photos of a Technics display in Japan pictured below, you can see in great detail the new decks soon to be released.
The photos suggest that the turntables themselves spin, and are to work fundamentally along the same lines as the Technics 1200 series Turntables, but feature a huge number of digital functions, additions and improvements. The turntable also uses Panasonic’s SD Card technology so you can instantly switch between CDs and digital memory stick, which can hold up to 512MB. This essentially enables a DJ to rock up to a gig and deliver his set directly off SD Cards.
We are of course reserving judgment until we get to play with some, but the outlook appears promising. Technics decks are currently featured in nearly all clubs and bars around the world, and set the global standard for professional DJ equipment. It will be fascinating to see if these new CD mixers can live up to the high expectations and eclipse the Pioneer CDJ1000’s, which have grabbed much attention of late, for a decent share in the market."
Link to photos from Resident Advisor, Discuss (thanks, Geoff Goodfellow)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: List of links to wireless art projects
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DATE: 09/08/2003 05:38:49 PM
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Bev points us to this incomplete but interesting list of websites about art projects that involve cellular phones or mobile internet devices. Some of the projects are new, some are old, but the link-list is good for countless hours of amused browsing. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig 2.0
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DATE: 09/08/2003 06:49:28 PM
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Larry Lessig's a father! The gold master shipped yesterday, codenamed "Willem Dakota Neuefeind Lessig."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Boutin in Slate on RIAA's amnesty deal: "An offer you CAN refuse"
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DATE: 09/08/2003 07:10:27 PM
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Blogger and tech journalist Paul Boutin points us to this article, for which he pinged lawyers at the EFF and RIAA today to nitpick details and outline potential problems with the RIAA's Clean Slate amnesty program. "I'm sure people will disagree with my personal opinions," says Paul, "but the legal points are worth reading."
To those determined to make an end-run around the music biz's lack of attractive online offerings (Apple's iTunes Music Store is still the best of a weak lot), the lawsuits just mean it's time to abandon KaZaA by moving their game of keep-away to the next playground. KaZaA rose to prominence only after Napster was shut down. Now that RIAA lawyers have proved they can subpoena the names of KaZaA users from their ISPs, expect a mass migration to anonymous, encrypted P2P networks designed specifically to fix the known vulnerabilities in KaZaA. Earth Station 5 is the most outrageous example. It uses a mesh of proxy servers, encrypted data, and other identity-hiding tricks to keep copyright owners from tracking who's downloading what. To top it all off, the company—which recently issued a press release declaring itself "at war" with the entertainment industry—is headquartered in Palestine.
But what about Americans worried about the prospect of a bank-breaking lawsuit? Should you take the RIAA up on its amnesty offer? Maybe not. The "Clean Slate" program promises that the RIAA won't pursue legal action against P2P pirates who send in a notarized affidavit declaring that they've wiped all copyright-infringing materials from their disk drives and who vow not to file-share again. But lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco say there are multiple reasons to sit tight for now, rather than rush to sign and deliver what amounts to an admission of guilt.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Slip-N-Slide sues Dickie Roberts
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DATE: 09/08/2003 08:40:18 PM
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Wham-O, the brain-donors who manufacture the Slip-N-Slide water-fun-toy are suing the producers of "Dickie Roberts," a dumb torture-comedy movie in which Dana Carvey David Spade (thanks, JeremyT) flings himself on an un-wetted Slip-N-Slide and friction-burns his nipples.
Wham-O is asking a judge to order the film out of theaters as long as it contains the Slip 'N Slide scene, or for a disclaimer to be added urging viewers not to try the maneuver made by Spade.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gilmore on not obfuscating email in online archives
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DATE: 09/09/2003 06:53:27 AM
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Declan McCullough sent out a message to his Politech list subscribers recently, saying that he planned to go through the online list archives and obfuscate the email addresses published thereon to frustrate spammers' harvest-bots.
John Gilmore's written a stirring and principled response.
Why have you fallen into the all-too-common fallacy of thinking that
if email addresses aren't published anywhere, that will help "solve"
the problem of unwanted communications? I had an idiot come after me
several times, demanding that my archive of the USENIX Face Saver
images remove his email address, because he was trying to obliterate
every reference to it on the web. I refused, of course. Have we
reached a Brave New World in which we all start rewriting online
history to suit today's prejudices? That sounds like what you propose
for the Politech archives.
For the record, please keep my email address INTACT in the Politech
archives. I don't want my communications to be "obfuscated" in the
historical record.
Unwanted communications would exist even if every "spammer" was flayed
and burned at the stake. You should know -- reporters get more unwanted
press releases than anybody.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tell the Patent Office to back off on the open source WIPO debate
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DATE: 09/09/2003 06:56:55 AM
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WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, is theoretically about agreements on all kinds of copyright regimes, including open source and patent-free tegimes. However, the WIPO administration has refused to consider questions of how to promote open culture, open source, and open science, largely because the US Patent and Trademark Office has been throwing its weight around, saying that open IP regimes have no place at WIPO. Write to the USPTO and tell them what you think of this! EFF's got the details at the action center:
The cost of software, availability of medicine and production of valuable scientific knowledge are, in large part, determined by the policies of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Today, WIPO focuses on restrictive intellectual property regimes, but it doesn't have to be that way tomorrow. WIPO is holding a budget meeting in Geneva from September 8-10, where it will decide whether or not to schedule increased discussions of open and collaborative development models (OCDM). OCDM includes open source software like Linux and collaborative scientific endeavors like the Human Genome Project - valuable initiatives that benefit the public. WIPO expressed support for such a discussion, but backed off when the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) warned it away. Tell the USPTO to reconsider its misguided stance and support public information goods throughout the world! Note: International residents are welcome to take this action.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cheaper than Southwest Air: fly cargo
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DATE: 09/09/2003 07:24:35 AM
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The cheapest way to get from Boston to Texas? Air freight.
After hours of traveling, McKinley, 25, of New York City, pried open the crate with a crowbar Saturday morning. He popped up outside his parents' doorstep in the south Dallas suburb of DeSoto, shook the hand of a shocked deliveryman and walked away.
The deliveryman called DeSoto police, who arrested him on outstanding Texas warrants. The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration are investigating.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Making Book: best of the proto-blogs
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DATE: 09/09/2003 09:37:35 AM
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While at WorldCon last week, I had opportunity to go to dinner on two consecutive nights with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- friends and mentors and editors of mine who are both thoroughly engaged in the business end of the field and the fannish, amateur (as in "one who loves") end of the field. On the first night, Teresa mentioned that her collection of essays (mostly collected from fanzines, APAs and the like), "Making Book," was going into its third printing. I realized that I had seen this book on innumerable bookcases at friends' writerly apartments around the world, a kind of recognition symbol of membership in a fraternity of publishing and fannish insiderdom, but that I'd never read it myself. So I rushed out and bought one of the few remaining second edition printings still available for sale, had Teresa sign it, and started to read it in bits and bites.
This is a terrific book. I mean, I had no idea. It is a convulsively funny, shrewd and sharp collection of anaecdotes well-told, observations well-observed and jokes hilariously cracked, all the while tracing secret histories of fandom, the ins and outs of being diagnosed narcoleptic at a time when such diagnoses were considered sprious and radical by the medical establishment, and of the gypsy life of a con-running, APA-publishing foremother of the blogging masses whose "personal publishing revolution" has its origins in the dim days of mimeographs and dittos.
Oh, and don't miss the "On Copyediting" piece, which began as an internal publishing memo and is a sterling example of the species of bureaucratic documentation that can become a lasting work of art.
I've been thinking about which bit I wanted to quote here, and today on the BART I nearly fell out of my seat laughing at this passage:
Unfinished letter (New York, c. 1984): Take the "A" Train
We're in New York now, living a few blocks from the 190th street "A" train stop. I want someone to do a new musical arrangement of "Take the 'A' Train." It would be played at half the normal speed, and partway through the band suddenly stops and just sits there for fifteen minutes while the conductor cups his hands around a microphone and makes muffled announcements in Mandarin Chinese and the audience groans in unison. Then the band would play a few more bars and stop again, while the conductor announces that everyone sitting to the right of the center aisle must go find a seat on the left side and vice versa. Any member of the audience not complying will be forcibly seized and carried out, to be later deposited in Far Rockaway. And all that jazz.
BTW, Teresa's blog is every bit as sharp as her book, but harder to read on the subway.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Disney's self-destructing DVDs
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DATE: 09/09/2003 02:36:14 PM
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Disney is going to start offering DVDs that deteriorate within 48 hours after removing them from an oxygen-resistant envelope. Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sound of a Black Hole
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DATE: 09/09/2003 03:29:05 PM
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Regarding my Infrasound post below, Marc Laidlaw points us to this article about the discovery of sound waves from a supermassive black hole more than 250 million light years from Earth. According to a NASA article, "the 'note' is the deepest ever detected from any object in our Universe." Marc asks "Could it be that the supermassive black hole at the galactic core is responsible for the sense of cosmic dread that permeates our galaxy?" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: TSA's flight screening program color codes passengers
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DATE: 09/09/2003 04:57:44 PM
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Within the year, the new Transporation Securiry Administration will begin to do background checks on every airline passenger. You'll be issued a color-code: green, yellow, or red.
It's a textbook case of function creep. The TSA is not only targeting terrorists. but criminals of all kinds.
[U]p to 8 percent of passengers who board the nation's 26,000 daily flights will be coded "yellow" and will undergo additional screening at the checkpoint, according to people familiar with the program. An estimated 1 to 2 percent will be labeled "red" and will be prohibited from boarding. These passengers also will face police questioning and may be arrested.
...The system "will provide protections for the flying public," said TSA spokesman Brian Turmail. "Not only should we keep passengers from sitting next to a terrorist, we should keep them from sitting next to wanted ax murderers."
Thank goodness. This ought to put a stop to all those gruesome ax murders that are committed aboard commercial airliners.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Realdolls need Realsurgery
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DATE: 09/09/2003 06:44:36 PM
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Online step-by-step photo gallery documenting "surgery done on Realdolls." For those of you unfamiliar with these high-end sex toys, they are costly (about $6-7K) and unusually lifelike love dolls. Each page on this surgery site contains a brief explanation of the procedure, history of how each -- er -- mishap occured, and how each faux female was fixed. Includes helpful tips on why superglue is bad for Realdolls, intimate snapshots of "butt repair," and hyperpunctuated reminders to "enjoy the gruesome and PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOUR DOLLS!!!!!" Wiley points out that the site lacks "information on anything really interesting, like adding exta heads or limbs." I suppose it's not worksafe, but the only naked women here are 100% silicone, so, whatever. Link, Discuss (via News of the Dead)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Virtual "Burning Man" realm in online world of Second Life
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DATE: 09/09/2003 07:16:43 PM
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Participants in Second Life -- a large, user-built, 3D online society -- created a virtual "Burning Man" that existed concurrently with the real-world event:
All the freeform creativity and dreamy partying -- just without the sunburns, or long lines at the portapotty. In an online tribute to the legendary Burning Man arts festival held every Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock desert, Second Life opened up two new simulators (about 32 acres of virtual land), and let the residents go wild.
[R]esidents immediately converged on Burning Life, held in the Mauve and Chartreuse simulators, throwing up fantastic sculptures and structures. Pyramids of giant monkeys! The statue of a torch-bearing goddess! An electronica-themed nightclub for raving into the wee hours! Elf-bearing dirigibles, pagan art shrines, kinetic horse sculptures, solar system mobiles, and of course, the bonfire incineration of the Burning Life effigy itself. Everything seemed possible, and usually was -- right up until September 2nd, that is, when the simulator territories were returned to normal use.
Link, Discuss (thanks, Charlie O'Donovan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: photo gallery: Tricky Dominoes
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DATE: 09/09/2003 07:35:44 PM
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A new end-of-summer gallery of previously unreleased shots is now up on Paris-based photographer Ernesto Timor's site. Some nudity. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 100% X keyboard
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DATE: 09/09/2003 07:51:50 PM
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On this keyboard -- which is currently being auctioned on eBay -- every key has been replaced with an "X." I rather like it, but must confess a particularly personal bias to that character. Link, Discuss (via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dashboard mounted Tablet PC
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DATE: 09/09/2003 07:57:34 PM
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Pete Rojas writes on Gizmodo: "Someone in South Korea actually went to the trouble of mounting a Compaq TC1000 Tablet PC to the dashboard of their car so they could use it for GPS navigation and as a video and music player. We love it."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Warren Ellis takes up prose
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DATE: 09/09/2003 08:21:27 PM
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Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis has sold his first novel. Kick ass!
This comic tour of the dark underbelly of American culture features a down-and-out private detective who is hired by heroin-addled G-men to find the lost (secret) Constitution to the United States. Publication is slated for Winter/Spring 05.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chile's forgotten socialist Internet
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DATE: 09/09/2003 08:26:36 PM
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In the 1970s, Chile's Allende socialist government contracted with a British garage-inventor to erect an egalatarian nationwide data-network.
For the next two years, as subordinates searched for these amid the food shortages, and the local press compared him to Orson Welles and Socrates, Beer worked in Chile in frenetic bursts, returning every few months to England, where a British team was also labouring over Cybersyn. What this collaboration produced was startling: a new communications system reaching the whole spindly length of Chile, from the deserts of the north to the icy grasslands of the south, carrying daily information about the output of individual factories, about the flow of important raw materials, about rates of absenteeism and other economic problems.
Until now, obtaining and processing such valuable information - even in richer, more stable countries - had taken governments at least six months. But Project Cybersyn found ways round the technical obstacles. In a forgotten warehouse, 500 telex machines were discovered which had been bought by the previous Chilean government but left unused because nobody knew what to do with them. These were distributed to factories, and linked to two control rooms in Santiago. There a small staff gathered the economic statistics as they arrived, officially at five o'clock every afternoon, and boiled them down using a single precious computer into a briefing that was dropped off daily at La Moneda, the presidential palace.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wonderful Japanese toys from Hideshi Hino
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DATE: 09/09/2003 08:28:28 PM
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I don't know anything about Hideshi Hino, but I sure like the look of his toys.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky numbering systems from around the world
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DATE: 09/09/2003 08:37:35 PM
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BoingBoing pal ESC exclaims, "Did you know the British have a different numbering system than we do for numbers over a million? They have shit called Milliards, and Billiards! WTF?" Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Labels are data-mining the P2Pnets
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DATE: 09/10/2003 05:17:06 AM
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BigChampagne, a P2P metrics company that generates Billboard-charts for file-sharing nets, is the subject of a Wired article in which they reveal that their customers are the same labels whose industry association is suing everyone from 12 year old girls to university profs for using those nets.
According to on-the-record statements by many major labels, the scene I witnessed in Fleischer's office couldn't possibly have happened. But Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, says his firm is working with Maverick, Atlantic, Warner Bros., Interscope, DreamWorks, Elektra, and Disney's Hollywood label. The labels are reticent to admit their relationship with BigChampagne for public relations reasons, but there's a legal rationale, too. The record industry's lawsuits against file-sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance. "We would definitely consider gleaning marketing wisdom from these networks a non-infringing use," says Fred von Lohmann, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based cyber liberties group that's helping to defend Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bill Joy leaves Sun
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DATE: 09/10/2003 07:04:15 AM
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Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy said yesterday he is leaving the company. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: H-Bomb architect Edward Teller dies
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DATE: 09/10/2003 07:12:55 AM
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The Hungarian immigrant known as the "father of the H-bomb" died at his home on the Stanford University campus in California Tuesday. Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help pay back the RIAA's 12-year-old victim
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DATE: 09/10/2003 07:38:28 AM
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Emmett Plant is running a collection-plate to pay back the 12-year-old honor student who lives in a New York housing project who was intimidated into turning $2000 over to the RIAA to keep them from suing her for file-sharing.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 09/10/2003 07:42:31 AM
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* Smart Dust Millirobots take a walk
* Computer-recognition of human motion could lead to videogames where the players
control human actors
* A collaborative virtual workspace is tricked out with haptic feedback
All in my latest issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Please stop by!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: For the want of a fuse, London was lost
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DATE: 09/10/2003 10:43:08 AM
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London's worst blackout in 10 years was caused by the improper installation of a one amp fuse.
National Grid's chief executive, Roger Urwin, described the incident as a "one off" caused by a single faulty installation that remained undetected until August 28, when it provoked London's worst power failure in 10 years...
The automatic protection equipment, a shoebox-sized device that acts like a normal domestic fuse, was activated because it was the wrong amp size. Two years ago, engineers had mistakenly installed a one-amp version instead of a five-amp version. When the power surged, the fuse - because it was oversensitive - shut down the system when a correct fuse would not have done.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA amnesty is fraudulent
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DATE: 09/10/2003 12:17:45 PM
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A California resident represented by Ira Rothken, a brilliant Class Action attorney, is suing the RIAA for its fraudulent shamnesty offer:
It is "designed to induce members of the general public...to incriminate themselves and provide the RIAA and others with actionable admissions of wrongdoing under penalty of perjury while (receiving)...no legally binding release of claims...in return," according to the complaint.
"This lawsuit seeks a remedy to stop the RIAA from engaging in unlawful, misleading and fraudulent business practices," the suit reads.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to sell an iTunes track
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DATE: 09/10/2003 12:18:06 PM
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Want to exercise your first-sale rights in the music you buy from Apple? It's not easy, but it is possible. All you need to do is buy a disposable credit-card, jump through a lot of hoops, and eventually, you can make it happen.
I run to CVS and buy my first prepaid MasterCard, paying for it with my real credit card. The price of pseudo-anonymity is steep though, $9.95 for the card with a minimum initial balance for $20, turning my $1.05 iTunes investment into a pricey $31 expenditure. I should be able to get the $20 back out of the card assuming Keith doesn't buy 20 iTunes the moment he gets my email. [Update 2003-09-10 8:23 AM - I was able to spend $19 of the $20 on a gift to the EFF, not sure what happened to that other $1]...
I've deauthorized my computer, sent Keith the information and file. He can play the Double Dutch Bus as well as the other songs that he purchased from the iTunes Music Store. His computer is now authorized on his old account and the new account that he received from me.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: von Lohmann on RIAA Amnesty
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DATE: 09/10/2003 12:19:29 PM
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My co-worker Fred von Lohmann has an op-ed in today's LA Times about the ways in which the RIAA's amnesty is a scam:
Rather than trying to sue Americans into submission, imagine a real solution for the problem. What if the labels legitimized music swapping by offering a real amnesty for all file-sharing, past, present and future, in exchange for say, $5 a month from each person who steps forward?
The average American household spends less than $100 on prerecorded music annually. Assuming that many people will continue buying at least some CDs (a recent survey by Forrester Research found that half of all file-sharers continue to buy as many or more CDs as they did before catching the downloading bug), $60 per year for file sharing seems reasonable.
And such a plan would surely be more popular than the use-restricted and limited-inventory "authorized" alternatives. After all, the explosive growth of file-sharing is the strongest demand signal the record business has ever seen. The industry should embrace the opportunity instead of continuing to thrash around like dinosaurs sinking in hot tar.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Pixies together again
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DATE: 09/10/2003 12:32:45 PM
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BoingBoing pal Gil Kaufman breaks the news on MTV.com that after more than a decade, the legendary Pixies are reuniting in April for a world tour. Gil says: "The Eagles declared 'Hell Freezes Over' when they reunited a few years ago, and indie rock fans are about to feel the same way." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Roger Wood clock
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DATE: 09/10/2003 02:07:23 PM
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Roger Wood's latest clock is brilliant, beautiful. I really miss living down the hall from him.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jenn Shreve on NPR: Day to Day
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DATE: 09/10/2003 06:33:42 PM
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Former BoingBoing guest blogger Jenn Shreve was interviewed today on NPR: Day to Day. Jenn talked about her Slate essay "A Fitting Memorial," an insightful piece on memorial t-shirts that commemorate the tragic deaths of loved ones. Scroll down to find the audio link to "Slate's The Gist: T-Shirts and Mourning." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gawker's Elizabeth Spiers: first-ever bidding war for a blogger?
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DATE: 09/10/2003 06:57:12 PM
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Item! The blogosphere is all aflutter.
(1) Elizabeth Spiers, "snark queen" editor of Nick Denton's New York-based Gawker blog is said to be on (insert Dr. Evil air-quotes) vacation (/air quotes). Jeff Jarvis says:
She has been hanging around New York magazine, getting a co-byline on the Intelligencer this week (imagine if you could hear her voice there -- it'd be better than a return to the good old days of the column that really started smart local gossip). She has also been called by various magazines, even Conde Nast magazines (yes, even that one), to freelance.
What makes this notable is that Elizabeth is the first media star really made by weblogs. Others have become stars in their own rights (Glenn, Andrew, et al) but Liz is the first to be making the jump from niche to mass media; she is our Judd sister. Nick Denton discovered her voice on a weblog and together they made Gawker a hit and now she's getting ready to move on up to the East Side. Choire Sicha has been filling in.
Greg Lindsay from WWD dishes more speculation, Gawker weighs in here, and there's a statement on Elizabeth's personal blog here. You still with me? Good.
(2) Jason McCabe Calacanis wants to put the bling in blogs. The serial entrepreneur who created tech publications including Silicon Alley Reporter and Venture Reporter (disclaimer: I'm the former VP of the publishing company he founded, behind both magazines) has been quietly planning to launch his Next Big Thing later this month. His still-in-stealth venture has something to do with B2B weblogs for profit, and creating viable economic micropublishing models for bloggers. If it takes off as planned, someone close to the venture says, he'll have spawned 500 of these sites in three years' time.
(3) Calacanis initiated what amounts to a bidding war for Spiers today, offering her 50% of a new publication product she would edit, a new laptop, paying for her Soho house membership and funding. Can Nick Denton -- or any of Spiers' rumored print suitors-- top that?
Update: Nick Denton responds.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVRs: WTC, 9/11/2001, + 10
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DATE: 09/11/2003 09:15:19 AM
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QTVR panoramas of Ground Zero, shot ten days after September 11, 2001 by photographer Jim Galvin.
Link to Galvin's seven panoramas, Link to other 9/11-related QTVRs,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYC Supreme Court says: boobies = free speech
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DATE: 09/11/2003 09:40:10 AM
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Straight Outta Gawker:
Lushy clothes-shedding celebutante Tara Reid is undoubtedly pole-dancing with joy today. In the first good thing to happen to New York City in months, nudie bars and porno theaters are -- for now -- totally legal. Yesterday, Manhattan's Supreme Court ruled against the City's adult business ban, calling it, weirdly enough, unconstitutional. Michael Bloomberg, capitalist kingpin, will now spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of the broke-ass City's money trying to close down the small businesses. This is when Cindy Adams pokes her head out of the stripper bar and shrieks, "Only in New York, kids, only in New York!"
Link to NY Daily News item,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIAA counterpoint: Pie Rats strike back
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DATE: 09/11/2003 10:54:03 AM
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From Scott Rosenberg, in Salon:
My kids are big Richard Scarry fans, and one of their favorite books is a little paperback titled "Pie Rats Ahoy!" (Yes, these successors to Captain Hook are tiny rats who steal a pie from the seafaring hero.)
I thought of that punning title as I read the latest batch of headlines from the file-swapping wars. The RIAA and its member labels have now taken the final step (one I predicted nearly four years ago, as I recalled here) of declaring all-out war on the music fans who are their own best customers -- and who have in recent years taken to file trading en masse because of the music industry's price gouging and its pathetic reluctance to adapt to new technology.
Link, (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Latest in Graham Roumieu's BIGFOOT comic-art series
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DATE: 09/11/2003 11:14:57 AM
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Click
here
for the entire frame, with both image and text. A BoingBoing exclusive: Renowned Toronto-based artist Graham
Roumieu shares his latest from the Bigfoot series, and you're the first to see it.
Roumieu's graphic books In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot, and A Really Super Book About Squirrels are available through Amazon.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Here's what an actual California recall sample ballot looks like
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DATE: 09/11/2003 08:33:52 PM
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Link to scanned ballot (804x638 px jpeg), (Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: GPS Networkcar
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DATE: 09/11/2003 08:45:38 PM
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A company called GPS Networkcar promises "complete solutions for monitoring the performance, location, and security of your car." Location-based wireless technology connects to your car's computer and beams data about your car's performance to your "personal vehicle website," and your service provider. This kind of stuff seems to be becoming a more common built-in feature on late-model vehicles, particularly luxury brands (for instance, some of the cool telematics stuff that Mercedes-Benz began offering in 2003). But if your car didn't ship off the lot with such features, GPS Networkcar's service "communicate[s] with your vehicle's onboard computer, interpret[s] the data and transmit[s] important information back to you and your service provider." Here's how it works. Update: The all-seeing Paul Boutin wrote about this recently in Slate, and check out this related article by Paul on automobile "black boxes." (via unwired, Thanks Frank!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Muy, muy Muybridge
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DATE: 09/11/2003 09:21:01 PM
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When I was a little girl, one of my favorite books in our house was this gigantic collection of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge. I used to scan my eyes accross each page really fast, left to right, trying to form movies in my head out of the sequential rows of stop-action stills. The horse ones were my supernumberonefavorite; the naked baseball guy was also neat. So, anyway, there's a new biography out about Muybridge by Rebecca Solnit called River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking Press, 2003). It explores his relationship with California, examining his experiments in film and their importance in shaping the future of this state as the seat of entertainment and technology.
If you're in LA, or passing through -- Michael Dawson Gallery is launching an exhibit of Muybridge's photos that runs through November 8. They're also hosting an evening with Solnit on Tuesday, October 14.
"Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was born and died in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, England, but spent much of his working life as a professional photographer in America. He arrived in San Francisco from his native England in 1855. After working for a time as a bookseller, Muybridge began his career as a photographer, calling himself 'Helios' - the name of the ancient sun-god (...) By the late 1870's Muybridge was deeply involved in his study of human and animal movement and developed innovative techniques for producing sequential photographs. Employed by Leland Stanford to answer the question of whether all four legs of a trotting horse were ever aloft simultaneously, Muybridge became THE pioneer photographer of the moving image. His extensive studies and inventions were acknowledged by E. J. Marey, the Lumiere brothers, Thomas Edison and other innovators of the motion picture."
Link to more info on the show, Link to online gallery of some of the images in the show, Link to more info on the book.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Till Death Do Us Part
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DATE: 09/11/2003 10:17:15 PM
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In the October Wired, Joshua Davis tells the gripping operating room tale of Laleh and Ladan Bijani, the 29-year-old Iranian conjoined twins who underwent surgery this summer to get separated and died as a result. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Adolf Hitler's Homes and Gardens moment
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DATE: 09/12/2003 05:50:03 AM
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In 1938, Homes and Gardens ran a long, loving piece on Adolf Hitler's Mountain Home. Words of Waldman has the scans.
Link
(via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lethem's new novel reviewed on Salon
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DATE: 09/12/2003 05:57:36 AM
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Jonathan Lethem is a hell of a novelist. Ever since his Gun, With Occassional Music (the inspiration for me inserting a character who's "always self-identified as an ewok" in my most-recent novella), I've been an enormous fan. Now his new book, Fortress of Solitude is out -- and Salon has a great feature review of it.
"Like a match struck in a darkened room," his novel begins: "Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July." These are the Solver sisters, Thea and Ana, shining "like a new-struck flame" in the eyes of Dylan Ebdus, the currently five-year-old hero/narrator/recollected protagonist of Lethem's mighty "Fortress." The sisters are blond and beautiful, strangers, like Dylan, in a rundown New York neighborhood made up principally of browns and blacks. It's 1972 and the Solvers are "the new thing, spotlit to start the show ... The girls murmured rhymes," Dylan thinks, or "were murmured rhymes" -- it's hard to tell "in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell."
Gowanus is a part of Brooklyn, of course, not Krypton or Kandor, and Lethem is the new poet of Brooklyn -- the new Whitman, even, whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among this country's foremost novelists. Five years in the making, "The Fortress of Solitude" is Lethem's "spiritual autobiography," proudly claimed as such and following magically on the heels of 1999's award-winning "Motherless Brooklyn," the novel that introduced a detective with Tourette's syndrome to the United States and marked Lethem's departure from the hybrid but definitely marginal genres in which he'd previously worked -- mysteries, westerns and sci-fi's, sometimes all three at once. To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He's defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flash-mobs for the enterprise!
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DATE: 09/12/2003 06:00:18 AM
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Geoff Cohen's figured out the logic end-point of this whole flash-mob business:
You've read about flashmobs in the newspaper. Now, tap the power of flashmobs for your enterprise, realizing ROI on your enterprise software investment, and increasing the stickiness of your customers.
Using our proprietary peer-to-peer, adaptive, autonomic, social-network-aware FLASHPOWER software, direct your employees, customers, and stakeholders to arrive at specific locations. We support over four thousand possible locations through our FLASH LOCATIONS PARTNERS program, including Starbucks(tm), Marriott(tm), and Newbury Comics(tm). FLASHPOWER supports twenty-five different activities for your mobs, including muttering, chanting, clapping, hopping on one foot, and furiously scowling while entering data into their PDA*. Upgrade to FLASHPOWER PRO and receive additional PRO locations, including such important sites as Faneuil Hall, Boston, the QuickStop used in Kevin Smith's film "Clerks," and the 1st base bleachers of Coors' Field**.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ask Congress to fix copyright and stop the RIAA's lunacy
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DATE: 09/12/2003 06:10:42 AM
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The EFF has launched its first-ever a new petition, asking Congress to look into constructive solutions to the file-sharing problem!
Take a Stand Against the Madness; Stop the RIAA!
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on a rampage, launching legal attacks against average Americans from coast to coast. Rather than working to create a rational, legal means by which its customers can take advantage of file-sharing technology and pay a fair price for the music they love, it has chosen to sue people like Brianna LaHara, a 12 year-old girl living in New York City public housing.
Brianna, and hundreds of other music fans like her, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits -- supporting a business model that is anything but rational. This crusade is generating thousands of subpoenas and hundreds of lawsuits, but not a single penny for the artists that the RIAA claims to protect.
Copyright law shouldn't make criminals out of 60 million Americans, and it's time for a change. Congress is going to hold hearings; we need your help to make sure that the public's voice is heard. Tell Congress that it's time to stop the madness!
We have 3493 signatures so far. Help us get to 10,000!
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TITLE: 12 days more to propose a talk for ETCON
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DATE: 09/12/2003 06:16:26 AM
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Don't forget: you've got until September 24th to get a proposal in to the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference if you plan on speaking there.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Are the RIAA subpoenas legal?
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DATE: 09/12/2003 06:20:55 AM
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Lisa Rein has written a very good article for O'Reilly, reviewing the ways in which the RIAA's latest attack on P2P users (and due process!) are legal and how they're legally questionable.
A recent decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals finds that a party using "patently unlawful" subpoenas to obtain access to another party's stored electronic communications could be liable for violations of electronic privacy and computer fraud statutes. This could have serious implications for the RIAA's mass subpoena campaign in that, if such subpoenas were also determined to be "patently unlawful," for whatever reason, the organization could be held liable under electronic privacy and computer fraud statutes for accessing user data under false pretenses. (Read a summary of the decision.)
Does this mean, if the RIAA's subpoenas are determined "invalid," that they are illegally snooping? It's extremely possible. However, the DMCA subpoena law is new and there aren't many decisions on it, so the RIAA could try to hide behind the "newness" of the law to avoid liability for misusing it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Al Franken on The Daily Show
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DATE: 09/12/2003 06:31:47 AM
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Lisa Rein has uploaded captured video from Al "Fair and Balanced" Franken's appearance on The Daily Show.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos of NY skyline, 09/11/03
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DATE: 09/12/2003 08:01:49 AM
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Brooklyn-based photographer Siege, whose erotic "Dreampod Sessions" for Nerve.com have been blogged here before (Links: Hot, Cold), shot these images of the New York City skyline last night. He's published them online using an interesting photo-sharing service called Fotki I haven't used before. But then, I don't get around the Internet much. Link,
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: EyeToy: Play
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DATE: 09/12/2003 08:14:37 AM
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Greg says:
EyeToy:Play is, according to the ELSPA sales chart, currently the #1 best-selling "game" in the UK. The package includes a small camera you attach to your Playstation 2 via a USB cable, and a disc with a bunch of "mini-games." When you play a game, the camera catches your image, and displays it onscreen. You interact with game objects through the magic of motion capture, using your body to whack them or whatnot. Looks like a very cool toy. No word on if/when it will be available in North America, though.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Top 10 outsider videos of all time
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DATE: 09/12/2003 08:23:16 AM
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Hilarious list of the ten most awesomely bad videos of all time, according to Vice Magazine. Picks include the Orson Welles commercial for Paul Masson, some Anna Nicole Smith Outtakes (there are outtakes?), and What I Really Want -- described thusly:
[A] way-too-short informative clip (you want it to go on for days) features a typical Marin County self-help group talking about actualizing your dreams. The story goes that, halfway into filming, the leader of this bizarre yuppie cult decided “everything has to be destroyed – RIGHT NOW!” The filmmakers managed to salvage this 15 minutes before the rest was lost forever.
HIGHLIGHT: A man rests on his knees and, after being encouraged to say what he feels no matter how much it hurts, bursts into sobs and screams, “I want to touch people. I want people to TOUCH ME!!!!”
Link, (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: UK police argue for national DNA database
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DATE: 09/12/2003 08:36:48 AM
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Via politech: "Every single person in the UK should be compelled to have their DNA on the national database in an effort to prevent crime, a senior police officer has argued." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nokia ships phone with printable faceplate
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DATE: 09/12/2003 08:37:36 AM
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Nokia's new phone has a faceplate that can be printed to with an inkjet printer.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: William Gibson halts the blog
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DATE: 09/12/2003 08:47:01 AM
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BoingBoing reader Chris says, "William Gibson has 'unblogged' himself. He's going back to his day job, and he finds blogging overlaps with novel writing enough that it interferes." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Me in Wired on casemodding
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DATE: 09/12/2003 08:54:37 AM
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My piece on casemodding from this month's Wired magazine is online:
MODDER: Rainer Wingender
Manager, BITS-Consulting
Siegenburg, Germany
SPECS: left side: 1.8-GHz AMD XP Thoroughbred 2200, 512 Mbytes RAM, Nvidia GeForce4 graphics card, 110-Gbyte hard disk, DVD-ROM; right side: 450-MHz AMD K6-2, 256 Mbytes RAM, 44xCD, CD-RW, 40-Gbyte hard disk.
COST: $1,000 in cooling plates, exhaust, intakes, and gauges; $2,000 in computer components
TIME: 250 hours over three months
INSPIRATION: "A 1971 Ford Mustang I owned when I was 18. If you've ever driven a V-8, you know the feeling."
CHALLENGE: "Designing good-looking feet. Early tries seemed too small, but when I added the punched bars, it balanced just right visually."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Privacy-lovers: Kill phonecams with this remote device?
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DATE: 09/12/2003 10:54:17 AM
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CNET story about a new product that promises the ability to automatically shut off small cameras in futurephones:
Iceberg Systems is beta-testing Safe Haven, which combines hardware transmitters with a small piece of control software loaded into a camera phone handset. When the handset is taken into a room or building containing the Safe Haven hardware, the phone is instructed to deactivate the imaging systems. The systems are reactivated when the handset is out of range.
Analysts have predicted that there will be almost 1 billion camera phones in use within five years, which has led companies such as Samsung and LG Electronics to bar employees from using camera phones in research and manufacturing facilities because of fears over the security of sensitive data.
Patrick Snow, managing director of Iceberg Systems, said he is already in talks with well-known handset manufacturers interested in testing the technology. Although the technology is designed only for disabling the imaging system, it could be adapted for a wide number of uses, such as blocking loud or annoying ring tones in a theater or even disabling text messaging in a school. However, Snow said that for now, his company is focused solely on controlling the imaging side of handsets.
Link to story, Link to vendor site (via unwired list, thanks Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Floatation phone" blocks outside world
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DATE: 09/12/2003 02:03:22 PM
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BBC story about a gizmo that cuts out external sensory stimulation so you can make a phone call. Involves getting into a warm pool and sticking your head in a lightproof bubble. Link (via Smart Mobs)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Island Chronicles: Kookoo for Coconuts
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DATE: 09/12/2003 05:20:31 PM
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Our new Island Chronicles dispatch is up. Link Feedback
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Future sarcastic rayguns and robots of exceeding loveliness
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DATE: 09/13/2003 04:57:14 AM
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Greg Brotherton is a sculptor who recycles retro-futuristic vaccuum cleaners and other industrial detritus into breathtakingly cool, highly polished rayguns and robots.
I call this look "future sarcastic," and it's just about my favorite aesthetic. It says: "Well, it's the twenty-first century, where the fuck is my jetpack?"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Future sarcastic trousers of many, many pockets
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DATE: 09/13/2003 05:02:15 AM
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Speaking of future-sarcastic, John Illig makes these cargo pants that are rave culture's finest gift to nerddom, communicating the message, "I have a pocket of dimensions thus-and-so, I wonder if anyone manufactures a device that would fit in it." His fall line is out, and the RAF Fatigues are a really excellent, really future-sarcastic way of secreting your device-array about your person. What's more, they're priced competitively with Gap cargoes (and run about double Old Navy or Army/Navy prices).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speaking in San Diego, Sept 28
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DATE: 09/13/2003 05:06:35 AM
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I'm giving a talk called "Civil liberties, copyright law, and security" on Sunday, Sept. 28th at 11am at the ToorCon Information Security Conference, San Diego, CA, Sept. 27-28, $65 at the door.
ToorCon has established a name for itself within both the professional InfoSec and hacker communities for high-calibre cutting edge talks presented by eminent speakers. This year, with a theme of "Back to Basics," is no exception. Comprehensive presentations on both defence and attack of IT resources, and industry specific presentations on the growing concerns of policies, procedures, and regulatory compliance are highlights of this year's conference.
Link
Note: new link Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Sidekick features, just in the nick of time
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DATE: 09/13/2003 06:37:55 AM
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The Sidekick turns a year old this month, and for a lot of us early adopters who bought in at full retail on the (dashed) hopes that T-Mobile would make good on Danger's promise to deliver an open platform (like the Symbian phones from Sony-Ericsson, which anyone can write code for, and which, conseuqently, have a really robust software ecosystem percolating under them), that means that this is the month that we can get rid of our Sidekicks and buy something else. For those of us who were so turned off by the outrageous voice-plan offered by T-Mobile on these devices that we kept our old handsets and used these as handheld Internet terminals, there's precious little reason not to: the carriers are subsidising Symbian phones if you buy into a one-year plan, and who needs number-portability when you haven't given anyone the number?
Coincidentally (?), this month, Danger has announced a bunch of really hot (and long overdue) enhancements to the device, including such basic functionality as copy-and-paste. I may hold onto the Sidekick for a couple months longer -- at least until Novmember 28th rolls around and we get fee-crashing number-portability for cellphones.
The new features include:
* Copy and paste (party like it's 1982!)
* Download manager (with ringtones! Party like it's 1998!)
* More AIM features
* "Usability features"
Link
(Thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Indie comix festival at UCLA, Nov 7-9
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DATE: 09/13/2003 02:13:03 PM
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My old Clarion classmate Pam Noles has become a comix maven, and is co-organizing an indie funnybooks festival at UCLA called super*MARKET from Nov 7-9. Admission is $2, parking is $7.
Keeping with the do-it-yourself spirit behind super*MARKET, programs will include workshops and seminars designed to help up and coming creators, as well as inform fans curious about how these works of art come to be. Panels will range through topics political and humorous, with a tribute to the underground masters who laid the foundation for today’s independent creators. Quite a few crowd pleasers are thrown into the mix, along with a slate of events for youth. Programming is coordinated by local fan Pam Noles.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Africa needs open source
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DATE: 09/14/2003 10:53:24 AM
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Dan Gillmor's been in Africa, and in his column this week, he turns in good insight on the role that open source software plays in the developing world.
Around the globe, educators, companies and governments are getting tired of paying the Microsoft tax, which tends to rise inexorably, and sending the money to America. They don't like the upgrade cycle, especially when older computers run Linux just fine. They want to inspire more software innovation at home, and suspect Linux may be the best platform in a world where Microsoft also takes most of the profits in Windows application software...
Microsoft's best argument against open source in the corporate and government contexts is to say it really isn't free, given the support and training costs. There's some truth to this, but the logic also assumes that people are willing to keep buying new hardware to support Microsoft's latest products.
In Africa, that's not just flawed logic. It's nutty, and cost fundamentally rules out Windows on much of the continent.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Four scenaria for a futuristic vote
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DATE: 09/14/2003 11:02:29 AM
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The Accellerated Democracy Project features some very rich scenaria for a future in which democracy is computer assissted. I found more entertainment than insight here, though -- while the illustrations and faux newspaper headlines are very well-rendered indeed, tthere was nowhere near enough thinking about the failure modes and potential for expolitation inherent in the "solutions" imagined here.
Link
(Thanks, Tim!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place
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DATE: 09/14/2003 03:00:19 PM
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From Joi Ito's Web:
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vocab of Voice of America
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DATE: 09/14/2003 06:33:44 PM
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"Special English" is Voice of America's stripped-down English used in its propaganda broadcasts into foreign territory. Here's a link to the complete Special English vocabulary.
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(via Kung-Fu Grippe)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amazing Grace, harmonica-style
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DATE: 09/14/2003 06:37:06 PM
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Last week, I was privileged to hear virtuoso harmonica-artist Howard Levy blow Amazing Grace on a simple 20-note "Oh Suzanna" harmonica. Howard has allowed his track to be released online, and David Weinberger's blog has the details on Howard's homepage, publisher and such.
3.6MB MP3 Link
(via JoHo the blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cheap, OTC Prilosec
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DATE: 09/14/2003 06:38:05 PM
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Procter and Gamble is gearing up to ship over-the-counter Prilosec for $1/dose. At this rate, my heartburn-killing meds may drop from a major expense to a minor one.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jamie Zawinski's "scrmabling" script
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DATE: 09/14/2003 06:42:13 PM
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Jamie Zawinski has written a perl script to convert blocks of normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are "scrmabled," to prove the point that legibility is only marginally affected by altering spelling of words, provided that first/last letters are left intact.
# Premssioin to use, cpoy, mdoify, drusbiitte, and slel this stafowre and its
# docneimuatton for any prsopue is hrbeey ganrted wuihott fee, prveodid taht
# the avobe cprgyioht noicte appaer in all coipes and that both taht
# cohgrypit noitce and tihs premssioin noitce aeppar in suppriotng
# dcoumetioantn. No rpeersneatiotns are made about the siuatbliity of tihs
# srofawte for any puorpse. It is provedid "as is" wiuotht exerpss or
# ilmpied waanrrty.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MSFT + MOT team up to produce new phone
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DATE: 09/14/2003 08:09:07 PM
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Tomorrow, Microsoft is expected to announce a deal with Motorola -- the world's second-largest handset maker, after Nokia -- to create a new mobile device powered by Windows OS. The phone will be Microsoft's first-ever made in partnership with a major handset manufacturer.
The new glossy black clamshell-shaped phone, called the MPx200, will go on sale in Britain in October through Orange for a retail price of Ł239 ($383). It will be introduced in the United States through AT&T Wireless and in Asia through various Hong Kong-based distributors during the fourth quarter. The price has not been announced. The phone is aimed at executives on the go and is designed to make it easy to use e-mail messaging and synchronize the phone with a computer, the companies said.
Executives said the model was the first of a new line of Motorola phones to be based on Microsoft's software, although Motorola will continue to make phones based on other operating systems, like Linux and those developed by Symbian, Microsoft's main competitor in the market for operating systems for high-end phones. Symbian, based in London, is a software licensing consortium owned by companies including Nokia; Psion, a maker of hand-held devices; the cellphone makers Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson, as well as Matsushita Electric Industrial, the maker of the Panasonic brand.
Link to Telegraph UK article, Link
to NY Times article (registration required)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Darth Ashcroft: Copyright infringement is your best protest dollar
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DATE: 09/14/2003 09:30:02 PM
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Remember the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin gives himself his own music-track to accompany his comings and goings? Protestors are applying that to Darth Ashcroft, playing the Imperial March when he puts in appearances.
Ashcroft was bombarded by cries of "Shame!" and the sound of the "Imperial Death March" from the movie "Star Wars" as he entered a meeting with law enforcement officials in Faneuil Hall.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Magic posters
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DATE: 09/14/2003 09:40:19 PM
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Beautiful gallery of vintage magician posters, organized by illusionist.
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos: Inside the Temple of Skatan
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DATE: 09/14/2003 11:32:39 PM
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I photographed some sk8r bois at a ramp in Santa Barbara, California this weekend.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bush Bills
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DATE: 09/15/2003 08:04:43 AM
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From the Smo king Gun:
"SEPTEMBER 12--North Carolina cops are searching for a guy who successfully passed a $200 bill bearing George W. Bush's portrait and a drawing of the White House complete with lawn signs reading 'We like ice cream' and 'USA deserves a tax cut.'"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR: the iPod car
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DATE: 09/15/2003 08:05:43 AM
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QTVR enthusiast Hans Nyberg says, "At the Apple Expo in Paris on Tuesday smart car will introduce a special version called i-move It has an Apple iPod built in. The news about it has only been in Mac World UK and Mac Generation in France. (Link). I am now today able to present the car from inside in a Fullscreen QTVR with special music added. The page is here. The QTVR is made by Denis Gliksman from Paris."
Link to more info on i-move.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Make way for fembots
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DATE: 09/15/2003 08:29:37 AM
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At long last, my people are returning to Earth. BoingBoing pal Roland says:
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hill, of the Australian robotic company Kadence Photonics, has reprogrammed robots to give them some "feminine" intuition. As wrote the author, "a robot that thinks like your mum may be running your kitchen and home sooner than you think." Peter Hill's new method of programming robots [is] based on co-operation rather than exploitation. These reprogrammed robots, Michelle, Romy and Goldie, "are able to switch between a number of jobs according to priority and circumstance." "If a man does the housework, he'll load the washing machine then stand there and watch it," Dr Hill said. "A woman will go off and do something else." Check this summary for more details.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Richard Forno on "high tech heroin"
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DATE: 09/15/2003 08:53:56 AM
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Interesting essay by Richard Forno of infowarrior.org:
We want to be part of this information environment and feel more empowered with each new gadget, service, or digital connection in our lives. The concept of "information everywhere" provides instant gratification to satisfy our needs for books, music, porn, and digital interaction with others through web searches, e-commerce, wireless, instant messaging, e-mail, and streaming content over broadband. High-speed links enable organizations to operate around the world at light speed and conduct business on a twenty-four hour clock. (...)
Yet as we rush to embrace the latest and greatest gadgetry or high-tech service and satisfy our techno-craving, we become further dependent on these products and their manufacturers so dependent that when something breaks, crashes, or is attacked, our ability to function is reduced or eliminated. Given the frequent problems associated with the Information Age - losing internet connections, breaking personal digital assistants, malicious software incidents, or suffering any number of recurring problems with software or hardware products, we should take a minute to consider whether we're really more or less independent - or empowered - today than we think, knowing that how we act during such stressful periods is similar to a heroin junkie's actions during withdrawal.
Link, (via politech)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Poor countries walk out on WTO
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:31:56 AM
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A coalition of poor countries organized a mass walkout from the WTO's Minesterial meetings, where trade reps from the developing world were subjected to intense pressure to grant concessions to the rich countries.
The announcement of the walkout came at about 3:30 while US trade representative Robert Zoellick was giving a press conference declaring the intentions of the US to continue negotiations on the Singapore issues. As the press stormed out of the room into the hallway of the convention center, they were met by the dancing and singing of NGO members celebrating the collapse of the meetings.
Developing countries have said for weeks that they were already overburdened and hurt from previous concessions, and were not prepared to negotiate until the issues of agriculture was sufficiently addressed. Unsurprisingly, the demand of rich countries to include the Singapore issues was a clear indication that they were not committed to development, or even to the so called "development agenda" agreed upon in Doha.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public-domain Pinnochio lives again in a beautiful Tor edition
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:43:40 AM
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Pinnochio is one of my favorite children's books. Like many of the great children's stories that have survived history, it is a lot darker than most people realize. In fact, it's a vicious little bastard of a book, and screamingly funny in places. It was from my re-reading of the Gutenberg edition of the text that I was inspired to write my short story Return to Pleasure Island), which appears in my new short-story collection.
Now, Tor Books has brought out a beautiful new edition of the public-domain text of the novel, deisgned by Chesley-Award-winning art director Irene Gallo (who is astonishingly good at her job, and who has a special fondness for this book, I'm told), and lavishly (and I do mean lavishly) illustrated by Gris Grimly, in sepia-toned macabre ink drawings that are as angular and jocularly grim as the text itself. I got a copy of the book in the mail last week, and I've laid aside the book I'm supposed to be reading to read this one -- to devour it again. It's wonderful to have this brilliant text married to this brilliant package.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flashmobs and exhibitionist magicians make each other suck less
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:46:52 AM
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Flashmobs may be so over, but are they any worse than exhibitionist conjurer's tricks? Yesterday, a group of Londoners converged on the South Bank in a mob that spelled out rude words with their bodies beneath the clear glass box in which "flamboyant" magician David Blaine is passing 40 days without any food, suspended over the Thames.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How many CDs can be labelled with one sharpie?
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DATE: 09/15/2003 10:16:19 AM
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In an experiment aimed at determining qualitatively how much ink is inside a sharpie, the How Much is Inside people spent two days labelling CDRs with a single Sharpie. The answer:
The total was 968 CDs labeled with one Sharpie marker. You can view tiny images of the CDs on the gallery page.
I estimate the total distance marked to be 1,800 feet.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stealth Disco: rock out behind your cow-orkers
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DATE: 09/15/2003 12:38:34 PM
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Stealth Disco is the act of sneaking up behind your cow-orkers and silently rocking out while a co-conspirator films you and the hapless "victim." He's a screamingly funny best-of video.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Family Guy movie in 1-1.5 years
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DATE: 09/15/2003 02:30:11 PM
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There's going to be a direct-to-DVD Family Guy movie:
"Timeframe, you're probably looking at a year, a year-and-a-half down the line. It will take a while to make. If we could do it within a year it would be very exciting."
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Outsider recording artist Wesley Willis: RIP
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DATE: 09/15/2003 06:35:48 PM
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BoingBoing buddy Eli the Bearded points us to sad news that the wacky, Casio-keyboard-playing, Alternative Tentacles recording artist Wesley Willis has died of complications resulting from Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). "To me," says Eli, "Wesley's best song has always been I Whupped Batman's Ass. A classic of outsider art."
(Listen here -- WAV). Wesley's most recent album, Fabian Road Warrior contained some 24 original tunes -- including the timeless triumvirate, Suck a Cheetah's Dick, Suck a Pitbull's Dick, and Suck a Donkey's Bootyhole.
Shortly after he finished his first album, he was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia. Wesley described having "schizophrenia demons" in his head that removed him from the "harmony joy rides" that inspired his music, placing him instead on "torture hell rides".
Snip from the Geeklife news item on his passing:
"He lived an interesting life, going from homeless bum to revered musician. Some of his more memorable songs in my mind have been "Chicken Cow", "Kill That Jerk" and "I'm Sorry I'm So Fat (I will slim down)". I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Wesley one midsummer's night after a show at the Metro after a Reel Big Fish show (i think). I said hello to him and asked him how he was doing on his latest album. He was very friendly, albeit extraordinarily incoherent and when I moved to take my leave and shake his hand, I got a head-butt instead! I guess I should count myself lucky he didn't kill me as Wesley was a 6'5 350 lb. behemoth. Head knocking aside, Wesley will be missed for his whimsical outlook on life and his unfailing sense of humor in his song-writing."
Link to news item, Link to Wesley Willis fan page with links, a lyrics generator, and sound clips.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Solar window shades to prevent future NYC grid failures?
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DATE: 09/15/2003 06:54:22 PM
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Researchers are developing solar "window shades" for the biggest users of peak-period energy: big office buildings. They're targeting a 100% energy-conversion rate, a huge improvement over conventional solar panels.
It isn't surprising that New York's electrical grid malfunctioned during the big blackout of 2003, says one Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor. It's not that the grid is antiquated; it's that our demand for energy is insatiable. While proponents of conservation seek ways to get people to use less energy, Anna Dyson, who teaches architecture at Rensselaer, has another idea. She is leading a team of researchers who are trying to prevent future power failures by making energy-sucking office buildings ultra-efficient at peak hours. They plan to combine a series of highly efficient, low-cost technologies into a single sustainable device that would be almost transparent to those using its energy.
Link to Wired News story (via Mark Pesce's yeschaton listserv)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Xbox: Freedom is a bug, not a feature
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DATE: 09/15/2003 07:00:10 PM
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If your Xbox has the Xbox-Live "feature" wherein the device connects to the Intenret on your behalf, be warned: Xbox-Live will "update" your box to "fix bugs" without your permission or knowledge. Included in the "bugs" that will currently be fixed by Xbox-Live is the "bug" that allows the device to run Linux.
The particular bug that this update will correct for the user is the ability to run Linux. Once the update is in place you will not be able to install Linux on your Xbox any more, at least not in the convenient way that the Dashboard bug allowed, according to the XboxLinux pages.
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(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Groupware and group-think
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:05:44 PM
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Geoff Cohen's nailed a really important idea about network effects in "groupware," and the way that groupware creates group-think:
...it's a little applet which displays a bunch of pixels in a rectangle. Instructions tell the user that the area ought to look like a world map. One pixel is highlighted, and a form asks if the highlighted pixel ought to be land or water. Rinse, lather, repeat, and ten thousand visits later or so, it's moved from random noise to a recognizable world map. Pretty incredible...
Furthermore, imagine the difficulty of changing that consensus. Maybe you're a Pacific Islander, and you want to change the map to reflect the actual size of the Pacific. Too bad! Given the momentum of the consensus, it would be prohibitively difficult to move all the pixels of North America over the east, or shrink Asia, or whatever it would take. For the architecture of this application, consensus is what the old chaos mathematicians would call an attractor, and it's a powerful one.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Futuristic scenaria for BBC Interactive
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:08:07 PM
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Matt Jones, a very sharp application designer at the BBC, has been noodling around with futuristic scenaria, in the forms of rpedictions and narratives about what his users will look like in the face of those predictions.
ocial pressures to watch the latest seasons of Charmed, Buffy and Angel combine with file-sharing apps such as Kazaa to mean that many 15-24 year olds have watched entire seasons from the US on their PCs or Burned VCDs before they are shown on satellite pay TV or the much later free-to-air...
A "Social Scheduling" scenario as shown above could see p2p filesharing apps such as Bittorrent (which increases in efficiency with each concurrent user) thrive in the creation of ultralocal, and/or ultratribal media channels.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Atkins changes food economics (from beyond the graaaaaave)
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:11:34 PM
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Low-carb eating is changing the economics of food-prep, hurting sales of carb-heavy food from bread to sweets, and driving sales of meat and weird, revolting chemical "chocolate bars" made from (what tastes like) acetone, Splenda, cocoa powder, tar and sawdust.
Three months ago, the British Federation of Bakers made headlines when it announced that bread sales have declined 2 percent per year since Dr. Atkins’ book was re-released in 1997. Wheat consumption has dropped from 147 pounds per person to 139 pounds in the past six years. And in May, the Tortilla Industry Association held a high-profile seminar titled “An Industry in Crisis: The High-Protein, Low-Carb Diet and Its Effects on the Tortilla Industry.”
Atkins-friendly foods, on the other hand, are booming. News reports have credited Atkins for an increase in U.S. beef sales in 12 of the past 14 quarters. Prices on cattle futures have climbed from 65 cents per pound in 2001 to 82 cents per pound today (suggesting the beef market has grown by $3 billion in 3 years). Consumption of bacon and eggs are at 10-year highs. Beef jerky sales are up more than 40 percent in the past two years, and pork-rinds have tripled their market share to $496 million per year.
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Academic discussion of Whuffie
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:17:16 PM
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Over on the Whuffie blog (yes, there is such a thing; no, I did not have anything to do with it; and yes, I am immensely flattered), there's a guest-blogger writing good, scholarly critical analysis of the economics of the Bitchun Society, the world in which my novel is set.
The danger, pointed out in this passage from Doctorow's novel, in having a completely subjective, reputation-based economy is that it is quite possible for someone like me to be made an outsider from the economy due to actions for which I had no responsibility. Granted, similar problems exist in a cash-based economy. The market could bottom out, as we all certainly know, and I could be left with stock in… nothing. Still, there are objective factors, along with the subjective ones that move the market, that justify such occurrences. With a reputation economy, the threat of being ostracized unfairly is very real, and very much free from the protections of objectivity. Thus, this points to a problem with such a system. I do not think it is a problem that would defeat the system, as a general concept, but it is one that may justify eschewing it as a device for commerce.
The subjective nature of reputation is an interesting issue that goes beyond Herodotus. It is one that troubles modern politicians and entertainers, sometimes rightly, and sometimes wrongly. It's for this reason that I think X's website, and Doctorow's novel, are such interesting topics of discussion. Reputation is a matter that merits consideration, because it is a value that, subjectively, has massive impact on our life -- and on the lives of the ancients.
He makes a good point. The problem (OK, a problem) with Whuffie is that it lacks a lot of the critical stuff that makes up the fundamentals of democratic infrastructure, like protection for minority opinions. Some of that is elided by the lack of scarcity in the novel: it's hard to be a well-and-truly oppressed minority when every material want is answered in plenty, but the social effect of the normative pressure of Whuffie is ultimately highly corrosive.
To put it more pithily: "Popular speech never needs defending." Free speech shouldn't be a popularity contest.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Devil's Dictionary on Copyright
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:24:37 PM
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The new edition of The Devil's Dictionary has many swell corkers, but I'm quite partial to this one:
copyright, noun
The notion that you can protect from the future what you stole from the past.
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Phone-pranking the RIAA
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DATE: 09/15/2003 09:30:01 PM
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This phone-prank on the RIAA is high-larious:
JH: Hello. I just downloaded some illegal MP3s and my friend told me that the RAII is going to sue everyone who downloads music. What should I do?
RIAA: Hold on just a sec...
RIAA: The best advice I can offer you at this moment is to go to dub-dub-dub-musicunited.org and you can learn there how to uninstall your peer-to-peer software or file-sharing service.
JH: But I don't have a pee service. Someone just e-mailed me a song and I listened to it. Am I going to jail?
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rules for MMORPG bots
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DATE: 09/16/2003 07:12:49 AM
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GameSpy's PlanetFargo column this week is a very funny plan for setting up a bot to play your online role-playing games for you, including a scenario showing just how well this could work.
1. If someone says something ending in a question mark, respond by saying "Dude?"
2. If someone says something ending in an exclamation point, respond by saying "Dude!"
3. If someone says something ending with a period, respond by randomly saying one of three things: "Okie," "Sure," or "Right on."
4. EXCEPTION: If someone says something directly to you by mentioning your name, respond by saying "Lag."
5. (And remember to accept all trade requests from other players by giving them a melon.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Industrial art
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DATE: 09/16/2003 07:58:10 AM
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Cool new site of industrial-themed art and sound. Warning: egregious Flash. Link (Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Freenet's Ian Clarke gets props from MIT Tech Review mag
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DATE: 09/16/2003 08:01:40 AM
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Freenet creator Ian Clarke was selected as one of the top 100 innovators under the age of 35 by MIT's Technology Review magazine. Says Ian, "Why the fact that I am under the age of 35 is so important is somewhat beyond me, most innovators seem to do their cool stuff in their 20s." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Joy of 404
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DATE: 09/16/2003 08:07:09 AM
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Oldie but yet-unblogged-on-BoingBoing goodie: Hilarious online gallery archiving the art of the 404 error page. Link, My favorite. (thanks, ESC!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Virtual Museum of Bacteria
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DATE: 09/16/2003 08:09:20 AM
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The subject line says it all, folks. An online tribute to the glory that is, um, bacteria. Link (via Viridian list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: VC ISO failed startup ex-CEO for fun, adventure
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DATE: 09/16/2003 08:13:28 AM
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Interesting piece in yesterday's SF Chronicle about an irony-rich investment capital trend:
Ben Smith, the former head of financially troubled startup Casbah Corp. , knows firsthand the boom-and-bust cycle of the late '90s. It all converged one day during his topsy-turvy four-month ride as chief executive officer, when Upside magazine listed his company among the hot 100 firms in technology. Ironically, the accolade came just when the startup was about to be sold to a rival firm.
"I got a letter telling me that we were in the Upside 100 -- and we were out of money," said Smith. "Everything just sort of fell apart very quickly."
Despite his disappointing debut as a Silicon Valley chief executive officer, the 36-year-old is back in the startup business. As head of Spoke Software in Palo Alto, he has found venture capitalists willing to give him another chance -- and millions in cash -- to start and lead another company. Smith isn't alone. Today, venture capitalists are looking for management gems among ex-dot-com managers who survived an extremely turbulent time in the technology industry. Experience, leadership skills, tenacity and perseverance are qualities they are seeking in candidates.
Link (Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": RIAA backlash
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DATE: 09/16/2003 08:23:25 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I talk with host Alex Chadwick about popular backlash to the RIAA's recent lawsuits against individual filesharers -- and some possible solutions to the digital music dilemma. Link to "Day to Day" home, archived show will be here after noon Pacific/3PM Eastern.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Canada: We're not stealing music, eh?
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DATE: 09/16/2003 09:48:18 AM
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BoingBoing reader Darren says, "Via /., an interesting article on the apparent differences between American and Canadian copyright laws, and the rarely discussed digital media tax north of the border."
The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003.
Link to Tech Central Station article, (thanks to others who suggested, including Siege)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boycott JetBlue -- stop CAPPS II!
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DATE: 09/16/2003 09:55:20 AM
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CAPPS II is the TSA's mini-Total-Information-Awareness program, an automated suspcion-generation technology for our nations airports that will use algorithms to semi-randomly finger passengers for cavity-searches, no-fly-lists and other forms of terrornoia-inspired unconstitutionality.
CAPPS II isn't a reality -- yet. But that didn't stop Delta Airlines from deciding to pilot CAPPS II for its flights last spring. Massive public outcry changed Delta's mind about selling its passengers out to the governmental elements who believe that the Constitution only applies when we're not "fighting terrorists."
That was a real victory, but now JetBlue has stepped up to volunteer to run its customers through the TiA-meatgrinder.
The airline industry is in real trouble. Boycotts against the airlines work -- they can't afford to lose even a few patriotic customers. I'm not flying JetBlue again until they change their tune.
Rather than being merely the airline with free DirecTV, JetBlue shall henceforth be known as the airline with thousands of daily, non-stop trips from Washington, DC into the private lives of Americans foolish enough to fly their Orwellian, unpatriotic airline.
It's time for all patriotic Americans to share with JetBlue a little of that Boycott Delta love. If the JetBlue leadership hadn't been under a rock for the past six months, they would be well aware of the pillorying in the media and the countless millions of dollars in lost revenue borne by Delta by participating in the first round of CAPPS II testing.
Until JetBlue publicly withdraws from any and all CAPPS II testing and apologizes to the American people for their reckless disregard for the US Constitution, a boycott of JetBlue Airways is in effect.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Celebrity literati cupcakes for rabbits
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DATE: 09/16/2003 10:52:37 AM
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I don't make this stuff up, I swear. BoingBoing pal Mara alerts us to news that "comedian Amy Sedaris (Strangers With Candy, David's sister) is selling homemade cupcakes at a rabbit convention in New Rochelle, NY." Throw in a flashmob, a phonecam blogger, or an exhibitionist magician and we'd really have something. But I'd settle for a copy of the Sedaris cupcake recipe.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Parodies of new Apple iPod billboard ads
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DATE: 09/16/2003 11:06:24 AM
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Tons of wacky spoofs on the latest iPod ad campaign, courtesy of somethingawful.com.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Freewayblog on Halliburton's War Bonanza
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DATE: 09/16/2003 07:28:13 PM
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The Scarlet Pimpernel sends this example of Los Angeles freewayblogging:
It's about 10'X10' and reads "Dear America,
Thanks for all the money, sorry about your kids. -- Halliburton Oil" on one
side and "Nobody Died when Clinton Lied" on the other. Somebody's
opened a website dedicated to this mysterious group, and I'm thinking of
doing the same. In the meantime, check out Nobody Died.
From Smart Money:
Halliburton Corp.'s (HAL) U.S. government contracts to restore Iraqi oil production and provide support services to troops will cost taxpayers an estimated $2 billion and are expected to rise, Army spokesmen said.
An Army Corps of Engineers contract to rehabilitate the country's oil fields, controversial because it wasn't competitively bid, now is valued at $948 million, more than $200 million above the level projected last month. One particularly expensive item: importing fuel to the oil-rich country, at a cost of as much as $6 million a day.
Meanwhile, ex-Halliburton chief Dick Cheney continues to receive deferred compensation payments from Halliburton.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Translate gangsta to pirate
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DATE: 09/16/2003 08:18:31 PM
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Nice Gangsta-Pirate translation table:
| Gangstah |
Pirate |
fo'ties |
bottles o' rum |
| bling bling |
booty |
| Yo! |
Avast! |
| Homey |
Matey |
| Bee-atch |
Scurvey dog |
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: I'll be at a virtual book-club meeting in gamespace this Sunday
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DATE: 09/16/2003 10:15:21 PM
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I'm "appearing" at a book-club that meets in an online roleplaying game called Second Life, this Sunday at 6:30 PM. If you've got a Windows box, you can get a free seven-day avatar and join the disucssion!
Cory Doctorow will be the debut guest of the
Hamlet Linden Book Club, the first reading
group (far as we can tell!) to be conducted in
a massively multiplayer online world -- Second Life.
This Sunday, Sept. 21, at 6:30pm (PST), Cory
Doctorow's avatar will appear in the main auditorium
of Second Life, the 3D online society where Hamlet
Linden (aka Wagner James Au) is the world's
embedded journalist. Cory will discuss his
acclaimed novel *Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom* with an in-world audience of Second
Life residents.
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TITLE: NYT cartoon: The Copyright Cops
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DATE: 09/16/2003 10:16:40 PM
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Hilarious and instructive cartoon in today's New York Times about copyright crackdowns and the RIAA lawsuits, with guest cameos by the EFF's Fred Von Lohmann and the RIAA's Amy Weiss. Link (registration required)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Talking at Futurist Salon this Friday
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DATE: 09/16/2003 10:20:03 PM
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Just a reminder that I'll be giving a futuristic talk about copyright, DRM, science fiction and whatnot this Friday night at the Silicon Valley Futurist Salon:
We will be back at the Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center just across of the San Mateo Caltrain Station. 11 West Hillsdale Blvd., Hillsdale Shopping Center San Mateo, CA 94403 650-341-5560
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Signing my collection at San Francisco's Borderlands, Oct 2
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DATE: 09/16/2003 10:23:37 PM
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There's a book launch for A Place So Foreign and Eight More, my new short story collection, coming on Thursday, October 2nd at 7:00 pm at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I'll be doing a reading, answering questions, and signing all the books I can lay hands on. Hope to see you there!
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TITLE: Verisign is damage: route around it
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DATE: 09/17/2003 07:41:42 AM
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Yesterday, Verisign (the company I'd like to see put to death) broke the Internet by redirecting all unregistered .COM and .NET addresses to a page on their site where they run a search-engine. For a lot of good technical reasons, this is a bad idea, and it makes a savage mockery of Verisign's (unbelievably lucrative) monopoly on critical pieces of the Internet's infrastructure.
Today, the makers of the BIND DNS software responded by announcing a patch that will interpret Verisign as damage and route around them.
However, the ISC is about to undercut the Site Finder service with a patch to its BIND software.
BIND runs on about 80 percent of the Internet's domain name servers -- the machines that translate human-readable Web addresses like www.wired.com into machine-readable Internet addresses used by the Internet's vast network of computers.
The patch will be released by the end of Tuesday, said Paul Vixie, ISC's president.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Franken's Supply-Side Jesus
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DATE: 09/17/2003 08:04:29 AM
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One of the funniest bits in Al Franken's brilliant and scathing Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right is the comic-strip "Supply-Side Jesus." Now the strip's online -- enjoy!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese online art: "Mad Lovers Erotic Violence and Cute"
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DATE: 09/17/2003 09:13:45 AM
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Inexplicably zany sex-themed art from Japan: "Mad Lovers Erotic Violence and Cute." T-shirts, action figures, online gallery. Think, bunnies and panda bears ripping each others' entrails out during wildly bloodthirsty BDSM sessions, while condom-clad butterflies observe from a distance. NSFW, duh. Link (via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Zagat does Wi-Fi
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DATE: 09/17/2003 09:14:42 AM
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Chris Pirillo points us to news that the folks who brought you the Zagat guides (to restauraunts, nightclubs, and gourmet food sources) have just gone unwired:
"Today, there are thousands of wireless Internet access points in hotels and restaurants across the nation, with more appearing every day. This special-edition guide, created by Zagat Survey and brought tyou by Intel Centrino mobile technology, will help you find the coolest hotspots fast." Cities include: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle."
Link to PDF with more info.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech-ed: Kids and collective phonecamblogs in school, in Paris
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DATE: 09/17/2003 09:15:40 AM
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Jean-Luc, a BoingBoing ami from Paris, shares news of a fun educational experiment with young students in France:
"Xeni, have you seen the collective moblog that children from 7 to 11 years old have created (with me) at the Plessis-Trevise city (closed to Paris) where I worked. The children have done a report of their (school's) sportive outdoor centre by moblogging themselves the pics during all the day (this wednesday) from 9.00 al to 5.00 pm. they have been equiped of Nokia 3650s and all the pics have been moblogged by the children and I have helped them to configure and use the phonecams. they had not any problem in term of usability to use the phonecams. it seems to be very natural for them and they have a great dexterity with using their thumbs. this was funny (imagine 3 phonecams in the hands of children that run in playing soccer for example, at the swimming pool, etc.) and they are gonna add some comments and legends to their pics in some days at the telecenter of the city and we will edit a written newspaper of all of this."
URL of the collective moblog here, another snapshot of the kids here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Alert the media! IM used for gossip, flirting, timewasting
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DATE: 09/17/2003 10:28:20 AM
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This shocking CNN news item reveals that IM in corporate environments is used largely for productivity-burning smalltalk and illicit on-the-clock flirting, despite the ease with which instant message traffic can be monitored by employers. Link (Thanks ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Samsung and Napster 2.0 to create new digital music devices
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DATE: 09/17/2003 11:01:52 AM
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Electronics maker Samsung announced plans today to create a new line of digital music players with soon-to-be-reborn Napster 2.0:
The announcement Tuesday was just one of nearly a dozen products ranging from mobile phones with tiny built-in television sets to huge TV screens being unveiled at the company's annual showcase of new devices. The new Napster-ready device will be available in retail stores this fall, Samsung said in a statement. "Samsung is trying to do what Apple Computer has done with its iPod music players and iTunes online music store," said Michael Kelleher, an analyst with market research firm Yankee Group in Boston. "Certainly if Napster can build itself up as a legitimate file sharing portal, then that's good for Samsung."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New guestblogger: Jason of textfiles.com!
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DATE: 09/17/2003 11:17:46 AM
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Much thanks to Macki, who held down the BoingBoing guestbar in inimitably 1337 fashion for the past couple of weeks. Female fans, please stop tossing your digital panties at the blog. Because sadly, the mothership landed early today, beckoning him back with great haste to whatever planet he came from. We'll miss you, Macki. Now, BoingBoing welcomes a new guestbar tenant -- and he's gonna kick it old-school style.
Knock that broadband
connection down to 300 baud and let's get started, shall we?
Jason Scott runs textfiles.com, a collection of BBS-era textfiles that have turned from a side project into a foundation for about dozen other computer history related sites. Besides the original project he has also been maintaining a list of all North American BBSes in
history and has spent the last two and a half years filming and
editing a documentary about
BBSes. Throughout his journey into the past, he's unearthed
some pretty interesting stuff. Welcome, Jason!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jet Blue denies CAPPS II, Scannell rebuts
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DATE: 09/17/2003 02:37:53 PM
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If you wrote to Jet Blue yesterday to express your disappointment with the airline's unpatriotic cooperation with the Feds in piloting the CAPPS II spyware initiative, you probably got an official denial telling you that "No JetBlue customer information has been shared with the US Government with respect to testing the CAPPS II program currently under design."
Bill Scannell, the guy who outed both Delta and Jet Blue for particpating in CAPPS II, has the smoking gun on this -- a document showing that:
In September of 2002, JetBlue Airways secretly gave the Transportation Security Administration the full travel records of 5 million JetBlue customers. This sensitive travel data was then turned-over to a private security contractor for analysis, the results of which were presented at a security conference earlier this year and then posted on the Internet.
Check out the damning link for more -- the Jet Blue statement is technically correct, but only because of weasel-words inserted to elide the fact that they are enthusiastic collaborators with those who would undermine the Constitution to "fight terrorism."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Adult Happy Meals include pedometers, personal responsibility
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DATE: 09/17/2003 02:43:05 PM
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McDonald's has hired Oprah's personal trainer to ship a "healthy" "adult Happy Meals" that include a Pedometer instead of an action-figure.
Two weeks ago, a federal judge in New York dismissed an obesity lawsuit against McDonald's that alleged it had been hiding the health risks of eating its popular Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets. It was the second time this year that U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet threw out a class-action lawsuit that blamed McDonald's for making people fat.
Greene, who can't remember the last time he visited a McDonald's restaurant, said consumers had to take "personal responsibility" for the choices they make when it comes to consuming food. He will also consult on new menu items for the Oak Brook, Ill.-based company, which also announced a new taco version of its premium salads on Tuesday.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Miscount in beluga spells the extinction of caviar?
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DATE: 09/17/2003 02:51:25 PM
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The conservation body responsible for estimating population of beluga sturgeon and setting caviar-harvesting quotas may have misjudged this year's quote so badly as to drive the species to extinction.
Trade in beluga and the caviar they produce is governed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. CITES believes that beluga sturgeon numbers are on the increase, reaching 11.6 million in 2002, up from 9.3 million in 2001 and 7.6 million in 1998...
But critics say there may in fact be fewer than half a million fish left, and that raw data published by CITES itself suggests that the sturgeon population crashed by 40 per cent in 2002 alone. Continued fishing and trade in beluga caviar will only hasten the demise of the species, they say. CITES's approval also comes at a time when the US government, the world's leading importer of beluga caviar, is considering an outright ban.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Brilliant rant on suckitude of Motorola phones
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DATE: 09/17/2003 03:28:25 PM
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In Business Week, this hilarious rant from Christopher Kenton -- a (former?) consultant to Motorola:
My phone has more buttons and features than Luke Skywalker's cockpit console. Trouble is, I think Darth Vader led the design team. It's 2 a.m., and I want to tell you why I hate Motorola. I should be circumspect, since I've had the privilege of serving Motorola as a consultant, and the company was an exceptional client. But I've been staring at the ceiling now for more than an hour, my sleep destroyed by a thoughtful feature on my cell phone called the Low Battery alarm.
In the normal course of events, when I arrive home in the evening, I plug my cell phone into its charger, which sits on the kitchen counter not too far from the coffeemaker and the key rack. In the morning before I leave, I make my coffee, grab my keys and phone, and go on with my life. The phone is happy. I'm happy. The world is a happy place. Every so often something disrupts this routine, however. Sometimes I forget to take my phone out of my pocket. Sometimes my two-year-old finds the phone and, after exhausting the imaginative possibilities of make-believe conversation, abandons it under a couch or behind the desk. And there the phone sits, slowly trickling out of energy.
Like many smart devices, my phone has an alarm to tell me when the battery is low. I suspect this drains a lot of the remaining energy from the battery in order to fulfill its prophecy more quickly, but normally I might consider it a useful feature. Right now, however, at 2am, I've discovered that the usability engineers at Motorola designed this feature not as an alert, but as a behavior-modification tool. Make the punishment for forgetting to plug in the phone painful enough, and I won't do it again.
Link (via unwired)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reading in Berkeley, Oct 9
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DATE: 09/17/2003 07:52:24 PM
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I'll be reading from my short story collection and signing books on October 9th, at the Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore in Berkeley from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dean campaign spawns open source project
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DATE: 09/17/2003 07:57:42 PM
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The Dean campaign's grassroots organizing effort has spawned an open-source software project aimed at producing code for running grassroots organizing efforts.
This campaign's grassroots base - you - are incredible, and as you are discovering, quite powerful. Spawning from ad-hoc meetups and spilling over into Yahoo Groups and mailinglists you are defining the future of the political process. But while Meetup.com and Yahoo Groups have been very instrumental in this campaign, they were not designed specifically to be tools for political organization and expression. So I decided someone should build them.
Thus began the DeanSpace project. From a simple webpage with some rough ideas on how these tools should work and a mailinglist for development discussions, the project has grown into a full fledged open-source development community. Complete with rowdy IRC design debates and weekly tarballed releases, we are coding the tools we think will help define the future of political and civic participation.
Link
(Thanks, Brent!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Werbach's kick-ass spectrum paper
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DATE: 09/17/2003 08:22:28 PM
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Kevin Werbach -- former counsel for New Technology Policy at the FCC -- has released a 88-page draft of a whitepaper on spectrum allocation called "SUPERCOMMONS: Toward a Unified Theory of Wireless Communication." From the opening sentence ("A specter is haunting spectrum policy – the specter of commons.") to the real nut-grafs (Buried on page 55! Kevin, this should be on PAGE ONE!):
In short, fair use is outside but not opposed to the exclusive rights copyright grants. It is a realm of unconstrained sharing that balances a complex array of competing claims on
published work. All of these rationales can be applied to supercommons transmissions
around the exclusive transmission rights that administrative licensing or private ownership
guarantee. The primary difference is that fair use is limited to functions such as education and parody that do not directly compete with the primary commercial exploitation of the work.
The supercommons is a full-fledged communications space that may be utilized for any
purpose.
The universal access privilege, in effect, says that any transmission that is not otherwise
prohibited is allowed, though whether it is subject to a Hohfeldian privilege depends on
whether it exceeds a flexible set of boundaries developed through decentralized legal
mechanisms. This proposal reverses the current approach, under which actions must be
expressly authorized by the government, or in a property regime by the property owner. It
resembles the unambiguous language of the First Amendment, which is nonetheless is limited
and balanced in application.
this paper is provocative, comprehensive, lucid and brilliant. If you want to understand how spectrum came to be allocated the way it is today; how the spectrum auctions of the 80s took place, how the new property and commons models of spectrum allocation arose; how they differ, and what a credible path forward to universal connectivity through the public's airwaves is, you've come to the right place. Bravo!
495K PDF Link
(via Werblog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Word Pirates: take back the language!
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DATE: 09/17/2003 08:48:19 PM
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David Weinberger and Dan Gillmor have launched a site, Word Pirates, where we can reposses the vocabulary that's been hijacked by politicans and marketers.
They're our words, dammit!
Marketers, politicians and other short-sighted, self-interested, sticky-fingered people have been stealing our words. Not only do they take them for commercial purposes, but they misuse them entirely. They're Word Pirates and we're going to take back what's rightfully ours.
For instance...
For instance, the word "pirate" itself has been taken over by the Big Content companies. They mean "anyone who shares files." Real pirates murdered, raped and stole. They didn't share music, rightly or wrongly.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DC-only pickup lines
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DATE: 09/17/2003 08:58:56 PM
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WashPo ran a contest for the best pick-up lines that would only work in DC. Funny!
Third Runner-Up: Excuse me, ma'am, but the gentleman at that table has sent you a FYH 2005 energy and water appropriations bill rider for a $52.3 million solid-waste treatment plant upgrade in your home congressional district, with his compliments. (Mark Briscoe, Arlington)
Second Runner-Up: I'm guessing you work for Fannie Mae, because your fanny may be the best I've ever seen. (Chris Doyle, Forsyth, Mo.)
First Runner-Up: Babe, why are you wasting your time with an assistant to a deputy secretary, when you could be with ME, a deputy assistant undersecretary?
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dogging: UK sex-parties in parks, via SMS
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DATE: 09/18/2003 07:00:24 AM
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STDs are on the rise in the UK, a phenomenon that's blamed on "Dogging" -- the practice of organizing giant, secret sex-parties in public parks using newsgroups and SMS.
Legally, the issue of dogging is a grey area - "doggers" are committing no offence unless they are witnessed by a member of the public who can be defined as "outraged" in the eyes of the law.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bacteriophages: Set a microorganism to catch a microorganism
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DATE: 09/18/2003 07:35:40 AM
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Interesting piece from this month's Wired, about bacteriophages: microorganisms that attack bacteria and kill them in your bloodstream. Bacteriophages are being held out as an alternative to antibiotics (in the age of antibiotic-resistant superbugs that are only made stronger by the application of stronger antibiotics, an alternative is sorely needed), ironically, since they were set aside as ineffective when compared to the newly discovered penicillin in the forties.
Set aside by the West, but avidly (if sloppily) pursued by the Soviets, who saw bacteriophages as their best defense against infection. Now, former Soviet scientists have abandoned their bankrupted, catastrophic science-parks in Tblisi and emigrated to the US, there to establish a rigorous science of bacteriophages.
To gather new strains, Sulakvelidze need only drop a bucket into Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The waters of the Chesapeake Bay, of which the harbor is an inlet, have enough exchange with the Atlantic that he can find a phage for almost any species of bacteria, he says. If one doesn't work, he simply refills his bucket and looks for another that does.
"This upgradability is one of the unique qualities of phages," Sulakvelidze adds. "Developing a new antibiotic takes 10 years and God knows how many millions of dollars."
As he puts it, "Mother Nature runs the best genetic engineering lab out there. No institution or company can match it."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sharing culture: How middle-schoolers view P2P
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DATE: 09/18/2003 07:38:02 AM
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The NYT is running a fascinating report of a group of 12- to 14-year-olds at a Californian middle-school discussing file-sharing:
It shouldn't be illegal," said 14-year-old Sonya Arndt. "It's not like I'm selling it."
"Isn't it like recording movies?" asked Korbi Blanchard, 13. "They're making a big thing out of nothing."
"It's wrong to be downloading hundreds of songs, but if you only want one or two, it's not that big a deal," said 13-year-old Kristina Lee.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Moore's open letter to Wesley Clark: "The General vs. the Texas Air National Guard deserter!"
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DATE: 09/18/2003 07:42:02 AM
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Michael Moore has written an open letter to General Wesley Clark, who is standing for the Democratic nomination in 2004. Moore admires the General's integrity, but moreover touches on the plausibility of a Clark campaign against Bush -- a genuine military man who opposes war going up against a deserting, lying coward ("The General vs. the Texas Air National Guard deserter! I want to see that debate, and I know who the winner is going to be.") who uses war and punishing tax cuts to engineer massive transfers of wealth to his cronies who feed from the public trough:
1. You oppose the PATRIOT Act and would fight the expansion of its powers.
2. You are firmly pro-choice.
3. You filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan's affirmative action case.
4. You would get rid of the Bush tax "cut" and make the rich pay their fair share.
5. You respect the views of our allies and want to work with them and with the rest of the international community.
6. And you oppose war. You have said that war should always be the "last resort" and that it is military men such as yourself who are the most for peace because it is YOU and your soldiers who have to do the dying. You find something unsettling about a commander in chief who dons a flight suit and pretends to be Top Gun, a stunt that dishonored those who have died in that flight suit in the service of their country.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: South Africans: Organize against the telco
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DATE: 09/18/2003 07:46:25 AM
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South Africa's national telco monopoly has rolled out a terrible, hollow mockery of DSL service. As Martin says:
Certain ports on an ADSL line are 'prioritised', meaning all the others are basically useless. A 3GB cap is enforced per month. Line speed is 'deprioritised' after you have been capped, meaning your line is useless for everything but browsing local sites.
South African geeks are trying to get their government regulators to pay some attention to this: the telco is keeping the country in the technological dark-ages in order to preserve its dinosauric bizmodel, and the whole national economy is at stake if South Africa ends up largely off the Internet grid as a result of malfeasance and incompetence. The MyADSL site is a place where South Africans can share stories and hatch strategies for making a difference.
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(Thanks, Martin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fashion is a commons: copying is the sincerest form of flattery
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DATE: 09/18/2003 07:49:21 AM
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NPR's Morning Edition ran a great piece today on the fashion industry and copyright. Fashion designs are drawn from a rich commons of designs that have come before, remixed by designers who enjoy very little in the way of intellectual property protection, and yet the industry thrives and creativity flourishes.
Francesca Sterlacci is head of the fashion design department at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. She says it's expensive and risky to actually create new designs. It's cheaper and easier to simply knock off successful ones. Typically, Sterlacci says, designers just let the copies go. After all, new designs will come out in a couple of months, and lawsuits are time-consuming, expensive "and you're never really sure whether or not you're going to win," she says.
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(Thanks, The Other Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Political websites reviewed
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DATE: 09/18/2003 08:08:18 AM
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Brian Dear sez, "The Nettle blog is taking on political websites: candidate blogs, official sites, political party sites, etc. This will be a long-running series over the next 12 months."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Two new Haunted Mansion books out
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DATE: 09/18/2003 08:42:43 AM
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Disney has shipped two books in honor of the upcoming Haunted Mansion movie (which will not, can not suck, even though Eddie Murphy is in it). The first is Build Your Own Haunted Mansion, a punch-out book with plastic nuts and bolts bundled in so that you can assemble your own scale Haunted Mansion (yes, I am busting a nut, thank you very much); and the second is The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies, a book for ages 9-12 that probably will suck, but I am getting a copy anyway.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Haunted Mansion book probably *won't* suck
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DATE: 09/18/2003 09:47:23 AM
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OK, I take it back. There's every indication that The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies will not suck. Over at DoomBuggies.com, Jeff Baham has interviewed the author, who appears to be a real Mansion trufan who set out to write a comprehensive historical document about the bestest ride the Imagineers ever built.
This book is one of those classic "I really want to read this book so I guess I'll have to write it" situations. That was last summer, and I knew we had the movie coming up in a year-and-a-half, so I figured the timing was as good as it was going to get. I ran the idea by Don Winton, our VP of Creative down here in Florida, and he suggested taking it to Marty Sklar himself. Marty thought it was a great idea and told me to write up a proposal.
So, I wrote a five-page outline that broke the whole story down into three sections: the history of the attraction in all four parks, a scene-by-scene "tour" of the show, and the making of the movie.
The "spine" of the story was the evolution of this idea, from the very first sketch of a "Haunted House" that Harper Goff did back in 1951 to the attraction's transformation into a feature film. I thought it was a fascinating idea, because Imagineering was born of the movie industry. The first Imagineers were all filmmakers from Walt's studio and the attractions gave audiences the opportunity to experience Walt's stories in three dimensions instead of two; so the movie really represents that process in reverse. In a sense, I thought the book would give me the chance to show people how The Haunted Mansion came full circle.
At any rate, Marty helped me tweak the outline a bit and the next thing I knew he told me that Wendy Lefkon, the Editorial Director of Disney Editions, was waiting for my proposal. So I sent the thing off and about two weeks later Wendy called me and told me that everyone at Disney Editions loved the idea and they were going to do it. I think the whole thing was a result of very good timing and having the ability to get the idea directly in front of the decision-maker.
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(Thanks, Casey)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hypertension and plaque don't cause aneurysm
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DATE: 09/18/2003 10:39:07 AM
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The Mayo Clinic is asserting that high blood-pressure and arterial plaque are not significant risk-factors in aneurysm (though they are risk factors for other conditions).
"Atherosclerotic plaques and the risk factors that cause them, including hypertension, classically have been considered important potential causes of the expansion of the aorta," says Bijoy Khandheria, M.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiologist and study author. "Intuitively, it makes sense that high blood pressure would stretch the vessel walls and make them more likely to become enlarged. This study shows that while these risk factors are highly important in a host of diseases and conditions, they are bit players when it comes to causing the dilatation of the aorta that can lead to aneurysm."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Feathered Back Hair Site
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DATE: 09/18/2003 10:59:35 AM
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The Farrah. The Bertinelli. The Machio. They're all here, on a sort of online shrine to 70's and 80's feathered hairstyles. Flattery or mockery? Who cares, this site rules. Link (Thanks, Ken!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vanitydate.com: like Match.com, but for The Beautiful People.
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DATE: 09/18/2003 11:10:06 AM
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Not sure if it's hoax or a ridiculously tacky real thing, but the site description goes straight to the point:
Welcome to VantiyDate.com [sic -- you'd think those gorgeous Mensa wannabes could spell their own name, no? --XJ], the world's most judgmental, shallow dating website. At Vanity Date we have a vision of creating the largest database of the world's most good looking, rich and superficial people. Now, this doesn't mean you have to be a super model, but you have to be a so called 7.0 and above to be allowed full access to the database or be talented and have an income over 200,000 dollars per year. Leave a bad taste in your mouth? If so, then we have accomplished our goal. Remember though, intelligence is encouraged. In fact, if we find out you have an IQ below 100, you will be kicked off the site.
Link to Vanitydate.com.
Those who don't like the site are invited by its hosts to click here. IMO, the only truly unforgivable thing here is the site's assmunchingly gratuitous use of Flash. (Thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cataloguing the references in Paul's Boutique
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DATE: 09/18/2003 01:21:48 PM
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This site collaboratively catalogs and explains cultural references embedded in the Beastie Boys' hyperdense album "Paul's Boutique."
# "Are you experienced little girl?" - reference to Jimi Hendrix's song and album titled "Are you experienced?"
# "Cause you know why a you see H..." If you take the last five words of this line pronounced phonetically, Why=y, a=a, you=u, see=c, h=h = Y+A+U+C+H
# "customs jailed me over an herb seed" - refers to an incident in 1988 when the US customs arrested a man at the mexican border for posessing three marijuana seeds
# "Do Wah Diddy" (song by Manfred Mann)
# "Proud Mary keeps on turning..." song by the name of "Proud Mary" by Creedence Clearwater Revival
# Bob Dylan-famous folk singer
# Dragnet, TV show and pulp-movie
# Harley - Harley Davidson Motorcycle
# Miss Crabtree and Spanky (characters in Little Rascals)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Attack of the Giant Guinea Pig!
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DATE: 09/18/2003 01:52:25 PM
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Eight-million years ago, a cow-sized cousin of today's guinea pig roamed around Venezuela. "Imagine a weird guinea pig, but huge, with a long tail for balancing on its hind legs and continuously growing teeth," says one of the German scientists now studying Phoberomys pattersoni after finding an "exceptionally complete" skeleton. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Excerpt from Warren Ellis's novel
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DATE: 09/18/2003 02:35:00 PM
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Warren Ellis has posted an excerpt from his forthcoming novel:
What follows is a conversation between private investigator Michael McGill and the Chief Of Staff to the office of the President of the United States, essentially explicating the initial plot engine of the book. Again, this is all crabby-looking first draft stuff, so, you know, just roll with what it's saying, rather than how it's saying it. Good prose and funny jokes will be inserted later. I've got nine months to finish the book and make it pretty, and then it's published in early 2005. I'm probably going to need that long to come up with a title.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What're the odds on Monopoly squares?
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DATE: 09/18/2003 04:33:26 PM
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What's the probablity of landiing ona given square in Monopoly? What're the long-term earning possibilities for each? This guy has found out.
I first wrote a C program that simulates a single person rolling the dice and moving around the board a great number of times. It included all of the rules for going to jail and the Chance and Community Chest cards. Although this gave good aproximate answers, I decided that I wanted to write another program that would find the exact probabilities using a Markov matrix, which was the method described in a simplified form in the Scientific American article. I used an extended version of this program to generate this web page...
In the process of figuring all of this out I ran into an interesting difficulty. When trying to calculate the probabilities exactly using the Markov matrix, it is necessary to estimate the probability--for each square--that the last two rolls of the dice are doubles (since three doubles in a row sends you to jail). First I used an estimate of 1/36, but in practice it's different for each square and it's not that high for any square. I used my simulation program to find the empirical probability for each square and then used these values in my Markov matrix program. I simulated 32 billion rolls to make these estimates, so I believe they are reliable and any deviation from their exact values is extremely small. Interestingly, the probabilities of two previous rolls being doubles is slightly different on certain squares for the two jail strategies. Additionally, the average roll when landing on a utility is a bit lower or higher than 7 depending on the utility and the jail strategy, which affects the rent value.
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(Thanks, Jed)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: We all pay Hollywood's price for DVD
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DATE: 09/18/2003 04:41:09 PM
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DVD as a technology is very tightly controlled. As 3-2-1 Studios, a vendor of DVD copying and backup software discovered, making any innovation in the DVD world without permission from the Hollywood companies (who thought that the VCR and ReplayTV were forms of insitutionalized theft) is an invitation to a punishing lawsuit. Well, who cares, right? After all, DVD is a "success" -- lots of people have DVD players.
But DVD players are frozen in amber. The features that the public demands have not been forthcoming -- rather, they've stayed pretty much at the level that they started out at in the mid-nineties. They got cheaper, but they didn't get cooler, or weirder, or more flexible.
Case in point: Kaleidescape, a company in Mountain View, has built a "legit" DVD jukebox with permission from Hollywood. This is pretty easy hardware: big-ass hard-drives, some user-interface, and a commodity optical drive. Should be cheap as hell.
It's not. By the time Kaleidescape pays its license fee to the Hollywood studios and calculates the price it can command without any competition in the field, it ends up fielding a box that holds thirty DVDs on its hard-drive and costs thirty-thousand dollars.
The idea that a 30-movie DVD-ripping jukebox -- which I can build "illegally" in my living room for a couple grand -- should retail for thirty thousand bucks is revolting. It's what we, as customers of the CE companies, pay for adopting a technology that is proprietary to the Hollywood companies that take the view that watching movies out of order, skipping commercials, time-shifting and home taping are theft. Shame on us, and what a shame.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Street campaign for "New Napster": ah, the irony.
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DATE: 09/18/2003 04:51:04 PM
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BoingBoing reader Josh said:
"This is borderline cynical - - well maybe just cynical - - but in the week that UMG sued a 12 year-old girl for something she didn't know was wrong, the new owner of Napster sent out street teams to start the buzz for the late fall launch. UMG owns a hunk of Roxio which owns the market leading ripping software responsible for the mix CDs that little girl listen to and, of course, Roxio owns the new Napster. Like good street teams do, Napster is busy defacing everyone else's posters. Attached are on Santa Monica near the Century City Shopping Center. Napster. It's Bad. It's Back. (It's Legal)."
UPDATE: Faux graffiti! A number of BoingBoing readers including Abe wrote in to set the record straight:
from what I understand the Napster campaign is fully legal, they aren't
covering up other people's ads, only fake ads they themselves put up.
Unlike those Nissan Electric Moyo, they really do seem to be pasting the
heads on, not printing out fake paste ups. But I think they are pre pasting
the heads before putting up the ads...the amazing Wooster Collective has more images here.
I'm getting great pleasure watching corporate america try its hardest to
create "street cred" for a brand that once was the hottest shit around
without even a business plan.
link to image one, link to image two.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Save Baltimore's Book Thing
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DATE: 09/18/2003 04:55:38 PM
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The Book Thing is a Baltimore-based org that collects used books, stamps them "Not for Resale" and gives them away. They're in trouble:
We know that the current economy has hit all of us hard. The loss of our van made our situation at The Book Thing even more precarious. We appreciate all of those who have made the very valuable contribution of their books and time. we also need those of you that can and are willing to make a financial commitment, however small, to come forward to insure that The Book Thing can keep giving away books... we will continue our policy of not requesting donations from our patrons at our distribution site, since we don't want to discourage those who most need our service from coming to The Book Thing simply because they cannot afford the "suggested donation." Those who wish make a donation, however small, should make the donation payable to The Book Thing of Baltimore, Inc. Donations may be sent to The Book Thing of Baltimore, Inc., P. O. Box 2197, Baltimore, MD, 21203-2197. We are a non-profit organization with 501(c)(3) status, and all donations are tax deductible.
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(Thanks, Pete!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Penis enlargement pills loaded with toxins
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DATE: 09/18/2003 06:06:33 PM
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Penis enlargment pills are more than useless spam-fodder. They're also full of poison. The Chicago Daily Herald reports that "an independent laboratory analysis of a composite sample of 10 (so-called 'penile enlargement') pills ... turned up significant levels of E. coli, yeast, mold, lead and pesticide residues."
Link Via Follow Me Here
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Art Spiegelman (Maus) shunned by US Media
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DATE: 09/19/2003 12:57:40 AM
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In this UK Independent article, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and creator of Maus Art Spiegelman says he quit his job as an illustrator for The New Yorker because the magazine was sucking up to the government in order to retain access to Washington VIPs. Spiegelman also talks about his latest comic, "In the Shadow of No Towers," and how The New York Times wouldn't even reply to his offer to let the paper publish it. He ended up selling the strip to a German paper.
You would have expected the US media to sit up and take notice; instead, it slumped in its comfortable chair and closed its eyes. Yes, Spiegelman is a Pulitzer-prizewinning cartoonist; yes, he has a particular genius for describing the human price of fanaticism. Rarely have commentator and theme been so perfectly matched. But in the new "with-us-or-against-us" climate of aggressive US patriotism, his habit of expressing uncomfortable truths was becoming awkward. Once, The New Yorker had been happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with Spiegelman in the face of controversy (notably in the case of his notorious 1993 cover depicting an orthodox Jew passionately kissing a black woman); now he found himself being urged to tone down his work. "I found that I was fighting for every picture, and that was really exhausting." He realised that his new cartoon stood no chance of being published there; and, by extension, that he was probably working in the wrong place. (Spiegelman finally resigned this February, after 10 years, saying that The New Yorker was "marching to the same beat as The New York Times and all the other great American media that don't criticise the government for fear that the administration will take revenge by blocking their access to sources and information.")
Other leading publications were no more enthusiastic about the prospect of a Spiegelman cartoon on the theme of September 11. The New York Times never even responded to his offer of a strip; The New York Review of Books rejected what it saw with the opaque comment: "This would be great for Europe." Eventually, "In the Shadow of No Towers" was commissioned by the German newspaper, Die Zeit - whose editor, Michael Naumann, is an old friend and admirer.
Here's the Link. (I just noticed that this story is no longer available for free.) Shojo wrote to say "In the Shadow of No Towers" has been running in the The London Review Of Books for the past six months or so.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sf story about TiVo
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DATE: 09/19/2003 08:02:53 AM
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Here's a delightful sf short story exploring the erotic dominance relationship of TiVo to the real world, the ultimate power-fantasy inherent in being able to pause reality:
'You don't know what TiVo is.'
'If you put a gun to my head I'd guess it was like a Palm Pilot?'
'Doctor, seriously, what the hell. I was referred to you specifically, Doc, specifically because of your expertise with technology-related disorders. Your alleged so-called expertise.'
'I know Palm Pilots. It's usually about Palm Pilots or voicemail or cell phones, like ninety percent of the time.'
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open WiFi: A public good?
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DATE: 09/19/2003 08:05:42 AM
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Crooked Timber is a new-ish group blog run by academics from around the world. Yesterday's posting included a piece about the notion of open WiFi as a public good. I believe that it is, natch, but take some exception to the author's notions that free-riding is a problem or that anonymity is undesirable.
The first problem arises from the fact that publicly available wifi hotspots could do away with the need for users to register or identify themselves in some way, tying their computer to a personal identity in meatspace. In some set-ups, users of hotspots will be able to act anonymously, making detection of abuse (DOS or other computer related crime, spam, harassment, etc.) much, much harder.
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(via Many2Many)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rules for Talk Like a Pirate Day
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DATE: 09/19/2003 08:07:08 AM
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It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Me 'earties. Teresa Nielsen Hayden's got a good set of ground rules. Avast.
1. Rhotic, like, to the max.
2. The basic phonetic unit of pirate speech is the single long-drawn-out letter: R, I, A, etc.
3. Interpolate random piratical interjections: avast, belay, matey, me hearties, blow me down, bugger me standing, etc.
4. In a pinch, try the Pirate filter. If you’re fluent in Gangsta, you can also use the Pirate - Gangsta glossary.
5. Only to talk like a pirate. Not to make walk the plank. Not to sack the Accounting Department. For that is the law.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lyrics to PotC Theme, Avast!
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DATE: 09/19/2003 08:12:03 AM
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Of some assistance of Arrrr Talk Like a Yo-Ho Pirate Day will be the theme song from Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, "Yo Ho! (A Pirate's Life for Me)." Me 'earties.
We kindle and char and inflame and ignite.
Drink up me 'earties yo ho!
We burn up the city, we're really a fright.
Drink up me 'earties yo ho!
We're rascals, and scoundrels, and villains, and knaves.
Drink up me 'earties yo ho!
We're devils and black sheep and really bad eggs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Belgian teens losing sleep to SMS
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DATE: 09/19/2003 08:13:36 AM
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Belgian teenagers are losing sleep because they leave their phones on overnight and get up to answer their SMSes.
Many teenagers leave their mobile phone on while they are asleep. About 2500 children in Flanders (aged 13 years and 16 years respectively) were asked how often they were awoken at night by incoming text messages on their mobile phone. Among the 13 year olds, 13.4 per cent reported being woken up one to three times a month, 5.8 per cent once a week, 5.3 per cent several times a week and 2.2 per cent every night.
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(via SmartMobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sun's dumbass trademark policy
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DATE: 09/19/2003 08:44:07 AM
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Sun has an unbelievably stupid trademark policy that they somehow believe applies to "all Sun organizations worldwide and to Sun resellers, developers, customers, advertising agencies, consultants, professional writers and editors, licensees and other third parties making reference to Sun trademarks"
WRONG (possessives)
"Service providers admire the Sun Fire's features"
RIGHT
"Service providers admire the features of the Sun Fire servers"
WRONG (plurals)
"We bought fifty new Sun Rays"
RIGHT
"We bought fifty new Sun Ray appliances"
WRONG (verbs)
"I Java-tized my applications."
RIGHT
"I improved my applications with Java technology."
WRONG (puns)
"Let the Sun shine in your datacenter!"
RIGHT
"Bring Sun servers into your datacenter and make your net work."
Link
(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Camera specs for snapshots on the fly
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DATE: 09/19/2003 09:21:46 AM
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You thought phonecams would change how we feel about privacy in public spaces? H-P researchers have created a prototype pair of sunglasses with built-in, tiny camera.
"It means you now have a wearable camera which nobody will notice and can take pictures while being involved in events," said Huw Robson from Hewlett Packard.
Link to BBC story, (thanks to multiple BB readers for suggesting)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Laptop totes for fashionable shegeeks
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DATE: 09/19/2003 09:22:57 AM
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Cool laptop cases for girlnerds. One of them even includes a baby-changing panel. Link (thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Arrrrrrr! Pirate Zen!
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DATE: 09/19/2003 09:32:07 AM
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(1) day (2) quiz (3) glossary
(4) name
(5) translator
(6) shirts
(7) quest
(8) cruise
(9) pete
(10) golf
(11) dinner
(12) riddles
(13) murder
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank). Arrrrrrrr!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AccordionGuy's date from hell, concluded
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DATE: 09/19/2003 09:41:30 AM
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Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla has finished his hilarious, five-part saga of what is, almost certainly, the worst date in the history of the world.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Play Tele-Twister at noon (PT) today!
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DATE: 09/19/2003 09:42:01 AM
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Internet telerobotics pioneer Ken Goldberg and his students are testing their Tele-Twister collaborative telerobotics game today at noon Pacific Time. I've played with the system and it's quite engaging!
Come play Tele-Twister!
Have fun while learning about gravity, anatomy, ergonomics, and social
dynamics!
The party game Twister, introduced in 1966, was the first board game
played with human bodies.
This version, "Tele-Twister," is a game designed for the Internet. As
in the original, the game is played with human bodies (the twisters),
but in this version you get to play along and direct their moves from
the comfort of your computer.
As a player, you log in and are automatically assigned to either the
Red or Blue team. You view and play from your computer screen. You
see two twisters (real humans), one dressed in red, the other in blue.
They respond to moves chosen by the Red and Blue online teams. Your
team chooses moves for the twisters (eg, "right hand YELLOW") using a
Java-based online interface.
You can log in as a guest, but we much prefer if you register for your
own password. Just go to the Register page anytime before the game
starts and we will email you a password.
Please note: you'll need a PC with Internet Explorer, or a Mac with OS
X to use the Java interface. Tele-Twister includes audio, so if your
computer has speakers, be sure to turn up the volume.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Provigil: Eastern Standard Tribe's drug-of-choice
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DATE: 09/19/2003 09:50:19 AM
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A new "go pill" can keep you up and focused on boring tasks for 54 hours straight. It's being proposed for people who work swing-shifts -- the drug of choice for the Eastern Standard Tribe.
In 1998 the FDA approved Provigil to treat narcolepsy, but doctors prescribe it "off label" as a fatigue fighter for airline pilots, long-haul truckers, and medical residents. Users say the drug doesn't make them jittery the way caffeine does. One 200-milligram pill restores focus and alertness as effectively as three tall lattes and costs $5. And all the clinical data show that the drug has none of the addictive qualities of amphetamines like Dexedrine. Because Provigil has fewer side effects than Ritalin, it's even being prescribed to some children with attention-deficit disorder.
Link
(Thanks, Howard)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WIRED mag launches new e-mail newsletter on gadgets
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DATE: 09/19/2003 09:53:29 AM
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Pete Rojas (of Gizmodo, etc) is a busy fella. He's about to start a new column for Wired News, and will be contributing to a new, free, weekly gadget email list with Wired Magazine. Both are sure to rock. Link to newsletter subscription form.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Talk Like A Pirate Day photo-moblog
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DATE: 09/19/2003 11:39:07 AM
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For everything, there is a phonecamblog. Talk Like A Pirate Day -- today -- is no exception. Upload your snapshots of idiots people talking like a pirate for today's event. Post, ye scurvy curs! Link
(Thanks, Caines)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Time-Warner sues apartment over Wi-Fi, claiming "piracy"
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DATE: 09/19/2003 11:59:36 AM
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Sue like a pirate day? CNET reports that Time Warner Cable is suing a NYC apartment complex and its Wi-Fi provider with illegally reselling Road Runner broadband over a wireless network. AFAIK, this would seem to be the first suit of its kind.
The suit, filed Monday in the Southern district of New York, claims that Internet service provider iNYC Wireless and London Terrace Towers, a residential apartment complex, have been illegally pirating and marketing Road Runner through a Wi-Fi network.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stupid networks are still the best
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DATE: 09/19/2003 12:47:57 PM
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David "Stupid Network" Isenberg has a new blog, and is cooking with it. He're's a nice debunking of the idea of price-discrimination in networks:
...service providers need to make their networks 'intelligent' so they can identify users and the applications used.
Just what I want -- a network that identifies the application I'm using!
I can imagine
*** ERROR 4XX: UNAPPROVED APPLICATION ***
*** PERMISSION TO USE NETWORK DENIED ***
Link
(via JoHo the Blog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Island Chronicles: The Pickup
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DATE: 09/19/2003 01:44:05 PM
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Our new Island Chronicles dispatch is up at LA Weekly, called "The Pickup". Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If...
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DATE: 09/19/2003 02:08:25 PM
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A truly wonderful bit of net-lore: "You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If..."
# you have discovered the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP).
# you are the first to think of the FUSSP.
# you started looking for the FUSSP after observing that it is impossible to filter more than 99% of spam with fewer than 0.1% false positives by currently available mechanisms.
# despite being the inventor of the FUSSP, you are unfamiliar with "false positive," "false negative," "UBE," "tarpit," "teergrube," "Brightmail," "Postini," "SpamAssassin," "DNS blacklist," "HELO," "RBL," or "mail envelope."
# you plan to make money by licensing the FUSSP.
# you don't plan to make a fortune from the FUSSP, but you do expect fame as its generous and public spirited netizen inventor.
# you are deeply hurt and angry because you are not respected as "spam fighter."
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ice-age river discovered 123' below Toronto
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DATE: 09/19/2003 03:08:24 PM
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An ice-age river has been discovered running beneath Toronto:
The existence of a bedrock valley was first documented in the first half of the century, but its exact location remained largely unknown, said Steve Holysh, a hydrogeologist working on the project...
In tests done in August, researchers at the High Park site expected to hit bedrock at about 40 feet, but it wasn't until a depth of 123 feet that they hit the river system, technically known as an artesian aquifer. They hit bedrock at 145 feet.
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(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pix from Wireless Park Lab Days
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DATE: 09/19/2003 03:13:04 PM
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Bill sez, "I posted some photos I took this
afternoon at City Hall Park in Manhattan. NYC Wireless
sponsored their 'Wireless Park Lab Days,' to feature
the free public hotspot that they provide there. Tomorrow at 1 pm, they'll be having their Noderunner contest."
Link
(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IEEE members: save democracy from a broken standards-committee!
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DATE: 09/19/2003 05:34:48 PM
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The IEEE, normally the sobersided epitome of integrity and accountability, has had one of its standards-committees jump the tracks. The people who are writing the IEEE standard for voting machines have been doing their best to rig their deliberative process ot exclude input from critics who want the standard to include performance metrics that will guard against electoral malfeasance. This is heavy stuff: the standard this committee produces will likely form the basis of the US goverment's voting-machine purchases (as well as those of governments abroad), and if there are holes in the standard today, they will be biting our democracies on the ass for decades. There's never been a clearer demonstration that "architecture is politics."
IEEE is better than this. If you're a member of the organization, please take a moment to read up on this disaster-in-the-making and then use the form at the EFF's action-center to write to the IEEE and ask them to investigate this -- before it's too late.
...instead of using this opportunity to create a performance standard, setting benchmarks for e-voting machines to meet with regards to testing the security, reliability, accessibility and accuracy of these machines, P1583 created a design standard, describing how electronic voting machines should be configured (and following the basic plans of most current electronic voting machines). Even more problematic, the standard fails to require or even recommend that voting machines be truly voter verified or verifiable, a security measure that has broad support within the computer security community.
To make matters worse, EFF has received reports of serious procedural problems with the P1538 and SCC 38 Committee processes, including shifting roadblocks placed in front of those who wish to participate and vote, and failure to follow basic procedural requirements.We've heard claims that the working group and committee leadership is largely controlled by representatives of the electronic voting machine vendor companies and others with vested interests.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Guy tries to live off suburban land for 80 days
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DATE: 09/20/2003 01:20:47 AM
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Essay by a guy who lived off the land in the burbs near Santa Barbara.
I would wake up early, usually around six, and when I didn't already have food I would walk in the dawn to find something for a morning salad. These were quiet and relaxing times, when the rest of the college community was still sleeping, and it felt like I had the whole world to myself. My generous friend Ryan had two blocks away in his yard a huge Turkish fig tree that produced an exceptional bounty of the most heavenly fruits. The tree was about thirty feet tall, and I spent many hours in those branches, filling bags with ripe fruit or just stuffing myself. The tree's figs were as big as small apples, green outside and bright crimson inside, and the best were those so ripe that they had burst open. They had begun to ferment inside and tasted faintly of wine.
Link (Thanks, kk!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Haunted Mansion trailer
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DATE: 09/20/2003 04:58:11 PM
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There's a new Haunted Mansion movie trailer online. Exciting!
28.1MB Quicktime Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fed cop slams Verisign
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DATE: 09/20/2003 07:48:17 PM
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Andrew Fried, a Senior Special Agent for the U.S. Treasury Department and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has written a letter to the NANOG list today, praising the Bind people for writing a patch that un-does the damage that Verisign has wrought up the Internet with its brain-damaged SiteFinder "service." As Dan Moniz points out, it's pretty interesting that a big Fed cop like Fried is making this statment in public.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dewey Decimal bullies go after theme hotel
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DATE: 09/21/2003 09:45:49 AM
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The rights-holders to the Dewey Decimal System are suing some people who opened a Dewey-themed hotel in Manhattan where the rooms are decorated and appointed according to the subject that corresponds with their number.
Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit organization based in this Columbus suburb, acquired the rights to Dewey Decimal in 1988 when it bought Forest Press...
The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus on Wednesday seeks triple the hotel's profits since its opening or triple the organization's damages, whichever is greater, from hotel owner Henry Kallan.
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK health spreads FUD on Atkins
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DATE: 09/21/2003 09:49:04 AM
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The British government is busting out FUD over the Atkins diet, telling people it will make them fat and sick and that it's unsustainable. Of course, this is true, for people for whom it doesn't work. For people for whom it does work, it's a big, fat lie. And for some reason, opponents of low-carb diets can't distinguish between those two sentences.
'Cutting out starchy foods, or any food group, can be bad for your health because you could be missing out on a range of nutrients,' the statement says. 'This type of diet also tends to be unrealistic and dull, and not palatable enough to be tolerated for a long time.'
It adds: 'High-fat diets are also associated with obesity, which is increasing in the UK. People who are obese are more likely to develop conditions such as diabetes and some cancers. Low-carb diets tend to be high in fat, too, and eating a diet that is high in fat could increase your chances of developing coronary heart disease.'
Link
(via Joi Ito)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why we need smart fridges
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DATE: 09/21/2003 10:42:17 AM
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We've all chuckled at the businesses that promised to deliver us a "smart refrigerator," but after discovering that his fridge died during a two-week road-trip, Dan Gillmor's figured out a pretty important business-case for one:
I won't be too graphic about it, but the food -- including yogurt and formerly frozen meat -- was decomposing in an especially pungent manner. Luckily, I hadn't eaten anything in many hours, if you get my drift.
The circuit is now repaired. The foul smell is more stubborn. (There's also a whole industry devoted to "odor control," I've discovered.)
In any event, the experience has convinced me that that the modern home should be more intelligent, and communicative, than it is today.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Latest MSFT "update" hands control of your box to others
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DATE: 09/21/2003 10:15:38 PM
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Microsoft has issued an "update" to its operating systems that allow others to control what you may do with your computer, without your consent or ability to override. Called "Digital Rights Management," this is technology that requires backstopping from apocalyptically unconstitutional laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Microsoft is trying to get its users to opt-in to this, and over on Slashdot, the message boards are full of reasons not to.
Although it's not required or a 'critical' update, this just paves the road for all of Microsoft's software to require DRM technology on your computer. Quote from the details page: 'Installing this client allows RM-aware applications to work with Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) to provide licenses for publishing and consuming RM-protected information.' This, dubbed 'Activation', entails that 'your computer will be automatically connected via the Internet ... in order to create and save on your computer a system component that is associated with your hardware.' Hmmm... me no like ..."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Graffiti history site, annotated
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DATE: 09/21/2003 10:22:47 PM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written a stunningly good tour of Subway Outlaws, a "rich, complex site about the work and history of NYC’s aerosol graffiti artists," filled with links to the highlights of the huge site. This is the kind of annotation that hypertext was made for, and is rarely used for.
The lifestyle was hard. Some writers were throwaways or runaways, living wherever they could. Almost all of them were out stealing paint, sneaking into subway yards and tunnels at all hours, and getting into fights with other writers over territory, real and imagined slights, and raids on each others’ paint supplies. They tell wild stories about escape attempts, successful and otherwise, when the police showed up. Although their joy was great when they saw a car they’d painted in use in the subway system, in effect a traveling billboard
for their work, there was always a good chance that the cars they’d
just gone to so much trouble to paint were going to immediately get
hauled into maintenance and buffed straight down to the metal, so that no one would ever see what they did.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pipe-fixing bots obviate road-work
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DATE: 09/21/2003 10:23:18 PM
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New pipe-crawling robots in use in the UK can patch broken pipes from inside, without tearing up the streets:
First the bag is positioned at the point where damage has occurred and is inflated until it fits the pipe and irons out any dents.
Steam is then pumped in to glue the new lining to the walls of the pipe, which usually takes around two hours.
By using ultra-violet light to dry the glue this fix time has been cut to just 30 minutes.
Sharp objects or obstructions which cannot be removed with the bag are dealt with using remotely-operated high-pressure water jets.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.
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DATE: 09/21/2003 10:23:40 PM
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Former US Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam vet, has written an open letter to the current administration, who are eager to go to war, never having been, and sure that they will emerge victorious. The setup is very good, but it's nothing on the punchline:
The president has declared "major combat over" and sent a message to every terrorist, "Bring them on." As a result, he has lost more people in his war than his father did in his and there is no end in sight.
Military commanders are left with extended tours of duty for servicemen and women who were told long ago they were going home. We are keeping American forces on the ground, where they have become sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for every terrorist in the Middle East.
Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecam sales surpass digital cameras, worldwide
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DATE: 09/22/2003 07:23:09 AM
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A milestone for consumer camera phones:
For the first time, global sales of camera-enabled mobile handsets surpassed sales of conventional digital cameras in the first half of 2003. According to results reported by Strategy Analytics, mobile phone makers shipped 25 million handsets with built-in cameras worldwide in the first half of the year. This number is compared with four million in the year-earlier period.
Link to news item, link to related story about SA report and growing use of phonecams
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Library moblog for kids
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DATE: 09/22/2003 07:49:10 AM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc in Paris is at it again. He writes:
"This moblog experiment involved 10-13 y.o. children from the city library of Plessis-Trevise ; they are from a reading club and they exchange each month feelings about new books they are reading. The work is not finished, though. They're going to put add critiques on the book they have read and comments too... this will be THEIR moblog."
Link to library moblog, link to earlier BoingBoing post about Jean-Luc's phonecam projects involving kids in France.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to win friendsters and influence elections?
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DATE: 09/22/2003 08:14:19 AM
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Arianna Huffington has a Friendster profile -- no, really, it's her. Excerpt from her profile, which reveals the fact that she's into Public Enemy. If nothing else, it's way more entertaining than Howard Dean's blog:
Favorite TV shows: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Real Time with Bill Maher, The West Wing, Da Ali G Show, Who Wants to Be Governor of California?
Favorite Movies: Hybrid vs. Hummer
About Me: Well, first off, I'm NOT a Fakester. I'm the leading independent candidate in the California recall election. My dream is to unite Californians behind a real vision for California - clean government, clean energy, schools not jails. Check out http://www.VoteArianna.com for more about my platform and to join my campaign to Take Back California. [Extra Note: I would love to add you as a friend, but I'm currently at Friendster's maximum friend limit of 500. Hopefully, I'll be able to add you soon.]
Who I Want to Meet: Arnold, in a debate...but it's not looking good.
Link to related CNET item on Friendster's recent VC funding here, in which her campaign officials are said to have confirmed its validity. UPDATE: Anil Dash says, "Arianna updates her weblog herself, too, in addition to having a Friendster profile. Of course, I'm biased towards her because she's on TypePad. :) "
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Technorati API grows
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DATE: 09/22/2003 08:17:41 AM
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David Sifry is building out the API for his stellar Technorati blog-mining services. The new call is getinfo:
It tells you things that Technorati knows about a user. In the simplest case you can use getinfo to find out information that a blogger wants to make known about himself, along with some information that Technorati has calculated and verified about that person.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USB keychain with a camera
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DATE: 09/22/2003 11:12:37 AM
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Philips is shipping a $99, 64MB USB keychain with a built-in, no-driver 1.4 megapixel 640x480 camera.
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(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tai Chi boosts shingles immunity
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DATE: 09/22/2003 04:20:34 PM
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Participation in daily Tai Chi practice by a controlled group of seniors boosted their immunity to shingles in a preliminary study.
The researchers randomly assigned the adults to tai chi chih instruction or to a waiting list. Those who received the tai chi chih training learned the standard series of 20 "meditation through movement" exercises from an instructor with 20 years' experience. Irwin and colleagues monitored immune levels by through a series of blood tests.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Verisign's SiteFinder hijacks your privacy as well as your typos
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DATE: 09/22/2003 08:41:42 PM
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Not only has Verisign betrayed their trust by hijacking all the .NET and .COM typos, they've also tossed out the privacy of every fumblefingered netizen by putting a web-bug on their SiteFinder page, so that anyone whose session is stolen by Verisign is thereafter marked with a tracker-cookie that is used to spy on you as you traverse the Web.
The query string of the URL contains the usual things such as the Web page URL, the referring URL, browser type, screen size, etc. This query string is built on the fly by about 50 lines of JavaScript embedded in the Verisign Web page.
The Omniture server sets a cookie so that people can be watched over time to see what typos they are making.
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: JetBlue won't help out with CAPPS II -- anymore. Unless they have to.
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DATE: 09/22/2003 08:58:04 PM
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JetBlue, having been caught lying about its voluntary involvement with the testbed programs for CAPPS II (turning over 1,000,000+ customers' personal data over to a defense contractor in violation of its privacy policy), has had enough of playing ball with the unpatriotic feds who think the Constitution is less important than "fighting terrorists."
"(JetBlue) decided against further participation unless federally mandated due to concerns for customer privacy and the uncertainty of the final structure of CAPPS II," the airline said in a written statement.
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New voting machines are criminally bad
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DATE: 09/22/2003 09:31:45 PM
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Salon is running an astonishing interview with Bev Harris, the whistle-blower who broke the news that the computerized voting machines in use across America are not only insecure, but deliberately so, because insecure machines are easier for the techs from Diebold and other suppliers to "fix" when they have embarassing failures (of course, they're also easy for anyone else who wants to "fix" an election). Diebold hasn't denied that the leaked memos that Harris published are real -- rather, they've owned up to them and asserted a copyright on them, threatening her with a DMCA suit if she doesn't take them off the web.
Well, I don't believe you can protect intent to break the law by slapping a copyright on it. And the memos that we posted show that the law has been broken. If you can protect intent to break the law, all anybody would need to do is take their bank robbery plans and put a copyright on it, and then say nobody can look at them because they're copyrighted...
...[T]hey have been aware of these security flaws for years and they have chosen not to correct it. He says something to the effect of, find out what it will take to make this problem go away. [Referring to a voting equipment certifier, Clark tells a colleague to "find out what it is going to take to make them happy."] He says if you don't mention [a problem] you may "skate through" certification. And talking about doing "end runs" is not a good thing either.
And what's disturbing is the very same thing that these memos are talking about -- overwriting the audit log -- in the presentation in which they sold their machines to the state of Georgia they specifically bring up the audit log and say that no human can change it. This shows they made fraudulent claims, frankly.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to find out how often people are googling you
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DATE: 09/22/2003 09:59:45 PM
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Glenn Fleishman has come up with a neat way to find out how often people are looking up his name on Google.
I figured out accidentally a neat trick to find out how often people are searching on your name or seeing pages on which your name is prominent in some fashion. Buy a set of Google AdWords with your name. I composed a goofy ad for my name.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More US gyms are banning phonecams
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DATE: 09/23/2003 07:19:08 AM
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As concerns about phonecam misbehavior grow, an increasing number of healthclubs in the US are banning mobile devices with embedded cameras:
So far, gym bans on camera phones have occurred mostly outside the Washington area. Celebrity-laden clubs in Los Angeles, including the Sports Club/LA, already have nixed camera phones.
Camera-equipped cell phones have been banned at all 300 clubs in the 24 Hour Fitness chain nationwide. Cameras are not allowed inside those clubs without written permission, and "the new camera-cell phone combinations are no exception to this rule," said spokeswoman Shannon May. The rule appears on signs posted in every club, she said. The chain operates no fitness centers in the District, Maryland or Virginia. But most local workout spots haven't gone quite that far -- at least not yet.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Briana Lahara's RIAA settlement
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DATE: 09/23/2003 07:24:02 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted an amazing clip from the Daily Show, discussing the plea-bargain given to Briana Lahara, the 12-year-old honor student from a New York housing project, who paid the RIAA $2,000 in exchange for having downloading 1,000 songs, including "If You're Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands" and a number of TV theme-songs.
7.5MB Quicktime Link
(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tell Congress: We want number portability!
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DATE: 09/23/2003 07:54:27 AM
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We're fast closing in on the late November deadline for cellular companies and other telcos to offer number portability to their customers. The telcos have been dragging their heels on this for years, knowing that their businesses -- which have legnedarily poor customer satisfaction -- will be challenged to behave like real companies if their customers can switch and keep their phone numbers with them.
Now Congress is starting to waffle on the idea of number-portability -- big-money lobbyists have done their work and turned our elected representatives against us. Escape Cell Hell is the action-center fielded by Consumers Union (publishers of Consumer Reports) where you can write in and tell your Congresscritter not to sell out your interests to the twisted progeny of Ma Bell.
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(Thanks, Matt!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Lisa Rein track online
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DATE: 09/23/2003 08:20:07 AM
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Lisa Rein has released a new song online, under a Creative Commons license, called "Rain."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Non-genetic maggot speciation
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DATE: 09/23/2003 09:53:51 AM
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Changes in aromatic preferences can cause "sympatric speciation" among maggots -- a form of speciation that is not really genetic (the two species can still interbreed), but rather circumstantial: genetic differences contained in each species causes it to behave in a way that ensures it will never get it on with the other species.
The apple and hawthorn maggots are common names for the same species, Rhagoletis pomonella . The pest and the hawthorn plant are native to North America, but the apples they now infest were introduced from Europe around 250 years ago. During the 1860s, in New York's Champlain Valley, some hawthorn flies shifted to apple plants as their host, while others did not."There are no morphological differences between the two, so they are still the same species, but two races can be distinguished by looking at the diversity of protein structures of whole populations and by the specificity of individual flies to different host plants," explained Roelofs, who is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Insect Biochemistry at Cornell.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": VeriSign SiteFinder scandal
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DATE: 09/23/2003 10:09:19 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day":
Dot-Com Administrator Sued for Alleged Unfair Practices:
NPR's Mike Shuster talks with technology writer Xeni Jardin about a $100-million lawsuit against VeriSign, alleging the company engages in unfair business practices. The company was entrusted by the government to oversee all dot-com and dot-net addresses on the Internet -- but some of its competitors feel VeriSign is abusing its power.
Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here .
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Magnificent space-age illustration gallery
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DATE: 09/23/2003 02:39:27 PM
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Dreams of Space is an enthusiastic and wonderful gallery of vintage space-related illustration from the 1890s to the 1970s, divided by era.
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(Thanks, Charles)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bruce Sterling's Flash app
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DATE: 09/23/2003 04:22:07 PM
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Bruce Sterling has produced a piece of cranky and eerily beautiful Flash interactive art called "Embrace the Decay." Like Bruce, it is contrarian, challenging, gnomic, and thought-provoking.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Journos: a blogging survey for an academic paper
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DATE: 09/23/2003 06:41:28 PM
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Henry Farrell, an astute blogger and cyber-politics prof from at the University of Toronto, is co-writing a paper on politics and blogging, and he's looking for answers to a simple survey from journalists, columnists, commentators, producers, or editors for newspapers, magazines, or television stations.
1) How many blogs do you read a day?
2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if you read less than three? Then just name the ones you do read.]
3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis?
4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example?
5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neal Stephenson launches a Wiki to explain his new novel
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DATE: 09/23/2003 10:29:27 PM
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Inpsired by Quicksilver, his giant doorstop of a new novel, Neal Stephenson has put up a wiki where his readers can collaboratively annotate the ideas in the book:
My own view of the Metaweb is pretty straightforward: I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. It is great for selling stuff, distributing news and dirty pictures, and a few other things. But when you need to get a good explanation of something, whether it is a scientific principle, a bit of gardening advice, or how to change a tire, you have to sift through a vast number of pages to find the one that gives you the explanation that is right for you. Generally this is not a problem with the explanations themselves. On the contrary, it seems as though a lot of people like to explain things on the Internet, and some of them are quite good at it. The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.
We have been looking for a way to get an explanation system seeded for a long time, and it occurred to us that a set of annotations to my book might be one way to get it started. At first, the explanations here will be strongly tied to characters and situations in QUICKSILVER and so may be of only limited interest to those who have not read the book. However, with a few clicks we might move on to more general explanations. For example, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle appear as characters in QUICKSILVER, and so early on we might see annotations concerning specific things that they are shown doing in the book. But later these might link to explanations of Boyle's Law. Such an explanation need not refer to QUICKSILVER in any way, and so it could be useful to, say, a high school student who has never heard of me or my book but who needs to understand Boyle's Law and why it is important.
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(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hammersley's Florentine travelogue
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DATE: 09/24/2003 07:17:26 AM
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Ben Hammersley -- hacker, journo, gentleman adventurer -- has moved to Florence with his three high-strung doggies and his devastatingly tall, brilliant and beautiful Swedish wife, and is chronicling an adventure there right out of a (very funny) fairy tale.
Down at Marco's, my newly adopted cafe-for-the-evening, a habit is forming. Pico bounds in the arms of someone lovely, Mischa wanders into the bar and receives pizza crust benediction, and Lucy stands outside and watches the passers-by, leaving me, leads taut in three directions, stretched in the doorway, balancing my caffè coretto on the icecream fridge, and trying to remember enough Latin roots to work out what people are talking to me about. It's really quite amazing how long you can keep a conversation going without understanding more than one word in ten. I had a long one yesterday afternoon about hare coursing in Argentina. I think. Still: lovely chap.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best micropayments rant I've seen
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DATE: 09/24/2003 07:41:37 AM
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Lore "Brunching Shuttlecocks" Sjoberg has posted a freaking brilliant, bullshit-free rant about micropayments, charging for access to sites, and so forth:
ChargingPeople is far from the Web standard, even though it solves every single economic issue on the Web today, and several of the aesthetic ones. You make money instead of losing money. You make more money the more readers you have. You don't have to use invasive advertising or promote products you may not personally endorse. The only downside is that your readership shrinks to a fraction of its former glory.
ChargingPeople is especially suited to the independent Web artists out there. First off, only an employee-free operation can hope to make enough money from ChargingPeople to turn a profit right now. Secondly, the independent Web artists are the same ones who are going to write and draw stuff anyway. They've been making comics or writing stories since they were in grade school and they're not going to stop just because they're in QA now. So as long as you're making it, you may as well get what you can out of it.
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(Thanks, eegba!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Language Removal project: stump-speeches without any words
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DATE: 09/24/2003 07:43:52 AM
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The Language Removal project edits political speeches to remove all the words, leaving only the "uh"s "humm"s and "errr"s. They've got a page of California guberantorial hopefuls grunting and clicking -- it's cool, you can sort of make out their positions better this way.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CloudShield "improves" Internet by trapping it in telco amber
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DATE: 09/24/2003 08:29:05 AM
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CloudShield is a company whose explicit mission is to break the end-to-end nature of the Internet by creating high-capaciity packet-filters that can allow the phone company to decide which of your bits are important and which ones are unimportant. So, for example, if you were a physicist who invented a new protocol called http and a new service that runs on top of it called the WWW, you wouldn't be able to deploy it until you'd gotten all the CloudSheild filters to recognize your new system. Boy, that sounds like a real improvement to the Internet as we know it.
The Internet will choke under its own success if intelligence continues to be relegated only to the edge of the network. The notion that networks should remain 'dumb' and simply perform transport is outdated. Deploying certain application functions closer to the network core, instead of solely at the edge, relieves pressure on downstream access devices and applications, and allows the network to be more efficient, manageable, resilient and secure.
. . .
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(via Isen.blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jason Calacanis launches Weblogs, Inc
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DATE: 09/24/2003 09:07:46 AM
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Jason Calacanis, founder of Silicon Alley Reporter and Venture Reporter magazines, launched his new venture this morning. Weblogs, Inc is sort of a profit-based micropublishing system for niche, business-to-business blogs. Here's a snip from the company's manifesto.
Weblogs, Inc. is a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product. Weblogs, Inc. is creating a new layer on top of the traditional business-to-business media that:
* saves professionals the time associated with reading dozens of B2B publications by providing a non-stop, top-level summary of the news;
* provides analytical tools that allow users the ability to sort and search stories by subtopics inside B2B niches;
* gives users the ability to participate by engaging in discussions, ranking stories and by submitting their own “blogs” (i.e., pointers and summaries of stories on other sites); and
* promotes fairness and truth in reporting by acting as a public forum where industry professionals can participate.
Link (Disclaimer: I'm a former employee of the publishing company behind Silicon Alley Reporter/Venture Reporter/etc. )
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ICANN invites emailed comments on Verisign SiteFinder
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DATE: 09/24/2003 09:15:05 AM
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BoingBoing reader Hal says:
"I haven't seen this noted on Boing-Boing yet, and it seemed worth a mention. ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee has released a memo titled Recommendations Regarding VeriSign's Introduction of Wild Card Response to Uninstantiated Domains within COM and NET. I don't know if reams of emails from annoyed geeks will do any good, but it can't hurt either." Snip:
To gather information on security and stability implications, we invite inputs from all interested parties. Send inputs to: secsac-comment@icann.org. Further, we will meet publicly in the Washington, D.C. area on October 7, 2003, for interested parties to present factual information relevant to the security and stability of the Internet. Details will be available shortly.
Details here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Calf-implants: not just for lederhosen anymore
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DATE: 09/24/2003 09:19:36 AM
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A German company that makes "calf-implants" for stick-legged lederhosen-wearers to slip in their socks is branching out into Scotland, hoping to tap into the lucrative kilt-wearer market.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Makers of Kazaa sue record labels for copyright infringement
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DATE: 09/24/2003 09:20:41 AM
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Yes, you read the subject line correctly.
Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file-sharing software, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday accusing the entertainment companies of using unauthorized versions of its software in their efforts to snoop out users.
Sharman said the companies used Kazaa Lite, an ad-less replica of its software, to get onto the network. The lawsuit also claims efforts to combat piracy on Kazaa violated terms for using the network. Entertainment companies have offered bogus versions of copyright works and sent online messages to users. Sharman's lawsuit also revives its previous allegation that the entertainment companies violated antitrust laws by stopping Sharman and its partner from distributing authorized copies of music and movies through Kazaa.
Link to AP story
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Moore's comprehensive response to criticisms of Bowling for Columbine
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DATE: 09/24/2003 12:17:41 PM
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Michael Moore has written a thorough response to the critics of his disheaterning, enraging film about American life, Bowling for Columbine, called "How to Deal with the Lies and the Lying Liars When They Lie about 'Bowling for Columbine.'" He promises to keep this page updated with responses to all his attackers, so, "if you hear something about me that doesn't sound quite right, check in here."
When you see me going in to the bank and walking out with my new gun in "Bowling for Columbine" – that is exactly as it happened. Nothing was done out of the ordinary other than to phone ahead and ask permission to let me bring a camera in to film me opening up my account. I walked into that bank in northern Michigan for the first time ever on that day in June 2001, and, with cameras rolling, gave the bank teller $1,000 – and opened up a 20-year CD account. After you see me filling out the required federal forms ("How do you spell Caucasian?") – which I am filling out here for the first time – the bank manager faxed it to the bank's main office for them to do the background check. The bank is a licensed federal arms dealer and thus can have guns on the premises and do the instant background checks (the ATF's Federal Firearms database—which includes all federally approved gun dealers—lists North Country Bank with Federal Firearms License #4-38-153-01-5C-39922).
Within 10 minutes, the "OK" came through from the firearms background check agency and, 5 minutes later, just as you see it in the film, they handed me a Weatherby Mark V Magnum rifle (If you'd like to see the outtakes, click here).
And it is that very gun that I still own to this day. I have decided the best thing to do with this gun is to melt it down into a bust of John Ashcroft and auction it off on E-Bay (more details on that later). All the proceeds will go to The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence to fight all these lying gun nuts who have attacked my film and make it possible on a daily basis for America's gun epidemic to rage on.
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(via K5)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Early review of Haunted Mansion movie
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DATE: 09/24/2003 01:01:33 PM
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Ain't-it-Cool News has an early review of the Haunted Mansion movie:
The bad thing about this film is that it never really wants to scare you too much. When you are a kid and you go on The Haunted Mansion for the first time it scares the shit outta you! Waiting in line, standing in that sinking elevator, checking for exits, your heart beating fast, hands sweaty-I wanted that feeling when I saw this movie! Sure you get a few jumps, a few scary looking skeletons but that is pretty much it...
The music was great, assuming we heard the soundtrack that will be in the finished film. The FX although some unfinished were tight. Rick Baker's make up was sweet as always. And the cinematogaphy was great too. Interesting lighting, clean shots, taking great advantage of 2:35.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Her: great webcomic
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DATE: 09/24/2003 06:30:03 PM
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Stefan sez, "Oh, wow: 'Her!' is a delightfully nasty, minimalist web comic about a little girl, a pig, and various walk-ons."
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wal-Mart facing biggest lawsuit ever
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DATE: 09/25/2003 07:47:34 AM
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Wal-Mart is facing a potential class-action suit on behalf of 1.6 million female employees and ex-employees, who have always been paid less than their male counterparts.
One lawyer for the firm said it would seek testimony from 4,000 store managers in a class-action case, resulting in a trial that would last 13 years.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Domain registrar GoDaddy emails customers about Verisign
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DATE: 09/25/2003 08:50:29 AM
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BoingBoing reader Chris says, "Just got an email from GoDaddy as part of their quasi-spam/email alerts. They are going to sue verisign over the dns wildcarding." Here's a snip from the GoDaddy email Chris and other customers received:
Have you ever needed to ask for directions while you were driving? Let's say you stopped to ask a trusted authority, like a police officer. You'd expect that officer to be honest, right? Wouldn't you expect him or her to provide you a safe, direct route to where you needed to go? I sure would. But what if that officer instead misdirected you to a shopping mall? A shopping mall, it turns out, that actually paid the officer for every sale that resulted? That would be an abuse of the police officer's authority. It would be capitalizing on your misfortune.
We believe that's what VeriSign is doing with its "Site Finder" marketing scheme. We believe that it is once again abusing the power to oversee all .com and .net domains it was granted by the U.S. government.
Link to GoDaddy pdf press release on the SiteFinder lawsuit.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIAA sues grandmother for downloading Snoop Dogg
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DATE: 09/25/2003 08:55:45 AM
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New York Times story on the odd tale of 66-year-old sculptor and retired schoolteacher Sarah Ward, who received notice she was being sued by the RIAA (the case has since been dropped, but the RIAA reserves the right to sue again):
Mrs. Ward was deeply confused by the accusations, which have disrupted her gentle life in the suburbs of Boston. She does not trade music, she says, does not have any younger music-loving relatives living with her, and does not use her computer for much more than sending e-mail and checking the tides. Even then, her husband does the typing. "I'm a very much dyslexic person who has not actually engaged using the computer as a tool yet," she explained in her first interview about the case. (...)
In a number of the 261 lawsuits the industry has filed so far, members of the household other than the named defendant might have had access to the machines, she said. But some of those being sued, she added, are contending that their cases are purely ones of mistaken identity.
That is exactly what Mrs. Ward says happened to her. Not only does nobody else use her computer in more than a passing way, the computer, an Apple Macintosh, is not even capable of running the KaZaA file-swapping program. And though the lawsuit against her said that she was heavily into the works of hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg, Ms. Ward says her musical tastes run to Celtic and folk.
Link to NYT story (registration required) (thanks, SupeMatt!), Link to SFGate story (Thanks, Johnny!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Amazing Masonic watch
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DATE: 09/25/2003 09:08:14 AM
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I want this. Badly.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Boston Phoenix on downloading wars: The Empire strikes back
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DATE: 09/25/2003 09:27:24 AM
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Ted Drozdowski's story in today's Boston Phoenix on efforts by the five major record labels to stamp out free filesharing. I was interviewed for the piece, but thankfully so were a number of more intelligent people.
"What we’re seeing right now is really exciting in terms of inventiveness," says [Mike] Dreese [co-founder and CEO of the Newbury Comics retail chain]. "Just think of how far we’ve come since the advent of recording in how we listen to music. Now it’s a matter of the law and certain legal rights catching up with technology. We’re living in an accelerated world, so what we’re experiencing now with the lawsuits, some universities considering a student fee for downloading music, and other possible solutions might have taken much more time. After all, it took something like 40 years of litigation to get the music on radio licensed. Now, within the span of about five years, we’re going to have a completely new technology and possibly new laws in place for an industry. That’s remarkable."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Urban vehicle camouflage
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DATE: 09/25/2003 09:41:57 AM
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From Kevin Kelly's Recomendo e-zine:
My Jeep is camouflaged to look like a commercial fleet vehicle. I made up a fake company name, appropriated a 1950s-era logo that once belonged to a nuclear energy mutual fund, painted safety stripes on the back, and plastered a fake vehicle number all over the place. I also added flashing yellow lights in the rear window, and a police-style spotlight and rubberized push bumper to the front. VERY FUN accessories ... and useful too (when used with discretion). The spotlight is incredibly versatile -- you can point/rotate it while sitting in the driver's seat -- and it's come in handy countless times for roadside emergencies, setting up campsites, or finding house numbers on dark streets. This urban camouflage guise is very useful for parking in yellow zones, urban/industrial exploration, and crime deterrence. And the thing is... it really works!
The spotlight, bumper, and rear flashers came from my *all-time favorite* mail order catalog: Galls, "The Authority in Public Safety Equipment and Apparel." It's a gold mine, full of handy things that you didn't think you were allowed to buy.-- Todd Lapin
Galls catalog, The Unity spotlight, The Federal Signal flashers, Unruly crowds? Need riot gear? Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Intel's "One Unwired Day" is today
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DATE: 09/25/2003 10:37:16 AM
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In case you missed the blanket ad campaign: today, Intel is offering free Wi-Fi access for one day only at participating locations, like Borders & Starbucks. Link (Thanks, Chris)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free Monopoly money PDFs
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DATE: 09/25/2003 10:40:33 AM
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Hasbro has released high-rez, printable PDFs of Monopoly money. Great stuff, especially if you're playing a Cheapass Game that needs currency-tokens.
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WKRP in Cincinnati redacted to save on license fees
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DATE: 09/25/2003 10:43:29 AM
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Zed sez, "WKRP in Cincinnati (which was shot on video instead of film because RIAA's ASCAP's licensing fees were more favorable for programs on video) has, in syndication, had all the original music replaced with generic music because the RIAA's ASCAP's license fees to keep the music were outrageous. Other shows in which music plays an important role never see syndication for that reason. So instead of getting some money, they succeed in getting no money."
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scientists make 10 optical discs from a corncob
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DATE: 09/25/2003 04:25:33 PM
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The world's first eco-friendly optical discs made from corn will become available to consumers by December of this year, say Sanyo researchers who claim to have found a way to create 10 high quality compact discs from a single corncob.
This is no big deal. Squirrels manufactured the laptop I'm blogging from with nothing but a handful of discarded acorn hulls. Link (thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ACLU launches JetBlue FOIA/Privacy Act request Web form
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DATE: 09/25/2003 04:43:19 PM
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Wondering if your personal information might have been part
of the recent JetBlue privacy breach? The ACLU has launched a Web page where you can file a FOIA/Privacy Act request to find out if the government may be holding your information.
The Web page allows individuals who flew with JetBlue before September of
2002 (when the airline turned over its data to the government) to generate
an official request under the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Freedom of
Information Act for any data held about them in connection with JetBlue by
the Department of Defense (DoD), the Army, and the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA).
"After I realized that I personally flew JetBlue during the period in
question, I decided to file a personal Privacy Act request for my files,"
said [Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program]. "Then it occurred to us that people who aren't ACLU
lawyers should have an easy way to submit their own requests for their
files. So we set up this page so that anyone can exercise their legal right
to access files about them being held by the government."
Link (via politech)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Marc Cuban buys Landmark Theatres, nation's largest art-house chain
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DATE: 09/25/2003 06:02:54 PM
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Digital media evangelist Mark Cuban -- the serial entrepreneur behind Broadcast.com (sold to Yahoo!), HDNet, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks -- just bought Landmark Theatres. Cuban and longtime business partner Todd Wagner purchased the chain for an undisclosed sum, and say digital projection systems will eventually be introduced in an effort to influence every aspect of filmmaking, from production to display.
They already have their own film production company, called 2929 Entertainment, and they own part of Lion's Gate, a film production and distribution company, as well as Magnolia Pictures, an art-house movie company. About 18 months ago they bought Rysher Entertainment, which owns a library of TV shows and movies.
Now, with their own movie theaters, "We somewhat control our own destiny," said Wagner in an interview yesterday. "The ultimate goal is to attract more and more filmmakers. If they work with us and we commit to a project, they already know that (their movie) is going to get a certain amount of distribution right out of the box."
Link to Seattle Times story, Link to press release. UPDATE: And in a post to the pho list today, Cuban says: "We are going to be vertically integrated with our other companies....and not play by the rules."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speaking at ToorCon in San Diego this Sunday
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DATE: 09/25/2003 07:10:35 PM
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A reminder: I'm going to be giving a talk on security and copyright at the ToorCon InfoSec conference in San Diego this Sunday at 11AM:
Security begins with asking the right question. Asking "how can we keep sharps off airplanes" leads to confiscation of nail-scissors; while asking "how can we keep terrorists from overpowering pilots" leads to reinforced cockpit doors. It's all in the question.
The copyright wars should be asking questions like, "How can we compensate artists?" and "How can we preserve the largest library the world has ever seen?" and "How can we promote Constitutional values like anonymity, due process, and free speech?" Instead, the copyright debate has been hijacked by people who seem to be asking questions like, "How can we alienate 60,000,000 American file-traders?" and "How can we destroy the American legal system with badly conceived laws, suits and lobbying?"
There are better questions -- and better answers.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: A kids' musician who rejects the labels
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DATE: 09/25/2003 07:16:33 PM
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Gene sez, "Sara Hickman, an award-winning singer-songwriter, has thrown off the shackles of record companies and their ilk to self-produce her music, both for adults and children. This week she released her third self-produced children's album, 'Big Kid,' and her new weblog provides her with an outlet for exchange with her fans and friends -- I can only hope that the combination of the net, blogs, and the artists who take a chance can finally put an end to the ridiculous practices of the recording industry, and give us all much better music!"
Link
(Thanks, Gene)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bush's heavy-weather FUD is whistle-blown by EPA leak
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DATE: 09/25/2003 07:36:27 PM
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Stefan sez, "The fossil fuel industry and their ideological brown-nosers have done a great job of spreading FUD about Global Warming. This leaked internal EPA memo details the Bush Administration's own contribution to the effort." This is a disheartening and enraging document.
672k PDF Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Weekends mess up weather
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DATE: 09/25/2003 07:53:14 PM
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The weather is weird on the weekends -- turns out that our collective going-to-work Monday-to-Fridayism actually messes up the weather in real time. Chances are, it's the differntial in aerosol use from day to day. (Thanks, Andy)
Because weekly cycles are rarely if ever found in nature, the observed fluctuations must therefore be anthropogenic in origin, the researchers write. In particular, they propose that cloud changes associated with aerosol particles in the atmosphere could be causing the weekend effect, though other pollution processes cannot be ruled out at this time.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Railgun weblog
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DATE: 09/25/2003 09:48:59 PM
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Cool weblog about a high voltage homebrew railgun, which shoots metal projectiles over 300 MPH. Link (Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Clueless/hilarious soundbite of zen
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DATE: 09/26/2003 06:46:47 AM
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From the German Phonographic Industry chairman, via NY Times story "U.S. Is Only the Tip of Pirated Music Iceberg," emphasis added:
Music executives abroad are scrutinizing the American industry's legal campaign against people who share files on the Internet. But many doubt such tactics would work in their countries, given the relative weakness of laws protecting copyrights and the ubiquity of the activity. "People in their 60's are burning CD's at home," said Gerd Gebhardt, the chairman of the German Phonographic Industry Association. "Housewives, who should be cooking, are burning. It's not like we can go after 80-year-old men or 12-year-old kids. We have to find the right approach."
Link (via pho, Thanks, JP)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Librarians to P2P critics: Shhh!
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DATE: 09/26/2003 06:58:02 AM
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Via Declan McCullagh's politech:
In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two
peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's
librarians.
The five major U.S. library associations are planning to file a legal brief
Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit,
brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development
could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to
portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.
Link to CNET story
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Funnybook ads
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DATE: 09/26/2003 07:08:42 AM
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Amazing gallery of vintage funnybook ads.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Joel on Software's Bionic Office
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DATE: 09/26/2003 08:24:51 AM
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Joel of Joel-on-Software has just finished custom-building the new offices for his software company. Being a coder himself, he set out to design a non-cube-farm office, optimized for actually coding in.
1. Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation.
2. Programmers need lots of power outlets. They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor.
3. We need to be able to rewire any data lines (phone, LAN, cable TV, alarms, etc.) easily without opening any walls, ever.
4. It should be possible to do pair programming.
5. When you're working with a monitor all day, you need to rest your eyes by looking at something far away, so monitors should not be up against walls.
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Queer As Folk meets Dr Who
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DATE: 09/26/2003 08:35:13 AM
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The creator of Queer As Folk is writing a new Dr Who TV series for BBC.
Although Davies says he wants to "introduce the character to a modern audience", Lorraine Heggessey, the controller of BBC1, insisted yesterday that she did not expect a gay Doctor Who.
Link
(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Talk Like Bill O'Reilly Day -- Shut up!
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Atrios has adopted "Talk Like Bill O'Reilly Day" on his blog. Looks more bilious than "Talk Like a Pirate Day," but possibly also more spleenfully fun. Shut up!
It's this kind of talk that's getting our troops killed. I may have to make an exception to my unwavering opposition to the death penalty just for you.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flask-shaped PDA
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DATE: 09/26/2003 09:19:10 AM
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The Bar Master is a $30, flask-shaped PDA that stores drinks-recipes.
Link
(via Atrios)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Digital jewelry
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DATE: 09/26/2003 12:54:00 PM
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In Q104, Nokia plans to release a line of digital jewelry that features a little screen for displaying photos you upload via infrared (by phonecam or PDA). The device allows you to store and display up to eight different images. Bev, who pointed us to this item, imagines aloud, "I won't wear a photo of someone's face around my neck but i'd wear pictures of patterns or something that can act like a jewel."
Feature list, from the Nokia website:
"Wearable steel-framed display; Choker in two styles: steel chain or matte rubber; You choose the images; One touch reveals a timepiece; Color screen: 4096 colors, 96 x 96 pixels; Controls to browse and delete images."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Truck with a LOT of corn
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DATE: 09/26/2003 04:01:55 PM
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Amazing photo of a Somali truck laden with a really large amount of corn.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Philandering Fillipino Feds snitched out by SMS
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DATE: 09/26/2003 04:04:57 PM
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Filipinos are being encouraged to send SMSes to a special snitch-line if they spot electred officials treating their mistresses on the public nickel.
"Report-a-mistress is not an attack against mistresses," said Congress representative Kim Lokin.
"We are just looking here at the corruption aspect," Ms Lokin told a local radio station.
"It is not right for an official to use public funds to sustain his questionable lifestyle."
Link
(via Smart Mobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Electronic voting machines: WE WON!
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DATE: 09/26/2003 04:08:00 PM
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Remember last week when EFF asked IEEE members to write to their organization to get it to rein in a broken standards process that was threatening to unleash corruptable voting-machines onto unsuspecting democracies?
Well, we won! After all the hue and cry over the problems with the proposed standard, the committee has voted no-confidence in the proposal, sending electronic voting-machines back to the drawing board.
This is pretty cool -- chalk one up for the Internet, and for democracy. Thanks, folks.
The IEEE standard will now go back to its drafting committee, Project 1583, which holds its next meeting in Austin, Texas, in October. Once finalized, the U.S. and other governments worldwide will likely adopt the IEEE electronic voting standard, since IEEE sits on a technical advisory board established by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: @Stake employee fired after criticizing MSFT: Download the report
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DATE: 09/26/2003 04:13:10 PM
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An @Stake employee has been fired from his gig at the security company after co-authoring a report that was critical of Microsoft. His company does a lot of business with Microsoft. A lot of people are drawing the obvious inference. Dan Gillmor is urging his readers to download and link to the report in question:
879 PDF Link
(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fox News posts home phone for CNN's Tucker Carlson on web site
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DATE: 09/26/2003 08:18:10 PM
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CNN's Tucker Carlson says he was besieged by angry and threatening phone calls last night, when unknown persons at rival network Faux Fox posted his home telephone number on foxnews.com:
Carlson, who hosts CNN's "Crossfire," said on Friday that earlier in the week he jokingly announced what he claimed was his telephone number during an episode of his show, which he co-hosts with Democratic strategists Paul Begala and James Carville, along with conservative columnist Robert Novak. In fact, the number Carlson gave out connected callers to a switchboard at Fox News.
According to Carlson, an unknown person or persons at Fox retaliated by posting Carlson's actual home telephone number on the Fox Web site. Carlson said hundreds of angry phone calls were made to his home, including threatening calls. Carlson's wife and four young children were at home at the time the calls were made. Carlson and Carville on Friday excoriated Fox for the reverse prank, which Carville said "scared young children to death," unnecessarily.
Link to Boston Globe story, Link to FOX News story which previously listed Carlson's home number and has since been altered to list CNN's Washington bureau number instead. (note: if you search for the story name in Google, Carlson's home phone still shows up as the story title for this item).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google File System paper
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DATE: 09/26/2003 11:45:19 PM
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Three of Google's scientists have written a paper on the Google File System, the file-system custom-designed for Google's server-farm.
First, component failures are the norm rather than the
exception. The file system consists of hundreds or even
thousands of storage machines built from inexpensive commodity
parts and is accessed by a comparable number of
client machines. The quantity and quality of the components
virtually guarantee that some are not functional at
any given time and some will not recover from their current
failures. We have seen problems caused by application
bugs, operating system bugs, human errors, and the failures
of disks, memory, connectors, networking, and power supplies.
Therefore, constant monitoring, error detection, fault
tolerance, and automatic recovery must be integral to the
system.
272K PDF Link
(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: India to ban cover-versions of music
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DATE: 09/26/2003 11:47:28 PM
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Universal Music Group is pressuring the Indian Parliament to revise Indian copyright to make cover versions (without permission) illegal:
[...W]hen the soundtrack to a new film is released (by far the most popular genre of music in India), the demand for it is immense and the record labels have virtual carte blanche to sell it at any price they wish. However, starting in the 1970s and 80s, enterprising music distributors released cheap cover versions of popular songs (some of which were not covers but outright pirate versions) and significantly expanded the existing market by making music accessible to people who could never afford it before.
In this lobbying campaign, the music industry has also not hesitated to make some rather far-out arguments which tend to appeal to the religious right (which dominates the multi-party ruling coalition in India). These are along the lines of how song remixes are evil and mixing "pure" Indian music with music from other cultures is distasteful and further evidence of how our culture is polluted by American music, etc.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Doug Rushkoff's new book available as PDF
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DATE: 09/27/2003 01:51:24 AM
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Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Open Source Democracy, was commissioned by Demos, "an independent UK think tank with a strong interest in democratic renewal and emergent political systems. We think that Douglas Rushkoff is one of the most interesting thinkers on the new forms of social interaction that have grown up around the internet. And, as he argues in his new book, these networked, decentralised forms of communication have a lot to tell us about political organisation." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BeardCon comes to the US
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DATE: 09/27/2003 07:34:25 AM
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The World Beard and Moustache Championships are coming to Carson City, Nevada on Nov 1 -- this'll be the first BeardCon on US soil in over a decade! Maybe the first EVAR!
Link
(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion book really doesn't suck!
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DATE: 09/27/2003 07:40:20 AM
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Earlier this month, I predicted that a new book called The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies would suck -- it was packaged for 9-12 year-olds, and I thought it would likely be a brochure disguised as a book, targetted at kids.
I was so wrong. This is a really loving, thorough, adult history of the Haunted Mansion, an appredciation by someone who is clearly a dedicated fan of the ride and who has spent an enviable amount of time talking to some of the principals involved and digging through the Disney archives (the archival material reproduced in the book is stunning, and includes a lot of stuff that I've never seen in a lifetime of Mansion fandom). I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I take it all back. This does not suck.
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TITLE: Cringely's keynote at ToorCon
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DATE: 09/27/2003 02:16:04 PM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of Robert Cringley's keynote, "I Have Seen the Future and We Are It: The Past, Present and Future of Information Security" from the ToorCon infosec conference in San Diego.
I built, by hand, the first 25 Apple ][s, worked on the Lisa's
GUI. I invented the Trashcan Icon.
I had spent the summer of 1979 working for the Fed, debugging
3-Mile Island (I'd been a physicist). Then I wrote a book about
it on a 300-baud modem terminal connected to an IBM mainframe
using a line-editor. I hit the wrong key one night and trashed
70K words. Hell, Lawrence of Arabia lost a handwritten ms for a
350k-word manuscript.
When I went to work on the Lisa, I was determined that deleting a
file would be a two-step process. On some systems, the trashcan
bulges (defies physics); on others, the lid goes off (defies my
mother). In my version, a fly circled the trashcan. The focus
groups thought it was fuckin' awesome. But by turning off the
fly, the computer could be made to run twice as fast. They fired
me.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Schneier's keynote at ToorCon
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DATE: 09/27/2003 02:16:32 PM
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Here is my impressionistic transcript of Bruce Schneier's keynote, "Following the Money, or Why Security has so Little to do with Security" from the ToorCon infosec conference in San Diego.
* We want to get the most security for the least trade-off
* Determine the acceptable risk-level
* Figure out the trade-offs
THE BEST WAY TO DO THIS IS TO MAKE THE PERSON WHO CAN FIX THE
PROBLEM ON THE HOOK FOR FIXING THE PROBLEM.
We have no choice but to accept some residual risk. "No terrorism
is acceptable" in nonsense: there IS an amount of rat-droppings
that are acceptable in your breakfast cereal. Some risk is
inherent in everything. We've decided that 40k auto deaths/year
is OK. In the end, there's an amt of danger that we are willing
to accept.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TCP over bongo-drum
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DATE: 09/27/2003 02:44:11 PM
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Students at Algoma University have implemented a TCP transmission over bongo-drums.
Eight weeks later, the first public demonstration was given to the class by using a simple ping packet. With a blinding 2bps speed, the class sat patiently as the packet was received in roughly 140 seconds.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Feds snooping on Scotch distilleries for fear of chemical weapons conversions
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DATE: 09/27/2003 02:50:24 PM
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US Intelligence is closely monitoring Scotch whisky distilleries on the off-chance that they will be converted to chemical weapons factories.
For it has been revealed that Ursula, a spy with the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency - "Our mission to safeguard the US and its allies from weapons of mass destruction" - has been monitoring the island distillery.
Apparently, it takes just a "tweak" - her words - in the process of making whisky and Bruichladdich could be churning out chemical weapons.
Link
(Thanks, Will!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ToorCon photos
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DATE: 09/27/2003 03:54:56 PM
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I'm posting my photos the ToorCon infosec conference to a gallery linked below. Pictured here, Pablos and the Hackerbot, a WiFi-sniffing, password cracking sarcastic robot that hunts down WiFi users and shows their their passwords on a screen. I'll be updating the photos once or twice more over the weekend, so check back later.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Volumetric video rendering: time is the third dimension
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DATE: 09/27/2003 07:22:45 PM
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Video can be thought of as having three dimensions -- length, width and time. When you envision video with the third dimension transposed into depth, you get a volumentric picture of a moving image. Dan Kaminsky, a packet-obsessed crypto guy, has been monkeying with volumetric ways of visualizing the randomness -- the entropy -- in sets, and along the way, he's started visualizing other kinds of information. This is (some of) the output. By the way, volumetric visualization of code turns out to look like latticework, in proof of William Gibson's prescience.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Oxford geneticist says males are doomed to extinction
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DATE: 09/28/2003 03:49:55 AM
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Bryan Sykes, a professor of human genetics at Oxford University, says that because the Y chromosome doesn't mix with other genes, and is therefore unable to heal itself from genetic wounds, men will eventually become extinct.
Seven percent of men are infertile or sub-fertile and in roughly a quarter of cases the problem is traceable to new Y chromosome mutations, not present in their fathers, which disable one or other of the few remaining genes. This is an astonishingly high figure, and there is no reason to think things will improve in the future -- quite the reverse in fact. One by one, Y chromosomes will disappear, eliminated by the relentless onslaught of irreparable mutation, until only one is left. When that chromosome finally succumbs, men will become extinct.
Brian Carnell says: "a recent study demonstrated that the Y chromosome does have the ability to repair genetic damage to itself through a rather unique method."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet's builders and vandals
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DATE: 09/28/2003 09:46:42 AM
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In his current Sunday column, Dan Gillmor's written a very good piece on the good guys and bad guys of the Internet, and the ways in which the Internet constitutes a microcosm of the forces of constructivism and vandalism:
But pure malevolence fills some souls, and the Internet is their toxic playground. One creep found a security flaw in the software powering the site and exploited it. This person posted programming code inside a comment form -- some HTML that took users to an unaffiliated Web page containing one of the most disgusting photographs I've ever seen.
The site came down temporarily but quickly, thanks to users who alerted us. The offending post has been removed, thanks to a sharp-eyed programmer who let us know what had happened. The hole is being permanently repaired, thanks to the free software's developer, who hadn't foreseen this misuse.
We'd surely seen the downside of the Net. But in the response of people who helped us find, analyze and fix the problem, we'd also seen the profound upside.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Two new Lisa Rein songs online
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DATE: 09/28/2003 10:24:20 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted two more of her original songs to her site: Hiding and It's Alright. Both very good, both under a Creative Commons license.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: P2P United plans announcements tomorrow
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DATE: 09/28/2003 08:32:50 PM
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The recently-formed Peer-to-Peer filesharing trade association "P2P United", together with CxOs of larger P2P software developers, are expected to announce tomorrow the adoption of a "File-Sharing Industry Code of Conduct" at a gathering in Washington, DC. They're also expected to demand Congressional action to work out differences between the file-sharing public and the recording/film industries, and to halt the RIAA lawsuits. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New tech tools change definitions of comas, consciousness
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DATE: 09/28/2003 08:41:17 PM
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New York Times story about technologies for studying human consciousness -- and the impact of new research on both medical ethics and practical policy. Recently, one group of neurology researchers proposed a new definition, "the minimally conscious state." With it, they point to the possibility that many coma victims who've been diagnosed as vegetative might in fact have mental activity that was previously undetectable.
As the tape of his sister's voice played, several distinct clusters of neurons in Rios's brain had fired in a manner virtually identical to that of a healthy subject. Some clusters that became active were those known to help process spoken language, others to recall memories. Was Rios recognizing his sister's voice, remembering her? ''You couldn't tell the difference between these parts of his brain and the brain of one of my graduate students,'' says Hirsch, an expert in brain imaging at Columbia University. Even the visual centers of Rios's brain had come alive, despite the fact that his eyes were covered. It was as if his sister's words awakened his mind's eye.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: The sound of music
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DATE: 09/28/2003 08:45:27 PM
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lo-fi mixtape
audio vhs
disco
techno
rave slave
records
cassettes
cover versions
critic
emogame
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Greatest living writer" Neal Pollack launches punk rock tour
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DATE: 09/28/2003 08:59:46 PM
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Neal Pollack -- blogger, author, chutzpah-filled media prankster, and Suicide Girl -- tops even the zaniest of his previous stunts by embarking on a nationwide book/rock tour to pimp his latest literary and musical releases:
Now I'm going on the road, thanks largely to the generous donations I received from readers of this website, and I won't disappoint. Yes, I'm out to sell and promote my groundbreaking rock novel, Never Mind The Pollacks, currently the 66,410th most popular book in the country, and the accompanying soundtrack from my band, The Neal Pollack Invasion. Reviews of both can be found here. So, yes, I'm selling, because I'm the Willy Loman of literature. Attention must be paid. But I have other purposes as well.
Link. Tour starts today. Don't miss that soundtrack, which includes the timeless ballad "I Wipe My Ass on Your Novel."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fanimatrix: stunning Matrix fan-film
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DATE: 09/28/2003 10:39:30 PM
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I'm at the ToorCon infosec after-party at DachB0den labs, and they've just screened a stunning Matrix fan-film called The Fanimatrix, which had a roomful of hackers enraptured.
"The Fanimatrix" is a fan-made, zero-budget short film set within the Matrix universe, specifically shortly before the discovery of "The One" (i.e. the first "Matrix" feature film). It tells the story of two rebels - Dante and Medusa - and of their fateful mission onto the virtual reality prison world that is The Matrix.
The film was shot on the Sony Mini-Digital Video format and edited on a PC editing suite utilizing Adobe Premiere, After FX and AlamDV Special FX. The entire production was completed over nine nights, ranging from six to over fifteen hour shoots, not including rehearsal and blocking-tape-shooting sessions. Most of the props, sets and lighting equipment was borrowed and locations were either hired or shot guerilla style. Although the film was a "zero budget" production, the final cost of the movie (combining personal expenses of cast and crew such as investment into costumes, transport costs, food etc) has reached upto approximately $1000 NZ (or $400-$600 US). The movie was shot entirely within Auckland City, New Zealand (our home).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collaborative ToorCon notes
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DATE: 09/28/2003 11:16:53 PM
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Alexander "al3x" Payne, Chris Adams and Christian Woodward took great collaborative notes at ToorCon using SubEthaEdit, a Rendezvous-enabled text-editor for OS X.
a. Introduction to Root-Fu
- What is a hacker?
+ Deep knowledge: finding/writing exploits, breaking in, fixing, alluding capture
+ Classical hacking: physical security, dumpster diving, social engineering, phreaking
- What is a hacker contest?
+ The problem: how do you test a hacker's mettle in 2-3 days?
+ Limiting script kiddy BS
+ Finding/developing sploits
= Coming in with predefined sploits doesn't make a good contest; DIY sploit dev
+ Teamwork
= Range of skills required to own modern, complex systems
+ Integration of classical hacking
= Physical, espionage, information gathering
+ Challenge of scoring
+ Fast-paced game
Day One Link, Day Two Link
(via Al3x)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eat your spectrum: Clearchannel, the restaurant
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DATE: 09/29/2003 07:48:13 AM
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Following recent moves by ESPN and Fox Sports to add their names to restaurant chains, media behemoth Clear Channel Communications is licensing Minnesota's largest sports radio station to launch "KFAN the Restaurant." I'll have one order of monopoly meatloaf, some free speech fries, a Commons cupcake, and a side of public airwaves, julienned.
Opening in Roseville, Minn., near St. Paul, by early December, the restaurant will be the first of what may become many tied to Clear Channel properties throughout the United States, including New York City. The Minnesota restaurant is meant to piggyback on the power and reach of Clear Channel properties. In addition to 60 plasma-screen televisions, banquet space and private "skyboxes," it will offer patrons sports and music programming from Clear Channel's seven area radio stations.
In exchange, Clear Channel will receive 5 percent of the restaurant's sales, sales that are forecast to reach $10 million in the first year, said Ken Plunkett, the chief executive at Grand Management in St. Paul, which is opening the restaurant. Clear Channel has agreed to return half of that 5 percent in the form of advertising time.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney's Utopian EPCOT in an academic book
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DATE: 09/29/2003 07:53:33 AM
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Walt Disney and the Quest for Community is a (pricey, $50) academic text on Walt's Utopian dream of building a city called EPCOT -- Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow -- on the grounds of his planned Florida theme park. EPCOT would have asked its worker-citizens to sign away their Consitutional rights in favor of a code-of-conduct specified by Walt and embodied in the Park's designs, and included plans to be electrically self-sufficient through the construction of a nuclear power-plant.
Written by a professor of Urban Planning, the book seems to have been written from the perspective of utopianism in urban design, with Walt as a kind of Bizarro-world Jane Jacobs. This is a subject that's always fascinated me -- the idea of a top-to-bottom Disney-mediated utopian community. There was a generation of Americna entrepreneurs who dreamed of these things -- Ford reportedly built planned communities in Brazil called "Fordlandia" where he subjected his rubber-plantation workers to his utopian vision (which included the banning of the local booze in favor of Tom Collinses, which were inherently Utopian in Ford's eyes).
"Mannheim does a remarkable job in detailing the Disney's revolutionary urban planning contributions that shape most of the modern world."
Edward J. Blakely, Dean, Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University, New York, USA
"The book is the first to reveal Walt Disney's deep personal concern for the urban "crisis" of the time..."
Gerald Gast, Associate Professor, Portland Urban Architecture Program, The University of Oregon
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Australian 5-year-old makes bong for show-and-tell
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DATE: 09/29/2003 08:19:14 AM
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Yes, you read that headline right.
"The little girl showing how to make a bong was the most in-your-face example of drug culture among primary school students I've heard of,'' one teacher said.
Link (Thanks, Richard!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tickle Me Elmo fur coats
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DATE: 09/29/2003 08:34:40 AM
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The PETA people are sure to get their panties in a bunch over this one: fur coats from Elmo pelts, and wall-mounted game trophies of the googly-eyed one's decapitated head. Elmo say, "owie." But don't throw blood at your monitor -- it's only the work of artist Kelly Heaton, who purchased 64 previously-owned Tickle Me Elmo dolls on eBay.
Link to photo series, Link to eBay art auction (Thanks, Tim)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Voice-Over-IP-over-WiFi phone ships from Pulver.com
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DATE: 09/29/2003 09:33:30 AM
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Pulver.com -- makers of fine Voice-Over-IP memes, software and now hardware -- have shipped a Voice-Over-IP-over-WiFi phone, called the WiSIP. Right now, it can only be used to make calls on the Free World Dialup network, but a version that works with Vonage's service is in the offing, which will play with the legacy phone-network.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TSA-appointed "passenger advocate" in cahoots with CAPPS II contractor
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DATE: 09/29/2003 04:02:07 PM
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Bill Scannell -- the whistle-blower who caught Jet Blue violating its own policies by handing over its customers' records to defense-contractors for a TIA-like aviation spy-program -- has caught one of the CAPPS II vendors with its hand in the cookie-jar. The TSA has appointed David S. Stempler, head of the "Air Travelers Association," to serve as the "passenger advocate" in the CAPPS II process. CAPPS II, the suspicion-generating system intended to automatically determine which passengers are likely to be guilty of crimes and hence liable to search and grounding, is supported by Cendant Corporation, a defense contractor that stands to profit if CAPPS II is enacted.
And it looks like Cendant Corportation and the "Air Travelers Association" are run by the same people.
Some "passenger advocate." No wonder he says that CAPPS II is a fine idea and "(w)hatever's going to be done will have to be done in secret".
# Stempler's 'Air Travelers Association' website reads like an infomercial for Cendant's Travelers Advantage program.
# Both Stempler's website and the site of Cendant Travelers Advantage are owned and managed by the Trilegiant Corporation, a Cendant subsidiary.
Update: more background on Cendant from George Scriban your post on Cendant's shell game with the "Air Travellers Association" caught my eye. one thing you might want to clarify -- Cendant's not a defence contractor in the Lockheed sense of the term. they're a holding company for a number of businesses in the travel and hospitality industries (like the Gallileo GDS, CheapTickets.com, Days Inn, Howard Johnsons, Budget car rentals) with interests in real estate (Century 21) and consumer fiance (Jackson Hewitt). of course, they also have "loyalty" programs that remarket to frequent users of their products, and a wealth of data on their customers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dean campaign enlists clueful roster of net-advisors
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DATE: 09/29/2003 04:02:55 PM
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The Dean campaign has drafted a gang of Internet advisors -- not all of whom are Dean supporters -- to help guide its use of and feedback to the Internet. The advisors include Hal Abelson, Laura Breeden, Lawrence Lessig, Bob Lucky, Dewayne Hendricks, Joi Ito, David Reed, Richard Rowe and David Weinberger.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Accenture puts Verisign in charge of US Internet voting
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DATE: 09/29/2003 05:29:43 PM
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Remember Verisign? The incompetent crooks who have abused their monopoly over .COM and .NET, betraying the trust of every Internet user, continuing on a long history of abusing their customers and the Internet?
They've been tapped to secure the US's Internet voting technology. They were given the contract by Arthur Andersen consuluting, now using the post-felony-fraud alias Accenture Accenture (Accenture split from Arthur Andersen before the Enron scandal, thanks, Jamais!). This beggars the imagination. I'm going to be sick.
VeriSign announced Monday that it will provide key components of a system designed to let Americans abroad cast absentee votes over the Internet.
The contract was granted by consulting firm Accenture, which is working with the U.S. Department of Defense on a voting system known as the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment. When completed, the system will allow absentee military personnel and overseas Americans from eight participating states to cast their votes in the 2004 general election.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Roger Wood clock
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DATE: 09/29/2003 06:36:24 PM
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My friend Roger Wood's latest assemblage sculpture clock makes me homesick for a time that never was.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cramer disses Disney's MovieBeam
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DATE: 09/29/2003 09:09:27 PM
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James Cramer's rant on Disney's new VOD venture, Operation MovieBeam:
No more devices. Sorry, I don't want still one more device attached to my television set. And I certainly don't want to pay for it. Yet, there goes Disney (DIS:NYSE) , offering Operation MovieBeam, under which you can add a device to your television that costs you money every day so you won't have to pay late fees at Blockbuster. Huh? Who thinks about this stuff? Who creates it? And at what point do companies stop dreaming about the wonders of video on demand? (...)
My prediction: There's a $100 million write-off headed Disney's way. This venture reminds me so much of those Disney ventures I was involved during the dot-com period. Everything they touched turned to stone. They had no feel for the marketplace or for what consumers wanted. It's just amazing how bad they are.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: P2P Legal defense fund downhillbattle.org launches
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A new project known as the "Peer-to-Peer Legal Defense Fund" was launched today by a group calling themselvers Downhill Battle. Co-founder Nicholas Reville explains:
We think the major label lawsuits are just intimidation followed by extortion: the record companies scare people with a suit for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then offer a settlement for 4 or 5 thousand. The cost of fighting is so high that even if you think you're innocent, it's cheaper to settle. (...)
The Defense Fund actually runs on a peer-to-peer model: rather than collecting the donations centrally and then later distributing them, we use PayPal accounts so that donations go directly to people that have been sued and have signed up on our system. Our open-source software tracks donations and presents the person with the least donations so far to receive the next
contribution-- money gets spread out evenly over time, without a middleman. We think it's a cool system and a good political response.
We hope it will give some people the ability to fight and will help alleviate some of the financial damage to the families that have to settle, people are seriously talking about taking out second mortgages or not being able to afford college tuition. From a political standpoint, if we can take away the damage, then the lawsuit scare strategy doesn't work as well.
Link to web site, Link to related NYT story, (via pho list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: GPS will pinpoint Coke prize winners
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DATE: 09/29/2003 09:36:55 PM
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Presently topping my list of scary/surreal commercial applications for GPS technology:
Next summer, Coca-Cola plans to use satellites to find U.S. buyers who happen to purchase special cans of Coke products. They will be winners in a giveaway that will feature Hummer H2 sport-utility vehicles. The giant vehicles will be presented in person, using satellites to locate the recipients."
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TITLE: Moby hates the RIAA's response to P2P
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DATE: 09/30/2003 07:10:36 AM
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One of Moby's fans is being sued by the RIAA, and it's got Moby steamed:
personally i just can't see any good in coming from punishing people for being music fans and making the effort to hear new music.
i'm almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the riaa would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive.
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(via Kottke)
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TITLE: Disposable diapers' secret sauce useful for un-soaking books
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DATE: 09/30/2003 07:29:52 AM
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Super Slurper, the super-absorbent compound found in disposable diapers, is being repurposed for use in drying out books that have been flood-damaged:
"Around 250,000 books are damaged each year in the United States by water from flooding or burst pipes," Yeager said...
"With Super Slurper it takes roughly 10 minutes to dry each book. It's a quantum leap in the amount of time," Yeager said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi wants to be free
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DATE: 09/30/2003 08:18:03 AM
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Two interesting pieces on this morning's WiFi Networking News:
Intel's free networking day benefitted free networks: in hindsight, it seems obvious that the biggest beneficiary for publicity for free wireless will be free wireless networks. Still, the stats are compelling:
...the Starbucks in downtown Portland had 40 unique logins while Portland's free Personal Telco hot spot downtown had 176 unique logins.
Hotspot suppliers are offering competing packages for cafes that want to offer free wireless, including one that claims to "stop spam" (??). It's not clear to me, though, why a cafe that wants to give away free WiFi needs a "managed" solution (which requires that you depend on a tech-support queue for problems) that costs $300 when the "unmanaged" solution (a regular access-point, which can be "fixed" by turning it off and on) costs $40.
The moral of the story: Free WiFi is really, really free. Or at least cheap. The brisk market in WiFi gear, combined with the commodity nature of packets, makes it hard to engineer the kinds of market-failures in WiFi that represent gigantic marginal profit opportunities.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: new CA anti-spam law
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DATE: 09/30/2003 10:32:49 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day":
California's Anti-Spam Law: NPR's Alex Chadwick talks with technology writer Xeni Jardin about California's new anti-spam law, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2004, and how effective the law might be.
Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.
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TITLE: Study says RIAA lawsuits have decreased P2P downloads
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DATE: 09/30/2003 01:14:53 PM
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'Net research firm Nielsen/NetRatings says fileswapping volume has decreased on popular peer-to-peer networks since the most recent bout of RIAA-vs-consumer lawsuits.
Since the last week of June, traffic to the largest network, Kazaa, fell 41 percent to 3.9 million visitors during the week ending Sept. 21. Similar drops in usage were recorded for BearShare and IMesh networks. "The RIAA is clearly sending a strong message to American Web users and the message appears to be working," said Greg Bloom, senior Internet analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings (NTRT: news, chart, profile). "With hundreds of individuals facing real lawsuits, the threat to music file sharers is serious." Usage of popular file-sharing applications is at an all-time low, he added.
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TITLE: First-ever Internet-ready satellite launched
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DATE: 09/30/2003 01:18:09 PM
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Boeing's new 376HP model satellite -- "e-BIRD" -- was successfully launched earlier this week. The satellite was launched by an Ariane 5 rocket out of French Guiana on September 27, and is said to be the first ever specifically engineered for two-way broadband communications.
With a configuration of multiple spotbeams, each providing high-power regional coverage, e-BIRD can contribute to national and pan-European broadband programmes such as the European Union's e-Europe initiative that aims for all schools, universities and businesses to have access to the Internet by 2005. It is estimated that a quarter of the population and between 10 to 40 per cent of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union and candidate countries do not have access to broadband today.
link (via pho, thanks JP!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FBI invokes Patriot Act against reporters covering Adrian Lamo case
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DATE: 09/30/2003 01:21:27 PM
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Via Declan's politech list, news that the FBI is demanding that several reporters retail any notes or communication records pertaining to Adrian Lamo, the "Homeless Hacker" who turned himself in to Federal Authorities earlier this month. Lamo has been
charged in NYC federal court with computer fraud and unlawful
access.
The letters, first revealed in a report by Wired News, state that
pending authorization, the FBI will issue subpoenas for the reporters'
records regarding conversations with Lamo. (...)
FBI Agent Christine Howard states in the criminal complaint against Lamo
that she gained information about Lamo's New York Times break-in from
articles published by Securityfocus.com, Newsbytes (a Washington Post web
site), the Associated Press, MSNBC.com, ComputerWorld.com and the San
Francisco Weekly. Several reporters from these and other organizations have
received requests from the FBI to retain all records relating to their
contact with Lamo. Howard, part of the Cybercrime Task Force in the New York field office,
told Wired News that "all reporters who spoke with Lamo" should expect
similar letters.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Invasion of the high-tech body snatchers
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DATE: 09/30/2003 01:26:43 PM
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Brilliant and minstretching manifesto on the end of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, the dawn of Homo Technicus,
and the ethical implications of bioengineering. Author Alan H. Goldstein is director of the Biomedical Materials Engineering Science Program at Alfred University in New York. Snip:
"The current popular fixation on clones, or science fiction's obsession with
cyborgs, does not provide useful paradigms for the new forms of sentience
that will ultimately emerge from nanotechnology. Both clones and cyborgs are
too anthropomorphic. Ultimately, the future will not be about mixing
humanity and technology but about sentient chemistry. Just as the revolution
in quantum physics laid the foundation for the creation of weapons capable
of vaporizing the planet, so the nanotechnology revolution is laying the
foundation for the end of evolution and of life in any form we can imagine."
"A recognition of the ethical implications of bioengineering should have
followed logically from the ethical questions raised by genetic engineering.
But somewhere in our human hearts we apparently need to believe that, even
in a cyborg, there will be a border where biology starts and technology ends
-- a plug, a slot, an interface. That, unfortunately, is a fantasy. Silicon
and carbon are perfectly happy to bond on the molecular level. DNA has no
mandate from any deity that gives it an eternal role as the information
storage system of sentience. Homo technicus will be different at the atomic
level. We are not only going through the looking glass; we are merging with
it."
Link (thanks, Stephen Hill)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Why grossout photos online should make you smile
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DATE: 09/30/2003 01:30:10 PM
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Because they're proof that the Internet is still, on whole, uncensorable:
They die over and over on continuous loop, the journalist's throat slashed
again and again, the bank robber blown up by the bomb locked to his body
time after time. The graphic video and still images of dead and dying people that mainstream
news organizations choose not to display inevitably find their way to the
Internet, where they can't be killed. Some can be legally challenged, but
even if a site is shut down, the image rarely goes away.
And there's a vigorous argument over whether instant access to such images
is good or bad: Are they examples of stomach-turning excess or honest
depictions of a disturbing world? There's little disagreement, however, over the Internet's role in eroding
the mainstream media's reign as gatekeeper -- the media's decisions to
withhold images from their viewers no longer mean viewers won't see those
images
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New: "Beginners Guide to Building Robots" book
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DATE: 09/30/2003 01:35:30 PM
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Gareth Branwyn, blogger, author, and scribe of Wired Magazine's Jargon Watch column, has a new book out: The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots. It's part of the popular Absolute Beginner's Guide series by Que publishing, and leads newbies into the fascinating world of robots and do-it-yourself bot building. Gareth explains:
"The book contains projects that detail how to build three cool robots out of a coat hanger, a trashed computer mouse, and those AOL CDs that seem to breed on your desktop. I'm not kidding. Junkbots R Us. Ilustrations throughout the book where done by bOING bOING's amazing Mark Frauenfelder, with photos by Street Tech's very own Jay Townsend. The site will include information not available in the book, bug fixes on the projects, reader hardware hacks, robot news, and downloadable "Heroes of the Robolution" trading cards illustrated by Mark."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New work by painter Isabel Samaras: The Haunted Dollhouse
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DATE: 09/30/2003 01:43:56 PM
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If you're in LA: new work by BoingBoing pal and Bay Area artist Isabel Samaras will be included in a show called "The HAUNTED DOLLHOUSE," which opens tonight and runs though Nov 8th at Copro Nason Gallery in Culver City. Shown here: "Wednesday The Destroyer," Oil on wood.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mild-mannered spam victim strikes back
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DATE: 09/30/2003 02:02:51 PM
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Wired News story about a graphic artist whose domain and professional reputation were effectively hijacked by a spammer -- and what he did to fight back:
One week later, the spammer struck again, using Markley's domain. Five days after the second attack, the spammer struck yet again. Thousands of bounce reports and hate e-mails arrived in Markley's inbox. And Earthlink reps told Markley they could do nothing to help him. So "blood boiling, furious and literally foaming at the mouth," Markley set out to track the spammer down. (...)
Markley checked the headers on the original spam returned with some of the bounces. Then he learned how to access domain-registry information and how to use a trace-route program. Over the next two weeks, he painstakingly worked his way through a half-dozen hijacked servers and a dozen spoofed e-mail addresses and bogus identities to find "his" spammer. "Last Thursday, at around 7 p.m., I finally knew without a doubt that my nemesis was Eddy Marin, who has a reputation as the world's most prolific spammer," said Markley.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "New Ground" radio host Douridas to program iTunes?
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DATE: 09/30/2003 03:17:37 PM
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Rumor: A BoingBoing pal says that Chris Douridas, host of AOL and KCRW's syndicated radio show "New Ground," has just been tapped as music programmer for iTunes.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 10 techs that deserve to die
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DATE: 09/30/2003 10:07:52 PM
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Bruce Sterling's produced a list of ten dreadful technologies whose day has gone, technologies that deserve to die:
Most loathsome of all is the fiendish spam hard-burned into DVDs, which forces one to suffer through the commercials gratefully evaded by videotape fast-forwards. The Content Scrambling System copy protection scheme doesn’t work, and the payoff for pirating DVDs is massive, because unlike tapes, digital data don’t degrade with reproduction. So DVDs have the downside of piracy and organized crime, without the upside of free, simple distribution. Someday they will stand starkly revealed for what they really are: collateral damage to consumers in the entertainment industry’s miserable, endless war of attrition with digital media.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: O'Reilly eBay Hacks book is out, with an intro by me!
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DATE: 09/30/2003 10:10:27 PM
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eBay Hacks -- the latest of the O'Reilly Hacks series -- is out. It runs down 99 tips and tricks for eBay, ranging from simple buying and selling techniques to advanced programming with the eBay API. I wrote the intro for this book, and I'm really pleased with how it came out:
eBay makes us all into participants in the market again. It's no
coincidence that eBay's first great wave of participation came from the
collectibles trade. The collectibles market occurs at the intersection
of luck (discovering a piece at a yard-sale or thrift shop), knowledge
(recognizing its value), market-sense (locating a buyer for the goods)
and salesmanship (describing the piece's properties attractively). It
requires little startup capital and lots of smarts, something that each
of us possess in some measure.
Somewhere, in the world's attics and basements, are all the treasures
of history. Someone is using the Canopic jar containing Queen
Nefertiti's preserved spleen as an ashtray. Someone is using George
Washington's false teeth as a paperweight. Somewhere, a mouse is
nibbling at a frayed carton containing the lost gold of El Dorado. A
Yahoo! for junk would never break even: you simply couldn't source
enough crack junque ninjas to infiltrate and catalog the world's
storehouses of *tchotchkes*, white elephants and curios.
And just as Napster found the cheapest way to get all the music
online, eBay has found the most cost-effective means of cataloging the
world's attics and basements. It's attic-Napster, and it's spread the
cost and effort around. When you spy a nice casino ashtray on the
25-cent shelf at Thrift Town and snap its pic and put it up on eBay,
and when the renowned collector of glass ashtrays, ColBatGuano, bids it
up to $400, you have taken part in a market transaction that has
simultaneously catalogued a nice bit of bric-a-brac and moved it to a
collection where it will be lovingly cared for -- and you've left a
record of where it is and what it was worth when last we saw it. Buried
in eBay's backup tapes is a Blue Book with the last known value of
nearly every object we have ever created as a species, from Trinitite
(green, faintly radioactive glass fused at the detonation of the first
nuclear explosion at Los Alamos, $2.59 a gram at last check) to
commodity 40-gigabyte laptop hard-drives ($30 at press-time and falling
fast).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Newsmonster is hiring!
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DATE: 09/30/2003 10:21:01 PM
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Newsmonster -- a wicked-cool, Mozilla-based RSS reader -- is funded and looking to hire an engineer. The rarity value of this, a cool tech gig in San Francisco in 2003, is really astonishing.
We're looking for someone with experience in
# JavaScript, Java, C, C++ (min 5 years)
# XML including SAX, DOM, XPATH, XSLT, XUL, RSS, and RDF
# Understanding of "modern" RPC technologies (REST/SOAP/XMLRPC)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Book launch this Thursday in San Francisco for my collection
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DATE: 09/30/2003 11:13:29 PM
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A reminder: I'll be launching my new short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I'm going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The paper iPod
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DATE: 10/01/2003 08:08:07 AM
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Can't afford an iPod? Cheap consumer-electronics chic: print, glue onto cardboard, cut out and assemble.
100K JPEG Link
(via Mijnkopthee)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: VoIP providers must apply for licenses, say CA regulators
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DATE: 10/01/2003 08:11:05 AM
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Following similar moves by regulators in Wisconsin and Minnesota, companies that provide 'net telephony services to consumers in California will soon be required to obtain the same operator licences as regular old phone companies. VoIP developers argue this is not only an inaccurate application of the law -- they're not telecom providers, they're data carriers -- but that it will also throw a regulatory wet towel on an industry that's still in its infancy:
VoIP providers argue that a state's rules govern only telephone calls made over traditional telephone networks. VoIP calls use the Internet and should be excluded, the providers argue. But that distinction is becoming irrelevant, said John Leutza, director of the California Public Utilities Commission's telecommunications division. "They sure look like a phone company in nearly every regard," he said during an interview on Tuesday. "This will be California's policy going forward."
Because of its size and national stature, California's decision to bring VoIP providers into the regulatory fold could have enormous sway on the dozens of other state's now investigating a similar step.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple's going into the hotspot biz
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DATE: 10/01/2003 08:11:39 AM
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Apple is hiring a WiFi hot-spot evangelist in the UK -- looks like they're going into the free WiFi business.
The primary purpose of this role is to raise the profile in the marketplace of AirPort, Apple's Wireless networking solution. Achieving this by co-ordinating the opening of WiFi Hot Spots in high profile places, which Apple will support.
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(via ThinkSecret)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tenacious D movie script is complete
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DATE: 10/01/2003 08:14:26 AM
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Ain't-It-Cool News reports that there's a Tenacious D movie in the offing, and the script is complete.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Euro screws US dollar in ad campaign
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DATE: 10/01/2003 08:48:42 AM
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Russian Finance magazine was forced to tear down their ad posters in Moscow depicting the euro, er, pleasuring the US dollar from behind. "I thought the currencies were dancing on our poster," said the magazine's publisher.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: California Recall spawns as many t-shirts as candidates
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DATE: 10/01/2003 10:06:47 AM
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So. What are you wearing? Mmm-hmmm. Nice.
Me?
This.
Link. Bonus: read Schwarzenegger's 1977 Oui interview in entirety here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickenger's Wireless Hacks book is out
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DATE: 10/01/2003 12:25:01 PM
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O'Reilly's Hacks book are total mind-candy. I've got MacOS X Hacks on my desk, eBay and Google Hacks on the coffee table and now I've found one for the toilet tank: Wireless Hacks, by Rob Flickenger, the WiFi hacker who wrote Building Community Wireless Networks, outed Linksys for using Linux in its APs without delivering code, lost a kidney after falling off a roof while installing a WiFi antenna, and is in lots of other ways the wireless hacker's wireless hacker. Can't wait to get ahold of this.
Link
(via WiFiNetNews)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anonymous paper "Entrapment" warns RIAA could wrongly accuse non-filesharers
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DATE: 10/01/2003 02:53:55 PM
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A flaw critics have warned of in the RIAA's series of lawsuits against consumers -- the possibility that "innocent" file-sharers could appear "guilty" -- is the subject of a newly released anonymous paper. "Entrapment: Incriminating Peer to Peer Network Users," was posted this week on a free Australian webhost service. Excerpt from the document:
If a user of peer to peer (P2P) networks is allegedly caught searching for, downloading, sharing
or uploading contraband files such as copyright-protected music .mp3 files, they might
mistakenly believe that their only option is to plea bargain with authorities. However the P2P user, who the authorities are all too quick to brand as an offender, may
actually be an innocent victim. It is possible for an attacker to exploit both the underlying design
of P2P networks as well as implementation flaws in P2P applications in order to implicate
another P2P user in behaviour deemed unacceptable by the authorities.
In the worst case scenario, an attacker can anonymously trick an innocent P2P user into
downloading a contraband file from another user on the P2P network. If authorities participate
in P2P networks in order to identify offenders, the innocent P2P user may have downloaded a
contraband file from an authority.
This article will describe how a P2P user allegedly caught committing an offence relating to
copyright violation, such as sharing/uploading/downloading/searching for contraband files, might
not have been knowingly involved, or might not have been involved at all.
Link to New Scientist article, Link to "Entrapment" paper (Adobe PDF)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eurokids fastest-growing online population segment
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DATE: 10/01/2003 02:57:07 PM
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Kids in Europe who surf the 'Net for everything from tunes to term paper templates have become the fastest-growing portion of the Internet population, according to a new Nielsen/Netratings study released yesterday.
Some 13 million children under the age of 18 in eight countries surveyed surf the web for school work, games and music, a rise of some 27 percent over last year. Four million were under age 12... the findings from the survey covering Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands suggest that a plea from educators and politicians to add the Internet to school curricula and make high-speed Internet services cheaper as well as more accessible is paying off.
Link (via pho)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Smart iTunes playlists notes-sharing
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DATE: 10/01/2003 04:03:46 PM
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Here's a great open thread in which Mac users are discussing how they use iTunes. I'm pretty chuffed about the idea of a "Never Played" smart playlist.
I personally use dynamic playlists almost exclusively. I have the prerequisite Top 25 playlist (highest rated, random 25), the Recently Played (played in the last week) for finding something i recently heard and want to hear again, the Never Played (playcount: 0) to make sure i hear everything, and the Newest (Added after *date*), which i set up before the trip so i could listen to the newest stuff and add it to the iPod easily.
Every other playlist, with the exception of one, is a dynamic playlist with a Genre label and automatically includes anything with the specified genre. I maintain my genres fanatically and every mp3 i have fits into one of my genre playlists. The lone non-dynamic playlist i have is called Tag-Fixing and when i get new music on my machine i drag it into that playlist so i can check the tags. When i have edited the tags to my satisfaction, iTunes notices and pulls them into the appropriate Genre playlist and whatever other playlist they belong in as well. I then delete them from the Tag-Fixing playlist.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Decorative rug that looks like a pair of men's briefs.
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DATE: 10/01/2003 05:55:29 PM
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Tighty whitie home decor. At just 26 bucks (and free shipping when you order online), what better example of trailer park chic? Click thumbnail for full-size image. Link (thanks, claytonjames)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Acme Products, 1935-1964
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DATE: 10/02/2003 06:57:35 AM
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The Illustrated Catalog of Acme Products is a collection of frame-grabs from Warner Bros cartoons from 1935 to 1964, displaying the wide range of fine products on offer from the Acme company through the years.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rosetta project for people with axes in their heads
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DATE: 10/02/2003 07:03:46 AM
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In the fine tradition of I can eat glass, it will not harm me, and other Internet Rosetta Stone projects, here is a page on which you will find many translations of "Oh my god! There's an axe in my head."
Greek: hristo mou! eho ena maheri sto kefali mou!
Tagalog: Ay Dios ko! May palakol sa ulo ko!
Danish: Oh min gud! Der er en oekse i mit hoved.
Afrikaans: O God! Daar's 'n byl in my kop!
Polish: O Moj Boze! Mam siekiere w glowie!
Maori: Ave Te Ariki! He toki ki roto taku mahuna!
Italian: Dio mio! C'e' un' ascia nella mia testa!
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GPRS billing hack is disclosed
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DATE: 10/02/2003 08:38:11 AM
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GPRS (a cellular data service) has been compromised -- apparently for quite some time, though the disclosure only comes today. The hack that everyone's worried about is one that allows hackers to bill arbitrary services to any GRPS handset:
There are lots of potential issues, but the one which has forced the phone networks to acknowledge that there is a problem, is a scam where a company obtains IP addresses that the GPRS operators own, in the "cellular pool" and start pinging those addresses.
When one of them responds, the scam operator knows that a user has been assigned the address. And, unbelievably, there was nothing to stop them simply providing services direct to that IP address - and taking the money out of the GPRS billing system to pay for it.
Link
(via Interesting People)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nuns get wired
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DATE: 10/02/2003 09:35:21 AM
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The Poor Clare nuns, who take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, have launched a website, opening their reclusive world to the public for the first time. Saint Clare is also the patron saint of television. Go figure.
They usually only communicate with visitors, and even family members, by talking through iron bars at their closed monastery in Galway, western Ireland.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Branding your kids
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DATE: 10/02/2003 09:59:57 AM
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According to US social security records, there were five kids born in 2000 whose parents named them Timberland, forty-nine Canons, eleven Bentleys, five Jaguars, and a Xerox. The kicker? Twenty-four children were named Unique. Link (Thanks, Gil!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lore Sjoberg's comic-strips
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DATE: 10/02/2003 10:02:54 AM
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Lore Sjoberg, the Internet-comedy genius responsible for the Brunching Shuttlecocks, has collected his Lore-Brand Comics comic-strips on the Web.
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kurzweil and Joy on the 21st century
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DATE: 10/02/2003 10:13:36 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
In this long text published by CIO Magazine, Ray Kurzweil writes about the dangers introduced by new technologies. More specifically, he gives his views about genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics (collectively known as GNR). In his conclusion, he says that "we need to understand that these technologies are advancing on hundreds of fronts, rendering relinquishment completely ineffectual as a strategy. As uncomfortable as it may be, we have no choice but to prepare the defenses." As a matter of coincidence, Fortune interviewed Bill Joy a day after he left Sun Microsystems. And of course, he talked about the article he wrote for Wired in April 2000, "Why the future doesn't need us," in which he said that rapid advances in GNR could endanger our lives. This summary contains essential quotes from both articles, but read them in their entirety if you have some time.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coke's new "smart" billboard in London
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DATE: 10/02/2003 10:20:10 AM
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Coca-Cola launched what is said to be the world's largest and "smartest" billboard ever this week: 99 feet wide, full of neon, responds to weather changes and interacts with people observing it from the ground. Can you say overkill?
"This is an intelligent sign, with state-of-the-art computer technology, built-in cameras and an on-board heat sensitive weather station," the Coca-Cola Co. said in a statement. The sign can respond to weather and movement. "When it's raining, big drops will appear on the screen and when it's breezy, the Coke sign can ripple as if it's being blown by the wind," a spokeswoman for the company said. It will also be able to recognize if people are waving at it from the ground below and, eventually, will be able to respond to text messages from mobile phones, she said.
Link (thanks, Halvard !)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech confab Poptech: two weeks away
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DATE: 10/02/2003 10:38:58 AM
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I'll be participating in Poptech in a couple of weeks -- and there are plenty of reasons why you might want to, as well. Among them: Aubrey de Gray is going to talk about the possibility of people living to be 1000 years old. Another guy who creates biological art will talk about injecting tiny sculptures into itty-bitty lifeforms. Then, there's Graham Hawkes, who makes really, really, really deep-sea submersibles. Did I mention "space architect" Constance Adams? The event "explores the impact of technology on our lives, our planet and our future," and takes place October 16-19 in Camden, Maine. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Student group rallies against RIAA, MSFT
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DATE: 10/02/2003 11:18:03 AM
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A group of students at Swarthmore College have formed a "Coalition for the Digital Commons" to combat threats to open culture and information exchange.
This translates into resisting the efforts of the RIAA to sue those who share music files, opposing the DMCA and similar expansion of intellectual property law, spreading the use of Linux and other freeware programs and fighting the plan of Microsoft and the “Trusted Computing Platform Alliance” to put monitoring chips in personal computers.
Linux, a free alternative to the Microsoft Windows operating system, lies at the heart of SCDC’s philosophy. The group’s short-term goals include getting more students to switch to Linux and get some Linux-based computers in public areas, to “show everyone how functional Linux is — that it’s not some impractical pipedream,” Pavlovsky said. A major factor in SCDC’s championing of Linux is the advent of the Microsoft’s new “Trusted Computing” technology, also known as the Palladium chip. This technology, already present in some new IBM ThinkPads and set to be released in the upcoming version of Windows, would require Microsoft to verify if a user has permission to open a file on his or her computer.
Link (via pho, thanks, JP!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF's Trusted Computing white-paper
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DATE: 10/02/2003 12:30:21 PM
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My colleague Seth Schoen has finished his long-awaited, brilliant white-paper on Trusted Computing. Seth has been briefed as an outside technical analyst by all the companies working of Trusted Computing architecture, and has had his paper vetted by some of the leading security experts in the field. This is the most exhaustive, well-reasoned, balanced analysis of Trusted Computing you can read today. Don't miss it.
Remote attestation is the most significant and the most revolutionary of the four major feature groups described by Microsoft. Broadly, it aims to allow "unauthorized" changes to software to be detected. If an attacker has replaced one of your applications, or a part of your operating system with a maliciously altered version, you should be able to tell. Because the attestation is "remote", others with whom you interact should be able to tell, too. Thus, they can avoid sending sensitive data to a compromised system. If your computer should be broken into, other computers can refrain from sending private information to it, at least until it has been fixed.
While remote attestation is obviously useful, the current TCG approach to attestation is flawed. TCG attestation conspicuously fails to distinguish between applications that protect computer owners against attack and applications that protect a computer against its owner. In effect, the computer's owner is sometimes treated as just another attacker or adversary who must be prevented from breaking in and altering the computer's software.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogger Boobie-Thon for breast cancer
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DATE: 10/02/2003 04:05:38 PM
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An anonymour reader sez, "October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation one blogger has started the Blogger Boobie-Thon. Throughout October people can submit pictures of their boobs (yes, manly chests are welcome as well), with the more risque photographs being placed on the 'pay per boobie' page that can only be accessed with a donation of $50 or more. Collaborative porn for charity, anyone?"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nokia Commodore 64 emulator
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DATE: 10/02/2003 04:52:41 PM
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You can emulate a Commodore 64 on a Nokia Series 60 cellphone.
Why on God's green earth would one possibly want a Commodore 64 home computer running on one's cellphone? Aside from the thrill of seeing your old C64 humming away in the palm of your hand and the eyebrow-raising you're sure to see in friends and family, there are the games... oodles of them, available for playing pleasure from C64 UNLIMITED -- and you don't have to spend a quarter.
Sure they're one-off emulations of arcade games running on a one-off emulation of a home computer, but they're suprisingly well-written and very much resemble the real thing--for some definition of "the real thing" amongst all these emulators upon emulators upon emulators. There's Galaxian and Gorf, arcade favourites of the early 80s, Choplifter from my Apple ][, and hundreds more.
Link
(via Raelity Bytes)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free sign-language course
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DATE: 10/03/2003 07:00:44 AM
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The LifePrint ASL 101 course is a free online introductory course in American Sign Language. Looks pretty thorough.
Link
(Thanks, John E)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lisa Rein video online
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DATE: 10/03/2003 07:05:38 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted a video of her performing her song, Slipping Away.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ICANN gives Verislime until Oct 4 to kill SiteFinder -- or else
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DATE: 10/03/2003 07:10:00 AM
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ICANN has finally grown a spine. The President and CEO of ICANN has written an open letter to the General Manager of Verisign's Naming and Directory serivce in which he issues an ultimatum: get rid of the evilly asinine SiteFinder service (which breaks the Internet by redirecting all misspelled domain-requests to an ad-ware site) by Oct 4, or ICANN will "seek promptly to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations." Apparently, this is ICANN-speak for "terminate with extreme prejudice."
[...O]ur review of the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign leads us to the conclusion that VeriSign’s unilateral and unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains are not consistent with material provisions of both agreements. These inconsistencies include violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access provisions, failure to comply with the obligation to act as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply with the Registry Registrar Protocol, failure to comply with domain registration provisions, and provision of an unauthorized Registry Service. These inconsistencies with VeriSign's obligations under the .com and .net registry agreements are additional reasons why the changes in question must be suspended pending further evaluation and discussion between ICANN and VeriSign.
Link
(Thanks, Hal!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Latest code-creation from Freenet's Ian Clarke
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DATE: 10/03/2003 08:35:35 AM
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Freenet creator Ian Clarke does interesting things with code on the weekends while the rest of us sleep/eat/watch the game. His latest is a large-scale collaborative document editing app. Ian explains:
3D17 is a website which allows collaborative
editing of documents. Consider the scenario - you blog about someone with some wrong-headed
ideas, and you want to write a response, but you would also like to
enlist the help of your readers. This is where 3D17 comes in, you go to
3d17.org, create a document, like this for instance,
and direct your readers to its URL. They can then suggest amendments to it, which other readers can then
vote on, and whichever wins will be applied to the document. Hey, presto!
Large scale collaborative document editing!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: For sale on eBay: one air guitar
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DATE: 10/03/2003 08:45:00 AM
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One air guitar, "non-electric model." Link (Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: time kill zen
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DATE: 10/03/2003 08:50:17 AM
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weezer sumo
hangman
catch a fly
beat the quilters
internet tennis
bubble trouble
monkey moon lander
diner
office space
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: C++ speaks hacker
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DATE: 10/03/2003 09:13:05 AM
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If you define your variables right, you can get C++ to speak AOL chat-room:
If you define your variables right, you can get C++ to speak AOL chat-room:
Like main WTF
INEEDAVARCALLED y KTHX
HUHU
LOOPORSOMETHING( TEACHERSAIDSTARTWITH(y, 1) KTHX
y ENDSAT 10 KTHX
y HASTOGOUP, PUTONSCREEN y )
PUTONSCREEN HATS KTHX
STFU(y ISBIGGERTHAN 10) OMG UID10T
YOUAREFIRED
KTHXBYE
Link
(via NTK)
Link
(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vintage Hallowe'en costumes
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DATE: 10/03/2003 10:54:17 AM
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This week on Retrocrush: a stunning gallery of vintage Hallowe'en costumes.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ad-Sense Terms of Service gag critics
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DATE: 10/03/2003 11:15:27 AM
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Jason Kottke's got a good post on Google's new AdSense terms-of-service, which not only allow them to terminate you without notice, cause or recourse (withholding any sums owed to you at the time), but also bind you to a number of restrictive confidentiality terms, oncluding one that prohibits you from criticising the service. As Jason points out, this is definitely on the wrong side of the "Don't Be Evil" line.
I really like Google, both the service and the company (hell, I also really like the Googloids whom I'm personally acquainted by). At least once a week, I put on my Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" boxer shorts and get a little grin, and I wore a Google t-shirt to my signing last night.
But that doesn't mean that they should get a free ride. Google wants to be a company that makes money wihtout being evil, and I support that goal! Being not-evil is good, and so's making some dough. But part of being not-evil is that you have to incur liability over and above that which your counsel recommends as the safest path -- just as a shop-owner can't reasonably ask all her customers to submit to a strip-search to contain shoplifting liability, Google shouldn't ask all its users to submit to an unreasonable restriction on their speech in order to contain the spread of negative information about its service.
Google has every right to place whatever limits they wish on people who use their "service", but terminating said service without recourse when money is potentially owed by Google *and then* not allowing any site using Google AdSense (which may eventually include media sites like Salon, NY Times, MetaFilter, Slashdot, and even kottke.org) to comment on the Terms and Conditions that brought about the termination is just plain bad (evil?) and should give serious pause to anyone considering using any Google service.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: In the Neimans' Xmas catalog: His and Hers robots, $400K
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DATE: 10/03/2003 02:11:49 PM
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In this year's holiday catalog from upscale retailer Neiman Marcus: his and hers robots, six feet tall, engineered at International Robotics. The pair will set you back a cool $400 grand, though. Heck, for that sum -- *I'll* carry your groceries and respond empathetically! Snip from catalog:
Someone at the door? Click your remote and send His Robot to check it out. His Robot's voice circuitry can deliver your greeting, and His on-board video camera gives you a view of the visitor, who can hop onto His platform and be delivered to you in the den. Need some help getting the groceries into the house? Her Robot is happy to help. Need to leave a message for the spouse or kids? Tell it to Her Robot, and she'll spread the word. In fact, His Robot is designed to respond empathetically to us humans and features programmable technology. Our exclusive package includes much more, like preprogrammed messages and sequences of movements, and training for the humans.
Link (Thanks, siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Brief fiction gems on Warren Ellis' blog
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DATE: 10/04/2003 09:40:53 AM
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Author and blogger Warren Ellis has been posting some delectable, bite-sized morsels of prose on diepunyhumans recently. Snip:
She used to have eyes I could lose myself in, and then she had them replaced with laser pointers. Little red dots jumping up and down on the bedroom wall as I took her from behind. I could live with that until she had the animal voice import. The cheetah purring was okay, but the dingo noises just killed the mood. The combination of the red eyes and the gorilla sounds when she jerked off was horrible. A few weeks later, things were moving down there that shouldn't have. Don't be scared, she said, as stuff pumped like organ stops under her skin. Something extended itself and waved at me.
I threw up between her legs and she didn't talk to me for a week. Which I suppose you can't really blame her for, but still.
I knew it was over when she cut her legs off.
Link, and here's another.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: AmIGuyBourdinOrNot.com
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DATE: 10/04/2003 01:21:31 PM
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Madonna's recent video "Hollywood" is under legal fire as an alleged knock-off of images created by photographer Guy Bourdin some two decades ago. Compare for yourself, on this website that juxtaposes stills from the video with the Bourdin shots they're said to have been copied from.
But the guybourdin.org fan-site also recently announced THE BOURDIN COPY & PASTE AWARDS:
"send us your photos ŕ la maničre de Guy Bourdin the best will be shown in this web and win a copy of the book "Guy Bourdin" --amateurs & professionals qualify."
Link, and see more of Bourdin's work archived here. (via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More OS X Hacks
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DATE: 10/05/2003 03:23:11 PM
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Rael Dornfest is doing a new, Panther-ready edition of Mac OS X Hacks and he's looking for your power-user tips:
And so I turn to you, gentle readers, for your interest in contributing to the next book. Got a hack, tip, tweak, loophole, script (AppleScript, Real Basic, Python, Perl, Ruby, shell, ...), haxie, favourite bit of software, unconventional use you'd be interested in sharing and writing up (code and/or prose) for the book? Please do leave a writeback or drop me a line. While we'll certainly be covering more of Panther than you can shake a stick at, there's no reason to be OS version-specific.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hallucinogenic "tablets" hit Baghdad?
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DATE: 10/06/2003 08:37:50 AM
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Boing Boing pal Syd Garon points us to this odd article from the BBC, claiming that "a boom in supply of hallucinogenic tablets" in Baghdad is causing all sorts of chaos. To me, the article seems riddled with total disinformation. According to the leader of the Iraq police's anti-drug unit, 10-15 types of tablets were first available for just a few US cents per strip. The article quoes a user who says: ""One type of tablet is called Lebanon - when I take it I see Lebanon. I've never been there, but it's in the tablet." Link (Thanks, Syd!)
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TITLE: Tube-map with "walklines"
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DATE: 10/06/2003 09:13:46 AM
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The familiar London tube-map is hailed as an example of brilliant information design -- indeed, it is -- because it manages to show the logical relations between the stations clearly and consisely. However, the physical relationships between the stations are not priorities for the map's designers, which means that you can find yourself riding the tube for five stops on two different lines to go between two points that are physically only separated by a few hundred yards, though you'd never know it by looking at the map. Rodcorp has taken a standard London tube-map and added "walklines" to it, showing stations that are separated by 500 meters or less.
Link
(Thanks, Rodcorp)
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TITLE: Schwarzenegger's Enron connection
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DATE: 10/06/2003 11:37:33 AM
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Greg Palast reports that Schwarzenegger is working with Ken Lay to ensure that Enron's ill-gotten gains are not returned to California's treasury.
Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.
It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger...
The pay-off? Once Arnold is Governor, he blesses the sweetheart settlements with the power companies. When that happens, Bustamante's court cases are probably lost. There aren't many judges who will let a case go to trial to protect a state if that a governor has already allowed the matter to be "settled" by a regulatory agency.
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(Thanks, Lisa!)
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TITLE: WiFi radiation too dangerous for schools?
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DATE: 10/06/2003 02:24:04 PM
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An Illinois school-district that deployed WiFi has been sued by a parents' group that asserts that WiFi radiation is dangerous to kids.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First-ever virtual hurricane
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DATE: 10/06/2003 06:04:52 PM
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The most powerful computer in the world has burst into hurricane:
Virtual hurricanes have appeared in computer models of the Earth's climate for the first time. The swirling storms are visible in the first results from the Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan - the world's fastest supercomputer...
Whereas most climate models divide the Earth into blocks measuring hundreds of kilometres across, the powerful Earth Simulator can run models with cells as small as 10 kilometres. This means that detailed features of the weather - such as tropical storms - can be included.
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(via Robot Wisdom)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool laptop holder: oysterdock
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DATE: 10/07/2003 08:47:07 AM
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From Kevin Kelly's "Cool tools" e-zine:
If you use a laptop, the Oysterdock is fabulous. Very very simple, but just what you've always wanted for your home workstation. It's a really simple idea, but they're good looking and solve an irritating problem: putting a laptop screen where its easy to see. You supply your own peripherals (all you want -- the dock organizes and hides all the cords). There are just a few laptops that won't work with it (i think they list them on the site), basically the ones that don't open to (nearly) 180 degrees.
--Martha Baer
They sell for $150 here, or at Amazon.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Time to Recall E-Vote Machines?
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DATE: 10/07/2003 08:48:48 AM
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In today's edition of Wired News:
Recent reports claim the software in Diebold electronic voting machines is insecure. But the policies and procedures for using the system in California's recall election raise concerns that the software isn't the only problem.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: TypePad launches
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DATE: 10/07/2003 08:50:12 AM
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TypePad, the new blogging services from the creators of Movable Type, has launched. Subscription fees range from $4.95 to $14.95 a month.
Q. Is TypePad just hosted Movable Type?
A.TypePad was built upon the reliable,tested Movable Type platform, but it includes new functionality that is not in Movable Type. Most importantly, we rebuilt the entire interface from scratch to be simpler, faster, cleaner and more powerful. Then we added in huge new features like photo albums and statistics tracking right in the application itself, and integrated it with built-in hosting with plenty of space for your weblog entries, photos, and the flexible archives Movable Type users have grown accustomed to.
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TITLE: Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: controversy over e-voting technology
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DATE: 10/07/2003 08:58:02 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day", I'll speak with host Alex Chadwick about advances in computer-based voting technology, and controversy around the security -- or lack thereof -- provided by leading e-voting services. Many California voters will be using the systems for the first time during today's recall election. Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: If you're a California resident, get off your ass and vote
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DATE: 10/07/2003 09:08:48 AM
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Here's a list of polling locations (site's been off and on all day with traffic overload). Link
Update: Marc Brown points us to moveon.org, which also list polling sites, and Cyrus F. points us to another list of locations, here.
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TITLE: UK clinic calls texting a "behavioral addiction"
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DATE: 10/07/2003 09:45:27 AM
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One of the UK's most esteemed psychiatric clinics says that some behavioral relationships with technology are addictions -- and that more and more of us are developing those geek dependencies. Case in point: textaholics, who spend way too much time punching out short messages by cellphone.
"There has been a huge rise in behavioral addictions," including
excessive texting, said a spokeswoman for the Priory Clinic which
treats 6,000 patients a year for a range of addictions including
gambling, eating disorders and drugs.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired mag illustration: unmanned robotic aircraft
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DATE: 10/07/2003 09:53:06 AM
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BoingBoing pal Kenn Brown sends us this link to an illustration he produced in collaboration with fellow Vancouver-based artist Jeremy Hoey. It's a two-page spread on state-of-the-art unmanned, autonomous vehicles featured in this month's edition of Wired Magazine (pages 45 and 46). Buy the mag, it looks way better in glorious, hi-res, technicolor paper. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tribe.net: BoingBoing tribe!
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DATE: 10/07/2003 10:08:19 AM
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I've been fooling around with social networking service Tribe.net lately, and enjoying it thoroughly. The UI rules, the site performs pleasantly. The service seems particularly well-suited for folks who want to connect for purposes other than dating (not that there's anything wrong with dating). Like-minded users connect in groups called "tribes," formed around everything from photography to polyamory. One tribe.net user named Pauly recently created a "BoingBoing" tribe, to "further the banter and chitchat that goes along with boingboing". Pesco and I are both members, come check it out. Link to BoingBoing tribe, and recent Wired News story about Tribe.net: "Friendster meets Craigslist?"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Weapons of Mass Projection in San Francisco October 8
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DATE: 10/07/2003 10:56:20 AM
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Tomorrow (Wednesday), cyberdelic video performance pioneers Dimension7 will conduct the second annual Video RIOT! in San Francisco:
"This year, Video RIOT! will again showcase San Francisco's homegrown Vj community in a format that is a cross between an edgy electronic tailgate party and a real-time drive-in multiplex. Artists will join forces to create a massive outdoor wall of light just off the Embarcadero. All video projection and light based artists are encouraged to come, and can show if they have their own projector and gear."
Video RIOT! 2 will take place outdoors near the Dimension 7 studios (150 Folsom St. at Spear) from 8pm-11pm.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: French, Funkadelic 404 page
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DATE: 10/07/2003 11:35:26 AM
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Leave it to the French Ministry of Culture to create this truly funkalicious pluriligual psychedelic 404 error page. Taste the pixels, baby. (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC releases number-portability guidelines
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DATE: 10/07/2003 03:22:44 PM
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In preparation for the blessed day at the end of November when cellular number portability arrives, the FCC has issued guidelines for carriers. They're non-binding, though.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said carriers should let defecting customers keep their old number even if their account has an unpaid balance. The FCC also found "no technical reason" why switching subscribers should have to wait longer than two-and-a-half hours before their old number is "ported" to their new dialing plan.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sliding-scale indie disc with proceeds to bail out RIAA victims
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DATE: 10/07/2003 03:25:39 PM
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Scott sez, "Today I released my new DIY record, 'Where I've Been,' with a twist: the sliding-scale minimum price is $5, with all amounts over $5 donated to the P2P Defense Fund at downhillbattle.org to help out people who've been hit with RIAA lawsuits. The enhanced CD also contains MP3 versions of the whole record, licensed under a Creative Commons license."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reading/signing on Thursday in Berkeley
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DATE: 10/07/2003 07:25:57 PM
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A reminder: I'll be reading and signing books on Thursday night at Berkeley's The Other Change of Hobbit (2020 Shattuck Ave, 1-510-848-0413) from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBCi director's stunning speech on file-sharing and TV
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DATE: 10/08/2003 07:05:00 AM
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Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, gave a speech on Monday at the Royal Television Society about the nature of the BBC's ambitious and grand Internet plans. It's a stunner of a talk, filled with extreme sensibleness:
Downloading and sharing this video is the final piece of the jigsaw and will create a killer combination that I believe could undermine the existing models of pay-TV.
The killer combination is broadband together with digital TV and PVRs, plus the ability to share this video in the same peer-to-peer model with which music files are exchanged on the net...
We are exploring legitimate peer-to-peer models to get our users to share our content, on our behalf, amongst themselves, transparently.
And as an industry, we should be more active in creating legitimate content download products, whether that's as a pay-model, or rights-cleared for free. We need to help consumers leap-frog the illegal downloading issues that have wrecked havoc on the music industry. Here's what we believe is the shape of things to come, a way for people to search for whatever they are interested in -- perhaps in the case of a natural history for a school project -- searching from Buffalos to Bears -- and then download it for their use.
Link
(via Werblog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boombox modded into a WiFi AP
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DATE: 10/08/2003 07:12:31 AM
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The Bass Station is an old-school boom-box with a WiFi access-point built in, along with:
a 120GB hard drive, and an MP3 decoder, and that is controlled using a web browser. Besides being able to play MP3s, it can also stream audio to other devices in its local area network, double as a file-server for file-sharing.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apocamon 3 is out, and $0.25
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DATE: 10/08/2003 07:25:56 AM
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Patrick "e-sheep" Farley has published the third installment of his brilliant, scathing Apocamon strip, in which he interprets Revelations through Pokemon characters.
He's opted to charge $0.25 for 30 days' access to the strip, using the BitPass system that Scott McCloud was touting a little while ago. Of course, BitPass requires that you buy a $3.00 prepaid "card" in order to give Patrick his $0.25, and there's precious little else I want to buy with my remaining $2.75, so as far as I'm concerned, I've just spent $3 on this Apocamon installment, and as far as I'm concerned, it was worth it -- I'd pay that much for a comic book this good any day.
On the other hand, I'd own the comic book and be able to read it whenever I want to. Patrick's charging $0.25 or $3.00 (depending on how you squint at it) for 30 days' worth of access to his funnybook. Now, if I could only figure out a way to give Patrick the remaining $2.75 for permanent access (preferably without giving any money to BitPass).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tiny remotely chargeable battery for implanted medical apparati
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DATE: 10/08/2003 07:30:08 AM
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A new rechargable miniature (2.9 mm X 13 mm) battery intended for implanted medical appliances is shipping. The battery lasts 10 years, and is recharged when the body part it resides in is placed alongside an electrified pillow, which remotely juices up the cell.
"In the treatment of urinary incontinence, which is an area Quallion is focused on, the stimulation has to be delivered all day long so there's no good place to put an external coil," Loeb said.
The Quallion team decided to focus on urinary incontinence partly because the problem requires constant stimulation, but also because millions of people suffer from it.
"There are more adult's diapers sold in the world than children's ones," Fong said
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet voice technology is not subject to telco rules in Minnesota
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DATE: 10/08/2003 07:33:39 AM
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A Federal court has ordered the Minnesota telco regulator to stop treating Voice Over IP providers as though they were phone companies. This has been an area of great concern, since it made it appear that the Internet was going to come under the thumb of the thoroughly captured telco regulators, who'd trash our last great hope for bankrupting the telcos while insisting on the local equivalent of horseshoes for steam-engines.
The Minnesota PUC's August decision required Vonage to file with the commission as a telephone company, to receive official certification from the PUC in order to operate in the state and to begin making payments to support 911 service administration.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hard drive capacity explained -- will it stop the court case?
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DATE: 10/08/2003 07:38:39 AM
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In the wake of a lawsuit over "deceptive" hard-drive marketing in which it is alleged that hard-drive vendors mis-label the capacity of their products to make them seem larger than they really are, the tech site Wiebetech has published an easy-to-follow paper explaining the discrepancy. I wonder if it will be introduced as evidence in the hearing?
We’ve finally determined the math used by the operating system, which has converted
our drive from a capacity of 123.5GB to a capacity of 115.04GB. The mystery is solved.
This handy formula may be used by anyone for converting decimal GigaBytes to binary
GigaBytes (with decimal representation). The mathematical conversion works the other
way around as well, as shown below:
115.GB x 1,073,741,824 = 123,522,415,614 decimal bytes
(assuming all digits of precision are used in the 115GB). (This allows conversion
from operating system GigaBytes to Hard Drive Manufacturer GigaBytes).
76k PDF Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Giant Grocery "loyalty card" swapper
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DATE: 10/08/2003 08:27:32 AM
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Rob's Giant BonusCard Swap Meet is a site where you enter in your Giant grocery-chain "loyalty card" number and the site responds by serving you a printable barcode for someone else's loyalty card number. Paste the barcode over your own and help poison the Giant database.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online propaganda short from Korea: "Fuck'n USA"
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DATE: 10/08/2003 11:07:04 AM
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From RobPongi's blog, which features lots of streaming media oddities from Japan and other Asian countries:
"This is a very shocking anti-American propoganda video made by North Koreans and previously broadcast on South Korean and Japanese Television." Don't miss the part right after George W. Bush's head morphs into a bloodsucking vampire monkey, where they call America an "audacious" country that "stole the Olympic gold Medal from us."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spammer exploits PHP app to 0wn computer
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DATE: 10/08/2003 05:55:55 PM
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Eli the Bearded sez, "Long, detailed writeup of webserver
getting 0wned by a sophisticated spammer.
Through a PHP product security hole a
webserver was converted to a full time
spam machine following orders from a
remote server. The author of this paper
has found that this is not an isolated
event and apparently has been going on
for months.
Got a server? Keep it patched, including
any silly little add-ons like the photo
gallery bit that got subverted here."
60k PDF Link
(Thanks, Eli!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons' LazyWeb wishes
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DATE: 10/08/2003 05:58:46 PM
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Creative Commons has launched a series of technology challenges -- LazyWeb ideas for tools that could really help the effort along.
* License metadata validation web application.
* License claim embedding specifications for more file types.
* APIs for Creative Commons license metadata.
* GUI for embedding license claims in files and generating claim verification RDF.
* Build Creative Commons licensing into more content creation applications.
* Browser toolbar or plugin that extracts and displays license metadata embedded in a page.
* Media player and file sharing applications that read, verify, and display license claims embedded in files.
* Add license search to a major commercial search engine.
* Write a custom Creative Commons license-aware search engine.
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(via Lessig Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P2P can save the net
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DATE: 10/08/2003 06:00:26 PM
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Simson Garfinkel has written a great piece for Technology Review, describing the ways in which P2P technology could give us a more secure, stable, efficient Internet:
* One of the weakest points of the Internet right now is the domain name system, which is run by a loose confederation of name servers. Running DNS on top of a peer-to-peer system instead could dramatically improve its reliability.
* Today, if your business runs a small Web server and the site suddenly gets very popular, the server can crash from all of the extra traffic. But if all of the computers on the Internet were part of a global peer-to-peer Web cache, then small companies and individuals could publish their material to the multitudes. A good system would even prevent malicious modification of the Web page contents when they were served off other machines.
* In the event of a terrorist attack on the Internet’s infrastructure, a peer-to-peer system would be far more likely to recover than a system that depended on top-down control.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DIY Hallowe'en recipes
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DATE: 10/09/2003 06:28:19 AM
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Here's a great assemblage of Hallowe'en recipes from last year, including a DIY Mexican sugar-skull formulation.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Polish hackers offering "untraceable" hosting on hacked boxen
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DATE: 10/09/2003 06:32:49 AM
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Wired Magazine reports on a new kind of ISP: an "invisible" hosting service, based in the former Soviet Union, which uses a network of compromised machines and some redirection-fu to make it very hard to determine where a web-server actually lives. The service is reportedly marketed to spammers as an untraceable base-of-operations. I'm pretty skeptical about the untraceability of these systems -- I suspect that rather, they are resistant to some tools, not resistant to others, and not hard to write new tools to uncover. Still, it's juicy, lurid reading.
Another site hosted by the Polish group offers free credit consultations. Traceroutes to the site, removeform.com, also provided ever-changing results, ranging from a computer connected to a DSL line in Israel to another provided by EarthLink. However, the title of the site's home page consistently read "Yahoo Web Hosting," suggesting it was actually located on a server run by the Internet giant.
According to Tubul, his group controls 450,000 "Trojaned" systems, most of them home computers running Windows with high-speed connections. The hacked systems contain special software developed by the Polish group that routes traffic between Internet users and customers' websites through thousands of the hijacked computers. The numerous intermediary systems confound tools such as traceroute, effectively laundering the true location of the website. To utilize the service, customers simply configure their sites to use any of several domain-name system servers controlled by the Polish group, Tubul said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roll your own gossip magazine cover
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DATE: 10/09/2003 06:39:03 AM
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UK tea-vendor Quickbrew has put up a cute Flash thinggum wherein you pick from among lurid tabloid headlines and photos, enter a few personal details, and out pops a very plausible gossip-magazine cover starring you and your pals.
188K Flash Link
(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Online-game academic group-blog
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DATE: 10/09/2003 06:43:11 AM
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Ted Castranova (the academic whose game-world works have revealed such fascinating factoids as the GDP of Everquest ranking it among the world's top economies) has kicked off a group blog with a bunch of his fellow acadmic game-theorizers and observers, and it's fine stuff -- a kind of Crooked Timber for online gaming.
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(via Joho the Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lyrics to 2,000 "Island" songs
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DATE: 10/09/2003 06:45:24 AM
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Island Song Lyrics is a collection of words (and the occasional accompanying music) to over 2,000 Hawai'ian and south-seas songs:
1602 Bora Bora Breeze
1603 Island In The Blue
1604 Anywhere You Are
1605 Dark And Velvet Sky
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(Thanks, Larry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SF writers on Schwarzenegger
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DATE: 10/09/2003 06:47:43 AM
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Eileen Gunn (editor of the brilliant online sf magazine Infinite Matrix) has solicited comments from a number of science fiction writers on the Schwarzenegger gubernatorial victory in California:
William Gibson: I forget whether, in the Virtual Light books, Arnold is president of the US or merely Governor of SoCal, but, hey, it looks like I've gone and been prescient again. I hate it when that happens.
Harlan Ellison: To all the other 49 states — with the exception of Minnesota, whose election of a mountebank transcends even ours — the coronation of Ahnuld seems phantasmagoric. But not to us. We've done it at least twice before: George Murphy to the Senate, and Reagan to the White House. So, been there, seen that, done that. I thought, early on, that it was a great slate with Gary Coleman and Schwarzenegger both running: remember in MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME, the behemoth called "Master Blaster" — this seven-foot-tall brain-damaged, muscle-bound giant, with the midget strapped to his shoulders? Wow, what a terrific Governor we'd have if we just cranked Gary Coleman down onto Ahnuld's shoulders!! As long as nobody blew a high-pitched dog whistle, we'd be in sweet milk an' honey. So what do I actually think about all this foofaraw? To quote Thomas Jefferson, who was rewording Joseph de Maistre: "People get pretty much the kind of government they deserve."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: eMusic turns into a steaming pile
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DATE: 10/09/2003 07:19:15 AM
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eMusic, having been acquired by Dimensional Associates LLC, has eliminated its all-you-can-download plan (the only thing that made the service worth the $10 a month), in favor of a 40-download-a-month plan, with a "premium" $15 plan that gets you 60 tracks a month. The whole point of digital music is the risk-free grazing -- downloading things on the chance that you'll like them, downloading songs for an occassion (such as Christmas songs, or the time I made my Dad a three-CD set of different versions of "Stormy Weather"), and other forms of no-risk, all-you-can-eat entertainment. Well, eMusic was fun while it lasted. Bye.
Q: Why is EMusic changing its service?
A: The music industry continues to suffer under intense financial, legal and technological pressure. As a provider of music downloads, EMusic is subject to a complex system of intellectual property rights and technological challenges that impose high costs and often uncertain risks on the company.
In order to respond to these ongoing challenges and maintain a compelling service for our valued customers, EMusic will be making a number of significant changes in the coming weeks and months. As part of these changes, we will be discontinuing the current unlimited service plan and replacing it with a new service offering, as described above.
Translation: Our industry is thrashing in the tar. We had a pretty decent service here that didn't involve treating our customers like crooks, but the studio execs hated how stupid that made their DRM-and-lawsuit strategy look, so they've made us break it. Our new plan, described above, doesn't taste so bad if you put a lot of ketchup on it and hold your nose. Won't some nice lawmaker please stop us before we hurt ourselves?
Link to new Terms of Service, Link to Cancel eMusic Account Form
(via MeFi)
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TITLE: Presidential web roundup at E-Democracy
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DATE: 10/09/2003 08:32:39 AM
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The volunteer, nonprofit E-Democracy project has put together a good site with links to resources around the 2004 Presidential campaign.
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(Thanks, Steven!)
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TITLE: 22 pregnant cows killed by a single lightning bolt
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DATE: 10/09/2003 09:20:01 AM
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A lightning strike in Florida has killed 20 pregnant cows and fatally injured two more.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtual Book Tour is underway
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DATE: 10/09/2003 09:21:56 AM
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This year's "Virtual Book Tour" has kicked off:
In a nutshell, a Virtual Book Tour consists of an author "stopping" at a given number of websites in a given about of time, either to be interviewed, to take over the site for a day, to hang out with the site owner if they're in the same physical location etc. It's just like a traditional book tour except the cities are websites. The author never needs to live their living room, which makes it cheaper and easier than booking flights, hotel rooms, rental cars and all that jazz.
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TITLE: Share iTunes Smart Playlist tips
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DATE: 10/09/2003 10:39:28 AM
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Spencer sez, "In light of the recent post about Smart Playlists in iTunes, I thought this was timely:
'Announcing the launch of SmartPlaylists.com! This new website is a resource for creating, sharing, and chatting about iTunes' Smart Playlists. Why? Because they're cool and there are many ingenious ways to use them to keep your music fresh.'"
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(Thanks, Spencer!)
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TITLE: Pynchon to do The Simpsons
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DATE: 10/09/2003 01:31:23 PM
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Thomas Pynchon is slated to do a guest voice on The Simpsons:
We also have a show where The Simpsons go to London and it includes guest voices from Ian McKellen, J.K. Rowling, Jane Leeves and Prime Minister Tony Blair, playing himself. We have a show coming up where Marge writes a novel and gets endorsements from writers playing themselves, including Tom Clancy, Thomas Pynchon-
...He's wearing a paper bag over his head, but it is his voice.
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(Thanks, Tregoweth!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RC robots at Tokyo Game Show
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DATE: 10/09/2003 01:33:17 PM
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Justin Hall has turned in agreat report on phone-controlled RC robots at the Tokyo Game Show for The Feature.
Tiny tanks controlled with mobile phones seem positively playful compared with Fujitsu Labs' Maron-1, a home security robot also run by mobile devices. A research prototype was announced last year; according to information on the web site, the Maron-1 robot comes with two cameras, taking pictures on command and sending them to a mobile phone. Also, the Maron-1 can be programmed to understand the house layout, traversing locations issued by mobile phone command, calling the police or a mobile device if there is a disturbance or intrusion. Best of all, Fujitsu announced that the Maron-1 has infrared ports built-in to control appliances, so perhaps a lonely Maron-1 can entertain itself by piloting Combat DigiQ tanks. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep indeed.
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(Thanks, Justin!)
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TITLE: Whiny crybaby lobe of brain located
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DATE: 10/09/2003 01:41:15 PM
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Stefan sez, "Scientists have located a part of the brain that becomes active when a person recieves a severe social snubbing . . . and believe that such slights are as unpleasant as actual physical pain."
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gotchi lamps
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DATE: 10/09/2003 11:10:06 PM
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Tramp Lamps sells lamps made out of petrified women's undergarments.
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(Thanks, Kelly)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Artfutura in Barcelona today
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DATE: 10/10/2003 04:13:42 AM
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I'm in Barcelona at the 14th annual edition of Artfutura, a yearly conference on technology, art, and culture. Apart from being a mindblowingly beautiful city, filled with architecture that makes you feel like you've just dropped acid, Barcelona is home to a thriving community of bloggers. This afternoon, I'll be moderating a live discussion with the Spanish blogging community, and special US guests Anil Dash and Meg Hourihan. Tune in here!
UPDATE: Madrid-based blogger Marta Peirano of La Petite Claudine is doing a live blog throughout the conference at elastico.net. Check it out!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Usability movment hijacks, improves Parliament's website
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DATE: 10/10/2003 08:27:50 AM
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The "Paramilitary Wing of the Usability Movement" (a group of geeks who scrape and reformat badly designed websites) has tackled its most ambitious project yet. The site scrapes Hansard, the badly designed website for the UK Parliamentary record, reformats all the information to be had therein, and presents it in inforgraphic Tuftean glory, as a series of easy-to-digest and permalinkable charts, stats and so forth.
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(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Metafilter Matt's Long Now project
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DATE: 10/10/2003 08:29:35 AM
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Matt Haughey, he of Metafilter and seven other kinds of fame, has launched a project in honor of his 31st birthday called Ten Years of My Life. It's a website wherein he plans to post one daily photo for the next ten years. Why?
A few weeks ago I realized how quickly everything has been changing since I've turned 30, and how much I miss doing daily photos. I came up with the idea of doing it over ten years for a couple reasons. Although it sounds like a lot of work, it's only about 3650 images if I posted every single day, and I've taken more than that many shots in just the last year alone. During the upcoming ten years, from the time I turn 31 until I turn 41, I expect I'll be witnessing a great deal of major changes and would love to have a way to remember them.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How do you get the sheet metal Bill of Rights home?
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DATE: 10/10/2003 08:31:29 AM
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Little did I suspect, when I slipped my pal Nelson a sheet-metal Bill of Rights, that it would be the source of a flash of horrible realization that we're in deep crap:
I'm not one to make displays like that so it was an accident it came with me to New York. But now where do I put it going home? In checked luggage, where security may find it while I'm not around and decide to punish me for being clever? Or in my hand luggage, where it may cause my bag to be searched and an awkward conversation? Maybe I should just leave it behind.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
Then I realized, I was stressing about what people would think about me having a copy of the Bill of Rights! It's a terrible thing we've done to ourselves.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nanoscale waterproofing
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DATE: 10/10/2003 08:35:32 AM
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"Nano-turf," a new nanoscale material composed of teensy spikes is planned for use as a super nonstick coating for submarines ("which would glide through the water with much less resistance") and raincoats ("rain would fall and simply run off any garment").
"The surface is repelling water. It is densely populated so it will let the water flow against air instead of a solid surface, which makes it very slippery.
"When we roll a drop of water on this surface, we make it 99%, or more, less sticky than the flat surface."
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(via Die Puny Humans)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mouse Shoppe: Disneyland schwag reseller
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DATE: 10/10/2003 08:48:39 AM
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Mouse Shoppe is a site apparently run by people who go to Disneyland, buy merchandise at full price, then resell it at a markup. Right now, they've got a bunch of the very tasty new Haunted Mansion stuff that was released last week, including the hoody I bought and wore to Club 33 last weekend -- eatcherheartout!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scannell needs money to keep fighting CAPPS II
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DATE: 10/10/2003 10:15:14 AM
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Bill Scannell (the cypherpunk who has devoted his energies to outing Delta, Jet Blue, Cendant and the CAPPS II/TIA unpatriotism emanating from the Feds) needs help if he is to continue doing his good work. He's broke, basically -- spending all your time blowing whistles puts a big dent in your earning power. So he's soliciting donations.
Running the anti-CAPPS II campaign costs a lot of time and money. The Boycott Delta and Don't Spy On US websites require a team of graphic artists and web designers. As you can imagine, the bandwidth usage is enormous.
The over 40 million dollars in publicity generated for the ongoing anti-CAPPS II awareness campaign came at a cost of hundreds of media interviews, astronomical telephone bills, and all of my time and energy.
Up to now, I have funded this project out of my own personal savings. America has been good to me and spending money to keep our country free seemed only fair. Unfortunately, I can't do this alone anymore, which is why I am turning to you for help.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NaNoWriMo is almost here
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DATE: 10/10/2003 11:39:39 AM
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National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) -- the annual challenge to write a book in 30 days -- is fast approaching.
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
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(Thanks, Randy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites: Back to Iraq with MSNBC, back to kevinsites.net blog
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DATE: 10/10/2003 12:44:37 PM
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Blogger and journalist Kevin Sites is back in Iraq, this time on assignment with MSNBC. He's also re-starting the kevinsites.net blog. Snip from his first post, this time around:
The blog is reopen for business. It has been seven months since this site went silent. Time for everyone to get back to work. To all of you who have made this place so interesting with your informed and intelligent discussions, I thank you. For all who have been so kind as to inquire about my welfare—I also thank you and apologize for not being able to respond. When CNN politely (I mean this sincerely) asked me to stop blogging I felt it was my obligation to do so immediately and completely. CNN was signing my checks at the time and sent me to Iraq. Although I felt the blog was a separate and independent journalistic enterprise, they did not. Period. We move on.
Now I am freelancing again, but currently on-assignment in Iraq with MSNBC. I had been a long time staff member with NBC News and feel comfortable back with my old friends. MSNBC has also agreed to allow me to continue with my PERSONAL and may I stress, NON-AFFILIATED weblog. However, there are a few understandable stipulations which I want to relate to you: 1) I’m here because NBC News has hired me to be here, therefore the observations and experiences in Iraq that I relate to you this blog would probably not happen without them. 2) They have the right of first refusal on anything that I write that relates to this assignment. That means I run it by them and if they want it they will publish it on MSNBC.COM. It will be republished here. 3) If it’s something they’re not interested in or not directly related to an assignment they’ve paid me to do—it can appear here first. I think that’s fair and bypasses any of the editorial oversight and ownership issues that we encountered in the first run of kevinsites.net.
That being said, I look forward to a renewed dialogue on the very serious as well as the inane. We hear so much about the “synergy” of media companies with the so-called vertical integration of different communication businesses, well here’s the chance for individual “synergy” to impact media coverage. I’d like to know what you see as the shortcomings of media coverage in Iraq and elsewhere. What aren’t you getting? What are you getting too much of? I welcome your well-conceived story ideas, relevant information and observations or valuable sources that may contribute to better journalism and a more informed public.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free webhosting for "life" in exchange for getting a logo tatt
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DATE: 10/10/2003 12:55:24 PM
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Stefan sez, "About ten years back, NPR's morning show ran an April Fools gag story about teens getting corporate logo tattoos on their earlobes in exchange for discounts. Now, a Pennsylvania company will give you free web-page hosting services for life if you get a tattoo of one of their mascots. By 'lifetime,' they mean of their company, of course."
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: URGENT: Tell the FCC to say no to the Broadcast Flag
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DATE: 10/10/2003 01:00:09 PM
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The FCC is ruling on the dread and dreadful Broadcast Flag, a technology mandate that would give Hollywood a veto over general-purpose PC and home electronics technology, in order to prevent the potential infringement of copyrighted movies on a potential national digital television broadcast network.
Breaking PCs and VCRs and PVRs and such today, before there's any evidence of any problem (indeed, Hollywood makes more money every single year, and just closed the books on its best year since 1959) -- it's stupid. Passing a technology mandate before anyone can point to a problem is about as stupid as eating your seatmate before the plane crashes.
Nevertheless, there's every indication that the FCC will make the Broadcast Flag happen -- unless we slashdot them with letters telling them not to. EFF has an action center item on this, a letter you can tweak and send in to the commissioners with one click of a mouse. A Broadcast Flag mandate today will make tomorrow's technology dependent on the sufferance of the movie studios -- the companies that Business Week called "The most change-resistant companies in America." If you don't want these companies speccing your PC in a couple years, send a letter now -- this is easily the most important thing you can do this year to safeguard your technology freedom. Tell your friends. Re-blog this. This is big, important stuff.
Hollywood is at it again, trying to control the design of new digital technologies. If the motion picture studios have their way, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will force all future televisions to include Hollywood-approved "content protection" technologies. Fair use, innovation and competition will suffer. What's more, the "broadcast flag" technology that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has proposed is so weak that it will do nothing to stem Internet redistribution of television programs. In fact, the only people hurt by this are legitimate consumers, innovators and researchers.
The FCC has promised a ruling before the end of October. We need you to tell the FCC that we don't need "broadcast flag" regulations that hurt competition, consumers and innovators.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gorgeous graphics for Target's Halloween campaign
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DATE: 10/10/2003 11:21:17 PM
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Target hired Charles Anderson to design its Halloween campaign, and it looks amazing. "Asked to create the look of the store's seasonal identity, the design company took inspiration from the campy aesthetic of vacu-form plastic masks that many adults remember from childhood." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hard-drives as Buddhist prayer-wheels
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DATE: 10/11/2003 06:03:43 AM
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Who needs Tibetan prayer-wheels when Buddhist theorists are out there reforming their theology to admit hard-drives as instruments of devotion?
Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache for your browser.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Matrix trilogy FX directors speak at Artfutura
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I'm in Barcelona at the tech/art/culture confab Artfutura, listening to the two effects masterminds behind the Matrix trilogy: John Gaeta (right-hand side of the photo below) and Greg Juby of effects house ESC (Greg's at left in this photo).
ESC is the company created by the Wachowski brothers and John Gaeta to produce the complex work of visual effects in the Matrix series. Gaeta may well be the single most influential person in the last decade of visual effects, and right now he's talking to the audience of Spanish digital artists and tech developers here about the creative process behind the films, and what to expect in the forthcoming Matrix: Revolutions:
* "What will be different in Revolutions? It's the final, ultimate manifestation of Larry and Andy Wachowski's anime dream: to make am movie as close to an anime as possible. Take the best and coolest aspects of anime -- large scale robotics, entanglements between man anad machine -- and tranform it into a feature, live action film. You'll also see lots more bullets."
* "Subconsciousness needs to be redefined with every generation. Matrix is a stylized sci-fi story, but the root of the idea that you can have imagery placed into your mind is a very possible scenario, and I think that's a universe that our generation was finally ready to start dealing with. I grew up on Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and many other filmmakers that triggered ideas inside my mind -- that's how evolution works. One generation speaking to another. Larry and Andy [Wachowski] are preoccupied with those ideas, too, but they're also pop culture junkies and they share an obsession we also have with darker sci-fi threads in films you see in films like Bladerunner. It's no accident that some of the scenes in the Matrix trilogy are reminiscent of Bladerunner, because we've been dying all our lives to do that kind of work. "
* "I want to make an electrochemical movie.
In the year 2099 I'll be 130 years old, but I think around 2063 I'm going to have my brain taken out and have it inserted into a clone who's about 21 years old. Maybe some bionic augmentation upgrades, too. In about 40 years, I'm thinking some sort of military-industrial-supercomplex-international-intelligensia supergroup will figure out how to export imagery to people's brains. If you can see it in your head while you're dreaming -- well, that image is created somehow. Someday, someone will figure out how to place that image into your brain. It'll be some combination of electricity and drugs, and they'll call it Rosebud.
A billion people will attend the first electrochemical movie premiere. Everyone in the audience will experience love again for the first time, and we'll become gazillionaires. I don't know how we'll make our electrochemical movie into a DVD, though. And distribution is definitely going to be a problem."
* "The most difficult thing about creating effects for the trilogy? Designing choreography that could never be actualized by human beings."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chinese restaurant menu gallery
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DATE: 10/11/2003 04:02:34 PM
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Steve sez, "Indigo Som is an artist who is assembling a collection of every chinese restaurant menu in the US, she's got an art exhibit in Marin going on right now of her photos of the menus/restaurants and her site nicely explains the intent of her 'exploration'"
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(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter
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DATE: 10/11/2003 04:40:03 PM
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Sir Mix-A-Lot's "(I Like) Big Butts)" "Baby's Got Back." In Latin.
magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)
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(Thanks, chris242!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Shag fonts from House Industries
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DATE: 10/11/2003 09:09:49 PM
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The world's best font shop, House Industries, has a new set of fonts designed by retro artist Shag. They're also selling a Shag sculpture and prints. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why were computers beige colored?
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DATE: 10/11/2003 11:38:38 PM
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Why were most personal computers colored beige? I seem to remember
reading that some researchers (at 3M?) used focus groups to determine
that beige was the most non-obtrusive color to use in an office setting, but I
can't find a reference. If you know, email me at mark@well.com.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anime credit-cards
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DATE: 10/12/2003 06:21:38 AM
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If you're lucky enough to live in Japan, you can get yourself an anime-themed credit-card.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shag does the Tiki Room
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DATE: 10/12/2003 06:24:02 AM
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Shag (a one-man tiki-revival!) has produced a series of limited-edition merchandise to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Disneyland's Enchanted Tiki Room.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gummy mummy
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DATE: 10/12/2003 06:26:51 AM
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My friend Jef has discovered and captured evidence of the pinnacle of the gummysmith's art: the Gummy Mummy.
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(Thanks, Jef!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired illo: Wachowski Brothers, Anim(e)atrix style
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DATE: 10/12/2003 08:39:57 AM
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In keeping with the live-from-Barcelona Matrix thread, here is a commissioned portrait, Anim(e)atrix style, of the photographically elusive Wachowski Brothers -- by Canadian illustrator Kenn Brown. He explains: "Try googling them.. you wont find much - we were lucky to get a very small pic taken at the Wired offices to base this illustration on. The cityscape behind them is based on thier hometown of Chicago and was inspired by the Japanese anime classic Metropolis - (Metropolis was brought to the screen by anime legends Katsuhiro Otomo (of "Akira" fame) and Rintaro who once worked with Tezuka on the anime TV series Astro Boy)... you if you look closely you might recognize a few of the buildings. The windows echo the cascading effect of the famous matrix code." Click here for the full image, and feast your eyes on the gloriously ultra-hi-res version in the current print version of Wired on sale now.
I'm still at Artfutura, btw -- watching a bunch of game developers demo some amazing projects that involve use of wireless technology to blend real and online gamescapes; meshing feedback from both virtual and physical worlds. You can hear helicopters outside, right now, flying over contrasting protests. October 12, is Dia de la Hispanidad, a national holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus. Besides the official celebrations, a bunch of anticolonialist/anti-imperialist protesters are holding manifestaciones on one side of town, and some pro-fascist/anti-immigrant eurosupremacist guys are waving flags on the other side of town.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My collection reviewed in NYTimes
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DATE: 10/12/2003 10:12:14 AM
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My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, is reviewed in today's NYTimes Sunday Book Review!
[It's] a bracing collection of short stories by a Canadian writer whose influences range from Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker to Donald Barthelme and Roald Dahl.
As knowledgeable about computers as he is about flea markets, Doctorow uses science fiction as a kind of cultural WD-40, loosening hinges and dissolving adhesions to peer into some of society's unlighted corners. His best known story, ''Craphound,'' tells of a competitive friendship between two junk collectors, one human and one alien; what it says about the uses of the past is no more mysterious than the prices paid for a vintage Coke bottle or an early Barbie doll. Not every attempt to wrest truth from cliche works -- but you won't want to miss Doctorow's satiric glance at co-opted dissent among the grade-school set or the insidious horror of his updated Pinocchio tale.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Homeland Security deports fiancee of Homeland Security staffer
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DATE: 10/12/2003 10:22:18 AM
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Dan Hughes sez,
This just hit the wire about
my brother, who works *for* Homeland Security, and his fiancée who was
incarcerated on Yom Kippur last week *by* Homeland Security. The story broke on
the front page this morning.
Beate (Bay - ah - tah), Trevor's fiancée, was returning to the US from Germany.
She had interviewed with career diplomats at the American Embassy just weeks
before and was granted a 6-month visa. Nevertheless, when she landed in Atlanta
she was interrogated for six hours, led away in handcuffs with criminals,
booked into the Atlanta prison system (finger prints, mug shots and a group
cell) and the next day was placed in solitary confinement in a white room with
nothing save a toilet. She was left without food for 20+ hours and finally
deported to Germany. The whole time being told that she was not a criminal, nor
suspected of any crime!
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(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Island Chronicles: Islomane no more
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DATE: 10/12/2003 07:56:14 PM
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Our latest Island Chronicles dispatch is up at LA Weekly. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Justin Hall's photos of mobile phone users in Japan
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DATE: 10/13/2003 02:43:00 AM
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Justin Hall has put together a fantastic photojournalism story for TheFeature.com about mobile phone use in Tokyo. Remarkable things are happening there, like camera phones that have 3D displays, and street vendors who will shrink-wrap colorful covers around your phone on the spot.
Japan's mobility still beats the US by at least eighteen months. Each time I'm in the United States I feel like, hey, we're catching up! And then I come to Japan and I find TV tuners and highly designed tiny handsets and second generation video mail. Everyone has a camera phone here, while in the US I'm still waiting for my friends to get color screens.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites: arriving in Baghdad
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DATE: 10/13/2003 04:39:54 AM
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NBC News combat correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites has posted a second entry from Iraq on the newly re-opened kevinsites.net:
I am pleasantly surprised. Baghdad is neither new nor vastly improved, but it is much better than I remember it. An easy point to score considering last time I was here bombed out vehicles and burning tank wreckage lined the streets. But that was only five months ago. Now the place has a colonial feel. With two gulf wars past, we have grown accustomed to the sight of U.S. soldiers and Marines in the desert. It is different to see them patrol the streets of Baghdad in Humvees or baked by the Middle Eastern sun in their body armor and Kevlar. They are locked and loaded, sucking on Camelbacks as they move in five-man squads through the marketplace. At the Republican Palace, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked twenty somethings on loan from the State Department or Pentagon—staff the makeshift Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) offices that simultaneously administer Iraq’s overwhelming current civil needs while hammering out the blueprint for a post Saddam future. Many of the Iraqis I’ve talked to say they’re discouraged so far. With 60-percent unemployment and rampant crime (25 reported carjackings a day in Baghdad) it is a difficult time. But there has also been undeniable progress like news schools and sewage treatment facilities. Highly educated and immensely proud (one of our drivers teaches economics and Baghdad University) most Iraqis I talk with say they want a faster transition to self-rule. They make no bones about it, they are happy that Saddam and the Bathists have been ousted, but they are not comfortable being occupied by foreign troops.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Monkey controls robot arm through neural interface
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DATE: 10/13/2003 07:39:28 AM
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Researchers at Duke have implanted a neural prosthesis in the brains of a monkey, connected same to a robot arm, and taught the monkey to work a third arm through the use of its mind. The Flash animation from the Duke U site is a scream. The filthy monkey, it manipulates its robot arm.
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(Thanks, Justin!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley Engineering
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DATE: 10/13/2003 09:05:19 AM
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In my latest issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* Clearer vision for unmanned air vehicles
* Radar for grape growers means better wine
* Bio-chips for detecting "break-bone fever" in South America
* and why so many people die at railroad crossings.
Stop on by!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Early Peanuts anthology coming from Fantagraphics
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DATE: 10/13/2003 04:05:53 PM
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There are two Elvises: pre-army and post-army. There are two Lucille Balls: one who starred in I Love Lucy, and the one who was in everything after that. There are also two Charles Shulz's: one that drew Snoopy as a quadriped, and the later one who drew him as a biped. In all three cases, I like the earlier versions better. That's why I was so excited to learn that Fantagraphics will be publishing a book of Shulz's very first Peanut strips from 1950-1952 in THE COMPLETE PEANUTS.
This first volume, covering the first two and a quarter years of the strip, will be of particular fascination to PEANUTS aficionados worldwide: Although there have been literally hundreds of PEANUTS books published, many of the strips from the series’ first two or three years have never been collected before — in large part because they showed a young Schulz working out the kinks in his new strip and include some characterizations and designs that are quite different from the cast we’re all familiar with. (Among other things, three major cast members — Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus — initially show up as infants and only “grow” into their final “mature” selves as the months go by. Even Snoopy debuts as a puppy!) Thus THE COMPLETE PEANUTS offers a unique chance to see a master of the artform refine his skills and solidify his universe, day by day, week by week, month by month.
The book is being designed by Seth, creator of the fabulous comic, Palookaville. Many of the strips have never before been anthologized. Publication date is April 2004.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MacLeod on The Secret Return of the British Boffin
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:26:30 AM
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Ken MacLeod, the Scottish Trotskyist sf author who wins libertarian sf prizes, has briefly reviewed a fascinating-sounding book called Backroom Boys: the Secret Return of the British Boffin. I've just ordered mine.
Even many SF fans, I suspect, will be as surprised - and gripped - as I was by the tale of the British space programme. I honestly didn't know that ... (no spoilers from me). Likewise, I didn't know the backroom stories of Concorde, computer games (pioneered by libertarian SF fans), mobile phones, the human genome project, and Beagle 2 (the barbecue-shaped British-built space probe, due to land on Mars on Christmas Day this year).
Spufford does more than tell engaging tales. He painlessly puts across a wealth of information about science and engineering. To cover six very different areas of technology and science in such an intriguing way, and to catch the distinctive style of each field's native geek, is a rare achievement. Above all, he tells a coherent story, of industrial decline countered - in part at least - by ingenious adaptation to the 'post-industrial' world. It sharply evokes a lost world of Dan Dare, Look and Learn, and Meccano, and goes on to show us how that world was never lost: that it is, in fact, part of the secret history of today.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unicode primer
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:30:44 AM
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Joel-on-Software's posted a great primer on the Unicode character set. If developers all read this piece, I'd never get a bloody question-mark and a broken RSS feed when I pasted in a curly-quote or an accent-character.
In this article I'll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. All that stuff about "plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits" is not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, and if you're still programming that way, you're not much better than a medical doctor who doesn't believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.
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(via Nelson's Weblog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Three-parent foetuses
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:33:59 AM
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Chinese fertility researchers have created a technique to generat human foetuses with three parents: transfering the guts of a fertilized egg (sans mitochondria) to the hollow egg of a third party, who provides the mitochondria.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boot Xbox into a clustering Linux
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:40:44 AM
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There's a new Linux distro that will boot an Xbox into a mode where it becomes a Linux box that automatically seeks out its peers on the network for the purpose of forming a distributed computing cluster. So long as MSFT is subsidising the purchase price of its PC-disguised-as-a-game-box, this seems like a promising approach to forming cheap-ass, pwoerful clusters. Also, you can always yank a box or two out and play some games.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Private-but-not-secret is hard online
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:44:45 AM
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Danny O'Brien has posted a brilliant essay about the disappearance of the "private" sphere online -- the place where you talk about stuff that isn't a secret, but also isn't intended for public distribution. It's a response to some of the griping about the "Foo Camp" that O'Reilly threw last weekend, wherein a bunch of geeks that Tim likes were invited up to the O'Reilly offices to spend a weekend hanging out and playing and chatting.
If I was to be perfectly honest, if you were to hover about fifty yards away from the festivities, squinting with your eyebrow arched, it was like that. Were Andrew to hide in the bushes of Sebastopol, he would have had very little of his convictions shaken. People said "ohhhhh cool!". A lot. There was a Segway and an Aibo. There was one particular "acoustic jam" that had me choking on pie and making a polite exit to the bathroom.
But you know what? I can do the same thing to your parties. It's easy. And with a few hours training and a dictionary of convenient stereotypes, you could hang out in the shadows of a J-Lo-hosted all-nude sex-party and feel superior too...
Much can be made of all of this, but without more substantive points, it's just "Hahahahaha! Aren't the Different People funny?". Yes, it was Californian. This is because we are in California.. .
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Historical still photo archive posted by Pathe
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:48:29 AM
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British Pathé, the news-footage archive that launched an enormous archive of its newsreels this time last year, has released a comparable archive of old still photos.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dyslexia-friendly typeface
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:53:39 AM
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"Read Regular" is a typeface designed to be legible to people with dyslexia.
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(via Blackbelt Jones)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Desert Island discs skunked by iPod
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:56:04 AM
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Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, etc, has completely skunked the BBC4 "Desert Island" program -- sure, he only specified ten records he'd bring with him to the hypothetical desert island, but he chose an iPod as his luxury item -- clever sumbitch!
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(via Blackbelt Jones)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MTA alerts as RSS
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DATE: 10/14/2003 07:57:53 AM
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Mobius sez, "My friend Martin took the NYC MTA's Subway Advisory Alerts and made RSS feeds for each individual train. The URLs link directly to PDFs of the same posters the MTA hangs in the subway stations. Comes in pretty handy if you're used to MTA service sucking ass. Throw a feed up on your desktop aggregator or on your blog (as I have done at sexveggie.com) and you'll never get stuck waiting a month for the train again."
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(Thanks, Mobius!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brad Bird's Incredibles -- sneak peek
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DATE: 10/14/2003 08:01:47 AM
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Anthony sez, "These are screen captures from a sneak peek ABC did for Pixar's upcoming film, 'The Incredibles.' Looks absolutely amazing. The character design and direction is wonderfully done by Brad Bird, who did much-loved film, 'The Iron Giant.'"
Link 1, Link 2
(Thanks, Anthony!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Islamic mobile points to Mecca
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DATE: 10/14/2003 08:09:31 AM
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A new Muslim-targetted mobile phone uses a compass and location data to tell its owners which direction Mecca is at prayer-time. Bruce Sterling wrote this into a story called "We See Things Differently" for the seminal and brilliant Semiotext(e) SF anthology in 1990.
By setting the -5300-compass to the north and inputting their location information, Muslims can now easily find the direction of Mecca. With this feature, the handset positions itself as a specialized functional phone in the Middle East market. In particular, it is expected to spur a boom in the region because the compass may be used even where GPS services are unavailable.
I wonder if you can get a ringtone of a Muzzein's call to prayer?
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Enron's email laid bare
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DATE: 10/14/2003 08:15:38 AM
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Great Salon piece about the gigantic library of internal Enron email that has been posted online as part of the discovery process as the Feds slowly grind the corrupt empire into tiny, thoroughly punished bits of mince (of course, Kenny Lay will almost certainly walk away with his fortune and person intact, but we all expected that, right?).
Amid a sea of dick jokes, spam and Internet porn, the e-mails offer a window into the soul, such as it was, of Enron: from the high-flying days when the company decorated its top executive office suites in holiday themes -- according to a 2000 e-mail, Ken Lay's office was done up in honor of St. Lucia, Jeff Skilling's had Kwanzaa, and Andrew Fastow's was lit up for Hanukkah -- to the end, when things had gone so far south that members of the Lay family began to fear they'd be kidnapped...
Dear Joe: Enron, Mr. Ken Lay and Mr. Skilling are requesting that their contribution be matched per our understanding from the fax and verbal communications from Warren Robold. This totals $100,000 between both individuals and the Corporation for the RNSEC matching funds program. We want these funds matched in time for the Texas State deadlines. It was our intention from the onset of this program to have our funds go to this account. The various points of contact from the RNC caused some minor confusion so checks went to Texas instead of DC. This is very important to Mr. Lay and Mr. Shilling. Let us know if we need to request these funds returned and new checks written and mailed to you at your DC address. You may call me if you have any questions.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hellboy fan-film captures interest/approval of Hellboy film director
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DATE: 10/14/2003 08:57:22 AM
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Jason sez, "This guy did a test animation of a CGI Hellboy that looks very much like the comic book. It looks so good that the director of the upcoming Hellboy movie saw it."
I saw it. Is quite spectacular. I truly hope the movie succeeds and we can get a cartoon series off the ground. Obviously this is the guy to go to.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nanoscale avatars for chemistry ed
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DATE: 10/14/2003 09:04:54 AM
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Roland sez, "In 'NanoKids made in lab,' Nature writes that "man-shaped molecules help students learn chemistry." "A team of Texans has created molecules in their own image. The tiny army of human lookalikes is helping Houston kids to learn about chemistry. The researchers call their molecules the NanoKids. Their bodies are made from carbon and hydrogen, and their eyes are oxygen atoms. Each stands just 2 nanometres tall." The Texan team has produced a DVD filled with the NanoKids to teach chemistry to young students. This summary contains other links to the project and pictures of some of the NanoKids, like the NanoTexan, the NanoTeen or the NanoScholar molecules."
(Thanks, Roland Piquepaille!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help fix the typos in my short-story collection
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DATE: 10/14/2003 09:21:56 AM
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The (admittedly modest) initial print-run of my short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More has nearly sold out in just over a month since the initial publication (w00t!). My publisher is going back to the press for a second run, and he's asked me to provide him with any errata that I would like fixed before it goes to press (this means that the missing acknowledgements page will finally see print!).
If you've noticed any typos in the print edition (not the electronic texts), I'd love to know about them so we can get them fixed in the second printing (oh, also, this means that this is just about your last chance to get a copy of the first edition, which is sure to be an errata-filled collector's item after my untimely death). Please email me by Friday with any tyopos, etc.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: The NeoFiles, RU Sirius's new Web 'zine
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DATE: 10/14/2003 12:43:42 PM
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bOING bOING co-conspirator RU Sirius is editing The NeoFiles, a new 'zine sponsored by a "life enhancement" supplement company. Along with a survey of nanotechnology and a discussion of life extension technology, RU interviewed me about "Tools for Brains," from biopharmaceuticals to bionics. (Quite hontesly, I was honored that RU was asking me questions instead of vice versa!) Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harry Potter to be sold by German homeless
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DATE: 10/14/2003 02:44:18 PM
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A magazine sold by Germany's homeless population will feature an ahead-of-schedule excerpt from the German-language edition of the fifth book in the series.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Trash on San Francisco's sidewalks: a photo-essay
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DATE: 10/14/2003 02:48:25 PM
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Heather Champ has taken camera in hand and set out to produce a lovely photo-essay on the endless heaps of garbage strewn over San Francisco's sidewalks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Seekrit computer training for America's execs
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DATE: 10/14/2003 02:52:55 PM
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Senior execs at big companies hire seekrit computer tutors to train them after-hours, because they're too embarassed to reveal their ignorance to the in-house sysadmins.
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TITLE: Kinko's keylogger captures 450 banking passwords
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DATE: 10/15/2003 07:43:07 AM
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A crook in NYC installed keyloggers on Kinko's machines across the city, using the captured data to thieve the identities of Kinko's customers, including over 450 banking passwords.
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(via Crypto-Gram)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Identity thief steals sex-offender's name
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DATE: 10/15/2003 07:45:10 AM
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A drunk in Connecticut stole his neighbor's identity in order to get around his suspended driver's license. His neighbor was a registered sex-offender.
Perry moved to Connecticut about a year ago and things went well until Perry was arrested for disorderly conduct.
A routine computer check found that "Kowalski" was a convicted sex offender in Michigan and not registered as required with the state of Connecticut.
Every bit of identification in his possession labeled the suspect as "Kowalski," but man himself was adamant that he was not a convicted sex offender, police said.
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(via Crypto-Gram)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Moderation blog
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DATE: 10/15/2003 07:46:08 AM
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Tom Coates has started a blog called "Everything in Moderation," for discussions of moderating message-boards.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lego for a living
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DATE: 10/15/2003 09:18:06 AM
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Lego is looking for a full-time "Master Builder" to work at a California theme-park.
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(Thanks, Joe!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Giant Japanese wooden keyboards
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DATE: 10/15/2003 04:32:57 PM
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A Japanese company is shipping (Japanese and English) keyboards with giant wooden keys, aimed at old people.
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(via KoKoRo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TechTV to potentially violate DMCA this Saturday
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DATE: 10/15/2003 04:36:29 PM
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On Saturday, Kevin Rose, the host of a guest on TechTV's Unscrewed will violate potentially violate the DMCA by modding an Xbox to run Linux.
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(via Wasted Bits)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tampon angel DIY
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DATE: 10/16/2003 06:51:51 AM
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How to make a tampon angel.
1. Dip into water until tampon expands.
2. Remove and tie at the top to create the angel's head.
3. Let hang (by handy dandy string) for several days until dry.
4. Paint face with peach or skin tone color, and draw small
black dots for eyes.
5. Add blush or pink paint to cheeks.
6. Paint "dress" with glimmer paint.
7. Criss-cross thin gold ribbon across chest (around neck) .
8. Add yellow doll hair to top of head as well as a gold
pipe cleaner for a halo.
9. For the grand finale...glue small gold angel wings to back.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Edison's mistakes recapitulated by RIAA
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DATE: 10/16/2003 08:21:22 AM
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George Ziemann of MP3 NewsWire has posted a terrific installment in his ongoing series on the history of copyright and technology. Today's installment is called, "RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes," and it walks us throught he way that Edison's film monopoly -- which was eventually crushed by the Feds -- had a history that was very parallel to the RIAA's own tactics here.
The government allowed the Motion Picture Patents Company, which had been formed in December, 1908, to get away with their anti-competitive control over the industry for less than four years. The U.S. government brought an antitrust suit against the MPPC in 1912 and declared it illegal in 1915.
Considering that the government has a) been trying to diffuse the voice of the music industry for a half century, if not silence it altogether and b) four of the five major labels are foreign-owned, sooner or later someone at the top end of government is going to possess the lucidity to wonder why the government should even care what happens to the record industry.
The only real issue is how long we have to wait. Step 8 should be worth waiting for -- the same independent renaissance that filmmakers enjoyed in the 1920s and 30s when Edison's movie empire fell apart. But the indie filmmakers didn't even wait for the government. They simply walked away and started over.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion tatt
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DATE: 10/16/2003 09:18:27 AM
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Jason DeFillippo has posted a pic of his friend Tim's tattoo, which is based on the wallpaper pattern at the Disneyland Haunted Mansion (there are also some killer HM tatts on display at the photo-gallery for the goth Bat's Day in the Fun Park site).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Independent soundracks to classic sf novels
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DATE: 10/16/2003 01:01:36 PM
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Marc sez, "Sine Fiction commissions electronic-music soundtracks to classic science fiction novels, then makes them available online for free as MP3 files. Sine Fiction just posted its latest three: Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God, composed by Oeuf Korreckt (aka Frédrick Blouin); William S. Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded, composed by A. Dontigny, who curates Sine Fiction; and Italo Calvino's Ti con Zero (or t zero, depending on your paperback edition), composed by Ellende."
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(Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Farming RPG
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DATE: 10/16/2003 01:10:34 PM
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Nelson Minar describes Harvest Moon, an SNES farming-simulation game:
You pull weeds, plant crops, and try to marry someone in your town. The intro to the SNES game is charming - "how to play" features scenes of you breaking rocks and removing stumps. The screenshot above is the village church. I love the idea of a Japanese corporation earnestly making a cute simulation of agrarian Europe.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kids today on videogames yesterday
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DATE: 10/17/2003 05:36:43 AM
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Wil sez, "Electronic Gaming Monthly gathered up a bunch of pre-teen kids, and sat them in front of some classic video games. Their comments are at once hilarious, and depressing. Some highlights:"
Niko: Hey-Pong. My parents played this game.
Brian: It takes this whole console just to do Pong?
Kirk: What is this? [Picks up and twists the paddle controller] Am I controlling the volume?
Tim: Which [Tetris] button do I press to make the blocks explode?
Tim: Mario dies way too easy. Oh, grab the umbrella. Those are cool. Unfashionable, gay, but cool. Oh, 300 points. That's it? All you get is points? That's lame. Can't you do something with the umbrella?
Tim: They just put totally random stuff here for points. Oh, you've got an umbrella. You've got a purse.
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(Thanks, Wil!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF's new file-sharing movie
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DATE: 10/17/2003 05:54:14 AM
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EFF has released a new Flash movie aimed at explaining what's good and what's at risk with file-sharing. It's called "The Great MP3 Caper," and it's some funny stuff.
For years, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been waging war against peer-to-peer file-sharing software and the technologists who create it. Now the RIAA has turned its crosshairs on you, threatening to sue you for sharing the music you love. But even shotgun-style lawsuits won't solve the RIAA's problem. As more and more Americans learn to love online music, the answer must lie in new business models that harness the power of P2P as a vehicle for paying artists. If artists get paid when we share files, then artists win, we win, and yes -- even the RIAA wins.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pez museum opens
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DATE: 10/17/2003 05:57:14 AM
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A Pez museum has opened in Easton, Pennsylvania, around the corner from the Crayola factory.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cellular minutes can be resold in the Philippines
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DATE: 10/17/2003 07:49:26 AM
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A Filippino cellular company is allowing its customers to re-sell unused airtime.
Ms. Gazo, a 33-year-old housewife who lives 600 miles south of Manila in Davao City, is one of more than 100,000 mobile phone users who re-sell Smart's cellular services through a new prepaid service called Smart Buddy e-Load. With a special, $20 chip for her mobile phone, Ms. Gazo can transfer bits of air time to her friends' and acquaintances' phones - as little as 30 pesos worth (about 55 cents).
For every 1,000 pesos she sells, Ms. Gazo collects 150 pesos in commissions, turning her mobile phone into a second source of income for her family of four. "If I can earn 150 pesos a day," Ms. Gazo said, "I don't have to work."
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(via Smartmobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Russian prison tatts
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DATE: 10/17/2003 07:57:18 AM
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Amazing site devoted to reproducing and interpreting elaborate Russian jailhouse tattoos.
Link
Update: Looks like they're down now. Maybe try back later.
More update: Nik points out that there's a mirror at the Internet Archive
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Full-back koi tattoo blog
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DATE: 10/17/2003 10:25:59 AM
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Keith sez, "I've been blogging the process of having my entire back tattoo'd
with a Japanese Koi. I am eight sessions in, with four more to go."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Foglio fan-art for Good Omens
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DATE: 10/17/2003 10:29:37 AM
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Phil Foglio, one of the premier genre toon artists, has produced a two-page fan-art tribute to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's spectacular and hilarious end-of-the-world novel Good Omens.
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What if Photoshop was a web-service?
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DATE: 10/17/2003 10:32:06 AM
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Here's an interesting idea: a web-services-like image filter system: send your phonecam pix to the service and it will twist them according to your prefs and send 'em back to you.
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(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swedish Fish trademarks
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DATE: 10/17/2003 02:00:20 PM
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Ernie sez, "Apparently, the makers of Original Swedish Fish have lost their trademark battle with Famous Sqwish Candy Fish in a complete rout. The case is an example of how not to protect trademark, but more importantly is an interesting look behind the scenes of the gummy business. For example, do you know the difference between 'Gummy' and 'JuJus'? See footnote 2 of the case."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Franken book changes conservative columnist's mind
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DATE: 10/18/2003 09:12:46 AM
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Becky Miller, a conservative editorialist in The Oregonian has read Al Franken's excoriating new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, and it's caused her to reconsider her politics.
I read the book in one sitting. It is an amazing book, and -- if you're a decent, honest, hard-working, patriotic, true-blue conservative who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and watches Fox News -- an earth-shattering book.
To be aboveboard, I must tell you that Franken and I are friends. Well, OK, the truth is I made a wisecrack to him at a book signing, and he looked at me. (Read the book -- the part about Ann Coulter -- and you'll get it.)
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spider Jerusalem blogs
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DATE: 10/18/2003 09:18:55 AM
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Warren Ellis is blogging in the voice of Spider Jersualem, his character from the brilliant and sadly finished
Transmetropolitan series.
Junior wrenched open a draw in the desk and ripped from it a scrawny-looking cuddly toy with its eyes plucked out and awful stains on its mouth.
"THIS is Ringo!" he exulted. "RINGO is my FRIEND!" He clutched the scabby thing to a chest already pebbledashed with cocaine, bloodclots and snot.
My back bumped into the door. "And… he says things, does he?"
"Yeahhhhhh," Junior sighed, stroking Ringo's stomach in a disturbingly sexual way.
"Well, um, excellent. I should be going. I have to accept a shipment of dolphin steaks tonight
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(via Vertical Hold)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Game-designer on copyright
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DATE: 10/18/2003 09:23:35 AM
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Greg Costikyan, an award-winning games designer (he's the man behind Toon and others) who makes his living off of copyright, has written a brilliant editorial on the nature of intellectual property today.
In general, when the RIAA complains about file-sharing, the refrain is that "artists" are being ripped off. I agree, 100%. Artists are indeed being ripped off--by the members of the RIAA. Anyone with more than a cursory understanding of business practices in the recorded music industry understands that the labels have refined the business of screwing recording arstists to a very fine art. With rare exception, musicians never see a dime beyond their initial advance--nor will they if the RIAA succeeds in its effort to suppress file trading. Realistically, this is not about defending artists. It's about defending the labels.
Recently, I went to a movie, and was subjected to a spot from some film industry organization, I do not remember which, that featured a fellow who is a set maker for the movies. He spouted some nostrum about how people who 'steal' movies were screwing him, not the studios. I was not impressed. He's a member of a craft union in Hollywood, and receives union scale when he works; I very much doubt he gets residuals, or any kind or royalty on the films that get made. His income is not affected one whit if the studios lose income through 'piracy'. To be sure, if fewer movies get made because piracy affects Hollywood's revenues as whole, he may be affected--but this is at best a red herring. It's the suits who'll suffer first.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA streamlines confiscation of customers' life's savings
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DATE: 10/18/2003 09:30:13 AM
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The RIAA has figured out a cheaper way to intimidate its customers. Rather than suing them by the hundreds, they're offering to "settle" claims with people who are on their radar. So far, their settlements have consisted of confiscating the life's savings of students and the college fund of a twelve-year-old girl.
The RIAA said from now on it would send out warning letters first, allowing suspects to negotiate a settlement before being served with a lawsuit. Those who do not respond within 10 days will be sued.
"In light of the comments we have heard, we want to go the extra mile and offer illegal file sharers an additional chance to work this out short of legal action," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google softens AdSense ToS
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DATE: 10/18/2003 09:38:30 AM
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Google, having gotten a lot of public criticism for its terms-of-service for AdSense (which implied that AdSense users were prohibited from criticising Google), has changed its terms to soften the worst of it. Looks good.
Updated - In response to recent feedback regarding the Google AdSense Online Standard Terms and Conditions, we have made clarifications to this agreement in the following sections: Prohibited Uses (section 6), Confidentiality (section 8), Payment (section 12), Publicity (section 13), and Miscellaneous (section 17).
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Data-over-meat net uses human flesh as medium
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DATE: 10/18/2003 10:23:13 AM
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DoCoMo researchers have demoed a 10 mbs Ethernet running over human meat rather than copper wire.
The network, dubbed ElectAura-Net, is wireless, but instead of using radio waves, infrared light, or microwaves to transmit information it uses a combination of the electric field that emanates from humans and a similar field emanating from special floor tiles.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Foo Camp interviews
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DATE: 10/18/2003 10:26:53 AM
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Last weekend, Tim O'Reilly through an informal campout at the O'Reilly and Associates offices in Sebastapol, inviting a bunch of geeks to come out and hang around. Lisa Rein interviewed a number of the attendees, and is posting her footage, including talks from Danny O'Brien, Ben and Mena Trott and Esther Dyson.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Broadcast Flag request redux
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DATE: 10/18/2003 10:34:09 AM
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EFF is asking for your help with the Broadcast Flag. This is a proposed technology mandate that would give Hollywood studios a veto over the design of the output and recording technologies that get built into DTV receivers -- which is by way of saying the stuff that we take for granted on our general-purpose machines, like CD/DVD burners, high-speed cabling standards like FireWire, and so on. This is an unprecedented maneouvre: the Hollywood studios are saying that tech companies should have to get the studios' permission before releasing new tools to their customers. These are the studios that tried to ban the VCR, that sued ReplayTV over commercial-skipping, that put Fritz Hollings up to the CBDTPA bill, a proposal to make *all* technologists get the entertainment industry's approval before producing new equipment.
What's more, the Broadcast Flag demands that approved technologies will have to be built to be "tamper-resistant." That means that we'll have a law that will require an entire class of general-purpose technologies to use only obfuscated, closed-source drivers. That's right, it bans open source for tech that can be used in DTV applications.
The worst part is: there's no problem. Hollywood has made more money every single year since the last fight like this, over the VCR. Last year was the movie companies' best year since 1959 -- this despite a worldwide economic crisis! Hollywood doesn't dispute this, but they insist that since there *might* be a problem tomorrow, they need to take extrodinary measures today. This is ridiculous, of course: it's like eating your seatmate on the off-chance that your plane will crash.
Well, the FCC sought comment on this. They asked the public and other organizations to participate in the rulemaking, to help them make up their minds. EFF has been calling on our supporters to send notes into the Commission in opposition to this plan, and we've passed over 15,000 faxes onto the Commissioners' desks.
Numbers count in this fight. When over 700,000 Americans wrote to the FCC on media consolidation, it so alarmed lawmakers that Fritz Hollings (of all people!) called for Congressional action to limit media consolidation. We need lots of people to write into the FCC asking them to set this proposal aside, and we want you to help.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 10,000th link
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DATE: 10/18/2003 10:35:01 AM
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This is the 10,000th link posted to Boing Boing. Whee!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Social Hygeine posters through history
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DATE: 10/19/2003 05:33:34 AM
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The University of Minnesota has posted an amazing archive of "social hygiene" posters from the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s.
Your mother has been unselfish
and devoted to you
Will you be worthy of her?
The chivalrous youth protects the
honor of all women and girls
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(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet Security Model debunked
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DATE: 10/19/2003 05:35:43 AM
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Great essay exploring what the Internet's "threat model" actually is, and what it is presumed to be by SSL and other common security measures.
A threat model looks at the application - at what
we are trying to protect. In this case, we know
that the actual threat that SSL was built for was
the sniffer of credit card numbers. But, he, the
sniffer, is not considered, what's replaced his
role is some theoretical bogey man. The bogey
man can do anything that we know how to protect
against, and not the things we can't protect
against...
SSL was put together as a "perfect" protocol to
solve a "convenient" threat model from the
(admittedly persuasive and pervasive) knowledge
of the times. And, it took little or no account
of the needs of the application...
That's why, for example, the protocol finishes its
security job close to the borders of the comms.
That's why CA-signed certs were chosen, because
they solved something that could be solved, with
no particular analysis as to whether anyone would
bother to attack that weak link. That's why, for
example, it's a channel security product, and not
a page (credit card number) protection product.
And, for example, the digsig creates a chain
instead of affirming an intent.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?
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DATE: 10/19/2003 05:41:31 AM
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What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? is an essay that pulls out ten of the signal differences between weblogs and traditional journalism. I don't often link to stuff like this, since it's so often either wrongheaded polyannish nonsense or utterly obvious, but this piece manages to explore the possible wihtout losing sight of the probable.
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stained glass photo-archive
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DATE: 10/19/2003 06:00:29 AM
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Stained Glass Photography is an enormous archive of beautiful photos of classical church-glass, organized by artist.
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(Thanks, Neil!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Great roadside signs of Denver
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DATE: 10/19/2003 08:10:11 AM
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I've been in and around Denver all week for the Digital ID World conference, and I couldn't stop jumping out of my rental car to take pix of the amazing googie signs that grow in such stunning proliferation here.
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TITLE: 1,300 hot beverages coming to 7-11
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DATE: 10/19/2003 09:55:30 AM
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The new 7-11 hot-beverage automaton can mix 1,300 permuations of scalding fluid.
At 7-Eleven's new "hot beverage stations," customers will have a choice of more than 1,300 combinations. A minimum of five varieties of coffee, four flavored syrups, seven different tea bags, five toppings, creamers, sweeteners and all types of milk will be available at each station. 7-Eleven's customers will make the drinks themselves, guided by store suggestions, thus avoiding waiting in line to order. The drinks will cost about $1 per cup instead of the typical coffeehouse prices hovering between $3 and $4.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A night with Stephen Hawking
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DATE: 10/19/2003 04:38:23 PM
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My friend, journalist Peter Sheridan, emailed me his account of attending a Stephen Hawking lecture. It's really great, and he kindly gave me permission to post it here:
One superstar I did see this week, who has been one of my idols for many years, was Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Physics at Cambridge University.
I've been an admirer of his work for more than 20 years now, and knowing that he comes to California every year or so, I've been looking for the opportunity to attend one of his infrequent public lectures.
This Friday, I was lucky enough to see him lecture at Cal Tech.
It was like a rock concert.
People began standing in line for tickets the day before, pitching tents on the campus lawn outside the box office, and gathering through the night to discuss physics and black holes and molecular interactions.
When the 1,100 tickets finally became available at 9 a.m., they were gone in minutes.
Those who failed to get tickets immediately began standing in line for standby seats.
On the night of the lecture, there were more than 300 people in the line without tickets. Many who didn't get into the auditorium were given tickets to view a live video feed into an adjacent lecture hall. Those who couldn't squeeze into the hall could hear the lecture blasted across the campus on speakers, or go home and view the live webcast.
Anticipation was high inside the Beckman auditorium. Young girls with bouquets of flowers for Hawking milled around expectantly.
Physics undergrads roamed the aisles, begging autographs from several of the Who's Who in Physics stars attending the lecture. Many of them looked a lot older than the young men on their book jackets.
Finally, Prof. Hawking was wheeled in on his wheelchair down the center aisle: a truly extraordinary figure.
One of the most brilliant minds alive on the planet today, he is cruelly trapped within a useless body, which slumps like an understuffed and oversized rag doll in his large and gadget-filled wheelchair.
In a smart grey suit and white shirt with fine blue stripes unbuttoned at the collar, he was smartly dressed, with a mop top-type short haircut that made him look like an escapee from Quadraphenia.
Yet his movement is minimal. He blinks his eyes, his right knee vibrates up and down with an involuntary tremor, and only the slow rise and fall of his stomach indicates that he is still alive.
Because he lost the power of speech many years ago, he writes his lectures painstakingly slowly on his wheelchair-laptop computer, manipulating the cursor with only the slightest movement of his fingers, in which he has barely any movement left.
At the press of a button, his computer then reads Hawking's text in a perfectly modulated, slightly Americanized voice, which sounds a lot like the Daleks that Dr. Who used to battle.
Each sentence of his lecture is therefore preprogrammed into his computer, and Hawking controls the pace of its delivery through his limited hand movement and the cursor. Even this is a difficult feat for him, and sometimes three or more minutes would pass between sentences, as he slowly manipulated the computer.
At times the silence dragged out so long, it was hard to believe that he was not asleep. I wanted desperately to shout "Wake Up!" or run on stage and slap some smelling salts under his nose, just to make sure that he hadn't died on stage as we watched, and nobody was any the wiser. Yet after what seemed like an interminable pause, his computerized voice would start up again.
Once, early on in the lecture, his head slumped forward like a broken doll, and an aide had to walk on stage to readjust his body: an undignified moment as Hawking's head was manhandled and repositioned, and then his whole body picked up and put down, as if the aide was plumping up a particularly large and unwieldy pillow.
It was simultaneously eerie and inspiring: to know that within this frail, almost lifeless carcass, there hummed the thrilling genius of the mind that produced A Short History of Time, and The Universe in a Nutshell, and some of the most seminal work on black holes.
It was a remarkable experience, and I was delighted to be there, and yet there was also an element of disappointment at the scope of Hawking's lecture, which was ambitiously titled 'Godel and the End of Physics.'
I was expecting a lecture, especially one staged at Cal tech, that would be intellectually challenging to me, if not completely over my head. Instead, it seems that Hawking gives his technically overdosed lectures in private to select groups at Cal Tech, while his public addresses are more populist.
As a result, the level of physics involved, and the ideas addressed, were probably of a freshman undergraduate level, and while it was an interesting and often humorous lecture, that covered his topic neatly and succinctly, it was somehow disappointing not to be intellectually challenged by the lecture, nor to feel the awesome power of that incredible mind blowing over you like an intellectual Santa Ana wind.
Nevertheless, a night to remember. -- Peter
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: interview with "Matrix" FX guru John Gaeta
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DATE: 10/20/2003 11:32:41 AM
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In Wired News today, an interview I conducted with special effects guru John Gaeta on the future of film and media convergence. Fresh from finishing work on The Matrix Revolutions (which opens November 5), Gaeta hopped a plane to Barcelona to speak at tech/culture confab Artfutura, and I spoke with him there about his belief in a hybrid future of gaming and motion pictures. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lovy on the Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology
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DATE: 10/20/2003 10:44:34 PM
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With his usual brilliant insight and objectivity, Small Times news editor and NanoBot blogger Howard Lovy reports in from the 11th Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology. Surprise! The rest of the world is catching up with yesterday's "crackpots."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speakeasies for food
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DATE: 10/21/2003 12:16:19 AM
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"Underground" restaurants are springing up across the USA, run by elite (and amateur) chefs who can't or won't go through the certifcation process necessary to securing a restaurant license.
But securing a seat at Mamasan's is not easy. The restaurant, which also happens to be Lynette's apartment, has no sign, and the only way you will ever find it is if someone tells you where it is (a quiet street, a hidden door, up a dark stairwell to the top apartment). Even then, you can't just show up: you must have an invitation. To get one you need an introduction from a previous guest. This may seem as if it's a complicated way to get a plate of grilled salmon, but Mamasan's Bistro is not a legal endeavor. Its kitchen lacks the certificates, permits and inspections required by the city of San Francisco. And although the coconut-mango cocktails flowed, Lynette does not have a liquor license.
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(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites: Raid near Baji, Iraq
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DATE: 10/21/2003 10:08:54 AM
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Kevin Sites posts a new entry to his blog -- photos and a first-person account of a military raid in a small, northern Iraq town.
But as the [American soldiers drive], three men firing from a nearby ravine ambush the squad. Luckily the attackers are bad shots. AK-47 rounds go wide and a rocket propelled grenade sails overhead. The engineers return fire with the guttural thumping of the 50-caliber machine gun mounted on the vehicle. The suspected attackers flee, but are quickly captured. No weapons are found in the ravine, but there are dozens of spent shell casings.
Within minutes the Iraqi men, all in their early to mid-twenties, begin to turn on each other. They not only admit their guilt—but also point out a nearby house where they say they have accomplices. Lt.Colonel Huron tells Captain Larry Lyle to come up with a plain for a raid.
“Larry,” Huron says of the plan, “just make it quick and violent.” Violent I’ve come to understand, is a tactical term, rather than adjective. For soldiers it means a show of overwhelming force that immediately convinces an adversary to surrender rather than fight.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Film critics boycott giving awards to MPAA over "anti-piracy" measure
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DATE: 10/21/2003 04:30:14 PM
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Adam sez, "The LA Film Critics Association is so peeved over the MPAA's decision not to mail out DVDs and tapes of movies for award consideration that it's not giving out awards. Period. The LAFCA has said that if the MPAA reverses its decision, they'll do the same."
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(Thanks, Adam!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Are virtual items real enough to insure?
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DATE: 10/21/2003 04:33:23 PM
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High-larious story of a conversation between Julian Dibbell, an online gaming-wonk and PayPal, asking why virtual goods sold in meatspace but transferred in gamespace don't fall under PayPal's guarantee:
"OK, I just want to be absolutely clear about this now. So say I ship somebody tickets to a football game -- is that covered?"
"Yes, because you’ve shipped them tickets. That’s a tangible good."
"OK, then what if I ship them tickets to a virtual item?"
"What?"
"Say I write down a password that gives the buyer access to a virtual item -- say I write that on a piece of paper or put it on a computer disk and ship that to the buyer and then give you guys the tracking number for that shipment. Would that be covered?"
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(Thanks, mileena!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vertu: a phone for rich people who spend foolishly
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DATE: 10/21/2003 04:37:29 PM
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Vertu is the latest ridiculo-phone -- a handset (whoops, I mean, an "instrument") made of precious metals that costs as much as a downpayment on a house and will be obsolete in six months to a year.
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(Thanks, Kev!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Human Genome story
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DATE: 10/21/2003 04:40:01 PM
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John Sundman, a man who had three children with rare, horrible diseases, discovered that the human genome was being mapped for profit, with the intention of rendering the results into a proprietary storehouse to be sold to the highest bidder. That's why he's taken a compelling interest in the human genome project, a successful effort to map the genome and turn the data over to the public domain. Today in Salon is the first part of the story.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ETCON pre-reg open
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DATE: 10/21/2003 04:48:00 PM
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Pre-reg is open for the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference. I've been on the committee for this con, and we're just closing up the program grid, and it looks killer -- easily worth the money (and you save $455 by regging now)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pill packaging
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DATE: 10/21/2003 04:48:48 PM
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Check out this amazing gallery of birth-control-pill packaging.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wired News publishes idiotic story on Broadcast Flag
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DATE: 10/21/2003 11:53:28 PM
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Wired News has published a Reuters article on the Broadcast Flag that appears to have been written without a moment's thought to the proposal's critics -- indeed without any serious consultation with anyone who is even remotely skeptical about it. The piece says, basically, well, this will stop piracy, and the opponents are upset because people will have to buy new DVDs.
What Wired News misses by publishing the Reuter's piece instead of doing original reporting is that this won't stop piracy (as even the studios have admitted, in the plug-and-play cable proceeding), that it has nothing to do with buying new DVDs, that it makes a whole class of general-purpose open source software illegal, including code that's already in the market, and that it will give the companies who called home taping and peeing during commercials theft a veto over the design over DTV devices, including parts of your PC.
It also misses that fact that there is currently no problem with "theft" of Hollywood movies: these companies are making more money than they ever have -- a situation that's obtained every year since 1959, and more particularily since 1984 when the VCR was legalized and not only failed to strangle the film industry, but rather more than doubled its income.
This is the shoddiest thing I've ever seen in Wired News. It's disgusting.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Moore's new book excerpt on Salon
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DATE: 10/21/2003 11:57:15 PM
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Michael Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country? is out, and Salon's got an excerpt this morning.
What is the worst lie a president can tell?
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."
Or ...
"He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scheneier -- what data-mining can't solve
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DATE: 10/22/2003 08:31:31 AM
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Good Bruce Schneier op-ed on why terrorist profiling fails:
I have an idea. Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad - one of the accused D.C. snipers - both served in the military. I think we need to put all U.S. ex-servicemen on a special watch list, because they obviously could be terrorists. I think we should flag them for "special screening" when they fly and think twice before allowing them to take scuba-diving lessons.
What do you think of my idea? I hope you're appalled, incensed and angry that I question the honesty and integrity of our military personnel based on the actions of just two people. That's exactly the right reaction. It's no different whether I suspect people based on military service, race, ethnicity, reading choices, scuba-diving ability or whether they're flying one way or round trip. It's profiling. It doesn't catch the few bad guys, and it causes undue hardship on the many good guys who are erroneously and repeatedly singled out. Security is always a trade-off, and in this case of "data mining" the trade-off is a lousy one.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wired News to publish new story on Broadcast Flag
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DATE: 10/22/2003 02:37:04 PM
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I've just gotten word from Wired News that they've decided to balance out this morning's stilted story about the Broadcast Flag with a piece that takes into account the perspectives of the civil-rights/consumer-advocacy groups who've been fighting the Broadcast Flag from day one. I'm really glad to see this -- makes me glad to be a Wired News reader.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Who painted Paul's painting?
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DATE: 10/22/2003 02:48:40 PM
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Paul sez, " I own a painting that is probably about 50 years old, and I want to find its artist and possibly return the painting to her/him. I put a thumbnail and full shot on my blog, and am casting far and wide to find the painter. It is one of those cases where Google fails because of a similarly-named artist."
Paul sez, "Update: Found the artist, through her parents. The story was off by about 15 years (she graduated high school around 1970), but the rest of the story was correct. Her parents still live in the Bay Area, so I'll bring them the painting next week."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Teensy, cool, overpriced MP3 player can record off phone
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DATE: 10/22/2003 03:03:58 PM
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The "Compact Series 290" MP3 player only stores 256MB of stuff, but it's the size of a disposable lighter and has a line-in with an adapter for recording phone conversations. Want.
(But not enough to shell out $230 for it).
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Time-lapse vegetation footage
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DATE: 10/22/2003 03:06:24 PM
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Goddamn there is nothing cooler than time-lapse videos of germinating plants and opening flowers. Our world is inhabited by triffid-creepy alien lifeforms that move on such a slow timescale, we hardly notice. This archive of time-lapse vegetation gives me the willies.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogging for Jesus
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DATE: 10/22/2003 08:16:26 PM
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I suppose this isn't the only faux evangelical Christian weblog out there, but it is a rather colorful hoax.
Hi my name is Christina and I am a 14 year old home school student and I am going to blog for our lord and savior Jesus Christ since he is in heaven and there is no internet in heaven since internet is mostly filthy porn and athiest places that dont get into heaven.
Link (thanks, Sean, but you're still going to Hell)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MiniITX casemods in household objects
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DATE: 10/23/2003 01:54:13 AM
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Good NYT story on the rise of Mini-ITX motherboards and their usefulness for modding small household objects into PCs:
Across Europe, the United States and the Far East, hobbyists have been stuffing the works of personal computers into toasters, humidors, biscuit tins, lampshades, even a plush E. T. doll.
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What iTunes music costs: Ownership
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DATE: 10/23/2003 02:01:58 AM
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Here's a good article on one of the things that we lose by buying music from the iTunes store: ownership of the music we buy.
With this digital copy of Turn On the Bright Lights, however, my options seem drastically limited. Actually, beyond deletion of the files, my options are nonexistent. I only possess the idea of the music, the electronic fingerprint of its existence, perfectly non-negotiable, perfectly free of value.
But that’s the point, isn’t it. It’s never been about the copying. It’s always been an issue of ownership. If I sell my physical copy of Mellow Gold to the used CD store, I’m the only party profiting in the exchange. And if, in turn, the used CD store sells that same copy to another Beck fan, once again, it’s between the used CD store and the buyer. The cycle goes on ad-nauseam—endless exchanges of cash for that same disc, and not a taste for the record label.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYT headlines change typefaces
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DATE: 10/23/2003 02:02:13 AM
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The NYT is switching typefaces for its headlines, harmonizing on Cheltenham.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC launches iCan
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DATE: 10/23/2003 02:15:21 AM
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The BBC has launched the beta of iCan, its service for enabling Britons to act collectively to participate in their governments. This is a brave and important experiment.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Textbook arbitrage gets US students a deal
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DATE: 10/23/2003 02:20:59 AM
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American students are discovering that they are gouged by textbook publishers, who charge them double or triple the price that they charge for the same books in the UK and Canada. Now, thanks to the Internet, they're able to mass-import these cheap textbooks and get the same deal that students enjoy abroad.
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(via Lawmeme)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks
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DATE: 10/23/2003 02:21:43 AM
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Danny O'Brien's talk for ETCON 2004 is called, "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks." He's collecting tips from nerds for managing information and tasks at high density, and he wants to hear from you:
* Got to be geeks. There are plenty of books and guides for people who are managers or generally interested in organising their lives. I think geeks have their own problems and solutions. I leave "geek" deliberately undefined. You know what I mean.
* Don't got to be famous. If you know someone who you think is the best-organised geek you've ever seen, put their name down (or mail me, if you'd like to preserve their privacy. Famous people get picked for this list because we've both heard of them. There are plenty of my friends I'll be hobnobbing for this, and if your friends fit, I'd like to chat to them too.
* Don't worry about the genius thing. I'm well aware that Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds get most of their work done just be being naturally very good at programming. Doesn't matter. I'm still curious to see how they work. And why shouldn't people who are fantastic at coding get some hints on how to organise their lives from their peers, too? Just because you can code a reverse compiler in your sleep doesn't mean you pay your phone bill on time.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USB air-purifier
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DATE: 10/23/2003 02:23:46 AM
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A Chinese company is marketing a USB-powered ionic air purifier that "decontaminates the surrounding air by ridding smoke, dust, germs and other dangerous particles."
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free WiFi: cuz we don't have pay toilets, either
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DATE: 10/23/2003 02:26:18 AM
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Good Computerworld piece explains why giving away WiFi is good for business:
Panera Bread Co., based in Richmond Heights, Mo., has also embraced free Wi-Fi as a marketing tool and plans to offer the service in 130 of its 600 bakery cafes by year's end, eventually extending the service chainwide. Ron Shaich, the company's chairman and CEO, says he views free Wi-Fi as an amenity that has already started to attract and retain customers at what he calls a "minimal cost."
In fact, Shaich considers free Wi-Fi to be such an essential marketing tool that he dismisses any discussion of ROI. "What is the ROI on a bathroom?" asked Shaich, pointing out that the day of pay restrooms in restaurants has long since passed.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Invisible Cowgirl rides again: Susannah Breslin's new book
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DATE: 10/23/2003 08:21:59 AM
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Yee-Haw. Susannah Breslin, she of the recently shuttered Reverse Cowgirl's blog, has written a collection of sordidly sexual tales. And she will be reading chunks of YOU’RE A BAD MAN, AREN’T YOU? (Future Tense Books) at various locations in and around New Orleans, LA. Snatch it up for $7 at Amazon or Future Tense Books:
These poignantly provocative stories feature mannequin fetishism, midget love, and pornographers gone wild, providing the perfect literary accompaniment to the porn collection of any true intellectual. Bringing together the hilariously obscene and the obscenely hilarious, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? heralds the unexpected arrival of Pornographic Postmodern Literature. Fondling a book has never felt quite this good.
Warren Ellis says: “Susannah Breslin writes about sex in America the way Darwin used to study monkeys humping. The stories are like shattered glass; cold, hard and sharp. A window on the underside of the world, kicked in with a stiletto heel.”
Former VF editor, On Spec author, LA Innuendo publisher Richard Rushfield sez: “She is literature’s dominatrix, with a heart where her whip should be.”
READINGS: The Dragon’s Den, Friday, October 24th, 7PM, New Orleans, LA and Saturday, October 25th, 10AM – 6PM at The New Orleans Bookfair, Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA. Link to story in "Best of New Orleans."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese manga about bloggers
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DATE: 10/23/2003 10:30:03 AM
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Or a blog about manga, I can't really tell which. Link, ( Thanks Jean-Luc) Update: Link to translation from Matt's blog.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hijacked IPs
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DATE: 10/23/2003 10:37:56 AM
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BoingBoing reader Uncle Foobar points us to a website that deals with investigations of hijacked IP address blocks -- they're sort of like the "bad sectors" of the Internet, just as you have bad sectors on your computer's hard drive.
If you do not know what hijacked ips or even if you do know but are visiting this webpage for a first time, we strongly advise you read "Hijacked IPs Q/A" which explains in detail what hijacked IPs are and what can be done about it. We also maintain separate list of "hijackers" on this page - this has the same ip blocks listed here but grouped by hijackers and it is a recommended webpage to see after this one for those who are on this website for the first time. If you are searching for particular information you can also use our search engine (which includes ability to search in all hijacked ip block investigation evidence files)
If you believe particular large ip block (directly allocated or assigned by RIR) may be hijacked and is not used by proper company current, you can report it on this form (also use the same form if you have any new information regarding blocks already listed below, but if you directly represent the company listed as having hijacked or used ip block below, then use the disputes procedures to challenge this listing)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Popeye: New short story from Jim Ruland
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DATE: 10/23/2003 10:50:40 AM
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A new short from author/Navy veteran/tattooed hipster inkslinger Jim Ruland: The Previous Adventures of Popeye the Sailor. Look for his stuff in Barcelona Review, Exquisite Corpse, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Snip:
He goes by many names. In the Mediterranean he is Iron Arm. In Sweden he is known as Karl Alfred. In Denmark he goes by Skipper Skraek. Here in the Western Pacific he is best known as Father of One Hundred Bastards. Popeye’s past is forever creeping up on him. When he mutters his half-mad asides, is he speaking to those who would bring him down, or is he speaking to me?
To control Doan Vien, he introduced her to opium and made sure she had enough to smoke when he left her bedchamber each morning. Soon the pipe became more than an accoutrement for managing the quiet time between clients. Within a matter of weeks, it had become her master.
It is an easy thing to take out an eye. In the lexicon of tattooing, an anchor symbolizes a search for a home. This is ironic because a home is precisely what Popeye was not searching for.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Michael Robertson's SIPphones now unwired
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DATE: 10/23/2003 11:00:56 AM
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Consumer 'Net telephony company SIPphone.com (founded by Michael Robertson of MP3.com, Lindows, etc) announced today the release of an adapter that allows you to plug in any cordless phone and go. Previously, if you wanted to use their service to make supercheap (basically free) international calls, both parties on the phone conversation had to have a SIPphone. Now, you can use a "regular" cordless, with adapter. A single SIPadapter can be purchased for $79.99 and a 2-pack is available for $149.99.
Each SIPadapter comes immediately ready to use with no monthly fees or
activation fees. There is also no per minute fees, so callers can avoid large
long distance charges which means a SIPadapter can pay for itself in a very
short time.
There's background in this story I did for Wired News a few weeks back.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friday in SF: Seemen machine art shows
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DATE: 10/23/2003 11:09:33 AM
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Machine-art mad scientist Kal Spelletich offers two performances of "Live Audience Experiments with Machines and Robots" this weekend in San Francisco. Takes place Friday, October 24, at 8:00 & 10:00 PM. E-mail in advance for reservations, $10 per person.
Link to event details (including pre-reg instructions), link to photos, link to more photos. When your ticket includes a disclaimer like "YOU VOLUNTARILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BY ATTENDING THIS PERFORMANCE," you know you're in for a rockin', robotic good time.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony finally launches SDR (renamed QRio "Curio")
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DATE: 10/23/2003 11:19:57 AM
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BoingBoing pal David Calkins, RSA honcho and robotics guru, points us to the new Sony website for its consumer-oriented android Qrio. Dig the Engrish-flavored prose! I 'love' the seemingly random 'use' of 'quotation marks'!
"It is the product of cutting edge artificial intelligence and dynamics technology.
An entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy. Its name is QRIO. QRIO can gather information and move around on its own accord. QRIO not only walks on two legs, it can also manage uneven surfaces,
dance, recognize people's faces and voices, and carry on conversation. QRIO is eager to be friends with people.
Until a decade ago, the word 'robot' was associated primarily with industry.
Having robots perform tasks in place of humans is 'helpful',
but wouldn't it be 'fun' if people and robots could not only work together,
but live together too?SONY decided to create a 'partner' that talks to you, plays with you, encourages you."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired Magazine publishes story online before printing it
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DATE: 10/23/2003 11:30:43 AM
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Wired magazine did an unusual thing today: they published a story online before printing it -- because news broke. Amazon has a new, searchable book archive which amounts to a huge leap toward making books searchable.... a (semi)browsable database of 120 thousand books... 33 Million indexed pages. Wired had an exclusive on it -- a really smart piece by Gary Wolf -- but it wasn't going to hit newsstands for three weeks (ah, the wonderful 19th century world of magazine publishing), so editor Mark Robinson and others at the mag decided to put it online at wired.com. I'm told this was standard practice back in the publication's pre-Conde-Nast day, but it's interesting to see this happen again for the first time in what would appear to be a long while. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Picasa launches photo "Hello" digital photo communication thingy
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DATE: 10/23/2003 11:44:40 AM
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Two words that explain why this -- and similar new services I'm seeing of late -- are so important: Image conversations. Online consumer digital-photo-organizer service Picasa just launched a new realtime share feature called Hello. I had a chance to sit down with Picasa/Hello CTO Michael Herf for a demo over coffee a few weeks ago, and was totally blown away by it. Don't think there's a Mac version yet, but for Windows users, it is most certainly teh win. Snip from the press blurb:
'Hello' opens an entirely new way of sharing photos with friends and family through it's' private Peer-to-Peer network. Through this live experience, users connected via the internet are able to instantaneously share photos, and provide each other with immediate feedback using 'Hello's' chat function. 'Hello' simulates the experience of sitting down on the couch with a friend and showing them your photo album. This integrated software program eliminates email attachments so your readers can bring the highest quality of photos to life while allowing its users to organize, edit, make and share through its own private network
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos: Carnival Strippers
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DATE: 10/23/2003 12:00:47 PM
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Amazing photo collection, "Carnival Strippers," by photographer Susan Meiselas in 1974. All the trucker hats belong to actual truckers.
Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vintage '60s--'70s pr0n movie posters
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DATE: 10/23/2003 12:55:12 PM
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From the just-released book X-rated: Adult Movie Posters of 60s and 70s by Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh.
Shown here: "The Pleasure Machines," about -- what else -- Robo-Hos! Link (Via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tattoo Artist Database
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DATE: 10/23/2003 01:30:26 PM
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Online database of tattoo artists around the USA. Tattoo enthusiasts are encouraged to contribute new additions. Link (thanks, keith)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Naturally occuring alphabet on the wings of butterflies
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DATE: 10/23/2003 04:19:39 PM
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Armand sez, "Smithsonian naturalist and photographer Kjell Sandved one day found a butterfly with a silvery, gleaming letter 'F' woven into the tapestry of its wings. Having found one letter of the alphabet, he wondered whether there might be others butterflies flying around with letters on their wings. Could he find them all? He took the challenge but little did he know that it would take him 24 years."
Link
(Thanks, Armand!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nano-velcro sticks tight
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DATE: 10/23/2003 04:21:46 PM
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It's theoretically posssible to make super-velcro as strong as krazy glue out of hook-ended carbon nanotubes. (There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that carbon nanotubes are the next asbestos.)
The researchers estimate that nano-velcro would be about 30 times stronger than conventional epoxy adhesives. It would bond most solids together so powerfully that the materials themselves would break before the pads of hooks came apart. It would also be about 3,000 times stronger than a microscopic version of Velcro made by carving tiny hooks into silicon wafers
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aussie senators shout at Bush during Parliamentary visit
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DATE: 10/23/2003 04:34:32 PM
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Aussie Green Party senators shouted antiwar sentiments at GW Bush during a speech in the Australian Parliament. When they were ordered removed from the building, they sat down and refused to be budged.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Render 1,000,000 trees in eight seconds
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DATE: 10/23/2003 04:46:21 PM
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SpeedTree is a graphic utility for generating realistic forestry in gaming and other contexts. It can render out 1,000,000 trees in 8 seconds on a home-grade PC. There's a (Windows-only) demo app that sounds pretty mindblowing. No love on my Mac, though.
The Valley shows off some AMAZING new capabilities, including bump mapping, self-shadowing, specular effects, new trees (check out the giant Sequoias), animated grass, a new trunk algorithm and more.
Link
(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Shelley Jackson's SKIN project: (c) and your flesh
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DATE: 10/23/2003 04:49:19 PM
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Writer Shelley Jackson is doing a "mortal art" project in which 2,095 people will each tattoo one word of a 2,095-word story somewhere on their person. So far, 650 people have signed up via e-mail, and she's soliciting 1,445 more on her website. What's most interesting to me here is that Jackson intends to "retain copyright" over the work as a whole... but, the medium for this work is other people's bodies.
The text will be published nowhere else, and the author will not permit it to be summarized, quoted, described, set to music, or adapted for film, theater, television or any other medium. The full text will be known only to participants, who may, but need not choose to establish communication with one another. In the event that insufficiant participants come forward to complete the first and only edition of the story, the incomplete version will be considered definitive. If no participants come forward, this call itself is the work.
When the work has been completed, participants must send a signed and dated close-up of the tattoo to the author, for verification only, and a portrait in which the tattoo is not visible, for possible publication. Participants will receive in return a signed and dated certificate confirming their participation in the work and verifying the authenticity of their word. Author retains copyright, though she contracts not to devalue the original work with subsequent editions, transcripts, or synopses. However, correspondence and other documentation pertaining to the work (with the exception of photographs of the words themselves) will be considered for publication.
From this time on, participants will be known as "words". They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed texts, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Woodworking tools coming with bullshit EULAs now
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DATE: 10/24/2003 02:53:46 AM
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The vile, anti-customer shrinkwrap licenses that are universal in software have started showing up in hardware; particularily, jig-makers are requiring those who buy their templates to aver that they will not loan, sell or allow re-use of the templates they buy.
This is revolting: it comes down to the idea of expecting the world to pay your living, even though your business isn't sustainable. Copyright doesn't give you the right to restrict sale and lending of your works, but it does give you the power to shrinkwrap all of the copies of your work with a contract that claws back all of the public's rights in copyright, including the first sale right that enables reselling and so forth.
This is an abuse of copyright, plain and simple, and the manufacturer's claim that:
"...the purpose of the TemplateMaster is to clone itself. Therefore we are verifying your honesty that only you will use the tool and you will not be passing it around to others to use for free. It is exactly the same as the 'shrink wrap' agreement that comes with almost all computer software. Please help us fight 'tool piracy'."
is outrageous: we're chosen to get into a business that is tenuous and unsustainable. Therefore, we demand that you surrender your rights and legitimate expectations about what you may do with the goods that you lawfully acquire in order to ensure that we can keep our doors open.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Petition: Stop drive-thru mastectomies
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DATE: 10/24/2003 02:56:38 AM
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Robert sez,
Last year, my mother had breast cancer (cancer runs in my family like wildfire). She had to have a mastectomy, which is not trivial surgery; it's not open-heart surgery, but it does require a large incision to be made, which is always dangerous. And yet the insurance company mandated that she be out of the hospital within 24 hours. This is something that a lot of insurance companies have been doing, to a lot of patients who undergo serious surgeries (not just breast-cancer patients); get the patient in and out of the hospital in 24 hours. Costs stay down, profits stay up and the CEO gets another fifty-million-dollar bonus at the end of the year. Having seen my mother in the hospital when she got out, I can say -- and I hope you believe me when I do say -- that twenty-four hours is not enough recuperation time for surgery like that.
Lifetime TV has put a petition on their web site for people to sign. The goal: get the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act passed, an act that would require insurance companies to cover a minimum 48-hour hospital stay following such a surgery. It's about eliminating the "drive-through mastectomy" where women are forced to go home hours after surgery against the wishes of their doctor, still groggy from anesthesia and sometimes with drainage tubes still attached (my mother went home with one still attached).
Link
(Thanks, Robert!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Carnivore
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DATE: 10/24/2003 07:02:01 AM
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(1) eat bunny
(2) potted meat
(3) octodog
(4) ham sculpture
(5) poutine
(6) meat shake
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool free font: Capitalis Pirata (corporate pirates)
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DATE: 10/24/2003 07:07:14 AM
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Swelligant font set that mimics corporate logos. McD's, Honda, Ford -- all in there.
Link
(thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swarthmore and Diebold team up to undermine integrity of elections
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DATE: 10/24/2003 07:20:16 AM
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Ernie sez, "Manufacturer of e-voting machines Diebold has been running an aggressive notice-and-takedown DMCA campaign to suppress postings of their internal company memos that show Diebold to have been well aware of security flaws in their e-voting machines. Swarthmore students have started an electronic civil disobedience campaign to keep the memos public by hosting them on a variety of student servers, moving the files around as each student's page is taken down. Unfortunately, Swarthmore has been very risk-adverse and is shutting down student sites that host the memos even before Diebold sends a notice-and-takedown letter. Even worse, Swarthmore is now shutting down student websites that link to the central protest website (which links to the current location of the memos)."
Link
(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Big-ass solar storm tonight
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DATE: 10/24/2003 10:05:37 AM
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A very large solar storm is expected to take place tonight, and may cause some aurora borealis effects to appear throughout mid-latitudes (over the continental
US and Europe). Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Misbehaving, great new all woman group-blog
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DATE: 10/24/2003 12:50:17 PM
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Misbehaving, a new all-woman group-blog, with stellar contributors including Meg Hourihan, Caterina Fake, Danah Boyd, Liz Lawlet, Dorothea Salo, Halley Suitt, Gina Trapani, and Jill Walker.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: PHP insult gen
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DATE: 10/24/2003 09:48:17 PM
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This handy app generates polysyllabic slurs, so you don't have to:
* May 98 flaming SWBell technical support snuggle with a sharp stick while standing on your unusually small bottle of maple syrup.
* May one million homeless late night talk show hosts puke up Count Chocula after smelling milkshakes using only vaseline and your decaying popcorn.
* May 50 billion quadriplegic door to door salesmen implode Planter's Cheeseballs using only your Swedish fonics monkey.
* May a crowd of nuclear people named "dr. delicious" discover the secret of lard over your Swedish platypus.
* May a gross of fleshy jaywalkers ask "What chu talking about, Willis?!" to testicles, tinkering with your unusually small pontoon boat.
* May 32 Swahilli unix system administrators whip killer bees while performing a drive-by-shooting on your tv dinner.
* May three trillion free-balling members of Menudo swallow flaming crayons after genetically cloning your nose hair.
link (Thanks, Sean!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: GPS-tagged jpegs: location-indexed phonecam pics
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DATE: 10/25/2003 05:48:26 AM
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Boingboing reader Modesty writes:
So you take a moblogged photo, upload it to your MobileType blog, a bit of script finds the GPS Lat/Long/Alt co-ords in it and then links it to a mapping system, so you can see where the photo was taken. I think this is really great. I've already given up sorting all my photos, I just use a timeline system to find them. Now you could search them by location as well (get me all the photos I took downtown last month). On the other hand, when this starts to become standard on all GPS phones (and there's really no reason why it shouldn't), it better be a feature you get to opt-in to. Otherwise, there'll be an awful lot of people walking around taking photos with out realising each one has such detail tagged in the headers.
Link (via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: American Idol for Russian prisoners. Prize: freedom
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DATE: 10/25/2003 08:58:34 AM
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In a grotesque, totally po-mo spin on reality talent shows like "American Idol," Russian prison officials organized a contest in which prisoners sing their way out of jail. Six convicts pleased judges enough to win pardons.
Vladimir Volzhsky sang his own song, White Nights of the Perm Prison Camp. He has already released two albums.
The prisoners sang to 1,100 guests, most of whom were prison and police officials.
Technically, the six to be freed will be released because their parole is due, not just because of the competition. The 17 losers received a television and a small cash prize.
Link to story. Anyone who provides BoingBoing with links to MP3s of winning (or, heck, losing) tunes wins a reduced life sentence. UPDATE: An anonymous BoingBoing reader points us to MP3 files from prison singer Vladimir Volzhsky. Link to Russian page,
Link to English.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Progress for French street portrait shooters
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DATE: 10/25/2003 09:03:14 AM
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This fellow uses a digital camera, and carries a color printer around his neck. He'll take your souvenir portrait digitally, and print the results within five minutes. What, no Photoshop?Link ( thanks, Jean-Luc) update: BoingBoing reader Brian says: "While the photographer may be French, he is actually standing in front of
the Trevi fountains in Rome (the biggest fountains in the world). I saw the
guy when I went to Italy this summer."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen double-header: Celebrity
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DATE: 10/25/2003 09:11:02 AM
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(1) defacer
(2) stacey as britney
(3) fishyspoon
(4) impersonators
(5) b list
(6) celine dreams
(7) more than hucknall
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Citi's CEO's SSN sky-written over NYC
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DATE: 10/25/2003 12:01:14 PM
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The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights paid a skywriter to etch part of the social security number of Citigroups CEO in the sky over Manhattan, to protest Citi's lobbying against new consumer privacy legislation.
"Citigroup has gotten off pretty easy for advertising that it protects peoples' privacy, when in fact it has been not only sharing information among its many affiliates, but also spending $4.6 million lobbying in the first half of this year on this bill," Court said. "Their customers have to know that all those ATM fees they're paying are going to work against them. Citigroup has to face the fact that if they keep this up ... there's a good chance that one day they may face a boycott."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New car smell, in a bottle
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DATE: 10/25/2003 05:07:42 PM
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That sexy "new car smell"? In Cadillacs, it's enhanced by a distilled industrial perfume called "Nuance." The auto maker uses it to liberally coat the insides of fresh-off-the-assembly-line cars, as sensory stimulant for prospective buyers. From the New York Times:
"You pay the extra money for leather, you don't want it to smell like lighter fluid," said James T. Embach, G.M.'s manager for advanced features. "You want it to smell like a Gucci bag." ... The new-car smell need not stop at leather, however. "We believe there is growth potential in people wanting to be in this big burly S.U.V. with rich walnut and they want it to smell like wood," said Jeff Rose, senior vice president at Collins & Aikman.
Anyone want to place odds on how long before we see Nuance (or an eau de car knockoff -- perhaps Chanel No. 92 Unleaded) hits retail shelves? No telling what trouble a dab behind the ear might get you into. Link (thanks, Clive)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecamming the fires in LA and San Diego
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DATE: 10/26/2003 07:26:56 PM
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There's a public phonecam blog here, where people are snapping and uploading mobile shots of the fires currently raging throughout Southern California: Link. OMFG. The fire situation here in San Diego/LA is completely insane. I could see ash in the sky here in Los Angeles -- nevermind see, I can taste it. The air is dense with smoke, and we're like 40-50 miles away from the major blazes.... but even here, okay: I can usually see the Hollywood sign from the cafe where I spend most of my Sundays, and today I can barely see a couple of blocks away. There are fires in San Diego, too -- and several major airports were closed here for at least part of the day today, including LAX. Also, Sean Bonner at Sixspace gallery posted this. Update:
More photoblogs at Buzznet here and here. And this amazing sat photo of smoke plumes. Link (thanks, SJ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dean campaign notes from Gary Wolf
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DATE: 10/27/2003 03:34:04 AM
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Gary Wolf, an old Wired hand, has been working on a major story about the Dean campaign's use of the Internet. He's taking running notes on his blog as he organizes the peice -- it's fascinating stuff. Particularily interesting is the "Retroactive Manifesto for the Dean Campaign," identifying the principles that have worked best so far.
ALLOW THE ENDS TO CONNECT (David Weinberger)
This is the principle that resulted in the massive Meet-Up momentum, with 128,878 sign-ups as of tonight. What goes on at all the meet-ups? The Dean campaign has only the vaguest idea. “They are allowing the ends to connect without any centralized control from the campaign,” says David. “The goal is not necessarily to have messages flowing up and down. Democracy is supposed to be about people talking with each other about what matters to them and then organizing to get the things they want. If all you have a is a TV set and a ballot box, that's a shadow of democracy.”
Link
(via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Robot-assisted 2-minute jack-o-lanterns
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DATE: 10/27/2003 03:40:08 AM
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The Detroit Science Center's pumpkin-carving robot uses a drywall saw to render finished jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins in two minutes, then "as each piece is completed, the robot spears it in the center, then wipes it off by passing the saw through a fork located above the orange bucket."
Link
(via JWZ's Livejournal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 20,000 libertarians to move to New Hampshire
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DATE: 10/27/2003 03:45:23 AM
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The Free State Project is a coordinated group of 20,000 libertarians who are moving, en masse, to New Hampshire, to field candidates in key elections, in order to turn the state into a laboratory for libertarian experimentation. The Project hopes to bring 20,000 people to New Hampshire by 2006.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Meatspace wildfires undermine gamespace law and order
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DATE: 10/27/2003 03:46:39 AM
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Ted Castronove points out that meatspace fires can cause gamespace riots:
"All Sony Online Entertainment customer service support is closed due to the wild fires raging throughout San Diego and the proximity of those fires to the SOE offices. Normal operations will resume once this local emergency is over..."
In other words, a firestorm has knocked out the government that rules over 750,000 accounts. There will be no police officers on the streets tonight. If you're in the mood to do some random looting and griefing, now's the time.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wired runs a balanced Broadcast Flag story -- last week to fight the proposal
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DATE: 10/27/2003 03:51:31 AM
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As promised, Wired News has run an extensive, in-depth followup to the Reuters Broadcast Flag story it ran last week, soliciting comment from the activists who've been working on the issue since its earliest days. This coincides with a feature by Farhad Manjoo in Salon today, too. The Broadcast Flag will likely be enacted by Hallowe'en, unless we mobilize our friends to slashdot the FCC with letters in opposition to the proposal.
"The mandate comes with all kinds of obligations about what kinds of features you're allowed to offer with your product and how they must be implemented, and the people who control those requirements are the Hollywood movie studios and other technology and consumer electronic companies," he said. "It creates an environment where small innovators who are not willing to compromise for someone else's business model essentially get shut out."
He pointed to DVD technology as an example of what happens when technology is controlled by a particular group.
"In order to interoperate with DVD, you have to sign on with a bunch of agreements and private licensing arrangements under the auspices of the DVD forum," he said. "There's been no new feature added to DVD players since their introduction. And that's exactly the way Hollywood likes things to go."
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TITLE: UK salons provide captive audience for short films
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DATE: 10/27/2003 03:54:36 AM
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UK hair salons will showcase short films to customers in the chairs, who will be the last captive audience now that UK TV channels has stopped showing shorts.
Paul Trijbits, head of the Film Council's New Cinema Fund, which backs 150 shorts a year, said: "Short films are essential to filmmakers' development. With limited short film programming in cinemas and little support from broadcasters, this is a fantastic way of getting an audience."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New images from Iraq on Kevin Sites blog
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DATE: 10/27/2003 04:58:06 AM
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Kevin Sites is in Northern Iraq today. He just posted a slew of new photos to his blog, including the one below:
"During a night raid, while her brothers and sisters were crying this little girl was virtually stoic. He mother covered here face while the little girl peered right into my lens. I almost felt as if she was recording my image in her mind, just as i was getting hers on a memory stick."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paper-plate origami
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DATE: 10/27/2003 05:33:48 AM
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WholeMovement is a site devoted to paper-folding projects that use round sheets of paper -- specifically, 9" diameter paper-plates. Nice how-to, too.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WorldCon-running game
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DATE: 10/27/2003 06:58:28 AM
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If I Ran the Zoo Con is a game from NESFA Press in which you attempt to successfully run a World Science Fiction Convention. Greg Costikyan's got some good ruminations on it.
The game, in other words, serves a didactic purpose: It is intended to help wannabe WorldCon bidders at least understand some of the problems people have faced before, and (hopefully) get them to avoid making the most obvious mistakes. It serves that purpose admirably--and even if you don't plan on making a WorldCon bid, it's pretty fun to play, at least if you have an interest in science fiction and the field's personalities. It's rather amazing what can go wrong.
Since the digital games revolution began, starry-eyed twits have been going on and on about how games will change education and lead us all down a future glorious path in which everyone learns everything because it's fun to do so. This is, of course, nonsense, and always will be, since creating something interactive =and fun= is bloody hard enough, and insisting that the result should also cram some facts into people's heads is enough to turn "bloody hard" into "well nigh impossible." (And.... Have you noticed that every school computer lab in the country has Oregon Trail and SimCity installed--and few if any other games--and that this has been true for twenty years?)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Soccer balls made from plastic bags
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DATE: 10/27/2003 12:32:08 PM
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Nice photo-illustrated account of how kids in Burundi use off-cuts of fabric and old plastic bags to improvise soccer balls.
Link
(Thanks, Bob!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Whitehouse site blocks indexing of files about Iraq
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DATE: 10/27/2003 12:34:51 PM
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Whitehouse.gov has a robots.txt file that keeps directories containing the word "iraq" from being indexed by search-engines.
Sometime between April 2003 and late October, 2003, hundreds of instances of the term "iraq" were added to the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file.
On a quick look, It appears that the google cached version of the robots.txt file very nearly could be created by searching for the string "text" in the April 16 file and replacing it with the string "iraq" then adding the newly changed files ("text" to "iraq") to the original file, keeping the lines with "text" in them as well. That's from a quick look so I'm not sure it would hold up, but it appears it could explain the bulk of the "iraq" appearances.
Link
(Thanks, Kurt!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SoCal fires: more aerial imagery, online
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DATE: 10/27/2003 02:07:53 PM
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BoingBoing pal and benevolent wireless hacker Mike Outmesguine sends these links to mindboggling aerial imagery of the fires raging in Southern California. Link one, Link two, Link three, Link four.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: George Lakoff on why the conservatives seem to be winning
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DATE: 10/27/2003 02:15:37 PM
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My friend Bonnie Powell interviewed master linguist and cultural commentator George Lakoff at UC Berkeley about how the Democrats desperately need a lesson in language. This is a must-read:
"...Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gamespaces' toilets
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DATE: 10/27/2003 02:31:12 PM
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This Russian site features screenshots of toilets as they appear in dozens of video games, from the paleolithic VGA potties of Leisure Suit Larry to the nurby whimsy of Counter Strike's classy wooden-seat shitter.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aeron wheelchair
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DATE: 10/27/2003 02:33:02 PM
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Herman Miller has teamed up with a Tennessee company called Permobil to produce a powered Aeron wheelchair.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fire photoblogging from Jason DeFillippo
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DATE: 10/27/2003 03:39:53 PM
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Report from Machinima awards 2003
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DATE: 10/27/2003 04:53:22 PM
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Hugh sez, "The Machinima Film Festival 2003 happened on Saturday in New York City, and quite a lot of what it revealed was surprising. For example, Machinima is going pro much faster than most people anticipated - the films that swept the awards were either already commercial (and in one case bound for Sundance this year) or going that way - Red vs Blue is hopefully heading onto shop shelves soon. And the attendees were mostly older film-makers or film students, many of them already established as creators in other media."
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(Thanks, Hugh!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Entire house contents stolen
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DATE: 10/27/2003 04:56:42 PM
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Eli the Bearded sez, "Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a story about the entire contents of a man's SF apartment being stolen. All the furniture, photos, the food from the fridge. Everything. This was four months ago, and the police have no leads. The quirky thing about this, not mentioned in the article, is that it took place just about the same time an entire house (save the foundation) was stolen in Placerville, CA."
Link
(Thanks, Eli!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tekpunk author/visionary Kenji Siratori starts blogging
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DATE: 10/27/2003 06:06:37 PM
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BoingBoing pal Warren Ellis points to disturbed genius Kenji Siratori's brand-spankin'-new blog, and warns would-be readers to "start with small doses." Born in 1975, Siratori is the Japanese author of Blood Electric, and describes himself as a 'hypermodern writer working in a digital environment'.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spam ecosystem breeding hardier UCE
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DATE: 10/28/2003 03:58:41 AM
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Spammers acquire all the tools used by antispammers to filter email, and they tweak their spam accordingly. Antispam algorithms are acting like predators on the spam ecosystem, culling weak, easy-to-detect spam and leaving behind more virulent, hardier strains.
"There will be an enormous drop in HTML spam, and we will have more text-based and chatty spam," said Graham-Cumming. But "the volume of spam will increase as spammers send variants of messages to get them through."
Although no spammer has yet to fool every Bayesian filter, some tricks work better than others. One recent spam employed a trick that misspelled almost every word in the body, but was still coherent enough to get the gist through.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Audio Marx Brothers remixes.
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DATE: 10/28/2003 04:31:52 AM
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The FARKers are remixing Marx Brothers audio clips to make their own tunes, dialog, and comedy routines. I'm quite fond of this MP3 (617k).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Asia Carrera -- adult film star, geek -- evacuates from SoCal fires
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DATE: 10/28/2003 07:39:02 AM
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Adult film actress and self-professed nerd of porn (NSFW) Asia Carrera is among the many people evacuating homes in the line of fire today:
Homeowners packed their cars and fled several communities as adult film actress Asia Carrera left her Chatsworth townhouse after packing clothes, a computer and two cats into her metallic-blue Corvette. "I've been through it before, but this [fire] is a hell of a lot bigger," Carrera said. "I didn't sleep at all last night. I sat by the window and looked at the sky glowing red."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: San Diego Bloggers blog SoCal wildfires
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DATE: 10/28/2003 08:14:30 AM
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BoingBoing reader Joe writes:
I don't think I realized the impact of blogging until 9/11 -- and I was a bit dismayed when these fires hit that there seemed to be not a whole lot of coverage. But looking now and updating San Diego Bloggers I see that there are LOTS of people blogging about their experiences in the fires. Many first hand accounts of evacuees, many photos. Thankfully, things appear to be stabilzing. But the persistent smell, countywide, of campfire is still with us, and authorities say that they don't hope to have control of the fires for several more days.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My notes from Decentralized Economic Systems and Monetary Evolution
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DATE: 10/28/2003 08:29:30 AM
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Here are my running notes from the "Decentralized Economic Systems and Monetary Evolution" panel at the Future of Money conference.
Mobile phone companies have become billing systems. Payment
infrastructure is being integrated into software that you d/l to
your computer.
The info is more portable: your credit-record is more accessible,
it can be used to quickly get a credit-line, found a reputation
system, etc. As this is integrated into IT systems, we'll get a
wealth of apps, build on a centralized server.
How do you make the convenience sufficient to drive new market
apps? PayPal was successful by enabling new merchants -- lower
barrier to entry than getting a Mastercard acct. It's a P2P
system in that it allows individuals to accept payments. We have
a lot of IP in the antifraud systems that make that happens. The
centralized system allows for the antifraud systems, which allows
for the very fast creation of merchant accts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: New Napster launch
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DATE: 10/28/2003 08:45:33 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day", I speak with host Alex Chadwick about tomorrow's launch of Napster 2.0. The pre-release app was super-sweet and surprisingly stable, not entirely unlike iTunes, includes some goodies iTunes lacks, performs elegantly in Win environments, loved the massive catalog (found almost every obscure old-school hip-hop and dub track I wanted within seconds) but WMA + Win-DRM = ouch. Like a waiter serving you a hot, frothy, mouthwateringly delicious cappucino you've been craving all day -- then, peeing in it. Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Isenberg on the Future of Money
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DATE: 10/28/2003 10:41:35 AM
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David Isenberg has some interesting commentary on the Future of Money conference:
The agenda is interesting, but with glaring holes where the problems of the world are. For example, take the first session, "Digital Pearl Harbor: A Modern Disaster Scenario." I infer that this deals with what happens when the money system comes under attack.
Well, the money system already is under attack for anybody in the class formerly known as "Middle" who has children, according to The Two Income Trap, a jaw-dropping empirical study of 2200 U.S. families that went bankrupt.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Snip from Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl's Blog" Breslin's new book
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DATE: 10/28/2003 02:00:23 PM
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Excerpt from Susannnah Breslin's recently-released collection of PornoPoMo literary shorts, You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?.
Oh, he was a bad man. He had been terrible since the day he was born, before even then, perhaps. He had cried constantly as a small baby, masturbated obsessively as a young teen, and become the kind of man as an adult who only truly enjoyed himself when he was hurting other people. Now, he wanted to know, what was so wrong with that?
This badness, after all, had taken him to where he was today, sitting in his car in an empty parking lot with his brain like a dog running in a circle on a chain in the yard of his mind. Because, these days, he was King Shit of Turd Hill, a paid propagator of evil, a guy unabashedly enough in touch with his, well, bad self, really, that he made a living off it. Everyone else, he thought, could go and fuck themselves.
He was a pornographer, and he was not ashamed. In fact, he was terrifically proud. He told those who stood around him while he worked that porn stars were like game pieces, and porn sets were like chessboards, and he was like the god who moved them around. He would add, after a pause, But in this game, somebody always gets fucked in the ass! Then, he would laugh, and everyone else would laugh right along with him.
His life was hilarious, actually. Put that in your mouth, put this in your vagina, put the other thing up your butt. The variations were endless. It was their willingness that staggered his mind. The people in front of him were as malleable as freshly pulverized meat. Having been punched by their mothers, screwed by their fathers, and screamed at by their lovers, they stood limply before him and just did whatever he said.
Bonus: interview with the Invisible Cowgirl on Zulkey.com, here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool Wired mag illo: Zen and the Art of gaming
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DATE: 10/28/2003 02:30:44 PM
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Canadian artist Kenn Brown says: "The model was photographed in a studio against a white backdrop - he was then combined with the glowing mandala background (created with 3dsMax) and the wires were painted in using Photoshop. Final tweeking was done to the overall lighting on the monk to integrate all of the elements into a seamless image which runs full page in this month's Wired Magazine."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Back from the Islands and hungry for WiFi
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DATE: 10/28/2003 02:31:31 PM
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We're back from our four month trip to the South Pacific. We'd planned on being there for a year, but our kids ended up catching pneumonia, lice, and other creepy afflications and the health care there was really bad so we evacuated. I'll have an article at the LA Weekly about it in a few weeks. In the meantime, I wrote a piece about my search for WiFi connectivity for TheFeature.com. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ray Kurzweil on the coming revolution in IP
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DATE: 10/28/2003 02:36:02 PM
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Our cultural future? Software-based musical instruments, intelligent accompanists, and music as information, according to author/futurist Ray Kurzweil in a keynote speech delivered at a 2003 Audio Engineering Society convention -- The Future of Music in the Age of Spiritual Machines.
The issue of protecting intellectual property goes far beyond music and audio technologies, but the crisis has started in the music industry. Already, music recording industry revenues are down sharply, despite an overall increase in the distribution of music. The financial crisis has caused music labels to become cautious and conservative, investing in proven artists, with less support available for new and experimental musicians.
The breakdown of copyright protection is starting to impact musical instruments themselves. Synthesizers, samplers, mixers, and audio processors can all be emulated in software. It has been estimated that at least 90 percent of the copies of "Reason," one of the emulation software leaders, are pirated.
Music controllers still require hardware, but when full- immersion visual-auditory virtual reality environments become ubiquitous, which I expect by the end of this decade, we'll be using virtual controllers that are essentially comprised of "just" software. When we have the full realization of nanotechnology-based assembly in the 2020s, we will be creating actual hardware at almost no cost from software.
We are not far from that reality today, and for the recording industry it is already clear that the principal product music is pure information. In all industries, the portion of products and services represented by their information content is rapidly increasing. By the time we get to the nanotechnology era, most products will be essentially information.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Memory glasses
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DATE: 10/28/2003 02:41:00 PM
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MIT researchers announce a new invention: "memory glasses," intended to treat poor eyesight and poor mental recall.
Whatever you need to remember is programmed into a tiny computer that you wear. The computer sends messages in the form of light to a mini TV screen on the glasses. The messages -- like someone's name, or a word like keys or medicine -- flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. It's too fast for the eyes to notice, but not the brain. "Our tests have shown a 50 percent better memory with these than without, and the thing that's interesting is that people aren't even aware that anything is happening," [MIT spokesman Dr. Alex] Pentland said.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Burn, Hollywood Burn. More on blogs and SoCal wildfires.
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DATE: 10/28/2003 03:38:29 PM
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At left: snapshot I just phonecammed of the sky outside my home. Los Angeles is a very strange place to be this afternoon. Mad Max kind of vibe. Sunset, all day long. When I step away from the laptop, open the door, and step out into the street, I taste ash. See little bits of carbon floating in the air, little dark snowflakes. Smell smoke. Car is covered in fine black soot. It's hot here, but it's not just hot south hot, it's a weird kind of hot. Barbecued city hot. Freeways and roads are closed all over. Mayors appear on TV, telling entire cities to stay home from work.
I ate lunch on the westside with a friend today. Outside the cafe walls, in the open air, two tanned Hollywood moms in Gucci shades -- with infants at breast -- nibble on arugula. My friend exhales quickly, expressing disgust, then says, "How could any responsible mother just sit outside in the air with her baby today?" They're closing schools, too, because outdoor breathing is unsafe for children. Usually in the afternoons, you'll see a track-field of boys in football practice at the high school down the street from my home. Not today. Everything that's solid bears burnt dust; everything that's air is mud-orange, and I feel anxious, restless. Dirty and uptight. Boxed in.
Here are a bunch of links to blog coverage, thanks to Jonah at LABlogs.com.
Links from Oct 28: Joseph :: Extensive
collection on pictures in San Diego :: green
gabbro :: tolitz
:: Kenneth Cowan :: yambiguity
(pics) :: kristen havens
:: cruft (pic)
:: koganuts (lots of pictures and first hand
account) ::
Links from Oct 27: Brain
Farts (with pics) :: Give
War a Chance :: 20 20 Hindsight (multiple
posts) :: Sean
Bonner (with pics) :: Douglas Welch
(multiple posts) :: Tankbear
:: Grotani
:: Floorpie
:: Skits :: Dogs
don't purr :: Bitty Boo :: Kitty
Bukkake :: Everything is Wrong (pictures,
close to the fire) :: zilched
:: cognizant :: boing
boing (with links to photoblogs) :: baldilocks
:: xero79
(pictures) :: emmanuelle (pics) :: incadenza
(multiple entries) :: MyHuman (pics)
:: annika
:: marc brown (with links
to pics) :: painfully
cool :: los(t)
angeles :: blogging.la (dramatic pics)
:: Textamerica Fire Moblog (cam pics from
around the southland) :: Doc
Searls (with an inflight pic from today) ::
News/Satellite Photos: Satellite
shot showing fires from Ventura to Baja :: Yahoo
News Photos Detailed maps and affected area updates at GeoMac Wildland Fire Support's California Wildfire Viewer.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Code Genealogy of the New Napster
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DATE: 10/28/2003 05:13:47 PM
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The New Napster launches tomorrow, and -- apart from the crippling WMA/DRM barbwire -- it's really a rather nice app. With more than a little resemblance to Pressplay and MyMP3.com, from which it is descended. I asked MP3.com founder Michael Robertson (also founder of Lindows.com, SIPphone.com) to trace the digital DNA for BoingBoing readers; here is his take on who begat whom:
(1) VU buys MP3.com.
(2) VU owns half of pressplay (Sony owns other half)
(3) Pressplay uses MP3.com to build pressplay service.
(4) MP3.com had my.mp3 which made it fairly easy to do pressplay since framework was already built
(5) Roxio buys pressplay and got along with it 150 engineers in San Diego and the my.mp3 technology which is used for pressplay
(6) Roxio buys Napster
(7) Roxio takes pressplay, adds to it with tech all built by my ex-guys in San Diego
(8) Relaunches as Napster
So Roxio currently has a building in San Diego, one of the old MP3.com buildings full of engineers that do the work on Napster. It's like a soap opera.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Totally TMI: Survey shows information overload on the rise
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DATE: 10/28/2003 10:16:54 PM
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A group of researchers at UC Berkeley have just released research that shows global information production grew by 30% annually from 1999 to 2002.
"All of a sudden, almost every aspect of life around the world is being recorded and stored in some information format," said [researcher Peter] Lyman. "That's a real change in our human ecology."
According to the researchers, the amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media has doubled in the last three years. And, new information produced in those forms during 2002 was equal in size to half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collections of the entire Library of Congress, they added. The researchers also report that electronic channels - such as TV, radio, the telephone and the Internet - contained three and a half times more new information in 2002 than did the information that was stored.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fox threatens to sue Fox over Simpsons
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DATE: 10/29/2003 06:35:17 AM
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Fox News threatened to sue Fox Entertainment because a Simpsons parody of the Fox News crawler hurt Rupert Murdoch's feelings.
"Fox said they would sue the show and we called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it," Mr Groening told National Public Radio in the US.
"But now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls [tickers] on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news," he added on NPR's Fresh Air programme.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google to create searchable archive of 60,000 books
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DATE: 10/29/2003 06:36:33 AM
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Hot on the heels of Amazon's brilliant new text-search service for books, Google is getting ready to announce a similar service.
So far, Google has made agreements that give it the ability to scan as many as 60,000 titles, the report said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: America approves anti-shortness therapy
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DATE: 10/29/2003 06:37:53 AM
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The FDA has approved human growth hormone for use in treating shortness, so that parents of short kids can hack their hormone-balance and make them into beanpoles.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Biz-card-sized PDA with Crackberry functionality
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DATE: 10/29/2003 08:04:24 AM
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Here's some leaked info about a new business-card-sized PDA from Citizen that supports a WiFi card (or Bluetooth, if you're some kind of pervert) for email. Rumor has it that it will be targetted to corporations at 20,000-30,000 Yen ($185-$285) each.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CIA's goofy spy-robots
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DATE: 10/29/2003 08:12:28 AM
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The CIA has celebrated its 40th by showing off its misbegotten spy-robots (mechanical, eavesdropping bumblebees, dragonflies and catfish!) in a private exhibit.
In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency's scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it.
They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIP, Hal Clement
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DATE: 10/29/2003 11:20:26 AM
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Harry Stubbs -- AKA the golden-age science-fiction legend Hal Clement -- has died. He was a gentleman, a talented writer, and he always had the time of day for beginning writers. We were on panels together at Ad Astra, the Toronto science fiction convention, a couple times, and he always made me feel like I was worth listening to. I saw him and had a brief and friendly conversation with him in September at the World Science Fiction convention. He was very old, but sharp as a tack, and friendly as ever. Goodbye, Hal.
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(Thanks, Scraps)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MySociety: Technology in the public interest
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DATE: 10/30/2003 03:22:36 AM
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MySociety, a new project from the people behind FaxYourMP and VoxPolitics, launched today. MySociety is a foundation that supports the production of low-cost technology that is produced in the public interest:
mySociety.org will support projects that have three broad attributes:
1. Founded on electronic networks. This includes the internet, mobile and telephone networks, wireless, fax and anything related.
2. Real world impact. The projects must have an impact which is above and beyond helping users to use their computers or mobiles more efficiently. We understand that there is a degree of philosophical ambiguity here (isn't faster browsing a real life impact?), so we've developed the following list of desirable outcomes from projects...
3. Low or zero cost scalability. This is key. We are looking for projects that cost the same (or virtually the same) to run for ten or a million users. This doesn't exclude the possibility of SMS based services, but it does rule out one-on-one tuition or building a site just for your community.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Atkins Hacks: Overclocking your metabolism
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DATE: 10/30/2003 03:22:51 AM
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A Salon piece picks up on something I've been saying for a while: low-carbing is the geek diet. It's why conferences are now filled with nerds with jawlines.
Sure, if you eat fewer calories and exercise more you'll lose weight, but if, like so many dieters, you're unable to follow that advice, who cares if it's an airtight theory? "If that's science, then it's science that has yet to produce a lot of results because American asses grow rounder every day," says Doctorow. "If you ask people to reduce their caloric intake and increase their exercise, you won't get a lot of good results. It's like going around complaining that people have crappy passwords."
"The hacker ethic is not necessarily being a formally trained engineer, not necessarily being someone who understands the science. It's a reverse-engineering perspective: Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong, but it's based on empiricism," says Doctorow. "That's kind of the low-carb approach, which goes against the conventional wisdom about how you do nutrition and weight loss."
Scientific studies sanctioning the approach are just starting to appear, but there's a still a sense that one is tinkering with one's own body to somewhat unknown ends. "Maybe it will make us all grow third arms and go blind in 20 years," quips Doctorow. "It's sort of hard to tell. It represents a kind of hacker's approach, grounded as it is in jack-legged engineering rather than science."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MoveOn calls for homemade CC-licensed anti-bush TV spots
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DATE: 10/30/2003 07:34:44 AM
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MoveOn is sponsoring a competition to produce the best 30-second political TV spot showing "the truth about George Bush." The winning entry will be aired during the week of the State of the Union address -- and all entries must be opened under a Creative Commons license.
All eligible submissions will be posted on this web site and rated by visitors. The top rated ads will then be voted on by our panel of esteemed judges, including Michael Moore, Donna Brazile, Jack Black, Janeane Garofalo, and Gus Van Sant. The winning ad idea will be broadcast on television during the week of Bush's 2004 State of the Union address, and the winner will receive a recording of the ad as broadcast.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Extended iCal rant from a timezone warrior
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DATE: 10/30/2003 08:10:49 AM
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Apple's iCal has an unbelievably annoying, poorly thought-out system for handling timezone changes. Here's how it works: when you change the timezone of your system-clock, it adjusts all of your calendar items, so if you go from Pacific to Eastern time, you noon lunch appointment is "fixed" so that it shows up at 3PM -- the Eastern equivalent of 12PM Pacific.
What is the use-case for this? If I'm in San Francisco and I'm going to Toronto in a week and I make a 6PM dinner appointment with my brother and sister-in-law, should I enter it as a 3PM appointment, knowing that my computer will adjust this to 6PM when I land in Toronto and change my system clock? And if I do, how do I avoid double-booking myself when someone else asks me to have dinner at the same time and my calendar shows that 6PM isn't booked, that's fine?
In other words, why does Apple think I want to use Greenwich Mean Time, rather than my internal, subjective frame-of-reference, as my clock?
Now, Apple has updated iCal with a "switch timezones off" feature. Which doesn't work.
Here's how it doesn't work: Create an appointment with timezone "support" switched off. Make it from noon to 1PM. Now, go to your system clock and change your timezone to one hour back. The appointment will shift back by one hour. That's with timezone "support" switched off.
If you switch the "support" on and change timezones, iCal will ask you if you want to change the timezone "display" for your appointments. Answering "no" seems to solve the problem, as all of your events will stay localized for whatever timezone you were in when you created them. What's more, whenever you create an event, it gives you the option of specifying a timezone for it and adjusts it on your behalf -- so if you create a 12PM appointment while in EST and specify that its timezone is PST, iCal will move the event back to 9AM for you.
This stinks. For starters, that's all well and good when you and I make a lunch date for noon next week in New York, but it falls down when you call me back an hour later and ask me if we can make it brunch at 2PM -- now I have to go into iCal and work out that my noon-Eastern/9AM-Pacific appointment is really a 2PM-Eastern/11AM-Pacific appointment and, rather than simply bumping a noon appointment to 2PM, I need to subtract three and move a 9AM appointment to 11AM.
It gets worse, though: say you use the timezone "support" and just don't worry about the timezones. All start/stop times stay as you entered them, provided you keep on clicking "no" every time you change zones and iCal asks you if you want to update your display. So far so good. But woe betide you if you create an appointment with an alarm -- your 9AM alarm will ring a 6AM when you're on the west coast (if you created it while your clock was set Eastern), even though it will show up as a 9AM alarm in your calendar. There's a user-hostile design decision!
It gets even worse: Just wait until you synch iCal with your PalmOS device! Last night, I moved from Mountain to Central time. I adjusted the time-zone on my Clie and my Powerbook, but asked iCal to leave all my appointments in Mountain time. Then I made the mistake of synching my Clie: iSync decided that all the appointments in my Clie were an hour behind, and moved them up an hour -- including my wake-up alarm and the alarm for my 8:30AM conference call (Thanks, Apple!).
I have toyed with the idea of leaving my timezone set to GMT or some arbitrary value, and then spoofing my clock by manually setting it forward or back whenever I get off an airplane, but this royally screws up your email (which arrives at the remote end with bogus timestamps that indicates that it was sent hours in the past or the future, depending), and messes up any kind of incremental backup that uses change-dates to determine which version of a file to overwrite.
So, after all that whingeing, I have a solution of sorts. I used to use an app called "iCalTimeZoneFixer" that would automatically adjust your calendar items when you changed timezones, undoing the damage wrought by Apple's system. But with Panther and the new iCal, this doesn't work so good anymore: about 70% of the time, running iCalTimeZoneFixer deletes all the items in my calendar.
So this morning, while I was missing my phone call because my alarm hadn't gone off, I figured out a fix of sorts. It hinges on the fact that your iCal calendar file (which you'll find in ~/Library/Calendars/$CALENDARNAME.ics") is a flat text file, that you can edit with a text-editor like BBEdit.
1. Quit iCal, then make a copy of your calendar file. Open your calendar file in a text-editor (I used BBEdit)
2. Look for the string that denotes the city/timezone your calendar is localized to, i.e. "America/Chicago" or "America/San Francisco"
3. Go to System Preferences -> Date and Time -> Time Zone and use the map interface to find out the name of your desired timezone (i.e., if you're in America/San Francisco on your way to America/Denver, America/Denver is your desired timezone)
4. Search-and-replace the existing timezone string with your desired timezone and save
5. Start iCal up again, then go back to System Peferences -> Date and Time -> Time Zone and change your timezone. iCal will "adjust" your calendar and you'll find yourself looking at the correct times again
There you have it: using a text-editor and search-and-replace, you can undo the stupidest feature I've ever seen in a calendar app.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nokia's sideways phone makes people feel silly
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Sidetalkin' is a photoblog devoted to pix of people demonstrating how ridiculous they feel talking into the new "sideways" Nokia N-Gage phone, which requires that you hold it at a right-angle to your head and talk into the thin edge.
Link
(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century)
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TITLE: Hallowe'en, Jack Chick style
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DATE: 10/30/2003 09:32:41 AM
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If you're tired of celebrating Hallowe'en in a TP- and egg-free house, why not give you Jack Chick tracts instead of candy this year? Jack's got a bunch of suggestions for helping you warn your neighbors off of the evil crypto-druidic satanic costume-festival.
Link
(via EBA)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Protection from Pornography Week
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DATE: 10/30/2003 09:34:57 AM
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First they came for the bukkake websites, and I did
not speak out because I was not a bukkake website. George W. Bush says:
Pornography can have debilitating effects on communities, marriages, families, and children. During Protection From Pornography Week, we commit to take steps to confront the dangers of pornography.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Temporary IP address instead of boingboing.net
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DATE: 10/31/2003 05:05:30 AM
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As you may have noticed, we're in the middle of an extended outage. We've got a new server up and running (with lots of new posts), but the DNS is going to take a day or two. In the meantime, http://216.126.84.59/ is your friend.
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TITLE: Senator John Edwards to guestblog for Lessig
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DATE: 10/31/2003 05:41:26 AM
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Presidential hopeful Senator John Edwards is coming to Lessig's blog for a guest stint -- Lessig's doing this very swell thing in convincing presidential candidates to write frankly and personally about their aspirations on a blog. Shoot by and ask Edwards a question or two...
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crazy TokyoFlash watch: the Pimp Watch
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DATE: 10/31/2003 06:58:34 AM
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New on the killer TokyoFlash watch site, the Pimp Watch -- at $129, it's a little rich for my blood, but boy, that's some sweet watch action.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hack the universe
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DATE: 10/31/2003 08:15:20 AM
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BoingBoing patron saint Warren Ellis spake thusly, and lo; it was good:
Read this Scientific American piece. Short version; the universe is actually a two-dimensional plane packed with information, and the three-dimensions universe we perceive is nothing but an expression of that information. Matter and energy and life are, in fact, holograms. It leaves something very very interesting open for the future. If the universe is a vast two-dimensional plane of information -- then it can be hacked.
Link
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TITLE: Album covers redone in Lego
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DATE: 10/31/2003 08:22:41 AM
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Famous album covers re-envisioned in Lego. Can you guess this one? Nirvana's Nevermind. Link (thanks, jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Photo quiz: Serial killer or Programming Language Inventor?
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DATE: 10/31/2003 09:43:51 AM
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I got 7 out of 10. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lock-in prevents landfill
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DATE: 10/31/2003 10:38:00 AM
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The AP has run a good piece on cellphone recycling that is marred by an excitingly stupid lede about the likelihood that number-portability will cause many of us to throw away our phones once we get better deals under the new competitive rules, and that this will be an environmental disaster. Lock-in prevents landfill. Cheez.
The new rule that takes effect Nov. 24 allowing users to change wireless (news - web sites) companies without losing their phone numbers is expected to motivate as many as 30 million people to switch within the first year.
Those who do will need to buy new phones. That's because even carriers that use the same network technologies employ different encryption.
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TITLE: Powerbook 15" has known screen-defects
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DATE: 10/31/2003 10:47:58 AM
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The new 15" PowerBooks have a new known screen defect, in which big ugly white splotches show up on your display. My new 1GHz 15" has this in spades; Dan Gillmor's has a less severe case. The problem is that I suspect that I'll have to give the box back to Apple for a week to get it fixed, and there's no way in hell I can afford to do that any time soon.
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TITLE: Web archiving legal in the UK
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DATE: 10/31/2003 11:05:44 AM
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Parliament has enacted a law allowing the British Library to scrape and archive British websites.
"This new legislation will now mean that a vital part of the nation's published heritage will be safe," said MP Chris Mole, who supported the move.
The archive will comprise selective "harvesting" from the 2.9 million sites that have "co.uk" suffixes.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to bypass voicemail hell and get a live operator
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DATE: 10/31/2003 01:12:13 PM
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List of ways to get to a live operator for various banks, airlines, credit card companies, and support centers.
If you want to reach a live voice at Gateway, hit zero twice, but be prepared to wait on Hold for a little while.
For Hewlett-Packard say "agent" when you're first prompted to speak.
We found no magic bullet to bypass Dell, Apple, or IBM's automated voice menus.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Issue Two of LA Innuendo magazine now out
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DATE: 10/31/2003 01:22:20 PM
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The second edition of snarky LA Innuendo, post-ironic slicers and dicers of all that is Hollywood, is now out. If you're in LA on Wed. Nov. 5th, check this: editors and contributors will do standup at the Hudson Theater's Comedy Central Stage.
Link to the mag, Link to event details.
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TITLE: I'm interviewing Stross on the WELL
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DATE: 10/31/2003 02:34:06 PM
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I'm interviewing Charlie Stross for the WELL's inkwell.vue conference for the next two weeks or so -- it's free to read, and you can ask questions by emailing me and I'll post 'em.
I suppose you could say my second writing career dates to about 1998.
I took stock of myself and found (a) one unfinished novel (I was 12
months in to it), (b) one finished, unsold novel with structural
problems (bits of it have since re-surfaced in the form of "The
Atrocity Archives"), (c) one short story sale in 1998 -- and that was a
reprint of something I wrote in 1991. I was in my early thirties and I
realised that either I should give up, or I should get serious about
writing. I started by setting myself a goal of writing *and selling*
four stories a year, and a second goal of getting into the magazines
that get name recognition -- Asimov's, Analog, F&SF. Somewhere in the
preceeding decade I'd cross-fertilized a chunk of ideas between the
biological and computer science, and I'd also learned a little bit more
about human nature -- enough to handle characterisation better than
during my late teens or early twenties. (Parenthetically: this is one
of the reasons why we often see new authors erupt on the scene aged
thirty-something -- they've finally learned enough about human nature
to have something interesting to say about it.) So in 1998 and early
1999 I finished and sold "Antibodies" and "A Colder War" (which got me
into the Year's Best SF anthologies), wrote "Lobsters" (which got me
into Asimov's and onto the Hugo and Nebula ballots), completed the
novel now know as "Singularity Sky", and got serious.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hallowe'en and copyright
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DATE: 10/31/2003 05:58:22 PM
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Ernie sez, "On Halloween, what is more scary than copyright law? For example, did you know that the famous vampire movie 'Nosferatu' was almost lost forever due to copyright? On the other hand the makers of a Michael Myers Halloween mask won a lawsuit by proving they took the idea from the movie. Maybe someone can figure out how to get around pumpkin carving DRM. If not, some ghost pirates (or is that pirate ghosts?) have a solution for the file sharing problem."
Link
(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aaaaand we're back
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DATE: 10/31/2003 06:28:34 PM
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Well, it looks like we may or may not be back up (don't be surprised if we get an outage or two in the next couple days!).
Thanks to everyone who wrote in asking if everything was all right. The server threw a shoe, we moved it to a new host, all is well.
Thanks to Carl Steadman, for his years of hosting the box, and thanks to Ken Snider, who has taken over hostly duties. All hail the sysadmins.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Slashdot troll speaks
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DATE: 10/31/2003 07:53:38 PM
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Tom Coates has been discussing technical tricks for coping with message-board trolls on his Everything in Moderation blog, and, surpisingly, an avowed Slashdot troll has shown up to explain why he undertakes extreme technical measures to disrupt Slashdot's message baords.
...i believe that the people who must be treated with the most public, forthright, and open methods of censure are those who offend us the most. i do not believe that trickery is ever as effective as open methods because trickery is, at its core, dishonest to both the person being tricked and the online community you have secretly enacted policy for.
i believe that secret punishments inevitably lead to abuse and combativeness, that they lead to an arms race against people of equal intelligence and unlimited free time.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Post-circuit-switched voicemail
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DATE: 11/01/2003 05:48:31 AM
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Nice rant on how "circuit-switched" thinking is holding back advancement in telephony:
Assume a phone call requires an (extremely generous) 3Kb per second of audio. One hour of stored audio is about 10Mb of data. This is a pretty modest amount by the standards of modern flash memeory. Your mobile phone is perfectly capable of storing all your voicemail. The network is perfectly capable of transmitting the data in a sensible amount of time. Unlike email, most voicemail is listened to -- the amount of wasted download is small...
You should be able to listen to voicemails on your plane journey home. You should be able to reply to them on a store-and-forward basis, even when you're not connected to the network. And most of all, you shouldn't have to use a clunky telephony user interface to navigate a message queue. And you shouldn't be restricted to one device for accessing your own data.
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(via Werblog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spidering Hacks
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DATE: 11/01/2003 05:52:31 AM
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The latest book in the O'Reilly Hacks series, "Spidering Hacks," (written by Kevin "Morbus Iff" Hemenway and Tara "ResearchBuzz" Calishain) is out. It's the site-scraper's bible, with 100 tips and tricks for sucking in data from the Web.
Spidering Hacks takes you to the next level in Internet data retrieval--beyond search engines--by showing you how to create spiders and bots to retrieve information from your favorite sites and data sources. You'll no longer feel constrained by the way host sites think you want to see their data presented--you'll learn how to scrape and repurpose raw data so you can view in a way that's meaningful to you.
Written for developers, researchers, technical assistants, librarians, and power users, Spidering Hacks provides expert tips on spidering and scraping methodologies. You'll begin with a crash course in spidering concepts, tools (Perl, LWP, out-of-the-box utilities), and ethics (how to know when you've gone too far: what's acceptable and unacceptable). Next, you'll collect media files and data from databases. Then you'll learn how to interpret and understand the data, repurpose it for use in other applications, and even build authorized interfaces to integrate the data into your own content.
LInk
(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bluejacking: anonymous Bluetooth messaging
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DATE: 11/01/2003 07:09:53 AM
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Bluejacking is the art of sending a message to a nearby stranger's Bluetooth phone, having first encoded the message as the "Name" field of an address-book entry, i.e., "Name: I have bluejacked you, I 0wn l0l0l0l0l." BluejackQ is a new community site for posting bluejacking experiences.
Ellie and I were just outside a shopping centre in town and she was searching for a victim near where we were sitting. She came up with a contact; some Nokia, I'm not sure which one. We found out a few minutes later that our victim (who showed an un-canny resemblance to Alan Ford) was sitting in Starbucks with his wife.
After they'd left Starbucks, we followed the couple all over town for about 30mins. He couldn't understand what was happening to him and was looking around all over the place for his bluejacker! We went up and down, around in circles, dodging his stare; quite literally, up in lifts, down on escalators!
Link
(via Smartmobs)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYC event tonight: The Art of Gwar
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DATE: 11/01/2003 08:57:34 AM
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Gwar, the blood-spewingest band in the history of punk/metal/comic book chic, is an ensemble of musicians, artists and performers with stage names like Oderus Orungus, Jizmak Da Gusha and Flattus Maximus. Tonight in NYC, Fuse Gallery launches an exhibit of THE "ART" OF GWAR, and a launch party takes place at Lit Lounge with a live performance by members of the band. Show runs through mid-December.
Kiss, Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson. When it comes to onstage theatricality and over the top rock and roll antics, these are the names that come to mind. However, to a loyal army of fanatical fans, known affectionately as "Slaves", none hold a candle to Gwar, the undisputed kings of the theatrical concert-performance. The Richmond, Virginia based band is infamous for their heavy but humorous music, pornographic alien-barbarian costumes and outrageous stage props which include huge squirting phalluses, rubber fetuses and gallons of stage blood.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The problem with abundance
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DATE: 11/01/2003 02:58:01 PM
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BoingBoing pal Clayton says:
Here's an interesting piece on the unforeseen problems that can arise in modern society when previously scarce resources become commonplace... from obesity to P2P. And it kind of puts the Amish desire to "freeze" progress in a new light, as if it were the desire to blunt massive societal upheaval from new tech developments.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SIGGRAPH call for art entries, synaesthesia is 2004 theme
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DATE: 11/01/2003 03:00:33 PM
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A call for entries in the 2004 edition of SIGGRAPH's annual Art Gallery was issued this week.
Synaesthesia will showcase original digital art that explores new connections between the senses - the technological, the aesthetic, and the critical - and emerges from the conjunction of cybernetics and human vision, inner as well as outer.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Illegal Art: "Sonny Bono is Dead"
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DATE: 11/01/2003 03:11:25 PM
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Sonny Bono is in fact dead, and that is also the title of the latest compilation project from Illegal Art.
This project is a protest against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act, which passed through Congress in 1998 and was upheld
by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. This act diminished the
public's ability to access older works while granting more control to
corporations anxious to preserve a few copyrights from the 1920's.
Copyright law continues to expand and defeat its original purpose of
promoting advances in the arts and sciences. These excesses damage
the evolution of our culture and only serve corporate interests.
We encourage artists to liberally sample from works that would have
fallen into the Public Domain by the year 2004 had the Sonny Bono Act
failed. Artists are also encouraged to create new works by sampling
Sonny Bono's output (or other artists who embraced the notion of
copyright lasting forever). The deadline for submissions is January
31, 2004.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool way to organize travel images for online presentation
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DATE: 11/01/2003 03:19:52 PM
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Nice UI: cartoonist/illustrator/blogger Kean organized online photos and sketches from a recent trip to NYC along the subway map. Link (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Faux stereoscopic photos: "space wiggle" Burning Man images
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DATE: 11/01/2003 03:36:13 PM
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While it's true that a fair amount of actual wiggling takes place at Burning Man, the "space wiggle" images at this site are just a nifty optical illusion:
"This method of presenting stereo images uses animated .gifs to rapidly switch between left and right images. For most of us the brain will impose a crude sense of dimensionality on a wildly wiggling scene."
Link to smaller image size (for dialup folks), Link to larger images (for broadband gluttons). NSFW warning: includes naked (and wiggling) body parts. (Thanks, JP!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Thom Yorke, watch out for that mile-high ice cream cone!
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DATE: 11/01/2003 03:57:25 PM
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Hilarious story (several weeks old, sorry -- been traveling) about an experiment in which a San Francisco Bay Area 5th grade class listens to Radiohead, then draws what they hear. Some of the resulting images look like they could pass for actual Radiohead album covers. Snip:
"We will play a career-spanning selection of Radiohead songs; the kids, equipped with Sharpies and blank sheets of paper, will simply draw whatever the music suggests to them. We don't even give them the name of the band. They don't know anything about Radiohead, the mountain of criticism, the mythology. Their thoughts and interpretations are pure, unsullied, literally unique.
They are also extremely bizarre. The kids consent to this experiment, if only because [teacher] Mitsi [Kato] tells them to. They do, however, immediately request that we play Sean Paul or 50 Cent instead. 'This is not hip-hop,' Mitsi says. 'I'm not asking if you like it.' She doesn't have to ask. They don't. "
Link (Thanks, Mara!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Clie: saucy little bastard
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DATE: 11/01/2003 03:58:50 PM
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Purportedly, this is a leaked image of Sony's new Clie. It is teh sexy, at least on the surface.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japan street couture snapshots
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DATE: 11/01/2003 04:11:05 PM
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Portraits of iconoclastic Japanese street fashionistas. I really like the punk bride images (like the one at left from Meiji Jingu subway, 2001) because they remind me so much of Mexican-American gangbanger girls' street style here in Southern California. Instead of rhinestone tears, imagine black inkdrops on a young chola's cheeks.
Link
(Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pornoportraiture, deconstructed: every Playboy centerfold, ever
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DATE: 11/01/2003 05:08:53 PM
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Artist Jason Salavon created a suite of photographs which portray a mean average of every Playboy centerfold foldout for the past four decades, from 1960 through 1999. The series of composite Digital C-prints traces, meta-style, the evolution of sexually explicit popular portraiture.
Salavon "generates [and] reconfigures large collections of communal data to present new perspectives on familiar objects. Using software processes of his own design he produces compositions that are most often exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations."
Link (yes, worksafe, you prudes) (via Wiley)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photo: river of blood. Bloggers ask "hoax?", Sea Shepherd responds.
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DATE: 11/01/2003 06:39:35 PM
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In this photo shot near a Japanese fishing town, fishermen work on a boat full of just-killed dolphins, as a diver prepares to submerge into blood-filled water.
Link.
UPDATE #1: Bloggers are debating whether or not this image may have been digitally manipulated to make the water appear redder. See MeFi. AP distributed the photo, but cited Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (an organization protesting dolphin killing in Japan) as the image's source.
UPDATE #2: I contacted Scott Sheckman, Communication Director for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, about the retouching allegations. He responds to BoingBoing readers here:
The color of the pictures are authentic and were not retouched in any way.
The Sea Shepherd crew shot digital, film and video which was compared and
authenticated by the Associated Press before they accepted the pictures.
To support this statement, I refer you to this recent story by the Toronto Star
which reports that AP verified the photos before distributing.
A video of the slaugher is available here.
The color of the water is the result of at least 60 dolphins being bled to
death in the shallow cove close to shore. The Japanese government allows
the slaughter of approx. 20,000 dolphins a year in near-shore drives such as
the one documented in Taiji.
One of the photographers explains that tools used to stun dolphins included sonar, and says of the images: "They really did represent very well what we'd seen with our own eyes that day.... that color is 100% accurate... It was just as horrifying as it looks. It truly is the same most unnatural colour I have ever seen. It was one of the most deep crimson reds I had ever seen... and to realize that it came from a living organic being was shocking."
UPDATE #3: Sea Shepherd president Captain Paul Watson says to BoingBoing readers:
Associated Press required an affidavit and the original pictures. You can be assured that A.P. would not have released photos without authentication. For those who persist in denying the truth about the photos, I suggest a visit to Taiji, Japan to verify the accuracy themselves. The slaughter is still going on.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mieville on Tolkien
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Award-winning not-dead fantasy novelist China Mieville excoriates dead seminal fantasy novel JRR Tolkien in a most entertaining fashion:
Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious - you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike - his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien's clichés - elves 'n' dwarfs 'n' magic rings - have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: On 60 Minutes tonight: P2P and the movie biz
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DATE: 11/02/2003 12:07:23 PM
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Tonight, the CBS television show 60 Minutes will include a segment on digital filesharing and the film industry -- and the opportunity this industry has to avoid replicating the music industry's blunders with regard to P2P. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iranian cafe for bloggers
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DATE: 11/02/2003 12:14:58 PM
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From Hossein Derakhshan's blog:
"I'm not sure if there is any Cafe for bloggers in other cities, but there is one in Tehran. Actually it's recently opened in a northern area of Tehran and Ive heard that it's quite popular among Tehranian bloggers. It's called Cafe Blog and based on the website, they held some basic technical workshops for their members. There are some photos from their opening on their website."
Link (thanks Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR pano of "Matrix: Revolutions" Australia premiere
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DATE: 11/02/2003 06:41:42 PM
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QTVR enthusiast and photographer Peter Murphy says:
Hi Xeni, I shot a panorama for my blog at the premiere of Matrix Revolutions last night -- at Sydney Opera House. Keanu, Hugo Weaving, the producer ... were there. Security was tight -- only ticketed fans could watch the action.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gawker jumps the snark
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DATE: 11/03/2003 09:02:07 AM
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Dude, Gawker is OVER. Not shut down, I mean, like, so OVER. As in, when New York magazine publishes a feature which includes phrases like "Gawker Explosion," "Gawker Effect," and "Gawker-fed hotness" about your site, all your je ne sais blog vanishes like a broken RSS feed in the night. (Note to God: please, please, please, don't let them ever pen so much as a word about BoingBoing, or I'll have to go back to spamming friends with lists of art-porn urls. Oh wait, I still do that! OMG! LOL!).
Still, Choire has teh funny. And Elizabeth Spiers is somehow managing to stave off the ravages of obscurity despite having turned down Jason Calacanis' infamously unrefusable offer. As for Nick Denton, the blogtrepreneur is said to be launching new sites, very soon -- the first of which is Fleshbot, a hot pink orb devoted to all things porny. Next up: A Gawker-like site focused conceptually and geographically on Hollywood, and a DC-centric blog deconstructing politics, spin, and everything else that lies inside the beltway. Link to NY Magazine hand job story. (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Buddhist sanctuary mental patients
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Gallery of black and white photographs of mental patients in a Taiwanese Buddhist sanctuary. Link
(via signormori.clarence.com)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Liveblogging childbirth via hospital WiFi
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DATE: 11/03/2003 02:46:44 PM
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Matt sez, "the very cool presence of wi-fi here at the hospital means that I can blog my second daughter's birth as it happens. Finally my two favorite things (my daughters and my laptop) come together!"
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TITLE: EFF sues Diebold!
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DATE: 11/03/2003 02:48:46 PM
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EFF is suing Diebold on behalf of the Online Policy Group, who are being threatened with a bogus copyright action in retaliation for linking to a website that describes the technical failings off Diebold's voting machines.
"Diebold's blanket cease-and-desist notices are a blatant abuse of copyright law," said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "Publication of the Diebold documents is clear fair use because of their importance to the public debate over the accuracy of electronic voting machines."
Diebold threatened not only the ISPs of direct publishers of the corporate documents, but also the ISPs of those who merely publish links to the documents. In one such instance, the ISP Online Policy Group (OPG) refused to comply with Diebold's demand that it prohibit Independent Media Network (IndyMedia) from linking to Diebold documents. Neither IndyMedia nor any other publisher hosted by OPG has yet published the Diebold documents directly.
"As an ISP committed to free speech, we are defending our users' right to link to information that's critical to the debate on the reliability of electronic voting machines," said OPG's Colocation Director David Weekly. "This case is an important step in defending free speech by helping protect small publishers and ISPs from frivolous legal threats by large corporations."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eno lecture in SF on Nov 14
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DATE: 11/03/2003 02:59:36 PM
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Kevin Kelly sez,
Musician/producer BRIAN ENO will be giving a rare free public lecture next week at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 14, in the Herbst Pavillion. Coffee bar opens at 7pm, lecture at 8pm. Directions to Herbst Pavillion are here.
This is not a concert. Brian Eno will be speaking about "The Long Now." His talk will be the first of a monthly series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking, sponsored by The Long Now Foundation (http://www.longnow.org). Eno's talks are usually as amazing as his music...
Admission to the lectures is free (a $10 donation is welcome but NOT required). The hall holds about 700 people. For unticketed lectures like this it's a good idea to come early for a good seat.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Johnny Meah: The Czar of Bizarre
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DATE: 11/03/2003 08:00:14 PM
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Since the 1950s, Johnny Meah painted more than 2,000 circus sideshow banners. Here's his personal gallery of surreal canvases and writings on the carney and circus life. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Man drops phone in train toilet, causes big hassle
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DATE: 11/03/2003 08:06:42 PM
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"A man riding a Metro-North train dropped his cell phone in a toilet and got his arm stuck trying to retrieve it Thursday, forcing the train to stop and delaying the evening commute for thousands of people." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sustainable fish wallet-card
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DATE: 11/03/2003 09:53:24 PM
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The Monterey Bay Acquarium has produced a wallet-card that grades west-coast fish based on how environmentally sound the fishery practice is for each species.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Immersive VR Pacman
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DATE: 11/03/2003 09:56:07 PM
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The Human Pacman: an immersive 1980s video-game experience. I'm not convinced it's not a hoax: where are the screenshots?
Human Pacman is an interactive ubiquitous and mobile entertainment system that is built upon position and perspective sensing via Global Positioning System and inertia sensors; and tangible human-computer interfacing with the use of Bluetooth and capacitive sensors. Although these sensing-based subsystems are weaved into the fabric of the game and are therefore translucent to players, they are nevertheless the technical enabling forces behind Human Pacman.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Simpsons fan creates tomacco
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DATE: 11/03/2003 09:57:38 PM
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A Simpsons fan has created tomacco by cross-breeding tomatoes and tobacco:
"What we found was nicotine in the leaves". said scientist Ray Grimsbo. The plant grew off the tobacco roots and sucked up the nicotine, just like Tomacco on The Simpsons. The lab hasn't tested if the actual tomato has nicotine in it yet, but they say it probably does. "Generally in the fruit there is more material concentrated because that's what everything's going through to produce the fruit for the next generation. I would expect there would be more." And that would make the real life tomacco plant very poisonous. Rob Baur says he grew the tomacco plant just for fun, just to see if it would really work.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photographic place map
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DATE: 11/04/2003 06:53:16 AM
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Following on the heels of this site blogged last week, another online collection of images organized by points on a map. I love how the photographer/webmaster says, "Please make the room dark and look [at] the photographs." I can't recall ever having read those instructions on a photoblog before. Link (via Cup of Chica)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Microsoft's new blogging tool
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DATE: 11/04/2003 06:55:37 AM
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The new weblogging tool currently in development at MS Research Lab, "where you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends." Link (thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robolympics games in SF December 13
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DATE: 11/04/2003 07:20:08 AM
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From antweight to sumo fights, expect an overdose of robotic fun in the RSA's biannual show, including movie robots, stormtroopers, and lots of competitions. Plus, a vendor area selling cool robot stuff. link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool laptop bags for chicks
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DATE: 11/04/2003 07:23:16 AM
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The "Slim," a new bag/sleeve hybrid designed specifically for G4 Apple PowerBooks and other laptops. Bag can be inserted into another bag or carried with or without the removable shoulder strap. Lots of textiles to choose from. Starts around $79. Swankolicious. Link (thanks, Clayton)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: RFIDS and privacy
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DATE: 11/04/2003 07:30:02 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Madeline Brand about RFIDS -- radio frequency ID tags -- and the technology's potential impact on commerce and personal privacy.
Wal-Mart executives are scheduled to meet with some of their top suppliers today to establish RFID compliance standards. Participants in the meeting to be held near Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters are said to include Kraft Foods, Proctor & Gamble, Tyson Foods and Unilever. A number of large IT companies are also expected to be in town for an RFID-related tech event slated for Wednesday, including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Philips Semiconductor and SAP.
Both Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense plan to require that their major suppliers implement the wireless tracking technology by early 2005 -- a move similar to Wal-Mart's push for UPC (bar code technology) some two decades ago.
Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Debut of first Wired blog: Bruce Sterling, Beyond the Beyond
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DATE: 11/04/2003 09:16:01 AM
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Now online: "Beyond the Beyond" by Bruce Sterling, the first blog launched by Wired Magazine. Forthcoming launches are said to include a Mac-related blog from veteran Wired News correspondent Leander Kahney. From the "Wired Blogs" home page:
Wired News and Wired Magazine Blogs are new features that allow our writers and readers to post their thoughts on recent developments and ideas in their corner of the Web. As a new site feature, these blogs will grow and develop into living, breathing areas for the exchange of links, thoughts, and information.
Mr. Sterling explains that he will not be incorporating comments into said blog:
I plan to blog to this site EVERY SINGLE DAY except for weekends and major nondenominational holidays. Minor planetary calamities such as military invasions, Microsoft worms, electrical blackouts, abject market collapses, a patch of California the size of Rhode Island catching fire from climate change -- not only will these mishaps not slow me down in my blogging duties, they will probably SPEED ME UP. Note that there is NO COMMENTARY ALLOWED in my pristine, high-toned blog here. Why? Because you might be a spammer, that's why! When I have a big red anti-spam button I can push that will cause Homeland Security to arrest you immediately and deport you to Guantanamo, then you may comment. Until then, no blog-reader of mine will ever be forced to endure your lame illegal product pitches, and that goes double for you harebrained flamers and trollers.
Incidentally, I understand these sites will all use a weblog-building tool from Tripod -- part of the Terra/Lycos family of companies, which owns Wired News, but not Wired Magazine, which is owned by Conde Nast.
Link to "Beyond the Beyond."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Announcing Link-Fu: Battle of the Bizarro URLs
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DATE: 11/04/2003 10:31:38 AM
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OK. Listen up, freaks -- here are the rules. Link-Fu is an online competition where during a specific, pre-established period of time -- in this case, Thursday, November 6 from 9AM-12PM, Eastern Time -- you send us one url that links to some very weird something somewhere. Something so bizarre and wild and intriguing and fascinating, that no-one else (or as few nobodies as possible) has seen.
Judges: Warren Ellis, Invisible Cowgirl, Mark, Pesco, and yours truly. We declare a winner based on whatever we happen to like best. Not the grossest, not neccesarily Farkish or Rotten. Just the flat-out most bizarre -- though grotesquery is not neccesarily out of the question. In fact, here was last week's barfbag winner (WARNING: extremely distgusting, NSFW, Cowgirl found it). The winner wins the title of High Master of Link-Fu, until we hold the next battle.
So, if you'd like to compete in the website smackdown -- e-mail the funkiest, most potently bizarro url-age you can find to linkfubattle@yahoo.com on Thursday, November 6 from 9AM-12PM, Eastern Time (US). We will announce the winner Friday morning. May the best link win. (disclaimer: the whole thing was Warren and Cowgirl's idea.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wi-Fi's new security standard has a weakness
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DATE: 11/04/2003 11:46:12 AM
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BoingBoing pal Glenn Fleishman writes:
I wrote a piece yesterday for the Mac journal TidBITS about the recently released implementation of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) in the AirPort Extreme product line from Apple. WPA replaces WEP by fixing its various holes. That article drew a response from Robert Moskowitz, long-time wireless security expert, who sent me a paper and his permission to post it about a serious weakness in the consumer version of WPA: if you choose short keys that are comprised of real words, WPA keys can be easily broken through passive access to a network. I've written this up and posted his paper here. Interestingly, the problem is all at the presentation layer, not at the encryption layer. It's a flaw with how manufacturers are offering users the chance to create and enter WPA keys, and thus could be easily fixed with a driver update -- no firmware necessary.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Movie trailer for Disney + Baseman's "Teacher's Pet"
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DATE: 11/04/2003 11:49:49 AM
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Walt Disney Pictures' "Teacher's Pet" trailer is now online. The feature film, based on the art of Gary Baseman, is about a talking dog who finds a way to make his dream come true to become a real, living boy. Written by Bill and Cheri Steinkellner, directed by Timothy Bjorklund, starring Nathan Lane and Kelsey Grammer. Rated PG, opens January 16th. Link, or visit Disney.com/TeachersPet.
NYC BB readers: Gary Baseman will have a personal appearance signing his NEW Japanese "Dunces" Toys at KidRobot/Soho on November 6th from 5pm to 7pm.
126 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012, 212.966.6688. (thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC screws America, adopts Broadcast Flag, doom, gloom, armageddon
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DATE: 11/04/2003 03:12:52 PM
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We've lost a round in the Broadcast Flag fight. The FCC today decided that it didn't need to listen to the tens of thousands of Americans that wrote to it, asking to have this terrible proposal set aside, and instead adopted a rule proposed by billionaire movie studios whose biggest problem is figuring out how to spend the riches they made off the VCR after we saved their asses by telling them to get bent when they tried to get the Betamax banned the last time around.
"The FCC today has taken a step that will shape the future
of television," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property
Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Sadly, this represents a step in
the wrong direction, a step that will undermine innovation,
fair use, and competition."
"The broadcast flag rule forces manufacturers to remove
useful recording features from television products you can
buy today," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. "The
FCC has decided that the way to get Americans to adopt
digital DTV is to make it cost more and do less."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Herring fart
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DATE: 11/04/2003 11:05:37 PM
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It turns out that herring fart. It's not digestive gas, though. Scientists call it a Fast Repetitive Tick: a FRT.
Firstly, when more herring are in a tank, the researchers record more FRTs per fish. Secondly, the herring are only noisy after dark, indicating that the sounds might allow the fish to locate one another when they cannot be seen. Thirdly, the biologists know that herrings can hear sounds of this frequency, while most fish cannot. This would allow them to communicate by FRT without alerting predators to their presence.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Egg carving
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DATE: 11/04/2003 11:08:19 PM
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Gallery of eggshells carved and sculpted using a high-speed rotary tool.
Link
(Thanks, Jed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roger Wood's exploding alarm-clock
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DATE: 11/04/2003 11:10:44 PM
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I like the look of Roger Wood's latest: an exploding alarm-clock. That face is just marvellous.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wired's things of the past
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DATE: 11/04/2003 11:19:04 PM
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Phil Gyford -- late of Wired UK -- Matt Locke has come up with a list of things that Wired magazine has called "a thing of the past." Wired was the first mag I ever found that put its full text online in a searchable archive: clearly, this is the kind of thing that fulltext-search was meant to enable.
Incessant calling and voicemails might become a thing of the past
Long delays in counting absentee ballots would be a thing of the past
Housework is already a thing of the past
In just 20 years, chores will be a thing of the past
Hard landings would be a thing of the past
Paying royalties for George Gershwin tunes could become a thing of the past
Remembering long lists of website passwords [will be] a thing of the past
Chronic insomia could be a thing of the past
Could the deafening roar of gas-powered engines become a thing of the past?
Entertainment as a passive group experience is a thing of the past
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 400 year old Italian snatch art for sale on eBay
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DATE: 11/05/2003 05:07:18 AM
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Someone's selling a "Rare wax anatomical model genital organ !!!" on eBay. The item is purported to be ca. 17th century, from the anatomical science division of Italy's University museum of Bologna. Link (Thanks, ESC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Unwired in Kashmir
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DATE: 11/05/2003 06:53:41 AM
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Tourism officials in India's conflict-torn region of Jammu and Kashmir want to woo foreign tourists back with Wi-Fi:
"Two months ago, mobile phones were forbidden in tense Indian Kashmir. Now, anyone can wirelessly surf the Web from the houseboats and gondolas dotting the waters of its famous Dal Lake. (...) 'This facility... [will] tap travelers who would like to remain connected to the rest of the world,' Jammu and Kashmir state tourism chief Saleem Beig said Monday. 'It goes a long way in sending the right kind of signals to tourists.'
Link to CNN story, (via unwired, thanks shawn yeager)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Human genome online
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The data from the open-source project to map the human genome and release it to the public domain has put the genome online.
Ensembl presents up-to-date sequence data and the best possible annotation for metazoan genomes. Available now are human, mouse, rat, fugu, zebrafish, mosquito, Drosophila, C. elegans, and C. briggsae, Others will be added soon.
Link
(Thanks, Zed)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: First-ever VoIP telco?
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DATE: 11/05/2003 07:39:15 AM
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Via Kevin Werbach's blog:
VC Fred Wilson announces that ITXC, Tom Evslin's VOIP backbone company, is merging with Teleglobe to form the world's third largest long-distance company. This is a significant development. Like several of us, Tom recognized years ago that VOIP was the future of the telephone business, but he actually did something to make it happen.
Link to ITXC press release.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Latest Kevin Sites blog-post from Iraq: Hearts and Mines
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DATE: 11/05/2003 08:44:22 AM
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New photos and first-person accounts from northern Iraq, from MSNBC combat corrrespondent Kevin Sites:
"Well sir, it's been a rough deployment. This -- then the stuff at home -- my wife's probably cheated on me 15 times," he shakes his head and takes a long
drag from the stub of his cigarette. Many of the men we see tonight are doing a version of the same thing, smoking -- shaking their heads.
"I looked around town today," one lieutenant told me, "I was hoping to find someone doing something bad, somebody I could hurt -- but there wasn't one. Just people that needed my help."
It's just that kind of mission whiplash that has confused and demoralized so many troops in Iraq. Soldiers are ordered to go on a night patrols or raids--where danger can lurk at every corner or behind every door -- and life and death decisions have to be made within the hair-fraction of time it takes to pull the trigger on M4 assault weapon -- then the next day, they're told to monitor the selection of a new local mayor or to rebuild a school.
Link to photos, Link to story.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Todd Lappin takes over the Guestbar!
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DATE: 11/05/2003 09:55:48 AM
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A warm thank you to Jason Scott for his wonderful secret histories of the online world! Now we welcome Todd Lappin to the Guestbar. I met Todd more than a decade ago when we were both interned in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Since then, he's been my advocate, editor, and collaborator at Wired and Business 2.0, helping bring some of my favorite work into print. A renaissance man, Todd can also be spotted tooling around San Francisco in his fully-outfitted Telstar Logistics company vehicle. Indeed, Telstar Logistics is the only firm I trust for my supply chain needs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WIPO has crazy toilets
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DATE: 11/05/2003 10:56:41 AM
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I'm in Geneva, representing EFF at the World Intellectual Property Organization meeting on the unbelievably misbegotten Broadcast Treaty, an Orwellian masterwork that makes the DMCA look like junior-high playground strong-arming.
The high point (other than working with the amazing coalition of activists that Jamie Love and the Civil Society Coalition have gathered here) was the utterly bizarre self-papering toilets in the WIPO building. I was so taken by these things that I had to shoot a movie -- I knew I could never describe them adequately with words alone.
675k AVI Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gadgetgasm-inducing new products from Sony
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DATE: 11/05/2003 12:02:51 PM
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Sony announces plans for a new, all-in-one, handheld gaming device: the PlayStation Portable is said to be digital music player, video player, mobile phone, and then some. An iPod rival is also in the works for 2005 release, with a projected street price of as low as $60 US. Link, pic via Gizmodo, Sony PDF presentation which includes detailed specs. (via unwired)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Poison Ivy Awareness
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DATE: 11/05/2003 12:04:22 PM
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I always thought it was easy to identify poison ivy. Three leaves, red-tinged, waxy appearance. But this site has set me straight. "Poison ivy is so adaptable that it grows under very different conditions, so it shows up looking different ways." Be sure to check out the gallery of rash photos, especially if you enjoyed the pics of my ringworm. Link (Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Smart Dust Gets Back to Nature
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DATE: 11/05/2003 12:10:54 PM
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Here's a piece I wrote for TheFeature about using Smart Dust to monitor bird breeding on an island off the coast of Maine. (Smart Dust are small wireless sensors that can form ad-hoc networks.) Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mack White's conspiracy comics
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DATE: 11/05/2003 01:39:30 PM
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I'm a longtime fan of Mack White's comics. He did a regular strip for the print edition of bOING bOING called Jokey, which used a secret language. Mack recently let me know about his terrific blog, which is loaded with weird conspiracy stuff (including a link to an article that looks into Gen. Wesley Clark's involvement in the Waco massacre). Here's a one page comic Mack did for The Comics Journal about the Kennedy assasination, and how the reason behind it is similar to the current war in Iraq. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: International Protection from Crappy Porn Week of Resistance
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DATE: 11/05/2003 10:09:47 PM
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Now there's a (>cough<) mouthful. Anyway: the final week of October, 2003 was declared "Protection from Pornography Week" by President Bush. Some object to the declaration's equation of "pornography" as a whole with child porn, or adult entertainment produced in a coercive, exploitative manner. In other words, they believe porn per se isn't a problem -- bad porn is. And, by golly, they're taking action.
What do I mean by "crappy"? Well, basically, I mean pornography that doesn't affirm what sexuality really should be all about -- or what being a human being really should be all about. (...) So I thought I would launch a new campaign... because I believe that what we really need isn't to be protected from pornography, but to show resistance against crappy pornography and support for better, sex-positive, humane pornography that is produced without exploitation, without perpetuating damaging stereotypes, and that fully affirms the principle of informed, revocable consent.
Link (Thanks, Jonno)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: On your marks... get set... LINK-FU!
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DATE: 11/06/2003 06:00:59 AM
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Link-Fu starts now! Here's a reminder, in case you missed Tuesday's post:
Link-Fu is an online competition where during a specific, pre-established period of time -- in this case, Thursday, November 6 from 9AM-12PM, Eastern Time -- you send us one url that links to some very weird something somewhere. Something so bizarre and wild and intriguing and fascinating, that no-one else (or as few nobodies as possible) has seen.
Judges: Warren Ellis, Invisible Cowgirl, Mark, Pesco, and yours truly. We declare a winner based on whatever we happen to like best. Not the grossest, not neccesarily Farkish or Rotten. Just the flat-out most bizarre -- though grotesquery is not neccesarily out of the question. In fact, here was last week's barfbag winner (WARNING: extremely distgusting, NSFW, Cowgirl found it). The winner wins the title of High Master of Link-Fu, until we hold the next battle.
Starting now, through 12PM EST (9AM Pacific), e-mail the funkiest, most potently bizarro url-age you can find to linkfubattle@yahoo.com. We will announce the winner Friday morning. May the best link win.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WSJ breaks down lawyer's potential winnings from SCO v IBM
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DATE: 11/06/2003 06:58:38 AM
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This WSJ article says attorney David Boies could see $49.4 million or more from representing SCO in its $3B lawsuit alleging IBM stole trade secrets over Linux software-- even if SCO's case is unsuccessful.
Documents SCO recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission say the Lindon, Utah, software firm "is in the process of finalizing" a deal with its counsel. Under the agreement, SCO would pay the lawyers 20% of the proceeds of "a sale of SCO during the pendancy of litigation." (...) In 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq SmallCap Market Wednesday, SCO was at $17.87, giving the company a market capitalization of $247 million. If SCO sells at that price, the Boies firm would be entitled to $49.4 million -- and probably more with the premium that usually comes in a takeover.
Link (subscription required) (via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beasties exonerated for sampling
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DATE: 11/06/2003 07:04:02 AM
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The 9th Circuit has ruled that the Beastie Boys' sampling of a three-note segment of James Newton's composition to the song "Choir" did not infringe Newton's copyright.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Napster's Flash "Street" ad campaign
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DATE: 11/06/2003 07:06:39 AM
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Napster Bad -- not. This series of flash shorts on the Napster.com site seem to be a sort of animated equivalent to the faux graffitti ad campaign. Both the posters and the shorts cast that be-headphoned mascot as a hunted rebel The Man just won't leave alone. Sure, it may smell like teen spirit -- but Old Napster it ain't, despite the conspicuous attempts at street cred. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes: research from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering
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DATE: 11/06/2003 07:12:13 AM
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My latest issue of Lab Notes is online. Please take a look!
* The first ever nanofluidic transistor manipulates proteins and DNA instead of data.
* Neutron beams detect the clandestine transport of nuclear weapons materials in shipping containers... by triggering fission reactions!
* Studying the basic physics of the San Francisco Bay helps preserve delicate ecosystems and protect our water supplies.
* Esoteric mathematics amp up productivity in the workplace, from sandwich shops to banks.
* ....and more!
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dashboard cig lighters are the new cup-holders
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DATE: 11/06/2003 07:19:19 AM
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The automotive cig lighter has become a kind of lingua-franca for chargers of all descriptions -- this CNN piece calls it "the new cup-holder." The same thing is happening in USB: I charge virtually all of my devices (phones, PDA, etc) with retractable ZipLinq USB cables these days -- sure makes travelling easier.
In model-year 2004, there are 47 vehicles that come, standard, with five or six lighter sockets, according to Carsdirect.com. In 1998, no vehicles came with that many...
The Pink Pussycat Boutique, an "adult novelty" store in Manhattan, sells a variety of devices that can be plugged into car cigarette lighter sockets. We'll go no farther.
If you get a flat tire, Safetycentral.com sells a 12-volt impact wrench for removing lug nuts. Among other car lighter-friendly devices the site sells are a 20 oz. coffee pot, a frying pan, an oven, a curling iron, an electric cooler and a special adapter so you can plug multiple devices into one lighter. That way you can make breakfast, curl your hair, run your impact wrench and maybe light a cigarette while you wait for your beer to get cold.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Maher Arar: terrorist? Innocent computer scientist? It's who you know.
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DATE: 11/06/2003 07:19:33 AM
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Maher Arar -- a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen who operated a computer consulting business -- was arrested by US officials during a stopover at New York's JFK airport, then and deported to Syria by the US government. The FBI flagged him as a "suspected terrorist." After year of torture in a Syrian prison (he describes having been beaten with objects including shredded electrical cables, and living in a urine-filled, rat-infested 3'x6'x7' "grave"), they seem to have decided he was innocent, and safe enough to ship back to Canada. From Joi Ito's blog:
Obviously, it's probably easier for a Syrian national to get on a "list" than a Japanese, but this really scary. They say he had had a relationship with another suspected terrorist who is also being imprisoned and tortured now in Syria. He says he barely knew the guy. So what does this mean for us? If we meet someone, we should not "become friendly" with them until we are certain that they are not a suspected terrorist. What does this mean? We need to make sure they don't hang out with other suspected terrorists. So if you believe in six degrees, it's likely at some point you will be a suspected terrorist.
How do they know if you hang out with someone? Friendster? LinkedIn? Your email? We need to be VERY careful about the privacy of not just the content of our communication, but the privacy of who we are in touch with, often called sigint, or signal intelligence. Seriously though, this will cause a chilling effect on meeting, calling, emailing or otherwise "being in touch with" anyone who you don't know very well that could land you on the "suspected terrorist" list.
Among questions being raised by Arar's advocates: why was he deported to Syria, notorious for violating the human rights of prisoners, instead of being returned back to Canada -- where he lived for 15 years, and owned a technology company? There are now calls for an open investigation in Canada -- and in the US. Here's a link to one article in which Arar describes his imprisonment, Another in which his Canadian citizenship is said to have prevented more severe torture, and here's a link to the Google News search. (Thanks, Ned)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net turns 300
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DATE: 11/06/2003 08:03:04 AM
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A few weeks back, BoingBoing reader Pauly M. and friends created a "BoingBoing tribe" at the online social networking site Tribe.net to "further the banter and chitchat that goes along with boingboing." The group appears to be growing, and just passed the 300Update: 400!-member mark.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Urban sport of"Parkour" for wannabe spidermans
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DATE: 11/06/2003 10:56:50 AM
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Mindbending videos of a guy running up walls, jumping from building-to-building, etc. It's like a superhero come to life. Link (Thanks, Ben!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Antispam "Turing Tests" can't distinguish between the blind and software
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DATE: 11/06/2003 03:04:53 PM
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The W3C has singled out "captchas" -- the pseudo-Turing-Tests intended to keep spammers form using automated tools to create freemail accounts in bulk -- as disastrous for the blind and other disabled users of the Internet, since they rely on sight and reading comprehension to work. IOW, it's not a good Turing Test if the blind fail it as often as a computer does.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chart: How to interpret Friendster photos
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DATE: 11/06/2003 03:47:29 PM
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Via buttafly:
Photo Type | What They Want You to Think | The Truth
* Dark, brooding | Doesn't care | Dangerous, possibly a pirate
* Dude jamming on guitar | He's in a popular band and rocks out all the time | Unemployed
* Guy with beard sitting on couch | Sits on the couch a lot, has a beard | Sits on the couch a lot, has a beard
Link (Thanks, ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bullshit EULAs good for something
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DATE: 11/07/2003 12:00:23 AM
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You know the bullshit in software clickthrough agreements that says, "If you disagree, take this back to where you bought it for a refund?" A law student took his unopened copy of MSFT Office back to a shop with a no-returns policy and used it to force them to give him a refund.
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Belkin router "upgrade" tries to sell you censorship
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DATE: 11/07/2003 07:57:33 AM
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Belkin's new router firmware "upgrade" automatically redirects http sessions to a Belkin sell-page for some bullshit censorware filtering crap. That's some upgrade: from a router that routes packets to a router that pushes the antithesis of free expression.
In response criticism, a Belkin product manager came forward this week to confirm the behaviour was designed into the products as a way to make it easier for consumers to sign up to a free trial of its parental control software. Belkin's Eric Deming is keen to allay concerns about the technique which have produced sharp criticism of the company on the news.admin.net-abuse.email newsgroup.
Link
(Thanks, Rick!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Hipster Zen
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DATE: 11/07/2003 08:01:07 AM
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handbook
mr. hipster
free williamsburg
trucker hat
feathered hair
bingo
bumplist
terrorists
why hipsters suck
anti-hipster forum
not lost in translation
her
i hate nyc
six months ago
and, of course...
gawker [which we love, shamelessly. --XJ]
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IRS has a $1MM tax-refund form
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DATE: 11/07/2003 08:29:52 AM
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How much is Dubya's tax-break worth to the hyperrich? Enough that the IRS has a new (thanks, IAW!) form for the electronic deposit of a tax refund of $1 million or more.
28k PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act
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DATE: 11/07/2003 09:35:09 AM
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Several members of Congress who (now looking back with regret) voted in favor of Ashcroft's PATRIOT act are supporting a bi-partisan bill called the Benjamin Franklin True Patriot act, which will restore many of the Constitutional Rights that Americans had before Bush and his cronies gutted them.
Rep. Butch Otter, a conservative Republican from Idaho, joined Rep. Bernie Sanders, a liberal independent from Vermont, to call for the repeal of the PATRIOT Act provision Ashcroft claims to have never used [spying on the library habits of citizens -- Mark]. Otter had his own quote from the same founding father.
"It was Thomas Jefferson who said, 'In questions of political power, speak to me not of confidence in men, but bind them down from mischief with the chains of a Constitution,'" Otter said. "That mischief is what we're seeing today and could see tomorrow."
UPDATE: My friend and former Wired crony Dan Brekke found plenty of errors in my post. He writes:
Ever the editor, let me observe:
1) That the Bernie Sanders bill mentioned in that item (HR 1157, The Freedom to Read Protection Act (which would repeal USA Patriot's library-search
provisions), was introduced by Sanders alone back in March and cosponsored
by about 20 others; haven't checked all the cosponsors, but most are liberal
Democrats. Otter, one of the two representatives from the worst state in the
Union, signed on five days later. That's just my analness at work; for all I
know, Otter was in discussions with Sanders about the measure before it was
introduced and only signed on formally later. It's not necessarily strange
to see ultra-conservative Republicans sign on to privacy causes embraced by
the left, by the way; the first exhibit being Phyllis Schlafly, who's been a
loud (if not leading) opponent of mandatory key escrow.
2) That the Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act is a separate bill (HR 3171),
introduced in September by Dennis Kucinich and many of the same liberal
Democrats behind HR 1157; in fact, the sponsors list includes just about
every member of the Bay Area delegation. The bill aims to repeal a long list
of USA Patriot provisions that loosened the reins on government spying.
3) Both of these bills look like they're buried in committees. The last
listed "significant action" on the Freedom to Read Protection Act was nearly
six months ago. The Benjamin Franklin Act has been referred to five
different committees.
Link (Thanks, Mack!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Link-Fu contest: Here are the winners.
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DATE: 11/07/2003 11:17:19 AM
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The votes are in. For this week's battle to find the most bizarre and obscure links on the web (background) there were many judges, and countless submissions: so, we have multiple winners. And no, those aren't hanging chads you see scattered around the floor of Link-Fu competition headquarters. That's just leftover confetti from the inauguration party last night. Today, my friends, a generation of Link-Fu masters is born.
* Christina James was the first to submit Koonago Factory. Comments: Several judges picked this one. Dark, violent Japorn featuring tiny cartoon fairy-doll women? What's not to like? (NSFW rating: some nudity and grossness, but nothing Rotten-grade).
* Wayne Mercier submitted The International Trepanation Advocacy Group. Comments: Invisible Cowgirl says, "Because nothing says scary like I Got a Hole Drilled in My Head personal testimonials."
* Steve Lew submitted
Mutant Midget Interracial Lemon Porn. Comments: Xeni says, "Strange fruit. Mmmmmmm."
* Steve Mills submitted Coffee Table Wife. Comments: Warren Ellis liked it. Go figure.
* Lucas Emery submitted Aussie Scrotum Shop. Comments: Made Warren smile.
* Zach Rodgers submitted Ordo Magazine. Comments: Invisible Cowgirl says, "A beauty of a blog chock full of everything that's weird and wonderful on the web." (NSFW guide: Links to some sexually explicit stuff, but links to lots of other stuff, too).
* An anonymous Link-Fu Master Ash Kalb submitted Jesus is With You Everywhere. Comments: Xeni liked the scary trucker picture.
* Peace Rug and Wholesome Swimsuits
came from from Judson. Comments: Mark thought they were weird, silly and fun.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Economist replies to Valenti on Broadcast Flag
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DATE: 11/07/2003 11:51:11 AM
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Arnold Kling has a PhD in Economics from MIT, and took great umbrage at Jack Valenti's characterization of the Broadcast Flag decision at the FCC as a victory for consumers. He's written an open letter to Valenti in reply.
I will not buy any device for the purpose of receiving HDTV. Instead, I will gladly purchase devices that will route packets via the Internet Protocol over that spectrum. In the neighborhood of my house, IP packets will take precedence over HDTV signals.
I recommend that other consumers adopt the Jack Valenti Spectrum Re-allocation. I am talking about massive civil disobedience of the FCC. Remember, anyone who receives television over cable or satellite will give up nothing by assigning higher priority to IP packets. For anyone who misses broadcast television, it would be better to give them taxpayer dollars to subscribe to satellite TV than for consumers to pay the Broadcast Flag hardware tax.
By re-allocating spectrum from HDTV to wireless IP, we can kill two legacy birds with one stone. We can hasten the demise of the phone companies--because with a wireless "last mile" the wireless Internet can replace traditional land lines and cell phones; and we can show Jack Valenti, the movie industry, and the television industry what it really means to "score a big victory for consumers."
Link
(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fair Seuss on SCO
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DATE: 11/07/2003 12:25:44 PM
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The Grinch Who Stole Linux:
SCO hated Linux! The GNU Linux season!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be that their heads weren't screwed on quite right.
It could be, perhaps, that their shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that their bank account was two sizes too small.
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(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Amazing sculptures by woman with Down Syndrome
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DATE: 11/07/2003 03:31:36 PM
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"Judith Scott (born 1943), a fifty-five year old woman with Down's Syndrome, has spent the past ten years producing a series of totally non-functional objects which, to us, appear to be works of sculpture, except that the notion of sculpture is far beyond Judith's understanding. As well as being mentally handicapped, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language."
Link (via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shirky on SemWeb
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DATE: 11/08/2003 01:01:00 AM
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Clay Shirky has published a ringing denouncement of the Semantic Web, pointing out that this is a project that elides the hard bits and solves the easy bits -- it's not far off from the digital identity world, where 70 percent of the use cases are easy problems that could be solved with some new W3C form elements, and the remainder are deep, philosophical problems we've been arguing about since Roman times.
First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.
All the actual complexities of matching readers with books are waved away in the first sentence: "You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want." Who knew it was so simple? Meanwhile, the trivial operation of paying for it gets a lavish description designed to obscure the fact that once you've found a book for sale, using a credit card is a pretty obvious next move...
No one who has ever dealt with merging databases would use the word 'simply'.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chimp filmstar turns to painting
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DATE: 11/08/2003 01:04:39 AM
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JWZ just got the coolest birthday present ever: a painting painted by Cheeta, the chimp who played opposite Johnnie Weismuller in the Tarzan movies.
The artist is now 71 years old and living in Palm Springs, Florida, enjoying his new career as a painter.
His name is Cheeta, and he's the world's oldest living primate.
Note: the text next to the image above is a quotation (as is any text that appears indented on this page). It contains an inaccuracy. If you are moved to be pedantic in regards to this inaccuracy, I suggest you take it up with the person who wrote it, not me.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: McDonald's should get a dictionary and look up "trademark"
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DATE: 11/08/2003 01:45:19 AM
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McDonald's misunderstands the nature of dictionaries: that is, to observe the language as she is spoken and document her. McDonald's is up in arms over Merriam-Webster's inclusion of "McJob" in its current edition. Naturally, McD's has trumped up a completely groundless trademark claim to back this up. Trademarks don't let you control how people speak -- they only allow you to stop other commerical outfits from confusing your customers; certainly, they don't give you the power to stop the reporting of the fact that English speakers use "McJob" to describe a crappy job.
Walt Riker, a spokesman for McDonald's, said the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant also is concerned that "McJob" closely resembles McJOBS, the company's training program for mentally and physically challenged people.
"McJOBS is trademarked and we've notified them that legally that's an issue for us as well," Riker said.
(Note: Every time I post here about trademarks, I get a flurry of emails from people patiently "explaining" to me that you need to sue everyone who utters your trademark or risk losing it; without covering ground I've run over before, suffice it to say that this is wrong, and it's a fairy tale that trademark lawyers scare their clients with in order to drum up more business, and I don't care if your in-house counsel or nephew-in-law-school swore it was true, it's not. Really.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Art for cockroaches
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DATE: 11/08/2003 12:41:22 PM
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The Viennese arts/science collective Monochrom has put together an exhibit called "Art for Cockroaches." Every month, a different arts group is invited to design an environment in which Monochrom's tribe of giant South American cockroaches are placed, to act as audience for, and aesthetic judges of the work. There's a 24/7 webcam on the little critters, and the next environment (based on Mars-scapes) goes live next week.
"The errant because otherwise constantly resting regiment of comedic Punchiorettes of Zecantros" presents "Freedom Or Liver Loaf" // About the work: What may art for cockroaches mean? Do you really have to confront the roaches with themselves? With their blattopterian sociopathies? We like to conceive of art as a means of social intervention: the roaches are confronted with the radical option of eating or going free. A cockroach-gallery solid as a liver-loaf. You can either eat it and savour the moldy serendipity of the golden cage in which you choose to stay, or you can abdicate and escape into the wild freedom of the Electric Avenue.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: We've had Napster since 1909, and the sky still hasn't fallen
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DATE: 11/09/2003 02:36:53 AM
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In 1909, residents of Wilmington, DE, were able to subscribe to an online music service that piped phonograph recordings over their telephone lines and through loudspeakers. 1909 was one year after the sheet music publishers were told to get bent by Congress: see, they'd grown alarmed at the prevalance of unauthorized piano rolls and had asked the Congress for a Broadcast-Flag-like regime that would let them veto any new music tech that would endanger their business (like online music delivery), making it illegal. Congress told them to get lost. Good thing we rescued those idiots from themselves back in 1908 -- can you imagine a music industry where the most lucrative product in the market was sheet music?
It's a pattern: the Vaudeville artists sued Marconi over the radio -- which made them rich. The movie studios boycotted TV until Disney sold out to get the funds for Disneyland -- and TV rights made the studios rich. Jack Valenti told Congress that the VCR was the Boston Strangler of the film industry, and then it doubled his income through pre-recorded tape sales and rentals.
Now, of course, Congress has given up on saving the entertainment industry -- and us -- from itself. With the Broadcast Flag, new technologies will only come into the market if they don't disrupt the industries built on the old ones. And with the WIPO Broadcast Treaty in the works, it's fruitless to pray for some technology safe-haven where we'll be able to develop our gear in peace, far from the short-sighted, greedy lunacy of the entertainment companies. The FCC should be ashamed of itself.
When plugged up to a phonograph the subscriber's line is automatically made busy on the automatic switches with which the Wilmington exchange is equipped. Several lines can be connected to the same machine at the same time, if more than one happens to call for the same selection.
Each musical subscriber is supplied with a special directory giving names and numbers of records, and the call number of the music department. When it is desired to entertain a party of friends, the user calls the music department and requests that a certain number be played. He releases and proceeds to fix the megaphone in position. At the same time the music operator plugs up a free phonograph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the piece the connection is pulled down, unless more performances have been requested.
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(via Smart Mobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: High ersatzery from Farkistani photoshopper army
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DATE: 11/09/2003 03:21:32 AM
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Good Fark photoshopping contest: come up with cheap imitations of well-known products, the cheaper the better.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Moore AV archive
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DATE: 11/09/2003 04:20:24 AM
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The Unoffocial Michael Moore Media Archive is an enormous collection of unauthorized sound and video recordings of Moore's speeches, films, videos and so forth.
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(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Nat Heatwole
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DATE: 11/09/2003 04:38:34 AM
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Amazing Daily Show segment on Nat Heatwole, the "blade runner" who stashed weapons on dozens of Southwest Air jets to prove that Homeland Security's invasive searches do nothing to secure our skies.
5.03MB Quicktime Link
(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dog Harry Potter Hallowe'en costume
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DATE: 11/09/2003 04:44:57 AM
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There's a Dog Hallowe'en Parade in NYC -- who knew?
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(via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tetrapaks as pop art
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:23:43 AM
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The Viennese artists' group Monochrom has a web exhibit of Tetrapak milk cartons, treating Tetrapak design as a form of pop art:
The breakfast table and other battle sites of the packaging struggle between Burma and Belgium are the real exhibition sites of everyday consumer design, packaging nutrition and luxury foods, filling garbage sacks, but also focusing our aesthetic sensors. There is also a delivery of literature for the table, offering the possibility of studying a language in foreign contexts.
Since the collected examples not only come from shop counters and were saved from garbage death but have also been discovered in ditches and sinks during a situationist meandering through the world with trained eyes, there is also a link to securing evidence.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Average Internet self-identity
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:35:41 AM
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Inter.Face is the winner of last year's Machinista Russian art festival. It invites visitors to drag and-drop graphic facial-anatomy elements to avatars of themselves; once the project ran through, all the avatars were combined and smoothed to generate an "average net self-identity."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Back and to the Left
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:40:59 AM
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"Back and to the Left" is a "scratch-video" composition produced by a Canadian video artist. It makes very witty use of classic film footage and a catchy tune to create an audiovisual composition.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Adult magazines screwed by the Internet?
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DATE: 11/09/2003 08:56:21 PM
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Interesting AP story about the web's impact on the economics of adult print magazines:
After 35 years in the business of titillating and offending, pornographer Al Goldstein says his magazine can't compete anymore. The audience is just as large, he says, but the Internet has transformed the product and its delivery. Just over a month ago, Goldstein stopped publishing Screw magazine and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, giving him a chance to cut costs, relaunch the magazine and refocus attention on his Web site.
Goldstein said circulation woes throughout the field show "we are an anachronism; we are dinosaurs; we are elephants going to the bone cemetery to die. ... The delivery system has changed, and we have to change with it if we want to survive."
Link (Thanks, JP!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Infinitely expressive smileys
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:27:12 PM
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This highly tweakable smiley-generator is part of a computational semiotics project to refine the expressivity of machine-mediated communications.
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(Thanks, Hamish!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Captchas as random poetry
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:32:47 PM
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Patrick Swieskowski has written a scraper that sucks in four random captcha words from AOL Instant Messenger's sign-up screen and arranges them as serindipitous, random poetry.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Well, helloooo, Fleshbot.
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:35:55 PM
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A new web magazine in blogtrepreneur Nick Denton's growing Gawker Media portfolio launches today. Fleshbot promises "all the porn that digital technology and distribution has made possible:" CGI, amateur girls, webcam guys, sex blogs, and plenty more juicy, geeky, NSFW goodies. Notably, the site combines gay and straight smut: will the unusual decision to mix genres tittilate or alienate? Either way, it's a ballsy move. From the FAQ:
"Q: I like straight porn. What's with all the gay stuff?
A: Fleshbot does not believe in the balkanization of pornographic desire. Fleshbot seeks to address and stimulate all varieties of tastes and sexualities. If you don't like what you see on the main page, simply use the text and graphic buttons in the sidebar to filter the content which most interests you."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney aping Pixar, going all-digital
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:40:01 PM
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Here's a great Slashdot article and discussion thread about Disney's abandonment of traditional, hand-drawn animation (which Disney has sworn, for years, it would never give up), in favor of 3D, computer-generated work.
Supposedly, all of their animators-- even staunch traditionalists such as Glenn Keane-- are being trained on 3D computer animation techniques. The last hand-drawn high-budget Disney feature scheduled for release is Home on the Range, which is due out next April. It appears that Disney is bowing to the supposed pressures of the market, even though the hand-drawn Lilo and Stitch was considered a success and the all-CG Dinosaur (done at Disney's now-defunct FX house The Secret Lab) was not. However, I believe there's another factor at work: Pixar's contract with Disney is set to expire soon, and the revered CG house has been making their own demands of Disney for the contract's renewal.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Merkins for virtual people
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:51:04 PM
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If your morph-porn is perfect save for the pubes, the virtual merkin is an $8 library that you can use to generate picture-perfect thatches.
This is a smart prop and it was formed to fit Victoria's default mesh with the Pubic Detail Dial set to 1.000...
3 Morphs are applied, which can be mixed as you like
- Mid Noise (default set to 1.000) allows you to control the roughness of the middle plane.
Thus the look can be improoved when viewing the prop from side angles.
- Top Noise (default set to 1.000) does the same for the top plane.
- Gen Ctrl allows you to adjust the shape for existing genitals on the hip texture map.
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(via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SMS road-killer walks
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DATE: 11/09/2003 11:55:11 PM
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A Sydney motorist who killed a cyclist while she was distracted with composing an SMS has been given a suspended sentence.
"It is tragic that a man's life was lost in these circumstances but this case should serve as a stark warning to all that the risk is very real and with the extended use of mobile phones generally more public attention should be drawn to this risk," Judge Cohen said.
However she said she took into account Ciach's guilty plea, her excellent character and the fact the dead man's parents did not wish her to be imprisoned.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hill of Crosses
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DATE: 11/10/2003 12:39:43 AM
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Amazing photos of the Hill of Crosses in Siauliai, Lithuania, a small hill where hundreds of thousands of crosses have been deposited by pilgrims since the town was raided by Teutonic Knights in the 14th Century.
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(via Geisha Asboi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swedish woodlands butter-footgear shock horror
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DATE: 11/10/2003 12:41:11 AM
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Swedish hikers discovered 70 pairs of shoes in the woods, each pair filled with butter. No word on whether it was the very best butter.
A provincial spokesman says the buttered footwear ranges from sneakers to boots. There are even butter-filled high heels and tap shoes. Each contains about a pound of butter.
The province spokesman says they'd like to catch the person who did it and make them clean it up. He says it's going to create quite a mess when the butter starts to spoil.
Link
(via JWZ)
Update: Erik sez, "It's an art project by German/Swedish photographer Boris Duhm who put the shoes on this mountain and filmed it and he will be showing it at an exhibition in Sweden in January. He forgot to tell the locals.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites' blog: How a "sojo" files a live report -- or doesn't.
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DATE: 11/10/2003 03:05:13 AM
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Kevin Sites, blogger and NBC News correspondent in Iraq, has posted a fascinating account of the unbelievable lengths to which solo journalists must go to file live satellite transmissions from remote battlefields. Equipment breaks, unexpected technical snafus come up, but news has to get through. Sometimes, the means disassembling gear to make a temporary laptop modem out of a videophone. Sometimes, that means your dinner becomes a tripod.
"At left -- adjusting the camera. See that dirt berm? That's Syria on the other side. See that guy with a gun? That's a new Iraqi border guard. Nice pose, huh. See that guy in camo -- that's Lt. Col. Arnold (he's going to be bummed because he wanted to take off his cold weather gear before going on camera -- too late. It's an Army macho thing). See that guy behind the camera? That's me. See that tripod? It's a piece of crap -- one of the legs fell off en route to the border and will never be found. See that box of MRE's (Meals Ready to Eat)? That's my new tripod leg. See the Colonel's helmet? That's the counterweight that keeps the camera from tipping over. It's amazing how desperation can push you to new levels of creativity in the middle of the desert."
Link (note: this round of photos shot by Joe Raedle of Getty Images)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CodeCon CFP online
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DATE: 11/10/2003 09:40:49 AM
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CodeCon, the real cheap P2P hacker convention that requires running code from all its presenters, has posted its call for papers:
All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally open source. Presenters must be one of the active developers of the code in question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working* code.
CodeCon strongly encourages presenters from non-commercial and academic backgrounds to attend for the purposes of collaboration and the sharing of knowledge by providing free registration to workshop presenters and discounted registration to full-time students....
* community-based web sites - forums, weblogs, personals
* development tools - languages, debuggers, version control
* file sharing systems - swarming distribution, distributed search
* security products - mail encryption, intrusion detection, firewalls
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(via The Farm)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Merriam-Webster 0wnz0red by McDonald's
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DATE: 11/11/2003 03:32:01 AM
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Jonas sez, "It appears that dictionary producer Merriam-Webster's has yielded under pressure from McDonald's. Yesterday, the word 'McJobs' disappeared from their web site's page with "new" words in the new edition. I have links to the google-cached version with the word still there - and a pdf-print of it - , and to the 'cleansed' page (and the code)."
Link
Terry sent a letter to the dictionarians and got this back: "You'll be glad to know that we have not removed the entry for McJob from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (which is available on-line by subscription at www.Merriam-WebsterCollegiate.com). Although we did alter some marketing text on our main Web site that quoted the entry, the dictionary itself remains unchanged."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet talk radio
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DATE: 11/11/2003 03:56:48 AM
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W3W3 is an Internet talk radio program -- I did an interview with them a couple weeks ago at the Future of Money summit. Lots of interesting things up there.
LInk
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eleven forthcoming novels (including mine) excerpted
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DATE: 11/11/2003 04:52:53 AM
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Fantastic Metropolis has published exerpts from eleven forthcoming novels by Liz Willians, Peter Crowther, Leslie What, Jeff VanderMeer, and me, among others. The excerpts are here, and the link below goes straight to the excerpt from "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," one of my novels-in-progress, which currently stands at 75,000 words of about 100,000 in total, and will likely see print sometime in 2005.
Alan woke with something soft over his face. It was pitch dark, and he couldn't breathe. He tried to reach up, but his arms wouldn't move. He couldn't sit up. Something heavy was sitting on his chest. The soft thing -- a pillow? -- ground against his face, cruelly pressing down on the cartilage in his nose, filling his mouth as he gasped for air.
He shuddered hard, and felt something give near his right wrist and then his arm was loose from the elbow down. He kept working the arm, his chest afire, and then he'd freed it to the shoulder, and something bit him, hard little teeth like knives, in the fleshy underside of his bicep. Flailing dug the teeth in harder, and he knew he was bleeding, could feel it seeping down his arm. Finally, he got his hand onto something, a dessicated, mummified piece of flesh. Davey. Davey's ribs, like dry stones, cold and thin. He felt up higher, felt for the place where Davey's arm met his shoulder and then twisted as hard as he could, until the arm popped free in its socket. He shook his head violently and the pillow slid free.
The room was still dark, and the hot, moist air rushed into his nostrils and mouth as he gasped it in. He heard Davey moving in the dark, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw him unfolding a knife. It was a clasp knife with a broken hasp and it swung open with the sound of a cockroach's shell crunching underfoot. The blade was rusty.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How (not) to negotiate an intellectual property treaty
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DATE: 11/11/2003 05:28:09 AM
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The Consumer Project on Technology is hosting a workshop in Miami on negotiating intellectual property provisions in free trade agreements. IP treaties have become the hot way for the US to strong-arm the rest of the world into giving it control over medicine, culture and industry abroad, and the CPTech group have the best ongoing advice for keeping your country from becoming a US client-state:
The goal of the workshop is to provide negotiators participating in the
development of FTA's with a useful "toolkit" of information about basic
IP law concepts; the IP provisions of various concluded and proposed
FTA's; the implications of those provisions for cultural, scientific,
and economic development; and the possible alternatives. In the course
of the day, experts from South and North South America will participate
in a series of topically organized panels on various IP topics, leading
up to a general discussion of negotiating goals and strategies. The
workshop will offer a wide range of perspectives on this important
topic, along with an opportunity for the exchange of views among
participants.
60k PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiki & Lowbrow Art by Flounder
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Excellent (and inexpensive!) original art by a fellow named Flounder. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush wants to shut down London while he visits
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DATE: 11/11/2003 10:38:23 AM
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Bush is so frightened of his staunch allies in Britain that he is demanding that the city of London be practically shut down during his three day visit there.
American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protestors. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Miami's homeless children have developed their own mythology
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DATE: 11/11/2003 10:43:03 AM
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Miami street kids have created a bizarre, complex mythology that would make for a great movie.
"On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. 'Demons found doors to our world,' adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with 'black windows.' The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear."
Link (Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: People disguised as car parts trying to sneak into US.
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US Customs site about people squeezing into cars, or masquerading as car parts, to cross the border in the U.S. Link (Thanks, Jeremiah!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tony Perkins has invited you to whitewash his fence
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DATE: 11/11/2003 02:40:11 PM
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Hilarious running commentary on an email that Red Herring founder Tony Perkins wrote to the readers of his Always On Blog about his forthcoming book on Google that he wants other people to research and write for him. (If Perkins can pull it off, good for him, I say.)
Writing a book is a very painful experience. And frankly, the only way I can pull this off under a tight deadline (I want it out before Google goes public), is to write it with AlwaysOn members.
Writing a book is so painful, I find it easier if someone else does all the hard work. So I'm asking you, members of the AlwaysOn network, to give me all of your ideas.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Digital Identity World audio online
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DATE: 11/11/2003 03:08:18 PM
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The Digital Identity World has posted complete audio, in a variety of formats, of all the presentations, along with the slides and so forth. I'm pretty happy with how the DRM panel I moderated (10.2MB MP3) turned out.
Link
(Thanks, Alice!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More Seatman photos
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DATE: 11/11/2003 03:27:04 PM
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Here are a few more photos of the seatman, sent to me by a person who wishes to remain anonymous.
The poor guy had to sit on this red strap while crossing the border. Link to bigger photo
He looks very hot and fatigued. I hope they didn't keep him sitting there long. Link to bigger photo
The original photo, only larger. Link to bigger photo
UPDATE: A Boing Boing pal pointed me out to the nice pics of Dashboard Lady, too. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Naked lady sushi
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DATE: 11/11/2003 04:45:42 PM
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The hottest Japorn export since bukkake? Or a dehumanizing, exploitative stunt? The provocative trend of presenting sushi on the body of an au naturel female model migrates to the US. Chaos ensues. Please, please, be careful with the wasabi. Snip from Seattle Times story:
Chopsticks at the ready, patrons line up. Hours earlier, across town on the campus of the University of Washington, eight activists, mostly Asian-American women, express outrage at what they call the prostitution of sushi and the exploitation of women. They plot their strategy.
(...)While the promoter and the sushi model say this melding of prandial and sexual is performance art, Bonzai's patrons --men and women of various ethnicities --say it merely adds to the restaurant's sensual vibe. Opponents say treating women like a serving platter reinforces attitudes that make domestic and sexual violence so prevalent.
Link (Thanks, Paul)
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TITLE: Digital/Analog fusion art: Justin Wood
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DATE: 11/11/2003 09:20:43 PM
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From the online portfolio of artist Justin Wood: "neuro.case," shown at left (2002) is "an illustration element for a book based off an excerpt from William Gibson's Neuromancer; mainly a portrait of the main character, Case. The book, antique future, was published by the artcenter college of design.... 25"x23" digital/acrylic/housepaint on paper."
Link to artist's online portfolio, which also includes this Gibson-inspired image. (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PVR anxiety: the tyranny of the to-do list
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DATE: 11/11/2003 11:40:32 PM
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I ditched my TV and my cable and my beloved TiVo a couple months back (saving money, saving time), and one of the first things I noticed is that I lost a huge amount of unconscious anxiety that I'd been lugging around: every time I turned on my television, I'd be confronted with a "to-do" list from my TiVo, all the shows it had captured that I hadn't watched yet.
When I first got my TiVo, having a lot of programming on the drive felt like someone had done me a large favor; but over time, it felt almost like a nag: here's all this "work" I've got piled up for you to do.
Of course, this isn't specific to TiVo -- any PVR has this effect, as does an RSS reader, mail reader and so on: the unread/unwatched/undealt-with flags that define my life multiply, and my personal time does not.
I'm not the only one: Sign on San Diego has a piece on other PVRs owner who're drowning.
"For something that is supposed to be relaxing and unwinding at the end of the day, you (think) 'Wow! I have a lot of shows to watch,'" said Scott Bedard, technology director at an online media company in San Francisco...
"I get to the point now where I skip going to the gym so I can keep up with watching "Dawson's Creek" reruns," which are broadcast for two hours each day, he said. "I look forward to when they end so I won't be stressed."
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CVS as a means of keeping track of your life
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DATE: 11/11/2003 11:47:49 PM
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This is a habit of the alpha-geeks if ever there was one: Joey Hess keeps all of his email, config files, and all of his work files in a CVS repository. CVS is a free software tool that programmers use to keep track of, and synchronize, changes to documents. It's optimized to keep groups of people spread out over time (multiple versions) and space (multiple contributors) in synch, but Joey's had the key realization that he, on his own, is separated from himself by time (the file he edited yesterday, last month, last year) and space (his laptop, his desktop, his work computer). Keeping everything in CVS means that he can keep all of his user-environments in synch, it means that he never loses data. This is the kind of thing that Passport is meant to solve, and the sort of thing that LifeLog was supposed to do, but Joey's solution has the signal advantage of using free software with a robust developer community that is completely, 100 percent under his control.
It only took a few more weeks before the advantage of having a history of everything I'd done began to show up. It wasn't a real surprise because having a history of past versions of a project is one of the reasons to use CVS in the first place, but it's very cool to have it suddenly apply to every file you own. When I broke my .zshrc or .procmailrc, I could roll back to the previous day's or look back and see when I made the change and why. It's very handy to be able to run cvs diff on your kernel config file and see how make xconfig changed it. It's great to be able to recover files you deleted or delete files because they're not relevant and still know you've not really lost them. For those amateur historians among us, it's very cool to be able to check out one's system as it looked one full year ago and poke around and discover how everything has evolved over time...
I'm told that the best backups are done without effort--so you actually do them--and are widely scattered among many machines and a lot of area so that a local disaster doesn't knock them out. They are tested on a regular basis to make sure the backup works. I was doing all of these things as a mere side effect of keeping it all in CVS. Then I sobered up and remembered that a dead CVS repository would be a really, really bad thing and kept those wimpy backups to CD going. But the automatic distributed backups are what keep me sleeping quietly at night. Later, when I left that job, the last thing I did on my work desktop machine was: cvs commit ; sudo rm -rf /. And I didn't worry a bit; my life was still there, secure in CVS.
Link
(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: VoIP use-case: mindblowingly cheap telephony
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DATE: 11/11/2003 11:52:30 PM
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Dan Gillmor's on his annual teaching stint in Hong Kong, but he's still on the job for his newspaper in San Jose. Normally, this would entail enormous phone bills and patient hand-holding by email for Americans who've never dialled an overseas number in their life. But this time around, Dan's got a Voice-Over-IP box plugged into the Ethernet in his place in China and a phone plugged into that. This box is a portable phone-number: dial a number in San Jose, and it rings in Hong Kong (or wherever Dan has plugged it in). So all of Dan's communications with the home office are free. What's more, the long distance charges for US-Hong Kong on the service are only $0.05/minute, so Dan can simply forward his VoIP number to a Hong Kong prepaid mobile phone and take his San Jose number on the go with him throughout the city.
Companies around the world are already moving to VoIP in big numbers; now it's getting easy enough -- and the quality is getting good enough -- for individuals and families.
This shift is inexorable due to the nature of technological improvement. The main questions are a) how soon; and b) how the existing phone companies and regulatory agencies will deal with that reality.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC moving to break VoIP
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DATE: 11/11/2003 11:54:26 PM
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David Isenberg points out that federal regulators have Voice-Over-IP telephony (see below) squarely in their sights, and are working hard to make it just as broken and screwed up as the old phone system:
I've known for several weeks that the FCC will be holding a hearing on Voice Over Internet Protocol on December 1. I had thought it would be like the delightfully informative and informal Rural Wireless Internet Service Provider Workshop that the FCC held on November 4. But this is not to be.
Apparently the December 1 meeting is to be a formal FCC hearing designed to legally circumvent the more normal, deliberative Notice of Inquiry process, which is designed to solicit, collect and consider a wide range of public comments.
The FCC is in a hurry. "Things have greatly accelerated over the last year," writes Powell to Wyden, "and so have the FCC's actions."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Merriam-Webster stands its McGround
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DATE: 11/11/2003 11:56:21 PM
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Despite having taken down its Web defintion of McJob, Merriam-Webster has now publicly announced that it will not remove McJob from the print and pay-for-click versions of the dictionary.
"For more that 17 years 'McJob' has been used as we are defining it in a broad range of publications," the company said, citing everything from The New York Times and Rolling Stone to newspapers in South Africa and Australia.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mayberry gets WiFi
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DATE: 11/11/2003 11:59:51 PM
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Mount Airy -- the town that provided the location and the inspiration for Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show -- is rolling out an 18-blog-wide WiFi network.
Working with Mark Spencer of 8021Link Inc., Mount Airy set up a Wi-Fi network covering 18 blocks. Several merchants already have signed as for hot spots and have added "Internet Hotspot" signs. The network augments the community's use of the web to tout business and tourism. It's web site (www.visitmayberry.com) is a treasure trove of Mayberry information. Wi-Fi was a logical next step.
"You already can see people coming downtown – not in droves but in 1s, 2s and 10s, carrying not only pocketbooks but also computers," says Bradley, who has run the Chamber since 1998. On a recent Saturday he stopped in at the Good Life Cafe. "There was a guy on one of the PCs set up in the coffee shop," he says, "and another guy was at a table with his laptop.
"This is just pretty darn cool!"
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(via WiFi Net News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sputnik ships new AP
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DATE: 11/12/2003 12:02:32 AM
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Sputnik has shipped the latest version of its WiFi router, built out of commodity hardware, running an open, Linux-based firmware, with tons of cool management and access-control/connection-throttling services. At $185, it's a lot cheaper than other "managed" APs and not so much more expensive than a bog-standard Linksys router.
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(via WiFi Net News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Better Lorem Ipsum with JanusNode
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DATE: 11/12/2003 12:15:41 AM
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JanusNode is a MacOSX app that generates and munges text according to a number of rules. It can "ee cummings-ify" arbitrary text:
Dan Gill
mor's
on
his
annual teaching
stint
in
Hong
Kong,
or it can generate random pseudo-intellectualism:
Chaos theory: Its debt to Jesse Jackson
What is the contemporary significance of psychotic chaos theory? Psychotic chaos theory is often confused with teleological realism. Psychotic chaos theory is of particular interest to grandfathers.
other modes include Haiku, Bureaucratese, Fortune Tellers, and so forth.
Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Segway-Based Robot Opens Doors
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DATE: 11/12/2003 07:09:09 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says,
"In this short article, Technology Review tells us that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have built a new robot, named Cardea, which is able to push open doors and has the bottom half of a Segway scooter. Cardea will be five feet tall with a torso, three arms, a variety of sensors, and a human-like head with expressive features and vision, and mounted on a Segway base. More details and references are contained in this review which also includes several pictures. For even more details, go to the Cardea Project homepage."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Licensed character breakfast cereal gallery
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DATE: 11/12/2003 07:18:13 AM
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Ralston -- now a division of General Mills -- is the cereal company best known for Cookie Crisp and Chex, but the company also had a sideline in short-lived, craptacular cereals based on licensed characters from GI Joe to Rainbow Brite to Slimer. Some of the most forgettable are gathered into this annotated gallery.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nicotine is kind-of good for your brains
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DATE: 11/12/2003 07:20:09 AM
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New evidence suggests that a nicotine metabolite improves memory and combats Alzheimer's.
Nicotine made a significant difference in the animals' performance in the tests. Low and high doses of nicotine altered behavior in opposite directions: The low-dose group tended to learn faster and the high-dose group tended to learn slower than the control animals. "Whether performance improved or declined is probably less important than the demonstration that nicotine does produce long-lasting changes in the animals' performance, presumably reflecting long-lasting effects on brain development," says Robert Smith, PhD.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's Day to Day: VoIP crackdown
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DATE: 11/12/2003 07:34:34 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Madeline Brand about the boom in consumer voice-over-IP telephony, recent efforts by states to regulate, and the FCC hearings on December 1. As an increasing number of formerly state-run monopolies overseas open up to competition, a global 'net telephony boom seems imminent -- who doesn't want lower phone bills? What will be the cultural impact of a technology that makes a call to the other side of the world (or anywhere else) as cheap as an e-mail or IM?
Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show here after 12PM Pacific.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neurology of love shows no emotion, only goal-seeking
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DATE: 11/12/2003 08:12:32 AM
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The early stages of love are governed by parts of the brain that are used for goal-seeking and reward, and resembles obsessive-compulsive disorder:
The early stages of a romantic relationship spark activity in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward. The more intense the relationship is, the greater the activity.
The regions associated with emotion, such as the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Disinfo book: 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know
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DATE: 11/12/2003 10:09:14 AM
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The subculture aficionados at Disinformation have released a new book. 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know is filled with "factoids about human health hazards, government lies, and secret history and warfare excised from your schoolbooks and nightly news reports." Tinfoil beanie cap not included. Within the bite-sized chapters, you'll find "irrefutable evidence" that:
* Nearly all American milk-cows are infected with Bovine Leukemia Virus
* One of the heroes of 'Black Hawk Down' was a convicted child molester
* The Bayer Company developed and marketed another "wonder drug": Heroin
* After 9/11, White House staff reviewed and considered a Special Ops presentation, Thinking Outside the Box: Poisoning Afghanistan's Food Supply
* Pope Pius II wrote a best selling erotic novel
* Positive HIV test results are wrong for half of all low-risk people
* Two atomic bombs were dropped on North Carolina
* You can mail letters for little to no cost using simple methods to fool
the post office
* Senior auto industry execs characterize SUV drivers as "insecure and vain... nervous about their marriages... self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."
Link to Disinfo home, Link to book ordering info.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Let the Paris Hilton Sextape Parodies begin
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DATE: 11/12/2003 11:06:52 AM
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The first in what will no doubt be an endless number of Paris Hilton sex tape send-ups is here (via Gawker: "Hey, I Answer My Phone During Sex, Too!"). Looking for the (alleged) real thing? Check the spam in your in-box from countless pay-per-porn sites now planning to sell it, or try the suggestions at fleshbot. Update: An anonymous BoingBoing reader says that a Freenet file conveniently named
CHK@PTVe670F51FwBLplnFNBqpvKtSALAwI,QYghmYcJkyVChzINXEdBhg may be said sex tape. As always, caveat downloader.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Naked Lady Sushi, part deux.
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DATE: 11/12/2003 11:31:27 AM
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Seattle sushi restaurants aren't the first to serve food on the bodies of naked women, nor are various Japanese porn sites displaying X-rated human sashimi platter tableaus. Boingboing pal Eli the Bearded points us to this image by William Klein: Photograph of Models and the Surrealist Group
around Meret Oppenheim's "Festin," 1960. The image was a fashion shot for Vogue magazine, under the title of Inaugural Feast in the March 1960 issue.
Link to image, Link to previous BoingBoing post.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lego fabrication, stylishly explained
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DATE: 11/12/2003 11:43:45 AM
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Check out this amazing Flash pased pixelart/video-clip interactive tutorial explaining Lego fabrication: the perfect marriage of style and substance.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Classic Canadian social-democratic parable
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DATE: 11/12/2003 11:45:52 AM
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The Story of Mouseland, written by Tommy Douglas (founder of Canada's New Democratic Party, nee Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) in 1944 is a parable about the need for a third party to represent working peoples' interests:
Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that's Mouseland needs is more vision." They said: "The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouse holes we got. If you put us in we'll establish square mouse holes." And they did. And the square mouse holes were twice as big as the round mouse holes, and now the cat could get both paws in. And life was tougher then ever.
And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black one's in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Get fed up through your nose
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DATE: 11/13/2003 12:00:37 AM
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Early clinical trials of an appetite-supressing nasal spray are promising:
The hormone in the spray, PYY (for Peptide YY 3-36), is what makes people feel full after a meal. It is made in the small intestine in response to food and then carried by the bloodstream to the brain, where it switches off the urge to eat. Obese people seem to make less of the hormone than lean people.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex
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DATE: 11/13/2003 04:15:44 AM
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Larry Niven's classic essay, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," which explores the likely outcomes of a Superman-Lois Lane union, is online, with permission:
Either Superman has gone completely schizo and believes himself to be Clark Kent; or he knows what he's doing, but no longer gives a damn. Thirty-one years is a long time. For Superman it has been even longer. He has X-ray vision; he knows just what he's missing. (*One should not think of Superman as a Peeping Tom. A biological ability must be used. As a child Superman may never have known that things had surfaces, until he learned to suppress his X-ray vision. If millions of people tend shamelessly to wear clothing with no lead in the weave, that is hardly Superman's fault.*)
The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles "a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack." One loses control over one's muscles.
Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Central London WiFi map
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DATE: 11/13/2003 04:19:13 AM
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This is a pretty good map of public WiFi hotspots, mostly (all?) pay-for-use.
(also useful: the Hotspotted directory of London WiFi)
440K JPEG Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Read a free excerpt from Gareth Branwyn's new robot book!
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DATE: 11/13/2003 07:29:27 AM
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BoingBoing pal, StreetTech blog founder and Wired Magazine's "Jargon Watch" editor Gareth Branwyn says:
An entire chapter of my book Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots is now
available on InformIT. Called Robot's Rules of Order, it is a
collection of laws, maxims, words o' wisdom, and rules o' thumb used by
robot thinkerers and tinkerers of all stripes. Also includes a section
called "Rules for Roboticists," tips and working principles to keep in
mind while building your own bots.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More Segway-inspired robotic fun
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DATE: 11/13/2003 07:32:44 AM
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BoingBoing buddy and robotics whiz John Wiseman says:
Regarding Segway robotics, I thought you might be interested to know that DARPA funded development of a Segway-based common robotics platform (the "RMP"): Link. A group at CMU is working on a Robocup robot soccer team using the Segway RMP: Link. One cool thing about their work is that it's the first robot soccer team (as far as I know) that can play with and against humans on the field. Unfortunately they don't seem to have any images/video of that online; I saw some video at a conference a few weeks ago.
Also, check out this origami folding robot at CMU: Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Naked Sushi Lady history, part three
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DATE: 11/13/2003 07:38:49 AM
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Don't forget Stanley Kubrick: the milk ladies in Clockwork Orange. Okay, they're serving dairy products, not California rolls, but you get the idea. Link to full-size image, Link to previous BoingBoing post on the Naked Sushi Lady Controversy: one, two. (Thanks, Janet!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Naked Lady Sushi parody website from Japan
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DATE: 11/13/2003 08:15:38 AM
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BoingBoing pal Geisha Asobi points us to Takako Umemiya's NYO-TA-I-MO-RI-Project (Link), and says, "She is very funny!!!!" I don't speak or read Japanese, but maybe a better-educated BoingBoing reader can contribute a partial translation. Takako's website features her sashimi-clad body in an apparent spoof of the ongoing International Naked Lady Sushi Controversy (marginally work-safe, I suppose).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Obituary recursion
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DATE: 11/13/2003 08:56:53 AM
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Richard G. "Noodle" Pearson, the obituary editor for the Washington Post, has died. His obituary is amazing.
"On a day when everyone else is writing about a snowstorm, we're writing about a city council member, the king of Burma, a junior high school geography teacher, a Nobel physicist, a jazz drummer, a baseball player. . ." he said in a 1996 interview. "As I tell people sometimes, God is my assignment editor."
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TITLE: Currency exchange parable fotonovela
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DATE: 11/13/2003 08:58:57 AM
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The Towers of Hanoi, an Austrian true-life fotonovela about a guy who goes into a bank and changes 50 Euros for dollars, then the dollars for Euros, then back again, und so weiter, until only chump-change remains.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kazaa to distribute Bollywood feature
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DATE: 11/13/2003 09:02:50 AM
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Kazaa has inked a deal to simultaneously distribute a theatrically released Bollywood movie, using its DRM-based Altnet technology.
"The Bollywood movie market is growing at twice the rate of Hollywood, in terms of production and revenue. This is where the benefits of P2P technology become really clear," Sharman CEO Nikki Hemming said in a statement. "P2P technology offers the movie industry a huge opportunity to massively enhance its distribution and generate revenue."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Songs inspired by spam subject lines
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DATE: 11/13/2003 09:19:25 AM
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Here's a surprisingly good compilation of songs with titles taken from common spam subject lines, such as "You Are Being Watched," and "Look and Feel Years Younger." The full MP3s are available for download. My favorite is "Do You Measure Up." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Nevermind the Pollacks" author Neal Pollack calls the blog quits
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DATE: 11/13/2003 11:57:03 AM
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Writer Neal Pollack, who penned this scathing comeback to a less-than-flattering New York Times review earlier this week, has decided to shut down his popular weblog.
Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WTF? Did Linkedin lose their domain name?
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DATE: 11/13/2003 12:42:59 PM
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BoingBoing buddy Jason Calacanis points us to Linkedin.com, which -- instead of the Linkedin network site -- now defaults to a domain registrar temporary page. What's up? Someone forget to pay the domain name renewal bill? They just received $4.7 million in financing, so unless someone's buying their engineers a whoooole lot of Skittles and Red Bull, that can't be it. Whois shows that the domain still belongs to Linkedin, Inc. Could this be related to recent reports of patent conflict, backbiting, and incestuous dealmaking involving Linkedin, Tribe.net, Friendster, and a horde of hungry investors, hmmmm? Or what I suspect to be the real deal here -- our alien overlords have returned to earth in a shiny new spacecraft, and they want to eat all the online networkers first? Link. Thanks also to IHeartMena blog, who evidently noticed the news before any of us.
Update: Konstantin, co-founder of Linkedin, replies:
Just read the story on BoingBoing about people wondering where their LinkedIn is . . . no, no aliens; also, while tempting, we did not take off to Bermuda right after the financing :) . . . unfortunately, our domain name registrar messed up the renewal billing (it was set to auto-renew).
We notified them of the problem last night. They promised to fix it this morning, but now it's going to take until tomorrow morning. And then it takes 24 hrs to propagate across every server on the Internet. No fun -- especially the day of a big article in the Washington Post and a day after the one in the Wall Street Journal.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spy on CMU's wireless devices
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DATE: 11/13/2003 12:53:51 PM
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Here's a real-time map of all the wireless devices using CMU's campus-wide network.
Link
(Thanks, Ophir!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Le cinema du Paris: let the lofty sextape critiques commence!
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DATE: 11/13/2003 02:29:15 PM
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A review of the oh-so-48-hours-ago PHST (Paris Hilton Sex Tape), on "Noted Film Critic and Swede" Bergmann Endresson's blog. What's next, a tete-a-tete with James Lipton? A three-way with Roger Ebert? A new cinematic school of doggy-style Dogme?
The cold black of night is penetrated by an alien tone, played upon an inhuman scale. It pierces through the quiet slumber that is the inheritance of honest men.
As when Psyche dripped her voyeur wax upon the forbidden face of love, a sprightly nymph stirs, and all is a flutter:
"Let me get my phone."
Paris Hilton's first line in this magnificent post modern statement is more conditioned response than free will. Like Pavlov's doggy, she is powerless to resist the cold intrusion of the technological sprawl that devours countrysides, bathrooms and budoirs with the same unyielding hunger. McLuhan promised us a Global Village, but nowhere did he say that it would be a tax haven, and on this evening the throbbing circuitry of a connected world demands the sacrifice of a media virgin. But she is not without an advisor. In this film Ms. Hilton acts opposite Rick Solomon, media mogul, giver of corporal knowledge. Yet he is more, and in a poignant moment of self-loathing which defines the entire encounter, Solomon blasphemes the very technology upon which he has built his empire:
"Fuck your phone."
Link to Eros and Thanatos in L'affair Hilton on D-Nasty (via the Kicker)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pearson Intl Airport threatens to sue websites that take its name in vain
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DATE: 11/13/2003 04:30:07 PM
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Pearson International Airport, of Toronto, Ontario, has threatened legal action against a website for mentioning its name. The site in question is urinal.net, a user-submitted gallery of pissoir photos -- including a couple from Pearson. Inexplicably, Pearson has the surplus budget laying about with which to pay some puffed up dillweed to send letters to urinal-gallery sites, threatening to sue them for illegally (sic) putting the name of the airport on said site. I think that some goddamned budget-cuts are in order at Pearson.
The GTAA [Greater Toronto Airports Authority] would like to request that you remove Toronto Pearson International Airport from the title of the page below, including the removal of Toronto Lester B. Pearson International Airport from within the page. If you choose to keep the photos, we just request that you remove the text below in red. We appreciate your cooperation. We will check back in a week to ensure that this information has been removed. If at that time it has not, we will forward it to the Legal department for subsequent action.
Link
(Thanks, Mike)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Americans are naming their babies after brands
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DATE: 11/13/2003 10:57:42 PM
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Increasingly, American parents are naming their children after major corporate brands, particularily car-model names. A psych prof who's been studying social security rolls to gather info on child-naming for 25 years says that the 2000 data indicates a sharp uptick in brand-based naming, which he describes as the 21st-century aspirational equivalents of the Victorians who named their daughters Opal and Ruby.
He has found that car models are a popular source of inspiration; 22 girls are registered as having the name Infiniti while 55 boys answer to Chevy and five girls to Celica.
Seven boys were found to have the name Del Monte - after the food company - and no less than 49 boys were called Canon, after the camera.
Designer firms and types of clothing were also well represented, with almost 300 girls recorded with the name Armani, six boys called Timberland and seven boys called Denim.
In some cases it seems something else was on some parents' minds - six boys were named after Courvoisier cognac.
Link
(via Die Puny Humans)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ruminator Books's auction
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DATE: 11/14/2003 12:16:07 AM
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Ruminator Books, an indie bookseller in St Paul, MN, is in dire financial straits and is holding an auction in order to keep its doors open.
An original piece of artwork from Ralph Steadman; Paul Auster's reading glasses; A hunk of wood from Rick Bass's writing cabin; Drawings from Siri Hustvedt and Oliver Sacks; A musical manuscript by Bill Holm; A copy of an early manuscript of 'The Laws of Our Fathers' signed by Scott Turow; T-shirts from Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford and Neil Gaiman; A first draft manuscript page from Charles Baxter; Rick Moody's electronic music CD; A letter written to Russell Banks by Jonathan Safran Foer on a piano roll of 'It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing'; A shirt given to Neal Karlen by Kurt Cobain; A Romanian flag given to Andrei Codrescu amidst gunfire during the 1989 revolution.; also: A limited edition of Mary Poppins (signed on D.L. Travers deathbed); valuable broadsides and handmade books; sports memorabilia; a brownie recipe; a pen blessed by the pope;and a portable personal altar with angel cards; And much more...
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(Thanks, Heidi!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cool new concept monowheel
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DATE: 11/14/2003 12:45:45 AM
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Embrio, Bombardier's new concept monowheel -- balanced by gyros -- is pretty cool looking, and like all good vaporware vehicles, it is powered by magic hydrogen fuel-cells. Also: night-vision and ATV-style active suspension. I love the fact that the lines are visibly CAD-generated. You can almost see the nurb and spline handles depending from the curves.
Link
(Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Link directly to the middle of a RealMedia stream
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DATE: 11/14/2003 01:07:32 AM
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Rich Persaud has developed a tool to allow you to link the middle of RealMedia streams -- so that you can, for example, reference a particular moment in a video of a presidential debate and link directly to the timecode for that moment.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The latest NYT plagiarism case: Bernie Weinraub
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DATE: 11/14/2003 01:10:01 AM
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Choire on Gawker says:
Here we go again. Have all journalists figured out the only way to get a good book deal and some press is to plagiarize and invent stories? Or is there some sort of airborn virus at the Times? Look for an act of contrition in the Times' corrections tomorrow. What's even odder is that Weinraub borrowed from the highly unusual source of LukeFord.net.
Link to Slate story
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Real property rights to virtual game objects
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DATE: 11/14/2003 06:04:53 AM
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The Terra Nova gaming groupblog reports that Second Life, a massively multiplayer online game, has amended its terms of service to allow players to "retain real world property rights in the virtual world products they produce."
Link
Update: here's the official press-release
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Presidential websites pretty much suck
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DATE: 11/14/2003 07:54:54 AM
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Researchers at Optimization Week have done a study on the presidential campaign websites and concluded that they pretty much suck: bloated, inaccessible and noncompliant.
Link
(Thanks, Andy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nintendo 64 to be reborn as a $10^H^H^H 57 Euro console-in-a-controller?
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DATE: 11/14/2003 08:05:41 AM
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The new Nintendo iQue, intended for the Chinese market, will reportedly cost $10 57 Euros, play $5 Nintendo 64 games, and fit into a game-controller.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
Pete Rojas sez, "The Reg got the price wrong -- there's a typo: it should be 57 Euros instead of 7 -- so the iQue is gonna cost considerably more than $10."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Frogs have accents
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DATE: 11/14/2003 11:20:05 AM
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A researcher has recorded frog-calls and discovered regional accents among them.
Bernie Simmons, a spokesman for SPSS, said it was thought the frogs migrated to the warmer climate of southern Europe during the last ice age where they separated into distinct colonies that slowly started to diverge.
Part of that diversity has emerged as regional accents.
The accents are different depending on whether pool frogs belong to the ancient Iberian, Italian or Balkan populations.
Link
(Thanks, Rod)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why Wal-Mart will rule the world
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DATE: 11/14/2003 12:29:11 PM
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Fascinating Fast Company article explains why manufacturers must suck up to Wal-Mart's demands, or face extinction.
For many suppliers, though, the only thing worse than doing business with Wal-Mart may be not doing business with Wal-Mart. Last year, 7.5 cents of every dollar spent in any store in the United States (other than auto-parts stores) went to the retailer. That means a contract with Wal-Mart can be critical even for the largest consumer-goods companies. Dial Corp., for example, does 28% of its business with Wal-Mart. If Dial lost that one account, it would have to double its sales to its next nine customers just to stay even."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worldchanging: tools for building sustainability, democracy and open systems
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DATE: 11/15/2003 02:25:27 AM
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Worldchanging is a new group blog "covering tools for building sustainability, democracy and open systems." Lots of interesting stuff up there right now, including this Brian Eno challenge:
Tonight, at a rousing lecture sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, Brian Eno described his next undertaking. It's a book, 250 Projects for a Better Future.
Like most good ideas, the premise is deceptively simple: can we describe the 250 projects most critical to building a better future?
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Artists' own album covers
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DATE: 11/15/2003 04:29:12 AM
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The Art Rocks asked 100 artists to produce album covers for their favorite musicians. It turns out that Kurt Vonnegut is also a painter, and a Phish fan.
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(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Owner Override: a proposal to fix Trusted Computing
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DATE: 11/15/2003 09:51:14 AM
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My collegaue Seth Schoen has written an audacious article for Linux Journal in which he calls on the architects of "Trusted Computing" [TCPA|TCG|Palladium|NGSCB] systems -- which ostensibly solve some of the Internet's security problems by adding cryptographicallly secured tamper-detection to the hardware of the commodity PC -- to add a feature that he calls "Owner Override."
Trusted Computing proposals have drawn fire as tools for lock-in and other anti-competitive strategies; Seth's Owner Override allows the owner of a computer to override the Trusted Computing security when it is in her own interest.
For example, you could use Owner Override to tell a "lie" to your bank, which insists that you use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access its website, and convince the bank's webserver that your copy of Opera or Safari or Mozilla is really Internet Explorer. This is possible (even routine) today, but in a Trusted Computing universe, it will be impossible, modulo Owner Override.
Fortunately, this problem is fixable. TCG should empower computer owners to override attestations deliberately to defeat policies of which they disapprove. Giving the owner this choice preserves an essential part of the status quo: third parties can never know for sure what's running on your PC. TCG already defines a platform owner concept. The TCG specification also should provide for a facility by which the platform owner, when physically present, can force the TPM chip to generate an attestation as if the Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs) contained values of the owner's choice instead of their actual values.
APIs and a clear user interface for the override mechanism could be specified by an appropriate TCG committee. Only the platform owner should be able to do this; whenever a machine provides an inaccurate attestation, it does so for what its owner considered an appropriate reason. This change would do nothing to undermine the basic security benefits of the TCPA hardware, including those outlined in the Safford article; you still could tell whether your computer had been altered.
Link
(via Vitanuova)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Censorware thinks blogs are unsavory
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DATE: 11/15/2003 09:57:42 AM
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SurfControl, a censorware vendor, has roped off blogs from some of its customers' machines. That means that if your workplace, library or school relies on SurfControl to keep naughty pages away from its computers, you can't get at blogs, either.
Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the federal mandate requiring libraries to censor their terminals, companies like SurfControl control more than surfing: they control basic access to information.
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cellphone jammer
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DATE: 11/15/2003 10:10:33 AM
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The SH066P Personal Cell Phone Jammer is disguised as a phone, has an effective radius of 10-15 yards, and comes in US and worldwide frequency-flavors. They're illegal to use in most places, but (usually) not illegal to possess, build or sell. I'm as bugged by mobile abuse as the next person, but using one of these strikes me as a much greater breach of the social contract than talking too loudly or subjecting your coachmates to the default Nokia ring.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My NYT Mag piece on robots
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DATE: 11/15/2003 10:24:23 AM
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I wrote a piece on home robotics for the New York Times Magazine as part of a section on Home Automation with contributions from James Gleick, Paul Boutin, Clive Thompson and others; it shipped today:
Home robots were the jet-pack future's sweetest lie: personal assistants working tirelessly and without complaint -- companions, servants and pets. They would be nimble and able, and computers would be blinking omniscient behemoths.
How wrong they were. Just as millions of users defied the first engineers' narrow visions of what a home computer could be, and figured out how to make PC's bend to their will, the cheapness and flexibility of commodity computer components are now enabling a new hobbyist revolution in home robotics. C.P.U.'s -- the brains of a PC -- are cheap like borscht, and the sensors that allow computers to see, hear, feel and smell have likewise plummeted in cost. (Pinhead digital cameras, for example, are so cheap these days that it's hard to find a pocket-size gizmo that doesn't have one built in.) All it takes to turn these pieces into a robot is packaging the brains and the senses atop a mobile platform and stirring in some clever code.
Link
(Thanks, Paul)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 3D London Tube
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DATE: 11/15/2003 12:23:15 PM
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These 3D rendered London Tube maps are pretty mind-blowing.
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(via Blackbelt Jones)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Secrets of drivers' licenses revealed!
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DATE: 11/15/2003 12:40:04 PM
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It turns out that drivers' license numbers contain coded information about your name and other details. If you're going to verify -- or generate -- a driver's license number, you need to know about this:
Soundex is a hashing system for english words. You might want to look at further information on how soundex works.
The example soundex is F255, so the example name starts with F, so the name starts with an F, followed by a gutteral or sibilant, followed by a nasal, followed by another nasal. This is correct, as the example person's last name is "Fakename"
For my license generator, I simply implement this. For my license reverser, I simply take likely guesses. I also generated the Soundex code for the top 10,000 (ish) last names in the US, and I suggest the top 10 for any given code.
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(via Crypto-Gram)
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TITLE: Secret documents revealed!
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DATE: 11/15/2003 12:41:11 PM
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The Austrian techno-activist group Quintessenz has created a sizable archive of secret documents; they want your contributions:
All the doquments in this section are being published here for reasons of scientific research only. They have been collected mainly from various open sources on the internet. Our sole intention is to inform the public about what is being done to their personal data right now in the digital networks.
We just preserve here what governments, various international bodies and certain IT companies did not care to publish or took off the net.
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TITLE: Secret cameras revealed!
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DATE: 11/15/2003 12:43:32 PM
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How to find hidden cameras:
Some methods to hide cameras solely rely on the way human perception works. A very simple way to "hide" a camera is to install it at a large distance from the space to be surveilled. This does not restrict the usefulness of the camera images in any way because tele lenses can be used to compensate for the distance. For this application there is no need for subminiature cameras, although these are even easier to hide. Standard surveillance cameras painted the right color are very hard to spot and usually have a CMount or CS-Mount 7 socket which is needed for attaching the necessary high quality tele lens.
260K PDF Link
(via Crypto-Gram)
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TITLE: Privacy-consciousness-raising stickers
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DATE: 11/15/2003 12:52:39 PM
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The Austrian cyber-activists Quintessenz put on the local Big Brother Award ceremony. To promote it, they distributed these stickers that look like hidden cameras, encouraging people to put them up in toilets and other places where privacy matters. The caption means "The Most Shameless Surveilleur."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sexy Math
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DATE: 11/15/2003 03:26:17 PM
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BoingBoing patron saint Bruce Sterling points our dirty minds to a website containing this suggestive series of images created entirely from mathematical algorithms. "If you find them offensive in any way," says the site's creator, "all I can say is that beauty (or obscenity) is in this case most certainly in the eye of the beholder." If high school algebra had been half this fun, perhaps I would have passed. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Silvery Roger Wood clock
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DATE: 11/15/2003 04:42:24 PM
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I love coming home, firing up my mailer and finding a new Roger Wood clock in my in-box.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Secret Epcot VIP lounges revealed
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DATE: 11/16/2003 12:57:08 AM
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Epcot Center had the distincition of being the first Disney park in which every single ride and pavillion was sponsored -- in the case of the World Showcase, the sponsors were the countries represented; but in the case of the Future Showcase, the sponsors were tech companies, and they built VIP lounges and conference spaces into their ride-pavillions for their bigwigs and guests. Hidden Mickeys has a ride-by-ride description of Future Showcase's VIP lounges (I found out about this through an eBay listing for a Living Seas VIP Lounge uniform jacket)
Around the right side of The Living Seas, past the Coral Reef restaurant, there is a door marked only by the United Technologies Corporation logo. Press the buzzer by the door, display your pass and you will be allowed access to the VIP lounge and the conference center beyond it. (George Bush was received in the conference center in 1990.) The conference center is on the second floor of The Living Seas and has huge windows that look into the tank. You can see these windows when you are in the attraction by looking for the restaurant windows. The second set of windows above the restaurant are those of the conference center. The conference center is currently closed but is frequently used to receive VIPs including Michael Eisner.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Good-Turing method finally improved-upon
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DATE: 11/16/2003 01:00:10 AM
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Sixty-or-so years since Alan Turing and IJ Good invented the Good-Turing method for modeling of probability distributions behind data streams as part of the Allied code-breaking effort, researches have discovered the limit of its usefulness, and produced a replacement method that transcends them:
The German Enigma encryption machine used a huge number of decryption keys, making it almost impossible to crack the code. British intelligence had gained possession of Enigma machines, had determined how they worked and had even obtained a copy of the full book of keys. Some messages had been decrypted and the keys used recorded, so that the code breakers had a small sample from a very large set of keys. But it was unlikely the Germans would continue to use the same keys, so some method of assigning a probability distribution to the keys not yet used was needed...
Orlitsky was able to discover this limit by quantifying the problem in terms of the positive integers. The nature of the sample set is actually irrelevant to the probabilistic algorithm. What matters is the order in which outcomes appear and how often they appear. So a sample sequence such as giraffe, giraffe, elephant, giraffe, zebra would be encoded in numbers as 1,1,2,1,3. Every time a new item appears, it is assigned the next-highest number, so that this mathematical model, according to its creators, can capture the worst possible problem-one in which there is an infinite number of hidden data items.
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(via Smart Patrol)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: French porn director John Root now has a blog
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DATE: 11/16/2003 07:51:57 AM
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Famous French adult film director John B. Root, nee John Guillore, has launched a self-described "sexblog" about his life and the porn biz: Inkorrekt, the Diary of a Pornographer. Not long ago, Root was the author of an open letter protesting a French ban on TV porn organized by right-wing and "family values"groups.
"Porn's subject matter is physical love, a theme that has produced countless masterpieces in painting, in sculpture and in literature," wrote Root.
"If celluloid sex has never succeeded in hoisting itself to the rank of a cinematographic or televisual genre, it is because we have denied it the right to be economically viable. We wouldn't be having this debate if porn was what it should be: joyous, well-made, aphrodisiac art, respectful of its actors and its audience, portraying real people and making sense of its subject matter."
Link to John B. Root's blog (written in French, and not worksafe), Link to Guardian interview with Root (snip: "There's no earthly reason why a porn film shouldn't also be a good film. I want the product to respect me." ) (Merci, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Island Chronicles: Hiking up the Volcano
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DATE: 11/16/2003 04:56:20 PM
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Here's our latest Island Chronicles dispatch. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RSS explained
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DATE: 11/17/2003 02:05:11 AM
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RSS -- the little technology with the big, big list of acronym-expansions -- has even more acronym expansions than heretofore suspected; Google definitions has the scoop:
Repetitive stress syndrome that is caused by repetitive movement (causes Carpal Tunnel Syndrome when occurs at wrist/hand)
(Regional Subscription System) The system by which U S WEST processes Equal Access information that allows end users to obtain service from their Interexchange Carrier of Choice.
Radio Science Subsystem (orbiter science investigation)
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What's up with Technorati
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DATE: 11/17/2003 02:07:47 AM
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David Sifry's Technorati service -- a blogmining and analysis system that can tell you the shape and velocity of the blogosphere at any given moment -- has been cranky and creaky for a couple days now. Sifry has posted an update to his blog, with info on how things are going and the difficulty of keeping pace with blogging's amazing growth.
Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshop effects tutorial
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DATE: 11/17/2003 02:12:40 AM
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Great tutorial explaining how to use Photoshop to create four different after-effects (Soft Focus, Drawing, Moody, Lomo) and then encapsulating all the steps as macros you can install. It's a great and dinstinctively Internet-era means of instruction: "Here is a set of steps that can be used to make a tool; here is a packaged tool -- you can use the packaged tool, but now that you understand how it was made, you can also make your own variants."
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Domo-kun phone
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DATE: 11/17/2003 02:15:08 AM
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It's not clear to me whether this is a phone, a phone-cozy, a homemade phone-mod or a photoshop job, but whatever it is, I want one.
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(via KoKoRo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Government documents and the librarians who love them
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DATE: 11/17/2003 02:18:37 AM
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Amazing gallery of photos of government document librarians posing with their fovorite govdocs. I used to work at a Business and Urban Affairs collection at one of Toronto's bigger libraries -- it's amazing what governments publish.
1. The Adventure of Echo the Bat / Kimberly Kowal
2. Air House, A History by Perry D.Jamieson / Paula Fox
3. This is Ann [anopheles mosquito]...she drinks blood! (1943) / Anna Hobbs
4. Annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. 1913-1914 / Randy Smolnikar
5. Assorted Publications / Future Farmers of America
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily funnies as RSS
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DATE: 11/17/2003 02:21:30 AM
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Now this is a fantastic idea: daily comic-strips syndicated as RSS feeds -- who needs a separate "comics reader" when an RSS aggregator can suck in anything that can be represented as a syndicated feed?
Adam@Home by Brian Basset http://dwlt.net/tapestry/adam.rdf 2003-08-03
B.C. by Johnny Hart http://dwlt.net/tapestry/bc.rdf 2003-08-25
Big Nate by Lincoln Peirce http://dwlt.net/tapestry/bignate.rdf 2003-08-11
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ch.rdf 2003-06-09
Dilbert by Scott Adams http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf 2003-06-06
Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau http://dwlt.net/tapestry/doonesbury.rdf 2003-06-13
Drabble by Kevin Fagan http://dwlt.net/tapestry/drabble.rdf 2003-08-11
For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston http://dwlt.net/tapestry/fbofw.rdf 2003-08-03
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tumors grow just like animals
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DATE: 11/17/2003 02:28:29 AM
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The same equations used to model animal growth also describe the growth of tumors:
As an animal's mass increases, so does the number of cells within it. But the blood supply that feeds those cells grows more slowly. As a result, an increasing proportion of the available nutrients go towards maintaining existing cells rather than the growth of new ones, so the rate of growth slows and ultimately comes to a halt...
When they compared their predictions to the growth of 13 rodent or human tumours, they found the tumours' growth closely followed the same universal law.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vanity tinyURLing
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DATE: 11/17/2003 05:33:16 AM
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Erik Olsen writes,
So, we all started "tinyurling" our names
http://tinyurl.com/evo (my init) is rather odd.
http://tinyurl.com/erik leads to a dead link (sob!)
http://tinyurl.com/pnh is, well, Swedish. I think.
http://tinyurl.com/cory , however, May Well Lead To The Truth(tm).
Anyhow. Rules are simple, link is 1-4 chars after the tinyurl.com/
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(Thanks, Erik!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Send back your MP3s
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DATE: 11/17/2003 05:36:32 AM
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Do you feel remorse over all the MP3s you've downloaded? This site has the answer: send them back!
1. Look up the email address of your regional RIAA authority (listed in your white pages under "Recording Industry: Regional Authorities)
2. Open up your email program, such as Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express
3. Create an email to the email address you found.
4. Attach all the MP3s you're returning
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(via JoHo the Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Singing, sample-driven website
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DATE: 11/17/2003 06:00:26 AM
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Let Them Sing It For You: a Swedish site that takes a phrase as its input, and then "sings" it by playing it back, word-by-word, from a library of sampled words from pop songs.
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(via Daily Notes)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto Board of Ed shafting alternative schools
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DATE: 11/17/2003 06:21:42 AM
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Laura James, Co-Chair of the Toronto Alternative Primary School Council is getting the runaround from the Toronto District School Board, who have all but declared war on alternative education in the city. She's looking for help from other people involved in Toronto's alternative schools in refuting the Board's claims.
We are being told by the TDSB that our current council "set up" is not recognized by the Board but yet my calls to several "regular" schools indicate that many others schools have separate Incorp entities / charities that fundraise the way we do and that the School Advisory Council is for Policy only.
I would like to get some feedback on how other "Alternative Schools" are set up.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: David Weekly on OPG v Diebold case in court today
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DATE: 11/17/2003 11:11:32 AM
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Today, a federal judge will hear arguments that will determine whether or not e-voting manufacturer Diebold Systems can use the DMCA to force 'Net users into removing links to online discussion archives stolen from Diebold earlier this year. Those archives contain dialogue in which Diebold employees talk online about problems with the company's e-voting products.
In the case being heard today, the nonprofit ISP known as Online Policy Group (OPG) and two students from Swarthmore College argue Diebold is exploiting copyright law in order to silence criticisms about the security and reliability of their digital voting systems. Representing them: The EFF and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw. Last week, I caught up with Online Policy Group (OPG) Colocation Director and Board member David Weekly for a quick IM chat on the case, which you can read in entirety here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: iTunes, Napster, meet MSFT.
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DATE: 11/17/2003 03:32:06 PM
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Microsoft announces plans to open a music-download service in early 2004. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Democratic candidates should pledge an open Internet
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DATE: 11/17/2003 03:59:15 PM
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Dave Winer is calling on leading Democratic hopefuls -- who have, one and all, turned to the Internet as their primary organizing and fundraising tool -- to pledge to keep the Internet free and open, opposing the Broadcast Flag and other measures that break end-to-end and compromise freedom and innovation.
Both Clark and Dean have raised prodigious amounts of money on the Internet. Now, how about using that money to keep the Internet free. And even better if Dean and Clark make a joint statement about this, that no matter who gets nominated, they will work to fight control of the Internet by the media companies. The Democratic Party has a very spotty record on support of the Internet. By making the statement in unison, that would change, overnight, the political balance.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dead Bug Funeral Kit
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DATE: 11/17/2003 04:42:18 PM
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From David Barringer's site: The Dead Bug Funeral Kit comes with an Illustrated Buggy Book of Eulogies with Ribbon Bookmark, Casket, Grave Marker, White Clay Flower, Burial Scroll, and Pouch of Grass Seed. "We are deeply saddened by your loss. We hope the Dead Bug Kit will honor your bug. We are working as briskly as we can to make these Kits, but there is a lot of grief in this world. And there are a lot of bugs. We appreciate your patience." Link (Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Railguns and other lethal electrical experiments
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DATE: 11/18/2003 03:30:28 AM
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PowerLabs is where a serious electricity geek keeps track of his many railgun, disk-shooter, Tesla coil and related projects, documenting them with video, stills, blueprints and tutorials. Lethal fun!
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(Thanks, h1kari!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wireless users chase George Bush across London
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DATE: 11/18/2003 07:55:12 AM
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Cellphone-toting protesters pissed off about the "security bubble" surrounding George W. Bush during his ultra-high-security UK sojourn are using wireless tech to track his whereabouts -- and make their opinions known. This BBC News article has details, and this moblog captured a snapshot of one of the flyers soliciting participation from UK geeks. (thanks SH)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky, surreal ad artifact archive
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DATE: 11/18/2003 08:07:06 AM
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In the misterpants ad archive: Kooky advertisements for spinach-flavored potato chips, Hello Kitty toilet paper, and more. Link (Via Geisha).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scary article about cell phone use and brain damage
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DATE: 11/18/2003 09:46:42 AM
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The jury is still out on whether wireless phones can cause brain damage or cancer, but there are an increasing number of studies coming out that suggest it might not be smart to yack all day on your wireless phone.
Dr. Lief Salford, of Lund University in Sweden, who has called the evolution of wireless phones 'the largest biological experiment in the history of the world,' reported in June that cell phone radiation damaged neurons in the brains of young rats.
The study showed cells in the parts of rats' brains that control sensation, memory and movement died after being exposed to various cell phones at different levels of radiation for two hours.
'The situation of the growing brain might deserve special concern, since biological and maturational processes are particularly vulnerable,' Salford said.
He cautioned that it is possible that after decades of daily use a whole generation of users may suffer negative effects as early as middle age. The paper was published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a U.S. National Institutes of Health journal.
Link (via Wi-Fi Networking News)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jaime Hernandez interviewed
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DATE: 11/18/2003 10:35:18 AM
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Here's an interview at suicidegirls.com with Jaime Hernandez, co-creator of the 25-year-old(!!) comic book Love and Rockets.
DRE: In doing my research I found hundreds and maybe thousands of articles written about the comic, you and your brother. Do you ever wonder why it doesn't translate into sales?
JH: Well when you're thinking about money it can get frustrating. Ok so yeah people have written about us for years, why isn't anyone following? That's one thing I have never been able to figure out, how to make them buy it. That's for someone else to figure out.
DRE: What's Gary Groth [co-owner of Fantagraphics books] say about that?
JH: They're just banging their heads against the wall. They tell us we were in Time magazine but no one's coming from it. It is nice that people appreciate it though. It's enough for me to continue. I've seen so many people stop doing their comics because they couldn't make a living.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites dispatch from Tikrit: "You're Either With Us..."
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DATE: 11/18/2003 10:37:51 AM
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NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites has just posted a new update to his blog, live from Tikrit. Excerpt:
So in some ways, embedded in this unit, I begin to feel I've betrayed the people that depend on me to be skeptical; to question the dominant powers and institutions of my nation and the actions it undertakes in the name of its citizens. I am not a military or American cheerleader, not a mouthpiece signed on some institutional agenda whether I believe in it or not. I am here to ask the hard questions of the people who make the hardest decisions; ones that result in people dying or people being killed. I must remember as one journalist advised, "write in your notepad every day 'I am not one of them.'"
But in this room, where every piece of information is broken down quantitatively--number of patrols, number of raids, number of IEDs (improvised explosive devices), number of detainees, number of weapons -- and put back together in the form of a task completed or a mission to be accomplished, Operation Thunder Road, Operation Ivy Cyclone, the problems and solutions seem remarkably clear an seductively simple. (...)
Image above: Al Auja is the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. The community here was very pampered during his rule. But now U.S. forces feels it's a nest of former regime loyalists and anti coalition fighters. It's wrapped the entire town in triple layered razor wire. Male residents must register and carry ID cards. There is only one checkpoint that all four-thousand residents must enter and leave through. This man was already cleared to exit, but spun his wheels in anger on the way out. A U.S. soldier had a bead on him with his M-16 before he stopped his car. The second search was bit more invasive.
Link to esssay, Link to photos
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gilbert Hernandez's 520-page comic anthology
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DATE: 11/18/2003 10:41:05 AM
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Speaking of Los Bros H., here's a glowing review of Gilbert Hernandez's 520-page anthology, Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories compiled from past issues of Love and Rockets.Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sidewalk painter Kurt Wenner's 3D illusions
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DATE: 11/18/2003 11:33:25 AM
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Gallery of amazing sidewalk paintings by Swedish chalk artist Kurt Wenner. UPDATE: Scott Underwood points out: Wenner is an American, educated at RISD and Art Center.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tunisian blogger finally released from prison after hunger strikes, alleged torture
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DATE: 11/18/2003 11:44:19 AM
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35-year-old Tunisian blogger Zouhair Yahyaoui, imprisoned since June 2002 for criticizing the Tunisian government on his weblog, was released on parole this morning. An overjoyed Sophie Elwarda -- his fiance, who campaigned tirelessly for his release -- tells BoingBoing:
"Zouhair returned to his family's home shortly after his release. This morning even, he was still unaware of this decision and thus has just stopped the hunger strike he started on November 2nd. He is very weak and suffers from his dental abscess due to poor medical care in prison, but seemed to be in a good mental state when he talked to us on the phone and thanks all those who have been supporting his case during all these months.
He does not forget the people he left behin him and said to one of his friends: "Two years are nothing compared to the long sentence of some of my fellow prisoners ". I can only express a very great happiness to know he is free, at his place finally, after this year and half of battle.
I thus dedicate my joy to all those who, by their thought, their messages of support (to which I sometimes forgot to answer), their presence, their combativity, their perseverance, allowed this day to come and that I write, finally, the press release I've always dreamed of ! I also dedicate it to all NGOs which supported Zouhair (by regard for those that I might forget, I do not make the list), to all the journalists who have been the echo of our voice, to his courageous family and to all those forming what Zouhair calls "his XXL family". And if I had only one hope to express, it would be this one: May this press release be REALLY the last !"
Background on Zouhair's case here; Reporters Without Borders press release here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo embraces porn ads again, sort of
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DATE: 11/18/2003 02:07:44 PM
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Yahoo yanked X-rated products and banner ads from its American portal under pressure from conservative groups in 2001 -- but apparently, they're now back in the biz:
With the acquisition of Overture Services last month, Yahoo is now selling ads to a range of hard-core Web sites. Those ads appear on two search engines Yahoo acquired as part of the Overture deal -- AltaVista and AlltheWeb.com. Yahoo's latest embrace of the adult industry has attracted little attention until now. The Sunnyvale company has kept the adult ads off its popular U.S. portal, which has a mainstream image. Instead, the ads appear only on what are relatively small Web sites that few Internet users identify with Yahoo. The ads are also exported to Web sites outside the Yahoo family such as InfoSpace, which owns its own branded search engine, plus Dogpile and Metacrawler.
Link (via dazereader)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA county says tech vendors can't use BDSM slang for equipment
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DATE: 11/18/2003 03:52:27 PM
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An anonymous Boingboing pal shares an actual email from the Los Angeles County Purchasing and Contract Services
Director, asking technology vendors to refrain from using the terms "master" or "slave" to refer to interrelating parts -- for example, a "master" hard drive controlling a "slave" client device. Perhaps Dom/Sub/Switch would be more apropos. Talk SCSI to me, baby: who's your (hard drive's) daddy? Snip:
The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived.
As such, it is the County's expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and
contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies
or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray
an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.
One such recent example included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words ''Master/Slave'' appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources.
Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not
an acceptable identification label.
We would request that each manufacturer, supplier and contractor review, identify
and remove/change any identification or labeling of equipment or components
thereof that could be interpreted as discriminatory or offensive in nature before
such equipment is sold or otherwise provided to any County department.
God forbid anyone should tip the county off to interlocking male/female connectors.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Xbox DRM adds insult to heartbreak
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DATE: 11/18/2003 03:57:42 PM
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Falling in love with a gamer sounds like a good idea, but who gets custody of saved games when you split up? Microsoft won't let you transfer saved games from the Xbox.
Justin is a man of action. He promptly called customer support. "I have two Xboxes," he said breathlessly. "A memory card that's too small and an ethernet cable. Lets try to figure this out..."
"So you're telling me it's not possible for my ex-girlfriend to take with her her own saved games? I can't believe that! You make it sound like hacking my Xbox is a good idea!"
Link
(via Costik)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Home fashions for total perverts
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DATE: 11/18/2003 07:15:26 PM
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Spotted in Hint Magazine:
"In a kinky convergence of couture and coitus, the London-based artist-designer duo of Basso & Brooke -- self-proclaimed 'enthusiasts of luxury, pomposity and irony' -- produce the most perverted fashion and items for the home we've ever seen. These include hot pads and tea towels illustrated with penises, eye masks quilted with illustrations of genitalia and picnic blankets splattered with ejaculation images. Our fave is a men's velvet v-neck sweater ($400), featuring drawings of high-heel shoes where the points are replaced with spouting male members in what has to be the ultimate in self-pleasure. Sadly, the heels are too good to be true, but the pullover exists and is available for sale at the website, along with an orgy scene of other goodies."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scam literary agent run to ground
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DATE: 11/18/2003 11:17:48 PM
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A grifter who has made it her practice to rip off naive writers with a phony literary agency has been snagged, after a bewlidering array of international scores:
In a burst of activity, Melanie Mills--long known to be a scam literary agent--has promoted a nonexistent writers' conference in South Carolina, which she then cancelled without sending anyone their promised refunds on memberships they'd bought; faked her own death, masquerading as her own assistant and possibly as her own daughter as well; shut down her operation in North Myrtle Beach SC, and decamped to Canada; while operating under the name "Elizabeth von Hullessem", fraudulently promoted and sold memberships in a nonexistent literary conference in Banff (trading on the reputation of the prestigious Banff-Calgary Wordfest), plus an equally nonexistent charity concert in Banff to benefit autism; and vanished from Banff with tens of thousands of dollars in convention fees.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dick's from-the-grave career in Hollywood
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DATE: 11/18/2003 11:23:53 PM
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With Paycheck (a new John Woo movie based on a Philip K Dick story) opening on Christmas, the time is right for Wired to run a long feature on Dick's life and death, and his posthumous career as a film-writer. I have to confess that I prefer the movies built on Dick's work to the work itself, which I often find clumsily written, thinly characterized, and incoherently plotted -- but when streamlined by a screenwriter and acted out by a cast of talented actors and designed by a stylish director, Dick's work really shines.
Isa and her older half-sister, Laura Leslie, are upstanding Bay Area citizens, both intelligent and obviously competent. Together with their younger half-brother, Chris, who works as a martial arts instructor in Southern California, they control their father's legacy. Russell Galen advises them from New York. The four take their stewardship seriously: They're fine with repackaging a novel to tie in with a movie, for example, but novelizations of short stories are out. And thanks to Vintage Books, every word of his fiction will soon be in print - as you'd expect for an author who's now taught in colleges and cited by the French post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
As for film deals, the estate has become increasingly choosy. "We sort of feel like we have to protect Philip K. Dick's brand image," says Galen. "So we set very, very high prices, and we'll only do business with people who are established. It's ironic, because the films that created the phenomenon started with options that were granted to struggling filmmakers. Today, we shun people like that." Not every movie based on Dick's writings has been a hit: The 1996 film Screamers, starring Peter Weller, and last year's Imposter, with Gary Sinise in the lead, grossed only $12 million between them. "But in Hollywood, what matters is getting the movie made," explains Galen. "If somebody options a story and it's not made, that spoils the track record."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turkey Soda is the new Shamrock Shake
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DATE: 11/19/2003 01:46:36 AM
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The Jones Soda Company has posted a (hoax?) announcement of its latest seasonal beverage: Turkey and Gravy Soda. Even if it turns out not to be true, I very much appreciate the deadpan delivery of the copy on the sell-page, and the graphics for the new bottle are fantastic. I wouldn't drink this, but I'd buy a bottle, soak the label off, scan it, and use it for desktop wallpaper.
"We are really excited about the limited test launch of our new flavored Turkey & Gravy beverage. This seasonal flavor allows us to enter a new market segment, the meal replacement market. The new flavor will also appeal to new consumers, those who prefers a savory type flavor to the traditional soda flavors," says Peter van Stolk, President & C.E.O. "With consumers becoming more and more health conscious, Jones Soda's Turkey & Gravy flavored beverage is a zero calorie and zero carbohydrate beverage that can be served warm or cold with a full flavor that will meet and will exceed our customer's expectation."
Link
(Thanks, Computerface!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USB-powered travel-sized Xmas tree
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DATE: 11/19/2003 01:53:46 AM
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Imagine that you're a business-traveller whose whole life is packed into a 22 kg, Euro-airline-compliant rolling suitcase. Imagine it's the holiday season. There's no way you're going to pack a Xmas tree into your little roll-along, even though it would brighten up the generic hotel-room something fierce, especially when augmented by a couple airline-sized miniature liquor bottles, a carton of convenience-store eggnog, and the warbling of the bolted-down television tuned to a Donny and Marie Xmas Special.
Fear not. The USB Christmas Tree Light glows in six neon colors, packs handily into even the smallest suitcase, and has a candy-cane-striped cable that you can plug straight into your laptop for hours of lonely, festive fun. So draw the blackout curtains, drown out the roar of the passing airplanes, and hoist a phlegm-nog while you contemplate your email by the light of this cheery bit of decor.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pink Floyd: The Wall action figures
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DATE: 11/19/2003 01:57:58 AM
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Just in time for the holiday season: Pink Floyd: The Wall action figures. Collectible action figures. Strictly limited edition. (Limited, I suspect, to the number of units they think they can sell.)
Link
(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bond, eyes closed
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DATE: 11/19/2003 05:27:53 AM
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There's something queerly compelling about this three-minute video of stills of people in James Bond movies with their eyes closed, dissolving into other people in Bond films with their eyes closed.
17MB Quicktime Link
(Thanks, Johannes!))
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Celebrity dead photshopping
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DATE: 11/19/2003 05:38:57 AM
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Nice Fark photoshopping contest: turn celebrities into the living dead.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gamers' argot
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DATE: 11/19/2003 06:15:14 AM
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Master game-designer Greg Costikyan's article, "Talk Like a Gamer," is an etymological excursion into gamer's argot. It reminds me of my favorite learned book on jargon, The Big Con, a book about grifters' slang, which I reviewed here.
Some games have separate gameworlds devoted to roleplayers and to power gamers--those who play primarily to become more powerful in the game world and can't be bothered with such fripperies as pseudo-Elizabethan chat. Power gamers seek to power level, increase in ability in the game quickly--often with the help of a more powerful character who provides buffs to allow the character to gain experience rapidly. This practice is called twinking--gaining quickly in power or level in a semi-illegitimate fashion through assistance from a more powerful character. The term is obviously derived from Twinkie, but the association with a sugary snack is not obvious--I surmise that the usage may come from gay slang, in which a "twinkie" is a cute young man with an older lover.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spam Sandals: $12/pair
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DATE: 11/19/2003 06:31:11 AM
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Spam Sandals: tagging meets irony meets luncheonmeat meets interweb.
Link
(Thanks, Alice!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: G4 Cube fishtank
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DATE: 11/19/2003 09:26:42 AM
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Got a dead, orphaned Apple G4 Cube lying around? According to the ancient traditions of the Mac-faithful, this is a signal that you are to get out your caulking gun and turn it into a fishtank.
Link
(via MacSlash)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Googlehouse
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DATE: 11/19/2003 09:42:34 AM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc says, "This incredible Net Art page from french artists Rika Dermineur and Stephane Degoutin uses Google Images search -- with the following words "X + house" -- to constructs a wall with all these pics and form a live 3D collage. The artists tell that it's a kind of mirror that shows how intimacy is revealed on the Internet, and what role Google plays in that process." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emerging t-shirts
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DATE: 11/19/2003 10:25:45 AM
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Emergants sells t-shirts with slogans relating to "emerging tech:" P2P, Open Source and nanotechnology.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese rubber monsters of the 1970s
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DATE: 11/19/2003 10:31:46 AM
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Amazing gallery of famous Japanese monsters of the 1970s. I have just fallen down the clip-art hole.
Link
(via Die Puny Humans)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crafting hipsters unite
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DATE: 11/19/2003 10:54:59 AM
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At Craftster (a community for crafting hipsters), the motto is, "No tea cozies without irony." Get in touch with your kitsch-fetish and your urbanity, all at once.
Link
(Thanks, Leah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Goatse casemod
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DATE: 11/19/2003 04:54:27 PM
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If you've hung around the Internet long enough, chances are you've encountered the Goatse guy (he's not hard to find -- google it if you're curious and want to be lastingly revulsed, but don't say I didn't warn you). Slashdot has added whole volumes of code just to keep users from tricking each other into opening this photo.
That said, this casemod -- an obvious homage to Goatse -- made me laugh aloud.
Link
(Thanks, Soninlawofsam!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Second coming of Opus the Penguin
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DATE: 11/19/2003 11:06:04 PM
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Berkeley "Bloom County" Breathed is making a comeback, according to this long interview with Salon:
Now. Lord, now. The din of public snarkiness is stupefying. We're awash in a vomitous sea of caustic humorous comment. I hope to occasionally wade near the black hole of pop references only obliquely without getting sucked in with everyone else. Full disclosure: I'll admit that I had a momentary lapse and recently inked a strip where Opus' mom sees a picture of Michael Jackson in 1983, proclaims Jacko's old nose irresistible and voices an urgent wish to nibble it off down to the nub.
It took every thoughtful middle-aged fiber in my being for the courage to toss the finished strip. I did, but I wept.
Now the flip side of this is when events get untouchable. It becomes like the occasional lampoons of supermarket tabloids: unfunny because they're mocking something that's funnier than the satire. You can't effectively satirize Bill Clinton getting waxed by an office vixen in the office of Abraham Lincoln. It's done. Over. Go home. Know when you're beat. It almost was physically painful to watch the great Garry Trudeau have to try to get a handle on it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: It's a steaming pile of synthetic poo! No, it's art! No, it's both!
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DATE: 11/20/2003 09:23:52 AM
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Wim Delvoye, the artist Warren Ellis describes as "the Walt Disney of poop," is about to launch a superpowered version 2.0 of "Cloaca," a crap-themed art installation that grossed and wowed patrons of the New Museum in 2002. Snipped from Hint magazine:
[Delvoye's] Frankensteinian contraption -- when "fed" food twice a day -- mechanically and chemically recreated the human digestive process all the way to the bitter end. Now, the Belgian artist has pumped up the dump with Cloaca Turbo, a supercharged poop-making machine -- currently on view at Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in the northern Italian city of Prato -- that produces a constant stream of excrement. "It's an industrial version of what you've seen in New York," Delvoye says, explaining that its New Museum predecessor only performed once daily. "It has a 250 liter capacity, which is a lot, and that ends up in 40 kilograms [about 90 pounds of waste] spread throughout museum hours." It's the latest in a body of work that includes oddities like gas canisters decked in Delft porcelain and stained glass windows paned with erotic x-rays, all aiming to bring together the high and low or, in this case, the technological and biological.
Link to museum home page, Link to story with background on Cloaca 1.0. Also check Delvoye's luscious, large-format X-rated X-rays-- cited here on Fleshbot today. Worksafe if you're a radiologist.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Streaming obsession du jour: LynnFox's vid for FC Kahuna's "Hayling"
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DATE: 11/20/2003 10:15:17 AM
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I can't stop playing this on my laptop: the video LynnFox created for FC Kahuna's song "Hayling." LynnFox is a UK-based collective of crazy boys who do crazy things with computers. I met them a few weeks ago in Spain, at this event. Here's what I learned in Barcelona: they can drink any non-android Earth inhabitant under the table, they are fun to troll dive bars with, and they build amazing, brilliant, superfunky digital dreamscapes like the one in this video -- which involves a robotic sea anemone. Watch it here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Asimo in Paris
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DATE: 11/20/2003 10:29:03 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland says:
One of the current exhibits at the cultural representation of Japan in France -- Maison de la Culture du Japon -- is about men and robots -- Hommes et robots (pages in French). And Asimo, the fantastic robot from Honda, is in Paris until November 22. I must admit Asimo's presence on stage is overwhelming. In particular, there was a crucial moment I was unable to catch, when Asimo received an Eiffel Tower from the -- human -- presenter's hands, and put it on a table several meters away. You'll find several somewhat wicked pictures of the 1.2 meter high and 52 kg robot in this photo gallery.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I Heart Nerds Pin
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DATE: 11/20/2003 04:24:24 PM
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I must have this right now.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lowcarbing preciptates American bread crisis
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:26:07 AM
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American breadmakers have called a summit to discuss strategies for coping with the plummeting sales of carbo-rich bread in an Atkins-ascendant America.
Consumption of bread plummeted in America in the past year with an estimated 40 per cent of Americans eating less than in 2002. The US bread industry is to hold a crisis "bread summit" tomorrow to discuss measures to curb falling sales. In Britain, the Federation of Bakers launched a promotional campaign last month to counter the Atkins effect. British Bread month was advertised with the slogan "Use your loaf, have another slice."
Link
(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Funeral interrupted by corpse's cellphone
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:27:24 AM
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A Belgian funeral service was interrupted when the corpse's cellphone started ringing from inside the coffin.
The night before the funeral, the family gathered at the undertakers for a final private farewell, when they heard the sound of his cellphone ringing from within the sealed coffin. Several distressed members of the family had to leave the funeral home whilst staff rushed to remove the cell phone.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collaborative object-sexing
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:34:13 AM
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This object-sexer is a hot-or-not site that asks you to express your feelings about the probable gender of inanimate objects (these tins of soup are considered "male" by 61.4% of respondents).
To quote Ken Campbell's astonishing Wol Wontok (an annotated translation of pieces of Macbeth into South Seas Island pidgin, and my kingdom for a decent link for this), "You know that [linguistic] organization where things are masculine, feminine or neuter, and ridiculously so in German, so you might say, 'Where is the turnip?' and the reply might be, 'She is in the kitchen.' And then you say, 'Where is the young English maiden?' and the reply would be, 'It has gone to the opera.' Nutty!"
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Way being paved for petaflop computing
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:36:58 AM
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Cray and Sun are working on radical new operating systems and programming environments for the coming petaflop supercomputers.
Zima said the new language will help software developers exploit both parallel programming techniques and the locality of data in a large clustered system. The language will hide details of the underlying CPU but expose specifics about the communications technology used in the high-end cluster. It will also support today's message-passing interface (MPI) and global-address-space programming models, he added.
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(via Hack the Planet
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Skinny people win eating contests
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:38:16 AM
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PopSci uses a biology lesson to explain why skinny guys always win eating contests.
Kobayashi's regimen includes shrinking his gut by jogging for hours, then distending it by chugging gallons of water. He regularly feasts on giant meals of low-fat, high-fiber foods like cabbage, which stay in the stomach longer before breaking down. (By the way, the world record for cabbage consumption is 6 pounds, 9 ounces, in 9 minutes, held by American Thomas Hardy.) And he keeps trim: A skinny man's stomach has little fat to push against it and fight the food for space.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kyrgyzstani grave-robbers supplying museums with corpse-chunks
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:40:16 AM
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A Kyrgyzstani MP alleges that the Kyrgyz mafia has been exporting tons of human corpses and corpse-chunks to museum curators and artists.
But Tashtanbekov, who spearheaded the hearing, said on Wednesday that he intended to keep up his campaign to uncover what he claims is a "mafia operation" that he says has exported 35 tons of bodies and body parts in the last six years.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney films kicking a$$, despite "piracy"
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:43:12 AM
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Disney's annual financials reveal that the company is making giant truckloads of money off of its movies, despite a couple of recent flops (and losing money on its themeparks). Funnily enough, this comes at a time when Disney is, along with Fox and other MPAA members, winning the Broadcast Flag fight by claiming that infringing Internet distribution of movies is bad for business, so much so that they need to be put in charge of all PC technology in order to ensure that "anti-piracy" tools are in place throughout every box.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kenyan minibus strike ends
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:46:42 AM
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Kenya's minibus drivers -- who provide the primary form of transportation for commuters -- have ended their two-day strike over a government mandate requiring them to put seatbelts in their vehicles.
There's something strange happening in Kenya. At the Broadcast Treaty meeting at WIPO this month, the Kenyan delegate revealed that his country has recently outlawed taking photos of the pictures on your television set; when we cornered him on this, he said that he couldn't answer out questions without first consulting with the representative of the US National Association of Broadcasters, who appears to be in charge of shaping Kenyan IP policy.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: E Coli DNA used to assemble nanoscale transistors
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:48:25 AM
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Israeli scientists have successfully coaxed DNA into acting as an assembler for nanoscale transistors.
Braun's team began their manufacturing process by coating a central part of a long DNA molecule with proteins from an E. coli bacterium. Next, graphite nanotubes coated with antibodies were added, which bound onto the protein.
After this, a solution of silver ions was added. The ions chemically attach to the phosphate backbone of the DNA, but only where no protein has attached. Aldehyde then reduces the ions to silver metal, forming the foundation of a conducting wire.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: U of C grad students' online health-care preservation campaign
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:51:14 AM
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Grad students at the University of Chicago are attempting to shame the administration into reversing its plans to substantially undermine health insurance there. They're soliciting health-care horror stories from U of C grad-students to help them make their case.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Images from the Victorian Internet
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DATE: 11/21/2003 02:56:48 AM
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Amazing B3TA photoshop challenge: graphics from the "Victorian Internet." Lovely, witty steampunkery to be found here.
Funnily enough, I just (finally!) read Tom Standage's wonderful book, The Victorian Internet on an airplane yesterday. Standage's account of the rise of the telegraph worldwide vividly brings to life the personalities and the mania that brought the first global communications system into being, and draws fascinating parallels to the Internet boom, and the promises raised, fulfilled and betrayed therein.
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(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Order-5 Magic Cube discovered
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DATE: 11/21/2003 03:00:54 AM
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A Magic Cube is a three dimensional Magic Square: a 3D grid in which the numbers in all the rows, columns and diagonals total up to the same number. The very first order-5 Magic Cube (previously suspected to be impossible) has been discovered.
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(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Conference calls: excuse for nudity and websurfing
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DATE: 11/21/2003 04:18:45 AM
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An international survey reveals that nudity and inattention are astonishingly common among particpants in conference callls:
So what are they doing instead? Twenty-nine percent of British workers say they doodle, while 22 percent of Germans surf the web. Twenty percent of Americans say they have side conversations with someone else during conference calls.
It gets weirder: 22 percent of Hong Kong workers admit they weren't fully dressed during their last teleconference, while 14 percent of them were doing their makeup or hair.
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(via FARK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Overuse of copyright is its downfall
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DATE: 11/21/2003 04:28:06 AM
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Interesting Legal Times article argues that the assertion of copyright where none exists and other abuses of copyright are the real cause behind the public's sharing-is-OK attitude as evidenced by the file-sharing networks.
Owning a copy is not the same as owning a copyright. Yet publishers routinely require their own authors who want to use reproductions of old diaries, maps, photographs, or other images long out of copyright to obtain a license from a library, museum, or other owner of a physical copy. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, many authors find this requirement too much trouble and just omit the image.
...many academic authors have faced the uphill battle of persuading their own publisher to let them include excerpts from the copyrighted works of others. Fair use is meant to allow and encourage such conversations among authors. However, publishers routinely edit out fairly used materials and require their authors to indemnify them against any claims for infringement.
32K PDF Link
(via Interesting People)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Freenet's Ian Clarke on latest threat to P2P -- from within.
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DATE: 11/21/2003 06:28:51 AM
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Ian Clarke, who recently relocated from LA to Edinburgh, Scotland, says, "I just threw together an article on what may be the latest threat to P2P, and this one comes from within the industry." Snip:
Altnet, the company most responsible for the proliferation of spyware, recently acquired a patent which allows easy identification of files on a P2P network. In the words of Derek Broes, Altnet's executive vice president of worldwide operations, Altnet will "...focus on protecting and commercializing our patented technology and realizing the potential it offers content owners by commercializing peer-to-peer networks". Just another day in the world of little-league software companies you think. Not so.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this picture. The so-called "Truenames" patent, filed in 1997, is little-more than a marketspeak-friendly name slapped on a decades old and widely known technique in computer science called "hashing". A hashing algorithm takes a file, and produces a "signature" for that file, a short set of letters and numbers that, for any two identical files, will always be the same. This technique has often been used to detect identical files, or to verify the integrity of software downloaded over the Internet. Clearly, it requires very little imagination to suppose that hashing might also prove useful when verifying the integrity of files on a P2P network.
This, of course, puts Mr Broes' quote in a somewhat sinister new light. In a classic example of P.R "doublespeak", what he refers to as protection, most would see as an anti-competitive offensive, and what he refers to as commercialization, most would refer to as extortion. Yes, the implication of recent public statements from Altnet is that they plan to use their government granted monopoly on an obvious idea to force other P2P companies, through threat of litigation, into cooperating with whatever scheme they are cooking up.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A Twist on Tele-robotics: Today at noon PST!
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DATE: 11/21/2003 07:00:43 AM
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Boing Boing pal Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley invites us back to play another round of Tele-Twister, the telepresence-based version of the classic party game. The mad professor says:
"Left foot red? Right hand green? In the newly redesigned Java-based variation of the classic '60s party game, users join forces with others online to direct the movements of live humans on the playing board. The game tests leadership ability as users try to influence group dynamics and out-strategize the opposing team. Players are ranked continuously using a new scoring metric (link to PDF paper) based on clustering and user response times. Live games run from 12-1pm Pacific Time on Fridays."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Werbach on why good isn't good enough for mobile devices
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DATE: 11/21/2003 08:13:40 AM
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In The Feature this week, Kevin Werbach explores how small improvements in small devices can mean big results:
Last month, I bought a Treo 600, the new PalmOS smartphone. I'm still marveling over one aspect: its size. When I took the Treo out of the box, it looked half as big as its predecessor, the Treo 300. The first comment of most people who see it is, "Wow, that's tiny for a smartphone!" When I actually put the current and prior Treo models side-by-side, however, I was in for a shock. The Treo 600 is slightly narrower, but it's also taller, thicker, and heavier. In other words, essentially the same size. The many small industrial design changes make a world of subjective difference.
I use this example not because I'm enthralled with my new toy (though I admit I am), but because of what it suggests for the mobile world. Subtle improvements can have huge consequences. The same is true when it comes to functionality. A torrent of incremental advances are now producing converged devices that are "good enough" at each of their primary functions. This will have significant consequences for both device manufacturers and operators.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Music Video Zen
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DATE: 11/21/2003 08:19:57 AM
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i've seen things
floral dance
sorry
elephant yeah!
space monkey
del gazeebo
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Here Come the Media Phones
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DATE: 11/21/2003 12:08:37 PM
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Here's a piece I wrote for TheFeature called "Here Come the Media Phones."
It's too early to make the claim that most people don't want handhelds that play live audio and video and offer interactive multimedia services and entertainment. The lack of interest might be a classic example of the chicken-or-egg syndrome. Are customers staying away from premium services because they don't like the services being offered? Or have carriers and manufacturers been afraid to invest the money it takes to create compelling media phones and media services when the customers don't seem to want them?
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Ferberizing my baby
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DATE: 11/21/2003 03:02:53 PM
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I wrote a journal entry at TheFeature about training my baby daughter to fall asleep on her own, using the "Ferber" method. It really works!
We decided to 'ferberize' [Jane]. Dr. Richard Ferber is a child sleep specialist who has a come up with a method to train babies to go to sleep on their own, and help them sleep through the night. Basically, it works like this: at bedtime, you kiss your baby and set her in the crib and walk out. She'll holler bloody murder, but you have to stay out of the room for five minutes. Then you can come back in and pat the baby on the back and reassure her that you haven't packed up and moved to Estonia without her. Then you leave the room again and wait 10 minutes, then 15, then 20. She'll eventually fall asleep, according to the good doctor.
UPDATE: Here's the correct link:
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Zombie Within
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DATE: 11/21/2003 03:06:59 PM
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Good L.A. Weekly profile of Caltech professor of computation and neural systems, Christoff Koch.
As we sit in Koch’s office, he offers to reveal to me a small portion of my own zombie self. For a moment I am seized by visions of a nasty chemical cocktail, my mind turned to mush, my body rendered into a helpless puppet, but instead of reaching for a syringe, Koch turns on his computer. He brings up an image of an airplane on a runway and tells me that when he presses a key some major feature will disappear. I am to tell him what it is. Koch jabs at the keyboard and the image flashes momentarily, but as far as I can tell everything remains the same. He does it again, several times, but still I see nothing different. Finally Koch tells me it is the aircraft’s fuselage that disappears. Once it’s pointed out, the omission becomes glaringly evident.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robot in the Sky! (almost)
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DATE: 11/21/2003 03:20:34 PM
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Seiko Epson Corp. showed off their flying micro-robot at this week's International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. EE Times reports that ultrasonic wristwatch motors keep the 8.9 grab machine airborne. It's also outfitted with Bluetooth and several microsensors including a gyro and camera. Right now though, battery weight keeps it tethered to its power supply. (The photo is from Yahoo! News.) Link (Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Psychic TV 3.0 to play in NYC!
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DATE: 11/21/2003 03:29:34 PM
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The latest incarnation of seminal industrial/electronica band Psychic TV will play on Devember 5 in New York City. PTV3 features Boing Boing co-conspirator Douglas Rushkoff on keyboard. Don't miss this rare appearance by the pandrogynous Genesis Breyer P-Orridge sporting his newly-installed breast implants. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gary Baseman's Happy Idiot show in NYC
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DATE: 11/21/2003 04:14:42 PM
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Good interview with artist Gary Baseman (creator of Disney's Teacher's Pet). He's got a new showing of his paintings at the Earl McGrath Gallery in NYC.
Even working with Disney— it’s been really great, but I had to basically give away an organ. Coming from illustration, I usually get to maintain the rights to my art. With Teacher’s Pet, I had to sell them the rights to the characters. My art is still my art, but those characters are their property now. If I ever use them, I ask their permission to do so.
Link(thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tech Bloom
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DATE: 11/22/2003 02:43:38 AM
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Alex Steffen has written an op-ed describing the new give-it-away-for-free tech ethos:
The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.
Not just making it, but giving it away. Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.
Which may be why the media haven't quite gotten the magnitude of what's happening here: It's not about investments. If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool.
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(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vivendi burning MP3.com library to the ground
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DATE: 11/22/2003 02:45:10 AM
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Vivendi has announced that it's flushing all the music it hosts at MP3.com down the toilet:
...they're not selling the archive, containing more than a million songs by 250,000 artists. As of December 3rd, they're destroying it.
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(Thanks, Proclus!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rude cross-stitching
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DATE: 11/22/2003 12:19:57 PM
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Subversive Cross-stitch: rude and snarky cross-stitch patterns to amaze and delight.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig: Towns should own their fiber
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DATE: 11/23/2003 02:04:59 AM
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Lessig has an op-ed in this month's Wired explaining why towns should own the fiber in their soil.
The answer, as Cornell economist Alan McAdams argues, has nothing to do with Karl Marx and everything to do with basic economics. AFNs are natural monopolies. That doesn't mean that there can be only one, but rather that if there is one, then it is far cheaper to simply add customers to the one than to build another. The electricity grid in a local neighborhood is a good example of a natural monopoly. Sure, we could run four wires to every home, but do we really need four electricity companies serving every home?
Most economists would leap from the premise of a natural monopoly to the conclusion that such a monopoly must be regulated. But regulation is not the end that McAdams seeks. Ownership is. If a traditional network provider owned an AFN in a particular area, that network provider, acting rationally, would charge customers a monopoly price, or restrict service to get its monopoly benefit. But if the customer owned the network, then the customer could get the same access at a much lower price and be free of use restrictions. McAdams is pushing - and Burlington and other cities are actually deploying - customer-owned AFNs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-advertising to out iPod's dirty secret
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DATE: 11/24/2003 01:29:41 AM
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iPod's Dirty Secret is a three-minute movie made by an iPod owner to protest the fact that Apple won't replace his 18-month-old iPod's dead battery. He's engaged in a one-man guerrilla anti-advertising campaign to stencil a warning over Apple's street posters promoting iPod.
As commenters on Dan Gillmor's blog have pointed out, Apple can replace your iPod battery for $99, and there are third-party service options as well.
6.9MB Quicktime Link
(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to change phone-carriers
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DATE: 11/24/2003 01:32:12 AM
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As of today, you can take you phone number with you when you change mobile carriers. There's a good set of tips for potential switchers:
* Go to company/ carrier stores for switching. Trust me when I say that the guys at RadioShack, Best Buy and Staples are morons who don’t know anything about switching right now.
* Adventis folks advise that if you are a user of data services, check with your new service provider regarding the availability of services that you have become accustomed to. Functionality and availability of data services, as well as the customer experience itself (e.g., transfer rates) varies considerably from carrier to carrier.
* Back-up your cell-phone contact list data to your computer by using a data sync cable or bluetooth connections otherwise you will spend an entire weekend punching in phone numbers.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Autistic savants
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DATE: 11/24/2003 01:38:17 AM
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Steve Silberman, who wrote a brilliant piece on geeks and autism in Wired a couple years back, has a great long feature in the current issue about autistic "savants" -- people who have an instinctive, brilliant grasp of some abstruse task, such as music or math. There's some very good stuff about this in Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, particularily when he discusses very "low-functioning" people who have an intuitive understanding of music and numbers that is almost spiritual in nature.
When Matt was 6, he confided to his mother, "My mind is made of math problems." Diane started buying him math workbooks for kids twice his age. He zipped through them so quickly, she learned to hide a few in a drawer so he'd have something to work on the following day.
Then one night, Diane and Larry heard a melody coming from downstairs. It was their son, playing "London Bridge" on a toy keyboard. Diane brought Matt into the family room and introduced him to the middle C on the piano. Within a day, he was devouring music books as hungrily as he had math books.
Matt took classical lessons for a year, then Diane enrolled him in the jazz program at the New England Conservatory of Music. Upon meeting his first jazz instructor there, a bearish Israeli whose last name is Katsenelenbogen, Matt cried out, "Six syllables!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 3-year-old xylophonist prodigy video
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DATE: 11/24/2003 01:40:41 AM
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Jed sez, "Video clip of Mo Kin, a 3-year-old North Korean girl, playing a complicated xylophone tune. (Until the voiceover narration made a big deal about how perfect her facial expression was, I thought she looked like she was having a great time; later, I wasn't so sure.)"
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(Thanks, Jed!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Call for Creepy Santas
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DATE: 11/24/2003 10:12:24 AM
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My friend Kirsten Anderson (who owns the far out Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle) is publishing a photography book of bad, drunk, deranged, drug-addled, criminal, and slovenly Santas. If you want to contribute a photo read on:
Here Comes Santa Claus! - Ignition Books Fall 2004
While sorting through old photographs at my mother's house one Christmas, I came across a photograph that was to haunt me for years. It was a photo taken at a mall of my brother Michael sitting on the lap of Santa Claus. Innocent enough- loads of people have pictures of themselves or thier children sitting on Santa's lap...it's a tradition to see Santa every year, tell him what you'd like for Christmas,and get a candy cane. What struck a chord with me about this picture was the Santa himself. Slouched into the chair, one arm clumsily draped around my brother, much in the same way barflys casually hug thier fellow brethren before falling to the floor in a stupor. I looked closer...thick black body hair sprouted from every opening of the ill fitting Santa suit, the too-short trouses- revealing fish white, strangely pocked legs. This Santa boasted one enormous black eyebrow, an 5'oclock shadow (needless the say the beard was falling off) and the dull gleam of narcotics in the one eye that wasn't drooping and looking far past the camera. This was GREAT! I then turned my attention to my brother who I now realised was not merely smiling on command for the camera but rather was grimacing, rigid in fear on his hobo Santa's lap, fists clenched, eyes silently pleading. Oh how I laughed.
After I finished enjoying my brother's pain, I started thinking about the whole Santa Claus phenomenon...every mall has a Santa come Christmas-time, and let's face it- most of those Santas ain't "Miracle on 42'd Street" quality. I figured there were probably tons of these photos floating around, kids horrified by thier low rent Santa and being scolded if they didn't "Smile, dammit" for the capture of a warm holiday memory. I began to ask around if anyone else had horrible Santa pics, and indeed, a small flood came in...drunk Santas, passed out Santas, creepy Santas. I decided to make a book and share the wealth.
Of course, the more the merrier so I am ever on the lookout for Santa pics for inclusion in the book. I'm hoping to get as many as I can so I can pick the choicest, the most god awful,and the funniest Santas with terrified children for the project. People can mail or email me photos that they'd like to submit. In return, people's whose pictures I include in the book will get thier name in the book (unless the shame requires anonymity) and a free copy of the book. These pictures would only be used for this book and any promotional press associated with it. I will return all hard copies (photos, discs, ect). Contracts will be required for publication.
Interested person can mail photos or 300dpi scans of thier drunken, flea ridden, pervy, waxy complexioned Santas to me at:
Kirsten Anderson
Ignition Publishing
4015 Airport Way S
Seattle WA 98121
(206)374-8977
or email questions or 300 dpi jpegs to me at : kirsten@ignitionpublishing.com
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools -- the book
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DATE: 11/24/2003 03:34:08 PM
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Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired and the former editor of Whole Earth Magazine, has self-published my favorite book for 2003: a 140-page color book with reviews of his favorite "gadgets, how-to books, amazing documentaries, great pieces of software, uncommon mail order catalogs, websites, pieces of machinery, and things you can grab with your hand." If you've seen the old Whole Earth Catalogs, then you already have a good idea of what Cool Tools is like. No matter how much you already know, you'll find dozens of things in here to blow your mind. Hurry, because Kevin only printed 250 copies. They cost $20 at Amazon.com Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Olympics serves ROBOlympics with cease-and-desist
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DATE: 11/24/2003 08:41:38 PM
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David Calkins, president of the Robotics Society of America, tells Boingboing that the ROBOlympics -- a biannual robot game and expo -- has been C&D'd by the recently-scandal-ridden US Olympic Committee.
The bot-builders' expo has apparently been asked to stop using, well, the name ROBOlympics. "Of course, the hinge is the term 'athletic event,' " says David. "Are robot events athletic? Doesn't really matter if I can't afford the lawyers."
The ROBOlympics event is slated to take place at Fort Mason Center Herbst Pavilion, San Francisco, California, in March of 2004, and will include contestants from around the world to help promote robotics, engineering, and education.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Weird, weird cosplay Japorn. Sort of. I can't explain.
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DATE: 11/24/2003 09:31:16 PM
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I have no idea what this is, but it's totally freaking me out. Like a Philip K. Dick stripshow. All I can tell you is that this link takes you to a Windows Media video clip in which a (male) human dressed in (female) animated child character drag performs a sort of webcam erotic tease. Shemale hentai cosplay? Something like that. Please, someone, explain. Keep watching, eventually Sabrina strips. No actual nudity, just oddity. Link (Thanks, Warren, thanks Matt)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: News from the Iranian blogosphere
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DATE: 11/24/2003 10:38:04 PM
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Toronto-based blogger Hossein Derakhshan points us to two new developments. First: the launch of iranFilter, a new collaborative website focused on Iran (Link). And, news that Iranian vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi has started a weblog -- he's the first major Iranian politician to do so. (Link to Persian blog, link to the vice-president's English site.).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japorn anime cosplay and living-doll erotica, part two: Kigurumi
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DATE: 11/24/2003 11:31:00 PM
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BoingBoing reader Justin Brown -- who wins an honorary Link-Fu master award -- says:
"After you posted that creepy Sabrina link on BoingBoing, [I discovered that this is] a form of cosplay called Kigurumi. This site has some good definitions, and this site also
has interviews with people who do kigurumi. I am throughly creeped out now, and I blame you. Especially after
seeing this page. But wait, it gets weirder: here, and here. Don't miss this -- middle aged man turns into Real Doll. But wait, thats a copy of this. I'm going to attempt to sleep now, I expect I'll have some really strange dreams."
The Kigurimi enthusiast behind the mask in the snapshot at left (from one of the sites Justin points to), says:
"This is my all time favorite female mask. It is made by Natori of the Photogenic mask site. The cost is around $900.00 and it is in my opinion the most realistic female mask I have seen. Plus I love to be a super cute Japanese girl. The only drawback to this mask is the limited vision and breathing."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Erotic cosplay doll-mask photos
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DATE: 11/25/2003 12:06:20 AM
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The snapshots of photorealistic latex doll faces on this website -- some deconstructed, others complete and ready to wear -- are as unnerving as they are flat-out beautiful. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: British Library catalogue soon searchable through Amazon
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DATE: 11/25/2003 05:26:13 AM
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Amazon has purchased a license to create a searchable index of the entire British Library catalogue, including 1.7 million titles that predate ISBNs.
The deal gives Amazon the right to use the British Library's bibliographic catalogue, which contains 2.55 million books. Crucially it includes 1.7 million produced before the introduction in 1970 of the International Standard Book Number (ISBN), a 10-character code that uniquely identifies any modern book.
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Inkha, the Roboceptionist
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DATE: 11/25/2003 06:55:59 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland writes:
In "Robo-receptionist clocks on," Nature tells us the story of Inkha, a robot which greets guests of King's College London (KCL) and adds artificial intelligence to the front desk. "Inkha -- short for 'interactive neurotic King's head assembly' -- will dole out directions and events information. Like receptionists across the globe, she will also comment on the weather and fashion faux pas." Inkha was funded with a Ł8,400 grant and has become a celebrity in the U.K. It even has its own website, http://www.inkha.net/. More details are available in this overview, which also includes pictures of Inkha.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kigurimi vs. Cosplay
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DATE: 11/25/2003 07:01:40 AM
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Welcome to episode four in BoingBoing's crash course on the global cybercartoon fetish pantheon. So, apparently, there's a difference between Kigurimi and cosplay: masks. Fleshbot and BoingBoing reader Sarmoung says:
There's a certain blurring between the two types of dressing up in Japan, but there are certain distinctions. Cosplay is almost always mask free and draws on various video game, manga and anime characters. This is more fantastic in look generally. The majority of cosplayers in Japan aren't too happy about its infiltration into the hardcore adult market, but there's no denying its clear debt/links to the fetish scene. There's a book out in English called "Cosplay Girls" and you can find a fair amount of adult (and non-adult) cosplay related material via J-List. Nao Oikawa has done a fair amount of this adult cosplay work.
The use of masks makes it kigurumi. These are in origin the same as people in Goofy outfits of whatever at Disneyland. You seem them frequently enough at amusement parks in Japan or doing product promotions in the street. These are also generally drawn from the manga/anime/game world. Now some people do this for a living and some do it as a hobby. Obviously it's a step beyond as these people tend to wear full skin-toned body stockings, unitards and whatever in addition to the masks. Also, you suspect that many of the hobbyists are men although this isn't always the case. It's just impossible to tell, although the hands do give it away much of the time.
What you then discover is that kigurumi is further subdivided between people who wear manga styled masks and costumes (pointy chins, huge eyes, etc) and those who go for a ultra-realist look, where the costumes become much more everyday. This then sort of leads on to Japanese ultrarealist love dolls.
Link to "What is Kigurimi?", Links to very strange adult kigurimi: Room 107, Room 108, from dollhouse.jp. (Thanks, fleshbot.)
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Neckaces made from keyboard keys
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DATE: 11/25/2003 02:39:24 PM
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Funky jewelry made from keyboard keys. I want one now, along with one of the "I [heart] geeky boys" pins! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lovemarks.com: I love/respect this brand!
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DATE: 11/25/2003 03:14:41 PM
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Snarked from Gawker:
Charles "Chucky" Saatchi, swinging advertising mogul, thinks it's time for you to revel in the consuming pleasure that is Lovemarks: the future beyond brands. At the oddly confusing Lovemarks.com, "real people" write in about how favorite brands moved from objects to something more like family members. Adidas: "Reminds me of my childhood." BMW: "Mystery, aura and history oozes out." Abercrombie & Fitch: "I started wearing their clothes and it made me cool and hip differentiating me with the rest of the Gap wearing populace." (Snicker. Mmm, Snickers! I could go for one of those...)
Link
(Spotted first by Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bruce Sterling and "Tech Nouveau" design examples
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DATE: 11/25/2003 07:10:19 PM
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On Bruce Sterling's Viridian email list this week, a round-up of 21st-century "Tech Nouveau": buildings and products that incorporate organic forms in a manner similar to Art Nouveau movement of the early 20th century. Some cool outtakes:
* "There is a new, witty nouveau afoot, from the Vallo watering can by Monika Mulder at Ikea, which looks like a stork," Link (halfway down the page)
* "to the coffee and tea set by Greg Lynn for Alessi, which opens like a clove of garlic." Link
* "Tord Boontje's chandeliers for Swarovski look like clouds
of slender branches surrounding a light." Link
* "In the United States, the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum looks like a giant bird about to take off." Link
* "William Sawaya, a designer based in Milan, created a
blossom-like plastic Calla chair for Heller, which was
inspired by a lily." Link
* "A new digital camera for Creative Labs by the California company Whipsaw Design takes its inspiration from the many-chambered spiral shell called the nautilus." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Mark Cuban -- I'm a Maverick, not a mogul!
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DATE: 11/25/2003 07:29:57 PM
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I interviewed Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com founder, Dallas Mavs owner, HDnet founder, etc.) for this month's Wired Magazine about his recent purchase of Landmark Theatres -- and his plans to build a digital entertainment empire in which production, development, and distribution are all housed under one corporate roof.
Q: How is this any different from the studio conglomerates that led to antitrust laws?
A: Digital makes filmmaking cheaper and more accessible, so we see ourselves as a conduit for new, independent voices who'd otherwise never have a shot. You could shoot your film on digital, dump it on a hard drive, edit it on a laptop, send us that file, and 20 minutes later we could show it in a theater or upload it to a satellite. You could say that if we became huge, we'd risk becoming a Microsoft. But if we become huge, we want to become more like a Linux.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Yesterday was the best day of my writing career (so far!)
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DATE: 11/26/2003 04:46:11 AM
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Yesterday, I had the flat-out most amazing day of my writing career:
I finally got to see the paperback edition of my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is out just in time for Christmas. For various good reasons, Tor elected to publish the hardcover in January of last year, too late for Christmas shoppers. A lot of people complained (including me), but it's clear that they knew what they were doing -- the book didn't end up competing with the big, frontlist holiday titles and sold very well indeed. Still, I'm very grateful indeed that the paperback (which Amazon has for $10.36) is out in time for the holidays this year.
I also got to hold a copy of the second edition of A Place So Foreign and Eight More, my short story collection, which sold out its first print run in six weeks or so and is well on the way to selling out the second edition, I'm told. A bunch of you submitted errata for this printing, and made it a better book altogether. I'm told that the next printing will have the Neil Gaiman quote added to the cover, which is all to the good indeed.
As if that weren't enough, I also got a stack of gorgeous, color-cover advance review copies of Eastern Standard Tribe, my second novel which will be a March, 2004 hardcover on sale in late January (pre-order it for a 30 percent discount). The William Gibson quote on the cover ("Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar -- a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)") looks unspeakably swell...
But the good news kept coming. I also got word that my agent, Don Maass, has sold my next two novels, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and /usr/bin/god, to Tor for 2005 and 2006 publication.
The icing on the cake is that I signed off on the inclusion of Flowers from Alice, a short story that Charlie Stross and I co-wrote for Mike Resnick's forthcoming New Faces in Science Fiction anthology, in a Year's Best Science Fiction anthology.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons Moving Image deadline looms
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DATE: 11/26/2003 05:01:12 AM
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The Creative Commons Moving Image contest (which gets you a G5 or equally shitkicking PC as grand prize for a two-minute film explaining Creative Commons) deadline of Dec 31 is fast approaching -- time to get started!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 35,000 zombies form lobby group in India
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DATE: 11/26/2003 05:03:51 AM
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35,000 Indians have joined the Association of the Living Dead, a group of people whose relatives have cheated them out of their fortunes by bribing officials to have them declared legally dead. The living dead, being dead, can't afford the counterbribes necessary to get un-dead-ified.
The ``living dead,'' having been cheated out of their property, cannot afford to pay bribes or even legitimate fees to get their cases dealt with.
Lal Bihari, president of the Association of the Living Dead, estimated 35,000 people in Uttar Pradesh state have been wrongly certified as dead.
Link
(via Beyond the Beyond)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hilbert's 16th problem solved by 22-year-old student
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DATE: 11/26/2003 05:30:56 AM
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A Swedish math student has solved number 15 part of number 16 of David Hilbert's 23 math problems for the Twentieth Century, which has stood unsolved since 1900.
Link
(Thanks, Mikael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Diebold ATMs are vulnerable to worms
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DATE: 11/26/2003 05:42:10 AM
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Diebold's ATMs, which run Windows XP, are the first ATMs to become infected with malware:
It is the first known case of a worm actually installing itself on individual ATM operating systems, says Peter Lind, a security expert at Spire Security in Malvern, Pennsylvania...
Diebold does not know how the worm got on to the closed financial network. But security experts suggest it could have been carried past security measure on an infected laptop computer. The laptop would have contracted Welchia while connected to the internet, and then transferred it when later connected to the financial network.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Diebold rolls on back, pisses self, begs for mercy
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DATE: 11/26/2003 08:14:19 AM
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Diebold has withdrawn its lawsuit threats against the sites that republished the leaked memos demonstrating its gross malfeasance in its voting machine business. Having had these memos exposed by whistle-blowers, Diebold sought to use copyright law to censor websites that published them. Then EFF took up the cause of one of the site-operators, the Online Policy Group, and now Diebold is slinking away with its tail between its legs, off to plot the downfall of democracy in some rancid warren of its own devising. Don't let the courtroom door hit yer ass on the way out.
Link
(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guy in Japan makes girl masks from paper, then asphyxiates himself.
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DATE: 11/26/2003 08:17:57 AM
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Matt Fraction, trying desperately to kick the extreme japorn web hunt habit, found this -- and forwards, with apologies
"Kumiko" says: "can't stop myself to go to the deadline. The second series I took off my wig and I wrapped my head tightly. At my neck, there are no hole for new air. There are no tricks in these pix. Please stop your breath while you're browsin these. Please, please NOT do the same. You must be killed. "
By the time you read this, the Geocities Japan site will be BoingBoinged to death, but: Link (didn't notice nudity or explicit sexual content, but didn't stay too long, either)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Exotica album produced through open collaboration, licensed CC
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DATE: 11/26/2003 08:18:38 AM
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Michael sez, "Two Zombies Later is a 'double CD' set... The artists featured on these 'discs' are all members of the Exotica mailing list and within the shortest period of time managed to get together and compile this compilation. The whole set is downloadable as MP3s and has been published under the Creative Commons license. They will only be available (at this URL) for 3 months, after that, they are taken 'off the market' and (hopefully) something else will be published."
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(Thanks, Michael)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NPR's turkey Soda taste test
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DATE: 11/26/2003 09:04:35 AM
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Click thumbnail for full-size phonecam snap. "Day to Day" host Alex Chadwick did taste test of that Jones Turkey and Gravy soda yesterday. I was in the studio just before the moment of horror, and snapped this phonecam shot of NPR producer Kathryn Fox preparing for Mr. Chadwick's total grossout. Listen to the segment here, after 12PM PST. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": phonecam revolution
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DATE: 11/26/2003 09:11:25 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Alex Chadwick about how phonecams are changing the way we communicate with each other, and the way we see the world around us. The segment includes a live in-studio demo (which produced the phonecam snapshot at left), and a chat with anthropologist Mimi Ito (yes, Joi Ito's sister!) who's been researching phonecams and culture in Japan and the US for several years. On Monday, she launched a "bento blog" -- a phonecam photo gallery where she archives snapshots pictures of the lunches she makes for her children every morning. How cool is that?
Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show:
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coming soon: America's first phonecam art show, "SENT"
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DATE: 11/26/2003 09:23:56 AM
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I'm co-curating an exhibition of camera phone photography at sixspace art gallery in February, 2004. The project is called "SENT," and through it, we're inviting professional photographers, filmmakers, media personalities, and regular folks to explore the camera phone's potential as a creative tool:
Their use is largely utilitarian: snap a photo of your baby, your sunset, your face; then, share it with friends or family. They're small and cheap. We use them to capture the mundane, the obvious, and the personal. Soon, we'll use them to capture and manipulate data: phonecams are becoming handheld barcode readers, and tools for a variety of new mobile commerce applications.
The images they produce are undeniably crude, but like Polaroids or snapshots from vintage or "toy" cameras, that lack of finesse lends a distinctive, awkward charm. And the fact that they fuse together the abilities to capture, view, and distribute what we see (through e-mail or online photo weblogs) makes them revolutionary. Phonecams are changing the way we see the world, and our place within it. They're an extension of urban eyes. They democratize, hack, and deconstruct photography. When everyone is both photographer and publisher, how will art change? How will human conversation change? What will be the difference between professional and amateur? Through SENT, we'll find out.
Check out the growing list of invited participants here -- and contact us if you're a technology company who'd like to get involved. Soon, we'll announce the launch of the completed project site, where anyone with a phonecam can contribute their snapshots to the exhibition. Link.
update: Now, NPR's in the mix. They've issued a "Phonecam Challenge," inviting listeners to contribute mobile phone snaps -- some of which will be included in SENT. Link to more info on NPR Phonecam Challenge. Listen:
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mightylady.net
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DATE: 11/26/2003 10:59:25 PM
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Warren says:
"When clambering into an anime-girl body suit just isn't enough for you: there's MightyLady.Net, for those who derive special enjoyment from giant robot women, either in bondage, wrestling, doing gymnastics or on a slab being repaired. "
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Book Five of King's Dark Tower is out
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DATE: 11/27/2003 12:27:56 AM
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I've been addicted to Stephen King's Gunslinger books since I was about 17. They're long, tense, gripping tales, filled with enough po-mo weirdness to make them interesting and keep me guessing. The first book was begun when King was a teenager; the last book will be the last fiction King ever writes, according to him. Book five -- the third-to-last in the series -- is Wolves of the Calla, a 600+ page brick of a novel that I've just finished reading. It's a very satisfying installment in the saga, and ends, as they all do, on a cliff-hanger that is as exciting as it is exasperating. I can't wait for the next two. There aren't a lot of modern genre authors playing with the memes from the Western pulps these days; King's reinterpretation of them makes me want to dig up some old Zane Grey.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Foldable popcult dollies
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DATE: 11/27/2003 12:47:52 AM
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Printable templates for folding-and-glueing together Kubrick-like characters from Mario Brothers and other pieces of the popcult pantheon.
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(via KoKoRo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big Thunder Mountain broken by negligence
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DATE: 11/27/2003 09:11:39 AM
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Looks like the fatal crash on Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain was the result of poor maintenance. Disneyland's maintenance has been suffering ever since a group of McKinsey and ex-McKinsey consultants advised them to save money by cutting back on preventative maintenance and forcing out experienced, senior cast-members. Management consultants: is there anything they can't screw up?
"Our own analysis found that the accident was caused by incorrectly performed maintenance tasks required by Disneyland policy and procedures that resulted in a mechanical failure," said Leslie Goodman, senior vice president of strategic communications for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.
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TITLE: Mood-recognition coming to Playstation
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DATE: 11/27/2003 09:13:59 AM
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The next-gen Sony Playstation will have an optical sensor built in for gesture and facial recognition, and is indended to allow for affective game-design that detects and responds to players' emotional states.
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(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Red Riding Hood dances with DDD-breasted fursuits video
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DATE: 11/27/2003 07:44:41 PM
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In this TV commercial for a Japanese construction firm, Little Red Riding Hood dances with huge-titted and generously-testicled furry woodland creatures. Link (via diepunyhumans)
update:
Jed says, "
"Here are eight more ads from this company (with heavily overlapping elements in some of them; the first two are particularly similar). Also, here is more info and a translation, plus a transcription of the lyrics. It seems that the theme of the ad is 'expansion.' And more translation here.
At any rate, the other thing worth noting on that last page is that the raccoon with the giant testicles is actually a tanuki, apparently a raccoon-like nature spirit. Or else actually a raccoon, depending on which source you believe. It's been speculated that Totoro is part tanuki, and there's another Studio Ghibli movie (not directed by Miyazaki) that features tanuki more directly/prominently. And that's more than enough digression for one site suggestion, so I'll stop now."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Persian blogger runs for parliament in Iran
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DATE: 11/27/2003 07:47:54 PM
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Hossein Derakhshan, Toronto-based pioneer of the Persian blogosphere, just announced he's running for Iranian parliament. Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine says:
In the comments, Sassan worries that this will put Hossein in jeopardy. I fear his incredible activities online could do that as well. But if he merely tries to run -- even if from afar, even if not allowed to, even if unable to campaign or win -- sends a most powerful message: Here is a man who has created a new political power base online. We've joked about a blogger running for office in the U.S. Hoder is doing it. We've joked about starting a revolution online. Hoder has done it. I pray that Hoder does nothing to put himself at risk. But I stand in awe of what he has accomplished.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vietnam Veterans' art online
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DATE: 11/27/2003 07:54:09 PM
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This online gallery features a portion of the works in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, which contains works in various media created by vets from around the US. At left: "Ambush Behind a Thin Wood Line," by John Plunkett:
"Our home base sat at the foot of the only mountain range for about a hundred miles. It consisted of two mountains: Nui Ba Den and Nui Ba Ra. These paintings are from a diary that was written in my brain and in the brains of thousands of others, on a daily basis in Vietnam. Some of the situations did happen to me; others were bad dreams, fears of what might happen, hallucinations; images that seemed to appear out of nowhere, for no reason."
Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Microsoft prepares to launch new moblogging services?
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DATE: 11/27/2003 07:57:35 PM
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On the "Microsoft Windows Mobile Communities" site, this blurb:
Get Ready for Moblogs -- Turn an ordinary blog into a moblog by including pictures from your Pocket PC or Smartphone. Check back here in December to learn how to create yours.
Link (thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wayne Correia's Magic Bus
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DATE: 11/27/2003 08:54:33 PM
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The satellite-equipped rockstar tour bus of Critical Path founder and geek's geek Wayne Correia is the subject of this San Francisco Chronicle article. He (and his bus) saved my ass once in Black Rock City. I rode around with 30 pounds of gear on a young girl's banana-seat Huffy bike, all day long in burning heat and whiteout dust storms, all over the desert, looking for a functional satellite connection to file an audio report on Burning Man for NPR. My skin was sunburned, my butt was aching, and I was as dehydrated as an overdone tofurkey. And then, when I'd all but given up -- I stumbled on Mr. Correia. He said "Hey, I know your face from Friendster!" -- and opened the door to a bus filled with nerd hotties and unwired bandwidth.
The bus cannot be described as "regular." It's a luxury cruiser of an ungainly vintage -- 1992, to be exact -- and is rumored to have belonged to Don Mattingly of the New York Yankees. The carpet is teal, with an ivory dolphin carved into the weave. (To be fair, Wayne swears he's about to tear out the carpet because, he says, it's "silly.") The wall lights are a peculiar construction of brass and graduated glass rods that would fit on a set for "The Sopranos." Gilt-edged cocktail glasses nest in the glass cupboards. In the front of the bus are gray leather captain's chairs on swivels. In the back is a bedroom lined with mirrored cabinets.
Wayne, who intends to install solar panels on the roof, somewhere near the satellite uplink for his computer, bought the bus on eBay for the bargain price of $200,000 in cash. He says that as he drove it from Chicago, where he purchased it, to the Bay Area, he had a revelation: "I realized, 'Oh, my God, I'm a bus driver! My grandfather was a bus driver in L.A.for 40 years. He got up at 5 am every day. And now I'm a bus driver, too!'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big Mouth Billy Bass runs Linux, does impressions
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DATE: 11/28/2003 04:33:34 AM
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Now that the antimated talking fish doll Big Mouth Billy Bass is out of fashion and can be had at pennies on the dollar, why not try your hand at installing Linux on it and getting it to lipsynch funny Simpsons quotes or act as the phyical avatar for someone at the other end of a teleconference line?
We will make the following improvements to Big Mouth Billy Bass.
* User defined audio clips
* Lip syncing
* Video recording
* Audio recording
By adding this functionality to the bass, in addition to networking protocols, the bass will be transformed into an H.323 compliant video teleconferencing host. It will be possible to use Microsoft NetMeeting or CUSeeMe to connect to your bass at home and talk with your loved one ones!
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(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sociology of cellular
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DATE: 11/28/2003 08:52:42 PM
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"The Effects of Mobile Telephones on Social and Individual Life" is an interesting paper by Motorola sociologist Dr. Sadie Plant. Joi points out the fascinating stuff on cellular body-language:
Those who use their mobiles with this light touch often have their index finger aligned with the aerial at the top of the phone. There are also variations in the ways in which people’s eyes respond to a mobile call. Some mobile users adopt the scan, in which the eyes tend to be lively, darting around, perhaps making fleeting contact with people in the vicinity, as though they were searching for the absent face of the person to whom the call is made. With the gaze, the eyes tend to focus on a single point, or else to gaze into the distance, as though in an effort to conjure the presence of the disembodied voice.
1327k PDF Link
(via Joi Ito)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P2Pnets: where deleted documents are reborn
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DATE: 11/29/2003 04:52:31 AM
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Matt Jones posted a strategy document he'd his co-workers had written for the BBC, his then-employer, on his blog. They asked him to take it down. As is inevitably the case when this happens, people are coming by and posting to the comments section, asking where the document can be had. Turns out, it's circulating on Kazaa.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lockers create love hotel loyalty
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DATE: 11/29/2003 12:26:12 PM
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According to Joi Ito, Japanese love-hotels have lowered churn and increased customer loyalty by adding storage lockers, because:
Married couples found it convenient to store adult toys and other things that they didn't want their children to find in these lockers. These lockers created a relationship between the customer and the hotel and dramatically increased customer retention. Now these lockers are used to store all sorts of "Not Safe For Home" things.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Custom crocheted laptop sleeves
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DATE: 11/29/2003 12:29:34 PM
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For 60 Euros (and up), avant-gardge Viennese artist Evelyn Fürlinger will hand-crochet you a custom laptop sleeve with a design of your choosing: I'm especially fond of the red go-faster stripes.
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(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Replace storage with the bag it came in.
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DATE: 11/29/2003 12:32:22 PM
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Anti-static plastic, the kind used in RAM envelopes and other component-wrappers, is an excellent candidate for high-density storage. Reminds me of the Lily Tomlin bit: "I bought a garbage can and brought it home in a plastic bag. When I got there, I put the bag in the can."
Any device resulting from their work would be a "write-once, read-many" format and could perhaps be used to store films or music.
The researchers speculate that very dense memory blocks could be created by stacking the thin layers of the material on top of each other.
They team estimates that working devices could be up to 10 times more dense than current hard disks.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Labels detect and display fruit-ripeness
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DATE: 11/29/2003 12:46:51 PM
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A new labelling technology foor fruit senses the ripeness of the underlying comestible and changes color accordingly:
The system, developed at the Horticulture and Food Research Institute of New Zealand, uses a punnet that traps the volatile compounds fruit emit. As the fruit ripen, the colour of the label changes in response to changing concentrations of these compounds.
Since pears need to soften before they achieve their best flavour, shoppers often squeeze the fruit to test them, which can damage them, says Ron Henzell, who led the research team.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aussie passports get animated kangaroos
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DATE: 11/29/2003 12:54:02 PM
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The new Australian passports have an anti-counterfeiting laser-generated image of a kangaroo that hops up and down when you change your viewing-angle.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turing paper into ASCII
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DATE: 11/29/2003 01:36:50 PM
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Gary Wolf has a wonderful feature in this month's Wired about the parallel efforts to put texts, indices and images of books on the net (and to render them in cheap wood-pulp substrate) from the Internet Bookmobile to the Amazon Search Inside the Book system:
Kahle is happy to sidestep the problem of digitizing commercially successful books. He has no wish to antagonize the publishing industry. What he hates is that the Million Book Project cannot legally digitize countless books that aren't generating money for anybody. US libraries hold about 30 million unique volumes. No one knows how many of those books continue to be protected by copyright or are available from commercial publishers. Still, Kahle says, "they can't be digitized because the copyrights can't be cleared, and the copyrights can't be cleared because it's too much work to identify the copyright holders. Some people call them abandonware. I call them orphans."
"Amazon is taking a cut at the commercially available titles," continues Kahle. "We are going for the public domain titles. But who is taking care of the orphans? Nobody."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DNA sequencing for children
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DATE: 11/29/2003 01:40:52 PM
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Discovery toys is selling an $80 toy called the DNA Explorer, which allows small children to extract and sequence the DNA from a variety of foodstuffs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eroticising trademarked battlemechs
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DATE: 11/29/2003 01:45:23 PM
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ScoutWalker is a novel form of Star Wars porn: giant AT-ST Walkers engaged in scenes from the Kama Sutra.
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(Thanks, Jed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dishonest anti-bootleg DVD ad
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DATE: 11/29/2003 01:56:45 PM
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The UK-based Federation Against Copyright Theft is running ads in UK newsmags that warn:
BEAT THE CON MEN
To ensure your complete enjoyment, don't be persuarded to buy fake DVDs -- especially pre-release copies. Pirate DVDs are a rip-off, with poor sound and picture quality. Even if the packaging looks convincing, you will probably be disappointed with the contents. Avoid being conned by con men. You can report any suspicious activity in confidence to the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) on 0845 6034567. Copyright is a matter of FACT.
This ad makes the fairly hilarious and very hysterical assertion that people who buy pre-release DVDs at fun-faires or out of the trunks of suspicious cars are somehow being duped into buying less than they expect; that purchasers of bootleg DVDs assume they're getting crystal-clear sound and picture and are, in fact, patsies of these sinister con artists who dupe them left and right. It's my suspicion that the FACTs are quite different -- that most customers of DVD bootleggers know exactly what they can expect when they buy a fake DVD off a blanket on a side-street. And they buy them anyway.
When I was in Hong Kong's Temple Street night market, I found stalls selling bootleg VCDs of current release movies for less than a (US) dollar; alongside the stalls were permanent storefronts selling the licensed VCDs (months behind the theatrical release) for about US$8. The life-cycle of the movies there appears to be: buy the bootleg, check to see if it's worth seeing in the theatre. See the good movies, buy the licensed discs. So long as the studios make movies people want to see, the bootlegs merely serve as advertisements for cinema tickets and licensed discs.
It's all well and good for FACT to pursue its goals of convincing Britons to buy licensed discs instead of bootlegs, but this ad is pretty intellectually dishonest.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Journey Thru Innerspace lives again in 3D animation
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DATE: 11/29/2003 05:40:32 PM
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A trufan of the sadly defunct Journey Thru Innerspace ride from Disneyland's Tomorrowland has recreated the ride as a 3D model and is publishing stills and flythroughs of the textured mesh.
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Herald Square Xmas tree topped with open WiFi antenna
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DATE: 11/29/2003 05:42:31 PM
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Yahoo! has sposored the ornament atop the Xmas tree in NYC's Herald Square this year: a WiFi antenna broadcasting an open connection to the Manhattan passers-by who want to get in the holiday spirit with a little open spectrum. What a brilliant idea.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Retro-feel travel accessories
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DATE: 11/30/2003 04:10:48 AM
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Flight 001 is a chi-chi luggage-and-travel-accessory boutique, with retro-style Pan-Am-logo bags and such. I'm particularily fond of the airline-safety-card-print wallets, passport-sleeves and etc.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: San Francisco's homelessness quagmire
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DATE: 11/30/2003 10:09:28 AM
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The San Francisco Chronicle has begun a five-part series on the incredible homeless problem in SF. Thousands of homeless people live on San Francisco's streets, in straits as dire as anything you can imagine in the worst slums of the developing world, amid some of the wealthiest people in the world. It's a crisis that no one seems to know how to solve, and that San Franciscans have, by and large come to accept as an unchangeable fact of life. The first installment, "Homeless Island," is a gripping account of the knot of beggars who live and die on a downtown traffic island, holding up heartbreaking signs and shooting heroin into infected veins, waiting to die from flesh-eating bacteria. It's like a tour of hell.
"Day clinics? Jail? You think anyone out here on the street, all over this city, can stick with that?" Tommy said weeks before he died. "Why the hell do you think we're out here? Because we can't get over what's going on with us by ourselves, that's why.
"We want to get off the street, but I got to tell you true," he said. "Unless they take people like us and put us somewhere where we can't keep f -- ing up, we're going to keep f -- ing up."
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(via Nelson's Weblog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: ipodsdirtysecret.com's dirty secret
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DATE: 11/30/2003 03:02:00 PM
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The guy who donated bandwidth to ipodsdirtysecret.com (about two brothers who spraypainted complaints about lousy batteries on iPod posters) is pissed a plenty:
"Jesus, I cannot BELIEVE you guys. In good faith, I put the video back on the basis of the email you sent me, hoping that at least some people would click on the mirror link at at least get the truth, and information about how to replace the battery. Instead, you removed the mirror link entirely, used the bandwidth and resources that I was providing you exclusively on your front page, AGAIN without providing ANY information whatsoever about how users can solve this problem, or the fact that Apple now has an official $99 battery replacement, and on top of it all, put ThruPort's banner on the front page! I've now served 91,629 downloads for you, for over 0.6 terabytes of data transfer. What the f*** is you guys' problem? I guess that fact that you are liars shouldn't surprise me, since that's exactly what your whole site and the video is. Have fun with it, and whatever f***ed up satisfaction you get from having as many people as possible see your video, and not even wanting to tell people that there is a solution."
Link (thanks, Ian!>
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roy Disney resigns from Disney, slams Eisner
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DATE: 11/30/2003 07:10:16 PM
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Roy Disney has resigned from the Disney Board of Directors, and has sent a scathing email to Michael Eisner explaining, in exorciating detail, exactly why he's leaving the company his uncle founded.
1. The failure to bring back ABC Prime Time from the ratings abyss it
has been in for years and your inability to program successfully the ABC
Family Channel. Both of these failures have had, and I believe will continue
to have, significant adverse impact on shareholder value.
2. Your consistent micro-management of everyone around you with the
resulting loss of morale throughout the Company.
3. The timidity of your investments in our theme park business. At
Disney's California Adventure, Paris and now in Hong Kong, you have tried to
build parks "on the cheap" and they show it and the attendance figures
reflect it.
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(Thanks, Robynne!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Deborah Iyall of Romeo Void sells new print on eBay
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DATE: 11/30/2003 08:37:25 PM
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Debora Iyall -- artist, Native American cultural activist, and former front-woman for new wave band Romeo Void-- is selling this linocut on eBay to benefit People for the American Way. She says:
"[I wanted] to visually address recent events and the role of the Supreme Court. Where have all our freedoms gone? The foundation of our nation is based on broken treaties. A stack of money energizes the book of law. Apache helicopters circle overhead as the Supreme Court loiters around a river of death, the Court which allowed George W. Bush to assume the office of President of the United States of America in 2000. A soldier strides toward battlefield while a woman pulls a cart of produce. Hummers roll by. Mortar rounds flank the scene and a bear witnesses."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Rodney-King-like" citizen phonecam episode
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DATE: 11/30/2003 10:51:12 PM
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BoingBoing pal Emily says:
A blatant act of racism by the Portland police was snapped by a "citizen reporter" armed with a camera phone. The story and the photos were published in the Portland Tribune and broadcasted on television:
"Police offers parked their car outside Ringlers restaurant with a stuffed gorilla attached to the car's grill last Tuesday night, - where a largely black crowd had gathered for a weekly hip-hop show hosted by disc jockey Mello Cee. This is the kind of thing you expect to see in the South, like a Confederate flag. They might as well paint their faces black with white lips," said Mello Cee.
"Resident Calvin Washington who said he took the photos around 1 a.m. last Tuesday morning outside Ringlers restaurant at 1332 W. Burnside St. Washington said when he realized what was happening, he grabbed his cell phone camera and walked outside to take pictures. 'I went out and flicked a few pics. The police couldn't tell what I was doing because I had the phone in my hand. They couldn't tell what it was,' he said."
The Portland Tribune published a follow-up article on Friday, questioning whether the "incident may have launched the age of technological vigilantism in Portland".
News stories: Clubgoers accuse police of racism, Gorilla case highlights cell phone vigilantism, more links here
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Female blogger's first-person sex column causes ruckus in China
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DATE: 11/30/2003 11:00:11 PM
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NY Times piece on 25-year-old Chinese blogger Mu Zimei, whose sexually explicit first-person accounts have generated controversy -- and celebrity -- for the former magazine columnist. Snip:
What changed everything was her decision in April to start her own online blog at a new Chinese site for personal diaries. She said she thought it would be fun. While writing her magazine column, she had hopped from man to man, sometimes hopping to two men at once, sometimes hopping to married men. Her topics, though, remained more thematic than explicit.
But in her online diary, she began writing explicitly about these encounters, or those of her friends, and on July 26 described her brief and apparently unsatisfying liaison outside a restaurant with a famous guitarist in a Guangzhou rock band. The entry was posted at a popular online discussion board, spread among China's "netizens" like wildfire and was quickly picked up in the gossipy newspapers that feed China's growing celebrity culture. Eventually, she was featured in China's edition of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Link. Zimei isn't the first female writer in China to raise eyebrows over sexually explicit autobiographical work -- check this link for background on Mian Mian. (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese web celeb rabbit "Oolong" now has a successor
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DATE: 11/30/2003 11:09:01 PM
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Remember that website where the guy in Japan took totally cute daily snapshots of his beloved bunny named Oolong, and remember how Oolong passed away, and he took snapshots of his rabbit's death that were so sincere they just made you want to cry right into your keyboard? I may be the last blog-obsessed geek to learn, but the guy has a new, and equally photogenic rabbit named Yuebing ("moon-cake") Brace yourself for more really cute rabbit photos. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Half Life mod based on notorious Aussie detention camp
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DATE: 12/01/2003 02:07:39 AM
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Escape from Woomera is a first-person video strategy game (based on Half-Life) in which you play a refugee in the notorious Australian detention center. The idea is to call attention to the deplorable state of Woomera and the inherent cruelty of the detention process.
Q: By basing the game on the perpetration of illegal activities such as breaking out of detention aren't you inciting people to break the law?
A: This raises a further question:
"By basing the game on the perpetration of illegal activities, such as locking up people without trial, aren't you inciting governments to break the law?" Fortunately for those worried that the game would encourage refugees to break out of detention, or would incite governments around the world to break international law and defy UN conventions, these ideas show a real ignorance about the nature of videogames. Giving a player agency within a fictional game world - allowing them to make decisions and act out roles - is not at all the same as incitement or advocacy. Though there have been many studies done to try to prove a causal link between virtual actions in game and the real-life actions of the game player (for example "do violent videogames make kids violent"), no link whatsoever has ever been found. If we apply Ruddock's logic to the world's top-selling game for over a year (how many gamers do you know that haven't played GTA3?)- Grand Theft Auto III- a game in which the central premise is breaking the law, we'd presumably be seeing a massive increase in car thefts, prostitution and murder, and we'd have to believe that Rockstar games (the developers) condone such activities in real life. And finally, let's stop to consider exactly which law would be broken in an escape from detention. Yes, believe it or not - it's actually legally a crime punishable by imprisonment (oh irony of ironies!) to step outside a detention centre to 'tresspass' on Australian soil.
Link
(Thanks, Jean!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Techie Xmas list
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DATE: 12/01/2003 02:42:50 AM
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Dan Gillmor's put together a list of geeky Xmas prezzies that I quite like:
Inexpensive:
# Free software. OK, almost nothing is truly free. But free open-source software comes pretty close. I'm running the Mozilla Firebird Web browser on my everyday personal computer, for example. It's fast, capable and reliable. Isn't that enough these days?
On the Web, meanwhile, are vast numbers of excellent utilities such as the Google Toolbar, which works only with Windows and recent versions of Internet Explorer.
# USB plug-ins. Once entrepreneurs glommed onto the fact that USB ports on computers offer elecrical power in addition to data connectivity, they came up with a raft of cool stuff.
I use the Zip-LINQ retractable cables from Keyspan to charge my phone and make connections with several other devices. They cost $15 to $25 or so, but mean fewer power bricks to lug around. A colleague at Hong Kong University, where I'm teaching part time this month, also just brought to work a USB cable that connects to a sleeve you slide around your coffee cup. I haven't been able to discover if anyone in the U.S. is selling NewMotion's $6 "Cup Warmer" (but I'm planning to bring several home).
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ruggedized bike-powered mesh WiFi demo tomorrow in San Francisco
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DATE: 12/01/2003 03:30:47 AM
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The Jhai Foundation is demonstrating its ruggedized bicycle-powered WiFi access points in San Francisco tomorrow. These meshing wireless bridges are intended for use in rural Laos, as part of a sustainable economic development project.
When: Tuesday, December 2, at 10 a.m
Where: Jhai Foundation, 921 France Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112
The relay point would therefore have a computer (the "relay PC")serving the access point function for the villages and providing a link (the "backhaul" in the language of telephony) to the phone lines at Phon Hong. This computer would be a remote installation where access is by foot up a trail of moderate difficulty. It would be solar powered and highly resistant to environmental factors.
At Phon Hong the "server PC" would be installed on a water tower having an unblocked view of the mountain ridge. High-gain (24 dbi parabolic) antennas would be installed at the villages and at the server, while lower-gain "patch" antennas would be installed at the relay PC.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bruce Sterling hits his stride on his blog
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DATE: 12/01/2003 09:08:31 AM
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Bruce Sterling's been running his new Wired blog for a couple months now, and this morning, though, he hit his stride with a classic cyberpunk-dense review-cum-rant of a Brazillian electro-pop CD. This is killer prose.
I am digging this thing. Even a white-guy-samba
chestnut like "So Nice (Summer Samba)"
springs into a weird post-60s afterlife once it's
been globally cyberized with a samplerdelic
melange of hisses, whoops, whooshes, bleeps,
thuds and twitters. The spacey remixes of
"Tanto Tempo" sounds like they're scratching
at the edge of the universe with thick rubber
spatulas.
I pay attention to electronica for obvious reasons,
and I can always get along with easy-going,
caiparinha-blurred Brazilian beach music...
I mean, who couldn't like such stuff, it's so
harmlessly sexual and ingratiating... but techno
gives bossa nova some serious nova-osity.
The fact that these are actual songs, with
verse-verse chorus and that ruthlessly slinky
beat, gives all that synth dithering some useful
spine. Hey, it's "Brazilectronica!" This stuff
could conquer the world!
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hayes Micro: the moral is, take the money and run
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DATE: 12/01/2003 12:52:23 PM
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Amazing profile of the founders of Hayes Microcomputers -- Hayes (who wanted to build empires, went broke and blind instead) and his partner Heatherington (who cashed out early and has a putterer's dream-life now).
"Competition was heating up. Technology was moving faster. I just wanted out of the rat race," Heatherington says. "Apparently Dennis enjoyed the rat race, so he stayed."
Heatherington retired at 36. Hayes was shocked. He knew there was more money to be made in the years ahead...
Neither of Hayes' former wives would be interviewed. But Chan's attorney, Jimmy Deal, said Hayes is months behind on child support payments for the couple's two children.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Digital sundial: passive timekeeping through new materials
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DATE: 12/01/2003 01:03:18 PM
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Gosh, this is clever.
...the device is purely passive - it operates without electricity, and has no moving parts. Instead, the sunlight is cast through two cleverly designed masks in the shape of numbers that show the current time of day. The sundial is available in two versions, for use in either hemisphere. Placed on the inside of a south-facing window (north-facing in the southern hemisphere), the sundial can be read through the horizontal mirror. The display updates every 10 minutes, and gives a remarkably accurate record of the time during the daylight hours.
Link
(Thanks, manx!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fan builds 11,000 sqft Haunted Mansion replica
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DATE: 12/01/2003 01:44:44 PM
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This former Disney contractor turned his 11,000 sqft house into a replica of the Haunted Mansion, complete with homebrew audio-animatronics.
Link
(Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: RE/Search Pranks Festival in San Francisco on Saturday!
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DATE: 12/01/2003 05:27:50 PM
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"Fifteen years after it first hit shelves, PRANKS! remains one of the most important and relevant books ever to emerge from RE/Search's outre publishing house. In today's current surreal political landscape, a well-executed prank can do much more than yelling theater in a crowded fire!
In that spirit, RE/Search and The Lab present The Pranks! Festival (Saturday, 12/6). The Pranks! Festival will celebrate ten Bay Area artists who appeared in PRANKS! Through art exhibits, panel discussions, and chaotic socialization, we will fete the fearless Situationist spirit that San Francisco's pranksters embody. This is a rare opportunity to engage with prankster pioneers Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL), Monte Cazazza, Bruce Conner, Paul Mavrides, Mark McCloud, Mal Sharpe (yes, of Coyle & Sharpe), Fluxus anti-artist Robert Delford Brown, John Trubee, tattoo guru Don Ed Hardy and Jello Biafra (tent.)."
Update: Milton Rand Kalman, Chief Scientist of the Billboard Liberation Front, tells us that the BLF will also be making an appearance!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New regional weblog Blogging.LA launches
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DATE: 12/01/2003 10:45:52 PM
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Sean Bonner, Jason DeFillippo, Wil Wheaton, Caryn Coleman, Chris Pirillo, and a herd of fine nerds just launched Blogging.LA. Bunch of cool contributors on board. And then, in an unguarded moment, they loosened their standards and let me in. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New mobile hacking blog
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DATE: 12/02/2003 03:54:04 AM
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Rael Dornfest -- inventor of Blosxom, editor of the O'Reilly Hacks series -- has started a new blog called MobileWhack, where he's keeping track of sexy/weird crap you can do with cellphones.
MobileWhack is all about that mobile handset, palmtop, hiptop, ipod, or laptop in your pocket, purse, briefcase, or dangling from your utility belt. It's about squeezing every last ounce of mobility out of your mobile device.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CSS hack to replicate OSX toolbar zooming
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DATE: 12/02/2003 03:56:13 AM
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CSS-Fisheye is a CSS hack that allows you to create lists that zoom on mouseover in a fashion reminiscent of the OSX zooming toolbar. It's super-sweet. Try mousing over the text below to see what I mean:
Tiger, tiger, burning
bright,
In the forest of
the night,
What immortal hand
or eye
Could frame thy fearful
symmetry?
In what distant deeps
or skies
Burnt the fire of
thine eyes?
On what wings dare
he aspire?
What the hand dare
seize the fire?
And what shoulder,
and what art,
Could twist the sinews
of thy heart?
When thy heart began
to beat,
What dread hand forged
thy dread feet?
What the hammer?
What the chain?
In what furnace was
thy brain?
What the anvil? What
dread grasp
Dared its deadly
terrors clasp?
When the stars threw
down their spears
And watered heaven
with their tears,
Did He smile his
work to see?
Did He who made the
lamb make thee?
Tiger, tiger, on
the mat,
You're nothing but
a pussy cat,
But damn your eyes
and rue the day!
I have to clean your
litter tray.
with apologies to William Blake
Link
(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: E-texts used against Bayesian spam-filters
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DATE: 12/02/2003 04:00:52 AM
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Bayesian anti-spam filters count word-frequency in suspect messages and compare the results to profiles of word-frequency in spam and ham. Defeating this requires that your spam include a lot of natural human prose. So spammers have started to mine the Gutenberg Project and other sources of human-generated ASCII and dumping random hunks of literature into their messages to get around the filters.
Blogger and journalist Clive Thompson found an excerpt from Chapter 20 of The Master Key by Wizard of Oz author L Frank Baum in a message that had as its subject line "the big unit" (no prizes for guessing what the rest of it was hawking).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Updated: Open HDTV PVR coming to market, probably illegal
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DATE: 12/02/2003 04:04:55 AM
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The inventor of the ReplayTV has created an open high-definition PVR/entertainment hub that is Linux-based and invites itw owners to hack the hell out of it. This is not only a nice piece of technology, it's also probably illegal, given the tamper-resistance requirement in last month's Broadcast Flag order from the FCC. Thanks, Hollywood. You've successfully outlawed the next generation of VCRs. Turns out that this box is a media player, not a PVR, and probably won't be touched by the Broadcast Flag.
High-definition TV content remains scarce, according to Roku, and the HD1000 is intended to help fill that gap, letting HDTV owners actually use their machines rather than just having them hanging there, on the wall, with nothing to do. "The Roku HD1000 gives HDTV owners the ability to create a high-definition showcase for art, music, and photos that is individual and unique," says Woodward.
The Roku HD1000 range of media capabilities comprises digital photos, art, music, and "dynamic media applications." Content is displayed through memory card slots for CompactFlash, MMC, SD, Memory Stick, and SmartMedia. Or, the Roku HD1000 can connect via Ethernet or Wi-Fi to a home network.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: David Byrne loves PowerPoint
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DATE: 12/02/2003 07:45:38 AM
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This Thursday in LA, Wired Magazine is teaming up with the LA County Museum of Art to produce a performance by David Byrne called "I [Heart] Powerpoint." I'll be there, and if there's Wi-Fi, goshdarnit I'll blog it.
[His] most recent project is Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, a book of artwork [and DVD] done with the ubiquitous presentation software PowerPoint. "I have been working with PowerPoint as an art medium for a number of years. It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship--or lack thereof), but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the 'medium'."
See excerpted portions of E.E.E.I. in the September 2003 issue of WIRED.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lisa Rein open-invite party/showcase on Dec 13, San Francisco
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DATE: 12/02/2003 11:22:43 AM
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Lisa Rein -- XML wonk, activist, writer, musician -- is holding a giant, open party on Dec 13 in San Francisco at which she will be performing her music. Admission's free!
This party is basically a chance for me to present my music and catch up with old friends. I've wanted to have a party for some time since I moved back to San Francisco in October 2001, but I kind of know a lot of people, and wanted to invite all of them, and still have enough room for the people I don't know personally yet to come by and say hi and hear my tunes.
6:30-6:55 Lisa and Ron and Friends
7:00-7:30 Alex Walsh
7:30-7:55 Lisa and Ron and Friends
8:00-8:30 Paul de Benedictis
8:45-9:30 Lisa and Ron and Friends
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": Hollywood Wardrive
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DATE: 12/02/2003 12:50:39 PM
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On today's edition of the NPR show "Day to Day," I go wardriving with founders of the Southern California Wireless User's Group -- we hunt for wireless LANS that might be vulnerable to security breaches.
"As wireless network technology becomes increasingly popular, users still seem unwilling to outfit their networks with proper security to protect their information from hackers. "
Link to "Day to Day" home, listen to the archived show using Real or WinMedia here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jorn Barger is missing
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DATE: 12/02/2003 01:03:55 PM
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Jorn "Robot Wisdom" Barger, who coined the term "weblog," is missing. He hasn't been seen since October.
Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence.
Jorn is a prolific Usenet poster, but his last posting took place on September 30. His last posting on Slashdot was also on September 30. He last accessed his website via an FTP connection from Socorro on October 1.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Naked sushi in Seattle update
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DATE: 12/02/2003 01:53:24 PM
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Our pornpals at DazeReader say:
Naked sushi in Seattle update. Dan Savage ridiculed both the "clenchbutts" for protesting naked sushi and the local media for giving them attention. His one criticism: "How come no boy plates?" In the interests of equal opportunity objectification, The Stranger sponsored Naked Doughnuts at the same restaurant on a recent Friday night. "Two good-looking guys will be laid out on the bar and covered with Top Pot doughnuts. . . . Ogle the boys, eat the donuts, fuck the clenchbutts." The restaurant owners invited the two men back for sushi night, so now you can eat sushi off naked women and naked men in Seattle. Bonzai gallery.
Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: National Radiotape Network: 1960s audiotape APA
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DATE: 12/02/2003 02:08:45 PM
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In 1964, a group of Britons began the practice of producing homemade "radio" programming -- light entertainment, music, etc -- and recording them to reel-to-reel tape, and then passing them around to their colleagues via the post. The club grew into something called the National Radiotape Network, and now its archives are online.
In 1972, Transdiffusion merged with Electromusications, another school-based tape recording network, running in the English midlands. Over 20 years, Transdiffusion, with Electromusications, built up a large collection of music, jingles and TV and radio presentation material.
As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the fashion for circulating tapes diminished, and the National Radiotape Network closed. Transdiffusion was left with its own archives, together with the archives of its defunct contributing member organisations, and the archives of the Round the Horne Appreciation Society.
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(Thanks, Alice!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ClickTheVote launches
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DATE: 12/02/2003 11:34:25 PM
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John Parres writes:
Today marks the official launch of Click The Vote. We are a grassroots non-profit dedicated to educating and organizing new technology users to promote legalized file-sharing, defend open source computing and demand democratic spectrum allocation for emergent technologies like Ultra-Wideband and software radio. We invite everyone to join up because over the coming election year we are going to have fun asking tough questions, flash mobbing candidates, sending targeted CD-Rs, utilizing P2P tools for grassroots efforts and demanding answers to important questions that affect the lives and futures of everyday users of new technology.
The USA primaries are only months away and the general election is less than a year off. Time to get busy!
Link to CNET news article, Link to Clickthevote.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SciFi Channel launch party for Battlestar Galactica miniseries, Hollywood
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DATE: 12/02/2003 11:46:02 PM
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At the DGA in Hollywood tonight, SciFi Channel premiered the forthcoming "reimagined" miniseries Battlestar Galactica, which debuts Monday night, next week.
Cast and crew were present, along with SciFi Network brass. The event included a screening of episode one in entirety. Forget what you've heard about complaints from fans of the original series -- the new version is nothing short of breathtaking, and lives up to its producers' promise to turn the science fiction TV genre on its head. The two-part miniseries was co-produced by David Eick and Ron Moore (Moore also co-wrote the screenplay), and masterfully, sensitively directed by Michael Rymer -- who is destined to become "untouchable in five minutes," according to a pre-screening quip from Eick. He's right. This stuff is the real thing.
More in Wired News shortly... but for now, here are a few snapshots I took of the cast members who were present this evening. From left to right: Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Tricia Helfer (Cylon Number 6), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), and Grace Park (Boomer).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Typeface brought to life
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DATE: 12/03/2003 04:58:04 AM
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"Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black" is a long, hilarious video is a spoof of the MTV VH1 "Behind the Music" show, tracing the history of the Cooper Black typeface with font-otaku care and affection.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Soylent Dean poster
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DATE: 12/03/2003 05:01:42 AM
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Nice work from the Dean campaign: downloadable Soylent Dean posters. These are the next "When you download MP3s, you're downloading communism" posters, or possibly the next "When you download porn, God kills a kitten" posters -- mark my words!
520K PDF Link)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Perl Advent Calendar: Xmas spirit with an RSS feed
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DATE: 12/03/2003 05:03:14 AM
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The Perl Advent Calendar is a clickable tip-a-day site for aspiring perl hackers. Lovely geeky holiday spirit.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free software, for the sake of regional identity
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DATE: 12/03/2003 05:04:40 AM
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Nice Bruce Sterling editorial from this month's Wired on the move in Extremadura, Spain, to develop a local flavor of Linux:
The features may be mundane, but they add up to something quite new: a patriotic regional operating system. The emailer's logo is a stork, Extremadura's most beloved bird. The word processor is named after a famous local poet. The desktop is crammed with hallowed symbols of the homeland. Extremaduran schoolkids could stand up and pledge allegiance to this thing...
This deeply rooted regional approach could prove a more nurturing environment for Tux than either the EU, with its stifling bureaucracy, or the US, where lawyers for SCO are eager to sue the daylights out of anyone who dares to propagate the penguin. Right now, most of the action is in government, where officials are beginning to wake up to the advantages of open standards and malleable code - and not having to pay Americans for any of it. India is releasing Linux variations in local dialects from Assamese to Telugu. China, Japan, and South Korea are collaborating on their own OS. South Africa recently approved an open source strategy, and similar things are going on in Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Peru, and Ukraine.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Talking Heads box set
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DATE: 12/03/2003 05:06:51 AM
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There's a new Talking Heads box set out, "Once in a Lifetime," with four CDs (including the rarities released on the Sand in the Vaseline two-disc set a few years back), a DVD containing all the band's videos, and lots of other juicy stuff.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dell won't help customers remove spyware
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DATE: 12/03/2003 05:09:47 AM
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Dell has issued a memo to its tech-support staff, telling them not to help Dell customers remove spyware from their systems, because it "may conflict with user license agreements of other applications installed on your system." I.e., Dell has decided that its duty to its users is superceded by its duty to upholding "contracts" that you "sign" when you click on the I Agree button after downloading this app or that, contracts in which you promise to allow spyware to be installed on your machine, and promise not to try to remove it. Nice one, Dell.
This means we do not take callers to download.com or doxdesk.com, nor do we recommend spyware removal programs, nor do we advise callers on the use of spyware removal programs. This includes using phrases "We don't support the removal of spyware, but I use..."
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The CIA Assassination of John Lennon
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DATE: 12/03/2003 12:29:21 PM
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My friend, cartoonist Mack White, has a new one-page comic called "Dead Silence in the Brain: The CIA Assassination of John Lennon." The page also has a bunch of links relating to government-sponsored assasinations and real-life Manchurian Candidates. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: R.U. Sirius' NeoFiles
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DATE: 12/03/2003 12:43:21 PM
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Mondo 2000 founding editor R.U. Sirius is conducting interviews with cutting-edge scientists and thinkers (including Boing Boing's own David Pescovitz) for a nutritional supplement company website. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool aerial snapshots -- from a kite
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DATE: 12/03/2003 03:48:58 PM
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Sweet snapshots taken from a small camera attached to a flying kite. Link (thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: David Cronenberg talks geek tech philosphy on "Alias" TV show
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DATE: 12/03/2003 03:52:23 PM
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Via "Amy's Robot" blog:
David Cronenberg was on Alias last night, playing a neuroscientist with an experimental method for recovering lost memories through the use of drugs and lucid dreaming. The episode itself is almost an homage to Cronenberg's ideas and visual style...as Sidney undergoes DC's process, the show turns into one of the more visually and conceptually cinematic bits of TV I've seen in a while, full of Cronenberg's illogical logic, layered realities, and of course the requisite bit of Cronenberg's nonsensical corniness. In any case, before the experiment gets started, DC's character offers a nice little monologue about simulation, postmodernism, lucid dreaming, and fake bacon. Watch:
David Cronenberg on Alias talking about postmodernism and reality [mp3, 2.5 mins, 1.8 mb]
If you missed him this week, he'll be on next week, too.
Link, (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nokia 6600 review
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DATE: 12/03/2003 04:26:41 PM
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BoingBoing pal R. Emory Lundberg just reviewed the apparently ubergruven Nokia 6600:
[The] all-in-one organizer, information manager, and mobile communicator that you may have been waiting for. If the Nokia 3650 was too playful for your lifestyle, you should consider this handset as a way to communicate, organize, and lighten the load in your pocket. Generally I prefer separate devices. I really like the Palm Tungsten T3 (review) and find it a very capable tool. But there are times when I just want my schedule and contacts with me, and don't need to work on Office documents on the go, and the Nokia 6600 has quickly become my handset of choice.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Zoo Zen
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DATE: 12/03/2003 08:03:53 PM
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chaoskitties
bunnies
uncommon creatures
no hands kitten
counting sheep
teddy bear
lemur
monkey
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dude Where's My Blogshares?
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DATE: 12/03/2003 08:15:50 PM
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Blogshares.com is no more. Founder Seyed Razavi says:
Dear BlogShares players, I am sorry to announce that BlogShares will not be reopening after the current technical difficulties are resolved. Currently, the database server is dead and looks to be for the next few days. The latest system crash has highlighted to me that deliverying a fun, useful service for the BlogShares community requires an active operator and developer. As most of you are no doubt aware I've been neither for the past couple of months. That has led to a decline of quality service, new features and ultimately income for the site and it looked likely that there wouldn't be enough to pay for next month's hosting.
It's been an interesting and very rewarding nine months bringing a bit of entertainment to bloggers (and blog lovers). I'd like to thank especially all those people who donated money or their valuable time, those who became premium subscribers, those who worked on cool toys which made use of the fledgling API and all those who could be found on the forums and IRC channel. You turned a silly fun idea of a mad monkey coder in London into something worthy of the attention by thousands of bloggers and the press. (...) My goal with the project was always to embrace the power law and to provide a new way of highlighting blogs with a little bit of fun. I've been pleasantly surprised of how well it did and stupefied it did it for so long. Now, however, it is time to move on to other things. I'm sure you'll be hearing from me in the not so distant future. You can also find me at my perpetual home: monkeyx.com.
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TITLE: What happens when you give gamers intellectual property rights?
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DATE: 12/04/2003 03:13:16 AM
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James Grimmelmann has penned a bloody brilliant essay about the issues raised by allowing (or not allowing) players to hold an intellectual property right to objects they create in games. Inspired by the Second Life announcement at last month's State of Play conference, Grimmelmann presents and synthesizes the positions of a variety of the world's leading thinkers on IP, game economics, and playability, and comes up with more questions than answers. There's fodder for a dozen sf novels here -- and just when I thought that stories about VR worlds where anything can happen (and hence nothing is interesting) were narratively dead in the water...
# Castronova cares about the game society, but not so much about the platform. He's thinking about these in-game values as things that we ought to encourage, perhaps by giving appropriate economic incentives to game owners. It's okay with him if the owners keep their game platforms locked down. As long as some owners give their players a rule-set that preserves in-game freedom, fairness, and community, it's all good.
# Benkler is more or less the opposite. He'd love to see some games ripped open at the level of the platform -- developed by distributed groups and run without a single centralized owner-god-wizard. In his writings on the regulation of communications infrastructure and media concentration, Benkler has consistently emphasized the view that avoiding such concentrations of power at the infrastructure level is the most important act -- from it, everything good flows.
# The agoraXchange people want both the platform and the game world to be open. Now, the question above tugs at apotential tension between these two forms of openness. When push absolutely comes to shove, the agoraXchange team will assert control at the platform layer if their core values are threatened in the game universe; otherwise, they walk the walk and quack the quack of freedom at every level.
# Bartle really doesn't care about either form of freedom. My caricature of him lives in what might be caricatured as the "game designer" paradigm: I want to be free to create whatever strange and twisted world I want. If players like it, they'll join and stay; if they don't like it, they'll go somewhere. Now, Bartle is a great designer, and as with the other great designers, his writings involve an exquisite level of sympathy for (and understanding of) players. But his is basically a "game"-centric view: if you build it, they will play. There aren't political questions here, except potentially if stupid lawyers come barging in and start treating games as something other than games.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turn NSFW into SFW
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DATE: 12/04/2003 03:15:21 AM
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BadBlue allows you to interpret your workplace (or school) sysadmin as damage and route around him. The way it works is, you install an app on your home, broadband-connected PC, and then when you get to the office or school, you run a complimentary app on your PC there. The app disguises and forwards all of your Web traffic to your home PC, which fetches and sends back the pages you're looking for, free from automatic monitors, filters, and workplace snoopers.
If this sounds familiar, that's because it's based on the principles underpinning Peek-a-Booty and other "hactivist" apps intended to give Chinese dissidents and other prisoners of censoring proxies free access to the net. Of course, the killer app for this is looking at porn at the office.
OfficeSurfer lets you surf in privacy from your office, bypassing corporate restrictions on specific web sites, defeating monitoring software, and preventing routine logging of your online activities.
Check personal email accounts... visit your favorite web sites... worry-free and hassle-free.
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(via Infoanarchy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crank letters to corporate America and its response
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DATE: 12/04/2003 04:13:50 AM
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Consumer Joe is a collection of crank/prank letters sent by screenwriter Paul Davidson to a variety of giagantic corporations, asking, for example, if he should call poison control after swallowing toothpaste, or if the Barbie hot-tub would be suitable for a garden party. The letters are genuinely funny, and the clueless bureaucratese in the responses is often equally good, but best of all are the responses from corporate letter-answerers who have winkled out his game and are playing along with their own sly humor:
Our research and development department went to work right away in the smoothie lab experimenting with your concoctions.
The Tuna Melt smoothie looks promising. We found the key to be white albacore tuna in oil, lots of mayonnaisse and some powdered cheese. However, the Thanksgiving smoothie (turkey, cranberry, and gravy) is posing some challenges. Your recommendation to heat it up would require us to install microwave ovens at all locations.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshop was invented for Star Wars
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DATE: 12/04/2003 04:32:13 AM
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Photoshop was developed as part of the SFX efforts for Star Wars:
Thomas was a programmer, while John was in charge of special effects for the first Star Wars film. Brown confirms: "Photoshop is here today because of that movie." Thomas developed software to add effects and painting tools to images at John's request.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Battlestar Erotica: Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!
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DATE: 12/04/2003 06:12:46 AM
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I filed this story for Wired News about the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries:
"We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex," quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday night's Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed "walking toasters" from the original TV series are succeeded by -- well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom.
One of the newly humanized enemy androids, Number Six, is played by former Victoria's Secret model Tricia Helfer (so that's Victoria's big secret! -- we always knew there was a sinister purpose behind those ubiquitous catalogs). While in the throes of sex, her spine glows a luminescent, otherworldly, X-ray crimson.
Episode No. 1 of the two-part miniseries, which debuts Dec. 8, explodes with a jaw dropper of a scene that blends Cylon eroticism with equal parts pants-wetting apocalyptic terror and blast-tacular deep-space warfare. None of this should work, but under the nuanced direction of Michael Rymer, it does, spectacularly, and the rest of the episode never disappoints.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: No Parking Tree
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DATE: 12/04/2003 11:07:36 AM
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Picture of a tree that has assimilated a No Parking sign. Link (thanks, Pete!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: The Smalley vs. Drexler "Battle of the Nano Scientists" rages on
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DATE: 12/04/2003 01:53:42 PM
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Nobel Laureate nanotechnologist Richard Smalley and pioneering nano visionary Eric Drexler have taken their firey debate about the scientific probability (and exact definition) of molecular assemblers to the front page of Chemical & Engineering News magazine. Here's the Foresight Institute's summary. Ray Kurzweil has jumped into the fray too. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Update on Star Wars and Photoshop
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DATE: 12/04/2003 03:41:08 PM
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At least a hundred (well, OK, 30) of you wrote to say that the MacWorld story about Photoshop's relationship to Star Wars is bogus. Here's a link, decide for yourself.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tapestries for the 21st Century
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DATE: 12/04/2003 03:46:31 PM
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Wonderful Something Awful photoshopping contest to create medieval tapestries with modern themes.
Link
(Thanks, Gnat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Recreating Toad Hall in CGI
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DATE: 12/04/2003 03:51:24 PM
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The Mr Toad's Wild Ride at Walt Disney World's Fantasyland has been gone for years, shoved aside to make way for the Pooh ride. One Toad truefan is bringing the ride back as a detailed 3D VR experience, a la the virtual Journey Thru Innerspace.
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(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-Terror Line: audblogging The Man
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DATE: 12/04/2003 03:55:47 PM
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The Anti-Terror Line is the reverse of a Fed snitch line -- it's a number you can call when The Man is giving you a hard time in the name of defending the homeland from terrorists -- your call (and anything you can get your attacker to utter into the handset) is recorded and published on a webserver where you can annotate it. Natalie Jermijenko, the project's originator, has used it to record herself being put off an airline for using the first class toilet.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stephen King: forget piracy, boomers are just tired of buying crap
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DATE: 12/04/2003 04:02:22 PM
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Stephen King's editorial in the new Entertainment Weekly (not online, but the best part is below) opines that the real crisis in the entertainment industry isn't piracy, it's mental fatigue among moneyed baby boomers.
So what happened in the '90s? I think we're seeing an entire generation -- my generation, the baby-boom generation -- turning off the lights upstairs and putting a sign on the door: SORRY, BUT I'M TAKING A NAP. MIND CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Pretty much the same deal is going on with music sales. Piracy and illegal downloads, although covered to a fare-thee-well in the press, account for only a fraction of the drop in $$. I think what's happening is all too clear: We baby boomers are just too pooped to party. Oh, we do buy some records -- you may have heard that we love the Beatles, Rod Stewart, and those funksters the Rolling Stones. Just don't try to get us to listen to anyone who isn't registered with AARP! Bob Seger was probably correct when he told us rock & roll never forgets, but it sure gets tired.
Movie-ticket sales have remained strong, but only because the studios are selling a product aimed almost solely at Gen-X and Gen-Y. Most R-rated movies go in the tank. PG-13 rules. A film like ''The Fast and the Furious'' strikes box office gold, while Clint Eastwood's ''Mystic River'' muddles along at the box office. I'd argue that 20 years ago, ''Mystic River'' would have done ''Chinatown'' box office numbers. Now the baby boomers look at the previews on TV and think, Nah, that looks too serious. Too hard. Guess I'll stay home and watch ''Jeopardy!'' And the ''Jeopardy!'' answer is ''Just about the saddest thing Steve King can think of.'' The question is ''What do you call a whole generation going to sleep?''
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New bizmodel: screw customers with phony charges
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DATE: 12/04/2003 04:23:10 PM
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David Pogue takes up arms against "miscellaneous" charges on phone and banking bills, and against "innocent" mistakes where customers are repeatedly, routinely overcharged.
Phase 1 of this program was the proliferation of miscellaneous fees - for "regulatory assessment," "handling," "restocking," and so on. According to Business Week, newly concocted fees will generate $100 million for hotels this year, $2 billion for banks, $11 billion for credit-card companies - and an average of 20 percent extra on every phone bill.
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(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Infringement isn't terrorism
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DATE: 12/04/2003 04:26:09 PM
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My colleague Jason Schultz has blogged some pithy remarks about the head of WIPO's comparison of copyright infringement to terrorism. God, how I hate the comparison of all things to terrorism, it's such shoddy rhetoric. Really: if copyright infringement is like terrorism, does that mean that our first line of defense against illicit music downloading shoud be the systematic confiscation of nailfiles and scissors from business travellers?
Mr Idris described how he had heard of children dying after using counterfeit baby shampoo and warned of the potentially disastrous consequences of relying on machines that had been made using an illicitly duplicated model.
Excuse me, but those aren't intellectual property/piracy problems. False advertising is a consumer protection issue and a problem that everyone supports eradicating...
However, there have been several documented instances where WIPO's own high protectionist patent and data registration policies are actively hurting patient access to AIDS-related drugs and other essential medicines in the third world, Africa in particular...
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cellphone charger also disinfects
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DATE: 12/04/2003 04:28:21 PM
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A Korean outfit has announced a cell-phone charger that also disinfects the handset. I need one of these for airport touchscreen check-in kiosks, which always seem to be covered in a thin film of Burger King and mucous.
According to the company, the germ-killing products are equipped with an airtight container and a special lid on top of the normal charger's body to sterilize the digital gadgets during recharging.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Homemade astrolabes and such
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DATE: 12/04/2003 04:31:29 PM
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Nice gallery of a hobbyist's efforts to reproduce ancient scientific instruments. I love the astrolabes.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photos from amusement park trade-show
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DATE: 12/04/2003 05:06:03 PM
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The crew from Intercot have been attending the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions conference in Orlando and posting kick-ass photos as they go.
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(Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reforming a garbage house
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DATE: 12/04/2003 05:06:37 PM
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This is an inspiring story about an obsessive "hoarder" whose home had become a garbage house, so full of crap that he was in danger of going to jail for criminal violations of local ordinances. Then the county counsel cut a deal with the president of the local chapter of the National Assn. of Professional Organizers to help the craphound clean up his life -- and he allowed a news-crew to document the process.
Drum, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat tied under his chin, will supervise from a chair near the garage. Breininger is jazzed. Drum has kept his promise not to bring anything back into the two rooms the crew cleared out a week ago.
Drum is nervous. He frets about the broken windows and rotting flooring, things that must be fixed to put him back on the right side of the law. And he wants shelves so he can have his books, now boxed, around him.
"First, we get you organized, then we'll figure out how to take care of the repairs and the beautification," Breininger reminds him.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig tears SCO a new one
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DATE: 12/04/2003 05:24:22 PM
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Larry Lessig, having heard about Darl "SCO" McBride's latest missive, has dropped everything to write a scathing response.
We should all believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced when "Authors" have the right to do with their property whatever it is they want to do -- consistent with the law, and so long as the property right is properly balanced. And we should all believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced when that right is "vigorously protect[ed]".
But the owners of GPL'd software are doing no more than exercising this right, just as Microsoft would exercise its right. They are profiting from the right to choose the terms under which they release their software, and the terms they have chosen also have a great benefit to other software innovation. They exercise their property right; they and we benefit.
But if we are to protect that property right "vigorously," then we should take steps to protect property owners from baseless lawsuits against their right to use their property as they wish. So when it comes to the matter of sanctions against the lawyers in this case, the judge might well want to consider how important it is that the property right of copyright owners be "vigorously" defended.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jorn Barger is alive and well
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Jorn "Robotwisdom" Barger, missing for two months, has been found alive and well in New Mexico.
It turns out Barger had simply relocated to a new home in the small desert town of Socorro, New Mexico, without telling his roommate.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mr Potatohead meets Picasso
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DATE: 12/05/2003 04:33:13 AM
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Mr. Picassohead: a roll-your-own picassoid face app, a la Mr Potatohead.
Link
(Thanks, Grad!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tree with Attitude
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DATE: 12/05/2003 11:02:28 AM
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Inspired by yesterday's sign-eating tree, Boing Boing reader "cow" sent in these pictures of a plaque-biting tree. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Updated: eCommerce is 0wned by bogus patents
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DATE: 12/05/2003 01:58:52 PM
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Want to get a sense of just how screwed up the patent system is? Check out this mockup of a simple e-commerce page, which is annotated with the twenty patents it violates.
* 24-kids-scannan.ie: domain name. National characters in domain names: EP1159820
* [Action] [Kids] [Drama] [Adventure]: (tabbed pallettes) EP689133
* Picture link - pop-up window: EP0537100
* Watch - Displaying video through the web: EP0933892
* Download film - Displaying video through the web (same as above):
EP0933892
* mpeg4-format - Widely used video format for video download: More than 40 patents (herunder DK638218)
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Updated URL: Link
(Thanks, Yoz!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bike-eating tree
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Number three in a series of object-eating trees: the bike borg. Link (thanks, ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Omnivorous Trees: Part 4
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DATE: 12/05/2003 03:43:37 PM
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Here's another hungry tree. This one has a taste for rusty farm machinery. Link(thanks, Paul!)
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TITLE: The mother lode of omnivorous trees
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DATE: 12/05/2003 03:51:06 PM
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Here's the site of a guy so obsessed with "gluttonous trees" that he has a collection of pictures of them and a book, to boot. Don't you wish someone had trained a time-lapse movie camera at some of these trees? Links
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Growing a car
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DATE: 12/05/2003 04:46:20 PM
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Interesting piece in VentureBlog about job loss in the US. Since 1995, two million Americans have lost jobs in the manufacturing industry. Those jobs didn't go overseas, though. China lost 16 million manufacturing jobs in the same period.
Economically, trade is no different than other technologies. Economist David Friedman of Santa Clara University puts it most succinctly: there are two ways to make a car -- you can either make it in Detroit or grow it in Iowa. You already know how to make it in Detroit. You get a bunch of iron ore, smelt it into steel, and have an assembly line of robots and workers shape it into a finished vehicle.
To grow it in Iowa, you plant car seeds in the ground (also known as "wheat"), wait until they sprout, and harvest them. Take the harvest and put it into a big boat marked "to Japan" and let it sail off. A few months later a brand new car comes back.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto skyline at high speed
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DATE: 12/06/2003 03:24:31 AM
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This is a breathtaking 24h time-lapse film of the Toronto skyline. The sunrise, in particular, is spectacular.
5.07MB Quicktime Link
(Thanks, homerj!)
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TITLE: Marijuana IPO in the offing
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An entrepreneur has responded to Canada's impending marijuana legalization by founding a company to package, sell, and pay taxes on medical pot, and now he hopes to take the firm public.
Eugene estimates the grass crop is worth anywhere from CN$4 billion to CN$7 billion and thinks a money-making opportunity exists as governments move to decriminalize the drug. He also said a U.S. Supreme Court decision in October lifting a federal ban on medical marijuana will open the doors to a larger international market.
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TITLE: 20 Things auction has begun!
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DATE: 12/06/2003 03:38:27 AM
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The "20 things. 20 people. 20 days." project collects 20 pieces of art and auctions them on eBay once a year, raising money for charity -- including EFF. The new 20 Things has just kicked off, and is open for business.
Face Jug, by Ben Truesdale, in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This salt fired, cobalt-alkaline glazed stoneware face jug is a small and charming relative of last year's hottest auction item. Measuring 3.25" h X 2" d x 2" w, this quizzical face jug will ponder your activities as you glide thru your day. Fits nicely on computer monitors, desk tops, breakfast tables or dashboards.
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(Thanks, Ben!)
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TITLE: Tech hits and misses of 2003
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DATE: 12/06/2003 03:39:57 AM
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Dan Gillmor is soliticing your suggestions for his annual Hits and Misses column:
As in previous years, I'll be doing a year-end round-up of the
hits and misses in technology, tech policy and the business world in
general. (Here's last year's column.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jojo in the Stars: Rankin-Bass meets Delicatessen
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DATE: 12/06/2003 03:51:30 AM
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Jojo in the Stars is a stop-motion CGI animation movie that was apparently released in November. Looks like Delicatessen meets Rankin-Bass. The Flash-based trailer is beautiful.
Link
(Thanks, Why!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ongoing discussion of Eastern Standard Tribe
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DATE: 12/06/2003 04:03:25 AM
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The early review copies of my next novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, have begun to circulate among critics and bookstore owners. There's a bit of a discussion going on about the book's notions of geography-independent tribes over in Julie Czernada's SFF.net newsgroup.
What struck me, about 2:00 AM this morning, after reading the book last
night, is that the tribes exist already. Cory isn't talking about a nebulous
future, I am, in effect, part of E.S.T. I certainly haven't adjusted my
circadians to E.S.T. (consciously, though for some time I have been rising
an hour or two earlier than I used to, and going to bed earlier), yet also,
for some time now, a significant percentage of my social interaction has
revolved around newsgroups that focus on several E.S.T.authors, some
E.S.T.publishers, a WorldCon that took place in E.S.T. Additional time is
spent communicating with Robert J. Sawyer's Yahoo Group (E.S.T.) and an
R.P.Gaming programmers' group that has its key members in E.S.T. My
favourite Canadian book distributor is on E.S.T. and I devote a
dis-proportionate share of my work energy into promoting their books.
Link
(Thanks, Kent!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stunning board-game history book
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DATE: 12/06/2003 09:04:31 AM
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In a shop today, I came across "The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board and Table Games," which is a stunningly illustrated book from an academic press, which collects board and token-art from a museum collection of boardgames. It was one of those books that I wished I had someone on my Xmas list to buy it for.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Taschen book of Chinese propaganda posters
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DATE: 12/06/2003 09:08:44 AM
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From artbook publisher extraordinaire Taschen comes this oversized collection of Chinese Propaganda Posters, faithfully reproduced and annotated with scholarly essays. I couldn't put this down in the bookstore -- it was only the fact that I've already got thousands of books in storage and not a lot of room in my suitcase that stopped me from buying it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Walt Disney's FBI files
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DATE: 12/06/2003 09:13:37 AM
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Update: I've found a new host for these files, thanks to the generosity of Danny O'Brien and James Cronin
Walt Disney's FBI files are a hoot -- all 450 pages worth. Mostly, they consist of various Feebs (all the way up to Hoover, whom field agents call "The Boss") fretting that Disney's farce comedies like That Darn Cat (which was based on a novel written by a retired Agent who was a constant thorn in the Bureau's side) would cast a disparaging light on the Bureau and speculating about how to convince Walt to change the FBI agents to a different species of Fed cop -- SS, Park Ranger, anything but the G-Men. Also noteworthy: trying to figure out if Walt is a Commie, debating whether they should let Walt film the crime-lab as part of a Mickey Mouse Club "future careers" spot.
2.8MB PDF Link, 3MB PDF Link, 2.7MB PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mago Brooms: if Pixar made housewares
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DATE: 12/06/2003 09:13:38 AM
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In a housewares shop today, I was struck by these Mago Brooms, which have the feel of something out of a Pixar cartoon, with colors and lines that look explicitly computer-generated but still fanciful.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Calling all bluejackers in L.A.
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DATE: 12/06/2003 11:25:37 AM
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If you are (a) in Los Angeles over the next couple of weeks and (b) you engage in bluejacking, and (c) you're not opposed to the idea of talking about it on broadcast media, and (d) you're not bullshitting about it, please e-mail me at xeni at xeni dot net.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First Cut Books: indie online bookstore and publisher
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DATE: 12/06/2003 04:31:04 PM
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First Cut Books is an online indie publisher and bookstore with a small, hand-picked, entertainingly reviewed selection of books.
Link
(Thanks, Lucia!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sega's Crazy Taxi patent suit against EA is crazy
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DATE: 12/06/2003 04:33:29 PM
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Avi Bar Zeev, former Imagineer who invented a Crazy Taxi video game while at Disney, weighs in on a patent dispute between Sega (which hired a Disney exec who'd seen Avi's idea and which quickly produced and patented a Crazy Taxi game) and EA (which has its own Crazy Taxi game). Here's a case where none of the litigants in the patent dispute is the inventor of the patented material. Nice work, USPTO.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ska-anthem about duct tape
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DATE: 12/07/2003 02:50:03 AM
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Something to Do, a Ska band based in Waukesha, WI, has won a $2,500 prize for writing "When I'm Stuck I Turn to Duck Tape," a ska-anthem celebrating gaffer tape's many virtues.
I never had much luck with nails
(so, I turn to duck tape)
Staples always seem to fail
(so, I turn to duck tape)
Wood glue can't help but go stale
(so, I turn to duck tape)
(so, I turn to duck tape)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kitschy religious items for Xmas
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DATE: 12/07/2003 02:53:54 AM
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The 12 Days of Kitschmas is a gallery of twelve utterly tasteless (and apparently sincere and unironic) items of religious paraphenalia. Don't miss the five-inch-nail-Xmas-ornament, a $8.99 remembrance of the crucifiction for your tree.
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cthuhloid Chick tract
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DATE: 12/07/2003 02:56:23 AM
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Wonderful mock-Jack-Chick religious tract, suitable for educating your neighbours about Cthulhu.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mental card games without a referee
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DATE: 12/07/2003 03:02:00 AM
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Is it possible to play card games without a deck of cards and without a referee? The question has profound implications for cryptography, in which the need to nominate and monitor a trusted third party (the referee in a cryptographic transaction) is a major pain in the ass -- this is the basis for the assertion that Trusted Computing systems will enable P2P games and distributed computation projects to proceed without cheating. This paper demonstrates some of the ways that we can dispense with a referee and rely on math to keep everyone honest.
Mental card games are played without a trusted party and without
cards. It is well known
that the problem of mental card games can be solved in principle. But
the schemes known so
far are too messy to be used in practice. Only for the mental poker
game a suitable solution
is known [Cr'ep 87] that achieves security against player coalition
and complete confidentiality
of a player's strategy. Here, we present a general-purpose scheme
that may be used as basic
toolbox for straight-forward implementations of card games.
We present a data structure for cards and decks that is secure
against player coalitions
and enables standard operations like picking up a card, opening it,
and (re-)mixing stacks.
Futhermore, we introduce tools for special operations like inserting
a card into the deck,
splitting the deck, parting the game. The correctness of all
operations is testified by zeroknowledge
proofs.
Link
(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LayerOne geek festival call for proposals
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Boogah Smalls and his pals are putting on a low-cost geek festival in LA on June 12, called LayerOne -- looks wonderful! They've just put out a call for papers; got something you want to say?
LayerOne is now officially accepting papers and presentations for our
first session, tentatively scheduled for June 12th and 13th, 2004. We
are looking for people to speak on a broad range of topics, however we
encourage all submissions. Since the target audience will consist of
mainly technophiles we've gathered a list of some of the topics we'd
love to see covered below...
:: Peer To Peer Networks
:: Securing
:: New models
:: Network Security
:: Flaws with current protocols
:: Techniques for hardening
:: Community based tools
:: Social software models
:: Weblogs
:: Encryption
:: Securing your files
:: Implementation
:: Telephony
:: VoIP
:: Copyright Issues
:: Releasing works into the public domain
:: Creative Commons
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(Thanks, Boogah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Not to be read by Metafilter Matt
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DATE: 12/07/2003 02:34:43 PM
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Matt Haughey, if you're reading this, stop, right now.
All right. The members of MetaFilter are teaming up to buy Matt an Xmas present -- a trip to Iceland -- to thank him for all his hard work on MeFi. If you've enjoyed the fruits of Matt's labor, go on and chip in.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rubber duckie keychain drives
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DATE: 12/07/2003 11:11:31 PM
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This Japanese company is selling glowing rubber duckie USB keychain drives. Capacity caps out at 16MB -- someone should make a 1GB version of this. That plays MIDI jingles. And has a fingerprint-reader-based encryption scheme. You would be the coolest kid in the Internet cafe when you plugged in your fingerprint-reading lightup singing duckie and used it to transfer your ssh keypair-halves to gain acess to your cage. Seriously.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Borribles: fine, dark English kids' trilogy
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DATE: 12/08/2003 03:27:40 AM
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Michael de Larrabeiti's classic children's trilogy, "The Borribles," is back in print in an omnibus edition incorporating all three volumes of the story. "Borribles" is not only one of the finest children's adventure stories ever penned, it's also an epic love poem to London, in the same way that China Mieville's King Rat is -- dark and glorying in the decadent, intestinal twistings and turnings of London's sooty, crowded, vibrant streets. I've just started re-reading the trilogy, and I'm astonished anew at how good this is.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How many years does an Azeri have to work to buy a copy of WinXP?
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DATE: 12/08/2003 04:26:29 AM
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Over at FirstMonday, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh has published a table showing how many years an average wage-earner in various countries around the world will have to work if they are to buy a copy of Windows.
Country GDP/cap PCs ('000s) Piracy WinXP Cost [3]
Effective $ GDP months
Albania 1300 24 n.a. 15196 5.17
Algeria 1773 220 n.a. 11140 3.79
Angola 701 17 n.a. 28184 9.59
Argentina 7166 3415 62% 2757 0.94
Armenia 686 24 n.a. 28806 9.80
Australia 19019 10000 27% 1039 0.35
Austria 23186 2727 33% 852 0.29
Azerbaijan 688 n.a. n.a. 28708 9.77
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New story of mine online
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DATE: 12/08/2003 07:53:09 AM
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My short story, "Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)" (which wasn't included in the collection, but is still a personal favorite of mine) was originally published in the print magazine Black Gate last winter. Now, thanks to the good graces of Fortean Bureau, an excellent webzine, the story is online for free in its entirety. This story is my tribute to Wyndham's post-apocalyptic literature. Here's a taste:
We were the Eight-Bar Band: there was me and my bugle; and Timson, whose piano had no top and got rained on from time to time; and Steve, the front-man and singer. And then there was blissed-out, autistic Hambone, our "percussionist" who whacked things together, more-or-less on the beat. Sometimes, it seemed like he was playing another song, but then he'd come back to the rhythm and bam, you'd realise that he'd been subtly keeping time all along, in the mess of clangs and crashes he'd been generating.
I think he may be a genius.
Why the Eight-Bar Band? Thank the military. Against all odds, they managed to build automated bombers that still fly, roaring overhead every minute or so, bomb-bay doors open, dry firing on our little band of survivors. The War had been over for ten years, but still, they flew.
So. The Eight-Bar Band. Everything had a rest every eight bars, punctuated by the white-noise roar of the most expensive rhythm section ever imagined by the military-industrial complex.
We were playing through "Basin Street Blues," arranged for bugle, half-piano, tin cans, vocals, and bombers. Steve, the front-man, was always after me to sing backup on this, crooning a call-and-response. I blew a bugle because I didn't like singing. Bugle's almost like singing, anyway, and I did the backup vocals through it, so when Steve sang, "Come along wi-ith me," I blew, "Wah wah wah wah-wah wah," which sounded dynamite. Steve hated it. Like most front-men, he had an ego that could swallow the battered planet, and didn't want any lip from the troops. That was us. The troops. Wah-wah.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SaveDisney: support the dissident Disney board members
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DATE: 12/08/2003 07:59:21 AM
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SaveDisney.com is a fan-site devoted to promoting the agenda of Roy Disney and the other dissident ex-Disney board members.
Link
(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Man phones in tag renewal, avoids the tow
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DATE: 12/08/2003 08:13:03 AM
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A man who'd been pulled over for driving with expired tags called a friend while the tow was on the way and had the friend update his registration online. Before the tow arrived, the car had been registered, and the cop let him go with a ticket.
Leach took the renewal form the commission had sent him from his visor, which contained the access code he needed to renew. While Zier issued the summons and ordered the tow, Leach called a friend who took his credit card number and other information and renewed the registration for him, Conry said.
When Zier came back with the ticket, Leach told him the car was now registered. The computer inside Zier's patrol car confirmed it.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ergonomic shirt folding video
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DATE: 12/08/2003 09:22:53 AM
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This is an amazing (Japanese? Korean?) Taiwanese video showing an ergonomic method for folding shirts that exploits the unique topology of a hollow fabric vessel to allow for neat-as-a-neurotic folds that look like they came off a Gaparista's folding-board.
6.3MB WMV Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Data Quality Act opens doors to psuedoscience DoS attacks
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DATE: 12/08/2003 10:01:56 AM
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The Data Quality Act, which sets standards for the quality of data used in US law-making, has turned out to be a great tool for forcing pseudoscience (asbestos isn't that bad for you) into the lawmaking process -- a way to filibuster the scientists by requiring them to disprove whatever woo-woo notions you want to raise.
As the testimony of former Clinton administration Energy official and George Washington University epidemiologist David Michaels shows, the guidelines are very troubling. Michaels' complaint is that under the guise of "peer review," industry sponsored or funded attempts to undermine good science are going to get a big boost. That's for a number of reasons, one of them being the key question of who will be doing the peer reviewing.
The current guidelines say that as far as peer review goes, scientists who have worked for government have a conflict of interest and can't participate, but scientists who have worked for industry have carte blanche. As Michaels puts it, the suggestion "that academic scientists are more beholden to public funding agencies than corporate funders is on face ludicrous." And there's more. The peer review guidelines play into clever industry strategies for using the system of science to advance their economic interests.
Link
(Thanks, Henry!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More Linux Robot Photo Galleries
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DATE: 12/08/2003 10:34:42 AM
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BoingBoing buddy Roland Piquepaille says:
Following this LinuxInsider.com story, "Japan's Robot Developers Go Linux," Linux Devices decided to publish its own "Linux-powered Robots Quick Reference Guide." And Paul Baron spent some time shooting pictures during the 2003 International Robot Exposition in Tokyo about two weeks ago. So here is a photo gallery gathered from these two different sources. You'll meet for example TMSUK04 from Meiji University, able to communicate via e-mail, or Isamu, which climbs stairs like Asimo.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites: back *from* Iraq, here's his latest.
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DATE: 12/08/2003 10:51:27 AM
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Blogger and MSNBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites posted a final dispatch from Iraq before returning home to the US for a brief break. He returns to Iraq shortly after the holidays.
It is the eve of Eid or the end of the Ramadan and the end of the month long dawn to dusk fasting for many Muslims. It is a time of celebration on par with Christmas for Christians. But the night has begun with a bang. Literally. An IED (improvised explosive device) has exploded just outside the north gate of the 4th Infantry Division's headquarters. I hop in the back of Bressette's Humvee as the patrol heads out to investigate. Bressette gets on his two-way and in the guise of a flight attendant giving the pre-flight briefing, tells the squad the plan. (...)
I videotape Bressette as he walks back to his Humvee with the 1-22's commanding officer Lt. Col. Steve Russell. They at the curb to discuss what's next, when Bressette looks down. He sees something strange; wires sticking out of a concrete block. Suddenly this inert object is filled with potential energy.
"Sir, we better back up," Bressette says, already doing the moonwalk away from the block. "We're standing next to an IED!" The Humvee shoots forward away from the bomb, while the rest of back away. The concrete block has been hollowed out and is packed with enough plastic explosives to kill us. Bressette just shakes his head, still in disbelief that all of us, the Colonel, Bressette and his squad, myself and reporter named Betsy Heil from the Pittsburgh Tribune, were all standing next to a device that could've taken our lives within a fraction of a second.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tart cards: illicit ads from London, chronicled in new book
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DATE: 12/08/2003 11:05:45 AM
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A fine stocking stuffer idea for literate, wired pervs. On sale for under $20. Warning: do not confuse tart cards with tarot cards. Any attempt to read your future with tart cards may bring about truly hazardous results.
"This amusing, enlightening, and beautifully designed book explains the history and graphic/technical development of tart cards with over 400 examples in color. Tart cards are the means by which providers of sexual services advertise in London, and they have become as ubiquitous a symbol of that city as the red telephone boxes where they are found. The book also contains an eye-opening, comprehensive glossary of the suggestive and coded language they use. 128 pages, trade
paperback."
Link (Thanks, Bruce Sterling!). update: Here are more images, not worksafe. Link. And Fleshbot picks up on our hot tartcard-on-tartcard action, and provides more links to images.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BBC warblogger, mine blast survivor Stuart Hughes videoblogs in Cambodia
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DATE: 12/08/2003 11:21:18 AM
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BBC war correspondent Stuart Hughes' courageous, first-person blog testimonial on surviving a land mine accident in Iraq brought home the personal reality of war to readers worldwide. At left, a snapshot of Stuart taken in the hospital, as he recovered from the loss of his leg earlier this year.
Stuart is now traveling to Cambodia and reporting -- through the BBC and through his blog -- on the human impact of mines, during conflicts and long after the conflicts end. He writes to BoingBoing:
"Greetings from London. Me and my artificial leg have just returned from northwestern Cambodia, where I carried out my first experiments in videoblogging.
You can view my efforts on my blog here. See what you think!"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Photo of a little fish in the mouth of a big fish
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DATE: 12/08/2003 11:47:21 AM
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Who says fish can't convey emotions with their faces? See the look of doom in this little guy's eyes?. Link (via Reality Carnival)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogshares coming back?
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DATE: 12/08/2003 12:15:07 PM
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Recently-departed website Blogshares may return:
The Bad News: The BlogShares database was corrupted and it's taking a few days to get things back together.
The Good News: A solid agreement has been reached between BlogShares founder Seyed Razavi and technologist Jay Campbell -- the site is coming back! Premium memberships will be extended one month to make up for this downtime. If you had 8 months left, now you have 9. The reconstituted BlogShares team is doing cartwheels over the possibilities that 2004 brings. Check back for more notices, and soon a working site.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coke's music downloads: the real thing?
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DATE: 12/08/2003 01:04:42 PM
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Coca-Cola is launching a digital music download service in the UK:
Coca-Cola will become the first high-profile consumer brand to get involved directly in the music business, launching what it claims will be the largest collection of tracks yet available. (...) The site, MyCokeMusic.com, will launch in January next year offering a catalogue of over 250,000 new and recent hits from more than 8,500 artists with all four major record labels represented.
It also promises back catalogue hits from established artists, although some major acts such as The Beatles have yet to allow their songs to be sold digitally. Given the ongoing controversy over the apparent conflict between its claim it would not market its drinks to under-12s and its sponsorship of the chart, Coca-Cola today made it clear only those over 18 would be able to buy music through the site. It plans to back the launch with a year-long campaign to promote legal music downloads, including promotions on its cans and bottles to win free tracks.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Civil rights hero Rosa Parks sues Outkast
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DATE: 12/08/2003 01:33:02 PM
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...over their song "Rosa Parks," claiming the band violated her publicity and trademark rights and defamed her. Link (thanks claytonjamescubitt)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Variety launches porn blog (Peter Bart + AVN + blogs = WTF?)
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DATE: 12/08/2003 04:42:56 PM
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Variety just launched its very own porn blog. Huh? Anyway: The Porning Report: Coverage of the Porn Industry's Move to Mainstream -- the scribe is Frank Meyer, who's also the Online Associate Editor of AVN. (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hacking free WiFi at XML 2003
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DATE: 12/09/2003 01:56:09 AM
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Ben Hammersley's at the XML 2003 conference, where the WiFi password costs $40. He and Bill Kearney and the other RSS-wonks in the room have interpreted the confernece organizers' charging for basic conference functionality as damage and are routing around it:
In answer to the long held question, can a TiBook with one Wifi card act as a repeater and relay access to everyone else in the room without them having to pay, the answer it turns out is yes. How do we do this? Well, first turn off the built-in Apache installation on the OSX machine that is online. Edit httpd.conf to load mod_proxy (there are about 20 or so lines to uncomment). Turn Apache back on. Go to network prefs, and find out your assigned IP address. Write it on a piece of paper, and pass it around the room, telling them to set it as their web proxy.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stuff breaking in slo-mo
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:16:39 AM
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Micah says, "Here are some wonderful high-speed videos of objects changing state, deforming, recoiling and combusting. Glass, tofu, matches and kickballs are all subjected to forces and recorded in fascinating detail."
Link
(Thanks, Micah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Taco joint sign gallery
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:23:10 AM
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Tommy and his girlfriend have spent the past two years driving America's highways, taking pictures of signs for taco joints. Here is the gallery of their work.
Link
(Thanks, Tommy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fan-generated Peter Jackson Hobbit trailer
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:26:49 AM
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This is a bloody good fan-generated trailer for a notional Peter Jackson film adaptation of The Hobbit, cleverly remixing found footage and footage from the LOTR discs to make a kind of "draft Jackson" piece that shows how good this movie could be.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hippie Hobbit House
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:33:19 AM
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The "Mushroom House" is a hippie house in Whistler, BC, built in the style of a Led-Zeppelin- album-cover Hobbit House.
Link
(Thanks, Glen!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sri Lankan (et al) journos will netcast footage from WSIS
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:40:37 AM
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Jo sez, "Young video journalists from India, Sri Lanka and Uruguay will be covering a
variety of topics taking place at the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS) for OneWorld TV. These diaries will feature video reports
from debates, workshops and other events at WSIS, the ICT for Development
Platform and other related meetings."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Thai elephants freak out, raid, pillage
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DATE: 12/09/2003 08:21:56 AM
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Lack of food sparks very bad behavior for elephants in Thailand. Link (thanks siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friendster or Foester? Conspiracy Art of Mark Lombardi
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DATE: 12/09/2003 08:26:49 AM
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Village Voice piece on the "conspiracy art" of Mark Lombardi -- and what it tells us about real-world and virtual-world social networks:
Much is being made lately of the FBI's phone call to the Whitney Museum in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks requesting access to Mark Lombardi's drawing BCCI, ICIC & FAB (1996-2000). This piece, the last work the artist made before he was found dead in his studio in March 2000, an apparent suicide at age 49, represents the tangled web of power and influence that comprised the largest banking scandal in history—in which an impenetrable network of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, and banks-within-banks laundered billions of dollars while supporting terrorism, arms and drug trafficking, and prostitution. The names of Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush, among many other high- and low-profile world figures, are connected by a network of delicate, yet potently insinuating, pencil lines. The FBI agent who called was informed that the work was on view in the museum's galleries, where he was welcome to see it during it during regular museum hours. A visit to the current Mark Lombardi exhibition at the Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, through December 18) by an affiliate of the Homeland Security Agency has also raised eyebrows in the art world.
In cyberspace, the architectural parallel to Lombardi's work is not to be found in the utilitarian, "drill-down" salt mine of the Defense Department's TIA, but in the burgeoning blackberry-bush tangle of Friendster.com. For the one or two of you who still don't know, Friendster is an online network in which members can connect to friends, as well as to friends' friends, friends' friends' friends, and so on. As a result of having 32 friends in my immediate network, I am automatically linked to a larger network of 441,710 individuals. I can search this database by gender, age, locale, and interest. Unlike some more purposeful sites, such as the business network LinkedIn, or any of the many cruising spots online, Friendster is notably open-ended. In addition to identifying oneself as looking for a "friend," or a "serious relationship," one can also present oneself as "just here to help." It is in part this indirectness that suggests a parallel to Lombardi's indeterminate fields of "influence."
Link (thanks claytonjamescutebutt) Update: this web page has interpretations of some of Lombardi's drawings. Thanks, Jane!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Shockwave goodie from Flying Puppet: white vibes
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DATE: 12/09/2003 08:35:19 AM
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I love what Nicolas Clauss does with Flash Shockwave. Always imaginative, elegant, understated, and in this case, vertigo-inducing.
"interactive sound paintings,a work on pixel as texture, a nods at the cd-rom Alphabet. Four years after dropping the brushes,a virtual come back to painting."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Charges of new 'Net censorship in Iran
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DATE: 12/09/2003 08:37:31 AM
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Persian blogger hoder tells BoingBoing:
Net censorship in Iran has been intensified lately by the government, using expensive filtering software that they've just bought. There are also reports that the TCI (Telecommunication Company of Iran) has blocked Google Cache to stop people accessing the filtered websites. At the same time, Iran has sent a big delegate to the World Summit on information Societies in Geneva.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: B is for Bukkake
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DATE: 12/09/2003 08:45:11 AM
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Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin and illustrator Anthony Ventura are about halfway through a collaborative graphic book called Fetish Alphabet. Check out letter B, now online at ordomag:
It was a matter of mathematics. Outside, 100 men were waiting. She could hear them laughing, and hooting, and pounding on the door. Inside, one of her was waiting. She was down on her knees on the cement floor of a soundstage in Porn Valley. Soon, the men would come in and form an unknown number of concentric circles around her. With her eyes closed, she would count them, as they came forward to her, one-by-one. For the next 120 minutes, she would think about the things in her life that were of value to her. Her boyfriend who was back at home. The sunset where she grew up near the Mojave Desert. The sight of a dozen Maple Glaze Donuts at Krispy Kreme. Eventually, it would all come to an end. The P.A. with one hand would help her to her feet. The men would walk out the back door, where they would be given $50. She would walk out the front door, where she would be given $500.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Turning Heads With PowerPoint: David Byrne
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DATE: 12/09/2003 08:54:59 AM
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In today's edition of Wired News, an interview I conducted with former Talking Heads member David Byrne about his art-explorations into PowerPoint:
From televised presidential aircraft carrier visits to the glut of unreal reality TV shows, "American culture is becoming a culture of pageants," says David Byrne. "We're surrounded by show, just as the Roman Empire turned to bread and circuses to hide other things that were taking place." To examine how the medium shapes the message, the former Talking Head uses Microsoft PowerPoint -- the ubiquitous presentation software -- as a creative tool.
His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: From Lead Blocks to Weblogs
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DATE: 12/09/2003 11:33:53 AM
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The organizers of Spanish tech conference Artfutura asked me to write a primer on the history of weblogs for a publication distributed at the event. The essay is now online, here's a snip.
When I was a child, my father hauled an abandoned antique printing press into our house one afternoon. He was an artist and writer who had a habit of falling in love with discarded tools, the same way I became routinely obsessed with broken dogs and fallen birds. But this thing weighed over a ton.
He'd become enamored with the way words from the press felt in his hands, divided into chunks of lead characters. Sentences formed like spines strung from vertebrae. I remember exactly how the blocks of type felt when he placed them in my small hands -- they were palm-sized then, but cold; sharp enough along the corners to puncture skin. Heavier than the wooden alphabet building-blocks I played with upstairs.
I remember the acrid smell of black ink, and the slapping sounds of my father spreading each blob into a thin film that coated wide plates of assembled text. Gears made metallic groans when he heaved his giant body into the wheel that set the press into motion, a wheel as tall as he was, a wheel that smashed wet steel plates into paper to form printed words.
The press was an elderly oddity: a fat, shut-in houseguest who consumed two rooms, accompanied by floor-to-ceiling cabinets of paper and type trays. Homes didn't have PCs in 1974, but there were many more efficient ways to speak to the world. My father wrote on a typewriter, and words were published in books, newspapers, and magazines. But words that came out of this press had a scent. A personality you could feel with your fingers. Whatever my father's words were, when they were printed this way they had history, as if he had squeezed them through a time machine on their way to the sheets of vellum extra-bright white.
Link to Spanish, Link to English. For more essays from Artfutura contributors including Terence McKenna, Lev Manovich, and others, try this: Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos: amorous trees
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DATE: 12/09/2003 01:52:24 PM
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BoingBoing reader George Perdicaris points us to the work of photographer Yuri Dojc. His "Amorous Nature" series reveals hidden eroticism in the world of plants. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robot pics from "Hallucigenia" event in Japan
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DATE: 12/09/2003 01:55:47 PM
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BoingBoing reader Dave says:
Check out this page at Gizmodo.com pointing to video clips of the Hallucigenia 01 at FuRo, the Future Robot Technology Research Center of the Chiba Institute of Technology:
"ZDNet Japan has some video clips of the Hallucigenia 01, the futuristic eight-wheeled car/transportation robot with wheels that can rotate independently of the others, and it can move up hills while the body of the car remains level."
Links page is hosted by Cacheop.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Celebs rake in top-drawer swag on charity circuit
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:15:51 PM
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Good LA Times article about the lavish perks demanded by stars who attend charity events.
But many celebrities appear at these events not solely out of the goodness of their hearts. They come to line their pockets.
"Stars know they can literally steal from charity," said Steven Fox, a Monterey businessman who worked with Tonken on a 1995 fundraiser for the Tommy Lasorda Jr. Memorial Foundation, named after the baseball legend's late son. "Otherwise, they don't perform. They don't appear."
Actor David Schwimmer, who has made many millions of dollars starring in NBC's "Friends," received a pair of Rolex watches worth $26,413 in advance of a 1997 charity gala that had among its intended beneficiaries the John Wayne Cancer Institute.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Australian magazine editor given terrorist treatment
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:22:10 PM
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Kevin Roderick of LA Observed summarizes an Aussie journo's humiliating ordeal at the hands of US immigration officials.
"I've had every part of me groped beyond belief...(I was) shocked more than anything, disbelief, total sense of disbelief, humiliated," she told Australia's Channel Nine. Smethurst was detained under a new reading of the law that lets tourists in on a 90-day waiver of the visa rules, but not working journalists.
Apparently, foreign journalists are percieved to be a threat to U.S. interests.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Jim Woodring toys: "Imperial Newts"
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DATE: 12/09/2003 02:49:12 PM
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KidRobot is selling a new series of toy figures designed by cartoonist Jim Woodring. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Supersized layoffs at AOL Music?
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A BoingBoing pal who prefers anonymity says "AOL @ Music office NUKED today.. ops, QA, eng, PMs all let go." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Alien porn, hot space babes.
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DATE: 12/10/2003 08:36:34 AM
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I don't usually post links to regular old XXX porn sites on BoingBoing, but this one -- well, it's not regular. The kitsch is so thick you'll need a shovel -- cracked me up too hard to pass up. Promises "hot space babes," "celebrity beauties exposed to intergalactic invaders... alien monsters, galactic sex training, and more" -- shot with the lowest production values this side of the twelve colonies. Don't miss the poster for the site's remake of It Came from Outer Space. Warning: gratuitous purple appendages, much spurting of green liquid; probably about the least worksafe thing ever linked to from this blog. Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl, via Indienudes)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: String Cheese Incident takes on Ticketbastard
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DATE: 12/10/2003 08:52:58 AM
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From this month's issue of Mother Jones:
How the String Cheese Incident -- five barefoot, mandolin- plucking improvisers from Boulder -- is taking on the most hated corporation in music (...)What do you call a company that has preserved its near monopoly for more than a decade despite numerous antitrust lawsuits, that charges exorbitant fees to its captive customers, whose CEO is said to revel in the fact that he "crushed" one of America's most beloved rock and roll bands when it dared to take the company on, that (for these reasons and more) is near the top of most Americans' list of companies they love to hate? Well, some people call it Ticketbastard, but Ticketmaster doesn't mind, so long as people keep calling -- and logging on and walking up to its outlets, which they did enough times last year to buy 95 million tickets, worth $4 billion, on behalf of its parent, Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp.
Link. BoingBoing reader Andrew Crocker points us another, earlier story from a local alt weekly in the band's hometown: Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jellybath: surely space aliens are responsible
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DATE: 12/10/2003 09:00:53 AM
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This product looks like it could fit comfortably on that alien porn site below. Fancy getting naked in a tub full of warm, aromatherapeutic slime? Jellybath turns ordinary bath water into a soothing puddle of brightly-colored gel. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it. Site includes a how-to quicktime video. Link (thanks, Quin!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dick Cheney shoots 70 pen-raised birds
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DATE: 12/10/2003 11:16:17 AM
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Poor Dick Cheney. Those defered-salary payments he receives from Halliburton Oil (which has been importing oil into Iraq -- at taxpayer expense -- at twice the rate other companies have been trucking it in from Kuwait) must not be enough to pay for groceries. He has to go out and shoot his food. Read about his exciting bird hunting trip, where he shot 70 "pen-raised animals that cannot escape." He sure must be hungry. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Election Day 2004 newspaper parody
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DATE: 12/10/2003 12:23:00 PM
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Excellent Fark.com Photoshop contest -- front pages on Election Day 2004. Link (thanks, rb!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More wonderful Woodring Weirdness
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DATE: 12/10/2003 12:43:57 PM
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The fun loving freaks at STRANGEco comissioned Jim Woodring to design this lovely seven-inch Dorbel figurine. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scary article about the flu
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DATE: 12/10/2003 03:16:08 PM
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There isn't enough flu vaccine medicine to go around this year, but that might not matter, because the vaccine might not be effective against the "Fujian" flu that's going around.
Bad as they are, the difficulties in coping with this year's influenza epidemic are like the tiny tremors in California that remind you of the looming Big One. In the world of influenza, the Big One is a pandemic—a strain of influenza so different from what has circulated before that people have no immunity. That's what happened in 1918 when the flu killed between 20 million and 40 million people worldwide. Pandemics that killed well over half a million also struck in both 1957 and 1968.
Link(thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Looney Tunes composer profiled in Slate
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DATE: 12/10/2003 03:51:22 PM
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Nice article about Carl Stalling, composer of Looney Toons scores Link (thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mugging caught on audioblog entry
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DATE: 12/10/2003 07:03:04 PM
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A LiveJournaller was phoning in an audioblog item when she and her friends were beaten and robbed. The thieves didn't think to turn off the phone, and were captured and audblogged to her journal.
Link
(Thanks, Paul!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Did Blaster cause the August blackout?
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DATE: 12/10/2003 07:03:22 PM
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Bruce Schneier (author of Beyond Fear) speculates that the great August blackout on the East Coast may have been caused by the Blaster worm.
Although the worm didn't have to perform any malicious actions on the computers it infected, its mere existence drained resources and often caused the host computer to crash. To remove the worm, a system administrator had to run a program that erased the malicious code; then, the administrator had to patch the vulnerability so that the computer would not get reinfected.
The coincidence is too obvious to ignore. At 2:14 p.m. EDT, the MSBlast worm was dropping systems all across North America. The report doesn't explain why so many computers--both primary and backup systems--at FirstEnergy were failing at around the same time. But MSBlast is certainly a reasonable suspect.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SCO sends IBM 1,000,000 pieces of paper
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DATE: 12/10/2003 07:03:35 PM
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As part of a court order to provide IBM with evidence relating to SCO's frivolous anti-Linux lawsuit, SCO sent IBM one million sheets of paper on which were printed the source-code that SCO alleges is being infringed upon. Of course, this is just a tactic to sabotage IBM's defense, since it needs all that code in a machine-readable format.
"Knowing full well that IBM would need its source code in electronic form so that proper analyses--such as those SCO itself claims to have performed--could be conducted, SCO instead produced the source code on one million sheets of paper," IBM said in the motion. "The only reason for SCO's production of code on paper was, we believe, to stall the progress of these proceedings while giving the (false) impression of being forthcoming in its discovery responses."
In response to IBM's complaint, Stowell said, "If a company wants code, it's the other party's decision to provide that any way they feel like providing that."
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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TITLE: Canadian courts to enforce Shari'a-based arbitration
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DATE: 12/10/2003 07:03:58 PM
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The Canadian judicial system is admitting a new class of arbitrators who will rule on the basis of Shari'a law. If two parties want to settle a civil dispute according to Muslim law, they can seek out a Shari'a arbitrator, whose judgement will be enforced by the regular Canadian courts.
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(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spamware dissected
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DATE: 12/10/2003 07:14:58 PM
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This is an amazing technical dissection of a piece of spamware that was implanted on a savvy user's webserver, a hunk of code that cleverly turned the machine into a piece of a distributed spamming cluster.
After the identification, the client sends the report command, and sends a list of exactly 1000 items, each item composed by the e-mail identification number (as shown above), and two other arguments, the first one is an error code that determines if the e-mail has been sent (for instance, 6 means 'Timeout connecting to host', 11 that the e-mail has been sent, 9 means 'Timeout reading from socket', ...) and it will be clearly shown in the next paragraphs, and the third one that I haven't identified yet, but it could be a flag to know if the e-mail address has been treated. It seems that it is the report for telling which e-mail address is valid. Just to be sure, I executed the daemon with its configuration file slightly modified, changing the /dev/null to real files to watch its logs. As seen in the daemon's configuration file, there are three different logs: logfile, speedlog and out. The last one (out) is always empty, but the other two contain interesting things: As seen in the daemon's configuration file, there are three different logs: logfile, speedlog and out. The last one (out) is always empty, but the other two contain interesting things; following is the speedlog file:
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turning off your SSID is dumb
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DATE: 12/10/2003 07:18:58 PM
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Good, short white-paper explains why turning off your WiFi access point's SSID broadcast is not only bad for security, it's also bad for performance.
Contrary to a common belief that the SSID is a WLAN security feature and its exposure a security risk, the SSID is nothing more than a wireless-space group label. It cannot be successfully hidden. Attempts to hide it will not only fail, but will negatively impact WLAN performance, and may result in additional exposure of the SSID to passive scanning. The performance impact of this misguided effort will be felt in multiple WLAN scenarios, including simple operations like joining a WLAN, and in significantly longer roaming times.
129k PDF Link)
(via WiFi Net News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Thunderbirds trailer is go!
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DATE: 12/11/2003 05:52:06 AM
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Jonathan "Commander Riker" Frakes is directing a live-action film based on the Thunderbirds. Sweet-looking trailer.
5.8MB Quicktime Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Urban farmers reclaim Detroit
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DATE: 12/11/2003 05:54:59 AM
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In Detroit, urban farmers, frustrated with buying their groceries at Party Stores now that the grocery chains have largely pulled out of the city, have begun to reclaim Detroit's vast empty spaces for grow-your-own operations, complete with livestock and tractors.
After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.
Rather than fight this return to nature, Mr. Weertz and other urban farmers have embraced it, gradually converting 15 acres of idle land into more than 40 community gardens and microfarms — some consuming entire blocks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Labels to VCs: invest in P2P at your peril
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DATE: 12/11/2003 06:04:56 AM
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The IFPI -- the international equivalent of the RIAA -- has begun threatening venture capitalists who are considering investing in P2P applications.
"The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry [IFPI] Taiwan calls for existing investors and potential investors to seriously consider their investments in unauthorized peer-to-peer network operators..>"
"IFPI seriously advises those who collect money on Kuro's behalf to reconsider the legality of their business activities with Kuro," Lee said.
If you've ever thought, "Well, why should I care about P2P? I use my computer in non-infringing ways," this is why: investors who put money into general-purpose technology that is no more immune to infringement that email or web-servers or SIP-phones or what have you are being put on notice by the labels that such investment will be targetted in the courts.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons party this Sunday
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DATE: 12/11/2003 06:06:09 AM
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The Creative Commons anniversary party is taking place in San Francisco this Sunday:
Creative Commons is having its anniversary party on Sunday, December 14, from 6-9pm at 111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco (directions). There will be some cool new CC tunes, and great-news annoucements, and most of Joi’s cool SF friends. Be sure to RSVP.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steven Levy on Trusted Computing
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DATE: 12/11/2003 06:12:43 AM
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Steven Levy, author of Hackers and Crypto, has a fantastic piece on Newsweek's site about the potential dangers of Trusted Computing.
How could the freedom genie be shoved back into the bottle? Basically, it's part of a huge effort to transform the Net from an arena where anyone can anonymously participate to a sign-in affair where tamperproof "digital certificates" identify who you are. The advantages of such a system are clear: it would eliminate identity theft and enable small, secure electronic "microtransactions," long a dream of Internet commerce pioneers. (Another bonus: arrivederci, unwelcome spam.) A concurrent step would be the adoption of "trusted computing," a system by which not only people but computer programs would be stamped with identifying marks. Those would link with certificates that determine whether programs are uncorrupted and cleared to run on your computer.
Link
(via Smartmobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grassroots WSIS coverage
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DATE: 12/11/2003 07:25:31 AM
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The Daily Summit is a group blog reporting from the front lines of the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, available in English and Arabic. Check the blogroll for lots more grassroots coverage links.
How do you make your press conference stand out from all the others?
Head of UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Ole-Henrik Magga decided to round his off with a song.
Without any backing, brave Mr Magga from the Sami reindeer hunting tribes of Northern Europe, trilled a song about a young reindeer meeting an early end in life.
Link
(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 12/11/2003 10:06:28 AM
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In this issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* Grabbing waste heat from industry to warm your apartment
* Engineering our water resources against El Nino
* Simulating cyber-attacks on a microscale model of the Net
I hope you enjoy it!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More luscious eye candy from Lynnfox: Bjork concert graphics
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DATE: 12/11/2003 10:39:46 AM
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LynnFox, whose surreal, organic digital creations I swooned over in this previous post, have just published clips of the graphics they created for Bjork's latest concert tour. Beautiful stuff. Four movies they made for her
live shows are now online here. (gracias, Jose Luis de Vicente!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lisa Rein interview on Music for America
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DATE: 12/11/2003 10:43:17 AM
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Here's a great Music for America interview with activist/musician/geek Lisa Rein, whose open-invitation concert/party is this Saturday in San Francisco.
I believe that music is a good way to approach the emotional side of these controversial political issues. I believe that the cultural aspects of, for instance, copyright -- and the common man's loss of our history and heritage in exchange for big business to make more money on it's intellectual property -- are explained better through song.
I also believe that music is a good way to raise awareness about important issues. If you can write a song that's good in its own right, in that it's a catchy tune and people like it no matter what it's about -- that they might eventually read the lyrics and learn more about the issue you're singing about.
I try to follow John Lennon's model in raising awareness. He was able to eventually stop the vietnam war with this song and the feeling of love and community that he was able to bring to people at large. I hope to do the same thing and encourage others to climb on board.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet
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DATE: 12/11/2003 11:32:19 AM
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Kevin Werbach comments on Jeff Pulver's worries about the FCC regulating voice-over-Internet technology:
As I said at the FCC VOIP hearing last week, the real issue is the transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet. That means treating voice as an application that can run on any platform, not as the platform itself.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Device turns hotdogs into octopuses
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DATE: 12/11/2003 12:00:18 PM
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Useless but fun gadget converts ordinary hotdogs into "Octodogs." The logo is very cute, that's the main reason I'm blogging this. Link (thanks, Mel!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Contest to make a tiny chair out of champagne cork wire
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DATE: 12/11/2003 12:33:07 PM
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Design Within Reach holds a yearly competition to design a chair faishioned out of the wire that secures a champagne cork. Link (thanks, Justin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tribute to Sachs: Me
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DATE: 12/11/2003 12:53:53 PM
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"Me" is a lovely short video from Austrian net.artists Monochrom in tribute to Oliver Sachs's research on neurological defects: a man recounts his unusual defect and his coping mechanism.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First-ever public demo of an open-source PC on Monday
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DATE: 12/11/2003 12:59:07 PM
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The OpenCores movement, which produces open-source-licensed "code" for producing chips using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) has built a complete RISC computer that runs Linux using open source libraries to describe the hardware characteristics. This means that your open source operating system can now run on open source microprocessors. Monday will mark the first-ever public demonstration of the system.
On Monday, December 15, at 7pm, OpenCores developer Damjan
Lampret will give the first public demonstration of an
all-Open Source System-On-Chip (SoC) at the Freedom Technology
Center in Mountain View, California, USA. The new OpenCores
System-On-Chip, developed and manufactured by Flextronics
Semiconductor, runs Linux, uClinux, or eCos. The SoC is
exclusively built with freely licensed OpenCores IP cores.
The chip includes the OpenRISC OR1200 32-bit processor, a Memory
Controller for SDRAM/FLASH/SRAM, a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet MAC,
32-bit, 33/66MHz PCI support, and a 16550 UART.
Link
(Thanks, Seth!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Toys R Us' sneaky trick loses in court
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DATE: 12/11/2003 01:41:05 PM
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Eli the Bearded says: "This story of Louisiana winning a court tax battle is interesting to see the types of tax evasion big companies use.
"In this case Toys R Us advertises using a giraffe mascot named Geoffrey. But TRU does not own the rights to that mascot, instead Geoffrey, Inc (a TRU subsidiary) owns them. So the toy store "licenses" the trademark from Geoffrey, Inc, at a hefty rate, then calls that a business expense and deducts from its pre-tax income. Since GI isn't a Louisiana company, TRU argued that it doesn't need to pay LA taxes on it's income. The judge disagreed."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Art car near my office
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DATE: 12/11/2003 06:34:06 PM
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This cool art-car decorated with a diorama of a scene from the mountainous outdoors was parked out front of my office today.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Epidemiology meets Six Degrees
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DATE: 12/11/2003 07:14:32 PM
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Neat-o-keen epidemiological concept: use informal surveys to identify the highly connected individuals who are likely to be super-spreaders of illness, then vaccinate them.
The idea is to randomly choose, say, 20% of the individuals and ask them to name one acquaintance; then vaccinate those acquaintances. Potential super-spreaders have such a large number of acquaintances that they are very likely to be named at least once, the researchers found. On the other hand, the super-spreaders are so few in number that the random 20% of individuals is unlikely to include many of them.
Link
(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Selling snowballs in a blizzard
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DATE: 12/11/2003 07:16:23 PM
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During last week's NYC snowstorm, an entrepreneur set up shop in Times Square, selling snowballs for $1/pop.
The young man was Gilberto Triplitt, a 28-year-old unemployed artist from Queens who attended LaGuardia High School and worked in a furniture store until it closed in the post-Sept. 11 downturn. He went into the snowball business Monday afternoon on Prince St. in SoHo. He reported selling six in 2-1/2 hours.
"It's really easy to sell them," he said, to a reporter's surprise.
Link
(via Smart Patrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hyper-trendy prison clothes big in Berlin
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DATE: 12/11/2003 07:21:48 PM
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Marc sez, "Haeftling sells 'trendy' products manufactured by inmates of a Berlin prison. The marketing and branding is the idea and scheme of a Berlin ad agency. The prison has found itself barely able to keep up with orders."
Link
(Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stunning snow-sculptures
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DATE: 12/12/2003 02:40:40 AM
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The winners of the 2003 International Snow Sculpture Championships in Breckenridge, Colorado have been declared -- the photos are stunning.
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(Thanks, Melissa!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London tube map, remixed
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DATE: 12/12/2003 03:40:49 AM
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Hilarious remix of the London Tube map.
184K JPEG Link Original source Link
(Thanks, rackhelgand!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mad Drew: new Toothpaste for Dinner book
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DATE: 12/12/2003 06:45:06 AM
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Drew, the creator of the Toothpaste for Dinner comics and assorted humoribilia has a new book out, called "Mad Drew: Boyond Coffeedome." It recounts the life of a post-dot-crash temp with a near-autistic inability to understand his surroundings and a deadpan delivery that reminds me of Molesworth, by way of Office Space.
also i remembered how it is sometimes good to work when you can use things like the copy machine and stapler for free! i did not do a lot of copying when i was unemployed but now that i have a job i know that i can write things on a piece of paper and make a hundred copies of them and take them home and put them on telephone poles!! the power is amazing, if i want to tell all the poeple walking down the street to shut up then i can write SHUT UP in large letters on paper. using an office marker for free by the way!!! and then copy it and stable it to telephone poles USING AN OFFICE STAPLER, it is a dream come true!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google tracks packages
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DATE: 12/12/2003 07:29:36 AM
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Google will now search for UPS, FedEx and other numbers:
UPS tracking numbers example search: "1Z9999W999999999"
FedEx tracking numbers example search: "fedex 999999999999"
Patent numbers example search: "patent 5123123"
FAA airplane registration numbers example search: "n199ua"
FCC equipment IDs example search: "fcc B4Z-34009-PIR"
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Teddy: mind-blowing 3D package
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DATE: 12/12/2003 07:35:49 AM
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Teddy is a spookily cool 3D modelling package that automatically extrudes your 2D line-drawings into three-dimensional, rotatable objects. It runs in a Java applet and is mindbogglingly easy to use. The forms that it creates have a kind of organic roughness that is utterly unlike the 3D objects I've created with other 3D packages.
32MB AVI Link
(via KoKoRo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NPR clip: Paul Boutin on ICANN
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DATE: 12/12/2003 09:07:22 AM
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Paul Boutin was on NPR the other day discussing the latest on ICANN and the Geneva WSIS summit. "As I say here," says Paul, "When Indymedia and Instapundit agree, how can we be
wrong?" Link. Happy birthday, Paul!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT apparently devising new crapware disc format for Xbox
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DATE: 12/12/2003 09:29:58 AM
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MSFT has a traditional business-model for the Xbox: sell people devices that are deliberately crippled, then charge them money to temporarily uncripple them. Unfortunately, MSFT's customers keep on treating their bought-and-paid for Xboxes as though they were their property, "hacking" the devices so that any software can be installed and run on them.
To combat this dreadful piracy, MSFT is apparently considering moving from traditional CD-sized silver discs for its Xbox built-in readers to some other, nonstandard format that it will have exclusive control over, via patents or trade secrets or both. This is a wonderfully terrible idea: spending extra engineering dollars to produce a device that does less, costs more, and can't be used to run all the media and code that's available on traditional optical discs. Nice one, MSFT.
According to the ad, Microsoft's Xbox team is seeking an engineer "to manage the design and development of the Xbox Game Disc for the next generation Xbox console", with the job description going on to mention anti-piracy as the first in a list of key factors for the new game disc specification.
Although it's possible that the role will simply involve devising a copy protection mechanism for games on existing DVD media, similar to that used by the current generation Xbox and the PlayStation 2, the description of the role hints strongly at the company developing a more proprietary format.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": Holiday gizmo-shopping
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DATE: 12/12/2003 11:15:22 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day," host Alex Chadwick and I talk tips about which of this holiday season's crop of electronic gadgets will make great gifts. This week: Words of advice when shopping for portable DVD players, mobile MP3 players, and universal remotes. In next week's show, more gadget fun. Link, audio stream will be available after 12PM Pacific.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Group-blog on security and privacy screwups
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DATE: 12/12/2003 11:20:57 AM
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Abuseable Tech Awareness Center is a new group blog in which prominent tech researchers will describe their ongoing projects to crack open technology and expose the security and privacy vulnerabilities in the system. The contrib list is amazing:
Steve Bellovin, AT&T Labs-Research
Matt Bishop, UC Davis
Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania
Dan Boneh, Stanford University
Simon Byers, AT&T Labs-Research
Bill Cheswick, Lumeta
Lorrie Cranor, AT&T Labs-Research
Ed Felten, Princeton University
Dan Geer, Independent Consultant
Tadayoshi Kohno, UC San Diego
Carl Landwehr, University of Maryland
Patrick McDaniel, AT&T Labs-Research
Gary McGraw, Cigital
Mike Reiter, Carnegie Mellon University
Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University
Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security
Richard M. Smith, Internet Consultant
Adam Stubblefield, Johns Hopkins University
Dan Wallach, Rice University
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Great science fiction radio plays, open licensed and free for downloading
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DATE: 12/12/2003 02:20:29 PM
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My pal hugh Spenser is a hell of a science fiction writer, and he's got a passion for the golden age of science fiction radio dramas. He wrote a six-part series of radio plays about the early days of science fiction fandom, which were produced by the wonderful Shoestring Theater and aired last summer on NPR. Hugh and Shoestring have released all six epiisodes as MP3s under a Creative Commons license that allows for the noncommercial redistribution -- give them a listen, they're way boss.
Amazing Struggles Episode 1, 28.8MB MP3 Link
Amazing Struggles Episode 2, 29MB MP3 Link
Amazing Struggles Episode 3, 29.4MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 1, 30.1MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 2, 31.2MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 3, 30MB MP3 Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Eyesore of the Month photos and commentary
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DATE: 12/12/2003 02:23:00 PM
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Architectural critic James Howard Kunstler has a section on his website called "Eyesore of the Month," which includes a monthly photo of a hideous architectural blunder along with scathing commentary. Like me, he seems to think the 1920s represented a high water mark in esthetics.
Considering I took this shot at lunchtime (12:15) on the first nice spring day. . . and considering that the four towers are full of toiling state workers, the emptiness of the vast plaza is rather remarkable. Conclusion: it totally sucks.
Link (thanks, Steven!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Two rants on Geneva's crappy WiFi, one fictional, one non-
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DATE: 12/13/2003 08:40:51 AM
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Lessig's just got back form the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, where he ran into the Swiss version of WiFi, a craptacular extravaganza of telecom stupidity compounded by the irony of hosting a summit on the "Information Society" where it's easier to get a gift bag of conference schwag than an Internet connection. Lessig's rant on the subject is entertaining, and it put me in mind of a section I wrote for my novel-in-progress, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," which is about community wireless hackers (among other things) and this chunk was inspired by my trip to Geneva a couple months ago to attend the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. I've uploaded the relevant section.
"No problem -- outside every hotel and most of the cafes, I can
find a signal for a network called 'SwissCom.' I log on to the
network and I fire up a browser and I get a screen asking me for
my password. Well, I don't have one, but after poking around, I
find out that I can buy a card with a temporary password on it.
So I wait until some of the little smoke-shops open and start
asking them if they sell SwissCom Internet Cards, in my terrible,
miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, they look at
me and say, 'I have no clue what you're talking about,' shrug,
and go back to work.
"Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one,
the guy tells me that they only sell cards to guests, since
they're in short supply. The cards are in short supply! Three
hotels later, they allow as how they'll sell me a 30-minute card.
Oh, that's fine. 30 whole minutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And
how much will that be? Only about a zillion Swiss pesos. Don't
they sell cards of larger denominations? Oh sure, two hours, 24
hours, seven days -- and each one costs about double the last, so
if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as much as
you'd spend on a day's worth of connectivity in 30-minute
increments -- about $300 Canadian for a week, just FYI.
"Well, paying 300 bucks for a week's Internet is ghastly, but
very Swiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits
of cheese at breakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But Three
hundred bucks for a day's worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I
was going to have to find a seven-day card or bust. So I ask at a
couple more hotels and finally find someone who'll explain to me
that SwissCom is the Swiss telco, and that they have a retail
storefront a couple blocks away where they'd sell me all the
cards I wanted, in whatever denominations I require.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What Dean needs from the Dems
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DATE: 12/13/2003 08:43:12 AM
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An interesting view of the Dean campaign: a borging of the Democratic party in order to rescue the brand for an Internet-centric political party:
Other candidates -- Joseph Lieberman , John Kerry, John Edwards -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media assets. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants is the Democratic brand name and legacy, its last remaining asset of value, as part of his marketing strategy.
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(via Many 2 Many)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Holographic lollies
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DATE: 12/13/2003 08:44:49 AM
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Screw lollipops screened with detailed edible artwork: these guys are selling giant lollipops with edible holograms embedded in them.
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bringing pinball to MAME, one table at a time
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DATE: 12/13/2003 08:54:50 AM
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MAME is a project to allow for the emulation of every video-game ever minted, but what if you're more the pinball type? No fear: a group of MAME hackers are building virtual pinball machines that lovingly emulate every jot and tittle of every pinball table under the sun.
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(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mondo Cane -- the proto-shockumentary
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DATE: 12/14/2003 09:19:35 AM
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Excellent NYT article about proto-shockumentary Mondo Cane and it spawn by Boing Boing pal Matt Haber.
..."Mondo Cane" presented bizarre, humorous, frightening and downright dubious dispatches from the farthest corners of the world: Italians in the village of Calabria slicing themselves with glass in celebration of Good Friday, the French painter Yves Klein painting with his naked "human paintbrushes," a woman in New Guinea suckling a pig and swanky New Yorkers dining on insects in a restaurant. As seen by Mr. Jacopetti, the world was a truly strange and frightening place.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Jackson fan-portaiture
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DATE: 12/14/2003 05:48:05 PM
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Here's a creepily magnificent gallery of portraits of Michael Jackson, painted by an obsessive fan who sends her work to MJ and sells prints on the Interweb.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese dollar-store opens doors in North America
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DATE: 12/14/2003 05:50:39 PM
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Hyaku Yen, a Japanese dollar-store, has begun to open shops in North America.
At its Aberdeen store, at Hazelbridge and Cambie Road, 45,000 items will initially be sold at $2 Cdn each. These are to include cosmetics, gardening tools, household goods, soft drinks, snack food and stationery.
"A public survey in Japan showed Daiso-Sangyo as being the second most recognizable brand-name retailer after Disney World in Tokyo," Fairchild chairman and CEO Thomas Fung said Tuesday. "They ranked ahead of famous brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Sony, Toyota and Starbucks."
Link
(Thanks, [sorry, deleted your name]!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Micronations: folly and grandeur
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DATE: 12/14/2003 05:53:33 PM
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A conversation this weekend got me to thinking about this old Wired article from March 2000, "It's Good to Be King." The piece is about obsessives who create "countries" by declaring their bedrooms or homes to be sovereign states, and then start issuing passports, attracting adherents, and generally ruling. Just re-read it, and it's as striking as it was when I first found it three years ago:
Some claim physical territory - the family farm, a square foot of Scottish fen, the bottom of the ocean, or, in Talossa's case, the east side of Milwaukee plus a chunk of Antarctica and a small island off the coast of France - but none would actually take power even if it were offered to them. Most feature a founder with the requisite lofty title, and almost all make their home, in one form or another, on the Web...
An entire subcategory of micronations owes its existence to adolescent alienation. These empires of angst betray themselves in one of two ways - either with hackneyed origin myths, usually involving benevolent sultans and distant tropical seas, or with paranoid rants against authority punctuated by proclamations of universal domination and reprinted Rage Against the Machine lyrics. Though almost all teen kingdoms claim legions of subjects, more often than not, populace, ruler, and disaffected youth are one and the same. The Kingdom of Triparia (www.triparia.cx), founded in 1998, is a classic of the genre: 17 citizens, with fancy titles and a penchant for posting overintellectualized bulletin-board messages, united in an act of collective imagination.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtual casino added to Everquest
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DATE: 12/14/2003 05:56:14 PM
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Everquest has added a virtual casino to its gamespace:
The casino is a game of chance. To play you will need to buy a token from one of the wait staff in the casino. You can then take this token to one of the dealers and hand it in to him. There are four different dealers, each with prizes suitable for the different class types. When you turn the token in, he will deal you a hand of King's Court. Based on what your hand turned out to be, you will be awarded a prize. The chance to win a Gold Ticket exists on every hand you play. If you win the Gold Ticket you can turn it in to the manager of the casino and he will spin a grand prize wheel. The number the wheel lands on will determine the item you receive. There are many prestigious items that you can obtain from the ticket turn-in. Some of them are the Guise of the Deceiver, Fungus Covered Great Staff, and Holgresh Elder Beads. There are many more, and we also have intentions of adding more prizes in later patches if the games are popular.
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(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Orange cubic PC
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DATE: 12/14/2003 05:58:43 PM
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The T-Cube is a new tiny, orange, cubic PC intended for sale in China. It runs some whacky OS called T-Engine.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Social people don't need social networking
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DATE: 12/14/2003 06:00:18 PM
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Kevin Werbach points out that social networking sites like LinkedIn and Tribe and so forth have very little to offer highly connected people like Esther Dyson, who would nevertheless be a real asset to the network:
Esther and Pierre don't need LinkedIn to reach pretty much anyone they want to contact. Yet there are a whole lot of folks who want to reach them, and don't have a personal connection to do so. So the service worsens their email overload with little corresponding benefit.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geek tatts
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DATE: 12/14/2003 06:02:55 PM
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Killer gallery of geeky tattoos.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wiki inventor goes to MSFT
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DATE: 12/14/2003 06:05:06 PM
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Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wikis, is taking a job at Microsoft: he's put up a wiki page to solicit advice for surviving there.
You can have a huge impact on Microsoft's culture. Push yourself to the max. Prepare the family -- working at Microsoft is fun and I went overboard. Sometimes the family doesn't understand. Take days to yourself. Try to build friendships and get a mentor or two. That'll help.
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(via Many2Many)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crippled "disposable" digital camera hacked and improved
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DATE: 12/14/2003 06:10:58 PM
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The Walgreens-branded PureDigital camera is a "disposable" digital cam, requiring that you bring the device to a Walgreens to have your pix "developed" (printed and/or exported). A hacker has cracked the device, so that you can add Smartmedia memory and export pictures to your PC at home, reusing the camera.
you will see there is a daughter board on there with the nand flash for picture storage ..
if you remove that board you can add a smartmedia socket and using smartmedia card you will
be able to get the pics with a smartmedia reader standard jpg's but it will not do more that
25 pics still (think its using fat12)..
Slashdotted Link,
Mirror Link,
Another Mirror
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help the music industry figure out which way to jump
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DATE: 12/14/2003 06:16:03 PM
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Aaron Swartz has started a blog to record and discuss "alternative compensation schemes" -- business models for music in the era of P2P nets.
Here's the proposal in a nutshell: Some group of people pay a small fee (like a couple dollars a month). In return, they can download whatever they want, however they want. We track what is downloaded and then distribute the money received, in proportion, to the people responsible for the songs. Everybody wins: users get all the music they want, software developers can continue innovating, and the industry gets paid.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Voting By Design
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DATE: 12/14/2003 06:19:33 PM
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Voting By Design is a "Knowledge Map" and report on how design affects the voting process.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Left Behind deconstructed
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DATE: 12/14/2003 06:30:31 PM
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"Left Behind" is an immensely popular science fiction series about the sinners left behind on earth after good Christians are swept up in the rapture. Over at Slacktivist, a blogger has been dissecting the book in two- and three-page chunks, tearing apart the assumptions, fallacies and curiously compelling heresies in the story.
Charlie Stross and I just finished "Appeals Court," the sequel to Jury Service, which Argosy magazine will publish bound together in January, in a fix-up novel called "Rapture of the Nerds." "Appeals Court" is, in part, a response to "Left Behind": a story about a world where the only hominids who haven't ascended to the post-human cloudmind are reactionaries, missionaries, and religious fundamentalists.
Here's a little chunk of "Appeals Court," so you can see what I mean:
The ant-colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the US, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has entered its eighth year of life, which is middle-aged for a normal colony, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.
The God-botherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled in ant-tunnels within hours. They've learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their space-suits and send them off to Bible classes.
The ants have eaten their way through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root-systems of the sickening flora (the gasoline refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony -- anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouth-part with a lot of hydocarbons). They've eaten the bee-hives and wasp-nests, and they've laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few billion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.
The American continent is a fairy tale that the cloudmind tells itself whenever it doubts its collective decision to abandon humanity. The left-behinds there spent their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit -- plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.
What more could they possibly need?
and here's Slacktivist on "Left Behind":
The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.
It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.
Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" -- jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)
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(Thanks, Kathryn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Honors for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
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DATE: 12/14/2003 07:08:18 PM
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My novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has made the Amazon and Chapters/Indigo editors' picks lists for best science fiction novels of 2003. Also, it's only three recommendations short of making the preliminary Nebula ballot (any SFWA members out there who dug the book?). Oh yah, and the Livejournal people are considering adding Whuffie to their system. Killer news, all 'round.
(Thanks, Amanda and Bo and Micah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons Flash online
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DATE: 12/15/2003 07:46:25 AM
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The brilliant new Creative Commons Flash animation (which premiered last night at the one-year anniversary party, which was a blast) is now online! I'm very flattered at being featured in it...
7MB Flash Link
New Link, please use
(via Lessig)
(NB: Two minor corrections: I won a Campbell Award, not a Hugo, and sold out one print run, not two)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hack your Xbox, get illegally converged
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DATE: 12/15/2003 07:54:14 AM
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Why buy an expensive "media center" PC with lots of DRM that restrict how you can use your own music and movies, when you can hack a cheap Xbox to do the same thing?
"It's a convenience thing," said Phil, whose hacking hobbies discourage him from divulging his full name. "All of my movies are organized into categories, and it's very easy to navigate through the menus to find exactly what I want to watch. I have a PC in the basement of my house which stores all of my music and movies, and the Xbox makes it extremely convenient to use them."
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(via Gizmodo)
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TITLE: JWZ on RFID credit cards
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DATE: 12/15/2003 07:55:58 AM
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Great commentary by JWZ about the coming RFID wave-to-pay credit-cards:
"I like that it's on your keychain and it's fast to use," said Kristie Beenau, 36, of Peoria, Ariz., who has used ExpressPay for about six months at a CVS Pharmacy and fastfood restaurants. "I charge everything anyways. Now I wave it rather than get my card out. It's more convenient."
I'm going to make a fortune by selling an invention that lets you punch a hole in a credit card so that you can wear it on your keychain. Then later I'll repurpose that invention to let you punch a hole in a $20 bill, so you can wear that on your keychain too!
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TITLE: Toshiba's new tiny hard drives
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DATE: 12/15/2003 08:06:10 AM
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Toshiba's new hard drives are the size of a nickel and can store over a gigabyte of data.
The 0.85 inch diameter disk is believed to be the world's smallest hard disk drive that can store about 2 or 3 gigabytes worth of information, company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki said Monday.
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(via Werblog)
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TITLE: Virtual hooking, real censorship in The Sims Online
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DATE: 12/15/2003 08:07:54 AM
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An independent in-game newspaper published in The Sims Online is being censored by Maxis for running ads for underage in-game sex.
So The Alphaville Herald continues to push the edge of the envelope. In this case the envelope has "Underage Child Sexual Solicitation in Virtual Worlds" written all over it. They're running a mind-boggling interview with an avatar who's been turning tricks in TSO since the early days. Since this sexual activity involves real money, an under-age protagonist, and the violation of a serious number of federal and state sexual solicitation statutes, it's your required reading for the day. Call it research.
Oh, did we mention that Maxis, the developers of TSO, have started to delete in-world references to The Alphaville Herald?
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TITLE: God to smite "Bible pirates"
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DATE: 12/15/2003 08:10:17 AM
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BBSpot's got the high-larious scoop on God's copyright wroth:
God said that 'spreading the Gospel' was not a valid defense for distributing copyrighted materials. "Rev. Jackson has published at least 35% of My word electronically, where anyone with an internet connection can download it. Thrice did I call on him to repent; thrice did he ignore me or refer me to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation]."
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(Thanks, Donna!)
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TITLE: SMS keyboard for PCs
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DATE: 12/15/2003 08:28:55 AM
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If you're frustrated by the ease-of-use represented by a 101-key keyboard, why not buy one of these USB "Texting" keyboards with a 12-button phone-pad, and recreate the fakenet experience of SMS on your PC?
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(via MobileWhack)
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TITLE: Spiderman 2 marketing driven by blogs
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DATE: 12/15/2003 08:39:43 AM
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Ben sez, "Sony's marketing for Spiderman 2 includes a huge weblogging push, including Blogger and LiveJournal templates, for the downloading."
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(Thanks, Ben!)
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TITLE: Region-free-ify your Mac's DVD drive
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DATE: 12/15/2003 09:57:39 AM
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Here's a firmware update that can region-free-ify and speed up your Mac's Superdrive DVD drive. Warning: may screw up your computer ferociously. Warning: may violate the DMCA. Warning: It's your goddamned computer, why the hell hasn't Apple given you the capability of watching all your DVDs on it, no matter what country you bought them in?
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(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecam snap of LA flyers: Crimes against Elvedom
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DATE: 12/15/2003 11:37:28 AM
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Phonecam snapshot of freshly plastered flyers along Vermont street in Silverlake, outside the House of Pies where I just ate breakfast. Click thumbnail for larger pic. Who's behind these? I bet it's the Y-Que posse, whose store is like a block away. Everything's always "WANTED" or "FREE SOMEONE" with those people. UPDATE: BoingBoing reader "Crimefighter" says, "Actually the 'Wanted: Santa' poster was related to the Santanarchy/SantaCon in LA. It's a Cacophony Society related event. See this site for more info."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Trademark smackdown: US Olympics Committee v. Robolympics
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DATE: 12/15/2003 11:55:57 AM
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The United States Olympic Committee says it and it alone can use the word "olympics" to describe an athletic competition, which miffs the organizers of the Robolympics. I filed a story about the copyright conflict between bot-builders and the USOC for Wired News here.
"The last time I checked, the USOC wasn't hosting robot sumo events," said Calkins. "Common sense dictates that no one would confuse a 6-pound hunk of steel and plastic with Picabo Street, nor would this dilute her image or in any way disrespect her accomplishments. "We won't compete against them in the 50-yard dash, so I don't see why they won't help us to create an aptly named forum for competing in robotic line-following or robot firefighting," he said.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Golden Age of Silver Age comics
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DATE: 12/15/2003 12:17:32 PM
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I discovered Jack Kirby around 1972 (with KAMANDI) and quickly devoured his comics from the previous decade, especially Fantastic Four. Here's a nice NYT article about 1960s comic books that sums up why they're so great.
Just as Mr. Infantino's Flash had captured the gung-ho futurism of the late 50's, illustrators like Kirby and Mr. Ditko brought an appropriately darker, grittier and sometimes spaced-out look to Marvel's pages in the mid-60's. The Fantastic Four spent a lot of time on the Lower East Side, where Kirby had grown up. Mr. Ditko's hallucinatory illustrations for the mystic Dr. Strange had a direct impact on the psychedelic art that bloomed a few years later. In "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," Tom Wolfe reported that the LSD guru Ken Kesey spent hours studying Dr. Strange comics with acid-inspired probity. Rock-concert posters also lifted the character's image.
Link (thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flocking CGI orcs are too smart to stand and fight
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DATE: 12/15/2003 01:11:34 PM
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Computer animators have been using cellular automata in their crowd scenes for ages, granting the dancers in the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Orcs in LotR the liberty to autonomously determine the fine details of their movement, creating realistic mob scenes that appear to contain a cast of thousands. The problem is, as the programming for the automata gets more sophisticated, they start to express non-linear behavior.
In the climax for The Return of the King, the animated forces of evil kept running away from their enemies.
"So each of these computerized soldiers is assessing the environment around them, drawing on a repertoire of military moves that have been taught them through motion capture - determining how they will combat the enemy, step over the terrain, deal with obstacles in front of them through their own intelligence - and there's 200,000 of them doing that..."
"For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle," Taylor said.
"We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away."
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(Thanks, Yoz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sf story about Saddam's Frazetta-dealer
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DATE: 12/15/2003 04:19:35 PM
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Chris Nakashima-Brown is a hot up-and-coming sf writer whose prose is slick, post-Gibsonian, and funny as hell, like Neal Stephenson meets Hunter S. Thompson. His latest story, about the art dealer who supplied Saddam with his kitschy barbarian-art paintings, is up on Infinite Matrix, called "Script-Doctoring the Apocalypse."
Womack turned to look his guest in the eye. It was only then that Friedman looked closely at the Captain's Hawaiian shirt and realized the pattern was a camouflage design carefully woven from graphic designs of the heads of Seventies action heroes: Mr. T, Bruce Lee, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson.
"Beautiful shirt," said Friedman. "Postmodern Escher-wear."
"Thanks," he answered. "Got it down the street from your gallery. They've got some cool shops up there. You snuck out early that day to party with your boyfriends, so we figured we'd catch up with you this weekend. What we need is for you to help us get some new memes in front of your favorite client."
"Well, you can't just..."
"It's about time," said Womack. "You didn't think you could spend a year working as the Leader's personal shopper without attracting our attention, did you? You're closer to the man than we could ever hope to be."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fuel cell toy
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DATE: 12/15/2003 09:50:57 PM
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Cool science toy: a DIY fuel cell car.
Pour in the water and watch it separate into hydrogen and oxygen, forming a gas to power your vehicle across the floor. Now that we have your attention, roll up your sleeves and find out more through experiments and demonstrations you can do on your own, in a classroom or with friends.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USB-powered novelties
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DATE: 12/16/2003 06:57:52 AM
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This Slashdot post has a a nice roundup of novelty USB-powered devices:
Link
(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Epcot Center ride now comes with puke-bags
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DATE: 12/16/2003 06:59:29 AM
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Mission: Space, the new thrill ride at Epcot Center, has begun to provide barf-bags to riders.
Several theme park consultants told Local 6 News that it is the first time "motion sickness" bags have been made available on a theme park ride.
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(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free Willy seekritly buried in Norway
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:02:07 AM
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Keiko, the killer whale who performed under the screen name "Free Willy," died last week. Free Willy's pals shipped the six-ton whale in seekrit from Oregon to Iceland and then they buried it. They buried a whale. Not at sea. In the ground. A whale.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hong Kong maids are expected to be sysadmins
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:04:41 AM
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Maids in Hong Kong can draw a higher salary if they're computer-literate enough to defrag hard-drives, reinstall OSes, and do other sysadminly chores. Well, so much for geeks as the lords of creation. It was nice while it lasted.
The demand for maids who are able to clean up the fridge and the hard drive has been driven by the surge in computer use and the numbers of children now doing their homework on computer...
But some have rebelled against the shift to computer-literate cleaners. "There's too much pressure," said Sally Yip, 47, from the Philippines, who has been in Hong Kong for 15 years and has earned a reputation for her cleaning allied with her computer skills. "I was coming home with a headache and arguing with my husband. I was offered a job with an international law firm but I turned it down. It wasn't about how much they could offer," she said, "I enjoy the babies and doing the ironing."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Network effects and the Sampling License
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:08:13 AM
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Hot on the heels of Creative Commons' announcement of the Sampling License (which allows you to license your work for reuse, on the condition that only samples, and not the whole work, are used), comes this lucid legal/economic analysis from my co-worker Jason Schultz of what the real benefit of a Sampling License will be: the network effect.
Sampling, by all accounts, should also work on these principles. Yet, under the current sampling system, just because one person clears rights to a song for sampling doesn't mean anyone else can. Each negotiation is generally separate, thereby requiring transaction costs for time and attorneys, etc, each time someone wants to use the track.
Under the CC licensing system, however, the more songs you have in the library, the more valuable the library becomes. This is because you know that you can use all the songs you like in any way you like as often as you like. Eventually, with enough songs, musicians will come to value the CC sampling library more because as a whole it represents more value than any particular individual song might represent under the traditional copyright licensing scheme.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Immersive Quake superimposed over meatspace
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:19:13 AM
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Augmented Reality Quake is an Australian academic project to integrate the open-source Quake code with VR goggles and plastic guns. Basically, you put on a headset and the game superimposes enemy characters, geographic elements, and power-ups over your field of vision, so that as you run around the parking lot or football field, you play a Quake that only you can see. Check out the movies from the project.
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(Thanks, Rooter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: One of the readers
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:26:05 AM
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One of the readers on Farber's Interesting People list traced a spam to a relay on a US Naval vessel, the USS San Antonio or swn-email.lpd17.navy.mil.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Heil Honey, I'm Home: Britcom about Hitler
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:29:01 AM
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In 1990, Britons were delivered a short-lived sitcom called Heil Honey, I'm Home, about Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun's home-life next door to a Jewish couple in the 1930s.
This most infamous of all British sitcoms attracted controversy out of all proportion to the number of people who saw it. Naturally, the hullabaloo was built on the shocking notion that anyone would mount a comedy about Hitler and the Jews - seemingly the definition of poor taste. In reality, the show was no more than a spoof - and not of 1930s Germany but of the kind of 1960s/1970s American sitcoms that would embrace any idea, no matter how stupid. The title, the corny dialogue, the applause when anyone arrived on set, the acting (McCaul's Hitler was more reminiscent of Chaplin's The Great Dictator than your actual Fuhrer) - all were clear signposts of parody. Mel Brooks had already explored the concept of pantomime Nazis in his masterpiece movie (and eventual stage musical) The Producers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UMaine launches free culture/code/knowledge service
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:31:51 AM
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The University of Maine has launched "Still Water," a copyright-free zone for posting and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts.
"We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EA's geeky recruiting campaign
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:36:47 AM
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Games publisher Electronic Arts Canada is running these amazingly geeky billboards that translate as "Now Hiring."
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(Thanks, Pete!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Once More, With Hobbits: Musical Buffy meets LotR
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:41:08 AM
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Chris sez, "In honor of Return of the King we've created Once More, With Hobbits. This combines the Buffy: the Vampire Slayer musical episode with Lord of the Rings.
ORC:
I've been having a bad bad day
Come on Gimli put that axe away
I'm asking you please no!
You've my sincere apologies
You've got the killing expertise
You'll cut through my collar like cheese
I'm begging let me go!
You have got me on my knees
You could slaughter me with ease
I really hate those fucking trees
GIMLI:
Forty-two, Master Legolas!
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(Thanks, Chris)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSNBC video only for Windows
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:43:38 AM
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MSNBC is no longer supporting MacOS or Linux with its free video. They sent Chris an email that said, "MSNBC Video now requires Windows 98SEor higher operating system, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5or higher, Windows Media Player 9 or later, Macromedia Flash Player 7or higher, and Microsoft .NET Passport. The MSNBC Video content is currently unable to support Macintosh or other operating systems."
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dalek Xmas
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DATE: 12/16/2003 07:59:02 AM
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A little holiday spirit: Daleks eating Christmas dinner.
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(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Italian/English poem-collage-photo-blog
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DATE: 12/16/2003 10:47:27 AM
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Delightful photoblog: snapshots of poems strung together in haphazard kidnapper script; Italian and English. Beautiful visual style; odd, quirky mood. Link (Grazie, Jean-Luc). Update:Gamethyme points out the similarity between this blog and A Softer World, "simultaneously haunting and hilarious."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR: Jehova's witness tub-baptism
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DATE: 12/16/2003 10:55:56 AM
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QTVR enthusiast and photographer Peter Murphy says: "Sydney is full of thousands of Jehovah Witnesses at the moment, here for a big Convention. My panorama shows their mass baptism ceremony today at the Olympic Stadium here -- Jehovah Witnesses are into full immersion baptism." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Evangeline: "Interview with a Child cyber-Prostitute in TSO"
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DATE: 12/16/2003 11:00:03 AM
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Noted without comment. The anonymity-requesting BoingBoing buddy who forwards this, then ducks and scampers away in a hurry, asks "What subculture is this? Jeez louise!" Snip:
In the following interview, notorious sim Evangeline goes back to her early days in Alphaville, and claims to have worked as a cyber-prostitute and then to have been a madam for various cyber-brothels under the guise of her sims Roxy, Tori, Fanki and then Dorian Merrill, claiming that at times she made the equivalent of $50 US per trick from her customers. She claims to still being a minor and hints that some of her customers have been Maxis employees. She discusses the conflagration with Mia Wallace, and claims to have guessed Mia's password and trashed her property and account. Finally she discusses her current policy of newbie-humiliation on her Free Money for Newbies property, currently number 1 in Alphaville's welcome category. In particular, she discusses her new game of locking newbies "in the freezer" and "caging" dark skinned avatars and calling them "monkeys" and also calling them "ugly" because one can't see their eyes.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NASA off-world Wi-Fi simulation success
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DATE: 12/16/2003 11:28:06 AM
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NASA researchers have conducted a successful test of Wi-Fi networking in a remote location to simulate terrain on another planet. BoingBoing pal Mike O points us to part of this article which states "Wi-Fi technology currently rates in the 1-to-3 range on NASA's 10-point technology readiness scale," and asks, "Does anyone know more about this scale? Is it an official thing or just a soundbite for the article?"
During a September field test at Meteor Crater, Ariz., NASA used Wi-Fi cells from Tropos Networks to measure a reliable 1 megabit/sec of solid data throughput at a range of 1.3 miles. A three-node network of Tropos 5110 Wi-Fi cells was set up over a two-square mile hot zone at Meteor Crater. Engineers used a laptop computer inside a moving vehicle, with no external antenna, and successfully transmitted data from a remote location through two nodes back to the base camp computer. Though NASA has no current plans to send Wi-Fi technology into space, researchers are examining Wi-Fi as a possible future communications support to interplanetary expeditions, including flights to Mars.
Link
Update: Joe Crawford points us to background on the NASA scale here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Holiday gift guide zen
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DATE: 12/16/2003 11:32:08 AM
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design object |
print club |
acme bags |
pixel blocks |
hand pressed prints |
bleibtreu bags |
pimp cups |
shag |
technokitty bags |
catapult watch |
tiki art |
threadless |
jelly bath |
zakka |
kid robot |
happy tree friends |
chaoskitty |
ultimate wish list
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hungary takes aim at phonecam snapshots
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DATE: 12/16/2003 11:49:34 AM
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The data protection ombudsman of Hungary ruled last week that phonecam users who transmit pictures of people who are unaware of being photographed may be prosecuted for privacy violation -- as could their mobile service providers.
Ombudsman Attila Peterfalvi said he started an investigation after one of Hungary's three mobile providers ran an advertisement saying: "If you see a good-looking girl or guy on the street, don't hesitate to share the aesthetic experience with your friends via MMS." Mobile phones, kitted out with small cameras used in multimedia messaging (MMS), are selling fast in Hungary, where mobile penetration is a high 75.2 percent.
Link (via diepunyhumans)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Softcore Chinese flower girl photos -- on Xinhua
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DATE: 12/16/2003 12:01:40 PM
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Bruce Sterling muses aloud, "Holy macaroni. Why is the official news agency of the People's Republic of China posting a whole bunch of nude body-painting? Have they lost all their little gray Mao suits over at Xinhua? What gives? A couple of these pics are Veruschka Lehndorff art-shots from the mid-1980s. Some official Chinese web-guy has been collecting these things. What could this be about?" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool bodypaint photo gallery
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DATE: 12/16/2003 12:18:09 PM
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Link (thanks Invisible Cowgirl, via cupofchica)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nerd porn: "Lord of the G-Strings"
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DATE: 12/16/2003 12:30:38 PM
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Fleshbot is on a LOTR-themed rampage lately. See a slew of related posts over the last few days. Of particular note, this video:
We'll let the box cover copy speak for itself: "In the mythical realm of Diddle Earth, diminutive yet delectable Throbbit Dildo Saggins is sent by Smirnoff the Wizard to destroy the legendary G-String - most powerful weapon in the land."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wrist-mounted catapault watch
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DATE: 12/16/2003 01:19:34 PM
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The Catapault Watch fires BBs and similar projectiles from your wrist.
Link
(Thanks, Samari Chop!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtuoso Super Mario Brothers 3 game
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DATE: 12/16/2003 05:25:32 PM
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This is a streaming screen-movie of an utterly virtuoso game of Super Mario Brothers 3, played from start to finish in under 11 minutes. Update: various among you point out that the video, while impressive, appears to be faked.
Streaming Windows Media Link
(Thanks, fRiT0!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nagano big-brotherware is insufficiently secured
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DATE: 12/16/2003 05:39:59 PM
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Nagano's new citizen-tracking system is not only invasive of privacy, it's also incompetently secured and exposes citizen data to potential corruption by malefactors.
Tests by the prefecture to infiltrate the system found that access to private information on residents was accessible with local area network (LAN) connections, both from within and outside local body offices.
"(The network) is in a dangerous situation in which personal information can be stolen," specialists hired by the prefecture wrote in an evaluation of the access tests...
Part of the tests also reportedly showed that it was possible to falsify personal data in the network and send it to servers nationwide.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Elf Sex, per Tolkien
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DATE: 12/16/2003 05:43:40 PM
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Nice scholarly paper on Tolkein's writings describing elf-sex:
There was at least one elvish word related to a sexual act in Quenya or Sindarin: nosta / onna, beget. The source for this is Treebeard's farewell to Galadriel and Celeborn in "Many Partings," ROTK. This farewell includes the Quenya phrase "O vanimar, vanimalion nostari", translated in The End of the Third Age, in the chapter discussing Many Partings, footnote 16, as "fair ones begetters of fair ones." There is a related early Quenya noun, ontâro, meaning begetter/masculine parent. The early Quenya word wegê, meaning manhood or vigor, may be open to a variety of interpretations. There was also a Quenya word meaning virgin, rod, as in Rodwen, "High Virgin Noble (female)." (Maeglin, The War of the Jewels, HME)
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: You need a license to say "I have a dream"
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DATE: 12/16/2003 10:37:40 PM
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Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is still in copyright (as is almost everything else familiar in our lives), and Dr King's heirs strictly enforce the copyright. Wendy Seltzer points out what this means for free expression and political commentary.
You can always quote a few lines without asking permission, but that's likely to be the same few lines that have become cliched with repetition. Quote the whole speech to make a more substantial point, and you face thousand-dollar license fee claims from the estate. Quote them to make a point critical of King, and you may be denied a license entirely.
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TITLE: Found alphabet made from human brains
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DATE: 12/16/2003 10:40:30 PM
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The Brain Alphabet is a set of 26 Roman letters visible in the bumps and valleys of photos of real human brains.
Link
(Thanks, Armand!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cousin-identification chart for cousin-marriage advocacy
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DATE: 12/16/2003 10:43:54 PM
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CUDDLE (Cousins United to Defeat Discriminating Laws through Education) is an NGO that advocates for the rights of cousins to marry one-another. Here's a handy chart they've produced to show just how related you are to that cute girl (who looks a little like your mom) in the next pew at the Bar-Mitzvah.
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(via AccordionGuy)
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TITLE: Anti-road-piss campaign from Washington State
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DATE: 12/16/2003 10:49:41 PM
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Washington State highway cops are sick of picking up the bottles of piss and poopie that truckers (and other long-haul drivers) toss out their windows, so they've started a campaign to warn and fine scat-flingers and piss-pitchers.
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(Thanks, Psylux!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 12 Days of Xmas cost index
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DATE: 12/16/2003 10:51:49 PM
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PNC publishes an annual price index of the good enumerated in the 12 Days of Christmas, discussing the costing trends of celebrating a carol-traditional Yule.
Two exceptions to this trend, however, are the swans and the calling birds, which cost significantly more this year. Unlike 2002, when swans took a significant dive in price, these graceful feathered friends have bounced back to their 2001 level of $500 a piece, up from $300 last year, according to the Philadelphia Zoo. The four calling birds are also flying high at $400, more than a 26 percent increase from last year. "The bird prices tend to be stable, except when supply and demand get out of sync, causing the prices to move dramatically," said Rebekah McCahan, investment strategist who provides the research for the Christmas Price Index. "The low inventory of calling birds and swans this year, combined with a resurgence in demand, has boosted prices -- a sign of consumer confidence returning," she added. All told, the swans, geese, calling birds, French hens, turtle doves, and partridges cost over $4,100, representing about 25 percent of the overall Index.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy
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DATE: 12/16/2003 11:01:33 PM
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Today, I wore my new NTK shirt to work and to the Google Xmas Party, and boy, did I ever get a lot of compliments. It reads: "They that can give up general purpose computers for the sake of a little eye candy deserve neither computers nor eye candy," a reference to Franklin's famous "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Verisign calls for Internet redesign, Minitel-style
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DATE: 12/17/2003 07:15:41 AM
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When the CEO of Verisign says something as ghastly-stupid as "We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge," it's like waving a red flag before David "Stupid Network" Isenberg:
How do you feel about Sclavos' remark?
(a) It is cluelessly megalomaniacal.
(b) It is tragically ignorant.
And I suppose I should add:
(c) It makes me feel warm and fuzzy and safe to think that some day the grown-ups might finally make the Internet a serious communications system instead of the toy that it is today.
Mo<
Record your vote on a Diebold voting machine and send an image of the paper receipt it produces to isen-at-isen-dot-com.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LiveJournal demographics
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DATE: 12/17/2003 07:18:11 AM
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LiveJournal has posted a bunch of demographic stats about its user-community -- the age distribution skew (shown here) is fascinating.
Link
(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Everyday Fashion as Pictured in Sears Catalogs
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DATE: 12/17/2003 07:31:54 AM
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I just happened upon these amazing books edited by JoAnne Olian, the "Everyday Fashion as Pictured in Sears Catalogs" series, covering
kids' fashions from 1900-1950,
1909-1920,
the forties,
the fifties and
the sixties.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blockbuster prez calls for end to DVD region-coding
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DATE: 12/17/2003 07:41:44 AM
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The President of Blockbuster has called for an end to region-coding in DVDs:
"I believe, in addition to the elimination of two-tier pricing, the studios should also make another significant strike against piracy with the elimination of regional coding," he said. "The extra time on windows created by regional coding is an opportunity that pirates exploit."
His reasoning is a little mealy-mouthed. This isn't "pirates exploiting opportunities," it's more like "customers routing around market-failures," as when the product they demand isn't offered for sale, or when they discover that they can buy the same product for half the money in a different part of the world.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Lisa Rein song online
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DATE: 12/17/2003 07:43:03 AM
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Lisa Rein has begun to post the recordings from her musical showcase. Her first track, "In the Spirit," is up now. It's her first anti-war song.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Salem paying flirts to take photos of drivers' licenses
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DATE: 12/17/2003 09:06:24 AM
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A poster on Farber's IP list sez:
The Salem cigarette brand is marketing itself by paying attractive young men and women to give away its product. To keep these employees from making mass donations to their friends they've been given digital cameras. They're asked to photograph a unique driver license for every 3 packs given away. I witnessed this at my first visit to Dee's Cafe on the south side. It's a favorite hangout of Pittsburgh bike messengers, hep cats, artists, and smokers. About 30 packs were given away in the hour that I was there.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fart-filtering seat-cushion
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DATE: 12/17/2003 09:56:15 AM
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The GasBGon is a "flatulence filter" that you put on your chair-seat, so that when you fart, it doesn't smell. Available in many designer patterns.
Q: What is a GasMedic flatulence filter seat cushion?
A: The clinical version of the GasBGon cushion with an impregnated carbon filter based on technology used to develop military chemical defense garments and a specially produced polyurethane foam with improved feel, height and shape retention.
Q: Why use a GasBGon or GasMedic flatulence filter-seat cushion?
A: Today's health conscious population is concerned about eating the right foods and the trend has been towards a high fiber diet. This fact coupled with various illnesses, produce intestinal gas discharges, commonly know as flatulence, crepitating, breaking wind, cutting the cheese, or farting.
Link
(Thanks, Amanda!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Custom bobble-head dolls
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DATE: 12/17/2003 12:24:18 PM
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Supply this website with a photo, choose a body, pay $39.95, and they will knock out a custom, one-off bobble-head doll of you or a loved-one.
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(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stem cells can "humanize" animal organs
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DATE: 12/17/2003 12:31:02 PM
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"Organ humanizing" is the process of injecting your stem cells into an animal foetus, so that when it is born, its organs' cells will be similar enough to your own that they can be used for spare parts.
The human cells must be injected around halfway through gestation - before the fetus's immune system has learned the difference between its own and foreign cells, so that the animal does not reject them, but after the body plan has formed.
That ensures that the resulting animals look like normal sheep rather than strange hybrids like the "geep", created by fusing the embryos of a sheep and goat.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ode to lutefisk
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DATE: 12/17/2003 12:39:58 PM
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Tom sez, "Just in time for the Norwegian Christmas rush: Clay Shirky's 1994 epic, 'Ode to Lutefisk'. 'Lutefisk' is an infamous Norwegian dish composed of fish soaked in lye. Clay's take on it: 'You need to drink enough aquavit so you can't tell the difference between caviar on a cracker and ketchup on a Kit-Kat with your eyes open'. My take: I never understood how Jesus fed 5,000 people with just 5 fish, until I had lutefisk."
Link
(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kids hate CDs for Christmas
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DATE: 12/17/2003 04:18:56 PM
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Funny site warns parents not to disappoint P2P savvy kids by giving them shiny discs for xmas.
Kids today are so good at downloading music from the internet that most of them already have all the music they like on their computer, or if they don't have it yet they can get it in 10 minutes. And remember: if your family turns off "sharing" downloading songs is 100% safe..
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Killer origami
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DATE: 12/17/2003 08:02:21 PM
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Amazing gallery of spectacular origami.
Link
(Thanks, Kate!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Inside Lolita
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DATE: 12/17/2003 09:37:51 PM
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Great Amazon.com boner with the cover of Lolita! Link (Thanks, Dr. Mazoola and Jeff Zeldman!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Graffiti Archaeology
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DATE: 12/17/2003 09:46:53 PM
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Eric Rodenbeck and Cassidy Curtis have created a masterful timelapse photographic collage of various San Francisco graffiti sites to show how these urban canvases have changed over the last five years. It's a design tour de force. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eerily accurate text-sexer
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DATE: 12/18/2003 06:56:42 AM
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Feed the Gender Genie 500 words of text and it will guess at the sex of the author. It got five in a row right for me. Eerie.
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DIY medieval tapestry
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DATE: 12/18/2003 07:08:32 AM
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Vanessa sez, "This is just amazing -- the authors manipulated images from the Bayeux Tapestry and created a Flash-based kit where you can make your own medieval comic strip. Images are scalable, type can be colored. You can send your images as ecards to the medievalists of your acquaintance." I made an Orwellian one that I'm quite proud of, in my own, quiet way.
Link
(Thanks, Vanessa!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Smart Radio docket announced at FCC
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DATE: 12/18/2003 07:18:44 AM
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The FCC has announced a new docket for commentary on "smart radios." It's seeking comment on how to encourage frequency-agile radio technology, including through use of location-snesing technologies to know, a priori, whether the radio is situated out in the bush where it won't interfere with other users if it transmits at higher power. I'm going to be writing some EFF/communtiy wireless comments in this docket -- if you've got a dog in this fight, you should send comments to the Commission, too.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Recreating gone Disney rides online
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DATE: 12/18/2003 07:20:08 AM
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Nice NYT piece about the ongoing efforts to rebuild old Disney rides as CGI, using the Web to coordinate volunteers:
At least two other sites are creating virtual versions of discontinued Disney rides: Adventure Thru Inner Space (www.atommobiles.com/cgi-project.htm), a Disneyland attraction that gave visitors the experience of being smaller than an atom, and If You Had Wings (dizneyworld.net/iyhw.html), a Disney World ride to exotic travel destinations. Although these re-creations have not been authorized by Disney, a spokesman said the company "appreciates their passion."
Why do Disney rides inspire such allegiance? "Disney is one of the few organizations that produce elaborate dark rides, that invest in story line," explained Cory Doctorow, a technology activist and writer whose recent novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," is set in a Disney World of the future.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fold a Yamaha motorcycle
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DATE: 12/18/2003 07:56:22 AM
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Amazing free downloadable paper-motorcycle kits.
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(Thanks, bakahage!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nanowire Wrapping a Beam of Light around a Human Hair
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DATE: 12/18/2003 09:52:53 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says:
The nanotechnology research field is pretty fertile these days. Researchers at Harvard recently showed a nanowire which could be the next big diagnostic tool for doctors. Meanwhile, University of Southern California scientists have developed a 'nanosensor' that only works when noise is added. And another Harvard team has developed nanoscale fibers that are thinner than the wavelengths of light they carry which may have applications in ever-shrinking medical products and tiny photonics equipment such as nanoscale laser systems, tools for communications and sensors. This news roundup contains more details and references about these projects. You'll also find a stunning picture of a s ilica nanowire wrapping a beam of light around a strand of human hair.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More amazing Down and Out news
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DATE: 12/18/2003 09:52:54 AM
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This week's Entertainment Weekly lists the 10 Best Novels of 2003. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is number five. It's also one of Sunday, December 28th's NYT's "New and Notable" paperbacks.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online art gallery: Suehiro Maruo
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DATE: 12/18/2003 09:56:12 AM
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At left, my favorite from this wonderful collection of the works of Suehiro Maruo -- sexy, disturbing, nostalgic, and supercool. Link (thanks Invisible Cowgirl, via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dead Logo Graveyard
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DATE: 12/18/2003 10:03:51 AM
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A wistful, meandering walk through the graveyard of dearly departed logotypes. Link (thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian Feds adopt RSS
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DATE: 12/18/2003 10:13:31 AM
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The Canadian government is syndicating its daily news items as RSS feeds. There are a bunch of feeds running, including:
National news
Regional news
Aboriginal peoples
Business
Children
Educators
Link
(Thanks, Andrew!)
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TITLE: Type in the brain-alphabet
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DATE: 12/18/2003 10:38:04 AM
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Lucas Gonze has created an app to render out text in the alphabets made from astronomical phenomena and human brain-whorls.
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(Thanks, Lucas!)
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TITLE: Red Versus Blue season two to premiere at Lincoln Center
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DATE: 12/18/2003 01:32:37 PM
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Red Versus Blue is a series of comedy short films made by scripting avatars in the game Half Life Halo and recording screen-movies of the results, then adding voice-over and sound-effects, a process called "machinima." The first two episodes of the next season will be screened at Lincoln Center on January 3. That's pretty cool -- it's almost as if Homestar Runner came to Carnegie Hall.
We are extremely pleased to announce that Red vs Blue Season 2 will debut on January 3, 2004 at the Lincoln Center in New York City. We're extremely honored to be invited back to this prestigious venue and we hope that any Red vs Blue fan in the area will make it to the 9:30 PM show. The plan is to show Season One in its entirety and then show Episodes One and Two of Season Two. Also, the entire cast and crew of Season One will be on hand for the event, which is a milestone in itself -- we have never been in the same place at the same time. So, if you want your RvB DVD signed by the cast, this may be your one and only shot.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Small tech in big appliances
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DATE: 12/18/2003 04:10:55 PM
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My Small Times column this month is online. It's about how microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)--the tiny machines that trigger the airbag in your car and squirt out the ink in your desktop printer--are now being integrated into white goods.
"I'm not talking about an accelerometer-laden Rosie the House-Cleaning Robot, although she may be on deck soon, too. I'm talking about newfangled washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, ovens and even refrigerators that will ease the pain of some household chores while keeping your utility bill in check."
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TITLE: Rustic found alphabet
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DATE: 12/18/2003 04:40:06 PM
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Nick sez, "Dean Allen at Textism created a found alphabet in a rural setting. The alphabet has a pleasant rustic feel, using mostly earth tones."
Link
(Thanks, Nick!)
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TITLE: Throwaway email addies with RSS-syndicated mailboxes
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DATE: 12/18/2003 04:46:04 PM
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Dodgeit allows you to create throw-away email addresses (for crappy registration sites), and then delivers the email that comes into the resulting mailbox as an RSS feed that you and everyone else who can guess at your throwaway email addy can read. That's pretty sweet.
Pick a throwaway address, say: deeznuts@dodgeit.com
Give that address out whenever you need to.
Check deeznuts from homepage of dodgeit.com.
Subscribe to RSS feed to keep an eye on the mailbox.
Get it?
Link
(Thanks, Phil!)
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TITLE: Buy an Arizona ALL CAPS ghost-town on eBay
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DATE: 12/18/2003 04:49:49 PM
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The entire town of Tortilla Flat, Arizona, is up for auction on eBay. The first order of business for the new owner is to fix the town's lone computer's shift-key.
THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO OWN YOUR OWN HISTORIC TOWN. TORTILLA FLAT IS ONE OF THE LAST REMNANTS OF THE OLD WEST. THE SCHOOL, GENERAL STORE, RESTAURANT, OLD TIME ICE CREAM & CANDY STORE AND THE POST OFFICE HAVE BEEN RESTORED OR REBUILT. TORTILLA FLAT IS LOCATED 18 MILES NORTH-EAST OF APACHE JUNCTION, ARIZONA ON HIGHWAY 88 AND IS THE ONLY SETTLEMENT BETWEEN THE "JUNCTION" AND ROOSEVELT DAM, A DISTANCE OF 47 MILES. THE SETTLEMENT IS SITUATED IN THE VALLEY ALONG TORTILLA CREEK SURROUNDED BY THE MYSTERIOUS SUPERSTITION MOUNTAINS, THE LEGENDARY LOCATION OF THE LOST DUTCHMANS MINE. TO DRIVE TO TORTILLA FLAT IS TO PASS THROUGH SOME OF THE MOST SPECTACULAR SCENERY IN THE WORLD. TORTILLA FLAT'S FINE RESTAURANT, THE SUPERSTITION SALOON, IS FAMOUS FOR ITS KILLER CHILI, HUGE HALF-POUND COWBOY BURGERS AND HOME-COOKED MEXICAN FOOD. IT'S KNOWN THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AND REGULARLY VISITED NOT ONLY BY LOCAL RANCHERS, COWBOYS AND PROSPECTORS, BUT ALSO BY PEOPLE FROM SURROUNDING TOWNS AND TRAVELERS FROM ALL OVER THE UNITED STATES AS WELL AS THE WORLD. IT IS A DESTINATION PLACE FOR ARIZONA. YOU ARE PURCHASING ALL THE BUILDINGS/LAND IS LEASED FROM THE TONTO NATIONAL FOREST SERVICE CALL 1-888-299-6792 ASK FOR SHERRI PACK EXCULSIVE AGENT TO REQUEST ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.
Link
(Thanks, Dan!)
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TITLE: Dear Atari: your DRM screwed me, so now I hate you
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DATE: 12/18/2003 07:48:37 PM
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Good letter from an Atari fan to Atari, describing the way that their anti-copying technology has screwed the innocent in order to get at the guilty.
Link
(Thanks, Marie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open source hackers release open fixes for MSFT vulnerabilityware
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DATE: 12/18/2003 08:16:05 PM
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MSFT's apparent incapacity for patching MSIE vulnerabilities hasn't deterred open-source hackers, who have released a free software patch for a well-known Explorer vulnerability.
Update: Andrew sez, "...it contains buffer overflow exploits that are wide open for hax0r5 to take advantage of. In addition, it redirects weird URL requests to -it's own website-."
Update: Yoz points out that the patch has been patched.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Joi Ito kicks Japanese national ID card ass
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DATE: 12/19/2003 06:01:23 AM
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Joi Ito was hired to audit the security of the Japanese feds' big-brother national ID system as implemented in Nagano . His conclusion? The system sucks -- it places the personally identifying info of Japanese citizens at risk of being stolen, altered, and deleted, and it was implemented incompetently. He wrote a letter to governor to the governor of Nogano (and released it under a Creative Commons license) detailing the problems with the system. Joi is now in big trouble -- and I suspect he likes it that way.
In summary, I believe that the security level of the networks were below average and any average computer network engineer could break into and steal or damage a variety of personal information including Jyukinet information. The people working in the office and in particular, the vendors providing the system security are not sensitive to security and privacy issues. The servers have not been maintained properly and the selection of passwords (many had default passwords or easily guessable passwords) was irresponsible and showed a complete lack of attention to security. I strongly urge that the priority on security for privacy purposes be increased significantly, both in local government offices and vendors providing solutions to these local governments. I believe that the citizens and the people responsible for protecting their information are significantly at risk.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Homebrew USB menorah
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DATE: 12/19/2003 06:04:45 AM
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In this project called "Taking Menorah Design into the 59th Century," an amateur hardware hacker uses the $8 commodity USB chipset to brew his own USB-powered menorah, then writes some code to get the shamas to blink arbitrary messages in Morse code.
Link
(Thanks Buddha!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Arthritic cockroaches -- won't someone think of the arthritic cockroaches?
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DATE: 12/19/2003 06:06:10 AM
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Elderly cockroaches get arthritis and become confused and prone to wandering.
Case Western Reserve University researchers reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology that as the roach's life wanes between 60-65 weeks after the onset of adulthood, and the cockroach slows down, experiences stiff joints and has problems climbing and a decreased spontaneous fleeing response. Death comes shortly after the onset of these movement problems.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple seeking video iPod developer
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DATE: 12/19/2003 10:02:58 AM
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A job-posting on Apple's site implies that the next generation iPods will do video, too.
Seeking a highly motivated engineer to develop next generation iPod product. Must have experience in overall system design of audio and video products.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: OSCON call for proposals
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DATE: 12/19/2003 10:10:32 AM
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O'Reilly has just released the Call for Proposals for the next Open Source conference (to be held in Portland, OR, July 26-30), whose theme is ""Opening the Future: Discover, Develop,
Deliver." The keynotes look pretty stunning:
The keynote speakers for the next OSCON exemplify the event's wide-ranging
mix: Freeman, George, and Esther Dyson, presenting a joint keynote
address; Robert Lefkowitz, who was one of OSCON 2003's most
thought-provoking speakers; Milton Ngan of Weta Digital, the company that
created the digital effects for "The Lord of the Rings" films; and Tim
O'Reilly. Other influential open source leaders will come to OSCON to
accept the first Open Source Awards, produced by the Open Source Institute
(OSI) and ZDNet (winners will be announced in stages during the winter and
spring of 2004).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chinese court orders new instances of WMDs for hacked virtual arms dealer
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DATE: 12/19/2003 10:14:47 AM
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A Chinese court has ordered a online role-playing game host to create new instances of artifacts looted from a player-character's account after it was hacked.
Li Hongchen, 24, had spent two years, and 10,000 yuan ($1,210) on
pay-as-you-go cards to play, amassing weapons and victories in the
popular online computer game Hongyue, or Red Moon, before his "weapons"
were stolen in February, the Xinhua news agency said on Friday...
In the end, Beijing's Chaoyang District People's Court ruled on Thursday
that the firm should restore the player's lost items, finding the
company liable because of loopholes in the server programs that made it
easy for hackers to break in.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ambiguous's ode to eggnog
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DATE: 12/19/2003 10:52:21 AM
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This elaborate, obsessive rumination of phlegmnog almost makes it sound appetizing:
I love you all, and I am here to help. Here is the recipe by which I was shown
the true nature of eggnog:
- Separate the whites & yolks of six eggs.
- Beat whites stiff and add a quarter pound of powdered sugar.
- Beat yolks until thick and add another quarter pound of powdered sugar, 3 drops
oil of cinnamon, and 2 drops oil of clove. (Respect these amounts! Do not
underestimate the power of these oils!)
- Fold together whites & yolks. This is your batter.
- Right in the mug, combine about 1 part of batter with 2 parts hot milk.
- An appropriate quantity of booze (traditionally 1 part rum to 2 parts brandy) may
also be added.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Get your iPod polychromatically modded
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DATE: 12/19/2003 10:55:34 AM
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Short review of ColorwarePC's painted-iPod service, wherein your iPod is sent to ColorwarePC, painted, and returned to you.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ooky vintage potato chip cookbook
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DATE: 12/19/2003 07:04:39 PM
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This scanned-in Good Housekeeping/Smith's Potato Crisps "Cooking With Crisps" cookbook has many revolting comestibles made with potato chips, but perhaps none so grody as these potato-based desserts: a lemon pie and chocolate bananas -- made with crisps. Ew.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: A&E gratuitously slams science fiction
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DATE: 12/20/2003 10:44:52 AM
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![LeGuin [sic] is best known for her science fiction/fantasy novels, a genre typically seen as non-literary. However, her writing's intense complexity and sophistication have broken the boundaries of the medium--many perceive her writing as veiled philosophy.](http://craphound.com/images/aandeonleguin.jpg)
A&E has produced a craptacular Flash site to promote Lathe of Heaven, a telepic adapted from an Ursula K Le Guin story. The promo copy contains this grotesquely patronizing bit of gratuitously insulting analysis of science fiction, apparently aimed at ensuring that any science fiction fans who enjoy the work are put firmly in their place and instructed that this is different from that crappy rocket-ship stuff that they're accustomed to. I thought that this kind of thinking was dead and buried, but apparently, it's alive and well at A&E's marketing department.
Flash Link, click "Author"
(Thanks, Emilyg!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amazing week in EFF's history
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DATE: 12/20/2003 01:28:54 PM
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This was a red-letter week for EFF, with three critical victories coming each on the heels of the last:
* Under pressure from EFF and a broad, bipartisan coalition of
organizations we led, the U.S. Forest Service announced that
it would drop plans to block messages from web action centers.
* The Dutch Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision protecting
peer-to-peer software provider KaZaA from liability under Dutch
law for copyright infringement by its users. EFF's Fred von
Lohmann will argue a similar appeal in the MGM v. Grokster case
in January, and while the European law is different, the decision
provides a positive context within which to argue that the higher
court should uphold our victory before the lower court last
Spring.
* Finally, the DC Circuit ruled Friday to uphold Verizon's right
to protect its customers' privacy from subpoenas issued by the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) under the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). EFF helped lead a coalition of
44 privacy and consumer groups, plus a host of ISPs, in an amicus
brief in support of Verizon.
A reminder: EFF is a member-supported charity -- and you've got just over a week left to throw some money at a worthy charity before Uncle Sugar will take it away from you.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Doom comic from back in the day
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DATE: 12/20/2003 06:25:16 PM
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Jesse sez, "This is an old comic based on the video game "Doom". It's actually really funny, because it doesn't attempt to embroider on the game or add anything to the plot, it's just a guy running around shooting demons with successively larger and larger guns, occasionally falling into pits of radioactive waste and making environmentalist speeches. Perfectly captures the essence of Doom in comic book form."
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(Thanks, Jesse!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emerging Tech's self-organizing conference-within-a-conference
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DATE: 12/20/2003 06:29:00 PM
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At this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, there are 27 night sessions reserved from allocation by the organizers, left open to be a "self organizing conference-within-a-conference." The idea is that ETCON attendees propose sessions on the open wiki, and vote on which they'd prefer to attend.
We're not looking for polished presentations. We'd prefer "white board" sessions on your works-in-progess, rough demonstrations with promise, concept and code (with an emphasis on running code, even if it doesn't yet fully represent the concept). You should be prepared to take input, answer questions, engage in discussion, and be open to altering your conceptions and mucking about in your source. Oh, and have a good deal of fun while you're at it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bear: funny comic from Slave Labor Graphics
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DATE: 12/20/2003 09:52:37 PM
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On a recent trip to London, I picked up a copy of the new(ish) comic "Bear," from Slave Labor Graphics. It's damned funny stuff -- I've asked my corner comix store to put aside new issues for me.
When you're only twelve-inch high teddy bear, you're at a disadvantage, anyway, but Bear has more pressing worries on his mind. His days are spent watching TV on his owner Karl's couch, with short breaks for biscuit-eating or reminiscences on his long, distinguished, and quite frankly, rather unlikely military career.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Merlin's lists of five
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DATE: 12/20/2003 10:21:38 PM
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From my pal Merlin Mann, a stunningly funny collection of lists of fives:
Five terrible names for local retail stores
- Pricey McMarkup's House of Suspicious Deals
- Hot Fence Electronics Village
- Kostly Kornerz
- Chez Ripoffski: A Retailerié
- Misleadington's Big Box
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Argosy Magazine reborn
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DATE: 12/21/2003 03:17:29 PM
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Argosy Magazine got a nice write-up in the Birmingham News. Charlie Stross and I just turned in a novella for the next ish of Argosy, a sequel to Jury Service, called "Appeals Court." Argosy is publishing both stories together in a perfect-bound package, as a fix-up novel called "Rapture of the Nerds."
The original Argosy ran from 1896 to 1943, publishing stories by authors as noted as fantasist Edgar Rice Burroughs, Western author Louis L'Amour and mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. One of the first pulp fiction magazines, Argosy crossed genre boundaries before those boundaries were sharply defined...
The first issue, which came out in November, featured contemporary fantasy by Jeffrey Ford; suspense by Ann Cummins; a science fiction/horror story by Caitlin R. Kiernan; mystery by Barry Baldwin; an interview of groundbreaking science fiction author Samuel R. Delany by author Adam Roberts; a history of Argosy by Rick Klaw; and science fiction by Benjamin Rosenbaum.
Each issue includes a separately bound novella, with both volumes packaged in a single slipcase. The first issue's novella, "The Mystery of the Texas Twister" (an alternate-history Western with "undercurrents of political satire," Anders said), was written by famed fantasy author Michael Moorcock and illustrated by Jon Foster.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rescue your teeth with Mexican dentistry
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DATE: 12/21/2003 06:10:52 PM
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Amazing first-person story of a guy who couldn't afford the full set of caps his teeth needed and was looking at a lifetime of dentures, who became a medical tourist to Tijuana and got the work done for a fraction of the cost in Mexico.
I mentally multiplied $715 by 28 and groaned. Either my teeth were about to become the most expensive thing I ever owned, or I was going to lose them and likely have to start wearing dentures at the age of 39...
Once again we found tales of $120 caps, and of an entire industry catering to American medical tourists. In several places along the US-Mexico border, clusters of dentists operate within convenient driving distance so that an inexpensive bus tour from Las Vegas or a trolley ride from San Diego could bring you to where this cheap care was available.
Nowhere did we find a horror story -- indeed, everything we read was very enthusiastic. We did research and began to lay plans.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: John A MacDonald action figure
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DATE: 12/22/2003 05:48:28 AM
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Just in time for the holidays, the John A MacDonald action figure: the first Prime Minister of Canada, reborn in PVC with many accessories.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Zip-Linq cables: device charging without bricks
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DATE: 12/22/2003 06:30:30 AM
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It used to be that I shlepped a power-strip (sometimes two!) with me when I went on the road, because they haven't built the hotel-room yet that has enough plugs to charge my entire device array, not least because everything that fits in my pocket comes with a charger whose transformer brick eats two or three outlets.
Then I discovered USB and FireWire charging -- and more specifically, Zip-Linq retractable cables. Instead of plugging everything into the wall, you attach your device to a little bon-bon-sized retractable wire that goes into one of your computer's ports and plug your computer into the wall. This is especially handy if you're travelling overseas, since it's just not practical to buy enough Euro-220 adapters to get your devices to talk to the local alternating current. Your laptop probably has an international power-supply requiring only a plug adapter, and once that's attached to the wall, you've got know-quantity/know-interface power for all your gizmos.
Before I leave on my next trip overseas tomorrow, I will slip into my pocket a Firewire cable (for my little backup harddrive, which I yanked out of an old PowerBook and put into a tiny enclosure, so that I can back up every day on the road), a cellphone charger (one for my US Motorola iDen phone, one for my European
Nokia phone -- and cables are available for most manufacturers:
Motorola,
Sony-Ericsson,
Samsung,
Kyocera,
Sanyo)
and a PDA charger (Palm,
iPaq).
Rael crashed on my sofa this weekend and pointed out that Zip-Linq is now shipping a wall-adapter, so that if your laptop is unavailable, you can plug this into the socket and still charge up.
The best part is that at $10-20 these wires are actually cheaper than the manufacturers' chargers for the most part.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Futuro House: better living from the Gernsback Continuum
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DATE: 12/22/2003 06:40:01 AM
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Amazing gallery of photos and video clips from the Futuro House, a UFO-shaped concept dwelling designed by a Finnish architect in 1968. This is Jetpack Futurism at its finest. 20 of these houses were built!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Varley's Red Thunder qualifies for preliminary Nebula ballot
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DATE: 12/22/2003 06:58:46 AM
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I grew up on John Varley's short fiction (careful readers of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom will note several loving tributes to Varley's work), and still return to collections like The Barbie Murders, Blue Champagne and the magnificent The Persistence of Vision nearly every year, re-reading those stories and marvelling anew at how deft and clever Varley's hand is.
I just noticed that Red Thunder, the second Varley tribute to Heinlein (the first was the Hugo-nominated Steel Beach, a mind-crogglingly wild, funny and clever tribute to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) has qualified for the preliminary Nebula ballot, which is proof that we live in a just universe indeed.
Red Thunder is a tribute to Heinlein's juvie novels, particularily the classic boys-own-adventure tale Rocket Ship Galileo, about three plucky, ethincally diverse, multi-gender adolescent heroes who rescue the US space program.
Varley manages this amazing trick of simultaneously writing a juvie book -- this would be a hell of a book for your favorite precocious thirteen-year-old -- and writing a book about juvie books, a book for those of us who grew up on the juvies of yesteryear.
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TITLE: Four CDs I'm damned glad I bought this weekend
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DATE: 12/22/2003 07:27:54 AM
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I took a stack of used CDs to my corner record store this weekend and traded them in for a bunch of new music. Here are the picks of the litter:
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Deep Note: Music of 1970s Adult Cinema: The title says it all, doesn't it? This is a CD that was made for MP3 players. It's amusing to listen to the "tone poems" of ecstatic chanting layered over wah-wah pedals -- once. But the actual funk tracks on this are really nice, the kind of thing you want to put in a high-rotation playlist for urban walking; think of the fat-bass instrumentals from the Fat Albert theme with a George Clinton's slitheriest, perviest licks.
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Five Red Caps: 1943-1945. Steve Gibson and the Five Red Caps were a comic, vocal-oriented boogie-woogie act that released a ton of music in the 30s, 40s and 50s, almost none of which is available today. This disc of wartime tracks contains some of my favorite music of all time: Grand Central Station ("Got a yearning to be/down in Tennessee/got a sweetheart that waits for me/got the biggest brown eyes/that can hypnotize/makes you wanna leave New York"), Mama Put Your Britches On ("Put away your fancy hose/and your dainty dese and dose/what you need now is Victory Clothes/so Mama put your britches on"), and Gabriel's Band ("Better be prepared if you want a part in that heavenly show/or on judgement day they'll find a place for you below/make your trumpet call ring out/hallelujah sing and shout/gotta know what rhythm's 'bout, if you wanna play in Gabriel's Band")
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The Beau Hunks Play the Original Little Rascals Music. Roy Shield, the composer of the incidental and theme music for the Little Rascals shorts, was a freaking genius, an unsung hero on the order of Raymond Scott and Carl Stalling. His orchestral music -- faithfully recreated by the Beau Hunks here -- manages to evoke the sepia-toned comedy of the Our Gang serials, especially in some of the really short tracks, like the ten seconds of the woodwind-section laughing; close your eyes when it plays and you can see Spanky holding his gut and rocking back and forth.
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Doob Doob O' Rama: Filmsongs of Bollywood: One of my plane-trip books for tomorrow is the bound manuscript for Bruce Sterling's new technothriller (Me: "What's a technothriller?" Bruce: "It's like a science fiction novel, only it's got the President in it"), The Zenith Angle, which apparently revolves around Bollywood (I haven't cracked the cover yet, I'm just going off of the stuff he's been blogging). I really enjoyed the Bollywood tracks on the Ghost World soundtrack and the occassional Bollywood licks in Fat Boy Slim and at my local curry hut, but I had no idea of where to begin. This disc turns out to be just the right place for me to have started. I'm enjoying the hell out of it, and I suspect that Asha Bosle has stolen away Tiny Weymouth's place in my heart as my obligatory rock-star crush.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wrist-mounted walkie-talkies storm Hong Kong
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DATE: 12/22/2003 08:12:43 AM
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Gizmodo reported that people in Hong Kong are going around with short-range walkie talkies in order to communicate with nearby chums wihtout paying a toll to the telcos; now a Gizmodo reader confirms it:
Your entry on the HK Walkie Talkie phenomenon is 100% accurate. All the electronics markets are filled with FRS radios and the like. I've even seen people using them to meet up on the MTR (Subway).
He also says that walkie-talkies that you wear on your wrist (like the one pictured at right) are most definitely the ones to be seen with.
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TITLE: WalTunes ToS suck: they 0wn the music they sell you, not you
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DATE: 12/22/2003 08:16:40 AM
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My co-worker Fred von Lohmann writes: "Wal-Mart launched a music download site today. Notice the rather breathtaking EULA terms (much more onerous than the Apple terms) -- Fair Use, First Sale, all other copyright exceptions are swallowed up by contractual prohibitions. Just as with software, these restrictions will almost certainly be selectively enforced against reverse engineers, would-be competitors, and tinkerers who disrupt the biz model. All backed up by WinMediaPlayer technical restrictions.
"And all completely useless at preventing Internet redistribution, since you can presumably record via analog outputs or burn to CD-R and re-encode to mp3.
"I say again: current DRM has nothing to do with preventing piracy, everything to do with impairing consumer rights, competition and innovation."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Contract-law analysis of Sauron's offer to the Dwarves
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DATE: 12/22/2003 08:21:01 AM
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A Michigan law student has deconstructed Sauron's offer to the Dwarves in Fellowship of the Ring, with reference to contract law:
But then we get to the last statement. "Refuse, and things will not seem so well." There are (at least) two ways I can think of to view this. One possibility is that Sauron is not actually proposing unilateral contracts at all. After all, a reasonable interpretation of his offers would be that they were unilateral, but we're talking about Dark Lord Sauron who really wants to enslave all the free peoples. He might not contemplate reasonable contracts. In fact, given the ease with which agents of the Dark exact damages from lackeys who fail them, it seems possible that in Morder, where the shadows lie, all contracts are bilateral, no matter how ridiculous it seems to contemplate such a thing. So maybe what he's saying is that if they fail to produce the ring or any information, he'll exact expectation damages.
But this reading doesn't really make sense given the express language of the offer. The Messenger from Mordor isn't claiming that if they fail to deliver the ring they'll suffer expectation damages unto the fourth generation. He's saying "Refuse, and things will not seem so well." The "Refuse" comment modifies the offer. The law doesn't contemplate expectation damages if you don't accept an offer, although Sauron might.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 125-year-old fossil fruitcake coming to Tonight Show
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DATE: 12/22/2003 08:39:46 AM
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A 125-year-old fruitcake, a family heirloom, will appear on Leno.
The cake rests in a glass bowl, covered by a glass top. A large raisin and what might be a clove are visible among the brown mass - Ford says it's fossilized - that emits a pleasant odor of spices.
Its baker died in Berkey, Ohio, in 1879 and the cake remained untouched for 85 years. Someone clipped Bates' obituary out of The (Toledo) Blade and placed it on top of the cake. Inside the glass cover someone glued newspaper clippings that read "Mother 1878 November 28." Ford guesses that is when the cake was baked.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Terror alerts as breakfast cereal
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DATE: 12/22/2003 09:14:52 AM
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Talented net.cartoonist Goopymart has shipped this new Terror Alert Chart just in time for the latest installment in the Homeland Security Free Floating Anxiety System.
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(Thanks, Goopymart!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London Tube Map as flowchart
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DATE: 12/22/2003 09:32:37 AM
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Nice HOWTO for using graphics in the style of the London tube-map to flowchart complex processes. Includes downloadable PowerPoint templates.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Xmas music from video-games
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DATE: 12/22/2003 11:53:36 AM
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Nice CD of Xmas music created by mixiing samples from various 8-bit video games:
This very special holiday release from 8bitpeoples features an allstar cross-platform lineup that is sure to make yours a truly chippy christmas indeed. Brought together from all corners of the globe, these 8 amazing tunes were composed by 8 dedicated chiptune maniacs on 8 different videogame consoles and homecomputers! Featuring the sounds of Yerzmyey on the Spectrum, Nullsleep on the NES, Vim on the VIC20, Paul Slocum on the Atari 2600, Bit Shifter on the GameBoy, Goto80 on the C64, Dma-Sc on the Atari ST, and Hally on the X68000, there is only one way to celebrate the holidays right this year, and this is it.
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(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Three men from Yemen sue NASA for trespassing on Mars
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DATE: 12/22/2003 05:41:19 PM
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File under "News imitates The Onion:"
No one expects to lose much sleep over it but, for the
record, NASA has been sued by three men from Yemen for invading Mars. The three say they own the red planet, and claim they have documents to
prove it.
"We inherited the planet from our ancestors 3,000 years ago," they told the
weekly Arabic-language newspaper Al-Thawri, which published the report
Thursday. Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil and Abdullah al-Umari filed the lawsuit in
San'a, Yemen, and presented documents to the country's prosecutor general
which they say proves their claim. There was no word on whether they had
paid the appropriate inheritance taxes.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nerve-y X-mas: human cupcakes and pornstar yule orgies
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DATE: 12/22/2003 07:36:40 PM
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Two seasonal goodies on Nerve.com for your clicking pleasure. First, a photo gallery with holiday-themed contributions from some of the online zine's regular contributors -- including a terrific X-rated cupcake shot from Siege (cropped thumbnail at left), whose work has been blogged here on BoingBoing before. The gallery is thankfully devoid of naughty Santas because, according to photo editor Whitney Lawson, the "treacly tradition... fall[s] into the same category as spiced rum and Kenny G's holiday album." Link (sorry, but paid registration or someone else's password required).
Next up, the latest experiment in Nerve regular Grant Stoddard's "I Did It for Science" series: "To attend a porn star's Christmas party." The party was an orgy in LA (yes, an actual orgy), hosted by a highly Googleable adult entertainment biz couple whose female half is seen as often in pixels as she is on DVD and video. My dear BoingBoing readers, let it be known that I refuse to be outdone in the realm of party invites. I, too, received an Evite to this very same Christmas clusterfuck. I did not attend, but I can tell you (swear on a stack of mid '90s Wired Magazines) that said invitation included a very thorough FAQ with the line, "Q: Can I bang [female co-host's name]? -- A: Sure!" Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogshares appears to have returned
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DATE: 12/22/2003 07:47:23 PM
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Back from the dead: Blogshares.com. (thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Holiday Zen
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DATE: 12/22/2003 07:48:43 PM
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christmas price index
wesley willis
happy holidays from lester
christmas choir
record-o-matic
they might be giants
santacon
holiday special
diy cards
create a tree
drunken christmas
santa says
shuffle the penguin
and a zen repeat...
chaoskitties in snowsuits
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Best of BritBlogs, 2003
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DATE: 12/22/2003 08:00:57 PM
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In the Guardian UK, this wrap-up of "best blogs," which includes a well-deserved nod to "Belle de Jour," a recent addition to my personal list of frequently-checked urls. Whether or not that online journal is indeed written by a London call girl, as it's said to be -- it's good stuff. Link (Thank you, Bruce Sterling.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online Japorn: plastic poo, bleeding limbs, bad gadgets
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DATE: 12/22/2003 08:12:19 PM
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A fresh dose of Japorn perversion -- this time, all items are bona fide buyable things. Sexualized plastic turds, severed torso toys, a weird t-shirt, and some mysterious electrical instrument of male torture. I don't know what any of this stuff is, I only know it's giving me nightmares. Links: one, two, three, four. (Um, thanks, Warren. No. Really. Thanks a lot.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Some thoughts for 2004, see you then!
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DATE: 12/22/2003 08:20:43 PM
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I'm going on holidays until after New Years tomorrow, and will be spending a fair bit of time away from the box. I'm going to be simply unavailable, which is kind of unusual for me. I may or may not blog at all (which means that if you're not already using the blog suggestion form that sends your suggestions to the whole team, it's time to start), and I'm going to be ruthlessly pitching out, rejecting, and tersely responding to any requests for my time or attention between now and Jan 3 when I do get online. Downtime is good, and my good-deeds-and-favors-battery is empty and needs recharging.
As a kind of farewell to 2003, I wrote a little squib for Warren Ellis this morning, as part of a series of ruminations on the future that he's putting together on Die Puny Humans. Here's it is:
The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It's about realizing that all the really hard problems -- free expression, copyright, due process, social networking -- may have technical dimensions, but they aren't technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can't solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.
On that note: I have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("Someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("A 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol -- on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). I don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.
An important note for 2004: stop trying to build an Internet without malefactors, parasites, freeriders and inefficiency. There is no such thing as a parasite-free complex ecology (thank you Kathryn Myronuk for this formulation). Some organisms lamented the existence of mitochondria. Others adapted to exploit them and integrate them. Some lament the existence of spammers. Spammers will always exist: stamping your foot and demanding their nonexistence won't change that: adapt or die.
I'll see you again in 2004 -- if you've got a response to this piece, post it to your blog or on Tribe or something; I'll see 'em in the referer logs or in Technorati. I won't be responding to any email about it, though.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jim Griffin on radio show "Politics of culture" Tuesday
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DATE: 12/22/2003 09:03:45 PM
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Pho list co-founder Jim Griffin moderates a live discussion on copyright, digital entertainment, and the future of online music tomorrow (Tuesday 23 December) at
2.30 p.m. on 89.9 FM Santa Monica, simulcast on KCRW.com.
I'll be moderating, if you can call it that, a panel discussion
involving Matt Oppenheim of the RIAA, Sarah Deutsch of Verizon, Ted
Cohen of EMI and Fred von Lohmann of the EFF. That's a mouthful of
acronyms, to be sure, but one chock full 'o first-hand experience from
the front lines of this year's marquee battle over copyright
enforcement.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Howard Dean tattoo
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DATE: 12/22/2003 10:13:35 PM
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Heavy, man: someone got a fan-tattoo for yet-to-be-nominated-by-the-Democratic-party US presidential candidate Howard Dean. Link (Thanks, boogah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian Liberal party trying to shut down political parody site with crappy Trademark claims
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DATE: 12/23/2003 05:54:57 AM
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I'm off to catch a plane, but before I go, I had to post this. Bullies from the Canadian Liberal party are strong-arming a parodist who has put up a political site to make fun of the Prime Minister. This (should be) a national embarrassment: Canadian journalists should be covering this story.
I woke up on Wednesday morning to a phone call from a friendly guy named Tim, who informed me that I had one hour to take down the website, PaulMartinTime.ca, or he would set the lawyers loose on our asses (that's not a quote, but it's an accurate summary).
In between his friendly but businesslike remarks, he dropped a few remarks intended to make me nervous. He said, for example, that he "had a little trouble getting through privacy.ca, but they're no longer supporting your cause." If we had in fact been using privacy.ca, that would be pure power-play. It would mean that he had intimidated (legally or otherwise) a company whose function it is to protect the identity of people who use it into breaking its sole mandate. As it turns out, we don't use privacy.ca; the address of Rob Maguire, the person who registered paulmartintime.ca, is publically available, for all with an internet connection to see.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR's "Day to Day": more gadgets!
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DATE: 12/23/2003 10:24:21 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day," host Alex Chadwick and I chat about more last-minute gadget ideas for the geek in your life. Wireless fishfinders, bluetooth headsets for your mobile phone, and how to buy a DV cam -- including my current favorite toy, the Panasonic DVX-100 (true 24P for under $3G. Sweeeeeeeet) . Link, audio stream will be available after 12PM Pacific.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Textually.org's wireless year in review
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DATE: 12/23/2003 10:25:49 AM
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BoingBoing pal Emily in Switzerland says, "Here is a round-up in 10 chapters of mobile news for 2003 from the best news sources online and a look at what's ahead in 2004: Textually 2003 - The Year in Review." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywood gambles on P2P
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DATE: 12/23/2003 10:26:55 AM
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In the UK Guardian today:
Bollywood movie fans will soon be able to download full-length features with the file-sharing software Kazaa. A deal struck between a partner of Sharman Networks Ltd, the company which owns Kazaa, and IndiaFM.com, a popular entertainment site, will allow Indian film producers to distribute movies, music and other large, rich media files online to an estimated 60 million international Kazaa users. The move follows a pilot scheme in November when Bollywood thriller Supari was offered for sale at US $2.99 and promoted through Kazaa prior to its release in India. The file was designed to self destruct after being watched and could not be copied.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fast Company | If He's So Smart...Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation
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DATE: 12/23/2003 10:41:39 AM
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Fast Company's Heath Row was kind enough to point out this article about Steve Jobs. He says:
The battle over digital music is just another verse in Apple's sad song: This astonishingly imaginative company keeps getting muscled out of markets it creates. So what does Apple have to tell us about innovation?
It's less an anti-apple piece, which is how one reader pegged it, and more an analysis of what innovation really means to an organization. Can you build a company on innovation alone?
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old!
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DATE: 12/23/2003 01:27:19 PM
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In addition to cutting out scenes of gay events held at National Parks, the US Park service is also selling books that "prove" the Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old.
This fall, the Park Service also approved a creationist text, 'Grand Canyon: A Different View' for sale in park bookstores and museums. The book by Tom Vail, claims that the Grand Canyon is really only a few thousand years old, developing on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. At the same time, Park Service leadership has blocked publication of guidance for park rangers and other interpretative staff that labeled creationism as lacking any scientific basis."
Here's a quote from the book: "... in the creationist's view, the carving of the Canyon would have taken place when the sedimentary layers were still soft, allowing the catastrophic erosion process to quickly and easily cut through the layers."
From Amazon.com: "Author Tom Vail and his wife are the founders of Canyon Ministries, which offers Christ-centered voyages through the canyon."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sea Monkey magnate dead at 77
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DATE: 12/23/2003 01:45:09 PM
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Harold von Braunhut, who ingeniously marketed one of the ugliest and most boring aquatic creatures in existence -- the almost-invisible brine shrimp -- as" Sea Monekys," died last month.
"...Mr. von Braunhut's piece de resistance was Sea Monkeys -- which come from dried-up lake bottoms, not the sea, and are not monkeys but brine shrimp. His extravagant claims for the crustaceans -- for example, that they come back from the dead and that they can be trained and hypnotized-- are convincing because they are sort of true. (The shrimp do follow light.)
Billions of shrimp have been sold, not to mention a Sea Monkey aphrodisiac and a wrist watch filled with swimming shrimp. There are Web sites for sea monkey fans; CBS briefly had a Sea Monkeys series on Saturday mornings; 400 million of them went into space with John Glenn in 1998; and, for the lazy, a new Sea Monkey video game allows a player to 'virtually' care for a shrimp colony, lest the animals 'virtually' die."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sony's QRIO robot
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DATE: 12/23/2003 02:17:03 PM
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Sony's QRIO robot appears to be an incremental improvement over Honda's ASIMO, but like the ASIMO, it still walks like an old man who needs to go poo (to paraphrase a Boing Boing reader.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Town of Bourton's miniature model has a miniature model of the model (and so on)
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DATE: 12/23/2003 08:07:12 PM
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Mark Bourne says: So my wife Elizabeth and I are googling up possibilities for our long trip to England next year. Checking out London sites and so on. An acquaintance suggested staying for a few days in the Cotswolds, a scenic Middle Earthy region west of London. That's how we found a page about the town of Bourton.
You just gotta love this text, which blends Ye Olde Scepter'd Isle with sci-fi gee-wizardry:
You will probably have noticed that when you take a branch from certain trees (some conifers for example), the branch looks like a miniature version of the tree, and when you break a piece off the branch, that looks like a tree too. Mathematicians call this property self-similarity.
Bourton has a wonderful example of self-similarity: it contains a 1/10 scale model of itself. Because the 1/10 scale model is a complete model of the town, it must contain a model of itself, and it does, a 1/100th. scale model of Bourton, and because the 1/100th. scale model is also a complete model of Bourton, it must also contain a 1/1000th. scale model of the scale model of the scale model of Bourton.
And it does. It is only a matter of time before a team of nano-technicians turn up in the town to etch a sub-micron scale model of Bourton on a silicon wafer, complete with mill, waterwheel, and a highly imaginative interpretation of the River Windrush as a stream of electrons.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photographer James Nachtwey
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DATE: 12/23/2003 08:28:00 PM
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New obsession: the work of a war photographer named James Nachtwey, who was injured earlier this month in Iraq. At left: "Iraqi soldiers search for what they thought was a downed American pilot along the banks of the Tigris River. No pilot was found, and the U.S. denied that any aviator had been lost over Baghdad." This is a link to his work this Spring in Iraq, and rumor has it there's more work from Iraq coming from him soon. This book of his work released a few years ago is fantastic. There's an update about his condition online here. (thanks Invisible Cowgirl) Update: Oh, and -- the Nachtwey documentary was just released on DVD. Link (Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Santarchy in Antarctica
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DATE: 12/23/2003 08:44:41 PM
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Click thumbnail for full-size image. The RSA's David Calkins shares this snapshot of Santarchy mayhem afoot on the ice continent (left), and says: "Santacon comes to Antarctica! Yeah! There will be a 36-Santa rampage tomorrow and Thursday. I know... Because me 'n' Rob (who founded Santarchy) bought those 36 suits and shipped 'em to my friend Allie, who works at McMurdo (bigdeadplace.com!)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More Santarchy in Antarctica
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DATE: 12/24/2003 08:23:42 AM
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Somewhere in Antarctica, a woman in a Santa suit is blogging. Alli, aka Sandwichgirl, e-mails BoingBoing with this update on holiday preparations and the spread of Santarchy down south. And by "down south," I mean way, way, way down south. Click thumbnails for larger images.
if there is a god or santa, i must have done something to piss them off in the dish line cause santawich got no love from the health fairy. a week and a half ago, i was told i have a stomach virus. after a very humbling 4 days, a cough that bruised my ribs, a fever of 102, and a vicious lung infection kicked my ass the one week i have been looking forward to since before i came to antarctica. i have been trapped in my little crap dorm watching no less than 15 movies, wishing, for once, i could be at work. i wanted to be making cookies. i wanted to be slacking off in the name of christmas. i wanted to be taking advantage of all our volunteers. feck. so i stayed in bed the past 4 days. hacking, breathing, sweating, crapping. did i mention the 15 movies i watched? maybe it was more.
today was the first day i emerged since saturday night. i asked medical if icould borrow a wheelchair to make a grand appearance into the galley but they said they needed it for 'real emergencies'. then i asked the firefighters if they could carry me in, but most the firefighters i know were off base on some call. so, i trudged in on my own, clad in santa. it was hilarious, watching santas collect their food from the hot lines, then along table full of santas, eating together in peace and harmony.
after i watched everyone eat (i still have zero appetite), i hung around to watch the community file in and react. it was amusing, but i had to do something less stimulating or perhaps i would die. there were lots of people taking pictures and video. i promise i will report within the next few days. here's a few things. i'm going back to the galley now to see how things are progressing. tonight i want to go out for a little while to get some shots around town. thank you for everything. the galley staff thanks you! -- santawich
(Thanks, David)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Shirley has a weblog
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DATE: 12/24/2003 08:25:16 AM
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One of my favorite authors, John Shirley, has a blog. John is the original cyberpunk writer. If William Gibson is Johnny Rotten, John Shirley is Richard Hell. Here's what Gibson says in his forward to Shirley's 1980 novel City Come A-Walkin':
John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier. City Come A-Walkin' is evidence of that and more. (I was somewhat chagrined, rereading it recently, to see just how much of my own early work takes off from this one novel.)
Shirley made the plastic-covered Sears sofa that was the main body of seventies sf recede wonderfully. Discovering his fiction was like hearing Patti Smith's Horses for the first time: the archetypal form passionately re-inhabited by a debauched yet strangely virginal practitioner, one whose very ability to do this at all was constantly thrown into question by the demands of what was in effect a shamanistic act. There is a similar ragged-ass derring-do, the sense of the artist burning to speak in tongues. They invoke their particular (and often overlapping, and indeed she was one of his) gods and plunge out of downscale teenage bedrooms, brandishing shards of imagery as peculiarly-shaped as prison shivs.
John's new blog is well worth reading!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: R.U. Sirius interviews Richard Metzger
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DATE: 12/24/2003 09:18:03 AM
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Boing Boing pal R.U. Sirius interviews Boing Boing pal Richard Metzger (Editor of Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult) in the latest issue of R.U.'s online magazine The NeoFiles:
"Most people have this assumption that magick is all about some kind of 'hocus pocus' or 'eye of newt, tongue of toad' thing or the sort of 'incense and affirmations' school of thought that a lot of New Agers and Wiccans are into. I don't see it that way. When I was a teenager, I read in one of the RE/Search books that a modern magician uses the tools of their time. It was Genesis P-Orridge, the rock star, who said that, and it made a major impression on me. He meant that a modern day "sorcerer" would employ video cameras, printing presses, television, electronic instruments, the Internet and so forth to work their magick and since so much of magick is about INTENT, then it stands to reason that something like the Internet can have magical uses. Advertising, too, is a magical act and so is PR, basically. Advertising allows these big corporations to create a desire in the center of your head that you should run out and buy things you don't need! That is magick, right? Right."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Utne chooses Howard Rheingold's 'Smart Mobs' for Award
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DATE: 12/24/2003 10:10:49 AM
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Roland Piquepaille says: "This is the end of the year and so it is time to give awards for 2003. And Utne Magazine just picked Smart Mobs, the collective blog led by Howard Rheingold for this year's Utne Independent Press Award for best online cultural coverage. This overview tells you why this award is deserved, what are smart mobs, and why you should become a smartmobber in 2004. It also includes a little-known picture of Howard *working* in his *office*.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Happy Holidays!
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DATE: 12/24/2003 04:55:16 PM
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I've had an interesting year. On January 1, 2003, Carla and I decided we would sell our house and move with our two daughters to the South Pacific. We started packing and were surrounded by boxes for weeks and weeks.
Five months later, we were on a plane bound for Rarotonga. It was wonderful (no stress, living in a house next to the ocean and walking barefoot everywhere) and awful (the baby got antibiotic-resistant pneumonia and the hospital sucked, lice, tropical sores, ceaseless weeks of rain).
Four and a half months after that, we were back in Los Angeles. We bought a car (a neat Scion Xb) and a house the first week we got back. We lived at Carla's mother's house for two months.
Now we're in our new house, surrounded by boxes, and I feel like I haven't been anywhere or done anything. Rarotonga, Aitutaki, New Zealand, and Australia seem like a daydream I had while shuffling around these boxes.
Happy holidays to all of you. I appreciate all the great suggestions you've submitted to Boing Boing. And many thanks to David, Xeni, and Cory for all their wonderful entries!
-- Mark
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy Holidays from Hollywood
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DATE: 12/24/2003 08:31:19 PM
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Feliz Navidad, y un prospero año nuevo a todos ustedes. Snapshot of the foot of the Xmas tree, here at casa Xeni. Best wishes to all of you out in pixel-land who visit our humble blog. Peace and happiness to you and your families in the new year, and thank you for stopping by.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: On Your Mark, Get Set, Unwire!
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DATE: 12/26/2003 04:18:28 PM
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On a recent trip to Spain, I caught up with Blast Theory cofounder Matt Adams for a chat about the wireless games his company develops -- high-adrenaline, multiplayer roleplaying experiences like "Can You See Me Now" and "Uncle Roy is All Around You." Here's a snip from Adams' explanation of these games, which take place simultaneously in virtual space and real space:
"It's a chase played simultaneously online (by the public) and in the streets (by assigned participants). You're dropped into a virtual city, you use avatars to navigate, and there's a chat interface so that real-world and online participants can text one another.
"You're chased in the real city and the virtual city, at the same time. Three runners on the street are equipped with PDAs, GPS devices and walkie-talkies. To "get" you, they have to come within five meters of your position. The game is physical and visceral, and we were amazed at just how clearly a sense of presence in time and space was communicated. Players in Seattle, Tokyo and Germany communicating with players on the ground in the U.K. could hear weather conditions, traffic, where the busy roads were -- "Hey, this road's jammed, why don't you zigzag back and forth here?" They learned where hills and valleys were along the game terrain -- "This one's too steep, go there instead."
When virtual players heard a runner say, "OK, she's really close now -- let's run up and get her," they told us the hair stood up on the back of their necks with an adrenaline rush -- "Shit! They're coming for me now" -- it was one of those things we thought would be interesting ahead of time, but had no idea there would be such a strong emotional and physical reaction in an online environment.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Filmica: New collaborative blog about film launches in Spain
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DATE: 12/26/2003 04:29:18 PM
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Caspa.tv blog founder Antonio Delgado, who gave me a personal guided tour of all things geeky in Barcelona not long ago, sends word of a new addition to Spain's growing blogosphere:
Mainly composed of weblogs, Filmica project was born to become an open
platform devoted to the present and future of the film and TV industries,
collaborating the dialogue and extracting the knowledge from the
information that is flowing on many spaces.
Each weblog is a personal site where authors freely write and comment about
topics of their interest. Directors, producers, script-writers, journalists, proffessionals and fans will have their weblog installed and ready for them to write, freely. No computer skills required. At this moment, Filmica.com is at beta stage, finishing some adjustments and designs. The official opening is expected at the begining of 2004. People interested to open a weblog in Filmica should send an e-mail to weblogs@filmica.com, describing who the author is and what the subject of the weblog will be. The proposals will be reviewed.
Links: Spanish, English
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What to do in LA: see NANO exhibit at LACMA
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DATE: 12/26/2003 04:33:03 PM
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Recently opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: "nano," a cool art/science exhibit for geeks of all ages:
nano [is] an exhibition that merges the arts and the atom by
presenting the world of nanoscience through a participatory aesthetic
experience. The
exhibition, a collaboration between LACMALab and a UCLA team of nanoscience,
media arts, and humanities experts, is free to the public and runs through
September 6, 2004 in LACMA's Boone Children's Gallery.
This groundbreaking project provides a greater understanding of how art,
science, culture, and technology influence each other. The exhibition
addresses sophisticated subject matter that is especially relevant for the
next generation. Modular, experiential spaces using embedded computing
technologies engage all of the senses to provoke a broader understanding of
nanoscience and its cultural ramifications. The various components of nano
are designed to immerse the visitor in the radical shifts of scale and
sensory modes that characterize nanoscience, which works on the scale of a
billionth of a meter. Participants can feel what it is like to manipulate
atoms one by one and experience nano-scale structures by engaging in
art-making activities.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Holiday Leftover Zen
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DATE: 12/27/2003 12:01:02 PM
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holiday medley
nativity
winter scene
dancing santa
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Kelly: Powering Virtuous Circles
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DATE: 12/27/2003 12:05:44 PM
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In the latest edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools ezine, some thoughts on giving:
There's no shortage of opportunities to support important causes. Lot of charities are local and community based. Some are more internationally- and future-oriented such as Amnesty International, EFF, Long Now Fondation, World Vision, the AFCLU, and Oxfam to name just a few. Everyone can add their favorite.
But let's say you were interested in a "tool" to leverage the least amount of money into the largest measurable effect over time. For that I'd like to recommend a type of giving that multiplies itself. Over the years, these are the criteria I've adopted for this challenge:
1) The help is aimed at the lowest, those with the least, where small makes a huge difference.
2) The gift expands itself, gaining amplitude with each cycle.
3) The range is global.
Think of it as enabling philanthropy: take a minimum of money and aim it at the precise point where it can do the maximum good, multiplied by many generations. Maximum good is measured simply: when you enable someone to enable someone else. That is a virtuous circle. I've found the follow three do-good organizations to meet these criteria. They fund the neediest in the world. They are highly-evolved programs that produce amazing results. And one tangential result is that when we give to these three, we feel optimistic.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: 24-Hour Movie People
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DATE: 12/28/2003 01:21:50 PM
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Choire "Gawker Guy" Sicha writes:
Recently I was invited to spend the night with two lovely ladies, writer Xeni Jardin and photographer Aliya Naumoff. We didn't sleep for a day and a half! Oh, the hilarity. Anyway, the result: a documentation of the 24-hour digital movie-making contest here in New York. To celebrate, here's a shot of Xeni, who by that point was powered solely by espresso and her iron will, stealth-discoing our non-sleep-deprived editor Rob [Levine] at the Wired offices.
24-Hour Movie People, Wired, January 2004
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New, sneaky, evil PayPal spoof.
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DATE: 12/28/2003 01:25:32 PM
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Mike Outmesguine points us to yet another new riff on the classic PayPal scam (click thumbnail for full-size image):
I got this email that looks like it came from PayPal. Of course, I didn't believe it for a second. But I'm sure others would. Digging deeper, the URL redirects people to a site in China that uses the IE URL spoof to seem like it's sitting at paypal.com. Insidious! I reported this to Paypal and they confirmed it's a spoof site. Here's the breakdown:
1. URL included in the original email:
<a href="http://www.paypal.com%01%01%01%01%01%01%
01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%
01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01%01
%01@pp.youlikeshe.com ">click here</a>
2. jump-off site pp.youlikeshe.com
3. Actual site being loaded (remove spaces to activate): www . Epack . Ch/p/verify.htm
4. Spoofed to appear as www.paypal.com using the IE URL spoof vulnerability
shown here:
<script language="JavaScript"> location.href=unescape('http://www.paypal.com%01@www.epack.ch/p/verify.htm
');
</script>
Microsoft has not released a patch for this URL vulnerability. Now it seems there is a real-world attack, albeit only to Paypal members so far. Sneaky buggers!
Update/Correction: BoingBoing reader Fraser Cole in Ottowa says, "Hello, just a friendly note regarding the PayPal scam. I'm probably not
the first to point out that the final destination site is in the .ch domain, which of course is Switzerland, not China. Maybe since they're in Europe they can be tracked down easier?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Thoughts on Bam earthquake from Iranian bloggers
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DATE: 12/28/2003 02:36:23 PM
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The recent earthquake in Bam, Iran may have claimed as many as 40,000 lives by some estimates. Sorting through the Persian blogosphere, you'll find a number of sites where residents and expatriates are posting about this tragedy, and its impact on their country's future. Hossein Derakshan has yet to sound out on his English-language site, but there's a post on his Farsi blog for those who read Farsi. Among the English-language sites where posts are already out: Persianblogger.com, Pesmanesque, Days of My Life In California, Iranian Truth, Iranfilter, Eyeranian, HumanFirstThenaProudIranian. Many more are listed here, including blogs written in Farsi (there are probably more than 12,000 of them -- here is a good background piece on the Persian blogosphere, from Wired News). And finally, Doug Rushkoff (not Persian) has this to say.
BoingBoing welcomes pointers to other sites sounding out on the Bam earthquake via this form.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Will the real Antarctic Anti-santa please stand up?
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DATE: 12/29/2003 08:06:10 AM
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Leave it to me to botch the geographic details of recent posts about Santarchy sightings in Antarctica. Look, I live in LA. Anything south of Wilshire is a remote southern terrain, as far as I'm concerned.
Nevertheless, Oren Leaffer, a member of the National Science Foundation's United Stated Antarctic Program who is evidently stationed near the South Pole, writes:
"I just saw your boingboing posts on the Santas in Mactown, well that's not even part of Antartica (it's on Ross Island). Here at the south pole we had the anti-santa [left], who liked to point out that while Santa brings you coal if you're naughty, here a lump of coal would be a good thing. Happy newyear and whatnot."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Does this car make my ass look big?
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DATE: 12/29/2003 09:05:52 AM
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BoingBoing reader Clive says:
Patent #6,649,848 is for "Vehicle with on-board dieters' weight progress indentifying and control system and method". In plain english, that means it's a car that weighs you when you sit in it -- and yells at you if you're getting fat. There's also a story in the New York Times about it today.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Disney tweaks privacy policy; allows promotions
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DATE: 12/29/2003 09:07:23 AM
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BoingBoing reader Caines says:
Walt Disney has revised its online privacy policy to allow the sharing of user information to third parties, the company confirmed on Tuesday. New registrants who accept Disney's privacy policy during registration also accept all marketing options by default. They have to manually turn them off later if they want to opt out. A Disney representative said the changes were made to help customer service operate more effectively between its offline and online businesses.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Applying For Prix Ars Electronica's new "Digital Communities" cash prize
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DATE: 12/29/2003 09:12:01 AM
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So, what exactly does one call a cash prize for weblogs? Bling-blog? Digital arttfest Ars Electronica recently announced that the 2004 competition will include the new category "Digital Communities," awarding cash prizes to projects of great sociopolitical relevance. Howard Rheingold posts more details on his blog, including a snip from instructions on how to apply. Thanks to all who have suggested BoingBoing as an entrant, but since co-editor Cory is a judge this will not be possible.
Prix Ars Electronica, the foremost international prize for computer-based art, offers an open platform for the encounter with leading-edge trends in art, technology, and society. Over the last 17 years, more than 24,800 works from 87 countries have been submitted for Prix Ars Electronica consideration. With a total prize money of 130,000 Euro this year, and no participation fee, it is the highest endowed and most reknown competition in this field worldwide.
The new category "Digital Communities" - to be awarded for the first time in 2004 - encompasses the wide-ranging social consequences of the Internet as well as the latest developments in the domain of mobile communications and wireless networks. "Digital Communities" will spotlight bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, bridging the digital divide regarding gender as well as geography, or creating outstanding social software and enhancing accessibility of technological-social infrastructure.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Funding drive for Wikipedia
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DATE: 12/29/2003 09:15:52 AM
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BoingBoing reader Michael Reeve says:
I'm sure I'm not the only person to recommend this page for inclusion - concerning Wikipedia's appeal for funding. OK, at the time of writing, they've already reached their target, but a little more certainly won't hurt.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing exclusive: new cartoon from Graham Roumieu
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DATE: 12/29/2003 09:21:51 AM
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Click this cropped sneak peek (or here) for full-size image. Here's a fresh piece from Canadian illustrator and cartoonist Graham Roumieu, who is a very sick a very talented man.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Best geek gift yet: decommissioned aircraft carrier
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DATE: 12/29/2003 09:40:38 AM
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Sorry I missed this when we were assembling lists of hot geek gadget gift ideas last week for NPR. L@@@K! Excellent buyer! A+++++! Would do business again!
Aircraft carrier (deommissioned ) for sale.
Vehicle Description: This maybe the first ever aircraft carrier (decommissioned 2001) available for auction at EBAY !
But the auction was delisted not long ago due to accusation wrongly made by a suspicious customer. We showed evidence that this vessel is DECOMMISSIONED and therefore not Ordanance. We are shipbroker and not arms dealer. We shipbrokers do not have the ownership of the vessels we sell, as none of the shipbrokers does, just as your real estate broker cannot ask you to transfer the title of your house to him before he start selling propery for you.
Current bid: US $6,000,000.00.
Link (via Geeknews)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FBI warns of terrorists toting copies of Old Farmers' Almanac
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DATE: 12/29/2003 08:06:40 PM
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My country grows stranger by the day. The elderly Italian lady who lives next door to me annotates her almanac to keep track of which moon phases bode best for planting, thinning, or harvesting fresh back yard arugula. Suspicious ways? She's definitely attempting to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning. If the taste of the fresh, shared greens she drops off on my doorstep in brown paper bags are any proof -- it's working.
The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning. In a bulletin sent Christmas Eve to about 18,000 police organizations, the FBI said terrorists may use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning." It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially if the books are annotated in suspicious ways. "The practice of researching potential targets is consistent with known methods of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood of operational success through careful planning," the FBI wrote.
Link (Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hoder on Bam earthquake and Iran's goverment
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DATE: 12/29/2003 09:26:20 PM
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Hossein Derakshan, a native of Tehran who now resides in Canada, posted this today on his English-language blog -- "When people have different needs than the state." Snip:
Nothing could ever show the real sense of diconnectivity and distrust between Iranian people and the Islamic regime, and its deeply dysfunctionality better than a devastating quake. Everywhere you go and every blog you read, there is talk about the political implications of such tragedy going on.
People inside and outside Iran are desperately trying to gather donations, but they don't want to give the money to the government. They'd rather give the aids directly to the International organizations or trusted NGOs and persons in Iran whom they are sure have nothing to do with the regime and its institutions. For instance, Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel laureate has stepped in and announced measures to directly gather people's aids. This amount of distrust and disconnectedness has never been see before.
However, the reason is pretty clear: When a government can run the whole country only by the oil and gas income, it doesn't have to answer its people's needs; it only thinks about its own needs. (In 2004, Iran will have $16 billion revenue from oil export, while it only depends on approximately 18% of citizen's taxes.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art: Eric White
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DATE: 12/30/2003 06:20:33 AM
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(via Wiley's blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: John Perry Barlow now has a blog
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DATE: 12/30/2003 07:27:25 AM
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Right here: Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mobile carriers brace for New Year's textstravaganza
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DATE: 12/30/2003 08:38:51 AM
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Telecom providers in Australia, Japan, and Europe are bracing for a bumper crop of text-messaged new year's greetings:
Mobile phone companies are bolstering networks in anticipation of a record 35 million text messages New Year's Eve revellers will send tonight. The figure would surpass the record estimated 29 million text messages on Christmas Day. With many texters in places where it will be hard to hear a phone ring, never mind hold a phone conversation, some are predicting the volume of text messages could eclipse voice calls for the first time. A Telstra spokesman said that on Christmas Day customers made 15 million voice calls and sent 11.8 million text messages. Virgin, which has the smallest, but youngest and most text-mad customer base, expects to carry about 4 million messages on New Year's Eve - an average of 10 texts per customer.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Get your hot live naked anonymous moblog photos right here, folks
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DATE: 12/30/2003 10:04:03 PM
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Jason Calacanis, founder of Venture Reporter, Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs Inc., etc., blogs thusly:
Phil [Kaplan] (aka PUD) of FuckedCompany.com fame has started an anonymous moblogging project. Basically you send your photo to pics@mobog.com and a minute later they are on his site ready for users to make comments on them.
Jeff Jarvis calls it anonymous instant photophone moblogging, a phrase which is giving me a heavy wallop of jargon vertigo right about now.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kirk! Sings! Again!
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DATE: 12/30/2003 10:18:02 PM
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According to a NY Post article, referenced in this CBC.ca article, William Shatner will soon release a new album -- produced by Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five fame. Guests are said to include country star Brad Paisley and former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins, whose performances have also been described from time to time as examples of "either impassioned intensity or pompous overacting."
The new album isn't the first foray into recording for the Montreal-born actor best known for playing James T. Kirk, the captain of the starship Enterprise on the original Star Trek series. In 1968, Shatner released his first album The Transformed Man, which includes spoken-word cover versions of the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man. Although Shatner intended The Transformed Man to be taken seriously, it's become something of a camp classic. The Hip Surgery Music Guide, an internet guide that celebrates offbeat musical genres, says the songs can be taken as examples of "either impassioned intensity or pompous overacting."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bang the Machine - Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts
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DATE: 12/30/2003 10:56:33 PM
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BoingBoing reader Alex Steffen points us to a new exhibition opening in January at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Jan 17–Apr 4, 2004:
In conjunction with the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, the Center presents an exhibition that addresses the pervasive influence of video game culture. The program explores a variety of subject areas, from the evolution of the game and its roots in military training applications to its contemporary features and cross-fertilization with artistic endeavors. Among the anticipated projects included in the exhibition are: an interactive lemon tree-powered hand held games by acclaimed artist and graphic designer, Amy Franceschini; renderings of historic events in the isometric perspective of video games by John Haddock; and a curated show in a virtual Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in The Sims Online created by Katherine Isbister/Rainey Straus. Also on display is an interactive video game created by the youth from YBCA's education program, Young Artists at Work. An exhibition plug-in by KOP, Game Commons, will accompany the exhibition.
Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Seth claims the exhibition's title is a case of unfair name-poaching:
Just a bitchy complaint to say that the title of this art exhibition poaches directly the name of a preexisting documentary film on Street Fighter videogame players (which was at SXSW, Sundance, etc. about 2 years ago). The film's producer (my friend Peter Kang) has been inundated by emails and calls asking whether the film (understandably very popular with gamers at festivals, but not yet in full release due to music licensing issues, and therefore more tantalizingly difficult to see) is playing at this show, to which it has no connection at all.
The Center seems to have poached the name. Even among hardcore players given to obscurantism and inbred slang, this phrase is (or was, pre-documentary) totally obscure. The festival organizers ignored totally repeated attempts by Peter (who ran the fabulously successful boutique design co. Kioken, and is too nice/busy to think about really pushing them, though he is understandably really upset- he's got a very expensive property which they're obfuscating) to at least clarify the situation, before finally responding to say "We came up with it on our own" (???- seems uncontroversially a reference to *something*) and "it refers to pinball". The "pinball" followup at least makes the "we came up with it on our own" sound remotely plausible, though in fact those answers (from the same person) are simply mutually exclusive. Further "pinball" is a pretty implausible inspiration for a naming a show that has no connection whatsoever to pinball. Like most arts center people trying to stay on top of the ever-cresting wave of cool, they probably asked someone whom they adjudged "hip", who coughed up the last sexy-sounding game-related phrase they'd heard. And even if they had somehow come upon this themselves, it doesn't seem really to matter- there's still the copyright stemming from the creation of a known property. I guess being an arts center means you're free to give actual artists the finger?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogger Chris Allbritton heads back to Iraq
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DATE: 12/30/2003 11:01:42 PM
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BoingBoing reader Clive says:
Chris Allbritton was the first truly blog-created journalist -- a former Associated Press guy who raised $13,000 in donations from the audience of his blog Back To Iraq, to pay for a reporting trip to Iraq during the war. With no editors to please, he was able to cover whatever stories he and his audience wanted. Now his readers have asked him to do another trip -- so he's started another fundraising drive. If you want to support truly independent war reporting, drop by his site and throw some change in his Paypal jar.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fray: Tell your holiday story!
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DATE: 12/30/2003 11:02:35 PM
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Derek Powazek says:
Come read Fray's special holiday story by Beth Lisick: Kathy's Annual Ladies Luncheon. It's about her family's annual Christmas gathering, and how it went very, very wrong one year. Have you just had a harrowing holiday? Tell your story!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hardware Openness Factor
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DATE: 12/30/2003 11:07:58 PM
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BoingBoing reader Owen Williams points us to:
.... a short article asking reviewers of hardware devices to add a score to their reviews: the openness factor. For instance, when I buy this mp3 player, what will it let me do, and how am I restricted? I've come up with a simple 4-point scale of openness from crippled products that subvert standards to lock you in (remember DivX?), to complete freedom (palmOS or modern hardware).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nihon Break Kogyo
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DATE: 12/30/2003 11:22:59 PM
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BoingBoing reader Dav says:
JapanToday has an article about an unlikely hit pop song. The song is the official song for a demolition company, composed and performed by one of the workers. After it was picked up and played on a TV show, the company began getting so many calls that they started to sell recordings of it. I usually don't suggest links to my own blog, but in this case I haven't found a better link, since I've collected the english translation of the lyrics and the link to the original Japan Today article together. I've been looking around for an MP3 to no avail. I figure a post about the song on BB might help in that search :)
The sound is, like, really fast drum-n-bass mashed up with a bad TV show theme. Link
update: Oliver Schnarchendorf says, "This site contains a flash animation containing the construction company song."
Jim Spurrier says, "This link contains the mp3 file for the Japanese NBK construction theme song. I don't know how stable the site is, but it oughta hold long enough for you to d/l the thing before the boing-dotting commences."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblogging/phonecamblogging services: watch the terms and conditions...
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DATE: 12/31/2003 01:06:07 PM
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BoingBoing reader Cassandra Fleetwood asks:
Do you know of a site to post photos where one still retains ownership of their photos? I noticed this is not the case for Textamerica (see excerpt from their Terms and Conditions below).
From Textamerica Terms and Conditions
"12. All images and comments posted on Textamerica.com, regardless of the source or content, immediately shall become the exclusive property of Liberation Management LLC. By posting images and text on Textamerica.com, you are representing that you are the owner of such images/text and thereby assign to Liberation Management LLC any ownership interests you have in the images/text, including your copyrights. By posting images or comments on Textamerica.com, you further agree that Liberation Management LLC shall have the right to use your images/text for any purpose without compensation to you and shall not be responsible to you for unauthorized copying of the images/text."
Link, and thoughts / suggestions from other BoingBoing readers welcome via our submission form.
Update: Textamerica responds by removing the phrase "All images and comments posted on Textamerica.com, regardless of the source or content, immediately shall become the exclusive property of Liberation Management LLC" from the service terms and conditions. The moral of this blog-post? With this or any online service, read the site terms and conditions carefully, and be aware that, as Textamerica's site states, "[They] may change from time to time." .
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Naked Barbie walks free
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DATE: 12/31/2003 01:09:36 PM
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John Parres points us to an interesting chunk of copyright news:
Court rules on Naked Barbie: We know art when we see it
An artist's use of the iconic Barbie doll in photographs depicting the Mattel toy without clothing and being assaulted by kitchen appliances is protected as "free speech" says a US Circuit Court. Upholding a decision by a lower court, the court of appeals said the works are obvious parodies and do not infringe on the company's copyright and trademark protection. Mattel had claimed people might think they were responsible for the caricatures and that their availability to the public could damage the brand and even hurt sales. At issue was a 78 image series by Utah artist Thomas Forsythe, shot in 1999 and titled "Food Chain Barbie."
Once widely available online, the series has been the subject of intense legal action by Mattel and only a few images remain available for download. In the latest ruling, a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld an August 2001 ruling by US District Judge Ronald Lew. Following that earlier decision, which Mattel appealed, Mr Forsythe's attorney, Simon Frankel, told the press, "The ruling doesn't mean it's open season (to exploit products by) Mattel, it means there is a certain amount of breathing room for artists who want to use a commercial symbol that has tremendous cultural meaning, for purposes of artistic expression."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Countdown to NYE Times Square QTVR pano!
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DATE: 12/31/2003 03:41:42 PM
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Happy New Year, everyone! Jim Galvin of "Virtual Tour of NYC" says:
Hi Xeni, Jook Leung who shot this QTVR of Times Square last year will be in TS again tonight and I anticipate that he will have another stunning QTVR completed and up on the web by 4 or 5 am. I don't have a URL yet but I'm sure that panoramas.dk will have it first.
Update: Leung does it again: a magnificent panorama of NYE*NYC*TS*04, with sound, right here (cropped thumbnail at left).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LOTR fan-art: Gollum rap
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DATE: 01/01/2004 10:32:06 AM
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Jason DeFillippo casts his gaze upon yonder .swf file and opines, "This shit Rocks!!!!!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fuel Cell Generator
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DATE: 01/01/2004 10:49:53 AM
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Spotted on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:
This generator provides 1,000 watts of 120 volts AC with no noise and no emissions, so that it can be used indoors. It uses Ballard's fuel cell technology for this silence and cleanliness. You need either tanks of industrial hydrogen or commercial metal hydride canisters to power it. Might be useful for mission critical power in clean rooms, medical operations, or in places where quiet is also essential.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing readers on Persian confusion
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DATE: 01/01/2004 10:56:45 AM
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Sina Ahmadian points us to the FarsiWeb Project, and corrects my sloppy references to lanugage in Iran on recent posts (1, 2) about blogosphere reaction to the Bam earthquake (now said to have taken 50,000 lives):
I noticed that you have used the word "Farsi" (instead of "Persian") as English equivalent of our language in your web site. I would like to point out that FARSI (which is originally PARSI) is the native name of our language and PERSIAN is its English equivalent; as the native name of German language is 'Deutsch', but we never use 'Deutsch' in place of 'German' in English; or native term of Greek Language is "Ellinika" and always in English we say 'Greek' language, not 'Ellinika' language.
Update: Other Persian bloggers write in to disagree. Cyrus says, "I've heard both, and despite all the linguistic/political arguments, I don't care which is which."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Baby vaporizers
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DATE: 01/02/2004 01:57:07 AM
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I'm guessing that the Vicks product-naming people aren't science fiction readers: when I read "baby vaporizer," I immediately wondered if it would work on certain adults and yappy dogs as well.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to Apologize
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:01:19 AM
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This LiveJournal post explaining how to apologize is a fine read, and particularily nice to start the year with. I did my share of apology-worth things in 2003, and I expect there will be any number deeds in 2004: if I can hew to these guidelines when saying sorry, I'll be a better person for it.
Be Specific and Don't Exaggerate: Avoid hyperbole, exaggeration, self-pity, and vagueness. Instead, try to focus on a realistic and specific approximation of what you actually did wrong. Exaggerations and vague generalizations put the other person in the position of defending you instead of accepting an apology, which isn't fair to them. It's a way of (consciously or unconsciously) weaseling out of actually taking responsibility for your actions. For example:
* I'm sorry I was such a pain in the ass. (self-pitying exaggeration)
* I'm sorry I yelled at you. (better)
* I'm sorry I ruined our whole day. (vague exaggeration)
* I'm sorry I lost my temper in front of your friends. (better)
* I'm sorry. I just suck at this stuff. (vague self-pity)
* I'm sorry I wasn't communicating with you very well about how I was feeling. (better)
* I'm sorry I can't do anything right. (self-pitying, vague exaggeration)
* I'm sorry I ruined your shirt by drying it on "Hot". (better)
These kinds of pseudo-apologies often work to inspire in a caring person the desire to comfort you, to say that it's really not all that bad, etc. Miraculously, you are relieved from actually have to talk about what you did do, because you've redirected the conversation toward things you didn't do. Sneaky. Manipulative.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: High-larious Price is Right clip
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:03:47 AM
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This is an amazing video-clip of "Daniel," a hyperactive contestant on The Price is Right. Daniel wins very big, all the while doing a kind of flippy-floppy hope-and-victory dance that looks like a Saturday Night Live schtick and has Bob Barker in disoriented stitches.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 101 ways to save the Internet
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:06:57 AM
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Paul Boutin has created a list of 101 Ways to Save the Internet for Wired magazine. Some I disagree with violently ("Declare spammers are terrorists" Oh really? Does that mean that we can solve spam by taking away business-travellers' nail-scissors?), some I laughed aloud at ("Take over the MPAA, Keanu") and some I cheered for:
3 Quit already, Jack Valenti
4 Appoint Larry Lessig to the Supreme Court Is he a Democrat or a Republican? Who cares! Laws governing information flow are the new affirmative action, abortion, and gun control rolled into one.
5 Create the all-in-one inbox Email, phone calls, instant messages - they should all go into a single app.
6 Triple our cable modem speed First step: Just turn off the Golf Channel and UPN.
7 Demand truth in advertising for software updates C'mon, AOL 9.0 is really AOL 8.0 with the version number increased 1.0.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Email blackmail shows that security through intimidation doesn't work
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:12:37 AM
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Crooks are sending email to naive office-workers, warning that their computers have been 0wned and demanding small sums of money in exchange for not getting them fired by filling their machines with child-porn.
What caught my eye about this is that it preys on the fact that most office-workers are required to sign documents saying that they understand that all of their Internetn use can be monitored, and that being caught with porn on your PC is a no-questions-asked firing offense.
These two measures, meant to enhance "security" by intimidating end-users into believing that they are universally surveilled and readily fired, has instead had the consequence of turning them into patsies for con-artists who exploit their fear to blackmail them.
In the annals of cybercrime, investigators acknowledge the racket is one of the most difficult to crack. Because the ransom is small, people tend to pay up and keep quiet...
The e-mail said several security vulnerabilities had been detected on the university's network and that unless the e-mail recipient transferred 20 euros ($25) to the author's online bank account, he would release a series of viruses capable of deleting a host of computer files.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TBL knighted: Arise, Sir Tim, defender of the WWW
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:15:30 AM
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Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been knighted by the Queen of England.
The rank of Knight Commander is the second most senior rank of the Order of the British Empire, one of the Orders of Chivalry awarded. Berners-Lee, 48, a British citizen who lives in the United States, is being knighted in recognition of his "services to the global development of the Internet" through the invention of the World Wide Web.
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TITLE: Disney's WWII veneral disease movie
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:19:15 AM
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Nice review of Disney's anti-VD movie, produced for the US military during WWII.
The next scene is of an animated germ wearing a spiked Kaiser helmet, the Sergeant (played by Keenan Wynn -- perhaps best known for his role as Colonel 'Bat' Guano in Dr. Strangelove) briefing his troops of the Contagion Corps. The troops are syphilis and gonorrhea germs that wear berets with their initials on them ('S' and 'G').
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TITLE: Kuleshov effect: meaning is too contextual for metadata
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:22:33 AM
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Danah Boyd has posted an interesting rumination on the "Kuleshov Effect," wherein a still image is freighted with opposite emotions by adding different soundtracks to it. The most interesting question this raises for me is: how can we expect "accurate" tagging of the subjective content of an artistic work ("Happy boy," "Pretty dog") when there are such fundamental conditionals dependent on context?
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker. Because of the political climate of Russia, he was left without access to actual film. Instead, he constructed films by splicing film and telling his story in a collage-esque manner. In addition to his style of film, he's known for something called the Kuleshov Experiment. In this experiment, an image of a man's face is shown juxtapositioned with various other images immediately following. Viewers thought that the man's emotion changed even though it is exactly the same shot.
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TITLE: Kids' craphoundery compromised by commercialism
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:25:13 AM
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Fiona Romeo writes about a BBC program about children and collecting, and the way that the commercialization of collectibles has changed the experience of collecting for kids.
Finkel argued that the commercialisation of collecting, through products like Pokémon cards, has devalued the experience: "What's really exciting about collecting is looking for things that you can't find when you want them. All you need to find [mass market collectibles] is the money. The real thrill is lost."
And, that these products might be branded as 'limited edition' or 'rare' but this is manipulated rather than spontaneous. I noticed this recently in Forbidden Planet, which has lucky-dip style vending machines for pocket-money priced toys, and trading cards on the counter. Reading both the pitches and disclaimers reminded me more of gambling than collecting.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 2003 Google Zeitgeist
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:29:03 AM
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Google has published its "Zeitgeist" for 2003 -- some interesting aggregated stats about what people searched for and how and when they searched for it through the year (there's a lame Yahoo version, too -- do people really still search there?). As Jason pointed out, it's amazing to think what Google could charge for access to this kind of info-porn.
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TITLE: USB HDTV tuner hits the market
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:32:31 AM
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A Korean company has shipped a USB-based HDTV decoder -- that is, a box you plug into your PC's USB port and use to receive high-defintion TV signals. I wonder how "open" this device is -- under the proposed Broadcast Flag rules, if open-source drivers can be written for it, it might be illegal.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Back pain costs $90 billion/year
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:12:42 AM
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A Duke University study has concluded that back pain costs the US economy $90 billion a year.
"To put these expenses in perspective, the total $90 billion spent in 1998 represented 1 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the $26 billion in direct back pain costs accounted for 2.5 percent of all health care expenditures for that year," said lead researcher Xuemei Luo, Ph.D., who published the results of the Duke study today (Jan. 1, 2004) in the journal Spine.
OK, here's a thing: from the age of 17, right up until September 2002, I suffered from really bad back pain. I would spend a couple days a month laid up on the sofa, unable to move, and I'd go through a couple bottles of over-the-counter pain meds a month. I developed chemical burns on my back from overuse of "deep heat" patches and Tiger Balm. I saw a doctor who told me that I would likely need to have my spine fused.
Then I read this really weird, hippy-trippy book by Richard John Sarno, a guy who appears to be to back pain what Atkins was to dieting a couple years back, a fringe researcher with no independent verification of his results and a slightly suspect, "They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them all" affect that makes it hard to take his stuff seriously.
Sarno advocates a kind of self-hypnosis or self-interrogation to relieve the mental causes of back pain, and states that it works even if you don't believe in it. Well, I tried it. 24h later, I began the single longest period of pain-free living in my adult life. I haven't been laid up in over a year now, and I take painkillers for headaches, not back-aches.
Your mileage may vary, but after more than a year of this, I'm ready to start talking about it. Like Atkins for weight loss and hypnosis for smoking cessation, Sarnoid back-therapy feels something like getting root on my body, like being able to move into user-controlled space stuff that the OS was badly mismanaging in the background.
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TITLE: PC cassette deck
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:17:01 AM
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The Plus Deck: a cassette deck for your PC. This would be pretty cool if it could be used to auto-rip tapes to MP3, but alas, it goes the other way around -- i.e., it's a (slightly) more convenient way to record MP3s to audio cassette. Apparently, this can be used to rip tapes to MP3 as well as recoding MP3s and other computer-derived audio to cassette.
- Records all kinds of sound sources on Cassette Tape.
- Records sounds from Internet contents - Web learning, Internet Radio, Flash movie, etc onto Tape.
- Records CD sound onto Cassette Tape.
- Dub voice with mic on Tape.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtual pageant for simulated women
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:20:34 AM
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The Miss Digital World pageant is a beauty contest for digitally-rendered women such as Lara Croft and Ananova.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public Domain Day in Canada
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:22:32 AM
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Yesterday marked the turning of the year, and as a consequence, millions of works entered the public domain in Canada and other countries with copyright terms more limited than those in the US.
Today, January 1, 2004, every unpublished document whose author had died on or before December 31, 1948, has passed from copyright into the public domain in Canada...
Also today, the published works of people who had the good sense to die in
1953 have become public domain in Canada and any other country which
retains the life+50 rule for copyright term. These people include Polish
poet Julian Tuwim, British mathematician Alan Turing, Dutch children's
author Hugo Pilon, Russian author and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin, Soviet
dictator Joseph Stalin, metaphyisical author Baird Spalding, Norwegian
novelist and Nobel laureat Knut Hamsun, playwright and Nobel laureate
Eugene O'Neill (1953 was a bad year for Nobel laureates!), Irish poet and
Yeats' one-time lover Maud Gonne, Welsh poet and playwright Dylan Thomas
(bad year for poets!), country music singer-songwriter Hank Williams,
French author Hilaire Belloc, American historian J.G. Randall, Russian
composer Sergei Prokofiev (bad year for Russians!), founder of Saudi
Arabia Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, Maria Montessori of school fame, and many more.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help Caterina sew a dress out of labels
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:24:27 AM
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Caterina Fake is sewing a dress entirely out of labels from other clothes, and she's soliciting raw materials for the project.
If you have any clothing you are throwing out or giving away (or even if you're not) would you do me a favor and cut the labels out of them and send them to me? I am trying to make a dress that is contructed entirely of labels for a show at the Helen Pitt this coming spring. I've cut all the labels out of my own clothes, and they aren't nearly enough. I can only make a little doll-sized dress.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Most-forwarded NYT stories of 2003
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:27:47 AM
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The NYT has published its list of most-forwarded stories from 2003.
MARCH 15 (No. 75) The tale of a carp that shouted in Hebrew, shattering the calm of a New York fish market and creating what many called a miracle.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why starving makes you live longer
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:29:08 AM
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MIT researchers have gained insight into why sever calorie-restriction in a wide variety of organisms leads to life-extension.
"These findings provide a simple model for activation of Sir2 and extension of life span by calorie restriction," the authors write. "Our findings suggest that the NAD/NADH ratio can serve a critical regulatory function, determining the life span of yeast mother cells. A reduction in this nucleotide activates Sir2 to extend the life span in calorie restriction."
In previous research, Guarente found that rather than a slower metabolism leading to a slower rate of respiration, it turns out that respiration in yeast cells under calorie restriction goes up, not down. "A high respiration rate is intimately connected with calorie restriction in yeast," he said. "A high respiration rate activates SIR2. When respiration goes up, NADH goes down and SIR2 goes up. When SIR2 goes up, longevity happens."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dangerously strong magnets
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:35:59 AM
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Mark Allen is selling "dangerously strong" magnets for $5 a throw:
These are neodymium rare earth magnets with a magnetic field strength in the 45MGOe range. 45MGOe! I'm not kidding around here! Should two become co-joined by mishap, they are very very difficult to pull asunder. These magnets will fly eagerly through the air to reach each other, possibly crushing your fingers in the process. Let us be honest with each other- I'm simply not responsible enough to have these around.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland Paris's fart humor
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DATE: 01/02/2004 03:39:14 AM
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I took a holiday in Disneyland Paris this Christmas, and was amazed to find the flatulence-humor subtext pervading the safety cards stuck on all the ride-vehicles.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hasbro sought indemnity from Internet's disbanding by foreign governments
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DATE: 01/02/2004 04:03:44 AM
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Check out this crazy legalese on an old Hasbro "Arena Blast" CDROM, which indemnifies Hasbro in the event that a foreign government disbands the Internet.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Filipino call-center Flash game
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DATE: 01/02/2004 04:05:57 AM
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Luis has made a free Flash game based on the Filipino call-center industry. He sez, "The call-center business is really huge in places like India and the Philippines, and in my country in particular (the latter of the two), working in a call-center has become the default occupation after you graduate. It pays more than your average bottom-of-the-ladder job and let's you exercise a bit of control over your work-hours."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing's 2003 stats
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DATE: 01/02/2004 04:10:50 AM
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I keep a spreadsheet where I record our monthly visitor, post, and reload stats, so that we can get an idea of how things are going on Boing Boing from month to month and year to year. 2003 was very good: we more than doubled the pageviews here, and posted over 4,000 entries to the blog. Here's the latest version of the spreadsheet, with the numbers for 2000-2003
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony UX50 New Year's Easter Egg
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DATE: 01/02/2004 08:45:29 AM
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Gareth Branwyn points us to this post by Nate on streettech.com:
Crazy little January 1st Easter egg appeared on my UX50 (thanks to a heads-up from mattyy at ClieSource): a little fiddling
with the time and a soft-reset caused this man to appear in the
Settings screen for a fleeting moment, holding what appears to be a
driver's license or some sort of ID. Who is this guy? Street Tech swag
to the first person to positively identify this man and post info in
this blog item's Comments area.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Your own Disneyland Paris anti-flatulence sign
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DATE: 01/02/2004 09:06:07 AM
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Turns out that you can buy a "No Farting On This Ride" Disneyland Paris sign on eBay for about $10.
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(Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brazil to fingerprint Americans in retaliation for Homeland Security indignities
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DATE: 01/02/2004 09:28:19 AM
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The Brazilian government has retaliated against a US plan to fingerprint Brazilian visitors to the US by fingerprinting US visitors to Brazil. The judge who enacted the regulation has exempted citizens of countries whom the US intends to fingerprint from the Brazilian requirement, and has had a little Godwin's Law moment in his publicity regarding the decision:
"I consider the act absolutely brutal, threatening human rights, violating human dignity, xenophobic and worthy of the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," said Sebastiao da Silva in the court order released on Tuesday.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Logos drawn from memory
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DATE: 01/02/2004 09:36:09 AM
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Monochrom, the Austrian arts collective, has asked 25 people to draw 12 famous logos from memory and published the results online.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spam email CD contents analyzed
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DATE: 01/02/2004 11:00:58 AM
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A fascinating analysis of the contents of a "millions of email addresses" CDROM acquired via a spam-advertisement:
You can find a number of addresses you don't want to send spam to. The spammer didn't even remove the abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses, 175 and 561 respectively. Both of them have doubles themselves. These role accounts include respectable providers that have a widely known anti-spam policy: the abuse desk of XS4ALL appears 5 times, the abuse desk of Planet three times and their postmasters will receive the spam three times each.
Role accounts not only encompass abuse desks or Network Operation Centers, but also operational accounts like 'hostmaster' and 'postmaster', who have to deal with requests from customers and feedback from key institutions like ARIN and RIPE or domain registrars. Spamming those accounts has several drawbacks for a spammer, their spam is most definitely not wanted by the recipient. It isn't too farfetched to state that online businesses (that mostly have to rely on e-mail for direct customer contact) might be facing increasing difficulties coping with the loss incurred by spam, both technically and financially.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public Sterling interview on the WELL
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DATE: 01/02/2004 11:13:05 AM
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Bruce Sterling's doing a public interview on The WELL -- it's just been running for a day or so, and it's already accumulating some primo SterlingRants:
Spammers are not monsters ten feet tall. Spammers are vermin.
If we all looked, acted, thought and behaved as badly as
spammers do, our world would be reduced to desperate penury.
Spammers are parasites. They contribute nothing to the
general welfare. Spammers couldn't trust each other with
five bucks to walk down to the corner grocery and bring
back a loaf of bread. They are wicked and malicious
and they should be brought to justice.
The day when the delete key still ruled, well, these
cool clean technocratic days are over on the Net. Microsoft might
patch some security holes here and there, but there are
no technical solutions to semantic frauds like
phishing. The Internet has become a massive, worldwide medium.
It has become a global arena of massive popular struggle,
It's Chinese Indian American Brazilian European, the world wide works,
and it reflects our own faults and deficits with cruel accuracy.
When we look at the Net these days, we are staring
straight into the portrait of Dorian Gray.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How many bytes to store all human speech, ever?
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DATE: 01/02/2004 01:58:23 PM
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Interesting discussion of the number of bytes necessary to store all the syllables ever uttered by every person who ever lived, and when acquiring that number of bytes will be in the realm of affordability.
First, the proposed configuration would amount to 1.2 petabytes, which is a thousand times smaller than 1.2 exabytes. Second, a 5 exabyte store would roughly be eight thousand times too small to store "all words ever spoken by human beings", at least in audio form. Therefore the 2007 cluster's storage would be too small by a factor of about 32 million rather than a factor of 4. I freely confess that maybe the authors were thinking about text -- but in the first place I'm a phonetician, and in the second place most human languages have not had a written form. So bear with me here for a while.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scout Walker for sale on eBay
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DATE: 01/02/2004 02:45:26 PM
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0.5-scale Star Wars scoutwalker up for bids on eBay.
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(Thanks, Beau!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Props for BoingBoing from PC Magazine
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DATE: 01/02/2004 06:33:12 PM
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Gareth Branwyn says:
"BoingBoing was named Top Blog in the December issue of PC Magazine (Top Ten Blogs)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Warren Ellis: moment of phonecam zen
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DATE: 01/02/2004 06:45:46 PM
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Author and blogger Warren Ellis shot this phonecam snap with a Nokia 3650, then opined aloud:
"What I just clicked into is that futurephones are very good for the micro, and that weird impressionistic smudging and the odd focal length creates its own suite of weird effects.
This was made by touching the phone's top down on some gravel on the edge of a puddle in a back alley.
The photo is upside down -- if you look closely at the top half of the picture, you can just make out the stones underwater in the puddle.
I am oddly pleased with this little picture."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What to do if you're sued by the RIAA: update
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DATE: 01/02/2004 09:29:05 PM
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On Declan McCullagh's Politech list, attorney Charles Mudd says:
I have updated my RIAA web page that provides general answers to questions that individuals may have regarding the RIAA's initiative. This reflects updates in light of the two opinions of recent note.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why we hoard
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DATE: 01/03/2004 12:43:45 AM
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A Bronx man was trapped for two days under an avalanche of harded magazines and catalogs with which he'd filled his apartment. The NYT investigates the emotional and intellectual basis for haording, including these delicious little case-studies:
One woman, for example, found throwing out a newspaper so unbearable that her therapist instructed her never to buy one again. Another could not pass a newsstand without thinking that one of the myriad periodicals on sale contained some bit of information that could change her life.
And a third, trying to explain why she had bought several puppets that she did not want or need from a television shopping channel, spoke of feeling sorry for the toys when no one else bid on them...
Toby Golick, a clinical-law professor at Cardozo Law School, described the case of an elderly Manhattan man who rescued broken toys, discarded toasters and dilapidated umbrellas from the street until even his kitchen and bathroom were too crammed for use. The situation came to light only when the landlord could not squeeze in to fix a leaky faucet.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Futurismic blog starts accepting fiction submissions
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DATE: 01/03/2004 12:47:41 AM
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Futurismic, a terrific group-blog run by sf writers, has decided to begin publishing fiction online, paying a nominal-but-respectable $100 per story. I love this idea, if for no other reason than it will give a bunch of writers an opportunity to read "slush" (unsolicited manuscripts), something that really helped me learn what mistakes new writers make and how to avoid them. Some other stuff I like: in an era when most magazines still insist on paper submissions, they're only reading via the Web, and insisting on ASCII, pasted into a form, for submissions. ASCII is the new PDF!
Stories should be compelling and well written, with a strong emphasis on characters confronting or embracing imminent cultural, social, technological, and scienctific changes. Post-cyberpunk, Information Age, and near-future extrapolations will be welcomed--serious or satirical, straight-forward or gonzo, optimistic or pessimistic. We are not interested in fantasy, horror, or more conventional SF themes such as space opera, time travel, first contact, or alternate worlds.,,
Our reading period for the first half of our publishing year will begin on January 3, 2004 and end on February 3, 2004. Any manuscripts sent before or after these dates will be deleted unread. Because of the short timeframe, you may send two stories during this reading period, but please do so in separate submissions. We'll begin to respond some time in mid-February, and hope to respond to all submissions within three months of the reading period's closing. At this time we're only planning to publish one story per month, so only six stories will be accepted during each reading period. (The second reading period of the year should occur in July 2004.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion Fan Club calls for Disney boycott
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DATE: 01/03/2004 12:54:34 AM
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The Haunted Mansion Fan Club has shut down for one month in solidarity with Roy Disney's resignation from the Walt Disney Company's board of directors, and they're calling for a one-month boycott of Disney parks and movies in order to convince Michael Eisner to resign.
The list of accusations leveled against Mr. Eisner by family groups,
children advocates, safety officials, the press, consumers, stock holders,
and Disney cast members is voluminous and can no longer be ignored or
tolerated. Don't stand by as this man leads to ruin the dreams and memories
of untold millions of people. Help take back OUR magical kingdom and restore
what Walt created and gave to us. Enough is enough.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to rip vinyl, per the NYT
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DATE: 01/03/2004 01:07:38 AM
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The NYT has published a detailed how-to for converting vinyl LPs to MP3s or CDs. When Napster started, it solved two distinct problems. The obvious one was that you might not have the CD handy that you wanted to listen to (either because you hadn't bought it or because you'd left it somewhere else, i.e., at your parents' place while you went to college), but the more subtle one was that ripping CDs used to be really hard. You needed specialied software, tons of hard-drive space, and you had to title all those tracks by hand.
This meant that once one person had gone to the trouble of ripping a disc, it made a lot of sense not to replicate that effort: better to download someone else's rips from her Napster share than to go through that fooforaw on your own.
Today, ripping CDs is literally a one-click operation, but ripping vinyl is still very freaking hard. Newsgroups like alt.binaries.sounds.78-era often get nice payloads of ripped wax, shellac and vinyl, but the general attack on P2P means that this stuff is getting harder and harder to find on demand, which means that more and more of us are having to individually rip our music, one side at a time, in order to transfer and preserve it (80% of the music ever recorded isn't available for sale -- if you want to hear the song on that groovy LP through your iPod's headphones, you're gonna have to get ripping).
Some LP restoration software suites, including Pinnacle Clean Plus ($100), come with an external preamp that plugs into a U.S.B. port and works with your existing sound card. (Clean Plus and other software choices are described in more detail in the accompanying article.) There is also the iMic from Griffin Technologies ($40, www.griffintechnologies.com), a small input device that converts analog signals to digital outside of the computer, eliminating the possibility of electronic interference from other computer components...
You also need lots of hard-drive space, because sound files occupy about 10 megabytes per minute; that would be almost a gigabyte for all 77 minutes of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Trout Mask Replica."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tonight: Robots on Mars, hunting for life on Mars?
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DATE: 01/03/2004 11:16:11 AM
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Magic may happen this evening. The USA will attempt to safely land a scientific golf cart on Mars at about 8.30pm, California time:
Two NASA (news - web sites) Mars landers -- Spirit and Opportunity -- are speeding toward "sweet spot" touch down sites at different, but scientifically attractive locations on Earth's mysterious neighbor.
The opening act in this $820 million drama to place dual robot geologists on Mars is the landing of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) dubbed Spirit tonight at about 8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST). The target: Gusev Crater -- a possible former lake in a giant impact crater on Mars. Primary among the mission's scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars
Link to news story, Link to NASA Mars Rover home page. (Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Geek history: world's first pocket calculator
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DATE: 01/03/2004 11:42:59 AM
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Boingboing reader fRiT0 says:
The Curta mechanical calculator and its story are featured in the January 2004 issue of Scientific American and a Google search turned up this excellent website with information and pictures regarding this truly incredible device. The Curta is a mechanical calculator that was designed by Curt Herzstark while he was imprisioned in a Nazi concentration camp. It is a facinating instrument and a Curta in good condition is worth $1000+ on ebay.
Link (Thanks Mark Quin, and thanks fRiT0!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art: Kozyndan
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DATE: 01/03/2004 11:51:53 AM
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The artwork of LA-based illustrator duo Kozyndan has been blogged here on BoingBoing before, but a quick wander through their online gallery reveals some delightful recent additions. Playful, tongue-in-cheek geek fantasies of robots, rabbits, the beauty of messy desks, and tributes to hip stores.
At left, a detail view of a rabbit-filled homage to Hokusai (the print is super-cool, and is hanging on my living room wall as I type this blog post).
Check out some of the panoramas, too. We've blogged their SARS Art Project contribution before -- The Yum-cha Militia (My Mother thought she had SARS, but it turned out to be PMS)-- but there are many others (some viewable as QTVR panos).
Link to Kozyndan home page, link to online gallery. Most of what you see is available for online purchase; many prints priced at a wallet-friendly $25 or under.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to snog in D&D
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DATE: 01/03/2004 04:49:32 PM
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Ever since Wizards of the Coast relicensed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons under the terms of the Open Game license, third parties have been able to add their own rulebooks to the game-universe. Now there's a book of rules for integrating sex into your RPGs.
The first chapter discusses handling sex in a mature way, and provides an overview of various facets of sex such as humor, sexual orientation, fetishes, prostitution, pornography, commitment and infidelity, chastity, pregnancy and childbirth, and taboos. This is a fairly basic section, but more thought-provoking than you might expect -- at least as it pertains to a roleplaying game.
There’s a look at how the alignments relate to sex, as well as how each player character race typically views it. Other fantasy races are also mentioned, including centaurs, doppelgangers, dryads, giants, goblinoids, lizardfolk, merfolk, nymphs, and sprites. There are even considerations on other creature types: aberrations, constructs, dragons, elementals, outsiders, and more.
The new (and optional) rules for sex -- skills, feats, etc. -- are found in the second chapter. The Appearance ability score is brought into play, which is used for certain skill checks. Some of the new uses for existing skills include Appraising a potential partner, Bluffing to connect with someone, Knowledge about various topics, Perform (sexual techniques), several Professions (such as Courtesan, Masseuse, Midwife, or Tattoo Artist), and Sense Motive. New feats include such entries as Animal Magnetism, Chaste Life, Disarming Looks, Limber, Seductive, Sexual Training, Sterile, and more. Issues such as sexually transmitted diseases and their physical and social consequences are covered, along with birth control, conception, and pregnancy.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hello, Spirit: Mars landing successful
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DATE: 01/03/2004 10:09:23 PM
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NASA's "Spirit" Exploration Rover appears to have arrived safely on the red planet this evening. The robot geologist touched down, sending back a simple message of its landing.
"...Tonight another first was made, for the first time in human history ... we have an interplanetary communications network. We went from the rover, to Odyssey [Mars satellite] to Earth to the Deep Space Network. So we've now established a communications satellite system over another planet for the first time in history..." -- Dr. Ed Weller, NASA
Link to Spaceflight Now, an independent site with up-to-the-minute updates (via /.), Link to NASA TV's coverage. (Thanks, JP and Bren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RFC for origin of "foo"
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DATE: 01/04/2004 06:11:03 PM
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Noting that hundreds of Internet RFCs "contain the terms `foo', `bar', or `foobar' as metasyntactic variables without any proper explanation or definition," this old April Fools RFC examines the roots of Foo, Bar and fubar.
For, it seems, the word `foo' itself had an immediate prewar
history in comic strips and cartoons. In the 1938 Warner Brothers
cartoon directed by Robert Clampett, "The Daffy Doc", a very early
version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!"
`FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strips. The
earliest documented uses were in the surrealist "Smokey Stover"
comic strip by Bill Holman about a fireman. This comic strip
appeared in various American comics including "Everybody's"
between about 1930 and 1952. It frequently included the word
"FOO" on license plates of cars, in nonsense sayings in the
background of some frames such as "He who foos last foos best" or
"Many smoke but foo men chew", and had Smokey say "Where there's
foo, there's fire". Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled
it with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AA allegedly pisses in discount travellers' soup
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DATE: 01/04/2004 06:12:34 PM
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If your AA flight has a preponderance of discount-fare passengers, you may end up with shittier catering as compared to flights where a good number have paid full fare.
A very subtle form of product crimping allegedly is employed by American airlines. On flights with a high proportion of full-fare passengers, American improves the quality of the meal service, thereby rewarding the full-fare passengers and injuring, on average, discount flyers.
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sex Tips for the Modern Avatar machinima
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DATE: 01/04/2004 06:15:12 PM
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"Aunty Flidais' Guide to Dating in Dereth" is a high-larious machinima shot in the video game Asheron's Call and edited together into a kind of "Sex Tips for the Modern Avatar" educational film.
22MB DivX Link
(Thanks, Ockham!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Auction site for stuff stolen in NYC
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DATE: 01/04/2004 06:16:51 PM
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New York City is auctioning off property seized in busts. Great deals on hot goods.
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(Thanks, noel!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mars moblog: amazing photos beamed home from NASA Spirit
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DATE: 01/04/2004 07:49:20 PM
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Now *that* is a photoblog. Chronologically indexed gallery of interplanetary snapshots from this weekend's Mars landing. The first images sent back are of limited quality -- and only in black and white -- because data transmission rate from Spirit's antenna back to Earth is limited. Higher-res color images are expected to be relayed back from the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey Spacecraft later today, according to Mission Control. At left:
"This mosaic image taken by the navigation camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has been further processed, resulting in a significantly improved 360 degree panoramic view of the rover on the surface of Mars."
Link to NASA's Mars moblog, link to full-size, 360-degree composite panorama image. Link to AP story with details on how NASA's coping with bursting web traffic for the online images (= 1300 web servers around the world!). (Thanks, Warren)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Why Your Next Phone Call May Be Online
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DATE: 01/04/2004 08:32:29 PM
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A brief "how this stuff works" piece on VoIP I wrote for the current issue of Wired Magazine:
Regional and long-distance carriers, facing extinction, are lobbying government officials for protection. California, Minnesota, and at least nine other states are pushing for some sort of regulation, and the FCC is weighing its options. Meanwhile, big telecom is joining the party. International voice carrier Teleglobe is acquiring a VoIP wholesaler, and others are poised to follow suit. Cox, Comcast, Cablevision, Qwest, and Time Warner are also rolling out VoIP offerings. Their existing customer bases, fat pipe IP infrastructures, and coveted "last mile" connectivity create a powerful triple threat. And, as more telecommunications monopolies around the world open up for competition, the cost savings promised by VoIP seems destined to spark a market shift as dramatic as the one that followed US telecom deregulation decades ago.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New National Geo TV show: Crittercam
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DATE: 01/04/2004 09:12:32 PM
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The world's first non-human reality show? National Geographic is launching a program consisting entirely of footage shot from small cameras attached to animals. Or something like that.
Ride on the backs of Earth's most charismatic creatures on Crittercam. Our new show reveals new, unexpected behaviors in the lives of marine and land animals.
Link (no web site for the show yet, scroll down on this page for video teaser clip), Link to website with technical background on the Crittercam device. (Thanks, Mike O!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BDSM + MMPORG: a Sims master and slave speak.
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DATE: 01/05/2004 04:08:58 AM
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Of Sins and Sims. BoingBoing mentor Bruce Sterling points to this, gasps, and averts his eyes:
In this interview we talk with practitioners of Gor, Mistress Maria LaVeaux and her slave Toy. They discuss their pre-Alpha careers as cyber-escorts in other TSO cities, their arrival in Alpha, and their introduction when Lady Julianna called Mistress LaVeaux to mediate a dispute between two Doms in the Alphaville BDSM community. They discuss the practice of Gor, its culture, history and language (as well as the fictional/literary origins of Gor), and explain the ways in which it differs from other forms of BDSM. They explain how Gor is a projection of their inner selves and is not inherently wedded to any set of doctrines and they reject the claims of some vocal Alphaville residents that they are a BDSM cult.
Link, also see in archives: Evangeline: "Interview with a Child cyber-Prostitute in TSO"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Charles Atlas ad send-up
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:30:26 AM
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This is the single-best piss-take I've ever seen on an old comic book add: "How I Made a Hacker out of a Slacker." I want a Sea-Monkeys version.
Link
(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copenhagen's Christania voluntarily demolishes "Pusher Street"
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:33:58 AM
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Christania, the Permanent Temporary Autonomous Zone in Copenhagen, has been under threat of demolition for over a year now. With destruction looming, the drug dealers of Pusher Street, the open-air hash-and-pot market, have torn down their stalls, so that the authorities can no longer maintain the pretense that they are attacking the decades-old, pretty and astonishing squatters' village because it presents a drug problem.
Using a tractor, crow bars, saws and hammers, dealers and residents tore down two dozen colorful booths that have stood along the sparsely paved but well-traveled Pusher Street for years...
In 1987, Christiania was recognized as a "social experiment" and two years later the government gave residents the right to use the land, but not ownership of it.
Christiania has become a tourist destination, with some travel guides mentioning it prominently, and Pusher Street appears on several city maps. In May, one of the booths that sold hashish was donated to Denmark's National Museum.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FuhQuake: Quake with "stunning visual effects and eyecandy"
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:37:55 AM
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FuhQuake is a project to hack "stunning visual effects and eyecandy" into the open-source Quake engine. Does this mean that everyone who's made Quake machinima can now re-render their movies and get Moore's-Law improvements in the quality of their SFX?
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(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mars Jiggyvision and QTVRs: silly goggles optional
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:39:54 AM
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Daniel Root says, "NASA JPL has released stereo views of the red planet- in B&W- from one (actually two) of the on-board cameras. I combined them in a quick animation that gives somewhat of a feel for the 3d effect. (Not my own idea, but I can't find the site where I first saw it...) It's the next best thing to standing on Mars and getting a headache! You can see more stereo sets here."
(Thanks, Kevin Kelly, and Hal!)
And Nick says, "NASA's Explorer has sent back its first low res pictures, which NASA have stitched together into several panoramic pictures. They haven't (so far, as far as I can see) gone the whole way and released them as QTVRs - so I did the job for them, here."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NASA's Martian Standard Tribe
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:40:30 AM
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NASA scientists working on the Mars rover have adopted a Martian sleep-schedule so that they can be awake and working during Mars daylight. Not exactly
Eastern Standard Tribe, but not far off, either.
Link
(Thanks, Paul)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Royalty-free postmen coming to UK
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:47:23 AM
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A new music-licensing scheme in the works in the UK will allow postmen to whistle without paying royalties: A new business-licensing scheme in the UK will allow postment to whistle rights-cleared work without obtaining a venue license first.
* Spontaneously singing "Happy Birthday" will NOT be illegal.
* Spontaneous pub singalongs will NOT be licensable.
* Carol singers, going from door to door, or turning up unannounced in a pub and singing, will NOT be licensable.
* A postman whistling on his round will NOT be licensable.
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(Thanks, Lee!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Obsessive Star Wars concordance
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:49:30 AM
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Here's a nice, idiosyncratic concordance of interesting stuff in frame in the first (historically)/fourth (narratively) Star Wars movie:
My Dinner With Owen -- Things to spot:
There is a blue treadwell droid wandering in the background. Cybot Galactica manufactures the WED15 units as general purpose machinery maintenance droids.
When Luke says "It's a whole 'nother year" you can hear birds in the background.
Shelagh (Aunt Beru) Fraser's voice is painfully dubbed over, particularly in the Hif Fi Pan & Scan and THX versions. I've heard rumors that is was changed because she had too heavy an Irish accent or that her dialogue was too soft-spoken on locati
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kuleshov and reframing: is it illegal to frame a picture?
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DATE: 01/05/2004 09:55:15 AM
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My co-worker Jason Schultz has written a great LawGeek article about the way that copyright and the Kuleshov effect (in which art can be made to mean opposing things throught framing or recontextualizing) interact. The US courts have handed down some jaw-droppingly stupid rulings on this matter, as it turns out, in relation to a company called Albuquerque ART.
ART specialized in buying up books and art-cards, cutting them up and glueing them to tiles, then selling the tiles. This seems pretty straightforward: if you buy the book, you own it -- you should be able to glue the pages to anything you care to and sell them on, provided that everyone concerned knows that you're not selling the original deal, and provided that you are actually buying and cutting up actual books, and not just buying one copy and scanning it and running off fresh copies from your laser-printer.
ART got sued by various people, and the courts handed down rulings that said that while framing a picture isn't an infringement of the author's copyright over derivative works, that really, really outre frames that change the context do infringe -- the next time you think about getting a New Yorker cover framed for the toilet wall, think again:
The court cannot agree that permanently affixing a notecard to a ceramic tile is not recasting, transforming or adapting the original art work. Placing a print or painting in a frame and covering it with glass does not recast or transform the work of art. It is commonly understood that this amounts to only a method of display. Moreover, it is a relatively simple matter to remove the print or painting and display it differently if the owner chooses to do so. Neither of these things is true of the art work affixed to a ceramic tile. Moreover, tiles lend themselves to other uses such as trivets (individually) or wall coverings (collectively).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Burning Man + MSFT Flight Simulator = Duuuuude
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DATE: 01/05/2004 10:10:58 AM
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Bay Area-based artist Andrew Johnstone has created a digital, virtual, and three-dimensional Black Rock City for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 and 2004 platforms.
[I]n the spirit of Burning Man's no-commerce, gift economy philosophy, he's making his project available for free. One of Burning Man's mottos is "participants only," and, fittingly, Johnstone's Virtual Playa rewards active involvement. On his site, he provides free 3D building tools that Burners can use to model a version of their own camp or art project, which they can then upload and incorporate into the complete Virtual Playa version available to everyone. If people want to design a camp made from pre-fab pieces, he provides digital tents, domes, RVs, U-Haul trucks and many of the other details.
"You can be your own Larry Harvey if you want. You can put whatever you want in," says Johnstone. "They can scratch their playa itch in March when they're not feeling very Burning Man."
Link to Wired News story
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nominate for the Pioneer Awards
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DATE: 01/05/2004 10:39:50 AM
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The EFF Pioneer Awards are upon us again -- time to nominate your cyber-heroes for EFF's annual award for "leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology."
Simply tell us:
1. The name of the nominee,
2. the phone number or email address at which the nominee can be reached, and, most importantly,
3. why you feel the nominee deserves the award.
You may attach supporting documentation as RTF files, Microsoft Word documents
or other common binary or plain text formats.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paleo-Internet-coverage from the CBC
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DATE: 01/05/2004 10:40:06 AM
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Darren sez, "Check out this hilarious archived video clip from the CBC on a network called Internet. It's back in the days when 10% growth per month was remarkable, emoticons were hip, and Peter Mansbridge still had some hair. I particularly like the way they refer to 'Internet' without the article--it reminded me of Tron. The report is from 1993...a reminder of how far we've come and how nascent this Intarweb thang still is."
Link
(Thanks, Darren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bush in 30 Seconds finalists
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DATE: 01/05/2004 10:43:52 AM
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The Bush in 30 Seconds finalists are posted. This was the competition to come up with a 30-second, Creative Commons-licensed political ad exposing the Bush regime's failings, with the winning spot to be aired in commercial slots bracketing the State of the Union address. Here's my favorite, but the other 14 finalists are also very good.
Link
(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flowers From Alice published, soon to appear in a year's-best
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DATE: 01/05/2004 12:30:27 PM
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I've just gotten back into the office and discovered a copy of the new Mike Resnick anthology, "New Voices in Science Fiction," a Science Fiction Writers of America-sponsored book showcasing new, noteworthy writers. Charlie Stross and I wrote a story for it, called Flowers from Alice, a pervy piece of post-Singularity erotica. I'm happy to say that the story was also selected for the inaugural volume of Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber's new Best of the Year anthology.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Prisonaires: golden age pop music from behind bars
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DATE: 01/05/2004 12:42:07 PM
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In Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which I finished on a plane yesterday, there's an amazing aside about a band called The Prisonaires, a group of 1950s black men who'd been sent to jail on faked-up charges and who formed a best-selling pop group behind bars, leaving on special work-release programs to perform and record. It turns out that The Prisonaires aren't fictional -- what's more, you can actually buy a reissue CD of their greatest hits.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Interactive centrifuge simulates g-stresses in flight sim
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DATE: 01/05/2004 12:45:25 PM
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Dynamic Flight Simulator is an interactive centrifuge controlled by a traditional PC_based flight-sim: as fighter pilots bank and roll in their simulated jets, the centrifuge spins to simuulate the g-stresses they'd actually feel in the air.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Share and map your RSS reading list
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DATE: 01/05/2004 11:33:26 PM
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Dave Winer's created a service that maps out who reads what RSS feeds -- just upload the OPML file from your RSS reader and it will add your name to the list of subscribers for all the feeds in your rota. Cool to see who's reading you, and who you're reading. Made me remember that I have a bunch of blogs in my bookmark group that I haven't entered into my RSS reader...
Link
(via Battelle)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Moore endorses file-sharing of his movies
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DATE: 01/06/2004 06:28:42 AM
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Here's a wild video of Michael Moore at a Q&A session, being asked if he minds people on file-sharing networks passing around rips of his movies. His answer, in a nutshell: "Share away!"
I don't agree with copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it...as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor...
I make these movies and books and TV shows because I want things to change, and so the more people who get to see them, the better.
5.4MB DivX Link
(Thanks, Kolano!)
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TITLE: Wired's open letter to new head of MPAA
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DATE: 01/06/2004 07:16:42 AM
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Chris Anderson, Wired's Ed-in-Chief, has written an open letter to whomever succeeds Jack Valenti as the head of the Motion Picture Association of America:
Now the bad news: You're at risk of alienating your customers like the music industry did. The do-not-record "broadcast flag" that the TV industry just pushed through the FCC will introduce new restrictions on programming, none of which benefit consumers. Proposed legislation that throws anyone caught with a prerelease movie on their hard drive into prison for three years is the sort of disproportionate response that gives the RIAA a bad name. The notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act is Hollywood's fault. And extending copyright protection year after year so that the film and television archives stay shut isn't just bad law, it's depriving Americans of their cultural history.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Retrocrush's "Worst Love Scenes" swiped by British tabloid
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DATE: 01/06/2004 08:13:29 AM
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Boing Boing pal Mark Plattner says: "The UK tabloid 'The Daily Star' stole a story from RetroCrush entitled 'The Worst Sex Scenes Ever: A Look At The Most Unsexy Sex Scenes,' then passed it off as their own. It was picked up by at least 30 other media outlets and The Daily Star was credited with the story. When pressed on the issue, the News Editor was quoted as saying 'Well, if it's on the internet it's up for grabs. You can't copyright anything on the Internet.' Webmaster and writer of the article Robert Berry is calling for legal assistance." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Game for morons who like electrical shocks
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DATE: 01/06/2004 09:11:58 AM
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The Johnson Smith Company used to sell all sorts of wonderful novelties, contraptions, and magic tricks (read Stefan Jone's description of an old copy of the catalog), but it underwent an unfortunate Archie McPhee-esque revamp in recent years.
One of Johnson Smith's new products is a Russian Roulette style game for four players. Each player sticks his finger in a hole and "when the sound stops, someone gets the shock of their life -- and everyone else gets a big laugh!"
Link (Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bullying NYC mayor should stick to Sim City
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DATE: 01/06/2004 09:34:31 AM
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Michael Bloomberg is cracking down on people for doing ordinary city-living activities.
* Jesse Taveras, who sat on a milk crate outside the Bronx hair salon where he works and was fined $105 for "unauthorized use" of the crate.
* Kim Phann and Bruce Rosado, fined for "loitering in front of a business" while taking a smoke break outside the Bronx barber shop where they work.
* Pedro Nazario, 86, of Morningside Heights, whacked with a summons for feeding pigeons.
* Yoav Kashidia, an Israeli tourist, fined $50 for falling asleep on the subway and occupying two seats during his slumber.
* Crystal Rosario, a pregnant Brooklynite, ticketed for resting on a subway step.
* Brian Bui, owner of Mekong restaurant in SoHo, twice fined $200 for allowing a customer to smoke under a retracted awning. Bui fought the second ticket and won, but only after spending $3,000 in legal fees.
Link (Read a comment from Boing Boing reader)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DVD Jon becomes iTunes Jon
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DATE: 01/06/2004 09:47:11 AM
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Jon Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who cracked DVD encryption, has effectively done the same with iTunes DRM-ed music.
"We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use," Johansen told The Register via email. Johansen cracked iTunes DRM scheme in November by releasing code for a small Windows program that dumps the stream to disk in raw AAC format. This raw format required some trivial additions to convert it to an MP4 file that could be played on any capable computer.
But in the best Apple ease-of-use tradition, Johansen has now made this
completely seamless, integrating it with the VideoLAN streaming free
software project.
Link (via pho list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Straightedge, ca. 1906?
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DATE: 01/06/2004 10:48:24 AM
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This is either fodder for a terrific SomethingAwful photoshop contest, or a really odd historical quirk.
Now, I realize that teetotaling vegetarians existed in the 1900s, but were they really called "straight-edgers" -- a term which found popularity in the mid-1980s to describe fans of hardcore music who eschewed intoxicants and embraced hummus?
Sean Bonner forwards this link to what is purported to be a 1906 New York World graphic captioned, "Just a Few of the Regular Diners at a Broadway Physical Culture Restaurant," an illustration for "Eating Walnut Croquettes and Broiled Peanuts with the 'Straight Edgers' and Indulging in Date Butter and Nut Sandwiches at a Vegetarian Restaurant." This illo, further down the page, depicts "A Straight Edge Waiter."
Parody, or a genuine artifact of bizarre pop culture coincidence?
Sean says, " I'm still not sure I'm buying this, but it was sent to me from Glen E. Friedman, and it was sent to him by Ian himself. Could there have been straight edge in 1906?"
xLinkx
Update: Well, bless my combat boots! Apparently, the term "straight edge" really does date back to the turn of the 20th century. BoingBoing readers wrote in today with related anecdotes -- Ron Hogan, who is the editor of Beatrice.com, says: "About a year ago, I was at the New York Public Library and they had an exhibit of NYC restaurant menus and photos from the first half of the century. There I saw a menu for the Straight Edge Kitchen, located at 7th Ave and 11th St, offering health food lovers 'a plain homelike meal.' I wrote it all down in my moleskine because I, too, was surprised to see the term dated back that far. Here is the original exhibit URL, and some other info."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scientists, Agreeing Martians Are Super-Race, Believe Planet Signaling to Us
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DATE: 01/06/2004 11:41:12 AM
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From the same incredibly cool archive of old newspaper and magazine clippings that the 1906 Straightedge illos came from, this -- New York Tribune, February 8, 1920.
Caption: "Scientists agree that the people of Mars differ from us in many ways. The Martians are believed to have very large noses and ears and immense lung development, because of the rarefied atmosphere. Their legs are poorly developed, because matter on Mars weighs less than here and sturdy legs are not needed to bear their weight. Birds and butterflies are very large and beautiful."
Link (Thanks, Sean!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: On Magazine: Phonecam anthropology, mobile photoblog roundup
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DATE: 01/06/2004 11:51:06 AM
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The December issue of Ericsson's consumer magazine ON includes a couple of pieces from me, both about camera phones.
One -- on page 22 -- is a profile of Mizuko Ito, an anthropologist researching phonecams and culture in Japan and the US (and, incidentally, Joi Ito's sister); the other -- page 45 -- is a roundup of interesting phonecam blog sites (which, sadly, disappear as quickly and quietly as they appear).
Link (PDF)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What do lower P2P numbers mean?
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DATE: 01/06/2004 11:54:32 AM
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A new Pew study reports that 50% fewer Americans reported that they are engaged in P2P file-sharing, and a lot of people are claiming that this is some kind of victory for the recording industry's campaign of indiscriminate lawsuits against their customers.
Lemme offer an alternative interpretation, which comes out of some discussions that we've been having at EFF:
* For starters, it's not hard to imagine why someone might be reluctant to tell a survey-taker that he is file-sharing in a climate where the RIAA is confiscating the life's-savings of little girls who download cartoon themesongs.
* And even with that chilling effect, the Pew study still has one in seven American Internet users file-sharing -- in other words, file-sharing is still solidly mainstream and nowhere near being "driven underground."
* It's ironic that this survey comes out right after a court has said that the RIAA's lawsuit campaign relied on an abuse of federal subpoena powers that put the privacy of all American internet users in jeopardy. Other fallout: developers are reluctant to ship new P2P apps, investors are reluctant to invest in them, and broadband growth is stalled.
* Pew's numbers suggest that roughly 18 million Americans stopped downloading in the last three months. But iTunes probably would be lucky to have a million total customers. Where did the rest go? Has the recording industry acquired any new customers, or just alienated a bunch of die-hard fans?
* There's a better way -- why can't the American music fan get the same deal that radio stations get? Pay a reasonable blanket fee, and play whatever music they like on whatever equipment suits them? That's the way that live performance, cover music and radio all work: the recording industry could be flexing its might and creating a blanket license regime that would leverage the fastest-adopted technology in the history of the world, P2P file-sharing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-Dean ad so over-the-top, it's self parody
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DATE: 01/06/2004 01:23:40 PM
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A right-wing group is running a 30-second attack ad against Howard Dean in Iowa that appears to be a satire of itself:
In the ad, a farmer says he thinks that "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ..." before the farmer's wife then finishes the sentence: "... Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."
Link
(via Sylloge)
Update: Here's a Real stream of the ad
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bloggies 2004
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DATE: 01/06/2004 01:57:53 PM
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The new Bloggies Awards ballot is up -- nominate your faves.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush throws out just cause, just because.
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DATE: 01/06/2004 04:30:14 PM
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Wired News reports that Bush signed a bill that allows the FBI to get information about anyone from banks and other financial institutions without a court order.
The law also prohibits subpoenaed businesses from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of their transactions.
Link (Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Celebrities subjected to cruel age-progression treatment
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DATE: 01/06/2004 04:48:23 PM
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Funny pictures of celebrities getting the photoshop treatment to make them look older and a lot weirder. Link (via Awful Plastic Surgery)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bruce Sterling interviews
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DATE: 01/06/2004 10:33:00 PM
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Two exciting and thought-provoking Bruce Sterling interviews are online today: an hour-long MP3 of an interview with Massive Change on the University of Toronto's CIUT radio and a long interview on the future of everything with Mike "Godwin's Law" Godwin in the libertarian mag, "Reason."
reason: Blogging seems to have taken a place in the culture that used to be occupied by fanzines, and maybe by the science fiction magazines.
Sterling: It had its apotheosis in people like Cory Doctorow [author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and other writers who really aren’t that interested in the old paper world. Cory actually publishes stuff electronically, and blogging is his Weird Tales. He is of a generation sufficiently divorced from the old pulps that he’s the dolphin among mesosaurs here.
5.9MB MP3 Link, Reason Link
(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crazy Japanese DJ Disney mixes
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DATE: 01/06/2004 10:35:49 PM
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I'm grooving hard on my latest Xmas gift, a CD my mom sent me from Tokyo called Readymade Digs Disney. The liner-notes are all in Japanese, but the songs basically consist of high-energy pop and smooth/silly jazz remixes/covers of traditional Disney songs (like the theme from Small World and the Mickey Mouse March, in Japanese and English) produced by Yasuharu Konishi of Pizzicato 5. I can't put it down.
Link
Update: here are some downloadable samples from the disc. (Thanks, How!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Google to IPO with market value of about $12b
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DATE: 01/07/2004 07:59:55 AM
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Bloomberg reports that Google has hired Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to manage its initial public offering this year.
The sale by Google, the world's most used Internet search engine, would be the biggest IPO since CIT Group Inc.'s $4.87 billion deal in July 2002. It "will certainly be the deal of the year,'' said Sanford Robertson, who founded San Francisco-based investment bank Robertson, Stephens & Co. before starting private- equity firm Francisco Partners LP.
About a third of Mountain View, California-based Google may be sold in the IPO, giving the company a market value of about $12 billion, the bankers said. The company will probably register the shares for sale with the Securities and Exchange Commission this month and sell them by April, they said.
Link (Thanks, Amit!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Comics Journal Audio Archives: Jim Woodring
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DATE: 01/07/2004 08:13:58 AM
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Here's an hour long MP3 interview from 1993 with one of comicbookdom's greats, Jim Woodring. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Open letter to Miramax: leave KFC Cinema alone
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DATE: 01/07/2004 08:16:18 AM
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An anonymous BoingBoing reader writes:
Miramax has apparently jumped on the "let's be evil" bandwagon. Kung Fu Cult Cinema is a site for fans of Asian Cinema, including reviews, message boards, etc. As part of the site, there are links to websites outside of the U.S. that sell Asian films legally. Miramax has apparently sent the site a bogus "cease and desist" order, claiming that KFC Cinema cannot even *link* to said overseas sites without violating the copyright they have on certain asian films (Hero, Shaolin Soccer, etc.). The link above is to an open response to Miramax's letter.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How 'bout some freakazoid fries to go with that Frankenfish?
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DATE: 01/07/2004 08:56:43 AM
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More chromosomes, more better! BoingBoing reader Roland writes:
Phil Mackey is the general manager of the Mt. Lassen Trout Farms. His 30-pound rainbow trouts are hatched from eggs 'manipulated to produce fish with three sets of chromosomes instead of two.' The Los Angeles Times reports about these freakoid fishes (free registration needed), called 'blasphemy' by some purists because of their strange proportions. The third set of chromosomes renders the trout sterile, 'allowing them to conserve energy that otherwise would be spent on the development of sexual organs or mating,' and so to take more weight. This overview contains additional details about what is a good money-making business and a photo of one of these gargantuan rainbow trouts. Now I repeat my question: would you eat such a 'Frankenfish'?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 0wnz0red is nominated for a Nebula Award
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DATE: 01/07/2004 08:59:39 AM
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The preliminary 2003 Nebula ballot was released this morning. 0wnz0red, my short story that was published on Salon and reprinted in my short story collection, made it -- what's more, given that only four stories qualified in the Best Novelette category, that means that I've also made the final ballot: I'm a Nebula nominee!
BEST NOVELETTE
"The Mask of the Rex"; Richard Bowes (F&SF, May02)
"0wnz0red"; Cory Doctorow (Salon.com, Aug02)
"The Empire of Ice Cream"; Jeffrey Ford (SCI FICTION, Feb26, 2003)
"The Wages of Syntax"; Ray Vukcevich (SCI FICTION, Oct 16, 2002)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Girl scouts learn hard-sell for cookies
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DATE: 01/07/2004 09:33:21 AM
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Girl scouts can attend a pressure-sales seminar in Plymouth, Minnesota to teach them how to use hard sales to move cookie-product.
The scouts, mostly teenagers, learned about "the surly customer," the one who just won't say yes, and the best response to the customers who say they've already bought.
Cookie sellers were coached to appeal to people's patriotism: You don't have to eat the cookies, you can donate them to troops overseas.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crap cockpit UI may crash planes
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DATE: 01/07/2004 09:34:54 AM
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A new study has found that the bristling impressiveness of the standard airplane cockpit is a UI disaster and theat the complexity can lead to plane-crashes.
They say that, during emergencies, pilots are overloaded with technical information which they are unable to process quickly enough. This could mean that wrong decisions are made at crucial moments -- and these cannot be reversed.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet Archive's back-end released as free software
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DATE: 01/07/2004 10:08:29 AM
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The Internet Archive has released the code for its "extensible, web-scale, archival-quality web crawler" under the GPL LGPL.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Funny iPod t-shirts
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DATE: 01/07/2004 11:24:03 AM
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Funny iPod/Gollum crossover t-shirts.
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(Thanks, Oliver!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Segway Robots and Humans Play Soccer Together
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DATE: 01/07/2004 11:44:19 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland points us to this:
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), working under a grant from DARPA, are putting humans riding Segway scooters and robots built on Segway bases on the same soccer team in the hope to encourage the kind of cooperation that leads to understanding between the both. Technology Research News has the story. This could lead to autonomous robot vehicles sharing the roadway with human-driven vehicles or robot building construction crews. Robots designed for specific applications could become practical in 5 to 10 years. Robots that interact with other robots and humans in general applications will take longer -- at least 20 years. This overview contains additional details and pictures of a human and a Segway robot playing together.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cool Jim Woodring animations
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DATE: 01/07/2004 12:17:54 PM
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These are really neat Jim Woodring animations for the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. Too bad they are presented in a blurry, artifact-riddled, RealPlayer format. It's a crying shame. Link(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Apple's miniPod -- too little for too much
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DATE: 01/07/2004 01:39:17 PM
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Alex Salkever of Business Week humorously sums up what many people think about the new miniPod: "Far less capacity in a slightly smaller device for nearly the same cost? Sorry, Steve, this tune is off key."
SMALLER BUT WIMPIER. Less music in a device marginally smaller at about the same price. Get it? I didn't, and few others will, either. In fact, while I was watching Jobs give his spiel, my mind replayed the infamous scene from the cult classic mockumentary Spinal Tap where the dim rock band tries to explain that dials on their amplifiers go to 11 -- and that's what makes them louder. I was left with the same sense of befuddlement after watching Jobs show off the smaller but much wimpier miniPod.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Boing Dish
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DATE: 01/07/2004 02:01:35 PM
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Bruce Sterling says: "I don't know why, but I sure want one." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turn USB devices into networked devices
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DATE: 01/07/2004 03:39:55 PM
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Keyspan is developing a USB-server, so that you can attach a USB device to a network and share it among Macs and PCs:
"Share a USB printer or scanner ..., turn a USB hard drive into a simple file server, make USB devices available via Wifi", etc. The router-sized server sports 4 12Mbps USB ports with full 500mA of power per, 10/100 RJ45 network port, and static, DHCP, and Rendezvous IP.
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TITLE: Pranking housesitters wrap apartment in tinfoil
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DATE: 01/07/2004 03:44:53 PM
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A Washington man's apartment-sitter wrapped everything he owned in tinfoil while he was away:
Trerice and his friends unrolled the toilet paper in the bathroom, enveloped the bath tissue in aluminum foil and rolled it back up again. They covered Kirk's book and compact disc collections but made sure each CD case could open and shut normally.
They even used foil to encircle Kirk's spare change -- each individual quarter he had left atop a living room bookshelf.
"It went surprisingly fast," Trerice said. "The toilet was hard. The molding around the doorways took a very long time."
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(Thanks, Scraps!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Novel writing, per the other Doctorow
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DATE: 01/07/2004 06:13:29 PM
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Great EL Doctorow quote on the nature of writing. I've been giving this a lot of thought as I go into the home stretch on my next novel (which is as long as the other two put together), and plot out the second half of my fourth novel and go to work on speculating about the fifth, which Charlie Stross and I plotted out in London last month, after running into each other in a bookstore, quite by accident. You know, the other Doctorow is a hell of a novelist -- in particular, books like Ragtime and Book of Daniel (the narrator of which is supposedly based on Abbie Hoffman!) inspire me more with each successive reading.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining,
researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is
writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the
fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole
trip that way.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Corpsicle vault gets cemetery license
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DATE: 01/07/2004 06:39:04 PM
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The Michigan cryonics institute where Ted Williams's offspring stashed his corpsicleA Michigan cryonics institute that was shut down during the whole Ted-Williams's-frozen-remains meshegas has resolved it business-licensing issues: it's been licensed as a cemetery.
DLEG ordered the facility located at 24355 Sorrentino Court to preserve the bodies in its care; however, it would not be able to accept any new contracts or bodies.
Now that CI has been licensed, the cease and desist orders have been withdrawn.
"We are pleased that CI can now become a licensed facility, permitting state oversight of its operations," said David C. Hollister, Director of DLEG. "We believe that it's licensure as a cemetery provides additional protections to the people of the State of Michigan."
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Insufficient commercial renovation: Not Fooling Anybody
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DATE: 01/08/2004 06:20:47 AM
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NotFoolingAnybody is a photo-site that catalogues storefronts that have been thinly remodelled when they changed hands, so that the original trade-dress shines though -- as with this Dairy-Queen-cum-Hertz. Nice commentary, too: "Impressive conversion from fun to boring."
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(Thanks, Pete!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple Xgrid: out-of-the-box supercomputing clustering
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DATE: 01/08/2004 06:27:55 AM
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A much-overlooked announcement from this week's MacWorld Expo is XGrid, an out-of-the-box, Apple-supported application for clustering MacOS machines together to form supercomputers, using Rendezvous and screen-savers to accomplish networking and scheduling. The announcement page reads like a cross between the COSM, PopoularPower and SETI@Home manifestoes.
Without needing any programming knowledge, you can see the power of sharing resources when you set a group of Macs to drawing sophisticated graphics. As you add more Macs to the cluster, the program draws more quickly, as in the included Mandelbrot set demo. If you're a geneticist, you'll appreciate the Xgrid BLAST application that lets you compare sets of genetic sequences even more quickly...
Xgrid uses zero configuration Rendezvous to discover available resources, so you never have to enter IP addresses to set up a cluster. An easy-to-use System Preference panel lets you control how your machine gets used by the network, and also tells the cluster which computer can send problems to the group for number crunching. Xgrid takes the grunt work out of splitting jobs and collecting results. Many scientists who already use command line tools in their work will immediately be able to take advantage of Xgrid and have the power of a cluster without the hassle of setup.
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(via Kottke)
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TITLE: Japanese lost-and-found dates back to 718
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DATE: 01/08/2004 06:30:32 AM
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Miles sez, "Tantalizingly short NYT article (registration required) on the Japanese lost-and-found system, which dates back to 718 (!) and is as telling a snapshot of cultural differences as any I've seen. The picture of the umbrella room is amazing, and looks somehow like a Matrix outtake (must be the lighting & grim walls)."
Consider that in 2002 people found and brought to the Tokyo center $23 million in cash, 72 percent of which was returned to the owners, once they had persuaded the police it was theirs. About 19 percent of it went to the finders after no one claimed the money for half a year...
In the 18th century, finders were given more rights and were rewarded with a certain value of the found property. Finders who did not hand in objects were severely punished. According to Mr. Fukunaga's book, in 1733 two officials who kept a parcel of clothing were led around town and executed.
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(Thanks, Miles!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US dollar headed down the same toilet as the Argentine peso
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DATE: 01/08/2004 06:53:25 AM
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Not long ago, a post on the Canadians in the US list reminded expats earning Yankee dollars that the US dollar had climbed to an all-time high, and now would be a great time to pay off Canadian student loans and credit-card bills.
How the dollar has fallen! Charlie Stross, recently retired from writing for a British magazine to write novels full-time, largely for US publishers, notes that the US dollar has hit an 11-year low against the UK pound. In the past couple months, I've watched my own purchases on trips to London get 4-5% more expensive, as the rate went from $1.7 to $1.8 to the pound. For Charlie -- earning US dollars, spending UK pounds -- this is a 4-5% pay-cut, courtesy of the world currency markets.
Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman notes that the US dollar's ride down the toilet has not occurred in a vacuum. Rather, it is the consequence of the current administration's tax-the-poor-and-not-the-rich-and-spend-in-Iraq fiscal policy, which is sending the US debt and deficit into unprecedented levels.
Unprecedented in the US, that is. The economic policies of the Bush administration do have a solid precendent further south, in Argentina, where "business-friendly, free-market policies would...allow the country to grow out of...budget and trade deficits," but where, instead, the economy collapsed spectacularily.
Remember the pictures of women in fur coats smashing ATMs in Buenos Aires after the banks froze everyone's accounts? The miles-long barter markets that took up positions down the middle of the national highways, allowing refugees to swap their meagre possessions for the necessities of life?
Krugman says that the Argenitinification of the US economy is a serious possibility, and discounts the fuzzy Schwarzzenegarian deficit plans ("I will examine the books!") as a plan in "flat defiance of the facts."
"Substantial ongoing deficits," they warn, "may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits." In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cash prizes for Triffid fanfic
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DATE: 01/08/2004 07:06:09 AM
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Bristol's Great Reading Adventure is sponsoring a contest to write a piece of Day of the Triffids fanfic, with cash prizes of £750 and £450.
In The Day of the Triffids, Josella Playton is separated from Bill Masen by the intervention of Coker and his crew, and sent to work in Westminster. We do not encounter Josella again until Bill finds her at Shirning Farm in Sussex, and she gives a brief account of how she escaped from the city.
We invite you to write a short story imagining what Josella might have experienced on her journey out of London to her friends' home.
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(Thanks, Sandra!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshop rips heavy cultural symbols out of artists' phrasebook
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DATE: 01/08/2004 07:39:49 AM
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Photoshop CS automatically detects images of US currency and prevents the manipulation, copying and pasting of same. When my grandfather was in hospital with Alzheimer's, one of his major causes of anxiety was money, but we could soothe him by giving him $20 "bills" we ran off an inkjet (fakes easily detected by anyone not suffering from senile dementia). The images on the US dollar, being a product of the US government, are not copyrightable.
The images on US currency are among the most ubiquitous in our society. They are freighted with heavy symbolism, and have constituted part of the artistic vocabulary of visual artists for generations. Thanks to Adobe's decision to exercise prior restraint over its customers -- to punish the innocent to get at the guilty -- currency images have been ripped out of the photoshopper's artistic phrasebook.
If we ever needed an example of the idea that "architecture is politics" and that "code is law," here it is.
And as if that wasn't enough, the scanning of all images for content reportedly creates a massive performance hit in Photoshop, as your CPU's cycles are hijacked to police your lawful activity.
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sterling: "I'll believe in settling Mars when I see people settling the Gobi Desert"
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DATE: 01/08/2004 08:01:15 AM
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Bruce Sterling's just posted a doozy about Mars exploration in the interview he's doing on the WELL:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the
same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert.
The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times
as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times
cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever
writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well,
it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's
no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly,
it's inhospitable and there's no way to
make it pay. Mars is just the same, really.
We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
On the other hand, there might really be some
way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay.
And if that were the case, and you really
had communities making a nice cheerful
go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock
and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars
might make a certain sense.
If there were a society with enough technical
power to terraform Mars, they would
certainly do it. On the other hand.
by the time they got around to messing with Mars,
they would have been using all that power
to transform *themselves.* So by the time
they got there and started rebuilding the
Martian atmosphere wholesale, they wouldn't
look or act a whole lot like Hollywood extras.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Edinburgh pubs serve short measures of whisky
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DATE: 01/08/2004 09:00:52 AM
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Half of Edinburgh pubs surveyed serve short measures of whisky:
Trading standards officials have called on drinkers to come forward with information on any pub they suspect of having sold them short.
As well as the premises found serving short measures, more than a quarter of those visited had no notices stating the quantities spirits were sold in.
The law says licensed premises must sell spirits in 25ml or 35ml measures, or multiples thereof, and must clearly indicate which measure they use.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Security at on-alert airports can take 5 hours to clear
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DATE: 01/08/2004 09:08:28 AM
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Andrew Leonard has an op-ed on Salon today describing the amazingly baroque TSA-inspired "security" procedures in Mexico City last weekend, which created a multiple-day delay for thousands of fliers.
I like to travel. But I'm not looking forward to a future in which I need to get to the airport five hours ahead of departure to be sure I won't miss a flight, one in which I'm patted down from head to toe several times every time I try to board a plane, one in which I am constantly explaining every item in my luggage and every twist in my itinerary to hostile agents. I've had the chance to think about airline security a great deal over the past few days, and I'll tell you this: After being asked by one security guard to drink from a water bottle in my carry-on to prove that it wasn't acid or poison; after being interrogated by a U.S. customs agent who was suspicious at the number of books I had in my luggage; after the long lines, the hand inspections, the X-ray screenings, the near riots by enraged passengers, the uncertainty and the anxiety -- after all that, traveling to a foreign land, or even just across the state of California, doesn't seem quite so exotic or alluring anymore.
Link
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogs Coming of Age in Spain
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DATE: 01/08/2004 09:16:58 AM
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In today's Wired News, a story I filed about growth in Spain's blogosphere -- after a trip there in which I met and spoke with bloggers, geeks, digital artists, and journalists. Recent events in 2003 such as the Prestige oil spill and the war in Iraq war sparked growth and a new sense of significance for weblog culture throughout the country.
According to journalist Jose Cervera, director of the online edition of Spanish newspaper 20 Minutos (which gained attention last year for being the first newspaper released under a copyleft license), the strongest weblog growth indicator of all in Spain may be the proliferation of flame wars.
"In 2003, thousands of new blogs launched in Spain, and at least as many flame wars broke out in discussion boards on those sites," says Cervera. "That's not polite, but in aggregate it's actually a good sign."
Cervera sees other good signs for Spain's bloggers. "The traditional press in Spain, as in other parts of the world, is in a deep economic crisis," says Cervera. "By their own numbers, they have more readers than ever before, but they're in bad fiscal shape. But this year, the combination of Internet growth in general and their own internal crisis will make blogs a very, very important part of the mediascape here. This is the year that blogs become a household word in Spain."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: One-shot, six-week heroin-withdrawal drug trialled
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DATE: 01/08/2004 09:40:18 AM
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Researchers at Johns Hopkins have published results from a trial of a one-shot opiod-addiction drug that lasts for six weeks and prevents widthrawal symptoms.
Five opioid-dependent volunteers each received a single subcutaneous depot injection containing 58 mg of buprenorphine and were assessed for at least four weeks for signs and symptoms of opioid withdrawal, first residentially and then as outpatients. Depot buprenorphine appeared to provide effective relief from opioid withdrawal, with no participant requiring additional medication for withdrawal relief following depot administration.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Livejournallers save Austin mural
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DATE: 01/08/2004 10:06:13 AM
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A mural on the side of a shop in Austin that was to painted over by the new owners has been saved by a campaign organized by Livejournallers.
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(via Torrez)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SRL show in Vegas in February!
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DATE: 01/08/2004 10:52:14 AM
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Former BoingBoing guestblogger and Survival Research Laboratories engineer Karen Marcelo says:
"Interested in joining SRL for some fear and loathing in vegas on feb 7 2004? Tickets are available online now, right here.
We will be bringing pretty much *everything* and making about 20 brand new sneaky soldiers by then!"
More info here on the SRL website.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: more EVDO: Verizon building big, fast, unwired data network
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DATE: 01/08/2004 11:08:25 AM
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Verizon is announcing plans to spend $1B US in the next two years to develop a wireless broadband network that will offer 300-- 500K speeds at $79.99 a month, starting this summer.
The network, which will use third-generation or "3G" technology provided by Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO), will be fast enough to allow consumers to download video and music as well as send video messages. The high-speed network, called BroadbandAccess, will be available to businesses and individual customers beginning in the summer of 2004. Since 2003, Verizon has operated wireless broadband networks in Washington, D.C., in a partnership with Lucent Technologies, and in San Diego with Nortel Networks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Foldable 35mm cameras
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DATE: 01/08/2004 11:11:35 AM
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Eli sez, "This Czech designed pinhole camera is made from carefully cut out and constructed paper (needs to be stiff and lightproof). The name comes from the Czech word for pinhole (dirka) and a pun on Nikon. Uses 35mm film. Remember that you'll want a long exposure for a pinhole camera."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tolkien Barbie and Ken
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DATE: 01/08/2004 11:28:27 AM
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Talk about a misbegotten licensing deal: LotR's trademark holders have blessed the production of Arwen and Aragorn Barbie and Ken.
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(Thanks, Ed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Linksys's new WiFi convergence box-thingy
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DATE: 01/08/2004 12:43:43 PM
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Linksys has shipeed a WiFi box with a built-in DVD player to move AV stuff (movies, pix, songs) from your PC to your home theater.
The DVD Player with Wireless-G Media Link sits by the television and stereo and connects to them using standard composite, component A/V or S-Video cables. Then it connects to your home network by Wireless-G (802.11g) networking, or if users prefer, it can be connected via standard Ethernet cabling. The Media Link also works in peer-to-peer mode (direct connection between the media adapter and wired or wireless enabled computer) so no Internet service is required, unless Internet radio is desired.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Entire-roll-of-film-long panoramae of trains in motion
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DATE: 01/08/2004 12:48:46 PM
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Bradley points us to this site of "amazing, super-mega-panoramic photos (i.e. an entire roll of film in length) of trains in motion."
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(Thanks, Bradley!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Valerie, a domestic android
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 01/08/2004 01:48:29 PM
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Meet Valerie (for $59,000, including a two-year warranty).
"We are now accepting orders for up to 6 complete and operational Valerie androids for delivery at Christmas of 2004. Valerie is the most advanced android in the world having more degrees of freedom than any android shown up to now. She uses the AT&T speech synthesizer giving the most human-sounding voice available today. She is also easily the most anthropomorphic android available. She will have a high degree of artificial intelligence due to our proprietary AI software - and a generalized interface to the internet (the only existing super-intelligence). Order now - before you get backlogged in a 3 year waiting list!"
Update: BoingBoing reader Rion says, "You may want to inform your readers that this same Chris Willis (who, as you write, is selling his supposed "domestic android" for $59,000) is also selling tickets for a manned trip to Mars at the cheap cheap cheap rate of $2,000,000 a head. Not quite sure whether it's a harmful or harmless prank -- but anyhow, while Android World looks like a very cool compendium of robotics research, his claims for "Valerie" are a similarly a fair bit outlandish."
Link (Thanks, secret submitter)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Civilization arises from agreements about shit
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DATE: 01/08/2004 04:37:50 PM
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"Shit and Civilization" is a course offered at the London Consortium; the syllabus looks very good indeed. Lenny Bruce once did a bit about how all civilization begins with a social contract regarding where you shit and where you don't. Living as I do in the public defecation capital of North America, I'm inclined to agree: I think that this course should be a prerequisite in all post-secondary degree programmes.
Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure. Ancient cities are now identified by the mounds raised above the surrounding terrain, called tells. Tells are heaps of rubble, garbage and ordure into which cities have crumbled. Cities have always left the poor to scavenge and to live from re-cycling garbage. In many contemporary third world cities slums have been built on and around the town dump.
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(via Blackbelt Jones)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fish poachers arrested for getting pike drunk on champagne
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DATE: 01/08/2004 06:24:23 PM
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BoingBoing reader and Robotics Society of America president David Calkins points to this and quips, "Of course they're being arrested. Everyone knows that when poaching fish, you use white wine - not champagne."
Three Polish divers face a police probe for possible illegal fishing and abuse of animals after a newspaper photo showed them plying a freshly caught pike with champagne at an outdoor New Year's party.
"They may have committed offences of poaching and maltreating a fish," said Maria Niedziolka of the National Fishing Authority, which notified police about the incident. One of the frogmen, seeing in the New Year by diving in a lake near the city of Opole, told news agency PAP that they had found the pike half-dead and wanted to "restore it to consciousness by treating it with champagne".
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Feds seek wiretap access for VoIP calls
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DATE: 01/08/2004 06:28:04 PM
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On CNET, Declan McCullagh reports:
The FBI and the Justice Department have renewed their efforts to wiretap voice conversations carried across the Internet. The agencies have asked the Federal Communications Commission to order companies offering voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service to rewire their networks to guarantee police the ability to eavesdrop on subscribers' conversations.
Without such mandatory rules, the two agencies predicted in a letter to the FCC last month that "criminals, terrorists, and spies (could) use VoIP services to avoid lawfully authorized surveillance." The letter also was signed by the Drug Enforcement Administration. [...]
One unusual section of the FBI letter is that it claims the bureau is seeking to protect Americans' privacy rights: "Mandatory CALEA compliance by VoIP providers would better protect the privacy of VoIP users than a voluntary approach. CALEA protects the privacy of surveillance suspects by requiring carriers to provision the surveillance in a confidential manner." Otherwise, the FBI argues, a VoIP company might turn over a "full pipe" to police that would include conversations of more people than necessary.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tongue-mounted vibrators
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DATE: 01/09/2004 05:45:35 AM
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TongueJoy sells tongue-mounted mini-vibrators (which are, according to the FAQ, not sex toys), and accessories, including a kit for mounting them on your tongue piercing (the unpierced can use rubber bands) and an external "turbo pack."
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(via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stop-motion captures of body language on public transit
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DATE: 01/09/2004 05:53:22 AM
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Stop-Motion Studies is a series of dozens little five-or-six-frame Flash movies of people on subways in NYC, Boston, London, Tokyo, Paris and elsewhere. The movies are run-together stop-motion flickers shot with a digital camera, intended to illustrate the in-motion body language of people in public spaces. The subtle, darting movements captured are hypnotically cool.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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TITLE: Taxidermy-cum-househould objects
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DATE: 01/09/2004 05:56:40 AM
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A Chilean artist specializes in turning taxidermied animals into household objects, "as a criticism of the way animals are treated by society."
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creepy Dutch dolls
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DATE: 01/09/2004 06:02:46 AM
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These hand-made, life-size dollies from Holland are compellingly creepy in a hydrocephalic, Keane-kids, Midwich Cuckoos way. The sculptor is really prolific, and the photos of the dolls are all in natural settings -- ratty sofas and beaches and such -- giving the impression that the idea is to get one of these things and set it down somewhere where it can glare at you all day.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aaron Swartz's unexpurgated file-sharing editorial
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DATE: 01/09/2004 06:07:20 AM
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Aaron Swartz was invited by the New York Times to write an editorial explaining why he thinks that file-sharing is ethical, but before the piece ran, the Times edited it, because they "had decided not to tell kids to break the law." Aaron has published the whole piece on his blog:
Downloading may be illegal. But 60 million people used Napster and only 50 million voted for Bush or Gore. We live in a democracy. If the people want to share files then the law should be changed to let them.
And there's a fair way to change it. A Harvard professor found that a $60/yr. charge for broadband users would make up for all lost revenues. The government would give it to the affected artists and, in return, make downloading legal, sparking easier-to-use systems and more shared music. The artists get more money and you get more music. What's unethical about that?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dead-end job memoir
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DATE: 01/09/2004 06:20:09 AM
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This is the first of a two-part Salon piece on working at a dead-end customer service job in North Carolina. This genre of memoir is really compelling to me, maybe because I'm so thankful to not have a job like that, but also because it's the 21st Century equivalent of Orwell's labor-condition memoirs like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.
This was the awakening, the realization that I had officially and for all time put my head in a noose and the hangman was taking his sweet time. And that's the day I officially stopped caring. Never stay late. Never work overtime. Never offer opinions. Do not go the extra mile. At one time, I offered to train new employees, without a raise in my salary, just so that I could take the time to train them more thoroughly (training was fast becoming an afterthought, as people were needed immediately to answer phones. It didn't matter what they knew how to do). The problem was that the people who were training me told me as much, and I refused to believe them. But the equation was simple: Management is entrenched. They're not going anywhere. The department is too unwieldy from turnover to create another position. So why would management struggle to improve the call-taker's lot?
Link
Update: Dan points out that the full texts of Down and Out in Paris and London and Road to Wigan Pier are online.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TiVo's new PC-viewing deliberately broken
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DATE: 01/09/2004 06:31:34 AM
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TiVo has rolled out "TiVo to Go," a service that allows you to move video from your TiVo to your PC's hard-drive, and then to burn the file to a DVD. Unfortunately, the system uses a proprietary DRM system that tethers the video to your machine and your home, meaning that you can't move the video to your hard-drive as an MPG file that you can edit at will, send to a friend, include in a school report, grab stills out of to make a highlight reel, etc. In other words, TiVo is lagging the functionality available for free in open source software projects like mythtv.
Once selected, the secure and encrypted TiVo recorded programs are moved to the PC, where the TiVo Content Security Key is used to unlock the files for playback or burning, preventing files from being shared online, outside of the user's home network.
The TiVo Content Security Key and the TiVo-enabled versions of Sonic Solution's MyDVD and CinePlayer applications will be sold as a bundle at www.tivo.com.
The TiVo execs I've spoken with about this have expressed TiVo's philosophy as "reasonable compromise" -- delivering features that customers want, so long as it doesn't make the Hollywood companies too unhappy. This is usually presented as a business-person's realpolitik: look, kid, we know your ideals say that crippling the stuff we sell you is bad, but we've got a company to run here.
What's funny about this is that it's the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn't upset the music publishers, Marconi didn't cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players -- hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.
Where does this bizarre idea -- that the dinosaur industry that's being displaced gets to dictate terms to the mammals who are succeeding it -- come from?
I'll tell you two things that are obvious to my entrepreneurial instincts:
1. There is no market demand for TiVo's DRM -- or anyone else's. No TiVo customer got out of bed this morning and said, "Damn, I wish there was a way I could do less with my videos."
2. If TiVo isn't giving customers the features they want, someone else (like a commercial packager of mythtv, for example) will.
Not delivering the products your customers demand is not good business. It never has been.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US kids are fattest of all
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DATE: 01/09/2004 06:53:13 AM
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A study of kids in 14 counties reveals that American kids are the fattest of all.
In the study, headed by Inge Lissau, Ph.D. from Denmark, the researchers tabulated the BMIs of 29,242 children 13 and 15 years of age. The children were from Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Flemish Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Ireland, Israel, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, and the United States. The children's BMIs were based on self-reported heights and weights collected from surveys the children answered in school.
Children from the United States were the most likely to be overweight. Among 13-year-old boys in the U.S., 12.6 percent were overweight. Among 13-year-old girls, 10.8 percent were overweight. For U.S. 15 year olds, 13.9 percent of boys were overweight, and 15.1 percent of girls were overweight.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Toshiba breeding Large Humans (TM)
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DATE: 01/09/2004 09:20:09 AM
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From richinternetapps:
Toshiba today announced at the Consumer Electronics Show the result of a successful project to breed huge humans. Industry insiders suspect that with Moore's Law starting to crumble, and physical limits on lithographic technology causing tremendous problems on the continued minituarisation of a range of devices, that the solution was to breed huge people, which in the words of a spokesman, "...obviously have huge hands...".
Results of this programme are demonstrated in the above photographs showing large humans (TM) to scale against a traditional 40GB SCSI drive. As can be seen from the above images, the technoloy has also been applied to children, in attempts to bring school bullying to a historic end. Rumours that Toshiba have in fact just announced a tiny hard drive are being dismissed as ludicrous.
Link (thanks JD and Sean!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rube Goldberg machine to be demoed tomorrow in NYC
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DATE: 01/09/2004 09:39:49 AM
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A filmmaker has built animated an actual Rube Goldberg machine -- a self-operating napkin -- and written an original score to accompany it and will perform both tomorrow night in NYC.
"It's basically attached to the pendulum of a clock," Mr. Biskin said, "so the napkin swings back and forth." He used Goldberg's original drawings to make his film, titled "Goldberg's Variations." At first he intended only to write music for the artwork, but he decided the images needed to move. "It was kind of fun to get into the physics of it," Mr. Biskin said, noting that he sometimes had to reposition figures like a drunk bird or a cat that had had too much caffeine. He has also featured Goldberg's convoluted texts onscreen.
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(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What young Iranian websurfers want: softcore porn?
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DATE: 01/09/2004 10:42:45 AM
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Persian blogger Hoder writes:
If you need a proof that Iranian youngsters don't have any interest in politics, you must see this stats report for the most popular Iranian websites.
You see that a website called Jeegar is on the top with over 100,000 visitors everyday. It's content: links to mainly soft porn material on the Net. The next website is Gooya, a simple but old and lucky directory of popular Iranian websites; next is Baztab, a political news website close to the center of the right; then is Dalghak, an entertainment portal without any particular content; and Gooya News is next which is the most popular news site close to the reformists and the left in general, with only 30,000 visitors.(...)
Looking at the details of Jeegar.com's stats report, there is no doubt in my mind that what the young Iranian wants is not necessarily an open, transparent government. They need to have fun like all other people in their age group in the World. Although you sometimes do not know what exactly should come first: the democratic and secular government, or social freedoms.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Amazon's not-really-sekrit 800 number
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DATE: 01/09/2004 10:56:57 AM
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In "Cool Tools," Kevin Kelly writes:
On average I've ordered from Amazon once a week for the last four years or so. Not just books, but power tools, toys, kitchen stuff, the whole lot. Given the volume of my orders I think their customer service is super great; it sets the gold standard for other companies. No other merchant online or offline has provided the ease and accuracy of ordering as Amazon does. Still, in my experience there are occasionally glitches that their email-bots can't deal with, usually entailing a minor billing snafu. In these rare cases you need Amazon.com's almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won't find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down this number for those special moments when only a human will do: 800-201-7575.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Poppy Brite's "fans" lock her out of fan-board
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DATE: 01/09/2004 02:02:59 PM
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Some of Poppy Z Brite's fans set up a Livejournal forum in which they're discussing her stuff and their choice to be "child-free." Poppy posted a message in the forum asking about "child-free"-ness and joining in the discussion of her work, got a snippy response from the moderator and then found herself locked out of posting in the forum.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Wireless prank - Burger King customers told: 'You are too fat to have a Whopper'
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DATE: 01/09/2004 02:57:31 PM
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"Police believe teenage pranksters are hacking into the wireless frequency of a US Burger King drive-through speaker to tell potential customers they are too fat for fast food. Policeman Gerry Scherlink said the pranksters told one customer who had just placed an order: 'You don't need a couple of Whoppers. You are too fat. Pull ahead.'" Link (Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open source, flocking UAVs for hobbyists
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DATE: 01/09/2004 03:34:20 PM
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Autopilot is an open-source firmmare for autonomous model aircraft:
We're building a system for autonomous aerial vehicles for the hobbiest. The entire design and all software is available as Free Software, licensed under the GPL. The goal is to produce a do-it-yourself autopilot kit that anyone can build and fly.
Our initial target is 60 sized model helicopters and less than $500 in parts. So far we've been very successful -- one of our 2.2 boards has hovered a Concept 60 for several minutes at a time under attitude command from the safety pilot. It isn't totally autonomous yet, but the demonstration has proven that the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and Kalman filter approach work well.
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(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bespoke martian watches keep 24h, 39m day
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DATE: 01/09/2004 04:11:35 PM
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Researchers working on the Mars lander are rising and sleeping on Martian Standard Time, the daylight hours on the lander's plot of Mars. The martian day is 24h, 39m long -- which means that the rover crew had to get custom-made timepieces (for "had to," here, read, "thought it would be really cool to") manufactured for them by a master watchmaker.
My next novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, (due out in just a few weeks!) revolves around the way that your sleep schedule determines a lot about your social circle and hence your beliefs, alliegances, and so forth. A friend of mine in DC who used to work for the CIA just read the book and wrote to point out that the military has been running timezone-tribes for years, so that all the people commanding and supporting some distant operational unit are rising and sleeping on a schedule synched with daylight hours in some far corner.
But I bet they don't get cool watches like this one -- someone should manufacture and sell 'em. My sleep-schedule is so scr0d that I would happily wear this thing and abide by what it told me about my circadian.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Last chance for ETCON EarlyBird!
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DATE: 01/09/2004 05:22:33 PM
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Today is your last chance to get a pass for the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference -- coming up in February in San Diego -- at the earlybird rate. Be there or be oblong!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 2003 in (deadpan, hilarious) review
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DATE: 01/09/2004 05:23:48 PM
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Johannes has posted a completely hilarious, deadpan "Year in Review," analyzing the great aggregate effort and accomplishments of 2003.
The length of the earth's course is approximately 940 million kilometers. That means that every human being is whizzing along at about 30 km per hour in relation to the sun. Additionally, the sun (and with it the earth) is moving a) toward a constellation named Hercules (19.4 km/s), b) with the entire spiral arm around the center of our galaxy (272 km/s) and c) with the entire galaxy toward another galaxy (264 km/s).
Thus we've come quite a long way.
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(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why can't Homeland Security tell the difference between Al Quaeda and small children?
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DATE: 01/10/2004 03:32:04 AM
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Schneier's op-ed for Salon explains why our "security" measures are taking away our liberties without foiling terrorists.
In the months and years after 9/11, the U.S. government has tried to address the problem by demanding (and largely receiving) more data. Over the New Year's weekend, for example, federal agents collected the names of 260,000 people staying in Las Vegas hotels. This broad vacuuming of data is expensive, and completely misses the point. The problem isn't obtaining data, it's deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it. So much data is collected that intelligence organizations can't possibly analyze it all. Deciding what to look at can be an impossible task, so substantial amounts of good intelligence go unread and unanalyzed. Data collection is easy; analysis is difficult.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoessay about the decline of fashion photography
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DATE: 01/10/2004 06:04:41 AM
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The Decline of Fashion Photography: An Argument in Pictures is an engaging Slate photo-essay -- engaging enough to hold my attention even though I have little interest inj fashion, photography, or fashion photography.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Solve Dating Manifesto
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DATE: 01/10/2004 06:05:49 AM
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Clay Shirky extracts the subtext of the idea that social networking sites can "solve dating" with a notional "Solve Dating Manifesto."
1. Modern Soulmate Theory is based on math and probability calculations.
2. It has nothing to do with reincarnation, astrology, or magic.
3. Soulmates are not destined to be with each other.
4. God may have made a soulmate or a few soulmates for you. God may help you find your soulmate or He may not. Evil forces or your own free will may influence you to choose the wrong person.
5. You may have one or millions of soulmates depending on how different you are from the population mean.
6. Statistically, there is at least one person in this world that will bring you true love, a love that will last a lifetime.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Uh, um and nationality and speech recognition
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DATE: 01/10/2004 06:09:25 AM
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"Signposting" -- involuntarily uttering little interstitial syllables between words, like "um" and "uh" -- varies widely from country to country, and makes life difficult for speech-recognition software.
The French say something that sounds like euh, and Hebrew speakers say ehhh. Serbs and Croats say ovay, and the Turks say mmmmm. The Japanese say eto (eh-to) and ano (ah-no), the Spanish este, and Mandarin speakers neige (NEH-guh) and jiege (JEH-guh). In Dutch and German you can say uh, um, mmm. In Swedish it's eh, ah, aah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a and oh; in Norwegian, e, eh, m and hm.
These interruptions, it turns out, plague machines more than people -- speech-recognition systems in particular -- so researchers have increasingly been turning their attention to uh and um (among other so-called disfluencies).
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(via Foe Romeo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amazing Heinlein discussion on Electrolite
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DATE: 01/10/2004 06:48:13 AM
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Respected science fiction critic John Clute reviewed Heinlein's long-lost, unpublished novel, For Us, The Living, for SciFi.com, giving it a rave -- saying that this was the kind of science fiction that, if it had been published in its day, might have actually yeilded a generation of futurists who more-or-less accurately described the present-day-future.
The 140-comments-and-still-going discussion of this on Electrolite is just about the most fascinating literary/political/historical discussion I've ever read. You've got heavy-duty writers, ex-space-program people, major editors, Heinlein trufans and assorted others really digging into this idea: how much did Heinlein get right, what did he get wrong, since when are sf writers supposed to predict the future anyway, how did his politics change and how did he change politics? Meaty stuff.
As I said in another thread on another Nielsen Hayden's blog, I recently re-read "Friday," and then immediately picked up "For Us, the Living" and read that next. "Friday" was published in 1982, and FUTL was written in 1937-38. In both novels, Heinlein writes about a world-spanning information network. The 1982 "Friday" version looks a lot like the Internet of today; Heinlein's characters sit at "terminals" and "punch" requests for information -- they can get everything from the history of the city of Memphis, Tenn., to musical recordings, to astronomical data. One character removes a "portable terminal" from her purse and punches for her family financial records, which she can examine in depth while sitting out in the garden.
Change some of the buzzwords there and you have an accurate portrayal of the Internet in 2004.
Heinlein's Internet ca. 1938 AD was way cool for fans of retro futures: users called operators on videophones (I forgot what Heinlein called the videophones) and the operators sent documents on their way via pneumatic tube; the tubes could reach from one coast to another. Whoosh! (Why doesn't the world have long-distance pneumatic tubes, dammit?!) At one point, a character in the 2085 wants to look up a newspaper article from 1938; she calls the operator and has a photostat in her hands within a few minutes.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why can't Homeland Security tell the difference between Al Quaeda and my six-year-old daughter?
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DATE: 01/10/2004 09:20:13 PM
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My six-year-old daughter is on the CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening) list as a security risk.
Here's what happened. We went to visit my parents in Colorado for the holidays. When we got to the Burbank Airport, the skycap asked for our IDs. He noticed that my wife driver's license had expired. He excused himself and came back about five minutes later, and said we could fly, but that Carla would have to undergo "secondary screening," which meant she had to take her shoes off and have all her carry-on luggage searched. It was a hassle, especially since we had a lot of carry-on stuff for our six-year-old and infant daughter, but at least they let us fly to Denver.
A week later, we got to the Denver Airport to go home. Carla showed the agent her ID, and the woman didn't say anything about it being expired. I thought we had gotten lucky. But when we got to the security screening area, the woman working there looked at our tickets and said "Who is Sarina?" I pointed to my six-year-old. "She's been marked for secondary screening," she said. "She has to go over there. One of you can go with her." Carla went with Sarina and I went through the normal line with Jane. While Carla was escorting Sarina through the extra security check, she asked for an explanation. A man working there told her Sarina was on a list that required the extra search, and that he couldn't tell her anything more about it.
My daughter was scared and shaken up by the ordeal and told us that she "hated it." At least the security people were polite to her. But they were like polite robots, unable to laugh at the fact that someone had mistakenly pegged a little girl as a potential terrorist. No, they insisted that she had to take off her shoes and get patted down and have a wand passed over her body and have her Hello Kitty suitcase opened and examined with a fine toothed comb.
When we got to the gate, I looked at one of the monitors, and I saw Sarina's name on the list, along with one other person's name. The list was titled "CAPPS."
My guess is that somebody decided to put Carla on the CAPPS list for showing up with an expired driver's license, and then screwed up by entering Sarina's name instead.
I'm not too mad or upset about this, but after reading how this kind of thing has happened more than once, I have lost what little faith I had in the Department of Homeland Security to do its job. I wonder if we are going to have to go through this every time we fly? I also wonder if we can get Sarina's name taken off the list? If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Read some comments I've gotten on this so far.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Britcom clips online
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DATE: 01/11/2004 07:10:54 AM
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BBC Comedy has posted dozens of clips from classic britcoms -- alas, in RealVideo instead of something useful like MPEG that could be readily cut up, turned into homemade animations, incorpoated into school-reports, etc. Still and all, funny stuff!
* 2 Point 4 Children
* Absolutely Fabulous
* All Gas And Gaiters
* 'Allo 'Allo!
* Are You Being Served?
* Black Adder, The
* Blackadder II
* Blackadder The Third
* Blackadder Goes Forth
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(Thanks, Kim!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Congresscritters blast RIAA
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DATE: 01/11/2004 07:12:32 AM
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Paul sez, "A bunch of congressfolks criticize the RIAA for misinterpreting the DMCA, in front of the makers of electronic gadgets."
"The fundamental problem with the approach of the RIAA took is that it was based on legislation that created special property rights," Sununu said. "Suddenly, you had a private entity that's able to issue subpoenas, which is unprecedented."
"That's not what the DMCA was intended to do," he said. "We can't be writing legislation that gives holders of certain types of intellectual property special rights...We can't carve out special legislation to give special powers to certain types of content."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mecha for sale
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DATE: 01/11/2004 07:15:52 AM
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You can buy a Japanese rescue-mecha: "it's 10m wide with its arms fully outstretched, is powered by an onboard water-cooled three cylinder direct injection diesel engine, has a maximum speed of 3Km/h, and carries seven 680,000-pixel CCD cameras with a separate monitor for each camera. If no whiny 14-year-olds are available to pilot it, it can be remotely controlled (with a dummy plug in the cockpit, presumably)."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Laws from interesting people
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DATE: 01/11/2004 11:07:36 AM
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Edge.org has asked a bunch of interesting people to formulate bits of wisdom phrased as "laws" -- they're quite good.
Morgan's Second Law: To a first approximation all appointments are canceled.
Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Yellow Zipper Pokemon Laptop
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DATE: 01/12/2004 01:05:44 AM
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From the artisan who brought us the pink Hello Kitty laptop, instructions for making a Yellow Zipper Pokemon Laptop.
"I made this laptop myself. It is not for sale. Please do not ask me where you can buy it or how much it costs."
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The former audience
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DATE: 01/12/2004 01:07:02 AM
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Dan Gillmor's column this week, a great riff on the former audience.
The broadcast culture assumes that most of us are "consumers" of mass media. We are merely receptacles for what Hollywood, the music industry and even our local daily newspaper decide we should view, hear or read.
The post-broadcast culture is a democratization of media, and it comes at things from the opposite stance. It says that anyone also can be a creator, not just a consumer. There's a world of difference.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: .nu: an abandoned nation?
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DATE: 01/12/2004 01:09:28 AM
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Niue, the tiny island nation that gave us the .nu top-level domain and launched the world's first nationwide WiFi network, has been crippled by a cyclone and is considering disbanding.
The citizens would move to New Zealand, and someone would have to figure out what would happen to all those .nu domains.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Howard "Angry" Dean
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DATE: 01/12/2004 01:10:35 AM
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Screamingly funny Daily Show clip about Howard Dean's reputation for being "angry."
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(via Vertical Hold)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hugo nomination ballot online
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DATE: 01/12/2004 03:32:42 AM
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Noreascon, the upcoming World Science Fiction convention in Boston, has posted an online Hugo Nominations Ballot that you're eligible to fill in if you were a member of last year's WorldCon in Toronto, or if you've bought or are willing to buy a membership in Noreascon.
For the record, here are the things I published in 2003 that are eligible for the ballot:
Best Novel: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Tor
Best Novelette: Liberation Spectrum, Salon.com
Best short story: Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers, Asimov's
Best short story: Flowers from Alice, New Faces in Science Fiction (DAW)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Midair slug coitus
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DATE: 01/12/2004 03:38:46 AM
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Did you know that leopard slugs practice aerial mating? Here's an illustrated slug kama-sutra, showing the process in depth.
So this is how they end up - the slugs hanging by a metre of slime, with their sexual organs entwined in this strange embrace. I suppose that they were exchanging some intimate substance. They stayed like this for a while, and unfortunately I was called away for dinner. When I returned they were gone, having taken their bungee cord with them.
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of visual zen
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DATE: 01/12/2004 12:33:27 PM
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From the Pirelli calendar for 2004. Images shot by Nick Knight. Link
(thanks Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Balldroppings" in NYC on Jan 16th
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DATE: 01/12/2004 12:39:46 PM
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Choire Sicha of Gawker points us to an upcoming tech-art happening in New York City -- a "custom version" of the geek art piece "Balldroppings" will be installed at TKNY's Compact-Impact show in Manhattan; January 16, 7pm @ 21 Ave B. More on, ahem, Balldroppings:
"BallDroppings is an addicting and noisy play-toy. It can also be seen as an emergence game. My brother Marc takes this software seriously as an audio-visual performance instrument. Balls fall from the top of the screen and bounce off the lines you are drawing with the mouse. The balls make a percussive and melodic sound, whose pitch depends on how fast the ball is moving when it hits the line."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hi-res Mars QTVR panos
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DATE: 01/12/2004 05:37:01 PM
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The first hi-res panorama images from Mars are here in full QTVR glory. Link.
Also: spotted on Wiley's website, Steven Frank blogs -- "Confidential to T-Mobile: NASA is downloading 36 MB TIFFs from Mars and I only get 2 bars of signal on my cell phone inside my house. Please look into upgrading."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing exclusive: latest comic from Graham Roumieu
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DATE: 01/12/2004 07:59:26 PM
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Click on this cropped thumbnail to view fullsize image. It's the latest comic illo to emerge from the super-sick-n-twisted lump of gray matter that is Canadian artist Graham Roumieu's mind. Link to "Mystery Salmon"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SETI: Managing 4.7 million Computers With Six People
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DATE: 01/13/2004 11:11:36 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says:
It's a well-known fact that the SETI@home distributed computing program is the largest grid computing effort in the world, with 4.7 million computing nodes. But do you know how many people work to maintain this network? The SETI team manages 0.1 percent of the world's total computing capacity with only six programmers and system administrators, according to this interview with David Anderson, the project leader for the SETI@home program, by Astrobiology Magazine. In other words, each member of the team is handling about 800,000 PCs. Impressive, isn't? This summary contains some excerpts from this interview about the history of the project or why users were attracted to the project for social reasons more than for technical ones.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Laser cheese art
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DATE: 01/13/2004 11:14:18 AM
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Some scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (of course) are machining cheese into intricate shapes with the help of pulsed ultraviolet lasers.
"Wisconsin is a big dairy and cheese making state and we were approached by a company that wanted to know if we could use a laser to cut thin slices of cheese at high speed," Xiaochun Li, one of the researchers, told optics.org. "One motivation is the ability to cut cheese into fancy shapes that appeal to kids, such as a dinosaur or letters. The fast food industry is very interested in that idea."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tech/art pioneer Billy Kluver, RIP
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DATE: 01/13/2004 11:35:23 AM
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Former Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver, the co-founder with Robert Raushchenberg of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) in 1966, died on Sunday of cancer. E.A.T facillitated collaborations between avant-garde artists and creative scientists, leading to a groundbreaking performance series called Nine Evenings: Theater and Engineering. The patron saint of tech-art, Kluver worked with the likes of John Cage, Andy Warhol, and Jean Tinguely (whose self-destroying machines later inspired Survival Research Laboratories).
"In the twentieth century efficient means of spreading technical information have developed and now the emphasis is on the individual's relationship to the environment. This is a change in attitude away from concern for the object--its engineering, operation, and function, and toward aesthetics--human motivation and involvement, pleasure, interest, excitement." --Billy Kluver, 1971
Link to an article about Kluver
Link to NY Times obituary (free reg. required)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mustaches give cops more authority
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DATE: 01/13/2004 12:59:22 PM
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Reuters reports that "police in northern India are being paid an extra 65 cents a month to grow a mustache to give them more authority... However... the shape and style of police mustaches would be monitored to ensure they did not take on a mean look." Link (Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dude, Check This Out Beta
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:12:53 PM
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My old OpenCola partners have started a new company, Dude Research, to work on the kind of predictive recommendation service we were hot for a couple years back. The product is called Dude, Check This Out!. Sadly, it doesn't work on the Mac yet, but these are good guys and they promise to get it working on the Mac as soon as they get through the primary development phase. From the looks of it, the Dude is a very simple blogging app (WYSIWYG, drag and drop, no HTML) that forms an associative relevance network that suggests new items to Dude users.
Dude 2.0 supports the RSS and Atom XML formats for content syndication and the FOAF XML format for social networking.
They have some cool features, including some social networking stuff, send-to-a-friend, and the ability to post to an external Movable Type or Blogger blog. It works with Bookmarklets or a Toolbar in Explorer only. However, the Dudes at Dude Research want me to warn you that this is still a Beta app, so please don't beat them up too badly if it doesn't work perfectly. Fortunately, it's a Web app, so as they catch bugs the app can be quickly improved without users having to download a new version. If you're Dude enough, give it a try and send your thoughts to support@duderesearch.com.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WTF: an instant tech conference
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:13:16 PM
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David Isenberg is trying to organize an "instant conference" -- basically, get 30 yesses from people interested in talking about the value of and challenges to the "Stupid Network," find a venue, and show up. He's calling it WTF?
+ If Clay Christensen or his co-workers show up, I want
to learn the new taxonomy of disruptive technology.
+ If George Gilder or his compadres arrive, I'd like to
get the skinny on ILEC fiber and Chinese capitalism.
+ If Porter Stansberry comes, I won't let him escape
without hearing why the U.S. is following telecom into
bankruptcy.
+ If Halley Suitt comes, I hope she's misbehaving.net with
her blogsisters.
+ If recent SMART List joiner Gerry Butters shows up, I'll
hope for insight into Lucent's murky future.
+ If Clay Shirky shows, I'll want to hear about the Art of
War according to the RIAA.
+ If Cory Doctorow arrives, I hope somebody will challenge
him on how musicians make a living when copying is
frictionless.
+ If Bob Lucky shows up, I'd be tempted to give him a
fireplace, a comfortable chair, a glass of brandy and
as much time as he wants.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Union bugs for blogs
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:13:26 PM
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Member of a trade union? Put a label on your blog!
The International Unionist Weblog Association is a group whose purpose is to promote trade unionism by displaying a Union Label on its members' weblogs.
If every blogger who was a member of a trade union made that fact clear to their readers, it would generate excellent publicity for the labour movement. By displaying a Union Label on your weblog, you can help support unionism while tapping in to a network of unionist bloggers and their readers."
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(Thanks, Alex!))
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: European traveller info being fed into CAPPS II
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:13:37 PM
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Despite assurances to the contrary, it turns out that European travellers' info is being used as part of a trial of the CAPPS II passenger profiling system.
Thank you, EU Commissioner Bolkestein for assuring us on December 16 2003
that European passenger name records [PNR] would not be fed into the US
computer assisted passenger prescreening system CAPPS II. Three weeks
later the US-Department of Homeland Security officially states that personal
data of European airline passengers are already being fed into that system for
testing purposes. [..]
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(Thanks, Peter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Adopt a book at the British Library
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:13:48 PM
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The British Library's "Adopt-a-Book" program lets you pick out a favored text from among the famous collection and make a donation that's earmarked for that specific book's upkeep and preservation. If you give enough money, they'll even put a plate in the book to tell people who request the books at the library's reading rooms that you, personally are responsible for that book's ongoing presence on the shelf.
Support the Adopt a Book apppeal and you can help us to protect the world's knowledge. Preserving one book can cost as little as £25 and up to £5,000 or more. Through your contribution, you will play a vital role in the conservation of our heritage. The books available for adoption have recently been conserved and your donation will help us care for even more titles in need.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kodak gives up on film cameras
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:34:07 PM
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Eastman Kodak, the company that democratized the Daugerrotype taking pictures by inventing amateur photography, has decided to stop selling film cameras in the US, Canada and Western Europe.
Blaming declining demand, the Rochester, New York-based company said it would by the end of this year quit making cameras that use the Advanced Photo System (APS) format, as well as reloadable cameras that use 35-millimeter film.
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tim O'Reilly's 2004 wishlist
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:35:52 PM
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Tim O'Reilly has posted a wishlist for 2004, including one wish-by-proxy from Rael Dornfest:
Rael Dornfest, author of Google Hacks and the mobilewhack weblog adds: "I'd like to see consumer mobile devices--palmtops, hiptops, and handsets--scriptable. It was scripting that drove the Web, taking it from a static online catalogue of content to an operating system. Gaining simpler programmatic access to the contacts, calendars, and other assorted user-data; bluetooth, messaging, image capture and minipulation on the phone will open up the mobile to the people prototyping the next generation of applications." I agree completely with Rael. Scripting opens up development to users, letting them show vendors where they want the technology to go, filling in the gaps between the vendor's paid offerings. It's an incredibly important part of the open source landscape, and one that doesn't get enough attention. As Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster, once said, "Perl is the duct tape of the Internet." Where's the duct tape for my cell phone?
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(via Seb)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bankruptcy trustee demands freelance writers return their paychecks
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:38:01 PM
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A bankruptcy trustee overseeing the remains of collapsed magazine has begun to sue the freelancers that the magazine paid in its last days, arguing that the money they were paid two years before rightly belongs to the magazine's secured creditors.
Ms. Smith Rakoff, who has written for The New York Times, said she had received a note demanding that her $1,550 fee be returned in 10 days - or else she would be sued and forced to pay the money back. "I feel angry and betrayed," she said. "This thing has taken over my life. I can't afford to pay it and I can't afford not to do anything about it because then there will be a default judgment against me."
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Solar powered, device-recharging jacket
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:40:34 PM
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Scott eVest, a company that manufactures clothes engineered to network small devices (and which holds a completely bullshit, sleazy patent for same) has a new vest out with solar panels on the shoulders that charge a battery wired into its many pockets.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Thousands of "mole people" beneath NYC
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DATE: 01/13/2004 02:43:13 PM
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The Straight Dope analyzes the claims made in a book -- The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City -- about the people who live under the streets of New York, and concludes that it's probably true.
The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City details Toth's early-90s encounters with several dozen of what she estimated at the time to be 5,000 homeless people living beneath the streets of New York, mostly in subway and railroad tunnels. Particularly large populations inhabit (or inhabited, anyway) the multilevel labyrinths beneath Grand Central and Penn stations. Many tunnel people are solitary loonies not unlike the guys you see living aboveground in cardboard boxes in any large American city. In a few cases, though--this is where it gets truly weird--sizable communities have coalesced, some allegedly numbering 200 people or more, complete with "mayors," elaborate social structures, even electricity. Toth describes one enclave deep under Grand Central with showers using hot water from a leaky steam pipe, cooking and laundry facilities, and an exercise room. The community has a teacher, a nurse, and scampering children. "Runners" return frequently to the surface to scavenge food and such, but others--the real "mole people"--routinely go for a week or more without seeing the light of day.
Update: This guy makes a pretty good case for the mole-people story being so much bullshit
Link
(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Austin's wireless economy
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DATE: 01/13/2004 03:03:27 PM
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Jon Lebkowski has just finished a major research project on the role that wireless technology is playing in Austin's economy. It's a great read.
The report is part of a larger IC2-led effort to draw attention to Austins significant wireless assets as they relate to business, community, and public policy development and identifies key actions we can take to ensure the success of wireless ventures in Central Texas, said Eliza Evans, program manager for research at IC2. The Institute is bringing national and international thought leaders in wireless to Austin for a national conference, The Wireless Future, in conjunction with SXSW Interactive on March 12-16.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tinfoil beanies for dogs, cats, birds: Pet Foil Hat Technology (PFHT)
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DATE: 01/13/2004 04:16:27 PM
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I only wish I'd known about this AFDB variant before my axolotl's brainwaves were hijacked by the Department of Homeland Security.
Pet Foil Hat Technology (PFHT) is the sorta-patented system that protects you and your pet from the government! This ultra modern aluminum foil hat will protect your pet from the brain scanning rays of the NSA, certain 'auction' websites, fbi.com, and CIA satellites that are monitoring their little subversive thoughts. You may not have considered this before, but your lead lined hat is worthless if your pet can give away your secrets to the very people most dangerous to you - your government! The PFHT contains space age materials, and is guaranteed to work for your pet. All government I/O is cut off. It's like a firewall for your pet's brain.
[Also b]akes potatoes when placed around a potato in a hot oven.
Link (Thanks, Susan)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nokia: No one will call you if you don't have friends
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DATE: 01/13/2004 07:54:59 PM
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In addition to cellphone etiquette tips, a new marketing brochure from handset maker Nokia offers advice on how to live long and prosper.
"Don't use your mobile phone when you're driving. Signal when you change lanes, stop when the light turns red and watch out for that kid on the bicycle... And it wouldn't kill you if you called your mother every once in a while," reads a Nokia marketing brochure. Friendless phone owners are out of luck if they expect their Nokia cellphones to ring, it adds. "No one will call you if you don't have any friends," reads the leaflet sent to shops around the world selling the Nokia 6800 model.
(...)
Those in need of cellphone etiquette guidance or lifestyle tips could also turn to Nokia: "If you use your mobile phone in a fast-food restaurant, keep your voice down so you won't annoy people. And order a salad ... Quit smoking. Drink less."
Link (Via pho, thanks JP!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anil's ode to loss of communication serendipity
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DATE: 01/13/2004 08:12:11 PM
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An interesting series of thoughts on Anil Dash's weblog today -- what's the net social impact of a shift from location-focused addresses to person-focused addresses?
I know a significant number of people who initiated business relationships with people they met while on hold as the phone was being passed, in contexts that we'd now call "loose ties". And that's not to mention romantic couples who met this way, resulting in everything from flings to marriages. I'd suspect all of us know at least one person whose parents met by accident because communication in the past was typically to a place before it was to a person. It's gradually gotten less centralized, of course; Few of us in the United States can remember party lines or going to a general store to get the mail.
So I lament the serendipity that's been lost. Many of the most interesting and exciting things that happen to us happen by chance, and now most of the time when I talk to someone, I do it by getting in touch with that specific person. There are of course the rare times when someone is using a computer that belongs to another person and that entry on my buddy list yields a surprise when I send a message. Or a few times I'll call a cell phone and it will have to get handed to its rightful owner before the conversation can begin. But those pass-through moments used to be commonplace, and used to result in the incidental creation of social capital.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ???
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DATE: 01/13/2004 10:46:47 PM
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I don't know exactly what this is, but I can only presume it's parody/art/something other than real: a future-freaky cosmetic plastic surgery website in which flower-shaped bone implants are inserted underneath the skin to create a sort of decorative body-mod. A bit like scarification. If the website is legit, I can only hope that they have better surgeons on staff than they do copy editors. Snip:
The decision to undergo an implant intervention is exiting and relatively uninterfered. To choose it's form and size is important as it defines the best result. Our collection holds several examples to choose from. The organically formed implants to choose from, are based on the shapes of flowers, cultivated in the Netherlands and traded all over the world.
By coming to our clinic for a Floral Sculpture implant intervention, you will acquire a unique and permant reminder of the Netherlands. By carrying a special moment of your life right beneath your skin, you have become the lucky owner of the ultimate souvenir and part of your personal remembrance.
(worksafe) Link (thanks Invisible Cowgirl)
Update: BoingBoing reader Oscar Bartos says, "You are correct to suspect the authenticity of those implants. They were
part of a conceptual project to reinvent Dutch souvenirs. You can buy the ceramic flowers, but the artist (Simone Van Bakel) admits the implantation is only a concept, and the images are photoshopped. Here's what she said:
"We get a lot of reactions!" says Van Bakel. "Articles in papers, live radio appearances, but we leave everyone in the supposition that the clinic is real. The funniest thing is everyone - journalists, potential clients, salesmen - believes it."
This came out of the current issue of ID Magazine. It also mentioned the ceramics are on sale here."
Update 2: Isis says, "Here's a FAQ on implants including sculpted implants as described on the floral sculpture clinic page. While what that website claims to sell is insane and wouldn't work, you could get the same effects in real life -- but as the FAQ points out, it's risky and from what i've heard usually not long-lived before complications require implant removal."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gene Wolfe interviewed by Neil Gaiman
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DATE: 01/14/2004 01:12:38 AM
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Neil Gaiman interviewed Gene Wolfe about The Knight, Wolfe's new novel:
Well, I don't see the point in telling the same story over and over. Neither do you, obviously--you could be asked this question every bit as easily, and you'd answer it better. As you know, you can't interest readers unless you're interested yourself. This is the law of the blue bunny rabbit: If the author doesn't care what happens to the blue bunny, the kid won't care what happens to the blue bunny.
Besides, it's far easier to write if you become fascinated by the characters and their story. You know all this, Neil. Why are you asking me? You sit down thinking, "Wow! What happens next!?!" And it's fun. They pay us to do this?
Link
(via Electrolite))
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: S-Train blogger confronts a troll in meatspace
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DATE: 01/14/2004 01:15:15 AM
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The proprietor of the S-Train Canvass blog runs a Quizno's sub-shop, into which strolled one of his most persistent and obnoxious trolls, and he got to live out one of the blogger's dearest fantasies: confronting a troll face to face and watching him dissolve into a puddle of shame-faced cowardice:
I just smile and say, "Your lookin' at the S-Train" while showing him my right arm tattoo that has S-Train there. You should have seen his face! I mean this guy turns as white as snow and his eyes practically bulge out of their sockets. I just say that I loved the e-mails that you sent me also. And he is straight-up babbling. By this time, some of the other guys on his team see the state he was in and the carnivorous smile on my face. They turn around and asks what's going on. The HOGG Boss doesn't even see them. He is staring at me like I'm going to kill him. He is downright scared. Very scared. Ok, I know I was looking straight-thuggish to him but I was LMAO inside.
So I let him off the hook. I just say that I know you were just jokin' around in your own special way and it is all good. And I offer my hand to shake it. His teammates are positively confused. But the HOGG Boss comes through. He gets himself together and says, "No hard feelings?" I say not at all. He extends his hand and I give him the ol' S-Train thug grip and shake it. I told his teammates that we had a disagreement in a past meeting and we're cool now. The HOGG Boss echos the same thing and they leave.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Minimal Porn
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DATE: 01/14/2004 08:29:27 AM
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Spotted on Fleshbot: "No-frills hardcore action is taken to a formalist extreme in the paintings and videos in this Flash gallery, which reduce sex to a series of colors, shapes, and negative spaces." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sundance: I'm an actor who really wants to be a director who blogs
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DATE: 01/14/2004 10:42:06 AM
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Jason Calacanis launches yet another new new thing: www.bloggingsundance.com. Site features interviews with directors, live buzz from Park City, and, if I know Jason, inevitable party reports.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iranian protestor MPs urged to blog their sit-in
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DATE: 01/14/2004 11:58:07 AM
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Regarding sit-ins by Iranian MPs over a decision to ban thousands of reformists from February elections in Iran, Hoder blogs:
I just posted an open letter to Reza Khatami, deputy Parliament Speaker who is also one of the organizers of the ongoing sit-in in the Parliament, in my Persian weblog. I asked him to start a weblog in Persian and English and get some reporters to post unofficial news and updates along with unofficial pictures; of course if they want to be heard in the world. Weblogs are their best live medium while the Iranian TV and Radio is totally ignoring them and their only newspaper is not capable to be published more than once a day. This could give a serious recognition to this amazing democratic ethnology among Iranian activists and politicians. They must do it immediately. They'll never regret it.
Link to Hoder's blog, Link to related BBC News story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wanna buy a record label? Online auction for Beastie Boys' Grand Royal
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DATE: 01/14/2004 02:10:53 PM
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The Beastie Boys' bankrupt and defunct (de-funked?) Grand Royal record label is being auctioned online today at Bid4Assets.com. Bidding is open for seven days. Founded in 1993, this was one of the most popular artist-owned labels in recent history.
For a minimum bid of $10,000, potential purchasers can acquire the label's entire product inventory as of May 2002 (including thousands of copies of releases by acts such as Josephine Wiggs, Luscious Jackson, Buffalo Daughter and Money Mark), master tapes and a wealth of merchandise. After an eight-year run, Grand Royal closed for good in March 2001, citing "mounting debts, decreasing assets and exceedingly harsh industry conditions." The Beastie Boys shifted their recording contract to Capitol, which later this year is expected to issue the group's first album since 1999's "Hello Nasty."
Link to Billboard story, Link to auction website
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Angelic leaders of the world
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DATE: 01/14/2004 02:56:23 PM
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Free Press International has compiled "just a few of the many photographs mainstream media has been deliberately releasing to the public showing our world leaders with halos." The devil is indeed in the details. Link (Thanks Vann, my multi-talented friend currently seeking gainful employment!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Aphex Twin on digital music and copyright
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DATE: 01/14/2004 04:10:32 PM
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An interesting snip from a recent interview with idiosyncratic-to-the-max recording artist Richard D. James, AKA Aphex Twin:
Despite the rushed release of Drukqs and the reasons behind that, he thinks "having music for free is a good thing, because I don't think music should be a commodity. I've changed my opinion to and fro over the years, but I really do think there shouldn't be any copyright on art.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Instant-on Linux distro boots in 10 seconds
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DATE: 01/14/2004 11:53:31 PM
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LinDVD is a stripped-down Linux distro designed to boot in 10 seconds or less, for use in consumer-electronics-style devices, like DVD players. It's designed for dual-booting with modern Windows flavors, so that you can choose to boot your PC as an entertainment console (fast) or as a workstation (slow).
InterVideo developed the InstantOn technology in collaboration with Intel, IBM and Sony. Its system lets LinDVD and Windows coexist in the same computer, running on a Pentium 4 processor and a minimum of 128 megabytes of RAM. When the "on" button is pressed, the software loads in less than10 seconds, giving all but instant access to TV, CDs or DVD movies.
MP3s, photos and videos filed by Windows will also be accessible in this mode. But if the user wants to do some work, they use a remote control to switch off the LinDVD software and the PC re-boots to run Windows.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CodeCon program online
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DATE: 01/14/2004 11:56:12 PM
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The speakers for CodeCon -- the grassroots P2P hackers conference in San Francisco this February -- have been posted, along with their talk descriptions and links to a lot of source, docs, and running code.
ida-x86emu - The x86 Emulator Plugin for IDA Pro
presenters Chris Eagle
history This tool was developed to assist in reverse engineering shiva, an anti reverse engineering tool developed for Linux platforms. Initial development took place in September 2003 and new capabilities are constantly being added. The tool played a supporting role in my BlackHat Federal presentation detailing the reversing of shiva, but it has not been formally presented in its own right.
Link
(via Infoanarchy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Elvis lyrics in Sumerian: the Nam-Shub of El-vi
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DATE: 01/14/2004 11:58:29 PM
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Some notes on the challenges inherent in translating Elvis Presley's songs into Sumerian, from a man who released a CD of same.
I must admit translating Elvis into Sumerian was not easy, but it was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot in the process. The main difficulty was lexical: because of the great distance in time and hence differences in culture -- Sumerian became extinct as a spoken language about 1800 BC -- it was difficult to find Sumerian equivalents for certain modern concepts and words. For example, the Sumerians of course didn't have nylon socks, so I had to improvise and made it "cotton boots," šuhub gu. (I resolutely resisted the temptation to take the easy road and use modern words as loan words in Sumerian, which would have ruined the whole experiment). It took me some time to solve this problem, because there does not exist a dictionary where you could simply look these things up. The only modern dictionary of Sumerian, the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, ed. Å. Sjöberg (Sumerian-English, not English-Sumerian!), has not yet advanced beyond the letters A and B!
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Terabyte drives, $1200
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:03:50 AM
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Just before Christmas, I stopped in to see some friends in San Jose and they proudly showed off the terabyte storage array they'd built for a few hundred dollars after an impulsive shopping spree at Fry's Electronics. Now LaCie has announced a cigar-box-sized terabyte drive for $1200, with a Firewire 800 interface. Storage price/performance curves continue to boggle the mind: I remember the $3000 1GB drive that I was issued for mastering a Voyager CDROM on, and the rare preciousness of it. That was less than a decade ago. This drive is a thousand times for capacious and a third the price. Think about what that means about storage costs in another decade: a petabyte for $400?
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:06:25 AM
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Warp Records, the label for Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, is using a digital download service called Bleep, which features this very sensible bit of FAQqery:
Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals - DRM is easily circumvented and just puts obstacles in the way of enjoying music. Apple has even privately stated that they decided to use a weak form of DRM solely to get major labels onboard.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beautiful art museum in Graz, stupid websites for same
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:13:15 AM
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The arts museum in Graz, Austria, is a really cool-looking building. Unfortunately, all the websites for it focus on breaking usbaility in order to prevent deep-linking or to present some kind of Flash-based, non-bookmarkable "user experience." So go look at the press photos, but ignore all the incredibly stupid copyright warnings that are apparently intended to scare off people who might actually take an interest in the site, and just check out the building itself.
Link
(Thanks, Machaus!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Math and physics visualizers
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:14:27 AM
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This is a great collection of Java applets for visualizing physics and math concepts.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Captured Belgian poach-mobile filled with jamesbondian paraphernalia
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:16:51 AM
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A pair of Belgian rabbit-poachers had outfitted their poachmobile with a bunch of zany James Bond/Car Wars stuff, including a bicycle-ejection system.
The car was also equipped with an automated box ready to spring tire traps to slow pursuers. The poachers had fitted a halogen lamp on the outside to blind their prey and shielded the car's number plates with lead sheeting to avoid identification.
There was also a device to eject two old bicycles fixed on the back of the car on to the road as an obstacle to any vehicle in hot pursuit, Belga reported.
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World's most powerful hand-gyro
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:18:19 AM
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The PowerBall is "the world's most powerful hand-gyroscope," intended for RSI rehab and geeky fun:
The Powerball is started out at about 2,500 rpm and is slowly worked up to speeds over 13,000 rpm. It's a lot of fun to see just how fast the Powerball can rotate. There is a digital display built into the Powerball that can display the realtime rotor rpm as well as store the highest achieved rpm - a high score which will remain in the memory until you achieve a higher score or clear the memory. Use it around the office to see who can achieve and maintain the highest rpm speed. You will get tired with your repeated attempts to continuously get higher and higher rpm speeds. It's a lot of fun and dangerously addictive. (Chris is the current ThinkGeek high score holder, with almost 12,000 rpms).
Link
(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turgid sex-writing contest in honor of Bill O'Reilly
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:22:50 AM
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Salon is running a contest for the best-worst turgid sex-writing, named in honor of drooling right-wink shitheel Bill O'Reilly, whose own career as a porn novelist was outed in Al Franken's brilliant Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Salon posted third place yesterday, second place today, and the grand prize winner comes out tomorrow.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 296 different accents
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:24:13 AM
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This page contains links to audio-files exemplifying English as spoken in accents from 296 different countries.
Link
(Thanks, Derek!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: My DJ
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DATE: 01/15/2004 09:05:16 AM
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Found at McSweeney's: My DJ, a short piece by Brian Bieber.
The doctor starts to give me a little lecture about the importance of performing monthly checks on myself, but it's hard to keep a straight face because my DJ is wearing a surgical mask he found in one of the doctor's drawers and pretending to scratch his records with a tongue depressor. I'm really relieved about not having testicular cancer, and I have to restrain myself from singing along with the words to the sample my DJ drops every twelve measures or so. The doctor gives me a little plastic card to hang in my shower that shows me how to check for lumps. Motherfucker say what, I mouth to the beat. My DJ encourages the doctor to throw his hands up, but the doctor declines.
Link (thanks, Invisible Cowgirl)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: A Cotton Candy Autopsy
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DATE: 01/15/2004 09:13:13 AM
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Scary graphic novel about clowns behaving badly, from "Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Link-Fu, Version 2.0: Friday, January 16
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DATE: 01/15/2004 09:19:28 AM
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Ready for another round? Here are the rules. Link-Fu (which is now officially "wired", not tired, not expired) is an online competition where during a predetermined period of time -- in this case, Friday January 16 -- you send us a url that links to a very weird something, somewhere. Some online gem that's intriguing, fascinating, and cool. Something we haven't seen before.
Judges: Warren Ellis, Invisible Cowgirl, Mark, and yours truly. We declare a winner based on whatever we happen to like best. Not the grossest, not neccesarily Farkish or Rotten. Just the flat-out most bizarre -- though grotesquery is not neccesarily out of the question. The winner wins the title of High Master of Link-Fu, until we hold the next battle -- here's a list of previous winners.
So, if you'd like to compete in the website smackdown -- e-mail the funkiest, most potently bizarro url-age you can find to linkfubattle@yahoo.com on Friday January 16. We will announce the winner Monday morning. May the Fu-est Fu win.
(At left: The honorary link-Fu mascot. Snapshot of Pipsqueak, a cat belonging to graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner -- he's learning to live with three legs after a catfight accident. Thanks, Susannah).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fake album folk-art (and who is Mingering Mike?)
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:10:50 AM
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A participant in the soulstrut hip-hop/vinyl/dj culture discussion boards stumbled on an amazing find at a flea market -- a collection of hand-drawn "imaginary record covers". Homegrown funky folk art: Howard Finster meets Motown.
"About 35 or 40 hand-drawn and hand-painted album covers made between 1969 and 1976, some complete with fake cardboard records inside them. Apparently some guy who called himself 'Mingering Mike' put together all of these albums as if he were the musician.
"The covers are complete with hand-drawn barcodes, track listings, lyrics, drawings of the band(s), and in some cases, liner notes. He did soul and funk albums and blaxploitation soundtracks (for movies that never existed), and even a christmas album!"
Link (Thanks, Riana)
Update: Tom says, "This thread has been removed from Soulstrut because of concerns about releasing too much personal information on Mingering Mike and to protect his privacy. There should be some form of a more permanent display of his amazing work at some point in the future, although plans are somewhat nebulous at this point."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley Engineering
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:59:15 AM
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In my new issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley:
* Software that recognizes faces in the news
* A satellite to unravel the mysteries of dark matter
* High-performance computer chips that don't melt
* The father of Fuzzy Logic
* and more... Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: VoIP on the road in Guatemala
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DATE: 01/15/2004 12:33:39 PM
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My sister and I run an online office furniture company. She's traveling in Central America for a while, but since there's still a business to run back home -- we've had to explore a number of ways to stay connected. Guatemala doesn't exactly have the world's most advanced telephone networks... rates to and from the country via POTS are prohibitively high, and our calls are often dropped because of poor connection quality. The solution? Ubiquitous 'Net cafes, which are more common than we'd expected in larger Guatemalan cities like Antigua and Guatemala City. Per-hour broadband access for IM and email is really cheap, and a surprisingly high percentage of those cafes offer voice-over-internet phone calls for very cheap per-minute rates (about ten or twenty US cents a minute for outgoing calls to the US, compared to the "here's our best offer" business rate we got from Sprint -- $1.50 per-call initiation fee, then nearly a buck a minute for Guatemala-to-US calls).
Toting your own VoIP phone when you travel is a great idea, but isn't practical when you're way out in the boonies and you're not packing your own bandwidth (satellite or whatever). If the only connectivity you can scare up is dial-up access at someone's home or a small B+B, that's just not gonna work. This Net cafe thing, however, seems to be working really well instead. I'm amazed at how common and cheap the 'Net cafe access and pay-as-you-go VoIP stations are in Guatemala. The other interesting thing to consider is that VoIP isn't just for tourists like my sister -- it's not uncommon for households in Antigua not to have running water, let alone phone access, let alone affordable international phone service. So, VoIP cafes are definitely for local users.
She VoIPped me a few minutes ago to say that she can see a smoking volcano outside the window of the 'Net cafe where she is right now in Antigua.... beyond the broadband, above the cobblestone streets and the smell of fresh corn tortillas, there is smoke and lava.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mad Magazine editorial berth
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DATE: 01/15/2004 01:54:19 PM
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Mad Magazine is looking for a senior editor. Another boyhood dream passes by.
BA/BS degree in related field required or equivalent related work experience. Must have excellent humor writing skills. Must have superior contacts and ability to attract other comedy writers. Proven ability to maintain relationships with freelancers required. Must have high energy and an ability to work under tight deadlines. Copyediting and rewriting skills required. Familiarity with MAD Magazine strongly preferred. Must be able to communicate effectively and tactfully with individuals at all levels, both on the telephone, in writing and in person. PC and Microsoft Word proficiency required. Requires an individual who is team-oriented. Ability to prioritize and maintain several projects at once required. Must have ability to travel locally on occasion. Experienced comedy writer required. Must be able to provide writing samples. Minimum 3-5 years related experience. Prior copyediting and proofreading experience required.
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Get Your Mars On
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DATE: 01/15/2004 01:58:48 PM
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The amazing Get Your War on toon-strip goes to Mars.
Link
(via Vertical Hold)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SRL Vegas show canceled.
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DATE: 01/15/2004 02:36:02 PM
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Survival Research Laboratories founder Mark Pauline says:
The SRL show scheduled for Feb 7th in Las Vegas is cancelled as of today due to unreasonable restrictions imposed by the Las Vegas Fire Department. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused those interested in attending this event.
Those who purchased tickets for this event will be reimbursed by the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Please be advised that SRL did not receive any of the ticket monies collected. We will use the amazing props and machines which were prepared for this event in a future SRL show.
Link (Thanks, karen)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney selling off Celebration, FL
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:41:42 PM
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Celebration, Florida, the New Urbanist planned community that Disney built on the grounds at Walt Disney World, is being sold off as part of the general disintegration of the Disney company. I just finished Walt Disney and the Quest for Community, an academic book by a real-estate scholar about Walt's obsession with urban reform and the fascinating shift in the Disney Company's focus from building futuristic, ambitious domed cities (the original plan for EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) to this modest, New Urbanist venture in which the emphasis was on high-speed data, alternative education, and building all the houses out to the curb to encourage inter-neighbor communications.
"I moved here because I loved Disney ? we had such blind faith," said Mrs. Shaw, treasurer of the association board. "But this was just a business venture for them, and now it's up to us. Their success is based on financials, and ours is going to be more, `Are you proud to live here? Do you love your life here?' "
Others, like David Manuchia, who owns two downtown restaurants, said they feared that the town might not be as well-oiled a machine without Disney. "There are enough trash cans, the streets are cleaned, the traffic is orderly," Mr. Manuchia said, citing how meticulous the Celebration Company has been, about special events in particular. "There is probably nobody better than Disney at making things run smoothly."
Link
(Thanks, Erin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Far-out comp sci conference call for papers
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:43:15 PM
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Geoff sez, "Onward! is a computer science conference dedicated to far-out, paradigm-breaking thinking. The Call for Participation is out, and we're seeking submissions of papers describing new ideas or projects that represent innovative thinking. Last year, Larry Lessig keynoted."
OOPSLA 2004 welcomes papers describing new paradigms or metaphors in computing, new thinking about objects, new framings of computational problems or systems, and new technologies. Papers in the Onward! Track need not advance the state of the art, but should aim, instead, to alter or redefine the art by proposing a leap forward—or sideways—regarding computing. Papers in the following areas are welcome, as are any papers representing radical thinking of interest to theoreticians and practitioners at OOPSLA:
* programming language theory, practice, and design
* architectures
* software development and methodologies
* applications
* environments
* education
* ethics
* biological or other non-traditional models of computing
* paradigms, metaphors, philosophy, and problem framings
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mazda Transformer
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:45:30 PM
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Nice Mazda CG animation showing one of their cars turning into an Autobot.
Link
(via Blackbelt Jones)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New "everyday neuroscience" book from author of Emergence
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:51:39 PM
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Steven Johnson, the guy who wrote the brilliant Emergence (a book whose lyrical description of emergent phenomena in ant-colonies inspired both my forthcoming novella Human Readable and the ants that crawl over Appeals Court, the sequel Charlie Stross and I wrote to Jury Service, which will be published as a fix-up novel by Argosy in just a couple weeks), has a new book out: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life, which he describes as:
...an attempt to look systematically at the question of what brain science can tell you about yourself as an individual. There are a number of great books that ask questions like: How did the brain evolve? Or: how does the brain work? This book asks a related, but more intimate question: how does your brain work? In what ways can science shed light on your own personality traits, emotional habits, mental blindspots or strengths? In the book I've set myself up as a kind of guinea pig for this experiment: I take a number of tests that evaluate different cognitive faculties; I do a number of explorations with neurofeedback; I help design a series of fMRI experiments on my own head. I also have conversations with some of the world's leading brain scientists, who function as guides through this amazing inner landscape.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Moz 1.6 is out
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:53:53 PM
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Mozilla 1.6 is out! All of today's blog-posts were researched and posted through it and it's running like a charm. New features for Moz 1.5 users:
# A bunch of fixes and features for mail and IRC
# "Translate Page" functionality has returned to this release of Mozilla.
# The View Source window now has reload functionality.
# Several security-related bugs were fixed in 1.6
# Many crash bugs have been fixed.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Developing nations shouldn't respect US copyright unless farm subsidies end
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DATE: 01/15/2004 11:56:07 PM
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Lessig points out that the US spent a hundred years ripping off everyone else's copyrights and now expects that no one else will ever do the same: moreover, we're demanding onerous IP regimes from developing nations in the name of "free trade" even as we engage in unfair trade subsidies ourselves.
The dirty little secret, however, is that we don't respect the free trade rules that we impose on others. While the US sings the virtues of free trade to defend maximalist intellectual property regulation, we poison the free trade that developing nations care about most - agriculture - by subsidizing farming in the industrialized world to the tune of $300 billion annually. Rhetoric about family farmers aside, most of that money passes quickly to agribusiness. This is not Adam Smith; it is corporate welfare par excellence...
A block of powerful developing nations should first take a page from the US Copyright Act of 1790 and enact national laws that explicitly protect their own rights only. It would not protect foreigners. Second, these nations should add a provision that would relax this exemption to the extent that developed nations really opened their borders. If we reduce, for example, the subsidy to agribusiness by 10 percent, then they would permit 10 percent of our copyrights to be enforced (say, copyrights from the period 1923 to 1931). Reduce the subsidy by another 10 percent, then another 10 percent could be enforced. And so on.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Self-parking Prius
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DATE: 01/16/2004 12:37:09 AM
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A $2,200 add-on to the new Toyota Prius hybrid car allows the car to parallel-park itself, using a sensor array.
A dashboard display shows the image taken by the camera. When you near a parking space and shift into reverse, computerized lines pop up on the display, along with arrows pointing up, down, left and right.
Using the arrows, you move the lines around until they define exactly where you want the car to be parked. Then you push the "set" button on the display.
Keep your foot lightly on the brake pedal, and the car will start backing up, the steering wheel responding to an invisible hand. Voila, the car will park itself in the spot you've chosen with the arrows.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 40s science fiction comic scanned
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DATE: 01/16/2004 10:25:10 AM
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Bless this kind-hearted sould who scanned a beautifully rendered comic book from the 1940s and uploaded it to his site. I wish all Golden Age comics were available like this. Link (via Irregular Orbit)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Google lookups
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DATE: 01/16/2004 11:15:33 AM
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Aaron Swartz points out several useful Google lookups:
Area Codes, e.g. 650, bring up maps.
UPC codes, e.g. 073333531084 or 036000250015, bring up some information about the product.
Flight numbers, e.g. usair 50, provide links to flight tracking
Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers, e.g. JH4NA1157MT001832, link to a CARFAX report on what kind of car and its status.
U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers link to package status
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Free USB Wi-Fi adapter
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DATE: 01/16/2004 11:46:33 AM
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Get this cute-as-a-button USB Wi-Fi adapter for free (after rebate). Link (via Wi-Fi Networking News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Goatse.cx taken offline
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DATE: 01/16/2004 04:07:58 PM
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Goatse.cx was a webserver whose index page contained an incredibly disgusting, anatomically explicit image (if you've seen it, you know what I mean, if you haven't seen it, imagine the biggest squick you've ever had and then put it on a webserver). As a universally squicky image, goatse.cx enjoyed a certain pride of place as the mover behind various Internet sports and countermeasures. For example, large pieces of the slash, the code behind Slashdot, exists to keep pranksters from sending people to the goatse.cx page; every troll's first trick appears to be inlining a copy of the image on a targeted message-board (as Dan Gillmor found out a little while back); and now, one of the image-sharing communities I'm part of has a new fad: showing goatse.cx to people who've never seen it before and taking a picture of the reaction shot to post for general amusement.
A complaint to the .cx registrar has resulted in the goatse.cx DNS being yanked, which means that this page no longer works (of course, "tubgirl," the equally nuclearly repulsive image that you can find with Google if you really want to, is still online). Naturally, a petition has sprung up to bring it back.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fake Dinar gaining against US dollar
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DATE: 01/16/2004 04:08:35 PM
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Bush's economic policies have weakened the dollar world-wide -- including in Iraq, where the new, "Saddam-Free Dinar" (a currency that should properly be thought of as lying between Monopoly money and Flooz in terms of its credibility as a financial instrument) is gaining against the buck.
The new dinar, introduced in the fall, has strengthened by about 45% in dollar terms. The previous notes became worthless Thursday.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Honda Civic as H-Wing
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DATE: 01/16/2004 04:13:07 PM
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This guy has modded his Honda Civic to look like a Star Wars H-Wing fighter.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Barlow on Spalding Gray: "Is he finally swimming to Cambodia?"
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DATE: 01/16/2004 08:21:58 PM
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John Perry Barlow, a friend of missing monologist Spalding Gray, writes:
I try to imagine him actually attempting a swim to Cambodia. I see him swan-diving from the rail of the Staten Island Ferry late Saturday night when he disappeared, rounding Sandy Hook by dawn, and turning south for Cape Horn. He'd be well past the mouth of the Delaware by now, strong swimmer that he is. What a great monologue this is going to make. Or not. Spalding inhabits a magical reality where such feats might actually be possible, but there is something about the current state of New York Harbor that seems adamantly unfit for human survival. In my less magical reality, it's easier to see him beneath all that black water.
Still, it seems premature to write one of those eulogies that I all too often compose for my closest friends. Part of me thinks I should be out there looking for him rather than writing this. Perhaps, I think, he just went out on one of his famous walks, walks that I shared for many droll miles. Perhaps he was hit by a cab and is lying comatose and unidentified in one of this perilous island's anonymous hospitals. He left his wallet and ID at his loft and would thus have been taken for another homeless drifter, as he frequently was. He could be holed up somewhere, waiting for his mood to pass. But he hates (or hated) to be alone. Neither seems likely, but where there's no proof, there remains hope, however unrealistic. What is grief without finality? A terrible confusion and an opportunity to celebrate what one might still have.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Industrial beauty
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DATE: 01/17/2004 03:29:09 AM
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These photoos of human-made toxic disasters -- mining tailings, tire-piles, oil refineries, etc -- capture the beauty of industrial horror.
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(via JWZ's Livejournal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wood-fired hot tub
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DATE: 01/17/2004 02:25:13 PM
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The Dutchtub is a wood-fired hot-tub that exploits convection to create heat and bubbles. It's portable and can fit in the back of an SUV.
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(Thanks, Ivy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PalmOS reset primer
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DATE: 01/18/2004 02:11:57 AM
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Here's a HOW-TO describing the different flavors of reset available in various PalmOS devices.
The reason it takes a while to get the general preference screen after a soft reset is that the OS notifies every app on your device that a soft reset has occurred. That allows each program to reinitialize. There are two cases where you don't want that to happen. One is if you want to delete a system file or other file that's normally open in the OS and won't let you delete it as a result. Since that app won't be initialized, it won't be active after the reset and you can freely delete it. The second is if some app is crashing your system in an endless chain of soft resets. This reset will keep all apps inactive until you manually start them after the reset is complete. This way, you can work your way through the apps and see which one is causing the problem. It could be as simple as a corrupt preference database for an app. This takes some patience in troubleshooting, but always start with what you did last and work your way back through your last changes in reverse order.
Link
(via Mobilewhack)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roots bluegrass Disney covers
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DATE: 01/19/2004 12:59:16 AM
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Proof that in some dank basement in Burbank, there is a clade of Disney merchandisers plotting ways to sell, me, speicfically, on new Disney product: "O Mickey Where Art Thou" is a collection of roots-oriented bluegrass covers of Disney music. Dang.
1. Circle Of Life - Collin Raye
2. Zip A Dee Doo Dah - Elizabeth Cook
3. You'll Be In My Heart - Kevin Montgomery
4. Baby Mine - Caroline Brown
5. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (Instrumental) - O Mickey, Where Art Thou?
6. Bare Necessities - Stonewall Jackson
7. When Somebody Loved Me - Sonya Isaacs
8. You've Got A Friend In Me - Amanda Martin
9. Mickey Mouse Medley (Instrumental) - O Mickey, Where Art Thou?
10. When I See An Elephant Fly - Robbie Fulks
11. I Will Go Sailing No More - Charlie Louvin
12. When You Wish Upon A Star - Ronnie Milsap
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Girls eating sandwiches gallery
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DATE: 01/19/2004 01:01:37 AM
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The Girls Eating Sandwiches gallery is pretty much what you'd expect: pictures of young women eating sandwiches. Everyone's fully clothed, no one is, you know, fellating the sandwiches, but still, there's something weirdly kinky about this.
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(via Pirotcar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Starbusian remix of a Vietnam atrocity photo
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DATE: 01/19/2004 02:11:05 AM
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This remix of a classic Vietnam war-atrocity shot may not be suitable for those of weak constitutions or delicate natures, but there's something amazing about the cognitive dissonance of the Starbusian iconography and the black-and-white familiarity of the original photo.
36K JPEG Link
(Thanks, grum!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Apartment building weblog
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DATE: 01/19/2004 09:54:05 AM
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BoingBoing buddy Jean-Luc says: "The idea of a community weblog for an apartment building in L.A. is absolutely great!" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Portraits in carbonite brick
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DATE: 01/19/2004 09:57:29 AM
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Online gallery of super-geeky sculpture, from artist Nathan Sawaya :
I decided to make Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Life size. It took about 10,000 bricks, almost all dark gray, and about three months of on and off building. I built the sculpture so it can break down easily into smaller parts, thus making it mobile. Because, like most people, I like to take large sculptures of people frozen in carbonite with me whenever I travel.
Link (Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US Senator calls for P2P Summit
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DATE: 01/19/2004 10:00:17 AM
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BoingBoing pal John Parres says:
Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) is back in the news. Last fall the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he chairs, scrutinized the RIAA's crackdown on file-sharers. Last week during a Consumer Electronics Show panel he said, "With the advent of technology such as peer-to-peer networking, law, technology and ethics are now not in synch. We need to find other ways to solve the problems rather than issuing lawsuits and lobbying Congress to pass tougher laws." Now, lo and behold, he is planning to convene a peer-to-peer (P2P) summit within the next two months. (Story link)
The Senator says, "I believe we need the technology experts, the computer industry, the peer-to-peer industry, the software industry, the entertainment industry, the privacy experts and the business experts to come together and discuss positive and meaningful solutions to this challenge facing a major segment of our economy." A voice of reason in the Senate? I for one am hopeful.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New website for Katinka Matson's scanner art
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DATE: 01/19/2004 10:01:43 AM
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BoingBoing friend John Brockman says:
"Katinka Matson has just redone her website and put up a catalog of large Iris Giclee prints (up to 3' x 4') for sale. They're beyond spectacular.
As great as they look on the web, the prints take your breath away."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Interactive Art Zen
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DATE: 01/19/2004 10:05:00 AM
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(1) spin |
(2) fly guy |
(3) tinygrow |
(4) world of wassco |
(5) audiogame |
(6) euh? |
(7) white vibes |
(8) greatest day of your life |
(9) garden of mutabor |
(10) days in a day |
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of Porn Zen
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DATE: 01/19/2004 10:17:29 AM
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This visual moment of totally worksafe porn zen is brought to you by the Invisible Cowgirl. Photo taken at the OTHER recent convention in Vegas -- the porn awards. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Which listening patterns are Radiohead-approved?
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DATE: 01/19/2004 10:38:33 AM
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Pat, noting that Radiohead "believes their albums should be listened to in their entirety and will not sell them online as singles," wonders:
# My CD player has a random feature. Am I allowed to listen to the Radiohead album on random play?
# The inside of my car is quite noisy and I'm thinking it might interfere with the "Radiohead experience." Can I listen to it in my car?
# At home I have two small JBL speakers for my stereo, are these "Radiohead approved?"
# What household activities am I allowed to do while I listen to the new Radiohead album? I'm guessing that dusting would be okay, while vacuuming would be right out...
...and so on.
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TITLE: BB up for four Bloggies
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DATE: 01/19/2004 10:39:10 AM
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The Bloggie nominations are up -- Boing Boing is eligible for Best Group Blog, Best American Blog, Best Tech Blog and Blog of the Year.
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TITLE: Spam-filters bounce email about spam-filters
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DATE: 01/19/2004 10:43:08 AM
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Spam-filters are trained to catch anything that looks like spam, including discussions of spam and spam-filters.
"Patterns of e-mail use are definitely being impacted both by spam and by antispam filters," said Craig Hughes, chief architect at McAfee Security and co-developer of the open-source SpamAssassin spam-filter project.
"I myself run into the problem all the time, mainly because what I'm corresponding about frequently involves discussions of spam or particular spam strategies..."
"I've lost count of the number of e-mails that get bounced back thanks to spam filters getting triggered by completely innocent words and phrases," said Suresh Ramasubramanian, head of security and antispam operations for managed mail-services firm Outblaze.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iranian MPs blog sit-in protests
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DATE: 01/19/2004 11:13:13 AM
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Update on a previous BoingBoing post: Persian blogger Hossein Derakshan points us to a weblog by Iranian MPs protesting a decision to ban thousands of reformists from next month's Iranian elections.
the good thing is that, apparently, while they have no access to any Iranian TV or Radio, they've embraced weblogs as a great means of a) publishing their announcements and program b) reaching the young Iranians who have long lost their interest in politics whatsoever.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Technorati beta
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DATE: 01/20/2004 12:20:42 AM
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Dave Sifry has just launched the beta version of the next rev of Technorati, his amazing blog-analysis tool:
1) Much faster indexing - the median amount of time it takes from when someone posts something on their weblog to when it is captured and searchable via our live database is 7 minutes.
2) Much faster querying - our goal is to have every search query take less than a second, even as the database is being continuously updated. We added a query timer at the top of every results page so you can judge for yourself.
3) Much more scalable - We built this distributed database system to scale. As we track more events, we add more machines to scale. As our user traffic increases, we add more machines to scale. This should continue to work for quite some time, so we're eager to test under load.
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TITLE: Guestblog: Thanks, Todd, hello Johannes!
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DATE: 01/20/2004 08:53:36 AM
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Thanks to Todd Lappin for the killer guestbloggin' -- we may yet see one more post from him!
Welcome to our new guestblogger, Johannes Grenzfurthner.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is writer, artist and founding member of Vienna/Austria
based art-tech-philosophy group monochrom. monochrom is an
unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural
science and political activism. monochrom's mission, its passion and
quasi-ontological vocation, is primarily the collection, grouping,
registration
and querying (liberation?) of the scar tissue represented by everyday cultural
artifacts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Shake it like a (robotic) salt shaker
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DATE: 01/20/2004 09:08:07 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
In "Robot belly-dancer shakes her stuff," Nature says that a belly-dancing robot, inspired by Lucy Liu in the film Charlie's Angels, and built by Jimmy Or of Waseda University in Tokyo, is controlled by a computer program mimicking a lamprey, a kind of primitive eel. "To generate the robot's undulations, Or borrowed a computer program built by Swedish researchers that simulates a network of nerves in the lamprey called a central pattern generator (CPG). The CPG directs the lamprey's movements without the help of the brain or sensory feedback." This summary contains short excerpts as well as references to a simulated lamprey -- and of course, a picture.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Suicide Girls Interview: You're A Bad Man, Aren't You?
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DATE: 01/20/2004 09:11:23 AM
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On SuicideGirls.com, I interviewed author/photographer/post-blogger Susannah Breslin about her new book, You're a Bad Man Aren't You. It is because of Ms. Breslin that the terms "bukkake," "Osteogenesis Imperfecta Fetish," and "stumpfucking" have become part of my vocabulary.
XJ: What would you tell would-be readers who are expecting, shall we say, one-handed reading?
SB: I'd be most inclined to tell them they're shit out of luck, but one never knows. A friend of mine who read the book said, "It's like references to sex in the stories come second to what the main characters' feelings and motivations are." There are a plethora of penises and a gaggle of nude women in the book, but the point is more the people than the porking. Of course, people are capable of getting turned on by absolutely anything, so who knows what could happen if people read the book one-handed? Maybe, they'd like it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Link-Fu 2.0: And the Winners Are...
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DATE: 01/20/2004 09:16:24 AM
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You submitted, we voted, and here are the results for Link Fu Too: Shaolin Webmonkey Beatdown.
(1) Susannah
Breslin says: "My first Link-Fu master award goes to Joe Ashear for the [[Jarvis
Products Corporation ]] website featuring meat and poultry processing equipment: Electrically Powered Bandsaw for Splitting Cattle, Pigs, and Sows, Ele
ctric-Hydraulic Powered Hog Head Dropper, and the unforgettable, no skilled-labor required Sow
Bung System. "And in second place: Siege for (not worksafe) [[midget
spanking porn]]. This
one is my favorite."
(2) Warren Ellis says, "In the absence of anything truly hideous (that I hadn't already seen), I am giving my votes for Link Fu Too: Shaolin Webmonkey Beatdown to two sites with the authentic, ripe aroma of obsession.
"My first place Link-Fu master: "why the lucky stiff," for finding [[idolatrous tooth porn]]. This is a man who's spent much too much time in a small room with narcotics and teeth. This is a man who is, in fact, sexualising teeth. Imagine him performing dentistry on you. You're laid back in the chair. You can't move. And you can feel someone stroking your teeth. Caressing them. And then... his rank, oily sweat dripping into your open mouth... link one, link two, link three, link four, link five.
"The runner-up was a close-one. I was especially fond of the violently supercompressed crab Jim Oliver sent, and what I believe was a Czech disco instruction video that Rob Flickenger passed on. But today we are doing obsession. And this is just wreathed with the thick stench of people who think about things that are Wrong for far too long. Lauren found [[Boytaur]]. And here is a good example.
(3) Mark says, "Here are my four Link-Fu winners: Vivien Park found [[this website]] where you can order a drawing of you and Stevie Nicks, on paper or a tambourine. Rob Flickenger found [[Discofinska!]], and said 'The last 30 seconds bring the power and glory of Disco to
life once more! Wish I knew what they were saying.' Then, christoph found [[richardsandrak.com]]. " Mark also nominated the [[Jarvis
Products Corporation ]] site, as did Susannah -- so submitter Joe scores double Fu karma.
(4)
Me? I liked Leslie Hall's [[Sweet Smelling Sweater Salad]], suggested by Scott -- now dubbed Link-Fu master. A gallery full of ironically unselfconscious sweater Couture; beaded beauties with names like Creme la' Tart, Heart of the Bossom (sic), and Sprinkle Specktacaler (sic again). And OMG, the pants.
Two entries tied for second
place: Tim Sharkey submitted [[MyPetFat.com]], a website where you can buy an anatomically-correct plastic blob crafted to look like a chunk of human fat. The fauxblubberblobs are sold as psychological weight-loss aids. I was equally pleased to anoint Nathaniel Marsh Link-Fu mastership for having submitted [[North Korea's 3 Year Old Xylophone Prodigy]], which was so conspicuously cute it totally freaked me out. Like a bathtub full of saccharin.
Thanks to all who participated. (
Background)
(At left: The honorary link-Fu mascot. Snapshot of Pipsqueak, a cat belonging to graphic novelist Phoebe
Gloeckner -- he's learning to live with three legs after a catfight accident. Thanks, Susannah).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More TSA fun -- robot-brained airport security worker makes mother place infant on ground
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DATE: 01/20/2004 11:33:32 AM
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Airport security tells a Mom to put her infant on the ground so they can check for a bomb in her bra.
That rule about not holding a baby during a search--what is up with that?? Believe me, I am fully capable of holding my child far enough from my body to get that little wand where it needs to go, but there was just no negotiating a compromise. I had a purple, writhing, screaming baby, a toddler, and a preschooler with me, not to mention a double stroller clogging up the gate, and in the end I actually had to put the baby on the ground so that they could put me in the off-balance stance, search me, and invesitgate the wire in my bra.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gary Panter custom artwork for $100
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DATE: 01/20/2004 11:56:18 AM
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Gary Panter (of Jimbo and Pee Wee's Playhouse fame) has an incredible offer. Send him $100 and "one to three keywords" and he'll send you an orginal drawing. Link (Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Air video: '70s skinflick porn-ennui
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DATE: 01/20/2004 12:32:50 PM
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Barcelona-based blogger and BoingBoing pal Jose Luis De Vicente says:
"Cult Porn film director Kris Kramski has directed a videoclip for french band Air about the european porn industry circa the seventies...beautiful, cool stuff. Check out the streaming video."
Link
Update: Fleshbot editor Jonno says, "There's an unedited [non-worksafe] QT version of the clip on the Air site (the streaming version you linked to is censored!), as well as some links to Kris Kramski stuff. Link"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo launches "Yahoo Labs"
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DATE: 01/20/2004 01:49:52 PM
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BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc says, "We know about GoogleLabs but YahooLabs are now online here."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Calling all hardware hackers and tech-project geeks
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DATE: 01/20/2004 02:59:32 PM
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I'm working with O'Reilly Books and am looking for contributors. If you have designed and built a fun, creative, and useful hardware hack or other tech-related project for your home, office, car, or outdoor hobby, email me at mark@well.com. I'd like to talk to you.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn search engine "Booble" launches
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DATE: 01/20/2004 06:24:42 PM
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"Booble," purported to be a parody of Google, launched yesterday. Snip from the press release:
"Booble can't be fooled because each of its 6,000 + listings have been edited and classified by hand, not by the computer algorithms used by the major search engines. In addition, Booble's listings often contain pricing information and, where applicable, Booble directs users to site and product reviews. Best of all, Booble is 100% free to consumers.
"Booble is the brainchild of a former senior executive from one of America's leading online services who now lives in New York City with his wife, a French fashion model scandalously younger than he. At this moment, the executive would prefer to stay anonymous."
Yeah, I bet he would. Link to Booble, Link to Sydney Morning Herald story, Link to press release announcing site launch. (Thanks, Lloyd)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chocolates and cellphones for Valentine's
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DATE: 01/20/2004 06:31:10 PM
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Nokia's Valentine's Day promotion for Japan this year is a chocolate-box, containing chocolates, a chocolate cellphone, and an actual cellphone.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Churchill's parrot
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DATE: 01/20/2004 06:32:52 PM
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Winston Churchill's 104-year-old parrot lives:
Charlie, who kept Churchill company during World War II, was famous for occasionally squawking four-letter obscenities about Hitler. But Martin told Reuters the bird has mellowed.
Link
Update: Churhill's kids say that the parrot is a fake: "His daughter, Lady Soames, 82, told The Scotsman: 'I'm fed up with this story that my father taught it rude words. He only ever had an African grey parrot and it certainly did not talk.'" (Thanks, John!)
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: State of the Union highlight
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DATE: 01/21/2004 06:08:19 AM
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This was, hands-down, the best moment of last night's (infuriating) State of the Union address:
GW Bush: "Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year."
Audience: [Applause]
GW: [Frowny face]
1.2MB DivX Link
(Thanks, guerilla!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bayesian decision-making rules our unconscious
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DATE: 01/21/2004 06:39:10 AM
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Bayesian statistical modelling is a tool used to compare new events to past experience, something useful for applications as diverse as predicting whether a message is spam and whether a Web-page is relevant to a given subject. New research indicates that we do a lot of Bayesian comparisons in our heads, particularily when engaged in athletic tasks:
"Most decisions in our lives are done in the presence of uncertainty," Dr. Körding said. "In all these cases, the prior knowledge we have can be very helpful. If the brain works in the Bayesian way, it would optimally use the prior knowledge."
The researchers drew the analogy to tennis in their paper, and it is not the first study to suggest that athletes have a more sophisticated understanding of mathematics than even they may realize.
Link
(via K5)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-spammers blacklist the competition
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DATE: 01/21/2004 06:40:25 AM
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SPEWS, one of the spam blacklisters, has blacklisted DSL Reports, which has been instrumental in running spammers to ground.
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TITLE: More TSA fun -- robot-brained airport security worker makes mother place infant on ground
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DATE: 01/21/2004 07:53:30 AM
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Airport security tells a Mom to put her infant on the ground so they can check for a bomb in her bra.
That rule about not holding a baby during a search--what is up with that?? Believe me, I am fully capable of holding my child far enough from my body to get that little wand where it needs to go, but there was just no negotiating a compromise. I had a purple, writhing, screaming baby, a toddler, and a preschooler with me, not to mention a double stroller clogging up the gate, and in the end I actually had to put the baby on the ground so that they could put me in the off-balance stance, search me, and invesitgate the wire in my bra.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory speaking on Jan 28 in Novato
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DATE: 01/21/2004 07:53:50 AM
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I'm giving a talk ("Copyright, the Web, and Innovation") for the North Bay Multimedia Association on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2004 from 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM at the Marin Community Foundation in Novato, CA.
There's nothing new about a copyright crisis: the ability to automatically reproduce work has been contentious since the Gutenberg Bible -- and as recently as the mid-Eighties, when the Hollywood studios tried to outlaw the VCR, calling it "the Boston Strangler of the American film-industry."
Is it any wonder that the web, with its ability to move, organize and reproduce information without control or oversight, has precipitated another crisis? Course not.
What is a wonder is that any number of otherwise bright and well-meaning lawmakers, geeks and businesspeople are behaving as though the proper response to a collision between copyright and technology is limits on technology -- imagine if recorded music had been "limited" to ensure that it didn't disrupt the sheet-music business! (It almost was -- and recorded music was only rescued through a Hail Mary act of Congress that legitimized piano rolls in 1908)
Today, the notion that technology should "compromise" with rights-holders is a tremendous threat to the open Web. The recording industry is indiscriminately abusing copyright law to sue 70,000 American file-sharers into submission. The Hollywood companies are getting the FCC to regulate the basic components of the PC.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Feds and Cali prosecutors conspire to hack marijuana law
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DATE: 01/21/2004 08:38:43 AM
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John sez, "Two medical marijuana patients face life in prison after local prosecutors lured away their defense attorneys to permit federal agents to arrest the couple in court."
Davidson and Blake, both 53, have doctor's recommendations to grow and consume medical marijuana under California's 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215). While their defense attorneys were meeting in the judge's chambers to discuss the case with Tehama County assistant district attorney Lynn Strom, Strom announced that she was dropping the state charges because Davidson and Blake were being arrested in the courtroom on a federal indictment.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Silly Disney songs
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DATE: 01/21/2004 08:47:14 AM
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Walt Beanpole are comedy-rockers with a penchant for writing silly songs about Disney parks, with capsule descriptions like:
A happy sing-along tune about Disney's ex-CEO Card Walker, featuring a barbershop quartet and a small brass band...
Walt Beanpole's tribute to a Disneyland classic attraction: Country Bear Jamboree. Gone but never, ever forgotten. Yeee Haaaaah! ...
This song pays homage to the Haunted Mansion. Larry Lalonde of Primus plays banjo
Link
(Thanks, Karl!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Today we are four
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DATE: 01/21/2004 02:37:05 PM
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Today is Boing Boing's fourth anniversary. Hard to believe it. In the past four years, we've served over eight million pageviews and posted nearly 11,000 links. It all started with our very first post: Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sleep makes you smarter!
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DATE: 01/21/2004 02:37:19 PM
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An AP article says that the first "hard evidence supporting the common sense notion that creativity and problem solving appear to be directly linked to adequate sleep" will be published in tomorrow's issue of Nature. Finally, proof that my nap habit is actually beneficial to my productivity! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free tickets to my Jan 28 talk
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DATE: 01/21/2004 05:28:34 PM
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Dori Smith has some free tickets to my talk next week in Novato, CA.
Link
(Thanks, Dori!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Battlestar Galactica gets 6 more
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DATE: 01/21/2004 08:04:02 PM
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Rumor has it that the Sci-Fi Network miniseries "Battlestar Galactica" will go on for six more episodes. Link, and link to previous BoingBoing post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ichatnaked.com
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DATE: 01/21/2004 08:43:19 PM
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...is seeking beta testers. Link (via fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lynching photography in America
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DATE: 01/21/2004 08:46:35 PM
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A disturbing historical record:
Searching through America's past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America. With essays by Hilton Als, Leon Litwack, Congressman John Lewis and James Allen, these photographs have been published as a book – "Without Sanctuary" by Twin Palms Publishers. Experience the images as a flash movie with narrative comments by James Allen, or as a gallery of photos which includes 81 postcards.
And from the details of one of the photo postcards in this online exhibit:
These tiny documents were purchased by a flea market trader in a trunk stored in the attic of a prominent Savannah family during the dispersal of an estate. Lynching, as example, usually proved an efficient means of intimidation and oppression. Richard Wright spoke to the heart of black anguish: "I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew."
Link (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "4400" -- new TV series from Outer Limits creator and Francis Ford Coppola
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DATE: 01/21/2004 08:52:40 PM
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Production starts in February on "4400," a new USA Networks sci-fi series created by former Outer Limits producer, director and writer, Scott Peters. Francis Ford Coppola co-executive produces. Series will... "follow the lives of 4,400 alien abductees upon their return to Earth by unknown forces." Link to UGO.com interview with Scott Peters.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eurekster, social networking search engine, now out of beta
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DATE: 01/21/2004 09:26:45 PM
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eurekster, "the only search engine with personalized results," launched today after several months of beta testing. The site promises to "show you What's Hot with your friends... results get better as you invite more friends." Is there a word for that post-Friendster/Tribe/LinkedIn/SixDegrees oh-god-not-again feeling I'm getting as I read the launch announcement? Like, HTML rug burn? I mean, really -- I haven't played around with eurekster yet, and I mean no disrespect to whoever built the project. But if one more website asks me to "invite all of my friends," I swear I'm gonna fucking throw up. Invite your own damn friends, you website.
Anyway, link to Eurekster, link to a slew of news articles, and today's launch release (which explains that Eurekster's revenue model includes paid listings from Overture in the search results). (thanks, Marc)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tower of Terror opening: $1600
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DATE: 01/22/2004 12:27:55 AM
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They're opening the Disneyland version of the stellar Tower of Terror ride at the California Adventure. A mere $1,600 gets you into the premier.
* Exclusive Dinner in The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror attraction (4/22/04)
* ONE (1) night accommodation at Disney's Grand Californian Hotel (4/22/04 only) *
* Breakfast at a Disneyland Resort Hotel Restaurant (maximum dollar limit and other restrictions apply)
* Lunch at Golden Vine Winery (4/23/04) (maximum dollar limit and other restrictions apply)
* Hors d'oeuvres & Refreshments
* Swinging Entertainment
* Ride on The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror attraction
* Opportunity to Pre-Purchase The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror Merchandise (Pins, Art & Collectibles)
* Commemorative Gift
Link
(via Waxy)
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TITLE: CAPPS II protests today -- "Don't Spy on Us"
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DATE: 01/22/2004 07:29:15 AM
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BoingBoing reader Bill Scannell says:
Airline COOs are meeting with Homeland Security officials today at the Air Transport Assn HQ to discuss CAPPS II...time to remind them whose data they'll be givng away: call the ATA at 1-202-626-4000 or 1-202-626-4172 and tell them what you think about CAPPS II.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Howard Dean stump speeches as DJ mixes
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DATE: 01/22/2004 09:02:40 AM
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Ben Hammersley links to a handful of funky-ass remixes of Dean's "Yeaaaaaggghh!" stump-speech from this week's primaries. They rock.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod battery motion comes to Parliament
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DATE: 01/22/2004 09:20:17 AM
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A UK Parliamentary motion has been introduced, calling on Apple "to ensure that replacement [iPod] batteries are plentiful in supply and priced at a reasonable level."
Link
(via iPod Hacks)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What's inherently hard to model in virtual worlds?
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DATE: 01/22/2004 09:29:35 AM
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Interesting Terra Nova rumination on what kinds of objects are inherently hard to model in virtual worlds:
What happens when your avatar puts sugar in a bowl of water or dips an apple into honey? Even if we program the honey to get stuck on the apple and slowly drip off the apple, Richard notes that this will surely lead to a player wondering (at some juncture) why honey drips off kittens at the same rate it drips off apples.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Air travel "security" as theater of the absurd
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DATE: 01/22/2004 09:30:02 AM
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US air-travel security is becoming more and more of a performance of the absurd, as this very good blog-post on Idle Words, inspired by the new "No queueing up for the in-flight pissoir rule" points out:
How is this measure in any way enforceable? Is the pilot expected to divert the flight? Perform a barrel roll at the first sign of a pee queue? And how, exactly, is the sight of multiple passengers simultaneously lunging from their seats towards a suddenly available lavatory an attractive alternative to having a little group milling about by one of the galleys?
I was filled with curiousity to see if the pilot would perform an emergency landing at Reykjavik after the meal service, but of course (inevitably) everyone just ignored the directive, and let the passengers empty their bladders in peace. On an eight-hour flight with free alcohol and predominantly Russian passengers, there was just no other solution.
Link
(via Dive into Mark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chilean blob was whale-guts, not sea monster
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DATE: 01/22/2004 09:38:13 AM
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The 13 ton blob that washed up on Chile's shores last July is not the remains of a squid, sea monster or Cthuloid. It is "the highly decomposed remains of a sperm whale."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vote absentee, avoid Diebold machines
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DATE: 01/22/2004 10:21:19 AM
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Danah points out that registering as an absentee voter gets you a voter-verified ballot, side-stepping the corrupt Diebold voting-machines.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GOP electronically burgled Dems' computers
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DATE: 01/22/2004 11:29:11 AM
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The Senate Sergeant at Arms and the Secret Service have concluded that ranking Republicans have been electronically burgling Democrat computer files.
Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Milne heirs don't own Pooh
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DATE: 01/22/2004 11:33:02 AM
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AA Milne's granddaughter has had her bid to recapture the licensing rights to Winnie the Pooh denied by a UK court. The Milne heirs licensed the rights to Pooh to Disney, only to discover that Milne had previously sold them to his literary agent, who is now suing Disney for all they're worth. The UK court ruling is the latest setback on the way to what could be the Disney company's financial ruination for (ironically!) trademark infringement.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Labs' loss-leading 4GB drive
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DATE: 01/22/2004 11:40:31 AM
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Creative Labs sells its Muvo2 4GB music player for $299, and includes a 4GB Microdrive, an item that retails on its own for $499. Here are step-by-step instructions for removing the Microdrive (which isn't soldered on), so that you can install it in another device, such as a digital camera. Also included are instructions for installing a cheaper 1GB drive in the Muvo2, so that you end up with a functional music-player when you're done as well.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Robot imagery gallery
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DATE: 01/22/2004 12:10:37 PM
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Nice little gallery of images of robots from album covers, advertising, funnybooks and stock photos.
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DVD cartel backs off, EFF wins, DVD keys aren't "secret"
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DATE: 01/22/2004 01:33:10 PM
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EFF won an important legal battle today. DVDCCA, the Hollywood licensing body that runs DVD, has dropped its bullshit suit against Andrew Bunner, a client of ours whom they accused of misappropriating their secret keys -- "secret" in this instance meaning, "available on millions of webservers all over the world."
"DeCSS has been available on hundreds if not thousands of
websites for 4 years now," said EFF Legal Director Cindy
Cohn. "We're pleased that the DVD CCA has finally stopped
attempting to deny the obvious: DeCSS is not a secret."
The California Supreme Court last year ruled that one could
apply preliminary restraint on publication of a computer
program only in very narrow circumstances. DVD CCA sued
Bunner along with hundreds of people, including some T-shirt
manufacturers.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Google AdSense Sandbox Tool
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DATE: 01/22/2004 02:24:44 PM
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John Battelle (who has a great blog about Internet seach business and technology) points out a neat little page that lets you enter a URL and see what kind of Google ads would appear on it. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nag "Revenge of the Nerds"'s Poindexter into getting his picture took
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DATE: 01/22/2004 02:40:21 PM
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Jon sez, " We are currenly putting together a tremendous reunion of everyone from the cast of the Revenge of The Nerds for a special photoshoot. Only problem is, the guy who played Poindexter is holding out! Currently we are running a petition to try to persuade him to change his mind."
Link
(Thanks, Jon!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: R.I.P. George Woodbridge, 73
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DATE: 01/22/2004 03:14:19 PM
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George Woodbridge, a longtime Mad cartoonist died this week. He was 73. I always thought he had a low opinion of human beings, because he drew them so ugly. Not cartoony ugly, like Basil Wolverton, but blotchy and smelly and decaying from the inside out. He was a damn fine artist, though.
Known for his delicately crosshatched pen-and-ink style, he was equally adept at caricature, at evoking historical styles and skewering Madison Avenue. A typical Woodbridge target was the suburban dweller, who progressed over the years from his early-1960's incarnation as a commuter-train-chasing executive in a button-down shirt to his overweight, barbecuing 1970's counterpart clad in polyester and plaid.
NYT Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: I'm Feeling Lucky bookmarklets
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DATE: 01/22/2004 04:11:55 PM
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Tara "Google Hacks" Calishain has created a bunch of neat Google bookmarklets for Moz/NS/Opera and MSIE that allow you to replace your bookmarks with "I'm Feeling Lucky" keywords. Simply click the bookmarklet, enter your keyword, and be whisked to the canonical googlepage for that string.
Link
(Thanks, Tara!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Space Mountain car and other cool disneycrap for auction
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DATE: 01/22/2004 04:18:38 PM
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Disney's just posted a ton of cool crap at their eBay auction site. Pick of the litter is definitely the Space Mountain ride capsule, but I'm also partial to the Pirates of the Caribbean movie prop shirt, the Haunted Mansion movie Knight maquette and the PeopleMover car.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Orkut.com, affiliated with Google, launches.
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DATE: 01/22/2004 07:48:03 PM
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Yet another social networking site launches: Orkut.com. All I know about it is that supercool BoingBoing buddy Justin Hall is a member, the site was launched "in affiliation with Google", it includes a friend rating system (ascribe degrees of various attributes to your Orkutsters -- hipness, h4wtness, whatever), and it's asking me to invite all of my friends. (loud retching sounds).
Update: The site's mastermind is Orkut Buyukkokten, a Stanford CS PhD. candidate and Google software engineer. He developed the project during personal time at work that Google grants each of its employees. CNET, Search Engine Watch, and The Register now have stories online.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Christopher Coppola, filmmaker and digivangelist, has a blog.
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DATE: 01/22/2004 08:00:12 PM
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Director and digital filmmaking evangelist Christopher Coppola (IMDB link, production company link) launched a photo/audio/mobile/text blog a few months ago. Lately, it's really falling into a sweet stride. At left, a photo posted today to mark the passing of a family member. Mr. Coppola and the legion of digital filmmaking wizards he houses in Hollywood are up to many interesting things. I expect great stuff to come to light on and off the blog from him this year.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Microsoft MSN wireless watches released
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DATE: 01/22/2004 08:15:18 PM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine (/OUT-mess-geen/) says:
These are neat rechargeable watches that feed you weather, headlines, etc. just like your alphanumeric pager did back in 1993. Ironically, I saw the ad on Weather.com. Coverage is sparse. It took me a couple tries on the zip to find the coverage near Los Angeles (hint: 91301 bad, 90066 good.) I have no idea what it's like elsewhere. (I hate zipcode lookup applets that don't give you proximity.) Microsoft MSN site showing all the watches: link. Fossil site for the Dick Tracy watch: link. From the website:
"MSNR Direct is a specialized wireless service that delivers personalized information through enabled watches. Smart Watches with MSN Direct provide you timely, glanceable information conveniently available at the flick of the wrist. Receive accurate time and stay connected to the information that matters most to you including news, weather, sports, stocks, personal messages, appointment reminders, and more. Find everything from a stock quote to the latest sports scores of your favorite team all with a simple glance!"
Sparse details on actual services provided (no games, mp3s or ringtones, apparently), Services include news, weather, stock quotes, appointment reminders, and personal messages. I don't know if I'll give up my Tokyo Flash watch just yet. Maybe I can go retro 80's multi-watch.
link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Davosblogging
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DATE: 01/22/2004 08:17:24 PM
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BoingBoing's French Connection Jean-Luc says:
a french businessman blogger named Loic Le Meur blogs in English live from the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Master roboticist Cynthia Brezeal speaks in SF on Mon., Feb. 2
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DATE: 01/22/2004 08:17:54 PM
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David Calkins, Robolympics creator and president of the Robotics Society of America, says:
Dr.
Cynthia Breazeal, inventor of the super-cool robot Kismet and researcher in socially intelligent humanoid robots at MIT's Robotic Life Group, will be giving a talk in SF on Monday February 2nd at the Commonwealth Club. Dr. Breazeal is one of the world's greatest roboticists, and make robots that truly interact with humans. Breazeal is internationally known for creating compelling robotic creatures with a "living" presence. Her current research pushes the state of the art in building socially intelligent robots that can interact with and learn from people in a natural and intuitive manner. Tickets are $18.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Saturday in LA: Robot Golem Voodoo Art
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DATE: 01/22/2004 08:22:08 PM
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sixspace in Los Angeles opens a new show of robots-as-golems art this Saturday -- from artists Martin Ontiveros and Donovan Crosby. Gallery co-owner Caryn Coleman says:
"The reception for Risen is Saturday, January 24th, from 7-10 pm. The show continues through February 28th.
Risen explores the themes in differing folklore: Ontiveros (Portland) depicts the deed-doer Golem from Jewish folklore with his signature-style robots in his paintings on wood and bottles while Crosby (Los Angeles) takes haunting tales from voodoo tales to create a little black magic in her lush work. The title Risen is derived from the rising souls in Golem's quests or the rising of evil, such as zombies or spells, in voodoo.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Awesome online gallery of funky Tokyo pix
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DATE: 01/22/2004 08:36:53 PM
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A slew of wonderful images on My Private Tokyo right now. Link (thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Death Stick Hammers: "Make the nail bleed."
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DATE: 01/22/2004 09:32:27 PM
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Macho/goth hardware for hanging pictures of death-metal heroes and stuff.
Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Alan Reiter on MSN watches: they will suck
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DATE: 01/23/2004 08:14:10 AM
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Do those MSN SPOT watches stand a chance? Mobile data pundit Alan Reiter says (this) (and this), summarized by BB reader John Troyer:
- They're big and ugly
- They need to be recharged daily
- They crash and sometimes die when shocked with static electricity
- They have to be turned off on planes
- Coverage is spotty compared to pagers and mobile phones
- News blurbs are 25-word useless snippets
- You have to tell MSN when and where you are traveling for it to work away from your home area!
- Nobody's *ever* made money selling generic headlines, weather and sports via wireless.
Reiter also says:
"However, syncing with MS Outlook is useful, and Reiter does believe they could catch on if Microsoft repositions to emphasize the fun aspects: downloadable watch faces, games, etc. ... [The watches] look as if they were designed by the Borg, on a very bad day. Many years ago Motorola introduced its first pager watch, I was there. I was pretty excited about the product. But when I spoke with a Motorola executive, he said the company wasn't sure whether the target market would view the device as a smallest, sexiest pager or as the world's ugliest watch. Unfortunately for Motorola, the view was the latter. Pager watches have generally died quick or lingering deaths. But the operative word is "death."
Link to earlier BoingBoing entry on MSN SPOT Watches
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Supermodel meat sports
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DATE: 01/23/2004 08:23:06 AM
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Kooky quicktime short. Atkins sex. If bikini-clad supermodels cavorting with lunchmeat is your idea of hot online action -- then consider this the jackpot, baby. The whole mad cow thing adds an extra-sexy whiff of danger. Carb-free and work-safe (unless you work in a vegan ashram). Link (via Fleshbot, which provides more background here)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Flexible Screen Technology Almost Ready To Roll
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DATE: 01/23/2004 09:09:23 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says:
I already wrote about roll-up screens for televisions or for computers. Now, researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T) say that, sooner or later, "powering up your laptop may require that you unroll it first." Engineers at U of T have developed "flexible organic light emitting devices (FOLEDs), technology that could lay the groundwork for future generations of bendable television, computer and cellphone screens." FOLED technology could be manufactured using a low-cost, high-efficiency mass production method and products should be available within two to three years. This overview contains more details and references. It also includes a very nice picture of the lead researcher showing such a flexible device.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Partycar in SF this evening
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DATE: 01/23/2004 09:16:15 AM
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Are you in the Bay Area today? Join a bunch of hackers and geeks and BoingBoing freaks for a spontaneous, digitally-organized BART party. Pole dancing is inevitable. At left, Macki from Rotten.com practices. An anonymous partycarster says, "The last car on the BART is always the party car. Critical mass transit. Friday, Jan 23rd - 16th/mission BART - Richmond train departing at 5:30 if you miss that train, get the next one. bring music, visuals, people."
Link. Anthem. Hey, we could do this in Los Angeles, too -- if anyone could figure out where the mass transit was.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogging and Journaism Conference, Jan 26-27
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DATE: 01/23/2004 09:17:04 AM
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Justin sez, "First of its kind conference held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Journalism School, exploring the relationship between journalism and blogging."
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(Thanks, Justin!)
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TITLE: Pepsi ads to feature file-sharing teens
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DATE: 01/23/2004 09:20:21 AM
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Pepsi is recruiting RIAA-targetted file-sharers for its TV ads.
Some 20 teens sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, which accuses them of unauthorized downloads, will appear in a Pepsi-Cola (PEP) ad that kicks off a two-month offer of up to 100 million free -- and legal -- downloads from Apple's iTunes, the leading online music seller. The sassy ad, to be seen by Super Bowl's 88 million viewers on Feb 1, is a wink at the download hot button. Pepsi hopes the promotion will connect its flagship cola, as well as Sierra Mist and Diet Pepsi, with teens who've shown more affinity for bottled water, energy drinks and the Internet.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to Make Money Selling Your Body to Science While You're Still Alive
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DATE: 01/23/2004 09:31:13 AM
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New Canoe University offers a one day course on ways to make money as a human test subject in medical trials, or selling your body after you die. This reminded me of a Loompanics book from a while back called Sell Yourself to Science that Jim Hogshire wrote, which got me to thinking about how Jim was in this incredible article from Harpers about extracting opium from poppies. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)
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TITLE: Law and Order coloring book
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DATE: 01/23/2004 09:54:46 AM
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Brandon Bird has made his very own fan-art Law and Order coloring book -- and produced a limited-edition print run at $12 per.
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(via Dive into Mark)
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TITLE: Origami mini-iPod from rip-off artists CDW
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DATE: 01/23/2004 12:08:42 PM
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From CDW comes an origami mini-iPod. A lot lamer than the other origami iPod, which is unsurprising, given that CDW are a bunch of rip-off artists (I once ordered an iPod from them, got a confirmation, and then got a phone-call telling me they were sold out the iPod at the price they'd confirmed, but could sell me one for $200 more).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Free After Rebate - The best things in life are free, after sixto eight weeks
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DATE: 01/23/2004 12:41:03 PM
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This website lists stuff that ends up costing you nothing except the (sometimes costly) shipping charges. What a great idea.Link (via GlennLog)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hey Ya, Charlie Brown!
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DATE: 01/23/2004 04:16:38 PM
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Really cute and oddly fitting re-edit of Peanuts clips to Outkast's catchy jam. Link (Thanks, Gabe!)
Update: The creators' server is down, but this link is working for the moment.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Interactive Zip-code explorer
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DATE: 01/23/2004 04:58:53 PM
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Darren sez, "Okay, get this: You look at a map of the United States, with each zip code represented as a single white dot. You punch in a zip code - say, your own - and watch as the applet zooms down on that specific location. For example, the entire country is white dots to begni with; then, when you hit '9', only the West Coast lights up; with '0', Los Angeles, and then '210' narrows it down to Beverly Hills in specific. It's frighteningly addictive."
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(Thanks, Darren!)
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TITLE: wonkette launches
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DATE: 01/23/2004 05:03:09 PM
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Latest citadel in the Denton empire? The highly-anticipated beltway insider blog Wonkette, which launched today and is penned by Ana Marie Cox (former writer of Wired Digital's Suck column).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Helmut Newton passes away
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DATE: 01/23/2004 05:37:14 PM
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Photographer Helmut Newton died in LA today. Link to news, Link to online archives of his work. (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wedding cake casemod
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DATE: 01/23/2004 11:28:54 PM
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A casemodder proposed to his girlfriend by building her a wedding-cake PC with a miniature bride and groom, a secret ring-tray, and ribbon-wrapped, illuminated internal connectors visible through a cutaway transparency.
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(Thanks, Jay!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tin robots in impressionistic oil
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DATE: 01/23/2004 11:32:45 PM
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Eric Joyner's gallery of his impressionistic oil-paintings of tin robots is endless fun. He sells a bunch of them as prints.
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(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIP, Whole Earth Review
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DATE: 01/23/2004 11:35:44 PM
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Whole Earth magazine has gone bust (they owe me money!) (and they changed my life!) (and their editorial board insisted on utterly stupid edits to the story they owe me money for!) (and they really did change my life!) (boy, those were stupid edits!). This is bad news.
Whole Earth magazine -- spawn of the amazing Whole Earth Catalogs, source of the WELL, first to mention in print the Gaia Hypothesis, the Internet, Virtual Reality, the Singularity and Burning Man (or at least so the legend goes), the place where folks like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold found their voices, and where a whole generation of young commune-kid geeks like myself learned to dream weird -- is no more.
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(Thanks, Alex!)
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TITLE: Twitch game to end all twitch games
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DATE: 01/23/2004 11:53:41 PM
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Dolphin Dash is white-hot searingly intense twitch game, the kind of thing that feels like it was designed to be played by people on better stimulants than I'll ever lay hands on. You navigate a dolphin through a sidescroll and collect coins and power-ups, but it all happens so fast and with so much crazy-ass surf guitar, it almost hurts. "Time for lunch," the power-up sound effect, is ringing in my ears like the afterburn of a savage beating.
375K Flash Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to spot a trendy logo
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DATE: 01/24/2004 07:51:46 AM
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Interesting piece on current trends in logo design (merging blobs, swooshes, pop-art finneals, the color green, wireframes, etc). Though it strikes me that, given my penchant for dinstinctiveness in logomarks that I would be likely to use this as a crib-sheet for critiquing the logo-development undertaken by my design-firm: "Dude, a green wireframe swooshy pop-art blob? That is so played-out. I want the new-new." Or, as Ian McDonald put it in his brilliant novel, Out on Blue Six:
So I said, like, whazz new, I mean, like new new, not old new, yuh know, like last-week new, so she said, this yulp in the shop, "This is new," like she said, "Cheez, like everyone, but everyone's going to be wearing one next week," like, whazz a yulp know 'bout fashion? Anyway, I thought, well, maybeez sheez right, so, I got one, so I did like, whadyou think? Isn't it wheeeee! like. Isn't it the most? Meanasay, you not got fashion, you not got nothing!
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(via Smartpatrol)
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TITLE: Europe to get fake-tree microwave masts
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DATE: 01/24/2004 07:59:22 AM
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A Dutch company has acquired a license to market Envirocom's fake-tree cellular masts in Europe -- the next stately pine you whizz past between Reims and Disneyland Paris might contain a giant, carcingoenic microwave tower.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ian McDonald's Kling Klang Klatch
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DATE: 01/24/2004 08:06:22 AM
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Thinking about Ian McDonald for the post on logomarks below got me thinking about McDonald's stone-brilliant 1992 graphic novel, Kling Klang Klatch, illustrated by David Lyttleton. Unlike much of McDonald's most amazing work, Kling Klang Klatch is still in print, which makes me feel like there's maybe just a little justice in this universe.
Kling Klang Klatch is a hardboiled detective story that revolves around the lyrics to various classic Tom Waits lyrics, in ways both trivial (The diner menu lists "Eggs and sausage, side of toast, coffee and a roll, hashbrowns over easy, chili in a bowl") and significant. The kicker is that all the characters in this really grisly murder mystery are teddy bears, dollies and other toys, executed in vicious lines that make their cuddliness into something sinister.
Heartbreak and psoriasis, my friend.
I am telling you, it's all heartbreak and psoriasis.
Five a.m. on the greasy streets of a city that never sleeps, the dolls are on the hard stuff and the transport's about to strike again. On the news it's all bombs and killing machines the size of tenement blocks. The only consolation for a weary middle aged cop on his way home is a little illegal sugar and some sweet tenor sax.
But that was before they found the body that looked like somebody and unzipped it then scooped out all its insides. And the three words scrawled on an alley wall.
Three red words, so fresh they were still dripping.
KLING KLANG KLATCH
It's enough to knock out anyone's stuffing. And in Toyland, that's no joke.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dollar bills used as advertising
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DATE: 01/24/2004 08:20:08 AM
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More proof that the dollar is being devalued: it's lost its sanctity to marketing execs. A new TV show about dope-dealers is being promoted through stickers on dollar bills that will be given away in bars:
The network is distributing 50,000 one-dollar bills in trendy bars in Los Angeles and New York. Affixed on each of those bills: a removable sticker bearing the USA Network logo, along with the title and airtime of the three-part miniseries.
Based on the movie of the same title, the show is about drug dealers, users, and the position of cash at the center of drug culture lifestyles.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: McDonald's diet makes you sick as hell
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DATE: 01/24/2004 12:08:02 PM
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Lorin sez, "Documentary maker subsists on McDonalds 'food' 3 meals per day for 30 days, gets sick as hell."
Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock's entire body deteriorated.
"It was really crazy - my body basically fell apart over the course of 30 days," Spurlock told The Post.
His liver became toxic, his cholesterol shot up from a low 165 to 230, his libido flagged and he suffered headaches and depression.
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(Thanks, Lorin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More Howard Dean remixes
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DATE: 01/24/2004 01:28:07 PM
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Dean Goes Nuts is a Creative-Commons-licensed collection of remixes of Howard Dean's "I Have a Scream" speech.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free WiFi coming to Best Western
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DATE: 01/24/2004 04:31:17 PM
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Every Best Western hotel in the US, Canada and the Caribbean will have free open WiFi by Sept 1. Tell you what, I've got a new default choice for hotels when I travel. Let's start finding ways of holding conferences at BW's instead of high-ticket Hyatts and Marriotts with their craptacular $10/day WiFi.
"It's the No. 1 amenity requested by virtually everyone, especially businesspeople, said Tom Higgins, CEO and president of the Phoenix-based hotel chain. "High-speed Internet for free is going to be where it's at."
Link
(via matthowie)
Update: Glenn adds, "It's a mix of hardwired and Wi-Fi. They're actually not precisely
promising that you'll have access in every room. They'll loan you a
wireless card for rooms that don't have a hardwired line, but that
doesn't necessary mean (at least initially) that every room will have a
good Wi-Fi connection."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Life on the pro Dance Dance Revolution circuit
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DATE: 01/25/2004 12:31:28 AM
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Yoz has posted a great account of his encounter with a touring clade of pan-European Dance Dance Revolution obsessives:
"We're a group of DDR players in Norway." Do they play other bemani games? "No, just DDR." He points to the guy he was playing with, now off the machine and chatting to his girlfriend. "He's from Sweden, he has a DDR group there too." The machine is now in the control of the third chap, a large-ish bloke with shoulder-length hair. "He has a group in France, but they play all kinds of music games." Do you guys play competitively? "Sometimes... like tomorrow. It's why we're all here - there's a big contest at the Namco arcade in Westminster. There'll be players from four different countries. It's pretty big."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 100 reasons abstinence is doomed
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DATE: 01/25/2004 12:42:34 AM
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Guideposts For Teens, a pro-abstinence org, has posted a list of 100 things for teens to do instead of savagely shagging one another. It is a very, very lame list.
6. Play hide-and-seek in a cornfield... (if a body meet a body comin' through the rye)
9. Pray together. (Jesus Jesus Jesus, don't stop)
10. Do a crossword puzzle... (What's a four-letter word for -- oh, nevermind)
21. Watch your favorite Disney movie... (Dude, this is totally one of my major turn-ons)
34. Color eggs -- even if it isn't Easter... (yes, that's right, encourage them to fetishize the reproductive cells of chickens)
100. Wash your parent's cars. (Ohhhhh, soapy t-shirts)
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(Thanks, justpat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Table Hockey documentary premiere today at 1PM in Canada
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DATE: 01/25/2004 09:22:06 AM
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My friend Thor's documentary -- TABLE HOCKEY (the movie) -- about the passions of 'international men of table hockey', is airing across Canada on CTV, at 1:00 PM local time today. (Check local listings) These guys are good, really good. They even have a school.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: If IKEA was a video game
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DATE: 01/25/2004 09:30:06 AM
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Treating spousally mandated IKEA visits as a video-game seems like a pretty good coping strategy, especially when you've got a walk-through to crib from. This is a screamingly funny piece from The Morning News.
You start this world armed only with a UNIVERSAL FURNITURE-ASSEMBLY ALLEN WRENCH. This is the weakest weapon in IKEA: You will have to hit a person 16 times with it to kill them. So your primary goal in this level is to find more lethal means of dispatching your enemies.
As you enter the SHOWROOM, perform a rolling dodge to the left. Grab a free PAPER TAPE MEASURE and a handful of IKEA EMBLAZONED GOLF PENCILS from the kiosk near the entryway. The PENCILS serve quite well as ranged weapons, but it will take some time to master their use. Before venturing further in the world, stand at the kiosk and practice hurling GOLF PENCILS at patrons as they enter the SHOWROOM. Remember: Hitting the eyes does triple damage.
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(via Dive Into Mark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Get Your State of the Union On
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DATE: 01/25/2004 01:37:59 PM
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Get Your War On tackles the State of the Union speech.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Has Columbus found a solution to homelessness?
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DATE: 01/25/2004 09:08:06 PM
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Columbus, OH is entering its fifth year of a radical approach to dealing with homelessness, providing subsidised housing instead of shelter-beds, and the program is looking like a real success, both at addressing homelessness and at curbing budgets for coping with homelessness-related problems. I've passed three public urinators and two public defecators, two passed out junkies and two fixing, all on my block, just this weekend. Maybe San Francisco can look to Columbus for some answers before the city is destroyed by human-feces-borne disease, infectious needles and flash-floods of toxic piss.
Studying shelters in Philadelphia and New York City in the 1990s, Culhane found that although the long-term homeless made up only 10 percent of the homeless population over three years, they were using half of all shelter beds on any given night. And when Culhane compared the costs of supporting those with and without permanent housing, he discovered that it cost a city just $1,000 more annually per person to offer supportive housing - with services for mental health, addictions, employment, and other needs - than to care for the chronically homeless.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kill Bill 2 trailer
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DATE: 01/25/2004 09:14:09 PM
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The trailer for Kill Bill Volume 2 is up -- and the DVD for Kill Bill Volume 1 is out soon.
12.2MB Quicktime Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beautiful lamps
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DATE: 01/25/2004 09:18:12 PM
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Beautiful, sculptural lamps to admire and buy.
Link
(Thanks, Evan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cambodian hybrid motorcycle/WiFi network
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DATE: 01/25/2004 09:48:00 PM
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In Cambodia, WiFi-equipped motorcyclists pull up to schools, download all the email, drive to the next village, and dump off copies of locally-destined mail, picking up that community's load and delivering it along to the next town.
It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The system, developed by a Boston company, First Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle's battery. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village's outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. The school's computer system and antenna are powered by solar panels. Newly collected data is stored for the day in a computer strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung, where an advanced school is equipped with a satellite dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside world.
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(via WiFiNetNews)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Coop Linux: scary kernel hack
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DATE: 01/26/2004 06:18:45 AM
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Wes "Kernel Hacker" Felter describes Cooperative Linux as, "a scary hack that loads the Linux kernel into the NT kernel as a driver so that they can both run in ring 0 at the same time, allowing Linux apps to run full speed on Windows without porting."
Link
(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 320,000 ping-pong balls
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DATE: 01/26/2004 06:56:52 AM
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I can't really figure out what's going on here -- Japanese people creating an "experiment" involving 320,000 ping-pong balls and a ski jump. Whatever the science, it sure is photogenic.
Link
(Thanks, Thomas)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Multifaceted history of the Mac from Andy Hertzfeld and co
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:02:38 AM
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The Folklore project is legendary designer Andy Hertzfeld's collaborative undertaking to collect anaecdotes from the birth of the Macintosh from the people who were there when it went down. Multiple perspectives illuminate the subjetivity of memory and the way that things are different from different points of view. (The back-end is a new software project meant to allow for folkloric collection and organization regarding any subject).
The first time we went to lunch, I found out that Burrell's creativity extended beyond his engineering work. He would often try to convince our waitress to concoct variations of the standard fare on the menu, thinking of something different every time.
For example, after he successfully persuaded a waitress to divide his pizza toppings into thirds, he asked her to do fifths the next time. Or he would sometimes try to order mixed sodas as if they were cocktails, in ever varying proportions, like three quarters Coke, and one quarter Sprite. Often, the waitress would balk but Burrell was sometimes charming enough to eventually convince her to comply. He would also obsess on certain foods, becoming fixated on Bulgarian Beef sandwiches from Vivi's for a while, and then a Pineapple Pizza phase (see Pineapple Pizza) , evolving to his most enduring favorite, sushi, which provided a new range of interesting choices and combinations.
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(via blogaritaville)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vintage Masonic gag catalog
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:06:01 AM
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The 1930 edition of the Burlesque and Side Degree Specialties, Paraphernalia and Costumes for Freemasons, scanned and posted to the Web. Now these are practical jokes!
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Electrically curdle your fat to tighten your skin
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:11:38 AM
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ThermaCool is a newly approved nonsurgical skin-tightening procedure that involves cryogenicallly freezing surface tissues while baking the tissue beneath with jolts of electricity. The result is sub-surface burn-curdling, which causes the visible effect of skin-tightening on the surface.
"When you normally use radio-frequency technology, you get kind of a welding effect, where all the heat and energy are focused on one point," Byrnes said. "We are able to spread that heat over a large surface area -- a couple centimeters square -- which allows us to deliver large volumes of heat deep into the tissue."
A special filter diffuses the electromagnetic waves, so instead of welding the skin, the device can heat the dermis and subcutaneous tissue to about 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Farenheit), which causes collagen to contract.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Election contributions via Amazon
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:15:30 AM
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Amazon is now processing political contributions for presidential candidates.
"For us, we think this is an interesting but natural extension of what we do every day," said Amazon spokesman Chris Bruzzo. "Our goal here was to make it as easy for people to make contributions to presidential campaigns as it is to buy the latest Harry Potter book."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pink tank
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:19:18 AM
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I'm quite taken with this pink art-tank (and the photodocumentary of its transformation) that's now parked near the London Bridge tube. Like a sword beaten into a pink ploughshare.
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(via Beyond the Beyond)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wireless Future conference at SXSW
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:22:52 AM
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This year's South By Southwest conference in Austin will feature a sub-conference on spectrum and wireless -- "The Wireless Future" -- that I'll be speaking at.
A four-day conference on the future of wireless, with full access to SXSW Interactive, that will include esteemed speakers such as:
* Keynote Speaker, Howard Rheingold -- Author, Smart Mobs
* Kevin Werbach -- Analyst/Writer
* Cory Doctorow -- Electronic Frontier Foundation
* David Weinberger -- Author, Small Pieces Loosely Joined
* David Isenberg -- Prosultant
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Red vs. Blue
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:24:43 AM
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There's a new episode of Red vs Blue online -- RvB being the machinima-animated comedy serial made by editing together screen-movies from the game Halo and overlaying a voice-track. This is a particularily good one -- I'm still chuckling.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Were Iraqi WMDs a kleptocratic con-job?
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:27:38 AM
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Calpundit believes that Saddam's WMDs were ginned up by scamming Iraqi scientists, who get lots of fake weapons programs funded in order to funnel off the money.
An increasingly out-of-touch Saddam makes sense. High-level scientists faking programs in order to get money for their own pet causes makes sense. Saddam's attitude toward the inspections makes sense because he thought there really were active WMD programs in place that would take time to dismantle. And it may be that even some of the exiles were telling the truth when they reported that Iraq still had active large-scale WMD programs. They might have been scammed the same way Saddam was.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: video: Ramiro Torres
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:34:21 AM
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Video artist and producer Ramiro Torres is best known for his sexy, creepy interstitial clips for MTV Latin America. Wanna see them on MTV USA? Don't hold your breath. Instead, click here. (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Towards a non-evil social networking service
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:36:47 AM
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Within an hour of the launch of Orkut, Google's new YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service), I had written a mail filter that silently discarded invitations to join (it's the same filter that tosses out mail from Ryze, Friendster and all those other services, which drive me completely bonkers, since I already know who my friends are, am not actively trying to get laid, and don't need the "service" of having to risk offending near-strangers who want me to confirm some notional "friendship" between us a dozen times a day and I certainly can't think of a good reason to entrust some commercial outfit with my personal relationship data).
Do these things have to suck? Damnifiknow. I know that there's a bunch of stuff I'd like from a social network analysis of my own inbox, voicecalls, and so forth. Today, I have an iTunes playlist ("Old friends") that just plays highly rated songs that haven't been played in the past 30 days. Why not a smart to-do list that reminds me to email old friends that I haven't called or written in the last season (credit: Alice)? Hell, how about something that gives me a distinctive ringtone for calls from out-of-touch old pals and the option to define attention-grabbing behavior (a chime, a prioritization, coloring) when they email?
Foe Romeo talks about how Google could have launched a YASNS that actually provided a useful service that end-users could still control but that Google could add a lot of value to: a FOAF explorer:
Google would not create its own closed social network, Orkut, but would instead make FOAF one of its quick searches,
so that FOAF:Fiona Romeo would return my FOAF file as the primary
search result, with friend and location filtering options. (Content
about Fiona Romeo would also be returned but would be differentiated.)
Perhaps Google could add value by introducing a sense of authentication to FOAF, by indicating reciprocal links between FOAF files. I know that this result for Fiona Romeo is the correct one because her friends link to it. Oh, and I know that Matt Jones is really a friend of Fiona Romeo, because he says so too. (Plink, a FOAF search tool, gets this bit right.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hip-hop blog hit?
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:37:33 AM
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BoingBoing's French connection
Jean-Luc points us to the first "ill blog-vs.-sucka" weblog war song. "Will it be the first HipHop music hit about blogging? you can download the song there -- Now I know Why The Unicorn Cries -- and see the lyrics too."
you think your tiny sucky blog makin me feel fear?
I get more hits in a week than you get all year
you cry a tear cuz you're jealous about my fame
talk a good one but never call me out by name (...)
small time dropping small thoughts for small minds
up against THE GREATEST HIP-HOP BLOG OF ALL TIME!? (portentous echo)
Link. Yeah, boyeeeee!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Australia Day bangs like a dunny door in a windstorm
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:45:47 AM
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Happy Australia day! To all my Aussie pals (P, Foe, Katie, Trog, Phil and Carolyn and the sprogs, Jess and Muz, Gwen and Ernie, Martin, Ian, Pete, Droopy, Natalie, Jazza and the rest of you), have a round of two-up for me, and boil me a billy, OK?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Avacado thievery turns rural SoCal into high-crime area with specialized cops
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:50:04 AM
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The "Guac Cops" are a special squad of San Diego-area cops who specialize in busting -- and jailing! -- sneak-thieves who rob small avacado growers of thousands of dollars' worth of "green gold," especially around Superbowl season, when the fences are greedy for chip-dip.
Although there is no set profile of an avocado thief, law enforcement officials say many of them are transients or petty thieves who steal to support a drug habit, sometimes selling avocados to naive or unscrupulous roadside stands and restaurants or to wholesalers in Los Angeles. Last summer, in broad daylight, avocado thieves in Bonsall, west of Valley Center, shot at grove workers as they made their getaway. There were no injuries, but he thieves were never caught.
Ms. Cruz of the San Diego County sheriff's office said there tended to be a correlation between price and theft. Although reputable packing houses require documentation showing where avocados were grown, including an authorized signature, she said it was not difficult to launder avocados -- especially around the Super Bowl, which, along with Cinco de Mayo, is the biggest avocado day of the year. "They go anyplace you can think of," she said of rustled fruit. "There's a lot of guacamole out there."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: blog-based campaign to open Iranian Parliament to ordinary Iranians
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DATE: 01/26/2004 07:56:25 AM
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Blogger Hossein Derakshan says, "Project 'Ordinary Iranians for Parliament' needs your help." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney may offer cellular service
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DATE: 01/26/2004 08:02:23 AM
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Disney, Sony, Nike, and Wal-Mart are all considering getting into the cellular service market.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What kind of people are companies?
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DATE: 01/26/2004 08:11:42 AM
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Here's a good Kottke post about The Corporation, a Sundance-winning flick (with accompanying book) that considers the implications of treating companies as legal persons.
...the feature documentary employes a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites returns to Iraq, new photos and essays from Baghdad
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DATE: 01/26/2004 08:35:36 AM
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NBC combat correspondent and weblogger Kevin Sites has returned to Iraq, and posts two new entries to his blog today: "Coming Home," a dispatch about the psychological challenge for soldiers to "turn off the killer switch" as they prepare to return to their families in the US -- and a photo essay, excerpted here.
"These families of a rural neighborhood called Albo Eatha, south of Baghdad, were awakened at dawn by the 82nd Airborne's Alpha Company, 2nd Platoon, so their houses could be searched and their cooperation requested in stopping insurgent activities. Despite the early hour, the woman and children seemed cheerful. The imposition became an opportunity for them to socialize -- while helicopters and jet fighters flew overhead."
Links: PHOTO ESSAY: Women and Children of Albo Eatha, and DISPATCH: Coming Home. Discussion forum here.
UPDATE: Kevin has just posted a series of new photos to accompany the dispatch "Coming Home." Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Screamingly funny lists of 5
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DATE: 01/26/2004 08:47:50 AM
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Merlin Mann continues to post to his list of fives. I've blogged this before, but it keeps on getting funnier. It took me ten minutes to swallow my mouthful of tea while paging through this, because I was worried that I'd choke on the laughter. Someone should give Merlin a job writing for Mad Magazine. This is, character for character, the funniest goddamned page on the net.
Five possible reasons there's a stretch limo parked outside
1. Japanese businessmen are considering a leveraged buyout of the Sunset District
2. Little Laotian man around the corner is secretly a rich, hostile pimp
3. Someone's about to receive a giant, novelty-sized check from Ed McMahon
4. The 85-year-old man next door is about to get a Queer Eye makeover
5. I'm actually Bon Jovi
Five ways I tend to feel after speaking with Sprint's Customer Service
1. Like I was just traded to another inmate for 2 packs of menthol cigarettes
2. Like I've been slapped repeatedly with a half-frozen sturgeon
3. Like I've accidentally just agreed to finish the homework of every kid in my middle school
4. Like somewhere in a big Sprint building, there's a fat man with a monocle and a top hat smoking a cigar while dancing a jig and holding a fat bag of five-dollar bills with my bewildered face on it
5. Very, very unclean
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Joel on Software on resumes
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DATE: 01/26/2004 09:26:44 AM
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Killer Joel on Software rant about how to write a tech resume -- though this could handily apply to any situation where you're trying to wheedle a favor out of someone alongside of many other wheedlers: sending a manuscript to a publisher, raising money from investors, or even trying to get someone to blog your project.
Don't tell me about one of the requirements of the position and then tell me that you don't want to follow it. "One of the requirements for Summer Internship says that you need to interview in person in New York City. I am interested in the position but I stay in East Nowhere, TN." OK, that's nice, hon, you stay there. Another PS, I thought we said in the requirements "Excellent command of written and spoken English." Oh, yes, indeed, that was our first requirement. So at least do yourself a favor and get someone to check your cover letter for obvious mistakes. Like I said, don't give me an excuse to throw your resume in the trash.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Confessions of a Car Salesman
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DATE: 01/26/2004 10:48:38 AM
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Edmunds (the car buyer information company) sent a reporter undercover to work as a car salesman and report back on the tricks of the trade. It's a great read, and there's a dealer jargon glossary at the end of the piece.
Pounder - A deal with $1,000 profit in it. "Doctor comes in and buys the top of the line model, fully loaded - and he pays sticker! That'll be a two pounder for me."
Rip their heads off - This describes taking a customer to the cleaners. "I stole their trade in, I sold them the car at a grand over sticker - I mean, I just ripped their heads off."
Roach - A customer with bad credit. Not to be confused with the "roach coach" (see entry below). "The guy looked good. But we ran his credit and he turned out to be a roach. We're talkin' a 400 credit score here."
Link (Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Warren Ellis on Orkut
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DATE: 01/26/2004 11:46:45 AM
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Orkut, the recently-launched, Google-affiliated FOAF (Cory critiques them -- and the bigger FOAF picture -- here), is offline for a while. Before the temporary beta outage, Warren Ellis logged on, sniffed around, then said:
Right now, it looks pretty much like an iteration of the Tribe.net system, with an eye on Friendster's apparent main function as a dating system. (Which means, oddly, it requests your business profile at the same time as it's asking you where you like to be fingered.) (...) It's faster than Fuckster and Tribe, but it shows that all these friend-of-a-friend things have really hit a wall. I mean, what can you actually do aside from invite all your friends and piss about on a couple of small message boards? Message boards that, unlike Tribe, allow anonymous postings and therefore devalue the message board experience? What happens after that? After you've gotten all your friends in -- whom you send email to or IM regularly in any case, presumably. That's it. All done. Until, I guess, yet another social network system opens and you start all over again.
These things want to be a hub for your Internet community experience, but they're just not necessary enough. Tribe gets closest, but it's nothing you're going to leave as an open window on your desktop all day. The first new social network system that builds an IM program into its structure may have a shot. The Delphiforums message boards have Jabber tacked on to them, which would have been brilliant when Delphi was at its height, but has gone pretty much unnoticed in the wake of their self-mutilating half-smart attempts to monetise. The idea was and is sound. The minute you make these things the easiest and most direct way to communicate with the personal network the system's let you build or collate, there's going to be a reason to keep the site on your desktop. And that has to be their goal. I mean, who builds a social network system that doesn't want people to use it all the time?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New FOAF acronym
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DATE: 01/26/2004 03:30:47 PM
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SNOT: Social Networking Overdose Totality.
Example: I invited all of my friends to sign up for Orfuckster this week, despite having just come down with a bad case of SNOT.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stunning political advocacy Flash.
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DATE: 01/27/2004 06:22:57 AM
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This is one of the most effective pieces of political advocacy I've ever seen. Ben Cohen, the Ben of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, narrates a short Flash movie for TrueMajority.org, in which he explains -- using Oreo cookies -- the way that the federal budget is currently apportioned, and how little rearrangement would be necessary to renew all of America's social programs. The examples are vivid and charming, and the logic is compelling.
The only thing I'd change is adding a fast-forward, pause and rewind button. I wanted to refer back to specific sections of the movie, and the "play all the way through" interface really frustrated me (just taking this screenshot was really hard).
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(via Vertical Hold)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NY Chinatown Chinese New Year QTVR
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DATE: 01/27/2004 06:42:56 AM
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Beautiful Full screen QTVR by photographer Jook Leung of the celebration of Chinese New Year on Mott Street in NYC. Includs sound! Link (Thanks, Jim)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Palahniuk story GUTS makes people barf?
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DATE: 01/27/2004 06:45:33 AM
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A controversial short story, "Guts," by Chuck Palahniuk is set for release in the March issue of Playboy. Rumor has it that when the author reads it in public, audience members flee, faint, and -- vomit. We don't know if this is true, but it sounds cool enough.
Link 1, Link 2, Amazon link . (Thanks, Susannah!)
UPDATE:
Listen to a bootleg copy of one recent GUTS reading here (MP3, 12 MB) or here (thanks, Boogah!) or here (thanks, P!)
BoingBoing reader Evan DiBiase says: "It's definitely made people flee and faint when read in public, at least. I attended a reading of the author's at the University of Pittsburgh, and several people left during the reading of the story, and at least one gentleman who was sitting near me fainted, went completely stiff, and was carried out by a few men who I presume to have been his friends. Additionally, Pahlaniuk did mention that similar things had happened elsewhere, so it seems that we Pittsburghers are not especially squeamish. (For what it's worth, I sat through the whole thing...)"
And Joshua Terrell says, "This seems to be a sort of ongoing and semi-organized public art performance that your witnesses were party to - people have been faux-vomiting, fainting and having fits at Palahniuk readings going back several years. In fact, from what I have read and heard (and seen, once, in San Francisco), something like this happens at every single one of his readings. Google it and you will find many, many references & even a few people planning "barf-ins" at his readings."
Audblog founder Noah Glass says: "Wondering if you checked out the audblog posts where he talks about people vomiting in the isles. Link, goto features, goto audioblogs, scroll down to Tuesday, September 09, 2003. There are a couple of posts where he talks about people passing out and people vomiting. "
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Protect your investment: buy open
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DATE: 01/27/2004 10:11:19 AM
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Scoble has written a weblog entry about, among other things, iTunes DRM and Microsoft DRM, and whether you should get an iPod. Scoble works for Microsoft, as do a number of good, sharp, ethical people that I know, and I know him in passing, and he seems to be a good guy. With that disclaimer out of the way, let me say that I think that this blog entry of his epitomizes the sloppiest, worst thinking about digital-media in the field today.
Scoble's point, if I understand it, is that we are going to spend a bundle acquiring music from "legit" services like the iTunes Music Store and the upcoming Microsoft music store. If we spend hundreds of dollars on digital music, we should be on the lookout to protect and maximise that investment. I agree.
Well, says Scoble, all of the music that we buy from these legit services is going to have DRM use-restriction technology ("See, when you buy music from a service like Apple's iTunes or Napster (or MSN), it comes with DRM attached."). So the issue becomes "choosing between two competing lockin schemes."
And in that choice, says Scoble, Microsoft wins, because it has more licensees of its proprietary, lock-in format. That means that when you want to play your music in your car, it's more likely that you'll find a car-stereo manufacturer that has paid Microsoft to play Microsoft music than that you'll find one that has coughed up to Apple to play Apple music.
And this is the problem with Scoble's reasoning. We have a world today where we can buy CDs, we can download DRM-music, we can download non-DRM music from legit services, we can download "pirate" music from various services, and we can sometimes defeat DRM using off-the-shelf apps for Linux (which has a CD recovery tool that handily defeats CD DRM), the Mac (with tools like AudioHijack that make it easy to convert DRM music to MP3s or other open formats) and Windows (I assume, since I don't use Windows, but as Scoble points out, there's lots of Windows software out there.).
In this world where we have consumer choices to make, Scoble argues that our best buy is to pick the lock-in company that will have the largest number of licensees.
That's just about the worst choice you can make.
If I'm going to protect my investment in digital music, my best choice is clearly to invest in buying music in a format that anyone can make a player for. I should buy films, not kinetoscopes. I should buy VHS, not Betamax. I should buy analog tape, not DAT.
Because Scoble's right. If you buy Apple Music or if you buy Microsoft Music, you're screwed if you want to do something with that music that Apple or Microsoft doesn't like.
Copyright law has never said that the guy who makes the records gets to tell you what kind of record player you can use. If Scoble and his employer want to offer a product with "features" that their customers want, those features should reflect what their customers want: No Windows user rolled out of bed this morning and said, "I wish there was a way that I could get Microsoft to deliver me tools that allow me to do less with the music I buy."
No, the "customer" for Microsoft DRM is the guy who makes the records: the music industry; and not the gal who buys the records: you. That customer has already told Microsoft how it feels about its products: in the Broadcast Flag negotiation, the movie companies locked Microsoft DRM out of consideration for use in next-generation PVRs in favor of DRM that Sony (also a movie company, surprise, surprise) had a patent for.
Microsoft is selling out its customers to people who aren't even buying. Scoble points out that Microsoft licensed the hell out of its OS to hardware vendors, pioneering a new kind of open-ness. He's right. Microsoft set a good example that Apple has been too stupid to follow, and it's time for the company to do it again. When Microsoft shipped its first search-engine (which makes a copy of every page it searches), it violated the letter of copyright law. When Microsoft made its first proxy server (which makes a copy of every page it caches), it broke copyright law. When Microsoft shipped its first CD-ripping technology, it broke copyright law.
It broke copyright law because copyright law was broken. Copyright law changes all the time to reflect the new tools that companies like Microsoft invent. If Microsoft wants to deliver a compelling service to its customers, let it make general-purpose tools that have the side-effect of breaking Sony and Apple's DRM, giving its customers more choice in the players they use. Microsoft has shown its willingness to go head-to-head with antitrust people to defend its bottom line: next to them, the copyright courts and lawmakers are pantywaists, Microsoft could eat those guys for lunch, exactly the way Sony kicked their asses in 1984 when they defended their right to build and sell VCRs, even though some people might do bad things with them. Just like the early MP3 player makers did when they ate Sony's lunch by shipping product when Sony wouldn't.
But forget Microsoft, because Scoble's not talking about the best thing for Microsoft, he's talking about the best thing for you. The best way to protect your investment in music. Without a doubt, the best way to protect that investment is to only buy music that isn't in a lock-in format, and to break the locks on any music you do own, while you can. Scoble asks what you will do if "Apple doesn't make a system that plays its AAC format in a car stereo?" I'll tell you what you should do: you should get yourself tools to turn AACs into OGGs or MP3s right now, so that you can buy any car stereo you want and play your music on it. If you can't get those tools, you shouldn't buy AACs (Student: "What do I do if three thugs follow me down a dark deserted street in the middle of the night?" "Master: Don't walk down a dark deserted street in the middle of the night.")
Microsoft can pursue the bone-stupid strategy of kowtowing to the music labels instead of delivering the tools its customers want, but it's a dead end. When Sony invented the VCR, it did so after the movie companies had already decreed that they would only license their movies for use on the "Discovision," a hunk of shit best forgotten on the trashheap of history (much like the products that Sony later delivered instead of MP3 walkmen). With the VCR, though, Sony delivered what its customers wanted, and the movie companies got rich off of it, dragged kicking and screaming to the money-tree again.
Now, that's grandiose. Now that's visionary. Next to that, Microsoft's fraidy-cat technology is suicidally stupid, and so are you if you invest in it. Protect your investment. Vote with your wallet. Buy open.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Search engine adds links to Internet Archive cache
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Gigablast, a search engine, now provides links to current versions of search-results and to older versions cached in the Internet Archive.
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(via Battelle)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MUDDA
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DATE: 01/27/2004 10:20:50 AM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Backes says: "Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel's newly announced union for musicians -- MUDDA. Stands for "MAGNIFICENT UNION OF DIGITALLY DOWNLOADABLE ARTISTS". The site has the manifesto they wrote and handed out this week at Midem." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR "Day to Day:" in-car video tech... and the law
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DATE: 01/27/2004 11:27:40 AM
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On today's edition of the National Public Radio program Day to Day:
"Never mind cell phones -- the newest trend in driver distractions is having multiple in-car video screens. Day to Day tech goddess Xeni Jardin profiles one man with 11 LCD video screens in his SUV -- even though, the man admits, he couldn't possibly fit 11 people inside. We go channel surfing on the highway."
Link to NPR feature, including photo gallery of life inside a blinged-out SUV, and archived audio.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: MP3s of former slaves telling their stories
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DATE: 01/27/2004 01:00:50 PM
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Mind blowing recordings taken between 1932 and 1975 of former slaves describing their lives.
The former slaves discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, how slaves were coerced, their families, and, of course, freedom. It is important to keep in mind, however, that all of those interviewed spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives, rather than their lives during slavery, that are reflected in their words. They have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond. As part of their testimony, several of the ex-slaves sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cambodia QTVRs
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DATE: 01/27/2004 01:29:10 PM
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Photographer and QTVR enthusiast Peter Murphy says:
I shot a few panoramas for my blog when I was in Cambodia last week. This shows the controversial wax works diorama at the Cambodian Cultural Village theme park in Siem Riep - where the UN period of Cambodian history is summarised in a scene of a UN soldier with a bar girl. Also there is this panorama I shot from a balloon 200m above the Angkor plain.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Danes invent bomb-sniffing GM flowers
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DATE: 01/27/2004 01:44:11 PM
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GM plants change color in the presence of landmines.
The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil.
Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Star wars footage leak
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DATE: 01/27/2004 02:18:05 PM
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An anonymous BoingBoing reader who really should be doing more productive things with his day points us to leaked Star Wars footage online. He says, "We may not have rocket cars like the Jetsons but we can see films online before they are even made! Someone page Gazoo! Welcome to the future. Someone's head is going to roll over there at LucasFilm! It's still up at www.filmfeed.com , catch it before a cease and desist letter does."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Actual piracy on rise, response orthagonal to RIAA's response to "piracy"`
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DATE: 01/27/2004 04:15:16 PM
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Actual piracy is on the rise. That is to say, more people are boarding more ships with more guns and shooting more people and taking more cargo, all the while uttering more horrible cries of "ARRRRR."
Strangely, the shipping industry's response isn't to keelhaul passengers who don't tip well on ocean cruises, or to hull random pleasure boats, or to demand special bow-mounted lasers that vaporize any ship that gets within a hundred miles.
Around the world, more than 20 sailors are known to have been murdered by pirates last year.
Seventy are missing, presumed dead.
Other trends are also emerging: ships are now less likely to be hijacked for their cargo; attackers, possibly from militant groups, are seizing ships and ransoming their crew.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Tijuana bible" proto-pr0n
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DATE: 01/27/2004 04:17:07 PM
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On Fleshbot: Tijuana Bibles were your grandfather's low-tech equivalent of Internet porn: pocket-sized stroke mags published between 1920 and 1960 featuring illustrations of "wildly sodomistic situations" and politically incorrect smut before anyone realized such a thing existed.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Citytv personalities behaving badly
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DATE: 01/27/2004 04:49:14 PM
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Frank Magazine, Canada's lame-duck answer to Private Eye, has posted four brutal outtake reels of Citytv TV personalities acting like jerks. Major jerks. Here's how Joey describes it:
There's anchor Gord Martineau calling fellow anchor Anne Mroczkowski a "fucking bint", not really giving a crap about pancreas transplants (diabetics everywhere, including my Dad, should kick his ass) and telling "homo" jokes, Irshad Manji passing out just as it's her turn to go on camera (a bit cruel, since unlike the others' behaviour, passing out really isn't a deliberate act) and funniest of all, crime reporter Jojo Chinto actually pinching some Grand Marnier from a counter while waiting for the owner of the house he's visiting to get dressed.
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(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: True confessions from the DeCSS Haiku author
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DATE: 01/27/2004 04:55:28 PM
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After three years, my cow-orker Seth Schoen has broken his hard silence and admitted to writing the DeCSS haiku. In this poem, the algortihm necessary for playing back DVDs is expressed as a series of haiku, despite the fact that such publication is banned under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In this essay, he explains his motivations and the procedure he went through:
Writing the bulk of the poem itself took me around 15 hours over the course of several days, excluding the CSS tables (whose construction I describe below). As Leigh Ann Hildebrand observed, there were classical influences at work in my efforts; I realized immediately that I would need to begin with an invocation of the Muse. (My poetic skills were not up to constructing dactyllic hexameters, and I had already settled on the haiku form.) I used Prof. Touretzky's article "The CSS Decryption Algorithm" as my main source for the technical details, but I set myself a strict rule against using hexadecimal constants, because they seemed unpoetic. Everything had to come back into decimal form, because a number is a number. I also felt that it was important to include passages honoring and praising heroes (even using an epithet in the traditional epic way: "wise Andreas Bogk", only partly metri causa) together with a substantial amount of context. After all, one of the ways long poetry maintains interest is by telling several stories at once, and by painting scenery. Finally, I felt that expressing the fear of censorship directly and repeatedly within the poem itself created an interesting tension. It emphasized that the poem had really been written by a human author with a human voice and his own interests and passions. Aware of the prospect of censorship, the poem confronts would-be censors directly and takes them to task. By contrast, most source code is relatively defenseless: it can't fight against its own suppression, and it gives less direct evidence of being in a human voice, leading some people to accept its stigmatization as "merely mechanical" or "merely functional". I feel that it is essential that the poem constantly pleads for its own life -- an effect accomplished comically yet powerfully by Joe Wecker in "Descramble (This Function Is Void)"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Solving and creating captchas with free porn
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DATE: 01/27/2004 05:21:26 PM
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Someone told me about an ingenious way that spammers were cracking "captchas" -- the distorted graphic words that a human being has to key into a box before Yahoo and Hotmail and similar services will give her a free email account. The idea is to require a human being and so prevent spammers from automatically generating millions of free email accounts.
The ingenious crack is to offer a free porn site which requires that you key in the solution to a captcha -- which has been inlined from Yahoo or Hotmail -- before you can gain access. Free porn sites attract lots of users around the clock, and the spammers were able to generate captcha solutions fast enough to create as many throw-away email accounts as they wanted.
Now, chances are that they didn't need to do this, since optical character recognition has been shown to be readily tweakable to decode captchas without human intervention -- that which a computer can generate, a computer can often solve.
My cow-orker Seth Schoen points out that human-generated captchas are much harder to solve: say, picking out a photo of an animal, at a funny angle, in a cage, and challenging attackers to correctly identify it. People can do so readily, machines probably can't.
Except, of course, that getting people to pick out pix of animals at funny angles doesn't scale. Unless, of course, you offered them free porn to do so ("Want free porn? Identify the animal in this cage!").
Which suggests a curious future, where commodity pornography, in great quantities, is used to incent human actors to generate and solve Turing tests like captchas in similarily great quantities.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Starbucks and Ikea not considered harmful
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DATE: 01/27/2004 05:59:20 PM
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Here's an inspired rant in favor of Ikea ("If your life is mediocre, I promise you, Ingvar Kamprad didn't make it that way. You did.") and Starbucks:
I am also old enough to remember the swill that Americans drank and were pleased to call "coffee" before Howard Schultz swept down out of his damp PNW redoubt and clusterbombed us with franchises. It tasted like soggy cardboard, it was served in chipped diner porcelain that itself generally tasted of soap, and most importantly, with a very few exceptions, it was all you could get anywhere.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shooting food
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DATE: 01/27/2004 10:29:12 PM
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Here's a great archive of high-speed, slo-mo videos of various foodstuffs being shot. Depicted here: a pudding cup with a bullet passing through it.
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(Thanks, Justin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bitter comic illustrator humor
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DATE: 01/28/2004 08:10:30 AM
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This makes me think that life among funnybook writers and their pictureifiers isn't all sweetness and light: "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work, or some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has some lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page."
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT's MikeRoweSoft.com letter on eBay
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:34:23 AM
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Mike Rowe (the kid who got a stupid trademark hassle from MSFT over his use of MikeRoweSoft.com, and subsequently settled for an XBox and a trip to Redmond) is selling off the threatening letter on eBay.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tethered cheek-gunk wipes for cellphones
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:36:04 AM
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Rael reports on the new prevalence of cellphone-wipes, little bits of fabric that you attach to your phone's strap to wipe cheek-gunk accumulation off your futurephone's screen.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Imaginary girlfriends on eBay
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:38:15 AM
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There are dozens of "imaginary girlfriends" for sale on eBay. Here's a bit of one of the listings (which closed at $20.51):
The winning bidder will receive my instant messenger screenname,email address and phone number. We can chat once a day or webcam if you like. I have pictures that I can send over email or by regular mail, both clothed and nude... I like video games, karaoke and football:) This is a 2-month relationship,and I hope you renew it. You can get back at girlfriends or impress your buddies or just have a good time. The friendship will be real,the girlfriend will be a fantasy.
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(via J-Ko)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Panopticon Singularity
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:40:30 AM
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Charlie Stross has posted his essay for the sadly defunct Singularity ish of the Whole Earth Review, entitled "The Panopticon Singularity:"
If a panopticon singularity emerges, you'd be well advised to stay away from Massachusetts if you and your partner aren't married. Don't think about smoking a joint unless you want to see the inside of one of the labour camps where over 50% of the population sooner or later go. Don't jaywalk, chew gum in public, smoke, exceed the speed limit, stand in front of fire exit routes, or wear clothing that violates the city dress code (passed on the nod in 1892, and never repealed because everybody knew nobody would enforce it and it would take up valuable legislative time). You won't be able to watch those old DVD's of 'Friends' you copied during the naughty oughties because if you stick them in your player it'll call the copyright police on you. You'd better not spend too much time at the bar, or your insurance premiums will rocket and your boss might ask you to undergo therapy. You might be able to read a library book or play a round of a computer game, but your computer will be counting the words you read and monitoring your pulse so that it can bill you for the excitement it has delivered.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paul "Ghost Host" Frees official biography
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:42:56 AM
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"Welcome, Foolish Mortals" is the forthcoming authorized biography of Paul Frees, the voice of the Haunted Mansion's "Ghost Host" narrator, Buff the Buffalo from the Country Bear Jamboree, and numerous other classic bits of voice-over.
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(Thanks, Gavin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYT discovers the "Plam Pilot" phenomenon
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:46:40 AM
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In August, 2001, I wrote Metacrap, an essay about the problems with user-generated, explicit metadata, where I said,
Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try searching for "plam" on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed listings for "Plam Pilots." Misspelled listings don't show up in correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at eBay.
A couple years later, the NYT has twigged to this, reporting on bargain hunters who search eBay listings for typos.
Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless -- and sometimes just careless -- sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires.
They do get bidders, but rarely very many. Often the buyers are those who troll for spelling slip-ups, buying items on the cheap and selling them all over again on eBay, but with the right spelling and for the right price. John H. Green, a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them.
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(Thanks, Clive!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kottke hires a social networking software aide (FriendsterHelper)
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DATE: 01/28/2004 11:09:37 AM
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Kottke posts a brilliant rant on the incredible laboriousness of being poly-FOAFed:
Overwhelmed by the amount of work necessary to keep up with all my friendships on Friendster, Orkut, and all the other social networking sites, I've posted a job opening over on craigslist for a personal social coordinator:
* Permanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.
* Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.
There's even room to grow in the position:
* Future duties may include discouraging companies and individuals from starting new social networking sites so that additional staff won't be necessary in the future. Past employment as a bouncer, "heavy", or
hired goon may be helpful in this regard. (...)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing mobile from WINKsite
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DATE: 01/28/2004 11:37:26 AM
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The moblog service Winksite (which has Howard Rheingold on its advisory board) is offering a mobile version of Boing Boing, under the terms of Boing Boing's Creative Commons' license. If you have a browser on your mobile, you can try it out, or view it on Winksite's Java emulator.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
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DATE: 01/28/2004 11:40:48 AM
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Business2.0 presents its yearly "101 Dumbest Moments in Business." Some pretty funny ones in here.
In September, retail chain Urban Outfitters begins peddling Ghettopoly, a Monopoly knockoff. The top hat, shoe, and car are replaced with a machine gun, marijuana leaf, basketball, and rock of crack cocaine. Reacting to protests, Urban Outfitters pulls the game from its stores.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sid Lavernts, home movie maker extraordinaire
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DATE: 01/28/2004 02:05:41 PM
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Boing Boing pal Matt Haber wrote an article for the NY Times about Sid Lavernts, a guy who singlehandedly created many funny and offbeat movies, often featuring himself, combing el-cheapo equipment with extraordinary resourcefulness and creativity.
"Mr. Laverents's first completed movie, 'The Wonders That Surround Us: Snails' (1966), is a 26-minute nature film set in the least exotic of locales: his backyard. Shot — at what must inevitably be described as a snail's pace — over four years, the film captures its subjects with magnifying lenses Mr. Laverents designed himself. Playful and informative, it is somewhat reminiscent of Disney educational filmstrips. (Mr. Laverents sold 'Snails' and several of his other nature films to the California Department of Education for classroom use.) One thing that differentiates 'Snails' from Disney movies like the 1954'The Vanishing Prairie' (aside from hundreds of thousands of dollars) is Mr. Laverents's wit. On the sticky subject of snails' mating habits, for example, he tells us: 'A snail's love life is considerably simplified by the fact that they are hermaphroditic.' We see two snails press together. 'So, no matter who meets whom, it's always `boy meets girl.'"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Retro arcade games reinvented
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:27:19 PM
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Recreated in Flash for maximum retro pleasure: classic arcade games like Pac-Man, Tetris, Space Invaders, and others. Grab a milkshake, and prepare for joystick-jockeying flashbacks, courtesy of designer Paul Neave. Link (Thanks, Chris Pirillo!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New short on Nerve.com from Susannah Breslin
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:31:26 PM
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Susannah Breslin has a brilliant new fiction short on Nerve.com: "The First Time She Died While Having Sex." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Barlow on Dean, Yeaaargh!, and why analog politics matter
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:45:30 PM
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On John Perry Barlow's blog this evening, a series of thoughts about online media and the Dean presidential campaign:
[T]hey may have eliminated the candidate most likely to defeat George Bush, whose adventures at home and abroad are likely to make for another four years of riveting television. Or have they? Howard Dean has hardly retired from the race, even though he will be running uphill from here. And it may be that the traditional media have done us a favor by beating some of the smug snot-nose out of us. One of problems with the groups that form on the Internet (...) is that they often end up being self-reifying fields of ideological homogeneity. We create our own ideological ghettos which seem much larger to us than they are.
Moreover, while many of us are convinced that the Internet is a powerful environment for organizing belief, it is also a great cacophony against which even the diminished voice of broadcast retains a kind of clarity. I believe I have just seen demonstrated the power of that signal. Can we create one of our own that is heard as clearly by the public in general? That remains to be seen. Now, at least, we know what we're up against.
Of course, there remains the possibility that the big media didn't beat Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire at all. It may simply be that the new media failed to win it. We may have been too glued to our monitors to remember that while elections get won by money - 12 out of 13 races in the last Congressional elections were won by the candidate who spent the most - they are also won by people on the ground. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, we will have to work very hard, in dreary, traditional ways, to get him elected.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYTimes covers last week's partycar event on SF BART
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:51:10 PM
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A piece in today's NY Times on last week's partycar event aboard a BART train in San Francisco, blogged here on BoingBoing and organized through Tribe.net -- and a stack of 1000 black-and-white flyers. FWIW, Marc *is* both a chef and a hacker, and I dare say he's damn fine at both.
When the reporter approached Marc, the party's nonleader who was described by others on the car as both a chef and hacker, Marc asked to see proof of employment. He looked disdainfully when handed a New York Times business card, refusing to take it. Marc then declined to speak further.
After about half an hour, the party took a general turn for the worse when two transit police officers boarded the last car in Berkeley.
It was there, with everyone required to assemble on the platform, that Romance the clown joined the reporter on the party's island of misfits. The police were threatening her with a citation for boisterous behavior. More than a few commuters simply wanted to read a book after a long week at work, the officers explained, suggesting that she just shut up. But Romance did not, for the longest of times. Most of the geeks scattered as she endeavored to remain in character, even when her rubber chicken slipped from her belt and an officer ordered, "Don't drop your chicken, ma'am."
Link: "Last Car. Geek Party. Spread the Word."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bras made from modded skullcaps
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DATE: 01/28/2004 10:53:12 PM
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Brassieres made from yarmulkes, in limited editions (and limited cup-sizes).
Link
(Thanks, Seth!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 8-bit Nintendo sports bloopers
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DATE: 01/28/2004 11:16:08 PM
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Manero sez, "An hilarious take on sports bloopers... except this time it's within the realm of old 8-bit Nintendo games."
9.1MB WMV Link
(Thanks, Manero!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ironic LotR slash-videos
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DATE: 01/29/2004 12:04:38 AM
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These elaborate videos of male characters from Lord of the Rings kissing each other are remarkable testaments to photoshopping and video-editing skills, but no less stunning is the ironic, double-standard warning:
I do not want anyone to put these animations up on another website, journal, etc. Normal ones are strenuous enough to do, but these were done with my very heartblood in hours of tedious puzzling.
Please respect the work I have put into them
In other words: "Having created these ingenious-yet-incredibly-infringing videos by ignorning the rightsholders to the LotR footage, I now demand that you treat my own creative endeavor as utterly sacrosanct."
Link
(via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Exploding Sperm Whale Inevitable
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DATE: 01/29/2004 09:18:23 AM
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A bad case of gas caused a dead sperm whale to explode in the middle of Tainan City, Taiwan. The 50-ton carcass was en route to a research facility when the pressure of decomposition gases became to great for the beast's belly. The stinky mess, however, didn't stop "a large crowd of more than 600 local Yunlin residents and curiosity seekers, along with vendors selling snack food and hot drinks, (from braving) the cold temperature and chilly wind to watch workmen try to haul away the dead marine leviathan." Link (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lotto winner's low-brow headstone
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DATE: 01/29/2004 09:36:49 AM
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A construction worker in British Columbia won $76,000 in a lottery and plans to use some of the money to commission a headstone with images of "a champagne glass, a royal flush, a slot machine, a nude woman facing backwards and a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse." Do I have to wait for him to die before I get to see a picture of the headstone?
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Modest proposal for non-evil social services
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:06:32 AM
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A guy who runs a social software service wrote to me recently asking me, in light of my statements about these services, how he could improve things. I have a lot of ideas, but here's the biggest one:
Adjust your tool so that it subtracts bad social interactions, instead of adding to them.
Right now, I get a lot of email along the lines of, "A person you vaguely know wants you to click a link in order to confirm his assertion that he's a pal of yours. Click here to confirm this, or click here to break his heart by utterly rejecting him." I don't know about you, but these things drive me bonkers, and leave me with this kind of nagging guilt that builds into resentment for the people who put up the service.
I have mail-rules for a lot of these things that silently discards them, so at least I don't know how guilty I should feel, and I have autoresponders for others, like this one:
Hi there. you appear to have sent me an eVite. I'm sorry, but due to time-pressure and my intensely creepy feeling that companies like eVite view me as a "sticky eyeball" and wish to interpose themselves between me and my personal relationships, and deliberately break their service by sending out non-forwardable URLs and emails that don't contain the invitation details, I no longer read or even see eVites (this is an automated form response). I am very grateful for your invitation and would love to hear more about it, if you'd be willing to send me the invitation as text in the body of an email.
Thanks for understanding!
Cory
But here's a way that the social software operators could help me out. Let me use their service to opt out of their service.
Here's how it would work. You go to eVite. You create an invitation. You invite me. eVite consults its list of opt-outers, and gives you this message:
The user "Cory Doctorow" has asked me not to contact him any longer. Here's his message:
I'm sorry, but due to time-pressure and my intensely creepy feeling that companies like eVite view me as a "sticky eyeball" and wish to interpose themselves between me and my personal relationships, and deliberately break their service by sending out non-forwardable URLs and emails that don't contain the invitation details, I no longer read or even see eVites (this is an automated form response). I am very grateful for your invitation and would love to hear more about it, if you'd be willing to send me the invitation as text in the body of an email.
Here's the best part: eVite gets to keep track of how often these opt-out messages appear, and can, from time to time, examine the explanations proffered by the most popular opt-outers. In other words, they can get a real-time moving snapshot of the elements of their user-experience are most alienating to the users that are most-sought-after within the system. They get a free, permanent, floating focus-group, and emprical data on which complaints are doing the most damage to their value-proposition.
All of these services could erect these tools, including the YASNSes: "I'm sorry, but Cory isn't on this service because he: found it socially awkward to reject strangers who wanted to be his friends. Your invitation will not be sent."
If you want to have a non-evil social service, first do no harm. Don't create bad social situations for your users.
Wouldn't that be something?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT: don't click on links, type them in by hand
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:15:24 AM
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Microsoft's crapware browser, Explorer, has more security vulnerabilities than my block has dope-dealers, but this is ridiculous. MSFT now advises its users to not click links, but rather to type them in by hand:
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.
Or, you could, you know, just Download Moz.
Link
(Thanks, Paul!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Presidential decorum myth shattered shock-horror
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:17:08 AM
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Here are some nice factoids about America's past presidents:
Warren G. Harding once gambled and lost a box of priceless White House china during a poker game.
Link
(via FARK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Novel written in French SMS slang
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:19:30 AM
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A French publisher has released a novel written entirely in Franco-SMS-slang, in a move calculated to piss off the French language academics who keep tight reins on the introduction of neologisms into French parlance.
Thus an example passage in the book has a Dtektive (detective) asking the villain: "6 j t'aspRge d'O 2 kologne histoar 2 partaG le odeurs ke tu me fe subir?"
Which, once expanded and translated, would come across as "What if I spray you with cologne so you can share the smells you make me suffer?"
Other sentences showcase the French equivalents of terms along the same lines as English Internet equivalents that have given rise to "LOL" (for Laugh Out Loud), D8 (for date), OMG (for Oh My God) and OvR8d (for overrated).
Link
(via Smartmobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: G5-to-PC modding
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:22:06 AM
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This guy's parents gave him a dual-CPU Mac G5 for Christmas, which wouldn't run any of his Windows apps, so he gutted the box and installed the guts of a PC, then donated the Mac parts to a friend who is going to try to jam them into his old G3 chassis.
It's a good thing my parents don't know anything about computers, because I'm sure they would be really angry if they knew what I did. I have to say that I'm happy - I can keep on using XP.
The board is a Biostar Micro ATX, with a 2200 Athlon XP with an Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller and two 36 GB Atlas 10K V hard drives. I am stuck using the onboard video because there is no AGP slot. I had no money for a SATA controller and quite honestly, I swear by SCSI (the G5 comes with SATA drives).
Link
Update: Looks like this is a hoax
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Muppet origami
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:28:29 AM
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Here's a lovely collection of Muppet origami HOW-TOs, with some Star Wars stuff and misc thrown in for good measure. Again, some irony: all of these bits of origami use famous trademarks without permission from the mark-holders, but the author of the page says, "just please don't distribute them without asking first!" Begging the question: did s/he get permission before making the origami up in the first place?
Link
(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Creative Commons licenses RFC
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:30:00 AM
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Creative Commons has released a draft version 2.0 of its licenses and is asking for public feedback on the modifications:
# Warranties will now be a matter of choice for the licensor. See Section 5a.
# The attribution clause will include a link-back requirement simliar to the one previously discussed here. Licensees will only be required to link back to licensors if (1) it's reasonably practical to do so; (2) the licensor actually specifies a URI; (3) that URI actually points to license information about the work. See Section 4d.
# The Share Alike provision will be more flexible. The provision will allow licensees to license resulting derivative works under Creative Commons licenses that feature the same license restrictions/permissions, including future and iCommons versions of the same license. The Share Alike provision will also be clearer about what happens when different kinds of Share Alike content is mixed together (e.g., How to license a collage made from an SA photograph combined with an NC-SA photograph). See Section 4b.
Link
(via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gillmor on Dean campaign changes, online and off
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:30:02 AM
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Dan Gillmor weighs in on present shakeups in the Dean campaign (AP Story on yesterday's campaign manager switch)-- and what role the 'Net plays in all of this.
Neel isn't just a Gore associate. He was head of the United States Telecom Association, probably the single most retrograde Washington lobbying organization around -- the mouthpiece for the local phone monopolies that have worked so hard to thwart serious competition in telecommunications. In other words, Neel is as inside-the-beltway as you can get. Now he's running an "outsider's" campaign. Sure thing.
Trippi was far from perfect as an operative. But under his guidance, Dean emerged in the first place as a credible candidate. And Trippi, via Dean's candidacy, was a catalyst who helped change the rules of national campaigning in ways that will reverberate through politics until they've been absorbed by everyone in the political game. The Net helped make Dean, and it was Trippi who grasped what was happening early on and convinced Dean to take advantage of it. Of course, the true revolutionaries here have been the Dean supporters who understood the power they could bring from the edges and apply to the center. They will not go away, however much the political establishment may want them to.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reporting on facts as assertions, and journalistic balance
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:34:13 AM
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Newswriters have a compulsive habit of couching all assertions in someone's point-of-view, preferring "Person X says that Y is true," rather than saying "Y is true." It gets you off the hook if it turns out that Y isn't true.
But as Slacktivist points out, there are factual matters that are actually, verifiably true, and couching them in someone else's words transforms them from facts into suppositions. This is most damaging in the political arena, where news-organs are reporting on the fact of Bush's deficit spending as though it were a Democrat talking-point, as opposed to a verifiable number:
Over the next 10 years, cumulative deficits are likely to add almost $2.4 trillion to the national debt, the CBO estimate said.
The forecast comes as Democrats campaigning to run against President Bush charge that he has turned a surplus into a deficit.
The key here is "Democrats ... charge." After the first two sentences, this is a rather strange attribution. During President Bush's tenure, the surplus has, in fact, been turned into a deficit. Despeignes seems uncomfortable simply stating fiscal statistics relating to the incumbent administration when those facts may seem unflattering. So, to avoid any appearance of bias, the reporter attributes any unflattering facts to the "charges" of the president's political opponents.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HugeURL: TinyURL in reverse
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:54:00 AM
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HugeURL is a service that converts short URLs, like http://craphound.com, into huge URLs, like http://www.hugeurl.com/?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 .
Why not? After all, using TinyURL-like services rips all the semantics out of the URLs you send around, gives a third-party a way of spying on which URLs you're loading, and invites man-in-the-middle attacks by interposing an untrusted party between you and the server you want to talk to. Oh, and if the tiny-izer service tanks, your bookmarks all go blooie.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BugMeNot: circumvent annoying registration
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:58:19 AM
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Riana sez, "BugMeNot circumvents those annoying registration requirements that haunt sites such as the NYT's, via the simple strategy of allowing people to post the login and password for accounts they've created so that anyone can use those logins. (Contributors of fake logins get banned from the site.) Search for URL www.nytimes.com, and BugMeNot returns the login info for four different accounts. Thanks, BugMeNot! Now I can read the BART party car story!"
Link
(Thanks, Riana!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bronze 170 lb Yoda statue nicked
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DATE: 01/29/2004 11:14:44 AM
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Someone stole a 170 lb bronze statue of Yoda out of the back of a pickup truck in Pasadena, unbolting it while the truck-driver crashed at a motel.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: David Hasselhoff defeated communism
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DATE: 01/29/2004 11:21:41 AM
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David Hasselhoff has claimed partial responsibility for the fall of the Berlin Wall
Speaking to German magazine TV Spielfilm, Hasselhoff said in 1989, the year the wall fell, he had helped reunite the country by singing his song 'Looking for Freedom' among millions of German fans at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin...."I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Check-Point Charlie.
Link
(Thanks, Sparky!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hundreds of BBCers protest director's resignation
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DATE: 01/29/2004 11:38:32 AM
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Greg Dyke, the director of the BBC, resigned this morning, in the face of an official inquiry that determined that the BBC was at fault when it reported that the Blair government embellished the reports of WMDs that it used as an excuse to get into the Iraq war. Now, hundreds of BBC employees are marching in the streets, demanding that Dyke come back.
"Cut the crap, bring Greg back", "We Love Greg", "Hutton Take a Hike, Bring Back Greg Dyke" screamed out hastily prepared banners. Some clutched blown-up full colour pictures of the man himself.
Jessica Powell, who works in casting, said: "He cared about the little people, that's why we came out."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Video of Apache helicopter shooting Iraqi soldiers
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 01/29/2004 11:42:35 AM
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Joi Ito's posted a night-vision video from an Apache helicopter shooting Iraqis who were allegedly trying to blow the helicopter out of the sky with a stinger missile. The scene is graphic (guts are warm, so they glow when they get splashed on the street) so don't watch it if you are easily upset. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired hotseat: Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister
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DATE: 01/29/2004 03:27:01 PM
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For this month's issue of Wired Magazine, I interviewed Kevin Bermeister, CEO of Altnet:
The latest P2P flap comes from within the tech world. Altnet, which provides DRM-encoded files for distribution on Kazaa, has issued cease-and-desist notices to eight P2P companies, including MediaDefender and Overpeer. Altnet accuses them of violating the patent on its TrueNames technology, which calculates a unique number, or hash, based on a digital file's contents. Developers say the patent is fluff; the tech is old and generic. Wired asked Altnet's CEO about his bullying ways.
WIRED: What right do you have to a technology that has been around for decades?
BERMEISTER: In the 1980s, the chief scientist of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Altnet's parent company, invented a specific use of file hash as it relates to the distribution of content on a widely distributed network. With P2P, dynamic nodes are automatically established and files are indexed by hash to improve network efficiency. This way, users can seek a file from a number of sources and have a better chance of getting it.
WIRED: Why are you suddenly claiming ownership?
BERMEISTER: Right now, P2P is the Wild West of the Internet, and we see an opportunity to commercialize it. Without that patent, a series of claims would inevitably be made not only on Altnet, but on other parties. We want to use the patent to create partnerships.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pickled dragon mystery
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DATE: 01/29/2004 04:13:01 PM
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PapayaSF says: "A fellow in England discovered what looks like a dragon in a jar. Speculation is that it's a 19th hoax by German scientists aimed at their English counterparts, who didn't fall for it. Whoever created the dragon could have used it to get a job at ILM. It's that good." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Acorn-dwelling non-slave-making parasite ants discovered
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DATE: 01/29/2004 04:31:28 PM
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Ohio State researchers have discovered a super-rare colony of non-slave-making parasite ants, living in an acorn:
L. minutissimus is a unique social parasite in that it lives entirely within the colonies of other ant species. But unlike parasitic slave-maker ants, which raid and virtually destroy the colonies of unsuspecting hosts, L. minutissimus appears to move in and live amiably with its host. Such organisms are called inquilines.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Marxist fairy tales
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DATE: 01/29/2004 05:55:05 PM
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When I was a kid, my Dad, a Marxist, used to tell me Marxist parables adapted from the Conan stories he'd grown up on, but starring a gender-diverse trio called "Harry, Mary and Larry," with the storylines tweaked for maximal socialist moralizing.
It turns out that this isn't all that aberrant among the Red Diaper Baby Experience. Eric Olin Wright is an analytical Marxist who raised his kids on extemporaneous Marxist fairy-tales, and recorded them for posterity. They are hilarious. Unfortunately, they're presented as crapware Windows Media streams as opposed to downloadable files, so I can't load them on my iPod, but listening to these brought a real nostalgic smile to my face.
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(via Crooked Timber)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Your customers don't want DRM, part MMMCCXI
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DATE: 01/29/2004 07:05:39 PM
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Remember Disney's self-destructing DVDs that rotted into unplayability after 48 hours? No one wants 'em. Stores are taking 'em off the shelf.
Ghertner said the decision was not made for environmental reasons; rather, company officials "made the decision strictly on sales."
"It just wasn't a good fit for us," she said. "It didn't turn out to be an item that our customers were looking for."
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(via LawGeek)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hidden beauty in a missile's nosecone
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DATE: 01/29/2004 08:20:33 PM
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This wall-hanging made from the circuit-boards from the nose-cone of a Minuteman Missile is awfully, lethally pretty.
Because the missile was perpetually armed, Williams explained, the circuitry was immersed in liquid Freon to keep it from critically overheating. In the event the missile was launched, the coolant would be abruptly disconnected and the circuitry would have approximately 10 minutes before it burned itself up - just enough time for the missile to reach its target. Freon, it turns out, was an excellent preservative for the colorful (but now ancient) transistors, resistors and capacitors displayed here.
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(Thanks, Hugh!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Robot Chick assemblage scuplture
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:34:09 PM
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These "Robot Chick" assemblage sculptures are a little on the NSFW/pr0ny side for my taste, but one or two are quite striking. Wish I have half a grand or so to blow on one!
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jason Schultz on American Blind versus Google
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DATE: 01/29/2004 10:39:39 PM
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A company called American Blind (which makes window-coverings) is suing Google because other organizations, like the American Council for the Blind, its competitors have bought the Google AdWord "blind" and so American Blind claims that its trademark is being infringed-upon, and that Google is secondarily liable for the infringement. My cow-orker Jason Schultz dissects and destroys this claim in very short order.
"We spend millions of dollars annually to build brand awareness and cannot stand idle while Google allows our competitors to ride our coattails," said a statement from Steve Katzman, CEO of American Blind.
So it's really not about consumer protection after all; it's about money. Money that AB&WF spent on silly meatspace advertising while its competitors blew past it by disintermediating physical adspace.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 300 mile electric car runs on laptop/cellphone battery tech
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DATE: 01/30/2004 08:38:30 AM
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Steve sez, "The demand for powerful consumer electronics batteries (for laptops, cell phones, etc.) is reviving promise for electric vehicles (EV's). Traditionally, batteries produced for EVs have been limited in capacity and expensive to boot (due to small manufacturing runs). But laptop and cell phone batteries now out-perform these batteries and cost less, so this company (AC Propulsion) has essentially kluged together a boat-load of consumer Li-Ion batteries to produce an EV with a range of 300 miles!"
104K PDF Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Run your iPod for 40 hours
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DATE: 01/30/2004 08:41:15 AM
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This external iPod battery provides 40 hours of playtime and includes a USB port for plugging in USB-charged devices like PDAs and cellphones. It's $100, and no indication of what it weighs.
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(via iPodHacks)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Impending totalitarianism
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DATE: 01/30/2004 08:45:13 AM
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Bruce Schneier's latest op-ed on the impending police-state is chilling as hell.
Last week the Supreme Court let stand the Justice Department's right to secretly arrest noncitizen residents.
Combined with the government's power to designate foreign prisoners of war as "enemy combatants" in order to ignore international treaties regulating their incarceration, and their power to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without charge or access to an attorney, the United States is looking more and more like a police state.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department has asked for, and largely received, additional powers that allow it to perform an unprecedented amount of surveillance of American citizens and visitors. The USA Patriot Act, passed in haste after Sept. 11, started the ball rolling.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: danah on Orkut
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DATE: 01/30/2004 08:52:12 AM
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danah boyd (she's saving up for some capital letters) weighs in on Orkut and in particular on the craptacular ToS, which can be characterized as a collection of the most evil practices from the industry's unforgivably bad ToSes, including things like the right to change terms without notice, a blanket ban on "unauthorized" use, a ban on non-browser-based user-agents, and so on.
1) What the hell is up with the elitist approach to invitation? That's just outright insulting and an attempt to pre-configure the masses through what the technorati are doing. Social networks are not just a product of technologists. Everyone has a social network and what they do with it is quite diverse. To demand that they behave by the norms of technologists is horrifying.
2) Are trustworthy, cool, and sexy the only ways that i might classify my friends? (Even Orkut lists a lot more in his definition of self.) And since when can i rate the people that i know based on this kind of metric?
And goddamnit CONTEXT CONTEXT CONTEXT. Cool as a techy? Cool as a party kid? Trustworthy along what fucking axes?
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Girls, cars stuck in mud, and the men who love them
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DATE: 01/30/2004 08:52:47 AM
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Apparently girls whose cars are stuck in mud is an emerging sexual fetish. For 50 Euro or so, you can own such erotic DVD masterpieces as "Michelle got stuck in snow and mud" and "Party-Stuck-Video 002." (Carstuckgirls.com is seemingly safe for work, at least from what I saw.) Link (Thanks, Dr. Maz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Programmable screwdrivers
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:14:05 AM
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It's about time someone invented a smart programmable screwdriver.
Matsushita Electric Works has launched what they call the world's first intelligent screwdriver. Looking like something that would crop up in Ultraman or Power Rangers, it allows you to record macros--slow start, fast midsection, slow again at the end, for example--and replay them with a single button-push. Record an expert's macro and even the novice screwer will see a dramatic improvement, so they claim. It also has a learning function that allows it to gravitate to the speed range you're using most often.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Periodic table of condiments
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:17:19 AM
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A periodic table of condiments that sometimes go bad.
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(via Pirotcar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Modding the box
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:21:43 AM
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Wired News covers the release of a new book called Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty -- whcih is pretty much just what it sounds like, step-by-step instructions for modding your toys to turn them into better and weirder toys.
Some of the hacks are just for entertainment, like turning a standard Apple mouse into a glowing UFO mouse or modifying a PlayStation 2 so that you can use it to program your own games.
Others are practical, like the chapter on designing and building your own Windows- or Linux-based home theater PC or the ultimate external hard drive to store all those digital images, videos and MP3 files, complete with custom case -- all from stuff you may already have lying around the house. Equally useful are the step-by-step instructions on how to replace a dead iPod battery without having to send the MP3 player back to Apple.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Google to Booble: take a cold shower
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:24:48 AM
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As expected, Google sends "Google parody adult search engine" Booble.com a cease-and-desist. From Adult Video News:
Sent earlier this week, Google's letter demanded Booble disable their Website and stop using the domain name, "take steps to transfer" the domain to Google, "(i)dentify and agree to transfer to Google any other domain names registered by you that contain the GOOGLE or are confusingly similar to the GOOGLE marks," and "permanently refrain" from using Google's name or any variation on it "that is likely to cause confusion or dilution."
An adult Web portal, YouHo!, uses a parody of one of the earlier Yahoo! homepage styles and layouts, a parody the site continues to use despite Yahoo! undergoing several alterations to its basic homepage look in the past several years.
"We note that you have given interviews to the press in which you state that you intend booble.com to be a parody," said a passage from the Google Trademark Enforcement Team, cited on Booble's Website. "We dispute your assertion that your Website is a parody. For a work to constitute a parody, it must use some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on the original author's works."
Link (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mars OS: no life on the red planet, but many bugs
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:26:18 AM
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In today's edition of Wired News, I interview Mars Rover mission chief software architect Glenn Reeves about the challenges of maintaining a functioning operating system on another planet -- and what it's like to live life on Martian Standard Time.
WN: What are your biggest challenges right now in sorting out what went wrong with Spirit, and how you're going to fix its tech problems?
Reeves: We have to plan ahead very carefully what we're going to do during each window of opportunity. There are only about three "windows" in each day, and we need to be able to see Earth from Mars.
During one window, we're running a script on the vehicle to tell us which piece of software in the system is causing that reset problem. We've tried that for two days, but so far haven't been successful. In another, we're trying to dump parts of the 224-MB flash file system back down to Earth, so we can reconstruct the system here. But think about it -- on a good day, we can only transmit less than 5 MB, so moving the whole file means a lot of days with no additional science. We'd prefer to avoid that path, but it's a contingency plan. In that third window, we try to communicate with the orbiter.
Since we can bring up the system in "cripple mode," we're doing integrity checks manually. But this takes a lot of time, because we like to do them one by one, in order. We can't waste any effort, or time. You could say our dialup service is really, really, really slow.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Totalitarian trusted computing
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:43:12 AM
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From Greg Costikan, a humourful, totalitarian vision of hardware as it might be.
Troubleshooter: How much is two plus two?
PDC: What is your security clearance, Citizen user?
Troubleshooter: Red, friend PDC!
PDC: Two plus two equals a number between three and six.
Troubleshooter: What?
PDC: You are not cleared for greater precision at this time...
User Desmond-O-NTY-3 is not available. This call has been forwarded to an automated voice system. Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed. To confess to treason, please press 1. To accuse the citizen you are calling of treason, please press 2. To accuse a different citizen of treason, please press 3. To leave voice mail, please press 4. To send a numeric page, please press 5. For more options, please press 6.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robolympics call for entries
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:47:01 AM
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Robotics Society of America president David Calkins says:
Only one month left to register for ROBOlympics! You've still got two months left to get ready for the event, but only one month to register to compete. This is the first robot event where all major types of robot competitions will be held at the same time. And of course, you can compete in several events - you're not just limited to one. Also: Tickets go on sale Friday (today)!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First corporate sponsorship for an MMORPG guild
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:50:44 AM
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The Syndicate is the largest guild in MMORPG-space, and it has just acquired a corporate sponsor.
To celebrate this sponsorship, The Syndicate and Thunderbox are offering a number of special deals for gamers. As gamers, we make sure we have a machine that will let us play the games we want, but we dont always buy the 'cool' addons preferring instead to add more RAM or buy another game. Now you can get alot of those extreme-addons (from PC Skins, to Custom Lighting to a complete Extreme kit) for your PC for free as part of celebrating this groundbreaking event in gaming history. Online Gaming is loaded with guilds many of whom claim to be the best but who are solely focused on themselves. The Syndicate has consistently led the pack in all areas it participates in, paid its dues as a guild, and earned its place as a lead guild in the gaming world. However, during its 8 years of existance, it has maintained its focus on having fun and in making the online community a better place. We hope this sponsorship will be another way we can add value to the gaming community and we look forward to many more years of online gaming with all of you.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The value of endangered languages
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DATE: 01/30/2004 11:25:26 AM
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A great interview with linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald, in New Scientist:
"If these so-called "exotic" languages die, we'll be left with just one world view. This won't be very interesting, and we'll have lost a vast amount of information about human nature and how people perceive the world. (...) [W]ithout their language and its structure, people are rootless. In recording it you are also getting down the stories and folklore. If those are lost a huge part of a people's history goes. These stories often have a common root that speaks of a real event, not just a myth. For example, every Amazonian society ever studied has a legend about a great flood.
"...In English I can tell my son: "Today I talked to Adrian", and he won't ask: "How do you know you talked to Adrian?" But in some languages, including Tariana, you always have to put a little suffix onto your verb saying how you know something - we call it "evidentiality". I would have to say: "I talked to Adrian, non-visual," if we had talked on the phone. And if my son told someone else, he would say: "She talked to Adrian, visual, reported." In that language, if you don't say how you know things, they think you are a liar. This is a very nice and useful tool. Imagine if, in the argument about weapons of mass destruction, people had had to say how they knew about whatever they said. That would have saved us quite a lot of breath..."
Link (via diepunyhumans)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More non-evil social network ideas
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DATE: 01/30/2004 03:13:05 PM
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Here's some bloody good ideas about social networks from Quinn.
i've long wanted to be able to search my friend's brains, which is the kind of social networking that matters. there's no technical reason i can't, just no one has built me the app. i still haven't figured out the solution to the socially awkward "actually, you're not my friend, why are you saying you are?" problem, which is why i quit orkut. but maybe you can raise the value of the app so that people will put up with that, and maybe its ok to say "actually i share some pretty intimate stuff, so my circle is kind of tight." as a reply- i don't know. the point is, people will put up with problems in proportion to the value they derive from a system. right now orkut and friendster and the like are mostly fun for people that really enjoy filling out webforms and uploading pictures of themselves. and maybe as dating sites, but as i don't really date i don't know. for useful social networking being in my social network has to mean more than being out of it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: When spam-filters attack
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DATE: 01/30/2004 03:15:51 PM
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What's worse than spam and virii? Overzealous spam- and virii-filters:
It's always a joy to watch prissy corporate mail filters twitch their lace curtains and bounce back NTK when they spot a phrase they don't like. This week they refused to deliver NTK because we used the word "dyke". As in Greg Dyke. (Admittedly, the completely justified use of "butt" and "wanker" elsewhere might not have helped our case.)
Not as bad as one UK firm's IT department, which is currently binning any incoming email with "hello" or "Hi" in the subject line. "These are common header descriptions of the e-mails containing the [MyDoom] virus", they say. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest they're also common header descriptions of the e-mails not containing it, too.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DDR for weight-loss
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DATE: 01/30/2004 03:20:39 PM
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Dance Dance Revolution is a viable form of geek exercise.
I started playing Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) at the age of 17
with the very first version that was released to the United States, DDR Version 1.5. The first time I saw the game was at Gameworks arcade in Seattle, where tons of people were crowded around the DDR machine to watch different players dance. At this time, I was a senior in high school and weighed about 235 lbs. Four and a half years later, I now weigh close to 140 lbs and I would've never guessed how much that trip (OR a video game) would affect me with my health/weight, and in growing to be a better, more self-confident person.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Donate winning iTunes/Pepsi codes to benefit indie artists
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DATE: 01/30/2004 03:30:52 PM
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TuneRecycler uses unwanted Pepsi/iTunes Store winning codes and spends them on indie bands available through the iTunes Music Store.
"When you buy major label music on iTunes," Wilson explained, "the musician usually gets nothing, because they're in perpetual debt to their label until they sell more than 500,000 CDs. And at best they only get 8-14 cents on a $1.00 song. We want to get some of Pepsi's money going to actual musicians, not just record label CEOs and RIAA lawyers."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Orkut = Roach Motel?
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DATE: 01/30/2004 05:04:26 PM
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Meaning, you can check in, but you can't check out.
After exploring Orkut for about a week, sniffing around, and learning more about the turn-ons and sexual habits of various remote professional acquaintances than I ever in a million years wanted to know, I decided I'd like to delete my account. But unllike other popular social networking services like Friendster, the app UI does not allow you to delete your account. I noodled through the help contents for a bit, and learned that the only way to resign from the realm of orkut is to email a request to admin@orkut.com with your first and last name.
I did so eight hours ago and haven't seen a reply; not holding my breath for one, given the fact that Orkut is likely a small, overwhelmed operation with zero admin resources.
I realize the site is still in a very early state. But come ON. I've worked on large-scale public web projects before, and no matter what label you use to excuse the incomplete nature of a service -- alpha, beta, whateva-- not allowing users to opt out of participation as easily as they initiated it in the first place just seems irresponsible. If it's not ready for the public, don't release it to the public. Orkut's Roach Motel syndrome, combined with the onerous TOS terms danah and others have pointed out, leave me feeling kind of icky where this particular service is concerned.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Justice for the murdered women of Juarez?
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DATE: 01/30/2004 05:09:47 PM
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More than 250 women been murdered in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, in the past decade, with hardly any official notice. The Mexican government has long ignored the problem, but has finally taken the small step of appointing a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of it.
Many of the women killed in Ciudad Juarez - across the border from the US city of El Paso in Texas - over the past 10 years were factory workers snatched while travelling to and from their jobs.
Most had been brutally sexually assaulted and tortured before their deaths.
There have been several arrests - but most cases were allegedly based on forced confessions and only one man has been convicted, for one of the killings.
Link
Update: The V-Day organization is planning a memorial march on Juarez for Valentine's Day -- just a short hop from San Diego if you're coming down for ETCON
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Radiohead's Thom Yorke on BBC and Hutton Report
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DATE: 01/30/2004 07:28:50 PM
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In today's Guardian, an op-ed by Thom Yorke:
Lord Hutton's damning report of the BBC is a whitewash. The result will create fear at the Today programme, where there should be pride. As so many times before, they were there with a story that nobody else would touch. And I still cannot see why Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke have had to resign. It flies in the face of reality, ripping all evidence to shreds.
This is a theatre of the absurd. It has left everybody I know shaking their heads in disbelief and anger. Such a performance should make us all deeply nervous about the future of Britain. While Blair wishes to draw a line under the whole episode, I hope this doesn't happen. Sometimes a story will end up being told, no matter how many times they try to close the book
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Secret, personal weblog of slain CNN employee Duraid Isa Mohammed
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DATE: 01/30/2004 07:29:13 PM
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A BoingBoing reader who wishes to remain anonymous points us to the personal weblog of slain CNN employee Duraid Isa Mohammed. Duraid died earlier this week along with fellow CNN employee Yasser Khatab, when the vehicle they were traveling in came under fire from Iraqi insurgents. The weblog, titled "Memories of a war torn heart: Sometimes I feel like screaming", was started just one week before Duraid was killed.
The following poem, "Risks" -- printed in English and signed "anonymous" -- was found in Duraid's personal car in Baghdad. The nature of the poem is similar to other material on his short-lived blog. It is presumed that Duraid did not author the poem, but that the handwriting was his (a quick Google search turns up the same poem on various "inspirational quotes" webpages throughout the 'Net).
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd Is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is To risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing dies nothing, Has nothing and is nothing.
They say they avoid suffering and sorrow, But they cannot learn, Feel, change, grow, love, feel.
Chained by their attitudes, they are slaves.
They have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.
-- Anonymous
Duraid's blog does not bear his full name; each entry is signed "Mr. D.," and one post states, "I work as a journalist now with a big corporation, I was a basketballer in college, I was a DJ in my Baghdad, a war-torn town by now." The blog includes lyric quotes from Poison and Bon Jovi, and mentions that its author was permitted to travel with the military. This link to a related CNN story mentions also that Duraid was a DJ before the war. The BoingBoing reader who brings this story to our attention shares further information (and asks that it not be repeated here) which leads me to believe that the blog is in fact Duraid's.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rules for living
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DATE: 01/30/2004 09:40:10 PM
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This is a great collection of aphorisms by which you would be well-served if you were to build your life around them.
Yeah, I know Sid Vicious wore a lock on a chain around his neck just like that. But the first time you try and pogo with that thing on it's gonna chip a tooth, Road Warrior.
Now that you've climbed up there, it's a lot higher than it looks, isn't it? Dumbass.
The Renaissance Faire may not be the source of all your problems, but it sure as shit isn't helping any.
You're probably doing something that bugs the next guy twice as much. Clam up and get on with your life.
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(via AccordionGuy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: We Like Dyke ad runs in Daily Telegraph
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DATE: 01/31/2004 05:52:23 AM
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An ad calling for the return of BBC-director Greg Dyke, paid for and signed by hundreds of BBC staffers, ran in the Daily Telegraph today.
"Greg Dyke stood for brave, independent and rigorous BBC journalism that was fearless in its search for the truth. We are resolute that the BBC should not step back from its determination to investigate the facts in pursuit of the truth," the ad reads. "Through his passion and integrity, Greg Dyke inspired us to make programmes of the highest quality and creativity. We are dismayed by Greg's departure, but we are determined to maintain his achievements and his vision for an independent organisation that serves the public above all else."
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(via Plasticbag)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mobile interface myths
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DATE: 01/31/2004 05:54:13 AM
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Twelve myths about mobile interface design:
Myth: Users want power and aesthetics. Features are everything.
Myth: What we really need is a Swiss army knife.
Myth: 3G is here!
Myth: Focus groups and other traditional market analysis tools are the best way to determine user needs.
Myth: If it works in Silicon Valley, it will work anywhere.
Myth: The killer app will be games, er, no, I mean, horoscopes, or
Myth: Mobile devices will essentially be phones, organizers, or combinations, with maybe music/video added on.
Myth: The industry is converging on a UI standard.
Myth: Highly usable systems are just around the corner.
Myth: One underlying operating system will dominate.
Myth: Mobile devices will be free-or nearly free.
Myth: Advanced data-oriented services are just around the corner.
My only modification: for "Silicon Valley," substitute, "Silicon Valley, Japan or Finland."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Juarez killers: five untouchable drug-lords?
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DATE: 01/31/2004 08:04:03 AM
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An investigative journalist is publishing a book alleging that five untouchable rich narco-gangsters are responsible for the murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez.
'Mexican federal authorities have conducted investigations, which reveal who the killers are,' she claims. 'Five men from Juarez and one from Tijuana who get together and kill women in what can only be described as blood sport. Some of those involved are prominent men with important political connections - untouchables.'
The chosen victims are so young, explains Washington, to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Underlings supply new victims: 'They capture the girls and bring them to their masters.'
Washington alleges at least 100 women have been killed by these men, of whom all but one are multi-millionaires. They have political connections going all the way to President Vicente Fox, and some have allegedly made contributions to Fox's presidential campaign. They have ties to the Juarez Cartel, and have used their drug wealth to build respectable businesses.
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Product-placement film
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DATE: 01/31/2004 09:50:23 AM
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A Negativland-produced indie film coming to the San Francisco Indie festival features nothing but product-placement shots from other movies.
Steve Seid, Video Curator for Pacific Film Archive and Peter Conheim of Negativland present a finely tuned montage of egregious product placement shots, drawing on 70 films - removing the gratuitous and unnecessary plots and leaving behind just the exhilarating core of consumerism.
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(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Typepad and iPhoto united with Atom
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DATE: 01/31/2004 06:06:52 PM
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Atom is a powerful, open, RSS-like syndication format, but so far, not a lot has been done with it. Now, Deez Steeles has used Atom to ship an iPhoto-to-Typepad tool that directly exports pictures that are retouched, selected and organized in Apple's iPhoto to Movable Type's Typepad blogging service. That's pretty sweet.
I'm digging the new Atom API interface to typepad. I have just completed a prototype of an iPhoto2Typepad interface. That means that its now possible to select photos in iPhoto and directly export into a Typepad Photo Album. This is basically my Holy Grail of digital photo convenience. Now the same program we use to import, and organise our pictures can send them right to Typep
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(via Dive Into Mark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Car Talk dumps Real for WMP
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DATE: 01/31/2004 10:59:21 PM
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The guys who run Car Talk on NPR have dumped RealMedia in favor of Windows Media Player, having gotten fed up with Real's deceptive practices that try to force you into downloading the payware version of their player.
Here's the problem. In order to hear our audio, you have to go to Real.com and download their "free" RealPlayer. But when you get to the web site, the free player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night. And the site seems to do everything it possibly can to get you to "buy" a player instead. You have to work very hard to get the free player. And we think that stinks. And get this. It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That's something, huh?
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Marvel and DC claim they own "superhero"
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DATE: 02/01/2004 07:17:37 AM
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Zed sez, "It seems Marvel and DC co-own a trademark on the word 'superhero.'"
GeekPunk is announcing that their flagship comic book title featuring superheroes patronizing their favorite bar & grill during their off-hours will now be entitled Hero Happy Hour beginning with the fifth issue of the ongoing series.
According to creator Dan Taylor, "The decision to change the title was brought upon by the fact that we received a letter from the trademark counsel to 'the two big comic book companies' claiming that they are the joint owners of the trademark 'SUPER HEROES' and variations thereof."
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to get spyware-free RealPlayer through the BBC
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DATE: 02/01/2004 08:33:45 AM
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An anonymous reader sez, "The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it."
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(Thanks, Anonymous Reader!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Satan as file-sharer
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DATE: 02/01/2004 09:28:12 AM
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Satan, in Paradise Lost, on "Apple Sharing"
'O fruit divine, Sweet of thyself, but much more sweet thus cropt,
Forbidd'n here, it seems, as onely fit
For Gods, yet able to make Gods of Men:
And why not Gods of Men, since good, the more
Communicated, more abundant growes,
The author not impair'd, but honourd more?
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT outfits Chinese MiniTrue's Room 101
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DATE: 02/01/2004 09:30:48 AM
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Amnesty International has fingered MSFT for violating the UN's Human Rights code in supplying the Chinese government with the network tools necessary to entrap and bust political dissidents.
Amnesty believes Microsoft is in violation of a new United Nations Human Rights code for multinationals which says businesses should 'seek to ensure that the goods and services they provide will not be used to abuse human rights'...
Microsoft told The Observer: 'We are focused on delivering the best technology to people throughout the world. However, how that technology is used is with the individual and ultimately not in the company's control.'
This is a curious rationale from a company that is shoving DRM down its customers' throats, effectively telling the entertainment industry that it believes that it can and should control how its users use its products.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Engineer calls his namesake son "2.0" instead of "Jr."
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DATE: 02/01/2004 03:51:03 PM
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An engineer from Michigan named Jon Blake Cusack has named his son, also called Jon, "Jon Blake Cusack 2.0."
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(Thanks, edmz)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sock-puppets in oil
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DATE: 02/01/2004 05:10:40 PM
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Wonderful gallery of oil-paintings of sock-puppets.
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(Thanks, Lisa!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pierced fish
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DATE: 02/01/2004 09:06:05 PM
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Interview with a piercer who has come up with a successful method for piercing pet fish.
BME: If someone brought their fish to you for a piercing, would you do it and what would you charge?
WILLIAM: Yes, as long as it was a fish of substantial size. People have asked me to pierce Betas and there's no way I would. I don't think I could charge for the service, just the jewelry.
BME: What's morally worse, piercing a human baby's ears, or piercing a fish's "labret"?
WILLIAM: Well, I pierced a baby's lobes once and I'll never do it again! I'll pierce fish again though.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Understanding slush, a primer on rejection
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DATE: 02/02/2004 05:53:57 AM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor who's been in publishing for enough time to have developed some very advanced theories on the inner workings of the industry, has published a detailed account of the action on RejectionCollection.com, a site where writers post and complain about the rejection slips they've garnered from publishers.
Teresa invites us into the world of the "slushreader" -- the editor who goes through the unsolicited manuscripts, deciding which will to have a chance at publication and which will go back to their creators, and then analyses the mental model of this process implicit in the RejectionCollection.com commentary. The disconnect is profound and highly thought-provoking. At the very least, this should be required reading for anyone who aspires to a career in the arts (where the stiff competition from your fellow would-bes gives decision-makers the ultimate buyer's market).
But even if you don't want to write or paint or sing for a living, this is important stuff, illustrating the core principles of life in a world where we strive to get busy people to recognize the merit of our contributions.
Herewith, the rough breakdown of manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections:
1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hers-n-his duvet cover
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:24:30 AM
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It seems to me that this his-n-hers duvet cover would be a great way to finally settle any lingering arguments over who gets which side (and would make life easier if you were, you know, "getting to know someone"), but at $276, it might be cheaper to go for a session or two of counselling.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emer3g1ng L0ft, an ETCON crashspace in the tradition of Emerging Man
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:32:43 AM
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At last year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Danny O'Brien, Quinn Norton and Jon Gilbert invited ten people to come pitch tents in their nearby backyard, where there was WiFi, water, and electricity. They called it Emerging Man, a cross between Emerging Tech and Burning Man. They even had a geodesic dome.
This year, ETCON is being held in San Diego and the kids don't have a backyard to throw open to the public, so I suggested that they get in touch with the DachB0den crew, the hacker group who run the wonderful ToorCon, an astounding tech-security conference at which I spoke last year.
One thing led to another, and DachB0den has opened up its wicked hacker loft (here are my pictures of the space from the ToorCon afterparty in September) in downtown San Diego as a communal crashspace for some of this year's ETCON attendees.
The roster filled up fast, but as with the Emerging Man space, there's every reason to believe that the Dachb0den loft will become a social nexus for this year's ETCON, and there's also every reason to believe that there will be some dropping out and shifting around, so don't give up hope if you're looking for an ETCON crashpad.
There is, of course, a Wiki wherein the whole affair is being planned. I love watching this stuff come together.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT ships a metadata stripper for Office
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:38:10 AM
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It appears that the MPAA writes memoes to the FCC on behalf of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee chairman Fritz Hollings.
How do I know this? Because last year, Hollings sent a letter to Chairman Powell urging him to open proceedings into the apocalyptically stupid Broadcast Flag, and the memo was released as a Word file.
Word files contain tons of metadata about their creation and revision, including things like the name of the person to whom the version of Word used to create the document was registered, which is how we busted Hollings. NTK sometimes pulls apart the Word-based press-releases coming out of the UK government and shows how the New Labor taskmasters are rewriting (and upbraiding) the Old Labour bureaucrats who produce the initial drafts.
After years and years of this sort of humiliation, MSFT has finally gotten wise and shipped the "Remove Hidden Data" add-in for Office XP/2003, which "you can use to remove personal or hidden data that might not be immediately apparent when you view the document in your Microsoft Office application."
Of course, the "add-in" only cover a couple recent flavors of Office and doesn't work on the Mac, so for the rest of us, there's still a pretty good reason not to use Word for any sensitive electronic document dissemenation.
And, of course, it remains to be seen whether the "Remove Hidden-Data" function actually removes all the hidden data -- MSFT has devoted so much engineering to obfuscating its file format to lock out competitors from shipping a compatible word-processor, there's really no good way to evaluate this claim.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The SuperBowl ad you didn't get to see
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:47:01 AM
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MoveOn.org organized the BushIn30Seconds campaign to raise the money to air a 30-second spot during the SuperBowl detailing the problems with the Bush administration. The spots were produced by MoveOn fans, released under a Creative Commons license, and juried by a distinguished panel.
Only one snag: CBS wouldn't run the winning ad. They claimed that it would be too topical for them (though an ad equating drugs with terrorism and a Janet Jackson's nipple were both peachy keen). So much for open political discourse in America.
Here's the SuperBowl ad you didn't see. It's licensed under a Creative Commons license, so you can make copies, you can share it with your friends, you can put it on your hard-drive and show it to your kids when they ask you what happened to America.
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(via Vertical Hold)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: William Carlos Williams's "This is Just to Say"
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:49:27 AM
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I followed a link to William Carlos Williams's poem "This is Just to Say" this morning, and it froze me in my tracks. So much in just 12 lines. I want a plum.
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tablature for Super Mario Brothers
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:55:40 AM
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I've seen walkthroughs and screenmovies of video-games that explain or show how to win and find all the Easter Eggs, but this takes the cake.
It's a how-to-win guide for Super Mario Brothers, and the authors have invented an ingenious, ASCII-based tablature for noting the proper keypresses at each moment in the game for a perfect win.
It's hard to say what's more impressive here: the obsessive documenting of the winning strategy or the marvellous creativity in the invention of the tablature itself.
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(Thanks, stx!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tomorrow, the future of the Internet gets set in court
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DATE: 02/02/2004 07:05:11 AM
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A bunch of my EFF co-workers are in Hollywood tomorrow, fighting for your rights and mine. Today is the day that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hears the Morpheus appeal, fighting the studios who say that the toolmakers who build P2P networks should be on the hook for what their users do with those networks (like saying that Bank of America should be able to sue Ford if they get stuck up by someone driving a Mustang getaway car).
Good luck to them. We've won this fight in the lower court, and we'd all better hope we win it again on appeal, too: otherwise, you can kiss the idea of general-purpose networks goodbye: network operators will have to build their systems to police their users' activities, using fallible human judgement or even more fallible algorithms to grant or forbid access to the network depending on the file you're trying to share.
"This is not just a case about peer-to-peer," countered Fred von Lohmann, who represents Streamcast and is senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It is a case that will determine whether technology companies are allowed to innovate or whether they have to ask permission from copyright owners before they build new products."
The legal doctrine tested in this case is the same one that protects companies like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft from being held liable when someone uses HP CD burners or Internet Explorer to commit copyright infringement, von Lohmann said.
"It's important to protect the Betamax doctrine, so the price of innovation doesn't become a huge lawsuit from the entertainment industry," he said.
In the landmark Sony Betamax case in 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony was not liable for contributory copyright infringement for selling VCRs that allowed consumers to tape content from their televisions.
This will be an important day in the history of the future. Hold your breath and hope. And give to EFF -- someone's got to fight this fight.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mingering Mike run to ground
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DATE: 02/02/2004 07:20:58 AM
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Mingering Mike is the unknown folk-artist responsible for the astonishing hand-painted record albums Xeni wrote about here last month. Today, the NYT features a report from a journalist who tracked him down and got his amazing story.
He said he would spend as long as a week making his album jackets. He originally put the cardboard records inside because the covers were too flimsy otherwise. And then he began adding fake promotional stickers, seven-inch singles to accompany the records, lyric sheets, gatefold sleeves, fan club information and nearly every other detail imaginable. "I wanted everything to be my own stuff and my own ideas," he said, "and not copy from anybody else."
Mingering Mike's dream, he said, was to be known for his music, and for his songs to inspire people. Thus, he tackled subjects like the growing drug problem in the United States on the cover of "The Drug War" and compulsory military service in his apocryphal reissue of an apocryphal soundtrack to the apocryphal film "You Only Know What They Tell You."
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(Thanks, Star!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: State Department bans Courier 12
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DATE: 02/02/2004 07:31:01 AM
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The US State Department has banned Courier 12 in favor of Times New Roman 14. Hammersley points out that the logical next step is "intelligence reports in Comic Sans, obviously."
"In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: 'Times New Roman 14'," said the memorandum.
The new font "takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look," it said, adding that after February 1 "only Times New Roman 14 will be accepted."
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Extremophile mining for bio-ideas
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DATE: 02/02/2004 08:24:51 AM
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Bio-miners are looking closely at extremophiles, organisms that thrive in adverse environments, for exploitable bio-ideas. The gold rush mentality is endangering the extremophile habitats, though, and may cost humanity the lessons they have to offer us.
Extremophiles comprise principally bacteria, which have the remarkable ability to thrive in conditions that would be hazardous to other lifeforms - extremes of temperature, radiation, salinity, and metal toxicity...
One promising discovery is a glycoprotein which prevents Antarctic fish from freezing...
Other Antarctic discoveries include an extract from green algae for use in cosmetic skin treatment, and anti-tumour properties in a strain of yeast.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Course in googling comes to UW Seattle LIS department
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DATE: 02/02/2004 08:53:36 AM
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The UW Seattle Library and Information Science program is offering a course in Google -- in Microsoft's back-yard, no less, and just a few days since Bill Gates said that MSFT was going to un-break its search offerings:
'Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignore the other stuff,' he said. But 'it's the remaining 20 percent that counts,' he added, 'because that's where the quality perception is.'
This was by far the most interesting thing I've read about Google in 2004: the value proposition is in the 20 percent that represents the least-frequent queries in the service. It's the same reason that PirateNapster, with millions of songs (most of which you didn't care about) was a million times better than LegitNapster, with a few hundred thousand songs, most of which you can hear by turning on the radio. It's the difference between an ASCII ebook that you can print of turn into a PDF or run through text-to-speech or any of a million tasks that most of us don't care about and a frozen ebook in a DRM format that you can only use in the ways that the publisher's research has indicated are most popular.
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(via Battelle)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Wiley Wiggins movie available on DVD
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:28:44 PM
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Wiley Wiggins sez, "My last movie, Frontier - A surreal quasi-comedy performed entirely in a heretofore unknown eastern european language with English (and Esparanto) subtitles, is now available on DVD from Film Threat. Watch grown men beat each other with whole raw chickens. Watch me copulate with a hole in the ground and lick inhabited spiderwebs. Fun for the whole family. Frontier was directed by David Zellner and is based on the classic Bulbovian drama fragment 'Froktog'."
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(Thanks, Wiley!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Explore your privacy with Swipe
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DATE: 02/02/2004 06:45:02 PM
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Chris sez, "Swipe focuses on automated collection of personal information. You can read the barcode on your driver's license, request your personal information and opt-out from commercial databases, and with the 'data calculator,' determine how much your personal information is worth to direct marketers. It's neato torpedo."
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(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unix as she is spoke
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DATE: 02/02/2004 10:09:46 PM
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Glossary of how to speak your Unix vocabulary.
<> ANGLE BRACKETS, angles, funnels, brokets, pointy brackets, widgets
< LESS THAN, less, read from*, from*, in*, comesfrom*, crunch, sucks, left chevron#, open pointy (brack[et]), bra#, upstairs&, west, (left|open) widget
> GREATER THAN, more, write to*, into/toward*, out*, gazinta*, zap, blows, right chevron#, closing pointy (brack[et]), ket#, downstairs&, east, (right|close) widget
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Homemade M&M dispenser
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DATE: 02/02/2004 10:12:44 PM
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Erincraft features homemade one-of-a-kind ceramics, including this ingenious M&M dispenser.
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(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Giving a talk on Thursday in Chapel Hill, NC
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DATE: 02/03/2004 08:43:18 AM
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I'm going to be at the UNC in Chapel Hill, North Carolina this week for some iBiblio events, one of which is a public talk on copyright and the EFF at 3:30 on February 5. If you're in the area, it'd be great to see ya!
What: A Public Talk on the Electronic Frountier Foundation and Copyright
When: Thursday February 5 at 3:30
Where: Wilson Library's Pleasants Family Room, UNC-CH
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What do the states' shapes mean?
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DATE: 02/03/2004 08:49:33 AM
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Funny commentaries on the hidden messages in the shapes of the states and Canadian provinces, such as, "what makes Oklahoma so desperate to touch New Mexico?"
Link
(via Kottke))
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why checking IDs doesn't make you secure
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DATE: 02/03/2004 09:07:34 AM
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Bruce Schneier explains why verifying that someone has a photo ID is a completely useless security measure:
Our goal is to somehow identify the few bad guys scattered in the sea of good guys. In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that denotes intention. We'd want all terrorists to carry a card that says "evildoer" and everyone else to carry a card that said "honest person who won't try to hijack or blow up anything." Then, security would be easy. We would just look at people's IDs and, if they were evildoers, we wouldn't let them on the airplane or into the building.
This is, of course, ridiculous, so we rely on identity as a substitute. In theory, if we know who you are, and if we have enough information about you, we can somehow predict whether you're likely to be an evildoer. This is the basis behind CAPPS-2, the government's new airline passenger profiling system. People are divided into two categories based on various criteria: the traveler's address, credit history and police and tax records; flight origin and destination; whether the ticket was purchased by cash, check or credit card; whether the ticket is one way or round trip; whether the traveler is alone or with a larger party; how frequently the traveler flies; and how long before departure the ticket was purchased.
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(Thanks, Bruce!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dave Pell's Electablog
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DATE: 02/03/2004 09:49:23 AM
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Dave Pell has started a new blog about the upcoming presidential election, and as you would expect, it's very funny and insightful. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT's "Practice Safe Hex" classroom posters
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DATE: 02/03/2004 10:31:31 AM
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MSFT is offering teachers free posters for their classrooms advising their students of the risks of opening dodgy attachments.
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(Thanks, Higgins!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Things you can't talk about on standardized tests
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DATE: 02/03/2004 12:38:02 PM
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Harper's publishes a leaked memo from the Princeton Review advising of subjects that should be avoided when preparing practice-versions of standardized tests. The list is an astonishing testament to squeamishness, and what's most remarkable about it is that it excludes virtually every subject of moment, depth or verve that I can think of, guaranteeing that the examples in these tests will be utterly devoid of any interest-grabbing content, and will consequently lack the vividness that examples can bring to a good examination.
Individuals who may be associated with drug use or with advertising of substances such as cigarettes or alcohol
Name brands, trademarked names
Junk food
Fad diets
Abuse, poverty, running away
Divorce
Socioeconomic advantages (e.g., video games, swimming pools, computers in the home, expensive vacations)
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(via Dive Into Mark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Words-per-query on the rise
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DATE: 02/03/2004 01:03:52 PM
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The number of words in the average search-query is increasing. No theories proffered for this, but I'd assume ti's because Internet users are, on the whole, getting more sophisticated in the way that they think about information storage, labelling and retrieval.
1. 2 word phrases 32.58%
2. 3 word phrase 25.61%
3. 1 word phrases 19.02%
4. 4 word phrases 12.83%
5. 5 word phrases 5.64%
6. 6 word phrases 2.32%
7. 7 word phrases 0.98%
Link
(via Battelle)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Freaky ceramic figurines from the '60s
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DATE: 02/03/2004 01:18:03 PM
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Wotta treaure trove -- extra creepy ceramic dust collectors for sale. Link (via sensibleerection)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-tech multidimensional maps
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DATE: 02/03/2004 04:15:56 PM
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The Dynamap is a low-tech way of superimposing differnt logical and geographical networks over one another. As Gizmodo puts it:
...using interlaced images, manages to put three different maps of Manhattan -- a street map, a subway map, and one showing landmarks and neighborhoods -- all onto the same surface. Tilt it to one side and you see the street map, tilt it another way and you see the subway map, etc.
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(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Political book network maps reveal deep divide
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DATE: 02/03/2004 04:34:18 PM
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Fascinating map of political book clusters. The researcher used Amazon's "Customers who bought this book also bought these books" service to draw links between books that were purchased together.
So, if you are working a 2004 political campaign what do you do with this information? Obviously you will not be successful in removing a reader from deep in one cluster and transplanting them into the other cluster. All you can do is focus on the edge nodes and the bridges. See someone reading Sleeping with the Devil? That is someone you can talk to about your candidate. If they are reading Bushwacked or Dereliction of Duty -- the most central books in each cluster -- then either give them a high-five or a sneer, you won't change their views.
Link(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Number "6" makes your foot change direction
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DATE: 02/03/2004 05:36:33 PM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden brings us this interesting mind-hack:
While sitting in your chair, lift your right foot slightly off the ground and move it in clockwise circles. Now draw the numeral "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will involuntarily reverse direction.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google tutorial
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DATE: 02/03/2004 06:48:34 PM
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GoogleGuide is a pretty good tutorial on building good Google queries, covered by a Creative Commons license.
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(Thanks, Robert!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eastern Standard Tribe has launched!
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 02/03/2004 09:01:52 PM
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My second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe starts shipping today -- it should be showing up in bookstores any day now.
As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first novel, I've made the whole text of the novel available as a free download in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license -- and I've written a short essay explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.
I'm unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a new practice of book, readers. Take this novel and pass it from inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over P2P networks. Put it on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure ebook formats. Show me -- and my colleagues, and my publisher -- what the future of book looks like.
I'll keep on writing them if you keep on reading them. But as cool and wonderful as writing is, it's not half so cool as inventing the future. Thanks for helping me do it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pepsi and Guinness Can Stove
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:15:11 PM
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Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools e-zine:
This little stove is amazing; it's made from pepsi and guinness cans, using things that can be found around most households. It takes about an afternoon to make (plus some time waiting for the epoxy to set), weighs only a few grams, and is sufficient for most backpacking trips. I made my first one a few years ago, and I've been handing them out as gifts ever since. The stove is powerful enough to boil a quart of water in a reasonable amount of time, it's MUCH quieter than other camping stoves, if you lose it you're not out $80.00, and you can get the fuel for it (denatured alcohol) at most hardware or paint stores. Mine fits nicely inside of the mug I use for cooking and eating, with room to spare. I usually stuff a spare pair of socks in with it to keep it from rattling around. The site provides detailed instructions and photographs, as well as a message board with feedback and suggestions from other stove builders.
Link to Scott Henderson's Pepsi-G Stove
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Holy crap: South Park's "Casa Bonita" is for reals
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:17:51 PM
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Intrepid fact-checker and friend of BoingBoing Mara Schwartz says, "I was doing some research on Comedy Central programming for work, and found this. There was a recent South Park episode where the kids go for Kyle's birthday to a huge, amped-up Mexican restaurant in Denver called Casa Bonita, that features cliff divers, caves, waterfalls, etc. Turns out it's a real restaurant. Here's a link to their site."
UPDATE: Holy crap, indeed! Many BoingBoing readers wrote in to share experiences of the real-life Casa Bonita, and of other similiarly over-the-top Mexican/Central American/Pseudo-Mayan theme restaurant/amusement park combos located in the American midwest. Who knew? Reader Emily Smith says, "I've eaten [at Casa Bonita]. I don't recommend it for the food (sub-standard Mexican with a high chance that you'll be puking in the fountain outside later) and the food tastes a bit funny with the amount of chlorine from the diving pool floating around in the air. But, if you get the chance, do go sometime. The wait to get in is 1 hour at least and the wait to get out can be half an hour, but the chance to go through their haunted cave and get lost on the way to the bathroom is priceless."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell's Message Board
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:24:35 PM
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BoingBoing reader Avi Solomon says:
Edgar Mitchell,former Apollo 14 Astronaut maintains a message board where he answers questions put to him by the public. He is one of the few Apollo astronauts who is in public contact and the message board is a rare chance to put your own question to a man who walked on the moon. The thread I link to is one in which Dr. Mitchell discusses the impact of seeing earth from space. Many other threads on the message board relate to interesting details of the Apollo missions.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Andy Warhol and the Commodore Amiga 1000
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:30:47 PM
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Artnode.org has uncovered and posted a fascinating mid-'80s interview from Amigaworld magazine in which Andy Warhol discusses his relationship with his Commodore Amiga 1000, his experiments using it in portrait pieces of Debbie Harry and Dolly Parton, and his predictions about the future of computer art.
BoingBoing reader Jose Luis of Barcelona-based blog elastico.net, says "It's always fun finding this sort of stuff from the past, and wondering what would have happened if he hadn't died a year later."
Link to elastico.net post, Link to 2 MB PDF of the original magazine article.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Crazy art from guys in Finland: Mieskuoro Huutaja
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:33:47 PM
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BoingBoing buddy Gareth says:
Take a group of men from the northern Finnish town of Oulu... dress them in dark suits with black ties made from the inner tubes of car tyres.
Next, send them out on to the ice floes of the frozen Baltic and get them to shout - in choral unison - at a stranded 10,000-ton ice breaking vessel, and you have got something called Mieskuoro Huutaja (Men's Choir Shouters)... a new art form, and it is taking parts of the world by arctic storm.
Link to BBC news story, Link to truly bizarre audio and video clips of these Finnish guys, well, flowing with the ice floes.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Is photoblogging good for photography?
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:37:53 PM
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BoingBoing reader mat says, " This essay from Emese Gaal asks the question, 'While [photo]blogging helps build traffic and creates a sense of a welcoming and creative community, does blogging actually make you a better a photographer?' Well written and interesting article on the relative merits of the rise in photoblogging, from the point of view of a professional photographer. A selection of excellent comments really makes this worth a read." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Should Robots Have Human Faces?
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:38:26 PM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
A robotics designer named David Hanson, who lives in Dallas, Texas, says yes, according to this story from the Associated Press. But can you imagine that this guy gave his latest robot, designed to resemble his girlfriend, a name like Hertz? Does he think his girlfriend is for rent? Quite amazing! Besides choosing such a name, why is this such a controversial idea to make robots looking very much like human beings? Because the theory goes like this: "humans have a positive psychological reaction to robots that look somewhat like humans. But if a robot is made to look very realistic but somehow isn't quite right (it has an odd smile, or it doesn't blink, for example) it seems grotesque instead of comforting." You'll find more details and an astonishing picture in this overview.
Link
UPDATE: Popular Science magazine ran an extensive profile of David Hansen and his robot/girlfriend project last September, which includes some cool photos. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New paper on data privacy and Social Networking Services
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:40:56 PM
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Roger Clarke says:
I expressed concerns a couple of days ago about Plaxo. I've now flung together a draft privacy analysis of address-book and social networking services (SNS) generally, with particular reference to Plaxo. As always, I'd appreciate constructively negative criticism, particularly if I'm being unfair to anyone.
Abstract:
Technology and human ingenuity continue to pose new privacy challenges. During 2003, a new dot.com fashion arose from an odd amalgam of Rolodex address-books, e-communities and dating. Users of these services store personal data on a central server, which can be accessed by other people, and, potentially at least, exploited by the service-operator. There are privacy concerns, of a kind that has been analysed many times before. The new dimension that these services bring is that they entice users to disclose personal data about their friends, business contacts or acquaintances. That is a disturbing feature, and it requires careful analysis.
Link to Very Black Little Black Books (via politech)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Animation Zen
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DATE: 02/04/2004 10:43:38 PM
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(1) muffin films
(2) robot love
(3) door steps
(4) weapon of stick figure
(5) catfish hotel
(6) acme catalog
(7) ray patin studios
(8) animwatch
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jimmy Carter -- was president, is blogger.
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DATE: 02/05/2004 12:20:33 AM
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Former US President Jimmy Carter has a blog:
"Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, are traveling in West Africa Feb. 2-7, 2004, on behalf of The Carter Center. The purpose of their trip is two-fold: to call international attention to the need to eliminate the last 1 percent of Guinea worm disease remaining in the world and to launch the Development and Cooperation Initiative, a multiyear effort to help reduce poverty in Mali.
Members of the general public can accompany President Carter virtually as President Carter blogs, or publishes regular journal entries from the field. Reports will be posted as they are received from President Carter, who will share his thoughts and feelings during his journey in West Africa."
Link
(Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Court to entertainment lawyer: Calling it "theft" doesn't solve it. And curtail the use of abusive language
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DATE: 02/05/2004 05:03:57 AM
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Judge Noonan, one of the Ninth Circuit judges who listened to the Morpheus case in which the legality of building a tool without the entertainment industry's permission -- and hence the future of the Internet -- is being decided directed this blast at Ramos, the attorney arguing the music publishers' side:
"Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh
terms ["piracy," "theft"], but you are dealing with something new, and the question is,
does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to
that something new. And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it 'theft.' You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language."
EFF is now hosting the entire argument in the case as an MP3, which is in the public domain. My cow-orker Donna Wentworth sums up some other good linkage in her blog post:
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bay Guardian articles on iPods and digital music
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DATE: 02/05/2004 06:22:30 AM
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The San Francisco Bay Guardian ran a series of articles about digital music, iPods and the RIAA this week. Unfortunately, the Guardian's profoundly awful archiving policy means that this URL will go stale in a week (Cheez!), so enjoy this stuff while you can. They've fixed their permalinks, hurrah! Here's a bit from Annalee Newitz's piece:
And that's where the high-tech industry comes into the picture. Software companies, eager to lap up profits any way they can, realized there would be a huge market for programs that could be wrapped around digital media or put into players to prevent piracy. Microsoft, Apple, and RealNetworks are at the forefront of this burgeoning market with their DRM schemes for music. Apple packages iTunes songs in its Fairplay software, while RealNetworks (maker of the popular RealPlayer) has just opened a music store full of DRM-shackled songs to compete with iTunes. Microsoft markets the Media Rights Management software package and is planning to include a controversial and elaborate DRM scheme called the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (formerly known as Palladium) in the next version of Windows.
Link
(Thanks, Annalee!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple selling DRM'ed silence at $0.99 a pop
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DATE: 02/05/2004 06:29:39 AM
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As the Apple Turns has compiled a playlist of silent tracks available as DRM-restricted files from the iTunes Music Store.
Yesterday we mentioned in passing that faithful viewer djsteve had purchased a track that cost him the "best 99 cents [he'd] ever spent." The joke, of course, was that it was the second track from The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth, which consists of a minute and three seconds' worth of silence. To tell you the truth, while we're amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o' nothing, we're even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. And the most amusing thing of all, of course, is that the song has a thirty-second preview.
Well, as it turns out, the Ciccone Youth track is by no means the only all-silent untune for sale at the iTMS; faithful viewers ben, Scott Levin, and Michael Wyszomierski contributed their own suggestions, too. And you know how Apple recently added a bunch of "iTunes Essentials" playlists to the store, such as "Cover Songs" and "'70s AM Radio Classics"? Well, we've compiled all the silent tracks we managed to scrape together into the first AtAT Essentials playlist, "To Be Played At Maximum Volume."
Link
(Thanks, noel!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hackers improve cablemodem firmware
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DATE: 02/05/2004 07:09:23 AM
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Hackers have reverse-engineered a popular cablemodem design and released a homebrew firmware version that...
....lets you log in to an interactive VxWorks shell, or issue commands from a Web browser through an http interface. You load it by tapping an undocumented console serial port on the circuit board
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: PETA Goes Porno
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DATE: 02/05/2004 09:09:25 AM
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Fleshbot says:
"Is that a sausage in your pocket, or are you just happy to eat zucchini? Whether or not you believe that eating meat causes impotence (we've never had a problem), this 70s porno-themed ad for PETA makes vegetarianism look mighty sexy."
Link to "The Super Bowl Ad They Won't Show", link to other meat-themed items on Fleshbot, aka "Atkins Porn." Don't ask.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art.blogging.la launches
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DATE: 02/05/2004 09:13:19 AM
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A new blog about art in Los Angeles just launched: art.blogging.la. Upcoming profile in the LA Weekly, and check #5 on Modern Art Notes' "five to see" list (right hand column).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sweatshop conditions alleged in computer parts factories
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DATE: 02/05/2004 09:27:37 AM
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The overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in England has released a report called "Clean Up Your Computer" alleging dire working conditions in computer production facilities throughout the developing world.
CAFOD has proof that electronic workers in Mexico, Thailand and China suffer harassment, discrimination and intolerable working conditions. The workers produce parts that end up in the computers of companies such as Hewlett Packard, Dell and IBM.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Car-mod: Cuban '51 Chevy transformed into tailfinned escape boat
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DATE: 02/05/2004 09:29:59 AM
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Former BB guestblogger Todd Lappin says: "The Cuban guy who tried to flee to Florida in a 1951 Chevy he turned into a boat has now tried again... in a tailfinned 1959 Buick. Nice paint job!"
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Kevin Sites Iraq dispatch: Portrait of the Dictator as an Old Man
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DATE: 02/05/2004 10:15:29 AM
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A new photo and essay dispatch from Kevin Sites (blogger and NBC News correspondent currently stationed in northern Iraq) about an artist named Wisam Rady -- former propagandist for the Ministry of Information under Saddam Hussein. Excerpt:
Wisam is 36 years old, but still lives at home with his parents in Ath Thawra or Sader City. Partly he says it's because his family is so close. His mother still waits outside the gate for him to come home at night. But it also has to do with prison. His time at Abu Graib deeply wounded him, he says; his loss of time and place, which perhaps only home, only the familiar, can heal. It seems strange that healing can be done here, a city so strewn with garbage that goats feast along the median strip, among the passing traffic. It is also, the inspiration for the rats on Saddam's shoulders.
"There were no rats in Ath Thawra," Wisam says, "And then one morning we awoke and the city was infested with them. "It was a scheme by Saddam to make the people sick." Or so the people of the city believe. Wisam says he first did the Saddam paintings for his own catharsis. He shot a digital picture of the television video and turned reality into artistic realism. When he added the rats, the work somehow transcended the painterly necessities of so many Iraqi artists who knock out quick commissions on popular contemporary motifs. Now the work was more than just a colored mirror of a current event. Now the work found an audience. Local newspapers began doing stories on Wisam. American Army officers and western journalist began buying the paintings at $100 a pop. A steal, by Soho standards, but a good price in post-war Iraq.
Link, discussion forum
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anti-YASNS is the new black
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DATE: 02/05/2004 01:06:33 PM
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More ramblings throughout the blogosphere on Orkut and all of the other online schmooze enablers we all love to say we hate, but secretly participate in anyway. Link to an amusing musing from Michael O'Connor Clarke, who crafts the genius image at left. Me? I'm wearing an "I'd rather be filtering out networking invitations from my in-box" T-shirt right now. Yeah... uh-huh... it's the same one I'm wearing in my Friendster headshot. (via Paul)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 2004 DIY Convention, this week in LA
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DATE: 02/05/2004 02:13:18 PM
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In LA this week? Check out this year's edition of the DIY Convention, a how-to event about creating, promoting, protecting and distributing independent film, music and books. The three-day gathering helps artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians lean how to "make a living, not a killing," -- in other words, do it for themselves. $85 gets you into all three days of events, including the big opening night bash (tonight).
The fourth annual DIY Convention: Do It Yourself in Film, Music & Books will be held Feb. 5-7 in Hollywood. The grand finale of the DIY Music and DIY Film Festivals will be augmented by a full day of panels, workshops and speeches by some of the cutting-edge leaders of independent film, music and books.
Happens in Hollywood today through Saturday. Panelists, schedule, and more details here: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: META: Boingboing readers, please use our handy site suggestion form
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DATE: 02/05/2004 05:19:39 PM
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A friendly reminder to BoingBoing readers who'd like to submit item suggestions to me, or any of the blog's co-editors: we love you, we love your ideas -- you are what makes this blog fun to produce and fun to read. But please, please, please, please, please, please use our handy online submission form instead of sharing ideas by email. Or (gag) IM.
Really. Even if you're a personal pal. Each of the site's four editors -- myself included -- have spam and virii-challenged in-boxes, and we find ourselves traveling/being crushed by other deadlines/having to take blog-breaks at various times for various reasons. So, submitting your suggestions by online form instead of personal email is really really really the best way to (a) ensure that your suggestion receives timely consideration, and (b) help us avoid nervous breakdowns. Thanks! Here's that link again!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ed Broadbent's campaign blog
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DATE: 02/05/2004 07:56:20 PM
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Ed Broadbent, the former head of Canada's progressive New Democratic Party, has started a blog. It's a running personal account of electoral stumping, and witty as hell.
Let me begin by saying that I know nothing about trucks. Except that driving around this old beat up borrowed one-ton helped me get in touch with the big butch of a man?s man that lives somewhere under my yuppie Glebe demeanor.
Something about that big roaring engine that lurches into gear like a rodeo bull, and the satisfaction of being able to throw anything in the back and haul ?er away.
Except when it doesn?t start. That?s when the big butch of a man?s man shrinks back into the yuppie Glebe shell.
Link
(Thanks, Jordan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wild Eastern Standard Tribe remixes
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DATE: 02/05/2004 08:01:46 PM
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Trevor Smith has whipped up two amazing remixes of Eastern Standard Tribe, my new novel. The first is a "speed-reader," based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you've found a back-door to your brain's comprehension nodes. The second is a "PurpleSlurped" version of the book, in which every paragraph is given its own link, so that one can easily refer to a specific passage of the text.
Link
(Thanks, Trevor!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIP Disney World's designer, John Hench
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DATE: 02/05/2004 08:05:25 PM
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John Hench, the Disney artist designated as "Mickey Mouse's offical portrait artist" and the designer behind the look and feel of the parks, is dead at 95.
When Walt Disney started planning for Disneyland, one of the first artists he enlisted was Hench, who designed such attractions as Disneyland's Space Mountain.
After Walt Disney's death in 1966, Hench oversaw the creation of Walt Disney World in Florida in 1971 and the addition of Epcot in 1982. He also helped supervise the design of Disney's first overseas park, Tokyo Disneyland, which opened in 1983 in Japan, among other projects.
His color sense was legendary.
Against Hench's arguments, the head of a corporation once insisted on white for the walls of an Epcot attraction. A frustrated Hench finally replied, "Well, I have 34 shades of white. Which one do you want?"
Link
(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worst ToS on the entire Internet
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DATE: 02/05/2004 08:08:55 PM
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The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum has 21,000 words of legalese on its homepage, a disclaimer and terms-of-service document that is likely the very worst of its kind on the entire Internet. James Grimmelman shreds this thing, picking out the dumbest moments in a 21 kiloword extravanganza of dumbness:
[It] gives every sign of having been professionally drafted by a competent lawyer with severe OCD. It's not quite that any individual term is clearly insane as that the redundancy makes the whole much less than the sum of its parts. We've been cracking each other up by reading selections aloud. Some highlights inside:
"All other access, use, disclosure, reproduction, delayed use, reduction to human-perceivable form, printing, copying or saving of digital image files or other content, reformatting, file sharing, downloading, uploading, storing, posting, mirroring, archiving, recording, distributing, redistribution, repurposing, modification, rewriting, manipulation, creation of derivative works, translations, or products, licensing, sale, transfer, display, public performance, publicity, broadcast, televising, reporting, publication (in whole or part) or transmission whether by http, ftp, electronic mail or any other file transfer protocol, and whether by electronic means or otherwise, or use by other than individual scholars, or commercial use requires prior written permission of the rights owner(s) and payment of a fee, and severe penalties apply for theft and unauthorized publication, which is also a crime."
Link
(Thanks, James!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iTunes/Pepsi ad parody
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DATE: 02/05/2004 10:01:02 PM
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This is a great parody (cum attack on the recording industry) of the iTunes/Pepsi ad that ran during the Superbowl.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steve Jobs for Disney CEO?
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DATE: 02/06/2004 03:23:41 AM
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One of the purged Disney board members working to secure theouster of Michael Eisner thinks that Steve Jobs should run their show.
Gold, who left Disney in December, told The New York Post: "There are five or six guys I believe can run this company. Steve Jobs would absolutely be one of them."
Gold confirmed that he hasn't approached Jobs, nor has Jobs asked him for the job.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sexually explicit snowpersons
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DATE: 02/06/2004 08:22:00 AM
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Snapshots of pornographic snow figure tableaus. Link (Thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: So.... ahem... there was life on Mars?
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DATE: 02/06/2004 08:24:48 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
Two researchers from the University of Queensland (UQ) have confirmed that life existed on Mars. They first looked at magnetic crystals found in mud samples from a water trap of an Australian golf course. UQ News Online reports that they found their proof by comparing these crystals with those contained in a meteorite discovered in Antartica in 1984 and named ALH84001. "Our research shows that the structures found in the NASA meteorite were more than likely made by bacteria present on Mars four billion years ago, before life even started on Earth," said Dr Taylor, one of the two scientists. You'll find more details and references in this overview, both on the research work and the meteorite.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gallery of fabulous 3D-like sidewalk chalk paintings
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DATE: 02/06/2004 08:29:19 AM
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BoingBoing reader satirista says,
"A half-dozen photos of simply the finest trompe l'oeil works I've ever seen--and they're done on sidewalks with pastels! The pix at Snopes are better than the gallery photos at Kurt Wenner's own site (in my opinion), but here's a link to Wenner's Q&A with the Artist page, which answers questions like 'what happens when it rains on your pictures?'"
Link to gallery at Snopes.com
UPDATE: Will the real Kurt Wenner please stand up? BoingBoing reader Walt writes: "Unfortunately I think people are failing to recognize that the work cited from the original blog, and now on Snopes, is not the artwork of LA based Kurt Wenner but ANOTHER sidewalk artist, most likely based in Britan. You can see by comparing the pictures of the two, it is not the same guy. I have yet to determine the name of the artist originally sited in the blog. I have also contacted Snopes to try and set them straight."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Comic Zen
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DATE: 02/06/2004 08:35:19 AM
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(1) her! (2) the boy fitz hammond (3) a softer world (4) death to the extremist (5) my fighting technique. Link to web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: eBay as distribution channel for haute couture
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DATE: 02/06/2004 08:49:18 AM
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NYT article on a new eBay hack of sorts -- up-and-coming fashion designers are using the online auction site as a means of reaching would-be customers who don't live in spitting distance of Park Avenue or Rodeo Drive.
The 10-day auction, planned for Feb. 26 to March 7, will not be the first on eBay by a fashion designer. Narciso Rodriquez crossed that threshold last September. But in that case only two items, a nude-tone sequin dress and a similar colored suit, were direct from the runway.
The coming Proenza Schouler auction, by contrast, will be "virtually an online trunk show - the first of its kind,'' said Constance White, the style director at eBay. The Web site is intent on expanding its clothing offerings and special promotions. "The potential is vast," Ms. White said.
Link (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kazaa, Sharman offices raided in Australia
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DATE: 02/06/2004 08:54:59 AM
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Australian recording industry investigators raided the Sydney offices of Kazaa, of owner Sharman Networks, and homes of two company execs today -- seeking evidence to support copyright infringement allegations.
The raid was conducted under a rarely used law, known as Anton Pillar, which allows litigants in civil copyright cases to gather evidence. The Federal Court gave major Australian record labels permission to raid 12 premises in three states to collect evidence against Kazaa, said Michael Speck, general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations. The group is owned by Universal, Festival Mushroom Records, EMI Music, Sony Music, Warner Music Australia and BMG Australia. (...) Speck said the recording industry would launch a civil action against Kazaa in the Federal Court on Tuesday.
Link to SF Chronicle article. Link to statement from Sharman Networks about the raid. (via pho)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Qwesting in NYC
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DATE: 02/06/2004 09:18:41 AM
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Earlier this week, I participated in an internal symposium in NYC for telecom company Qwest, along with Doug Rushkoff (far left in snapshot here), Sueann Ambron, Omar Wasow, Clay Shirky, Janet Abrams, Justin Hall, Dennis Crowley, and Jane Buckingham. Justin blogs and shares snapshots from the event at links.net. Snip from Justin:
"We wrapped up the extended session by listing all of our telecommunications loyalties - astonishingly long lists (...) That jumble of communications begs simplification. What one company might offer me all those services? A frighteningly large company, I suspect. Or maybe a nimble one. We left them with a number of bold propositions and excited suggestions; I will be interested to see how the company develops itself over the coming years. Between wireless, landlines and high speed internet, with a firm local footing in the middle-West United States, I think Qwest has potential to create new forms of community using telecommunications."
Link
UPDATE: Numerous BoingBoing readers who are current or former Qwest customers wrote in to express, shall we say, less-than-warm-and-fuzzy feelings about past service experiences with this provider. Qwest is currently undergoing aggressive restructuring under a new CEO, after a disastrous recent past. Among the more polite comments received, Robert Rose writes "People here HATE Qwest in Oregon (...) [They need] to get the few services they offer currently right before they start looking at others." To their credit, the handful of Qwest executives I met in NYC this week seemed to be an intelligent and forward-minded lot who are well aware of this fact, and of the inherent challenges involved in planning for the future while contending with the company's past.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dell's Linux Blog
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DATE: 02/06/2004 09:20:28 AM
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Genuine, honest-to-blog corporate weblogging from a Fortune 500? Dell Linux engineers speak freely in this collaborative online journal, which consists mostly of software update news, patch pointers, and other deeply geeky stuff: Link. Also available in tasty, low-carb RSS.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Amazing Iraq photo website from Stephanie Sinclair
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DATE: 02/06/2004 02:12:19 PM
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A weblog and an incredible collection of images from Iraq (also Cuba), shot and written by photographer Stephanie Sinclair. Click thumbnail for full-size image.
link
(note: Her blog and photo gallery launch by way of a nasty javascript pop-up window, but the UI is well worth enduring for the truly stunning images inside)(Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: William Gibson's U.S. book tour
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DATE: 02/06/2004 03:19:36 PM
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Author William Gibson is on a book tour this month, promoting Pattern Recognition. 02.03.04 to 02.21.04. Check out dates and venues here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Playboy syndicates Suicide Girl nudie pics
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DATE: 02/06/2004 03:26:52 PM
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Not one of the links in this post is worksafe, but you knew that. So: Playboy online just launched a new feature, "Suicide Girl of the week." I heard about plans for the syndication launch last week from SG founder Sean in LA, and I understand this is the first time Playboy has ever syndicated another site's content nudes directly on playboy.com (thanks, Michael). An interesting development, given SG's humble, indie dot-com beginnings. BoingBoing reader matt rhodes says, "You can see the thread on the SG board here and the Playboy boards are here. From what I gather, there is some degree of bitching on the Playboy boards. They don't seem to want their nudes with tattoos and piercings." The Suicide Girls may be a first for Playboy, but Playboy certainly isn't the first to syndicate Suicide Girls: Fleshbot has been featuring a SGOTW since launch.
In other news... SG is launching a bunch of new website content in a beta section called SG Newswire (think hybrid collaborative blog/news format, on music, politics, technology, etc.), plus an RSS feed for SG Newswire, and they've also got another big announcement in the works about a new offline project. If I tell you what it is, hordes of hot chicks clad solely in SG-logo underoos will swarm my office and spank me. And that would be, you know, a bad thing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wolfram's giant book free online
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DATE: 02/06/2004 03:44:37 PM
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Stephen Wolfram has made the complete text of his New Kind of Science (a 1000+-page treatise on the way that virtually everything in the universe can be explained with cellular automata), which he self-published a couple years back with some of the squillions of dollars he's earned on his seminal Mathematica software program, available for free on the Internet.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Two "official" blank CDRs when you buy the new Eisbrecher CD
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DATE: 02/06/2004 03:46:36 PM
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Eisbrecher, a band, is bundling two blank CDRs, silkscreened to match the official CD, with sales of its new disc:
We are of the opinion that the music buyers are criminalized enough and have been made responsible for the wretched state in the music industry. We are giving them the chance to make 2 legal copies for private use with 'official blanks'. It can't always be that the end users have to take the blame for something that international corporations have arranged with their artist-burning methods.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USB-powered vacuum
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DATE: 02/06/2004 03:49:42 PM
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This USB-powered, keyboard-sized vacuum cleaner looks geniunely useful.
192K PDF Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My New Fighting Technique: a tale of xerography on the high seas
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DATE: 02/06/2004 04:26:11 PM
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David Rees, author of the Get Your War On strips and the book My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable describes how MNFTIU became a book -- a tale involving countless under-the-table deals with people who have access to high-speed photocopiers. This kind of story illustrates the power of xerography and the importance of having a job wiht access to a high-speed photocopies.
So the book was being distributed via fax without my permission. This is called "file sharing." I asked the guy if he thought his photocopy friend would make me some copies of the book at a reduced rate ? seeing as how he was already engaged in unauthorized fax piracy on the high seas of clip-art comics. He thought this was reasonable. I called the guy at the photocopy shop and we worked out an arrangement whereby I would stop by the shop on Friday afternoons with a 12-pack of beer. I would leave the beer on top of the counter and he would kick a box of books under the counter. I would lug the books (actually, collated pages) home on the subway and staple them in my living room. That is how I learned the ancient art of bookbinding.
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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TITLE: Dumbass "Copyright Registration" "service"
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DATE: 02/06/2004 04:31:48 PM
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GoDaddy has created an idiotic "Copyright Registration" service that provides "expert assistance" in registering your copyright -- something that you have virtually no good earthly reason to do, and something you absolutely don't need any pricey "expert assistance" with. They offer a goony little badge you can put on your work to show that it's really, really, s00per-copyrighted, too ("Display this on your site and show thieves and others
that you have federally assured rights to damages and attorneys' fees"). This is about half a step above the Green Card lotto scam and pay-for-book-doctoring "services" that prey on would-be artists' anxieties.
Link
(Thanks, Devon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Age-maps: cool photoshoppery to span the years
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DATE: 02/06/2004 04:38:02 PM
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Less sez, "Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together. In this fusion a jump-of-time is established at the tear."
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(Thanks, Lee!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mean Valentine's Day cards
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DATE: 02/06/2004 04:41:36 PM
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Love this gallery of print-and-assemble Valentine's Day cards that are full of bitterness, exquisitely expressed.
Link
(Thanks, Eyes Spies and Lies!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: American dispatches from London
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DATE: 02/06/2004 04:47:40 PM
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Yankee Fog is a weekly blog account of life in London written by a former Dennis-Miller-comedy-writer, living as an American in the UK. The weekly essays are engaging and funny and evocative.
Link
(Thanks, Jacob!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Win a leather-bound "insanely detailed" Necronomicon
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DATE: 02/06/2004 05:13:57 PM
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The HP Lovecraft society is holding a contest to write the best "spell, drawing, chapter, or passage of mad Mythos rambling." The grand prize is a "handmade, leather-bound, super authentic copy of the finished work, done up in full 17th-century style at the insane level of detail the HPLHS is known for!"
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(Thanks, Alan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iTunes blocks you from sharing music with YOURSELF, on your own computer
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DATE: 02/06/2004 11:26:45 PM
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Rael has discovered another "feature" of iTunes: if you leave a copy of it running in one of my user accounts and switch to another, I'm blocked from launching it. That's right, iTunes is set up to keep you from sharing music with yourself.
It's silly enough that I can share my tunes across my home network yet
I can't share them with someone on the same machine. Despite keeping
all my music in /Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/Music,
I still have to wander from account to account adding each new CD or
iTunes Music Store purchase to each user's library just so that we can
share _our_ (defined in the strictest sense) music. Surely your iTunes
library on the local machine should show up in my iTunes window just
like any other network-shared iTunes library?
You cannot open the application "iTunes" because another user has it open.
Ask the other user to quit the application, then try again.
[OK]
No, not OK.
Should I mistakenly leave "my copy" of iTunes open and wander off
for a bit, there's no music for anyone until my return. No music for
you! Nobody but an administrator capable of killing off other logins
and processes has the ability to rectify this situation. Should every
user really need to be an administrator to truly share this multi-user
environment?
Link
Here's how to hack iTunes to play in multiple accounts
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How fanfic makes kids into better writers (and copyright victims)
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DATE: 02/07/2004 12:13:52 AM
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Here's an amazing Technology Review piece about how kids are writing Harry Potter fanfic and editing one-another's stories in order to become great and prolific writers. The author, Henry Jenkins, characterizes this as an "unconventional" way of teaching creative writing, but I think that fanfic is more conventional than he credits (the first story I wrote was set in the Star Wars universe; I was six -- and the first long-form work I wrote was a Conan pastiche, at 12). The biggest difference between the kids' fanfic of yore and that of today is that back in the old days, kids had no way to readily collaborate with one another on their creations -- nor to expose themselves to copyright infringement liability from overzealous rightsholders who indiscriminately shut down kids' sites with threatening letters.
FictionAlley, the largest Harry Potter archive, hosts more than 30,000 stories and book chapters, including hundreds of completed or partially completed novels. Its (unpaid) staff of more than 200 people includes 40 mentors who welcome each new participant individually. At the Sugar Quill, another popular site, every posted story undergoes a peer-review process it calls "beta-reading." New writers often go through multiple drafts before their stories are ready for posting. "The beta-reader service has really helped me to get the adverbs out of my writing and get my prepositions in the right place and improve my sentence structure and refine the overall quality of my writing," explains the girl who writes under the pen name Sweeney Agonistes?a college freshman with years of publishing behind her.
Like many of the other young writers, Agonistes says that Rowling's books provide her with a helpful creative scaffolding: "It's easier to develop a good sense of plot and characterization and other literary techniques if your reader already knows something of the world where the story takes place," she says. By poaching off Rowling, the writers are able to start with a well-established world and a set of familiar characters and thus are able to focus on other aspects of their craft. Often, unresolved issues in the books stimulate them to think through their own plots or to develop new insights into the characters.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Garbage house via eBay
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DATE: 02/07/2004 12:42:38 AM
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A SomethingAwful user has posted dozens of photos of the house he shares with his mother, who has some compulsion to order tchotchkes from eBay well beyond her ability to display or use them, so that the house is full of hundreds of unopened boxes of glass paperweights and god-knows-what. It's like a garbage house, but with bubblewrap and Mailboxes, Etc boxes instead of kittylitter (though she does have a lot of parakeets).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Physics of Haute Couture
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DATE: 02/07/2004 08:13:35 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
In this article, Nature tells us that mathematicians have set up "equations that predict how fabric will fold." This theory of drapery could help fashion designers build clothes that hang straight. It also will allow computer animators to "model more realistically how clothes hang and move." "Mahadevan's equations could also allow clothing companies to give online shoppers a personalized, virtual view of how a garment will look on them -- something they are keen to do as web-based retailing gathers pace. This overview contains more details and references on wrinkles and crumples because one of the leading researchers studied them extensively. It also includes pictures of how a crumpled sheet exhibits deformations that are strongly localized around peaks and ridges and of "crow's feet" wrinkles that appear around people's eyes as they age.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool Tokyo-retro shopping arcade
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DATE: 02/07/2004 08:16:08 AM
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BoingBoing reader Rob Satterwhite says,
"This week Tokyo Q magazine is running a special feature on the Nakano Broadway complex in Tokyo. It's a very old shopping arcade that's now filled with tiny shops catering to all sorts of "otaku" collectors - shops selling comic books, collectible toys, cels from anime films, old movie posters, "costume play" shops selling full-size outfits for comic-book dress-up parties, etc.
"One of my favorite shops is Rough Toys, which specializes in "urban vinyl" - limited-edition artistic hiphop action figures from Hong Kong (Link). Another nice shop is Robot Robot (Link), where you can find Ren and Stimpy dolls and thousands of other cartoon-related toys. This article covers the entire complex, with links at the bottom to seven more short articles about some of the most interesting individual shops. "
Sweet! I'm dying for one of the Robot Robot shop logo t-shirts -- a stick-figure 'bot sketch captioned, "childhood obsession with robots drove us insanity." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New AIM supports video IM, crossplatforms with iChat AV 2.1
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DATE: 02/07/2004 02:38:30 PM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine says:
The new version of AIM (5.5, released Thursday, 2/5/04) now supports video instant messaging. That's kind of cool in and of itself. But check this: AOL Video IM crosses platforms and works with Apple's iChat AV 2.1 "public beta".
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Piracy for pornos
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DATE: 02/07/2004 03:31:24 PM
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Jonno on Fleshbot says:
Interesting New York Times article on the adult industry's take on file sharing and digital piracy, with responses ranging from legal threats (Titan Media) to a regulated "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach (Playboy.com). (For the record: we here at Fleshbot believe that porn wants to be free, but also think that people deserve to be credited and/or compensated for their creative efforts. How's that for a diplomatic response?)
Link to "The Pornography Industry vs. Digital Pirates" (NY Times; registration required)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New twist in Bikram Yoga copyright feuds
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DATE: 02/07/2004 07:12:23 PM
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Bikram Choudhury, the eccentric Beverly Hills yoga master who once said in a Business 2.0 interview, "I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me," has been suing practitioners he accuses of illicitly teaching his particular style of yoga (26 postures, done twice each in a >105-degree-hot room). Now, one group of yoga enthusiasts is suing back.
Choudhury, America's best known and most controversial yogi, opened one of his first yoga schools in San Francisco in 1973 and now boasts 900 studios worldwide. He copyrighted, trademarked and franchised his poses, breathing techniques and dialogue, creating the first chain of its kind. He also hired lawyers who set loose a flurry of cease-and-desist letters warning yoga teachers in the Bay Area and beyond not to teach his yoga or anything "derivative" if they haven't graduated from his $5,000-per-person training program and are not paying a studio franchise fee. His letters threaten a penalty of $150,000 per infringement.
Now, a San Francisco nonprofit organization of yoga enthusiasts from San Rafael to Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., is countering with a federal lawsuit attacking the guru's claim that yoga is proprietary. They say that yoga is a 5,000-year- old tradition that cannot be owned. The suit is asking the judge to determine whether Choudhury is entitled to copyright and trademark his material under federal copyright laws. A trial date has been set for next February.
Link to SF Chron story, Link to Reuters story, Link to a spookily similar Onion story (thanks, Siege!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Snitchpix as photojournalism
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DATE: 02/07/2004 07:24:31 PM
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These pictures of moron vandals trashing cars on the Northeastern University campus after the SuperBowl have been posted by the campus cops in order to garner snitch-tips that will help them bust these guys; but the pictures themselves are actually pretty compelling when considered as pieces of photojournalism.
Link
(Thanks, Vandal!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geek love poem
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DATE: 02/07/2004 07:29:35 PM
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Here's a lovely, pithy geek poem written by KillerHamster, a Slashdot poster. Select from here --> roses are red, violets are blue, all my base are belong to you <-- to here for a white-on-white translation.
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
chown -R you ~/base
Link
(Thanks, Mozai!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virus writers profiled
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DATE: 02/07/2004 07:52:39 PM
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Clive Thompson's written a lyrical and evocative article profiling several (mostly European) virus-writers, coders who write and post proof-of-concept malware to demonstrate security flaws in Microsoft products.
Benny, clean-cut and wide-eyed, has been writing viruses for five years, making him a veteran in the field at age 21. ''The main thing that I'm most proud of, and that no one else can say, is that I always come up with a new idea,'' he said, ushering me into a bedroom so neat that it looked as if he'd stacked his magazines using a ruler and level. ''Each worm shows something different, something new that hadn't been done before by anyone.''
Benny -- that's his handle, not his real name -- is most famous for having written a virus that infected Windows 2000 two weeks before Windows 2000 was released. He'd met a Microsoft employee months earlier who boasted that the new operating system would be ''more secure than ever''; Benny wrote (but says he didn't release) the virus specifically to humiliate the company. ''Microsoft,'' he said with a laugh, ''wasn't enthusiastic.'' He also wrote Leviathan, the first virus to use ''multithreading,'' a technique that makes the computer execute several commands at once, like a juggler handling multiple balls. It greatly speeds up the pace at which viruses can spread. Benny published that invention in his group's zine, and now many of the most virulent bugs have adopted the technique, including last summer's infamous Sobig.F.
Clive touches on, and dismisses the free-speech arguments for publishing malware code (interestingly, he does so without any quotes from legal scholars and impact litigators who work on First Amendment issues, and so ends up eliding the nuance in the argument and presenting a somewhat blunted picture of the issue) and only lightly touches on the far more important notion of legitimate security research.
If, as Schneier says, "Any person can create a security system so clever s/he can't think of a way to defeat it," then the only experimental methodology for evaluating the relative security of a system is publishing its details and inviting proof of its flaws -- proof readily embodied in malware.
Codebreakers and worm-writers are the only mechanism we know about for reliably strengthening systems, and the idea that they should refrain from publishing their research in order to keep us safe is fundamentally flawed, since it depends on the idea that malicious people will never be clever enough to independently reproduce their techniques, and that the public is better served by remaining ignorant of the potential risks in the systems they've bought than by being exposed to the evidence of the rampant flaws in those systems.
This notion falls flat when considered in light of the real world. If a developer was building condos whose doors could all be unlocked with an unbent paper-clip, this line of reasoning demands that the person(s) who discover this should keep mum about it, in the hopes that no bad guy ever catches on. In the real world, the best answer is usually to scream about this to high heaven, so that the bad developer can't silence you and cover his ass, and so that his customers can get their locks fixed.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open WiFi ethics
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DATE: 02/07/2004 08:23:26 PM
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The NYTimes's Ethicist tackles the question of using open WiFi nodes you discover. I like his conclusion (it's pretty much OK), but disagree with some of his implicit assumptions -- that all ISPs ban running open WiFi (they don't), and that most people don't know they're sharing (lots do).
The person who opened up access to you is unlikely even to know, let alone mind, that you've used it. If he does object, there's easy recourse: nearly all wireless setups offer password protection. And while the failure to lock a door may indicate carelessness, not consent, in this case it does suggest indifference. Godwin does warn of the tragedy of the commons, however, which here means you have an obligation not to use too much bandwidth -- by downloading massive music files, for example, which would inconvenience other users.
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(via WiFiNetNews)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Florida's officials threaten journalists who ask for documents
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DATE: 02/08/2004 07:32:20 AM
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Nearly half of Florida county officials tested disgraced themselves last week, when journalists posing as average Americans attempted to retrieve government documents under Florida's open access laws. 43 percent of the county bureacrats stonewalled, threatened, cajoled and gave the run around to the journalists who participated.
Roger Desjarlais, the Broward County administrator, threatened a volunteer by saying, "I can make your life very difficult."
After insisting that the volunteer give his name, Desjarlais used the Internet to identify the volunteer, find his cell phone number and call him after work hours...
They cited a number of arbitrary reasons for their suspicions, including the volunteers' hair length, casual dress and, in one case, "the look in his eyes."
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(Thanks, Justin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Carbohydrate-Free Lunch
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DATE: 02/08/2004 07:46:53 AM
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The Los Angeles CBS affiliate has just released a damning report on low-carb foodstuffs, in which its lab determines that many low-carb foodstuffs have far more carbohydrate content than claimed by the manufacturers ("Low-Carb Emporium claims 15 grams of carbs per bagel. Our lab found... 55").
At Subway we tested the Turkey Bacon Melt Wrap. Subway claims that it has 22 grams of carbs, while our lab results showed it at 28 grams...
At Carl's Jr., we tested the low-carb Six Dollar Burger, which the company claims has six grams of carbohydrates. Our lab results: 9 grams...
We tested TGIF's Sizzling New York Strip with Blue Cheese. TGIF claims 6 net carbs and 11 total carbs. Our lab found 20 total carbs...
Low-Carb Emporium claims 15 grams of carbs per bagel. Our lab found triple the carbs -- 55. Low-carb Emporium says they just re-did the formulas and will be getting lab reports on new formulas soon.
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(Thanks, saiyuk!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: LaundryView helps students schedule clothes washing
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DATE: 02/08/2004 08:50:35 AM
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Roland sez: "It's Sunday and you realize that all your clothes are dirty. If you're a student, it's time to go to your campus laundry room. But wait, you might be lucky enough to plan your laundry in advance. In this article, the Boston Globe reports that it's now possible in some colleges and universities in the U.S. "to go online to check all laundry rooms on campus and see which washers and dryers are open, occupied, or broken; how long until a machine completes a cycle; and how many others are waiting." Users of the LaundryView system "can arrange for an e-mail to alert them when it's time to put clothes into the dryer or rescue their wardrobe and fold it." This overview contains more details on this 'Web service' and includes a screenshot of what students can see if the LaundryView system has been installed on their campus."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Register: is Orkut TOS a deja vu of controversial, discarded Microsoft TOS?
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DATE: 02/08/2004 11:50:30 AM
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In the Register, an interesting piece on Orkut's terms of service, which danah previously criticized, and Cory described here as "craptacular":
Orkut's terms of service harbor a nasty payload --
"By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials." -- It's startlingly similar to the Microsoft Passport Terms which caused a storm of outrage two years ago, a reader points out. (...) Microsoft was forced to amend [its] terms five days after our first story, amidst threats of defections.
I don't imagine that the folks behind Orkut are evil people, and I wonder what their response is to the Reg article -- and to concerns voiced by present and former Orkut members. In a similar flap, users publicly lambasted phonecam-blog service Textamerica last December over a draconian TOS; to their credit, Textamerica modified it promptly.
Link (via The Unofficial Google Weblog, and thanks, Cole!)
BoingBoing reader Michael J. Madison, a professor at Pitt, says "take a look at this post on my blog about RSS v. Atom as XML standards for feeds. I haven't seen anyone else in the techlaw/policy blogosphere pick up on this, but the possible Google/MS parallel is interesting. "
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New anti-download campaign debuts during Grammys
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The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), the organization behind the Grammys, debuted a TV and radio PSA campaign against digital filesharing during tonight's awards show. One TV ad premiered during the awards show observes a young woman downloading a 3MB file called "music" to her PC, while a club full of hipsters dances to the music somewhere else. When her download completes, lights and music in that somewhere else shut off.
The spot urges viewers to visit the dorkily-domained whatsthedownload.com, where they'll find statements from pop stars about the dire consequences of downloading (causes regional blackouts?), and pleas to purchase tunes from a list of approved online services. I understand there's already a deadpool going for how long until haxxors shut off the lights. The site also includes a message board. Will be interesting to see how that portion of the site fleshes out.
One thing that visitors won't find, unless they're looking really really hard, is the fact that The Recording Academy is behind the site. Regardless of whether you're for or against filesharing, lack of transparency makes people suspicious -- particularly the web-savvy, younger crowd they're probably hoping this site will reach. At least one flamewar about that issue is already under way in this area of the site's message board. Link to press release about whatsthedownload.com launch.
And in other news, what the hell was up with that Outkast finale number? I mean, what was that? The Lucky Charms leprechaun meets every horrible Native American stereotype ever plastered on a football helmet meets a set of macrame curtains? Where are the Fab 5 when you need 'em?
Update: For those of you without MTV or someone under 25 in your life, "whatsthedownload" is a bad pun sortasoundalike for "what's the downlow." Which translates to "wassup." "Que hubo." "What's shakin'." BoingBoing reader Bruce says, "On a hunch, I tried www.whatsthedownlow.com, and I'm happy to report that NARAS didn't secure that domain as well. Heh!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Random advice for composition
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DATE: 02/09/2004 06:41:32 AM
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Here's a procedure that I almost always find useful for improving almost any kind of written composition -- a speech, an essay, an op-ed or a story. As a first pass, try cutting the first 10 percent (the "throat clearing") then moving the last 30 percent (the payoff) to the beginning of the talk (don't bury your lede!). About 90 percent of the time when someone gives me a paper for review, I find that it can be improved through this algorithm.
Weirdly, I almost always need someone else to point this out to me. I circulated a draft paper for comment this week, and it took Grad to remind me that I'd buried my lede and spent too much time throat-clearing. It turned out that he was completely right, but I didn't see it until it was pointed out to me.
Just a bit of random foo for the day.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pecksniff: The word of the day
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DATE: 02/09/2004 07:09:21 AM
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From this Electrolite post, my vocabulary word for the day: Pecksniff. Damned if I know what it means (no, don't tell me, I prefer to guess), but I sure like the sound of it.
Denied a visa to attend the Grammy Awards, in which he's a nominee: Buena Vista Social Club musician Ibrahim Ferrer. And five colleagues...
Tell me again how John Kerry, with all his drawbacks, would be "barely any improvement" on this crowd of censorious, vengeful, authoritarian pecksniffs.
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TITLE: Marvin the Martian secretly etched on Mars Lander chips
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DATE: 02/09/2004 07:21:11 AM
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Trademark-infringing images of Marvin the Martian were secretly etched into the Mars rovers' image-sensor chips.
We managed to capture a photograph of what are now perhaps the tiniest Martians on Mars. Appearing as an opposed duet of helmeted gladiators, these angry silicon soldiers were discovered on the surface of an image sensor used by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers sent to probe the Red planet. Maybe these are the ONLY Martians on Mars? Probably not. In any event, the chip was loaned to us by designer Mark Wadsworth who is a fan of the Silicon Zoo. Mark informs us that he decided to try his hand at silicon artwork after visiting the Zoo on several occasions. The title of his artwork is the "Dueling Marvin the Martians". Mark designed the image sensor for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory along with Tom Elliot, who actually did the testing of the flight candidate imagers to select the 20 or so that actually made it on the two missions. Tom and Mark tended to butt heads quite a bit, which was the inspiration for the doodle.
Link
(via Fark)
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TITLE: Technorati adds text search
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DATE: 02/09/2004 07:55:52 AM
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Dave Sifry has added keyword search to Technorati: now you can run structured queries agains tthe full text of over a million blogs that ping blo.gs, Technorati or weblogs.com, and get up-to-the-minute accurate results.
Link
(Thanks, Dave!)
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TITLE: Disney bans Segways in the parks
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Disabled Segway users are outraged at Disney's decision to ban Segways from the theme parks.
Disney World doesn't allow visitors, even those with disabilities like Exum, to use the self-balancing transportation machines in the parks. The policy angered some Segway owners with disabilities and surprised others since the Disney parks have a reputation for accommodating the disabled.
They said even some Disney employees use Segways, which are becoming increasingly popular with people who otherwise would have to use wheelchairs.
"I'm not prepared to let a corporate attorney dictate to me how I should be mobile," said Exum, who is technically quadriplegic from an injury as a teenager but functions as a paraplegic.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogging eTech
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DATE: 02/09/2004 11:52:41 AM
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In addition to the slew of live blog and wiki coverage already taking place at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego (Cory's a featured speaker, and I'm popping in to schmooze for a few hours later today!), Jason Calacanis just launched www.bloggingetech.com. Update: Textamerica's doing a live phonecam blog.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ultimate Soccer Souvenir
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DATE: 02/09/2004 04:20:28 PM
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Football (soccer) Hall of Famer George Best's diseased liver is allegedly up for auction on ebay. Link (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hobbit Love
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DATE: 02/09/2004 04:26:28 PM
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LOTR stars photographed when asked to sign a decidedly homoerotic bit of slash art. Fake? Link (Thanks again, Dr. Maz!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Columbia's online social search study released
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DATE: 02/09/2004 11:06:50 PM
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BoingBoing reader Eli the Bearded says:
In this era of renewed interest in social networks, finally comes the results of perhaps the biggest social network connection study. Snip: "We report on a global social-search experiment in which more than 60,000 e-mail users attempted to reach one of 18 target persons in 13 countries by forwarding messages to acquaintances. We find that successful social search is conducted primarily through intermediate to weak strength ties, does not require highly connected 'hubs' to succeed, and, in contrast to unsuccessful social search, disproportionately relies on professional relationships."
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TITLE: Photos from SF Chinese New Year Parade
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DATE: 02/09/2004 11:17:00 PM
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Derek "Fray" Powazek just posted some lovely snaps from Saturday's Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Insanity Chic in Hollywood
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DATE: 02/09/2004 11:32:05 PM
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Mark Ebner -- investigative journalist and contributor to the jaded, snarky, underground Hollywood rag LA Innuendo -- has a new book out on February 24. "Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity," co-written with Andrew Breitbart (Matt Drudge's right-hand guy). Basically 416 pages of celebrities behaving badly. Read how Mike Ovitz's then six-year-old son once peed on a tree in the front yard, yelling "My mom said I could, and mom is in charge of you, I could have you fired!" to his nanny when she scolded him. There's supposed to be another section in here that chronicles some Powerful Hollywood People engaging in cybersexual harassment with a young AOL customer support agent.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Disabled blogger Mark Siegel: The Invisible Man
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DATE: 02/09/2004 11:57:37 PM
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Mark Siegel of the blog 19th Floor, who has spinal muscular atrophy, is the subject of a feature article in Law & Politics, a legal magazine out of Minnesota. Some images from the article are here; the full text of the article is here, and includes excerpts from his blog. (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz
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DATE: 02/10/2004 12:01:55 AM
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My former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague Brian Alvey documents the fundamental rules of good web design by way of a cable TV parable:
Running on HBO from the summer of 1997 through early 2003, Oz is everyone’s favorite don't-drop-the-soap opera. Reflecting on the same years in my web design career, I see considerable parallels. Many of the lessons I learned watching Oz and designing websites are too similar to be coincidental.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rotary Engine Fishtanks
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DATE: 02/10/2004 12:05:25 AM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine says, "Australian Paul Cochrane mods expired Mazda rotary engines into Fish Tanks for less than US$200." Link (by way of Car and Driver)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Folk street-art in discarded urban space
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DATE: 02/10/2004 12:12:15 AM
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BoingBoing reader Heidi says,
"Rob Walker writes about the North Claiborne area of New Orleans, where a community still uses an area as public space -- even though it's now under a freeway. Some of the highway support columns are painted with murals, but the most interesting column is plastered with newspaper obituaries of neighborhood residents. Photos are included in the essay."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Piratical outhouse tchotchkes
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DATE: 02/10/2004 07:11:18 AM
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Not one but two online stores specializing in pirate-themed bathroom accoutrements.
Link One, Link Two
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New mobile short stories for your WAP -- Warren Ellis Portable -- phone.
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DATE: 02/10/2004 08:44:46 AM
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"Warren Ellis Portable" -- Thirteen ultrashort stories in permanent installation, from author/blogger/geek-mentor Warren Ellis, "For those long train/bus trips, extended visits to the toilet, whatever."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scanned instructions for every Transformer ever made
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DATE: 02/10/2004 08:56:35 AM
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Here are scanned instructions for every Transformer ever made.
Link
(Thanks, Josh!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Battlestar Galactica becomes a regular series on SciFi Channel
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DATE: 02/10/2004 09:18:28 AM
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SciFi Channel has greenlit an ongoing BSG series, after a successful pilot (blogged previously on BoingBoing):
SCI FI Channel has greenlit production on the Battlestar Galactica franchise as a new original weekly series. Based on the top-rated December miniseries event of the same name, the one-hour drama is slated to begin production on
13 episodes in Vancouver next month. All principal cast from the mini will reprise their roles for the series, including Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck), and Tricia Helfer (Number Six), among others. Ronald D. Moore (Carnivale, Mission Impossible 2) returns as executive producer as well as writer. The project will be produced exclusively forSCI FI, in association with Sky One. The series will be distributed by USACE, where David Eick, an executive producer of the miniseries, serves as Executive Vice President.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tim O'Reilly's Emerging Technology keynote
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DATE: 02/10/2004 09:30:59 AM
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Here're my running notes from Tim O'Reilly's opening keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
What's on the radar now?
* Amazon Hacks, Google Hacks, eBay Hacks, Spidering Hacks, etc
* You might think you're not a Linux user, but if you use Google, you use Linux. What you use isn't (just) what's on your desk
* The Internet is the platform
* Killer apps are built on OSS, but aren't themselves OSS -- like Google and Amazon
* User contributions are critical to market dominance: Listmania in AMZN search-results (BN.com doesn't have this -- and it shows, and they have 1/10 the market of AMZN)
* MSN maps are really cool and useful, but there's no collab element, just blinking banners that appear to be saying "Go away user, go away"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Detroit's SuperBowl bid faked the skyline
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DATE: 02/10/2004 10:04:46 AM
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The Detroit Free Press has broken a story about how Detroit's SuperBowl 2006 bid used a doctored photo to sex-up Detroit's snaggle-tooth skyline, lighting up abandoned buildings with Photoshop. Don't miss the killer infographic.
In real life, though, at least 10 of the photo's buildings are abandoned hulks. Some are burned-out, roofless and scarred with soot.
Artists touched up the photo by splashing light onto darkened windows and streets and adding roofs where there were none.
The final product made Detroit's lonely blocks look as Super Bowl-worthy as busy Houston.
"We want to do the same thing, put our best foot forward and turn on all the lights we can," said Michelle Fusco, a spokeswoman for the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau, which helped staff the Detroit booth.
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(Thanks, tracymilburn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eric Bonabeau's Evolving the Bad Guy ETCON talk
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DATE: 02/10/2004 11:54:20 AM
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Here're my running notes from Eric Bonabeau's Evolving the Bad Guy at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Bad guys co-evolve with your defenses -- tax code, software and NBA rules all need to constantly evolve, as does Google
Evolutionary computation: represent individuals as genetic strings, i.e. 110100101
Test individuals for fitness -- how good they are at finding and exploiting loopholes
Mutate and crossover to get individuals who are better and better at solving your problem -- at finding loopholes.
In 2002, Sussex researchers tried to design an osscilator using evolutionary computation, but found it ended up weird because of unintentional RFI emission from a nearby PC
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Afghan rugs depict twin towers
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DATE: 02/10/2004 12:16:51 PM
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Get your hand-made rugs depicting the Twin Towers being hit by planes here. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)
Kerim sez: I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but I feel your comment on the Afghan
War rug to be dangerously misleading. Please see my comments here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Elizabeth Lawley's Breaking Into the Boys' Club ETCON talk
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DATE: 02/10/2004 12:35:18 PM
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Here're my running notes from Elizabeth Lawley's Breaking Into the Boys' Club: How Diversifying Your Team Can Expand Your Market at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
RIT is struggling with enrolment, but the enrolment is
overwhelmingly male. Why not bring in more women? It's an
untapped field and it makes men happier.
People say that women don't want want to be there, why are your
forcing them to go? But this is what people said about math 30
years ago.
Today there's gender parity in math classes, but subtle pressures
steered them away.
We design products for men -- women get killed by airbags. If you
include women in the devleopment of product, you diversify the
view. Women aren't the only viewpoint you need to include, but
it's half the potential market.
Anil Dash: It's no coincidence that the two popular blogging
packages (Blogger and MT) were co-developmed by women (Meg
Hourihan and Mena Trott).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Raymond Scott album: The Unexpected
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DATE: 02/10/2004 12:35:33 PM
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There's a new Raymond Scott album! If you don't know Scott, here's a quick bio: he was a bandleader in the 40s, well-known for quirky, whimsical songs (many were used in Looney Tunes). In the 1950s he became interested in electronic music, and composed amazing pre-Moog marvels, including two albums designed to soothe babies. The Secret 7 is a group of jazz players headed by Scott and the 1959 album they recorded is called "The Unexpected." You can hear a Real Audio sample on the site. Be sure to look at the rest of Basta Music's offerings. They're a wonderful label out of Holland. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cartoonist and Animator Gene Deitch at Egyptian Theatre in L.A. tonight!
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DATE: 02/10/2004 12:42:49 PM
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Gene Deitch, the former art director for UPA (the cartoon studio that made Gerald McBoingBoing) and the illustrator for a 1940s jazz magazine called the Record Changer (see his book, The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove), and the father of underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, is going to be showing a bunch of his great old cartoons at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. See you there! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Which Amazon products are most blogged today?
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DATE: 02/10/2004 02:37:13 PM
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Dave Sifry has whipped up a Technorati hack that tells you which Amazon products have been blogged most today.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Leveraging RSS at Disney ETCON talk
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DATE: 02/10/2004 02:40:57 PM
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Here're my running notes from Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Modern computers can handle large files, video, media, etc.
Want to provide experiences above the effective bitrate of our users, and bits are expensive to ship.
Example: Added a high-quality video clip to the front page of ESPN.com.
Came to think about the enclosure tag in RSS -- the idea of asynchronously d/ling content behind the scenes. You can download the experience prior to hitting the page.
Built a client-side technology -- espn.com, disney.com, etc -- an RSS aggregator that d/ls and pre-caches video on the machine, and communicates with the mothership to tell them who's got what in the cache.
We wanted 500k users in 1 year -- in three weeks we hit a million. Over 2 million now. Sustainign 2GB of bandwidth, TBs/day.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GI Joe Meets the Ubergeeks ETCON panel
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DATE: 02/10/2004 03:19:26 PM
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Here're my running notes from GI Joe Meets the Ubergeeks: Many-to-Many Technologies in the Defense Department at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Military logistics are unstructured. We're trying to build a neural-network like fluid resposne systems that is complex and adaptive to get stuff to the right place.
Everyone under 30 gets this, everyone else is too old.
We are moral, legal and unconstrained.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Win a Fluke ukulele
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DATE: 02/10/2004 04:40:33 PM
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Boing Boing gets only 30,000 visitors a day. My other blog, Ukulelia.com pulls in a whopping 175 visitors a day. If you don't own a uke, you're missing out on a whole mess o' fun. But here's your chance to enter a drawing for a free ukulele. It's a Fluke ukulele, and it's a great instrument. I reviewed the Fluke for Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tim O'Reilly's ETCON keynote per Quinn
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DATE: 02/10/2004 05:18:09 PM
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Quinn's written a damned good summary of Tim O'Reilly's opening keynote from the Emerging Technology Conference.
having seen a few of tim o'reilly's keynotes i get the feeling that he throws conferences to get thousands of people working on the technologies he really wants. if tim really wanted a jet car, he'd throw a conference, invite some jet car enthusiasts and talk about how great it would be to have a jet car and then sit back and wait for someone to build him a jet car. it's like the peter lynch investing philosophy in reverse: instead of investing in the things you use everyday, get other people to invest in the things you wish you had everyday.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The Future of Cyberspace Economies
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DATE: 02/10/2004 05:19:44 PM
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Here're my running notes from The Future of Cyberspace Economies at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Econ is the study of choice under scarcity. The dismal science says, when essential stuff is scarce, you've got to trade something for something else.
MMORPGs sometimes try letting everyone have everyone for free are ghost towns. MMORPGs create artificial scarcity.
The surprise to econismists is that scarcity is fun -- people hunger for that which is dismal, scarce.
Because wealth accrues due to temporal investment, the rich and powerful in MMORPGs are people who can devote a lot of time to games, which means that they tend to be poor in real life.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr for image-sharing launches at ETCON
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DATE: 02/10/2004 05:52:07 PM
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Ludicorp (disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp), whose Game Neverending was one of the most interesting social software projects of the last two years, has just launched a new product, called Flickr, live on-stage at ETCON.
Flikr is a social image-sharing application: it's a mechanism for creating ad-hoc chats, using a drag-and-drop GUI interface that lives inside your browser, and share images from peer-to-peer and within conversational groups.
I've beta-tested this at various points and at each time I've been struck by Ludicorp's amazing combination of utilitarian, usable interface aesthetic and genuinely witty whimsy. As Ben Ceivgny, a developer on the project, said:
We collect images with cameraphones and so forth, but we have no good mechanism for advancing them out into the world. Here's a mechanism for batching them into a locked-and-loaded tool for firing them into the world.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Transcendant Interactions ETCON talk
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DATE: 02/10/2004 05:55:46 PM
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Here're my running notes from Danny O'Brien's Transcendant Interactions at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Manifesto: Don't build applications. Build contexts for
interactions.
The architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of immersion.
We try to design places for people to play, but play is about people, not places.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Please Don't Squeeze the Sharman
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DATE: 02/10/2004 06:30:10 PM
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Best. Headline. Ever. Story in today's Wired News on the legal response of Kazaa's makers to last week's court ordered raid of its Australian headquarters.
Sharman Networks threw down the legal challenge Tuesday in Australia's Federal Court in Sydney. Sharman was raided by Music Industry Piracy Investigations, a private investigations unit established by the Australian Recording Industry Association to crack down on copyright infringement, including illegal Internet file sharing. MIPI successfully applied to the federal court for a number of private search warrants, known as Anton Piller orders, which were executed at 12 locations, including Sharman's offices in Sydney. The order allowed MIPI to seize data and documents from all 12 sites, including the private residence of Sharman chief executive Nikki Hemming. The raids are a prelude to a copyright infringement suit, which will argue that Sharman has the ability to block the transfer of copyrighted works through its software but refuses to do so. Sharman vehemently denies the claim.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Orkut members launch Orkut Paranoia community about Orkut TOS on Orkut
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DATE: 02/10/2004 06:36:42 PM
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Geez. My head is spinning. Anyway, BoingBoing reader Adam fields points us to a new "Orkut community" (one of many online affinity groups within the social networking service), called "Orkut Paranoia" (link requires free membership). Adam says, "This formed out of some interesting discussion we've had about what's going on... summarized in this blog post:"
1) Orkut claims irrevocable unlimited license rights to everything you post. Most people don't understand what that means. One example of this is that many of my friends have posted pictures that I've taken. This is probably not a problem, generally, but they've granted Orkut a license to use them without consulting me, and created a legal tangle should I have a problem with that, forcing me to have to perform a legal struggle with Orkut, because of their unwitting actions. I think this is rude behavior on the part of Orkut, but their prerogative to demand.
2) Orkut may share personal information with Google in an unrestricted way. Google is unwilling (so far) to discuss what use they may make of that information.
3) Google's privacy policy possibly has some holes in it with regards to data collected by way of means other than use of the google.com website.
I suspect that Orkut is a way for Google to gather personal information about their clientele for marketing purposes, and to try to form a more solid relationship beyond "I just use Google for search because it's convenient". This is not terribly nefarious, but the kind of data that could be collected to do so has wide potential for abuse, and people should be aware that that's what's going on. Some may not care, but many people I know are signing up without reading or understanding the implications of the above three points.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bruce Sterling
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DATE: 02/10/2004 06:47:21 PM
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pwns.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos of funky retro erotic museum in Japan
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DATE: 02/10/2004 07:15:11 PM
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Surreal series of snapshots from what is said to be Japan's "oldest and still open 'house of hidden treasures," or Hihokan -- including some crazy, retro, sex themed circus-midway-style games. And whale vulvas. And walls plastered with scary plastic breasts. And very, very old Japorn movie posters.At left: what the museum's proprieters promote as "Japan's only live horse sex show," which visitors soon discover is no more than a faux herd of weird livestock mannequins knocking bovine boot in front of some equally weird human mannequins. Photoblogger Juergen says, "This was Japan's first (or second, depends on how you count) Erotic Museum and is pretty much unchanged since 1971."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scans of every Spiderman cover
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DATE: 02/11/2004 07:31:55 AM
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This "Spiderman completist" has scanned the covers of basically every funnybook on which Spidey appears (over 4,000!) and posted them to the intarweb.
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(via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grokster is the new Betamax
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DATE: 02/11/2004 08:38:20 AM
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My cow-orker Ren Bucholz has done a magnificent and pithy analysis of the parallels between the 1983 Supreme Court arguments in Betamax, in which the studios argued that the VCR should be criminalized, and last week's arguments in the 9th Circuit Appeals Court in Grokster, in which the recording industry argued the same thing about P2P file-sharing networks:
Later in last week's argument, Judge Thomas took Frackman's argument
(knowledge - ability = contributory infringement) to its logical
conclusion by asking whether he thought Xerox should be held liable
when a UCLA student uses a photocopier to make infringing copies.
Here's what happened to Kroft in '83:
Justice Stevens: Under your test, supposing
somebody tells the Xerox people that there are people making illegal
copies with their machine, and they know it. What are they supposed to
do? ... Your view of the law is that as long as Xerox knows that there
is some illegal copying going on, Xerox is a contributory infringer?
Kroft: To be consistent, your honor, I'd have to say yes.
Justice Stevens: A rather extreme position.
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TITLE: Comcast makes offer on Disney
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DATE: 02/11/2004 08:41:29 AM
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Comcast has made a $66 billion offer for Disney.
Comcast also released a letter sent to Eisner indicating that Eisner had personally rejected Roberts' offer to enter into discussions about a merger earlier in the week.
The letter from Roberts called it "unfortunate" that Eisner was not willing to enter into discussions. "Given this, the only way for us to proceed is to make a public proposal directly to you and your board," the letter stated.
Under the merger, Comcast said it would issue 0.78 of a share of its stock for each Disney share, and Disney shareholders would retain 42 percent of the combined company.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video of my UNC talk online
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DATE: 02/11/2004 08:43:21 AM
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The iBiblio people have posted the video of my talk on copyright and the entertainment industry at the University of North Carolina last week.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Human-computer-interface rap
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DATE: 02/11/2004 08:53:55 AM
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The people behind OK/Cancel, the hilarious comic-strip about human-computer interface, have written the HCI gangsta rap.
So sit down -- and listen to me
No one wants see their product become ancient history
BEFORE you start rushing to build those interfaces
your best bet is make a set :: of simple use cases
They should describe what users actually do
and if that's unknown, run a contextual inquiry too
Because your interface will never be easy to follow
lest you build it to match up with their cognitive models
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(Thanks, Oliverw!)
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TITLE: Jim Griffin on un-b0rking copyright
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DATE: 02/11/2004 09:45:51 AM
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Fantastic interview with Jim Griffin, one of the leading advocates of blanket licenses for online music, in The Register.
Broadcasting started out as a pirate technology. But as rights holders we'd rather not have bar owners and radio stations ringing us up and asking us for permission each time they wanted to play a song, because it would cost us more to answer than phone than it would gain us in revenue. So the US broadcast industry went to rights holders and created this bundled price with bundled choice, a sort of 'theme park admission fee' for content that allowed that cable operator, or satellite operator, or radio station, or bar to use the content without seeking permission.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Laden vs USA" handheld game
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DATE: 02/11/2004 10:05:39 AM
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Carlo sez: "Your post yesterday on the Afghani blanket showing the WTC made me think of this handheld video game a friend of mine brought me back from Taiwan about 6 months after 9/11, and I thought you might like to see it... (Sorry for the low-quality images, it's still in its plastic blister pack and I didn't want to take it out.)" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Put your ETCON notes on the Wiki
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DATE: 02/11/2004 11:26:02 AM
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Justin Hall is trying to get everyone to add links to their ETCON conference notes to the wiki:
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TITLE: Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks ETCON talk notes
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DATE: 02/11/2004 11:48:38 AM
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Here're my running notes from Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10
seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the
simplest interface we can imagine.
It's also the simplest way to find intercomation. EMACS, Moz and
Panther have incremental search: when you type a "t" it goes to
the first mention of "t", add "to" and you jump to the first
instance of "to", etc.
This is being added to Longhorn (Unix geeks, we've had this since
Jan 1 1900, and it will go away in 2038).
Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks
has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust
software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more
forgiiving.
Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and
win and *nix.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Great ETCON pic
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DATE: 02/11/2004 12:09:53 PM
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I love this pic from ETCON.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles ETCON talk notes
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DATE: 02/11/2004 12:29:00 PM
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Here're my running notes from danah boyd's Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
The response is an attempt to "configure the users" -- constrain
behavior to acceptable behavior with messaaging, kicking people
off, etc.
This won't work: you can't tell a hacker not to hack. These kids
are social hackers. You can stop some bad behavior, but you chase
off your best users, too.
Dating doesn't happen because you're in a dating context. Dating
arises out of real contexts.
Taking away fakesters didn't make Frienster more real. Friendster
is unreal because people never remove their friends, even if they
never see them (the exception is when you break up, ironic,
because ex-lovers are strong ties!).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eastern Standard Tribe for sale today at ETCON
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DATE: 02/11/2004 12:36:27 PM
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Came down to the ETCON conference space today to discover that even though my signing isn't scheduled until tomorrow, the bookseller has copies of Eastern Standard Tribe on sale today. A bunch of people have told me that they're not going to be able to make it tomorrow -- I'd be delighted to sign a copy anytime!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: boyd's social networks talk from ETCON
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DATE: 02/11/2004 02:39:12 PM
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danah boyd has posted the text of her ETCON talk, Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles.
Asking favors is fundamentally different than offering them. People gain by being bridges. Thus, to be able to tell you about a job gives me whuffie in our relationship. Feeling pressured to connect you to an open job makes me uncomfortable. In all of the networks described above, the bridge got to control the information flow. In Milgram's "Small Worlds," if you didn't know that i knew the target person, you may not have tried to pass it on to me. If you don't know that i am dating someone who has something that you want, you won't try to pressure me into giving you access to it. Thus, i can choose when to reveal my connections in a situation where i can come across as being helpful, rather than being put in a position to feel cornered. Revealing the network shifts the power.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harlan Ellison's AOL/Time-Warner suit
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DATE: 02/11/2004 02:41:21 PM
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Jason Schultz, my cow-orker at EFF, has written a lucid legal analysis about the latest turn in Harlan Ellison's ongoing suit against AOL/Time-Warner, in which he asserts that AOL should actively police its newsfeeds and restrict access to feeds that carry infringing materials, and be on the hook if they are insufficently diligent in their restriction of access to information.
The e-mail standard doesn't trouble me as much, but the phone call one certainly does. Just because one person (who isn't even the copyright owner) calls your company on the phone to complain about something on your servers generally shouldn't, in my mind, trigger "knowledge" liabiliity generally. Perhaps the caller specifically mentioned Ellsion, but the opinion isn't clear about that.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Decompression bombs: email attachments expanded and expanded and expanded
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DATE: 02/11/2004 02:44:01 PM
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Here's an interesting security noodle from Yoz Grahame: some (meaningless) data is highly compressible using standard compression algorithms -- what would it do your computer if the payloads in automatically decompressed messages went from 7kb to 100gb?
Here's an example scenario: A mail arrives at your super-barbed-wire-protected mail gateway. The gzip-compressed attachment - only 7k big - is grabbed by the anti-virus scanner, looking for any suspicious signatures. It starts to decompress it and BANG - the resulting file, over 100 gigabytes, crashes the AV scanner and completely fills the hard drive partition in the process.
Fortunately, a good number of the AV scanners that AERAsec tested aren't too vulnerable, but some require patching. Similarly, sending a gzipped-HTML bomb to a browser will crash a fair few of them. Not so scary, then, but nifty in an admirably-nasty way.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google is Harder Than it Looks ETCON talk notes
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DATE: 02/11/2004 03:30:39 PM
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Here're my running notes from Nelson Minar's Google is Harder Than it Looks talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Query comes into custom httpd, Google Web Server ("gwis")
Sent in parallel to several places:
* Index server, "every page with the word 'apple' in it -- a cluster that manages "shards" or "partitions" (everything starting with the letter "a") and then load-balancing replications for each. Have to calculate intersections for multiple-term queries
* Doc server, copies of webpages -- whence page-snippets are served in results. Sharded and replicated for scaleability and redundancy
* Misc servers: QuickLinks, spell-checkers, Ad server (first two are small servers, ad server is humongous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Atkins was skinny when he died
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DATE: 02/11/2004 03:38:49 PM
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Business 2.0's blog reports that Atkins was skinny and healthy just before he died, no matter what the scandal-rags (which have been reporting that he was 60lbs overweight with heart disease at the time of his accidental death) say.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lurid Toy Stories
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DATE: 02/11/2004 04:05:04 PM
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Deranged X-rated toy fanfic. Wayward Barbies doing bestiality threeways, bookshelf quickies, BDSM, homoerotic roleplaying, and other activities so hot they melt plastic: "silver plastic molded Terminator Arnie and big-armed Last Action Hero Arnie get to know each other. Terminator is just two molded pieces of thin silver plastic, but Last Action Hero is a high quality articulated doll, with holes through his clenched hands which once clearly locked into something; a car, perhaps, or one of his enormous weapons." Link (Thanks, Steffen!)
UPDATE: Owie! This humble Geocities site was BoingBoinged and Fleshbotted in one day, and is now inanimate. BoingBoing reader Pete says of the site's creator, "There's occasionally more toy fun in her weekly comic strip, and her home page is here."
UPDATE #2: Jeremy Dennis writes to let BoingBoing readers know that even though her Geocities "Lurid Toy Stories" site is dead, "You can now find them here!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney World parade float kills castmember
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DATE: 02/11/2004 04:48:38 PM
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A parade-float has killed a castmember backstage near Walt Disney World's Splash Mountain.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Slashdot bans ETCON
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DATE: 02/11/2004 05:15:44 PM
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Slashdot has a script that bans your IP address if you pull their RSS too often. I'm at ETCON, where I'm sharing a public-facing IP with hundreds of Slashdot readers who are all pulling /.'s RSS. So I have been banned, along with all of them, for 72 hours.
Update: Thanks to Jamie McCarthy for fixing this!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CIA creates WMD snitch-form
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DATE: 02/11/2004 05:30:53 PM
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Tim sez, "CIA is asking for help finding WMD by entering information on a secure form on their website. You can't say the CIA isn't innovative!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fictional Google banners
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DATE: 02/11/2004 11:57:22 PM
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Fark photoshopping contest: Google banners for fictitious holidays.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Emotional Design: The Principles ETCON talk notes
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DATE: 02/12/2004 09:24:38 AM
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Here're my running notes from Donald A. Norman's Emotional Design: The Principles talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
I no longer tell you why everything is crappy -- now I'm the guy
who tells you how nice and pretty things can be.
The orange juicer on the cover of my new book, Emotional Design,
evokes strong emotion.
I'm here to talk about consumer products, not computers.
Getting the tech right is only part of the problem: the big part
is the hearts and minds, so your customers enjoy it.
There's something about physical design that really turns people
on. The tech has to be flaawlessly, but no one cares about it --
it's just infrastructure.
See the Mini Cooper -- the NYT said, "It has many flaws, but boy
is it fun."
I used to buy stuff that I knew was b0rked, but I wanted to own
them anyway.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Python runs on Nokia phones
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DATE: 02/12/2004 10:37:35 AM
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During yesterday's morning keynote at ETCON, the CTO of Nokia confirmed that new Nokia phones could run python scripts. Rael's got the screenshots.
Yesterday's keynote by Nokia CTO Pertti Korhonen at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference confirmed that we would be seeing Python rolling on Series 60 handsets (specifically the 6600 and family) via Forum Nokia.
The proof being in the pudding, here are a few snapshots of the Python interpreter and scripts running on a 6600 to get your programming juices flowing...
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sneaky game hijacks your buddy list to spam your pals
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DATE: 02/12/2004 10:41:04 AM
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When players accept the terms of service for an Osama Bin Laden game, a piggyback program sends advertising to everyone on their buddy lists.
On Wednesday, Buddylinks' Web site contained a message denying the program is a virus. The home page also makes no mention that the program would in the future send out additional advertisements using the same method.
"Our games interact with instant messengers by promoting the game among the user's network of buddies,'' it reads. "Please understand, our flash games are in no way a virus. We simply combine peer-to-peer, social networking, and instant messaging into one spectacular technology.''
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Atkins vs. the PCRM
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DATE: 02/12/2004 01:30:29 PM
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Today, I sent an email to the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the non-profit organization that gave Dr. Atkins' death report to the Wall Street Journal. The PCRM promotes a vegan diet, so they obviously don't like the Atkins' diet, which is almost impossible to follow as a vegan.
A group called the Center for Consumer Freedom, a non-profit supported by restaurants and food companies that sell meat and junk food (and are therefore natural enemies of the PCRM), loves to issue press releases calling the PCRM a "phony" organization. It's doubtful that either group delivers the unvarnished truth, but on Tuesday the CCF issued a press release claiming that:
The late Dr. Robert Atkins is being smeared for his alleged obesity at the time of his death, by a phony doctors organization that has been exposed as a front group for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and has been censured by the American Medical Association (AMA).
The AMA has formally censured PCRM in the past, calling its recommendations "irresponsible" and "potentially dangerous to the health and welfare of Americans." The AMA has also called PCRM a "fringe organization" that uses "unethical tactics" and is "interested in perverting medical science."
Dr. Stuart Trager MD, chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council ... release this morning reads in part: "Due to water retention ... [Atkins] had a weight that varied between 180 and 195. During his coma, as he deteriorated and his major organs failed, fluid retention and bloating dramatically distorted his body and left him at 258 pounds at the time of his death, a documented weight gain of over 60 pounds."
(Don't forget that Dr. Trager, as chairman of the Atkins Physicians Council, isn't exactly a disinterested party in this.)
I asked the PCRM to respond to the reports that Dr. Atkins actually weighed 195 pounds at the time of his accident, and that his weight gain to 258 pounds -- while in a coma -- was due to the major organ deterioration and fluid retention he suffered as a result of his accident. I also asked the PCRM if it had challenged or investigated these reports, because I couldn't find anything on the PCRM website about this.
Here is the PCRM's reply
Mr. Frauenfelder:
Thank you for contacting the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Jeanne McVey forwarded your note to me for a response.
This is a huge public health issue. The Atkins Nutritional Corporation and Dr. Atkins through his books have been telling millions of people that cholesterol, saturated fat, and total fat don’t matter. We clearly know from the medical and nutritional scientific literature that these nutrients do matter, and consuming them in increasing quantities escalates the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and some cancers.
And the Atkins Nutritionals Corporation has evidently put a lot of effort into painting a picture of robust health for the late Dr. Atkins going even so far as to say that he had “an extraordinarily healthy cardiovascular system” right after his cardiac arrest in April 2001 (http://atkins.com/Archive/2002/4/25-466719.html). Now, in her most recent statement Ms. Atkins allows as how, in addition to the cardiomyopathy that he suffered, “Robert did have some progression of his coronary artery disease in the last three years of his life including some new blockage of a secondary artery that was remedied during this admission.”
We know from the medical examiners report that Dr. Atkins weighed 258 pounds at the time of his death. We know that the examiner listed myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure, and hypertension on the report. All of this is simply evidence that he was not in the best of health, and especially not in excellent cardiovascular health when he died.
By the way, 195 pounds at 6 feet tall, still puts Dr. Atkins above a BMI of 25 (26.4) which is technically considered overweight for an adult male. One might expect a famous diet doctor to boast a weight that actually puts him in a healthy weight range for his height and weight.
Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions.
Best regards,
Amy Joy Lanou, Ph.D.
Nutrition Director
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
I checked out a BMI calculator, and Dr. Lanou is correct. 26.4 is overweight, but not by a lot. And the link to the pictures of Dr. Atkins that Cory posted a couple of months before he died show that he was quite trim.
But all in all, I feel this reply is pretty sneaky. The PCRM doesn't mention that Atkins' heart disease may have been from a virus, or that his weight gain while in a coma may have been from the fact that his body had stopped functioning properly. Instead, the PCRM hopes you'll connect the dots between Atkins' weight at death and his heart disease with his diet.
I'm sure there will be more news about Atkins/PCRM/CCF in the coming days.
Stimps sez: "A lot of what you say is true, but if you look at the background of the Center for Consumer Freedom, you see that they are hardly just a group of restaurants and food companies. =). Organic Consumers has a long list of who they [CCF] have fought against, as well as a list of who their backers and officers are... people ranging from Philip Morris people to Coca Cola people, with a look towards protecting FoxNews' advertisers. It's pretty nasty stuff.
Brian sez: "In regards to PCRM vs. CCF. I run an anti-animal rights site at http://www.animalrights.net/ and there is something you might want to add to that post about PCRM vs. CCF.
Yes, CCF takes money from the food and beverage industry, but it is open and up front about that.
On the other hand, PETA and PCRM deceptively use another nonprofit front group, The Foundation to Support Animal Protection, to hide the fact that PCRM is a front group for PETA. Basically PETA transfers large amounts of money to the FSAP which then transfers the money to PCRM -- that way people looking at PCRM's tax returns don't see large donations from PETA and vice versa. That's outrageous behavior regardless of what the ideology or movement is.
That was was originally publicized not by CCF or me but by the animal rights magazine Animal People which has for years provided excellent analyses of the funding of AR groups.
Follow the link I provided for a summary of the PETA-->PCRM connection and quotes from Animal People.
PCRM regularly misinforms the public about the role of animal research in thigns like keeping premature infants alive (http://www.animalrights.net/articles/2001/000125.html), so it's not surprising they're deceiving people about Dr. Atkins weight.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Popping water balloons in zero gravity
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DATE: 02/12/2004 02:08:34 PM
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I love these quicktime movies of water balloons being popped in space. Link (via Good Morning Silicon Valley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Down and Out relicensed today
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DATE: 02/12/2004 02:14:56 PM
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Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.
It didn't.
So here we are, just a little over a year later, and I am currently, at this moment, standing on a stage at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, delivering a talk called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, in which I lay out the case for what I've done and explain the myraid ways in which the sky has not fallen on me, and just about now, I'm announcing what' sin this blog post:
That I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic, slashfic...you get the picture.
I can't wait to see what you-all make of this. Surprise me, please!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My ETCON talk, in the Public Domain
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DATE: 02/12/2004 02:16:26 PM
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I have just given a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, which is something of an anomaly for me in three ways:
- I wrote out this talk, word for word, in advance of the presentation
- I am releasing that written text as a free, public domain file, right now, moments before I get off the stage
So here's the text of that talk, dedicated to the Public Domain, for you to do with what you will.
This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.
From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can reproduced.
(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CAPPSII report ships, head of program resigns
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DATE: 02/12/2004 02:36:44 PM
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The General Accounting Office has released a report on the CAPPSII airline-profiling system that is so damning, the head of the program resigned before the report shipped.
The Supreme Court decided in Bowsher v. Synar that the GAO is part of the legislative branch, not the executive,1 and therefore Presidents and their legal advisors consistently maintain that the GAO can have no role in executing the laws. That conclusion follows naturally from the earlier Chadha decision, which held that the only way in which the legislative branch may affect the legal rights duties or responsibilities of persons outside the legislative branch is by legislation—passage in both houses (bicameralism) followed by presentment of the act to the President (presentment) for signature or veto (which can then be overridden).2
In light of these very clear precedents, the White House announced at the time GW Bush signed the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act of 2004 that it would treat the report as advisory only. This is a reasonable legal position, and probably the one a court would adopt, although one could also argue that the favorable report requirement can't be severed from the appropriation and that therefore the unconstitutionality of the one implies the invalidity of the other.
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(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney/Dali Oscar nomination has execs in a tizzy
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DATE: 02/12/2004 04:11:15 PM
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Sam sez, "Disney/Salvadore Dali film Destino nominated for Oscar. Disney PR isn't happy with the thought of Roy Disney speaking to 200 million viewers."
"This is really a lose/lose situation for the Walt Disney Company," said one studio insider. "If the studio doesn't mount a really aggressive promotional campaign in order to claim a Best Animated Short Oscar for 'Destino,' Roy and Stanley get the right to complain that the Disney Company deliberately torpedoed this film's chance. Out of fear over what Walt's nephew might say once he gets up on stage at the Kodak Theatre."
"On the other hand, if Disney does put together a great Academy Award promotional campaign for 'Destino' and the short does actually win, all the suits still have to sit there and sweat. Wondering if Roy is going to use his opportunity -- standing there in front of over 200 million television viewers worldwide -- to talk about his campaign to remove Eisner."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: And this little piggie got stuffed
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DATE: 02/12/2004 10:19:56 PM
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If I had an extra $3800, I would purchase this antique taxidermy mount of an eight-legged hermaphrodite piglet. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jay-Z v. the Beatles -- "Grey Album" food fight
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DATE: 02/12/2004 10:21:53 PM
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BoingBoing pal (and former guestblogger) Todd Lappin points us to yet another food fight between copyright and Remix Culture.
DJ Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z's "Black Album" with the Beatles "White Album" to create... The "Grey Album," of course.
The New Yorker had a little Talk of the Town piece on this, Apparently, Jay-Z created a vocals-only version of his album *explicitly* so DJs could remix it. And many have. This week, the Beatles issued a cease and desist to stop the Grey Album... which of course makes the Grey Album even more desirable as a collector's item, so now the whole album is available for download. Here's the commentary above the download links:
"Special interests, including the major labels, have turned copyright law into a weapon," said Downhill Battle co-founder Holmes Wilson. "If Danger Mouse had requested permission and offered to pay royalties, EMI still would have said no and the public would never have been able to enjoy this critically acclaimed work. Artists are being forced to break the law to innovate."
So is the Grey Album any good? Hell yes! I've been listening to it for a few days, and it grows on me more and more with each listen.
Link.
UPDATE: Andy from Waxy.org, the fellow behind the download link referenced above, says "Just received a DMCA violation notice from EMI about the copy of the "Grey Album" I have online. I took the MP3s offline." And a sekrit BB reader says, "HERE (MP3 link) is another place to get the grey album. I know waxy can't post it .. but we can! and did. please tell the people."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mobile Phones With Manners
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DATE: 02/12/2004 10:44:05 PM
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I'm humbled and honored that I was asked to join Mark, Doug Rushkoff, Howard Rheingold, Justin Hall, and the rest of the big thinkers contributing to TheFeature. My first article is about MIT researchers who are technologically instilling mobile phones with some manners. I hope you enjoy it! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What do do in SF on Valentine's Day if you heart robots
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DATE: 02/12/2004 10:47:56 PM
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Geek heartthrob Kal Spelletich, the dapper mad scientist who performs as SEEMEN with a herd of crazed machines, performs at San Francisco's Odeon Bar this Saturday, February 14, 10pm-2am, for a whopping six bucks.
Well, we are in several shows this month, even one in Switzerland, BUT we have been saving the NEW BIG MACHINES AND ROBOTS for this one! Like the GYROSCOPE, LION LEAP, GROPEY CHAIR, MONKEY ON YER BACK and a slew of other goodies.
Jay, GEEKBOY, RANESSA, Kal and some of the gang are gonna DJ, show special rare videos and RUN MACHINES! SEEMEN create situations where audiences are encouraged to Interact and operate their machines and robots. You get to run a machine that can kill you. IT'S FUN!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Study: N.Y. Drivers Ignore Cell Phone Ban
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DATE: 02/12/2004 10:58:40 PM
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On today's edition of the NPR program Morning Edition:
In 2001, New York became the first state to prohibit drivers from using hand-held cell phones. A new study indicates that New York drivers reduced their use of hand-held mobile phones by half a few months after the ban went into effect, but usage has since bounced back. Hear NPR's Bob Edwards and New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, who helped draft the ban.
Link (thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sims + Sex on CNN and the Daily Show
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DATE: 02/12/2004 11:16:10 PM
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Two pieces of TV news coverage about the vrtual scandal involving digital sex in the Sims Online -- and related discussions aired The Alphaville Herald that led to the Herald's Peter Ludlow being yanked from the game. Ludlow writes:
CNN has produced a story on the joys of cyberbrothels in alphaville. I have no idea if it has aired on the network. It seems that the reporter (Bruce Burkhardt) got his virtual ashes hauled in the Jiggolo [sic] Escorts cyber brothel, which offers a good hour of cybering for the low low price of 17 K simoleans. I guess my complaint would be that the story makes it sould like all the Romance category houses are sex oriented.
Meanwhile, everyone who is angry at me for the CNN story can look forward to my ritual humiliation by The Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight! My students are especially looking forward to this one, as will all haters of Urizenus -- The producer promised that they would indeed make me look like a total ass. I'm not sure what will make it into the story, but there is a bit where Rob Cordry (sp?) insists that I shoot Polie Bear. There are also some obligatory remarks about fisting parties (how else are they going to stay on basic cable?).
background: NYT article via IHT, no registration required
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Phone numbers for sale on eBay
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DATE: 02/13/2004 07:48:13 AM
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Clive sez: "The advent of number portability has produced an interesting and predictable side effect: People selling off cool phone numbers. Someone on ebay is selling off the number 867-5309, made famous in the Tommy Tutone hit song 'Jenny (867-5309)'. It's in the 212 area code." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: D&D to be reissued by WotC
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DATE: 02/13/2004 08:08:29 AM
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Wizards of the Coast is releasing a 30th Anniversary D&D set, including a recreation of the an historical Basic D&D booklets D&D set:
Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set: Modeled after a classic boxed set from the game's early history..., the new Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set is the perfect introduction to the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying experience. The set includes streamlined rulebooks, map boards, roleplaying dice, and 16 miniatures from the new Dungeons & Dragons miniatures line. Release date scheduled for September 2004.
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(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Netwon-based NES
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DATE: 02/13/2004 08:09:43 AM
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There's a Nintendo Entertainment System emulator for the Netwon, called "Newtendo."
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(Thanks, c1josh!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Love Zen
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DATE: 02/13/2004 08:40:03 AM
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(1) the things we do for love
(2)
we love cards
(3)
i love egg
(4)
love calculator
(5)
candy heart maker
(6)
and the classic...
chaoskitty hearts you
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Cheeseball pop love songs are poetry, too.
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DATE: 02/13/2004 09:10:20 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I interview a University of Pennsylvania writing instructor who is teaching her students the common literary elements found in simple pop songs from the '70s and '80s, classic love poems, and sonnets. Her course is called "Hit Me Baby One More Time -- The Erotic Lyric Tradition", and uses two recently-published compilations of uber-schlocky pop song lyrics: I Can't Fight This Feeling (love songs), and You Give Love a Bad Name (breakup songs).
Listen to the archived audio segment after 12PM PT, and hear what may well be the most hilarious 30 seconds in NPR history: award-winning news man Carl Kassel performing a reading of the Pat Benatar classic "Love is a Battlefield." Who loves you, baby?
Link to archived audio (Real and WM), available after 12PM PT.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Great Star Wars photo remix
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DATE: 02/13/2004 09:43:24 AM
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I'm greatly amused by this remixed, Star Wars-themed photo of an iced-over freezer.
160k JPEG Link
(Thanks, Neils!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ETCON in five-minute chunks in San Fran and London, Monday
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DATE: 02/13/2004 09:44:56 AM
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If you missed ETCON, it's not too late -- ConCons are planned for next Monday in San Francisco and London, at which many of the ETCON speakers and attendees will recapitulate their ETCON talks as five minute lightning talks, with beer, in bars.
If you saw some good stuff at etech and want to tell people - or spoke at etech and want to retell your work to a wider audience, sign up below. Then force other people you know to do the same. The more people we have, the less you'll have to do!
The format is a casual, five-minute lightning talk with a friendly audience, with the emphasis less on five minutes and more on questions and answers. We'll just go through names until we run out of time. Then we'll have fun.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nano's Ways and Memes
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DATE: 02/13/2004 10:51:42 AM
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(This will be my last vanity post for a while, I promise...)
My new Small Times column is online today. It's a look at how the nanotechnology meme is spreading through popular culture, specifically video games and cartoons. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wagner on copyright
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DATE: 02/13/2004 12:36:28 PM
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Mitch Wagner's written a very lucid essay about DRM and file-sharing that strikes me as one of the better formulations of the problem that I've seen to date.
It's rather appropriate that the logo for Disney is a mouse, because The Walt Disney Company this week announced its intention to throw money down a rathole. Disney became the latest company to license Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. DRM doesn't work and consumers don't want it, so of course it's very appealing to big business, who are also in a big rush to sell other, equally practical products, such as anchovy flavored ice cream and bicycles with square wheels.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Bush's Meet the Press
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DATE: 02/13/2004 12:37:18 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted the Daily Show take on Bush's Meet the Press appearance. AHAHAHAHA.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amazon discloses many reviews written by insecure, sniping writers
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DATE: 02/13/2004 09:06:18 PM
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Amazon accidentally revealed the real names of many anonymous reviewers this week, through a bug in the amazon.ca back-end. It turns out that many of the reviewers are writers saying nice things about their own books or trashing their colleagues.
"That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd," said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens," on Amazon under the signature "a reader from Chicago." "How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them...."
One well-known writer admitted privately -- and gleefully -- to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: There's a club if you'd like to go
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DATE: 02/13/2004 10:21:17 PM
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The photo inside The Smiths' The Queen is Dead album depicts the boys in front of the Salford Lads Club in Manchester, England. Ever since the record was released in 1986, the building has become a mecca for Smiths fans--a notoriously, er, dedicated bunch. At first, the Club was less than thrilled at being associated with the kinds of characters who would sing about "stealing lead from a church roof." Now though, the charity is dedicating an entire room to those charming men who made their gateway famous. Link (Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy Valentine's Day
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DATE: 02/14/2004 07:51:17 AM
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Love is all that matters.
(image: a snapshot I took at Burning Man 2003 -- full size here).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "I'm the guy that killed that mad cow ... a good walker."
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DATE: 02/14/2004 10:11:05 AM
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Website by a man who claims to have slaughtered the mad cow. He says the cow was not a downer as claimed by the USDA.
WE WERE ONLY TESTING DOWNERS FOR BSE. NO MORE DOWNERS MEANS NO MORE BSE TESTING. PERIOD. We tested that big white walker because she was mixed in with the downers. Mad cows are not downers they are up and they are crazy. The USDA started testing downers because they didn't think they would find any BSE cows in that mess. They could then say to the consumer we've been testing and we haven't found anything. EAT YOUR MEAT. BUY BEEF. ITS SAFE
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IRC log from Trippi's talk at ETCON
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DATE: 02/15/2004 06:09:50 AM
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Kevin Burton kept a running transcript of Joe Trippi's talk at the ETCON Emergent Democracy event, pasting it into IRC as he went. He's posted the IRC log, which includes Kevin's transcription and the peanut gallery's responses (Burtonator tells us not to mind the typos: "The Internet is not a system for testing spell-checkers")
<burtonator> amazed that the press frankly can't figure out what the dean campaign WAS
<GabeW> WHY DIDN'T YOU LET US HAVE THE CONTACT INFO FOR LOCAL DEAN SUPPORTERS EARLIER?
<burtonator> not it's defining if it's a SUCCESS but still doesn't konw what it was
<Argyle> the sound of typing everywhere....
<burtonator> it's a mistake to buy the spin from broadcast media
<burtonator> broadcast politics has failed us miserably
<burtonator> no debate about the war
Link
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Firsthand account of the gay marriage rush at San Fran city hall
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DATE: 02/15/2004 06:11:48 AM
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My colleague Seth Schoen took a walk yesterday down to the San Francisco city hall and watched the hundreds of lesbian and gay couple in various states of marriage. His first-person account is touching and sent a shiver up my spine.
We walked around the side of the line and saw hundreds of same-sex couples in all states of dress (punk to tuxedo to family heirloom dress to just-off-the-street-in-work-attire). One couple wore yarmulkes and carried a siddur; another couple looked like ordained ministers, but I didn't know for sure of which Christian denomination. (It must be one willing to ordain gay women.) At the back of City Hall, the line was making its way through the door past a group of about half a dozen well-wishers with big pink signs. They looked like high school students. One of them was carrying an American flag with gay rights symbols in place of the stars. (Oddly enough, San Francisco regular Frank Chu was demonstrating too, with his usual sign that had nothing to do with same-sex marriage -- instead about galaxies, a rocket society, and impeaching former U.S. presidents. I was pretty sure he was just trying to get on TV with his message. You see him frequently in the Financial District.)...
Zack and I applauded for the couples as they were married, and shook hands with them. The couples were as diverse in age as they were in dress: I saw a pair of women get married and was sure they were younger than I am. And I saw and was most touched by several weddings of people who had likely been waiting even longer than 18 years. Two women of my mother's age, or a little older, were married right in front of me, and they started to cry. I almost started to cry, too.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney takeover photoshopping contest
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DATE: 02/15/2004 06:46:15 AM
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Nice: a Fark photoshopping contest whose theme is "Would-be takeover attempts of the Walt Disney Company."
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: James Joyce's descendants are copyright jerks
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DATE: 02/15/2004 08:31:15 AM
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James Joyce's terrible descendants have decided to use the newly extended Euro copyright to bully anyone who publicly reads his work, in Ireland, on Bloomsday, into silence.
Christ, this makes me angry enough to spit. Note to my literary executor: if you ever dream of doing anything like this after I die, I'll come back from the dead and reach out of the toilet and unspool your guts while dragging you down to hell. Sheesh.
...[T]he Joyce estate has informed the Irish government that it intends to sue for copyright infringement if there are any public readings of Joyce's works during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June.
James Joyce died in 1941 and the copyright in his work expired in 1991. Then the EU extended terms to life+70 years, and the work went back into copyright in July 1995. The estate has been very active in enforcing their copyright, suing regularly.
Link
(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Earn $25 for each junk fax you send in.
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DATE: 02/15/2004 09:04:51 AM
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The Demirali Law Firm says it will pay you $25 for each junk fax you send it (if a collection is made). You need to send in at least ten faxes at a time.Consumer rights advocate Tom Martino is behind this. Link (Thanks, Travis!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Freud/Jung slash
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DATE: 02/15/2004 10:23:21 AM
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Short (but high-larious) Sigmund Freud/Carl Jung slash fiction:
'I had a dream last night, Siggy.'
'Ja?'
'It was you and me together skipping in a field. Und then this great serpent appeared and slithered into a cave.'
'Du lieber gott! Do you know what you are saying to me? Do you know what zis serpent means?'
'Ja, it is some manifestation of the World-Spirit.'
NSFW Link
(Thanks, Quinn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MeFi, Megnut and Whole Lotta Nothing status
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DATE: 02/15/2004 03:17:47 PM
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MeFi, Megnut and A Whole Lotta Nothing have been offline for a couple days. Here's why:
People have been asking (not really), so I thought I'd let you know that MetaFilter, Megnut, and A Whole Lotta Nothing are down because of a bad computer fan. No ETA as of yet on when the box will be back up. Matt Haughey was unavailable for comment due to laziness on my part, but if he were available, he'd probably say something like, "you tell those ungrateful bastards that I'll order that new fan when I'm damn good and ready."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sophie Crumb profiled in NYT
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DATE: 02/15/2004 09:23:17 PM
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NYT story about Robert Crumb's daughter Sophie, who has a new comic book out called Belly Button Comix.
Ms. Crumb at work is reminiscent of several scenes in "Crumb," Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary about her father. The resemblance is only heightened by her surroundings, the remnants of the hippie subculture from which Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and the rest of her father's most famous characters sprang. She's currently living in a communal household — "It's so stuck in the 70's it's really painful," she said — and she and her housemates often raid local dumpsters for food. Her sketchbook, whose pages are imprinted with kitschy cat motifs, was also found in the garbage. "I'm trying to not spend money so I don't have to get a job," she said.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Detecting Patterns in Complex Social Networks
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DATE: 02/16/2004 09:13:56 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
So-called social networking is very popular these days, as show the proliferation of services like Friendster, Orkut and dozens of others. But do the companies behind these services have any idea of what is hidden inside their complicated networks? When these networks reach a size of millions of users, it's not an easy task. A researcher at the University of Michigan is trying to help, with a new method for uncovering patterns in complicated networks, from football conferences to food webs. This overview contains more details and references about this non-traditional method. It also includes a spectacular representation of the Internet and another image showing a food web at Little Rock Lake.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of visual zen: DARPA Grand Challenge illustration
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DATE: 02/16/2004 09:16:48 AM
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In this month's Popular Science Magazine, an illustration by Kenn Brown, who says:
"DARPA is putting together a race of autonomous (robotic) vehicles that runs from LA to Las Vegas. Completely remote, no one at the wheel. They are recruiting people (these guys are serious robot geeks who build and tinker with this stuff as a hobby and obsession) to build their own vehicles to participate in the race. The vehicles range from motorcycles to HumVees. The point of this story is to illustrate DARPA's interest in this technology, and that they hope to have autonomous vehicles waging war by 2015. "
Oh, goodie. I can hardly wait.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Win2K source code comments analyzed
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DATE: 02/16/2004 09:48:34 AM
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This great K5 article dissects the code and comments from the leaked source-code to Win2K. The conclusion: the code is pretty good, and the comments are an illumnating, NC-17 journey through the frustrations of working on giant code-projects that drag long tails of legacy code behind them.
In some cases, the programmers themselves appear to have been frustrated or surprised.
private\ntos\w32\ntuser\kernel\mnpopup.c:
// Set the GlobalPopupMenu variable so that EndMenu works for popupmenus so
// that WinWart II people can continue to abuse undocumented functions.
private\windows\shell\accesory\hypertrm\emu\minitel.c:
// Guess what? Latent background color is always adopted for mosaics.
// This is a major undocumented find...
private\windows\shell\accesory\hypertrm\emu\minitelf.c:
// Ah, the life of the undocumented. The documentation says
// that this guys does not validate, colors, act as a delimiter
// and fills with spaces. Wrong. It does validate the color.
// As such its a delimiter. If...
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SimCity for Sims, recursion will eat itself
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DATE: 02/16/2004 09:56:34 AM
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A third-party Sims developer has produced a version of SimCity for use in the Sims, so that your simulated people can simulate being the mayor of a simulated city. No word yet on whether we are all just sims in a great simulation in the sky, executing on a celestial computer the size of the universe, with "God" simply a gamer playing an unimaginably scaled up version of the Sims. But I have my suspicions. Have a melon. Lag. Dude.
"The Sims must routinely refurbish the buildings to keep the citizens happy, or just let them deteriorate and force the citizens to become unhappy and move away," says Alvey. "Happy citizens go to work and pay taxes, which the Sims collect as revenue. The higher the profits, the more attractive the city becomes, so more citizens will move into it."
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ann Coulter's lies about Cleland torn to bits
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DATE: 02/16/2004 10:01:55 AM
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Ann "Nutcase" Coulter wrote a scathing editorial in which she made up a bunch of unforgivable lies about Max Cleland, a US senator who lost three limbs in Vietnam, by way of rebuttal to his criticism of the Bush administration. The Center for American Progress tears apart her editorial, identifying, lie-by-lie, just how full of shit she is.
SAYING CLELAND WAS "LUCKY" TO HAVE LIMBS BLOWN OFF: Coulter said, "Luckily for Cleland…he happened to [lose his limbs] while in Vietnam" and said that had he been injured "at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. Senator." Of course, Cleland probably would not have been dealing with live grenades and enemy fire in the save haven of Ft. Dix. But, then, many top conservatives might not know this because they do not have firsthand knowledge of a combat zone. President Bush did not go to Vietnam because he was in the Texas National Guard. Vice President Dick Cheney did not serve in the military, saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." According to the Houston Press in 1999, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) "tried to blame minorities for his lack of military experience" saying, "so many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks" like him. And Rush Limbaugh avoided service by apparently claiming his "anal cysts" prevented him from defending the nation. See more conservatives who attack veterans while avoiding military service themselves.
Link
via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Social Software for Children
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DATE: 02/16/2004 10:03:02 AM
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Fiona Romeo has posted her notes from her excellent ETCON presentation, "Social Software for Children."
My talk focused on the findings of the BBC identity group's qualitative research and usability testing with children and teens. I shared insights into Jessica and Jake's approaches to identity management, friendship and group membership, with the view to inform actual product development work in this area.
While the purpose of my talk was to stimulate interest in the question: How can we ensure children's safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software?, I also gave some of my own opinions about the appropriateness - or not - of existing social software, and speculated about some positive future directions that wikis and weblogs could take (e.g. using RSS syndication to involve parents in the moderation of social spaces for children).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO: turn off html in your mailer
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DATE: 02/16/2004 10:06:55 AM
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Here's a great overview of the reasons to eschew HTML for email, and an amazing, exhaustive primer on turning off html-mail-sending in dozens of mail clients. I keep my screen resolution high enough that most of the html mail I receive shows up at completely unreadable sizes -- plain text mail automativally sizes to my preferred scale, but not so html mail.
Many E-mail and Usenet News reader programs, usually the mail and news reader programs that come with browser packages, allow users to include binary attachments (MIME or other encoding) or HTML (normally found on web pages) within their E-mail messages. This makes URLs into clickable links and it means that graphic images, formatting, and even color coded text can also be included in E-mail messages. While this makes your E-mail interesting and pretty to look at, it can cause problems for other people who receive your E-mail because they may use different E-mail programs, different computer systems, and different application programs whose files are often not fully compatible with each other. Any of these can cause trouble with in-line HTML (or encoded attachments). Most of the time all they see is the actual HTML code behind the message. And if someone replies to the HTML formatted message, the quoting can render the message even more unreadable. In some cases, the message is nothing but strange looking text. For this reason, many mailing lists especially those that provide a digest version, explicitly forbid the use of HTML formatted e-mail. See examples section.
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(via Dive Into Mark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dmitry has a book out!
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DATE: 02/16/2004 10:18:20 AM
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Pablos sez, "Dmitry Sklyarov became the first martyr of the DMCA's Dark Age when he was arrested by federal agents for speaking at a conference about eBook security in 2001. He's a brilliant engineer who has done security analysis of eBook copy protection schemes. Dmitry is also a Russian citizen, and the wrong guy to suffer for backwards attempts at modern copyright by United States corporate lawmakers. Fortunately, the courts did the right thing and the case against Dmitry was dropped. Dmitry has since written 'Hidden Keys to Software Break-ins and Unauthorized Entry' which became available in English on Amazon this week. Even if you aren't into cryptanalysis, DRM, or computer security, buying this book will up your whuffie."
Link
(Thanks, Pablos!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mathematics of M&M packing
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DATE: 02/16/2004 10:58:13 AM
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According to a paper in the new issue of Science, researchers were surprised to discover that M&Ms randomly dumped into a bowl pack together much more densely than spheres. Why? Aspherical ellipsoids like M&Ms can touch eleven neighbors when dumped together while spheres only saddle up to six. Understanding how particles pack together can help scientists develop new and denser materials, like ceramics for heat shields. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gum Blondes - portraits of blonde women made out of bubble gum
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DATE: 02/16/2004 11:11:53 AM
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Figures of famously fine flaxen-haired females (Britney, Xtina, Pamela, and others) -- made entirely from chewing gum. The bio page on this Flash-based site states that the artist doesn't actually chew the gum himself to make the art, and that color in the images is all from the gum itself, no extra pigment added. Link (Thanks, Steve; also spotted at Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jordan wants to impose license fees on 'Net radio broadcasting
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DATE: 02/16/2004 11:41:28 AM
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Award-winning Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab -- founder of the Arab world's first Internet-based radio station, AmmanNet -- is protesting the Jordanian government's plans to regulate Internet broadcasting. He describes the recently-announced intent to impose a license fee on Internet broadcasting in the mideast nation as "undemocratic," and "against the trends in Jordan and the rest of the world for openness and deregulation."
Hussein Ben Hani, the director of the newly established audio visual department has confirmed to the press that his governmental department has submitted a draft law that regulates internet broadcasting. Jordan will be one of the first countries in the world to impose such a regulation. Jordan's Higher Media Council is said to be opposed including the internet in the new media regulation. In his statement, Kuttab said that any restrictions on internet publishing is illegal according to international law and contradicts the efforts of King Abdullah to open up Jordanian society. "How can the Kingdom succeed in attracting new business and convincing the world that they are scaling back their media laws when such restrictions are being regulated," he asked. Kuttab warned that such regulations are harmful to all forms of free expression. "Once you charge a license fee on audio broadcasting you will next charge a fee on all internet publishing. Imagine government regulators knocking on every Jordanian citizen's home to see if their 12 year old son has created and published a web page for himself."
Link to complete statement, Link to AmmanNet english site; link to recent op-ed by Kuttab, "Bridging the Digital Divide."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Orkut OD: TOS hack, and craziest community yet
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DATE: 02/16/2004 04:13:52 PM
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BoingBoing reader Larry sends an interesting "loophole" for Orkut's much-bemoaned TOS:
I noticed that people have been making a stink about Orkut.com's TOS lately, saying that it reserves the right to do pretty much anything with content posted to Orkut.com. I was actually a little more disturbed by another item from the TOS. Orkut.com forbids "directing any user (for example, by linking) to any Materials of any third party without such third party's prior written consent." That runs counter to the ethics of practically everyone on the Web, right on up to Tim Berners-Lee himself. So I made a PHP hack so Orkut users can strictly comply with the letter of the law in the TOS, but still point to any site they want on the Web without guilt. The URL I give here is just an example of how it works; as you can see, it refers to bOING bOING. There are no specific instructions on my site yet for using my hack, but I may remedy that if needed. In the meantime, anyone on Orkut has my permission to use it. Link
... while Jason Schultz sends us a link to something that wins my vote for zaniest/most paranoid Orkut community ever:
"PONZI: For those who believe orkut is a Ponzi scheme, fans of Ponzi schemes, or those who think Ponzi was on Happy Days. It's all about the Ponzi is all we're sayin." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michigan TV "journalists" confuse Asimov's Science Fiction with pr0n
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DATE: 02/16/2004 05:18:35 PM
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Brian sez:
The local TV station had been running radio promos for a story about a local school magazine fundraiser that included an "adult" magazine. It's a conservative area, so we figured maybe they accidentally got order forms with Playboy, or maybe the locals were just throwing fits over FHM and Maxxim.
Nope -- the adult magazine in question was Asimov's Science Fiction.
Link
(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Guerrilla Gates-assassination mockumentary
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DATE: 02/16/2004 05:34:04 PM
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Brian Flemming, who is making a guerrilla fake-documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates, sez, "I just posted a QuickTime movie to my blog about the 'reality hack' the cast of Nothing So Strange and I did at the 2000 Democratic National Convention."
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(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Honda Hybrid Heist How-dunnit -- can you solve this?
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DATE: 02/16/2004 05:39:09 PM
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Former guestblogger Todd Lappin says:
Newsweek correspondent Brad Stone has written a "how-dunnit?" piece about the recent theft (and recovery) of his 2003 Honda Civic hybrid [affectionately nicknamed "Honky" --XJ]. In theory, thieves shouldn't have been able to steal the car, because it's equipped with a security transponder that's all but uncrackable. Brad writes, "Were we to believe that a thief stole our car to brag to his friends about getting 40-plus miles to the gallon and preserving city air? Odder still, how could they have bypassed the security chip in the thick black jacket of our car key, designed so that our keys, and only our keys, could send the unique code needed to activate the car's ignition? We still had all our keys in our possession."
The mystery remains unsolved, so Brad is soliciting theories from armchair-detectives who think they can explain this high-tech hybrid heist.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shows that mention witchcraft no longer eligible for closed-captioning
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DATE: 02/16/2004 08:04:47 PM
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The five-secret-person Department of Education panel that allocates funding for closed-captioning will no longer provide assitive tracks for the deaf to shows that mention witchcraft, including Scooby Doo, Bewitched, and Justice League.
[T]he result of this mysterious panel's deliberations was that the US Department of Education was to declare over 200 TV programs (almost no cartoons, except for things like Prince of Egypt. No more sports. Precious little drama...) were now inappropriate for closed-caption funding...
28 million Americans are now being protected from Sabrina...
Witches of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your vertical blanking interval!
Link
(Thanks, Sam!)
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TITLE: China police arrest online essayist for subversion
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DATE: 02/17/2004 07:26:09 AM
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Police in China have arrested 40-year-old civil servant Du Daobin with charges of subversion, after he criticized the government by way of a series of 28 online essays.
Du, who has been detained since October, also accepted money from overseas organisations and individuals in return for helping them post articles harmful to state security on domestic Web sites, official news agency Xinhua quoted the spokesman as saying. Du had overstepped his legal right to criticise government work and civil servants with good intent, and viciously incited subversion of state power through fabrication, Xinhua said.
(...)Du's case has drawn protests from scores of Chinese academics and reporters who have urged his release. Activists have written to Premier Wen Jiabao saying Du's detention was groundless. Internet surfers have flocked to Du's defence, even posting an online petition at www.mzyzy.com saying he had not called for the overthrow of the Chinese government.
Link to Reuters story, A quick Google of "Du Daobin" reveals dozens of "Free Du" petitions.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Webmonkey closes down
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DATE: 02/17/2004 07:28:25 AM
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This may be the year of the monkey, but sadly it is not the year of the Webmonkey. I'm gonna miss it. I learned some of my very first lessons about building websites from that website, and I still have various sections bookmarked for handy reference.
BoingBoing reader Philip
says:
Webmonkey is closing down! They finally pulled the plug. "Webmonkey, the site that turned humble Web developers into attention-grabbing authors, said last week it is closing down following a round of layoffs in the U.S. division of its parent company, Terra Lycos (also the parent company of Wired News). Judging by blog posts and e-mails, the site's fans aren't surprised. Still, they're sad to see the end of an era."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cingular buys AT+T Wireless
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DATE: 02/17/2004 07:34:06 AM
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$41 billion. What will the resulting company be, and do? Wow. Dan Gillmor has this to say about why the mega-merger shouldn't worry those concerned about carrier consolidation:
This merger won't necessarily be bad for competition.I've been using AT&T Wireless' GSM service for about a year now. Quality of service is marginal, and the customer service has been a bit lower than marginal. But Cingular, also a GSM carrier, has an even worse reputation. So maybe combining these two networks will create something that offers at least reasonable quality.
Cingular probably overpaid, but it's smart to make this deal in at least one respect. There's only room for a couple of mergers before the market gets too cozy for real competition. While expecting serious antitrust scrutiny from the Bush administration is probably futile, there's probably enough angst in Congress to keep consolidation from being rampant.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Product placement future cityscapes
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DATE: 02/17/2004 07:41:40 AM
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Nice gallery of photoshopped images of a sponsored future in which logomarks are plastered everywhere we look. Erm, kinda like today, but moreso. Nice counterpoint to the idea that in a PVR world, product placement displaces direct ads.
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(via Beyond the Beyond)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Verizon sez you can't sell 867-5309, it doesn't belong to you
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DATE: 02/17/2004 07:44:32 AM
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The guy auctioning off 867-5309 (made famous in the forgettable hit 867-5309/Jenny) is collecting eBay bids despite the fact that Verizon says they won't transfer the number because number portability wasn't supposed to confer ownership (and hence the right to sell) to its customers.
But there's a question of whether the number can even be transferred to the winner once the auction ends Feb. 22. Verizon says there's no question: It can't. Individuals do not have ownership of the numbers given to them, a Verizon spokesman said.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Papers Please: right not to show ID goes to Supreme Court
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DATE: 02/17/2004 07:49:31 AM
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A Nevada cowboy is fighting for his right not to produce ID on law-enforcement demand, and he's going all the way to the Supreme Court.
Meet Dudley Hiibel. He's a 59 year old cowboy who owns a small ranch outside of Winnemucca, Nevada. He lives a simple life, but he's his own man. You probably never would have heard of Dudley Hiibel if it weren't for his belief in the U.S. Constitution.
One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his ID. Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined. He was arrested and charged with "failure to cooperate" for refusing to show ID on demand. And it's all on video.
On the 22nd of March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether Dudley and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show "the papers" whenever a cop demands them.
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(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eastern Standard Tribe is shipping
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DATE: 02/17/2004 07:52:48 AM
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Eastern Standard Tribe, my second novel, is starting to appear on store-shelves across America. I spotted copies this weekend at Borderlands in San Francisco, and Amazon has started shipping their orders as well.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: I'm moving to England and selling off a bunch of stuff
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DATE: 02/17/2004 08:20:13 AM
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I've got a lot of changes coming up in my life this year. At the end of the month, I'm starting a one-month leave-of-absence from EFF, and I'll be going off to Toronto to finish my next novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town."
Then, starting on April 1, I'll be heading off to London, England, to work for Creative Commons and EFF on a variety of projects:
- Responding to the EUIPR enforcement directive in Brussels
- Participating in the DVB standards-body in Geneva
- Working with large-scale UK open licensing projects
- Representing EFF at WIPO in Geneva
It's really exciting (and I'm really frazzled!), and, in answer to some common questions:
- No, I'm sorry, I just don't have any time for dinner, drinks, lunch, coffee or meetings before I leave San Francisco. Every moment is spoken for. I'd love to see you at one of my book-signings, and there's a chance that I'll throw a party before I go (watch this space for details).
- I have a little bit of time in Toronto to hang out, but first priority is going to be finishing my novel (which, have I mentioned, is due at the end of March, eek!), seeing my family, and spending quality time with my closest friends. I'll be working out what days I have free time on after I touch down, and I'll post something here once I've got that sorted out.
- I would love to talk to you about EFF's plans in Europe, and/or socialize in London. Please drop me an email after April 2, once I'm off my leave-of-absence, and we'll sort something out!
Anyway, the other reason for this post is to let you know that I'm selling off a bunch of stuff that I'm not storing or shipping:
- A deco table lamp
- An iPod
- An iMic
- A bull-skull
- An iBook stand
- A fax machine/scanner/printer
- A Metro shelving unit
- A two-tub washing machine
- A queen-sized bed and frame (comfiest bed I ever slept in)
- A machine-washable rubber keyboard
I've put up a blog where I've listed all this stuff with prices, descriptions and pictures. I'll be adding a few more items tonight if I get the chance:
- A city bicycle
- Two Sony Dream Machine clock-radios
- An oil-filled radiator
It's all as-is/final/pickup in San Francisco (no shipping, sorry!). Check out the blog for more details:
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: List of programs disapproved for Closed Captioning
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DATE: 02/17/2004 08:27:16 AM
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Sarah sez, "As a follow-up to the posting on closed-captioning censorship, people may be interested to know that it's not just Bewitched and Scooby-Doo that have been deemed too strong for the sensitive eyes of the hearing impaired. Movies on the IFC, NASCAR, and Law & Order are all disapproved, but we can still read along with "The Fountainhead" and Fox Network News. List courtesy of the National Association for the Deaf."
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(Thanks, Sarah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sponsored Paris
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DATE: 02/17/2004 08:32:20 AM
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More logomarked futurism: a Flash app (with un-mutable, obnoxious soundtrack) showing various Paris landmarks as they might appear once sponsored by multinational brands. You know, I wrote a story about this (reprinted in this book).
Link
(Thanks, Chryde!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Harnessing the Hacker's HeckleBot
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DATE: 02/17/2004 10:34:03 AM
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Boing Boing pal Justin Hall sez: "Ostensibly a story about the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego last week, it's secretly a reflection of my own struggle to manage my attention span when I have access to the internet and I'm surrounded by hyperactive geeks and I'm supposed to be listening to straightforward in-person presentations but the twitchy nature of communcations online suits me more readily." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: COINTELPRO II: Police tactics since 9-11
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DATE: 02/17/2004 01:09:13 PM
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Kevin Bankston, EFF's Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow, sez, "This is an incredible, two part series in Salon about cops spying on political activists post-9/11. It is an absolute must read."
"What we're seeing is something much larger in scale and danger than
anything that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s," he says. "That's because of
computers. Now, instead of having these agencies working in semi-isolation
or occasional cooperation, there's the equivalent of the great Alaska
pipeline running between them, and the information flows in both directions.
In addition, in the 1950s or '60s, it took weeks of pavement pounding and
doorknobbing for the FBI or police or military to collect personal
information about people, the kind of information you need to put them under
surveillance. Today that kind of information can be obtained by a few
computer keystrokes. The harassment potential is much greater."
Part 1 Link, Part 2 Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Going away party this Sunday
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DATE: 02/17/2004 11:15:51 PM
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All right, I've promised a party, and I'm delivering. If anyone wants to wish me well and see me off from San Francisco, please come on down to Zeitgeist this Sunday for a late-afternoon send-off.
Where: Zeitgeist Bar and Guest Haus, 199 Valencia St at Duboce, San Francisco, (415)255-7505
When: Sunday, February 22, 2004, 5-9PM
What: Cory's going-away party
Please, no prezzies or keepsakes! I have enough to pack and store! (Oh, and on that note, I've just added a couple clock-radios, a heater and a trackball to the garage-sale blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Judicial pedantry saves gay marriage in San Fran
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DATE: 02/18/2004 05:56:04 AM
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The judge who refused to issue an immediate injunction against gay and lesbian weddings in San Francisco did so on the basis of a punctuation nit.
"The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word 'or'," the judge said. "I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances."
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pagan hierarchy
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DATE: 02/18/2004 06:12:01 AM
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The Pagan Hierarchy: like the Geek Hierarchy, but for pagans. I don't know why this kind of chart is so inherently funny, but damn, it sure is.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to get free iTunes from Pepsi with every bottle
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DATE: 02/18/2004 06:35:40 AM
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If you tilt a sealed, new Pepsi bottle at 25 degrees and squint at the underside of the cap, you can tell whether it's a winning free-iTunes-track bottle or a try-again bottle.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: William Gibson interview
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DATE: 02/18/2004 06:41:38 AM
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Here's a great interview with William Gibson, who is on the road promoting the paperback of his brilliant novel of apophenia run wild, Pattern Recognition (see my review, too).
"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."
And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction - anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future - is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Woman sued for file-sharing brings RICO countersuit against RIAA
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DATE: 02/18/2004 06:47:43 AM
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A New Jersey mom who was sued for file-sharing by the RIAA has brought a countersuit for racketeering.
The Rockaway Township woman, who claims she was targeted for her teenager's school research project, is among hundreds of individuals sued by the music industry since last summer. Another 531 computer users were sued yesterday in "John Doe" suits filed in Trenton, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Orlando.
Labels are using "scare tactics (that) amount to extortion" in efforts to extract settlements, Scimeca alleges in legal papers sent to the U.S. District Court in Newark.
"They're banding together to extort money, telling people they're guilty and they will have to pay big bucks to defend their cases if they don't pony up now. It is fundamentally not fair," Scimeca's lawyer, Bart Lombardo, said yesterday. The Cranford attorney said he occasionally downloads songs for personal use and sees nothing wrong with that.
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mind Wide Open excerpt
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:14:26 AM
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Salon is running a long excerpt from Steven Johnson's mindblowing new book, Mind Wide Open, which I read last week and have been returning to in my thoughts several times a day. Johnson takes apart the jargon and theory of various kinds of brain and mind science and exposes us to a bunch of aha! moments about the physiological, evolutionary and non-material bases for our thought processes. Reading this book, you get this curious form of vertigo in which you begin to see your brain as a collection of chemicals and processes and physiological serendipities, and then realize that that very same collection of goo is the thing that is having this realization, and boy, that's a weird goddamned feeling. As for me, after reading this I'm in the market for a cheap travel-sized USB neurofeedback EEG.
Areas that do show noticeable changes appear on the images as a cluster of bright yellow pixels, fading out to orange and red at their peripheries. The images look strikingly like the Doppler radar images you see on the Weather Channel. (If you blur your eyes a little, you might think that yellow patch on the image was a thunderhead, not a brainstorm.) The image is projected over a grid with numbers running along each axis. The numbered grid and the slices create a three-dimensional system of coordinates, the latitude and longitude of neuromapping. The grid is made up of small cubes called "voxels," and each voxel has a specific address.
Joy begins by laying down the twenty-five slices for stage one of our experiment, the dreaded checkerboard. The pattern of activity is immediately visible, even to my untutored eyes, mostly because there's literally nothing going on in 95 percent of my brain. Only a thin band wrapping around the back of my head, roughly at ear level, glows yellow.
"We know that the flashing checkerboard is a very salient stimulus for just the visual processing areas of the brain," she says. "And that's exactly what's happening here."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wicked-cool home robot videos from Japan
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:36:58 AM
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Robotics Society of America President and Robolympics founder David Calkins tells BoingBoing:
"While in Japan, I saw the coolest thing ever! Fighting robots. But not in the traditional Battlebots sense. Imagine rock-em sock-em robots, only fully articulated and computer controlled. It's called Robo-One and it's amazing. 15" tall androids belt each other boxing style until one falls down. These mini androids are as articulate as the Sony Curio, Honda ASIMO, or Fujitsu HOAP - only guys are making them in their apartments for about $3000, rather than 10 Million. I've uploaded a bunch of videos to give you an idea.
Robolympics is sponsoring a Robo-One match in San Francisco in March - along with Battlebots, sumo bots, and others. Watch these videos!" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turn yourself into a UPC
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:41:01 AM
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Feeling overly humanized? Let this Flash-based barcode-generator dehumanize you a little: apparently this UPC decodes to "32-year-old male, 173 lbs, 5'10", living in the US."
Link
(Thanks, Liz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Discordians organize MeetUp
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:42:16 AM
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evilevilmatt sez, "This site is devoted to getting discordians, worshipers of chaos to organize a 'meetup day.' Oh the irony!"
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(Thanks, evilevilmatt!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian file-sharing lawsuit clearing house
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:51:55 AM
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Glen sez, "A new Canadian site with resources to fight record company lawsuits re: file sharing. Looks like it was set up mostly by law students. This page on the message forum lists usernames & IP addresses of Kazaa users that CRIA is going after."
Link
(Thanks, Glen!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC Chairman's astounding statement of Internet Rights
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:56:00 AM
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FCC Chairman Michael Powell recently gave a talk called "Preserving Internet Freedom: Guiding Principles for the
Industry" at the University of Colorado School of Law. Powell sets out some "Internet Freedoms" that he believes Americans are entitled to: these are astonishingly radical ideas to hear coming out of the mouth of the Chairman of the FCC.
- Freedom to Access Content. First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content.
- Freedom to Use Applications. Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
- Freedom to Attach Personal Devices. Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
- Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information. Fourth, consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.
100K PDF Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mysterious celebrity-themed posters plaster LA streets
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:57:33 AM
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Click image for full size. A mysterious epidemic of posters is reported in LA this week. We understand they bear the work of famed street artist Robbie Conal They're Robbie Conal-esque, and we know they're some sort of sneaky underground campaign for some Hot New Thing Which Shall Be Revealed Shortly, and that posters sending up Wynona, Courtney, and Moby are also in the works, but we're told we'll be sent on a one-way ride to Naked Scientology Boot Camp for extensive botox torture if we reveal their true origin and purpose. (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory reading tomorrow night at Borderlands Books
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DATE: 02/18/2004 07:57:40 AM
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I'm giving a signing and a reading at San Francisco's Borderlands Books (19th and Valencia) tomorrow night at 7PM, in honor of Eastern Standard Tribe. Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free WiFi influences 40% of Schlotskys's customers
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DATE: 02/18/2004 08:10:35 AM
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Schlotzky's is a deli chain that gives away free WiFi -- they were among the first to do so, in a bold expeeriment at one of their flagship restaurants on the main drag in Austin, TX, after Starbucks set up shop directly across the street (Schlotsky's also took the incredibly canny step of renaming their coffee sizes Tall, Grande, and Venti and putting a starbusian combinatorial explosion of caffeine-delivery systems on the menu). The company has released new market research showing that free connectivity is a selection-factor for 40 percent of its customers.
Glenn writes,
I've met the CEO and the marketing director when I invited the CEO to speak at a panel I moderated at Wi-Fi Planet last year, and the most interesting aspect of the Wi-Fi is that they're not excited about the technology but its uses. There's a financial aspect to this, of course: the average purchase price of a Schlotzsky's customer is about $7.
But the CEO wasn't a geek; he liked seeing entire families or sports teams or groups of parents and kids come in and spent time using the high-speed connection. It's important to recall that a small but significant minority of Internet users have broadband; for the rest, Schlotzsky's offering is a profound (and free) pleasure.
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(via WiFiNetNews)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wirelessly Enabling the Disabled
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DATE: 02/18/2004 09:30:08 AM
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My latest piece for TheFeature is about researchers at Georgia Tech who are hacking mobile devices and off-the-shelf components to help disabled people become more independent. I'm really intrigued by the wearable "audiitory display," a navigation system for the blind that generates spatially-located sounds as trail-markers for the wearer to follow as they walk somewhere. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bnetd brief: a legal doc that *sings*
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DATE: 02/18/2004 12:43:36 PM
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Most legal briefs are boring and vaccilating, couched in a thousand maybes and coulds and other qualifiers. Thus, it's a pleasure to read a brief in which a lawyer lays down some muscular, no-nonsense prose in defense of a good cause.
My cow-orker Jason Schultz has just filed a brief in the Southern District Court in the BNETD case, in which Blizzard -- a Universal company that makes video games -- is suing some hackers who wrote their own free software version of Blizzard's game-server, called bnetd. The arguments from the other side are the height of bogosity, and Jason makes no bones about it in his brief. The prose here positively sings, and is as good a treatise on fair-use reverse engineering as you could hope to read.
First, as discussed in Defendants' opening brief, the dissimilarity between the "BATTLE.NET" and "bnetd project" marks alone warrants summary judgment for the Defendants on Blizzard's Count III. Also weighing heavily in Defendants' favor is the fact that Blizzard has still failed to come forward with any admissible evidence of actual customer confusion. Blizzard's sole set of "evidence" are two hearsay statements in a declaration from Paul Sams, a Blizzard employee. These vague assertions regarding what other unnamed people have said when contacting Blizzard constitutes inadmissible hearsay, and therefore cannot be considered as evidence of actual confusion. Even if these statements were admissible, misdirected communications such as these have been considered in other cases to be "de minimis and to show inattentiveness on the part of the caller or sender rather than actual confusion."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark's "Slug Food Journal" for sale
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DATE: 02/18/2004 03:17:59 PM
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I'm selling blank notebooks with my cover illustration of a girl feeding some magic pellets to her pet slugs. (click here for a larger image) The notebooks are wire-o bound, measure 5" x 8", and contain 80 sheets of paper. Yours for just $10. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory speaking at Wireless Future conference at SXSW in March
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DATE: 02/18/2004 03:56:31 PM
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Jonl sez: "Time is running out to register for the Wireless Future conference, which will be held March 12-16 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. Explore the future of licensed and unlicensed wireless technology with such luminaries as Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs), Kevin Werbach (organizer of Supernova and author of New America Foundation's Radio Revolution), Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legendary Dave Hughes, David Weinberger (author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Dewayne Hendricks of Dandin Group, Joichi Ito of Neoteny, Ltd., Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury, John Quarterman and many more! This is a great conference for wireless entrepreneurs, business strategists, developers, inventors, creative thinkers and anyone else interested in the promise of mobile technology. Sponsored by Andrews Kruth, Metrowerks, Motion Computing, RockSteady Networks, The Futures Lab, Polycot Consulting, Austin Wireless Alliance and Ink PR."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Science Fiction Inventions by Publication Date
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DATE: 02/18/2004 04:52:03 PM
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Very nice:
1980 Food Factory - fast food from outer space (from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl)
1980 Watercouch (from Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl)
1981 Communications Implant - I think therefore I network (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven)
1981 Mole - Underground vehicle (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven)
1981 Underground MagLev Train (from Dream Park by Larry Niven (w/S. Barnes))
1981 Arcology - Soleri's dream (from Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle)
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jim Macdonald explains writing
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DATE: 02/18/2004 08:20:45 PM
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Jim Macdonald, half of the Doyle-Macdonald writing team, has been presiding over a hundreds-posts-long running tutorial on how to write that is unbelievably good and sensible and right. If you want to write, go read this now.
Well, now, what to put in the opening?
We're going to stick with the chess game metaphor for a while here. In the opening you're trying to put yourself into a strong position for going into the midgame (where the exciting action and the exciting combinations occur), and you do this mostly by getting your pieces off the back rank as quickly as possible. The pieces are your major characters. Get them out there, and get them doing things.
Don't neglect your pawns -- your minor characters. You should cherish your minor characters. They'll save your life. If you have a selection of minor characters you can pull them out to solve problems later in the book.
Now, what to put in that first chapter? (Recall that if your readers don't finish the first chapter they'll never get to chapter two.)
To answer the question of what goes into chapter one, I'm going to grab the first stanzas from a bunch of Anglo-Scots folk ballads. These were the popular songs of earlier times, cooked by the folk process so that only the important and memorable parts remain, they're entertaining, and they tell stories.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Microcar and Minicar Club annual meet photos
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DATE: 02/18/2004 09:32:39 PM
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Once a year, members of the National Microcar and Minicar Club meet to show off their fully-restored pint-sized vehicles. Wouldn't the roadways of America be a lot more fun to look at if people drove microcars instead of SUVs? The 2004 meet will be in Huntington Beach in July. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Story of the TiVo remote
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DATE: 02/19/2004 05:35:27 AM
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The NYTimes covers the birth of the TiVo remote, one of the finest pieces of user-centered design I've ever encountered (if only there were some way to tell, without looking, whether you were holding it upside-down).
The peanut-shaped TiVo remote is at once playful and functional. A smiling TV set with feet and rabbit ears, the company's logo, graces the top. Distinctive buttons like a green thumbs-up and a red thumbs-down button have helped the remote win design awards from the Consumer Electronics Association.
"They did a really good job," said Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, a technology consulting firm in Fremont, Calif. Mr. Nielsen called the oversize yellow pause button in the middle of the remote "the most beautiful pause button I've ever seen."
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TITLE: Rotate video 90 degrees in OS X?
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DATE: 02/19/2004 06:15:46 AM
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Does anyone know of a free/cheap tool for OS X that will let me rotate video clips by 90 degrees? I have a little Exilim camera that shoots short video clips, and I'm perennially framing my clips in portrait, forgetting that the camera saves everything as a landscape-ratio AVI. I want to be able to open the clips, rotate them 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clock and save them again as AVIs or MOVs. Mail me if you know the answer, please!
OK, here are a couple of solutions for this:
- In QuickTime Pro: Movie -> Get Movie Properties -> Video Track/Size -- then use rotate buttons
- Simple Rotate, an iMovie plugin
(Thanks to Matthias, Marc, Mike, Dieter, and David!)
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TITLE: Cory reading tonight at Borderlands Books
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DATE: 02/19/2004 07:35:55 AM
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One final reminder: I'm giving a signing and a reading at San Francisco's Borderlands Books (19th and Valencia) tonight at 7PM, in honor of Eastern Standard Tribe. Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired -- Larry Flynt: Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Porn
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DATE: 02/19/2004 07:38:50 AM
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For today's edition of Wired News, I interview Larry Flynt. As Hustler magazine nears its 30-year anniversary, the adult entertainment magnate reflects on how technology has changed his business, the Justice Department's new "porn czar," the first major federal obscenity prosecution in over a decade, how the Patriot Act relates to porn, and why online anonymity matters. I also asked him about some recent allegations regarding George W. Bush that were attributed to Flynt, and published by New York Daily News. His response: a new book he's releasing on July 4 will document a year-long investigation into those claims. Snip:
Larry Flynt: [Technology has] had a dramatic effect. In the 1980s, publishing was 80 percent of my business. Now it's about 20 percent, and the rest is Internet or video. I don't think many people anticipated how the Internet was going to revolutionize the way we disseminate information. Now everybody does -- but some did in time, and some didn't. That's one of the reasons Penthouse filed for bankruptcy. They were relying totally on publishing. We knew in the early 1990s that we needed to diversify and branched out into a lot of different areas. Technology still has many surprises for us down the road, particularly in the wireless area. It's going to be absolutely phenomenal. In the next two to five years, you'll see the computer and your home television set merging. You'll have one remote control, and they'll effectively be one device.
WN: Do you ever get tired of having to answer for the actions of some of your more extreme colleagues in the industry?
Flynt: No. I let them do their thing and I do mine. I try to set an example for them. But I've been to prison, and I don't think some of them have. Let them try it, maybe it will change their attitude.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Case against Nader in Flash
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DATE: 02/19/2004 08:02:47 AM
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Ralph Nader is soliciting comments on whether he should run for the presidency this coming fall. Ralphdontrun is a site put together by "progressive Democrats and independents" urging Nader not to run on the grounds that he could act as a spoiler, handing another four years to Bush. They've put up a powerful and effective Flash movie stating this case, and they're urging the public to contact Nader and politely, forcefully urge him to not run.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google designer on Yahoo! search
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DATE: 02/19/2004 08:18:11 AM
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A Google user-interface designer has some pithy thoughts on Yahoo!'s new search product:
Google's search for 'cameras' gives a sponsored link for cameras at Buy.com at the top of the page, and eight AdWords ads down the side. The first four results make perfect sense: DP Review, Short Courses the leading publisher of photography-related eBooks, Conatax/Yashica, and Nikon USA. As you go farther down the list, there's more useful stuff.
Now try Yahoo's version. Right off the bat you have cross-sell links to products, and sponsored results that mimic web results which, along with the standard AdWordsClone ads on the right, push the first actual web search result below the fold, where most users won't even see it.
But say you do scroll down and see 'top 20 web results' (out of 27,700,000). The first one on the list is for Jersey Swimwear, USA with the blurb: "Coming soon -- Jersey swimwear for MILKDUDS.COM!"
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(via Battelle)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Curry KitKats
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DATE: 02/19/2004 08:44:25 AM
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Nestle is rolling out curry-flavored KitKats.
As well as the cumin and masala flavour, Nestle is considering offering lemon cheesecake, liquorice, saffron and passion fruit.
Lemon cheesecake KitKat is already sold in Germany and Japan, and the group confirmed it may be brought to Britain.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GreyTuesday: mass mirroring of the Grey Album
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DATE: 02/19/2004 08:49:02 AM
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GreyTuesday is an effort to protest EMI's crackdown on DJ Danger Mouse's amazing Grey Album.
Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience:
websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24
hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.
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(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help Derek give San Francisco's married gays prints of their happy moments
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DATE: 02/19/2004 08:50:58 AM
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Derek sez, "Last weekend I was a City Hall, photographing the happy couples descend the steps after their marriages. Now I'd like to track down as many of the couples as I can to give them prints of their happy moment! If you know one of these people, or know someone who might, please put them in touch with me using one of the many social software tools at our disposal!"
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(Thanks, Derek!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fun rubegoldberg Flash toy
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DATE: 02/19/2004 08:55:22 AM
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Jed sez, "Cute Flash toy in which you try to determine the order in which to drag various items into the middle. Each time you drag an item, the items you've already placed change ("level up") and interact with each other. The goal is to drag all the items in the right sequence to advance them all to their maximum levels. (The maximum score is 20,000.) There are quite a few possible sequences that do this, as well as some sequences that don't reach the maximum but do produce fun effects."
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(Thanks, Jed!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Video: seatbeltless driver falls asleep, crashes
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DATE: 02/19/2004 09:50:09 AM
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Incredible in-car video of a poor guy who falls asleep while driving, and then gets in an accident. No blood, but he flies all over the car and cracks his head through a window. Link (Thanks, Lorin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Send flowers to a random couple at SF City Hall
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DATE: 02/19/2004 09:56:53 AM
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A Minnesotan got the idea to have congratulatory flowers delivered to a random gay couple on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, and now s/he's trying to start a movement.
He called a florist and they agreed to do it. He told them to deliver to any couple -- it didn't matter who -- standing in line to get married, with his blessing. The card will read simply "With love, from Minneapolis, Minnesota."
Once they understood, they were very touched and thought it was a great idea.
He told another co-worker who did the same thing. And now we want to start a movement. Wouldn't that be cool if people from all over the country, gay, straight and otherwise, started sending flowers to the people waiting in line to get married.
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(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: GOODHAPPYFUN Baby bags
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DATE: 02/19/2004 01:06:23 PM
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My friend Racelle has made some amazingly useful baby bags. They work well as computer bags, too. Carla and I use them all the time. (And I designed her website, too). Racelle's going to start offering dad-friendly patterns. I'm trying to talk her into making one with J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' smiling mug. Link
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TITLE: Build handcranked automata from books of die-cut parts
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DATE: 02/19/2004 01:16:32 PM
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Wacky Neighbor sez: "I just ran into this while googling Die Fledermaus. Little origami robots for the desktop. They call 'em paper automata, and they're trying to sell them as executive toys. Although I think their real market is the geek sector. And given the lascivious movement of the witch, I think with minor redesigns, they could have a future in the risque novelty market. Whether the titular flying pig appears at life's lineups, a la Kids in the Hall, is another matter." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collective buying concern for flowers to queued-up SF gay betrothed couples
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DATE: 02/19/2004 05:49:00 PM
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Given the high cost of shipping flowers to queued-up gay couples waiting to get married in San Francisco, Darren Barefoot is putting together collective flower-buys to save on shipping costs.
Hence, Flowers for Al and Don. I'm using a PayPal account to collect money, with which I'll buy bouquets in bulk for the couples in line. You can donate as much or little as you please, and I pledge that every cent (minus the PayPal fees) that I receive will go to this project. If make a donation, and want your name and/or Web site to be listed below, let me know when making your payment in PayPal.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes: Research from Berkeley Engineering
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DATE: 02/20/2004 12:10:25 AM
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* Weaving flexible transistors into textiles!
* Self-diagnosing buildings!
* Swarm mechanics!
* The father of electronic art, RIP!
All of it, right this way.... Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Decease: The 'zine people are dying to read!
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DATE: 02/20/2004 07:18:35 AM
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Last summer, I posted that Boing Boing pal Meri Brin was seeking submissions for her new 'zine Decease, about the "cuture of death." This weekend, the first issue debuts at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco! APE is *the* gathering/conference/market for independent 'zine, comic, and book publishers. Congrats, Meri! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mediachest -- like eBay, except you borrow instead of buy
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DATE: 02/20/2004 10:38:37 PM
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Michael sez: "Mediachest is a social software site that allows users to inventory their collection of physical media items and search the collections of their friends and friends-of-friends for items such as DVDs or books that they would like to borrow. The site facilitates the borrowing and loaning of these items in a similar way to how Ebay facilitates online auctions -- there are user profiles, feedback pages, and rankings. In addition to searching the collections of friends you are able to see the items of people that are geographically close to you, or that are members of groups that you associate with (such as a student organization, gym, or work place group)."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Infrequent updates this week
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DATE: 02/22/2004 02:03:53 PM
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Some people have written in asking about blog updates:
I'm really busy preparing for my move (see the FAQ if you have any questions -- particularily about getting together in Toronto or London) and will likely only be blogging a few announcements as I get ready for my departure over the next week or so. Xeni's trekking in latinamerica, and so she's off the grid. Mark and Pesco are still blogging, but with half the team away this week, it might get a little slow around here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: ZigBee Spins The Carousel of Progress Forward
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DATE: 02/22/2004 08:20:49 PM
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I wrote an article about a new wireless standard called ZigBee for TheFeature.
ZigBee, which operates at 2.4-GHz, is two-way so it'll be able to log your house's electric, water, gas usage, and send it to your computer for analysis. (That way, you'll have documented evidence next time you yell at your kids for leaving the lights on.) Because ZigBee has a range of only about 30 feet, and sends data in infrequent bursts, batteries could last for a couple of years without having to replace them. Light switch and thermostat manufacturers have joined the ZigBee alliance, along with the usual suspects, such as Philips, Motorola, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard.
A recent analyst report issued by West Technology Research Solutions estimates that by 2008 "annual shipments for ZigBee chipsets into the home automation segment alone will exceed 339 million units," and will show up in "light switches, fire and smoke detectors, thermostats, appliances in the kitchen, video and audio remote controls, landscaping, and security systems."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mediachest has a Boing Boing group
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DATE: 02/22/2004 08:42:54 PM
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Nick Douglas has started a Boing Boing group on the media sharing network, Mediachest. There are currently only four members but they are sharing 400 items! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to get an agent
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DATE: 02/23/2004 06:22:03 AM
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Teresa Neilsen Hayden's essay about how to get a book agent and how not to get a rotten book agent is fantastic.
Not very helpful agents have some knowledge of and connection with the industry, but what they know isn't current, and the people who were their best connections at various houses no longer hold those positions. They tend to have one or two notable clients plus a bunch of small fry and marginal types. These agents have two virtues: they won't deliberately cheat you, and they can get you past the "agented mss. only" barriers. It's still a bit like marrying someone you don't care for because at least that way you'll get laid: the imagined benefits will rapidly pall, while the underlying discontents will only become more irritating.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tube-map as constellation-strewn sky
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DATE: 02/23/2004 06:26:54 AM
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An apopheniac's illustrated guide to unintentional animals hidden in the constellations of the London tubemap.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Phone-support confessions
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DATE: 02/23/2004 06:29:19 AM
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Salon's continuing its series of workplace horror stories with the inside story of an outsource telephone tech-support outfit where the only thing the staff know how to do is keep call-times down, but are clueless as to how to fix any tech problem you may have.
A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else...
Ted is someone I don't speak to. Ted is a formatter. Ted, and those like him, have only one solution to their customers' problems. Erase everything on the computer's hard drive and start over from scratch. While this can be effective for solving all sorts of software troubles, it's like amputating someone's leg to fix an ingrown toenail. The solution is usually worse than the problem. Most times Ted doesn't actually follow through with his plan. The entire strategy is just a bluff. Most people will balk at the proposition of losing everything and decide they can live with whatever problem they've called to complain about. At the very least they'll decide to hang up, back up their data, and call back -- at which point they'll become someone else's problem.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Personal Nautilus sub
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DATE: 02/23/2004 06:34:34 AM
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This guy has built an 18' long personal replica of the Nautilus sub from Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
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(Thanks, Lev!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SXSW set-list available over iTunes on free WiFi networks
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DATE: 02/23/2004 06:35:54 AM
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Jim sez, "My friend Rich in Austin is running LESS networks, a 'free wifi'
startup that actually has a revenue plan. The first real crack of
this involves making the SXSW '04 set list available via iTunes at any
of their 25 Austin locations."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory signing/reading at San Francisco's Booksmith this Wednesday
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DATE: 02/23/2004 06:53:41 AM
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A reminder: I'm doing a signing and a reading for Eastern Standard Tribe at 7PM this Wednesday at San Francisco's Booksmith in the Haight at Clayton. This'll be my last west-coast signing for the foreseeable future -- hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Weblog of Fortean phenomena
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DATE: 02/23/2004 08:43:40 AM
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Undiscovered is a nice looking site that reports on unusual "Fortean" style events, and takea a particular interest in a 19th century priest in France who built a lavish church, Rennes le Chateau, which is full of still-undeciphered symbols. Link
Here are some pics of the Rennes le Chateau.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Vanity Fair article: John Ashcroft is nuts
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DATE: 02/23/2004 10:55:17 AM
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Mike Harris sez: Vanity Fair article on John Ashcroft from February 2004 issue. Among other things, describes how Ashcroft fears calico cats, how he attended opponent Mel Carnahan's funeral against the family's wishes, how Ashcroft's dad put him at the controls of a plane with no training at age 8, and how parts of Justice Department boilerplate were altered because they conflicted with the Seven Deadly Sins."
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TITLE: John Shirley on The Nader Illusion
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DATE: 02/23/2004 11:26:26 AM
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John Shirley has some smart things to say about Nader:
The Nader Illusion is that both major parties are alike. He claims the Demos and the GOP are just the same, both beholden to special interests to such a degree that they're essentially paralyzed, no point in choosing one over the other. This is mostly hogwash. Yes they're beholden to special interests, but there are limits on that factor, and in fact there is a very distinct policy difference between the two parties. It *matters* which one you choose. There's not a chance that Gore would have supported --or that Kerry will support --a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Bush will try to push one through and with a Republican congress he may well succeed. Gore or Kerry--never happen. And this is a watershed issue, like so many that distinguish GOP and Dems. Such an amendment erodes the distinction between church and state, sets a bad precedent, and of course puts a Constitutional imprimatur on discrimination against a class of people, gays.
Bush has been a one-man environmental disaster, weakening the clean air and water acts, allowing mercury and arsenic pollution to go on. Gore would NOT have done this. The air will be dirtier because Bush was elected.
Gore would have encouraged an increase in the minimum wage; Bush is against it. People will be paid less because Bush was elected.
Too many special interests? Yes and that needs to be changed. But it matters which party you choose. Nader's preaching a fantasy.
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TITLE: Help take apart a pro-war astroturf letter
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DATE: 02/23/2004 11:33:05 AM
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If you recently received a letter in support of the Iraq war, urging you to pass it along to your local paper, have a look at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's online, interactive, participatory shredding of it before you do:
Let's look at the "worst" president and mismanagement claims.
FDR led us into World War II. Germany never attacked us: Japan did. From 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost, an average of 112,500 per year.
Germany declared war on us shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
As for direct attacks, on 31 October 1941 a German sub attacked and sank the Reuben James in the North Atlantic. You can look it up. There's even a song.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Stuart Hughes covering Tehran elections
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DATE: 02/23/2004 01:09:42 PM
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Stuart Hughes, the incredibly brave blogger and BBC reporter whose work I've posted about previously on BoingBoing, writes:
Greetings, Xeni, from Tehran! I managed to get an Iranian visa to come over and cover the elections. This afternoon I've uploaded what could be the very first Iranian videoblog...take a look at www.stuhughes.co.uk.
(and yes, as Cory blogged -- I'm on the road in Central America this week, so blogging will be thin where I'm concerned... please send suggestions via our form, not by email to me personally).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: FBI shuts down entire ISP to investigate one customer
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DATE: 02/23/2004 01:41:33 PM
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Eli the Bearded sez: "The FBI completely shut down an ISP by confiscating all its servers for about a week. Gotta love that sensitivity to keeping a business viable."
According to the warrant, it appears that the Bureau is investigating whether someone hosted on our network hacked and attacked someone else.
After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection. This was completed at 7:00 pm EST same day.
The FBI has assured us that as soon as the data has been safely copied and inspected, the equipment will be promptly returned. Unfortunately, the FBI has not been able to tell us when they will be completed with their inspection.
Link
Chris Siebenmann sez: " This may not be what it seems. At least some people in the newsgroup
news.admin.net-abuse.email believe strongly that Foonet/cithosting.com
are either spammers or active, knowing supporters of spammers. The
FBI raid was reported in NANAE, in a thread starting at message-ID
Xns949086FF99721bruns2mbitcom@130.133.1.4, and it has been suggested
(strongly) that it may not have anything to do with the reason that
cithosting.com is claiming for it.
"Both SPEWS and Spamhaus have listings for some or all of Foonet.
The SPEWS listing is http://www.spews.org/html/S2591.html and the
Spamhaus listings can be accessed through their SBL-search-by-ISP
web page (under 'foonet.net', not 'cithosting.com')."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: TSA mistakenly nabs one of its own
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DATE: 02/23/2004 03:39:14 PM
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Henry sez: "Another Brazil-style 'Tuttle-Buttle' situation:"
Michael Bills thought he had a pretty good gig with the federal Transportation Security Administration. His job as a screener at Love Field was government work--good bennies, nice retirement package. An ex-Marine and former quality inspector for a company in Garland before he was laid off, Bills says he even turned down other potential employers to stick with the TSA, where he worked for about 12 months.
Then the TSA fired him last October; said he failed to pass his background security check. Even worse, the TSA called him a sex offender--and worse than that, a child molester.
Except he isn't. The TSA--remember, these are the people who are supposed to weed out the terrorists from the regular airline passengers--got the wrong man.
"What hurt me the most is they accused me of being a sex offender," Bills says. "To me, that's the worst thing you can do."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spam filters that are better than people
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DATE: 02/23/2004 08:44:40 PM
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Interesting Slashdot thread about two spam-filters that score higher accuracy that human beings:
Based on a study by Bill Yerazunis of CRM114, the average human is only 99.84% accurate. Both filters are reporting to have reached accuracy levels between 99.983% and 99.984% (1 misclassification in 6250 messages) using completely different approaches (CRM114 touts Markovan, while DSPAM implements a Dolby-type noise reduction algorithm called Dobly).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Capitol Records ships threatening Grey Tuesday letter
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DATE: 02/23/2004 08:49:38 PM
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In honor of tomorrow's Grey Tuesday civil disobedience event (in which sites are encouraged to mirror copies of DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, which mixes together the Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's Black Album, a 3,000-pressing CD that attracted the maximal wroth of Capitol Records's bullying copyright lawyers), Capitol Records has already produced a threatening letter telling you just what you can expect if you take their precious. Good to see copyright protecting creativity here, by stamping it out -- as if the existence of this album will cost either The Beatles or Jay Z a single, solitary sale.
We are aware of the so-called "Grey Tuesday" event, sponsored by http://www.downhillbattle.org and described on the http://www.greytuesday.org website as a "day of coordinated civil disobedience" in which participating sites will make the unlawful Grey Album available for downloading, distribution, and file-sharing in order to force "reforms to copyright law that can make sampling legal." Your site is listed among those that will engage in this openly unlawful conduct. Any unauthorized distribution, reproduction, public performance, and/or other exploitation of The Grey Album will constitute, among other things, common law copyright infringement/misappropriation, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment rendering you and anyone engaged with you in such acts liable for all of the remedies provided by relevant laws. These remedies include but are not limited to preliminary and permanent injunctive relief as well as monetary and punitive damages necessary to remedy your openly willful violation of Capitol's rights.
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(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing is grey for Grey Tuesday
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DATE: 02/23/2004 08:57:31 PM
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Kottke's got the right approach: I can't afford the bandwidth to mirror the Grey Album, but Boing Boing is going grey for 24h to protest EMI/Capitol's heavy-handed response to DJ Danger Mouse's brilliant Grey Album project. Apologies for reduced legibility.
kottke.org is grey today because I believe that musical sampling without prior consent of the copyright holder should be legally allowed because it does our society more good than harm.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tokyo Trader Vic's makes a mean goddamned mojito
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DATE: 02/23/2004 09:48:55 PM
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The mojitos at the Tokyo Trader Vic's come in a ~8" tall block of ice, bored out to make room for the drink, served with a fat-ass novelty straw (that's a dinner-plate, shown for scale). 20,000 Yen!
Link
(Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writing
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DATE: 02/23/2004 10:09:25 PM
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Elmore Leonard's ten rule for writers. Brilliant.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
(this is my third link from Teresa Nielsen Hayden in one day, which has to be some kind of record)
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worst Beatles cover ever
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DATE: 02/23/2004 10:18:27 PM
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Mrs Miller's Greatest Hits is a novelty vinyl rarity featuring a woman named Mrs Miller doing random covers in a kind of Aunt-Bea-contralto with really inappropriate crisp diction and crazy off-key whackiness (a reminder that the difference between crazy and eccentric is how much money you have). There are a couple of Real streams of her excruciating Beatles and Petula Clark covers linked off of this page.
Mrs. Miller's album is definitely over the top, but I get the very sinister feeling from the liner notes that while Miller herself may have been completely serious about what she was doing, whoever coaxed her to make this album was laughing on the inside, and probably egging her on to be even more extreme. The sarcasm is very subtle, just enough to give the wink to record collectors like us while keeping poor Mrs. Miller in the dark. References to her "impeccible diction" and "scintillating delivery" abound, as well as the accolade "one of the most interesting voices extant... one that brings to mind the tonal qualities of a Florence Foster Jenkins or a Mrs. B. J. Fangman".
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(Thanks, miles!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Education czar calls teachers' union a "terrorist organization"
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DATE: 02/24/2004 07:19:07 AM
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The US Secretary of Education called the NEA, the national teachers' union, a terrorist organization. Then, he spun a mealymouthed apology that wasn't:
It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA's Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind's historic education reforms.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Garry Trudeau puts $10K up for anyone who will confirm Bush's Air Guard claims
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DATE: 02/24/2004 07:53:09 AM
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Garry B Trudeau, the author of the Doonesbury comic strip, has put up $10,000 of his personal fortune for anyone who will come forward and confirm to having witnessed, first-hand, GW Bush's putiative Air Guard service story, in which the President claims not to have deserted his military post, despite all evidence to the contrary.
For the past several weeks, trolling-for-trash journalists have made repeated forays into the continuing mystery of George W. Bush's Air National Guard service (to catch up on developments, read Salon's "Bad news doesn't get better with age", The Decatur Daily's "Former Dannelly worker: Bush not AWOL", The Nation's "W's AWOL Spin Update!", and -- of particular interest -- The Memphis Flyer's "On Guard -- Or Awol?"). With just eight months left in the presidential campaign, GBT is hoping to speed the disclosure process along by offering a $10,000 reward to coax a witness to step forward and confirm President Bush's story, thereby putting the whole sordid mess behind us.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nelson's Grey Tuesday RSS
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DATE: 02/24/2004 08:01:57 AM
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Kudos to Nelson Minar for turning his RSS feed grey in honor of Grey Tuesday. (Also, kudos to Nelson for recently switching his RSS to full text instead of the stingy excerpts that some people still publish).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Thanks, John Escobedo!
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DATE: 02/24/2004 08:18:24 AM
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John Escobedo, who animated Boing Boing's Jackhammer Jill, sent me a transparent version of the logo so it looks good on a gray background. Thanks!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pentagon warns Bush of apocalyptic climate change by 2020
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DATE: 02/24/2004 09:55:50 AM
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The Pentagon issued a secret report to Bush warning him that catastrophic climate changes in the next 15 years are a bigger threat than terrorism, and will lead to massive riots and nuclear war.
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
Link (Thanks, Tony!)
AndyHat sez: For those who want to make up their own minds about the Guardian story on the "suppressed" Pentagon report, Greenpeace has the full text available. Of course, as it says right at the top: "We have created a climate change scenario that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately." I like how The Guardian has changed "plausible" but "not the most likely" to a statement of near certainty.
A Boing Boing Pal sez:The Pentagon climate change paper story is interesting - but not quite accurate. The more interesting story is how the European press distorted what was a very interesting piece on abrupt climate change into a would-be smoking gun for the Bush administration.
Initial press on the abrupt climate change paper was neutral. It was a scenario exercise written for Andy Marshall in the Pentagon, profiled a month ago in Fortune Magazine.
From that piece, here is the story in a nutshell:
"Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked [Andrew Marshall] to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.
When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat. Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorks—he helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report. Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away from—at least in public.
The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE. It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies."
So a month later, the world press catches wind of the story and sensationalizes the hell out of it.
Headlines:
Agence France Presse: Leaked Pentagon report warns climate change may bring famine, war
The Observer: Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us: The US President has denied the existence of global warming. But a secret report predicts a looming catastrophe - a world riven with water wars, famine and anarchy
The story was picked up by Al Jazeera, Hindustan Times, Times of Oman, and more I'm sure.
That's just what landed in my inbox.
At this point the Oakland Tribune has the best coverage of the story - as well as the story behind the story.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jimmy Scott biography on PBS tonight
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DATE: 02/24/2004 10:16:09 AM
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Check your local listings for the airtime of this biography of vocalist Jimmy Scott, If You Only Knew.
"If You Only Knew is a film portrait of the now famous jazz vocalist who was 'rediscovered' decades after he disappeared from the public eye. Born in Cleveland in 1925, Jimmy Scott's early years were filled with devastating hardships. At age 12, he was diagnosed with Kallmann's Syndrome, a rare hormonal condition that kept his body -- and his voice -- from developing beyond boyhood. Seven months after the diagnosis, his beloved mother, the sole guardian of Scott and his nine siblings, was killed in a car accident. Her children were separated and sent to live in foster homes.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Slug Food T-Shirt now available
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DATE: 02/24/2004 12:18:48 PM
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People have emailed me asking for a Slug Food T-shirt. So I'm selling them for $18. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Aryanfest 2004
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DATE: 02/24/2004 12:28:12 PM
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Fascinating New Times article about Aryanfest 2004, "an 'international' gathering of Nazi skinheads, Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacists that took place inside McDowell Regional Mountain Park just north of Fountain Hills a couple of weekends ago."
The atmosphere inside Aryanfest was that of a Renaissance Fair gone over to the dark side, with "Heils" in place of "Huzzahs." Costumed attendees wore Iron Cross medallions and black bomber jackets emblazoned with swastika patches instead of studded leather armor and princess dresses. A Nazi memorabilia dealer hawked SS patches and framed photographs of Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolph Hess in the parking lot. Next to the stage was a picnic pagoda, serving as the Aryanfest day-care center, where little white children in skinhead clothes colored in white power coloring books. Directly next door to the pagoda was a tattoo booth, where the incessant high-pitched buzz of a tattoo gun sounded from behind a blue tarp curtain. Beside the Panzerfaust merchandise stand was the Women for Aryan Unity booth, which sold child-rearing guides and White Nationalist Baby magazines, including one containing a simplified biography of Hitler suitable for bedtime stories: "He was a lifelong lover of animals and children . . . He is invincible and victory shall one day be his."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Universal crackpot spam solution rebuttal
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DATE: 02/25/2004 07:13:29 AM
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This is a very funny checkbox-based form-letter for responding to crackpot spam solutions proposed in message-board posts:
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
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(Thanks, Jef!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory signing/reading at San Francisco's Booksmith tonight
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DATE: 02/25/2004 07:16:26 AM
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A reminder: tonight I will give my last public reading and signing for Eastern Standard Tribe before leaving San Francisco to emigrate to the UK.
Where: The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, at Clayton, +1.800.793.7323
When: Tonight, Wednesday, February 25, 2004, 7PM
Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mykeru.Com on anti-gay editorial
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DATE: 02/25/2004 01:02:27 PM
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This is a wonderful evisceration of a hilariously dunderheaded editorial against gay marriage that appeared in The Daily Mountain Eagle Online of Jasper Alabama. The editorial was written by the paper's copy editor, Susan Sanford.
Sanford (quoting from the Bible): "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works." -- Revelation 20:12
Mykeru: Uh huh. How about this one:
"Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church."
-- I Corinthians 14:34-35 (NIV)
How many times do you think Susan Sanford has been disgraceful in church? Do you think she ran this by her hubby?
Link (Thanks, bywayoftheroad!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Yale Photonegatives Collection
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DATE: 02/25/2004 01:24:37 PM
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Avi sez: "Don't know if you've had this before, but this database is an amazing photographic (and artistic) treasure of America's people and places at the turn of the previous century. Unfortunately, there is no index of the contents so you have to try your luck with keywords, which almost always turn up interesting finds. For example try typing in 'Indian' and see what happens! My favorite entries are 'Garden' and 'Gurdjieff'!"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Berocca: stay sharp?
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DATE: 02/25/2004 02:19:26 PM
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My wife Kelly just returned from London Fashion Week with several packages of Berocca, an effervescent over-the-counter nutritional supplement sold by Roche "for hectic lifestyles." She says it's all the rage there as a vitamin source, energy enhancer, hangover remedy, and all-purpose pick-me-up. (The Berocca slogan is "Stay sharp!") It's mostly B vitamins and doesn't contain any caffeine, sugar, or ephedra. That's probably why it didn't seem to affect me too much. But it does taste great, kinda like Tang. Link
Australian Boing Boing reader Pete tells me that down under--where Berocca's much more fun slogan is "gives you back your b-b-bounce!"--he has a couple of friends "who think it's fun to suck on the tablets rather than dissolving them in water. Apparently having them fizz in your mouth wakes you up just as much as all those vitamins." Meanwhile, Jen points us to a US product similar to Berocca, called Emer'gen-C. "Whenever I'm feeling sick, I down a couple and immediately feel better," she says.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark's new media blog: Mad Professor
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DATE: 02/25/2004 02:23:58 PM
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Madprofessor.net is my new media review blog. I'm writing about books, DVDs, software, games, and other media-like things that I like a lot. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: China International Adult Toys & Reproductive Health Exhibition 2004
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DATE: 02/25/2004 02:46:37 PM
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Mark your calendars for the China International Adult Toys & Reproductive Health Exhibition 2004, Aust 6-8, 2004.
With the economic development today Chinese people begin to pay more attention to the quality of their daily life including sex and reproductive health. A civilized, healthy and happy life has already been the realm of necessity that the Chinese mass cherishes.
The time of being shocked at the mention of sex or regarding sex as an evil has gone by. Now in China, the civilized sexual concept has widely prevailed.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Inside the CIA Museum
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DATE: 02/25/2004 02:49:21 PM
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Bas sez: "One page showing some absolutely fascinating CIA gadgets. The remote-control libella and catfish are awsome.
Note that these are not on the CIA Museum's own website." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Casshern Japanese movie trailer
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DATE: 02/25/2004 02:59:57 PM
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Scott sez: "Imagine David Fincher & Terry Gilliam having a drunken fistfight in ILM's parking lot, and you've approximated the look."Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Spy shots of Branson's Virgin Global Flyer:
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DATE: 02/25/2004 03:11:31 PM
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Boing Boing guestblog alumnis Todd Lappin points us out to these pics of the Virgin Global Flyer, a plane designed for a solo pilot to fly around the world on a single tank of gas. (Here's a good PopSci article about it.) Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Save money by tearing apart your iPod mini
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DATE: 02/25/2004 05:44:18 PM
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Joanne sez: "The $249 iPod mini contains a $479.95 Hitachi MicroDrive. So the best deal on buying a MicroDrive is to buy a iPod mini and take it apart. You get the MicroDrive for almost 50% off and you get a free pair of headphones. You can slap an old compact flash card into the mini and keep on rocking." Link
Sean Bonner sez: "This guy took apart the mini iPod and found that it is NOT useable outside of the iPod, so buying one for the drive will prove useless." A firmware issue?
A Boing Boing reader sez: "The iPod/microdrive hack does work. Where the other poster is confused is that you can't format the microdrive in the camera. You need to mount drive on you system with a CF reader. Then format it FAT and it works fine. The drive out of the mini has a partition on it that their camera can't deal with. A full wipe on your machine solves the problem and gets you a cheap mammoth camera card.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Drinky Crow jack-in-the-box
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DATE: 02/25/2004 10:53:12 PM
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This April will see the release of a jack-in-the-box featuring Drinky Crow from Tony Millionaire's genius transgressive funnybook series Maakies.
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(Thanks, Goopymart!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Electroluminescent purse-liners
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DATE: 02/26/2004 07:45:08 AM
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Bayer is proposing to use electroluminescent panels to line womens' purses, turning them into radiant, suitcase-of-drugs-from-Pulp-Fiction-esque cavities in which no lipstick or loose change can hide.
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(Thanks, Norm!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tragic, hilarious Marioland 8-bit Flash movies
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DATE: 02/26/2004 07:57:53 AM
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The tragedy of Marioland: a three-part Flash animation using pixel-cool graphics from 8-bit Mario games as characters in a screamingly funny movie about the tragic invasion of Marioland. The use of Marioland mood music is a masterstroke.
Part 1 Link, Part 2 Link, Part 3
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 'Musclebots' Are Coming
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DATE: 02/26/2004 09:04:40 AM
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Roland sez: According to an article to be published by New Scientist on February 28, First robot moved by muscle power, a microrobot half the width of a human hair has been powered by living rat heart muscle. "It is the first time muscle tissue has been used to propel a micromachine." Carlos Montemagno, from the University of California at Los Angeles, who created the 'musclebot', wants to use the technology to help paralyzed people to breathe without a ventilator. And NASA, who helped funding the research, hopes that battalions of these 'musclebots' could one day help maintain spacecraft by plugging holes made by micrometeorites. The device is an arch of silicon 50 micrometres wide. This overview contains more details and additional pictures.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Absurd news bites from Reason
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DATE: 02/26/2004 11:29:54 AM
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Good daily report of idiots on parade.
Weather forecasters weren't yet sure whether a snowstorm was coming, but Somerville, Massachusetts, Mayor Joseph A Curtatone wasn't taking any chances. Though not a flake of snow was in sight, he declared a snow emergency. The next day, citizens of the city awoke to find little snow. But some 3,000 of them found $50 tickets on their cars for parking on a snow emergency street. They were the lucky ones. Another 200 had their cars towed. The mayor says he has no plans to forgive the tickets or to cancel the towing charges, which could net the city some $179,000. Neither the state nor any other city in the area declared a snow emergency.
Link
Jesse sez: "Our mayor may have made a bad call to pad the city's coffers, but that doesn't mean he can't backpedal furiously."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: History of a punk band circa 1980
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DATE: 02/26/2004 01:18:57 PM
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M.Ace, who runs one of my very favorite weblogs, Irregular Orbit, has posted a wonderful history of the punk band he was in over 20 years ago. I really like the songs, which you can download one at a time, or in a 50 MB chunk.
Once upon a time, back in the old punk era, I was in a band you never heard of called Narthex. We played shows in Philadelphia and vicinity from 1980 to 1983. We've put together a web page recounting our ridiculously obscure story, because we think all of the little stories of all of the little bands are what added up to make a remarkable era. Everyone who participated should be telling their own first-hand stories. So here is ours. Along with visual artifacts, there's also a free web-album of audio, released with a Creative Commons license.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF on the Grey Album and Information Wants to be $5
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DATE: 02/26/2004 10:05:51 PM
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Two goodies from EFF this week:
Legal analysis of the Grey Album's copyright status:
Are the Grey Tuesday protesters protected by fair use?
Fair use generally refers to the federal copyright law exception contained in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Because the White Album is not protectible under federal copyright law, fair use is not directly applicable.
A proposal to end the file-sharing wars for a measly $5:
Voluntarily creating collecting societies like ASCAP, BMI and SESAC was how songwriters brought broadcast radio in from the copyright cold in the first half of the twentieth century.
Songwriters originally viewed radio exactly the way the music industry today views KaZaA users -- as pirates. After trying to sue radio out of existence, the songwriters ultimately got together to form ASCAP (and later BMI and SESAC). Radio stations interested in broadcasting music stepped up, paid a fee, and in return got to play whatever music they liked, using whatever equipment worked best. Today, the performing-rights societies ASCAP and BMI collect money and pay out millions annually to their artists. Even though these collecting societies get a fair bit of criticism, there's no question that the system that has evolved for radio is preferable to one based on trying to sue radio out of existence one broadcaster at a time.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: University requires copyright waiver from game-publishers for LAN parties
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DATE: 02/27/2004 05:59:15 AM
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A university has begin requiring that LAN party organizers secure a written letter of permission from all game publishers whose works will be "performed" at the party.
A college student at Bowling Green University has run into trouble while trying to set up a LAN party, after the university refused to let him schedule the event over fears it may violate copyright laws.
I was casually informed that I had to secure permission from the copyright holders for the games we would be playing. I was quite confused as to why they needed this, and their only answer was that it would be considered a 'public showing of copyrighted work', and therefore I must secure permission. I asked a lawyer about the policy and his best advice was to get a hard copy of their policy and then comply to the bare minimum. The University was unable to provide much hardcopy, but largely referred me to the University rule that all State and Federal laws were in effect.
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(via Lawgeek)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: White House To Seek Ban On Gay Sex On The Moon
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DATE: 02/27/2004 06:00:49 AM
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This is a pretty good extrapolation of the next probable announcement out of the Bush White House:
Worried by flagging poll numbers, a deteriorating situation in Iraq, and a sluggish economy, President Bush called on Congress today to approve a constitutional amendment that would ban gay sex on the Moon. Republican leaders hailed the move as a bold step to unite the country in a bold and forward-looking strategy to spread family values across the solar system, and protect the legacy of the Apollo missions.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-cost, DRM-free audiobooks, to make an audio Gutenberg Project
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DATE: 02/27/2004 06:09:54 AM
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TellTale Weekly is a new audiobook service selling low-cost (<$1) audiobooks as DRM-free MP3s and Oggs -- and building an audiobook version of the Gutenberg Project by releasing all their titles under a Creative Commons license after 5 years or 100,000 paid downloads, whichever comes first. There aren't many tracks up there yet, but as a certified audiobook addict, this is as exciting an idea as I've heard in a long, long time.
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(via Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Matchstick rockets: kitchen-sink rocketry
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DATE: 02/27/2004 06:17:03 AM
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Matchstick rockets are made by combining a paper match, a straight-pin, a paperclip and a little tinfoil, transforming these ordinary household items into a streaking, flaming jet of hot gases and eye-blinding fun!
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(Thanks, Bas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Orson Scott Card's disgraceful anti-gay-marriage editorial
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DATE: 02/27/2004 07:02:46 AM
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Orson Scott Card, whose notorious Hypocrites of Homosexuality revealed his revolting anti-gay side, has published a new broadside against gay marriages that dresses up homophobia with more sophistry. How shameful.
The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
It's that desire for normality, that discontent with perpetual adolescent sexuality, that is at least partly behind this hunger for homosexual "marriage."
Link
(Thanks, Frank!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gingerbread Kama Sutra
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DATE: 02/27/2004 08:32:43 AM
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These desperate amateur cookies will do anything to stay warm. Site includes recipes. Link (Thanks, Rose).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: RFID Tags in US banknotes?
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DATE: 03/02/2004 09:02:50 AM
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These guys microwaved a bunch of $20 bills and because the bills became scorched, they have concluded that they contain RFID tags. Wouldn't there be an easier way to determine whether or not currency has RFIDs in it? Link (Thanks, Sean!)
JC sez: The same thing happens if you take a stack of copy paper and microwave it. A central point in the stack heats and eventually ignites and burns up and down the stack from that point.
Alex Q sez:Also of interest (besides JC's comment) is that they say they are messing with the NEW twenties, but in fact those are the old ones. you can tell because the portrait of Jackson has the circle around it, which is absent in the new twenties.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Occupation: bad smell sniffer for NASA
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DATE: 03/02/2004 10:12:39 AM
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Roland sez: George Aldrich works at NASA and is not an astronaut. Instead, he's a 'master sniffer.' He tests everything that goes up in space on the shuttle or on the ISS for smelliness, from tennis shoes to teddy bears, and from refrigerators to socks or mascara. Why? Because things smell different in spacecrafts which experience a full day/night cycle every 90 minutes. And bad odors into a spacecraft can even lead to the abortion of a mission, like it happened to a Russian mission back in 1976. Wired Magazine tells us more about NASA's nasalnaut, a man whose colleagues call "Most Smella Fella" and has performed 771 flawless smelling missions. This overview contains more details and selected excerpts from a previous interview with Aldrich given to New Scientist. It also includes a picture showing how the NASA's nasalnaut smells things. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: NASA to report "significant" Mars discovery today at 2 p.m. EST
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DATE: 03/02/2004 10:17:41 AM
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"Significant findings from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, now exploring Meridiani Planum on Mars, will be announced at a press briefing at 2 p.m. EST, Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at NASA Headquarters, Washington." Link (Thanks, Kevin!)
News reports say it'll be evidence that Mars was once a "wet and warm planet, capable of sustaining microscopic life."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cory interviewed in R.U. Sirius' NeoFiles
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DATE: 03/02/2004 10:26:35 AM
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The latest issues of R.U. Sirius' excellent NeoFiles includes a great interview with Cory, along with interviews with a "neuroethicist" and an X-Prize contestant. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Virtual Sex Change
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DATE: 03/02/2004 10:30:08 AM
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From our pals at Fleshbot:
Men: wondering how you'd look as a woman, but don't want to deal with messy plastic surgery or expensive hormone treatments? Let expert technicians Candy and Angel Lee transform you through the magic of Virtual Feminization: "The process carried out by an artist technician employs hands on digital imaging to facially reconstruct and feminize your image using your own genetics and facial features as a base for the new beautiful, feminine you." (We think the new Dubya looks quite fetching, kind of like a femme Jamie Lee Curtis.)
Virtual Feminization Clinic and Imagurl Models (Imagurl.com),
See also: Cleavage Transformation Tips
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guatemala
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DATE: 03/02/2004 10:33:11 AM
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I'm back from Central America. For the past couple of weeks, I've been traveling and working in Guatemala, accompanying a writer/filmmaker who's working on a really incredible project that involves indigenous languages, and connections between early Mayan and modern scientific theory. An amazing project, more on that later, and more on the trip later. But for now, this quick snapshot, while I attempt to dig my way out of about 25 megs worth of emails from a certain someone in Nigeria who says I can grow a larger penis by eating low-cost prescription drugs from the comfort of my own home while enjoying the company of hot singles in my own area.
The children in this snapshot are mostly Kakchikel-speaking boys in a town called Ciudad Vieja, goofing off last Tuesday during carnival celebrations (pre-Ash Wednesday, pre-lent, lots of candy and confetti all over the place). Ciudad Vieja ("old city") was the former capital of Guatemala during early Spanish colonial times. It was wiped out nearly 500 years ago by a massive flood caused by a volcano of water; after the destruction the capital was then moved a few miles away to what became the city of Antigua, which was then wiped out by an earthquake. The country's capital was ultimately re-established in what we know now as Guatemala City, which strikes me as being one of the most dangerous urban places on earth. There are nearly as many ammo shops as tortilla vendors and the crime rate is insane. The local guide who accompanied us for much of our travels through the altiplano joked, "They say Guatemala is the land of eternal spring, but it's more like the country of eternal recovery. We're always in the process of surviving any of three things: earthquakes, volcano eruptions, or bloody wars. Pick one."
Click thumbnail for full-size image. Ay, que me alegro volver a BoingBoing. It's good to be back home on the blog.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gizmodo's Pete Rojas moves to Engadget
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DATE: 03/02/2004 11:24:55 AM
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Former editor of Gizmodo Pete Rojas is moving to Engadget, a new gadgets weblog hosted in partnership Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese train chimes
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DATE: 03/02/2004 12:26:37 PM
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Boing Boing pal Jim Leftwich alerted me to a couple of sites with MIDI files of "little chime songs played on Japanese trains and in their various stations." Link and Link
Andy Raskin sez:I noticed your link to Japanese train melodies. I did an audio piece for NPR's All Things Considered on the subject a few months back that your readers might enjoy. It's on my Website, andyraskin.com -- second Audio story on the right. The direct URL is http://andyraskin.com/TokyoTrainMelodies.ram
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cartoonists' toys at Critterbox
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DATE: 03/02/2004 12:48:59 PM
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Critterbox, the company that makes Tony Millionaire's Drinky Crow jack-in-the-box, also makes really nice toys by Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Dave Cooper, and Kaz. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Water on Mars. Life on Mars. Wow.
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DATE: 03/02/2004 01:04:12 PM
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Human beings reached a milestone in our understanding of the universe today, thanks in part to a hard-working robot. The NASA Mars rover Opportunity found evidence that an abundance of water once covered an area of the planet's surface. Where there was once water, it is presumed that there was once life -- and that living things may in fact still exist on the red planet.
[A] rock outcrop at the site, a shallow impact crater in Meridiani Planum, was once "drenched'' in water, Ed Weiler, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's deputy associate administrator for space science, said at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "The rocks here were once soaked in liquid water,'' Steve Squyres, the mission's principal scientist, said in elaborating on the discovery. The concentration of salts in the rock suggests the formation may have emerged in a briny sea, he said.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US launches new gov-sponsored Arabic language TV network
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DATE: 03/02/2004 01:15:29 PM
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Daoud Kuttab, an independent Palestinian journalist and media commentator, points us to the launch of a new Arabic-language TV station called Alhurra ("the free one"). The US-sponsored network is one of an ever-increasing number of government-controlled broadcasting outlets in the Mideast.
The new station joins America's Radio Sawa and its slick Hi magazine as post-September 11 Arabic-language media tools that the US hopes to use to win Arab hearts and minds. Judging from the broadcast content of its first day, Washington has a long way to go to achieve its goals. Alhurra operates with a $62-million grant from the US government. Judging from its first broadcast day, there is no hint it will ever become self-reliant. Listeners can only conclude that Alhurra will always be an instrument of the US government. The US secretary of state has a permanent seat on the station's board along with four Democrats and four Republicans.
Sponsoring foreign radio broadcasts has been a favorite tool of colonial European governments. The British have been bankrolling foreign broadcasts on the BBC; the French on Radio Monte Carlo. But neither has attempted televising in Arabic, via satellite, as does Alhurra. Arab regimes have for years monopolized the mass media to control their people and maintain power. But Alhurra will not contribute to efforts by many in the Arab world who want the air waves to be free to private and independent ownership. While some expected the new station to be an important addition to the plurality of opinions available to the Arab public, its first day of broadcasting confirmed what the skeptics have been saying all along: What the US needs to do is change its policy, not its media strategy.
Link to Kuttab op-ed about Alhurra in this week's Jerusalem Post, link to recent NPR story, Link to Alhurra.com.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ah, yes, those celebrity parody street posters.
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DATE: 03/02/2004 01:39:44 PM
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Remember this earlier post about mysterious street posters attributed to Robbie Conal, or someone whose work looks a whole lot like Robbie Conal's? A ton of them showed up around LA just before Oscar night. Turns out they're a street promo campaign for the recently-released book Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon. More details in WaPo today.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iraq war docu-pic "Uncovered" will soon be out on DVD
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DATE: 03/02/2004 02:51:37 PM
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Richard Metzger's Disinformation Company is about to release UNCOVERED: THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE IRAQ WAR on DVD. The disk hits the streets on March 30th (= timed to coincide with the date on which the war began last year). It's priced at a super-cheap $9.95.
UNCOVERED features compelling footage of Bush, Rice, Cheney, Powell, and others painting a very clear picture of the distorted intelligence and "spin and hype" presented to Congress, the United Nations, and the American people. Those interviewed include former Ambassador Joe Wilson, weapons inspectors Scott Ritter and David Albright, former Director of CIA Stansfield Turner, former Asst. Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle, anti-terrorism expert Rand Beers, former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Mel Goodman, former CIA operative Robert Baer, and Washington editor of The Nation, David Corn.
UNCOVERED has received grass-roots support from progressive organizations such as MoveOn.org, Alternet.org, The Center for American Progress, The Nation, Buzzflash, and Working Assets. More than 30,000 DVDs were distributed to MoveOn members who screened the film at 3,000 house parties and community screenings, a phenomenon that was widely covered by the media. "It's pretty amazing," said Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org's international campaign director, of the demand for the film. "When we first offered it on our site, we expected to just do a couple thousand copies. But when 23,000 people asked for it, we knew there was something significant about this movie."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art project on economics of tech outsourcing to India: Aladeen
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DATE: 03/02/2004 03:34:24 PM
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Danielle Spencer (a BoingBoing pal who works with David Byrne, among other things) points us to a new art project from The Builder's Association debuting in LA this week. It's "a techie sort of production about globalism and outsourcing in Bangalore," says Danielle, adding "The performances of ALLADEEN will be at REDCAT (the new LA Philharmonic Gehry space) on March 3-7. There is more information about the specific show here. Other sites which may be of interest: www.alladeen.com, and The Builder's Association." Here's a snip from the project summary:
The Alladeen project encompasses three collaborative works: this web project, www.alladeen.com (directed by Ali Zaidi); a cross-media stage performance (directed by Marianne Weems); and a music video (directed by Ali Zaidi), featuring music by Shrikanth Sriram (Shri) and video by Peter Norrman. Although distinct, these three works have been created in tandem, drawing on a common pool of imagery and information, with material from each interwoven into the others. [The show] explores how we all function as "global souls" caught up in circuits of technology, how our voices and images travel from one culture to another, and the ways in which these cultures continually reinterpret each other's signs and stories.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Video Game Porn
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DATE: 03/03/2004 09:26:33 AM
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Via Fleshbot:
Backdoor demon sex! Hardcore bestiality orgies! Hot gang bang action! The Accidental Video Game Porn Archive features vidcaps of moments in video games which might be considered pornographic if you look really, really hard and are really, really desperate: a site for the dirty-minded seventh grader in all of us.
Accidental Video Game Porn Archive
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spooky-cool Photoshopped child portraits
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DATE: 03/03/2004 09:35:57 AM
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Adobe's Photoshop turns 14 years old this month. In the NYT, this article on the work of German painter turned photographer Loretta Lux, who uses the ubiquitous image-editing software on portraits of children -- to magnificent effect.
With so many choices at her fingertips, she has opted for delicate, minute alterations. Walking through her show of children's portraits at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, one continually wonders if the boys and girls in her studies are software simulations, and why and to what degree they might be at the mercy of the artist's hand. In fact, Ms. Lux has carefully costumed and photographed her subjects and, after scanning the image, dropped the figures into a separately scanned background, often taken from one of her paintings. She erases irrelevant details — fireplaces, cats, toys — until the children are settled in a neutral, dreamlike space.
An eerie result is children who seem willed into existence by Ms. Lux (her puppet master's strings are evident in the slightly distended heads and limbs and in the pastel tints) but who also have the air of self-created beings, a race of tiny Nordic monsters, spawned inside her computer but now genetically mutated and struggling with her for domination.
Link (Thanks, Susannah!), and link to gallery website (thanks Ken!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Mobile/Meatspace hybrid game "I Like Frank"
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DATE: 03/03/2004 09:46:41 AM
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Matt Adams and the other mad scientists at Blast Theory -- an art/tech collective that creates games mixing wireless virtual space with reall space -- just launched a new 3G project in Australia called "I Like Frank." The mixed reality game is billed as a world first, for its innovative use of 3G technology, and debuts as part of the Fringe Festival in Adelaide. The purpose of the game? Search through real and virtual streets of Adelaide to find a guy named Frank.
Participants must register with the "I Like Frank" to play, and must have a 3G phone to send and receive data during the game. Street players use an "Event Search" option on the Fringe Festival website.
Previous coverage of Blast Theory's work in Wired News.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Variety Magazine launches e-gaming weblog
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DATE: 03/03/2004 09:53:09 AM
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Hollywood trade rag Variety just launched a new electronic gaming weblog, helmed by former Wired News staff reporter Brad King (also the author of Dungeons and Dreamers, a book on the history of gamer culture). Link to EEG News: Entertainment and Electronic Gaming.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ozone Depletion Rate Three Times Worse Than Predicted
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DATE: 03/03/2004 09:55:40 AM
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BoingBoing buddy Roland Piquepaille says:
According to a new study, the shrinking of the ozone layer over the Arctic is much worse than previously believed. In Climate change set to poke holes in ozone, Nature tells us it is a side-effect of global warming, the polar stratospheric clouds absorbing more and more industrial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). "I was surprised to see these results," says Drew Shindell, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York. "We never suspected the models were this far out of whack," he says. It remains to be seen if this new model is more accurate than previous ones. However, even if we reduce the emission of CFCs in a near future, another big unknown, the ozone layer will continue to shrink for decades to come. This overview contains more details and references. It also includes pictures of these polar clouds se en from space and from the ground (the one from space is amazing!).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: First music video shot entirely on a Nokia 3650
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DATE: 03/03/2004 10:01:44 AM
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It's kind of lame, but it's still a first. Link (Via Warren)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sound of War
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DATE: 03/03/2004 10:07:47 AM
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US forces in Iraq have a new non-lethal (but really annoying) weapon in their arsenal. According to American Technology Corporation's press release, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) is a "hailing and warning, directed acoustic device that is designed to determine intent, change behavior, and support various rules of engagement. With LRAD, a sentry can issue a focused verbal challenge with instructions in excess of 300 hundred yards, and follow up with a warning tone to cause behavior change." According to an Associated Press article, the LRAD tone is similar to that of a smoke detector but twice as loud and directed in a tight beam at a volume of 150 decibels. (As bb reader Grant Hamilton points out, that's 10db louder than the sound of a jet at take off!) "Inside 100 yards, you definitely don't want to be there," says the American Technology VP quoted in the article.
This reminds me a bit of infrasound weaponry research, exploring the use of ultra-low frequencies to cause discomfort, pain, suffering, and, er, bowel movements. The AP report also makes a reference to another non-lethal weapon almost ready for field testing, an energy beam that repels enemies. This one has a great name: the Active Denial System.
Link to LRAD press release,
Link to AP article
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tribal Digital Village -- wiring indigenous communities in SoCal
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DATE: 03/03/2004 10:11:30 AM
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Interesting BBC piece about some of the work going on in San Diego, California to wire Native American communities -- wirelessly. Snip:
Before the Tribal Digital Village project, Jack Ward could not get online when it rained. "The telephone lines are very old," explained the director of the Digital Village. "In the heat of the desert it doesn't take long for them to deteriorate."
Things are different now. Everybody has at least a broadband DSL connection. The Tribal Digital Village (TDV) is based in Southern California's San Diego County. This mountainous and remote land is home to 18 native American reservations - each one a sovereign nation - with an aggregate population of 15,000.
As with other rural areas of the US, wiring Native American reservations for telephony and internet access has never been an attractive proposition for established phone companies. The number of subscribers per mile makes recouping costs a tricky proposition. Nor has deregulation of the telecoms market changed the picture.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: McD's to nix super-size everything
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DATE: 03/03/2004 11:14:20 AM
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Looks like the film Super Size Me, previously blogged on BB, may have had more of an impact than imagined:
McDonald's Corp., battered by criticism of its fatty foods, said it would eliminate Supersize french fries and soft drinks by the end of the year, part of a swing toward pleasing health-minded customers and simplifying its menu. McDonald's Supersize option, which includes a 7-ounce fries carton and 42-ounce fountain soda, has been targeted by critics as contributing to a growing obesity crisis in the United States. The world's largest fast-food company said on Wednesday it is making the menu changes to "support a balanced lifestyle" approach that is in keeping with other recent moves to promote healthier behavior. These include a planned national launch of a Happy Meal for Adults which comes with advice from a fitness expert.
Link (thanks, Mara!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guatemala: street vendor kids on Pacific coast
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DATE: 03/03/2004 11:25:09 AM
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Click for full-size image. At left, one of the snapshots I took in Guatemala. These children work along the streets of Puerto San Jose, a small town with black sand beaches that swells on weekends with Guatemala City residents. It's about two hours by car from the capital, and two hours from the border of El Salvador. It's frayed, grimy, full of makeshift cinder-and-tin shack homes, and not the sort of place where foreign tourists tend to go. The girl in this photo walked alongside her brother, who balanced a basket of watermelon slices on his head. The fruit sells for about five quetzal a piece, more when it's hotter outside, and was tasty. My travel companion took some snapshots of the children with a Polaroid, and handed the snapshots to them for them to keep. The girl flipped out when she realized she was being handed an image of herself, for keeps -- this huge grin spread across her face. I don't think either of them had ever seen an instant photo before, definitely not of themselves. As they walked away, she would not stop looking at the instant photo. She was so engrossed in the image that she stepped into a hole in the sand and fell flat on her face. This made her brother and other vendors laugh hard, loud, and long, but it didn't kill the grin.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYC crosswalk buttons have been deactivated for years
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:12:19 PM
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Most of NYC's push-to-cross traffic-light buttons have been deactivated for years, but still function as a placebo. More interesting, is the glimpse into the history of computer-aided traffic routing and the "Barnes Dance" afforded by this NYT article:
Most of the buttons scattered through the city, mainly outside of Manhattan, are relics of the 1970's, before computers began tightly choreographing traffic signal patterns on major arteries. They were installed at a time when traffic was much lighter, said Michael Primeggia, deputy commissioner of traffic operations for the city's Transportation Department.
The first "semi-actuated signal," as they are called by traffic engineers, is believed to have appeared in the city in 1964, a brainstorm of the legendary traffic commissioner, Henry Barnes, the inventor of the "Barnes Dance," the traffic system that stops all vehicles in the intersection and allows pedestrians to cross in every direction at the same time. Barnes was also instrumental in completing the one-way conversion of major avenues in New York.
Link
(via Paul Boutin)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disturbing iPod ad remix
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:12:31 PM
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This is betamale's disturbing and good remix of the iPod ads and the classic Vietnam war-atrocity photo.
29K JPEG Link
(Thanks, betamale!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney World and Florida: raking the mud
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:13:24 PM
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A poli-sci prof from Rollins College has written what looks like a very good muckraking book about the relationship of Walt Disney World to the temporal authorities in Florida, called "Married to the Mouse":
Disney World, in its agreement with the city of Orlando and the state of Florida, actually negotiated the right to construct and use a nuclear power plant at the amusement park. True, it has never built one, but according to this well-researched, cogently argued and eye-opening account of the complicated relationship between the Disney Company and the city of Orlando, it's a sign of the high price that Orlando has paid to become the home of "the most popular tourist destination in the world." A privately held corporation, Disney has created what amounts to an independently governed country "a sort of Vatican with mouse ears" within Orlando, says Foglesong, professor of politics at Rollins College. For example, Disney competed for (and won) bond money, which ultimately paid for new sewers to accommodate its own expansion rather than for low-income housing in a county already strapped with the influx of Disney workers. When the Orlando Sentinel ran a series offering "tepid" criticism of Disney's bad-neighbor policy, the paper was banned from the theme park. In his litany of Disney's major and minor infractions, Foglesong never fails to shed light on the nuances of the situation. Even more than a critique of Disney, Foglesong's book takes a fascinating, important and entertaining look at contemporary problems in urbanology, city planning and, certainly, business ethics.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Donate your music antitrust check to EFF
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:13:45 PM
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Did you get a court-ordered $13.86 check from the RIAA to make up for its price-fixing wrongdoing? DonateMyMusicCheck.com is encouraging you to give it to EFF, "so the music industry doesn't screw you over again!"
Link
(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stop geting credit-card offers
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:13:50 PM
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A Kuro5hin writer has posted a great step-by-step for ensuring that you never receive a pre-approved credit-card solicitation again.
Fortunately, hidden away in the fine print of every single pre-approved offer sent to consumers is a paragraph stating how to prevent credit bureaus from including you in pre-screened lists. If you're like me and always end up throwing these offers away, I urge you to follow one of these procedures to notify the four credit reporting agencies of your request to opt out.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons Moving Images winners announced
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:14:00 PM
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The winners of the Creative Commons Moving Image contest -- which challenged creators to make a short movie explaining the value of less-restrictive copyright regimes -- have been announced. They're fantastic.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion action figures
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:14:11 PM
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Disney has released a line of theme-park-only Haunted Mansion action figures, including the three hitchhiking ghosts, the caretaker, the mariner and the bride. MouseShoppe has 'em at a healthy markup for $18 apiece.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gutenberg audiobooks
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:15:03 PM
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Michael Ellerbeck has started a project to read all of the Gutenberg Project texts aloud and release them as audiobooks under the terms of a Creative Commons license.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bilingual Ewok lyrics
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:15:23 PM
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The Ewok scene from the end of Return of the Jedi, the one where they all sing the victory song? Well, the song has lyrics. And an English translation.
Yub nub
eee chop yub nub
ah toe meet toe pee-chee keene
g'noop dock fling oh ah
Yah wah
eee chop yah wah
ah toe meet toe pee-chee keene
g'noop dock fling oh ah...
Freedom
we got freedom
and now that we can be free
come on and celebrate
Power
we got power
and now that we can be free
it's time to celebrate...
Link
(Thanks, kidsoncrack!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Yahoo Search doublespeak
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:15:37 PM
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Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's VP of Search, gave a remarkably smarmy doublespeak interview to Search Engine Watch about Yahoo's new paid-placement search "results." Here's a freely translated version of the interview.
Cadogan: It [rolling all the Yahoo, Altavista, Alltheweb programs together] radically simplifies the situation from having six programs to one that gets you a ton of distribution and gets you a lot of benefits from interacting with us.
Translation: All the money you pay for better
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(via Dive Into Mark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Justin's Tokyo guide under a Creative Commons license
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:15:50 PM
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Justin Hall has released his Tokyo-on-zero-dollar-a-day guidebook, "Just In Tokyo," as a free PDF under a Creative Commons license!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gene Wolfe's rules for writers
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:16:04 PM
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Gene Wolfe's rules for writers are amazing and sensible and good.
Examine your modifiers ruthlessly. What do they add to the story?
Cut adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors which do not shed light or develop the narrative voice.
Don't repeat yourself.
Give the reader small surprises: moments of humor, delightful metaphors, something that jolts.
Understand your characters. No one is a villain to him/herself. No one is clinically sane if you know them well enough.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 3D movies of Disney rides
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:16:20 PM
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This guy makes and sells stereoscopic videos of ride-throughs of Disney rides, and has just posted a vid of the Haunted Mansion Holiday from Disneyland last Christmas.
The *full* ride, including some outdoor footage, the full preshow, the entire ride up to the exit. Due to the dark nature of the ride, there is quite a bit of ghosting (which almost seems appropriate for a Haunted attraction, eh?).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DowningStreetSays: Public comment on the Prime Minister's briefings
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:16:31 PM
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Tom sez, "DowningStreetSays allows members of the public to comment directly on the Prime
Minister's Official Spokeman's briefings, previously reserved for the press.
The idea is to provide a hub for unfiltered access to discussion of major
political issues, where the words of 10 Downing Street, the media and the
public are all on a level playing field. We're all properly licenced, and
Downing Street seem content to watch us and see if anything interesting
happens."
Link
(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aramaic phrases of note and utility
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DATE: 03/03/2004 01:16:43 PM
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Here are some handy Aramaic phrases for those of us thinking of attending Mr Gibson's vanity film.
B-kheeruut re'yaaneyh laa kaaley tsuuraathaa khteepaathaa, ellaa Zaynaa Mqatlaanaa Trayaanaa laytaw!
It may be uncompromising in its liberal use of graphic violence, but Lethal Weapon II it ain't.
Een, Yuudaayaa naa, ellaa b-haw yawmaa laa hweeth ba-mdeetaa.
Yes, I'm Jewish, but I wasn't there that day.
Ma'hed lee qalleel d-Khayey d-Breeyaan, ellaa dlaa gukhkaa.
It sort of reminds me of Life of Brian, but it's nowhere near as funny.
Link
(via AccordionGuy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Douglas Adams media archive
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DATE: 03/03/2004 03:22:56 PM
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An extensive online media archive dedicated to the creator of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
The Douglas Adams media archive is presented here by the wi2600.org groups for your enjoyment. This allso is to serve as a tribute to Mr. Adams's great, but suddely shortened career. Those who have not heard his voice and those who know it well will both enjoy having this material available.We will miss him!
Link, which will no doubt be BoingBoinged to death by the time you read this, (Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worm-writers insulting each other in source-code comments
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DATE: 03/03/2004 06:07:48 PM
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Malware writers are releasing competing variants of current worms, each containing taunts deriding the coding skills of the others.
And now the authors of MyDoom.G, spreading today, have included comments in the worm's code insulting Netsky.
A similar message was found in Bagel J, also discovered today, which ended: "Don't ruine our bussiness, wanna start a war?"
Netsky's authors responded with the following message in Netsky.F: "Skynet AntiVirus - Bagle - you are a looser!!!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Secure your WiFi traffic for $8.88/month
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DATE: 03/03/2004 06:18:25 PM
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Matthowie points out that HotSpotVPN is a great, cheap, cross-platform service that secures all your promiscuous WiFi traffic by tunneling it to the company's servers (great idea, but only if you trust HotSpotVPN...). I do something like this with my own traffic, tunneling my mail and Web sessions over ssh to a secure box in a cage. You know what? This might just be the bizmodel for WiFi.
To check the security, I disconnected from HotSpotVPN's servers and ran Ethereal (a packet sniffer) on my desktop PC that's also on the network. I checked my email and checked the output on ethereal and my username, pop servers, and passwords were all in the clear. I connected to the VPN and ran the same test and only see garbled text that isn't even showing up as POP commands as the traffic is all being sent through the VPN securely. The only downside is that you have to trust that the company running HotSpotVPN is going to be secure with their data, as they could be sniffing/logging/analyzing your traffic on their end, but frankly I think the chances of that happening are slim, since they've been around for a couple years and doing anything like this would end the business for them.
Long story short, this is the best $8.88/month I've spent and I'm going to set up an account for all my wireless devices.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How piracy repeatedly saved the entertainment industry
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DATE: 03/04/2004 04:55:08 AM
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This month's Wired has a very good excerpt from Lessig's new book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, detailing the way that pirate media has always been the prerequisite of next-generation legit media.
As the history of film, music, radio, and cable TV suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all piracy is. Or at least, not in the sense that the term is increasingly being used today. Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, either to create new content or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all piracy.
This doesn't mean that there are no questions raised by the latest piracy concern - peer-to-peer file-sharing. But it does mean that we need to understand the harm in P2P sharing a bit more before we condemn it to the gallows.
Like the original Hollywood, P2P sharing seeks to escape an overly controlling industry. And like the original recording and radio industries, it is simply exploiting a new way of distributing content. But unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that gets shared on P2P services. This difference distinguishes P2P sharing. We should find a way to protect artists while permitting this sharing to survive.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eisner ousted from Disney's Board
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DATE: 03/04/2004 04:57:32 AM
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Michael Eisner has been fired off of Disney's Board of Directors (though he remains CEO. For now.).
After 43% of shareholders chose not to vote for his re-election to the board at the annual meeting here on Wednesday, the Disney board announced it was splitting the chairman and CEO posts Eisner has held since 1984. The board elected presiding director George Mitchell as non-executive chairman while keeping Eisner as CEO. The board added that it "remains unanimous" in support of Eisner.
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TITLE: Subways at the world, at scale
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DATE: 03/04/2004 05:00:28 AM
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Gallery of 13 subways systems from all over the world, shown at the same scale. Boy, Moscow's got a big tube!
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(via Kottke)
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TITLE: Print-shop HOWTO for Web-heads
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DATE: 03/04/2004 05:02:57 AM
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Great tutorial for Web-designers on setting up design jobs for print, such as business-cards.
Pantones are like web-safe colors for print. Your printer guy has a formula guide you can use. (Be aware, you will eventually desire your own pantone guide.) Your job is to choose colors from the swatches, which the printer can match exactly. You can specify these in your illustrator file by opening the pantone swatch library.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Database copyright: a stupid idea whose time hasn't come
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DATE: 03/04/2004 05:05:33 AM
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A database copyright in the US would be apocalyptically bad and terrible. The notion that facts can be owned offends reason. This Wired article explains why:
But Joe Rubin, executive director of technology and e-commerce for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says the bill's threshold for proving "commercial harm" is very low.
He cited the example of a financial planner who gathers information from several sources, like Securities and Exchange Commission filings, public documents and the Dun & Bradstreet business database.
"If he assimilated the information and put it into a report for his client, under this bill that activity would be illegal and would subject him to lawsuits from every company whose website he accessed," Rubin said.
He also says that despite Kupferschmid's characterization, the bill puts no limit on the amount of information someone needs to take from a database to violate the law.
"The bill mentions databases and subsets of databases. A subset could be any bit of information in a database," Rubin said.
A 1997 case between Motorola and the National Basketball Association could serve as an example. After Motorola sent basketball scores to its customers' pagers, the NBA sued the company for misappropriating its property. A U.S. Appeals Court, however, ruled against the NBA.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jay-Z construction set
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DATE: 03/04/2004 06:07:05 AM
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Claire Chanel sez, "I think you'll get a charge out of a new project I'm working on titled 'Jay-Z Construction Set.' It's a CD-ROM, distributed largely through BitTorrent, that contains nine variations on Jay-Z's Black Album, a collection of samples, over 1200 generic hiphop themed clipart images, tutorials on remixes/mashups, and a news archive about the Grey Album conflict. "
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(Thanks, Claire!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roll your own Psycho
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DATE: 03/04/2004 07:00:04 AM
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Jacob sez, "Saul Bass Studios has put the original footage of Alfred Hitchcock's famous Psycho scene online, and you can now re-edit it and compare your version to the original."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nerve.com "Science" experiment: sex with a RealDoll
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DATE: 03/04/2004 07:26:09 AM
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In the current edition of Nerve.com's recurring "I did it for Science" feature, Grant Stoddard conducts an experiment with a RealDoll -- "the world's finest love doll."Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online typography art piece
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DATE: 03/04/2004 07:40:46 AM
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Typography morphed into Flash-based online music video / concept art pieces. Sort of. Biggie and Dylan jam with Baskerville and Helvetica. Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Meet PaPeRo, Personal Robot and Interpreter
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DATE: 03/04/2004 08:22:56 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland Piquepaille says:
Yesterday, Dan Gillmor mentioned in his eJournal a new Japanese cell phone equipped with a very useful GPS system. He wished that the service was translated into other languages and that these phones were available for rent. A somewhat similar service is just being launched at Narita Airport, where you will be able to rent PDAs which can translate your language into Japanese. The application is based on speech-to-speech technology developed by NEC and implemented in small robots named PaPeRo (Partner-Type Personal Robot), according to BBC News Online. PaPeRo has a vocabulary of 50,000 Japanese and 25,000 English travel and tourism related words. This overview contains more details about PaPeRo including pictures.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free, geeky alternative for securing your WiFi traffic
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DATE: 03/04/2004 08:40:48 AM
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Wes sez, "To secure your WiFi traffic, you could just tunnel it through Tor for free, like everyone at CodeCon was doing to protect themselves from the nosiness of The Shmoo Group." Tor looks promising, but way, way geeky.
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(Thanks, Wes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Circus noises for your cellphone
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DATE: 03/04/2004 08:43:28 AM
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SoundCover is an app for your mobile phone that adds custom background noise, including a circus parade or a dentist's drill, to your conversation, so that you can fool people into thingking thaat you're talking to them while having a tooth removed under the big top.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Custom short-story collections on demand
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DATE: 03/04/2004 08:46:25 AM
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Rob sez, "I'm trying my hand in the realm of experimental, web-driven print publishing. I've penned 25 stories over the last couple of years (well, more, but 25 decent ones) and I've got them up for sale as a sort of modular book that can be ordered to the reader's specifications. Visitors to the site select the stories they want included in the work and place their order, and the book is printed on demand and shipped to them."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anthropomorphic Mars Rover LiveJournal
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DATE: 03/04/2004 09:01:15 AM
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If the Mars Rover opportunity had a LiveJournal, it would read something like this:
8:23 am
squee!
I got to drive today! It's so cool! I didn't think I'd ever be allowed to go out on my own. NASA is so protective sometimes; it's like they wanted to keep me swaddled in airbags forever. But anyways, I keep finding these round pebbly things. They get stuck in my treads. Do you think they'll leave a mark? OMG what if Stardust saw me like this? No, it's cool. It's not like he'd ever come by this planet again...
Spirit is still "sick." She swears she's gonna drive to that crater any time now, though. She just wants to do it on her time and not when NASA orders her to. Like, whatever. Don't tell anyone but sometimes I miss her.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guatemala: Guns and Jesus.
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DATE: 03/04/2004 09:05:30 AM
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This wasn't my first trip to the country. About ten years ago, we traveled there while the civil war was still going on. That time, it was different. No 'Net cafes or VoIP phones like there are today, so when you were there, you were there and only there. Our travel companions back then were two indigenous people, one who spoke Kakchikel, one who spoke Kanjobal, both of whom had lost friends and family members in the massacres. The military's anti-insurgency policy went like this: if we can't figure out which one of you is a guerilla, we kill all of you, and then we kill a few extra to make sure everyone gets the point. She told us about brothers shot in the eyes and neighbors tortured with electrical wires. He told us about highland villages whose only living residents were women and children. That time, we traveled everywhere by chicken bus, and some times the buses were stopped by armed soldiers, who ordered everyone off, searched us all, and let almost all of us back on. You never knew what was happening with the ones who didn't get back on, you just got back on.
So this time, there was no active war, but there wasn't an absence of war, either. There are still nearly as many ammo shops along the roads to Guatemala City as there are tamale vendors. And just about every building that contains anything worth stealing has an armed guard. The McDonalds. The gas station. Some of the little shops in Antigua that sell jade or tipica, handicrafts, to white tourists. For each one, there is a man in a uniform holding a semiautomatic rifle. Rios Montt -- el general as he's known -- the dictator under whose command the worst of the massacres took place, just ended a failed presidential campaign. He lost the 2003 elections, but his mug is still plastered all over telephone poles, rocks, vacant walls, all over the country. There are a lot of guns, and a lot of Jesus. Evangelical churches in hastily-constructed cinder-block buildings outnumber both the ammo shops and the tamale vendors.
When I stepped on board flight 889 from LAX to Guatemala this time, I knew it would be different, but I didn't know how. Almost midnight. Most passengers were guatemaltecos weighed down with bags full of things from America to bring home to families. We waited, passengers filed on with bursting suitcases. Flight attendants wheeled on a brown-skinned woman in a wheelchair whose body was limp, eyes dim and half-closed. They pushed her into place, strapped her down, we waited again. I dozed off, and woke up minutes later as attendants rushed back to her seat with oxygen and first aid kits. They called for paramedics. They called for doctors. No one could feel her pulse. The paramedics arrived, huddled for a while, then confirmed she was gone. One of the female flight attendants started crying. The woman in the wheelchair had terminal cancer, she said. "It's always like this on 889. They always want to return home to die."
At left, snapshot of a life-sized icon in a Catholic church in Antigua, Guatemala. I snapped it last week, on Ash Wednesday. She's about 300 years old. Click thumbnail for full-size image.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Low Life Labs walking robots
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DATE: 03/04/2004 10:16:44 AM
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Here's a neat video of a "passive" robotic walker. It's made of double jointed pendulums and looks very natural. I guess people walk like this. It's followed by a really cool 2003 video of a motorized walker. This is the first robot I've ever seen that I wanted to own. Link (Thanks, Bryan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hep C variant mitigates HIV?
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DATE: 03/04/2004 11:38:28 AM
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Researchers in Iowa have identified a virus related to Hep C that appears to sheild its victims from the effects of HIV.
...after about six years, the effect of the virus was dramatic. Survival for men who were continuously infected by GBV-C was 75 per cent compared with only 39 per cent for men with no evidence of infection. But the men who faired worst were those who "lost" their GBV-C infection sometime in the first six years - only 16 per cent survived.
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(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Recreating Far Side toons with Photoshop
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DATE: 03/04/2004 11:57:43 AM
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Worth1000 is throwing a photoshopping contest to composite together clip-images to make real-life versions of Far Side cartoons.
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(Thanks, Eyes Spies and Lies!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian Supreme Court gets copyright right
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DATE: 03/04/2004 12:42:38 PM
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This post to Interesting People runs down a new Canadian Supreme Court copyright decision that is the very soul of reasonableness, balancing out the public interest and the interest of rightsholders.
Considerations of copyright balance appear everywhere in the decision. For example, when working to develop a legal definition for originality in a work, the court expresses concern that too low a threshold tip[s] the scale in favour of the author's or creator's rights, at the loss of society's interest in maintaining a robust public domain that could help foster future creative innovation.
Similarly on the issue of fair dealing, the court notes that fair dealing is a user's right. In order to maintain the proper balance between the rights of a copyright owner and users' interests, it must not be interpreted restrictively. As Professor Vaver, supra, has explained, at p. 171: User rights are not just loopholes. Both owner rights and user rights should therefore be given the fair and balanced reading that befits remedial legislation.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 1951 Civil Defense film "Duck and Cover" site
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DATE: 03/04/2004 01:04:44 PM
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Ken Sez: "The Library of Congress National Film Registry, which each year inducts 25 films into their film preservation program, has accepted CONELRAD's nomination of 'Duck and Cover' - the classic 1951 children's civil defense short film - and we've launched a campaign to build support for it's inclusion. Deadline is March 30 and there's info at this mini-site including some details from the extensive research we've been doing on this film over the last year and a half. We also just revealed in December that Mia Farrow is original Duck and Cover Kid as part of a 1952 publicity campaign. "
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Distcomp project to find MD5 collisions
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DATE: 03/04/2004 03:28:36 PM
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Matt sez, "This site's purpose is to raise awareness of MD5's prevalence in most applications of cryptography (SSL, digital signatures, IDS software) and it's inherent weaknesses. MD5CRK is a distributed computing project that seeks to find a collision in the MD5 hash algorithm -- a property that hash algorithms are not supposed to have. The part of this project that has proved controversial is the (optional) use of an applet-based client. You put the applet on your site and your visitors contribute CPU cycles whether they notice or not."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lego Pantone values
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DATE: 03/04/2004 03:32:45 PM
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Here's a chart showing the Pantone, Hex, CMYK and RGB values of the colors used in Lego bricks.
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fish-finding watch
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DATE: 03/04/2004 03:35:54 PM
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Gizmodo reports on the Humminbird Smartcast RF30, a wrist-mounted wireless readout for your fisherman's depth-finder.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gay Marriage: history never repeats?
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DATE: 03/04/2004 04:18:02 PM
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Great thread on Corante about a historical parallel in US law to the current fracas over gay marriage. The punch line: in 1911, there was a constitutional amendment attempt to ban interracial marriage. Link (Thanks, CJC)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Programmable credit-card to replace most of your wallet's contents
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DATE: 03/05/2004 02:58:30 AM
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The Chameleon Card is a programmable credit-card and the Pocket Vault is a programming terminal for it. Feed it your credit-card magstripes and your loyalty-card bar-codes, seal it with your fingerprint, then, on demand, it can mimic any of the cards in your wallet. Oh, and it's got an RFID-mimic built in to replace your swipeless gas-pump card. This strikes me as simultaneously very cool and very creepy, and at $200, it seems too pricey to fly.
First-time users of the Pocket Vault will read their old credit cards with the device, which stores their information internally and backs it up to an online or local database in case the Pocket Vault is lost or stolen. Each credit card stored on the Pocket Vault is then represented by an icon on the device's touch-screen display.
The Pocket Vault also prompts its owners to place their fingerprints on the device's reader pad to create a biometric profile.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney park uniforms on eBay
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DATE: 03/05/2004 03:12:37 AM
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Wanna play castmember? Up for sale on eBay at the moment: women's Haunted Mansion costume and a Security Guard uniform. Just think of how this could spice up your lovelife: "Honey, let's play naughty preshow castmember and the stern rent-a-cop again!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mojo Nixon retiring
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DATE: 03/05/2004 04:25:09 AM
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Mojo Nixon is retiring after a final show at this year's SXSW in Austin -- as a side-note, I have to say how refreshing it is to see the <blink> tag still in use after all these years of derision and deprecation.
"I have nothing more to say," says Nixon. "Not only am I empty, but obviously nobody gives a rat's ass about the things I have been saying for twenty years. The masses are just as blinded by the light of stupidity, prudery and the shiny objects of hate..."
"He has been on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, he has appeared nude in magazines, he has been in bad movies, been censored by Hustler magazine, three record companies and MTV, he played every possible music joint where nutjobs congregate in 45 states, he even played in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan and did a three-week tour of Norway," says longtime manager Scott Ambrose "Bullethead" Reilly. "He has suffered death threats; he sang with Don Henley; he has even been an answer on Jeopardy for God's Sake. He was the captain of a US Olympic team and debated Pat Buchanan. For us. He did this all for us."
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(Thanks, eye_mojo!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FBI's guide to concealed weapons
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DATE: 03/05/2004 08:06:09 AM
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The FBI's guide to concealed weapons looks reveals that international terrorist suppliers have gotten their hands on too many Ian Fleming novels and the rulebooks from TSR's old TOP SECRET RPG.
2.1MB PDF Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Real Player really sucks
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DATE: 03/05/2004 08:09:31 AM
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Excellent analysis of the obnoxiousness of RealOne's defaults, which hijack the hell out of your Windows box and install shortcuts everywhere imaginable and grab anything remotely AV and try to play it back in Real and spam you with upsell offers and other creepiness. I like MPlayer and VLC for playing back Real, WMV, and MPEG files, as well as DivXes and the like.
If you choose the custom install, the process is a blend between an installer and a Pokemon-like game of gotta-uncheck-all-checkboxes.
Because, if you don't catch em all, Real Player assumes you want shortcuts to it on the desktop, in the Quick Launch bar next to the start-menu, in the top of the start-menu, another desktop shortcut to "free offers" from real.com, a third desktop shortcut to "Free Aol & unlimited internet", and last but not least, a special option in the windows search-menu called "Audio/video search". Note that Real Player does not just create a folder in the start-menu programs-folder, like most apps do, but claims a seat in the top of the start-menu, for quick and easy access. Besides all these short-cuts, Real Player also installs a shortcut in the programs-folder of the start-menu, and another folder, called "Real", in the programs-folder.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Radar on a Chip Means Radar on the Cheap
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DATE: 03/05/2004 09:24:24 AM
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I wrote a piece for The Feature about the potential uses for a newly invented radar-on-a-chip.
Late last month, an associate professor by the name of Ali Hajimiri of the California Institute of Technology announced that he had come up with a radar system on a chip. This is significant for two reasons. First, its tiny dimensions (one-fifteenth the diameter of a penny) will make it possible to add radar-like functionality to almost any wireless device no matter how small it is. Second, the price of anything that can be manufactured in a silicon fabrication plant will plummet as the number of units shipped increases. Will the next decade be known as the "Radar Age"?
Maybe so. Hajimiri's radar on a chip could replace a lot of existing dish antennae, like the kind you have on your roof to watch satellite TV. The frequency at which the chip runs - 24 Gigahertz - falls right into the spectrum allocated by the FCC for vehicular radar systems. These chips could be embedded into a car to give it 360-degree, all weather vision, protecting the occupants from reckless drivers and other highway hazards.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Spy On Your Food with this DNA Chip
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DATE: 03/05/2004 10:32:10 AM
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Roland sez: "Do you want to know if the chicken you just bought at the supermarket contains bits of pork or beef? Or would you like to know if the vegetarian meal you just ordered contains some fish or meat? If your answer is yes, you might get some help from a DNA chip which can recognize 32 different species of fishes, birds and mammals, including humans(!!), in a single test. Both Small Times and New Scientist carry a story of this DNA chip, which will likely be used first by food regulators. The FoodExpert-ID biochip is the first high-throughput gene chip for testing food and animal feed. But it doesn't come cheap. The cost of all the equipment needed to perform the tests is around $250,000, but each test would cost only $350 to $550. This overview contains more details and references. It also includes illustrations showing how the technology works." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Roundtable on design coverage in the media
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DATE: 03/05/2004 10:44:39 AM
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There's an interesting discussion taking place at Core 77 about industrial design in the media. Participants include I.D.'s Julie Lasky, New Yorker's John Seabrook, writer Kurt Anderson, designer Bruce Mau, and Moma design curator Paola Antonelli.
John Seabrook: It is very tedious, both for the writer and the reader, to describe in words the color, shape, texture, material, and style of an object -- when a picture could communicate most of this information in a fraction of a second. And yet, when you are writing for an audience that knows nothing of the context within which decisions about design take place, and has no feel for the culture out of which design choices emerge, then one has little choice but to scatter one's seed over such barren ground as mere description. Ergo, most cultural critics choose to spend their time writing about something else. Janet Jackson's breast, say.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hand drawn digital clock
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DATE: 03/05/2004 11:09:44 AM
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Sean Carton points out this funny digital clock, which consists of animated gifs of a person writing numbers with a pencil and erasing them every second. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: YASNS anthem: The OrkutWorld Song
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DATE: 03/05/2004 12:10:55 PM
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The OrkutWorld Song is an anthem for people stuck in the latest YASNS, to the tune of "Limbo Rock." It's funny as hell.
1.3MB MP3 Link, Mirror
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wireless researchers in (test)bed together
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DATE: 03/05/2004 01:17:21 PM
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"Wireless is the least understood form of communication network today," says Rajive Bagrodia, a professor of computer science at UCLA.
My latest article for TheFeature.com is about WHYNET, a $5.5 million meta-testbed for wireless research at six universities. WHYNET will enable researchers to test everything from smart antennas to Smart Dust networks "in the wild" (or close to it). Meanwhile, it will help scientists understand the chaos of the wirlesss spectrum.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblogging Chernobyl
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DATE: 03/05/2004 01:20:41 PM
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UPDATE: Is this story a fraud? See subsequent BoingBoing post: Link
Elena from Kiev recently toured the Chernobyl area on a motorcycle. She photo-blogs the journey here, and it is a truly amazing personal account. This is the sort of intimate, human stuff that makes you drop your jaw and think, good God, the Internet is an incredible thing.
"I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl dead zone. It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite? because one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes. There is no newly built roads, but those which left from 80th in fairly good condition..."
Link (via Warren). Recommended Reading: Polidori's Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, a collection of photographs shot in the dead zone (thanks, Patricio)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What to do in LA this weekend: Glen Friedman photo book launch
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DATE: 03/05/2004 03:46:35 PM
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If you're in LA this weekend, head downtown to sixspace tomorrow night for the world premiere of The Idealist by Glen E. Friedman. The new book (which is totally gorgeous -- I fondled one of the first copies a few weeks ago) gathers images spanning 25 years of Friedman's fine-art photography.
"Though he continues a heavy focus on both imagery and message, only a few of his traditional photographs of legendary people in the hip-hop, punk and skate communities will be recognized. The Idealist traces Friedman's development as a fine-artist as his subject matter includes a breathtaking international scope of landscapes, still life, and documentary."
Link to sixspace show info, Link to Friedman's website, where you'll find ordering info.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Get your fresh, raw Mars image data right here, folks
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DATE: 03/06/2004 08:02:49 AM
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BoingBoing reader Avi says, "Raw data from NASA's planetary probes is available for public access. This sequence of images of a receding Earth is spectacular!" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Odd Japan military billboards: Peace through booty?
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DATE: 03/06/2004 08:04:46 AM
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BoingBoing reader sid
says, "If you're walking through Shibuya and you see a bunch of hip-swiveling sailors on one of the big electronic billboards, it's not a Village People spinoff. It's an actual ad for Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force (navy), and the military thinks it will draw kids to military service." The ad series title? "Seaman Ship." Well alrighty, then.
Link, and Link to Japan times story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool new use of QTVR: coastal panorama
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DATE: 03/06/2004 08:07:29 AM
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QTVR enthusiast Hans Nyberg says, "This QTVR of the Brittany Rocky Coast includes an animated moving sea and sound. It is a big one -- 2.5 mb -- but it downloads as a preload while you read the text on the introduction page." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xerox Art Show
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DATE: 03/06/2004 08:07:49 AM
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Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA refund check on eBay, proceeds to EFF
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DATE: 03/06/2004 10:19:21 AM
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Amy sez, "I'm eBaying my RIAA settlement check and donating 100% of proceeds after eBay fees to the EFF."
Link
(Thanks, Amy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Martian Hidden Mickey
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DATE: 03/06/2004 02:46:19 PM
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The Spirit rover's stainless steel brushes on its Rock Abrasion Tool left behind a hidden Mickey on one of Mars's rocks.
Link
(Thanks, JWZ!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Akma on The Passion
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DATE: 03/06/2004 07:58:24 PM
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Akma, my favorite blogging cleric, has been to see Mr Gibson's Vanity Project and has posted a long, thoughtful review of it.
At the end of the film, I was shaken and drained. I earnestly hope I will never again see such harrowing scenes of brutality. My appreciation of the physicality of the crucifixion has increased tremendously. My anger at the way that Christians casually emphasize general Judaic responsibility for Jesus? horrible death, while they trivialize or shrug off Rome?s blame, has grown also. My sense of the historic embroideries of the Passion tradition has modulated from detached curiosity to engaged fascination and repulsion. My faith, such as it is, was perhaps least affected by the experience; what I saw this afternoon involves my feelings more than my understanding of who God is.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: West3rn pr0n
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DATE: 03/07/2004 04:15:03 AM
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Lovely collection of vintage (?) cowgirl pinup posters.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Congrats, Rusty!
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DATE: 03/07/2004 04:17:26 AM
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Rusty "Kuro5hin" Foster has landed a sweet new gig with a web consulting shop for political campaigns:
Rusty Foster joined Armstrong Zúniga in February of 2004 as CTO. Rusty created the Scoop software platform in 1999 and founded Kuro5hin.org the same year. Kuro5hin is widely recognized as a pioneering project in collaborative media, and Rusty has written and spoken extensively about the potential of the internet as a medium for collaboration and grassroots organizing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aibo-style "guard-dragon"
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DATE: 03/07/2004 04:42:15 AM
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A Japanese inventor has shipped an Aibo-like "guard-dragon" that costs as much as a car and has a bunch of anti-burglar sensors and behaviors.
With more than 50 built-in sensors, Banryu is capable of picking up changes in its surroundings and transmitting an alarm to its master's cellphone.
A camera on its back can swivel 360 degrees and send images of the room around it. It can also sense the smell of burning and detect temperatures above 50 degrees.
Link
(Thanks, hary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Software-based PVR that's feature-complete
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DATE: 03/07/2004 05:01:23 AM
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SnapStream's "Beyond TV 3" is a software-based PVR that turns your PC into a TiVo-plus-plus, capable of streaming stored programs to your browser and auto-skipping commercials. Basically, it's as though they made a TiVo whose only considerations were what you, the customer, would likely want to see, and not what the Hollywood studios would prefer.
The software streams to Web browsers, so you don't have to buy another copy for remote viewing. It's fairly simple to enable security so strangers don't have access to your television signal or recordings.
Beyond TV handles all the personal video recorder basics well. Users can pause live TV, rewind and set up recordings — all without an advanced degree in VCR technology. And like TiVo's Home Media Option, recording can be scheduled over the Internet.
But SnapStream also added commercial break recognition, which vastly simplifies ad skipping. It also supports a variety of video formats and lets you easily convert to a more tightly compressed file.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Russian fan-translation of Down and Out
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DATE: 03/07/2004 05:14:15 AM
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Ivan Appel, a Russian reader of mine, has begun translating Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom into Russian, posting a chapter at a time as he goes. Sweet!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshopped real-world video-game scenes
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DATE: 03/07/2004 05:27:49 AM
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Fark photoshopping contest theme: "what happens when kids start acting out their favorite video games."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Triplets of Belleville
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DATE: 03/07/2004 05:58:25 AM
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The Triplets of Belleville is an animated feature film that was up against Finding Nemo for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars this year. My mom has been talking about it nonstop since I got to Toronto, and I've just watch the trailer and poked around a little on the (sucktastic, Flash-based) website for the movie, and I'm pretty impressed -- enough so that I pre-ordered a copy of the May DVD.
Link
(Thanks, Mom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mel Gibson: violent, cynical Jew-baiter?
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DATE: 03/07/2004 07:00:24 AM
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When Frank Rich wrote a column criticizing Gibson's cynical marketing campaign for his little vanity project, The Passion, Gibson told the New Yorker, "I want to kill him... I want his intestines on a stick. ... I want to kill his dog." Now, Rich (who doesn't own a dog) has written another column, describing in detail the Jew-baiting manipulative tactics employed by Gibson in the effort to make his personal $25MM investment -- the most money sunk into a dead-language movie since Quest for Fire -- pay off.
As for Gibson's own speech in this debate, it is often as dishonest as it is un-Christian. In the New Yorker article, he says that his father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, "never denied the Holocaust"; the article's author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a "tragedy" in an interview he gave to the writer Christopher Noxon for a New York Times Magazine article published last March. Neither the word "tragedy" nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that Times article, and according to a full transcript of the interview that Noxon made available to me, Hutton Gibson said there was "no systematic extermination" of the Jews by Hitler, only "a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs."
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NetFlicks for geeky DIY vids
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DATE: 03/07/2004 07:35:49 AM
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Travis sez, "I run a small business which rents instructional videos (like a NetFlix for geeks). The site could best be summed up as 'learn how to compete on JunkYard wars from the comfort of your own couch': information on welding, using a lathe, building a heat treating oven, etc."
Link
(Thanks, Travis!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My new Roger Wood clock
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DATE: 03/07/2004 05:17:43 PM
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Visited my old building in Toronto tonight and stopped in to see my old neighbor Roger Wood, the talented assemblage sculptor whose clocks I dearly adore. Roger had just come back from doing a crafts show in Philly and had a few unsold clocks in inventory, and this one, a "wall-mounted Jules-Verne style" took my breath away. I bought it on the spot to be shipped to my new flat in London.
94K JPEG Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Convert your blogrolling.com blogroll to an RSS list and vice-versa
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DATE: 03/07/2004 05:22:43 PM
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Blogrolling.com, recently bought out by Tucows, has added OPML import and export -- that means that you can turn your RSS feed-list into your blogroll and vice-versa.
Link
(Thanks, Elliot!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pico Iyer on circadian violence, lit for the Eastern Standard Tribe
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DATE: 03/07/2004 05:31:42 PM
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Pico Iyer is a brilliant travel writer (his Video Nights in Kathmandu is a real standout) whose latest NYT editorial deals with the circadian violence wrought by jetlag and global communalism -- a theme near and dear to my Eastern Standard Tribalist's heart, especially when articulated in such beautiful, compellingly drunken language.
The lure of modern travel, for many of us, is that we don't go from A to B so much as from A to Z, or from A to alpha; most often, we end up somewhere between the two, not quite one, and not quite the other -- in an airport, perhaps, that is and isn't the place we left and the place we think we're going to. Jet lag, in some ways, is the perfect metaphor for this, the neurological equivalent, I often feel, of some long, gray airport passageway that leads from one nowhere space to another. It speaks, you could say, for much in the accelerated world where we speed between continents and think we have conquered both space and time.
And, yet, of course -- this is its power -- it isn't just a metaphor. It is painfully real, as real as the words that are coming out slurred or as that piece of paper on which we have methodically added two plus two and come up with three. We have been placed at a tilt, and the person who emerges from us is someone suffering from something much deeper than the high-frequency hearing loss or the superdry sinuses that come from flying 500 miles an hour above the weather in a pressurized cabin.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RNC trying to scare MoveOn ads off the air
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DATE: 03/07/2004 06:50:36 PM
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The ENC is sending threatening letters to TV stations that run MoveOn's anti-Bush ads, trying to freak them out with a nonsensical claim that that ads are illegal.
"As a broadcaster licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, you have a responsibility to the viewing public, and to your licensing agency, to refrain from complicity in any illegal activity," said the RNC's chief counsel, Jill Holtzman Vogel, in a letter sent to about 250 stations Friday.
"Now that you have been apprised of the law, to prevent further violations of federal law, we urge you to remove these advertisements from your station's broadcast rotation."
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(Thanks, blaine!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spring-loaded wooden kinetic sculptures
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DATE: 03/08/2004 01:26:02 AM
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David C. Roy builds beautiful, spring-driven wooden kinetic sculptures. Pricey but hypnotic -- check out the animations.
Link
(Thanks, Keith!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple trackpads can sense in three axes
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DATE: 03/08/2004 01:27:43 AM
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A blog from the Queens University Human Media Lab reports that the PowerBook/iBook trackpad can sense not only x and y data, but z-axis as well, being sensitive to pressure gradients. Nice potential for human interface work.
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(Thanks, Connor!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Notes from a non-evil record label
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DATE: 03/08/2004 01:29:48 AM
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John Buckman, the founder of the Creative Commons-licensed music-label Magnatune, has a very good blog where he talks about the trials and tribulations of running a record label that is non-evil.
I received two great African music CDs recently. These are musicians from Africa, recording in London. However, I can't accept that CD for Magnatune, because the recording is totally owned by a producer in London, who would then receive all the sales royalties, and none would go to the actual performers. This situation, where the recording company or producer owns all the rights to an album, is the norm in world music...
Basically, I'm not willing to have Magnatune prop up the "world musician gives up all his rights to his recordings" system which mostly exists today, and that philosophy limits what I can sign (and also what gets submitted). But, like "free trade coffee" I think people expect Magnatune to do this "fairness audit" on their behalf, and trust that half the money from their purchasers really does go to the musician.
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(Thanks, Christopher!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Haiti
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DATE: 03/08/2004 01:30:40 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted a fine Daily Show take on the ongoing conflict in Haiti and the US goverment's spin thereupon.
9.3MB MOV Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spam haiku
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DATE: 03/08/2004 02:10:21 AM
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Russell Buckley is creating found haiku out of spam subject-lines.
Re:
Terry Tate is back
gallop easel fanny coop
Good Sense Automation
Link
(Thanks, Russell!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Seed catalog covers from 1884 - present
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DATE: 03/08/2004 06:40:50 AM
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The Burpee Seed Company has put an archive of its seed-catalog covers, stretching back to 1884, online. They are remarkable. Ethan, who suggested the link, notes that the 1945 wartime catalog features a subtle V-for-Victory rhubarb (chard?) and bomb-shaped carrots.
Link
(Thanks, Ethan!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sexy martian game-controller
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DATE: 03/08/2004 06:48:19 AM
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The Nostromo is a new programmable game-controller from Belkin, with over 100 configurable key-combos and a sweet configurator. The rad, (useful-for-the-right-handed-only) alien appearance is allegedly ergonomically optmized for twitch-gaming and the Tom's Hardware reviewer says that it's also a pretty good paintmonkey's Photoshop-controller. Man, this thing is teh s3xy.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Susannah Breslin art-comic "My, My American Bukkake Too"
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DATE: 03/08/2004 07:32:25 AM
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"You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?" author Susannah Breslin has a new graphic work up on Artbomb. It's all about her experiences witnessing bukkake video shoots in Porn Valley. Brilliant. It's art, not porn, but deals with explicit subject matter so may or may not be worksafe. To quote Warren, go and have a look.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Television Zen
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DATE: 03/08/2004 07:38:10 AM
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(1) test cards
(2) logo animations
(3) vintage kids shows
(4) rainbow
(5) tv weebl
(6) law & order: plot generator
(7) commercial break
(8) law & order: artistic intent
(9) television heaven
(10) zap-o-matik
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Klingon is copyrighted
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DATE: 03/08/2004 08:35:08 AM
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The Klingon language is apparently copyrighted by Paramount Studios. The nonprofit Klingon Language Institute does not distribute any kind of canonical Klingon-English dictionary, because it fears litigation from Star Trek's parent company.
But the problem is, the Klingon language belongs to Paramount; it's copyrighted. If someone started distributing lists of Klingon words (or descriptions of grammar, etc.), then Paramount might view this as competition for the legitimate sale of their own products, which would be A Bad Thing.
Besides, the very act of compiling your own list, even if it's just from TKD , can be extremely educational
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TITLE: Is Klingon copyrighted?
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DATE: 03/08/2004 09:53:11 AM
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Ernie the Attorney Ernest Miller analyses the question, "Can the Klingon language be copyrighted?"
However, can you really copyright a language? You can copyright a dictionary, certainly, but can you copyright grammar? I'm not sure you can copyright grammar at all, since it is a set of rules regarding word usage. Grammar is an idea, that can probably only be expressed in a fairly limited number of ways, even if fanciful.
Additionally, each Klingon word would seem to be too short to qualify as copyrightable individually. I don't think that a list of words in a dictionary format would be copyrightable under Feist. So, I'm not sure at all how one could copyright a language. The individual descriptions of the words might be copyrightable, but as long as they aren't exact copies, the idea/expression dichotomy should provide only limited copyright protection to Paramount.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool comic about birds and death and stuff.
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DATE: 03/08/2004 10:39:30 AM
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Susannah spotted this lovely comic art piece by this guy (via Keaner).
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: So, you wanna be a pyro?
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DATE: 03/08/2004 10:46:27 AM
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BoingBoing buddy Hutch (pyrotechnics guru who works on the Burning of the Man, as well as Hollywood stuff) points us to a series of workshops in Southern California where you can learn to operate fireworks and do pyro stage effects.
The seminars cost only $15 each to attend (what is that in Starbusian currency, like, four venti cappucinos?), and they're offered by a group called Fireworks America. This year, they'll be held in three locations: March 13 - Los Angeles area, March 20 - San Diego area, March 27 - Stockton area. Hutch says, "This is a great opportunity to learn more about fireworks and stage effects. Courses are available for every level of experience. There will be special 'get your license' training for those that want it (please note: this is for Public Display and Theatrical licenses, it does not include Special Effects licensing information). These seminars are always informative and a lot of fun! I learn new stuff every time I attend. If you're interested in doing more shows, this is the place to meet other operators and get on their crews."
Attendees must be 18 years or older. And if you're coming with no prior experience or pyro scene connections, don't expect to walk away with an invitation to join someone's crew. For good reasons, that tends to take time, say folks in the biz. To RSVP for one of the seminars, FIRST visit this link for background info, then call Ashley or Dianna at 800-464-7976, and for more background visit the Fireworks America site.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chernobyl Poems and photos of Lybov Sirota
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DATE: 03/08/2004 10:47:40 AM
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Following up on last week's post about a woman's photoblogging-by-motorcycle in the Chernobyl dead zone, this somewhat older collection of poems by a Chernobyl survivor -- and an online collection of images documenting her journey back to the site.
Lybov Sirota once worked as director of a writing program for children near the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. Before April 25th, 1986, she'd never written poetry. That night, she needed a breath of fresh air; she walked out on her balcony in Pripyat and watched Chernobyl's nuclear reactor explode. The radioactivity exposure caused Sirota and her son, Sasha, to become very ill. She began writing poetry about the experience. In 2000, her son persuaded her make a pilgrimage to their their former home; that journey is documented here.
Link to poems, Link to photo series.
(Thanks, muonzoo.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Korean Robot Wants to Guard Your Home
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DATE: 03/08/2004 10:55:37 AM
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BoingBoing pal du Paris Roland Piquepaille says:
There's a new robot in town who wants to guard your home. This new security robot, which currently has no name, is designed by the Korean company Mostitech and will be distributed starting in June by Korea's top mobile carrier, SK Telecom. With its price tag of only $850, it will be a serious competitor for Banryu, which costs $18,000. The unnamed robot is 50 centimeters tall and weighs only 12 kilograms. In case of emergency, such as a fire, its cameras can take snapshots and send them to the owner's cell phone. Likewise, if an unexpected visitor is entering your home, you'll receive his picture on your phone. It also can entertain your kids by reading them a book. The Korea Times tells us the story while this overview provides some pictures of the cute unnamed robot.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tribe.net tribe of the day -- Die, Charles Shaw, Die!
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DATE: 03/08/2004 12:17:40 PM
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Oh, how I love this. There's an actual tribe on Tribe.net called "Anti-Two-Buck-Chuck," for people who are sick of other people bringing the infamous brand of dollar-ninety-nine wine from Trader Joe's to parties and potlucks and whatnot. For the record, If I invite you to my house for a party, and the invitation says BYOB, which it wouldn't, but I'm just saying, I'd rather that you bring a brown bag of fo'teez than Charles Shaw, plus it would cost less anyway. Link
Update: Better yet, why not go for Bum Wine? Even cheaper than Charles Shaw, offering a heady bouquet with crack-whore insouciance and subtle drainpipe undertones. (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How news travels through blogs
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DATE: 03/08/2004 12:45:37 PM
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A reader writes, "Stephen VanDyke analyzes how news travels on the Internet. He uses a nifty graphic that resembles a kabbalah diagram. (In the process of doing this, VanDyke's post becomes a textbook example of how news travels."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ted Williams' son, cryonics believer, dead at 35
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DATE: 03/08/2004 02:03:54 PM
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Howard Lovy's NanoBot alerts us to the death of John-Henry Williams, son of baseball great Ted Williams who was put in a cryogenic deep freeze in 2002. Apparently, John-Henry and his sister signed a pact with their father declaring their desire to be frozen. No word though on whether John-Henry went through with it.
Link
Update: bb reader Bryan Maloney points us to an ESPN.com article that says: "The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, citing family sources, reported John Henry Williams' remains were delivered to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., where his famous father's body has been stored since his death."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Passion of the iPod
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DATE: 03/08/2004 06:53:15 PM
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iGod: an iPod ad parody that speaks to the Mel Gibson Vanity Project zeitgeist.
Link
(Thanks, bturner!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Signing Sunday in Austin at SXSW
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DATE: 03/08/2004 07:54:53 PM
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A reminder of my upcoming Austin signing, this Sunday:
I will be signing copies of Eastern Standard Tribe Austin at the SXSW conference, immediately following the Bloggie Award Ceremony on the trade-floor.
March 15, 1:30PM, at the book signing area of the SXSW
Interactive Festival Trade Show & Exhibition on the third floor of
the Austin Convention Center.
If you're not a registered attendee at SXSW, you can get a free trade-floor pass here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tattoo shirts for the illusion of full-body tatts
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DATE: 03/09/2004 04:01:00 AM
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Sleeves Clothing sells translucent clingy shirts that "give you the realistic illusion of tattoos" -- essentially, these are skin-tight, thin undershirts covered in fake tattoos to allow you the look of full-body tatts without the permanence, pain, sagging or disapprobation.
Link
(Thanks, bturner!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Filthy origami
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DATE: 03/09/2004 04:05:55 AM
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This collection of dirty origami -- mostly explicit sexual stuff -- is hilarious. The Kama Sutra pieces are nice, and folding a vulva out of a dollar bill is a great dinner-table trick, but they're not a patch on this pooping doggy origami.
Link
(via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Burn CD labels along with data
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DATE: 03/09/2004 04:10:12 AM
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The new HP DVD/CD burners can use their built-in lasers to etch a high-rez, monochrome image right into the surface of the disc, obviating the need for printing labels and sticking them onto the platter. They're due in six months, will cost $10 more than current DVD/CD burners, and will require special media that "will cost about a dime more than today's discs" -- no word on whether "today's discs" are the premium CD blanks that go for $1 or more, or the el-cheapo ones you buy in hundred-packs for $3 through web-specials, though I suspect the former, since HP has almost certainly locked up production of these discs through patents...
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod media reader offloads digital camera memory into your MP3 player
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DATE: 03/09/2004 04:13:13 AM
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Belkin has shipped a six-in-one media reader that plugs into your iPod -- plug the reader into your iPod, stick the Compact Flash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick or whatnot from your camera into the reader, and your photos are offloaded onto the iPod's hard-drive, freeing you up to take new shots. When you get home, plug your iPod into your computer and offload your archived photos. Smart, smart, smart.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory tells Gizmodo what's in his pocketses
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DATE: 03/09/2004 05:52:33 AM
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I did a mini-interview with Gizmodo yesterday, in which I was asked to empty my pocketses and talk about what gadgets I was carrying and why:
Fido Vtech prepaid mobile: this is the worst mobile phone I've ever owned. I have a bottom-of-the-line Nokia I use in Europe and a similar one that T-Mobile sold me in San Fran, and when I turned up in Toronto last week, I figured I'd just put a prepaid SIM into that one and go with it. However, the scumbags at T-Mobile *locked* the fucking thing, which meant that I had to go buy *another* phone (that's THREE phones in total, now!) and I ended up buying the Vtech used for 60 Canadian pesos at a counter in a Chinatown mall. It receives and sends SMS, but it doesn't have T9, so it's basically impossible to use for texting. The UI is utterly martian, like something designed by throwing dice, and the phone itself feels like it's made out of dried spittle and chewed-up paper. Worst. Ringtones. Evar. Oh, and it's FUCKING LOCKED to Fido. Rilly. Christ.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sociology of tissue and organ donation
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DATE: 03/09/2004 06:03:26 AM
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Brilliant sociological analysis of organ and tissue donation and the relation and disjoint thereof to the gift-economy on the Crooked Timber groupblog.
Over the past twenty years or so in the United States, a very large and complex system of tissue procurement and distribution has grown up, mostly to service the demand created by new medical technologies. Some of these, like heart and kidney transplants, enjoy broad public support. Others, like the use of processed cadaveric skin for lip enhancement and penis enlargement, bone screws for orthopedic surgery or cadavers in automobile crash tests are less well known.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Prankster writes Dear Abby letter based on Simpsons episode
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:14:42 AM
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Some wise-ass Simpsons fan wrote a letter to "Dear Abby" based on an episode of the popular Fox network show. "Abby"'s response was yanked prior to print.
In both the letter and the Simpsons episode, the husbands grow suspicious when they stumble across bowling gloves - obvious gifts to their wives from the other man. In the television show, Homer responds by ineptly professing his love for Marge, who later goes to him at the nuclear power plant where he works. He lifts her up and carries her out of the plant as his co-workers watch and cheer. (...) Jeanne Phillips, who writes Dear Abby, told "Stuck" to tell her husband why she strayed. "To save the marriage," she wrote, "he might be willing to change back to the man who bowled you over in the first place."
Link (thanks, Jonno mas fabuloso!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Satellite news feeds of DARPA Grand Challenge
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:20:39 AM
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If you (1) are a robot-lovin' geek, and (2) have access to satellite communications, aim your dish toward the raw news feed from the DARPA Grand Challenge Race kickoff on March 13. If you lack (2), find someone who does, and badger/bribe/beg them into taping or TiVoing it for you. According to Paul Grayson (by way of an informal Grand Challenge e-mail list), DARPA will provide same-day coverage via satellite of the Grand Challenge start and highlights on Saturday, March 13 at the following times: Live coverage of the start: 6:30 - 8:30 Pacific/9:30 - 11:30 a.m. Eastern Video news release: 11:00 - 11:30 a.m. Pacific/2:00 - 2:30 p.m. Eastern. Coordinates for both feeds: Satellite: AMC 9, Ku, Transponder 03. Space is: 36 MHz. Downlink Frequency: 11760.000. Downlink Polarity: Vertical.
Related updates on the race in today's Wired News, here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Food porn: saliva-inducing gyoza gallery
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:27:28 AM
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Asia foodie, B2.0 senior editor, and former guestblogger Todd Lappin confesses:
While looking for a good recipe to make gyoza (Japanese dumplings) last night, I came across this luridly graphic website, which shows how the delicious treat is made. Step-by-step, full color gallery! Hot hot hot hand-wrapping action! No password required! I haven't seen anything this seductive since the ramen scene at the beginning of Tampopo. Be advised: Probably not work-safe before lunch or dinner. Here is the picture that's worth 1000 words.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Museum of Bad Art
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:37:34 AM
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The Museum Of Bad Art (MOBA) is the world's only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition and celebration of bad art in all its forms. "We do not tire in our efforts to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences," reads the MOBA manifesto. At left, the piece that started it all -- Lucy In the Field With Flowers, oil on canvas by Unknown, acquired from the trash in Boston. "The motion, the chair, the sway of her breast, the subtle hues of the sky, the expression on her face -- every detail combines to create this transcendent and compelling portrait, every detail cries out masterpiece."
Link to MOBA's online collection (via Buffoonery). BoingBoing's founder, the ever-prescient Mark Frauenfelder, covered this years ago in Wired Mag -- Link to article.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sick, surreal, dark QT short -- Beauty Kit
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:55:23 AM
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The nightmarish QuickTime short "Beauty Kit" parodies toy ads for children, instructional health videos, and modern-day body image psychosis by way of a do-it-yourself breast augmentation kit for young girls. When you live in LA, this is not such a far stretch of imagination: I've heard testimony from SoCal teens of late-teenage daughters in wealthy families receiving plastic surgery as gifts from adult family members. For real. While you're on this site, check out the rest of pleix.net's short films, which are fantastic. For instance, e-baby -- utterly chilling.
Link (from Ticklefight, via El Fabuloso Mas Macho).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy Birthday, dear Feedster.
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DATE: 03/09/2004 10:35:54 AM
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Feedster turned one year old yesterday. Happy Birthday, and congrats to Scott Rafer, Scott Johnson, and François Schiettecatte. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Top ten rules of Bollywood
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DATE: 03/09/2004 10:42:58 AM
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The essential list of required ingredients in Indian popular cinema:
# Two brothers separated in childhood will always grow up on different sides of the law. The law-breaker, however, will suddenly turn over a new leaf before the end, bash up the villain (who is the real bad guy), and be pardoned for all his sins before the last-scene family reunion.
# Any movie involving lost+found brothers will have a song sung by:
(a) the brothers
(b) their blind mother (but of course, she has to be blind in order to regain her sight in the climax)
(c) the family dog/cat.
The amazing thing is that these folks remember the song after 20 years in the movie, and you can't remember it 2 minutes after coming out of the theatre.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steve Ballmer's iPod ad
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DATE: 03/09/2004 11:05:22 AM
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Steve Balmer's infamous dance-monkeyboy-dance video, rendered as a moving iPod sillhouette ad.
Link
(Thanks, Nick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Human monkeys already know who their friends are, even without a YASNS to help
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DATE: 03/09/2004 11:54:45 AM
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Clay Shirky's posted a nice little analysis of the evolving user-interfaces for social network services on Many2Many. The thing he nails down really tight here is that negotiating friendship is something we're actually pretty good at -- until we're asked to port representations of those relationships to the digital realm. Computers are best used to do stuff that's hard or boring (repetitious counting and sorting, for example) and, IMO, it's a bad idea to ask them to take something that's neither hard nor boring and make it a little of both in the service off some ill-defined reward. By which I mean: I already know who my friends are, and it's not hard to know that; but exposing an exhaustive list of my nuanced social relations is damned hard, and none of the YASNSes offer me any serious benefit for doing so.
[N]ow [Orkut has] added this linear scale of friendship that would be laughed out of a freshman sociology course, and then they say tell me the data is private. Of course it's not private -- that data isn't for me, it's for Orkut. I don't need it in the first place, because I am a monkey, descended from a long line of such monkeys, whose main talent consists of keeping track of relationships. Measured on the time scale of our social capacity, fire is a recent invention and agriculture is still a novelty.
The "how good a friend are they" data is useless or worse for me, but useful for Orkut, because they are desperate to represent social networks numerically, which is why they keep adding things to an interface they should be subtracting things from. The problem isn't the cost or refinement of accepting a friendship transaction, the problem is that friendship isn't a transaction, something almost no social networking service understands.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark's guestblog at The Industry Standard
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DATE: 03/09/2004 12:43:32 PM
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I'm guestblogging at the resurrected Industry Standard. Come on by. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin
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DATE: 03/09/2004 01:55:02 PM
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Nice interview with Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh project at Apple and bOING bOING contributor.
very confused as to its use and when I was designing the software for the Macintosh, in designing the interface, I figured that if there was only one button, there would never be any question on what you have to press the number of ways of using a one-button mouse. I think this was probably a mistake, in fact there is an appendix in my book which discusses why I think this was a mistake and what I think I should have done. One of the reasons I made the mistake is that there is a certain school of industrial design dating back to the Bauhaus which says that designs have to be simple, uncluttered, and clean. In particular, don't put writing on it except for brand names or logos. If we had had a multiple-button mouse with two keys, labeled something like "select" and "activate," it would have been much easier to use, but the idea of putting writing on keys did not occur to anybody, including me. So if I was designing one today, it would have two buttons and they would be labeled. The labeling also the other good effect of forcing software designers to use them as labels otherwise it's clear that they are being misused.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wacky Packs revival
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DATE: 03/09/2004 02:14:25 PM
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Topps is bringing back Wacky Packs stickers. The original series included illustrations from Art Spiegelman and Norman Saunders and lampooned the brands of the 70s; the new series will bring back some of the original talent to mock modern brands -- for example, turning "Ring Pops" into "Bling Pups."
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Obesity, inactivity overtaking tobacco as top USA death cause
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DATE: 03/09/2004 02:29:48 PM
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This online data chart released today by the Center for Disease Control shows that lack of physical activity and poor nutrition are catching up to smoking as a top cause of death in the United States. There's an analysis in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association (link), and a summary here from AP.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PhoneCon 1876 program
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:36:44 PM
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This notional bumpf for an 1876 PhoneCon, celebrating the marvel of the voice network, is funnier'n hell.
As you know, the emerging power of the Telephone as a tool to shape democracy, our flour and cotton mills, and our understanding of Rhode Islanders, is just beginning to be understood. That's why it's so important for telephoners to get together in person to talk about talking on the phone.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
-Do you have a telephone?
-Do you talk on your phone regularly?
-Do you wonder where the telephone's headed?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF is suing the FCC over the Broadcast Flag!
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:40:05 PM
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W00H00! EFF is suing the friggin' FCC for sucking up to the Hollywood studios and enacting the loathesome Broadcast Flag without a shred of evidence that it was necessary and without a shred of evidence that it could stop "piracy" -- unless, by "piracy," you mean "inventing VCR-like technologies without the permission of scaredy-cat studio execs." So we're suing them! I love my job.
"The FCC's digital broadcast television mandate is a step in the wrong direction because it would make digital television cost more and do less, undermining innovation, fair use, and competition," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann, "The FCC overstepped its bounds, unduly restricting consumers and manufacturers when it issued its broadcast flag ruling..."
The lawsuit, called ALA v. FCC, was filed in the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., and charges that the FCC exceeded its jurisdiction, acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, and failed to point to substantial evidence in adopting a broadcast flag mandate.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pickup Pokemon tourney planned for NYC subway
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:41:57 PM
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Priceless Craig's List post from a Pokemon addict looking for co-religionists to do group-gaming on an NYC subway car.
I've been playing Pokémon Sapphire on the N expréss each morning from 59th St. to Union Square. If anyone else is commuting from Sunset Park to Manhattan each morning let's coordinate our schedules so we can battle, make pokéblocks, trade rare pokémon and éxchange ideas for training harder and raising our pokémon to greater heights of pokéness.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nader kicks Mastercard's ass in fair-use fight
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DATE: 03/09/2004 08:45:25 PM
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Ralph "Don't Run" Nader has won a key legal battle against Mastercard. Mastercard sued Nader over a parody of its "priceless" ad campaign that Nader maintained was a fair use -- and today the NY Southern District Court ruled in Nader's favor. My cow-orker Jason Schultz has the scoop.
Back in 2000, Ralph Nader ran a bunch of ads critiquing the corporate interests behind the Bush and Gore campaigns. To make his point, he used the style and some of ideas behind MasterCard's "Priceless" ad campaign -- specifically calling out the dollar amounts that corporate interests paid to candidates to secure their positions on the issues.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Building a-crawl with furniture
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DATE: 03/10/2004 03:59:09 AM
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My cow-orker Ren shot this amazing photo of a building in San Francisco's SOMA, whose owner has apparently decided that affixing old furniture to its outer walls will make it easier to sell.
804K JPEG Link)
(via Trubble)
A couple people point out that this is an art installation (Thanks, Paul and John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unlock your Nokia
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DATE: 03/10/2004 04:00:43 AM
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Good, comprehensive guide to unlocking mobile phones by Schuyler Earle. Anyone know when I can get a phone-unlocker for OS X? Update: You can always use the Web-based unlocker if you don't mind sending a stranger your IMEI.
The locktype, according to unlockme.co.uk, is usually 2, unless you're on a 3650 or 7650, in which case it's 5. The IMEI is the hardware serial number of your phone, which you can read off the inside label underneath the battery, or retrieve from the phone itself by dialing *#06#. Finally, you'll need the provider code, which is a 5-digit number you can pull from this network provider code list. Unlock code calculators give you seven different codes, at least one of which should unlock the phone when entered with the SIM removed, but you only get five tries, before the phone locks you out. So, you really want to double-check your work before entering would-be unlock codes into the phone.
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(Thanks, Schulyer!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ICANN's tongue slithers further up Verisign's foetid backside
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DATE: 03/10/2004 04:09:43 AM
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The lickspittles of ICANN have granted a Verisign proposal to allow people to place standing orders for domains, in order to snarf them up the minute they expire.
During ICANN's weeklong meetings in Rome last week, the VeriSign-proposed back-ordering service drew criticism during periods of public comment, according to registrars who attended. To Ric Chambers, managing principal of registrar R. Lee Chambers Co. LLC of Ooltewah, Tenn., a plaintiff in the ICANN lawsuit, the board seemed determined to approve the service regardless of the objections raised in Rome.
"It is hard to reconcile the level of disagreement on the WLS and a vote of the board," Chambers said in a statement. "It suggests that there was more going on here this week than was seen and heard in the public meetings."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Show iPod battery-status as numeric value
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DATE: 03/10/2004 06:11:26 AM
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Toggle iPod Battery Status is an AppleScript that switches your iPod battery display to a numeric value between zero and 500.
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(Thanks, Hamish!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vincent Gallo's Ebay Listing
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DATE: 03/10/2004 07:25:26 AM
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Vincent Gallo is evidently selling the film production package he used to shoot the "outstandingly bad" movie Brown Bunny on eBay. The listing is a characteristically Gallic stream-of-consciousness screed. Current bidding stands at $86,800 for a kit that includes Stanley Kubrick's legendary Barry Lyndon lens. And what Vincent Gallo eBay listing would be complete without gratuitous third-person references to Vincent Gallo, and abundant ad hominem attacks on the likes of filmmakers Spike Jonze, Darren Aronofsky and Wes Anderson? Ambiguous cinematic sex act not included. Link (update: I'll need to start waking up a hell of a lot earlier to scoop Choire Sicha, who covered this on Gawker last Friday -- that's, like, a whole lifetime in blog-years. I'm losing my edge.) Update 2: Boingboing reader and admitted "film dork" chandler says, "i just wanted to point out that the lens in the gallo kits isn't THE famous barry lyndon lens. by THE i mean the Zeiss f0.7 lens used to shoot the candlelight scenes. it's the other lens, the super long zoom lens used for some of the wonderful super-flat shots."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Evoting perils summed up neatly
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DATE: 03/10/2004 07:40:09 AM
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Dan Gillmor has posted a very good, concise analysis of the perils of electric voting in the wake of an Orange County vote where the loss of thousands of ballots was discounted because the race was won by a wide enough margin that the lost votes don't matter -- even though no one knows how many votes were lost.
Look. I'm a fan of installing modern equipment to make elections better. If the machines work right they'll be better than what we had. But these are computers, and computers are flawed devices. Software behaves in unpredictable ways, and rogue programmers or hackers can create havoc.
Meanwhile, as we've seen, the hardworking poll workers can make mistakes. They're human.
What we need is a backup and verification system that combines the best of computers and people but doesn't absolutely rely on programmers and people to get everything right every time. Such as system exists: It's called paper.
A paper printout could be used to recount in close elections, instead of trusting the "garbage in, garbage out" system that invites us not to trust it. It could be used for random checks, as a precaution.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dating site for activists
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DATE: 03/10/2004 07:45:02 AM
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Actforlove is a dating site for activists, complete with a write-your-Congresscritter tool for sending in letters to support Emergency Contraception. I always suspected that one reason for the popularity of the Dean MeetUps was that they were a way of coming out as a liberal in a political climate where lefty love dare not speak its name: with Actforlove, you can be sure that your date won't have a copy of The Fountainhead sitting on the toilet-tank.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web usability design book "Don't Make Me Think"
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DATE: 03/10/2004 07:45:21 AM
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Snipped from the latest edition of Kevin Kelly's newsletter "Cool Tools:"
Here, a cure for badly designed web pages. (This is major news since everything is now on the web.) Follow Krug's key heuristic: "Don't make me think." It works. His manual is a model of what it preaches. It is the best, clearest, succinct hands-on guide for amateurs and pros engaged in making the web a useable public space. You don't need a consultant; you need this book. I pray everyone reads and obey. Excerpts:
* When you're creating a site, your job is to get rid of the question marks.
*We don't read pages. We scan them.
*Create a clear visual hierarchy. One of the best ways to make a page easy to grasp in a hurry is to make sure that the appearance of the things on the page -- all of the visual cues -- clearly and accurately portray the relationships between the things on the page.
*Jakob Nielsen and Tom Landauer have shown that testing five users will tend to uncover 85 percent of a site's usability problems, and that there is a serious case of diminishing returns for additional users.
Link to amazon.com listing for Steve Krug's "Dont Make Me Think". For more Krugian wisdom, check out this recent interview: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kenwood's Gernsbacksploitation retro-futuristic ads
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DATE: 03/10/2004 07:51:32 AM
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Kenwood's new retro-future ads (for personal jetpacks, trips to the moon and home robots) are very clever Gernsbacksploitation media, tapping straight into the future-scarcastic receptors in my brain.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Print houses from CAD drawings using an adobe-extruding robot
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DATE: 03/10/2004 07:59:00 AM
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A USC roboticist has built a robot for "printing" houses that can extrude cement or adobe and shape it using trowel-manipulators to a CAD-represented spec.
The key to the technology is a computer-guided nozzle that deposits a line of wet concrete, like toothpaste being squeezed onto a table. Two trowels attached to the nozzle then move to shape the deposit. The robot repeats its journey many times to raise the height and builds hollow walls before returning to fill them.
Engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis, at the University of Southern California, has been perfecting his "contour crafter" for more than a year. "The goal is to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands," he says.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Variety's "Porning Report" blog shuts down
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DATE: 03/10/2004 08:00:29 AM
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Fleshbot notes that the pr0n-themed weblog penned by AVN's Frank Meyer and launched by Variety is closing down with far less fanfare than surrounded its launch. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Masonic Mishap
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DATE: 03/10/2004 08:22:01 AM
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The New York Times reports that on Monday night, a ritual inside Patchogue, NY's Southside Masonic Lodge No. 493 ended with the accidental killing of a new initiate. Another member shot him in the face. The shooter was carrying two guns, one with blanks and one with live ammo, and grabbed the wrong one during the ritual. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fonts used in Disney parks
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DATE: 03/10/2004 08:36:57 AM
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This is a wonderful list of faces employed in incidental typography in the Disney parks, including links to freeware versions of many of the fonts.
# Albertus - Animal Kingdom (entrance area signage), Norway
# Algerian - MK monorail station, Main Street, Haunted Mansion Fastpass, etc.
# Americana - Main Street, Liberty Square
# Anna - Tomorrowland logo/signage, Studios, etc.
# Antique Olive - Soarin'
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(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Idiotic revengeware security software to ship
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DATE: 03/10/2004 09:12:59 AM
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An infosec company is launching an idiotic revenge tool that launches DDoS attacks and blackholes hosts that are believed to be involved in DDoSing their customers, justifying it with a bunch of high-flown hooie about "rules of engagement for information warfare." Nevermind the likelihood that the "attackers" in these situations are almost certainly compromised PCs, hijacked into participating, and the necessity of collateral damage to nearby machines when DDoSing or blacklisting a host.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush flip-flops
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DATE: 03/10/2004 09:42:00 AM
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The Bush campaign is running ads attacking Kerry for being a flip-flopper. Here's a few Bush flip-flops from dailykos.com.
Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he's for it.
Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.
Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.
Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.
Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.
Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.
Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.
Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.
Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.
Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.
Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits
Bush-"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. Bush-"I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care.
Bush claims to be in favor of the environment and then secretly starts drilling on Padre Island.
Bush talks about helping education and increases mandates while cutting funding.
Bush first says the U.S. won't negotiate with North Korea. Now he will
Bush goes to Bob Jones University. Then say's he shouldn't have.
Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq. Later Bush announced he would not call for a vote
Bush said the "mission accomplished" banner was put up by the sailors. Bush later admits it was his advance team.
Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the US. Bush after meeting with Pres. Fox, he's against it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Crimefighting Hong Kong robot
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DATE: 03/10/2004 10:19:56 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
There is a new cop patrolling the streets of Hong Kong and teaching children how to prevent crime. But it's a robot, named Robotcop III, designed and built in Hong Kong, tells us Channel Newsasia. Robotcop III can walk, dance, move in any direction, display videos and answer questions asked in Cantonese and English. The previous versions of Robotcops, introduced in 1988 and 1995, were imported from the U.S. and taught 800,000 school children how to fight crime. The promoters of Robotcop III hope it will do even better. More details and references are available in this overview including a photo of Robotcop III patrolling on Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) campus.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harvard comps tuition for low-income students
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DATE: 03/10/2004 11:39:09 AM
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Harvard is waiving tuition for students from families with less than $40,000 in income.
"Too often, outstanding students from families of modest means do not believe that college is an option for them, much less an Ivy League university," Summers said at the recent meeting of the American Council on Education in Miami, according to a transcript published by Harvard. "Our doors have long been open to talented students regardless of financial need, but many students simply do not know or believe this. We are determined to change both the perception and the reality."
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(Thanks, Nick!)
Update: Princeton's been at this for ages. (Thanks, Drew!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Suicide attack on Turkish Masonic lodge
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DATE: 03/10/2004 11:48:44 AM
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The Masons have had a tough couple of days.
The bombers yesterday blew themselves up at the entrance of the lodge after opening fire on some 40 people in the private dining hall. One person was killed and five others were hurt
Link (Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lessig speaks at Wired event in NYC @ 92nd St. Y
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DATE: 03/10/2004 01:42:41 PM
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As part of an ongoing series presented by Wired Magazine, Lawrence Lessig will speak at the 92nd street Y in Manhattan on March 23rd. The talk is titled "Free Culture: Creativity and Its Enemies." .
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Warren Ellis's Mek and Reload omnibus edition
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DATE: 03/10/2004 04:54:39 PM
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It's Wednesday, which means the new funnybooks are out. I'm using The Beguiling as my interim comix shop while working on the next novel in Toronto, and tonight, they had a very nice surprise for me: a perfect bound omnibus edition of two of Warren Ellis's short-series stories: Mek and Reload.
Reload's a great action story, a lot of fun, but it's Mek that's the real standout here. Mek is like Asimov's Robots stories told by Hunter S Thompson after overdosing on Ralph Ellison: a caustic and corrosive story about body-modders who get the machinery the fetishize implanted in their flesh, and the discrimination they face as a result. (Also noteworthy: this is, as far as I know, the only comic to mention the EFF in dialogue).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Linux-based managed access-point from Sputnik
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DATE: 03/10/2004 04:58:15 PM
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Sputnik has shipped the next generation of its Linux-based, open source managed WiFi AP. At $185, it's the cheapest managed AP on the market, with some of the coolest features (though in most contexts I think I'd just advise shopping for el-cheapo no-name APs for $30 per and connecting them to a $50 a month DSL and making your money back in extra lattes, rather than paying for a managed solution).
The Sputnik AP 160 utilizes a customizeable captive portal that requires end-users to authenticate with their username and password before they can access the wireless network.
Additional wireless and wired devices connected through the AP 160’s built-in four-port router are also authenticated and managed by Sputnik Control Center. Simply plug third-party APs into the back of the Sputnik AP 160; end-users who associate with those APs are authenticated and tracked. The same principle applies to end-users who connect directly to the LAN ports.
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(via Sifry)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Working drafts of Gillmor's new book online
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DATE: 03/10/2004 05:00:58 PM
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Dan Gillmor has posted the Preface and Chapter One from Making the News, his forthcoming book about journalism in the Internet age. Gillmor is the best writer and thinker on this subject that I know, and his willingness to open source not just the book, but also his writing of it, is extraordinarily brave and visionary.
If Tom Paine showed the power of personal journalism, so did the muckrakers at the end of the 19th Century. They, more than most newspapers of the era, performed the public service function of journalism: exposing the anticompetitive predations of the robber barons and cruel conditions in workplaces, among a variety of outrages. Lincoln Steffens ("The Shame of the Cities"), Ida Tarbell ("History of the Standard Oil Company"), Jacob Ris ("How the Other Half Lives") and Upton Sinclair ("The Jungle") were among the daring journalists and novelists who shone daylight into some dark corners of society, and set a standard for the investigative journalists of the new century.
Personal journalism didn't die with the muckrakers. Throughout the 20th Century, the world has been blessed with individuals who found ways to work outside the mainstream of the moment. One of my journalistic heroes is I.F. Stone, whose weekly, and later bi-weekly, newsletter was required reading for a generation of Washington insiders.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland's hand-drawn type
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DATE: 03/10/2004 05:02:59 PM
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Beautiful gallery of hand-drawn typography at Disneyland.
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TITLE: Urgent: Anyone high-placed at Yahoo Groups reading this?
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DATE: 03/10/2004 05:11:49 PM
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If there are any Boing Boing readers who know anyone highly placed at Yahoo Groups, could you please ask her or him to email me? My YGroups account is royally screwed up and there appears to be no way to un-screw it. Pretty please?
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TITLE: Snoopy people offended at the pr0n on others' in-car DVDs
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DATE: 03/10/2004 05:26:38 PM
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CNN reports on the growing "problem" of people catching glimpses of dirty DVDs screening in other people's cars, and then getting angry because their snoopy peeking through someone else's car-window has exposed them to pr0n. So now, a bunch of lawmakers are trying to figure out if it should be illegal to watch skin movies in your car. Of course.
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TITLE: Army blows up surplus med-school cadavers
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DATE: 03/10/2004 06:17:05 PM
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Surplus corpses donated to Tulane Med School were sold to the Army to be blown up in land-mine tests. Guess it's a less ignoble end than being the cadaver at the alumni dinner or the arm left hanging from the toll-booth.
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TITLE: Mashup up of Flaming Lips, MLK and Public Enemy
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DATE: 03/10/2004 06:26:58 PM
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This Kleptones (now, that's a band-name) have released a mash-up of the Flaming Lips's "Are You a Hypnotist", Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get to Arizona" kicks ass.
4.7 MP3 Link
(via Scott Bateman, thanks Dan!)
More Kleptones mashups here -- thanks, Boogah!
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TITLE: Three hilarious remixes of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
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DATE: 03/10/2004 06:37:53 PM
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Yoz Grahame has remixed my novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with a bunch of really whacky and wildly imaginative perl scripts:
* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (CAPIPA Remix) - in which the original has its words reordered alphabetically, using PIPA's new cousin, CAPIPA, which retains capitalisation.
"Beautiful," BEAUTY beauty, became. BECAME because because because because because because -- because because because because because because because because because because because because because because become become become become become become become bed bed bed. bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed, bed bed bedroom bedroom bedroom-bedroom beds bedside bedside bedside.
* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (Sausages & Mash Remix) - in which the original has all words beginning with the letters S and M replaced with "Sausage" and "Mash" respectively, in accordance with the classic children's game.
He chuckled. "No sausage, not mash. I'm into the kind of mash sausage that you only come across on-world."
* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (More And Bloodier Wars Remix) - in which the original is run through Babelfish several times, from English to French to German and back to English again.
I never thought that I would live, in order to arise, where the maintenance would decide A-Movin ' Dan at the person in possession of a favour light up to the death of the heat of the universe.
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TITLE: New DARPA Grand Challenge live action website
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DATE: 03/10/2004 07:34:46 PM
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Just launched: a website promising live virtual coverage of this weekend's Grand Challenge race, in which robotic vehicles will race accross the California desert.
Live Tracking will show relative positions of the Challenge entrants, and requires a 7 MB download each time you use your browser to view the tracking. The Status Board provides a 30 second update of the status of each Challenge team. The Image Gallery will contain the most recent images from the Challenge, updated nightly through March 14.
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TITLE: Morrissey gets a job coloring book
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:06:56 AM
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Morrissey Gets a Job is a clip-art-chic coloring book about Morrissey's post-rockstar career as a salaryman.
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(Thanks, Francis!)
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TITLE: Disney builds a Green Line at Disneyland
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:08:56 AM
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Disneyland is adding a Green Line -- a security gate to "stop terrorists."
Reality is coming to Disneyland's fantasy world, in the form of permanent security gates. Bowing to terrorism fears, the Walt Disney Co. plans to build the gates at the Disneyland Resort next fall. The company had resisted security gates around Disneyland and the California Adventure theme park next door, believing the sense of fantasy would be spoiled.
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(Thanks, Ian!)
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TITLE: Black, magnetic silly putty
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:10:21 AM
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Puttyworld sells a $9 magnetic silly putty substance -- and it's goth black to boot.
Black Thinking Putty noticably responds to a magnet. Try pulling out a thin strand with your fingers and holding the magnet nearby. Or roll it into a ball and watch it roll right to the magnet, even uphill. The stronger the magnet the better the result, Neodymium Iron Boron works best. You can purchase some from our accessories category.
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TITLE: GOP shifts priorities, advocates Cheeseburger Bill while Rome burns
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:13:33 AM
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Republican lawmakers are trying to enact the "Cheeseburger Bill," which will sheild restaurant chains from lawsuits fo inducing super-sized obesity in their customers.
Opponents said the legislation was unnecessary and irresponsible in light of this week's government report identifying obesity as a condition fast catching up to tobacco as the No. 1 preventable cause of death in the United States. Democrats said the fact that the House was devoting almost a full day to the proposal illustrated the misplaced priorities of the Republican majority.
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TITLE: O'Franken Factor liberal radio show begs Bill O'Reilly to sue
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:15:48 AM
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Al Franken is hosting a new lefty radio show called "The O'Franken Factor." Franken has gone on record as begging Bill O'Reilly to sue him.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Remixing "Construction Kits" are the future of the music industry?
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:20:44 AM
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Inspired by the Jay-Z Construction Set (a CDROM and .torrent full of Jay-Z vocal tracks, samples and art, intended for remixture), Ernest Miller has written a shrewd editorial about a potential path for musicians to engage their fans with their work through the release of similar kits -- he likens this to videogames that encourage players to invest in making or seeking out custom mods.
Many videogames permit players to create new content for the game engine, such as levels, maps and mods. This new content is freely distributable (at least for noncommercial purposes) and frequently incorporates content created by the original game designer along with new user-created content. This has been incredibly successful for videogame companies. The more content there is, the more popular the game becomes. The ability to create and add content creates feverish and committed communities of fans for a game. Imagine if musicians had such communities working for them.
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(via A Copyfighter's Musings)
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TITLE: Depp digs Edward Penishands
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:22:20 AM
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E! Online asked Johnny Depp how he felt about his doppelganger in Edward Penishands, the pr0n parody of Edward Scissorhands. Depp is surprisingly cool about it!
I think it was either Tim [Burton] or John Waters who sent it to me. It might have been both. Tim and I were both quite proud they decided to do that. It was low budget and cheesy, but it was hilarious to watch. Those hands...they served him well.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steve Martin's script notes from The Passion
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:23:33 AM
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Jason Schultz has reproduced a bunch of Steve Martin's high-larious script notes for "The Passion" from this month's New Yorker.
* Love the Jesus character. So likeable. He can't seem to catch a break! We identify with him because of it. One thing: I think we need to clearly state "the rules." Why doesn't he use his superpowers to save himself?
* Does it matter which garden? Gethsemane is hard to say, and Eden is a much more recognizable garden. Just thinking outloud.
* Our creative people suggest a clock visual fading in and out in certain scenes, like the Last Supper bit: "Thursday, 7:43 P.M.," or "Good Friday, 5:14 P.M."
* Also, could he change water into wine in Last Supper scene? Would be a great moment, and it's legit. History compression is a movie tradition and could really brighten up the scene. Great trailer moment, too.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Random synonyms for masturbation
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:26:56 AM
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Funny Javascript mad-libs toy generates random synonyms for masturbation:
Charming the mink
Violating your goalie
Using the Force on the witness
Punishing the gator
Tenderizing the unicorn's horn
Loving Isaiah
Assaulting the possum
Twanging the antenna
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(via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Plush plagues for Passover fun
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:30:13 AM
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The Jewish.com store sells a bag of 10 plush plagues, one for each plague called down by Charleton Heston on the Pharoah.
A fun and educational way to involve children in the Passover experience. Symbols for each of the 10 plagues are included.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Automated font-identification
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DATE: 03/11/2004 03:47:06 AM
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Nishad sez, "Ever wanted to have a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using the WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and we'll show you the closest matches in our database!"
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(Thanks, Nishad!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Madrid, te queremos.
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DATE: 03/11/2004 06:20:18 AM
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173 dead today More than 185 people lost their lives today in Madrid. This graphic homage at left from an illustrator named Forges at El Pais, by way of Spanish blog caspa.tv. As it was here in New York, in Spain everything will now be spoken of in terms of "before March 11," and after.
El Internet fue formado de seres humanos, como nosotros. Un montón de amor y respeto para todos los amigos de BoingBoing que viven en Madrid, y en España. Queremos paz tambien, igual como ustedes.
Madrid-based blogger Ignacio Escolar has this to say: "ETA ha matado hoy a más personas que en los últimos ocho años....Decir que "no hay palabras" es un tópico tan usado que ha perdido su significado. Pero es que, literalmente, hoy no encuentro en el diccionario nada con lo que nombrar a esta masacre." (The ETA killed more people today than in the last eight years in Spain... to say that 'there are no words' is a phrase so overused that it has lost its significance. But the thing is, literally, today I can't find anything in the dictionary with which to describe this massacre.")
Here is a growing list of Spanish-language blogs, many based in Madrid, covering the terrorist attack and its aftermath. Link. Many other blogs appear to be posting this image on their home pages, as an expression of solidarity. BoingBoing buddy in Spain Antonio Delgado, of caspa.tv, says that the online edition of Spanish newspaper El Pais is a paid-access-only site -- but today, all contents are free, including this PDF version of today's edition. Link. Antonio also says traffic to Spanish news websites is up eight times normal, according to this article and this one -- that's more traffic than they received on 9/11. And Jean-Luc
says that Spanish professor Jose Luis Orihuela has built a newsfeed about today's events in this post on his weblog.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MyStack: syndicated sidebars fillled with realtime search-results
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DATE: 03/11/2004 08:00:23 AM
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Jim sez, "MyStack.com lets you build Stacks - self-updating link lists that you can paste into your blog or web page. You can build a Stack that lists all the posts which link to your site, or a Stack that lists every message talking about a particular topic. MyStack.com uses PubSub's matching engine to match blog entries and newsgroup posts against your request in real time. That means that any time you look at a Stack, you're looking at the most recent set of links - we rebuild the Stack and rewrite the HTML for you, automatically."
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(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The horror of "musical hallucinosis"
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DATE: 03/11/2004 02:18:31 PM
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Carl Zimmer has written a great article for the Sunday Telegraph about a brain disorder called musical hallucinosis. The victims hear loud music in their head, and the songs play over and over again.
When Dilbeck tried a new antibiotic for her Lyme disease the songs stopped, but the side effects of the drug were too much for her. Since she went off the antibiotic, the hallucinations have returned. For some reason they are milder now than before -- often just a few notes over and over again -- but they're still a burden. "I'm resigned to them," Dilbeck says. "But I'd give $100,000 -- if I had it -- to make them go away."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: We're a Movable Type blog now!
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DATE: 03/11/2004 02:24:29 PM
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After over four years with Blogger, Boing Boing is now a Movable Type blog! Blogger is an excellent tool, but we'd outgrown it and it was time for a change -- we're immensely grateful to Ev, Steve, Jason, Biz and the gang for all the support over the years.
So now we're an MT blog, which is great news. It means that we've got access to some of the fastest-evolving tools in the business, with all the third-party plugins that talk to MT's API. Expect some cool new features on the blog soon (we're gonna add search right away, and CSS layouts, and other neato crap to follow!).
Enormous, undying gratitude is hereby flung in the direction of Ben Trott, for all the work he did on making the transition smooth and painless. Ben, you are a prince.
Another change that you'll notice straight off: our permalinks are now post-per-page; that is, in order to load an individual post, you needn't load the entire month associated with it. We'll be using some mod_rewrite mojo to make this true of all the backlinks as well -- the bandwidth bills for loading monthly archives were really starting to add up (the reason we did monthly archives was the lack of a good search tool -- at very least, if you could remember what month you saw a post, you could load that month's archive and dig through it).
We still need to convert the guestbar to MT, which will come soon enough.
So, life is good. Beware falling rocks. Welcome to the MT era of Boing Boing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing has an Atom feed
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DATE: 03/11/2004 02:25:57 PM
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Another salutory effect of transitioning to MT: we now have an Atom feed for the latest in syndication goodness.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TV cliches catalogued
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DATE: 03/11/2004 02:26:21 PM
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Here's a Wiki cataloguing, with cited examples, all the eye-rolling idiot plots from sitcomdom.
Gilligan Cut
The Gilligan Cut is a classic staple of comedy. A character protests vehemently, "What, you expect me to wear a grass skirt, stand up on top of Empire State Building and belt out the chorus of 'New York, New York'? Well, I'm not gonna... I'm just not gonna..." And then you cut, and see the character doing just that. The Gilligan Cut. Comedy ain't pretty.
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(Thanks, Gnat!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More blogosphere reaction to 03/11 Madrid attacks
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DATE: 03/11/2004 02:44:41 PM
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A handful of updates on blogosphere reaction to today's terrorist attacks in Madrid, which killed more than 190 and injured over 1,000. Informally-constructed "condolence walls" are apppearing online; here is an example of a previously existing page on which the comments section has been transformed into a series of homenajes to the 03/11 dead. (Note: my Wired News colleague Leander Kahney points out that this page seems to have started out as a memorial wall for Miguel Angel Blanco, a Basque politician who was kidnapped and murdered by ETA a coupe of years ago).
This 03/11 site, launched earlier today by popular Spanish weblog Bitacoras, is dedicated to blogosphere coverage of the attacks. This page offers another comprehensive list of blog coverage links (nearly all are Spanish language sites). ALT1040's offering coverage. Victor Ruiz has assembled a good page in English with background.
Much activity on blogs in France, as well.
Countless homenajes throughout the web, including little graphics like the bandera at left from Patricio Lopez' site.
Massive demonstrations are planned for tomorrow at 7:00 pm local time in cities all over Spain. Expect live blog coverage. Numerous BB readers in Spain and elsewhere write in to remind us that there is much debate over whether or not ETA is in fact responsible, completely or in part, for the attacks.
And finally, this from the weblog called "Lost in Madrid," -- a "Post of Silence." Please excuse my hasty, clumsy translation from the original Spanish.
May they hear our silence in every corner of the Internet, from all of our weblogs. May they hear our condemnation of this massacre. We denounce the ETA; we denounce all forms of violence and terrorism. All we want is to live in peace. Unity and democracy are the most powerful weapons we have against terrorism... Tomorrow [through the demonstrations that will take place] at 7:00PM, Madrid will be inundated with silence. And on Sunday, we will all go to vote, and we will tell those assasins that our votes are the "arms" that we use. We will tell them that peace is the language we understand.
Hoy todos somos madrileños.
(thanks, JL, AD, Joi, and others)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hugo nominations close in two weeks
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DATE: 03/11/2004 06:32:59 PM
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The Hugo Nomination ballot closes two weeks today, on March 25. You're eligible to nominate if you're registered for the next or the last WorldCon. For the record, here are the things I published in 2003 that are eligible for the ballot:
Best Novel: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Tor
Best Novelette: Liberation Spectrum, Salon.com
Best short story: Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers, Asimov's
Best short story: Flowers from Alice, New Faces in Science Fiction (DAW)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's SXSW schedule
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DATE: 03/11/2004 07:12:35 PM
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CorrectedI'm leaving for SXSW in Austin tomorrow morning, where I'll be speaking at a couple items at the Wireless Future conference:
- Sunday, March 14, 5-6 PM. The Wireless Commons: Is the commons model (where spectrum is treated like a stream that belongs to all of us, and current technological innovations allow multiple signals over shared frequencies) truly applicable to wireless telecommunications? If so, what does that mean for society... culture... business? (Robert Heath, University of Texas (Moderator); Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation; David Weinberger, Author/Consultant; Kevin Werbach; Jim Snider, New America Foundation)
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Monday, March 15Tuesday, March 16, 3:30-4:30PM. Wireless and Grassroots Innovation: WiFi is a grassroots phenomenon where innovation is driven by the DIY gestalt that is so much a part of Internet and Open Source development. What are the latest grassroots developments, and how do they relate to the future of wireless? (Brad King (moderator); Cory Doctorow, EFF; David Weinberger, Author; Joi Ito, Neoteny; Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News; John Quarterman, Quarterman Creations)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bloggers express 3/11 condolences at Spanish Embassies
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DATE: 03/11/2004 09:18:36 PM
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BoingBoing pal JP points us to this post on Evan K's blog:
Further to this suggestion by Glenn Reynolds regarding the Spanish Embassy in Washington: there are also Spanish consulates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston, New York, Houston and San Juan (addresses below, via this page). Presumably the same goes for Toronto, Montreal, and of course there's a full embassy in Ottawa.
I went over to San Francisco's Spanish consulate this afternoon, and they had posted signs indicating that there was a book of condolences available for signing by the public.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New mobile number used to be Chris Rock's
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DATE: 03/12/2004 01:59:41 AM
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Funny personal account of a woman who was assigned Chris Rock's old cell-number.
CALLER: It's Adam.
LAURA: Adam?
CALLER: [In a jovial manner] It's Adam Sandler!
LAURA: [Realizes instantly it was indeed Adam Sandler -- there's no mistaking that distinctive voice of his] Oh, hi!
ADAM: Hi!
LAURA: Hi!
ADAM: Hi!
LAURA: [Overcome with sudden punchiness, from the craziness of one minute quietly winding down for bedtime, and then talking to Adam Sandler the next] So, are you calling Chris for business or pleasure?
ADAM: [Laughs, slightly taken off guard by this question, but still retaining his happy-go-lucky attitude] I'm calling Chris to say hello and chat. So... is he there?
LAURA: [Knows it's confession time, but tries her best to retain formerly buoyant personality] No, well... he's not. You see, I'm actually just this random New York City girl who happened to get Chris' old cell phone number....
ADAM: [Lets out a big laugh] Wow, that's really funny! That's great! You must be having a fun time with this!
LAURA: As a matter of fact, yes, I am! And what also makes it fun for me is that coincidentally, I write true stories about my life in New York City, and this will be another funny, true story to write about... Oh, I have number you can call to reach Chris....
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stories from an FCC lobbyist
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DATE: 03/12/2004 02:01:43 AM
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Tales of the Sausage Factory is a series of essays by Harold Feld of the Media Access Project. Harold's a Hill insider who lobbies the FCC for greater public access to the airwaves and less media concentration, and these are his running notes from the fights at the Commission.
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TV and games b0rk your circadians
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DATE: 03/12/2004 03:23:23 AM
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More sleepdep notes fo rmembers of the Eastern Standard Tribe -- computers and TVs b0rk your circadians. I was up at 4:30 this morning and I'm crossing two timezones this aft.Dr. John Herman, a sleep expert at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas states that the flashing lights of kids' television shows, video games and computer programs seem to be resetting the body's internal clock, stimulating kids' brains and making them want to stay up later and get up later.
Link(Thanks, Ian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Transparent briefcase PC case
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DATE: 03/12/2004 04:37:43 AM
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ClearPC's "Secret Agent" PC-case is a transparent acrylic PC case shaped like a briefcase. Great for LAN parties and airport security. Link (via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Roll your own pr0n
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DATE: 03/12/2004 07:06:39 AM
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A rollicking three-way of ironic, porn-themed fun. A site full of both Flash and flesh. Here is a DIY centerfold construction kit -- kind of like Mister Potatohead, but hotter. Link. And here is an ant's eye, interactive, nano-tastic view of a gigantic naked babe. Link. Finally, construct your very own soundtrack to shag by. Link. Nothing is worksafe. (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Howard Lovy's nanotechnology essay on H2O purification
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DATE: 03/12/2004 12:36:11 PM
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Another essay from the always interesting Howard Lovy:
Carlo Montemagno makes molecular devices that contain “embedded intelligence,” each molecule working in tandem with another to produce a desired action. His first application? Yes. Water purification. “We use membranes incorporated with some molecules that selectively only transport water molecules through, and with very, very high efficiencies,” Montemagno said. “The end result is that projected performance is at least 100 times better, maybe 1,000 times better than the best … filters.”
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Picture of orangutan hand and human hand
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DATE: 03/12/2004 02:04:59 PM
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Juju sez: This is a great picture comparing a human and an orangutan hand. There's also an analysis of the various differences between the two, and why those differences allow humans to have a precision grip, thus allowing us domination over the planet. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Correction: Cory's SXSW is Tuesday, March 16
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DATE: 03/12/2004 02:25:45 PM
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Correction: here is the correct date for my second talk at SXSW:
Tuesday, March 16, 3:30-4:30PM. Wireless and Grassroots Innovation: WiFi is a grassroots phenomenon where innovation is driven by the DIY gestalt that is so much a part of Internet and Open Source development. What are the latest grassroots developments, and how do they relate to the future of wireless? (Brad King (moderator); Cory Doctorow, EFF; David Weinberger, Author; Joi Ito, Neoteny; Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News; John Quarterman, Quarterman Creations)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cheat-code for new BMW gearbox
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DATE: 03/12/2004 03:30:36 PM
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The new BMW has a cheat-code built into the shifter, which disables a road-safety feeature intended to prevent 5000RPM jackrabbit starts.There's a cheat code in the software running the BMW M3's sequential manual gearbox (SMG): Press the right buttons in the right order and the car will launch you from a stop after revving the engine to 5,000 rpm. But don't look for a how-to in the owners' manual--this feature is undocumented, an inside joke of sorts...But there is a catch. In Europe, where the feature isn't so hush-hush, doing more than 15 launches voids the car's warranty. Federal laws prohibit such stipulations here, so BMW has turned down the wick. U.S.-spec cars are programmed to wind to only 2,500 rpm--and our test car topped off at 1,800. That's why you have to ask your dealer to install the European software. Most will happily oblige.
Link (via Gizmodo)
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TITLE: Free Nintendo DS in exchange for photo of same
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DATE: 03/12/2004 03:31:22 PM
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Gizmodo is offering to buy a Nintendo DS system for the first person to submit a pre-release photo of the gadget. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Howard Stern calls fair game on Bush
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DATE: 03/12/2004 08:15:00 PM
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Howard Stern is calling on his 8 million listeners (and their friends andfamily) to vote anti-Bush in the next election. Stern had strongly backed Bush's war on Iraq, but in the past two weeks, he has derided the president as a "Jesus freak," a "maniac" and "an arrogant bastard," while ranting against "the Christian right minority that has taken over the White House." Specifically, Stern has assailed Bush's use of 9/11 images in his campaign ads, questioned his National Guard service, condemned his decision to curb stem cell research and labeled him an enemy of civil liberties, abortion rights and gay rights.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Everquest widows tell all
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DATE: 03/12/2004 08:18:34 PM
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Everquest Daily Grind is a place where video-game widow(er)s post their personal stories of life with MMO-addicts who ignore spouse, kids, jobs and life for the game.Last spring my grandmother passed away, and he was so involved in the game that he wasn't there for me. I would go to his house when I only had an hour, and the hour would go by and he would play, and I would sit there, and then I'd have to leave without so much as a kiss. There would be nights when I'd go to sleep there, and wake up at 5 or 6am and he'd still be playing because his guild needed him, or he was retrieving his corpse - which as I'm reading is a popular line!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mobile fiction micropublishing
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DATE: 03/12/2004 09:07:40 PM
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Interesting Japanese publishing model: send 1.6k of serialized new fiction to subscribers' phones every day.The bestselling novel Deep Love was self-published in installments by the author on a website that offers content packaged for users of mobile phones. The story is about a 17-year-old girl named Ayu, who finds love through a chance encounter.The author, who calls himself Yoshi, created a website providing content for mobile phones in May 2000 with an investment of just ¥100,000 ($909.09 at ¥110 to the dollar). Using a promotional campaign that consisted of passing out business cards to about 2,000 high-school girls in front of Tokyo's Shibuya Station (the center of Tokyo youth culture), Yoshi released The Story of Ayu, the first installment in the longer novel. News of the novel spread by word of mouth, and within three years the site had received a total of 20 million hits.
Mobile phones can receive e-mail of up to 1,600 characters. While this is more than adequate for most personal use, the limit presents unique challenges to the author of a novel. Yoshi, however, not only managed to overcome this challenge but even turned it to his advantage by keeping the prose concise and fast-paced. The novel maintains a straightforward, conversational style and avoids the use of difficult words. Thanks to this quality, the story has found favor even among people who do not typically read novels.
Link(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free and unencumbered exotica
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DATE: 03/13/2004 07:11:53 AM
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Dave sez, "Hello and welcome to Comfort Stand Recordings, a not-for-profit community driven label where all releases are free for download with artwork and liner notes. Having no business model or profit motive we strive to bring you recordings that we find interesting, compelling and downright enjoyable. Everybody needs free music." This is pretty good exotica/tiki tuneage right here.
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(Thanks, Dave!
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TITLE: Binary LED watch from TokyoFlash
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DATE: 03/13/2004 07:18:44 AM
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New from TokyoFlash, purveyors of fine and impractical Japanese hipster novelty watches: the LED by Binary. It's a watch with a naked printed circuit board, on which are situated 10 LEDs, which glow to display the time in binary notation. ¥8900.00 -- about $80. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Korn's new video damns the music industry
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DATE: 03/13/2004 07:31:57 AM
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Korn's new video for "Y'all Want a Single? Fuck That," consists of the band trashing a record store, screaming the chorous, while a suprisingly eloquent rant against the recording industry's treatment of artists and the radio oligopolies' top-40 mentalitity scrolls past. The band reveals that they released the video against its label's wishes and urges you to "steal" it. Streaming WMV Link (via MeFi)
Update: Caines sez, "Korn has a MP3 remix of 'Y'all Want A Single' with words from Howard Stern regarding the FCC & Clear Channel available for free on their site."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Digital Preservation panel at SXSW this Monday
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DATE: 03/13/2004 07:35:09 AM
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Somehow, I missed reporting on this panel when I listed my SXSW stuff: I'm on a panel on Digital Preservation on Monday, 15 March, at 3:30 in room 15:
We take for granted that our cultural artifacts will last. It offends and horrifies us when we learn of decaying archaeological sites, looted museums and burning libraries. However, our digital heritage does not afford the durability that we enjoy with cave paintings, cuneiform tablets or even paper. How will digital content preserve its legacy? (Aaron Choate; Tanya Rabourn, Information Architect - MetLife; Barbara Taranto; Cory Doctorow , Outreach Coord - Electronic Frontier Foundation; Adam Greenfield , v-2 Organisation)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sims Online presidential elections
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DATE: 03/13/2004 11:39:07 AM
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Alphavilla, the capital city of The Sims Online, is having a presidential election. At issue is the appropriate means of warning newbiess off of scam artists, and threcruitment and training of virtual intelligence agents and cops.Indeed, differing approaches to protecting newbies from scams have evolved as the central issue in the presidential campaign. And while Mr-President seems highly popular and likely to fend off his opponent next month, he could lose to a candidate seen as tougher on scammers.If she survives Saturday's primary, that candidate could be Ashley Richardson -- the avatar name of a 16-year-old girl named Laura. Of four candidates running in the previous round, she got the most votes out of 213 cast by trumpeting her platform of confronting scammers and giving newbies as much help and welcome as possible.
Link (via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ian McDonald's Hearts, Hands and Voices
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DATE: 03/13/2004 12:29:50 PM
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Just a quick plug for The Broken Land (originally published in the UK with the much better title Hearts, Hands and Voices), by Ian McDonald. McDonald is one of the great underappreciated science fiction writers of the twentieth century and this is one of his great, underappreciated novels. It's a biotech parable for the Irish Catholic/Protestant conflict, and the bones of that conflict are fleshed with one of the saddest, funniest, strangest stories I've ever read. Start with the Ancestor Tree, on which the heads of the recently dead are spiked, where their brains are kept alive and linked into an (ahem) neural net that makes an oracle out of the combined wisdom of all the dear departed. When the ancestors grow old, the bark grows over their eyes and they go into a dreamtime of bio-computational fantasy. There's an adventure story in here, and a coming of age story, and a lot of deeply kinky biotech thinking, and some of the most poetic prose I've ever read.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NARC video game encourages players to get high as power-ups
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DATE: 03/13/2004 12:45:10 PM
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The remake of the NARC video-game encourages players to bust dealers, steal their stashes, and use the confiscata as performance-enhancing power-ups.You're still a cop and you're still looking to take out the dealers and suppliers. And, odds are you'll pick up the cash and drugs scattered about once again. The hook is: In the new "N.A.R.C.", your character can -- and is, in fact, encouraged to -- ingest those drugs.Looking to slow time around you -- a la "The Matrix" or "Max Payne"? Take a toke. Marijuana puts you into "weed time." Not sure who the bad guys are? Drop some LSD and enemies will appear to have giant devil heads. Moving too slow? A little speed will take care of that, letting you zip around and fight at an incredibly fast pace.
Link (via Costikyan)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Signing EST Monday at SXSW, loving from Entertainment Weekly
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DATE: 03/13/2004 01:13:28 PM
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A reminder: I'm signing copies of Eastern Standard Tribe tomorrow Monday at SXSW at 1:30, immediately following the Bloggie Award Ceremony on the trade-floor.If you're not a registered attendee at SXSW, you can get a free trade-floor pass here.
And on that note, check out the sweet lovin' I got in this week's Entertainment Weekly: "Clerks meets Startup.com... Tribe is packed with big ideas."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kim Stanley Robinson on what Martian water means for science fiction
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DATE: 03/13/2004 02:01:16 PM
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Kim Stanley Robinson, who is, on the one hand, the author of a brilliant, seminal series of novels about terraforming Mars has written a grand, overarching survey of the speculative literature of the Red Planet for the NYT, in the wake of the discovery of Mars's aquaeous history.
Meanwhile, the feedback loop between science and science fiction continues to flow. It is, as we have seen, an elliptical loop, like the orbit of a comet. Science-fiction writers seize on new scientific findings and immediately leap to conclusions, in the form of stories. Then these stories dive into young minds and percolate there, shaping future scientists and giving them dreams, visions, plans.Leap and percolate. These days I sometimes hear from young people who tell me they are studying some kind of science because of my Mars books. ("But you forgot to mention the math.") I feel like part of the science-fiction loop. I still follow the latest Mars news, and sometimes I wonder what the next wave of Mars stories will be like.
It seems awkward. I suppose the thing to do would be to tell the story of the robot rovers, because that's what we're going to have for a while. Maybe rovers much more powerful than Spirit and Opportunity -- artificial intelligences, in fact, and happy to be on Mars, because it's the world they were designed for, and they're protecting an indigenous cryptoendolithic, or hidden in rock, bacterial culture they have discovered. So that when humans finally arrive in person, it's a disaster in the making for all concerned, and the rover artificial intelligences and little red people have to play dumb and play ghost and change humanity for the good of all, and . . .
Link (via Nelson)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Potty mouth and lab-reports: an unbeatably funny combination
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DATE: 03/13/2004 02:29:01 PM
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Now this is a funny lab report, from a very frustrated solderer of germanium to wire.Check this shit out (Fig. 1). That's bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let's look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don't. I see a bunch of crap.Christ, this was such a waste of my time.
Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Flashmobs with a purpose: Protests in Madrid organized by SMS, chatrooms
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DATE: 03/13/2004 06:50:40 PM
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In Spain today, thousands gathered in the streets demanding answers from their government about this week's deadly terrorist attacks in Madrid. Bloggers in Spain tell BoingBoing the gatherings were decentralized "flash mobs", organized primarily by short text messages sent via Internet-capable mobile devices, and online in chatrooms and weblog forums.
Around 6PM local time in Madrid, an estimated 3,000-5,000 protesters gathered spontaneously in front of the headquarters of Spain's ruling Popular Party (Partido Popular, or PP), located on calle Genova. Participants shouted slogans against media manipulation, and carried signs asking, "Who did it?".
Flashmobs spread by SMS throughout the country, with parallel gatherings quickly emerging in other cities.
The protests occurred one day before general elections take place in Spain. Government representatives denounced today's gatherings, describing them as illegal assemblies -- but because they were organized in a decentralized manner using mobile technology, there was no single responsible party against whom punitive action could be taken.
Protesters accused Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of covering up information about the attacks for political advantage. Aznar is not seeking a third term in office, and has appointed ex-Interior Minister Mariano Rajoy as his successor.
Aznar's center-right administration first blamed the 3/11 massacre -- which killed more than 200 people -- on the Basque separatist group ETA, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. Their position has since been revised to acknowledge that Islamic fundamentalist groups, perhaps al Qaeda, may have been involved. Critics of Aznar allege that his strong support of the U.S. war in Iraq has transformed Spain into a leading target for such groups.
The events of 9/11 and 3/11 share a number of unsettling connections: the Madrid attacks took place exactly two and a half years after those in NYC, and there were precisely 911 days between the two. For these and other reasons, including this taped message, a growing number of observers in Spain and elsewhere are questioning whether or not the ETA is to blame.
Some Aznar supporters accused Cultura Contra la Guerra of initiating the text-messages calling for protests. The well-known art-protest group is a collective of artists and performers, and was originally founded to protest Spain's support for the Iraq war.
"Whether or not that's true, I don't know -- today was a long day filled with intense emotion for people throughout the country," says Cadiz-based blogger Antonio Delgado of caspa.tv. "Right now -- at 3AM -- it's hard to think clearly. The only thing that matters now is that everyone needs to get out and vote tomorrow."
Blog coverage at Caspa.TV, Barrapunto, MiniD, commentary and live on-the-scene observations by popular Spanish web pundit Nacho Escolar here. Some photos are here, including the one above. A moblog/photoblog dedicated to the event is here. More news: NYT (eng), El Mundo (SP), and Corriere (Italian). Leander Kahney's report "'Net Cries Out for Madrid" in Wired News, here.
Earlier BoingBoing posts about 3/11 news from Spain are here and here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Grand Challenge finish: not so grand?
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DATE: 03/14/2004 12:11:57 AM
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Looks like our autonomously war-waging robotic overlords won't be taking over any time soon. A little over two hours and about seven miles into the DARPA Grand Challenge race in the California desert, all vehicles were either withdrawn or disabled. But oragnizers say just because no competitor finished the race -- leaving the $1MM prize unclaimed -- doesn't mean the event was a flop.
Link to status board, Link to CNN story.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Put obese kids on Atkins
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DATE: 03/14/2004 04:54:21 AM
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A UK health expert is recommending that obese children be put on the Atkins diet, because the high fat protein content -- which makes it palatable to kids -- also suppresses appetite. The health risks of high fat and high sodium are outweighed by the health benefits of not being clinically obese.
"The children who come here are not just overweight, they are ill, and in danger of dying. Some of them can't breathe and some of them can't lie down."I do think the basis of Atkins - low carbohydrate and high protein - is a good diet for children and the priority is for these children to get weight off."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Updated AGAIN: Let's reform SXSW's no-photos, no-electricity policies
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DATE: 03/14/2004 05:11:21 AM
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Update: Dan Gillmor reports that the SXSW organizers have changed their policy regarding photos at the conference: "The only restriction on pictures/videos/recording is that they must be for personal use."
Update: jonl says, "They changed the rule - people can plug in. They just told me to announce it on my 11am panel. Yay!"
At SXSW, every speakers' table has this sign on it: NO UNAUTHORIZED VIDEOTAPING OR PHOTOGRAPHY IS ALLOWED IN PANEL ROOMS AS A COURTESY TO SPEAKERS.
This is a really silly idea, one that violates the burgeoning norm of tech conferences, which is to aggressively capture and retransmit the happenings at conferences as they are underway, and I think that we should do something about it.
Every speaker should open her or his panel or talk with the following:
[First, pick up sign and place it face down on the table]I am hereby authorizing you to take as many pictures and video of this presentation as you care to. I have travelled a great distance, at great expense, to say something and be heard. I would be deeply grateful to you for helping me to spread what I have to say.
I would be further grateful if your photos and videos of this presentaiton were distributed as widely as possible under a Creative Commons license.
Thank you.
If speakers forget to do this, someone in the audience should stand up at the start of the proceedings and say, "That sign says we're not allowed to take photos and videos without your permission. We'd like to share what you have to say with others -- may we have your permission to do so?"There's another problem at SXSW, which is that the conference center charges an arm and a leg to conference organizers who want to use the AC outlets in the hallways. SXSW doesn't have an arm and a leg to spare, so they haven't paid the extortionate sum.
The result of this is that red-jacketed "security guards" spend all their time going around, ordering paying attendees -- again, people who have travelled to Austin at great personal expense -- to unplug their laptops from the wall or face a $90 fine. This is the mingiest, rottenest way to make conference attendees feel welcome, and again, we should do something about it.
The Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau's email address is visitorcenter@austintexas.org, and their phone number is (800)926-2282.
Is there anyone from the Austin papers reading this? It would be grand to put someone from the convention center management on the spot about this: "Did you really pay your staff to walk the corridors of the conference center and order working people who had plugged in their laptops so that they could keep up with their jobs while visiting Austin to unplug or face a fine? Do you always do this? Is this in keeping with your remit as an ambassador for Austin to our visitors?"
I have a great time at SXSW every year, and the conference organizers do a tremendous job of putting on a show. But someone needs to take the conference center management to task for this unacceptable policy. Link
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TITLE: Nesting rock star dolls
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Russian Legacy sells rock-star matrioshke dolls. Link(via Geisha Asobi)
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TITLE: Radical alien-style cube case
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DATE: 03/14/2004 08:57:11 AM
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This is a sweet PC case -- "The bare-bones chassis includes three large acrylic windows, cut-outs for a mind-numbing 11 fans, chrome front-panel switches, and a set of medium-duty casters. You can remove the drive bays, the motherboard tray, and the backplane, and Xoxide plans to offer interchangeable drive bay modules for buyers who prefer different configurations. All three acrylic panes are fitted into the case's U-shaped wraparound cover, which removes them from harm's way whenever you work inside."Link (via Wonderland)
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TITLE: We can use the power outlets at SXSW now!
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DATE: 03/14/2004 09:45:33 AM
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The Austin conference center has changed its tune about its policy forbidding attendees from using the AC outlets. Jon Lebkowsky says, "They changed the rule - people can plug in. They just told me to announce it on my 11am panel. Yay!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos: Bruce Sterling in LA
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DATE: 03/14/2004 10:09:36 AM
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When the VH1 documentary airs, they'll call it "I was Bruce Sterling's Chauffer for a Day." Snapshots of Mr. Sterling's visit to LA, during which I kidnapped him for a trip to see the nanotechnology science/art show at LACMA. There were questions, but deep reflection led to answers. Technical notes: (1) everything was shot with the nano-sized digital camera Canon Powershot SD10 Elph, which is a little smaller than a pack of cigarettes. (2) I'm trying out FOTKI for the photo hosting, and really liking it so far (thanks, CJC).
Link to snapshots.
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TITLE: You can take photos at SXSW too!
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DATE: 03/14/2004 12:22:31 PM
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Dan Gillmor reports that the SXSW organizers have changed their policy regarding photos at the conference: "The only restriction on pictures/videos/recording is that they must be for personal use." This is amazing -- the SXSW organizers are marvellously responsive to their attendees -- great to see. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Exley and Pariser MoveOn keynote from SXSW
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DATE: 03/14/2004 01:03:15 PM
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Zack Exley/Eli Pariser from MoveOn.org just gave a fantastic keynote at SXSW, describing the happy accident that gave rise to the best new toolsuite for organizing and sustaining Internet-based activism. Here are my running notes:
Before the war, we did a candlelight vigil in defiance of the war. You could come and punch in your ZIP and set up a location where the vigil would take place, then told our members to go and find your local vigil. We did 6500 vigils all over the world. 500k people showed up. When you signed up, it told you that there were others signed up to attend your local vigil, so you owouldn't be the only one.Eli: This all came together in five days -- 500,000 people mobilized in five days. A vigil every 20 blocks for the whole length of Manhattan.
There are more political ways of doing this. We asked people to hold house parties and show a movie against the war, and people opened up their homes to have strangers come in and see this film. We heard from people in small midwestern towns who thought they were the lone anti-war people in their town, but the site showed them that there were dozens more who felt the same way.
Link
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TITLE: Lord of the Rings musical in the offing
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DATE: 03/14/2004 05:52:08 PM
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There's a LotR musical underway, and a Crooked Timber contributor has come up with some very tight suggestions for the songs.News today that a musical version of The Lord of the Rings is in the works. Suggest songs and plot-points here. Potential titles include: 'I'm gonna wash that orc right out of my hair' (Legolas), 'You're the One Ring that I want' (Sauron in Act I, then Gollum in Act II, and Frodo, Gollum and Sauron in Act III), 'People will say we're in love' (Frodo/Sam duet, Act II, theme echoed by Gimli and Legolas during Battle of Pelennor Fields), 'City with the Tree on Top' (Gandalf's arrival at Minas Tirith), 'How do I solve this problem, my dear Grima?' (Theoden introduction), and Gollum's Act III showstopper, 'Memorieses'.
Link (via Electrolite)
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TITLE: Water-electrolysis toy cars
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DATE: 03/14/2004 06:08:55 PM
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A Japanese toy-company is shipping a water-powered, 19cm-long car that "uses hydrogen created from the electrolysis of pure water" to run itself. Link (via Engadget)
Steve sez: "this thing undoubtedly uses electricity to _produce_ hydrogen from water (that's what an electrolyzer does). The hydrogen is then converted back to electricity to run the car. In other words, this thing is nothing but an inefficient _electric_ model car. The coming 'hydrogen economy' has been oversold. Don't believe the hype!"
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TITLE: Cover art for ReVisions anthology
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DATE: 03/14/2004 10:40:54 PM
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Last year, Charlie Stross and I wrote Unwirer in a public blog. The story was for ReVisions, an alternate history anthology edited by Isaac Szpindel and Julie Czerneda. Now, Kenn Brown has finished the cover art for the book, and it's very very nifty. Link (Thanks, Kenn!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Warren Ellis -- Biological
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DATE: 03/15/2004 04:55:02 AM
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A short dose of delicious new prose from Warren Ellis:
Lavinia sits on the bench outside the local Starbs and swallows her antifutureshock meds with a soy chai latte. After a few minutes, she feels able to switch her shades from obstacle-imaging to full vision. The world slowly fades up from green and black wireframe to three-dimensional colour. She gazes blankly over the rail station, at the full-motion billboard ad for the new Speculum Bar down on Main Street, where warm drinks are mixed in and served from the muscular rectums of young Algerian girls.
A flock of Fuckit Kids clatter past Lavinia, videoloop John Lydon tattoos on their scrawny arms snapping out the words "fuck it" over and over. Some of them slow down in front of her. People under twenty-five or so aren't used to seeing pregnant women. One of them stops dead, scratches his scabby upper arm, making his fresh new talking John Lydon face bend and ripple. Antishocked to the eyeballs, he still struggles to cope with Lavinia's alien curves.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: State attorneys general preparing assault on P2P with MPAA guidance?
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DATE: 03/15/2004 05:15:53 AM
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I filed a story for Wired News on Saturday about a draft document which is evidently being circulated by CA state Attorney General Bill Lockyer to fellow state attorneys general. Lockyer's office is planning to release a revised version of the document within the coming weeks, after obtaining additional signatories. The letter characterizes P2P software as a "dangerous product" and describes the failure of technology makers to warn consumers of those dangers as a deceptive trade practice. Metadata associated with the MS Word file indicates it was written or reviewed by a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America. Separation of Hollywood and state? Here's a snip from the leaked letter:
As a P2P software developer and distributor, we believe you have the ability and responsibility to better educate consumers about these known risks, and to design your software in a manner that minimizes the risks. We view with grave concern reports that at least some P2P software developers may be adding features deliberately designed to hinder law enforcement in its prosecution of crimes using P2P software. Companies that engage in such conduct, and fail to meet the important responsibilities referenced above, harm the interests of consumers in our States.
It is widely recognized that P2P file-sharing software currently is used almost exclusively to disseminate pornography, and to illegally trade copyrighted music, movies, software and video games. File-sharing software also is increasingly becoming a means to disseminate computer worms and viruses. Nevertheless, your company still does little to warn consumers about the legal and personal risks they face when they use your software to "share" copyrighted music, movies and computer software. A failure to prominently and adequately warn consumers, particularly when you advertise and sell paid versions of your software, could constitute, at the very least, a deceptive trade practice.
(...)
We take seriously our responsibility to protect consumers and ensure that the laws of our States are respected. In the future, we will not hesitate to take whatever actions we deem necessary to ensure that you fulfill your duties as a responsible corporate citizen.
Link to full story.
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TITLE: Secret knocking codes for firewalls
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DATE: 03/15/2004 06:29:34 AM
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Port-knocking -- like a secret knock for firewalls. Schneier calls it "defensive system that would not accept any SSH connections (port 22) unless it detected connection attempts to closed ports 1026, 1027, 1029, 1034, 1026, 1044, and 1035 in that sequence within five seconds, then listened on port 22 for a connection within ten seconds. Otherwise, the system would completely ignore port 22." Link (via Crypto-Gram)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SXSW irc users: support freenode
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DATE: 03/15/2004 07:27:10 AM
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Adina sez, "Lilo's letting SXSW use irc.freenode.net even though SXSW is a commercial project. People who are using freenode might want to contribute. In general, folks whose projects benefit from freenode might want to consider posting a "support freenode" link." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free paper toys to print and assemble
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DATE: 03/15/2004 10:00:22 AM
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Stunning, elaborate paper toys to print, fold and glue. I really like the Wrigley Field, too. Link (via Smartpatrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bush and Kerry's RSS, side by side
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DATE: 03/15/2004 10:29:39 AM
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Vivek sez, "This page is simple: an RSS parser (CaRP) is used to create a single page that lists the last five entries of Bush's and Kerry's official blogs, side by side." Link (Thanks, Vivek!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing just won a bloggie for Best American Blog!
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DATE: 03/15/2004 11:09:24 AM
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Boing Boing has just won the Best American Weblog award at the 2004 Bloggies. Here's my acceptance speech:It goes without saying that I'm accepting this not just on my own behalf, but on behalf of Mark -- who started it all, Xeni, Pesco, and the guestbloggers who slave away over there on the right-hand side. Oh, and Ken Snider, our tireless sysadmin, the Blogger team who stood us in good stead for all those years and the MT team who will stand us in good stead for all the years to come.You know, now that I'm moving to the UK, people keep asking me this really bizarre goddamned question. They keep asking me, "Are you going to stop blogging?"
And I'm all like, whaaaaa? Dude, you'd have to break my fingers to get me to stop.
I mean, hasn't anyone noticed that I periodically post a kind of exhausted, cranky post to Boing Boing saying, "I'm really tired and busy and I'm taking a couple days off," and then one of two things happens:
1. I keep blogging
2. I come back two days later with like a hundred posts, demonstrating that I've spent a couple days blogging without publishing.
I love blogging. There are a lot of blogging cynics who'll tell us that because blogging hasn't lived up the hype -- which it didn't, of course it didn't, that's why they call it hype -- that it's nothing. Personal webpages with a CMS. Slashdot. Posts about cats.
Blogging is not nothing. Blogging is something. Anyone who says blogging is nothing isn't paying attention. A million of us are not doing nothing.
It's something, and I'm proud to be part of it.
Thank you.
Thanks to everyone who voted for us! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The Talking Heads decision: the judicial system's David Byrne infatuation
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DATE: 03/15/2004 11:12:48 AM
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The "Talking Heads decision," is a slighly notorious Fifth Circuit Appeals decision in which the court quoted dozens of Talking Heads songs and lyrics. Raleigh Abner had a wild, wild life ofcorporate "alter egos" since he was not responsible to a viable boardof directors or supervisory corporate officers for any businesstransaction he consummated. For purposes of the present appeal,however, the only transaction of consequence is the sale of the Abnerfamily residence at 303 Lakeside Lane in Webster, Texas. This house waspurchased for approximately $ 240,000 by Raleigh Abner in hisindividual capacity in late 1979 and refurbished with thousands ofdollars "borrowed" from a few of Raleigh Abner's companies. In 1982 theAbners decided to pull up the roots, so the house wasconveyed to "303 Lakeside Group, Inc.," a corporation created byRaleigh Abner to hold the homestead and allow him to borrow against thecontract of sale with the purchaser of the property. n1 The 303Lakeside home eventually sold for approximately one milliondollars.
Link (Thanks, Kevin!)
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TITLE: Boing Boing just won the Bloggie for Best Group Blog
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DATE: 03/15/2004 11:22:09 AM
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Boing Boing just won the Bloggie for Best Group Blog! Here's my speech:You know, we got nominated a bunch of these last year and we didn't win any of them, so I thought that I was really optimistic just for writing ONE speech. Writing this one feels like monumental hubris. I cover myself in shame. Forgive me.
Thanks to everyone who voted for us! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing just won the Weblog of the Year Award at the Bloggies
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DATE: 03/15/2004 11:27:44 AM
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Boing Boing just won the Weblog of the Year award at the Bloggies: here's my speech!My shame. It is boundless. Seriously.BOO YAH, IN YOUR FACE WOO HOO GOD DAMN!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush: flag law breaker?
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Skippy sez: "I heard, years ago, about a rule prohibiting the use of the flag in advertising for any means. I committed this to memory, but never looked it up. No one ever believed me when I mentioned it, because I couldn’t cite a reference for it.
"I looked this up after seeing a link to this page, which compares the latest updates from Kerry's and Bush's blogs side-by-side (ingenious, if you ask me!). It ticked me off that Bush was using the flag, and I decided to find out whether my memory was correct.
"It turns out that George W. Bush's website is in violation of the United States Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 3. He owes $100, or thirty days in jail." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steampunk submarine free paper toy
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DATE: 03/15/2004 12:45:56 PM
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Stefan sez, "John McEwan is a grand old man of military and role-playing miniatures. He also makes cut-and-fold paper models of buildings and vehicles. Some of these are really, really cool, like a line of alternate-history zeppelins and steam tanks. Once in a while he puts up files for free download. This month it's a cool Victorian submarine."
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese foldable robots
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More foldable, glue-able PDFs -- this time, it's ultra-fab Japanese paper robots. Link (Thanks, Skye!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New addition to the solar system
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DATE: 03/15/2004 02:32:19 PM
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Is it a planet or isn't it? Today, CalTech astronomers announced the discovery of a "planetoid" eight billion miles from Earth, or more more than three times the distance of Pluto.
With a size approximately three-quarters that of Pluto, it is very likely the largest object found in the solar system since the discovery of Pluto in 1930.
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TITLE: Farkistani photoshop hall of fame
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DATE: 03/16/2004 05:47:08 AM
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Fark has asked its photoshop army to post their all-time favorite photoshooping contest entries. The result is a jaw-dropping gallery of ninja-grade, potty-humor rasterbation that I'm still chuckling at. Link (Thanks, urlnotfound!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Three more chapters from Gillmor's "Making the News"
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DATE: 03/16/2004 05:51:25 AM
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Dan Gillmor has posted three more draft chapters from Making the News, his upcoming book on the way that the Internet and journalism are changing one another. This is a very good draft, but he wants to make it better, so he's soliciting your input on ways to improve it.In April, 2001, Apple Computer's public-relations agency got a request from a blogger, Joe Clark, who wanted to interview someone inside the company about the Macintosh operating system. Clark had written for tech magazines, and his now-dormant NUblog (www.content.nu) was an increasingly popular site, but the PR agency didn't know this. Frustrated by the negative response, Clark posted the e-mail exchange on his site, which in turn prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the agency's regional vice president. The entire episode showed how fundamentally clueless Apple and its PR people were about a medium that was growing in importance.To be fair, this was 2001, before weblogs were well-known. Clark was a relatively early player in what Azeem Azhar, a principal in 20six, a European weblog tool company, calls the "eBay-ization of media -- everyone can be a buyer and a seller." Others call it "nanopublishing" -- small sites, run by one or a very few people, focusing on a relatively narrow niche topic. Niche bloggers may lack the influence of a major publication. Some are what Azhar calls "a teenage boy who drives the mobile-phone purchase decisions of his group of teenage friends; or the London yoga practitioner who has 60 or 80 fellow yogi readers on his blog, and who influences their yoga-related purchasing."
Chapter 2 Link, Chapter 3 Link, Chapter 4 Link
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TITLE: Spraycan hiss detector narks out taggers
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DATE: 03/16/2004 05:55:28 AM
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Taggertrap is an emergency-lighting box that has an audio sensor tuned to the sound of a spraypaint can in action. When it detects nearby graffiti writers, it activates a silent alarm, ratting the taggers out to the cops.The mobile unit (Stinger) is battery powered, augmented by solar energy and may be linked with other surveillance or communication equipment, including cell phones, pagers, or, in remote locations like national parks, by GPS. The fixed unit (Surveyor) may be linked with existing alarm systems.
Link (via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Weezer/Jay-Z mashup: Jay-Zeezer
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DATE: 03/16/2004 05:57:15 AM
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Inspired by the Gray Album and the Jay-Z Construction Kit, this guy has remixed Jay-Z's Black Album with Weezer's Blue Album, calling the result "Jay-Zeezer."First I needed some sample material. Albums with colors in their names were definitely the way to go, so I started to make a list. How about REM's "Green?" Nah, not ironic enough. King Crimson's "Red?" No way! Everyone hates that prog rock shit. What about Weezer's "Blue Album?" It's really just named "Weezer", but everyone calls it by it's jacket color to distinguish it from the other one they released with the same name. With rap-esque lyrics like, "What's with these homies dissin' my girl?", it practically remixed itself. Paydirt. "Jay-Zeezer" was born.
Link(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stewart Butterfield, the IM Question Answerer
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:01:16 AM
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Through a serindipitous google-accident, Stewart Butterfield has a lot of page-rank for the query, "IM Question Answerer," and as a result, people frequently IM him with random questions. He's started a new blog in which he posts transcripts of these Q&A sessions:Colombiangel1213: do u think i could lokk in another site
sylloge: How old are you?
sylloge: Don't you get it?
sylloge: Google is a search engine ....
sylloge: You can find anything
sylloge: watch!
Colombiangel1213: ok
sylloge: http://www.google.com/search?q=hiking+and+mountains+and+stuff
sylloge: All about hiking and mountains and stuff
sylloge: See?
Colombiangel1213: ok clam down
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Positronic rap about the three laws
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:18:48 AM
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A LiveJournaller has written a rap for Will Smith to perform in his starring role in the upcoming I, Robot movie -- it's about someone wrote a rap about the positronic three-laws-havin' robot underclass.The robots are in town, you better hear that
They got laws, so you understand thatThey can't hurt us, they must obey us
But to protect themselves, could they betray us?
They say the metal man, follow a higher plan
But are they right, or should we fight?
What is our plight?
Link(Thanks, Nat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NASA's official fold-and-glue ties
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:29:24 AM
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NASA has its own line of paper model toys, including gingerbread templates for making your own edible Cassini rover.Link(Thanks, rcrain!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NPR on Eastern Standard Tribe
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:30:44 AM
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NPR's Rick Kleffel broadcast a fantastic review of Eastern Standard Tribe yesterday, and he's posted the text on his site.True to form, Doctorow peppers his novel with technology so palpable you want to order it up on the web. You'll probably get the chance. But technology is not the point here, merely a fascinating, convincing backdrop for the story. It's a really old story, actually -- boy meets girl. What follows is not unexpected, or even particularly new. What is unexpected, shocking even, is how smart Doctorow is when it comes to the human heart, and how well he's able to articulate it.This novel feels whiz-bang modern, but Doctorow's prose uses the oldest trick in the book -- utterly direct simplicity. Even when he's explaining a sophisticated system of mobile music swapping, Doctorow comes off like a standup comedian. The insights he offers seem obvious, but only in retrospect. He seems smart because he makes the reader feel smart. When Doctorow talks, when Art argues, we just get it. There's nothing between the language and the meaning. The prose is funny, simple and straightforward. This is a no-bullshit book.
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TITLE: Turn any 3D file into a paper model
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:43:34 AM
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Pepakura Desinger is an application that converts any 3D CAD model (Maya, Lightwave, DXF, etc) into a printable fold-and-glue paper model.Link(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod on offer in exchange for fake girlfriend with great butt
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:48:33 AM
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A Craigslister is willing to trade his iPod for an imaginary girlfriend to impress his visiting small-town parents. Too bad John Ritter is dead: this could be the plot for a Three's Company ironic Starsky-and-Hutch-style feature film.I'm having my parents come visit me sometime in the next two weeks and have lied and told them I am dating someone I am in love with. You will only have to come to one dinner. In exchange for this I will buy you an IPOD - yes new - we walk into the store together and buy a new IPOD. Let me know if this interests you, and if you want to be in a loving relationship with all the benefits it brings ;-) I want to pretend we are totally in love. I am 24, swm, a grad student, italian-american, (not a guido), athletic build. Send pics and i will send you mine, note I check email basically every 3 hours. You should be in your 20's and athletic (great butt and legs are my main interest when I say athletic).
Link(via $MY_APOLOGIES_I_LOST_TRACK_OF_WHERE_I_FOUND_THIS)
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TITLE: 1:1 paper replica of rifle from Aliens
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:54:09 AM
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This foldable, futuristic paper macho-gun is pretty cool. It's a replica of the M41-A Pulse Rifle from Aliens. Link (Thanks, Ryan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tremendous Star Wars paper models
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DATE: 03/16/2004 06:57:34 AM
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These Japanese paper Star Wars toys are really, really good -- I think these are my favorites in the genre. Link (Thanks, $SORRY_I_HAVE_LOST_TRACK_OF_WHO_SUGGESTED_THIS!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Moore's publishers bully Soft Skull Press over Stupid White Men title
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:05:28 AM
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The idiot lawyers at the publisher of Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men" are going after the excellent Soft Skull Press for producing a book called "How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office" -- despite the fact the Moore himself is flattered by the reference. This is positively inexcusable in this era of "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." In November, HarperCollins wrote to the Brooklyn publisher, Soft Skull Press, demanding that the title be changed and stating that the similarities would cause "irreparable damage" to Mr. Moore and his book.The ironies compound rather quickly at this point, even ignoring that a company built on free and unfettered expression appears to be, by implication, objecting when someone else engages in that. In sending the letter, HarperCollins was protecting a book it refused to publish for a time, defending an author it fought bitterly with, and, according to Mr. Moore, doing so without his knowledge.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ninjas and Pirates, Dwarves and Elves: how to understand the world
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:14:02 AM
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Tom Coates has written an hilarious and insightful essay in which he attempts to rank his friends and their operating systems (!) on two axes: Elf/Dwarf and Ninja/Pirate. I'm digging the 2X2 graphs.
Think of some of the humble bloggers on my blogroll. Where would they live? Ben Hammersley has something of the pirate about him. This is not a restrained man of quiet honour, but a proud warrior of the sea -- hair flowing in the breeze. But his skills are more evenly tempered between the conceptual and the practical -- as best evidenced by his work on the schema for various syndication formats. His position is clear. Matt Jones is far closer to elf than dwarf, but as swashbuckling as a man can come. Not so Dan Hill, elven once more but evidencing the self-mastery and discipline of a true ninja.
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TITLE: Earbud headphones with built-in foam earplugs
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:18:30 AM
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Having just killed yet another pair of white iPod headphones, I'm in the market. This review of FutureSonic EARS headphones -- which integrate foam earplugs -- has me thinking.It took me three or for uses to get used to inserting the EARS and fiddling with the EQ settings on my iPod and PowerBook. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but gravitate towards rock, funk/groove, and electronica the most and like a fair amount of bass in the mix (though not at the expense of the middle and high-end of the spectrum). The EQ settings on my iTunes and home stereo system boost the low and high ends while cutting a bit of the mid-range, and I usually keep my iPod's EQ set to "Rock" or "R & B." So I was pretty stunned to find that I was getting too much bass using the EARS with these settings. Switching the iPod over to "Treble Booster" wound up yielding the best results: Clear mid- and high-end response with plenty of undistorted bass to keep my head noddin'. I'm a drummer, so I need the thump of the bass drum clear and strong underneath the rest of the music.
Link (via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Playstation 3 and Xbox 2 weblogs
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:21:32 AM
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Two new niche tech blogs launching from Jason Calacanis and crew: Playstation3 and XBox2.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ClicktheVote filesharing petition
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:25:17 AM
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Click The Vote recently announced the launch of a petition in support of "an equitable, balanced and reasonable system for legal file sharing that promotes learning and rewards creators." The petition is now available online for people to sign at the ClickTheVote.org website.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help a library win a copyfight
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:37:21 AM
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Jenny sez, "Would really appreciate help highlighting one public library's struggle against copyright law. All they want to do is show their staff in-service day video."The presentation was a success and the audience seemed to really like the video! There were some whoops and hollars! Then we did questions and of course the discussion turned to copyright. Yes, we used ROL by Madonna with no clearance but it was as much fair use as it could be: not sold, distributed, or copied.I told them we tried last year to reach out to Madonna's people and never got anywhere. I think this is a great idea for libraries to internally and externally market themselves -- hey Madonna... can you give me a minute of your time to chat about it?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Foucault in Lego
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:58:49 AM
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Social theorist Lego kits.Link (Thanks, Stevie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bruce Sterling talk from SXSW
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DATE: 03/16/2004 10:33:56 AM
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Here are my running notes from Bruce Sterling's rant at SXSW:This is a genius adminsitration for inspiring angry rhetoric.It's got a nice, interesting consistency. I like Rumsfeld, I dighis poetry. Job one in the Bush Admin is to get it spun: they'rean info-war-centric outfit. If you get it spun, you don't need toget it done.Controlling the message is more important to them thancontrolling the underlying reality. It's a blatant part of theirideology. Their global climate change policy is in defiance ofthe laws of physics, it's Lysenkoism. The Union of ConcernedScientists has a page documenting the Bushies' Lysenkoism fromclimate change to on.
The science stuff is starting to blow back. The UCS isnonpartisan. It's like Stalin and Lysenko's faith-basedagriculture: the reason Soviet wheat fields have weeds is becausewheat is evolving into weeds. You didn't have to get the peasantsto weed the fields, you could just allege this. Scientists wereamazed and horrified. Soviet scientists who went abroad to talkabout chemistry and physics were confronted with a credibilitygap arising from this -- they had to admit that back home,politicians made up the laws of physics. So scientists defectedto Cornell.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Antiques roadshow for scientific curioddities
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DATE: 03/16/2004 10:48:36 AM
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Wired News reports on the American Museum of Natural History's ID Day, sort of an antiques roadshow of biology and anthropology where the public can have scientific "treasures" appraised.
"Previous Identification Day examinations have yielded a fossilized whale's jawbone, a rare green beetle bracelet from Brazil and a 5,000-year-old stone spear point. But most often the items are identified as tourist trinkets or valueless bits and pieces of bone and stone."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Art of Electromagnetism
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DATE: 03/16/2004 11:25:00 AM
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The MIT Physics Department held their first annual "Weird Fields" contest for students in an Electromagnetism I class to construct the "weirdest two-dimensional vector field from simple analytic functions." The students used a Field Mapping applet developed at the school to produce a mind-blowing variety of psychedelic visualizations. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Abbott and Costello Go To The Porn Shop
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DATE: 03/16/2004 01:26:17 PM
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The Smoking Gun provides us with a 1958 FBI memo revealing that Bud Abbott was quite the porn aficionado, counting 1,500 movie reels in his collection. Of course, any films confiscated during a potential raid on a shady party Abbott was allegedly planning were to have been "submitted to the FBI Lab for examination and comparison purposes." I can hear the agents' conversation now: Who's on Top? No, Who is on the bottom! Link (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New camera from Philips works like human eye
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DATE: 03/16/2004 02:14:50 PM
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A new camera lens from Philips designed for small, cheap imaging devices uses fluids to shape the lens for focusing. Just like your eye. Link (thanks, Bev!). Update:
Grant says, "Engadget had a story earlier today about another company, Varioptic, which has already created a fluid, no moving parts lens. Engadget says, 'the two companies [Philips and Varioptic] are headed towards a legal showdown.'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Controlled vocabulary for describing personal relationships
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DATE: 03/16/2004 02:15:28 PM
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Clay Shirky's posted a fine rant on RELATIONSHIP, a controlled vocabulary of terms for describing personal relationships (i.e. friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf, spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith, knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation, closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith, employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf, grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf, participantIn, participant):Take the relationship closePersonalFriendOf. The designers of this list somehow overlooked it, possibly on the grounds that it's tautological, and only of use on talk shows. ("Oh yes, Julia Roberts is a close personal friend of mine.") But it is nevertheless informative -- you would only use closePersonalFriendOf if the person in question was someone of relatively high fame or station.In addition, anyone claiming to be a "close personal friend" of someone else is talking about a domain where a high degree of social interaction is the norm, e.g. show business. By extension, the seemingly oxymoronic friendYouDontLike is also a valid category, as anyone in highly social environments can tell you. (You often run into friendsYouDontLike at partiesYouHaveToGoTo.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Funky art fashion: Christian Joy
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DATE: 03/16/2004 02:23:34 PM
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The website of fashion designer Christiane Hultquist, whose work is produced under the label Christian Joy. She's the one who does those wacky art-graffiti-dresses for that chick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs okay, okay, okay, lead singer Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (there you go, Alex).
With no formal training in fashion design, Christiane started creating one of a kind hand painted and hand sewn t-shirts decorated with slogans like "FU I'm Not Your Waitress." As well, she began to re-design old prom dresses giving them names like the "Carried Dress" with a creepy "hahahaha" written across a bloody red bodice and the "Ex Dress" with the names of ex-boyfriends in gold glitter.
Link (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Adult angling: "Fish F*cker" for sale on eBay
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DATE: 03/16/2004 02:30:26 PM
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Fleshbot snickers,
Giggle if you will at this custom made, dildo-handled fishing rod (heh, "rod") currently on sale at eBay, but according to the item description it gets the job done just fine: "Not only did it perform well, it caught the most fish of any poles that day, AND I landed a 5 pound Whitefish with it!"
Link to eBay auction
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Shootin' pool with Hellboy
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DATE: 03/16/2004 02:36:57 PM
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Actor Ron Perlman shoots pool and talks with the magazine FHM, while dressed as the comic world's favorite beast of the apocalypse. Hellboy the movie, directed by Guillermo del Toro, launches April 2. Link to interview, Link to the website for the comic that inspired it (thanks, J. Hurwitz!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Self-made superhero Angle Grinder Man is back
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DATE: 03/16/2004 02:52:36 PM
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Joi Ito reports that Angle Grinder Man is back and in full effect. The British homegrown hero wanders the streets of London clad in gold lame caped crusader getup, freeing illegally parked cars of parking enforcement security boots. Or, as AGM himself would put it,
"Angle-Grinder Man [is] the world's first wheel-clamp and speed camera vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type personage.
A big welcome to all good, decent, law-unabiding citizens. Godspeed to you and your four-wheeled, petrol-driven chariots."
Link to Angle Grinder Man's website (Caution: Not worksafe for villains or parking enforcement officers. Contains strong superpowers)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mark Cuban, world's first Billionaire Blogger.
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DATE: 03/16/2004 05:12:27 PM
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Aside from being an HDTV and digital cinema entrepreneur, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, and the star of a new "Apprentice"-like TV show on ABC in which he hands out $1M to strangers, Mark Cuban is now a blogger. Weblogsinc founder Jason Calacanis is on something of a roll -- rumor has it he's launching several additional celeblogs soon. Link to Mark Cuban's new blog. Link to more Cuban news from John Battelle's blog today.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: VoIP company Skype raises $19MM
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DATE: 03/16/2004 05:27:58 PM
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Internet telephony startup Skype today announced a $19 million investment through DFJ. The VoIP provider was founded by creators of P2P network Kazaa. Skype plans to use some of that cash to buy hundreds of thousands of minutes per month from major telcos, and provide them in turn to its own customers.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Choline boosts brains
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DATE: 03/16/2004 05:33:50 PM
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Some Smart Drug enthusiasts I knew in the cyberdelic early 90s raved about the cognitive effects of the nutrient choline. A new study at Duke University Medical Center seems to support their claims. In the study, pregnant rats were given three to four times their normal intake of choline. Apparently, their offspring boasted bigger neurons that fired faster and for longer than the control group.
According to a New Scientist article, "behavioural studies have shown giving choline to pregnant rats improves learning and memory in their offspring." This latest study though "is the first time anyone has shown that prenatal choline supplementation actually changes the anatomy and physiology of single brain cells," one of the researchers said.
Still, another scientist adds, pregnant women should continue to avoid certain foods like liver, swordfish, and tuna that are rich in choline but may be bad news for other reasons.
Time to belly up to the Smart Bar? Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblogging a trail of nutty signs from deranged neighbor
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DATE: 03/16/2004 07:01:14 PM
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A participant in the Something Awful forums posts photos of Dr.-Bronner's-soap-like signs she claims were created by a disturbed neighbor nicknamed Crazy Tammy.
"She's been gone from the neighborhood for about nine months now, hopefully getting the treatment she so sorely needed. From what I understand, and from what others have told me, Crazy Tammy is a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia. We would have never known about her terrible mental problem if she hadn't advertised her insane views on giant sheets of cloth hung from her fence."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Porn for Pandas
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DATE: 03/16/2004 09:43:31 PM
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Chinese veterinarians are hoping "panda porn" movies will turn on American-born panda Hua Mei. According a Xinhua News Agency article, it's believed that because the panda was born in captivitiy, she was never clued in to the mating game. An Adult Video News report claims that "besides the videos, Hua Mei has also visited a few 'sets,' live viewing of other panda couples mating."
Link to AVN article (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: If Apple's founders were in a 70s cop-show
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DATE: 03/17/2004 06:52:10 AM
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Streets of Cupertino: a t-shirt celebrating an imaginary cop show starring the founders of Apple with 1979 haircuts. Link (via Blackbeltjones)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toy rollercoaster with inversion and electric lift-hill
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DATE: 03/17/2004 06:54:40 AM
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Caines sez, "Coaster Dynamix is taking pre-orders ($499.00) for a kick-ass roller coaster model kit. The coaster kit has an electric lift-hill and an inverted train. They attached a camera to the train and included this footage in the video that is on the site." Link (Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jack Chick's own Passion
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DATE: 03/17/2004 06:57:05 AM
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Before Mel Gibson's Vanity Project, there was Jack Chick, the clown prince of loony religious nuttery, author of countless comic-book tracts advising on the danger of Catholicism, Freemasonry, Dungeons and Dragons and Hallowe'en. Now, Chick has released his own vanity project, an utlra-violent DVD celebrating his unique spin on matters Biblical.
Cut to present day when a narrator informs us that "the whole world is filled with liars, thieves and fornicators" with the forced-sounding awe of the voiceover for a Christmas-themed McDonald’s commercial. This section is called "This was your life" and is based on the Chick tract of the same name. It tells the story of a man who thought he lived a decent life, but finds himself condemned for eternity to hell.But what a hell it is! It’s a feast of explosions of blood, cross-species monsters, huge dragon snakes and great, glowing orange eyes. Jack T. Chick LLC really gets off on gore, pain and blood. Later in the movie, Jesus’ face looks like a bloody stump when the Roman guard spits on him.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Artist Paul Lucas interprets "Jack Spratt"
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DATE: 03/17/2004 08:45:01 AM
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Paul Lucas creates his surrealistic images using a combination of sculpture, photography, drawing and collage. Link (via Cipango)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: h4w7 Naked chyxx0rs will teach U how 2 hack
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DATE: 03/17/2004 09:38:19 AM
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Fleshbot says:
Given the venerable historical associations between computer hacking and porn (er, pr0n), this seems like a natural: "HaXXXor combines computer hacking with porn for the first time on one DVD ... Armed with real girls showing all of their hardware!"
HaXXXor - Naked Chicks Teach You To Hack
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Swiss Army Knife with USB
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DATE: 03/17/2004 09:49:09 AM
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The next edition of the classic Swiss Army Knife will feature a built-in USB key.
The wired knife is one of many novelties scheduled to debut at CeBIT in Hannover, Germany from March 18-24.
Link
(Thanks, Jean-luc, also spotted on Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Time Warner taps into fed wiretap law
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DATE: 03/17/2004 09:58:17 AM
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Ben Charny at CNET reports that Time Warner is said to have begun complying with a federal law that requires telecom providers to help police conduct electronic surveillance:
Time Warner Cable is the first cable company to begin trying to adhere to the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, the source said. Cable companies are not yet required to comply with the 1994 wiretap law, but they see the writing on the wall.
Link to CNET story.
More updates on federal wiretapping activity in a March 13 WaPo article here.
(Thanks, Steve)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony launches "personalized radio" to mobile phones
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DATE: 03/17/2004 10:41:52 AM
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Allso at CeBit: Sony will announce what it describes as the world's first "personalized radio" service for mobile phones. Users can customize playlists to their own tastes, and listen via cellphone.
The Japanese electronics, film and music giant also unveiled the European version of its Internet music store Connect, aiming to beat Apple's iTunes Music Store to the European market, while relaxing restrictive usage rules of its SonicStage player which no longer limits the number of copies per song.
Link (Thanks, Hal)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bigfoot Defense Denied
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DATE: 03/17/2004 11:04:09 AM
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Last summer, Vermont driver Mark Zielinski crossed his van into oncoming traffic and killed another motorist. In a hearing to dismiss the charge against Zielinski, his defense attorney attempted to argue that there was no way of knowing whether Zielenski swerved to avoid an obstacle in the road, a moose or possibly even a bigfoot. Apparently, several sasquatch had been sighted in the vicinity. The judge wasn't having it though. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hello Kitty USB hub
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DATE: 03/17/2004 11:12:21 AM
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This Hello Kitty USB hub "will talk with you along with the input motion of the keyboard (moves both arms and head)" -- English and Japanese versions available. Link (via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SXSW Friendster keynote
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DATE: 03/17/2004 11:13:31 AM
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Heath Row has posted his near-verbatim transcript extensive notes on Jonathan Abrams's Friendster keynote at SXSW:It's an illusion to think that you can manage different personas for different people's access, but we are working on more privacy so different people can see different information. I talked our director of community for some interesting stories. We've had people accidentally delete a friend from their friend's list, and their friends apply peer pressure to add them back to their list. Then they email us and ask us to undo the deletion. If they added them again, they'd get an invitation, which would highlight the deletion in the first place. In the real world, people do get snubbed. We've tried to build Friendster so it mirrors real life, so it has some of the challenges of real life.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: World's smallest hard drive
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DATE: 03/17/2004 12:06:45 PM
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Toshiba Corp. landed a Guinness World Record for their new .85-inch hard drive with a four gigabyte storage capacity. (Toshiba's 1.8 inch drives are inside the iPod.) "Toshiba's innovation means that I could soon hold more information in my watch than I could on my desktop computer just a few years ago," David Hawksett, science and technology editor at Guinness World Records, told Reuters. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired Rave Awards
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DATE: 03/17/2004 12:45:24 PM
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Wired Magazine's anual Rave Awards took place on Monday night at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Robodominatrix and former BB guestblogger Karen Marcelo of SRL accompanied me. It was a terrific event. The Rapture played a tight set. The catering was awesome, particularly the organic greens as you can see from Karen's snapshot here (full size). USA Today has this article about who won what. Two of the awards that brought the biggest smile to my grass-grazing face: Scott Heiferman and Joe Trippi were honored for Meetup, as was Bram for Bittorrent. Here is the final list of winners. Maybe they'll give me something next year for my forthcoming adult bovine blog publishing venture, www.XXXRuminants.com (thanks, Jonno).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pepper spray ring and mobile phone stun gun
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DATE: 03/17/2004 01:03:19 PM
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After reading about Safety Technology's combination voice-changer/background-noise gadget that connects to your phone (reviewed in Wired's must-read Gadget Lab newsletter), I looked at some of the other things that Safety Technology sells. The Stunner, a pepper spray ring, looks like a great way to accidentally blast yourself or your friend in the face with a searing dose of capsaicin (the chemical that makes peppers hot). They also sell a stun gun designed to look like a cell phone (not the false-rumor Nokia stun gun that made the blog rounds a couple of weeks ago).
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TITLE: Funky-cool pissoires
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DATE: 03/17/2004 02:30:25 PM
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Bathroom Mania offers designer bathroom utilities -- flower pot toilet complete with singing birdie, hammock bath, beach cabin shower, and more. A recent Virgin Atlantic press release says their
new clubhouse at JFK airport now includes the "Kisses" urinal.
Update: BoingBoing reader Eric says, "The designer of the "kiss" (urinal in
shape of a mouth) might have a problem: the mouth-shaped urinal has already been patented.
This link takes you directly to the patent at the USPTO."
Link (Thanks, travis! Also seen on J-Walk)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: $54,000 shopping spree booty on display in London Museum
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DATE: 03/17/2004 02:40:34 PM
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Every year for the past 11 years Sir Terence Conran "has sent a notable figure from the world of design on a 30,000 pound ($54,000) shopping spree." This year 33-year-old English designer, sculptor and architect Thomas Heatherwick was given US$54 thousand dollars to buy "things [he'd] like to live with." His purchases of offbeat objects are on display at London's Design Museum. I wonder if he gets to keep the stuff? (Shown here: a welders mask from Hoodlum Welding Gear)Upstairs on a recent afternoon, people strolled past aisles of individually lighted boxes containing such items as a life-size glass "wine rifle" and a "rum sword" loaded with their namesakes. Christian chewing gum with a prayer on every wrapper. Edible peanut-shaped packing material. A urinal with a sink where the water tank usually is. A biodegradable papier mache coffin. Japanese eyelid glue. Oven mitts for Kosher Jews. A compass for pointing praying Muslims toward Mecca. Yorkshire tea made for London hard water. An organ donor T-shirt.
LinkNick Douglas sez: I found out where Heatherwick's items will go. A 2002 Independent article says this: "Every year, Sir Terence Conran chooses a guest curator to spend £30,000 on 'things you'd like to live with' to be exhibited at the Design Museum, London. These items become part of the Conran Foundation Collection, which conserves and records the cream of 20th and 21st-century design."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vaporware rumors of s3xy new Apple gear
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DATE: 03/17/2004 04:06:38 PM
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Here's some pretty teh s3xy new vaporware rumors about upcoming Apple products: first, a fourth-gen iPod with "max capacity of 50GB of storage, 2 inch color LCDs, video out, photo display capabilities, and revised (Mini-like) navigation wheel" and an Aluminium Display "with monitor feet resembling the PowerMac G5 handles."
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TITLE: Aftermath of Bruce Sterling's open-door SXSW party
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DATE: 03/17/2004 04:31:45 PM
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As is traditional, Bruce Sterling finished out this year's SXSW interactive festival by throwing an open-door party, with 600 in attendance. He's posted photos of the (surprisingly tidy) aftermath.
The cops showed up. There was no dancing or loud music. Those were human beings *TALKING SO LOUDLY*that they could be heard as a steady dull roar two blocks away. We've had SXSW parties here, every year, but we never set off the cop-ometer before.I had to hustle all the guests inside and shut the doors, whereupon the party immediately became MUCH LOUDER.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NASA can hear unspoken thoughts
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DATE: 03/17/2004 05:21:52 PM
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Sensors under the chin can "hear" the silent words conveyed from the brain to the voicebox, before they're uttered.
"A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain," said developer Chuck Jorgensen, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.
Jorgensen's team found that sensors under the chin and one each side of the Adam's apple pick up the brain's commands to the speech organs, allowing the subauditory, or "silent speech" to be captured.
Link
(Thanks, Rob!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's on the cover of this week's Now Magazine!
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DATE: 03/17/2004 05:33:24 PM
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Now Magazine, Toronto's free entertainment weekly, has a great cover story on me this week, with a review of Eastern Standard Tribe.
A reminder: I've got two signings coming up in Toronto this week. The first is tomorrow night, at the Merril Collection, 239 College, third floor, 7 pm, 416-393-7748.
The second is on March 27, at Bakka Books, 598 Yonge at Wellesley, 3 to 5 pm. 416-963-9993.
(Some minor errata: My thesis was about fringe culture and the Internet; I got a job programming, not advertising, CDROMs; and the entertainment industry is worth $60 billion, not million; I was considered the best writer in my school workshops, not my professional ones)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Coin-op WiFi
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DATE: 03/17/2004 08:32:35 PM
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These guys are selling a coin-operated WiFi access point. Apparently, this isn't a joke.
He/She inserts coins to the specific amount and the unit will enable the network port of the wireless AP. He/She will be able to access the Internet for a specific time (controlled by the timer builtin the unit).
Link
(via WiFiNetNews)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Teresa dissects a troll
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DATE: 03/17/2004 10:19:23 PM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden got trolled by someone who decided that because she is an editor, she isn't allowed to call out idiots who behave idiotically. The troll took the form of a series of accusations, guilt-trips and high-minded moralizing, and Teresa has, in her inimical style, pulled it apart and exposed it for the steaming pile of irredeemable bullshit that it is. I'm going to print this one out and stick it over my desk, once I have a desk again.
I hate crap like this. I’m just an editor. I work on books. Sometimes I buy them. That’s all.
When you see them cherishing this bizarre belief that you’re some hugely powerful figure who can’t be hurt (which in their minds invariably turns out to also mean that the jerk who in reality is going after your shins with steel-toed boots is actually a tiny fragile creature in danger of being horribly oppressed by you), you know the person you’re dealing with is operating in the Dream Time. This particular psychodrama is about him feeling like he doesn’t have enough power, which usually means he either thinks I’ve stolen his away, or that I simply have too much and will imminently squash him like the insect he is.
Cripes. Don’t I just wish.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Political cartoon on SMS and Spain elections
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:42:22 AM
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Following up on the recent flashmob-like protests in Spain after the Madrid bombings, see this attached cartoon from today's El Periodico. Translation:
The sign at left identifies the assembled group of suits as "experts in election strategies." The guy in the middle says, "Meetings, interviews, news articles, debates, banners, posters... nobody thought about SMS messages!"
(Thanks, Nick Boalch!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robolympics this weekend in SF
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:49:46 AM
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David Calkins, President of the Robotics Society of America, says:
1,000 robots. . .well, 414, but that is more than enough at the first Annual Robolympics - this Saturday and Sunday at Ft. Mason in San Francisco.
Robots from 11 countries will crawl, wrestle, screech, walk, roll and bash their way to victory. . .or limp pitifully to the recycling pile. Be there for all the action, from 25 gram nano-sumo matches to 340-pound behemoth combat monsters! Artbots, combat bots, huge bots, teeny bots, human competitors of all ages, sizes and shapes, from elementary school Lego League to professional combat masters, all vying for medals and glory at Robolympics! This event also introduces Robo-One to America, a little-known tournament all the way from Japan that features biped androids doing Kung Fu!
See the videos at the Robolympics website, Robo-One defies description. Your ticket pays for the whole seat - but you won't need it. You'll be to excited to sit!
Link (thanks also to
Roland !)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:54:00 AM
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Douglas Repetto, organizer of the robotic performance extravaganza Artbots, says, "The 2004 ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show call for works has just gone live! The deadline for entries is May 1st. We invite all geek/artist BoingBoingers to send in their stuff! Info and entry form here."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DaisyLift porcelain toilet seat handles
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:56:16 AM
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An anonymous BB reader says:
This is a little odd thing for people who don't want to touch toilet seats. It's a porcelain handle to lift 'em! Apparently porcelain won't let bacteria grow like plastic might, so it makes a sort of odd sense. Of course if toilet seats were made out of porcelain still this wouldn't be a problem, but then think how cold the seat would be in the winter -- we'd need an electric tushy warmer (although I bet Toto and Kohler already have 'em). What I'd really like to see is a toilet seat ringed with dozens of these things, like some sort of toilet stegasaurus.Update:
BB reader Maya Stosskopf says, "I don't know if it is still there, but for at least 15 years there was a lone billboard for this product (or a similair one) near my hometown in rural northern Illinois and the text of the billboard read avoid fecal fingers!".
JayPee provides proof, via Kottke.
Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Creem magazine archives: William S. Burroughs interview
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DATE: 03/18/2004 09:11:41 AM
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Creem was the best Rock 'n' Roll magazine ever. It was one of the few mainstream magazines to embrace Punk in the 70s and 80s. Its website is really nice, with lots of old articles and a complete cover gallery. Here are a couple of interviews with William S. Burroughs.MORGAN: For many contemporary rock critics and musicians, William Burroughs is rock ’n’ roll. Do you feel the same affinity for rock ’n’ roll that rock ’n’ roll obviously feels for you? BURROUGHS: Well, yeah. (laughs) I have given them a lot of titles: The Heavy Metal Kids, The Insect Trust, The Soft Machine. There are a couple of others. I enjoy rock ’n’ roll. It certainly is a unique and incredible phenomenon. Remember that 40 or 50 years ago, musicians didn’t make any money. They played to very small audiences in night clubs and road houses. Also, they had no protection on their records. I’m always asking rock ’n’ roll people if they know who Petrillo is, and none of them do. Well, they wouldn’t have a dime if it weren’t for Petrillo because he organized the Musicians’ Union way back at the end of the ‘30s. And that is why they make money on their records. There wouldn’t be any white Rolls Royces or anything like that.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kazaa Cleaner
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DATE: 03/18/2004 09:12:30 AM
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BoingBoing pal JP points us to Kazaa Cleaner, which its makers describe as "a free and tiny Adware / Spyware remover utility especially designed for getting rid of all Spyware and Adware applications (i.e.,
Scumwares) that have been bundled, past and present, with all Kazaa Media Desktop clients." Folks, I'm not recommending it, just pointing to the fact that it's out there. Several BB readers have written in to alert us to the fact that a download and attempted install triggers warnings in virus detection software. I haven't had time to check it out, and it may in fact be toxic stuff, I don't know. Proceed with caution.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Windows in Welsh
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DATE: 03/18/2004 09:38:14 AM
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Microsoft has announced a Welsh-language version of Windows.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Electric Sheep artificial life DVD launch March 31, San Francisco
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DATE: 03/18/2004 10:29:01 AM
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Spot Draves is the author of the brilliant Electric Sheep screensaver -- this is a distributed rendering application that grabs its users' computers' idle cycles to create computationally expensive, vivid and beautiful animated fractals. Users vote for the animations they like best while the screensaver is running, and those fractals are then given precedence within the computational gene pool, spawning variations that are rendered out again, dancing for their human masters who have the power of life and death over them.
The result is a breathtaking, psychedelic form of artificial life whose fitness factor is the ability to tickle the aesthetics of computer geeks.
Spot has assembled the best of these animations -- these "Electric Sheep" -- on a DVD, with DJ mixed background audio. The contents of the DVD are all online as small QuickTime movies, for for the high-rez, you'll have to order a copy or go to the launch on March 31, in San Francisco:
wednesday march 31st 7pm-2am StudioZ
314 11th st @ folsom san francisco
415.252.7666 www.studioz.tv 21+ w/ID
free admission
featuring the soundz of Spool, jhno, mbb,
dj vordo, and Kenji Williams/ABA Structure
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open source, world-editable novel on a Wiki
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DATE: 03/18/2004 10:33:16 AM
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Heath sez, "Rick Heller has put the full text of his novel Smart Genes up as a Wiki, encouraging people to contribute to it."
Link
(Thanks, Heath!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Carbs crank up serotonin
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DATE: 03/18/2004 11:02:15 AM
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An MIT study suggests that low-car/pro-protein diets like Atkins can chemically bum you out. Judith Wurtman, director of the Program in Women's Health at the MIT Clinical Research Center, found that when you kick the carb habit, your brain stops regulating serotonin. As people who take SSRI drugs like Prozac know, serotonin elevates mood and can also act as an appetite suppresant.
"According to Wurtman's clinical studies, if the carbohydrate craver eats protein instead, he or she will become grumpy, irritable or restless. Furthermore, filling up on fatty foods like bacon or cheese makes you tired, lethargic and apathetic. Eating a lot of fat, she said, will make you an emotional zombie."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nature's artforms, with alpha channels, free for the remixing
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DATE: 03/18/2004 11:07:26 AM
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Spot Draves has released a bunch of Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) as Creative-Commons-licensed, high-resolution scans in PNG format, with painstaking alpha transparency channels that allow you to easily composite them onto other images. Haeckel was the naturist who stated that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- that foetuses step through their evolutionary history in the womb. It turned out that he was kind of making that up and faking his evidence, but he sure drew pretty pictures, and the meme's got legs. Well, first it had a tail, then it had legs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr has blog support!
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DATE: 03/18/2004 11:37:25 AM
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Originally uploaded by 
Stewart.
Posted by Cory Doctorow from
Also noteworthy, flickr's best-of-breed terms-of-service and a privacy control-panel (reg required) that lets your friends assert your friendship without exposing your presence on the system to their friends.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crazy roadside signage from Oklahoma
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DATE: 03/18/2004 12:10:27 PM
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Bill Dugan snapped these pictures of crazy, ranting, wordy signs on a farm in Oklahoma in 1992 -- they're a kind of anti-Burma-shave ad, with neither rhyme nor wit to distract us from their glorious tinfoil beanery.
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(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: XPower Mobile Plug Inverter
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DATE: 03/18/2004 12:26:20 PM
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Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools:
You plug this solid-state inverter into your car's lighter socket and power whatever 110 volt AC appliance you want, 75 watts max. No need for special DC gadgets. It's made for recharging cell phones and other batteries, but I've used it for my scanner and my printer while on the road. Also, I've run a small B&W TV set (5'5), and more important, my baby's bottle heater (I admit is a small one). You can power almost anything that doesn't use large resistance like hair dryers, waffle makers, bread toasters, small ovens. I haven't tried a coffee maker yet. The same company offers an assorted line of automobile inverters with more output power (200 watts on up). This is the smallest one.
-- Juan J Gil
XPower MobilePlug 75, Manufactured by Xantrex.
Update: BoingBoing reader Ben Zanin disagrees with the review: "Admittedly, the convenience factor is nifty, but the efficiency is /terrible/. The cigarette-lighter-cum-power-socket puts out DC current, which is then passed into a DC-to-AC inverter, which in all of the given examples (recharging cell phones, running a scanner and a printer, heating a baby bottle) then passes the energy into a wall-wart adapter... that is, an AC-to-DC inverter.
"Derek Woolstar wrote about this much more clearly than myself. The numbers he came up with for such current inverters place their efficiency at less than 10%. Even if the efficiency were as high as double that, you'd lose more than 95% of your energy while transferring it from battery to device. See also this Harper's article."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bloggie victory photo
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DATE: 03/18/2004 12:29:09 PM
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Well, I've just mailed off the Bloggie certificates and the gold star to my co-editors' places, but luckily I've got this photo, courtesy of Justin Hall, of me displaying all the Bloggie bounty that Boing Boing was fortunate to acquire this year.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video of voting machine vendors and examiners admitting to the b0rkedness of voting machines
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DATE: 03/18/2004 01:20:39 PM
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Douglas sez, "A group of us recently got our hands on unedited videos of the meetings where Texas's appointed voting system examiners meet with vendors. Very scary stuff. We've put together a downloadable 'greatest hits' version. My favorite moment: 'I just want to make sure this machine can add. Remember, we've had machines recently that didn't add.' 'We've certified other things that weren't tested' is a close second."
Link
(Thanks, Douglas)
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TITLE: Saurian Sinclair software, encoded on vinyl records
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DATE: 03/18/2004 01:53:37 PM
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In the old days, you could get bonus software for your Sinclair Spectrum PC encoded as audio on vinyl record albums. This exhaustive, loving report has links to the code and emulators for executing it.
In the case of these programs on vinyl, the user would have to play back the proper portion of the record, record the resultant chatter to tape, and load the tape into the spectrum. Some users have mentioned playing certain games so much that they could recognise the loading sounds.
Link
(Thanks, Jed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Monthly archives are back
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DATE: 03/18/2004 02:01:24 PM
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We've got monthly archives again (I hope -- my Movable Type skillz are a little sub-1337) -- to those of you who have observed that the mailing list is b0rked, expect a fix soon.
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TITLE: Cory's book launch starts in two hours
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DATE: 03/18/2004 02:12:37 PM
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I'm about to fold up my laptop and grab a bite before heading down to my Toronto book-launch at the Merril Collection (239 College, third floor, 416-393-7748.), tonight at 7PM. Hope you can make it!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Video -- Rumsfeld eats his own words
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DATE: 03/18/2004 02:46:43 PM
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Here's a video clip from MoveOn that shows Rumsfeld admonishing some TV show hosts for claiming he ever said Iraq was an "immediate threat." He challenges his "critics" to provide "citations" to back up their claims, and when they do -- on the spot -- hilarity ensues. Link (Thanks, rupa!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Peter Bagge's libertarian comics for Reason
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DATE: 03/18/2004 04:12:18 PM
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I used to dislike Tom Tomorrow's comic strip, This Modern World. I'm not entirely sure why it didn't work for me, but I think it is because he would set up right-wing straw people to say exaggerated things to make them look bad. Lately, I've been enjoying his strip a lot more, and I think the reason is because the right-wing is now so outrageous, he doesn't need to exagerate to show how bad they are. The truth is funny without having to embellish it.To me, Peter Bagge is the opposite of Tom Tomorrow. I love the stuff he did for Weirdo, Neat Stuff, and Hate. Now he's doing a libertarian comic strip for Reason, and like a mirror-image Tom Tomorrow, he tries to make his point by exaggerating the kinds of things left-wingers say. And just as Tomorrow's early work wasn't funny, Bagge's recent Reason work doesn't make me laugh either. I did read Bagge's latest Hate Annual and thought he was in top form, so this criticism only applies to his Reason comics. Link
Brian Carnell sez: I thought it was unfair for you to pull that single strip out unqualified and claim that Bagge is just a right wing Tom Tomorrw.
Yes, that strip clearly exaggerates what the Left says for effect, but the difference between Bagge and Tom Tomorrow is that Bagge is an equal-opportunity exaggerator. For example, follow the link for a similar strip that is a caricature of the claims made by right wing supporters of the war on Iraq (I supported the war and I find it funny, but YMMV). He also lampooned libertarians.
The problem with Tom Tomorrow is that he's always caricaturing the Right, but never the Left (at least not that I can remember), unlike Bagge who skewers all sides.
(Mark sez: You're right, Brian!)
kellan sez: The other difference is that Tom Tomorrow often uses direct quotes, not caricature. When he exaggerates its clearly ridiculous (Bush in space fighting aliens), not a borderline, mean-spirited attack at common people.
Abelard sez: I'd love to point out the fallacy of Brian Carnell saying that Tom Tomorrow never skewers anyone on the Left, at least that he can remember. Apparently, his memory does not extend to 2000, and the running GoreBot gags [here and here] Or his occasional lampooning of granola guy. Just wanted to throw that at you - I was somewhat dismayed to see you agree with him on that rather ill-researched point.
Rick sez: I don't know why you and Brian have this idea of Tom Tomorrow of focusing only on the right for his skewerings. His politics aren't exactly secret and aren't meant to be, but he lets the left know when they've struck out. This even includes the Clinton years, the last of these three being an example. [here, here, and here]
(Mark sez: My argument is that Tom Tomorrow probably doesn't consider Clinton or Gore to be left wing. )
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TITLE: Guess What? Vaginamabutt.
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DATE: 03/18/2004 04:59:32 PM
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I have no idea WTF this is. Alright, I have *some* idea. It's -- like -- an X-rated pop art Farkistani Where's Waldo. Someone made this Keith Haring-esque Photoshop file of a vagina dentata assmonster. They invite you to download the file, print out, take photos of it in odd situations, then email in for inclusion on vaginamabutt.com.
Link (so not worksafe; thanks Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fauxtoblog
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DATE: 03/18/2004 05:23:41 PM
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A fellow named Jack posts a series of fake photoblogging documentaries on his website, fauxjob.com. Check out the hilarious fake Friendster UI on his home page. My favorite fauxtoblogs on Jack's site are "STAINS OF WEST HOLLYWOOD RAMADA INN" -- photos of stains on walls and carpet and furniture in an LA hotel -- and this series about (plastic) rats and roaches he discovered in a new Tenderloin district flat in San Francisco. Caption: " IT ALL BEGAN ONE MORNING -- SIMPLE ENOUGH -- WHEN I SAT DOWN TO ENJOY A BOWL OF CEREAL FOR BREAKFAST. HOWEVER, IT SEEMS, A GIANT RAT HAD BEATEN ME TO IT... I REALLY SHOULD HAVE MOVED TO THE CASTRO." (Thanks, J!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons music sharing license
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:16:14 PM
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Creative Commons has released a new, Music Sharing license, for bands who want to encourage sharing of their tunes.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bambi as prog-rock epic
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:21:31 PM
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Spastic Ink's prog-rock epic, "A Wild Hare," is a Zappa-esque guitar interpretation of Walt Disney's Bambi; there's a video that maps the music onto cuts from the animated film.
Part 1 5.3MB WMV Link,
Part 2 4.3MB WMV Link,
Part 3 5.3MB WMV Link,
Part 4 3.3MB WMV Link,
Part 5 6.5MB WMV Link,
Part 6 6.1MB WMV Link
(Thanks, Fnordo!)
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TITLE: Send-up of "Respect Copyright" PSAs
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:34:08 PM
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The CBC's Rick Mercer has produced a screamingly funny, vicious parody of the copyright boo-hoo-poor-Hollywood ads that run in front of all the movies in Canada now.
WHO MAKES MOVIES?
You know, people go see a comedy or a fantasy or an action film and nine times out of ten they walk out of the theatre at they look at one another and they say "Wow, that was really bad."
CHARLIE NESMAN MAKES BAD MOVIES
I make a lot of sequels. I'm the guy who makes part four and part five of movies where you haven't heard of the first one. Someday I'd like to make a part two.
What kind of movie do I like? I like a movie about a monkey that gets special powers and then has to play a sport. That's the kind of movie I like.
THE PIRACY ISSUE
I don't know why anyone would ever steal a movie. Unless of course it's to avoid this commercial which we now play in front of every single movie you could possibly go to, telling you you're bad for stealing even though you just spent $11 to see some movie and instead you have to sit there and listen to me whine at you and accuse you of being a thief. Nevermind the $9 you just spent for $0.30 worth of popping corn.
MOVIES: THEY'RE NOT WORTH IT
You're very bad people.
WATCH TELEVISION
Real Stream Link
(Thanks, Ted!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Currency origami -- strange bodies and familiar faces
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DATE: 03/18/2004 08:45:29 PM
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This Japanese site links to completed currency origami projects that focus on creating strange bodies for the faces found on notes.
Link
(Thanks, SE!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Doom: the board-game
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DATE: 03/19/2004 06:36:58 AM
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id has licensed Doom 3 to a board-game company, which is planning a meatspace, miniature first-person-shooter.
The game itself is set to be largely modeled after id's upcoming entry in the franchise, Doom 3, and will feature sculpted plastic miniatures of the game's characters, board pieces for players to create their own custom maps, specialized oversized dice, and a number of different weapon types.
Link
(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Odd Timewasting Zen
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DATE: 03/19/2004 07:34:54 AM
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(1) go?
(2) 6+=1
(3) boohbah zone
(4) grow
(5) larry carlson
(6) samorost
(7) and the classic
zombo
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Heatsink for your pillow
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DATE: 03/19/2004 07:45:38 AM
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The Chillow is a non-electric heat-sink you put under your pillow to keep it cool at night.
The Chillow was designed to match your body’s cooling needs. At night after an active day, when your metabolism is high and you’re hot, the Chillow is cool and refreshing. But in the the early a.m. hours, when your metabolism is low due to inactivity, and air temperature is at it’s coolest, the Chillow is lightly cool to lightly tepid, which is exactly the temperature you will enjoy. After you get out of bed, the Chillow loses any accumulated heat and recharges so it’s ready to go again at naptime, or at bedtime. There is no maintenance required, save sweeping the air out once per month, which takes approx. 20 seconds.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Canonical List of Weird Band Names
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:09:25 AM
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Names of actual bands, past or present, including: A Cat Born In An Oven Isn't a Cake | Accidental Goat Sodomy | Anal Beard Barbers | The Archbishop's Enema Fetish | The Ass Baboons of Venus | Bertha Does Moosejaw | Biff Hitler and the Violent Mood Swings | Chewbacca Plaid Cock | Crappy the Clown and the Punch Drunk Monkies | Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of Death. Link (via warren).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Profanity and broadcasting: New FCC actions, and the Loh-down
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:27:11 AM
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Last night in LA, I went to a big fucking party thrown by the fucking LA Press Club to show some fucking support for Sandra Fucking Tsing Loh, snarky host of "The Loh Life." The radio humorist was abruptly sacked from KCRW after her fucking engineer failed to bleep a certain fucking four letter word from a fucked-out taped comedic monologue. Fuck!
Her commentaries had previously included deliberately-bleeped words for comic effect, but the production goof came at a time of intense concern by broadcasters over new FCC scrutiny. Nipplegate, Howard Stern, now Loh. Station manager Ruth Seymour later apologized and offered to re-hire, but Loh declined. The whole story's here (and you can still hear Loh on NPR's Marketplace, here). LA Times update here.
There's good reason for concern, as evidenced by a recent decision by congress -- which passed 391-22-- to substantially increase fines, penalties and license reviews for 'indecent' or 'profane' material. BoingBoing pal Ernest Miller says:
"For years the FCC has been regulating 'indecent' speech. Recently, of course, this has become a big deal, what with Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction and Bono saying 'This is really, really f-ing great!' at the Golden Globes. Now, however, the FCC has really taking a big step forward in regulating speech. For the first time they have declared speech not only 'indecent' but 'profane' as well. If the FCC's argument about profane speech is upheld, any 'grossly offensive' speech, whether or not related to sex or excretion, could be banned from the airwaves."
Link to Corante post on the FCC's new moves to regulate profanity in broadcasting. Update: Stern fined, Bono's remark ruled profane, in FCC decision: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: OK, *I* am Belle de Jour
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:41:11 AM
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It doesn't matter who is really behind Belle de Jour -- we're all pseudonymous pretend prostitute webloggers, aren't we? For every meme, there is a Cafe Press shop, where you can buy t-shirts, mugs, and thongs. Link (Thanks, Hoff)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AccordionGuy's notes from Cory's reading
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:57:00 AM
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Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla attended my reading last night at the Merril Collection; he's posted great notes on the event:
I arrived about ten minutes into Cory's session, during a reading of what I later found out was Human Readable. Every seat in the Merril room was full; many were occupied by what The Onion might term "high-profile Area Nerds". Sci-fi authors Mike Skeet and Karl Schroeder took their places near the back of the audience, while closer to the front were Ian Goldberg (who has forgotten more about computer security than I will ever learn) and his wife Kat. As the reading went on, a guy sitting down in front of me drew an impressionistic sketch into a handmade blank book. Everyone's attention was focused on Cory, who sat at a desk beside a large bottle of water, looking trim (Atkins and a busy schedule will do that) in a two-tone Blogger T-shirt. You never forget your first blogging tool.
Link
(Thanks to Luke Tymowski for the photo!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Journalists "suspend their disbelief whenever someone starts waving
a paedophile on a string"
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DATE: 03/19/2004 09:03:03 AM
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NTK this week savages the UK media for gullibly swallowing the story of the NannieBots, chatbots that entrap paedophiles:
The BBC, The Register, New Scientist and all fell over
themselves this week to promote "NannieBots", a set of
"self-replicating" bots to fight chatroom "grooming". These
bots, relays their master Jim Wightman, guard kids'
chatrooms from predators, and "behave like humans, sound
like humans... but with one massive difference - they never
sleep". The idea of handing over your kids' safety to Eliza
the Psychiatrist may not be that reassuring. But don't worry
- these bots use "neural networks" to become "the most
advanced artificial intelligence in the world"! Looking
through the transcript of a NannieBot/Human interaction in
New Scientist, maybe he's right. Certainly this "IT
consultant from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands" has
either managed the greatest step forward in Artificial
Intelligence since Marvin Minsky scraped a pass in the
Turing Test - or this was a very carefully rigged demo. In
the transcript given, NannieBot seems to be able to make
logical deductions, parse colloquial English, correctly
choose the correct moment to scan a database of UK national
holidays, comment on the relative qualities of the Robocop
series, and divine the nature of pancakes and pancake day.
We look forward to the NannieBot sweeping the board at this
year's Loebner Prize. Either that, or journalists to stop
suspending their disbelief whenever someone starts waving
a paedophile on a string.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pink Girl subculture photography from Tokyo
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DATE: 03/19/2004 10:20:25 AM
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On Matthew Gilbert's PhotoMatt site, pictures of "Pink Girls" hanging around outside the Gap in Harajuku, Tokyo.
Link
(Thanks, Alice!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Device prevents airplane seat in front of you from reclining
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DATE: 03/19/2004 11:22:55 AM
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The Knee Defender is a set of plastic clips that fit on the airplane seat in front of you, keeping the person sitting in that chair from reclining his or her seat. Some airlines have banned the device. but it looks like you could probably improvise with a folded-up inflight magazine. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Meet Lucy, The Orangutan Robot
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DATE: 03/19/2004 11:42:52 AM
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BoingBoing pal Roland says:
Lucy is not an ordinary robot, driven by software. She's a pure product of artificial intelligence (AI). And after a three-year long training, she's now able to make a difference between an apple and a banana, which is quite handy for an orang-utan, even if she doesn't eat them. Her five microcontroller chips wouldn't like this... In "A Grand plan for brainy robots," BBC News Online tells us that Lucy is the brainchild of Steve Grand, an honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology. And why did he choose an orang-utan design? "I made Lucy as an orang-utan because, can you imagine how scary it would be if she looked like a human baby?," said Grand. More details and references are available in this overview which also includes the cover of Grand's last book, 'Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fast Company on blogs
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DATE: 03/19/2004 11:45:57 AM
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Heath Row of Fast Company sez: "We just went live with a wide-ranging package about blogs -- and their use in business. The package includes commentary from David Weinberger, guidelines from Robert Scoble, a look behind the scenes at VH-1's blog-driven show Best Week Ever, and a report on the state of Social Network Software -- as used in business." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The great ugg boots war
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DATE: 03/19/2004 11:59:18 AM
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Spencer sez: "Recently, a friend of mine from Australia was attempting to sell some ugg boots (note that's with a lowercase u) on eBay and received a note from them that she couldn't use the word "ugg" anywhere in their title or description because the trademark owner had threatened them. Knowing that "ugg" is a generic Australian term for sheepskin boots and has been used for years (to the point that it's in the dictionary), she was more than a little annoyed. We were inspired to do some research and discovered that the American company Deckers has been attempting to wrest control of the word "ugg" using legal threats for some time now." Link
Grant Barrett, Assistant Editor, Lexical Reference and Project Editor, Historical Dictionary of American Slang for Oxford University Press sez: "The Macquarie Dictionary ('Australia's National Dictionary') indicates that the Australian ug/ugh/ugg boots derive from a trademark. The OED concurs and defines them as 'a proprietary name for a type of soft, sheepskin boot' indicating that it is used in Australian and New Zealand. The original spelling appears to have been 'Ugh.'"
Zara Baxter sez: "The Macquarie dictionary only lists UGG boot as a proprietary name because Deckers threatened to sue them - see here. There's a big stink in Australia about it at the moment. Lots of media coverage. FWIW my (slightly older) macquarie lists it as a generic term.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fun Web button maker
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DATE: 03/19/2004 12:37:17 PM
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Here's a neat site to make fun buttons like these. Link (via horkulated)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online vigilantes troll for pedophiles
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DATE: 03/19/2004 12:57:46 PM
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Fascinating, disturbing two-part series by Julia Scheeres in Wired News about online anti-pedo vigilantes. Part One, Part Two.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Peewee = Free
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Child porn posession charges against Paul "Peewee Herman" Reubens have been dropped. Must have been the t-shirts. Link (thanks, Jonno!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More on Peter Bagge in Reason
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DATE: 03/19/2004 02:45:03 PM
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Nick Gillespie, editor or Reason, sez: "thanks for the plug re: bagge (however negative). take a look at peter's longer-form comics for us and i think you'll agree they are pretty damn swell. including:
Swingers of the World, Unite! A report from an alternative lifestyles conference (April 2004)
Everyone's a Winner! One state's--and one man's--love/hate relationship with legalized gambling (October 2003)
Observations from a Reluctant Anti-Warrior (March 2003)
and
(A secular humanist looks at the world of) Christian Rock (February 2002)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MusicBrainz for iTunes -- automated metadata for your MP3s
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DATE: 03/19/2004 03:48:25 PM
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IEatBrainz is a MusicBrainz plugin for OS X. You feed it tracks in your iTunes library with missing metadata -- artist, title, album, etc -- analyses the audio to generate a fingerprint of the song, then compares that fingerprint to a database of millions of songs, figures out what the unlabelled track is, and fills in the metadata. That's some sweet, sweet functionality.
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New shelter magazine for tract home owners: Atomic Ranch
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DATE: 03/19/2004 03:54:42 PM
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I haven't seen a copy of Atomic Ranch yet myself, but my friend Marc has and he says it's great. The magazine is for ranch home and tract house owners who like mid-century modern style. We're about to move into a ranch home in the San Fernando Valley, so I'm excited to get this. Link (On a semi-related note: we're getting a miniature donkey, and I'm wondering if any Boing Boing readers own one and can tell me about them. Email me.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Oliver North sez we worry too much about conspiracies
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DATE: 03/19/2004 07:40:50 PM
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Oliver "Conspiracist" North, who conspired with the highest levels of government to defraud Congress about his conspiracy to move guns, terrorists, cocaine and bayonetted nuns around the world for his conspiratorial ends has written an editorial about the tendency of "liberals" to worry too much about conspiracies. And he should know.
Liberals have always loved conspiracy theories because raising the specter of foul play and dirty tricks is an easy and convenient justification for ignoring their own political and policy failures.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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TITLE: Bway.net offers RIAA-proof anonymous DSL
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DATE: 03/19/2004 07:42:59 PM
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Wendy sez, "In response to privacy concerns and RIAA lawsuits, Bway.net offers no-logging, dynamic IP DSL service, billed as AnonDSL. Pretty cool."
Bway.net believes it should be your choice to be as public or as private on the Internet as you want to be. To accomplish this, Bway introduces:
* AnonDSL - the ultimate tool for protecting your identity from tracking by the RIAA, MPAA or anyone else.
* AnonDSL makes your online activities untraceable - except, of course, for email and any other activities that require authentication.
Link
(Thanks, Wendy!)
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TITLE: Chart explaining solution to P2P wars
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DATE: 03/19/2004 07:45:59 PM
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My cow-orker Ren has posted a Creative Commons-licensed flowchart showing the workflow of a Voluntary Collective License -- the blanket license that EFF advocates for solving the P2P wars.
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(via Legal Tags)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Markdown: text-to-html system
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DATE: 03/19/2004 07:53:30 PM
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Aaron Swartz and John Gruber have unveiled their seekrit project, "Markdown," a system for marking up ASCII to make it readily convertable to styled html text, without sacrificing the readability and expressiveness of the core text. There's already support for Blosxom, BBEdit and MT, and it looks pretty straightforward to implement in other environments.
Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)... The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
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(via Aaronsw)
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TITLE: Using your friends' hashed addressbooks to fight spam
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:09:52 PM
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LOAF is a novel approach to spam-filtration. The idea is that you send a one-way-hashed version of your entire address book along with every message you send. This allows all your friends to create a privacy-complete list of all the people in their friends' trusted correspondants' lists. When mail comes in, it is flagged as originating with one of your known correspondants, or one of their known correspondants, or a total stranger, helping you prioritize your inbox. The authors of the paper have written a list of known attacks against this system:
Ex-Girlfriend attack
While a LOAF file is hard to reverse-engineer, it's designed to answer the question ``did this person ever send email to X?''. In some cases, that's a question you don't want people to be able to ask. To avoid exposing the fact that you are corresponding with certain people, you have three options:
- Don't use LOAF.
- Create a blacklist of addresses for LOAF to pass over when generating a filter.
- Set a false positive rate high enough to give you plausible deniability: ``Oh, honey, don't be ridiculous. I certainly never wrote to X, that must be a false positive'' will work, but you must be sure to read the caveat about keeping a constant filter size in Dictionary attack below.
Marc Canter attack
The technique is similar to getting a perfect score on the SAT by filling in every oval on the SAT exam sheet - you provide a Bloom filter consisting entirely of ones, and every email address checked against it will match.
Sending an overloaded filter does not help you get accepted by new correspondents, but once you are added to their list, it will make you appear to know everyone. One possible solution to this spoofing problem is to impose a maximum density.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Whence three-letter airport codes?
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:11:15 PM
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Good essay explaining the origin of airport codes such as YYZ, LHR, ORD, and SFO.
Some special interest groups successfully lobbied the government to obtain their own special letters. The Navy saved all the new 'N' codes. Naval aviators learn to fly at NPA in Pensacola, Florida and then dream of going to "Top Gun" in Miramar, California (NKX). The Federal Communications Committee set aside the 'W' and 'K' codes for radio stations east and west of the Mississippi respectively. 'Q' was designated for international telecommunications. 'Z' was reserved for special uses. The Canadians made off with all the remaining 'Y codes which helps explain YUL for Montreal, YYC for Calgary, etc. One of the special uses for 'Z' is identifying locations in cyberspace. What am I talking about? Well, an example is ZCX the computer address of the FAA's air traffic control headquarters central flow control facility. ZCX is not an airport but a command center just outside Washington D.C., that controls the airline traffic into major terminals.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hidden Goatse in Unreal Tournament 2004
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:14:39 PM
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Goatse is an infamous Internet gross-out image (google for it if you must, but be warned: this is a sight you can't un-see). It has become iconic in geek cycles, so it's hardly surprising to find its echo in this screenshot from Unreal Tournament 2004. Unsurprising or no, it still evoked a beavisoid huh-huh-huh reaction from this correspondant.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MP3 of SXSW Friendster keynote
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:25:18 PM
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Here's an MP3 of Jonathan "Friendster" Abrams's SXSW keynote on YASNSes.
42.6MB MP3 Link
(via Apophenia)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hukilau: a 3-day tiki festival in Fort Lauderdale
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DATE: 03/19/2004 08:43:42 PM
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Hukilau 2004 is the third annual 3-day tiki festival, to be held at Fort Lauderdale's Mai Kai tiki bar (where I celebrated my 30th birthday!) from September 23-25. Featured entertainment includes tiki carvers, live exotica, custom swizzlesticks and matchbooks, and gigantic, flaming novelty cocktails. Oh, and hula dancers, a tiki merch exhibition, a cruise, fishing, and did I mention novelty cocktails? I wonder if there's any grant money available to attend this...
Link
(Thanks, Swanky!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dr Gray's libel-threats backfire
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DATE: 03/20/2004 05:10:08 AM
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Gavin Sheridan has been threatened by "Dr." John "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, I am From Uranus" Gray for declaring that Gray was a fraud whose degrees came from a diploma mill. Gray's lawyers demanded a retraction and reserved the right to sue for libel anyway.
Well, in an act of increasingly common Internet judo, Sheridan posted the nastygram, and the collective outrage from other Web-writers has spread the news of Gray's bullying -- and the dirt behind his degrees. Threatening to sue in order to silence a critic has simply spread the criticism much, much farther.
For example, have a look at this post in the Washington Monthly, in which Gray's credentials are attacked further:
Gavin's post says none of his degrees are from accredited universities. The lawyer's letter says only that Columbia Pacific was an approved university.
This is a considerable difference, since until 1989 pretty much
anyone who felt like it could call themselves a university in the state
of California. A few years after this changed, Columbia Pacific was
shut down when it was found to be what is colloquially referred to as a
diploma mill.
So then, was Columbia Pacific ever accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the accrediting body for western universities? And what about the
Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland, where Gray got
his BA and MA?
Nope. As the producers of Inside Edition verified in a show aired last November, none of these are accredited universities.
You know, as the possessor of a bona-fide fake Doctor of Divinity from the Universal Life Church, this really steams me. I worked hard to get my fake degree, so that I could add that all-important Dr. to the front of my name, becoming Dr. Cory Doctorow. Reverend Dr. Cory Doctorow. People like Gray give people like me with fake degrees a bad name. We aren't all bullies, you know. Some of us are quite proud of our fake education. Proud of our fraud. We don't sue people who call us out on it. We take those people out for drinks and thank them. Because we're proud. Very, very proud.
I would be remiss if I failed to point out this exhaustive run-down on the standard of education that Gray's alma maters hold themselves to:
* One master's-degree student was given credit for "a learning contract describing how he would continue taking dance lessons and watch dance demonstrations in order to improve his skills as a Country Western dancer."
* A Ph.D. dissertation written in Spanish was approved by four faculty who cannot speak the language.
* One dissertation "had no hypothesis, no data collection, and no statistical analysis. A member of the visiting committee characterized the work as more like a project paper at the college freshman level." The dissertation, The Complete Guide to Glass Collecting, was 61 pages long.
Link
(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dr Who gets grungy
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DATE: 03/20/2004 05:15:33 AM
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Christopher Eccleston has been tapped to be the scruffiest Dr Who ever.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Semi-ruggedized laptops for 10% more
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DATE: 03/20/2004 05:18:42 AM
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Interesting war-porn piece on the Panasonic ruggedized Toughbook, a laptop that, in its most extreme configuration, can survive being run over by a truck. Those boxen cost $5000, but a "semi-ruggedized" version, which is specced with "spill-resistant keyboards, hard casings, and gel-encased disk drives" is only 10 percent more costly to build than a standard machine.
Analysts say 20% of mainstream laptops fail in the first year, usually because of accidental damage. That rises to 35% once a notebook leaves its docking station and to more than 50% for machines that are used outdoors or on shop floors. But the failure rate of rugged or semi-rugged machines is just 5%.
Link
(Thanks, anonymous person!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Movable Type and NTT
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DATE: 03/20/2004 06:48:02 AM
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The Movable Type folks have inked a deal with NTT -- mazeltov, goys!
Weblog software leader Six Apart announced that NTT Communications, Japan's largest telecommunication company, has licensed Six Apart's popular TypePad software to power NTT's forthcoming "Blogzine Weblogging Service."
Link
(via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sex theme park opens in China
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DATE: 03/20/2004 08:59:56 AM
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China's largest "sexuality museum and theme park" just opened in Guangdong, promising attractions such as "penis-like" rocks and "vagina-like" caves. Link (Thanks, Caines)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Impossible Japanese pencil carvings
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DATE: 03/20/2004 09:12:57 AM
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Website documenting the creation of some insanely implausible carvings -- made from common #2 pencils, in Japan.
"According to their forms,they are divided into 4 types
- Double spiral, Chain,
Ring and Kikko that may be called a honeycomb
pencil.
Others like Six-fold spiral,
Extensible and
Triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon
are considered to be variations based on one of those 4 types.
[...] We are required to be skilled enough for delicate woodwork in carving out
a pattern like some kind of a tracery without making any miscut on the naked
lead inside."
Link (Thanks, CJC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR pano: Ice Climbing
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DATE: 03/20/2004 09:19:11 AM
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Photographer and QTVR enthusiast Hans Nyberg says:
"Ice Climbing in the Pyrenees was shot by Ignacio Ferrando Margeli. To make it, Ignacio hanged on for 2 hours in -8 C , 17 F."
Link to Quicktime panorama, Link to more great QTVRs in this month's issue of VRMag. (Thanks, also, Michelle!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robolympics: Send us your photos!
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DATE: 03/20/2004 09:28:43 AM
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I'm hunched over a lonely laptop, drowning my sorrows in soymilk and anime DVDs, wishing I were in San Francisco right now -- watching mindbogglingly awesome robots strut their stuff at the Robolympics. Pathetic, I know. But if you are fortunate enough to be at the event with digital imaging gadgetry at hand, point me to your photos on the web! I'll post 'em here on BoingBoing. Please don't e-mail me photo attachments, though. Thanks!
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TITLE: SF inner-city robots team needs help to get to the USFIRST finals
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DATE: 03/20/2004 10:15:53 AM
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Dana sez, "This is the blog of The Boilermakers, a team of high school roboticists from an inner-city San Francisco school. The team recently qualified for the USFIRST finals in Atlanta by beating more experienced and better funded teams at the Portland regional competition. The Cinderella story is in danger of ending prematurely, though, as the team doesn't have the funds to attend the event. They are currently attempting to gather enough funds to make it to Atlanta, but are running out of time. The blog has a Paypal link for donations."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gigantic aquatic pill-bug
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DATE: 03/20/2004 10:19:38 AM
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This is the biggest damned pill-bug I've ever seen.
Ever heard of a pill bug? They are more regionally known as doodlebugs and roly-polys. They're those little bugs that curl up into a perfect little ball when you mess with them. I had great fun with them as a kid. I thought it was so cool that a bug could turn into a ball.
Well, they're not actually bugs -- they're crustaceans. This guy up here is a very close relative of the roly-poly, only it lives in the deep sea along the ocean floor. It's just like the ones you found under rocks as a kid, only it's really fucking big. It even rolls up into a ball!
Link
(Thanks, Juju!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool comic art-strip "Piercing"
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DATE: 03/20/2004 10:26:43 AM
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"Piercing," a dark, beautiful, wordless online comic by David Gaddis.
Link (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Six years of kottke.org
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DATE: 03/20/2004 10:48:48 AM
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Jason Kottke's blog turns six today!
Except for the basics (eating, sleeping, remaining alive), I've never stuck with anything for six years straight, so it's hard for me to believe I'm still here doing this. Six years!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: File-sharing kills crap record stores, promotes great ones
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DATE: 03/20/2004 11:04:13 AM
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Good Wired News piece on the kinds of mom-and-pop record stores that benefit from file-sharing, treating it as promotions for their hand-sold, campus-cred merchandise.
"The file sharing, the Internet -- just makes them music junkies," Wiley said.
Paul Epstein, owner of Twist & Shout, a store in Denver, agreed that piracy has helped his bottom line. He said it's like radio, another form of promotion that spurs sales.
"File sharing is a danger, but it really turns a lot of kids on to music," he said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 40 drunkard milestones
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DATE: 03/20/2004 11:21:19 AM
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This Modern Drunkard list of 40 Things That Every Drunkard Should Do is very good. I like "Sit in on an AA meeting" and "Extravagantly overtip a bartender," but this one is my fave:
7.) Buy a crowded bar a round.
For no reason at all. Jump up on a barstool and shout it loud: "A round for the house! On me!" Make sure you have a good toast ready, because, for once, they'll all be listening.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Uncovered - The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
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DATE: 03/20/2004 11:31:25 AM
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Uncovered is a documentary about the way the White House distorted the truth in an attempt sell the American public and the rest of the world on its pre-emptive war on Iraq. I already thought that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest of that gang were being sneaky about it, but this DVD nailed it for for me. The reason Uncovered is so persuasive is that the director wisely chose to interview only "insiders" for the documentary -- CIA analysts, weapons investigators, Pentagon officials, and former White House counsels. Their comments on the administration's exaggerations and spin are devastating. According to the director, even people who support the war in Iraq become angry after watching Uncovered, because it exposes the Bush administration as a pack of thoroughly corrupt liars. Link
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TITLE: Accountant sues Google so that his license suspension won't show up in searches
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DATE: 03/20/2004 11:37:33 AM
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Mark Maughan, an accountant, is suing Google to get it to change PageRank so that searching for his firm doesn't return the California Board of Accountancy's report of the time he had his license pulled for a month. Oh yeah, that's gonna work: because there's nothing I look for in accountant more than blinkered pig-ignorance of the workings of the Internet and a callous disregard for the neutrality of search engines.
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TITLE: General Ursus bust
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DATE: 03/20/2004 11:54:48 AM
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At $200, this resin bust of Planet of the Apes's General Ursus is impossible to justify as an acquisition, but it is going into the list of things to buy after I make my first trillion.
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TITLE: Movie monster busts by Tom Savini
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DATE: 03/20/2004 11:59:29 AM
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Another item to add to the first-trillion shopping list: $450 busts of famous movie monsters by special effects wizard Tom Savini (I have a concrete casting of a Vincent Price life-mask that Savini made in storage, awaiting the end of my gypsy wanderer days).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nerdy Bay Area dream-jobs
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DATE: 03/20/2004 12:15:14 PM
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Claris sez, "A collection of cool geeky companies located in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, from anime/manga publishers to videogame companies to special effects shops. Best of all? Direct links to the job opening pages of each site, whenever I can find 'em. Might as well work somewhere cool, right?"
Link
(Thanks, Claris!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mark Cuban blogs inside NBA referee stats
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DATE: 03/20/2004 12:17:56 PM
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Those of you who are basketball fans will understand the considerable significance of this blog-post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: X-rated miniature railroad models
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DATE: 03/20/2004 12:24:28 PM
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If I asked you to form a sentence using the words "train" "sex" and "fantasy," this would probably not be the result -- but for every oddity there is a fetish, and a website to prove it. This German manufacturer of model railroad components caters to adult hobbyists who like teeny-tiny sex with their teeny-tiny trains. And a visit to this online discussion forum reveals that other companies are creating similar "adult" scenes -- some even more explicit:
"At the Neuremburg Toy Fair, Viessmann announced an electronic drive that moves the lady figure on one of the 'Sexy Scenes'. The venerable company Faller took things even further. They announced a kit of a 'night club' that includes five Preiser-style figures of 'hostesses'. On the small picture one of them can be seen receiving a 'guest'."
These guys put the "ho" in "HO Gauge."
Not safe for work or children, although the naughty bits are ZENSUR-ed.
Link (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robolympics photos!
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DATE: 03/20/2004 06:06:48 PM
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Simon Carless heeds the BoingBoing call for photos from today's Robolympics in San Francisco -- here's his gallery of snapshots. Thanks! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Job of the week: Dept of Homeland Security Entertainment Liason
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DATE: 03/21/2004 09:45:22 AM
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This has to be one of the more interesting "help wanted" ads to surface of late -- Entertainment Liaison for the US Department of Homeland Security. Up to $136K:
The Entertainment Liaison Office supports the Office of Public Affairs by influencing how the Department of Homeland Security is portrayed in mass entertainment media. It helps to ensure accurate portrayal of the department's mission, policies, and activities, while proactively working to help the American public better identify DHS functions.
Link
(via pho list)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Proposed Bible-based marriage laws
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DATE: 03/21/2004 09:54:57 AM
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Lawmakers who use the Bible to justify their opposition to gay marriage ought to be consistent. Here are some other Biblical rules to add to the Bill of Rights :
Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in
addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron
11:21)
A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a
virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut
22:13-21)
In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your
town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with
him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men
young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of
course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Do we really use just 10 percent of our brains?
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DATE: 03/21/2004 03:54:36 PM
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No. It's a myth. Psychologist and neuroscientist Barry L. Beyerstein puts the (gray) matter to rest at Scientific American.com:
"With the aid of instruments such as EEGs, magnetoencephalographs, PET scanners and functional MRI machines, researchers have succeeded in localizing a vast number of psychological functions to specific centers and systems in the brain. With nonhuman animals, and occasionally with human patients undergoing neurological treatment, recording probes can even be inserted into the brain itself. Despite this detailed reconnaissance, no quiet areas awaiting new assignments have emerged."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos of sex-themed museum/park in China
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DATE: 03/21/2004 04:17:57 PM
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Daze Reader editor Evan Daze says:
"Photos of the penis-like rock and vagina-like cave are here and here."
Link to Daze Reader post, Link to earlier BoingBoing post
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More Robolympics photos
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DATE: 03/21/2004 05:14:31 PM
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Boingboing reader matthew bennett says:
Here's some pictures on my photoblog from Robolympics yesterday and today! I competed with a mini sumo, that got taken out. I'm also a mentor on the Boilermakers robotics team
(
link to earlier BoingBoing post). You know, the SF innercity school that still needs money to go to Atlanta for the finals! As of Sunday morning, our blog has raised over $2200 in donations! Thanks, Boing Boing!
Link to photos
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aspiring writer's novel under Creative Commons license
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DATE: 03/22/2004 02:25:55 AM
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Kevin Christley, an aspiring sf writer, has put his novel, "Rieger Mortis," online under a Creative Commons license.
Link
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Technorati beta
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DATE: 03/22/2004 02:27:11 AM
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Technorati has launched a new public beta with a bunch of really exciting features, including:
# Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.
# Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Inventor of no-electricity refrigerator wins Rolex award
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DATE: 03/22/2004 09:50:53 AM
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Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria won a Rolex award for his "pot-in-pot refrigerator. It consists of a smaller clay pot inside a larger clay pot. The gap is filled with damp sand. As the sand water evaporates, the inner pot cools. Food that used to spoil in a few days now stays fresh for weeks. Second-order effects are already being noticed -- for one thing, girls who had to skip school to sell food at markets can now attend classes. Link (Thanks, juju!)
Alex Steffen sez: I love the pot-within-a-pot concept. Really excellent design, exactly what the world needs more of. And a guy commented this on our worldchanging post about it a couple weeks ago:
"The town I live in was settled by Quakers, the museum has an example of a refrigerator that uses a similar technique but with a wood box. It claims to be the first such device in America although that could be local folklore. Certainly the Pot-in-Pot can't be the first such invention of that type, in fact the Amish currently use this one, in production since 1900. What makes Pot-in-Pot special is the use of local materials and skills so that it can be accepted by the local culture. I suspect Africa has a lot to learn from the Amish and other modern low-tech cultures, maybe there should be an Amish technology transfer to Africa."
Thought it kind of cool. Then there's this water filter.
Pottery will save the world! um, or something like that...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Still! More! Robolympics! Photos!
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DATE: 03/22/2004 10:22:05 AM
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Scott Beale says: "Here are my photos from ROBOlympics (Saturday, March 20). David, Simone and their crew produced a truly amazing event (I'm a proud sponsor). [Note from Xeni: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid is the incredibly generous host of xeni.net; he makes all of the images I post on BoingBoing possible and he is a total mensch.] Link
Chris Pederick
Chris Pederick says:
"I have posted a few photos from Sunday's ROBOlympics." Link
Jeremy says:
"I took pictures and short video this afternoon at the robolympics in SF where the weather was a bit grey. It is hosted on my little pc behing my SBC DSL connection. So it can be a bit slow. I'll move the content later this week on a faster server. Aslo, I also didn't spend time to make the album look great, it is directly from ACDSEE tool (after some quicktime and Photoshop work still)." Link
Earlier BoingBoing posts with Robolympics photos: Link One, Link Two. Thanks, everyone!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NPR's Day to Day on the "no papers" cowboy
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DATE: 03/22/2004 10:45:15 AM
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Straight from the BoingBoing headlines! Today on NPR's Day to Day, a segment on the Nevada cattle rancher whose tale was blogged here on BB not long ago.
NPR's Alex Chadwick has the story of Dudley Hiibel, a poor rancher in northern Nevada who continues to fight his arrest for refusing to show his identification to a sheriff's deputy. He's appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the way the justices rule could have major implications. Learn more about the case -- and view videos -- on Hiibel's official Web site.
Audio here after 12PM PT today.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fark photoshoppers on low-carb products
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DATE: 03/22/2004 10:59:07 AM
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Fark photoshop contest: odd places for "low-carb" labels. I swear, Fark is the new Mad Magazine.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Awesome anime ferry
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DATE: 03/22/2004 11:46:19 AM
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Kudos to the crafty operators of this Japanese ferry service, who commissioned manga legend Leiji Matsumoto to design it "to appeal to the younger generation." As Gizmodo's Joel Johnson put it, "It does this by being awesome."
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyfight becomes an all-star group-blog
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DATE: 03/22/2004 11:50:02 AM
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Donna Wentworth's excellent tech-and-copyright blog, Copyfight, is now an all-star Corante-hosted group-blog, with contributions from Elizabeth Rader, Ernest Miller, Jason Schultz, Aaron Swartz, and Wendy Seltzer. This is the Crooked Timber or Terra Nova or Many2Many of copyright blogs.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army
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DATE: 03/22/2004 11:51:54 AM
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I dunno if SPC Schwarz actually did all the things on the list of "The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army," but reading the list is amusing enough to have evoked several louder-than-approriate laughs from me.
# Must never ask anyone who outranks me if they've been smoking crack.
# Must not tell any officer that I am smarter than they are, especially if it's true.
# Never confuse a Dutch soldier for a French one.
# Never tell a German soldier that 'We kicked your ass in World War 2!'
# Don't tell Princess Di jokes in front of the paras (British Airborne).
# Don't take the batteries out of the other soldiers alarm clocks (Even if they do hit snooze about forty times).
# The Irish MPs are not after 'Me frosted lucky charms'.
Link
(via AccordionGuy)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Li'l Abner comic strip reruns
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DATE: 03/22/2004 01:17:08 PM
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Visit this site each day for a new Li'L Abner strip. It's currently running strips from 1948. Link (via Irregular orbit)
Eric Burns sez: Here is "a slightly more consistently updated Lil' Abner site than the one mentioned before. Comics.com has had Lil' Abner and also has easily tracked archives, so someone can get into the storyline (coincidentially another Sadies Hawkins Day race, this time from 1951). The additional archives makes it easier to get into the spirit of Dogpatch and get a broader sense of Al Capp's satire. Besides, where else can you learn about the Dogpatch ham (man's best friend)?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BB reader attends "Wanna be a pyro?" workshop, blogs experience
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DATE: 03/22/2004 02:59:46 PM
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Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post, reader nym writes:
I've always been a fan of fire, the mistress of the night. She dances in a way that captures my eyes, and tugs at my soul. In my young years, I was delighted to read the childhood stories entitled "Diary of a Pyro" by John DuBois. I read it, and loved it, but when something blew up something in my face from careless meddling, I pulled back at my experimentation, and just admired the work of others.
Aside from a few fireworks, I haven't really spent time learning pyro since that day. When Xeni blogged 'So you want to be a Pyro', I was all over it. A chance to actually learn safely the ropes with the people who know it the best. I couldn't go to the local seminar in LA, but knew it was going to be worth the five hours of driving to and back from San Diego.
Link to entire blog entry. Thanks, nym!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: There's a party in my mouth.
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DATE: 03/22/2004 04:25:15 PM
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Yoo-hooooo, burners -- blink tags for your chompers!
"Oral Disco is a multi-coloured light cleverly concealed inside a plastic mould. This easily and comfortably slides onto your upper or lower teeth. When you switch it on, it makes your whole mouth glow in an array of colourful light! The light moves from tooth to tooth as if dancing, hence the 'disco' name."
Link (via Warren)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Underwood casemod
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DATE: 03/22/2004 04:28:17 PM
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This is a hellasweet case-mod: an old Underwood Noiseless typewriter running Windows 2K.
Link
(Thanks, Manx)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Shipping container houses
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DATE: 03/22/2004 04:33:59 PM
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Dan Mushrush sez: "A company is selling homes made of shipping containers for $76k -the lot -the installation. Luxury appointments are available." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: That's not a mouth-shaped urinal, it's a *travesty*
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DATE: 03/22/2004 05:24:04 PM
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Some people do not care for the big-fat-red-kiss-mouth-shaped pissoires recently installed in Virgin Atlantic's JFK clubhouse. Here is the National Organization of Women press release: Outrageous Interruptus / Sexist Urinals. I'm a pro-fempower woman, and I'm all for calling misogyny when we see it -- but I think NOW needs to unclench its collective sphincter.
UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Jonathan Guberman says, "My cousin sent me an article about the outrageous Virgin mouth-shaped urinals, and a link to complain to Virgin about it. Virgin has responded with the following, a very prompt and polite response. Good for them!"
(Begin forwarded message:) We are, of course very sorry to hear of your concerns with the design of the urinals that were to be fitted in our clubhouse at JFK airport. We can
assure you that no offense was ever intended.
The urinals were intended to be one of the more fun and quirky features of the new JFK Clubhouse, a project overseen by Virgin's in-house design team led by two female designers. The urinals themselves were the idea of a female designer, and we were surprised by the public reaction.
However, Virgin Atlantic always aims to listen to our passengers and the general public, and as a result of the feedback we have received we will not install the urinals in the bathroom at our new JFK clubhouse.
We trust our swift action will help restore your confidence in our company and thank you for taking the time to contact us. We appreciate your direct approach.
Yours sincerely,
John Riordan
Vice President, Customer Services
(end forwarded message) Link to article on NOW's hissy fit, Previous BB post (Thanks, Eric)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Son of Bride of Robolympics Photos, part umptybillion
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DATE: 03/22/2004 05:42:52 PM
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callum prentice says, "Our team entered a combat robot in the robolympics this weekend. I'm in the process of collecting images - more will appear here over the next few days - the heavyweight & super heavyweight battles were simply the most awe inspiring, violent mechanical event i've ever seen - these shots don't even come close to describing the screech of titanium armour being ripped off, the crash of a 6" spike smashing into steel plating or the staccato vibration of shrapnel crashing into the bullet proof windows of the arena." Link
VonGuard says, "Robolympics pictures -- about 300 of them." Link
And Ashley Niblock says, "I know you've already posted a gazillion of these, but this is a highly edited list, and I think captures the range of events going on." Link
Link to previous BB Robolympics photos post. Thanks, robogeeks!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Banksy: London's stencil graffiti genius
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DATE: 03/22/2004 09:20:51 PM
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London graffiti writer Banksy is a true stencil genius. His site -- frustrating to navigate -- is still a stunning walk through some of the finest art you'll see on the street or in a gallery.
Link
(Thanks, Sabrina!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swedish wooden computer accessories
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DATE: 03/22/2004 09:30:14 PM
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Check out these wooden ikeoid keyboards, mice and monitors.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Moldy coffee cups: a celebration of penicillin
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DATE: 03/23/2004 03:50:53 AM
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In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the discovery of penicillin -- a happy accident in which rogue mold grew in a forgotten petri dish -- the Royal Society of Chemistry has asked its most unhygienic stakeholders to send in photos of their most disgusting, molded-over and crufted-up coffee cups. Stomach-turning goodness!
Link
(Thanks, Malcolm!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chicken tikka masala: the silent, delicious, colorful killer
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DATE: 03/23/2004 04:55:47 AM
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Britain's beloved chicken tikka masala contains dyes linked to "hyperactivity, asthma, and even cancer."
Tartrazine, a dye made from coal tar, is banned in Norway, Finland and Austria.
As well as being used in a variety of cakes, soft drinks and sauces, some egg manufacturers feed it to their chickens to make their yolks extra yellow. But scientists believe it can cause blurred vision and purple skin patches and is particularly hazardous for asthmatics and anyone allergic to aspirin.
Sunset Yellow is also banned in Norway and Finland but elsewhere is used in juices, sweets and sauces. Scientists have linked it with chromosome damage and kidney tumours as well as abdominal pain, hives, nausea and vomiting.
Ponceau 4R, which is illegal in the USA and Norway, is believed to cause cancer in animals.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jay-Z meets Metallica: Black on Black
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DATE: 03/23/2004 05:12:01 AM
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DJ Halfred has remixed Jay-Z's Balck Album with Metallica's Black Album, producign a full-length disc he calls "Black on Black." Come and download the .torrent file so that I can get some more peers in the mesh!
December 4th Was Sad But True
Unforgiven Clarity
Don't Tread On My Encore
The God That Caused 99 Problems
The Threat of Wolf and Man
The Struggle Within to Change Clothes
The Sandman's First Song
Nothing Else Matters Other than the Allure
Justify My Thug Through the Never
A Public Service Announcement About Being Holier than Thou
Lucifer? Never!
My Friend of Saying What More, Exactly
Wherever You May Roam, Get That Dirt Off Your Shoulder
Wadda Da (Bonus track)
Link, Updated Direct Link to .torrent
(Thanks, DJ Halfred!)
Update: OK, I've got this now, and it is the bad-assest metal/hiphop crossover since Anthrax and Public Enemy's Bring the Noise
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Office plastered in Post-it-notes
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DATE: 03/23/2004 06:25:59 AM
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Documentation of an insane office prank involving 2,500 post-it notes and one mild-mannered victim.
"Damon has been playing tricks on me for a few days now. So I came in on the weekend and did some "re-decorating" in his office. He didn't see it until Monday morning when he came in and opened his office door.
His office blinds were closed, his door was shut and locked, and I left this post-it in the middle of his door. It says 'Can you pick up some more post-its, we're running low.' :) "
The pranksters notified Post-it manufacturers 3M, and received three cases of post-its "for future decorating." Hey, Daimler-Chrysler, did I tell you about my brilliant decorating prank involving multiple brand-new Mercedes convertibles? No, really!
Link
(Thanks, Ivy )
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Windows XP packaging as a Linux PC case
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DATE: 03/23/2004 06:40:53 AM
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This is pretty perverse: a PC that runs Red Hat Linux, painstakingly constructed within the packaging for Windows XP.
Link
(Thanks, Alexander!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tote-bags made from Indonesian trash
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DATE: 03/23/2004 08:00:49 AM
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Ann Wizer pays Jakarta's trash-dump pickers to find and wash plasticized packaging materials from the piles, then assemble them into tote bags.
Link
(via Joe Ganley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wicked RSS reader redesign
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DATE: 03/23/2004 08:31:20 AM
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My RSS reader of choice, Shrook, went 2.0 this morning. After five or six hours of using it (couldn't sleep, friggin' jetlag), I am in love. This is the best UI overhaul I've ever seen (the old UI was pretty good too), a completely unexpected redesign that nevertheless managed to make this app that I use all day, every day, into something five times more useful and stable than it had been the day before. I like this punctuated equilibrium stuff.
Yesterday's iPhoto update is another example: all of a sudden, iPhoto's gone from being an app that was just useful enough to put up with its ultra-shitty performance to something I just keep running in the background all the time, with 10,000 photos on tap.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Office plastered in Marshmallow Peeps
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DATE: 03/23/2004 08:59:37 AM
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BoingBoing reader Neil writes,
The BoingBoing entry about the Post-It notes prank reminded me of one we pulled at work several years ago around Easter. Instead of Post-It notes we used Marshmallow Peeps. Lots and lots of Marshallow Peeps.
[snip from website:]"We did mail Just Born, manufacturers of Peeps, but sadly they never got back to us. The peeps wound up staying in the office for about two years, through at least two occupant changes. Even six months after they were up we had people coming by and eating them off the ceiling. Ugh."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Why RSS Is Everywhere
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DATE: 03/23/2004 09:42:11 AM
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I wrote a brief piece about RSS, Atom, and the benefits of content syndication for the current issue of Wired Magazine.
Snip: "In the end, RSS may not save you time, but it'll help pack more info into the time you have, says Jonno d'Addario, editor of the sex blog Fleshbot, which (big surprise) offers an RSS feed. 'Since I've started using a news aggregator, I don't spend eight hours a day compulsively noodling through a dozen favorite blogs anymore,' he says. 'Instead I spend eight hours a day compulsively noodling through hundreds of RSS feeds.' Ah, progress."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nano Jobs
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DATE: 03/23/2004 10:14:44 AM
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Our friends at the Foresight Institute collaborated with Working In Ltd. on Working-Nanotechnology.com, a job board and information clearinghouse specifically for careers in small tech. The Education & Training section is especially cool, listing programs and courses for students all the way down to middle school age. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 3D virtual beers to hover over bars
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DATE: 03/23/2004 11:03:36 AM
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New heights in bar beer-ad-intrusiveness: 3D beer bottles that leap out of 52" flat panels and hover on the bar.
The system, from X3D Technologies in New York City, allows the virtual drinks to jump up to a metre in front of the screen. They can be viewed with the naked eye from anything up to a 120 degree angle.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hobby: buying used hard drives on eBay and unerasing the data for fun
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DATE: 03/23/2004 11:22:08 AM
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My friend Simson Garfinkel wrote a great piece on the foolishness of selling hard drives that haven't been sanitized:"Since then, I have repeatedly indulged my habit for procuring and then analyzing secondhand hard drives. (...) Last summer, I started buying drives en masse on eBay.
"In all, I bought and analyzed the content of more than 150 drives(...) In fact, only 10 percent of the drives I purchased had been properly sanitized.
"Much of the data we found was truly shocking. One of the drives once lived in an ATM. It contained a year's worth of financial transactions—including account numbers and withdrawal amounts—from a organization that had a legal requirement to not divulge such information. Two other drives contained more than 5,000 credit card numbers—it looked as if one had been inside a cash register. Another had e-mail and personal financial records of a 45-year-old fellow in Georgia. The man is divorced, paying child support and dating a woman he met in Savannah. And, oh yeah, he's really into pornography."
Link (via Bruce Sterling)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese style: Elegant Gothic Lolita
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DATE: 03/23/2004 11:36:47 AM
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Article about Japanese schoolgirl subculture.An Elegant Gothic Lolita, EGL or Gothic Lolita for short, is a Japanese teen or young adult who dresses in amazingly elaborate Gothic looking babydoll costumes. On the weekends these women walk the streets of Tokyo and Osaka and fill Yoyogi Park and Harajuku neighborhood where they pose for tourist’s pictures and sit around looking pretty. They are beautiful, glamorous, doll-like manifestations of their favorite Visual Rock stars.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Shirley on the remake of Dawn of the Dead
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DATE: 03/23/2004 01:39:22 PM
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The always interesting John Shirley has a posted an entry about immortality research and Dawn of the Dead, and why they are related.I just saw the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, which I thought worked well--though it lost touch with Romero's satirical metaphor about living/dead shoppers in the mall--and which reminded me that zombie movies are not really about corpses coming to get us, they're about death coming to get us. The hungry corpses in such films (28 Days Later, the Evil Dead etc) very simply stand for our own death. Our own corpses, seen in advance. Aggressive, because death is always stalking us, near or far; because it's inexorable, shuffling toward us slowly but never stopping, as the zombies do. In those movies, the humans never completely win out over the zombies. Can't beat death itself.
(John also has a new book out about the life of Gurdjieff.) Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scarlet letter license plates for drunk drivers
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DATE: 03/23/2004 01:58:06 PM
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If you get busted driving drunk in Ohio, you get these rad-looking yellow license plates with red letters on them. Link (Thanks, Lisa!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Most surreal headline about a DOS attack ever
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DATE: 03/23/2004 03:03:46 PM
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The Asociated Press reports on yet another derailing of RIAA.org: "Recording industry Web site downed, possibly by zombies." I guess we're having a kind of a Dawn of the Dead media moment. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mikroman: 150-micron-thick slices of theater
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DATE: 03/23/2004 03:30:11 PM
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My review of Sam Buxton's brilliant Mikroman desk-toys appears in this month's Wired. They really do kick ass.
Using a chemical milling process borrowed from the electronics industry, the Brit product designer acid-etches detailed scenes onto 150-micron-thick slices of stainless steel. Each of his eight MikroMan subjects - like this finely rendered astronaut with rover and landing craft -- is sold flat and can be teased into the third dimension with a fingernail
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Night of the Living Dead on Archive.org
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DATE: 03/23/2004 03:36:05 PM
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BoingBoing reader VonGuard says:
What with all the zombies here today, i figured it was a good idea to point out that the copyright on Night of the Living Dead has lapsed, and now the whole danged blasted movie is available for free on archive.org. Man, Archive rules.
Link
UPDATE: Travis, a member of the BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net, says: " Before 1978, any copyrighted work had to have a copyright notice on every distribution, otherwise it wasn't considered copyrighted. George A. Romero mistakenly left out the copyright notice when he distributed his 1968 film NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The copyright has not recently "lapsed," but was in fact never enforcable, which is why we have dozens of "pirate" distributions of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and innumerable knock-offs."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-carb Eastern Standard Tribe
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DATE: 03/23/2004 03:39:17 PM
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Inspired by Fark photoshopping contest whose theme was unlikely places for low-carb diets, Eldon Brown produced this terrific parody of my latest novel's cover.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: I just finished another novel!
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DATE: 03/24/2004 12:36:04 AM
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It's 1:30 in the morning, and I've just completed the first draft of my next novel, which used to be called "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," and now has a different, provisional title that I'm not so sure about. It is 125,000 words long -- longer than Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe combined. I started work on it in late December 2001 and finished it tonight. I'm exhausted and elated -- at one point, I actually fell asleep typing and woke up to discover that I'd kept on typing nonsense words from my dreams. Freaky. Here's an excerpt from an earlier draft:
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Valenti retires
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DATE: 03/24/2004 06:13:23 AM
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Jack Valenti is retiring from the MPAA. He's a man who championed the First Amendment rights of filmmakers and derided the First Amendment rights of programmers, a person who loved free speech, but not enough to share it with the rest of us.
Link
(Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Office plastered in eggs, live birds
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DATE: 03/24/2004 06:13:39 AM
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Hit this link, scroll down to the bottom of the page. Snip:
"Brian still doesn't budge. 'There's something you have to see,' he says.
I walk over to my desk and see the following:
Everyone in R&D is waiting to see my reaction. Unfortunately, I'm still in panic mode about being late. So, I run over to my desk. It is covered in eggs, complete with a live bird in a cage. After a beat, I say, 'Huh.'
Then I turn to Brian and say, 'Okay, we gotta go.'"
Link (Thanks, Marty Cortinas!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Download random numbers from quantum origin
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DATE: 03/24/2004 06:16:15 AM
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Jean-Luc says:
The University of Geneva and the company id Quantique team has launched the first web site offering the possibility to download random numbers from quantum origin.
The website offers the possibility to request a sequence of random numbers. The length and the bounds of the sequence can be specified by the user. A quantum random number generator connected to the server is used to produce the numbers on demand.
Link
Update: A cool site, but not the first to offer random quantum numbers, say BoingBoing readers. . Dave Polaschek and Charlie Reiman each wrote in to tell us that Hotbits, a site created by former Autodesk guy John Walker, has been offering quantum random numbers for years via web and through a java class. Link."
UPDATE 2:
ethan fremen says, "Note that randomnumbers.info has greater claim on being "truly random"
because it generates a single random number from a single quantum event while hot bits times the difference between two paired decay events in order to generate a single bit." Um, yeah! What he said!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photo series: A Gallon of Milk in an hour?
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DATE: 03/24/2004 06:21:41 AM
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Former Nerve.com "I Did it for Science" extreme sex columnist and fast-talking limey Grant Stoddard is caught living out a dare: can he drink an entire gallon of milk in one hour? The photo series shot by Clayton James Cubitt reads a little like Fear Factor, but, ummm, in Brooklyn with fauxhawks. Just click it. And, sing "Milkshake" to yourself over and over again while you're scrolling through. Or not. Got Vomit?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Recycled umbrella dress
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DATE: 03/24/2004 06:22:48 AM
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This dress is made entirely from discarded umbrellas found in Berkeley and NYC.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: KCRW responds to BB on Sandra Tsing Loh controversy
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DATE: 03/24/2004 06:31:59 AM
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Responding to this post on BoingBoing from last week, radio station KCRW sends us a statement:
After much deliberation, KCRW has decided to release the letter that Ms. Loh faxed to General Manager Ruth Seymour on the day she was notified that her program "The Loh Life" was cancelled.
You can read the entire KCRW statement, and the text of the letter in question, here. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-carb breakfast couture
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DATE: 03/24/2004 06:48:52 AM
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From the pages of a 1979 issue of Jackie magazine, here's a HOWTO for knitting a matching bag-and-beret featuring a delicious, low-carb breakfast.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion appears in Foxtrot strip
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DATE: 03/24/2004 07:46:09 AM
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Monday's FoxTrot comic mentioned and depicted Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
Link
(Thanks, Kronos!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SightLight: iSight lamp
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DATE: 03/24/2004 07:48:22 AM
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The SightLight is a bus-powered, auto-sensing light designed for use with the Apple iSight camera.
SightLight's custom-designed Fresnel-based lens carefully adds a direct but diffused light to the subject directly in front of the camera (you). This added illumination improves skin tone coloration and evens out the shadows caused by inconsistent directional room lighting.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dennis Miller's brain fries on air
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DATE: 03/24/2004 10:02:12 AM
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Funny account of Dennis Miller's nutty behavior on his talk show. The guest was NSNBC liberal Eric Alterman."You look so pissed off," said Mr. Miller.
"What do you mean, I look pissed off?" asked Mr. Alterman.
"I don’t even know what to say. You’re looking at me like—you’re just sitting there." Mr. Miller did an impersonation of what looked like a drunken, mentally disabled guy passing out. "Give me a question and I’ll ask you a question. What do you want to talk about?"
Mr. Alterman laughed nervously.
"Well," he said, "we could talk a little bit more about the way he misled the country." (Meaning George W. Bush.)
Said Mr. Miller: "This is what I’m looking at, here, like this."
He pretended to be asleep.
When Mr. Alterman finished his spiel, Mr. Miller went bolt upright and snapped at the camera: "All right, you’ve been great. Come back anytime."
Link
Here's the video of the interview. Actually, Miller seems like his cranky old self to me. (Thanks, Francis!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Carlo's Playmobil score
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DATE: 03/24/2004 11:02:50 AM
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Carlo Longino went to Germany and picked up some cool Playmobil sets, including a hazmat cleanup crew and a portapotty. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Circular saw won't hurt finger
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DATE: 03/24/2004 11:36:00 AM
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Amazing video of a circular saw that can tell the difference between wood and skin. Link (Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Speakerphone idiot
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DATE: 03/24/2004 12:45:23 PM
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Dan Gillmor writes about an obnoxious moron in a crowded airport lounge using his cellphone in speakerphone mode."Well, I have to get on a plane soon," he tells his colleague. I feel sorry for her, because he'll probably be bothering her in person soon, but those of us who are being forced to listen to this drivel couldn't be happier.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nun Urinals
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DATE: 03/24/2004 07:22:33 PM
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Noted without comment. A follow-up to earlier BoingBoing posts on the Virgin Atlantic "kiss" urinal hoo-haa: nun-shaped urinals.
Found here (warning: hideous popunder ads abound in parent directory). (via Warren)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Home Glow
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DATE: 03/24/2004 07:37:01 PM
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Luminosity is the new black. Loop.ph is a design group "exploring reactive luminous surfaces in the built environment." Products that respond to the activities of the human beings using them. Things that emit light, things worn or lived in. Here are a few:
wallpaper that glows as more sound is in the room Link
responsive window blinds that glow Link
a light blanket Link
Link to Loop.ph home with show dates and locations (Thanks, Bev!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Another man drinking another entire gallon of milk
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DATE: 03/24/2004 07:54:53 PM
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More on the milk-drinking-man-meme: this short film by Rich Lee of Jetpack Design.
Link, also see this previous BoingBoing entry.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig's Free Culture, free online, under a Creative Commons license
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DATE: 03/25/2004 03:00:05 AM
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Larry Lessig's new book "Free Culture" -- which is about the value of freedom to cultural production -- is out in stores today, and, unlike his previous two books, Larry has foudn the leverage to convince his publisher to let him release the full text of the new book online under a Creative Commons license. He credits me with providing the ammunition he needed to convince Penguin to allow him to do this -- which is extraordinarily flattering -- but however he got there, I'm glad he did.
A landmark manifesto about the genuine closing of the American mind.
Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of America's most original and influential public intellectuals, his focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. In his two previous books, Code and The Future of Ideas, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in Free Culture, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they're inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.
All creative works-books, movies, records, software, and so on-are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible-technologically and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the Constitution in 1787 was seventeen years. Now it is closer to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What did he know that we've forgotten?
Link
(Thanks, Larry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyright-banned music
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DATE: 03/25/2004 05:01:21 AM
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The Downhill Battle people have started a site to catalog and distribute .torrents of music that can't be liegally distributed due to copyright restrictions, such as the Grey Album.
Link
(via Trubble)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Passion of the Robo Christ -- NOT
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DATE: 03/25/2004 06:57:28 AM
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One of the humans behind Robots.net reports of our metallic overlords:
The Online
Sun and Ananova
report that Mel Gibson used a robot Christ in his recent movie, Passion of the Christ.
The £220,000 robot was used during the crucifixion
scenes because the weather was too cold for actor Jim Caviezel.
According to another
site, the animatronic Christ was operated by Mel Gibson himself.
The robot was created by Keith
Vanderlaan's Captive Audience Productions. In addition to realistic head
movements, the robot also bleeds and appears to breathe. This could give
a whole new meaning to the phrase, "I'll be back".
Link, (thanks noah!)
UPDATE: False! Boingboing reader Nelson says,
"As much as I wish it was true, IMDB debunks the robo-christ rumor here."
The figure of Christ during the crucifixion is actually James Caviezel, despite popular rumors - no animatronics were used. However, according to the movie's official website, the movie's make-up effects creator/producer Keith VanderLaan forged an articulated, rubber stand-in for Caviezel who could be suspended on the cross for certain wide shots to allow the actor some physical relief.
Yo, Snopes!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush thinks looking for weapons of mass destruction is a hoot
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DATE: 03/25/2004 08:11:50 AM
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Bush had a good laugh at the expense of the planet last night at a media dinner:
Bush put on a slide show, calling it the "White House Election-Year Album" at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association 60th annual dinner, showing himself and his staff in some decidedly unflattering poses.
There was Bush looking under furniture in a fruitless, frustrating search. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," he said.
As Reason's Hit and Run commented, "leading your country to war under false pretenses is hiiiiii-larious." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool new French group blog on cyberculture
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DATE: 03/25/2004 08:24:10 AM
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Spanish blogger Jose Luis of ecuaderno.com sends word of a new French collaborative weblog AEIOU -- described as having been "inspired by Metafilter."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kuro5hin's new membership system
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DATE: 03/25/2004 08:33:51 AM
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Rusty, the guy who runs Kuro5hin, has gotten fed up with abusive posters. He's going to implement a new system for new members.
The idea is this: someone creates a new account. They go through the normal email confirmation. At this point they cannot do anything. Before you have the privileges of a user, you must get an existing user to sponsor you. That just means that some user with the ability to sponsor others goes to a page and enters the new user's nickname. These two are now associated, and if a user gets kicked off the site, their sponsor does too.
This sounds like a good idea. People are already complaining on kuro5hin about the idea, but really, why should it be easy to gain membership into a club? It reminds me of the way private societies like the Masons work. New candidates can apply for membership, but need a couple of sponsors to be accepted into the club. Sponsors have to know the new member pretty well before sponsoring him, because they don't want their reps to be besmirched. And any latent jerk-tendencies in the new guy will be stifled, because he knows his sponsor will take the heat for whatever he does. Maybe Boing Boing should implement a similar system if we decide to allow comments again. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Comcast buys TechTV, will merge it with gaming channel G4
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DATE: 03/25/2004 08:39:15 AM
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Comcast announced today that it will purchase TechTV, the network creted by Zdnet and owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Programming Inc. When the deal closes, Comcast will merge TechTV with gamer lifestyle network G4.
Link to press release. UPDATE: Wired News has a story here, with more details.
Either way, industry observers think that TechTV and G4 are a good fit, and that both Comcast and TechTV will benefit because of the merger. "There's very good programming on TechTV that deserves to survive," says Laura Behrens, a senior media analyst at Gartner/G2, "and with an owner on the scale of Comcast, it now probably has a chance to survive."
But TechTV had been struggling for some time and after multiple rounds of layoffs it had been seen as an attractive acquisition target.
And because no one yet knows whether TechTV will suffer further layoffs, the mood at the company late Wednesday was grim, especially because the sale won't put to rest uncertainty over employees' futures. "After a while, I stopped paying attention," said one TechTV employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, about the acquisition rumors. "I stopped keeping track."
Link. (Thanks for the fact-check, Adam!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: FBI translator says she was bribed not to spill beans on 9-11 cover-up
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DATE: 03/25/2004 09:00:46 AM
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During the 9-11 Hearing, the spotlight was on Richard Clarke's testimony, because they've been so devastating to the Bush administration. But there's hardly any media mention of Sibel Edmonds' tesimony. She's a Farsi and Turkish translator who worked for the FBI from Sept. 20, 2001 to March 2002. Here's what Govenment Executive magazine had to say about her testimony.
Edmonds said she was hired to retranslate material that was collected prior to Sept. 11 to determine if anything was missed in the translations that related to the plot. In her review, Edmonds said the documents clearly showed that the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country and plotting to use airplanes as missiles. The documents also included information relating to their financial activities. Edmonds said she could not comment in detail because she has been under a Justice Department gag order since October 2002.
And here's what tomflocco.com reported:
FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, was offered a substantial raise and a full time job in order to not go public that she had been asked by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to retranslate and adjust the translations of [terrorist] subject intercepts that had been received before September 11, 2001 by the FBI and CIA.
Edmonds, a ten year U.S. citizen who has passed a polygraph examination, speaks fluent Farsi and Turkish and had been working part time with the FBI for six months-- commencing in December, 2001.
In a 50 reporter frenzy in front of some 12 news cameras, Edmonds said "Attorney General John Ashcroft told me 'he was invoking State Secret Privilege and National Security' when I told the FBI I wanted to go public with what I had translated from the pre 9-11 intercepts."
"I appeared once on CBS 60 Minutes but I have been silenced by Mr. Ashcroft, the FBI follows me, and I was threatened with jail in 2002 if I went public," Edmonds told tomflocco.com.
When we asked her if it was really true that she had been bribed by the FBI and DOJ, Edmonds said "You can interpret it as that."
More information about Sibel Edmonds is available at The Memory Hole.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tired of Silly Putty? Try Magnetoids
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DATE: 03/25/2004 09:16:40 AM
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I like to play with a hunk of Silly Putty while I procrastinate in front of the computer. But these Magnetoids look (and sound) really neat. Link (Thanks, Kent W!)
Singe sez: "You can order ferromagnetic Silly Putty. I suspect that these Magnetoids
you speak of would create an interesting gestalt with this ferromagnetic Silly
Putty, seeing as they also speak of interesting effects using their product
with a neodymium magnet which they sell."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: STRANGEco reports on the New York Toy Fair 2004
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DATE: 03/25/2004 09:46:05 AM
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Our favorite toy company STRANGEco reports on the NY Toy Fair, and has tons of pictures.
STRANGEco featured a combination of originally branded toys and specially distributed products. In addition to the previously announced Dorbel, MARS-1 and Tiger Baby vinyls, STRANGEco previewed The Neo Kaiju Project-- featuring reinterpretations of Japanese monsters by Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Seonna Hong, Kathy Schorr and Todd Schorr. The booth also showcased Scarygirl by Nathan Jurevicius (including the upcoming Mini Scarygirl series), Sony Japan’s Vanimal Zoo and Art Capsule mini figures, Presspop Gallery’s high-end vinyl figures and the new Punk Is Not Dead series by James Jarvis and AMOS Novelties.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Giant Shrimp
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DATE: 03/25/2004 10:59:02 AM
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Long John Silver's comes through with free giant shrimp! Stefan Jones sez:
Arrr! Line up for your giant bottom-feeding sea bugs ye swabs! Although NASA's announcement of evidence of ancient seawater on Mars came a bit late, Long John Silver's is going to go ahead and give away a free giant shrimp to all comers on May 10th.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Removable Media For Our Minds
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DATE: 03/25/2004 11:42:37 AM
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In my latest article for TheFeature.com, I report on the first baby steps toward "memory prosthetics," systems that could someday enable us to google our entire lives.
"Too often, our memories don't serve us well. We lose our keys. We forget names. As we age, the home movies that play in our heads begin to look like fifth generation VHS copies. But what if we could rewind to yesterday? Indeed, what if we could watch our entire lives flash before our eyes with the click of button? The possibility is not as far fetched as one might think."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WTF: a UK conference on "emerging memes"
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DATE: 03/25/2004 11:47:34 AM
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Tav sez, "The very first WTF, an open space gathering/conference of various grassroots projects, people, and organisations, will be happening from 11am onwards this Saturday, 27th of March @ the 491 Gallery, 491 Grove Green Road, London E11, UK. It's a UK based conference of emerging memes (foafy-crypto-socio-semantic-typographic-activist-style) empowered with technology (wi-fi, wikis, audio feeds, irc, etc.)"
Link
(Thanks, Tav!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Disney Ink Shop
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DATE: 03/25/2004 02:48:45 PM
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Disney has launched a custom T-shirt shop with a seemingly infinite number of images to choose from. some of the art is awesome, owing to the fact that it was drawn by the good old Disney studio cartoonists. I've found several ukulele related images already. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Don't think about pink elephants
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DATE: 03/25/2004 04:21:35 PM
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According to a new Harvard University psychological study, the thoughts we push out of our brains during the day seep into our dreams at night. The reason may be because the prefontal cortex--the part of the brain we use to plan and organize complex cognitive processes--doesn't work as hard when we're asleep.
"Maybe this is why students dream of sleeping through an important exam, why actors dream of going blank on stage, and why truckers dream of driving off the road," one of the researchers told Scientific American. "Dreams are where our thoughts go when we try to put the thoughts out of mind." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mythtv PVRs for sale
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DATE: 03/26/2004 04:12:29 AM
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An Aussie company is shipping prebuilt mythtv-based PVRs. These are souped-up TiVo-like boxen built out of commodity hardware with all the features that I want, not just the ones that make the Luddites who run the movie studios comfortable. This analysis of the features (including several features that the manufacturer lamely decided to "hide") makes this box pretty drool-worthy indeed.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: VLC will play iTunes Music Store tracks
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DATE: 03/26/2004 04:41:10 AM
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My favorite media player is something called Video LAN Client, or VLC, which plays everything from Quicktime to Divx and RealVideo. It's free and open source, and improves steadily. Now, someone's hacked in support for M4Ps, the DRM format used by Apple for the iTunes Music Store singles. Alas, it requires that you be using a machine that's been authorized by Apple to play the tracks in question.
That's a pretty big problem for me. Let me tell you my iTunes horror story. I'm a great Apple customer. I buy a new Powerbook every ten months or so. I've convinced all my family members to buy Powerbooks. Wherever I go, I leave a wake of Apple customers behind me.
So last year, when the iTMS debuted, I was in Toronto, and I showed my Mom how to stream music off of my Powerbook. I even authorized her to play my iTMS tracks -- I spent about $50 in the first day that the store was online.
Then I got back to San Francisco, and everything was fine. Apple announced the Aluminum 15" Powerbook, and that day, I ordered one to replace my 10-month-old 12" Powerbook, which was dying and underpowered. The 15" machine died a week after it arrived. I sent it back to Apple as a lemon and it was broken up for parts and a new machine was sent to me. I restored my data to the new Powerbook's HDD and tried to authorize iTunes to play my music, but I was SOL: I'd already authorized my old 12", my mom's iBook, and the Powerbook that was now back in Apple's parts-stream. So I de-authorized the 12" and away we went.
The first run of Alumninum Powerbooks had a screen defect, the "white blobs" problem. I had it in spades: huge, distracting white blobs all over the screen. Once I had the time, I moved all my data over to the old 12" and send the new machine back to Apple a second time, this time to get a new screen. While the new machine was in Texas getting repaired, I was in San Francisco, and I attempted to use the iTunes on my 12" Powerbook, only to be prompted to authorize the machine to play my susbtantial, expensive library of iTMS tracks.
But I couldn't. Between my mom's iBook (3,000 miles away in another country), my original Powerbook (broken up for parts by Apple) and the replacement Powerbook (back in the shop due to a manufacturing defect), I'd done all the authorizations that Apple's "speed bump" DRM would allow me. The Help links on Apple's site went to pages with support forms that returned errors when I filled them in. So, the "FairPlay" system was punishing me for:
- Buying so much iTMS music that burning it to CD and ripping it back as MP3 (and re-entering all the metadata) was too big a chore to contemplate
- Buying a new Powerbook at full retail every 10 months
- Buying new Powerbooks as soon as they are announced, before all the manufacturing bugs have been shaken out
Apple tells us that its DRM "keeps honest users honest." I'm a pretty honest user. Apple's DRM hasn't kept me honest, though: it's kept me angry with Apple. It's kept me feeling like a sucker for giving them my money. It's kept me in chains.
So I'm waiting for someone to hack support for unauthorized AACs into VLC, because I'm not confident in my ability to continue to authorize the machines I buy to play the music I pay for.
Link
(via Hack the Planet)
DVD Jon has written in with more info on this -- once you crack your music with VLC, you can play it on as many CPUs as you want
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Send your future self an email
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DATE: 03/26/2004 04:50:07 AM
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FutureMe lets you address an email to yourself and set a date in the future to have it sent -- pass an email to yourself in ten years reminding yourself about your vow to never, ever drink peach schnapps again and see how well you're faring.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's last Toronto signing tomorrow
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DATE: 03/26/2004 04:50:59 AM
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A reminder: I'm doing my final Toronto signing tomorrow afternoon at Bakka Books:
March 27, 3-5PM, Bakka Books, 598 Yonge St., at Wellesley, +1.416.963.9993
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Four-eared kitten finds home
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DATE: 03/26/2004 08:07:59 AM
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Lilly, the cute German kitten born with an extra set of non-working ears, has been adopted. According to the animal shelter in the foothills of the Alps where Lilly has been living, there was no shortage of people wanting to take her in once word spread about her unique trait (visible in this CNN photo)."We wanted to make sure the people were looking for a normal cat and not a gag to make an exhibition out of her," a worker at the shelter told Reuters. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese rescue robot vids
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DATE: 03/26/2004 08:18:08 AM
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A post on Dottocomu includes links to videos of the Enryu Japanese rescue-robot tearing the doors off of cars, moving steel girders and demonstrating humanity's hubristic attempt to supercede the Creator's unique right to create life. It's sacrelicious.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Worst album covers gallery
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DATE: 03/26/2004 08:23:13 AM
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Nice gallery of bad album covers, with funny commentary. Link (Thanks, Greg!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing mailblog is back
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DATE: 03/26/2004 09:07:50 AM
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We've finished setting up the new Boing Boing Mailblog (now! with actual working mail!) to which all future posts on Boing Boing will be posted. It's a Mailman list: sturdy and reliable, and less prone to weird unsubscribe errors than Yahoo Groups. If you were on the old Yahoo! list, you've been subscribed to the new list. If you want to subscribe to the new list, click the link. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Salon reports on FBI translator's revelations about Bush's 9-11 coverup
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DATE: 03/26/2004 09:13:01 AM
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Yesterday I pointed to a couple of articles about FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. Today Salon has a more in-depth article about Edmonds. She has a lot of shocking things to say about the tapes she translated, but since she's under a gag order issued by Ashcroft, she can't reveal everything.
Edmonds is offended by the
Bush White House claim that it lacked foreknowledge of the kind of attacks
made by al-Qaida on 9/11. "Especially after reading National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice [Washington Post Op-Ed on March 22] where she said,
we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they
might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's
a lie."
This week Edmonds attended the commission hearings and
plans to return in April when FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to
testify. "I'm hoping the commission asks him real questions -- like, in
April 2001, did an FBI field office receive legitimate information
indicating the use of airplanes for an attack on major cities? And is it
true that through an FBI informant, who'd been used [by the Bureau] for 10
years, did you get information about specific terrorist plans and specific
cells in this country? He couldn't say no," she insists.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Portable People Meter
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DATE: 03/26/2004 09:20:14 AM
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Here's a piece I wrote for TheFeature about Arbitron's Portable People Meter, a pager-sized device that monitor's a wearer's media consumption. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Aerogel
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DATE: 03/26/2004 09:26:24 AM
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Juju has written an nice introductory piece about aerogel, a solid material that just a tiny bit denser than air. The pics are amazing. They look fake, but they come from the NASA web site. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steven Hawking's wife accused of physically abusing him
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DATE: 03/26/2004 09:33:44 AM
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Steven Hawking's wife has been called in for questioning regarding injuries to her husband. She used to be one of his nurses, and the other nurses who tend him blame her for "numerous acts of cruelty." Both of them deny this.
Professor Hawking, author of A Brief History Of Time, has repeatedly been taken to hospital with unexplained injuries, such as a broken wrist, gashes to the face and a cut lip, that have left his family concerned for his safety.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nano, MEMS, and the wonders of nature
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DATE: 03/26/2004 09:58:53 AM
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My new Small Times column is now online:
"Mother Nature has an impressive resume as an engineer. In nearly 4 billion years, she's perfected millions of innovative designs and manufacturing techniques in such diverse fields as biochemistry, materials science and mechanical engineering. It's no surprise, then, that small tech researchers are looking to nature's elegance for engineering aid."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Chris Null soaks a gummi
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DATE: 03/26/2004 10:33:52 AM
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Chris Null soaks a gummi bear in water and gets a surprise. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flying Gernsbackian vacuum cleaners from the 1950s
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DATE: 03/26/2004 11:29:42 AM
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In the 1950s and 1960s, Hoover manufactured a line of flying-saucer-shaped "floating cannister vacuums" that rode on a cushion of their own exhaust, hovering over your carpet. This vacuum cleaner fansite has great photos, scanned ads and details for several of Hoover's most futuristic vacuum cleaners.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DVD Jon on VLC and Apple's iTunes singles
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DATE: 03/26/2004 11:34:11 AM
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Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen writes, in reference to VLC's support for iTunes's M4P DRM format:
In case you didn't know, I'm a VideoLAN developer. I reverse engineered
FairPlay and wrote VLC's FairPlay support. It's been available in
VideoLAN CVS since January, but the first release to include FairPlay
support is VLC 0.7.1 (released March 2.).
Just wanted to let you know that once you have generated the user key
file(s), you can copy them to as many computers you want and play your
M4P files there using VLC.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mind-bending space habitats
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DATE: 03/26/2004 01:19:16 PM
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Bernal Spheres are theoretical space-habitats that curve in on themselves, making fantastical, topsy-turvy eschroid landscapes. Here's a page with some nice pix and details.
Link
(via Flickr)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto blogger gathering tomorrow night, 7PM
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DATE: 03/26/2004 01:36:54 PM
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There's a gathering of bloggers this Saturday (tomorrow!) night in Toronto, at the C'est What restaurant, starting at 7PM. I'm going to head over after my signing that afternoon (alas, I'll likely only be staying for an hour or so, as I have a prior engagement that night).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Congress moving to criminalize P2P
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DATE: 03/26/2004 05:58:39 PM
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Congress appears to be preparing assaults against peer-to-peer technology on multiple fronts. Details in a story I just filed for Wired News.
A draft bill recently circulated among members of the House judiciary committee would make it much easier for the Justice Department to pursue criminal prosecutions against file sharers by lowering the burden of proof.
The bill, obtained Thursday by Wired News, also would seek penalties of fines and prison time of up to ten years for file sharing.
In addition, on Thursday, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) introduced a bill that would allow the Justice Department to pursue civil cases against file sharers, again making it easier for law enforcement to punish people trading copyright music over peer-to-peer networks. They dubbed the bill "Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004," or the Pirate Act.
The bills come at a time when the music and movie industries are exerting enormous pressure on all branches of government at the federal and state levels to crack down on P2P content piracy. The industries also are pushing to portray P2P networks as dens of terrorists, child pornographers and criminals -- a strategy that would make it more palatable for politicians to pass laws against products that are very popular with their constituents.
In defending the Pirate Act, Hatch said the operators of P2P networks are running a conspiracy in which they lure children and young people with free music, movies and pornography. With these "human shields," the P2P companies are trying to ransom the entertainment industries into accepting their networks as a distribution channel and source of revenue.
Link to Wired News story. Read the full text of Senator Hatch's remarks describing children as "human shields against copyright owners and law enforcement agencies," and the "piracy machine designed to tempt them to engage in copyright piracy or pornography distribution," here. UPDATE: link to full text of the PIRATE Act here.
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TITLE: Producing a blogger-read audio of Lessig's book
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DATE: 03/27/2004 03:52:01 AM
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Lessig's new book, Free Culture is available online as a gratis, Creative-Commons-licensed file, under terms that allow for the creation of derivative works.
AKMA has proposed a hell of a derivative work: he's inviting any blogger who cares to to read a chapter aloud, recording it and posting it, so that a distributed audiobook of the book will be produced. I may take a crack at a chapter myself this week.
Heck, we could have duelling chapters; which version of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guy’s or Jenny the Shifted Librarian’s? (Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They haven’t offered or anything. Yet.) (Another disclaimer: When I went to Jenny’s just now to get her link, I saw that she had the same idea — and we didn’t even talk about it Wednesday night!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hyenas and baboons for pets
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DATE: 03/27/2004 08:25:41 AM
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These pets make pitbulls look like tweety bird. According to the headline of this page of three pictures, these guys are money collectors in Nigeria. Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iVillage creates a virtual women-only island in the There MMO
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DATE: 03/27/2004 10:54:35 PM
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Terra Nova's Betsy Book takes note of a co-branding deal between the women's portal site iVillage and the massively multiplayer environment There, in which a women-only island called Paradise Island will be created for the enjoyment of women players, branded by iVillage. Book raises three excellent questions about this:
1 - It's a virtual space doubly marked by gender and commercial co-branding. (Is this the first of its kind? Anyone know of any precedents?)
2 - iVillage is a text-based community of women whose bonding often takes place specifically around members' relationships to their RL bodies in the form of pregnancy, dieting, health, and beauty tips. While there may be the rare case of role-playing and gender-bending in the iVillage web community (ie. men posing as women), most participants' online identities are extensions of their RL (female) selves. Will this direct tie between offline/online identity carry over into a virtual world? Or will iVillage women use There to role play, whether that means creating an avatar that looks radically different from their RL body, or even choose a male avatar?
3 - The branding of a virtual space as female automatically sexualizes it. Already some of the male community members in There are viewing the addition of iVillage island as a welcome opportunity to increase their chances for romance. How will the iVillage women respond to these romantic overtures? Is There prepared to deal with any Mr. Bungles that show up?
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TITLE: Europeans! Adjust your clocks and your circadians today
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DATE: 03/28/2004 06:20:12 AM
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Reminder: Today is Leap Forward day in Europe. Adjust your clocks accordingly. Here's an excerpt from Eastern Standard Tribe on the subject:
The sleep-deprived are terrible, terrible drivers. Daylight savings time is a widowmaker: stay off the roads on Leap Forward day!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland jacks up admission at 190% of inflation
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DATE: 03/28/2004 04:27:11 PM
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The price of admission to Disneyland is going up to $49.75. Frank Boosman points out that Disney is raising its ticket-prices waaay ahead of inflation:
According to Yesterland, the price in 1972 for a 15-ride ticket book -- the highest-priced admission back then and so the most apt comparison to today's unlimited attractions ticket -- was $5.95.
Using this handy calculator (thanks, NASA!), we can tell that $5.95 in 1972 dollars equals $26.19 in 2003 dollars. That means that Disney's ticket prices are now 1.9 times higher than if they had risen at the underlying inflation rate. Put another way, if this trend holds, in the year 2035, it will cost $94.50 in 2004 dollars to visit Disneyland for the day.
Link
(Thanks, Frank!)
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TITLE: Daily Show on Richard Clarke
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DATE: 03/28/2004 04:31:09 PM
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Here's Lisa Rein's video-capture of The Daily's Show on Richard Clarke's damning testimony about the Bush administration's terrorism snark-hunt.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: RFIDs of the Beast
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DATE: 03/28/2004 05:25:03 PM
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The Snopes.com Urban Legends Reference has a great new page detailing why radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are (for better or worse) not the "mark of the beast" as prophesized in this passage from the New Testament's Book of Revelations:
"[The beast] causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads. And that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Buckyballs are the new asbestos?
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DATE: 03/29/2004 05:06:15 AM
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Buckyballs -- nanoscale new materials based on inspired by Buckminster Fuller's research geodesics -- are theoretically inert in the environment, seeking out other buckyballs and forming clumps that are too big to do any real harm. Turns out they're not -- a Southern Methodist U researcher who released buckyballs into an aquatic testbed found that they were deadly to micro- and macro-organisms.
Oberdoerster kept young largemouth bass in ten-liter aquariums filled with fullerene-spiked water at concentrations of 0.5 parts per million -- similar to that encountered with more common pollutants in U.S. ports. After 48 hours, the fish were removed and their brains studied for evidence of lipid peroxidation, a tissue-burning chemical reaction that toxicologists use as a standard of biological damage.
The level of brain damage was "severe," Oberdoerster reported yesterday at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim -- some 17 times higher than seen in fish kept in clean water for comparison.
Link
(via /.)
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TITLE: Berlin theme-hotel of great and magnificent weirdness
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DATE: 03/29/2004 05:21:01 AM
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I've stayed in some pretty cool theme-hotels, like San Luis Obipso's magnificent and weird Madonna Inn, but now that I've had a virtual tour of Berlin's Propeller Island City Lodge (which styles itself an "art" hotel), I am quietly and determinedly obsessed to pay it a visit. The 40-some themed rooms have a couple of real standouts, like the Flying Bed and Grandma's. I'm moving to Europe in a week -- my first trip to Berlin (when it comes) is definitely going to include a night here.
Link
(via Geisha Asobi)
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TITLE: How to handicap fruit-fly combat
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DATE: 03/29/2004 05:30:23 AM
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Horny fruit-flies fight with one another over mates. A Harvard researcher has posted videos of 75 fruit-fly fights, along with notes analyzing the techniques employed by these adorable little critters and produced a crib-sheet for setting odds on which fly will triumph in any given bout.
Link
(via Geisha Asobi)
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TITLE: Replica Haunted Mansion segment on TechTV this Weds
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DATE: 03/29/2004 07:14:18 AM
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Last December, I blogged about Mark Hurt, who built himself a replica of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. TechTV is doing a segment on him this Wednesday.
One-time Disney contractor Mark Hurt turned his Georgia home into a look-alike of the Haunted Mansion attraction found at Disney amusement parks. We'll find out how and why he did it, and we'll give you a blood-curdling tour of Hurt's haunting renovations, tonight on "Tech Live."
Link
(Thanks, Walter!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Artist plans to marry dead poet, seeks attention, gets it
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DATE: 03/29/2004 09:13:19 AM
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New York artist Shishaldin is planning to marry a French poet. That wouldn't be newsworthy if the poet wasn't Comte De Lautreamont, who has been dead for 134 years. Apparently, an obscure French law allows the country's president to sanction weddings between the living and dead. No word yet on whether French President Jacques Chirac will give his seal-of-approval though.
Shishaldin, a 23-yeard-old student at the Pratt Institute and former Alaskan tennis champion, seems to be on a PR blitz. Earlier this month she bequeathed her remains to the Guggenheim Museum. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Judge throws out Pooh charges against Disney
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DATE: 03/29/2004 10:47:48 AM
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The case that Milne's agent's heirs brought against Disney for marketing Winnie the Pooh merch has been dismissed "with prejudice," after 13 years in court. Milne's agent's heirs brought the suit against Disney -- who had acquired a Pooh license from Milne's own heirs -- after discovering the Milne had signed over the Pooh merch rights to his agent in the thirties. The liability overhang was stupendous: potentially enough to kill the company.
Stephen Slesinger Inc., the family firm with U.S. merchandising rights to the honey-loving bear, had argued that Disney reneged on promises to pay royalties on video cassettes and short-changed it on other items...
In a hearing last month, Disney asked Los Angeles Superior Court judge Charles McCoy, who took over last October, to throw out the case, accusing Slesinger of stealing evidence. Slesinger had denied those charges.
Link
(Thanks, Amanda!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ernest Miller responds to "Congress moves to Criminalize P2P"
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DATE: 03/29/2004 11:13:42 AM
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The ever-astute Ernest Miller of Lawmeme and Copyfight responds to "Congress Moves to Criminalize P2P," a story I filed for Wired News on Friday. Snip from his post "PIRATE Act Reveals Sen. Hatch as Strange Ally of Pornography Industry":
"Public health and safety are also directly threatened by business models that tempt children toward piracy and pornography and then use them as "human shields" against law enforcement."
My first thought was, "I'm surprised Hatch didn't pull a Gen. Jack D. Ripper imitation and start calling for protecting the precious purity of our children's bodily fluids." My second thought was, "does Hatch know what he is saying?"
Perhaps Hatch doesn't realize this, but most pornography is copyrighted and, as Hatch notes, is frequently distributed via filesharing networks. Since Hatch wants to stop copyright infringement and also discourage the redistribution of pornography, there is only one logical conclusion. This new law is meant to encourage the DOJ to go after those infringing pornography copyrights through P2P filesharing. By suing those engaged in pornography piracy, the DOJ could accomplish two of Hatch's goals at once: reducing infringement and pornography redistribution.
Read "PIRATE Act Reveals Sen. Hatch as Strange Ally of Pornography Industry": Link. Read the original Wired report: Link
UPDATE: Ernest writes, "I've just written another piece on the PIRATE Act ... the feds can use wiretaps to enforce it, something the RIAA can't do." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Empirical data on file-sharing's effect on album sales
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DATE: 03/29/2004 11:24:12 AM
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Koleman Strumpf, a conservative, Cato-affiliated economist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just co-authored a paper on the effects of file-sharing on album sales, based on the first-ever empirical data analysis in the field. Koleman watched the file requests on OpenNap servers (to get numbers on which albums' tracks are being downloaded) and compared them to the sales-figures for each album, correlating file-sharing popularity against sales data. His conclusion: file-sharing isn't killing record sales.
We analyze a large file sharing dataset which includes 0.01% of the world’s downloads from the last third of 2002. We focus on users located in the U.S. Their audio downloads are matched to the album they were released on, for which we have concurrent U.S. weekly sales data. This allows us to consider the relationship between downloads and sales. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using technical features related to file sharing (such as network congestion or song length) and international school holidays, both of which are plausibly exogenous to sales. We are able to obtain relatively precise estimates because the data contain over ten thousand album-weeks...
Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale...high selling albums actually benefit from file sharing.
369K PDF Link
(Thanks, Koleman!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Web design guide for kids?
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DATE: 03/29/2004 02:25:53 PM
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My 9-year-old niece is interested in setting up her own Web site. The Dummies people sell a book from 1997 called "Creating Web Pages for Kids & Parents." I also glanced at Webmonkey For Kids. Does anyone have experience with either of these or recommend any other really good web design tutorials for kids? Your pointers would be appreciated!
UPDATE: Thanks for the multiple pointers to Lissa Explains It All!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Plural Animals
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DATE: 03/29/2004 04:30:05 PM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine says:
"This site lists the names given for groups of animals. But I see it's missing seagulls. Some examples: A shrewdness of apes, cete of badgers, army of caterpillars, knot of toads, unkindness of ravens, or a clowder of cats."
link
Update:
Simon Gatrall points to more collective critter noun fun here, here, and here!
And toothpastefordinner says, "I illustrated some of the groups not shown on your links here (small version, big version)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of zen: Arm-wrestling photo series
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DATE: 03/29/2004 05:27:20 PM
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Award-winning photographer and BoingBoing pal Clayton Cubitt says:
To get the most from this series recently shot in NYC, smear your upper lip with Ben-Gay and play "Eye of the Tiger" at full volume. "The Big Apple Grapple" International Arm Wrestling Championships, held on board the aircraft carrier Intrepid, shot for The Fader. The ref giving the "thumbs up" in this series is Bobby Buttafuoco, big brother of the infamous Joey. He's evidently the best arm-wrestler in New York City for like 13 years running. He was real nice, but I didn't ask him about Joey because I was worried he'd beat me to a pulp if I did.
Link to Clayton's photo series, Link to the list of contest winners (beware: MIDI soundtrack)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Action Comics #1 scanned and posted
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DATE: 03/29/2004 11:13:29 PM
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Someone's posted the whole of June, 1938's Action Comics #1 (including the first funnybook appearance of Superman) to the web as a series of medium-resolution scans.
Link
(Thanks, Eyes Spies and Lies!))
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Underwater motorcycle shipping soon
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DATE: 03/29/2004 11:56:59 PM
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The Scubadoo is an AUS$17,500 "underwater motorcycle" that looks like something off of Space: 1999's aquatic habitat ship, shipping soon. It does 2.5 knots and carries an hour's worth of air.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom makes the preliminary Nebula ballot!
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DATE: 03/30/2004 12:10:03 AM
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I've just gotten word that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has qualified for the Preliminary Ballot for the 2004 Nebula Awards. That's still a ways off -- the book still has to make the final ballot in spring 2005, and then the award will be announced in April 2005. But this is a hell of a mitzvah, I gotta say.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hilarious Ze Frank sendup of YASNSes
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DATE: 03/30/2004 05:59:36 AM
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Ze Frank takes a look at social networking -- Orkut, Friendster, and the lot -- and totally nails it.
Link to QuickTime video (via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AOL raffling spammer's Porsche
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DATE: 03/30/2004 06:41:47 AM
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AOL is raffling off a spammer's Porsche, which it won in a court settlement.
Seizure of property is becoming a major tactic in these lawsuits, since guilty spammers often protest their inability to pay large fines... The Porsche-owning spammer, whose identity remains confidential, was one of a group sued last year for having sent 1 billion junk messages to AOL members...
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GOP Sloganator highlights
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DATE: 03/30/2004 06:47:42 AM
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The sloganator was a GOP-provided webtool that would generate custom Bush-Cheney posters. Pranksters used it to generate their own ironic slogans, until it was shut down. This Flash blog is a montage of some of the funniest.
1.7MB Flash link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Memory-wire-based headset
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DATE: 03/30/2004 06:57:13 AM
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The Arriva headset uses memory-wire to coil securely around your head (Gizmodo compares it to an alien brain-sucker) and communicates with audio sources via wire, Bluetooth, or FM receiver. The "buy it" page is b0rked, so there's no way to tell what it costs.
Our patent pending headset is unique in design and functionality. No exposed wires increase durability. Flexibility allows for abusive use and storage without adverse damage. Best of all, the weave design fits any size head comfortably and securely. The "WRAP-RADIO" will NOT fall off. The design accommodates different "ear buds" and color specifications per your requirements. The headset can even be waterproof.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Downloadable audio rarities from Disney's 1964 World's Fair attractions
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DATE: 03/30/2004 07:04:13 AM
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Andy Baio has posted a .torrent of an unreleased, 4-CD set of the audio from Disney's 1964 New York World's Fair attractions (Small World, Magic Skyway, Progressland AKA Carousel of Progress, and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln). It's been floating around on Usenet ever since a deal to publish it fell through, and now it's available in one convenient place.
General Electric Progressland
01. There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Progressland Spectacular
02. Welcome
03. Walt and the Sherman Brothers
04. Carousel of Progress Early Script Reading
05. Carousel of Progress Alternate Universe Version
06. The Skydome Spectacular
07. Toucan and Parrot The Electronic Utility Show
08. Music to Buy Toasters By
09. Mirror Maze
10. Carousel of Music Kaleidophonic Opening
11. Carousel of Music 1890s
12. Carousel of Music Dixieland Gramophone
13. Carousel of Music 1920s
14. Carousel of Music 1940s
15. Carousel of Music Radio and Record Player
16. Horizons EPCOT
Link
(Thanks, Andy!))
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gates's vision -- and failure thereof
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DATE: 03/30/2004 07:19:45 AM
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Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. This is a pretty visionary idea -- and, I think, plausible enough; you can buy a $0.99 singing greeting card today with more computing power than all the world's digital computers at the launch of Sputnik (multiple Soviet space-programs' worth of cycles for under a buck!), so the idea of powerful, useful hardware going ubiquitous and cheap is pretty nifty and pretty credible.
In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won't be free -- though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it's because universal free software would be bad for his buiness, so he can't bring himself to contemplate the possibility). This kind of blinkered thinking does Microsoft -- which could be capable of pursuing lots of profitable strategies that don't involve fighting the future tooth and nail -- no credit. If the senior management at Microsoft is this head-in-sand over production trends in software, maybe it's time for the Board of Directors to think about hiring a new chief architect and CEO.
I suspect that it was this kind of thinking that led Microsoft superstar David Stutz to write his blazing resignation when he quit the company last year.
Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't .
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: QuickSilver, better than OS X LaunchBar
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DATE: 03/30/2004 07:37:32 AM
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The most useful OS X utility on my machine has been LaunchBar, an application launcher that makes switching between apps and launching new apps very fast and convenient.
That's changed. Today, I downloaded QuickSilver, a beta app that does everything that LaunchBar does -- but more stylishly, faster and more intuitively -- and also includes a clipboard manager that lets me store the contents of the last 9 copy operations. It's also savvy to your iPhoto albums, your iTunes playlists, your addresss book and your Documents folder. I'm in love.
Link
(Thanks, Jeff!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Robot camel-jockeys replace kidnapped children in Qatar
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DATE: 03/30/2004 07:54:07 AM
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The United Arab Emirates Qatar, responding to complaints from human rights groups that the jockeys in its camel races are often kidnapped children, has switched to using robot jockeys.
ROBOTS have been used as jockeys in Qatar for camel races, a favourite sport in the Gulf which has faced widespread criticism over the use of young children from the Indian sub-continent in such races...
The children, mostly from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Pakistan, are then smuggled into the Gulf states.
They are often starved by employers to keep them light and maximise their racing potential. Mounting camels three times their height, the children - some as young as six - face the risk of being thrown off or trampled.
Wish I could find a pic of this!
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Power-driver for Powerbook trackpads
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DATE: 03/30/2004 08:03:25 AM
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Sidetrack is a beta, open source replacement driver for the MacOS X trackpad drivers that adds a lot of cool power-user features to your trackpad:
* Vertical scrolling at left or right edge of pad.
* Horizontal scrolling at top or bottom edge of pad.
* Map hardware button to left or right click.
* Map trackpad taps to no action, left click, left click drag (with or without drag lock), or right click...
Link
(Thanks, Joel!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Starcade returns: Retro 80s video game show
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DATE: 03/30/2004 10:06:21 AM
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Super-bitchin' '80s videogame memories. Starcade was a game show that launched around 1983, played on Saturday mornings, and now replays on G4 Network (the all-gaming TV channel that Comcast is merging with TechTV). T-shirts and DVDs are coming out in April, and I want them most badly.
Show contestants played videogames to win fabulous prizes -- everything from video arcade games to the infamous "Mister Disc," as well as swank Wrangler jean jackets and my favorite -- "a trip to Hawaii and a roll of quarters."
Watch the original promo,
Link to Starcade home. (Thanks, Mara -- who says, "All I want out of life is a Stargate weepul.")
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: E-voting expose on Wired News
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DATE: 03/30/2004 10:30:21 AM
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If you haven't yet read the extensive report on e-voting's flaws from my Wired News colleague Kim Zetter -- you should. Managing editor David Miller explains why:
The story, which she has been working on for the past month, is an in-depth look at the controversy surrounding electronic voting in the United States. In this election year, electronic voting machines have been touted as the solution to the Florida debacle that marred the 2000 presidential race. But Zetter, who has been following the topic closely for nearly a year, shows in a magazine-length piece why no one should be confident that these machines are safe for use. She details numerous security flaws and vulnerabilities with e-voting as well as issues surrounding potential conflict of interest among the voting machine vendors.
How E-Voting Threatens Democracy: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Declan: Should the UN run the Internet?
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DATE: 03/30/2004 10:35:29 AM
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In his News.com column this week, Declan McCullagh explores recent debate around proposed expansion of United Nations involvement in managing 'Net architecture.
The United Nations wants to expand its influence over the Internet, but would it be wise to let that happen?
That question follows the conclusion of a two-day U.N. summit last week, in which delegates from sundry countries such as Cuba, Ghana, Bolivia and Venezula lectured North American, Asian and European countries about how best to run the Internet.
Their demands varied, but the bottom line was the same: They want a piece of the action in just about every way. The event's agenda was breathtakingly broad, taking in everything from spam and privacy to intellectual property, network security and the operation of root domain name servers.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gallery of confusing signs and designs
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DATE: 03/30/2004 11:26:44 AM
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"This is Broken" showcases confusing/dumb signs, buttons, user interfaces, and products. Link (Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessons to be learnt from Disney's Pop Century Resort
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DATE: 03/30/2004 12:06:19 PM
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The authors of Learning from Las Vegas (a hymn to the urban planning positives of the Vegas Strip) have written a good analytical piece in the current ish of Metropolis, analyzing Disney World's new Pop Century resort.
We see the Pop Century Resort as a third evolution of Pop Urbanism--beyond that engaging the symbolic-surface makeup of the first Las Vegas, evolving from the Strip; beyond that engaging the scenographic formal makeup of the second Las Vegas, evolving from Disneyland. Here is a vivid urban complex that is beginning to embrace symbolic content by combining surface and form, graphic signage, and sculptural symbolism--both the "decorated shed" and the "duck" (i.e., the loft whose surfaces are ornamented with signs, and the building as sculptural symbol).
What is to come next? The urban complex that is a city rather than a resort--a vivid multifaceted place that pragmatically juxtaposes decorated sheds and ducks through signage and sculpture, civic and commercial content--all in the service of enhanced communication, the vital community-building tool of our multicultural era. This is what the Las Vegases and Pop Century Resorts are leading up to and what the Tokyo of today has essentially achieved.
Link
(Thanks, Bruce!)
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TITLE: NES lookenfeel comes to GBA
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DATE: 03/30/2004 01:19:32 PM
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Nintedo's shipping a Game Boy Advance skinned to look like a first-generation Nintendo Entertainment System controller, with a suite of classic NES games.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DARPA Grand Challenge Video clips
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DATE: 03/30/2004 07:59:12 PM
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Video excerpts from DARPA Grand Challenge 2004, downloaded from satellite
feed on Saturday March 13th, 2004 .
This video was transfered from the satellite feed
provided by DARPA on the day of the race. It is provided as is. The video lasts
about 19 minutes.
Low bandwidth - 28.2 Kbps - wmf format - 8.8 MB
High Bandwidth - 512 Kbps - wmf format - 31 MB
The final results of the race can be found
here (PDF).
Hosting kindly provided by the Spacecraft Technology Center at Texas A&M
University.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Massive Kodak photomontage sets Guinness world record
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DATE: 03/30/2004 08:09:56 PM
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A gigantic photomontage created by Kodak scored an entry in the Guinness book of world records, and took home gold at the Effie Hellas 2004 Awards. The photomontage - titled "The Whole of Greece in One Smile" -- is comprised of 16,609 photos of Greek citizens, and covers a surface area of over 5,000 square feet.
Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Feedster + Share Your OPML
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DATE: 03/30/2004 08:13:49 PM
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Dude! You got your Feedster in my OPML! No, dude, you got your OPML in my Feedster! Whatever -- but this helpful little app allows you to search for what fellow RSS junkies might have read about a certain topic via their OPML file.
Link (thanks, Sean!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Job listings via RSS
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DATE: 03/30/2004 08:22:49 PM
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In an item about RSS for the current issue of Wired Magazine, I wrote:
Job seekers anxious about seeing the freshest Craigslist posts can subscribe to a feed instead of hitting Reload for hours in a paranoid funk.
Responding to this, Steve Rose of RSSJobs writes, "FYI, RSSJobs has been providing personalized job feeds in RSS format since last year! Check it out!" Link.
Total non-sequitur: read this hilarious Craigslist position-wanted post, "I Need A New Fucking Job," which sounds as if it were penned by my ex-boyfriend Jim Anchower.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Newsmap: visualizing the media tree through Google News
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DATE: 03/30/2004 08:37:43 PM
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BoingBoing reader paul says:
newsmap is an application that visualizes the totality of the GoogleNews aggregator -- an amazing piece of software which not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you - no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is.
Google news aggregates stories in several languages and customizes its content for 10 particular countries. I've loved googlenews for this particular reason since the first day, and it was then when I started thinking about visualizing the totality of it, since it could be a very close approach to getting a picture on how news media attention differs from country to country.
Newsmap utilizes a treemap algorithm to dynamically create each view, and the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster.
Link, created by the same fellow behind Social Circles.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chapter 6 of Gillmor's "Making the News" online
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DATE: 03/30/2004 08:40:16 PM
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Dan Gillmor has just posted a draft of Chapter 6 of his upcoming book, "Making the News." Readers are invited to contribute to the process by way of his weblog. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sony's QRIO in action
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DATE: 03/30/2004 09:21:02 PM
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The first time I saw a video clip of QRIO, I thought it was neat, but not a big improvement over Honda's ASIMO. However, this video clip of four dancing QRIO robots is mind blowing. Link (Thanks, Kirby!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites dispatch from Iraq: Omar's Arm
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DATE: 03/30/2004 09:44:56 PM
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MSNBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites returns to Iraq this week, after a brief respite back home. Here is his latest dispatch, about Omar, a freelance cameraman in Baghdad for ABC News.
While we wait for our flight--he gives me a disk to download some pictures that a friend had taken in the aftermath of his shooting. It included the emergency room, x-rays and his first surgery.
The pictures are painful to look at, much more so than the contraption that now surround Omar's arm. But they are, I know, the ugly reality of what happens when bullets meet bodies.
These days it's difficult to show casualties of war on evening newscasts or in any American media outlets. The images become politically charged; take on meaning beyond their face value. But more often than not, the violence is just too grim, too hard to stomach at dinnertime.
So the question becomes this; how can those who haven't seen it--begin to understand the truth of Omar's arm?
Link (Warning: post contains graphic images of gunshot wounds, and is not intended for viewing by children.)
Discuss
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Black" day of P2P protest on April 1?
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DATE: 03/30/2004 10:01:07 PM
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Rumors are circulating in geek circles that some peer-to-peer technology companies (and/or supporters) plan to paint their websites black on Thursday, April 1 -- protesting recent efforts by state and federal lawmakers to crack down on filesharing. Lest anyone forget that Thursday is also April Fool's Day, some of the participants are said to be planning to blame the "outage" on this gag website for a fictitious "Copyright Enforcement Agency" of the US government.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nielsen's new "people-meter" ignores Black and Hispanic programming
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DATE: 03/30/2004 11:10:49 PM
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Nielsen's new "people-meter" television-viewing measurators are being deployed to replace the traditional viewing journals and set-top boxen that the media metric firm uses to figure out who watches what. For poorly understood reasons, though, these new measurators generate viewing stats that report 60 percent less viewership for Black and Hispanic-oriented programming than previous measurating technologies. This has prompted Hillary Clinton and others to call on Nielsen to reevaluate its design decisions.
"It is impossible to overstate the potential impact of undercounting minority viewers," Senator Burns said in his own letter to Nielsen. "After years of work to make the entertainment industry more diverse and more reflective of the rich makeup of our country, this system could endanger all the progress that's been made."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Complimentary iPods in the Virgin lounge
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DATE: 03/31/2004 07:20:55 AM
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Virgin Airlines is giving the high-rollers in its departure lounges complimentary iPods to listen to while they wait for their flights. This begs three questions, though:
- What's the use of 40GB of someone else's idea of what kind of music a generic, notional traveller would like to hear?
- How do you sterlize the earbuds between use? Ever notice the wiry masses of ear-hair spilling out of the first class cabin? Squick.
- How do you hear your flight being called if you're wearing an iPod?
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Homeless Hacker profile in Wired
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DATE: 03/31/2004 07:32:36 AM
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Great Wired profile of Adrian Lamo, the Homeless Hacker who got busted for using the NYT's Lexis-Nexus account.
In theory, it's easy to see Lamo as a good guy. Unlike many hackers - even whitehats - he never uses a pseudonym and makes no effort to hide his identity. If the company he notifies appears grateful, he will often offer to help plug the hole he's discovered for free. Poulsen, for one, believes that Lamo "practices a style of hacking - open, brash, illegal, but carefully observant of an unwritten code of ethics - that went out of style a decade ago."
Indeed, Lamo's hacks are uncommonly witty and at times almost inspiring. Once, after tunneling into Excite@Home's customer service database, Lamo pulled the email and phone number of a customer whose complaint had gone unanswered for a year. Lamo called him up, chatted briefly, then offered to forward him all the company's internal correspondence pertaining to the original complaint.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Left-handed phone
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DATE: 03/31/2004 07:35:18 AM
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Sony Ericsson's LH-Z200 cellphone now comes in a left-handed model.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Keanu stars in A Scanner Darkly
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DATE: 03/31/2004 10:14:43 AM
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Boing Boing pal Dave Gill points us to news that Keanu Reeves will star in the Hollywoodization of A Scanner Darkly, based on Philip K. Dick's masterpiece SF novel about drugs and schizophrenia. As Dave says, "uh-oh."
According to Variety, Richard Linklater may direct the film, employing the same live action-to-animation technique seen in Waking Life. I suppose it's no surprise that Keanu was chosen for the role. After all, The Matrix was the ultimate PKD rip-off. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mephisto morphed art-pr0n
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DATE: 03/31/2004 10:38:57 AM
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Our pals at Fleshbot say:
Sure, any hack with a copy of Photoshop and a few hours can turn women into barnyard animals, but if you want to see beautiful models transformed into slugs, chocolate bars, or five-and-a-half foot tall anthropomorphic cigarettes, you'll have to consult the work of a master. (Anyone curious to see how Britney looks as a pig, cow, or dog should check this out as well.)
Mephisto Gallery (photomanipulations @ doc.furvect.com)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Canada's RIAA can't prove infringement by P2P uploaders, says court
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DATE: 03/31/2004 10:58:28 AM
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Canada's Federal Court has ruled that the Canadian Recording Industry Association was not able to prove copyright infringement by the uploaders it sued. The judge also said that under that country's copyright law, downloading is not illegal. Link
Chris Hoofnagle, Assoc. Director of EPIC, The Electronic Privacy Information Center, tells BoingBoing: "We have the decision online here (~670kb PDF). It's remarkable. The judge says that keeping a file in a p2p system is no different than installing a photocopy machine in a library." And BoingBoing reader Chris suggests this alternate link to a leaner PDF from the Federal Court of Canada: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robot-themed handbags, animal-shaped cellphone cozies
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DATE: 03/31/2004 01:57:43 PM
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Handbags and other accessories filled with esprit de geek. Handmade by genuine humans. High cuteness factor.
Chuckles Central makes stuff like Robot handbags,
iPod/digital camera/mobilephone Cozies, Laptop Magnet, and Robot Magnets.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mid Century Lampshades
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DATE: 03/31/2004 04:28:15 PM
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Meteor Lights sells really nice retro lampshades and other mid-century lighting stuff. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Google's free gigabyte
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DATE: 03/31/2004 05:25:25 PM
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Google announced a free email service, promising a Gigabyte of storage to each user.
"The idea is that your mail can stay in there forever," said Wayne Rosing, vice president of engineering at Google. "You can always index it, always search it, and always find things from the past."
That's a neat idea, but I wonder if you can store attachments, and how big those attachments can be? That makes all the difference. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Memos in Starbucks detail Bushies' Richard Clarke strategy
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DATE: 03/31/2004 05:47:36 PM
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Memos on letterhead from "Office of the Secretary of Defense, The Special Assistant," have been retreived from a DC Starbucks. They detail what appears to be Bushie spin-strategy to deal with Richard Clarke's damning WMD testimony.
The notes say: "Took threat v seriously and then segue to wh we have been doing. Rise above [ Richard A.] Clarke.
"Emphasize importance of 9/11 commission and come back to what we have been doing.
"[Commission member Jamie] Gorelick pitting Condi [ Condoleezza Rice] v. [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage
"Our plan had military plans to attack Al Q -- called on def to draw up targets in Afg -- develop mil options."
There's an underlined notation "DR" in the margin and a quotation, apparently from DR, perhaps Rumsfeld, to "Stay inside the line -- we dont need 2 ruff [or puff] this at all. we need 2b careful as hell about it. This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."
Reg Required Link
Non-registration American Progress Link
(Thanks, LVX23!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Batmobile built like a tank
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DATE: 03/31/2004 05:50:33 PM
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The Batmobile for the next Batman movie has monster-truck wheels and looks like a fighter-tank from the Car Wars universe.
Link
(Thanks, Numlok!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Katana controller for PS2 game
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DATE: 03/31/2004 05:56:52 PM
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This wireless motion-sensitive sword is the controller for a character in Onimusha 3, forthcoming for the PS2. The game itself is apparently recursive: you are asked to direct the motions of an avatar who is playing a videogame of his own controlled by a motion-sensitive sword, and swinging the physical sword-controller causes the virtual sword-controller to move, which, in turn, directs the swordsmanship of your avatar's character in an in-game game. Zany.
Update: Joel "Deadpan" Johnson writes, "The recursive stuff on that post was just a joke. There is only one layer of abstraction; you swing the sword and your character swings his, end of story. I'm obviously TOO FUNNY for my own good."
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Music industry relies on data from pirate nets to hone strategy
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DATE: 03/31/2004 06:01:06 PM
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Record labels are using data gleaned from pirate P2P networks to refine their sales-strategies, to excelletn effect. Nevertheless, they still repudiate the networks themselves, and vow to go on individually suing every participating music fan until they have all learned to respect the music industry.
The online data revealed that despite Story of the Year's lunar rotation, its single ``Until the Day I Die'' ranked among the top 20 most popular downloads, alongside tracks from Blink-182, Audioslave and Hoobastank that received significantly more airplay. And when the band performed in a city, ``we didn't necessarily see the phones blowing up at radio, but we saw download requests for the song skyrocket as they went through,'' said Jeremy Welt, Maverick's head of new media.
Armed with this data, Maverick fought for more airtime at radio, which translated into more CD sales. Story of the Year's album, ``Page Avenue,'' just went gold, selling more than half a million copies.
``I definitely don't like to spin it that piracy is OK because we get to look at the data. It's too bad that people are stealing so much music,'' said Welt. ``That said, we would be very foolish if we didn't look and pay attention to what's going on.''
Link
(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Feds crank up heat on P2P, new House bill promises prison for "pirates"
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DATE: 03/31/2004 06:31:23 PM
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I just filed a story for Wired News on a new House bill that proposes prison time for file-swappers -- and on today's Justice Department announcement of a new intellectual-property task force to analyze how the department addresses issues like the unauthorized sharing of digital software, music and movies.
Justice spokesman John Nowacki declined to disclose further details on the membership of the [Intellectual Property Task Force], or what specific activities it will pursue.
The task force was created in the wake of criticism by some members of Congress that the Justice Department has not done enough to crack down on digital piracy. The announcement took place on the same day that a House judiciary subcommittee unanimously approved a bill that would punish file swappers with up to three years in jail for first offenses, and up to six for repeat offenses.
Sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman (D-California) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the bill targets heavy users of peer-to-peer networks and those who pirate copies of feature films. The bill outlines a new piracy deterrence program for the FBI, and calls for the Justice Department to create an antipiracy "Internet Use Education Program." If signed into law, Justice would receive $15 million for investigation and prosecution of copyright-related crimes in 2005.
If signed into law, H.R. 4077 -- the "Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004" -- would be the first to punish file sharing with jail time. The bill also takes aim at camcorder copiers who sneak into film screenings. Anyone who "knowingly uses or attempts to use an audiovisual recording device in a motion picture theater" to copy a movie could face up to six years in jail.
Link to Wired News story.
Text version of PDEA should be available through Thomas shortly, here: Link. Update: PDF version (63Kb) of the PDEA is now available here: Link.
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TITLE: Powerbook battery tracker
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DATE: 03/31/2004 07:47:06 PM
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A new beta app for tracking your Powerbook's battery health just got posted to VersionTracker. The release version promises network-awareness so that you can compare you battery's health to others'.
iBatt is a new PowerBook battery tool which can diagnose your battery's health, and generate graphs showing battery utilization trends. Whereas the system only provides you with current charge level, iBatt tells you total battery capacity, rate of charge/discharge, current battery voltage, and battery state. The release version will have network support to compare your battery's health with other batteries in your PowerBook model.
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TITLE: Disney asks Gizmodo to clarify that jewel box is not intended for pot stashing
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DATE: 03/31/2004 07:57:53 PM
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Gizmodo's Joel Johnson blogged about Disney Electronics's fairly clever "Disney Princess" jewel box/CD player, noting that its secret compartment is "perfect for your child's first marijuana stash."
Disney wrote to Joel and asked him to clarify "that marijuana stashing is not an intended or authorized use of this product."
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TITLE: What recourse for "owners" of Earth and Beyond accounts?
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DATE: 04/01/2004 07:41:36 AM
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Last month, Electronic Arts shut down Earth and Beyond, a MMORPG. Just days before the closure, players were still paying as much as $3,000 for accounts in the game. Games economist Ted Castronova has a short thought-provoking piece on this in Terra Nova:
Why doesn't EA transfer the title? The previous discussion hung up on the question of value - is it a game, and if so, the things that happen there don't matter, etc., etc. But eBay makes the eocnomic aspect of that discussion moot. Game or not, the economic value is there, it's tangible, it's real.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kinja debuts
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DATE: 04/01/2004 07:43:51 AM
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Nick Denton says:
Kinja -- our latest site -- is live. It's a blog of blogs, designed to make it easier to discover and track favorite sites. Have a play around with the site. And do give your feedback. I've also explained why we built Kinja, and there's a link to today's article in the New York Times.
Kinja front page, The logic of Kinja
In related Dentonian news, Fleshbot has been converted into a hardcore blink-tag-and-popunder cesspool. At least for the duration of April 1, 2004. Link
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TITLE: EFF acquires Department of Justice
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DATE: 04/01/2004 07:44:01 AM
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April 1, 2004: EFF announces long-planned merger with the US Department of Justice:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is merging with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) in a stock-swap deal that will create a freedom advocacy giant better able to compete with the ACLU, the current industry leader.
Shari Steele, Executive Director & President of the EFF, will retain her position in the new expanded organization. John Ashcroft, the DOJ's Attorney General, will take up a new position in the EFF's Department of Office Supply Security.
"At a particularly challenging time for the Defense of Freedoms industry, this combination vaults us into a leadership role with customers and partners," said Steele.
"Yes," said Ashcroft, "it's true. I will be in charge of staples. And tape. Especially duct tape."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More RSS job listings
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DATE: 04/01/2004 07:45:58 AM
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Responding to this earlier post about job listings by RSS feed, BoingBoing reader
Javid says, "FlipDog (which is now part of Monster) has RSS job listings for each state now too." Still no word on whether or not my former paramour Jim Anchower used XML-syndicated help wanted ads to obtain his most recent gig at the Quad County Dragaway "takin' tickets and sweepin' up."
Link to Flipdog
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to change your body's timezone
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DATE: 04/01/2004 07:52:34 AM
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Great Seattle Times article on some peoples' natural propensity to be early risers and others' to be night owls, and hwo to change from a night-person to a day-person. Good, popularist brain-hacking for the Eastern Standard Tribe.
In college, many people find their optimal rhythm and harness it. Larks join the crew team; owls discover they study best over the midnight oil. These morning folks may be asleep by the time the kegger is raring, but they will be vindicated when it's time to enter the real world. They show up before the boss and look like go-getters. Owls can either find a night-shift job, one with a flexible schedule or reset their body clock to join the 9-to-5-ers.
A body-clock mismatch also can be hard on lovebirds. If she wakes up on New York time but his clock is set on Pacific, she'll view him as lazy, and he'll grow bored spending evenings alone.
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TITLE: Wacky Warning Labels
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:05:17 AM
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M-Law, which works to raise awareness of the social cost of litigation, has given out its annual "Wacky Warning Label" award:
The $500 grand prize for the wackiest label was awarded to Robert Brocone of Euclid, Ohio for a warning he found on a bottle of drain cleaner which says: "If you do not understand, or cannot read, all directions, cautions and warnings, do not use this product."
Link
(Thanks, Diane)
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TITLE: 500 Euros if you spot this MAC address in your server logs
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:08:56 AM
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Slashdot is advertising the MAC address of a laptop (00:30:BD:9C:BD:B2) and the IMEI of a cellphone (351083531088913) stolen along with a Mercedes in Holland on March 11th. If you can use these numebrs to track down these items, and if doing so leads to the recover of the Merc, you get €500.
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TITLE: Air America is live
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:11:59 AM
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Air America, the lefty talk-radio station with Al Franken's "O'Franken Factor" and Janeane Garofalo's "Majority Report" is now on the air -- you can listen in by RealAudio.
Link
(via AccordionGuy)
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TITLE: If Quake were Zork
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:15:31 AM
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IF Quake is an adaptation of Quake for a Zork-like interactive-fiction engine. It's a really cool and perverse idea.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pro-CSS march on DC
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:21:02 AM
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April 1 marks the first national march on Washington's National Mall to protest the use of non-standard html. You have nothing to lose but your cellpadding.
Link
(via A Whole Lotta Nothing)
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TITLE: Thoraxic cavity made of cake
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:26:21 AM
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This Hallowe'en cake is a replica of a Gray's Anatomy illustration of a complete thoraxic cavity. Swoon.
The plan was for each organ to be made out of a different kind of cake and to secrete a different color of fluid when it was cut into. Previous heart cakes have bled fresh, homemade raspberry sauce. This year I made raspberry, strawberry, kiwi, mango, and blueberry sauces. Sadly, the organs didn't bleed as well as I had hoped when I cut the cake, as each organ was relatively small and couldn't hold much sauce. Also all the moving around after filling the organs made it hard to keep the sauce contained in the little cavities I hollowed out. The heart bled pretty well, but the other organ fluids weren't very dramatic.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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TITLE: EZBake Oven for your PC
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:40:01 AM
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April 1: ThinkGeek adds an EZ-Bake oven that fits into a standard 5.25" drive-bay on your tower PC.
Link
(via DiveIntoMark)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Battelle on Google's S1 filing
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DATE: 04/01/2004 08:58:57 AM
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John Battelle breask the news on Google's S1 filing, and digs up some interesting details.The employee stock option plan, long believed to be the impetus to a public filing, has been dumped in favor of a private shadow equity plan modeled after the Economist magazine. "It's the only magazine we read that hasn't put us on the cover," Page explained. "We kind of hoped this hat tip might change that."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WorldWideWarDrive #4 announced
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DATE: 04/01/2004 09:02:38 AM
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The 2004 edition of the WorldWide WarDrive (WWWD) -- "an effort by security professionals and hobbyists to generate awareness of the need by individual users and companies to secure their access points" -- has been announced for 12-19 June, 2004. The WorldWide WarDrive has teamed with the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE) to provide real time maps and statistics as data from each area is uploaded. (...) and the Church Of WiFi is proud to announce that an updated version of WarKizNiz is available here. WarKizNiz accepts input from Kismet log files and converts them into NetStumbler .ns1 format. Coordination of drives throughout the world is done at the WorldWide WarDrive Forums. As in the past, discussions pertaining to the WWWD can also be conducted on the WarDriving mailing list. New for WWWD4 is the creation of a mailing list devoted solely to wireless security issues. To join this list, hosted by Michigan Wireless go here.
Link to WWWD home, background in this story I filed for Wired News about the 3rd annual edition in 2003.
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TITLE: Using the net to track down mercenary fighters in Iraq
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DATE: 04/01/2004 09:17:47 AM
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Kathryn Cramer has been posting a lot of really good, soplid investigative material about the ongoign use of mercenrary fighters in Iraq, googling the tail-numbers of aircraft and generally net-researching the hell out of the shadowy world of soldiers-for-hire in a US-led battlefield. This is what Internet investigative journalism is all about:
Another question for the next White House Press conference: Did flight N4610 depart the U.S. from Hope Air Force Base in North Carolina?
ONE MINOR FUSSY POINT: If you've been following my attempts to track down all the Boeing C-22Bs, you know that I have had a little bit of a hard time tracking down exactly how many there were. I thought I'd cut it down to four, but this photo of a C-22B, on the web site of the U. S. Air Force, clearly shows a plane with a number just beyond the sequence I was researching: the 34618 indicates a serial number 83-4618 associated with an original tail number N4618. Interesting.
Link
(Thanks, Karl!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: World's most powerful diesel engine
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DATE: 04/01/2004 10:09:44 AM
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Pictures of a huge diesel engine, made in Japan, which will go into a container ship. (The crankshaft is shown here.) Despite its high fuel efficiency, it consumes "1,660 gallons of heavy fuel oil per hour." Link (Thanks, Hary!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More cool lampshades and wall sconces
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DATE: 04/01/2004 10:27:31 AM
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Moon Shine Shades makes custom lamps, screen doors, and wall sconces. Link (Thanks, Ed!)
And there's yet another custom shade company: Deadly Nightshades. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Laxatives targeted at low-carbers
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DATE: 04/01/2004 11:25:54 AM
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Laxative makers are targetting their advertising at low-carb dieters, who are notoriously irregular:
GlaxoSmithKline's new ad campaign for Citrucel caplets offers a "zero-carb solution to a low-carb problem."
Proctor and Gamble fired back with ads that promise that Metamucil allows users to "Stay regular. The zero net carb way."
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spidering Word files for embarrassing metadata
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DATE: 04/01/2004 12:10:37 PM
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A hacker spidered every English microsoft.com site and sucked down all the Word documents, then used a script to identify interesting erasures left behind by the revision-tracking feature. Some interesting stuff fell out of his investigation.
A pointless idea came to my mind that instant: why not run a gentle web spider against all Microsoft sites in English, specifically looking for other instances of tracking data not removed from documents? I coded a bunch of scripts and let them run through the night, fetching approximately 10,000 unique documents; over 10% was identified as containing change tracking records. I decided to collect only those with deleted text still present, yielding a crop of over 5% of all documents. Quite impressive. Below, you will find a brief (and rest assured, incomplete) list of the most entertaining samples I've run into, along with some speculation (and only speculation) as to the reasons we see them.
Link
(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nice shiny fans
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DATE: 04/01/2004 12:15:46 PM
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Beautiful shiny fans -- nice mix of mahogany and polished metal and tilt-a-whirl-like orrery action.
Link
(Thanks, Thom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lucas's Star Wars DVD commentary leaks
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DATE: 04/01/2004 12:23:56 PM
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Five three-minute clips from George Lucas's commentary for the Star Wars Episode 3 4+ DVD have leaked onto the net.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Senator Daschle's statement on the abuse of government power
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DATE: 04/01/2004 12:36:18 PM
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On Bruce Sterling's blog - the text of Senator Tom Daschle's March 30 Floor Statement on the Abuse of Government Power. In recent days leading congressional Republicans are now calling for an investigation into Mr. Clarke. As I mentioned earlier, Secretary O'Neill was also subjected to an investigation. Clarke and O'Neill sought legal and classification review of any information in their books before they were published.
Nonetheless, our colleagues tell us these two should be investigated, at the same time there has been no Senate investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity as a deep cover CIA agent; no thorough investigation into whether leading Administration officials misrepresented the intelligence regarding threats posed by Iraq; no Senate hearings into the threat the chief Medicare Actuary faced for trying to do his job; and no Senate investigation into the reports of continued overcharging by Halliburton for its work in Iraq.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Batman vehicle models
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DATE: 04/01/2004 12:46:18 PM
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This guy has gone through Batman comics from the 1940s on up, and has built scale models of the cars and planes Batman has used over the decades. Super cool. Link (Via The Cartoonist)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Interactive chatting footwear: Seven Mile Boots
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DATE: 04/01/2004 02:19:18 PM
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BoingBoing pal Susannah points us to this:
"Seven mile boots, the magical footwear known from folk tales, enables its owner to travel seven miles with one step. With little effort one can cross the countries, to be present wherever it seems suitable and to become a cosmopolitan flaneur with the world as the street.
The project SEVEN MILE BOOTS is a pair of interactive shoes with audio. One can wear the boots, walk around as a flaneur simultaneousy in the physical world and in the literal world of the internet. By walking in the physical world one may suddenly encounter a group of people chatting in real time in the virtual world. The chats are heard as a spoken text coming from the boots. Wherever you are with the boots, the physical and the virtual worlds will merge together.
Link. What in tarnation's a flaneur? Glad you asked. Link. Oh, and then there's this, too.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FCC: No Free Speech Please, We're Americans
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DATE: 04/01/2004 02:28:21 PM
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The eternally insightful Ernest Miller says:
Yesterday FCC Chairman Powell and FCC Commissioner Copps met behind closed doors with the National Association of Broadcasters in order to discuss regulation of indecency. According to their speeches, the FCC wants broadcasters to create and enforce a "voluntary" code of conduct, regulate satellite and cable indecency, and put the kibosh on depictions of violence, among other speech stifling measures.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Take me out to the Wi-Fi
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DATE: 04/01/2004 02:45:54 PM
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Boingboing reader Becky says: "According to the AP, the SF Giants' ballpark is now a great big (one might say giant) free wi-fi access point."Story says the network will be free of charge during the 2004 season, but that providers SBC and Nortel may charge for access in 2005. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Two new EFF blogs
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DATE: 04/01/2004 07:22:36 PM
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Donna sez:
EFF today debuts "Deep Links," a new group weblog that answers
the burning question: What is EFF talking about today? Deep Links will feature daily pointers to the news articles and weblog posts sparking our interest, as well as provide you with a bit of on-the-fly commentary to help contextualize issues.
We're also debuting "miniLinks" - a weblog featuring the shorter,
one-or-two-sentence pointers EFFector readers have come to know and love as "Deep Links" (now going by the new name, "miniLinks"). Authored by EFF Activist Ren Bucholz, miniLinks will give you a constant stream of news on EFF issues - and a preview of what you'll see featured in each week's EFFector.
Drop by and check them out!
Deep Links,
miniLinks
(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Artificial human skin as a sculptural medium
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DATE: 04/01/2004 07:50:50 PM
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According to Engadget, these jellyfish-like sculptures are crafted from artificial human skin.
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Solar iPod charger
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DATE: 04/02/2004 06:52:04 AM
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This solar-powered iPod charger (¥15,000-20,000, only for sale in Japan) will fully charge its own battery in two days, and then discharge the collected electricity into your iPod.
Link
(Thanks, Pete!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cussword Mapping and Tolerance Levels
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DATE: 04/02/2004 07:35:10 AM
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For everything, there is a Venn diagram. Boingboing reader Ken Hooper points us to scientific prioritization of pottymouthfulness:
In soccer, spitting and swearing are serious fouls. Swearing is penalized by referees with various degrees of rigor. This site is for the instruction of referees--it's a sort of English Football Profanity Matrix complete with Venn diagrams. My friend Tony Cullen from Liverpool assures me this is not a joke of any sort, but it's hilarious. "Bitch" is worse than "shit" but they are both eclipsed by "bollocks" in terms of being offenses likely to be carded.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Just when you thought there were no more Robolympics photos
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DATE: 04/02/2004 07:49:17 AM
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Two more online galleries of photos from the Robolympics held recently in San Francisco. We've posted about photos from the event before -- but these are too hellarad to pass on.
Boingboing reader callum says, "The photographs were shot & processed by Gavin Cheng who won the Netscape Gold Rush competition for his "Exposure" photography site." Link
And reader Bill Sherman points us to his website with more snapshots of bot-on-bot action, here: Link
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TITLE: web zen: museum zen
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DATE: 04/02/2004 07:58:08 AM
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(1) artifacts
(2) forgotten girlie mags
(3)
adult movie posters
(4)
air sickness bags
(5)
temporary art
(6)
random art
(7)
xerox art
(7)
bad art
(8)
museum of online museums
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank). This vintage magazine cover is living proof that The Dude Abides.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Narcocorrido Culture
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 04/02/2004 08:07:43 AM
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BoingBoing pal JP says:
"Los Angeles television news lead tonight with the wake of Adan Sanchez. Tens of thousands of fans swarmed his SUV hearse, throwing flowers and their bodies, images captured by news and police helicopters flying above. The LAPD struggling to maintain control. Adan Sanchez, 19, had recorded nine albums of romantic ballads and tributes to his father, a narco-corrido music legend. By some accounts he nurtured an image as a suave, well-dressed, romantic teen idol.
"I had never heard of narcocorrido music until now. I write that with some embarrassment as I try to keep up and it is apparently quite alive and well in my megalopolis. But now I am intrigued by the narcocorrido subculture. A quick Google search turned up this LA Weekly feature from last week that I missed the first go-around: Los Chalinillos, The next generation. And another link further down the Google finds this:
A Narcocorrido is a type of song or music that often tells a story usually about drugs, alcohol and violence.
Thanks, JP. Another reader points me to this book, which I haven't read. The author's website also includes a bit of background on censorship of narcocorridos, though the timeline sadly seems to be cut off thanks to some wonky html.
Update: An anonymous BoingBoing reader writes in to remind us that while narcocorridos are a recent product of Mexican pop culture, corridos per se are a form of folk art and oral history dating back more than a hundred years. "More importantly, get your hands on that CD. The brass bass lines are so driving and completely original to my ignorant Seattle ear. Track 6 is sung from the perspective of a girl whos Dad got her into the business when she was 15 and now's she's big in Mafia. She calls herself the Jackle-woman. Enjoy." Link
And BoingBoing reader Christopher Filkins points us to this superb NPR segment by Mandalit del Barco about border FM radio censorship of narcocorridos -- the piece includes some audio snips of narcocorrido tunes.Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Craigslist Zen: Army and Arabic-speaker "role-play"
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DATE: 04/02/2004 08:15:06 AM
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BoingBoing buddy Choire "Gawker" Sicha redirects our collective cursors to this utterly bizarre entry on Craigslist.
Arabic speakers needed to roleplay for the Army - $4000 in 25 days
Date: 2004-03-31, 8:28AM CST
Arabic speakers only. Participate in a 25 day rotation to help train soldiers in an Army base in Louisiana. You will role play such roles as mayor, mailman, shopkeeper, farmer, etc. You will be instructed on what role to play once you arrive at the base. All meals, housing and transportation will be provided. All Arabic speakers are welcome to apply, men and women of any age and from any part of the country.
Link.
While we're on the subject -- of Choire, and of the bizarre -- check out this gutbustingly hilarious scientific study penned by Mr. Sicha for The Morning News: "An actually accurate mathematical equation [that helps] you decide in which restaurants it's appropriate to breastfeed." Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Blake West says:
"This posting really isn't that weird. The Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk, used mostly by the US army, has been running training scenarios for years with simulated civilians. There are little villages set up in the training area, and military personnel are tasked to play civilians. REAL civilians are also hired to participate in the training because they possess special skills (like speaking Arabic). Here's a power point about being a "Civilian on the Battlefield" or COB. Ft. Polk has really crappy weather. It's basically a big swamp."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: Florida court sends RIAA away
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DATE: 04/02/2004 10:05:34 AM
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A federal judge in Florida ruled yesterday that record labels must file individual lawsuits against suspected file-swappers, rather than lumping them together in a single suit. More in today's Wired News:
The Recording Industry Association of America has sued nearly 2,000 file swappers in jurisdictions around the country. In this lawsuit, the music trade group bundled 25 suspected file swappers who share the same Internet service provider, Bright House Networks, into one legal action. With this ruling, the RIAA must refile the lawsuits individually, marking another setback in its campaign to sue swappers. Judge David Baker of the U.S. District Court in Orlando is the second judge to rule that the RIAA cannot group individuals together. Last month, a Philadelphia judge made a similar ruling.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World's evilest pop-star
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DATE: 04/02/2004 10:15:21 AM
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Bruce Sterling calls Svetlana "Ceca" Raznjatovic -- the widow of noted Balkan
war criminal "Arkan", the current girlfriend of assassin and military deserter "Legija,"
and the former girlfriend of murdered gangster "Shaban" -- the "most evil pop star in the world." Here's her fansite.
Link
(via Beyond the Beyond)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WiFi in ballparks: legal question
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DATE: 04/02/2004 10:23:36 AM
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Responding to yesterday's post about WiFi coming to the SF Giants' home ballpark, a BoingBoing reader who may or may not want to be anonymous writes: "If I take my Powerbook to the ballpark and plug in my iSight Camera with it pointed towards the game, then isn't that an illegal broadcast of Major League Baseball? I'm a Giants season ticketholder, I'm going to try this." IANAL, but I'm thinking the fresh part of this question is not so much whether or not our reader points his connected camera at the game, but what happens with the footage once it's captured. To whom it's made available and how. What's the existing policy re: photography in general?
UPDATE: Jason Schultz, Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, responds:
There's not really a copyright problem, since its not a scripted performance, but there might be two legal problems: (1) trademark and (2) breach of contract. Trademark might be an issue because most people currently expect most broadcasts of baseball games to be sanctioned by MLB. However, if you made enough of a disclaimer to the people watching your broadcast that you are in no way affiliated with MLB and that you are a season ticket holder and this is your show and no one else's (including the Giants'), then I think you may safely avoid that problem.
The bigger problem, however, is contract. I haven't checked my Giants tickets lately, but I assume on the back of them is some kind of contractual prohibition on rebroadcasting the games in any form. If there is such a restriction, then MLB/Giants could assert that by purchasing the tickets, you agreed to be bound by the restrictions listed on the back. This may or may not hold up in Court, though, because just like click-wrap "I Agree" buttons, no one really reads those terms or assumes that they are bound by them. This doesn't make the restrictions void per se, but it does call them into question legally.
Update 2: BoingBoing reader David Newcum says, "Here's a very good summary of where photographs are allowed, by Bert P Krages II, Attorney at law. Snip:
"... The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. ... Property owners may legally prohibit photography on their premises but have no right to prohibit others from photographing their property from other locations. ..."
Link, and link (PDF)
And Jeremy Perkins says, "Found this on the Giant's website. It probably pertains to web broadcasting as well." Link
Update 3: ernietheattorney says, "You might want to add a link to Eugene Volokh (UCLA law prof and copyright expert)'s post about a related issue involving the Cubs effort to stop people from charging to watch the games from the rooftop behind Wrigley Field." link.
Oren says, "The link you posted to the policy on the Giants website only prohibits rebroadcast of Giants games for commercial purposes without the written permission... So I'd guess non-commercial rebroadcast would be fine. Until they find it happening..."
And Dan at Lawgorithm says, "I just read the last post you had about photography of a game at Pac Bell, now that they're offering WiFi, and I've posted some more on the legal issue here."Link
Update 4: BoingBoing reader David says, "I just happened to go to a game the other night and have the ticket. The print is too small to scan, but here's a transcript of the important bit: 'Holder also agrees that he or she will not transmit or aid in transmitting any description, account, picture, or reproduction of the Event (including the baseball game and all pre- and postgame activities).' So it looks like you aren't even allowed to call someone and describe the game."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google News (which scrapes) nastygrams Julian Bond (for scraping)
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DATE: 04/02/2004 11:48:58 AM
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Google News -- which scrapes news-sites and aggregates the results -- has sent a note demanding that Julian Bond stop scraping and aggregating the results.
I figure that using Gnews2rss[1] to feed into a personal aggregator is
not going to worry them too much. The problem seems to be posting the
results to a public website. If you do use gnews2rss, please host it
yourself.
Link
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gmail screenshot
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DATE: 04/02/2004 11:52:25 AM
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Screenshot of the beta version of GMail -- Google's forthcoming 1G mail service -- here. Link. [We've been had. That one's totally bogus, per Jason Shellen --XJ] Here's another. (Thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reuters email-an-article-TOS
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DATE: 04/02/2004 03:26:17 PM
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BoingBoing reader Steve Portigal says,
"Reuters offers a link in every story to email the article to someone. After you fill in the usual info, there is a line that says I confirm that I have the recipient's consent to provide their email address for this purpose, followed by Send and Cancel. This is very strange for a couple of reasons.
You aren't actually agreeing to their terms, IMHO, because you are not clicking Agree. And there isn't any language that says by clicking Send you confirm that...., as you sometimes see.
But further - if you follow their TOS, how useful is the feature? Are you expected to send a separate email to the person and ask them if you can send them an article? And then send it to them after that? A workaround would be to send it to yourself, and then forward it manually. But obviously, this is just to cover them from being sued in case you do something wrong.
Yuck."
link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ODP + RSS
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DATE: 04/02/2004 08:53:06 PM
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Open Directory Project / DMOZ.org appears to be the first major web directory of its kind to include RSS feeds:
Alongside standard HTML web sites and PDF documents, we're now accepting RSS feeds as listings in the directory. There's no change in the submission process but in future categories will start showing 'XML' sections with links to related RSS feeds.
Link (thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tron cosplay
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DATE: 04/03/2004 05:26:00 AM
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This guy made himself an incredibly faithful reproduction of the costumes from Tron, including the glowing piping around the seams.
Link
(Thanks, Julian!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblog of Tibetan monks creating a sand mandala
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DATE: 04/03/2004 06:55:20 AM
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Boingboing reader Jayvant says:
In my photoblog, I document the construction of a traditional Tibetan Sand Mandala built by two visiting Tibetan Buddhist Monks in my university. This truly fascinating and intricate piece of artwork is built slowly using just a few grains of sand at a time. Once the Mandala is completed it is deconstructed and deposited into a body of water, to symbolize the Buddhist belief of nonattachment.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy 25th Birthday, Space Invaders
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DATE: 04/03/2004 07:16:31 AM
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Space Invaders is 25 years old. Riding a wave of '80s old-school geek chick, the cult Japanese game is experiencing a renaissance. On April 25th, Space Invaders for PS2 launches around the world -- and mobile versions are said to be in the works.
Paris-based online/realspace boutique colette (I heart this store) will sell the remake. They'll also be selling tons of other cool Space Invaders schwag like t-shirts, key holders, books, and more. Tuesday 29th April is evidently Space Invaders Day with intergalactic gaming competitions planned in Japan, Paris, and elsewhere.
Link to colette store online (horrible Flash interface -- I love what they sell, but I hatehatehate the website UI), Link to Times UK story, Link to press relelase about Space Invaders remake coming to mobile phones with BREW platform, and Link to Space Invaders 25th anniversary home (also built with Flash, but IMO a rockin' good UI).
And finally, I urge you to visit the website for Taito, the Japanese company that created Space Invaders -- if only to read the clumsily translated English copy on this page that invites you, over and over, to "crick here for detail." Sweartagod. Link
Update: colette is one of many places where you'll soon be able to purchase a new book by a French artist who goes by the alias "Space Invader". His pixelated street-art draws from the aesthetic of the original game, and others of its era. Here's a link to more book info on his website. His work is coming to sixspace in LA this november, and there's a small show at an LA space called subliminal projects right now.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF dream gig: technical director
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DATE: 04/03/2004 09:38:49 AM
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How's this for a dream job? EFF is looking for a Technical Director to run special projects to enhance liberty and screw with The Man (i.e., making kick-ass, user-friendly PVRs; turning white-box PCs into software-defined-radio spectral analyzers, hacking on anonymizing onion-nets, etc).
This person will be responsible for managing four members of EFF's technical staff and their various projects. Technical staff responsibilities include keeping our internal systems running and providing expert support to our attorneys and members. It also includes actively building, and supervising the building of, technologies that advance free speech and privacy. The technical director will be responsible for creating a cogent technology strategy for EFF. The director must be a team player. This person must be a good writer, good speaker and good listener. This person may be called on to be an expert witness, conference speaker, declarant in a court case, or debater against entertainment companies or government attorneys. Comfort with advocating for a position essential.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Guitar virtuoso performs Super Mario Brothers theme
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DATE: 04/03/2004 11:29:28 AM
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This is an absolutely stellar video of Japanes guitar virtuoso KeiicHi performing a rendition of the theme from Super Mario Brothers, hendrixing power-up and coin-grab sound effects by wringing his axe's neck with long and clever fingers. Tasty.
3.7MB WMV Link
(Thanks, guerilla!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Everyone In Silico, licensed for remixing
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DATE: 04/03/2004 11:40:32 AM
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My friend Jim Munroe is a brilliant sf writer, author of Angry Young Spaceman (which I reviewed for Wired), Everyone in Silico, and Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask. Silico is a particularily interesting novel about the corporatization of public spaces (Jim used to be a managing editor at AdBusters), and among Jim's publicity stunts for the book was a letter-writing campaign to corporations mentioned in the book, shaking them down for money for "product placement."
Jim has decided to release Silico online under the same Creative Commons license that I chose for the re-release of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a license that allows the production of non-commercial derivative works, such as fan-films, sequels, translations, and audio adaptations. He credits me with inspiring this, which is immensely gratifying -- Jim's a talented writer and this is a wonderful book.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing Easter window
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DATE: 04/03/2004 12:37:35 PM
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Today in London, I passed this window display near the Goodge Street tube -- Boing Boing is everywhere!
448k JPEG Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wardrobe malfunction t-shirt
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DATE: 04/03/2004 04:19:55 PM
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I don't need reality TV, inky tabloids, or talk radio. To tap into the latest in lowbrow zeitgeist, I just walk down Vermont Avenue here in LA, past the front window of crazy t-shirt store Y-Que (say "ee-kay," means "so what" in Spanish).
Today, I saw this Free Janet Jackson's Exposed Boobie shirt. Other new ones were on display, too -- like Robots, Powered By Pancakes, Condoleezza Rice: Employee of the Month, and Visit Lovely Guantanamo Bay.
I was walking with a group of people, some of whome were English speakers, some who spoke Spanish. One of the latter was a visiting Quiché Maya linguist from Guatemala. He noticed the rest of us cracking up over the "No Justice/No Quiche" Free Martha t-shirts -- I had a really hard time explaining (in clumsy Spanish) the concept of quiche, and how the word quiche had nothing to do with the Quiché Maya people, who Martha Stewart was, and how all of this related to protest slogans from the American civil rights movement. But by the time we were done, he thought it hilarious that the biggest scandal currently shaking the USA centered on a wealthy woman famous for baking egg pies on TV.
Link to Y-Que online.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Digital timeclocks being doctored by chain-store managers
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DATE: 04/04/2004 01:02:00 AM
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Managers at chain stores across America are protecting their bottom-line-dependant jobs by secretly changing timeclock records, so that their workers aren't paid for their time.
In the punch-card era, managers would have had to conspire with payroll clerks or accountants to manipulate records. But now it is far easier for individual managers to accomplish this secretly with computers, payroll experts say.
Mr. Pooters, a father of five who left the Air Force in 1997 for a career in retailing, talks with disgust about photocopied Toys "R" Us records that he said showed how his manager made it appear that he had clocked out much earlier than he had.
"Unless you keep track of your time and keep records of when you punch in and punch out, there's no way to stop this," he said.
Link
(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Academy of Art University: Free speech chickenshits
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DATE: 04/04/2004 01:10:35 AM
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Neil Gaiman forwarded this note from Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler:
The Academy of Art University here in San Francisco - the biggest art school in the country - recently expelled a student for writing a violent short story, and then fired his instructor for teaching a story by David Foster Wallace the administration also found offensive.
As this story broke in the press the school has responded by announcing stringent policies regarding the content of students' artwork (writing, visual art, film, video game design, etc.), what can be taught in the classroom, and who is allowed to speak on campus. This was brought home to me when an instructor at the college invited me to speak to his class (along with the fired teacher and a representative of the First Amendment Project) and I was physically barred from entering the building.
Link
(Thanks, Neil!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free Culture distributed audiobook jukebox
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DATE: 04/04/2004 01:12:27 AM
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Here's a Web-based jukebox containing streaming MP3s of various bloggers reading Lessig's Free Culture. As soon as I have ten minutes to catch my breath, I'm definitely contributing a chapter to this.
Link
(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Is there room for some-rights-reserved speakers at Copyright Awareness Week?
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DATE: 04/04/2004 01:15:40 AM
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It's Copyright Awareness Week! The Copyright Society of America is looking for "members of the Copyright Society and other interested professionals in the copyright fields the opportunity to speak in local schools, universities, associations and other venues about the importance of copyright to the creative arts." I'd love to hear about the Society's response to some-rights-reserved creators of art and software who ask to be given an opportunity to speak about how reduced copyright regimes enable their creativity.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DARPA Grand Challenge robot snapshots
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DATE: 04/04/2004 08:47:17 AM
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BoingBoing reader Rupert Scammell says:
I was a volunteer in the video editing and media production center at the recent
DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous robot ground vehicles event, held in the Mojave desert between Barstow,CA and Primm, NV. I got many great pictures of the various robot vehicles and participants during the four days I was there, and wanted to share them with my fellow BoingBoingers. The images are all under a Creative Commons license. Enjoy!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Paris subway panorama photos
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DATE: 04/04/2004 08:56:46 AM
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Panoramic views of Parisian subways stations from an amateur photographer in France. *Not* QTVRs, just JPEGs with a wide aspect ratio.
Link (thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: US stamp of Bucky Fuller
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DATE: 04/04/2004 10:21:27 AM
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In July, the US Post Office will issue a Buckminster Fuller stamp featuring an old Time magazine cover illustration by the late great Boris Artzybasheff. Link
Mark sez: The picture of the geodesic dome on the stamp is NOT a dodecahedron/bucky ball. The standard dome starts out as a twenty-side polygon, whose points come together in "fives" not sixes. In between the five-star points, there are 6-star points, but there should be at least 20 five-start points over the whole sphere. The artist seems to have just tiled the sphere with hexagons which results in just six-star points, which ain't right. The only reason I recognized this is that I'm building a dome for burningman right now!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kaneda's motorcycle from anime classic "Akira"
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DATE: 04/04/2004 10:15:58 PM
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A fully functional recreation of the motorcycle driven by Kaneda, a character in the anime classic Akira (1988, Directed by
Katsuhiro Otomo). This was shown at the Tokyo Motorcycle show on April 2nd. If the posts I'm seeing on blogs like this one are true, this is not the first attempt at creating a "real" version of Kaneda's bike, though it may well be the first to be both operational and a completely faithful replica. Any Boingboing readers with more intel are invited to spill it here.
Link to manufacturer's site, Link to another website (in Japanese) with more details on both the bike and photos of a hot red leather biker jacket -- a replica of Kaneda's -- which I must own immediately. (at bottom of page). (thanks, Siege)
Update:
BoingBoing reader Julian Bond -- who runs a website and mailing list devoted to unusual motorbike designs -- says, "The machine on this site is not completely faithful to the Akira original, but it's real, runs and you can buy it (in Japan). And they've made multiple copies."
And BoingBoing reader Jim says, "While not quite as radical as the Kaneda bike from AKIRA, Suzuki's G-Strider does bear some configurational resemblance." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Super-rugged PDA
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DATE: 04/04/2004 11:39:36 PM
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TDS's Recon is a ruggedized PDA (alas, it runs MSFT's PDA operating system, not PalmOS or PocketLinux) Nice specs:
To list the full array of certifications and specifications is truly mind numbing, but highlights include the ability to operate in temperatures anywhere between -30 to 60 degrees C, and altitudes of 15,000 feet. To withstand 26 consecutive drops from over four feet, and total immersion in up to one metre of water for up to 30 minutes.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Freely copy iTunes Music Store files
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DATE: 04/04/2004 11:41:20 PM
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PlayFair is an open source app that strips Apple's DRM out of iTunes Music Store singles, allowing you to freely copy the music you pay for.
It takes one of the iTMS Protected AAC Audio Files, decodes it using a key obtained from your iPod or Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC Audio File. It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file.
Link
(Thanks, Rod!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto Star on Eastern Standard Tribe
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DATE: 04/04/2004 11:44:13 PM
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The Toronto Star has a wonderful review of Eastern Standard Tribe:
The power of Eastern Standard Tribe draws on traditional storytelling elements -- tight plotting, sharp characterization and keen thematic treatment. The novel is immediately accessible, the near-future setting all too familiar. Despite the shifting between chronologies and tenses (first- to third-person throughout), Doctorow maintains an unrelenting pace; many readers will find themselves finishing the novel, as I did, in a single sitting.
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Heath Row's WTF-con transcripts
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DATE: 04/04/2004 11:49:46 PM
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Heath Row's flying fingers have produced an astonishing near-transcript of the proceedings at David Isenberg's WTF? conference, wherein tech, telco and policy wonks are having a hell of a chin-wag:
The question I have is if this is the end of politics as we know it, or are we just being fooled by the flash and dash of MoveOn, Meetup, the blogosphere, self publishers, and the thing that got everybody in mu worlds attention, a presidential campaign that broke all sorts of records in raising money from small donors? Are we just seeing power and voice just as it ever was?
There are two key features in our political situation. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is. That's absolutely right. Organized money, capital, is what organizes campaigns, determines who can campaign, and what policy gets discussed. What we need to remember is that organized people matters too.
Link
(Thanks, Heath!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Keychain camcorder
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DATE: 04/04/2004 11:54:40 PM
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Philips has released a "keychain camcorder," which PC Magazine describes as a "thumb drive with a lens." It stores and plays MP3s and shoots stills and videos (admittedly, it doesn't do a stellar job at any of these tasks), and it's cheap(-ish) and you can keep it in the change-pocket of your jeans.
Link
(Thanks, Reid!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World's tallest Kapla structure
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DATE: 04/05/2004 12:40:06 AM
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Jeremy sez, "This is a small photo gallery of some buildings constucted from the coolest blocks in the world. They're called Kapla blocks. They're made in France from a special wood (Which is? I don't know.) marine pine (thanks, Laurent) They're pressure-treated and cut with a laser, so the tolerances are miniscule. They're guaranteed for life never to warp or chip or break, and if one does, just send it in and they send you a new one. They're proportioned in a 1:3:5:15 ratio, which means you can build ENORMOUS structures that won't tip over. Right now the world record stands at 51 feet 4 inches. "
Link
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Suicide Girls magazine sneak peek
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DATE: 04/05/2004 07:39:07 AM
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Popular alterna-grrrl pr0n site Suicide Girls is about to go ink. A print offshoot is launching soon, and photographer Clayton James Cubitt was tapped to shoot a different kind of ink job for the magazine's premiere issue.
Suicide Girls Magazine: Stormy Gets a Lightning Bolt Tattoo (not worksafe): Link
Update: Fleshbot points out that Clayton's online gallery of the SG shoot pics has been removed and replaced by a "teaser" notice. Why the folks at SG have their thongs in a bunch about a little dose of blog-love (some would call it free publicity), je ne comprends pas. Look for SG Magazine on newsstands in mid-May -- from what I've seen, it's gonna be hot. In other news -- SG just blogged the BoingBoing "leak" and subsequent "takedown" on SG's own newsblog, and their online readers are psyched about the forthcoming pub -- this all makes perfect sense! Not! Pass me some more acid! Sometimes the blogosphere is like one big fat M.C. Escher drawing.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US Army's tech overhaul plans b0rked
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DATE: 04/05/2004 08:21:07 AM
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Today at Wired News, this report by my colleague Noah Schachtman:
It's been called the most ambitious military effort since the Manhattan Project, and the centerpiece of Donald Rumsfeld's plans to overhaul America's armed forces: a $92 billion push to change almost everything about the Army by 2010, from the guns GIs carry, to the officers they salute, to the tanks they drive.
A new congressional report is alleging that the Future Combat Systems program is poised for major delays and a financial train wreck. Worst of all, the report claims, the Army knew this was going to happen all along.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes
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* The secret machinations of cells!
* SimEarthquake!
* The attraction of new materials for data storage!
>>>>> Step right up.... Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Foresight Vision Weekend
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DATE: 04/05/2004 10:16:29 AM
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Our dear friends at the Foresight Institute will host their Annual Senior Associates Gathering May 14-16 in Palo Alto to talk about the future of nanotechnology and other emerging technologies. Some great thinkers are on the schedule including Steve Jurvetson, Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, Christine Peterson. Christine extends a kindly offer to Boing Boing readers:
"We'd like to offer BoingBoing readers a discount of $200
off the standard fee if they join Foresight and register for our May
conference. In financial terms, this comes close to waiving the
membership requirement -- we want BoingBoing folks at this conference!"
To take advantage of the discount, select the expired "Super Early" rate and put "BOINGBOING" in the comments field. Link (Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Superman and Seinfeld's AmEx ad
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DATE: 04/05/2004 10:19:13 AM
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This AmEx ad, starring Jerry Seinfeld and Superman (with the voice of Puddy/The Tick), is unbelievably funny and irreverant enough that I can hardly believe that DC/AOL/Time-Warner licensed Supe for it.
Link
(via Paul Boutin)
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TITLE: Social-engineering a cellphone thief
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DATE: 04/05/2004 10:26:24 AM
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An Ohio teen whose cellphone was ripped off called the number, found herself speaking to the thief's girlfriend, and social-engineered her into giving up the crooks' address, busting a notorious cellphone-stealing ring in the process.
'Crystal? Tiffany? Jenn,' the voice asked.
'Uh, it's Tiffany,' Dempsey said.
'Hey, girl,' the voice said.
'I haven't seen you in, like, forever.'
'I can come right over,' Dempsey said. 'Tell me where you are.'
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Busting a 419 scammer spammer
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DATE: 04/05/2004 10:38:42 AM
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A guy who works in an Irish cybercafe writes about busting a 419 (AKA Nigerian Fraud) scammer. Best part: After the police arrive and have the scammer step away from the booth, the scammer tells the cops that "his wallet and ID are in the booth, so he walks in, rips a USB memory stick from the side of his laptop, tries to swallow it and makes a run for it." Link (via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Bush 'Broadband by 2007' promise
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DATE: 04/05/2004 11:26:53 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I talk with host Alex Chadwick about the president's recent promise to make broadband accessible to all Americans by the year 2007. The announcement had plenty of when, but where's the how? And just what should the federal government's role be in making high-speed, always-on connectivity availabile -- and affordable -- for more Americans? Listen to the radio segment here in Real or Windows Media after 12P PT, 3P ET. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Robert Crumb family pictures
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DATE: 04/05/2004 12:11:37 PM
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Robert Crumb's son Jesse runs a site that sells Crumb art. There's also a gallery of family photos. (Robert shown on left with a Devil Girl wall plaque). Lots of good stuff on the site, including art from Max, Charles, Sophie, and Jesse Crumb. Link (via The Cartoonist)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing's explosive growth -- and what to do about it
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DATE: 04/05/2004 02:12:15 PM
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(Note -- I'm posting this again so it'll show up for RSS users. -- Mark)
Boing Boing has been growing really fast. If you click on the Extreme Tracking counter at the bottom of the page, you'll see we had 871,305 visits in March, a record month. In fact, every month is a new record month for Boing Boing. The truth is, we get a lot more visitors than the Extreme Counter indicates. Our raw web statistics show 3.5 million visits for March.
As a result, our bandwidth bills are going through the roof. If traffic continues along the projected curve, maintaining Boing Boing will become unaffordable.
We've been thinking about what we can do to survive -- and more importantly, survive in a way that keeps the award-winning spirit of Boing Boing going, so it works for readers and the editors.
We've brought in our friend and colleague John Battelle, one of the founding editors of Wired and the founder of The Industry Standard, to work with us. He's looking into a variety of ways to help us pay the bills and make enough money to re-invest in Boing Boing. We're considering a number of models - sponsorship, context-sensitive text-ads, etc.
If you're interested in this kind of thing, we'd like to hear your ideas for keeping Boing Boing alive and well. What interesting models have you heard of, or thought of? Are there any other Web sites you know about that have a nice approach for paying the bills?
We've opened up comments for this one. Have at it. -- Mark Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help save Clarion
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DATE: 04/05/2004 03:11:12 PM
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Shane Tourtellote forwards this call-for-help from the Clarion Writers' Workshop.
San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc., the nonprofit corporation behind ConJose in 2002, has issued a call to individuals and nonprofit groups to help fund the Clarion Writers' Workshop. SFSFC will match grants up to $1,000 to help fund the workshop.
As reported in Online Update last year, Michigan State University cut its funding of Clarion (the 'Clarion East' workshop, distinct from Clarion West) by nearly $50,000, more than sixty percent of what Clarion previously received. Those interested in donating to the Clarion Workshop, and qualifying for the matching grant, are urged by SFSFC to contact organizers directly at
clarion@msu.edu
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: French-translation wash-care label apologises for Bush
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DATE: 04/05/2004 03:13:52 PM
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Casey sez, "A photo of care instructions (in English and French) from a Seattle-made laptop bag. The last lines of the French instructions read 'We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn't vote for him.'"
Link
(Thanks, Casey!)
Not worksafe. If you don't know what goatse is, don't bother with this. It'll only gross you out.
Link
(Thanks, ESC)Update: BoingBoing reader Badfish says, "This story is a little old, but... one of the guys over at b3ta did a kiddie-like painting of goatse, pretending to be a 14 year old, and submitted it to a local newspaper art competition. Guess what - they printed it."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ganguro girls through a Black artist's eyes
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DATE: 04/05/2004 10:30:21 PM
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Iona Rozeal Brown's works are an intercultural hybrid: a black artist using a Japanese style to paint Japanese women obsessed with black American culture.
Link to NYT story (registration required) (
Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Poo-detecting blue light won't work on low-carb skidmarks
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DATE: 04/06/2004 02:04:43 AM
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New blue-light sensors make poo residue fluoresce -- parents can ensure that kids have washed their hands properly and restauranteurs can ensure that employees are de-shitted before handling the chow. However, it only spots the poo-residue from people who eat leafy green veggies, which means that turdsmears from low-carbers may not show up.
"Nobody wants to have doo-doo on their burger," said Jacob Petrich, a biophysical chemist at Iowa State University who invented the meat-scanning technology with two scientists, Thomas A. Casey and Mark A. Rasmussen, at the Agriculture Department.
Link
(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sake marinade softens wood enough to use as speaker cones
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DATE: 04/06/2004 02:07:11 AM
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A JVC engineer has cracked the age old problem: how do you make wood pliable enough to shape it into a speaker cone? The answer: marinate it in sake.
Then, five years ago, a colleague, Satoshi Imamura, was dining at one of his favorite restaurants. Imamura contemplated the texture and malleability of the dried squid he was chewing. He asked the waiter how it had been prepared, and the waiter explained that the squid had been soaked in sake.
Imamura and Kuwahata tried soaking the speaker wood in sake. It worked! (They also tried Suntory whiskey; it didn't. Imamura isn't sure why, but he theorizes that there is something unique about the acids in sake, which is simply fermented, as opposed to those in whiskey, which is distilled after fermentation.)
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Every copy of Reason customized with sat photos of subscribers' homes
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DATE: 04/06/2004 02:09:34 AM
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The next ish of Reason magazine will be mailed out to 40,000 subscribers, with 40,000 custom covers, each bearing a satellite photo of the individual subscriber's neighborhood, with the subscriber's house circled. The point? "Everybody, including our magazine, has been harping on the erosion of privacy and the fears of a database nation. It is a totally legit fear. But they make our lives unbelievably easier as well, in terms of commercial transactions, credit, you name it."
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Administrators at censoring "college" have never heard of Rushdie
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DATE: 04/06/2004 02:12:41 AM
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Here's more on the Academy of Art College's ridiculous censorship campaign (which has so far resulted in the dismissal of an instructor for teaching a David Foster Wallace story, and the physical barring of Lemony Snicket from entering the school to give a talk).
The dim-bulb administrators of this "school" received a note of disapproval from Salman Rushdie, the current head of the PEN American Center, and dismissed it, because they'd never heard of Rushdie or his work.
Link
(via The Mumpsimus)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dr Menlo's Simpsons spec-script
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DATE: 04/06/2004 06:47:40 AM
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Dr Menlo has given himself one year to get a writing gig, or he will commit suicide, "live on the net." He's posting soem writing samples to help potential employers decide to save his life. Latest is this very funny spec script for The Simpsons.
HOMER
Ooh, ooh, I don't know where to begin! Oh! The Atkins Ride!
He runs over, under the Atkins Ride sign and onto a conveyor belt. There on the conveyor belt running adjacent at stomach level, plates are set down with bacon, steak, cheese, pork rinds, etc. He gobbles them all up and gets off the conveyor belt at ride's end, pats his stomach:
HOMER
I feel thinner already.
Link
(Thanks, Ben!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bush Sloganator reborn
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DATE: 04/06/2004 07:27:25 AM
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Dave has created a replica of the Bush Sloganator, which was taken down by its authors a couple weeks ago because Some People were making funny signs, like this one, which I whipped up to bring to tonight's Seder.
Link
(Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spymac beats Google to the 1G free email punch
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DATE: 04/06/2004 09:16:38 AM
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A small Mac-related web hosting site offers a free gig's worth of email. The company promises no adwords or other forms of promotion linked to email contents. Instead, they're using the free service to promote Web hosting and auction services. Link to announcement on Spymac site, Link to related News.com story. (via Batelle, thanks also Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fact Squad's short MP3 news items
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DATE: 04/06/2004 09:31:02 AM
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I just found out about the People For Internet Responsibility's (PFIR) Fact Squad Radio -- short MP3 snippets about current events. The latest one looks into the reason gas prices are so high. Link (Via Interesting People)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Happy birthday, cellie
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DATE: 04/06/2004 10:11:36 AM
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The LA Times ran an interesting article about how homemade (rather, prisonmade) greeting cards provide investigators with insight into gang activity behind bars. "That's where you get a lot of your information, from these birthday cards," said Officer Steve Preciado, a Lancaster gang investigator. "A lot of times their family members won't send them nothing. But the gangsters will put their nicknames on these cards, and where they're from, like 'Shorty from Pacoima.' So your job is to find out who Shorty is."
Link (Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lindows to change name, bows to Microsoft pressure
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DATE: 04/06/2004 11:12:13 AM
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Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson announces plans to change the product and online name for Lindows, because of ongoing legal troubles with Microsoft.
To assure that we can do business globally, we are in the process of selecting a different name for our web presence and product name. I believe it's the only way to respond to an onslaught from such a rich company, since we need to be able to continue to grow our business. (Only one of the richest companies in the world would launch 8 identical lawsuits from different countries.) Our US corporate name will remain Lindows Inc. since we have meaningful name recognition and product distribution.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why is LSD use down
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DATE: 04/06/2004 02:03:52 PM
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LSD use is way down in recent years, according to arrest records, hospital records, and surveys with high schoolers. Slate looked into it, and came up with two reasons why. First and foremost, the DEA busted a couple of guys in rural Kansas back in 2000, who supplied 95 percent of the country's acid. The other reason is the breakup of the Grateful Dead.
"The LSD market took an earlier blow in 1995, when Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died and the band stopped touring. For 30 years, Dead tours were essential in keeping many LSD users and dealers connected, a correlation confirmed by the DEA in a divisional field assessment from the mid-'90s. The spring following Garcia's death (the season the MTF surveys are administered), annual LSD use among 12th-graders peaked at 8.8 percent and began their slide. Phish picked up part of the Dead's fan base—and presumably vestiges of the LSD delivery system. At the end of 2000, Phish stopped touring as well, and perhaps not coincidentally, the MTF numbers for LSD began to plummet."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 600 quintillion possible spellings of viagra
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DATE: 04/06/2004 03:06:34 PM
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Using standard spammer substitution-techniques on the word "viagra" yields 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 possibilities:
Viagorea ViagDrHa V l a g r a VyAGRA via---gra viagrga
via-gra 'V 1 @ G' Ra Viagzra viagdra via_gra ViaZUgra
Viargvra ViagrYa Vii-agra ViagWra vi(@)gr@ Viagvra
V-I-A-G-R-A Vi-ag.ra vigra Vkiagra via.gra v-ii-a=g-ra
V l A G R A VIA7GRA V/i/a/g/r/a VIxAGRA Viaggra vi@gr|@|
ViaTagra ViaVErga Viagr(a Viagr^a Viágrá Viagara
Viag@ra Viag&ra vi@g*r@ V-i.a-g*r-a V1@grA ViaaPrga
Vi$agra ViaJ1gra Viag$ra via---gra Vi.ag.ra Viaoygra
Vi/agra Viag%ra Viarga V|i|a|g|r|a Viag)ra vi@|g|r@
Viag&ra vi**agra vi@gr*@ vi-@gr@ V iagr a V&iagra
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cosplay Casemod
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DATE: 04/06/2004 03:31:13 PM
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BoingBoing reader LVX23 says, "Ever dreamed of having a PC case shaped like a life-size sexy anime maid? Me neither, but now that I see it in glorious detail with step-by-step instructions..."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush photomosaic of American dead in Iraq
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DATE: 04/06/2004 07:47:35 PM
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Bush photomosaic of Americans who have died in Iraq since the war president entered office. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I, Robata
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DATE: 04/06/2004 10:12:29 PM
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Vancouver-based artists Kenn Brown and Chris Wren share this freshly minted image of robot cuisine with BoingBoing, and write, " Some say that here in Vancouver, we have a Starbucks on just about every corner. There are easily two or three Japanese restaurants for every Starbucks. The concept for this weeks illustration evolved over dinner at our favorite Japanese Restaurant."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 100 websites you didn't know you couldn't live without
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DATE: 04/06/2004 10:23:50 PM
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PC Magazine just published their annual roundup of 100 essential but not universally known websites. There's some good stuff in here *I* didn't know I couldn't live without. And there's a very kind nod to BoingBoing, for which we're most grateful. The review dings us for pokey load time-- yeah, we know. We're working on that already, stay tuned for the warp-speed edition. Link to overview, or hit the downloadable "favorites" installer. (thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to opt-out of Plaxo emails
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DATE: 04/06/2004 10:43:53 PM
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Dan Gillmor points to this page on the Plaxo website, where one can permanently opt out of receiving "Hey, I'm updating my contact information..." emails from the service. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Story of E-Girl
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DATE: 04/06/2004 11:03:05 PM
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In today's New York Observer, "You've Got Chutzpah!": the tale of an AOL customer-service rep who reportedly mined AOL's database for e-mail addies of celebrities, then used the pilfered data to chase fame and fortune in Hollywood. The tale is lifted from the recently-released book Hollywood, Interrupted by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner .
[Heather] Robinson admittedly used the information to contact, befriend and, in some cases, achieve a creepy intimacy with these famous and influential targets. And now she's working to parlay that proximity into her second movie deal of the past year. It's a picture based on Ms. Robinson's experiences. She's calling it E-Girl.
"It's going to be more a take on how these celebrities and politicians helped me. Mark [Ebner]'s chapter was more of a darker version," said the 25-year-old Ms. Robinson with a staccato laugh. "This one is going to be more lighthearted," she added, "showing how I went from a customer-service rep at AOL to selling a screenplay and now producing my first screenplay."
According to Ms. Robinson, for the period of roughly a year and a half in 1997 and 1998, she used her position at AOL to gain access to private information regarding celebrities, then sought them out. Ms. Robinson said she approached her famous subjects as if she didn't know who they were, then baited them with information she had gathered on them. "At first, I didn't have a reason--I just was doing it to talk to them."
Link to "You've Got Chutzpah!"; Link to a townhall.com column also lifted from Hollywood, Interrupted, this one on Scientology and the IRS -- "L. Ron Hubbard has better lobbyists than God."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bunny-Exorcist
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DATE: 04/07/2004 04:03:57 AM
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The Exorcist as a 30-second Flash-toon, reenacted by bunnies. Happy Easter.
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(Thanks, Caines!)
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TITLE: Tokyo nabe issues Astro Boy currency
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DATE: 04/07/2004 04:08:52 AM
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Takadanobaba, the neighbourhood where Astro Boy was invented in the classic comic/anime, is issuing a local currency bearing the likeness of Tetsuwan Atom, which will be issued in exchange for good deeds and can be redeemed for ¥.
Community members said Tuesday that the currency will be measured in horsepower, the unit of measure of Astro Boy's strength. One horsepower of the currency will be equivalent to 1 yen. The bills will come in denominations of 10, 100 and 200 horsepower.
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(Thanks, Steve!)
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TITLE: Arborsculpture: furniture made from living trees
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DATE: 04/07/2004 04:11:54 AM
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Arborsculptor Richard Reames creates "extreme trees" by encouraging live trees to grow into the shape of furniture and other household objects.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Classic Gamer Magazine
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DATE: 04/07/2004 04:20:54 AM
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Classic Gamer Magazine is a downloadable PDF zine (6MB compressed) devoted to news and reviews of obsolete arcade games. I love the graphics, especially the repros of vintage video-game ads.
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(Thanks, Cav!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AbiWord goes Mac native
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DATE: 04/07/2004 04:32:47 AM
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AbiWord is a cross-platform, open-source word-processor that reads and writes Word, OpenOffice, Word Perfect, RTF, Palm and HTML documents. The project has just shipped an OSX-native version that runs without X-Windows, meaning that all you need to do to run it is double-click and launch.
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(via Forwarding Address: OS X)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Librarians' struggle with Open Access publishing
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DATE: 04/07/2004 04:50:58 AM
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Jason Griffey has released an excellent paper on the tension within the library system between the endorsement on one hand of the Open Access model of scholarly publishing (in which scholarly materials are published gratis under permissive, Creative Commons licenses, and authors pay for for peer review; as opposed to the reigning model in which scholarly publications cost research institutes small fortunes) as being good for librarians and researchers; and on the other hand of the American Library Association's own journals, which are contracted-for and published under restrictive regimes that limit copying and sharing.
The paper's very good and sharply argued, but what's even cooler is the references cited: this is the first scholarly paper I've ever read with a cite to Wikipedia in its bibliography. Also in there are videos of speeches licensed under CC regimes, blogs, and other netinalia of note.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beat off to beat cancer
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DATE: 04/07/2004 05:05:06 AM
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Flushing out the prostate with regular ejaculation may prevent cancer.
In the US study, the group with the highest lifetime average of ejaculation - 21 times per month - were a third less likely to develop the cancer than the reference group, who ejaculated four to seven times a month.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wireless Game Boy Advance
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DATE: 04/07/2004 06:41:12 AM
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Nintendo will shortly be selling its Game Boy Advance wireless adapter outside of Japan. The adapter allows for head-to-head play without a tethering cable -- 2,000,000 have been sold in Japan so far.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired blog number two launches -- Cult of Mac
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DATE: 04/07/2004 08:56:25 AM
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The next Wired blog, Cult of Mac, is off and running. Leander Kahney's journal on everything Apple has been in soft-launch mode for the last week and a half, but goes public today. Link to Cult of Mac, and link to that other Wired blog.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Shave-ice website scofflaws beware!
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DATE: 04/07/2004 01:02:06 PM
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You're undoubtedly aware of the growing number of cases of abuse against shave-ice websites. The cowards who perpetrate these crimes threaten the very fabric of our great nation. Finally, someone has risen from the crowd to shout, "Enough! Enough of the shave ice site abusers! Begone, dastardly minions of lawlessness!" Marvel at this carefully handcrafted weapon designed to squash shave-ice criminals like the insects they are: the 2500-word shave-ice website terms of service agreement. Link (Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Delicious beverage made of pig whipworm eggs is also good for you!
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DATE: 04/07/2004 01:43:14 PM
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"Regular doses of worms really do rid people of inflammatory bowel disease. The first trials of the treatment have been a success, and a drinkable concoction containing thousands of pig whipworm eggs could soon be launched in Europe." Link (Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: War against terrorism has been won - Ashcroft now focuses on porn
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DATE: 04/07/2004 01:51:46 PM
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Good comment from the Harvard Republican Blog on Ashcroft's new folly, a war on pornography,
The Baltimore Sun article quotes Attorney General John Ashcroft saying that porn "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet." No, Mr. Ashcroft, that's incorrect; Americans persistently invite porn into our homes through the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet. According to Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness, Americans spend between $8 and $10 billion per year on adult entertainment, about as much as on first-run (non-porn) movies. Show me a videocassette that forces itself into an American's home at gunpoint, ties him to the couch, and plays itself, and I will concede that your claim makes sense; otherwise, you're wrong.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Broadcast Treaty threatens the whole world with super-duper DMCA
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DATE: 04/07/2004 02:11:46 PM
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Ernest sez, "If you like the broadcast flag, you're going to love this proposed new WIPO treaty that requires it. The draft treaty will be discussed June 7-9 in Geneva and gives broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights, such as the rights of reproduction, fixation, and distribution, even if the broadcaster doesn't have the copyright to the work broadcast. If the US gets its way, webcasting will also be covered. And don't try to get around the broadcast flag, either, the treaty has DMCA-like provisions for circumvention." One of my new gigs in Europe is fighting this thing. Expect to see lots more about it.
Link
(Thanks, Ernest)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Little Green Footballs readers jihad investigative blogger for outing mercs in Iraq
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DATE: 04/07/2004 02:22:06 PM
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Kathryn Cramer, the investigative blogger who tracked down a lot of the information on the use of hired mercenaries to fight in Iraq under the guise of "civilian contractors," has found herself under attack by the readers of Little Green Footballs, apparently at the behest of proprietor Charles Johnson (who took a cheap shot at Boing Boing yesterday -- thanks for the traffic, Charles), whom he calls his "lizardoid minions." One of the goons posting to Kathryn's blog is a member of the California Bar; Kathryn's doing what needs to be done to see to it that this breach of professional ethics is thoroughly documented and brought to the attention of the Bar's Ethics Committee.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ikea's a gas
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DATE: 04/07/2004 02:44:57 PM
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Vann points us to this oddly-named Ikea work bench. Something is clearly lost gained in the translation of the Swedish word for "speed." Link Update: Andre Torrez chimed in with another Ikea product that's even more aptly named. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Training speeders to slow down, lab rat style
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DATE: 04/07/2004 02:48:33 PM
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Dan Berkes sez: "This story from the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle reports on the city of Pleasanton, CA and its test of a new traffic control system to curtail speeding drivers. A sensor 350 feet away from a stoplight measures traffic, and if that traffic is traveling at more than 10mph above the posted speed limit, the light turns red for that/those driver(s). It's a 10-second stop unless cross-traffic is waiting, at that point leadfoots can cool their heels for 30 seconds." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ergonomic Onanism
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DATE: 04/07/2004 08:45:41 PM
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I promise this is the last funny Ikea product name I'll post. Perhaps this would make a good gift to the Internet porn addict in your life? Link (Thanks, Fredrik!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Editorial Photographers Digital Manifesto
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DATE: 04/07/2004 08:59:53 PM
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BoingBoing pal Clayton James Cubitt, who is a professional photographer, says:
Here is a guide to current pricing practices for photographers bidding on jobs involving digital workflows. The "Preamble" is a little dramatic, but the info in the piece is very very helpful in describing what many of us already know. Namely, that digital capture saves our clients tons of time and expense, and increases our necessary capital investments and our commitments in time dealing with converting, storing, and uploading the content we create. We need to charge appropriately for it, especially as antiquated "day rates" have stagnated relative to the rate of inflation.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Naked Sushi meme hits China, everyone freaks out
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DATE: 04/07/2004 09:15:48 PM
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Remember the string of earlier posts on BoingBoing about restaurants serving sushi on the bodies of clothes-free hotties? The owner of a Japanese restaurant in the Chinese city of Kunming had the same idea:
The Hefengcun Huaishi restaurant launched a promotional "feast on a beauty's body," for local journalists last Friday, hiring two attractive fair-skinned college girls to lie on tables, with sushi and other food and flowers placed on their bare bodies covered with thin gauze. The reports caused a firestorm in the local and national press with many readers slamming the novel dining trend as offensive and insulting to women.(...) Known as "Nyotai Mori" in Japan, the feasts date back to ancient times and are often offered in special hotspring resorts today, but are generally left off menus. They are offered to aficionados on request.
Link (Thanks, Steve Portigal!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple Extended Keyboard re-created in modern USB flavor
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DATE: 04/08/2004 05:13:03 AM
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Apple's Extended Keyboard was the keyboard that Mac enthusaists fell in love with. It had great action, a rattly, clackety hapticality that was poetry for the fingertips and wrists and forearms. Now a company has released the Tactile Pro, a modern USB keyboard that uses the same mechanism as the old Extended Keyboard, recreating that carpal nirvana in a package that will interop with your G5. Here's the ecstatic TidBITS review:
Where the Tactile Pro Keyboard really shines, though, is in its feel. The keys are decidedly "clickier" and more mechanical, and they have a slightly longer key travel when you push them. The end result is a much less mushy feel than on the Apple Pro Keyboard, but accompanied by much louder typing noises. When I'm typing fast, the Tactile Pro Keyboard almost clatters, and I can say with assurance that I don't mind one bit. The new feel took a little getting used to, but within a day, it felt quite wonderful.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gilmore on Gmail's terms-of-service
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DATE: 04/08/2004 05:28:51 AM
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John Gilmore has given me permission ot publish his very sharp analysis of Google's Gmail draft terms-of-service. As it stands, the ToS have some really objectionable elements. Google has a notation to the effect that this is a draft document and they are soliciting feedback on it to gmail-feedback@google.com. If these terms bother you, you could send polite feedback to Google about the parts that you find worrisome.
If they allege a "technical issue", including spam filtering, then they can access, read, preserve, and disclose anything in your mailbox. Since they probably do spam filtering for everybody (both for incoming and outgoing mail), then they have the right to read and disclose the contents of your email at any time.
Many spam-filtering services send copies of alleged spams to some central location. If they get N copies of similar messages, they declare it spam and publish the offending messages on the web. Google's right to send your spam to such services gives them the right to send ANY of your email to ANYONE -- for publication.
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Food Porn -- Burger King Subservient Chicken
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DATE: 04/08/2004 06:10:33 AM
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BoingBoing reader aeon points us to a bizarre marketing move by junk-food empire Burger King:
...For when "your way" calls for an enslaved chicken, Burger King invites you to "have chicken your way" by offering you the newest in ads even veteran AdBusters won't want to bust: The Subservient Chicken. He "riverdances", he "throws pillows", he "builds forts" and he even takes "bonghits". He's technically a rooster, but let's not worry about that when we can tell him to "play air guitar", "moonwalk", or "grab crotch like michael jackson."
The Subservient Chicken: more than a furry's dream come true, more than a timewaster for stoned college kids; this method of advertizing just begs to be copied like so many memes. Plus, you can tell him to "die".
How very interesting. I wonder if the ad execs who came up with this realize (a) the Internet is so weird that genuine furry submissive fetish poultry sites with live webcams already exist, and (b) (this is absolutely true) legendary porn magnate Larry Flynt claims to have lost his virginity to a chicken? If so, the new Burger King campaign is extra-creepy, hold the fries. And if not, they really ought to be reading more BoingBoing.
Link to Subserrvient Chicken
Update: BoingBoing reader Bobby Martin says, "For the obsessive compulsive, we've started a list of things the subservient chicken will and won't do. It's on a wiki, so you can sign up and add your quirky/interesting/fucking weird discoveries to the list for all to see." Excerpts:
Will Do: poop | macarena | lol | fart | lay an egg | hokey pokey
Will do, sort of: flip me off | masturbate | get funky | tear the place up
Won't do: barf | hurtle the couch or jump over it | vacuum
Link
UPDATE HERE
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Electronic Man of Constant Sorrow
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DATE: 04/08/2004 06:15:28 AM
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Electronica act Skeewiff has just released a free techno remix of the Soggy Bottom Boys's "Man of Constant Sorrow" as an MP3. It's pretty good!
7.1MB MP3 Link
(via Crooked Timber)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mapping Scientific Topics With Social Networking Tools
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DATE: 04/08/2004 06:15:47 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says,
In "Mapping the landscape of science," the National Science Foundation discusses the contents of a collection of articles published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "Mapping Knowledge Domains." Basically, all these scientists are using software social networking tools to build graphical representations of scientific knowledge or science communities. [Please note that the full version of all articles is available.] This overview contains selected excerpts and illustrations extracted from some of these articles, like the top 50 highly frequent used in the top 10% most highly cited PNAS publications during the 1982-2001 period.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Report from the spam/anti-spam summit
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DATE: 04/08/2004 06:17:36 AM
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Danny O'Brien has written up one of the first summits between spammers and spam-fighters for the Guardian. It's a great piece.
Surprisingly, no such shootings occur. It's oddly intimate, watching the spammers and the anti-spammers mill around each other like this. It feels like a temporary ceasefire in a vicious war that to most of us seems to be a stalemate...
Over the past year, though, a series of meetings arranged by a trusted figure in the American anti-spam community, Anne Mitchell, have been slowly bringing the two sides together. These mini-conferences, held under the banner of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, have mostly been between the highest-ranking ISPs - MSN, AOL - and commercial email marketers of the most squeaky clean kind. Initially in secret, these days the meetings are more public.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Greenwich Park's sky to be turned into RF-driven balloon-art
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DATE: 04/08/2004 07:35:25 AM
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Rupert sez, "On May 4th, above the Greenwich Meridian in Greenwich Park, London, a cloud of a thousand radio-sensitive glowing balloons will monitor the airwaves and respond by changing colour and brightness. Everyone's invited to bring their mobile phones and make contact with the cloud, which will also listen to atmospheric phenomena and the cackle of the rest of London's radio users."
Link
(Thanks, Rupert!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: First malware for OS X?
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DATE: 04/08/2004 02:38:16 PM
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One of the selling points of OS X has been, to date, the lack of any viruses, worms, or Trojan horses. Intego reports that it has identified a Trojan horse called MP3Concept.
Mac OS X displays the icon of the MP3 file, with an .mp3 extension, rather than showing the file as an application, leading users to believe that they can double-click the file to listen to it. But double clicking the file launches the hidden code, which can damage or delete files on computers running Mac OS X, then iTunes to play the music contained in the file, to make users think that it is really an MP3 file . While the first versions of this Trojan horse that Intego has isolated are benign, this technique opens the door to more serious risks.
Link
Meeroh sez: The Mac OS X mp3 trojan is being blown completely out of proportion. Quick review of facts so far:
1. It was pointed out in a Usenet thread that it is possible to embed arbitrary data in an mp3
2. It was subsequently suggested that the arbitrary data could be executable
3. An enterprising developer proceeded to then create a file which to any mp3 player will appear as an mp3 file, but the Mac OS X Finder sees it as an application
4. An anti-virus vendor published advertising for their product saying that it has a cure for this form of Trojan.
Some other relevant points:
1. This has little to do with Mac OS X vs. Mac OS 9. The exact same file will do the exact same thing on Mac OS 9 -- be playable by mp3 players, and act as an application
2. This has little to do with Mac OS X using extensions to identify file types. The icon shown by the Finder could be embedded in the file itself, in which case the file would look like an mp3 file regardless of its name.
3. This trick requires using the resource fork, and therefore the file has to be transmitted encoded. Any mp3 file that is transferred as a plain binary file (as opposed to a Mac binary file, with the resource fork), is harmless.
4. The fact that the file can be played in am mp3 player is irrelevant; if the trojan were malicious, the user would be doomed after double-clicking on it regardless of whether the file is a valid audio file.
To summarize, a Mac application can have any icon or name whatsoever, including a name and an icon that make it look like a document. Exactly what happens when you receive such an application (in email or by downloading it in your browser) depends on your settings, but I am not aware of any case in which it will be automatically launched.
Therefore, to activate this Trojan you have to either receive a Mac-encoded attachment and double-click on it in the Finder, or you have to download a Mac-encoded a file (which is then usually decoded to your desktop) and double-click it in the Finder.
The only reason that this is news is that a vendor of anti-virus software took it as an opportunity to generate some advertising, as far as I can tell.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Subservient Chicken's X-Rated Bits Exposed by Code
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DATE: 04/08/2004 05:07:18 PM
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Following up on the launch of Burger King's "instameme" promo -- background in this earlier BoingBoing post -- geek supersleuth NEMESIS reveals the Subservient Chicken's naughty little nuggets:
"By backwards engineering the API within the HTTP headers, you can un-censor the censored ones:
Link 1 (scratch, crotch, balls, nutsack, destroy tokyo, stomp, godzilla, jonny rotten, punk rock, fsu, fuck shit up)
Link 2 (rub, chest, breast, breasts, boobs, jugs, tatas, hooters, jugs, nips, burning man, mardis gras, girls gone wild, playboy, penthouse, barely legal, leg show)
Link 3 (give bird, give the bird, bird, middle finger, flipping, fuck you, fuck off, flip , flip me off, flip them off)
Link 4 (shit, ass , fuck, cock, pussy, motherfucker, cunt, piss , arse, suck, dyke, bitch, clit, cum , dick, dildo, feces, felch, foreskin, whore, jizz, jism, masturbate, jerk, anal, bastard, blowjob, butt, suck, choad, erection, fellatio, incest, semen, tit)
Link 5
(touch yourself, naughty spot , naughtyspot, private, privates, sore,
nuts , testicles, balls, groin, crotch)
Link 6 (show breast, breasts,
tits , titties, slut, whore, tramp , seduce, hooker, prostitute, tatas, jugs, nice rack, your rack, tatas, show yer tits, show yer breasts, show your breasts, show yer
tis)
Link 7 (masturbate, masterbate, play with yourself, jerk off , take off mask, take off costume, take off your, streak , flash , strip , naked, nude, take it off , get naked, take it all off, nekkid, get nekkid, whip em out, show your tits, show yer tits, tits , take off your clothes, take off yer clothes, clothes, off like a prom dress, prom dress, do me , blow me, take pants off, take off your pants, mask)
But to paraphrase another fast food empire: Where's the bukkake? Link to copy of file with index of all Subservient Chicken Behavior commands, many of which would merit FCC fines, if they were -- I don't know, read aloud on the Howard Stern Show or something. (Thanks also to Josh Santangelo!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Audio Interview -- authors of report about P2P's effect on CD sales
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DATE: 04/08/2004 07:12:25 PM
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Alberto Escarlate of thep2pweblog points us to an audio interview with Koleman Strumpf and Felix Oberholzer -- the two economists who made headlines last week when they published "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis." Here's the interview:
Link (in RealAudio only, ugh)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Try your hand at balancing the federal budget
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DATE: 04/08/2004 11:16:30 PM
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US Federal Budget sim created at Berkeley. This simulation asks you to adjust spending and tax expenditures in the the 2004 budget proposed by the White House in order to achieve either a balanced budget or any other target deficit...According to the White House, the 2004 fiscal deficit is projected to be $307 billion. This does not include the costs of the Iraq War, so it has been increased by a base estimate of $50 billion for those costs in this simulation (which can be increased, lowered or eliminated depending on peoples views of the costs or likelihood of the war.).
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Spaced Out on the Interplanetary Internet
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DATE: 04/09/2004 08:06:21 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature.com is online. It's about the Interplanetary Internet, NASA's effort to extend cyberspace into outerspace. TCP/IP co-inventor Vint Cerf is one of the project leaders. I hadn't heard much about InterPlanet since it was first announced in 1998, so I was surprised to find out that their open source architecture code had recently been publicly released. A ".mars" address is still quite a few years off, but the latest InterPlaNet research may have applications on Earth-based connectivity as well. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Battery recharges in 30 seconds
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DATE: 04/09/2004 08:26:09 AM
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Details are sparse, but NEC Corp announced they've developed a battery that can power a minidisc player for 80 hours yet takes only 30 seconds to recharge! "The company will initially try to commercialize the technology for using the battery as an emergency power source for computers, according to sources at NEC." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Computers, Freedom and Privacy reg is open
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DATE: 04/09/2004 08:51:48 AM
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Reg has just opened for this year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference (April 20-23, Berkeley CA), one of the world's oldest and most important tech-policy events (check out the program for items like this one:)
Wardriving, Wireless Networks, and the Law
Wireless networks are exploding in popularity, but are difficult to secure. Locating insecure networks & advertising their locations has become a sport known as "wardriving". We examine the Pen Register Act, the Wiretap Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act to evaluate criminal & civil liability which may apply to wardriving.
Panelists: Steve Schroeder, CCIPS consultant; Simon Byers, AT&T; Kevin Bankston, EFF
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Distributed audiobook for Down and Out
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DATE: 04/09/2004 08:59:44 AM
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Jill Smith has begun a distributed audiobook project for my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whose new, liberal Creative Commons license allows for exactly this kind of mishegas (see the distributed audiobook project for Lessig's Free Culture for an example of how well this can work). She's recorded a reading of the prologue and posted it to the Internet Archive's public submission area, where open-licensed material is hosted for free.
I'm immensely gratified by this -- audiobooks are my favorite nontextual medium for storytelling and I can't fall asleep at night without one. I would love for others to take Jill's lead and finish it out.
Link
(Thanks Jill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Metafilter Matt CSSifies Boing Boing
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DATE: 04/09/2004 09:14:55 AM
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Thanks to Matt Haughey, Boing Boing is now (mostly) CSS based! Still waiting to CSSify the guestbar, but that's gonna have to wait until after we've migrated it to MT. The rendering should be much faster (and more standards-compliant) now, though the bandwidth savings will be negligible, due to the fact that mod_gzip compresses redundant font, etc tags.
Thanks again, Matt!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The truth about camel spiders
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DATE: 04/09/2004 09:19:05 AM
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Here's the myth about camel spiders, the monsters of the Iraqi desert.
"Supposedly they leap onto the backs of camels and suck out the blood. I've been told that a couple of these things can kill a full grown camel."
Link "Here's the lowdown on camel spiders, which aren't spiders at all:
In reality, camel spiders aren't some mysterious Arabian creature -- we have them in the United States and in Mexico, where they are called matevenados. They are slightly smaller than the human hand, and while they do run quickly, their top speed is 10 miles per hour, not 25. But they also make no noise, they excrete no venom, and although they can be voracious nocturnal predators, they don't eat camels. They eat delicious crickets and pillbugs, and sometimes scorpions."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple I clones for sale
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DATE: 04/09/2004 11:30:18 AM
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This guy has built a working Apple I clone, which will run old Apple I software, and has posted PDFs of the original Apple I manuals.
Link
(Thanks, Ahm!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Playfair bullied offline by Apple, reappears on Indian site
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DATE: 04/09/2004 11:33:39 AM
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PlayFair, the free software project that allowed you to strip the copy-restriction wrapper off of your iTunes Music Store tracks, has been removed from SourceForge in response to a threatening letter, apparently from Apple. It has been relocated to a server in India, and development continues apace.
Link
(Thanks, Jonathan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canada's NDP leader endorses P2P
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DATE: 04/09/2004 11:40:49 AM
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Jack Layton is the leader of the NDP, Canada's left-wing New Democratic Party, and is in the running for Prime Minister of Canada in the next election. On the heels of Canada's landmark court decision that essentially legalized file sharing, Layton has turned P2P into an election issue, endorsing file-sharing as a beneficial activity, a gutsy move, considering the Party's close ties with the arts (the NDP has traditionally endorsed strong arts-spending):
"I'm a holder of a copyright myself. But it's a book on homelessness and I don't mind if anyone wants to copy it," he says with a grin. "I'm still not so sure how (file sharing) impacts sales -- some studies even say it enhances them. I don't think the dust has settled on this yet. When I was at university there was a great fear that photocopying was going to destroy the publishing industry and that hasn't happened. It's sometimes best to muddle along, take things one step at a time and see what happens. Society can have a way of sorting things out."
Link
(Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: American "Japgrish" tattoos
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DATE: 04/09/2004 11:46:18 AM
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It's all well and good to snigger at "Engrish" -- weird, random Englishoid phrases printed on Japanese garmets and packaging, but check this out: the Chicago Tribune went out and looked at the "Japanese" characters tattooed on five Chicagoans and had them translated, then compared the results with what the bearers thought their ink meant.
* What he thinks his tattoo says: "strength" and "courage."
* What it actually says: The left part of the symbol appears to say "dog," while the right part conveys something along the lines of "time moving into the past." Smushed together, the two symbols amount to gibberish.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Promising anti-obesity pill
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DATE: 04/09/2004 11:49:09 AM
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Rimonabant is a drug from a French pharma outfit whose clinical trials show remarkable results in controlling appetite with minimal side-effects. It's being hailed as a drug with the potential to practically address the obesity epidemic.
Dr. Despres led a trial of rimonabant in 1,036 overweight patients at high risk for heart problems. All patients were told to cut their food intake by 600 calories daily. Those who received a 20-mg dose lost an average of 20 pounds and trimmed their waistlines by three inches in one year. Those given placebos lost an average of five pounds.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Photo of a male whale's reproductive organ
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DATE: 04/09/2004 11:52:02 AM
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In the interest of zoology, here is a link to a photograph of a whale's penis. (Probably not safe for work) Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Owen Wilson's Celeb-Blog?
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DATE: 04/09/2004 12:52:38 PM
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A sekrit source, who is a well-known entertainment industry journalist in LA, tells BoingBoing that the anonymous weblog of "Rance" is rumored to belong to Owen Wilson. Anonymous boingboing readers have since chimed in to suggest that it may belong to Benicio Del Toro, George Clooney, Mr. Potato Head, Osama Bin Laden, or Jeffrey "can of whupass" Skilling. Choire at Gawker weighs in, but I don't think he's being serious there. Who knows? Remember: rumors in Hollywood are a dime a dozen. Just like blogs. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The $14 SteadyCam
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DATE: 04/09/2004 12:52:45 PM
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Brian sez: "For less than 5% of the price of a real Steadicam (the ones made for small video cameras go for about $900), you can apparently build your own "Steady-Cam" for $14 with parts from a hardware store. The sample video makes it look pretty good. Great gift for the amateur videographer in your life who refuses to use a tripod, the bastard. (Oh, and stabilized images compress much better for the Web, too.)" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Good time waster: simple sliding tile puzzle
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DATE: 04/09/2004 01:03:04 PM
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My dad sent me the url to this java-based slider tile puzzle, and it has killed half my work day so far. He solved it in 48 moves. I guess 44 is the minimum. I can't solve it! If everyone who reads Boing Boing spends ten minutes on it, it will result in 312.5 man-days of wasted time! (It didn't work in Safari for me; I had to use IE) Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CSS shakedown issues with Konquerer/Safari
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DATE: 04/09/2004 02:04:25 PM
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There's some shakedown issues with the new CSS layout and Konquerer/Safari -- we're working on it. In the meantime, beware the quantities of whitespace. Aaaand they're fixed. Metafilter Matt, we owe you one.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TTY services used by Nigerian credit-card scammers
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DATE: 04/10/2004 01:28:59 AM
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TTY relay services are phone-banks staffed by operators who take text messages from the TTY terminals used by deaf people and read them aloud into telephones. This lets deaf people order pizzas, and otherwise interact with the hearing telephony world.
Recently, TTY systems have gone web-based: instead of using specialized TTY hardware, deaf people can use a chat interface in a browser window to interact with the operators.
This fact has not escaped Nigerian credit-card scammers. These folks are piping the output of Babelfish and other machine-translation services into the chat interface and directing the operators to place calls to merchants, directing them to ship goods paid for with stolen credit card numbers to mail-drops.
Merchants stand to lose big if they fall for the ruse - callers often try to order more than $10,000 worth of expensive equipment. People who legitimately use the service fear businesses will stop taking their calls, thinking they are fraud artists...
The only possible beneficiaries are the successful scammers - profiting from free phone calls intended for deaf people - and the four phone companies that provide Internet relay service. They are paid for the calls by the minute.
Link
(via /.)
Glennf adds: The Nigerian TTY scam isn't new: bookstores have been experiencing this for quite a while. I started receiving queries about shipping books to Nigeria at isbn.nu, which is a book price comparison service, not a bookstore. I wondered why on my blog, and then received some startling news: Nigerians order books through TTY services and then resell them to Russia after stiffing the sellers. Wacked-out.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hugo ballot online
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DATE: 04/10/2004 01:30:09 AM
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The 2003 Hugo Nominees have been announced:
Best Novel (462 ballots)
* Paladin of Souls -- Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos)
* Humans -- Robert Sawyer (Tor Books)
* Ilium -- Dan Simmons (Eos)
* Singularity Sky -- Charles Stross (Ace Books)
* Blind Lake -- Robert Charles Wilson (Tor Books)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF on Gmail
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DATE: 04/10/2004 01:33:42 AM
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On EFF's Deep Links blog, some preliminary analysis of Google's Gmail terms-of-service:
"People are entitled to know what kind of information Google will pull from email, whether or not it logs this information, and for how long," said EFF's Kevin Bankston. "Can your Gmail address or any other personal identifier be linked to those logs, or to your Google search history?"
"Gmail's privacy policy states that 'Google welcomes feedback on this document and policy as the Gmail service is currently in an early testing stage.' While that's a nice sentiment, we can't give meaningful feedback until we have all the facts."
The remedy to the situation is obvious: Google needs to let us all know precisely what the privacy/convenience trade-off is for using Gmail, and soon.
Link
(Thanks, Inder!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig's Free Culture Chinese fan-trans
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DATE: 04/10/2004 01:35:58 AM
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Kevin sez, "Some Chinese bloggers have recently launed a collabrative transaltion project to translate Lessig's Free Culture into Chinese, Create a Wiki page in SocialBrain. So far, 21 people have joined this collaborative project, memes appeared in lots of blogs. 12 chapters were assigned by contributors to translate."
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(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Playmobil Airport Security playset
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DATE: 04/10/2004 01:41:51 AM
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Get your kiddies started on a career with real growth potential with this Playmobil airport security playset.
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(Thanks, Armand!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kosher for Passover circus
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DATE: 04/10/2004 01:46:42 AM
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Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey threw a Kosher-for-Passover circus at Madison Square Gardens for 19,000 orthodox Jews, selling bun-less hot-dogs and hiding the female performers.
The Greatest Show on Earth had its ethnic flourishes. The band started the afternoon by playing "Dayenu," a rousing song at the Passover Seder that children love. And David Larible, the master clown they call the Prince of Laughter, wore a yarmulke to perform a miracle that more than one youngster must have thought was right up there with the parting of the Red Sea and the Ten Plagues: he turned another performer into a goat for several heart-stopping seconds.
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(Thanks, Rose!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Playmobil Porn Intro
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DATE: 04/10/2004 04:09:42 AM
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Apropos of the Playmobil TSA Playset, Hubert sez, "Another favourite is this bedroom set, which threatens to erupt into Playmobil porn at any second. I think the woman is holding a hookah and the guy's moustache is... just... inappropriate."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC tries DRM-free distribution
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DATE: 04/10/2004 06:44:33 AM
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Dan sez, "The BBC is putting it's annual Reith Lectures online in DRM-free mp3 for download, for the first time ever. May not seem like a big deal, but it's the first time we've managed to do something like this. It's a trial to test public reaction (in terms of downloads and public opinion) - if successful, it's likely to make it more likely for the BBC to offer more programmes for download like this. It'd be great if Boing-Boingers could check it out and tell the BBC what they think of all this..."
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(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mynah bird "boing boing boing" clip
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DATE: 04/10/2004 06:49:52 AM
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Ian Brown found this weird clip of a mynah bird saying "boing boing boing."
17K WAV Link
(Thanks, Ian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wild west themeparks kicking ass in Bavaria
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DATE: 04/10/2004 09:36:23 AM
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Steve sez, "It's not quite a fetish but clearly 'wild west' life is big and serious in parts of German and Czech life..."
Main Street features covered plank sidewalks, double-decker railings and cutout clapboard facades. Outside the sheriff's office, the town marshal, Big Joe - a Turkish-born character actor little more than three feet tall - obligingly poses for photos, pointing his six-gun at guests and ordering "Hände hoch!" ("Hands up!")...Pullman City, in fact, is one of more than a dozen Wild West theme parks and similar attractions in Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia. I visited several others, including two parks in the Czech Republic and one near Vienna.
They all form part of a multifaceted Wild West subculture in Europe that includes everything from country music festivals and cowboy saloons to an established rodeo circuit. Tens of thousands of Europeans study (or even live like) trappers, American Indians or other frontier archetypes as a hobby. They join clubs, dress up in elaborate costumes and often take to the woods on weekends to live in tepees or sleep "cowboy style" under the stars. "People dream of a free, beautiful country, of romantic campfires and heroes in the saddle," said Detlef Jeschke, a Nuremberg-born former champion European rodeo cowboy who is Pullman City's program manager.
Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help Monochrom do something weird and funny with text and images
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DATE: 04/10/2004 10:08:34 AM
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Past guestblogger Johannes writes, "Cartoons often consist of two parts ... the graphical element and the text below the drawing (example). We need around 300 such text elements, ... only the text elements. We need JPEGs,
maximum width 300 px. Please send the files as attachments. Thanx a lot in
advance! We'll keep you updated!"
Mailto Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in LA: Living art from Mushrooms, Oysters
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DATE: 04/10/2004 11:21:23 AM
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Artist Philip Ross makes sculpture out of living oysters and mushrooms. A show of new work launches in Los Angeles this weekend.
Machine Project announces the opening of "Organized" by artist Phillip Ross, on Saturday April 10th from 5-8 pm. Mr Ross will give a talk on his work at the gallery the following Sunday, April 11th at 3pm. Artist, amateur bio-engineer and member of the San Francisco mycological society, Mr. Ross uses living organisms as the inspiration and means by which he makes his work. Through the design and creation of highly controlled environments, Mr. Ross manipulates, nurtures and transforms a variety of living species into sculpture.
Mr. Ross's work lies at the disparate intersection of homegrown technologies, folk art, materials science, and D.I.Y. cultivation techniques. The show includes a series of Reishi mushrooms grown into highly artificed forms, the aforementioned sculpture grown out of oysters, and a self-contained survival capsule for one living plant. These sculptures are at once highly crafted and naturally formed, skillfully manipulated and sloppily organic.
Link (Thanks, Mara!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen -- Music Zen
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DATE: 04/10/2004 11:25:32 AM
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midisko
8bitpeoples
opaquechannel
gameboyzz orchestra
bent2004
jump around mp3
robot soul mp3
mame jump
titanium rhapsody
kohina radio
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To Do in LA: Glenn Tillbrook doc film free preview
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DATE: 04/10/2004 11:35:21 AM
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Friend o' BoingBoing and rock-n-roll legend bassgoddessgreta (Moby, Debbie Harry, The Nuns, etc.) sends word of an offbeat new documentary film starring former Squeeze frontman Glenn Tilbrook. Twenty years ago with Squeeze, touring meant 18 wheelers, hotel suites and police-escorted limos. Now Tilbrook's music now finds its audience through a more independent route -- which involves a big mobile home and lots of open highway.
In November 2001, to support the release of his debut solo CD, The Incomplete Glenn Tilbrook, Glenn embarked on a different kind of independent route as he took to the road in America: One man, two guitars and a mobile home.
Glenn Tilbrook: One for the Road follows him on every step of that journey: arriving in the States; picking up his mobile home; performing the shows; meeting the fans; packing away his guitars; camping at campgrounds; traveling in the RV: All access, all of the time. It's an intimate look at how an established musician adjusts to his new independent surroundings. It's a commentary on the current state of the music industry. But, most importantly, it's a human interest story that transcends its musical base.
Link to movie homepage, and check it out in LA at a free preview screening on Tuesday, May 11th, 8:00pm at CineSpace, 6356 Hollywood Blvd. 2nd Floor. 323 817 3456.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nevermind broadband -- many First Americans don't have phone service
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DATE: 04/10/2004 11:53:07 AM
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Comments from an NPR listener who heard a segment I did for "Day to Day" on the president's promise to make broadband accessible to all Americans by the year 2007. Eric Martin says:
Phone penetration on reservations just passed the 50% mark within this decade and even where there are phone lines on US reservations a lot of them are old copper lines that can't handle dial-up. So before Bush goes and gets the rest of the country hooked up with high speed, he should make sure that all Americans, including Native Americans, have basic phone service. John Edwards wasn't lying when he was talking about two Americas.
There are some interesting stats on the lack of phone penetration in "Indian Country" on this FCC website.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Implicit ideology in video games
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DATE: 04/10/2004 12:14:28 PM
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From Reason Magazine, an article analysing the ways that video games influence our politics and world-view.
So implicit politics might be the better way to influence player opinion. But as a political vehicle, games may have an inherent bias. Bridging an ideological chasm, libertarian Iain Smedley and socialist Julian Stallabras agree that computer games possess a native individualism. Writing a decade ago, Smedley noted the "heroic and individualistic philosophy" of video games, in which the player "does not merely cheer on the hero in [his] struggle; the player’s actions determine the outcome." Writing contemporaneously in New Left Review, Stallabras concurred: In games, "the passivity of cinema and television is replaced by an environment in which the player’s actions have a direct, immediate consequence on the virtual world." For Stallabras, this makes computer games "a capitalist and deeply conservative form of culture."
Stallabras’ wide-ranging indictment of computer games is remarkable for its combination of savvy ("in Doom...all the corpses of a particular monster always look exactly the same") and pessimism ("The defining image in all this comes, not from any game, but naturally enough from a blockbuster film, Terminator 2; it is the jarring crunch of human skulls under the bright chrome of a robot foot"). Stallabras contends that many offensive traits of games are concealed by "chrome," by which he means slick user interfaces and graphical eye candy. What would he think of the recent release whose title is Chrome? Probably the same thing he writes about the video game as a medium: that it tricks players into imitating idealized markets and sweatshop labor through repetitive manipulation of game objects and numbers, that it is shaped by "the parameters of the computer industry’s links with the military," and that its innate objectification "leads to...an ever greater blurring of the use of people as instruments in the world and the game." But he might appreciate the irony that Chrome developer Techland is located in Poland.
Link
(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New short from Susannah Breslin
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DATE: 04/10/2004 03:39:57 PM
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Former BoingBoing guestblogger Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin celebrates a birthday today. She also a new short story out in Ducky Magazine. Dig the phat cover art. Excerpt:
One morning, she woke up and discovered that her head was gone. She had reached up to pat her hair, or rub the sleep from her eyes, or scratch her ear, and she had realized that her head was nowhere to be found. Where, she wondered, had it gone? She had no idea at all. She could not recall, in fact, very well what had happened the previous evening. She had been at a bar, and she had gotten drunk, and then she had come back home. From what she could remember, her head had still been sitting squarely on her shoulders when she had climbed into bed. Perhaps, she considered, her head had run off at some point during the night while she lay sleeping.
Link to "The Woman Who Lost Her Head".
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Remix of W's WMD joke
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DATE: 04/10/2004 04:20:23 PM
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This remix of George W's WMD joke at the White House Correspondants' Dinner is vicious, brilliant and true.
3.6MB QuickTime Link
(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: eBay listings by RSS
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DATE: 04/10/2004 04:21:33 PM
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Create your own RSS feed for your favorite eBay search. Link (Thanks, Chris Pirillo!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Distributed Proofreaders pass 4,000 ebooks
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DATE: 04/10/2004 04:21:54 PM
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An anonymous person writes:
Distributed Proofreaders is a volunteer driven website that is committed to putting Public Domain books online. OCR generated text is reviewed online and compared to page scans. Once the book has completed the proofreading process it is posted to Project Gutenberg where the ebook is available to the world for free.
On April 6th Distributed Proofreaders posted it 4,000 ebook: "Aventures du capitaine Hatteras" by Jules Verne. Yes, it is in French. Come help us produce more free ebooks in more languages at Distributed Proofreaders. Proofread a page a day, that's all we ask.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London's ghost tube-stations
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DATE: 04/10/2004 04:27:38 PM
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This site is devoted to the 40-some abandoned and ghost tube stations on the London Underground, including accounts of guided tours.
Link
(via Pirotcar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hip hop Man of Constant Sorrow
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DATE: 04/10/2004 04:30:58 PM
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This is Battlestar America's pretty cool hip-hop remix of Man of Constant Sorrow.
1.4MB MP3 Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Down with my Peeps
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DATE: 04/10/2004 08:42:38 PM
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Online gallery of Easter-themed diorama art created with Marshmallow Peeps. What are Peeps? Well, the Washington Post says they're "the chick-and-bunny-shaped marshmallow treats that have become America's best-loved harbingers of the season". You might call these images of winning art contest entries -- yes, yes -- a PEEP show. Huhhuhhuh. I think my favorite is this Mel Gibson homage, The Passion of the Peeps. Snip from the show review:
"Another religious entry could be described as Memorable Moments in Marshmallow Martyrdom. Created by two Catholic school girls, it depicted four saint scenes, including John the Baptist beheaded, Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, St. Peter crucified upside down on Pop-sicle sticks and St. Stephen being stoned to death by jelly beans."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collaboration across 120 years yields "oldest" movie ever
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DATE: 04/11/2004 07:32:48 AM
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In 1882, astronomer David Peck Todd shot 147 consecutive plates of the transit of Venus across the sky. Now, two modern astronomers at the Lick Observatory have scanned them and turned them into a Quicktime movie -- a film "shot" years before Edison made his first moving picture. This makes me wonder if we'll be able to pull off neat tricks like improvising stereoscopic, moving, and/or panoramic images of the present at some time in the future, say by pulling thousands of moblogged images of a single event off the net and using software to interpolate and assemble them.
Spurred by a reference in one of Todd's letters in Lick's Mary Lea Shane Archives, Bill Sheehan and I found all 147 negatives, still in good condition, at the observatory. To our knowledge, this collection of photos constitutes the most complete surviving record of a historical transit of Venus.
As we looked at Todd's extensive sequence of images, we realized we could turn them into a movie. A similar thought may have occurred to Todd himself, for a number of his contemporaries were already making the first forays into chronophotography — the recording of sequential motion and the forerunner of cinematography. Indeed, Pierre Jules Janssen invented his famous photographic revolver to capture the 1874 transit of Venus.
Link
(via /.)
Update: The Slashdot discussion points to even older examples of this, like animations of Galileo's 1613 sunspot drawings, not to mention this 1865 QTVR (Thanks, Ardes!).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Weirding-edge fetish vocab from Japan
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DATE: 04/11/2004 06:09:31 PM
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Here's a great glossary of outré kinks exemplefied in cuttin-edge Japanese pr0n.
chin chin kenkyu - (literally "study of the penis"). Chin-chin is a cute, childish term for penis. In chin-chin-kenkyu videos, average women on the street are given a lecture about the penis by some porno actors. The 'professional' will measure the penis, and describe how to make it stand up. there's lots of reaction shots of the embarrassed average women. it's kind of Benny Hill.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sweet Daily Show video clips
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DATE: 04/11/2004 06:12:43 PM
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Lisa rein has posted a bunch of great clips from recent Daily Shows to her blog, covering spam, Tyco's birthday party write-off, Richard Clarke's appearance, and the GOP response to the Clarke testimony.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collected toilet walls
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DATE: 04/11/2004 06:56:40 PM
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Writings on the Stall is a site that collects bathroom graffiti -- they want your submissions.
Link
(Thanks, Jonathan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dr. Seuss' "Gerald McBoing Boing" on MP3
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DATE: 04/11/2004 07:32:16 PM
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Delightful MP3 of a 1951 children's record about Gerald McBoing Boing, a boy who spoke in sound effects. Link (Halfway down page)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Museum of Unworkable Devices
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DATE: 04/11/2004 08:11:34 PM
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Nice site covering a bunch of inventions that won't work because they go against one or more laws of physics. It also looks at impractical, but interesting inventions, like this water fountain that squirts water out of a replica of a woman's head. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Would you erase me?
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DATE: 04/11/2004 10:35:06 PM
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I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and liked it rather a lot. If you are a geek, there's a high probability you will too. It's Michel Gondry's second feature-length film, and it's been out for about a month. Here's what Elvis Mitchell says about it in the New York Times. Check out the trailer here.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Viridian Design contest -- Aromatizer
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DATE: 04/11/2004 10:48:59 PM
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Mr. Bruce Sterling just dreamed up a new Viridian Design contest. Here's what it isn't:
"Smell- o-vision" has already been suggested. Smell-o-vision is a dead medium, however, and the addition of smell to computer games seems corny and too limited.
Here's what it is: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big name VC gets into microfinancing
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DATE: 04/12/2004 01:39:48 AM
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Amazing NYT piece on Vinod Khosla, a partner at Kleiner Perkins and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who is now devoting part of his time to trekking rural India, making micro-loans to entrepreneurs starting home-based businesses.
"I was completely blown as I listened to the stories of these tenacious women," Mr. Khosla said. "I started crying." In his view, the microfinance initiatives he visited in India and Bangladesh in February ran more efficiently than most Silicon Valley organizations. "They have sophisticated credit algorithms," he said. "Does the woman own a buffalo? Some chickens? Does she have a toilet in her home? What kind of roofing material does her home have? Does she bring a shawl to the village meeting?"
In India, microloans are usually disbursed to poor women whose total family assets are less than 20,000 rupees ($459) and whose monthly income is smaller than 350 rupees. Yet microfinance initiatives have a phenomenal repayment rate averaging more than 95 percent, better than the best commercial banks in the world. Many of the programs are highly profitable, Mr. Khosla said, adding that "microfinance is one of the most important economic phenomena in the world in the last 50 years."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Remembering gopher
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DATE: 04/12/2004 02:56:35 AM
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Lore "Brunching Shuttlecocks" Sjöberg has turned in a lyrical reminiscence about the glory days of gopher, the Web's predecessor. My first net-job (after the CDROM crash in the early 90s) was as a commerical gopher developer, and it turns out that were are lots of gopher sites still online:
Despite its relative obscurity, gopherspace is accessible to many more Web users than people realize. Gopher support is built into Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox, most versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer up to version 5, although the degree of support varies. People who want to stick with the familiarity of http can use the public gopher proxy at Floodgap.com, which translates gopher pages into HTML.
Visitors to gopherspace will find a piece of the Internet's history, some of which, Goerzen says, isn't available anywhere else. They will also find The Gopher Manifesto, a document praising gopher's simplicity and elegance.
The Gopher Manifesto describes gopher as "a hypertext Eden" that existed before the clutter and commercialization of the Web. "Is it time for a new Renaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years?" it asks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT pays $440MM to settle DRM patent dispute
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DATE: 04/12/2004 03:08:14 AM
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Microsoft has settled its patent dispute with Sony/Philips, who acquired a company called Intertrust solely for its patent on DRM, which conflicted with the patent that Microsoft got when it took a controlling interest in another company called ContentGuard.
Microsoft is paying $440m to settle its long-running digital rights management (DRM) patent infringement dispute with Intertrust. The one-off pay-out means that Microsoft customers can use their software "as they are intended to be used without requiring a license from InterTrust".
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tracking campaign contributions online
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DATE: 04/12/2004 07:24:55 AM
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Great piece by Joanna Glasner in today's Wired News about a number of websites that help you track campaign contribution history of US politicians. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mysterious power outage KOs casinos in Vegas
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DATE: 04/12/2004 07:46:21 AM
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Our pals at Gawker forward this tip from reader Audrey Bath about a bizarre power outage affecting casinos and hotels in Las Vegas for the past couple of days -- sounds uncannily like a scene from a recent movie filmed at the affected property:
I thought you might be amused to learn that Las Vegas' premiere hotel, the 5-star Bellagio Hotel, lost all power at 2:30am Sunday (Easter) and power has not yet been restored. As of right now, there is no access to their website, and no updated information. It is THE big story in Las Vegas.
No definitive word yet on why no power, but it appears a truck hit a transformer behind the hotel, on the new Frank Sinatra Drive. The hotel is said to have been 2/3 full (2,000 guests) and thousands of employees have not been able to go to work. All of the hotels' restaurants are closed, every gaming table and slot machine is dark, even the fountains are not operating. There are no elevators, no escalators, no Cirque du Soleil. Only the Bellagio Hotel is affected by the outage, and generators have not kicked in. (It's eerily like "Ocean's Eleven" which was filmed in part at the hotel 3 years ago.)
Some guests have insisted on remaining at the dark hotel; all others have been transferred to the "sister properties" like the Mirage, Treasure Island and MGM Grand. My husband is a chef at Picasso, the top restaurant in Las Vegas, located at the Bellagio, and he was told not to return to work tomorrow because power will not be back on. Power is not expected to be restored until possibly late Monday night. It's a very weird scene.
Link to story in Las Vegas Review-Journal
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wax museum of country music stars on eBay
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DATE: 04/12/2004 07:53:38 AM
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BoingBoing reader kowgurl says, "About 50 wax figures--all your favorite country and western stars. I saw it this weekend--they are creepy as hell. The sets are not 'museum quality' by any stretch. I would love to bid on it!"
Link. Beware the evil audio soundtrack! Almost as evil as the satanic grin on Minnie Pearl's waxen visage.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Classifying blobs as faces
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DATE: 04/12/2004 08:14:44 AM
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MIT researchers report in the journal Science that the brain relies on context to compensate for images that are noisy or degraded. For example, if you look at a person from very far away, their face may look like a blurry blob with no discernible features at all. Still, thanks to the contextual cues (in this case, the attached body), you still can classify the blob as a face. That seems obvious, of course. What's novel about this work is that the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to actually show that "the specific brain region known to be activated by clear images of faces is also strongly activated by very blurred images, just so long as surrounding contextual cues are present." Of course, surrealist artists like Rene Magritte have known this for years.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New book from House Industries
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DATE: 04/12/2004 08:32:42 AM
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House Industries, the world's greatest typeface designers, have published a 240-page book chronicling their work. I haven't seen the book itself, but the sample spreads shown here are stunning. The $69 book has a 32-page section on House's design process and it comes with four fonts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites in Iraq -- "Toppled"
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DATE: 04/12/2004 08:33:57 AM
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Blogger and MSNBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites has returned to assignment in Iraq after a short break home in the US. A year ago last Friday, the famous statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad was toppled; Kevin has posted a new essay about the state of Iraq since then.
But in light of the multiple hostage situations in Iraq right now, I want to mention one thing that he does not. This also marks the one year anniversary of his capture and subsequent release by Iraqi Fedayeen soldiers. We're glad that this story ended with Kevin free and unharmed. Snip from his latest post:
How did things turn so bad so quickly--in which a scattered insurgency gains broader support and the coalition Shiite alliance begins to crack? Some critics say it's a combination of a year of mismanagement by the Coalition Provisional Authority in which the lives of most Iraqis have not improved much since the reign of Saddam Hussein and the hardball tactics of occupation military forces that are alienating the people they were intending to help.
One member of a Ramadi-based Sunni insurgent cell who calls himself "Continuous Jihad" says the Coalition hasn't delivered on anything. "They break into houses in the middle of the night and arrest innocent people," he says, "and they've given us less then we had under Saddam. People are jobless, they distort our religion, and they're taking our oil and living in Saddam's palaces. Nothing has changed. They've become like him, yet they pretend they're here to help us."
Link to "Toppled", blog post from Iraq by Kevin Sites, Link to discussion forum.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Prehistoric cat people
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DATE: 04/12/2004 08:39:15 AM
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Archaeologists have found 9,500-year-old cat bones on the island of Cyprus, where felines are not native. The cat was buried beside a human skeleton, suggesting that it was a pet. Previously, historians though that the Egyptians were the first to domesticate cats about 4,000 years ago. According to the researchers, the eight-month-old cat may have been put to sleep so it could be buried with its caretaker. Poor kitty. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Trip Hawkins starts a game company for mobile phones
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DATE: 04/12/2004 09:00:07 AM
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Here's an article I wrote about Electronic Arts and 3D0 founder Trip Hawkin's new mobile games company, Digital Chocolate. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Canned beverage chiller
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DATE: 04/12/2004 10:06:33 AM
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This infomercial-ish device uses water an ice to quickly chill a can of beer (or soda). It works by spinning the can in a bath of very cold water. The can also wobbles slightly, to push the layer of warmed water away from the can. Link (via ZZZ)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Killer mutant staph infection on the rise
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DATE: 04/12/2004 10:09:28 AM
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Scary Business Week article about an anti-biotic resistant strain of staph.
For the past 30 years, hospitals have been battling a mutant form called methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) that is resistant to penicillin-related antibiotics and is especially lethal. Now this drug-defying strain is showing up in the general population. It can be deadly if it enters the blood stream, heart, or lungs, killing anywhere from 25% to 43% of its victims.
For years, the best treatment for MRSA was the powerful antibiotic vancomycin. But even this weapon has failed against new strains of staph that have emerged. Some infectious-disease experts predict that by 2010, 40% of staph infections will be vancomycin-resistant.
Link (Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: US government crackdown on P2P
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DATE: 04/12/2004 11:23:42 AM
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Today on the NPR program "Day to Day," I talk with host Alex Chadwick about recent actions in Congress and the Department of Justice to crack down on filesharers, and new studies that show a rise in P2P popularity. Link for today's show, scroll down for online audio of "Peer-to-Peer File Sharing On the Rise"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sex and gravestones
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DATE: 04/12/2004 11:38:15 AM
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Online photo gallery exploring the sensual female form in cemetary memorial markers.
Link (Via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Persian blogger Hoder on how to build a blogosphere
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DATE: 04/12/2004 11:50:30 AM
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Hossein Derakhshan publishes this insightful post on how to foster the development of "a local blogosphere in a community, based on the experience of Iranians." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Felten's Grand Unified Theory of Filesharing
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DATE: 04/12/2004 12:12:41 PM
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On "Freedom to Tinker," Ed Felten writes:
Recently we've seen several studies of the impact of filesharing on CD sales. We have enough data now to draw some (very) preliminary conclusions, assuming the studies are correct. Despite the apparent contradictions between the various studies, I think there is a plausible theory that can explain them all -- a Grand Unified Theory of Filesharing.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: H is for Hentai: Jlist founder talks about Japan pop culture
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DATE: 04/12/2004 12:20:40 PM
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(Some links in post not worksafe.) In today's Wired News, I interview Peter Payne, founder of J-list. They sell products for all ages, but in their adults-only section you'll find everything from "Cup o' Pussy" sex toys to "Poop Aid" and "Kanji Quiz" toilet paper to adult computer games to porn DVDs that combine the time-honored themes of bukkake and car-racing (cover snapshot below). Along the way, Payne offers some insights on why Japanese pop culture is so delightfully wacky. Oh, and he schools us on the history of bukkake. Hint: It's all Macarthur's fault. Snip:
It's hard for non-Japanese to understand why something becomes popular, or is perceived as delightful or funny in Japan. In the Japanese language, describing the color green -- a green stoplight for instance -- they say "blue." Looking around this country through the eyes of a gaijin -- a foreigner -- things are just different.
Take the bad words, for instance -- even the letter "h" is loaded. If a guy grabs a girl's breasts in a Japanese porn video, she might say "H!" with a Japanese accent -- like, ACH-ay. That's because H is for hentai, sexually explicit comics. It's like saying, "Pervert!" So, "H-suru" in Japanese means "to have sex." You don't want to actually say "have sex," so it's like saying, "do it."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hot pepper spray reverses "permanent" loss of smell
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DATE: 04/12/2004 12:48:27 PM
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The cold remedy Zicam (which I swear by) has been under attack for possibly causing permanent anosmia (loss of the sense of smell). But a new product on the market called sinus Buster, made from capsaicin (the ingredient that makes chili peppers hot) might reverse anosmia when you squirt it up your nose. "When my husband ordered the sinus buster over the internet I was skeptical. But I said okay I’ll give it a try. As soon as we got it I used it that night and the next day I noticed I could smell certain odors. I couldn't believe it. The first thing I smelled was my daughter coming home after a night of partying, and I could smell cigarette smoke all over her. I had to bring her coat out to the garage because the smoke odor was so strong. Then my daughter told me that’s how she always smells after going out, but I never smelled the smoke before. It's absolutely amazing," Anderson added.
I've always had a pretty bad sense of smell. Maybe I should give this stuff a try. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Controvery brews over Suicide Girls-branded print zine
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DATE: 04/12/2004 05:46:25 PM
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Fleshbot points to some hoo-ha around the yet-to-be-launched print magazine (sneak peek at the cover) bearing the Suicide Girls brand:
Will the new Suicide Girls Magazine be over before it even begins? We've just received a copy of a legal notice signed by nine writers whose work was supposed to appear in the debut issue denying the magazine the right to print any articles submitted by them; according to our tipster, "The writers, who are all without contract, lost interest in the magazine when it became clear that it would be little more than a hipsterized Maxim with nipples." (Hmm, "a hipsterized Maxim with nipples" ... doesn't sound so bad to us, actually.) We'll keep you posted.
I've seen a copy of the letter. I'm told by writers and photographers involved that none were being paid; all were said to be contributing gratis to get a cool, underfunded project off the ground. Link to previous BB post on SG's print plans. Suicide Girls online? Alive and well, and apparently not as directly involved with the magazine as many had assumed.
UPDATE: Suicide Girls founder Sean tells BoingBoing: "SG Pin-up (that's the official name of the mag, advertisers don't like the name Suicide in the title - shocking, no?) is a licensee of SuicideGirls. A company in New York is creating the magazine, which Missy and I get to approve. It is my understanding the Publisher and the editor had some disagreements about the direction of the mag and the editor is pissed off with a capital P and is throwing some kind of fit. I'm sure the publisher will work it out and get us an issue to approve, everything I've seen so far has been really good, but I'm not involved in the production of the magazine so I don't know if the stuff I've seen will be in the final first issue or not. In any case, news of our magazines demise has been reported prematurely, I hope. I think they're just going through the kinds of things you go through when creating a new magazine. Although honestly, I have no idea, as I've never worked in publishing and my only contact has been with the publisher and the art director, both of whom I think are doing a great job with everything they've shown me. I sent them the link and I'm sure they'll respond to you as well, but feel free to print my comments."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shelf filled with ivy
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DATE: 04/12/2004 10:41:21 PM
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This living shelf from Mosley meets Wilcox is made of transparent plastic with ivy growing in it.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UnAAmerican: American Airlines firehoses customer data at TSA, Lockheed Martin
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DATE: 04/12/2004 10:46:11 PM
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Remember when JetBlue and Delta got caught firehosing their customers' data all over the place in the name of "national security?" Well American Airlines just got caught doing the same thing.
Anyone who flew American Airlines during June of 2002 should assume that all information given by them to American Airlines, including credit card numbers, is in the possession of both the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the following TSA subcontractors: HNC Software; Infoglide Software; Ascent Technology; and Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as the passenger records were used to test the CAPPS II passenger profiling system, it should be assumed that the Social Security number, date of birth, as well as the associated credit histories and law enforcement records of many of the 1.2 million customers affected were combined into a single file and are now in the possession of the above-named companies as well as the Department of Homeland Security.
Link
(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing add Technorati support
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DATE: 04/12/2004 10:52:04 PM
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Check out the "New! Other blogs commenting on this post" at the bottom of our posts -- this is a link to Technorati's index of all the blogs that have linked to each of Boing Boing's posts. It's not quite a Discuss link, but if you have a blog and you post a comment about one of our posts to it, Technorati will find it and index it. Just make sure that your blogging tool is pinging one of the major pingsites, like blo.gs, weblogs.com or Technorati's own pinger (if you're using TypePad, Blogspot, Livejournal or one of the other major hosted services, this is already the case; most host-your-own tools like Blosxom, Movable Type and Radio have a setting for this).
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Highgate Cemetery photos
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DATE: 04/13/2004 12:14:13 AM
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I spent some of yesterday's holiday at Highgate Cemetery in North London. Best known as the burial place of Karl Marx, Highgate is a magnificent, decrepit (many of the crypts were damaged in the Blitz) boneyard, and the tours offered on the west side are spectacular (despite the notably unfriendly demeanor and shrill demands for donations from the woman who was working the gate -- I'm happy to donate money to the charitable trust that maintains the place, but I'm not thrilled about having my arm twisted, nor about being made to physically show that my cellphone has been switched off before I was admitted past the gates).
I took some photos that really turned out well. I've put up a gallery.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA art show: moonboots and barrettes, elves and cigarettes
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DATE: 04/13/2004 08:30:31 AM
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If you're in LA this Saturday evening, check out this new show opening at sixspace -- new works by LA artists Megan Whitmarsh and Rachell Sumpter. If you're not in LA, dig the preview online. I'm particularly fond of the images form Whitmarsh (detail at left) -- gallery co-founder Caryn Coleman tells me they're the result of a dream the artist had that Kermit the Frog was in her house, hanging out and doing origami. The pieces depict -- well -- Kermit the Frog hanging out in someone's house, doing origami. Snip from press release:
"Whitmarsh will present her exquisite embroidery on fabric pieces that combine this traditional medium with depictions of elements in pop-culture such as yetis and battling elf girls. While the size of her work ranges from small to large, her characters remain tiny and detailed, forcing the viewer to literally peer into her worlds. Sumpter, part of the new school of illustration, will be exhibiting paintings on paper using gouache, ink and watercolor. Her work has been described as '...delicate ink lines, and subtle attention to detail complement and subvert the lightness of her drawings' and her 'icon-like imagery resembles... children's books found in antique stores, but with a modernist composition and adult subject matter'."
Link to press release, show images up later this week.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dustindiamondsucks.com
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DATE: 04/13/2004 08:52:35 AM
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Ripped from the headlines of Gawker:
Last week, Dustin Diamond -- once known as Screech on the TV show Saved by the Bell -- apparently failed in an "internet court" arbitration to procure dustindiamond.com. (Yes, I know: I'm still having a hard time believing this isn't an elaborate joke.)
At legal issue in ownership of the domain name: just how famous is Screech these days? In the response to complaint, Max Goldberg, the operator of dustindiamond.com, says:
"Mr. Diamond's attorneys have sadly overstated the extent of their client's renown and the value of his 'brand.' This becomes embarrassingly clear when they attempt to support their claim by pointing to their client's video, Dustin Diamond Teaches Chess. Their Exhibit H shows an advertisement for the video on a nonexistent web site [EXHIBIT G]. Their Exhibit I shows a listing (not an advertisement, as they claim) for the video on eBay from February 3, 2004, shortly before the complaint was filed. It is very possible that the eBay offer was posted by Mr. Diamond or his representatives. Apparently Mr. Diamond's legal team can find no evidence that Dustin Diamond Teaches Chess is anything but a self-published vanity project, one that does not support the claim that the name 'Dustin Diamond' has acquired secondary meaning."
Harsh, dude. This is a clear wake-up call for C-list actors and reality stars everywhere: sock that money away, because your future is fucked.
Screech v. Goldberg [Dustin Diamond Sucks] | Response to Complaint [Dustin Diamond Sucks] |
Dustin Diamond dot com
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MP3: Don't Stop 'til you Get to Bollywood
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DATE: 04/13/2004 09:10:25 AM
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A few days ago, Jonno pointed me to a Bollywood-flavored remake of Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough," which he found on a sekrit MP3 blog that shall remain nameless. This track is phat. This track is funky. This track makes me want to do a little dance in my ergonomic chair. A little google-digging reveals the song is by a group called the Bollywood Freaks, and came out on a limited edition red vinyl 7" in the UK. I want to send them money for the funk they provide. I want more of their music. If anyone has info, cough it up.
But for now -- look! Someone dumped a copy of said funky track on a server somewhere. Download the MP3 while it lasts. Link
UPDATE:
Stephen VanDyke says, "The name of the artist is James Hy-man, you can find all of the tracks at Boomselection (Link, alternate link). You may also be interested in Get Your Bootleg On (GYBO), which is where a lot of the bootleggers post new mixes."
And Charles Vestal says, "The mix posted on boomselection is a DJ set James Hyman did. While it's wikked awesome, very little of it is actual work he's done, save beatmatching the tracks and adding his name from promos over the intro track. I believe he has done some great mashups in the past, like the Slim Shady / Rockafella Skank mashup from so long ago.
Also, have you seen neverfollow.com? Audi's giving away a TT Coupe for someone who does a mashup of a track off Bowie's new album, Reality and any other Bowie track. Go Home Productions already did this, at the request of Bowie for the new single (featured in a new Audi commercial), mixing the new rocker Never Get Old and Rebel Rebel from Diamond Dogs. So much newness with a little bit of old, and Bowie's still ahead of the curve, embracing mash-up culture when the rest of the industry is scared of it. Dig out your sampler and get to work!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: GIs in Iraq tote in digital pop culture -- and share it
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DATE: 04/13/2004 09:23:27 AM
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Fascinating piece in today's NYT about digital media sharing among enlisted personnel in Iraq. Would entertainment industry groups -- or at some point, our government -- prosecute these soldiers for piracy?
At the Kirkush Military Training Base in the eastern Iraqi desert less than
15 miles from the frontier with Iran, an hour's wait for a helicopter was spent listening to Marilyn Manson, Eminem and Shania Twain before the Black Hawk fired up its turbines and somebody back in the barracks, as if on cue and with a dark sense of irony, cranked up Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." The songs came from a European satellite music channel and a communal computer where 12.8 gigabites of tunes had been downloaded for sharing on MP3's. The rule was simple: Take some music, add some music. "Any time anybody on the team gets a new CD, they load it in, so we stay pretty current," said Sgt. Thomas R. Mena.
As the new CD from Tool blasted in the barracks, Sergeant Mena scrolled through the computerized music library, which ranged from Abba and AC/DC, through Limp Biskit and Metallica and on to Van Halen and ZZ Top. Emigres from West Africa who joined the Army for citizenship and career training arrived with the latest Nigerian pop CD's. Chinese-Americans hauled along hot Hong Kong video imports.
Link (site registration required (Thanks, JP)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chat, copy, paste, prison
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DATE: 04/13/2004 09:52:56 AM
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Via Declan McCullagh's politech list:
You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information.
You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail.
New Hampshire is "two-party consent state" -- one of those jurisdictions that requires all parties to a conversation to consent before the conversation can be intercepted or recorded. The decision is the first of its kind to apply that standard to online chats, and the ruling is clearly supported by the text of the law. But it marks a blow to an investigative technique that has been routinely used by law enforcement, employers, ISPs and others.
Link to Security Focus story
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Report from Yale's Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment
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DATE: 04/13/2004 10:31:11 AM
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James Grimmelman has written up a witty and marvellous con-report from Yale's Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment, wherein a bunch of Internet law-enforcement theorists and practicioners chewed the fat with civ-lib types:
Phil's Commandment Five -- "Criminal sanctions should where necessary deter costly anti-social conduct." -- sounds an awful lot like Bentham's "The general object which all laws have, or ought to have, in common, is . . . to exclude mischief." Similarly, Phil's Commandment Three -- "When traditional crime presents a greater harm to society because it is committed online, that crime should entail a heavier punishment, where possible through neutral means such as measuring the actual damage done" -- has a close resemblance to Bentham's "When two offences come in competition, the punishment for the greater offence must be sufficient to induce a man to prefer the less."
Now, this is all well and good, but Dan Solove then undermines these simple utilitarian calculations, in exactly the way that two centuries of law and economics have undermined Bentham's calm confidence. It turns out that optimal deterrence is indeterminate: it doesn't spit out clear answers all the time, because you can often make good deterrence arguments for lower punishments. This is what Solove is getting at when he says that constructing identity theft as "theft" undermines the importance of building secure architecture. Dan sees creating vulnerability itself as a harm that needs to be redressed: perhaps the people at "fault" are as much the people using social security numbers as database primary keys, as much as the crackers who steal those numbers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why national ID cards make us less safe
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DATE: 04/13/2004 10:35:49 AM
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Bruce Schneier has written an amazing editorial on the security risks inherent in instituting a national ID card.
Not that there would ever be such thing as a single ID card. Currently about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year. An entirely separate security system would have to be developed for people who lost their card, a system that itself is capable of abuse.
Additionally, any ID system involves people... people who regularly make mistakes. We all have stories of bartenders falling for obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It's not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.
But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.
Link
(Thanks, Bruce!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Streetside trompe l'oeil
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DATE: 04/13/2004 10:38:33 AM
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From Gizmodo: beautiful trompe l'oeil paintjobs on streetside transformer boxes.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart and Al Franken on Air America
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DATE: 04/13/2004 10:48:10 AM
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Here's Matt Haughey's 66MB Zip of Jon Stewart being interviewed on Al Franken's Air America show last night.
66MB Zip Link
(via Whole Lotta Nothing)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sniper rifle shoots RFID chips into people?
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DATE: 04/13/2004 11:45:47 AM
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This is probably phony, but it seems like something that might actually be used: The ID SNIPER rifle implants "a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis." Link (Thanks, Thorzdad!)
Steve Lawson sez: The ID Sniper Rifle is indeed a fake. The NPR show "The Next Big Thing" did a segment on it--the guy made a mock poster, business cards, etc. and took it to a weapons convention where he got serious interest from the Chinese. See http://www.nextbigthing.org/ and scroll down to the story "High Tech High Art"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Clear duct tape
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DATE: 04/13/2004 12:22:54 PM
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3M has shipped tranparent "Scotch" duct-tape. Kevin Kelly's been playing with it and he says it holds up as good as the silvery stuff, but strong uptake would obviate my favorite Star Wars joke: "Duct tape is like The Force: It has a dark side and a light side and it holds the Universe together." Still, we could sub in "Duct tape is like the good government: It is perfectly transparent and it holds the nation together."
Link
(via Cool Tools)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CD and DVD cover-art archive
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DATE: 04/13/2004 01:11:27 PM
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Damien sez, "these incredible guys have created an online archive of the front and back cover art of almost every compact disc album and DVD release ever, freely downloadable as a jpeg. of course, the linear shelf space of any decent DVD movie collection is enormous if actually stored in those over-sized black plastic boxes..."
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(Thanks, Damien!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LiveJournal image zeitgeist
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DATE: 04/13/2004 01:16:25 PM
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This page contains a scraping of the most recent couple-dozen images included in LiveJournal posts (which often includes some NSFW stuff, wage-slaves be warned).
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(Thanks, Singularity!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cosplay community site "Cure"
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DATE: 04/13/2004 01:19:44 PM
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Joi Ito writes:
The Japanese "sort of equivalent" of SuicideGirls is Cure, a cosplay site. The biggest difference is that the sexy pictures are not allowed. It's quite an amazing community. There are 5000 layers (comes from Cosplayers) and 30,000 cameko (comes from camera kozo or "Camera Boys"). The layers can be sorted by ranking or by the characters they play. The cameko are otaku who spend their lives taking pictures of the layers and giving beautiful prints of their photos to the layers and sharing them online. The site lets you send these photos to or view them on your mobile phones.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing tribe on tribe.net hits 700 members
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DATE: 04/13/2004 01:24:18 PM
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The Boingboing affinity group on tribe.net, created last year by a group of readers, just welcomed its 700th member. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Giving up on email folders
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DATE: 04/13/2004 02:06:25 PM
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Rael Dornfest says he's going to stop filing his email messages into different folders. Instead, he's going to put all the messages he wants to keep into a single folder and use his email programs search and sort functions to retrieve messages he wants to re-read. I'll be interested to see how this works for him. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cattle rustling on the rise -- blame Atkins
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DATE: 04/13/2004 02:22:56 PM
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Ten of millions of low carb dieters have created such a demand for beef that cattle rustling is getting popular again. Link (via Carbwire)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MoSoSo
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DATE: 04/13/2004 03:26:31 PM
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New jargon from Quake legend Alice Taylor: "MoSoSo." Social software for mobile phones.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AmEx's dumb-ass trademark threats
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DATE: 04/13/2004 03:51:58 PM
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Brad Templeton -- the long-time moderator of rec.humor.funny and host of the rhf archives -- has received a cease-and-desist notice from AmEx's lawyers over a 13 year old joke called "American Expressway." Brad, being fully aware of the Constitutionally protected right to parody and how that trumps trademark, has posted a link to the joke, the C&D, and his response, which pokes vicious fun at AmEx's lawyers at the firm of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe:
hould you ever feel your reputation lost or stolen by free speech and satire, just one call gets LVM to write a threatening cease and desist letter -- usually on the same day -- citing all sorts of important sounding laws but ignoring the realities of parody. Most innocent web sites will cave in, not knowing their rights. LVM will pretend it has never read cases like L.L. Bean, Inc. v. High Society and dozens of others. There's no preset limit on the number of people you can threaten, so you can bully as much as you wish.
After all, Being Giant and Intimidating has its Privileges.
American Express Lawyers: Don't leave your home page without them.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What's up with DoubleClick's Google AdWords-like ads?
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DATE: 04/13/2004 09:54:25 PM
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Rupert Scammell tells BoingBoing:
On Gawker tonight, I noticed that DoubleClick now uses banners which look like Google AdWords ads. In a similar manner to their infamous fake Windows error dialog banners, DC seems to be capitalizing upon the now familiar look of Gooogle's advertising to up their click rate. I wrote a quick weblog entry up about it, which features a screenshot of the advertising in action.
Link
Jon Gales tells BoingBoing: "That's not quite true. They are teamed up with Google. They take a bet that they will be able to beat the CPM they pay (which is quite low). Check this Webmaster World forum for more discussion on the topic." (NOTE: forum appears to be for paid members only. --XJ)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ecto for Windows launches, BoingBoing now a 100% Ecto blog!
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DATE: 04/13/2004 10:38:30 PM
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The popular blogging-aid software Ecto -- once only offered for Mac -- is now available for Windows users. With today's launch of Ecto for Windows, BoingBoing officially becomes an all-ecto blog! My BoingBoing co-editors all use it to make blogging with Movable Type more friendly and efficient. I'm the only PC-afflicted blogger in the bunch. TypePad, MovableType, Nucleus, and Blogger users: rejoice. Ecto creator Adriaan Tijsseling
says:
Joi and me are very happy to announce the release of a beta of a Windows port of ecto, thanks to a unique collaboration with Alex Hung. It is our hope that with this collaboration the ease of use and features of ecto will now be available to the Windows users.
The beta trial will last one month, during which we hope to find bugs and improve on the product with the help of user feedback. Any information about this beta will be on the ecto for Windows webpage as Alex will be the main responsible person for this Windows version.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stock footage film-fest
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DATE: 04/14/2004 12:21:58 AM
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Great Wired News piece on the Stockstock film-festival, where footage from the Prelinger Archive of ephemeral films is used as the raw material for a festival's worth of short movies.
Festival operators pore over films in the online Prelinger Archives and choose a mishmash of films that are then combined and pared down to a 40-minute tape. Entrants must create a short film, limited to three minutes, using the footage provided. They can manipulate the films however they like and add dialogue, titles and music. All that's required is a computer with video-editing software and the $20 entry fee.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fibonacci MIDI
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DATE: 04/14/2004 02:06:29 AM
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If you play the Fibonacci Sequence through a MIDI engine, you get something eerily Philip-Glass-like.
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(Thanks Quinn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Onion stories reported as fact
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DATE: 04/14/2004 03:34:46 AM
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The Onion's deadpan satricial news-stories, musch-forwarded and chuckled over, have frequently been reported as fact by variou snews agencies, law-enforcement departments, and pressure groups.
[T]he Branch County sheriff's department in Coldwater, Michigan, which had been investigating telemarketing scams targeting the elderly, issued an urgent press release.
"In the course of this investigation, it was learned that this is going on throughout the United States, and some of these telemarketing programs are believed to be operated by al-Qaida," the release stated. "The CIA has announced that they acquired a videotape showing al-Qaida members making phone solicitations for vacation home rentals, long-distance telephone service, magazine subscriptions and other products."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Underoo gallery: knicker nostalgia
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DATE: 04/14/2004 05:01:36 AM
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Retrocrush has put up a marvellous gallery of scanned vintage Underoo packaging -- they're looking for more. Can you fill in the gaps in the collection?
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Music industry smears file-sharing research
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DATE: 04/14/2004 06:57:47 AM
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Koleman Strumpf, the co-author of the first-ever empirical study on the impact of file-sharing on record sales, has found himself on the receiving end of a withering attack from the music industry who argue that their bought-and-paid-for, non-empirical "research" trumps his analysis, attacking his conclusions.
Two years ago, Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee set out to research the matter. Strumpf's interest was piqued by the Napster trial, where the recording industry alleged copyright violations that led to the demise of the pioneering Web site in 2001. In the testimony, experts argued that music downloads had to be the cause of slumping sales.
Strumpf read the studies they cited. They were horrible, he said.
"I was like, 'Boy, this is pretty amazing,' " said Strumpf, a Philadelphia native. "Nobody has done a serious study."
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(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Creative Commons-licensed phonecam blogging service
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DATE: 04/14/2004 07:36:09 AM
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Alfie Dennen of the phonecam blogging service Moblog UK says:
We operate the site code on a copyright commons basis, and with users like Warren Ellis (who want to retain control of their images/video/audio), we urge people using the site to do the same. The fact that Textamerica and mblog etc own your content once it hits their servers got us so angry we felt we had to make an alternative.
We carry no advertising, and are donation supported. In terms of the code itself, we support multiple image posts, multiple audio and image posts, in pretty much every format that phones can produce. The site is very malleable, if you can make a css style sheet, you can make the site entirely your own look, still hosting it with us. We are a community that consists partly of a lot of artists who want to make sure they keep some ownership of their work.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rave for the Deaf
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DATE: 04/14/2004 07:39:57 AM
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BoingBoing reader Charles Vestal
says:
A East London dance club held an all-deaf rave, featuring signing-karaoke, deaf rap, a standup comdian, and all the pumping basslines they could handle. Problem was, the lights were flashing so much, no one could chat with each other at the bar. Perhaps they should hook up with this guy to get a more moving experience.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eisner Award noms announced
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DATE: 04/14/2004 08:18:23 AM
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Nominations for the 16th annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards have been announced. BoingBoing pal Warren Ellis received no fewer than three four (thanks Rui Soares!). Link (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chicketecture? Chicken Chic? iCluck?
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DATE: 04/14/2004 08:27:29 AM
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You won't find any subservient chickens in these poultry housing units, which were thought by some to have been an elaborate April Fool's joke -- but were printed as the real deal in the Times of London, The Register, and elsewhere. Designed so that city-dwelling humans can add a little bokbok to their daily lives, the iMac-like eglu may just be "the world's most stylish and innovative chicken house and [a] perfect way to keep chickens as pets."
Link (Thanks, Giordano!)UPDATE:
Erin says, "A fresh-egg-lovin' pal of mine showed me the Eglu last week. It's no hoax, but it isn't designed for "city-dwellers" as such - most cities prohibit keeping poultry for health reasons, but there are a lot of little hamlets (omelettes?) in England where it would be perfect. Apparently their design was inspired by the iMac. Perhaps this heralds a new era in chicken coop fashions? :D"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FTC: Pr0n spam must be labeled
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DATE: 04/14/2004 09:11:48 AM
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Spam containing pornographic text or images will be required to bear a warning in the subject line for easy filtering, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said yesterday. This is gonna solve the problem? I'm not holding my breath.
Starting May 19, sexually explicit e-mail will have to bear a label reading " Sexually-Explicit:" and the messages themselves will not be allowed to contain graphic material, the FTC said. Outrage over unsolicited pornography and other forms of junk e-mail spurred Congress to pass the first nationwide antispam law last year, which required the FTC to develop labels for smut.
Link to Reuters coverage, Link to AVN coverage.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Larry Flynt and Online Porn Crackdown
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DATE: 04/14/2004 09:41:58 AM
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Today on the NPR program "Day to Day," a report on the debate over government regulation of online pornography and how veterans of such debates -- like publisher and Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt -- plan to weather the storm.
Link to archived online audio. Read a related interview with Larry Flynt on Wired News.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Every night, five mysterious thuds wake up neighborhood
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DATE: 04/14/2004 10:06:17 AM
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It's been six months since the residents of Manor Green Road in London have had an uninterrupted night's sleep. "[T]hey have been hearing five repeated thuds in the middle of the night and cannot trace the source. Double-glazed windows and ear plugs have been no match for the tumult." Link (Via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bowl made from melted toy soldiers
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DATE: 04/14/2004 11:23:39 AM
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Neat looking bowl made from partially-melted plastic soldiers. Reminds me of the wonderful Mattel Strange Change machine from back in the days when toys that got hot enough to melt plastic were considered a good thing. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A9: Amazon's new search engine
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DATE: 04/14/2004 11:40:09 AM
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John Battelle breaks the news on Amazon.com's new search engine. A9, Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live today, so I can finally write about it. I saw it last month (caveat: unbeknownst to me until recently, Amazon targeted me as their conduit to break this news - I think they wanted it to move from the blogosphere out, as opposed the WSJ in) and had to keep the damn thing to myself, it was hard, and here's why: On first blush it's a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google - and more broadly, the entire search-driven world - react?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Message from Weird Al Yankovic
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DATE: 04/14/2004 12:01:53 PM
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Comedian/musician "Weird Al" Yankovic lost both his mother and father this weekend in an accident involving carbon monoxide poisoning. He's posted a message on his website expressing thanks to fans for their kindness and support in his time of need, and he corrects errors in media coverage on the tragedy. Condolences, and much admiration and respect to Al and his family. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dry water
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DATE: 04/14/2004 12:44:41 PM
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"Sapphire" is a sythetic liquid that doesn't get stuff wet.
Pelton submerged several items into a tank of Sapphire that was on the Good Morning America set. Books did not get wet. Electronics were not be destroyed. Items that were submerged in the liquid were dried in a matter of seconds, and showed no ill effects according to Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer and other members of the Good Morning America staff who saw items plunged into it.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Unreal 3's amazing detail
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DATE: 04/14/2004 02:45:09 PM
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Here's a 12 MG Windows Medis video clip of Unreal's fantastically detailed world. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fools think Bill Gates is reading about their pleas for money
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DATE: 04/14/2004 04:21:27 PM
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Gadgetopia's Deane Barker sez: "Check out the comments on this thread. I posted this note about Bill Gates' philanthropy. There are dozens of comments from people who apparently think Bill Gates posted it and will give them money. It's fascinating to read -- what are these people thinking? I thought about shutting off the comments, but I have this perverse desire to read them. Every couple of comments I have someone leave their phone number and/or home address that I have to go edit out."
i was defrauded from my life savings, by a firm called financial asvisory consultants. the president of this firm had a ponzi scheme going for 20 years, and many investors lost thier life savings. its been all over the papers here in los angeles...if there is anything that you can do to help me out of this situation, i would be forever in your debt. please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, or need additional information in regards to this matter.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Redrum, Redrum
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DATE: 04/14/2004 08:38:00 PM
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I just returned from a conference in Estes, Colorado at the Stanley Hotel. Built in 1909 by the inventor of the Stanley Steamer, the hotel is apparently quite haunted. In fact, the spookiness so inspired Stephen King that he spent five months there in 1973 pounding out The Shining. Stanley Kubrick's version of the film wasn't shot at The Stanley, but much of the 1997 TV remake was filmed at the hotel. Unfortunately, I didn't see any ghosts during my stay, but I did see The Shining. The Kubrick version plays around the clock on the hotel TV channel. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free Audi for best Bowie mashup
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DATE: 04/14/2004 10:48:36 PM
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David Bowie recently cut an Audi commercial that mashes up his classic "Rebel, Rebel" andhis new "Never Grow Old." Now Audi and Bowie are holding a competition to see who can do the best new mashup of any two Bowie songs, with a new car to the winner.
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(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos of water throwing festival in Thailand
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DATE: 04/15/2004 08:20:33 AM
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Boingboing reader Ron Morris says:
Songkran - the water throwing fesitval in Thailand. A series of photos that shows what it is like to be in the middle of the water-throwing frenzy on Khao Sarn Road in Bangkok.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eglu and Urban Chicken Chic update
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DATE: 04/15/2004 08:24:03 AM
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Boingboing reader Shelly Rae Clift read yesterday's post on fashionable iMac-like poultry housing and says:
Not only is Chicken Keeping allowed in the fine city of Seattle but you can have up to three (as long as they are hens that is)! (And yes, hens lay eggs just fine without roosters). The City Chickens phenomenon has sparked some creative coop architecture and an annual tour of City Chicken Coops. Now I wonder how I can get an Eglu of my own...?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Green Freezers for Ben and Jerry's
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DATE: 04/15/2004 08:26:15 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
In order to boost its environmental image, Ben & Jerry's teamed with Penn State University to build 'green'-technology freezers which will replace existing ones inside its stores. These new greener chillers use sound waves for cooling instead of environment-damaging chemical refrigerants linked to global warming. In this article, the Wall Street Journal (sorry, paid subscribers only) reports that Ben & Jerry's invested $600,000 in the project and that the first acoustic chiller will be installed in New York next week. And these sound waves will really 'scream for ice cream': they will be attached to amplifiers generating 183 decibels, a sound level thousands of times beyond rock concert levels. This overview contains other details and references about the 'green' chiller.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Make a USB turd
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DATE: 04/15/2004 08:34:06 AM
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Instructions on how to make your very own USB-powered hunk of faux feces. Why anyone would want to, I cannot fathom. Link (Thanks,JL). And when you're done, you can print out this uttery non-worksafe coprophilia coloring book, and frolic away merrily in the land of poo. Link (Thanks, Manuel Wanskasmith, via Susannah)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Forget Alvin and the Chipmunks
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DATE: 04/15/2004 09:03:48 AM
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Here are the Hamsters! A graduate student at Cornell University built a MIDI sequencer controlled by six hamsters:
"The MIDI sequencer intelligently produced melodies by manipulating the musical elements of rhythm and note-choice. Guided by inputs based on hamster movements, Markov chains were used to perform such beat and note computations. In culmination, 3 simultaneous voices were produced spanning 3 octaves and 3 rhythmic tiers. Each voice was controlled by two hamsters: one that was responsible for adjusting the rhythmic qualities of the melody and another that modified the note sequence. With all of these elements in combination, an output was produced with very musical qualities."
Link (Thanks, Nick and Morris!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Transexual Korean pop singer stars in sanitary napkin commercials
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DATE: 04/15/2004 09:43:26 AM
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Harisu, a famous transexual pop singer in Korea, will appear in TV commercials for menstrual pads. "Harisu, who's hit song "Foxy Lady" has made her quite busy lately, will return to Korea on Friday. She is currently in the United States, where she will perform a concert after being selected as the "Korean Artist We'd Most Like to See" by the LA Korean Chamber of Commerce. Harisu, who's hit song "Foxy Lady" has made her quite busy lately, will return to Korea on Friday. She is currently in the United States, where she will perform a concert after being selected as the "Korean Artist We'd Most Like to See" by the LA Korean Chamber of Commerce."
Link (Via World of Wonder)
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TITLE: It's a computer case and a hamster cage
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DATE: 04/15/2004 09:47:44 AM
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"The PC HabiCase allows your gerbil, hamster or mouse to live INSIDE your computer. Ample room is provided for climbing, or your pet can hang out in one of the two "play pods" located at the front and top of the case. Heat from your CPU ensures your rodent will be warm and comfortable in a climate controlled environment." Cost $149. Motherboard not included. It's an April Fool's Joke. Link (Via World of Wonder)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Attogram scale can weigh viruses
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DATE: 04/15/2004 09:58:21 AM
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This new scale can detect mass differences of an attogram (10^-18 grams)"The nanoelectromechanical device used by Craighead and colleagues consists of an oscillating cantilever made from a small wafer of silicon 4 microns long and 500 nm wide. When a small particle is absorbed onto the wafer, it alters the frequency at which the wafer vibrates. The team was able to monitor this change by measuring laser light reflected off the wafer, which then allowed the mass of the particle to be calculated."
Link (Via ZZZ)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Thai Lady-Man beauty contest
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DATE: 04/15/2004 10:45:24 AM
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I'm no expert on Thai society, but I'm fascinated by the role of transvestites and transsexuals in Thai movies and popular culture. The relative social acceptance of "lady boys" seems to be rooted in part in Buddhist tradition, but modern manifestations owe as much to Holllywood dreams as anything else. For instance: the "Greatest Lady-man Pageant in the World," which took place last Friday in Pattaya, promising lady-men "more beautiful than you have ever seen anywhere before."
Link to Lady-Man Pageant website, Link to Flash-based website for the forthcoming Thai film Beautiful Boxer ("He fights like a man so he can become a woman").
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jenna Jameson has a really nice house
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DATE: 04/15/2004 10:55:14 AM
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According to this New York Times article about porn star Jenna Jameson's fabulous abode, we weblogger/freelance writer types are totally in the wrong business. I mean -- check out the size of her shoe closet, for chrissakes.
Link (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stephenson's money-centric interview on Wired News
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DATE: 04/15/2004 10:57:22 AM
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Paul Boutin conducted an interview with Neal Stephenson for Wired News in honour of Neal's new book, Confusion, sequel to the Leibnitzpunk doorstopper Quicksilver, a book that I like more and more the further I get from it (that is, when I read it, I liked it OK, but the more I think about it, the better I like it). Paul got Stephenson to expound for quite a while on money and what it means, a subject on which Neal has many interesting and rarely-heard things to say.
[M]oney is a sort of medium for the exchange of information. When the price of cloth went up in Antwerp, it was because the system of international trade, in some fashion that's too complex for us to understand, was transmitting information about the supply/demand balance. Money makes that kind of information flow better.
Nowadays money is electronic and there's plenty of it. Back then, money had to be silver or gold. In those days silver came from the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Peru, and gold came from the Portuguese colony of Brazil. It was transported across the Atlantic to Europe, though English and other privateers did their best to intercept it en route. Some of it circulated in European markets, some was hoarded in the vaults of wealthy families and institutions, and a lot of it flowed east toward India and China. China was notoriously hungry for silver. It was a complicated flow pattern, with any number of sources and sinks and eddies and feedback loops, and like any other such system it was capable of chaotic behavior. If enough people hoarded their metal, a money shortage would develop, which would make it very difficult to conduct trade on any level beyond that of a village market, and throttle the flow of information.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The whacky world of income tax protesters
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DATE: 04/15/2004 10:59:00 AM
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Great Reason article about people who flat out refuse to pay income taxes.
While in the past evangelists of the "income tax is a fraud" message have tended to sell books and seminars, the We The People Foundation has the advantage of being hard to blithely condemn as a scam. It is not a business selling advice but a nonprofit dedicated to spending money -- more than $1 million since taking up this fight -- to spread the word. Its founder claims Gandhi as his influence: From him Schulz learned that to fight an unjust tyranny, you need a proactive, nonviolent mass movement, and that is what he is trying to create.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cellular sounds
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DATE: 04/15/2004 10:59:13 AM
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What do cells sound like? Nanotech pioneer Jim Gimzewski and grad student Andrew Pelling are using the tiny tip of an atomic force microscope like the needle of a record player to pick up a cell's sound-generating vibrations. Gimzewski has named the fieled "sonocytology." From a Smithsonian Magazine article about the research:
"The distance the cell wall moves determines the amplitude, or volume, of the sound wave, and the speed of the up-and-down movement is its frequency, or pitch. Though the volume of the yeast cell sound was far too low to be heard, Gimzewski says its frequency was theoretically within the range of human hearing. 'So all we're doing is turning up the volume,' he adds."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Shooting for RFID in guns
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DATE: 04/15/2004 02:31:20 PM
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Verichip announced the development of a gun safety system based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. The aim is to prevent a gun from being fired by anyone other than its owner. Here's how it works: A gun is outfitted with an RFID reader. An RFID tag is implanted in the gun owner's hand. Only in the presence of that tag will the handgun allow its trigger to be unlocked. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF guide to Gmail privacy
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DATE: 04/15/2004 02:46:14 PM
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Donna sez: "EFF provides a quick and dirty technical work-around for protecting your privacy if you want to use Google's beta Gmail service - only a temporary fix, and there's the rub: Google needs to step up and provide a solution that protects its customers' privacy (and the same goes for other businesses than can link email to search data!)."
For current and prospective Gmail users, we suggest that you start by deleting your existing Google cookies before you use Gmail (and before you enter your real name or existing email address in any Google form). This will help prevent your pre-existing search history from becoming associated with your identity in the future. (Note that it will also cause you to lose any Google preferences you have entered, such as language or adult content preferences.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pig Brother: swine voyeurism
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DATE: 04/15/2004 02:47:05 PM
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Darren sez, "Watch a family of wild boars, live with video and audio 24-hours a day. I watched and listened for a few minutes tonight, which is tomorrow morning in German boar time. I didn't see any pigs, but I did hear them. The audio is fantastic--very atmospheric. You can hear them scuffling around and snorting in the dirt. Over the past two weeks, apparently this site in Germany was become something of a phenomenon, registering 1.5 million visitors."
Link
(Thanks, Darren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Headphones that can record their input as MP3
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DATE: 04/15/2004 03:05:22 PM
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Engadet reports on Aiwa's new ¥15,000 headphones, which can take standard audio input and play it through and/or record it as an MP3 to its built-in 128MB of memory. It's a great idea, and I can think of a million things I would love to use them for, from recording tracks off vinyl records to the air-traffic control chatter on Channel 12 on United flights.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Electric Company video and audio
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DATE: 04/15/2004 11:41:40 PM
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The Electric Company archive has audio ("Arthur J. Crank sings 'S On The End'," "Easy Reader," "Greedy Greg Grabbed," "The HEY YOU GUYS! Song," "Monolith," etc) and video ("There's A Banana In Your Ear!," "I Am Cute" with Mel Brooks, and "Silhouette Syllables" with Morgan Freeman) from one of the all-time great musical kids' shows of the 1970.
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(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Johannes Grenzfurthner's blog
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DATE: 04/15/2004 11:44:44 PM
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Former guestblogger Johannes Grenzfurthner has started a blog for Monochrom, the Austrian arts collective he's a member of -- it's full of the same wonderful stuff that he posted to our sidebar last month.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tire-slashing cyclist jailed
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DATE: 04/16/2004 06:05:26 AM
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A cyclist who slashed 2,000 car-tyres after being drenched by a car has been sentenced to 16 months in jail.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Howard Waldrop is blogging! Yee-goddamned-HAW!
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DATE: 04/16/2004 08:29:01 AM
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Howard Waldrop, the legendary science fiction writer whose short stories -- such as "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll" and "Night of the Cooters" -- are some of the best sf I've ever read, has taken over Bruce Sterling's old berth as blogger-in-residence for the brilliant sf mag Infinite Matrix. I thank the universe that I lived to read a blog penned by Howard Waldrop.
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(via Beyond the Beyond)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Seekrit Royal Mail site lets you look up cruft-free postcodes
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DATE: 04/16/2004 09:07:21 AM
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The UK Royal Mail has redesigned its site in craptacular, non-accessible glory, shutting off people using assistive devices from looking up postcodes. The official line of the post office is that Britons "begin to notice dramatic improvements in accessibility in the next two months." As NTK points out, though, the old, lynx-friendly site is still accessible at a s33kr1t URL.
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(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Average PC has 28 spywarez running on it
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DATE: 04/16/2004 09:14:46 AM
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Earthlink's spyware-hunting add-on has been running since January. In that time, it's found an average of 28 spyware apps on users' PCs.
The Spy Audit by EarthLink reflects the results of scans involving over one million computers between January and March.
It uncovered more than 29.5 million examples of spyware. These are parasite programs sometimes come attached to software downloaded from the web.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: UCLA Geophysicist says major quake to hit LA by September
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DATE: 04/16/2004 09:16:04 AM
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A geophysicist with a good track record of predicting quakes based on fault line stress data says Los Angeles will experience a nasty 6.4 quake by September.
The experts predicted in June an earthquake measuring 6.4 or higher would strike within nine months in a 496-kilometre region of central California, including San Simeon, where a 6.5-magnitude temblor struck December 22, killing two people.
In July, they said they predicted a magnitude 7.0 or higher quake in a region that included Hokkaido by December 28. The September 25 quake fell within that period.
Now they predict a major quake will hit an area that stretches across desert regions to the east of Los Angeles, home to around nine million people, including the Mojave desert and the resort town of Palm Springs, which lies near the notorious San Andreas fault.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple takes Playfair bullying to India
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DATE: 04/16/2004 09:30:18 AM
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Playfair is the program that removes the use-restriction wrapper from your iTunes Music Store tracks. It used to be hosted on SourceForge, but they chickened out when Apple sent them a bullying note demanding takedown under the ludicrous and loathesome DMCA. Playfair moved to a host in India, which apparently has no such law, but now Apple has nastygrammed the Indian hosts too, resulting in another takedown while the Indians get some legal advice. Gee, Apple, you really can't buy publicity like this. Well, you can. But why would you want to?
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How-to cartoons for kids
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DATE: 04/16/2004 09:38:54 AM
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Howtoons are how-to project cartoons for kids, with a good mix of mischief, smartassery, and science.
Link
(Thanks, Joe!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Paper DVDs
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DATE: 04/16/2004 10:22:21 AM
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Sony and Toppan Printing have developed DVDs consisting of 51 percent paper. Data is stored on the discs using a blue laser instead of red. The smaller wavelength of blue laser light means that 25 gigabytes of data can be packed onto each paper/polymer disk, more than twice the capacity of traditional polycarbonate plastic-based DVDs. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The how and why of happiness
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DATE: 04/16/2004 10:22:36 AM
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Long article about happiness from The Guardian. I was especially interested in the part that reported that people, on average, are least happy at age 42, because they realize they aren't going to be rich and famous like they thought when they were in their twenties. After 42, though, they stop worrying about it, and start enjoying life more.
'People start out in life pretty certain that they're going to end up like David Beckham or win the Nobel Prize,' says Oswald. 'Then, after a few years, they discover it's quite tough out there - not just in their careers, but in life. Unsurprisingly, their happiness drops.' The good news is that the downer doesn't last. According to Oswald, if you trace the trajectory of most peoples' happiness over time it resembles a J-curve. People typically record high satisfaction levels in their early twenties. These then fall steadily towards middle age, before troughing at around 42. Most of us then grow steadily happier as we get older, with those in their sixties expressing the highest satisfaction levels of all - as long, that is, as they stay healthy.
Link (Via LinkmachineGo)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Wireless Firefighter
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DATE: 04/16/2004 11:52:21 AM
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Here's an article I wrote for TheFeature about a new research projected at UC Berkeley to outfit firefighters with high-tech wireless helmets to help them navigate through burning buildings. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London blogger get-together in the planning stages
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DATE: 04/16/2004 12:45:02 PM
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Imajes is planning a London blogger get-together -- I'm hoping it'll happen on a day when I can make it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: British Library audio archive coming
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DATE: 04/16/2004 12:48:39 PM
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The British Library is releasing a ton of audio from its archive on the Web -- though the article implies that it will only be available to higher education institutions.
Examples held on the British Library site include a live recording of Paul Robeson in Othello, Florence Nightingale speaking in one of the earliest sound recordings, as well as the genesis of Sherlock Holmes.
These historic recordings will be made freely available to further and higher education institutions in the UK and will include a wide range of materials, including classical and popular music, broadcast radio, oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.
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(Thanks, Patricio!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian government funding DRM with tax-dollars
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DATE: 04/16/2004 12:53:03 PM
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The Canadian government is giving away tax-dollars to fund the creation of digital rights management software. I think I'm going to throw up. Or go on tax strike. The idea that the Canadian government is going to spend my arts-career-earned dollars on doomed techno-snake-oil whose only use is to frustrate posterity, steal the public's rights in copyright, and justify the existence of stunningly evil anti-circumvention laws -- Christ, it makes me want to spit.
To assist in the development and implementation of online, copyright management and licensing systems and mechanisms that facilitate access to and the exploitation of one or all types of existing or copyrighted works, in particular Canadian, including works where multiple ownership arrangements exist, preferably through the development of a single-window model.
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(Thanks, Damien!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: White roofs cut air-conditioning by 40%
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DATE: 04/16/2004 01:51:16 PM
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Painting our roofs and roads white would substaintially reduce the cost (both monetary and environmental) of cooling our cities.
Cooler roofs come from changing the color of the material used for roofing shingles. Most homes have to be re-roofed about every 20 years. Changing from a dark shingle (once traditional because it was more "wood like") to a light-colored (titanium-based white or terra cotta red) shingle can cut air conditioning costs by up to 40%. Georgia has been a leader in pushing cool roofs, passing a state law encouraging the shift. A few other states and regions also provide incentives, and the federal government is considering adding heat reflectivity requirements to housing regulations.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Brains and beauty, etc.
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DATE: 04/16/2004 03:33:29 PM
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A brain study released today shows that the human ability to appreciate aesthetics is based in the prefontal cortex, part of the brain involved in decision making. The scientists at the Balearic Islands University in Spain came to this conclusion by imaging their subjects' brains while looking at art and photography. According to the study, quoted in Scientific American, "'a phylogenetic change in the prefontal cortex could give way to the decorative and artistic profusion' in humans."
Another study published today by Northwestern University suggests that "Eureka!" moments of insight activate "a distinct area in the right hemisphere of the brain's temporal cortex," a region where semantic connections occur.
"For thousands of years people have said that insight feels different from more straightforward problem solving," one of the researchers said. "We believe this is the first research showing that distinct computational and neural mechanisms lead to these breakthrough moments."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Economics of Hacking an Election
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DATE: 04/16/2004 08:22:33 PM
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Counterpane.com's Bruce Schneier sez: "How hard would it be to swing an election by hacking computerized voting machines? How valuable would it be? I did the math, and the results are even scarier than I expected them to be." Link
The final Transmetropolitan collection, "Transmetropolitan: One More Time," is available for pre-order on Amazon. It's the tenth book, collecting issues 55-60: there are nine other books collecting the earlier issues, and as good as those issues were, it's in this, the final volume of the most original and invigorating sf comic I've ever read, that Ellis outdoes himself, pulling together a finale to his five-year serial that's triumphant, sad and brave. When the last issue came out, I wrote a Wired review of it -- and rereading it today reminds me of just how exciting it was to get a new Transmet ish at the comic-shop. It was Transmet that turned me into a comics reader again: I'm so glad that the whole series is now available for sale.
Link
(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Logan Airport deploys snitch-squad
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DATE: 04/17/2004 01:08:12 AM
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Logan Airport is deploying undercover snoops who will keep an eye out for anxious, sweaty, inappropriately dressed air-travellers who are observing security measures. These people will be sent away for secondary cavity-screening. You know, the number of times I've shown up at a warm-weather airport in a cold-weather coat (formy destination), sweating, anxious, and bug-eyed at the National Guard teenagers threatening to blow their zits off with their hulking carbines... Welcome to the future: a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
[O]fficials watch people as they move through terminals. They look for odd or suspicious behavior: heavy clothes on a hot day, loiterers without luggage, anyone observing security methods.
At the security checkpoints, screening supervisors have a score sheet with a list of behaviors on it. If a passenger hits a certain number, a law enforcement officer will be notified to question the person.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anyone with a Sidekick going to the Nebs?
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DATE: 04/17/2004 01:47:15 AM
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If anyone is going to be at tonight's Nebula Award ceremony with a Sidekick or other wireless email appliance, can you send me an email after the novellette category winner is announced, letting me know if I won? I'm in Linz, Austria, and I'm guessing the award will be announced somewhere around 8PM, which is 5AM here -- I'm setting an alarm for 5...
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Retired patent examiner turned Rube Goldberg
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DATE: 04/17/2004 03:27:13 AM
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Arthur Paul Pedrick was a UK patent examiner who retired and filed many patents for whacky, impractical inventions.
A horse-powered car, putting the cart before the horse. To control the speed, the car's accelerator pedal varies the thrust which the horse must exert to reach its feedbox 2. The brake pedal is linked to the horse's halter. The ignition switch can give the horse's posterior a mild electric shock to stimulate it into movement.
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(via Monochrom)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mickey Mouse's dwindling brand
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DATE: 04/17/2004 07:03:53 AM
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Great NYT feature on the dwindling importance of Mickey Mouse as a character, and the attempts of the Disney organization to reimagine Mickey as a relevant character today.
"I was around 6 when I first saw him," [Maurice Sendak] said. "It filled me with joy. I think it was those primary colors so vivid and pure, taken up with the most incredibly beautiful animation, reminding you of Fred Astaire. Oh! And his character was the kind I wished I'd had as a child: brave and sassy and nasty and crooked and thinking of ways to outdo people." The joy leached from Mr. Sendak's voice. "Not like the lifeless fat pig he is now."
Mr. Sendak is hardly alone in mourning the mouse's decline. "Boring," "embalmed," "neglected," "irrelevant," "deracinated" and, perhaps most damning, "over" are some of the adjectives that cropped up in recent interviews with people in the cartoon, movie and marketing businesses.
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(Thanks, Warren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Giant LAN party runs girl geeks off the premises
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DATE: 04/17/2004 03:07:48 PM
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Katla was one of the few women to attend a 5,000-person LAN party in Norway called The Gathering. Some of the "boys" at the LAN party decided to make a movie consisting of close-ups fo the tits and asses of the women in attendance. Katla's sworn off The Gathering -- her post is heartbreaking.
It was to much to hope for. 5 days running around with fellow geeks, doing geeky stuff. I sdont think i want to go back here, and now i just want to go home, damb brats. now there is not female geeks here anymore. but girls, and doubt not for a secound that they are here for your pleasure only. fucking assholes. and they are still here. they did not get kicked out. and i doubt they will be. Dam shame, it could have been fun beeing a geek here. but i think ill just stay away.
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(via Misbehaving)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: No Nebula for me, alas
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DATE: 04/17/2004 10:28:40 PM
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Well, thanks to Jack Bell, I just listened in on Connie Willis reading out the winners for the Best Novelette category at the Nebulas. My story, 0wnz0red, didn't win, alas. However, I am here to tell you that standing in a hotel in Linz, phone clamped to ear, listening to someone read out the Nebula winners thousands of miles and nine timezones away, was enough to set my heart racing. Thanks to everyone who nominated me and voted for me. It truly is an honour just to be nominated. Eileen Gunn would have given my acceptance speech, had I won, may as well reproduce it here for alternate historians:
If there's anything worse than a long award-speech, it's a long award-speech by proxy, so this is short. I deeply regret not being there tonight, and I am thrilled down to my boots by this honour. In this age of Neil Gaiman's Hugo speeches, it's a cliche to say, "Holy fuck, I've won a Nebula," but really, after all, holy fuck, I've won a Nebula.
Thanks to everyone, but especially to my editors, co-workers and copyfighters, to my agent Don Maass and the Gibraltar Point workshop, and to all the slashdotters and other netizens who downloaded this from Salon.
And thanks to Eileen for letting me make her say "fuck" twice, er, three times, in front of all of you.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nebula Award winners
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DATE: 04/18/2004 05:55:13 AM
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Locus Online has this year's Nebula winners:
NOVEL: The Speek of Dark, Elizabeth Moon (Ballantine)
NOVELLA: Coraline, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins)
NOVELETTE: "The Empire of Ice Cream", Jeffrey Ford (Sci Fiction, 26 Feb 2003)
SHORT STORY: "What I Didn't See", Karen Joy Fowler (Sci Fiction 10 Jul 2002)
SCRIPT: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair & Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema; based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien)
DAMON KNIGHT MEMORIAL GRAND MASTER AWARD: Robert Silverberg
SERVICE TO SFWA AWARD: Ann Crispin
SERVICE TO SFWA AWARD: Michael Capobianco
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1995 web-hosting rates
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DATE: 04/18/2004 07:26:52 AM
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This web-page advertising a 1995 web-hosting service is a reminder of the kind of crazy rates we got away with in the early day of the Interweb.
Sun, Dec 28, 1995
Special Offer! WorldWideWeb Precence for only $250 per month ($100 setup)!
* Your own unique WWW address (e.g. w3.1c4.net/www/users/j/jhs/index.html)!
* 1 mail account (e.g. you@mail7.1c4.net)!
* 3Mb storage space! More than enough for a modern information service.
* Unlimited FTP updates and transfers.
* 30 day money-back guarantee and no minimum contract.
* FULL customer technical support during normal office hours!
* Page Design, graphic design, and html authoring and cgi scripting is available from $50 to $125 per hour, domain name registration and maintenance is $100 per year.
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Clean Slate "amnesty" euthanized
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DATE: 04/18/2004 02:46:44 PM
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Jason Schultz analyzes the recording industry's withdrawal of its perp-walk "Clean Slate" program.
The RIAA has finally seen the light with regard to its "Clean Slate" program, which offered false amnesty, or shamnesty, to people who admitted to file sharing. Citing the success of its "education" campaign, the group has abruptly cancelled the program.
"Clean Slate" promised that in exchange for a confession, you could gain meaningful protection from lawsuits for copyright infringement. In fact, the program left you vulnerable to lawsuits by record companies and music publishers, as well as bands like Metallica that retain independent control of music rights.
Eric Parke, represented by Ira Rothken, brought suit, charging fraudulent business practices -- and here, perhaps, we can glean the true reason for the RIAA's change of heart. Its attorneys announced during a recent court proceeding that the group had discontinued "Clean Slate" -- and that therefore the case was moot. The announcement took Mr. Parke, his attorney and the judge by surprise.
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(Thanks Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Web-based iTunes Music Store client and library
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DATE: 04/18/2004 02:49:12 PM
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The Downhill Battle people are hosting a web-based script that searches the iTunes Music Store and allows you to interact with it as though you were using a copy of iTunes itself. The script is open-source, and they hope the script will be used for innovative functionality in other apps, like providing 30-second previews and metadate for tracks on P2P nets.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Vintage Electronics Zen
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DATE: 04/18/2004 03:47:12 PM
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pocket calculator show
commodore 64 heaven
vinyl data
world of spectrum
amiga forever
video synths
dot matrix synth
atari coin op flyers
seeing double
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Are Hybrids as Green as Fuel Cells?
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DATE: 04/18/2004 03:48:44 PM
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BoingBoing pal Frank Boosman says:
NPR's All Things Considered had an interview (audio only) recently with journalist Matt Wald, "author of an article questioning the optimistic vision of the so-called "hydrogen economy" published in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American." Wald talks about "wells to wheels," the total efficiency and pollution from source to use of different methods of powering cars. Apparently buying a hybrid (a Prius, presumably) is just as green as a fuel cell would be.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art from AA batteries
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DATE: 04/18/2004 03:54:41 PM
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Fully functional batteries transformed into hip objets d'art.
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(Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Live blogging from NAB-RTNDA television industry convention
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DATE: 04/18/2004 09:12:24 PM
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LostRemote's Cory Bergman says:
A couple of us are blogging from TV's largest annual convention, NAB-RTNDA, in Vegas all week. We're the only site blogging the event, and we'll post the most forward-thinking ideas and the most promising new technology.
These were followed up by questions about the BK Tendercrisp Sandwich and their low-carb menu. Looks like they're looking to evaluate the potency of their stealth marketing campaign.
Link to earlier BoingBoing posts on the Subservient Chicken online ad, including an expose of the chicken's X-rated code (which has now been removed from the site. No "blowjob" or "hump me"s for you today.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bay Area hip hop jargon glossary
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DATE: 04/18/2004 09:31:26 PM
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Former BoingBoing guestblogger and Business 2.0 editor Todd Lappin points us to an online glossary of hip-hop and gangster language that is regionally specific to the San Francisco Bay Area.
The list includes terms which are now part of the broader lexicon of American popular speech (like "cabbage," "cheddar," and "scratch," all of which mean money). But I found plenty of terms in here that were new for me. For instance: "Dipped in Butta sauce" (Hella fitted, g\'d up, creased up from tha feet up), "Burners" (a cellular telephone that is being used illegally), and "Fedex" (an individual that delivers quick money). Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn Valley's HIV Crisis -- Lara Roxx interview, blog updates
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DATE: 04/18/2004 09:45:23 PM
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Adult Video News has what appears to be the first extensive interview with Canadian teenager (conflicting reports peg her age at 18, 19, 21, and 22, thanks Fleshbot) Lara Roxx, the second of two porn actors to be diagnosed HIV positive last week.
When she arrived in L.A. in mid-March from Montreal, on a ticket paid for with borrowed funds, her short brown hair streaked with pink, all she wanted to do was perform in enough scenes to create a nest-egg that she could take back to Canada and use to go on with her life. Instead, she's now broke, jobless and had been staying with friends, and if the tests come back Saturday evening as she's hoping they won't, HIV-positive.
"My manager [Daniel Perrault] woke me up on that morning that they all found out,"Roxx told AVN.com. "I was very upset on that day; I don't even remember what day it was."It was Tuesday, April 13, the day the news broke that popular performer Darren James had contracted HIV -- the first active performer on the straight side of the industry to do so in nearly five years.
"When I got there, me and Marc had a little conversation, because Thomas Hope told me I was going to do a d.p., and so I get there and Marc Anthony tells me it's a d.a., which stands for double anal, "Roxx recalled. "And I'm like, 'â€What? I've never done a double anal.' And he's like, 'Well, that's what we need. It's either that or nothing.' And that's how they do it. But Marc Anthony was playing that, and I think that really sucks, because I'm mad at the friend I thought I had in Marc, because he knew double anal was dangerous. I knew it too, really, probably, but I was just putting it way back in my mind because I was down in California to make the maximum amount of money, to come back home wealthy. I had plans for the money."
LinK to AVN interview. Fleshbot has also been doing a terrific job of pointing to good sources of breaking news on the HIV scare -- the industry's first in five years.
AVN is collecting donations to assist Ms. Roxx, and also posts news that adult film star Jenna Jameson has launched a fundraising campaign to help porn industry workers suffering financial hardships from both the quarantine and the production moratorium. And Carly Milne at Pornblography posts this damning rant from one porn industry worker who says, "I'm about the most gung-ho porno guy you'll ever meet. But I'm pretty sick to my stomach right now hearing about the people who just don't care."
Update: The L.A. Daily News reports that a state-county task force has drafted a plan that would make condom use mandatory in the industry. The plan would require production companies to comply with a CAL-OSHA injury and illness prevention plan, and those who do not comply would face closure. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Condensed, snarkified Pericles
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DATE: 04/19/2004 03:23:18 AM
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Francis sez, " My Shakespeare reading group got around to Pericles on Sunday afternoon, and the plot was so far-fetched, even by Shakespearean standards, that I felt it needed documenting. So I wrote a condensed, snarkified version of the entire play."
HELICANUS: What's the matter, my lord?
PERICLES: Oh...the king of Antioch is sleeping with his daughter and now he wants to kill me because he's afraid I'll tell everyone about it or something. (He leans out the window.) OH, IF ONLY I HAD NEVER LEARNED HE WAS SLEEPING WITH HIS DAUGHTER.
HELICANUS: I can see how that would be a problem. Maybe you should leave town until he cools off, or dies, or whatever, since it's pretty easy to find you here.
PERICLES: Since I'm prince and all.
HELICANUS: Exactly.
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(Thanks, Francis!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pulp Fiction -- new RSS reader for Mac OSX
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DATE: 04/19/2004 06:31:54 AM
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Coming to beta for Mac OS X on May 1st: a new RSS reader called "Pulp Fiction."
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(thanks, Jean-Luc
)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: My Crate and Barrel Moment with Quentin Tarantino
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DATE: 04/19/2004 06:38:30 AM
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Well, you could call it that. Christen Nelson's blog entry about her chance encounter with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino at a shopping mall in Los Angeles. Ms. Nelson is an actor and former member of the infamous Groundlings Theatre, and was recently cast for a new Rob Reiner television pilot.
"That's a dynamite purse. Where'd you get it?" As I turned to respond to the question and the little bells in my head went off alerting me to the fact that the voice I heard sounded just like Quentin... oh my God I would recognize that big bell pepper of a head anywhere... Tarantino!
My pink vinyl purse with two black cats joined at the tail often generates conversation, had I known that the man who brought me Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction would engage me in conversation I would have paid 10 times the price. So I said,"ohIgotitinCanadafouryearsagoitssupersturdyanditholdseverythingbecauseit'sjustonebigcompartmentIloveit. I don't mean to be a gay jackass but... you're Quentin Tarantino AND YOU ARE THE BALLS!" Seriously that is what I said.
Link (Thanks, Shane)
UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Jason writes:
Christen Nelson's story [about a chance shopping encounter with famed film director Quentin Tarantino] was wicked cool and being that I am a detail-obsessed freak I went over to Crate and Barrel to see the registry. Sure enough, it exists!
And sure enough there were 16 Espresso Peppermills requested. However, none of them have been fulfilled. So that leads a kind of question to Christen's wonderful closer about the 4 mills from Dennis. I hate to peek behind the curtain and go 'Boo!,' but...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Criticism in Japan for "Lost in Translation"
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DATE: 04/19/2004 06:50:02 AM
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Interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor on reactions in Japan to the film Lost in Translation -- which is evidently not translating so well.
[T]he film is under attack for cultural bias, and for maximizing its humor by depicting Japanese as robotic and cartoon-like. The question is: to what degree is the film insensitive - and to what extent is this the kind of "poking fun" that some ethnic groups now ignore? Until now, none of these voices or questions has come from Japan. Indeed, while "Lost in Translation" opened all over the world last fall, it opened in image-conscious Tokyo only last weekend. Some sources say this is deliberate. Japanese decorum on culturally sensitive matters precludes angry protest or high-volume misgivings about images that might be considered unfair or "unpleasant," to use a local reviewer's term. But it is telling that the Academy-award-winning "valentine" can be seen here only in a small 300-seat theater in Shibuya, and critics warn that the film may hurt the feelings of ordinary Japanese.
Link, and Link to background on earlier inter-cultural criticism of the film (via Joi Ito)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Transgender in Thailand, online.
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DATE: 04/19/2004 06:51:22 AM
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Following up on last week's post on the subject, BoingBoing reader Rachel writes:
The Thai word translated as "transvestite" or "shemale" is khatoey, also spelled katoey, kathoey and several other ways. The word doesn't really have the negative ring of those two English words. And, trust me, those English words do have a negative ring. Call any TS woman in the US a "shemale" and she'll be deeply insulted 98% of the time. Very few crossdressers in the US like the term "transvestite". If you're looking for an English word to describe these women, "transsexual" is probably closest; "pre-op transsexual" or "non-op transsexual"
is possibly more accurate, though contentious.
Probably the best site around to actually get to know the khatoey is Andrew Matzner's Transgender in Thailand site . I also recommend looking at
my site for a more general view of transgender life in Asia.
You might also read my journal about getting SRS in Thailand.
I think that the site you linked to -- Alcazar's -- is primarily a club in Pattaya. The contest is quite glamorous and highly-esteemed, but that is because Alcazar's itself is the most famous kathoey cabaret in Thailand. I think that the contest is primarily a promotion for the club; it isn't so much about Hollywood dreams as it is about helping secure Alcazar's place in the drag universe. Finally, a plea: I hope that you are interested in the khatoey women as people, not as sex objects; your entry on BoingBoing seems to indicate that you are curious about their roles in society and how society views them, not in prodding them with a virtual stick as so many others have. If you are in fact approaching them with respect, then you have my heartfelt thanks.
Link. Photo: Thai kickboxer-turned-beauty-queen Nong Tum, whose life story is now a movie. Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Amherst asks: What is this thing?
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DATE: 04/19/2004 10:34:57 AM
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Thsi thing is from Amherst's Archives and Special Collections. No one there knows what it's purpose is, and they are asking for readers to help. (I'll bet Boing Boing's readers will come up with the answer today.)
The device is about 12 inches across and is seen here sitting on its flat wooden platform; apparently, it would be removed from the platform for use. The raised lid has a clip that restrains a spring-loaded brass oval, here shown released and resting on top of a ring of brass arms. Each brass arm has at its narrow end a sharp, upward-facing point. Those points form the innermost oval. The arms are connected to padded, movable wooden rods hanging below the device.
Link (Thanks, Anne!)
Mel Johnson sez: I believe I know what this device is.
In fact, as a child I had my head inside one, in the old McFarlin's Men's Clothing Store in Rochester, New York.
A piece of paper is fastened in the top of the device - probably held by the thee pins nearest the center. Then the device is placed over someones head, with the padded rods over and around the head, so the rods cushion the outer circumference of
the head, the flat surfaces of the device being parallel to the floor. Something happens with the piece of paper such that an outline of the head is punched in the paper with the pointed rods, giving the shape of the head.
It was used in clothing stores to aid in fitting hats.
My head was pear-shaped!
Anne sez: Here's some confirmation of the hat-fitting hypothesis: a picture of a similar hat-fitting device, a "conformateur", apparently patented in the 1850s by one Monsieur Maillard. It's shown on the head. Antiques like this are apparently still used in hat-making today, because no-one is manufacturing new ones. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Thin models boost self-image?
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DATE: 04/19/2004 10:56:20 AM
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A University of Toronto study posits that most young women who are exposed to media images of thin models are actually inspired in a positive way. "Our findings suggest that these images may actually make young women feel good about themselves because they treat that image as a fantasy goal, thinking, She looks great and I could look like that, too," says psychology professor Peter Herman, co-author of the study. Before you call BS though, know that Herman then adds that "young women who are really super-invested in trying to emulate this image may be the ones who go on to develop a true eating disorder."
"The idea that these thin media ideals are inspiring rather than depressing is almost necessary to account for the fact that young women - and just about everybody else - spend a lot of time voluntarily exposing themselves to these images," he says.
Masochism is very mysterious, Dr. Herman.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Intel IT manager simulation simulates sexist workplace assumptions, too
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DATE: 04/19/2004 11:43:32 AM
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Amy sez, "Intel has a game on their website called 'The Intel IT Manager Game - The simulation of an IT department.' It's supposed to simulate the tasks of an IT manager, including hiring new people. But guess what? All of the characters are male! You couldn't even hire a woman if you tried, because there are no female characters!!
Link
(Thanks, Amy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ESC-key chairs
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DATE: 04/19/2004 11:53:19 AM
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This German company is offering $90 stools shaped like giant ESC keys: "the perfect pouf for all victims of the new media collapse!"
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paint-your-floors HOWTO
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DATE: 04/19/2004 11:55:26 AM
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Great Apartment Therapy blog post on how to paint your floors "without screwing it up" -- the results speak for themselves.
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(via Megnut)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF waging war on bullshit Internet patents
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DATE: 04/19/2004 11:57:13 AM
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This is so freaking cool: EFF is going to start actively busting bullshit Internet patents, hunting down prior art and getting the USPTO to revoke the patents.
The new EFF initiative seeks to document these threats and fight back against them. EFF has pledged to file "re-examination" requests with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), asking the agency to revoke patents that are having negative effects on Internet innovation and free expression.
"More and more, people are using software and Internet technology to express themselves," said EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer. "Patent owners who threaten this expression are creating a chilling effect on free speech."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online gallery of extreme-goth Japanese dolls
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DATE: 04/19/2004 12:23:19 PM
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Photos of ultra-creepy Japanese dolls. Sort of "Silence of the Lambs" meets "Dream House Barbie."
Link (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Computer geek" sentenced to 13 years for making ricin
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DATE: 04/19/2004 12:27:06 PM
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Ken Olson, a former employee of Agilent in Spokane Washington, was sentenced to 13 years for making ricin, a highly toxic chemical derived from castor beans. It's very easy to make ricin and castor beans are legal to possess and are readily available. Prosecutors say Olson was plotting to kill his wife and take up with his mistress. Olson's wife and mistress have teamed up to defend him.
The trouble began Aug. 21, 2001, when a co-worker at Agilent found an 80-page document on how to make a bomb.
The co-worker took the document to supervisors, who traced it to Olsen's computer. Company investigators examined his Internet logs and discovered Olsen had spent more than a year researching explosives and poisons. They found books in his cubicle on how to kill people without leaving a trace and a piece of paper with calculations of dosages for a 150-pound person — the approximate weight of his wife.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Soup imitates art: Warhol-style Campbell's tomato soup on sale
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DATE: 04/19/2004 01:00:13 PM
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To commemorate the work of Andy Warhol, Campbell's is selling four packs of tomato soup with Warhol-esque labels. Link (Via WOW)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Nuclear Missiles pose a health hazard
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DATE: 04/19/2004 02:32:00 PM
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Concerned for the health of people being killed by nuclear bombs, the EPA has ordered new, less-toxic, rockets to be installed on ICBMs.
"In order to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulations, and at a cost of about $5.2 million per ICBM, the rocket motors on 500 Minuteman III missiles will be replaced with new ones. These rockets will emit less toxic chemicals when used."
"EPA regulations do not apply in foreign countries, so no changes are being made to reduce the harmful environmental effects of the nuclear warheads."
Link (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kill Bill, the Czech online game.
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DATE: 04/19/2004 03:28:34 PM
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Online game apparently created by/for this Czech company to promote Crate and Barrel aficionado Quentin Tarantino's new film Kill Bill in Eastern Europe.
Link (Via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Will trade passwords for chocolate
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DATE: 04/19/2004 03:34:21 PM
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According to this Security Pipeline article, nearly three quarters of office workers in an impromptu man-on-the-street survey were willing to give up their passwords when offered the bribe of a chocolate bar. Heh. Heaven only knows what they'd fork over for venti latte with extra foam. Link (Thanks, Mitch!)
BoingBoing reader Joe Buck was among a number of hardened cynics who wrote in to say, "If a person on the street offers me a chocolate bar in exchange for my password, and it's a good chocolate bar, I'll happily tell him or her a password... except that it will be fake." Man, the next time some internet security journalist approaches me clutching a wad of Godiva, I sure as hell know what I'm gonna say!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gothic dress made from umbrellas
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:17:24 AM
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Howard sez, "My friend Erin was inspired by the BB entry about the dress made with umbrellas. So as a school assignment (she's a fashion design major), she designed and fashioned together an umbrella dress done up in a 'elegant gothic lolita' style."
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(Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Soft-boiled-egg cakemod HOWTO
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:20:06 AM
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This cakemodder has devised a "soft-boiled egg cake" filled with lemon curd. Yummy!
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(Thanks, Yi!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Functional replica siege engines
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:24:59 AM
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Kaden hand-builds and sells these functional mantelpiece/desktop replicas of medieval siege engines, which he calls "antiques from a parallel universe." I'm partial to the ballista.
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(Thanks, Kaden!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mayor of Salt Lake City is an idiot
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:27:59 AM
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The Mayor of Salt Lake City is opposed to municipal Internet projects, because the Internet is bad for your quality of life and deprives you of fresh air.
"I just don't see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files," he said. "We should spend money on getting people fit, rather than deteriorating their quality of life with higher bandwidth to surf the Net."
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(via Werblog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Prison wipes creative-writing class HDDs after student wins PEN award
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:33:27 AM
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A creative-writing student in a prison in Connecticut won a $25,000 PEN American Center prize for the work she did in jail. The prison system responded by erasing all of the writing produced by her and her classmates.
15 women inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the prison's school ordered all hard drives used for the class erased and its computer disks turned over...
Department of Correction Commissioner Theresa Lantz halted the writing program March 29 after learning that inmate Barbara Parsons Lane had won a $25,000 PEN American Center prize for her work on the 2003 book "Couldn't Keep It To Myself: Testimonies from our Imprisoned Sisters."
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: U of T open source conference
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:39:20 AM
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University of Toronto is throwing a three-day open source conference from May 9-11 at Con Hall. Cheap student tix are available until the end of the month.
# Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat, the world's most successful Linux company
# Eben Moglen, Columbia law professor and general counsel, Free Software Foundation
# Steve Weber, Berkeley political economy professor whose Harvard University Press book on open source will appear this April
# Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server Project
# Derek Keats, recent chair of the first major African conference on open source
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(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Charlie Stross and me at Plokta.con, May 1
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:44:04 AM
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Plokta.con is a regional science fiction convention in Newbury, UK. Charlie Stross is this year's Guest of Honour, and I'll be coming out on Saturday, May 1 to conduct Charlie's Guest of Honour interview. Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nevermind chocolates, survey says people give passwords away for nothing.
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DATE: 04/20/2004 06:26:33 AM
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Boingboing reader R.I. Pienaar says:
I noticed this BoingBoing post about people swapping passwords for chocolate. Here is another article from January along the same lines -- except no offers for anything, and 90% of people still gave passwords.
Link. The BBC now has more on the choco-password connection, here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: ShitBegone: no-frills toilet paper
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DATE: 04/20/2004 08:31:26 AM
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A Boing Boing reader sez: "ShitBegone toilet paper is a quality product that exemplifies your attitude and approach to life. ShitBegone Value is a basic, 100% recycled toilet paper for those who don't need to pay for top-notch softness— like businesses and single men." 96 rolls for $44.99 Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Excellent '60s anti-Beatles pamphlet cover
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DATE: 04/20/2004 09:28:24 AM
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Cover art from a religious tract titled "Communism, Hypnotism & The Beatles." I wish the whole pamphlet were online. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The art of Ron Popiel
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DATE: 04/20/2004 09:46:45 AM
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Dominic sez: "IDFuel is a daily Industrial Design magazine, and we have just published our first full length article about the exhibit of Ron Popiel's inventions at the Chicago Cultural Center. Lots of cool pictures and commentary on the Pocket Fisherman, the O-Matics, and a multitude of lesser known gadgets." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Up close review of GMail
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DATE: 04/20/2004 10:02:39 AM
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Here's a review of Google's Gmail, written by a Beta user.
This is the time to say that for Gmail you are not senders of electronic messages, you are "conversers." For this reason, when you delete a message, Gmail will tell you, "The conversation has been moved to the trash."
This is about more than semantics. If, in Hotmail for example, you send four emails to four friends, asking them their opinion about a certain restaurant, every answer comes in as a separate email. Google thinks this is a mistake. "It's a conversation," the service maintains, and it put all the answers together under one roof - the "conversation." Thus, instead of four answers, you'll get one answer containing the messages from each friend who responded to your question.
Link (via Interesting People)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Weird books for tinkerers and mad scientists
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DATE: 04/20/2004 10:06:19 AM
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I came across an ad for Lindsay's Technical Books in Popular Science. The ad reads like a classified that would have been in the back of the magazine fifty years ago: "Secrets! Melt Metal! Machine Shop! Hydrogen! Old Time Radio! Tesla! Chemistry! Incredible plans, lost secrets, forgotten how-to, and strange books!" It looks like these folks have a lot of fun in their basement labs and backyard foundries. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Taxpayers unwittingly paying for Republican National Committee's propaganda
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DATE: 04/20/2004 12:00:45 PM
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Tex sez: "It appears that our tax money is being used to spread RNC propaganda.
Go here to this taxpayer-funded site and read at the bottom. These lines are there:
America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create
new jobs as the President's policies are doing; or it can raise taxes
on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery
and future job creation.
Now go to this page. Go
down to the bottom. In bold in the next to the last paragraph you will
read:
America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create
new jobs as the President's polices are doing; or it can raise taxes
on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery
and future job creation.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Poop Report
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DATE: 04/20/2004 02:08:25 PM
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Dan Brekke sez: "In looking for the story that must be behind ShitBegone, I came across a feature on SB's founder and resident genius, a Brooklyn lad named Jed Ela. The site running the feature deserves the attention of all who've ever spent a moment of deep thought on the wonders of the body's excretory system and its effects on our world: The Poop Report." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gucci's iPod case
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DATE: 04/20/2004 03:58:11 PM
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Gucci's shipping a $200 iPod case with all the stylish aesthetics of a chintz sofa-cover.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
to
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tubby little fluffy all stuffed with RAM
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DATE: 04/20/2004 04:00:15 PM
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This Winne-the-Pooh-looking plush toy conceals a 128MB flash-memory drive and MP3 player.
Link
(via Gizmodo and PlayerBlog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Move over, Grey Album -- "London, Booted"
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DATE: 04/20/2004 06:34:44 PM
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Former BoingBoing guestblogger Todd Lappin says,
"Hot on the heels of the Grey Album comes another innnnteresting mash-up/bootleg project that was originally posted as a collaborative challenge to DJs in February. The goal: Take one track from the Clash's "London Calling," and "remix it, add to it, subtract from it
- put your own tributary spin on it." The result is "London Booted" - 19 tracks (plus a few bonus extras) of eclectically reinterpreted Clash. In return for the download, the project organizers are asking listeners to donate to one of several charities, including Future Forests, a reforestation initiative that was a favorite of Joe Strummer. For £17.50 you can even have your own tree in Joe Strummer's Rebel Woods, a future forests project on the Isle of Lucy... er... Skye."
Pretty righteous. I'm fond of "Bubba's Got a Brand New Cadillac," "What about Brixton," and "(Spanish Bombs) over Baghdad," a mashup with a track from Outkast's Stankonia. Hmmmm.... Outklash? Link to London Booted home, and try this alternate site if that doesn't work.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYT coverage of prison attack on creative writing has gaping hole
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DATE: 04/20/2004 11:06:55 PM
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The NYT has reported, twice, on the prison creative writing program whose student won a Silver PEN award for First Amendment Writing and was rewarded by having all of her -- and her classmates' -- work erased by the prison system. As much as the Times loved the human interest angle of this story ("Prisoners win award!") they never bothered to pick up the AP newswire story on the unconscionable, tragic response from the prison system.
Link 1, Link 2
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gardner Dozois stepping down from Asimov's
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DATE: 04/20/2004 11:26:58 PM
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Gardner Dozois, the long-sitting editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, is stepping down to pursue personal writing projects. Gardner's won the Hugo for best editor 14 times, making him one of the award-winningest editors in the history of the field, and the stories in Asimov's are stunningly well-represented at every year's Nebula and Hugo awards. Dozois popularized the term "cyberpunk" and was a midwife for the literary movement. Gardner's also the first editor to have bought a story from me for a pro market, and the first Year's Best editor to buy a reprint from me, for his definitive, astonishing, long running Year's Best Sceince Fiction anthologies.
Sheila Williams -- currently Managing Editor -- is stepping into Gardner's position, which is itself exciting news: Sheila was a real protege of Asimov's, a friend of his who has been with the magazine even longer than Gardner has. Sheila's always been the "business" editor at Asimov's, the one who handles the logistics and keeps track of who's where and working on what. She knows the Asimov's stable as well as anyone and is herself a shrewd and astute editor.
But the biggest news here is that Gardner is going to go back to work on his own fiction. When I entered the field, all I knew about Gardner was that he was the magazine editor to sell to, but gradually, I discovered that Gardner had once been considered the writer to watch in the field, a talented and lively prose stylist whose output had all but stopped when he took over the berth at Asimov's and began editing his fantastic Year's Best anthologies.
So the field has lost one of its best editors, but it's gained back one of its best writers. That's pretty cool.
Link
(Thanks, Vera!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Darth Vader's flagship for sale on eBay
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This guy spent three years building an enourmous model of Star Wars Super Star Destroyer -- Darth Vader's flagship. It's to the same scale as the 4" figurines, making it a kind of jumbo skiffy dollhouse for your Lucasfilm dollies. It's pretty amazing. Bidding stands at £305 right now with four days left.
Taking almost 3 years to make, this is the one of a kind 4" scale figure toy that I always wanted, and now I have built it. I just wish I’d had one of these when I was a kid. And for kids this Star Destroyer has been built. The ship is constructed almost entirely of wood and all the parts are quite chunky with nothing small to break off (unless abused). It is approximately 2 metres in length, 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high, it is rather large but built solidly. Caster wheels on the base allow for easy movement and the top section can be removed for storage and easier transportation. Not for under 3s but great fun to play with from 6 – 60 year olds!
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(Thanks, Peter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 2nd Circuit opinion affirms fair use -- even when the source is infringing
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DATE: 04/20/2004 11:58:46 PM
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On Copyfight, Jason Schulz calls out to a recent Second Circuit opinion in which the value of fair use is affirmed, even when the material itself is taken from an infringer. This is the right decision: if I want to make a critical documentary about a Star Wars movie, and the only way for me to get my clips is by downloading them from Kazaa, my reuse of the material should be fair use -- even if the person who ripped the movie and put it on a P2P net is infringing.
"Fair use is not a doctrine that exists by sufferance, or that is earned by good works and clean morals; it is a right--codified in § 107 and recognized since shortly after the Statute of Anne--that is "necessary to fulfill copyright's very purpose, '[t]o promote the Progress of science and the useful arts . . . .'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spammer starting SpamKing clothing line: "Just opt out"
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DATE: 04/21/2004 12:01:34 AM
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Scott Richter, one of the original Big Name Spammers, has decided to augment his email marketing biz with a line of SpamKing clothing.
Richter said the line, initially hats, shirts and panties, will be aimed at the hip-hop, grunge and skateboarding crowds. It will feature sayings such as "Just opt out," and "Click it."
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(via Lawmeme)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stepheon's Confusion on Salon
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DATE: 04/21/2004 12:18:10 AM
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My copy of Neal Stephenson's Confusion, the new, enormous sequel to Quicksilver, arrived in the mail yesterday before I left for Turin, and it's in my suitcase, waiting for me. Quicksilver was a remarkable book, a triumphant combination of Stephenson's trivia-obsessed, research-intensive approach to the precursors of the information age (viz. Snow Crash's Nam-Shub of Enki and Cryptonomicon's Bletchley Park sequences) and his gift for sprawling, braided stoorylines that combine slapstick action scenes with intense, emotional passages.
Salon's running a double feature on Stephenson today: a long interview with Neal, and a review by Andrew Leonard. Both are highly recommended -- I can't wait to sink my teeth into this book.
Science was new and they didn't know how to do it yet. Science was and is a somewhat contentious thing. Someone's got a theory and they promulgate that theory and then something else comes along and alters, improves on or even flatly contradicts it. Now that we've got 350 years of perspective on this, scientists understand that this is how it's done and there's a mechanism in place for how to do it. It's refereed journals and it's become institutionalized. They didn't have that perspective on it. They couldn't stand back and say, Well, my theory may get contradicted here and there, but this guy who's contradicting it will get contradicted in turn. They didn't have that expectation. They didn't have journals. The first two journals were the Journale de Savants, which was about 1665, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society, which was right about the same time. Leibniz had to found his own journal in order to publish his own work. They were kind of banging around in the dark trying to figure out how to do this.
Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an anagram. He condensed the idea into this pithy statement: "The ideal form of an arch is the form of a chain hanging, flipped upside down." Then he scrambled the letters to make an anagram and published it. That way, he wasn't giving away the secret, but if somebody came along a few years later and claimed that they'd invented it, he could just unscramble what he'd published. He was establishing precedence.
Hooke squabbled with [Christiaan] Huygens over a bunch of clock-related inventions. This kind of thing was just rife. It came to a head in a grotesque way in the priority dispute over [who invented] the calculus. That was so embarrassing to the whole institution of science and people were so nauseated by it that it taught everyone a lesson. After that, no one would dream of doing what Newton did, which was to invent something really important and then sit on it for 30 years.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Robots Are Us! benefit in San Francisco
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DATE: 04/21/2004 12:36:21 AM
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Jed sez, "The Speculative Literature Foundation is holding an event in San Francisco this coming Friday, April 23, as a fundraiser for the new SLF Fountain Award for sf short stories of exceptional literary quality. The event will feature Pat Murphy, Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson, Ken Wharton, Charlie Anders, and Omnicircus ("an experimental, surreal-psychedelic musical-cabaret group"); 7:00 p.m., $10-$20 sliding scale at the door. It'll be at 550 Natoma, a few blocks from the Civic Center BART station, near 7th and Mission."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bloggers in Iraq
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DATE: 04/21/2004 07:22:08 AM
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A piece in today's USA Today about the growing weblog community -- in Iraq.
Fadhil's blog, iraqthemodel.blogspot.com, tells of his life and the lives of his two brothers. One brother also is a dentist, and the other is a pediatrician. "We wanted to help bridge the gap, not just between the U.S. and Iraq, but with the entire Islamic world," says Ali Fadhil, 34, the pediatrician. "The media is always taking a look at the bad stuff. We want to show the good progress in Iraq." The brothers' blog is written with an unusually pro-American viewpoint, especially coming from three Sunni Muslims. Sunnis — among them, Saddam Hussein — dominated Iraq's majority Shiite Muslim population before the war.
(...)There are about 30 Iraqi bloggers in Baghdad, plus a few other blogs written by Iraqis abroad. Not all share the Fadhil brothers' optimism. "You have your Fox TV. I am offering a counter response," says Faisa Jarrar, whose blog is critical of the U.S. occupation. Her mixed Sunni-Shiite family began in December with a joint blog, afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com. Now, each of Jarrar's three sons has his own blog. Raed, 26, Jarrar's eldest, is studying in Jordan. Khalid, 21, and Majid, 17, are in Baghdad.
"All of our efforts are more individual efforts, but we have one common goal, to show the world what is really going on," Majid says.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New tool for the molecular machine shop
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DATE: 04/21/2004 09:00:25 AM
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University of Michigan researchers are using a femtosecond pulsed laser as a milling machine capable of carving out features as small as 20 nanometers, 1/5000th the diameter of a human hair. The new approach trumps state-of-the-art electron beam lithography because it can machine features in three dimensions. "If we have three channels on a plane, we can link the outer two without cutting into the center one, we can go down over and up, we can cut a U-shape," said one of the principal investigators. "Not being constrained to one plane, the level of complexity that can be achieved is much greater." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Frequently spat-on bus drivers get DNA kits to collect evidence
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DATE: 04/21/2004 09:53:25 AM
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About once a week, a bus driver in Edinburgh gets gobbed on. To nab the sickening spitters, the drivers have been given "saliva recovery kits" -- aka "spit kits."
The kits include sterile swabs to pick up any trace of an offender’s DNA. The packs also contain a pair of latex gloves and an evidence collection bag.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Simple but brilliant bag sealer
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DATE: 04/21/2004 09:59:13 AM
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New patented Clip-n-Seal uses a plastic rod and clamp to seal a plastic bag. Invented by a dotcom burnout. Here's a profile of him. Link (Via idfuel)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Digital camera silliness: secret finger trick
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DATE: 04/21/2004 10:13:45 AM
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This page has dozens of photos like the one shown here. Safe for work, but if your boss catches you checking it out, you'll have to let her/him in on the secret. Link (via horkulated)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogging, Equality, and the Future
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DATE: 04/21/2004 11:37:27 AM
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BoingBoing reader Donald Melanson says:
Mindjack's Melanie McBride talked to a number of people including Rebecca Blood and Danah Boyd about the future of blogging and some of the important issues facing it (equality, privilege, access and standards). The result is "Linked Out: Blogging, Equality, and the Future", an in-depth piece that will hopefully encourage further discussion and debate of issues it raises.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Chickenhawk henpeck begins
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DATE: 04/21/2004 12:20:14 PM
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Great commentary from Reason's Tim Cavanaugh on the infighting between pro-war chickenhawks.
It's hard to say which of these sides is more contemptible, and I only hope neither ever runs out of bullets. The Stay-the-Coursers are, as ever, courageous enough to sacrifice other Americans' lives in support of their Wilsonian fancies. But I find the Wobblies even more perplexing. Did these goddamn dimwits really think things were going to go any better? Pipes I can at least credit with deviousness: He wants Iraq to descend into chaos so he can say something along the lines of "See? Perpetual war is the only language Arabs understand." The editors of the National Review, demonstrate their lack of acquaintance with human life as it is lived on planet Earth consistently enough that I guess they really are surprised to find democracy-building isn't as simple as advertised.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Picasso Guernica coverup at UN, one year later
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DATE: 04/21/2004 01:00:44 PM
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BoingBoing reader Jamie McCarthy writes
"Hi Xeni, re this story you blogged last year -- Take a look at this:
On Feb. 5, 2003, Negroponte sat next to Colin Powell for his historic speech to the U.N. urging multilateral war. That evening, at 10:51:58 PM EST, that photo of Negroponte was snapped, in front of the Guernica reproduction but far enough to its left that the curtain apparently did not stretch (or maybe the curtain had been removed that late in the evening). Now, a year later, that photo ended up on the homepage of the Coalition Provisional Authority. You can verify the timestamp in Photoshop by opening the JPEG, going to File Info, clicking Advanced, and looking at the XMP Core Properties. Small world...
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London: The (Magnificent) Biography
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DATE: 04/22/2004 06:29:49 AM
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I've just finished Peter Ackroyd's magnificent London: The Biography, an 800-page history of London spanning 2,000 years of history. I read it mostly on the tube, in London, while travelling to one place or another, on airplanes, while flying into or out of the city. The book is a triumph in that it manages to convey the unknowable vastness of London's environs and dwellers and history without ever having the hubris to imply that is has captured it or contained it.
The prose is glorious and even drunken in places: clearly this is a labour of love, years-long opus penned by someone who loves and is intimate with London -- even if the city is, as he says, so large that no person could hope to walk its every street in a lifetime. I can't remember the last time I smiled so much while reading a book, nor when I made so many notes of things to look up and do later.
The thing I liked best about Ackroyd's vision is the idea of continuity, which speaks directly to an idea I've been having lately: that books are a practice, not a product. Here's what I mean: the Bible was a book even before it was bound between covers; the fact that it was scroll-shaped didn't make it any less bookish. By the same token, one of my novels, represented as a text-file, is also a book -- even if it doesn't look anything like a bound volume -- even if it doesn't look like anything, period. A scroll, a bound volume, a CD of audio, a text-file: they're all "books" even if they're all different.
What a book is, is a collection of literary, manufacturing, commercial, and technological practices. And what all these different kinds of books have in common with one another is that their practices are continuous with one another. A Torah in scroll is related to a bound edition because the latter couldn't exist without the former: the latter rises up from the former, perhaps inevitably. The "book" is the continuous practice of writing, reading, marketing, distributing and publishing that dates back thousands of years.
We're continuous, too. The "me" who wrote my most recent novel -- which I'm very happy with, indeed! -- is not the "me" who wrote the one before that. The new one is informed with the lessons from the last one, and the intervening living. The me who wrote the last book could not have written the next one -- but the me I became could. And those two mes are continuous with one another: one gave rise to the next.
London is continuous. It's not a place -- its borders have shifted and shifted again over thousands of years. It's not a race of people -- its inhabitants have changed in individual identity and culture so many times that the culture and ethnicity of London 2004 is nearly completely different from London 0000. It's not a collection of architecture, or a map of roads, or a political system, for all of these have changed and changed and changed. London isn't even its name: London's had many names over the years.
London is a practice: London is what Londoners are doing right now, which is informed by, midwifed by, descended from what Londoners were doing yesterday. London is what Londoners do.
I'd suspected this, and Ackroyd nailed it up and down for me. He shows how the currents of London are fraught with eddies, whirlpools of continuity, so the 1960s movement to wipe London clean of its Victorian fooforaw and build modern high-rises echoes the 1860s destruction of 14 churches under the Union of Benefices Act, which, in turn, echoes the 1760s demolition of the gates to the city walls because they "obstructed the free current of air."
I've been buttonholing Londoners all month with intelligences gleaned from Ackroyd's book -- a triumph nearly on the scale of Trafalgar Square or the discovery of the physics of the arch or the rebuilding after the Fire. I'll be chewing it over for years.
Peter's Hill and Upper Thames Street were laid out in the twelfth century. Other street-surfaces and frontages have a similar history, with property divisions remaining intact for many hundreds of years. Even the devastation of the Great Fire could not erase the ancient lanes and boundaries. In a similar pattern of continuity those streets which were newly laid out after the Fire showed tenacity of purpose. Ironmonger Lane, for instance, ahs had the same width for almost 355 years. That width was and is 14 feet, originally sufficient to allow two carts to pass each other without hindrance or blockage. It is another aspect of this continuous London history that its structure can accommodate itself to quite different modes of transport.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Steal this remix
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DATE: 04/22/2004 07:53:21 AM
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BoingBoing reader fluffy says:
Forget about underground remixes of mainstream music - this site (inspired by the wonderful songfight.org) is an ongoing collaborative remix project where independent musicians remix each other. It's great!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down
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DATE: 04/22/2004 07:57:29 AM
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There are many reasons I love the Internet, but the fact that weblogs like
this one exists would have to be one of them. "Nice cup of tea and a sit down" is the Internet hub for cake, tea, and biscuits, and it's edited by a fellow named Stuart. That's it. Period. Simple. It's totally sincere and sweet, and full of breaking news about which flavor of jam is most popular for discriminating toast aficionados, newly resurrected teas, and so on. Sometimes, Stuart posts tea-and-biscuit related art, like a portrait of "Two little old space-alien ladies having a nice sit down." At present, Stuart is pretty worked up about the fact that the "iconic" biscuit known as Tim Tams have recently become available to UK consumers, after a long and ardurous struggle. "Tescos sell them now," says Stuart. "Hooray, you have to tell everyone, they're fantastic! Enjoy!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Octopus Robot
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DATE: 04/22/2004 08:00:23 AM
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Boingboing reader
LVX23 says:
Check out this cool "autonomous wheeled climbing robot" from the French Autonomous Systems Lab. They call it the "octopus". Now if only they could hack a humvee body on top...
Link
Correction: BoingBoing reader Carrick says, "the octopus robot is not from the "French" Autonomous Systems Lab, rather it's from a lab of L'Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: State of the Artists
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DATE: 04/22/2004 08:02:46 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature.com is now online. It's about art that incorporates, and sometimes critiques, mobile technology:
"Research laboratories are the avant-garde art galleries of the 21st century. That shouldn't come as a surprise though. Art is a lens through which engineers can raise tough questions about the science fictions that they create, and we inhabit."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Talking Trash
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DATE: 04/22/2004 08:03:16 AM
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BoingBoing reader ben peek says:
Talking garbage bins, how's that not futuristic coolness? but how long until they get irritating? (and will they update the poptune bins monthly?) from the article:
"In a uniquely German mix of hi-tech gadgetry and environmental awareness, Berlin authorities are installing talking trash cans in some of the German capital's most popular squares. Pop your litter into one of the bins and it's liable to say thank you. Or welcome you to Berlin in English, French or Japanese. Or even sing.
After a successful trial period, 20 of the bins have been installed in the Zoologischer Garten area of western Berlin's biggest shopping district and at the bustling business and entertainment hub of Potsdamer Platz."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Back to the Future Car for sale on Ebay
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DATE: 04/22/2004 08:11:24 AM
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For sale on ebay:
'You never will again in this accurate recreation of the DeLorean Time Machine made famous in the Back to the Future movie series. This recreation was painstakingly researched for nearly 5 years before construction. Dozens of original photographs, details, and interviews with the original vehicle builders and collectors were compiled to make sure no detail was left un-accounted for. All of the interior and exterior Time Machine components were made to last, but at the same time not damage the integrity of the original vehicle. (...) Motion picture parts replicated through archival photos and extensive research; working interior and exterior lighting system including the "Flux Capacitor", "Time Circuits" and exterior "Flux Dispersion Banding.'
Link (Thanks, Dave)
BoingBoing reader
Jesse Mazer says, "The guy who put up that Back to the Future DeLorean for auction is actually not the one who made it, and apparently he's using the creator's copyrighted photos of the car without permission, which previously resulted in a similar auction being taken down...also, according to the creator, he sold it to the guy because it had "a totally junked frame". The info is here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Time Magazine launches a blog
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DATE: 04/22/2004 08:15:22 AM
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"Techno File" is a new big-media-blog authored by TIME Magazine writer Eric Roston, described as "a daily commentary on the technology that will carry us through tomorrow -- and the stuff that keeps us stuck in yesterday." Here it is, on TypePad. Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc
)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn star privacy and the adult industry's HIV scare
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DATE: 04/22/2004 08:24:44 AM
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Fleshbot asks: do porn stars have the same right to medical privacy as the rest of us? In an effort to prevent the spread of HIV within the adult film industry, last week the AIM Healthcare foundation published names and testing status of actors who had recently worked with Darren James and Lara Roxx -- two actors who had just tested positive for HIV. Was it right for AIM to publish that information online?
It's a tough call, especially since the difference between public and private personas tend to get conflated for adult performers more than they do for other types of celebrities. In a new article at LA Voice, Mack Read says that AIM "may have done a wrong thing for all the right reasons, but without considering all the legal and ethical consequences," while Gay Porn Blog noted the issues at stake in a post last week. Both entries are open to comments if you want to have your say.
"Does HIV List Invade L.A. Porn Stars' Privacy?" (lavoice.org)
"Str8 Star with AIDS - Partners Named" (gaypornblog.com)
See also: "Four Women That Worked With James Have Negative HIV Test Results" (AVN)
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Update: It's now officially an "HIV outbreak," according to Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA). They're forcing AIM to turn over all records related to Darren James and Lara Roxx, and records of "first- and second-generation" actors who may have been exposed to the virus through working with James or Roxx.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help the Kerry campaign design better t-shirts
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DATE: 04/22/2004 08:57:54 AM
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Designs on the White House is a collaborative project to design t-shirts for the John Kerry campaign -- not authorised by Kerry -- with winners picked by Atrios and others.
Designs On The White House is a grassroots fund-raising organization in support of the John Kerry 2004 Presidential campaign. We aim to mobilize the creative community through an online design contest, judged by designers, celebrities, and activists. Winning designs will be available for resale on T-shirts and other products, and all proceeds after expenses will benefit the John Kerry Presidential campaign. Designs on the White House Organization (DOTWHO) is an independent political committee and is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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(Thanks, Kerim)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Business 2.0 feature on Creative Commons
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DATE: 04/22/2004 09:03:53 AM
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Andy Raskin has turned in a very good, long feature on Creative Commons -- including some quotes from me -- that does a terrrific job of explaining the project and why it's important.
The "sharing economy" is built on a supply-and-demand equation wholly alien to traditional media companies -- the record labels, Hollywood studios, and publishing houses that support strict copyright enforcement. It's powered instead by the Allan Vilhans of the world, digital artists who promote sharing as a means to obtain everything from 15 minutes of Internet fame to licensing deals, job offers, and mainstream publishing contracts. For these artists, rampant Internet file swapping isn't a threat, but a blessing: the cheapest way to move from unknown to known.
The sharing economy is already worth billions of dollars, but its direct beneficiaries aren't mainstream entertainment companies. Instead, they're the likes of Apple (AAPL), Adobe (ADBE), and EarthLink (ELNK) -- firms that sell the hardware, software, and bandwidth required to produce and distribute, say, a Howard Dean howl remix. But for the sharing economy to expand its scope and realize its full potential, it needs a signpost: a branded icon participants can use to tell each other, "Download my work. Modify it. Send it to a friend. Please." Creative Commons aims to play that role.
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(Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Silmarillion in 1,000 words
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DATE: 04/22/2004 09:06:34 AM
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The Silmarillion is a dense book chronicling the minutest minutae of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Reading it is something of an accomplishment in itself -- but now you can fake it, thanks to The Silmarillion in 1,000 Words.
VALAQUENTA:
MANWE: I'm in charge!
VARDA: I'm Manwe's spouse. And the queen of the stars!
NAMO: I do death and fate. They call me Mandos.
VAIRE: I'm Namo's spouse. I weave things.
IRMO: I have gardens. They call me Lorien.
ESTE: I'm Irmo's spouse. I take care of the gardens.
YAVANNA: I make things grow.
NIENNA: I'm sad.
ULMO: I live in the ocean.
AULE: I'm Yavanna's spouse. I've got a great big hammer! I made dwarves.
NESSA: I dance.
OROME: I hunt!
VANA: I'm Orome's spouse. I make living things happy.
TULKAS: I'm strong. I'm Nessa's spouse. I got here last.
MELKOR: I'm bad, momma, I'm ONE BAD MUTHA-
TULKAS: Grar.
MELKOR: Um. Yeah. Hiding now.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Prison system responds on Silver PEN winner
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DATE: 04/22/2004 09:23:08 AM
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John wrote to the Connecticut prison system about the imprisoned Silver PEN Award winner whose work was erased after her win was announced. He heard back:
My name is Brian Garnett. I am the Director of External Affairs for the Connecticut Department of Correction and I am responding to an e-mail which Governor Rowland's Office has referred to me. You had expressed concerns regarding the status of the writing program which is led by Wally Lamb at the York Correctional Institution. Let me make clear, that this program, which has been conducted for the past five years, is continuing at the prison. The Department of Correction is extremely proud of this unique and innovative program just as we are proud of the accomplishments of the women who have participated. The introspection and self-examination offered through the writing experience provides positive rehabilitative benefits. The program was temporarily on hold for about a month, as concerns were addressed about the dissemination of news within the prison, of the $25,000 PEN America prize, awarded to one of the inmate authors. The Department of Correction had been given no prior notice of the nomination or the awarding of the prize. There is a very real concern regarding safety and security for the inmate and the prison, with her being identified as having access to that amount of money. Based on a recent productive and positive meeting of all parties, including Mr. Lamb, the issues have been resolved. Media reports also charged that writing materials were destroyed. There was never any malicious intent on the part of the Department, nor was any destruction ordered at any time. Our only intention was requiring that the writings be committed to computer disks to fully preserve those materials and ensure they would be in place when the program started up again. We have now learned those initial reports of destruction were erroneous and little if any material was lost. Thank you for your time and concern.
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Academic essay on ShitBegone toilet paper and postmodernism
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DATE: 04/22/2004 10:21:32 AM
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Surprisingly readable academic paper with more information about ShitBegone toilet paper (which I blogged previously).
[Jed] Ela did the reverse of DuChamp: he exhibited a single role of a toilet paper he had thought of as a joke, called ‘Shitbegone’. The exhibit was a great success, and Ela realised he could actually make money by mass-producing Shitbegone and selling it in stores. What differentiates this from the sale of other artistic reproductions is that Ela markets Shitbegone as toilet paper, not as art: he sells it by the case (“96 double rolls for $44.99. That's 47 cents per roll!”). What started as something like Warhol’s soup cases turns into an idiosyncratic case of the product development and marketing of a basic essential commodity.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dirty Mechanical Paper Dolls
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DATE: 04/22/2004 11:44:48 AM
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Paper pervert and Boingboing reader Sandrine Sheon points us to a gallery of adult-oriented "naughty automata":
These are modern, gender-bending versions of old-fashioned wind-up toys, but all made of paper and very funny. They include a spanking duo, fucking skeletons, miss and mister masturbation, and a live paper sex act. You can also see animations of the toys in action.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bill O'Reilly mistakes Globe and Mail for Socialist Worker
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DATE: 04/22/2004 12:25:25 PM
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Bill O'Reilly called The Globe and Mail, a rock-ribbed, conservative Canadian newspaper "the far-left Toronto Globe and Mail," because a columnist in the paper descibed the Fox News Network (which is coming to Canada) as humorously exemplary of American foolishness. O'Reilly urged his listeners to write in to the columnist and give him what-for, and they did, calling him an "intellectual" and a "Canadian" and asking if he'd ever served in Vietnam.
Reacting to my column, which cheerfully suggested that the proposal to bring the Fox News Channel to Canada should be acted upon promptly, so that we can all take a look, and get a laugh, O'Reilly gave us a Fox-style whacking. In his segment The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day, he quoted from my column (which called him "pompous"), dismissed The Globe as a lefty outfit and said, "Hey you pinheads up there, I may be pompous, but at least I'm honest."
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Major DoJ warez crackdown -- Operation Fastlink
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DATE: 04/22/2004 01:21:43 PM
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Covert DoJ investigations into online swapping of copyrighted materials have identified over 100 people in the USA and other countries involved in the distribution of music, movies, and software valued at over $50 million. The initiative is called Operation Fastlink, and targeted warez groups like Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X. Excerpt from DoJ press release:
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced today the most far-reaching and aggressive enforcement action ever undertaken against organizations involved in illegal intellectual property piracy over the Internet. Beginning yesterday morning, law enforcement from 10 countries and the United States conducted over 120 searches worldwide to dismantle some of the most well-known and prolific online piracy organizations.
"Intellectual property theft is a global problem that hurts economies around the world. To be effective, we must respond globally," Attorney General Ashcroft said. "In the past 24 hours, working closely with our foreign law enforcement counterparts, we have moved aggressively to strike at the very core of the international online piracy world."
Link to DoJ press release, Link to related coverage from AP. (Thanks, JP)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Onion launches premium subscription site
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DATE: 04/22/2004 01:31:29 PM
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The ever-funny Onion just launched a "premium" site with extra content, for subscribers, at a price. How is it different from the free Onion? It's like, a fancy French shallot from the farmer's market, versus a regular old supermarket yellow one. Sort of. Oh, here's the Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: World's greatest Wi-Fi signal finder
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DATE: 04/22/2004 04:44:13 PM
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Glenn Fleishman got his hands on a prototype of a new, tiny, Wi-Fi signal finder, and he likes it a lot. There's a video clip of it on his site.
Chrysalis previews their WiFi Seeker, a keychain sized device for instant Wi-Fi signal finding: Chrysalis sent me a demo unit of its just-unveiled WiFi Seeker, which they designed to differentiate 80211b/g networks from other devices. Two previous Wi-Fi signal finders fell short in ways the Seeker does not.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Possum Fur Nipple Warmers
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DATE: 04/22/2004 06:53:08 PM
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Sometimes, you blog things just because you can. In honor of Earth Day, I present to you eco-friendly possum-fur nipple warmers and g-strings from New Zealand. PETA may not approve, but this sure beats using slabs of tofu.
Introduced into New Zealand about 150 years ago from Australia, the brushtail possum has multiplied now to over 70,000,000. With no predators, this pest has decimated huge tracts of New Zealand native forests eating 21,000 tons of vegetation nightly.
Both bird life (including the Kiwi) and many unique types of trees are threatened with extinction because of the brushtail possum. This marsupial is only very distantly related to the American Opossum.
The brushtail possum has a fur similar in quality to mink and colours range from silver to red brown to dark brown. Preservation of New Zealand Native Forests requires control of the possum population. All controls used in the past have had minimum impact. Poisoning of possums is an environmentally unacceptable way of control. Only through world wide marketing of possum fur products can this pest be safely controlled.
Link (via Warren with some help from Google)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Miniature Khutu's Pyramid turns your Japanese mobile phone into a PVR
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DATE: 04/22/2004 10:52:35 PM
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Engadget reports on a really cool-sounding, complicated and hard-to-explain device from Japan: a 1/2000 scale model of Khufu’s Pyramid with a Secure Digital slot in it. You put the pyramid atop your television and it turns your TV's video feed into 3GPP -- the file-format used by Japanese videophones. The idea is that you can load these into your camera phone's SD slot and watch TV on the way to work.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Used cellphone market taking off
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DATE: 04/22/2004 10:55:19 PM
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The NYT reports on the growing US market for refurbished, used cellphones.
Many customers for these retreads are more interested in price tags than multimedia messaging or games of Snake II. "They say, 'I just want to make a phone call,' " said Jay Ellison, executive vice president of U.S. Cellular (www.uscc.com), a wireless carrier based in Chicago, which operates in 26 states and maintains a small inventory of refurbished handsets in its stores.
But there is also the cellphone equivalent of the preowned BMW. ReCellular, a company based in Dexter, Mich., resells about four million handsets in bulk worldwide each year. Of the 1.5 million it resells domestically, mostly for use in prepaid wireless plans, "plenty are higher-end with cameras and bells and whistles," said Eric Forster, an executive for the company, which finds buyers for phones collected by charities, as well as retailers' overstocks and trade-ins.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: McDonald's advertising materials
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DATE: 04/22/2004 11:00:07 PM
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MrPromo is an Internet-based custom signage supplier to McDonald's restaurants. You apparently need to prove that you're a real McD's to actual get an order fulfilled, but it's really fun to poke aorund on the site and see all this disembodied greasebomb promo material and graphic elements.
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(Thanks, idogcow!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Petition against the Canadian DMCA
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DATE: 04/22/2004 11:05:31 PM
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There's a petition against Canada's proposed DMCA-like copyright law up at the Digital Copyright Canada Wiki:
We, the undersigned residents of Canada draw attention of the House to the following:
THAT the Copyright Act is properly recognised as being a careful balance between the rights of creators and the rights of the public (including viewers, readers and listeners);
THAT the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously affirmed this view in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada;
THAT digital technologies have recently given copyright holders the ability to upset the balance in the Copyright Act by preventing Canadians from accessing works for purposes that have been legally granted to them;
THAT the creation of original works is nourished by wide accessibility of earlier works, including a vibrant public domain;
THAT dissemination of cultural ideas requires that they be preserved in a form that is accessible to future generations; and
THAT historically, consultations regarding changes to the Copyright Act have mostly taken place with creators, intermediaries and only some special users (such as educators and librarians)
THEREFORE, your petitioners call upon Parliament to ensure generally that users are recognised as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about proposed changes to the Copyright Act and to ensure in particular that any changes at least preserve all existing users' rights, including the right to use copyrighted materials under Fair Dealing and the right to make private copies of audio recordings. We further call upon Parliament not to extend the term of copyright; and to recognise the right of citizens to personally control their own communication devices.
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(Thanks, Raymond!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photo-Journey through Buddhist Hell
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DATE: 04/23/2004 07:05:06 AM
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BoingBoing reader
Juergen points us to:
"Photo documentation of dioramas depicting the 6 different buddhist hells. Contains abused people, chopped off limbs and pee filled ponds. Of course this place is in Japan, where else can you find something like this?"
Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Alexander points us to a similar exhibit at the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore. Equally surreal and spooky. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacked MP3: Murray Saul "It's Friday!"
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DATE: 04/23/2004 07:15:37 AM
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BoingBoing reader Keith points us to an entry on a very cool underground MP3 blog, which I won't name here because I don't want to kill them with a traffic flood.
[They posted a link to an MP3 of] the lunatic radio ravings of a guy named Murray Saul, who is just SO GODDAMNED HAPPY that it's Friday! I dare you to listen to him scream about the "CHOCOLATE COVERED WEEKEND!" and not immediately feel happier to just be alive.
You can learn more about Murray Saul, an eccentric Ohio salesman and radio announcer, here. Our friend Leonard Lin has kindly offered to host the file on a BoingBoingable server, so have at it. It's pretty goddamned funny. I think some of it might be obliquely pornographic. It's just off the hook. Link.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nanowire nanomemory
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DATE: 04/23/2004 07:59:10 AM
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This image depicts a novel design for a nanomemory device that its inventors believe can store 40 gigabits of data per square centimeter. Developed by scientists at the University of Southern California and the NASA Ames Research Center, the self-assembled molecular memory consists of a nanowire coated with a layer of transistors. In traditional computer memory chips, each transistor holds one bit of information. The beauty of this nano-enabled approach is that the transistors can be put in eight distinct states depending on the voltage applied. That means each "memory cell" can hold three bits of data. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Steam Boy Trailer
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DATE: 04/23/2004 09:32:05 AM
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Scott sez: "Steam Boy, the long awaited and highly anticipated Anime film from Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo is finally nearing completion and is slated for release later this year. The trailer is up on the Japanese site and looks damn cool. From what I can see Otomo has once again created dazzling visuals -- the lush Victorian interiors and the elegance of the mechanical designs (Steam Punk, anyone?) should leave everyone in awe. The film cost 2.4 billion Yen (US$20.2m) to produce, just a few dollars short of the 2.4 billion Yen that it cost to produce Spirited Away, the most expensive Anime feature ever. In contrast, Steam Boy comprises 180 000 cels, 1.5 times as many as Spirited Away." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: BBC's disgust survey
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DATE: 04/23/2004 09:41:22 AM
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Test your disgust threshold by taking this photo survey. Before you look, know that you may consider some of these pictures to be disgusting. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ad Standards Agency sez: video pirates are terrorists!
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DATE: 04/23/2004 12:22:56 PM
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The Advertising Standards Agency was asked to investigate the anti-piracy ads that run before the UK's movies, in which a link between terrorism and DVD bootlegging is asserted.
The advertisers said the commercial had been given a "U" certificate by the British Board of Film Classification; they believed it did not appeal to fear unduly or without good reason. They said they could not send all the substantiation they held about the link between piracy and terrorism because it was confidential. The advertisers sent a report, published on the European Union website, that stated "Terrorist groups also commonly become involved in counterfeiting and piracy as a mean of financing their activities". They sent the Executive Summary of a report, by the Alliance Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, entitled "Proving the Connection"; that report claimed "There is evidence of proscribed groups in Northern Ireland using intellectual property fraud as a fund raising activity for their criminal activities.
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(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mystery meat haute cuisine
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DATE: 04/23/2004 12:27:01 PM
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Slate reviews The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, a trendy new English cookbook devoted to the preparation of offcuts, snouts, rectii, marrow, and bladders of all description.
One reason seems to be the frisson of naughtiness associated with eating such things. Due to the crackdown on the consumption of various meat byproducts in a post-mad cow U.K., lambs' brains are still illegal in England. (But this hasn't stopped Henderson from jotting down a few recipes, "so that when lamb's brain is freed from its sentence we shall be ready to celebrate its liberty.") Wondering about the legality of lambs' brains—given that I'd eaten them, or at any rate trace quantities of them, at Babbo—I went to Ottomanelli's butcher shop in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. Frank Ottomanelli told me that lambs' brains are legal in America. "What happens is you buy the whole head, and then I'll get the brains out for you, as a courtesy," he smiled. I ran through a list of other Henderson ingredients I was curious about: pig's head? pig's spleen? pig's feet? "The only thing on the pig that we don't have is the squeal," Frank said. So, tally your ingredients, intrepid chefs, and get thee to a butcher shop. And for those of adventurous tastes but milder temperament, just head to your local restaurant. I hear the Testa's good.
Link
(via Megnut)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jetsonian relic: the Ready Lady Chair
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DATE: 04/23/2004 02:20:04 PM
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Dan sez: "This chair is straight out of a "house of the future" cartoon. It is upholstered in a silky beige vinyl and has a Velcro sealed back flap that opens to reveal a fold-out ironing board, an iron, and a GE hair dryer (the kind with the bag that you put over your head - and the bag is connected by a plastic tube to the hair dryer). There is a label on the inside of the back flap identifying the chair as being a "Ready Lady Chair" made by Castro Convertibles." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A New Pentagon Papers Case - Newspapers, Blogs and the Diebold/Jones Day Memos
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DATE: 04/23/2004 02:29:49 PM
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Ernest Miller sez: Last Tuesday it was revealed that Diebold was informed by its lawyers that using uncertified e-voting software in California was probably illegal. Where did this information come from? Leaked legal memos from Diebold's law firm, Jones Day. Last Tuesday afternoon a judge ordered that all documents not already published on the internet be returned to Jones Day. But, if you can't stop newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers, why can you stop a newspaper from publishing memos dealing with important issues regarding voting equipment? Perhaps the lesson for newspapers is that if you think the public should be informed, publish as much as possible and don't try to hold back information for 'exclusives.'" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Questionnaire for mind-control perpetrators
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DATE: 04/24/2004 12:44:50 AM
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Here's a questionnaire posted by a "mind control victim" (who believes there's a controlling microchip in his skull) addressed to "perpetrators" of "mind-control/electronic harassment." It stresses that this is an anonymous opportunity for mind-controller to come clean abotu their motives, with questions like, "Will you tell us why you are a harassment agent?", "Are you also controlled?" and "Are you in fear for your life?"
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: References in Kill Bill
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DATE: 04/24/2004 12:46:08 AM
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Here's a pretty exhaustive-looking catalogue of film references in Tarantino's Kill Bill duology.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Obsessive spreadsheet community
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DATE: 04/24/2004 12:49:01 AM
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Noting geeks' propensity for creating spreadsheets to track random crap ("number of consecutive sunny days, the types and prices of the cups of coffee they drink, or just straightforward charts about their boss's mood"), Anil Dash proposes "ExcelPile" -- a place to put your obsessive spreadsheets.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Woody Woodpecker laugh-guy is dead
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DATE: 04/24/2004 01:35:28 PM
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Harry Babbit, the voice of Woody Woodpecker's laugh in the Woody Woodpecker novelty song, is dead.
Dubbed "Handsome Harry" by Kyser, Babbitt sang on several hits, including "Three Little Fishies,""On A Slow Boat to China,""(Lights Out) 'Til Reveille,""He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings,""Jingle, Jangle, Jingle" and "The Umbrella Man."
Babbitt's high voice was later used on a solo recording of "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth," for which he included a lisp. He was even responsible for the laugh on "Woody Woodpecker," Kyser's 1948 hit novelty tune.
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(Thanks, Amanda!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spanish translation and augmentation of Ebooks: Neither E nor Books
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DATE: 04/24/2004 01:37:30 PM
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This is screamingly cool: I gave a talk at this year's Emerging Tech conference called Ebooks: Neither E nor Books and released the text into the public domain. Alas, the slides that accompanied the talk were full of copyrighted images that I was in no position to release into the public domain with the talk.
Now, Javier Candeira has taken the public domain text and translated it into Spanish, adding extensive footnotes. But his friend José Antonio Millán went one better -- several better, in fact -- he then used used my notes about the slides I'd used to "illuminate" the translation with clip art he discovered on the Net, and then went through the piece and added hyperlinks. My Spanish is wildly imperfect, but it's good enough to see that this is a good, thoughtful translation, and the illustrations and citations are tremendous.
Link
(Thanks (a lot!) Javier!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-carbers booted out of buffet for meat-centric consumption
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DATE: 04/24/2004 03:50:15 PM
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A couple who were on a low-carb diet were ejected from a Utah all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant for eating too much meat.
"We've never claimed to be an all-you-can-eat establishment," said Johanson. "Our understanding is a buffet is just a style of eating."
The general manager was carving the meat, and became concerned about having enough for other patrons, Johanson said. So when Amaama went up for his 12th slice, the manager asked Amaama to stop.
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(Thanks, George!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open letter to crackhead
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DATE: 04/24/2004 11:18:43 PM
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A San Francisco Craigslister has written an open letter to the crackhead who improvised a pipe from his motorcycle's sparkplugs:
On Wednesday morning I emerged from my girlfriend's building by U.N. Plaza to find that you had sawed the tops off both the sparkplugs on my motorcycle. At the time, I had no idea why anyone would do that. Other than the sparkplugs, the bike was untouched. Some kind of bizarre vandalism? A fraternity prank gone awry? I had no idea. All I knew is that I looked like a huge douchebag riding the Muni to work in a padded motorcycle jacket and helmet.
Because the bike was immobilized I got a $35 street sweeping ticket that night. Thursday I had it towed to the shop ($45) where they replaced the sparkplugs and the boots ($50 including labor). They explained to me that "people" - I use the term loosely here - like you break off the tops of spark plugs and use the porcelain tubes to smoke crack. As an engineer and former MacGyver fan, in a way I think this is kind of cool. But then I remember that I just paid $100 for YOUR crackpipes, and I get angry again.
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(Thanks, brecht!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More on London Booted
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DATE: 04/25/2004 07:14:43 AM
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Following up on this BoingBoing post about the bootleg Clash remix project "London Booted," Will says:
We featured a preview of London Booted in issue-zero of our bootleg newsletter, which you can find here if you're interested (it's down the bottom in the "Coming Soon" section). We're also planning a follow up for issue-two (out 29th April) where we'll be talking to the remixers involved and also they guy who organised the project (only subscribers to the mailing list will get this issue).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Latte art
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DATE: 04/25/2004 07:17:51 AM
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Cool blog about the designs baristas can make in the foamy milk that sits on top of your caffe latte. My favorite coffee hang in Los Angeles is Urth (even though I can never get a table), in part because their coffee is dark, sweet, earthy, and delicious -- and in part because the guys who make it draw little hearts and zigzags in the foam.
Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Saudi Arabia and phonecams
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DATE: 04/25/2004 07:43:47 AM
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The only Saudi blogger I know of, Alhamedi Alanezi, talks about phonecams and culture in his country. "When the Saudi people finally rise up in revolt and throw out the House of Saud," he says, " it won't be for democratic reform, and it won't be for an islamic republic. It'll be about mobile phones."
Link
(Thanks, Mitchell)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Archival Zen
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DATE: 04/25/2004 08:02:57 AM
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prelinger archive
early new york films
british pathe
project gutenberg
beinecke rare book library
british library
internet archive
stockstock festival
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Latte art, part two
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 04/25/2004 04:58:18 PM
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Following up on this earlier Boingboing post, an anonymous reader points us to this cool news article about a guy in Australia who totally trumps all those sucka baristas still making wimpy little hearts and zigzags in the caffe lattes. He paints faces in foam. Each portrait only takes him about 30 seconds, so your drink doesn't go cold. Snip:
"When you pour the milk in and the cream hits, it's just like a blank canvas on which to paint," the 36-year old said. Mr Phillips and fiancee Bernadette Farrugia started Flavors of Lakhoum in Swan St five years ago and he dabbled with the idea while pouring coffee.
"Sometimes you see swirls and patterns when you're pouring the coffee in, and one day I was pouring it and I saw an eye appear," he said. "From there I just drew in a mouth and ears. I've been slowly practising since then, but have got pretty good in the last few months - every month I find ways to add more detail."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Corn syrup: the sticky kiiller
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DATE: 04/25/2004 11:52:22 PM
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Atkinsians know that the devil has a name and that it is High Fructose Coorn Syrup, Elevator of Insulin and Most High Gycemic. It's validating, therefore, to see some sciency-type news about how bad corn syrup is for us, how it's creating a nation of diabetics, and how it accounts for 10 percent of the average American's daily calorie intake. Yow.
"This shows the increase in the past 20 years is almost exclusively carbohydrates and certainly corn syrup consumption has increased dramatically."
Gross said he was not "picking on the corn syrup industry," but added, "It is hard to ignore the fact that 20 percent of our carbohydrates are coming from corn syrup -- 10 percent of our total calories."
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Retro-repro kitchen appliances
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DATE: 04/26/2004 02:41:49 AM
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Elmira Stove Works makes and sells repro stoves and fridges styled to look like 1850s and 1950s kitchen appliances.
Link
(via Pirotcar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Play iTunes tracks without restrictions under Windows
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DATE: 04/26/2004 02:50:12 AM
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Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen has released a new anti-DRM tool called DeDRMS, which enables unrestricted playback of iTunes Music Store tracks under Windows. Andrew is hosting a compiled binary and the source on the San Francisco State University server.
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(Thanks, Andrew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Random comics
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DATE: 04/26/2004 02:54:32 AM
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Earlier this month, we posted Monochrom's call-for-submissions for jpegs of random punchline-text from comic strips. Now, Monochrom brings us the outcome: a web page werein a single-frame comic and a punchine are combined at random. The results are funny-esque and very weird. Reload often.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian Greens building election platform via open wiki
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DATE: 04/26/2004 02:58:13 AM
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Forget Presidential blogs. The Green Party of Canada is thinking way outside the blog: it's assembling its party platform for the next fedeal election via a public wiki.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Erotic photo gallery "Silver," by Siege
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DATE: 04/26/2004 06:08:27 AM
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Nerve.com just published a new gallery of work by Brooklyn-based erotic photographer Siege. I wrote the intro. Fleshbot says the images "combine filters and projections to stunning effect," and offers a free sneak preview, but the complete Nerve gallery requires a paid subscription. Neither are work-safe.
Link to Nerve.com gallery.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA's noise-spoofs turned into noise-rock
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DATE: 04/26/2004 07:22:04 AM
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Claire Chanel, the person behind the Jay-Z Construction Set, has decided to net.judo-ify the RIAA's spoof tracks, random noise disguised as top-40 singles which it promulgates on the P2P netowrks.
As a follow-up to our last project, the Jay-Z Construction Set, Scary Sherman and I decided to take a fair & balanced route by highlighting one of the positive moves made recently by music industry leaders.
The RIAA-Mix Vol.1 is a compilation of the hottest underground remixes of top40 hit tracks produced by the upcoming talent at Overpeer. These homages to 20th century noise artists and avant composers pull a frightening bait and switch on listeners veering wildly from recognizable pop hooks to jarring digital distortion.
Available at riaamix.com as downloadable mp3s, streaming flash audio, or on a compact disc, we're hoping our compilation can help support the arrival of challenging new music to mainstream exposure.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Game Boy Advance overclockers
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DATE: 04/26/2004 07:57:11 AM
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These guys are overclocking the GameBoy Advance so that it can run fast enough to act as a SuperNES emulator:
When I saw loopy had released a SNES emulator I thought it was great! There were some limitations because of GBA processing speed, so we came up with a design to successfully overclock the GBA that is compatible with flash carts (so far - read on). We've already sent a prototype of our design for loopy to test with and he has had success with his Flash Advance Turbo 128, and we have successfully tested on our Flash2Advance 256. Unfortunately, though, it looks like different brands of Flash carts are reacting slightly differently to the Acceleration, so this is where we want to ask the community for their help. We want to test with all flash cart brands out there so we can finalize our design to be compatible with as many carts as possible.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Secrets of the music biz
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DATE: 04/26/2004 08:51:57 AM
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After an employee of Virgin's "indy" label V2 quit last week, he sent a great poison pen open letter to a bunch of music industry types:
"So, before i got let go, we had our weekly marketing meeting yesterday. They brought in a psychic person and everyone joined hands and did a seance... I'm not kidding, even if I wasn't fired I wanted to quit on the spot."
Link (via Gawker)
Update: Boing Boing reader Don Richards-Boeff points us to a Rolling Stone article revealing that the email above is a marketing hoax. Actually though, the whole truth though is stranger than the fiction the publicity firm created. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Many Worlds theory invalidated
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DATE: 04/26/2004 08:56:25 AM
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Kathryn Cramer breaks the story on a to-be-presented Harvard talk on an experiment that appears to invalidate both the "Many Worlds" and "Copenhagen" theories of quantum mechanics. Kathryn is the daughter of John Cramer, a physicist whose "Transactional Interpretetation" hypothesis is the only one left intact by the experiment's findings.
It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.
Link
(Thanks, Kathryn!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Webby Award nominees
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DATE: 04/26/2004 09:00:50 AM
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The nominees for the 2004 Webby Awards have been announced. I'm the "chair" of the Weird category and Mark and former guestblogger Karen Marcelo are two of the judges. Quite a few of the sites will be familiar to regular Boing Boing readers. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Ramones documentary you may never get to see
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DATE: 04/26/2004 09:10:46 AM
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The Ramones documentary, End of the Century, has won critical acclaim at every festival and screening it played at. But the two nearly bankrupt filmmakers who made it are having a hard time getting sign off from the surviving Ramones.
Even when the movie was shown at Slamdance, the filmmakers had not obtained permission to use archival concert footage and music from the Ramones and other bands. They had also never gotten the Ramones to sign releases for their interviews, which took more than three years to conduct. ... The film's release has been further complicated by the filmmakers' financial situation. By the time the film was presented at Slamdance, Mr. Gramaglia and his brother, John, a producer, had amassed a debt of about $65,000 in production expenses. They owed Chinagraph, an editing house, another $150,000 and they estimated they would have to spend several hundred thousand dollars more to secure the rights to music and concert footage.
Link (Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Shirley comments on Scientific American article about "Tyranny of Choice"
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DATE: 04/26/2004 09:55:18 AM
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Writer John Shirley has some interesting things to say about a new Scientific American article called "Tyranny of Choice" (paid subscription required to read article, you can read more about the article on Alternet.)
They suggest there are two basic types of choosers, Maximizers and Satisficers. The former aim to make the best possible choice in a near obsessive way, the latter tend to settle for 'good enough'. Maximizers spend a long time shopping, can't make up their minds what to buy for a gift, channel surf like a cokehead searching through the rug for fallen powder...
Maximizers in particular are prone to unhappiness in our society--there are too many choices, just too damn much input in general, and they can't deal with it. Satisficers are having a hard time too; they tend to go to lower stress options--and those are harder to find. But they're less likely to be depressed and suicidal.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Star Wars Kid versus Kill Bill
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DATE: 04/26/2004 11:08:38 AM
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This is the best internet video mashup evar: the Star Wars Kid (a net-icon famous for having captured his Darth Maul light-staff fights on video, thus becoming the subject of Internet mockery, which led to a really bogus lawsuit) matted extremely well into the Kill Bill trailer. I am in awe of the video effects wizardry here.
2.2MB WMV Link
Alternate Link
Alternate Link 2
Alternate Link 3
Alternate Link 4
(via Little Fucking Ray of Sunshine)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tales of a Tron Tailor
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DATE: 04/26/2004 01:55:32 PM
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Earlier this month, Cory blogged one man's amazingly detailed reproduction of a Tron costume. Now, our pal Gabe ups the ante with a pointer to Jay Maynard's masterwork. Link
Update: Jay Maynard "on being an Internet phenomenon." Link (Thanks, George!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: What's on John Lennon's iPod?
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DATE: 04/26/2004 07:31:26 PM
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Boing Boing guestbar alum Todd Lappin sez: "Sort of. This is an interesting tale of what might've been."
A long lost jukebox owned by John Lennon has revealed that, when it
came to musical inspiration, even the Beatles got by with a little
help from their friends.
The 15 kg [Swiss-made KB Discomatic] portable jukebox, owned by
Lennon around 40 years ago, was bought by the late Bristol music
promoter John Midwinter for just £2,500 at a Christie's sale of
Beatles memorabilia in 1989. He then spent years restoring it to
working order and researching its 41 discs. Listed in Lennon's
handwriting, they are effectively the Desert Island Discs which
helped shape his musical genius.
[...]
Artists featured on the jukebox include the Animals, Chuck Berry, Bob
Dylan, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson and Gene Vincent.
There are no Beatles records and only one sung by a woman, Fontella
Bass's 'Rescue Me'. In Lennon's rough and ready scrawl, with gaps and
crossings out, The Lovin' Spoonful become 'The Lovin's Spoonfuls' and
Otis Redding is 'Ottis Redding'.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Boomboxes of yesteryear
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DATE: 04/26/2004 10:29:44 PM
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Once upon a time, there were no iPods. This online museum offers images of boomboxes from the 1970s and '80s. A look back at music technology's humble roots, "when the idea of a personal stereo experience was a bit of a novelty." Serving suggestion: Crank up the volume on your PC and listen to this totally free teaser clip of "White Lines" by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel while you're browsing these amazing images of old-school funk-delivery systems. Fun, baby.
Link (Thanks, asthmatic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nanoscale spider-feet point the way to extreme stickiness
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DATE: 04/26/2004 11:20:09 PM
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A Swiss/German research team have published an article in Smart Materials and Structures analyzing the feet of jumping spiders. These feet covered in nanoscale fibers depending from thicker hairs, and the overall bundle is small enough that the van de Waals force -- "an interesting form of adhesion is that, unlike many glues, the surrounding environment does not affect it" -- creates a very high degree of waterproof, grease-proof, dirt-proof stickiness.
"We found out that when all 600,000 tips are in contact with an underlying surface the spider can produce an adhesive force of 170 times its own weight. That's like Spiderman clinging to the flat surface of a window on a building by his fingertips and toes only, whilst rescuing 170 adults who are hanging on to his back!"
...The total van der Waals force on the spider's feet is very strong, but it is the sum of many very small forces on each molecule. The researchers believe the spider lifts its leg so that the setules are lifted successively, not all at once, and it does not need to be very strong to do this. All you would have to do to lift a future kind of Post-it® note is peel it off slowly.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Legoland deploys WiFi kiddee-trackers
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DATE: 04/26/2004 11:22:56 PM
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The Legoland theme park has depoloyed tracker bracelets for kiddees based on WiFi tracking tag from Bluesoft.
Available for rent in the Information Office, a Kidspotter ensures that parents can always find their children whenever necessary. On entering the park, the wristband is placed on the child's arm. If parents lose sight of their child, they can send an SMS message to the Kidspotter system during their entire visit. They will then automatically receive a return message stating the name of the park area and the map coordinate of their child's position in the park. On their special Kidspotter map of the park, parents can easily see where to find their child. The Kidspotter kit consists of a small wristband with a tiny sender, plus a special Kidspotter map of the park.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Morse cellphone
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DATE: 04/26/2004 11:36:44 PM
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This Morse phone is the teaser for a Worth1000 photoshopping contest called "Vintage Products."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Size, not weight, is the key factor in shipping logistics
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DATE: 04/26/2004 11:38:36 PM
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The Royal Mail, which currently prices shipping on weight, is petitioning to change its pricing to be based on size -- apparently, size is the most important determinant of the actual cost of shipping goods.
Royal Mail's pricing structure has been in place for decades, and was inherited from a time when mail was sorted by hand...
Mr Dales said some customers would experience price rises and other price cuts, but the vast majority -- 74% -- would be unaffected by the proposed changes.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sweet BBQ
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DATE: 04/26/2004 11:45:39 PM
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The sun is out and the birds are singing and all my neighbors are roasting flesh on the communal patio, so I've been thinking about buying a BBQ. I think I just found it: the futuristic, portable Q:
Looking like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a jet engine, the Q BBQ can be carried around like a briefcase, but opens up Transformer-style to become a stylish, stand-alone, gas-powered grill. Crafted in durable steel, the Q uses inexpensive little propane tanks that fit right inside the grill. You'll get hours of cooking time from just one tank! It also has dual gas controls with a full range of temperatures, so you can sear burgers on one side of the grill and gently toast buns on the other, just by adjusting the flame.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Secret Service interrogate 15-year-old for making forbidden art
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DATE: 04/27/2004 08:57:08 AM
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A teenager drew some anti-war posters that were critical of Bush's policies, and his art teacher alerted school administrators, who in turn called the police. The cops went to the feds, and the Secret Service questioned the boy about his art. The drawing that drew the most attention showed a man in what appeared to be Middle Eastern-style clothing, holding a rifle. He also was holding a stick with the oversize head of President Bush on it. The student said the head was enlarged because it was intended to be an effigy, Cravens said. The caption called for an end to the war in Iraq.
Link (Via IP)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Video of Bush using unsuspecting woman as human Kleenex
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DATE: 04/27/2004 09:17:32 AM
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Here's an astounding video clip that clearly shows President Bush wiping his eyeglasses on an unwitting woman's clothing during his appearance on The David Letterman Show.
How would you feel about a person who thinks it is okay to grab your shirt and use it clean their eyeglasses? That's how arrogant our President is. During a commercial break on the David Letterman show, producer Maria Pope was on stage and discussing something with Letterman, and while she was standing there in front of Bush, George leaned forward, grabbed the back of her sweater and used it to clean his glasses.
Link (Via Horkulated)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Nifty Bluetooth phone application for OS X
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DATE: 04/27/2004 09:49:15 AM
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BluePhoneMenu is a menu bar icon that displays Caller ID for your Bluetooth phone, as well as the phone's signal strength and battery power. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pixelpalooza's 2004 icon design winners
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DATE: 04/27/2004 11:13:19 AM
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Here are the winners of the Iconfactory's Pixelpalooza competition. Link (Thanks Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Microchip detects traces of 33 different species of animals in food
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DATE: 04/27/2004 11:21:10 AM
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"The presence of unwanted or unknown animal species in food, can have a range of effects from benign to deathly serious and is of great concern for public health, economic, religious and legal reasons. Manufacturers and consumers alike have been unable to examine the composition of food at a molecular level. However, for the first time, the bioMérieux FoodExpert-ID Array is being used to detect DNA sequences specific to an animal, allowing species composition to be determined, safeguarding the purity and authenticity of food products." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wok-tobogganing
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DATE: 04/27/2004 12:14:54 PM
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Chiseen -- Cantonese for "crazy" -- is a Chinese sport in which kids in giant woks toboggan down angled moving sidewalks at night. Video here:
Link
Alternate QuickTime Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hard disk heads can be polished with green tea
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DATE: 04/27/2004 12:55:49 PM
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Green tea is an environmentally sound substitute for diamond polishing compound used in the preparation of super-smooth hard-disk read-write heads.
John Lombardi, at Ventana Research based in Tuscon, Arizona in the US, suspected that green tea might also provide be an effective compound for polishing magnetic read-write heads. This was because tannin, a chemical that gives tea and coffee a bitter taste, binds to certain ceramic and metal materials. It is this quality that causes it to stain teapots and mugs...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky new dance craze: krumping
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DATE: 04/27/2004 03:02:30 PM
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MTV dictates:
We've been deprived all these years. We've never seen Krusty the Clown popping his booty, Ronald McDonald never C-walked, and Bozo ... forget about it. He could probably barely do a jig, let alone shake his whole body like an enraged zombie from "28 Days Later."
Well, the dark ages are over. There's a group of California clowns doing the thang. We've gotten a potent dosage of clown dancing -- or krumping, as it's called -- in videos such as Missy Elliott's "I'm Really Hot" and the Black Eyed Peas "Hey Mama." Now the ringleader of the crunk circus act says the mainstream had better look out, because he's bringing more than balloons and giant shoes. The krumping era just may be upon us.
Link
(Thanks, Mara!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pizza delivery calls used to nab deadbeats
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DATE: 04/27/2004 03:21:24 PM
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I love this: the state of Missouri is using pizza delivery lists to track down people that owe court-imposed fines.David Coplen, the state office's budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people. "There are literally millions of dollars of uncollected fines, fees and court costs out there," Coplen said. [...] Databases compiled by private companies and government agencies are a key tool for firms such as ACS, Coplen said, and "one of the databases they find to be most helpful are pizza delivery databases." "When you call to order a pizza, you usually give them your correct name, your correct address and your correct phone number," he said.
Moral of the story: if you owe money to the court, use a pseudonym when ordering pizza. Link (Via IP)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online t-shirt store: "we were gagged by Google"
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DATE: 04/27/2004 03:38:02 PM
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Y-que, my favorite t-shirt store in glamorous Silverlake, LA, CA, claims to have been "gagged by Google." This is the online shop that makes all the "FREE [MISBEHAVING CELEBRITY NAME HERE]" t-shirts, and the TOTAL RETARD shirts bearing Arnold Schwarzenneger's smug mug. Free Y-Que!
From: Google:The following...items that must be removed from your site in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:
Recall Bush - White T-shirt (with radio control on head)
Dumb and Dumber White T-shirt - Bush and Blair: The Movie
You're Fired - George W. Bush White T-shirt
Dump Cheney White T-shirt - "Halliburton" tattooed across head
Miserable Failure T-shirt - George W. Bush
Kerry sucks (too) - T-shirt"
In order to stay in business and continue advertising on Google we are moving all of our political merchandise to a separate website located at: FashionCriminal.com. If you find any offensive or negative merchandise on this website, please contact us immediately at: billw@ekay.com and we will transfer the items to the other website asap.
I'd welcome a response from Google on this. Link to Y-Que home, Link to a gallery of the "banned," politically-oriented t-shirts. This isn't the first (or the last) AdWords-related conflict. In other news, I saw a beat-up art car driving down Sunset Boulevard today with "SWITCH LIARS IN 2004 || VOTE KERRY" painted on the side.
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TITLE: When booty calls: Free sex for Iraq-bound soldiers?
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DATE: 04/27/2004 05:56:51 PM
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Just when you thought war couldn't get any weirder, you stumble accross a text ad on Wonkette for an "online movement" known as Operation Take One For The Country. Let's just hope they're packing condoms.
Mission Statement: To discretely provide US troops shipping out overseas with the most sensually pleasing departure possible.
OTOFTC is a movement of like-minded women (women predominantly as of right now) who have covertly organized into groups to frequent eating and drinking establishments near armed service bases where troops are preparing to ship out overseas, and take one for the country, so to speak. We are a virtual organization and have no official headquarters or charter. We believe US service men and women deserve our support and we are willing to make caring choices about making them happy.
Kelly here! WOW!! - The site is finally up and running. I guess the time had to come. This site means this organization's existence is no longer covert, but remember, our missions should still be.
Link (via Fleshbot)UPDATE: There's some interesting social-sexual history behind this story. A BoingBoing reader writes in with background on "charity girls" from earlier wars: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SF show photoshop mashups
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DATE: 04/28/2004 01:39:43 AM
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This Fark photoshopping contest invites participants to mash up two or science fiction TV shows or movies. I love this one, as well as the Gerry Anderson/Trek classic one...
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tropical deepfreeze photoshopping contest
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DATE: 04/28/2004 01:47:40 AM
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Worth1000's new photoshopping contest is live for voting. The theme is "Let it Snow: Snow scenes where you'd least expect them."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Major new Blosxom version in alpha
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DATE: 04/28/2004 01:49:28 AM
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Rael Dornfest has come up from air after a prodigious bout of writing and editing, and promptly produced an alpha of the next major rev of his brilliant blogging tool, Blosxom:
It's been massively refactored, all but rewritten, object-oriented, and usable as a CGI script, module, or indeed subclassed. Oh, and I'm afraid it's grown a bit, now weighing in at a massive 15K (slightly less, actually) ;-)
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: United Airlines' honorific overload
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DATE: 04/28/2004 01:54:13 AM
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United Airlines' Mileage Plus signup form has an unbelieveable array of options for "Title," including "Swami" and "Cantor."
Mr
Ms
Mrs
Miss
Dr
1sgt
1st Lt
2nd Lt
Adm
Baron
Baroness
Bishop
Brig Gen
Brother
Cantor
Capt
Cardinal
Cmdr
Cmst
Col
Count
Countess
Cpl
Cpo
Dean
Duchess
Duke
Elder
Ens
Father
Fleet Adm
General
Governor
Gysgt
Hon
Imam
Judge
Lady
Lcpl
Lord
Lt
Lt Cmdr
Lt Col
Lt Gen
Lt Jg
Ma
Major
Major Gen
Mcpo
Mgysgt
Minister
Monsignor
Most Rev
Mother
Msgt
Mstr
Pastor
Petty Off
Pfc
Po1
Po2
Po3
President
Prince
Prof
Pvt
Rabbi
Rear Adm
Rev
Right Rev
Scpo
Senator
Sfc
Sgt
Sgtmaj
Sir
Sister
Smn
Smn1
Smst
Sp4
Sp5
Sp6
Sr
Sra
Srta
Ssgt
Swami
Tech Sgt
Very Rev
Vice Adm
Link
(Thanks, Ken!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Voyeuristic vintage snapshots of Disneyland
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DATE: 04/28/2004 06:04:19 AM
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Disneyland is one of the most-photographed piecces of real-estate in the world. Since 1955, visitors to the park have been exhaustively documenting it with photos and slides. Now, the Disnephiles of The Imaginary World have assembled a "virtual tour" made up of scans of slides shot at Disneyland in the 1950s and 1960s. This combines the thrill of fanboy history with the voyeurism of going through family photo albums found at thrift shops, and just about made my day.
Link
(Thanks, Hork!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brit Airways' honorifics kick United's ass
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DATE: 04/28/2004 06:44:21 AM
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Thomas sez, "Thought United Airlines covered every possible title? Not a chance. British Airways covers absolutely everything including -- I kid you not -- 'His Holiness' and 'Her Majesty'. Because I'm sure the Pope needs air miles."
Mr
Mrs
Ms
Miss
Dr
Herr
Monsieur
Hr
Frau
A V M
Admiraal
Admiral
Air Cdre
Air Commodore
Air Marshal
Air Vice Marshal
Alderman
Alhaji
Ambassador
Baron
Barones
Brig
Brig Gen
Brig General
Brigadier
Brigadier General
Brother
Canon
Capt
Captain
Cardinal
Cdr
Chief
Cik
Cmdr
Col
Col Dr
Colonel
Commandant
Commander
Commissioner
Commodore
Comte
Comtessa
Congressman
Conseiller
Consul
Conte
Contessa
Corporal
Councillor
Count
Countess
Crown Prince
Crown Princess
Dame
Datin
Dato
Datuk
Datuk Seri
Deacon
Deaconess
Dean
Dhr
Dipl Ing
Doctor
Dott
Dott sa
Dr
Dr Ing
Dra
Drs
Embajador
Embajadora
En
Encik
Eng
Eur Ing
Exma Sra
Exmo Sr
F O
Father
First Lieutient
First Officer
Flt Lieut
Flying Officer
Fr
Frau
Fraulein
Fru
Gen
Generaal
General
Governor
Graaf
Gravin
Group Captain
Grp Capt
H E Dr
H H
H M
H R H
Hajah
Haji
Hajim
Her Highness
Her Majesty
Herr
High Chief
His Highness
His Holiness
His Majesty
Hon
Hr
Hra
Ing
Ir
Jonkheer
Judge
Justice
Khun Ying
Kolonel
Lady
Lcda
Lic
Lieut
Lieut Cdr
Lieut Col
Lieut Gen
Lord
M
M L
M R
Madame
Mademoiselle
Maj Gen
Major
Master
Mevrouw
Miss
Mlle
Mme
Monsieur
Monsignor
Mr
Mrs
Ms
Mstr
Nti
Pastor
President
Prince
Princess
Princesse
Prinses
Prof
Prof Dr
Prof Sir
Professor
Puan
Puan Sri
Rabbi
Rear Admiral
Rev
Rev Canon
Rev Dr
Rev Mother
Reverend
Rva
Senator
Sergeant
Sheikh
Sheikha
Sig
Sig na
Sig ra
Sir
Sister
Sqn Ldr
Sr
Sr D
Sra
Srta
Sultan
Tan Sri
Tan Sri Dato
Tengku
Teuku
Than Puying
The Hon Dr
The Hon Justice
The Hon Miss
The Hon Mr
The Hon Mrs
The Hon Ms
The Hon Sir
The Very Rev
Toh Puan
Tun
Vice Admiral
Viscount
Viscountess
Wg Cdr
Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
Update: Johannes points out a glaring omission here: in German, someone with multiple PhDs goes by Doktor Doktor Doktor (und zo weiter), abbreviated DDDDr -- how does BA expect to attract hyper-educated Germanic people without this honorific in its otherwise exhaustive list?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Basecamp: project-management web-app from 37Signals
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DATE: 04/28/2004 07:26:10 AM
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37Signals, a fantastic web-dev company, has produced a new project-management app called Basecamp that looks like a winner. Not only is it extremely pretty and easy-to-follow -- I'd expect no less from the usability wonks at 37Signals -- but it's also open: information flows out of the app as RSS and can be bulk-exported in XML, so none of your precious project-management material becomes a lever to lock you into paying the (surprisingly reasonable) monthly rates.
Also nice: the option for iChatAV-based support, and 30 day free trials.
Finally, there's a fit and finish here that makes it feel like something much more stable than a just-launched product, for example, Basecamp can be skinned to look like your internal website and you can reference it with custom URLs that don't contain any hint that your project is being hosted anywhere but your own site: as the marketing bumpf points out, this is the kind of thing that can give you appearance of really intimidating savviness to your clients.
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblogachella
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DATE: 04/28/2004 07:28:24 AM
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Going to the Coachella music festival in the Southern California desert this weekend? I hate you, because you are going to see Radiohead, and I, who lack tickets, am not. Anyway -- bring sunscreen. Bring water. Bring your phonecam. Mark Brown of buzznet says:
Buzznet will be hosting a Coachella Festival moblog that anyone can contribute to from the Polo Fields during this weekend's music & art festival. As always, it is easy to contribute just email photos and blog text to 'coachella@buzznet.com'. As long as everyone's cellphones work out there, this will be a very successful event. Last year AT&T worked fine for me. But i've heard that the networks get *very* busy late in the day. If only they had wi-fi too...
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Social Network Spam = SNAM
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DATE: 04/28/2004 07:30:20 AM
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Snagged from Michael Tchong's "Trendsetters" newsletter:
Social networks have spawned a new form of spam that uses the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) message feature frequently found in this new genre of networks. Google's Orkut, a network of some 200,000 members, offers the ability to send messages to FOAFs. FOAF messages often contain conference promotions or job postings that, while low in volume, will one day require action on the part of network managers.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Social history of "operation take one for the country"
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DATE: 04/28/2004 08:00:12 AM
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Following up on this post about an online movement of women who offer free casual sex to Iraq-bound soldiers, BoingBoing reader James Stanek says:
America has a long standing tradition of this sort of behavior, going at least as far back as WWII. Although the term "Charity Girl" is/was generally used in reference to women who had sex for gifts and/or fun, its also used in a more specific way. I found this via a9.com in "No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease' by Allan M. Brandt (p. 81):
Physicians and social workers frequently commented that the professional prostitute had given way to the so-called "patriotic prostitute" and "charity girl." As one CTCA social worker wrote: 'The peculiar charm and glamour which surrounds the man in uniform causes an unusual type of prostitute to spring up in time of war. Girls idealize the soldier and many really feel that nothing is wrong when done for him. One such girl said she had never sold herself to a civilian but felt she was doing her bit when she had been with eight soldiers in a night.' The "girl problem," as it became popularly known, seemed even more ominous to reformers than commercialized vice because it so often included youngsters from respectable, middle-class backgrounds. "Girls apparently of good families drive up in their cars and invite the soldiers who happen to be along the roadside near the camp to come to supper to a roadhouse or the nearest city," explained Dr. Jennie H. Harris. "The results are the usual ones."
I'm not a particular expert or even particularly interested in this field, its just that I remember reading about this in college and it always stuck with me as one of those "Aha" moments where you realize references to the "good old days" should be treated with large skepticism. My college read was "Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America" by John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman (p. 260-261):
The response of moral reformers points to the changes that had occurred since the previous generation. Whereas those of the First World War focused on the dangers of prostitution, by the 1940s it was the behavior of "amateur girls"--popularly known as khaki-wackies, victory girls, and good-time Charlottes--that concerned moralists.
Update: Boingboing reader Abe says, "takeoneforthecountry.com is down, boingboinged perhaps. But it appears to be mirrored at takeoneforthecountry.org and takeoneforthecountry.net"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chinese gamer suing MMO company over artifact duplication dispute
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DATE: 04/28/2004 08:15:49 AM
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A Chinese gamer who bought a sword that was deleted by the game-host because it had been duplicated by the seller is suing the game-host to reinstate his sword and apologise. As Terra Nova's Dan Hunter says, "Virtual property, duping, and fraud. Heaven."
After many hours of playing the game, he earned 140 million units of game money, which he spent buying a powerful sword from another player through an online trading platform provided by the operator in November.
On November 16, he found the sword had been deleted from his account. After contacting Optisp several times, he was told that the sword was deleted because it was illegally duplicated.
He is asking the court to order Optisp to give back his sword, which he estimates is worth 1,000 yuan (US$120) in real money, and apologize.
Link
(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Attack of the giant snails
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DATE: 04/28/2004 08:58:26 AM
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Federal health officials are hunting down these Giant African Land Snails that can transmit meningitis, destroy plants, are extremely fruitful and multiplicitous, according to an AP report:
"In 1966, a Miami boy smuggled three Giant African Land Snails into the country. His grandmother eventually released them into a garden, and in seven years there were more than 18,000 of them. The eradication program took 10 years, according to the USDA."
Recently, a parent donated several of the beasties to a Wisconsin school. The US Department of Agriculture was called in after teachers learned that their latest classroom pets were illegal aliens. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Not your father's CIA
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DATE: 04/28/2004 09:40:05 AM
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"When people think of the CIA, they think of people lurking around in trenchcoats, sending messages in code, and using cool tools to do their job. Well, to some extent that's true, but it's not the whole story." For the rest, visit the Central Intelligence Agency Homepage for Kids! Link (Thanks, Dr. Maz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: James Patrick Kelly's wonderful sf stories online as free audiobooks
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DATE: 04/28/2004 12:36:48 PM
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James Patrick Kelly, my friend and mentor, is one of the finest short story writers working in science fiction today. His stories are like perfect little gems, and his advice on story-writing was the most important artistic advice I've ever received.
Which is a preamble to some of the best news I've ever imparted: Jim Kelly is releasing audiobooks of his stories on teh net under a Creative Commons license. I know what I'm gonna be listening to before bed and on the tube this month.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Knudsen's Dairy cookbook dissected
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DATE: 04/28/2004 12:44:53 PM
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James Lileks is in rare form today as he dissects the recipes to be had in a vintage Knudsen's Dairy cookbook.
Chicken Curry Salad. The recipe says “toss lightly,” but I suppose that depends on how much you eat and how bad the cramps get. The item in the middle is the Holiday Salad, although which holiday is best celebrated with tumor-studded Bruise Cake I’m not entirely certain. The item on the bottom is – well, steel yourself.
Corned Beef Salad Loaf.
I kid you not.
Meat Jell-O.
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AdBusters new sneaker to compete toe-to-toe with Nikes
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DATE: 04/28/2004 12:50:25 PM
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AdBusters has created their own brand of Converse-like sneakers, made by unionized workers. The launch of "Black Spot" sneakers is accompanied by a "subvertising" campaign aimed at humiliating Phil Knight and the Nike corporation.
Link
(Thanks, Seamus!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bootable CD turns 486s into meshing WiFi routers
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DATE: 04/28/2004 12:57:17 PM
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Glenn Fleishmann has written a blog entry about an amazing new WiFi project at Champaign-Urbana, to create a bootable disk image that turns its host machines into meshing wireless repeaters.
The CUWiN project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.
"We've been developing software now since about 2000, and our idea is to build software that is super user friendly, super easy for someone who doesn't understand the nuances of the technology or community wireless networking to set up their own system," said Meinrath. It's an attempt to enable community networking to spread beyond the folks who are self-starters.
Link
(Thanks, Glenn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Killer noise-cancelling headset designed for NYSE trading-floor
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DATE: 04/28/2004 01:04:19 PM
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The Boom is a noise-reducing headset designed for use on the NYSE trading floor that is said to be capable of delivering comprehensible speech even in the noisiest of environments. I'm ditching my landline this month in favour of a VoIP soft-phone on my PowerBook, so it's serendipity that I came across this headset today.
Link
(via Cool Tools)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: $10,000 1965 "kitchen computer"
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DATE: 04/28/2004 01:24:12 PM
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Mitch sez, "Another Jetsonian Relic: A $10K kitchen computer ca. 1965. Notice the orange-and-black Star Trek: TOS design."
Link
(Thanks, Mitch!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Self-propelled swarming robot traffic cones: nuff sed.
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DATE: 04/28/2004 02:15:00 PM
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Self-propelled swarming robot traffic cones: nuff sed.
The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a bid to help reduce the $100 billion per year that the Department of Transportation estimates is lost to the US economy through accidents and delays caused by highway lane closures.
The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Making life
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DATE: 04/28/2004 02:56:05 PM
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The current issue of Scientific American features a mind-blowing article by W. Wayt Gibbs about "synthetic biology," the effort to create designer organisms from the bottom up:
"This nascent field has three major goals: One, learn about life by building it, rather than by tearing it apart. Two, make genetic engineering worthy of its name--a discipline that continuously improves by standardizing its previous creations and recombining them to make new and more sophisticated systems. And three, stretch the boundaries of life and of machines until the two overlap to yield truly programmable organisms. Already TNT-detecting and artemisinin-producing microbes seem within reach. The current prototypes are relatively primitive, but the vision is undeniably grand: think of it as Life, version 2.0."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WiFi + planes = warflying
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DATE: 04/28/2004 04:21:10 PM
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BoingBoing pal, wireless ubergeek, and SoCalWug co-founder Mike Outmesguine says:
I went warflying yesterday with folks from DailyWireless.com, TomsHardware.com, HighspeedLA.com, and CNN. We took off on parallel runways and flew in formation throughout the flight. While the planes were next to each other, we set up an in-flight wireless network and did a videoconferencing session from plane-to-plane. WiFi in the sky! Additionally, we performed a wireless network survey during the flight and found about 4000 access points.
link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nekkid Klingon babes
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DATE: 04/28/2004 04:32:11 PM
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Fleshbot says:
Let it be noted that this is the first, last, and only piece of "Star Trek"-inspired porn we will ever feature here on Fleshbot; we're not big science fiction fans, but these sexy morph chicks were just too hot to pass up.
Naked Klingon Women (Geocities site - thanks Jay). See also: NudeTrek.com (AVS protected archive of alt.binaries.startrek.adult)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Copyright, Technology, and The New Surveillance
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DATE: 04/28/2004 04:38:10 PM
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Sonia Katyal of Fordham Law School has written a thought-provoking paper on the relationship between copyright enforcement and privacy in the digital age. Some very interesting observations here on the increasingly invasive methods used by rightsholders to control how intellectual property is accessed and shared. Excerpt:
A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously.
This paradox, in turn, leads to the tension between privacy and intellectual property. Both areas of law face significant challenges because of technology's ever-expanding pace of development. Yet courts often exacerbate these challenges by sacrificing one area of law for the other, by eroding principles of informational privacy for the sake of unlimited control over intellectual property. Laws developed to address the problem of online piracy - in particular, the DMCA - have been unwittingly misplaced, inviting intellectual property owners to create private systems of copyright monitoring that I refer to as piracy surveillance. Piracy surveillance comprises extrajudicial methods of copyright enforcement that detect, deter, and control acts of consumer infringement.
Ms. Katyal's paper was selected as the winning entry for the 2004 Yale Law School Cybercrime and Digital Law Enforcement Conference writing competition. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Wi-Fi positioning system
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DATE: 04/28/2004 09:35:07 PM
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Here's an article I wrote for TheFeature about Quarterscope's interesting Wi-Fi technology that could enhance or replace GPS in some instances. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Flickr features
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DATE: 04/29/2004 01:51:10 AM
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Flickr, the image-sharing social software app, has rolled out a bunch of new features, including this one, which does very intuitive group-based access-control to files:
Photostreams are a new way to share your photos on Flickr, on simple webpages where you control who sees what. All the photos you upload automatically go into your Photostream, but different viewers see different images, depending on their relationship to you.
How does it work?
* As always, you can make photos public or private. You can also restrict the viewing to people who you have tagged with a specific relationship ("only show this to friends or better").
* Public photos appear to everyone viewing your Photostream, but you can exclude any public photo if you'd like.
* You can also see the collected streams of your friends' photos at http://flickr.com/photos/friends/, and the latest public photos on Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grip-tape for your mouse
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DATE: 04/29/2004 05:19:48 AM
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Mousegrips are peel-and-stick rubberized decals that you can attach to your mouse to absorb hand-goo, sweat and burger king. When Apple switched from the old, integrated-handle "toilet seat" iBooks to the white, smooth, seamless EZ-fumble models, I went out and bought a bunch of crazy skateboard liners and cut-and-pasted them onto the chassis to give my clumsiness a fighting chance against the iBooks' inherent fragility.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshopped dream houses
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DATE: 04/29/2004 05:21:46 AM
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Lots of tasty entries into this Worth1000 photoshopping contest to design a fantastical dream house.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Baen ebooks CDs as .torrents
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DATE: 04/29/2004 05:40:13 AM
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Baen Books is a successful science fiction publisher that releases a lot of its titles as non-DRM text/html files via its website and on CDROMs bound into its book. Now, all six of the Baen CDs, representing a substantial library of science fiction, are available as Bit Torrent files, to be gang-downloaded to all comers at speed.
Link
(Thanks, Robotech Master!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bad film physics to teach good real physics
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DATE: 04/29/2004 05:43:06 AM
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Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics is a very good physics primer in the guise of a very funny critique of the ways that Hollywood bends the laws of physics when it makes movies.
Saying that shards of broken glass are razor sharp is an understatement. A shattered window contains thousands of incredibly sharp edges and dagger-like points. It takes almost no force for one of these points or edges to cause a laceration. However, people in movies routinely jump through plate glass windows without receiving a single scratch.
Broken glass has at least two mechanisms for slashing a person diving through a window: its weight and its inertia. First, large heavy shards of glass can fall like guillotines, slicing off body parts. Second, when a person jumps or, even worse, drives a motorcycle through a window, the shards of glass tend to stay in place due to their inertia. The only way to move them is to apply a force. If the person's body provides this force by pushing on the edge of a piece of glass, it can slice right through clothing, skin, and flesh. In the real world, jumping or driving through a plate glass window would be suicidal.
There are individuals who have accidentally fallen through windows without sustaining serious injuries. There are also people who have survived the Ebola virus. However, in both cases the odds are not particularly good.
Link
(Thanks, Peter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free WiFi in the National Mall
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DATE: 04/29/2004 05:45:19 AM
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Open Park is a community wireless group that is bringing free, open WiFi to the National Mall in DC, so that the next time you find yourself on the steps of the Supreme Court -- or wandering a Smithsonian building -- you can get online.
Link
(Thanks, Fred!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Life is tough for game developers, says study
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DATE: 04/29/2004 08:47:40 AM
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It looks like it's all work and no play for game developers.
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has a white
paper titled "Quality of Life in the Game Industry: Challenges and Best Practices." Some of the findings:
Crunch time is omnipresent, during which respondents work 65 to 80 hours
a week.
The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours 13% of the
time.
Overtime is often uncompensated.
Spouses are likely to respond that "You work too much..." (61.5%); "You
are always stressed out." (43.5%); "You don't make enough money." (35.6%)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblog image import app
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:00:15 AM
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BoingBoing reader Joshua says:
A few weeks ago, I read the post you guys made about MoblogUK, a creative commons licensed alternative to TextAmerica. I'd been searching for an alternative for awhile, so I was pretty excited to find it. After switching I wanted a way to get my images from TextAmerica over to the new site at MoblogUK, so I wrote this app to make the process easy. Besides parsing a TextAmerica moblog and sending the entries off to MoblogUK it can also save your TextAmerica entries locally in an XML/XSL format...in case you ever want to do that for some reason!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hoax --> Operation Take one for the Country
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:00:29 AM
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Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post, BoingBoing reader buddha says:
Single Southern Guy calls out the Operation Take One For The Country crew, claiming the whole thing is a hoax. Why? The radio station, DJs, and broadcast company involved in the interview transcribed on the OTOFTC site don't exist.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mathematical patterns in African-American hairstyles
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:00:37 AM
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What is the mathematical, fractal relationship between shapes found in beehive honeycombs, a pineapple, tesselating hexagons, and African-American hair braiding? Dr. Gloria Gilmer, founding president of the International Study Group on Ethnomathematics, is glad you asked.
Link (Thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Look like a film noir babe
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:01:02 AM
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Online clothing boutique Danger Dame offers some super-cool retro styles for wannabe vixens. Lace up, slink over to a barstool, and pretend you're in a Raymond Chandler novel with a tragic ending.
Link to Danger Dame shop. See also this lush new Taschen book, FILM NOIR.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reality-TV human baby giveaway, pissed-off Uri Geller claims trademark breach
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:01:15 AM
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The ABC-TV program 20/20 will air a contest between five couples on the show this Friday -- the winners get to adopt a real-live, pooping, crying baby. So, let me get this straight. You can't say "fuck," but you can broadcast a raffle for a human being? Snip from SJ Merc story:
"What's that? You say the program and host Barbara Walters have gone too far this time? What do you know about television? ABC knows a winner when it sees it and this is Nielsen gold, my friend. A reality show with a human life on the line -- all disguised as news programming. Let the other shows have half-naked people betraying each other on a deserted island. Give them the half-naked people eating buckets of bug eyes. And the half-naked people putting up with Donald Trump. And the half-naked people trying to get other half-naked people to marry them."
Link to SJ Merc story, Link to NY Post story (Thanks to several BB readers who pointed to this, including Iain Cooper)
UPDATE: Stop press! The real scandal here? Celebrity spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller is outraged at news of the 20/20 baby giveaway episode. He's planning legal action, and claims he owns a worldwide patent on any reality TV show that involves winning a baby. "I will speak to my patent attorney," says Geller, "I own the idea." Whatever, dear BoingBoing readers, but let me set the record straight: I own the patent on any reality-TV show involving live mudwrestling smackdowns between Uri Geller and Barbara Walters, and I will personally bend the spoon of anyone who forgets it. Link to Reuters story.
UPDATE 2: BoingBoing reader Kevin T. Keith says: "As a matter of fact, Uri Geller does hold a patent for a reality TV show that involves competing to adopt a baby. You can view the patent by going to the Patent and Trademark Office's Applications search page here and entering the phrase "in/geller-uri" (without quotation marks) in the large search window. The world gets weirder and weirder."
UPDATE 3: BoingBoing reader Marc Ascolese, who is a patent attorney, says -- more or less -- not so fast, mister spoonbender:
The link included above takes you to the search site for published U.S. patent applications (not issued patents). This does not mean that a U.S. Patent has been granted. Under certain circumstances, the USPTO requires applications to be published. In fact, if you go here, and enter the application number for Geller's patent application (09/757609) you can see some current status information. Basically, the application has not been examined yet. Because this application has been classified in U.S. Class 705, we can expect that it will be examined pretty rigorously. It may be a long time before Geller has an issued U.S. Patent he can enforce. Class 705 is where most "business method" type applications end up. For more about that, look here. Who said being a patent attorney was dull!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: E-Girl: Hack Your Way to Hollywood
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:01:32 AM
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In Wired News today, a story I filed about Heather Robinson -- also known as E-Girl. Her dark tale of following databases to Hollywood dreams broke first in the book Hollywood, Interrupted by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner.
An America Online customer service rep illicitly surfs the company's customer database, ferrets out private data on celebrity members and then hunts them down online under a false identity, seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood.
Sound like a prelude to prison? Not in the case of Heather Robinson. The former AOL employee managed to parlay privacy violations into useful contacts in Hollywood. With the help of those contacts, Robinson, 25, landed a movie deal, and she's using her toehold in the industry to advance another.
Later this week, Universal Pictures will start filming Robinson's first movie, The Perfect Man, a romantic comedy staring Hillary Duff and Heather Locklear. The film is about a teenage daughter who tries to create a "nonexistent boyfriend for her dejected mother," Robinson said. The story is based on another of her youthful indiscretions when she was 16 -- this one involving a stolen credit card and thousands of dollars of purchases.
Some would say it takes Robinson's level of moxie to succeed in Hollywood. In fact, the favorite legend in the movie business is that of a hard-working kid who starts in the mail room and through ambition, flexible ethical standards and political skill becomes a mogul. Judging by her exploits so far, Robinson is well on her way.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Howard Stern has a secret blog?
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DATE: 04/29/2004 10:11:06 AM
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Our friends at Gawker mutter into their Xantinis:
America's public enemy #1, radio-dude Howard Stern, made an off-hand remark on this morning's show -- he claims he writes a secret weblog. Stern said he writes as "another character" and that only "about 4 people are in on the joke." OK, he's almost certainly not Rance, who repeatedly claims to be an actor and not a fat guy eating Twinkies in his basement, laughing at a credulous, gossip-starved public.
If anyone out there has candidates for what might be Stern's secret blog, let us know -- if the blogger brags about hurling prosciutto at a stripper's ass, that might be a tip-off.
Link, And see also this previous Boingboing entry about mystery celeblogger "Rance" (George Clooney? Owen Wilson? Jimmy Hoffa? Alf?), Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mod a disposable cam into a stun-gun
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DATE: 04/29/2004 01:48:07 PM
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TechTV has a HOWTO for modifying a disposable camera into a stun-gun:
These disposable cameras (about $5 dollars a pop) have a capacitor that can store up to 600 volts of stopping power. When the capacitor discharges those volts, it delivers an amperage comparable to stun guns. Perfect for our shocking device.
Link
(Thanks, LVX23!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Googie landmark threatened with demolition
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DATE: 04/29/2004 02:21:10 PM
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Seal Beach, California's UFO-shaped Parasol diner, which is kept in pristine 1967 original condition by its owner, is scheduled to be torn down by a shopping mall developer in May. This site has more Parasol pictures, articles, and a link to an online petition. Link (Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Russian MP3 site sells music for about five cents a song
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DATE: 04/29/2004 02:35:34 PM
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The Sydney Morning Herald spoke to a lawyer about allofmp3.com, the Russian company that sells tons of online music by the gigabyte, and he said it is not likely that anyone who buys music from the site could get in trouble.
We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property.
His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?"
Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."
Link (Thanks, JNelsonW!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Patriot Act designed to protect Patriot Act by preventing challenges to it to be made public
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DATE: 04/29/2004 02:53:31 PM
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Great headline from the Washington Post: "Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act." It has to do with the ACLU filing a lawsuit challenging something in the Patriot Act, but a different provision in the Patriot Act made it illegal for the ACLU to reveal the lawsuit. Neat! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: BBC TV channel offers programming for pets
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DATE: 04/29/2004 03:11:06 PM
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From the Guardian: Pet TV "is being billed by the BBC as an attempt to find out what sort of TV programmes, sounds and images animals respond to. The interactive TV service will consist of a looped series of images and sounds, including clips of snooker balls rolling across the green baize, frisbees flying through the air, cat toys and cartoon characters such as Top Cat." Link (Registration required, unless you use the wonderful bugmenot.com) (Thanks, Carlo!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bob Moog documentary looks great
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DATE: 04/29/2004 04:07:48 PM
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The video clips from the new Bob Moog (inventor of the Moog synthesizer) documentary (titled "moog") are very exciting. Can't wait to see it. He says inventing things is a combination of "discovering and witnessing." (As an aside, isn't "Moog" a great name. It has that mod 60s sound that's perfect for a synthesizer. I don't think it would have been as popular had his last name been anything else.) Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Third porn actor tests positive for HIV -- Jessica Dee
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DATE: 04/29/2004 04:17:22 PM
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Fleshbot says:
[A] third adult performer, Jessica Dee, has also tested positive for HIV. Unlike Lara Roxx, who was just entering the business, Jessica has considerable video and photo experience under her belt. A search for her name at Ask Jolene turns up at least one photoset which seems to match the thumbnail photo of her in the AVN article; you can look that one up yourself if you're as morbidly curious as we were.
"Another Woman Who Worked with Darren James Tests HIV-Positive" (AVN)
"Jessica Dee Identified as Third HIV-Positive Performer" (AVN)
Jessica Dee (videography @ Search Extreme)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LayerOne Technology Conference in LA June 12-13
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:03:09 PM
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BoingBoing buddy boogah says:
A few of us have been working overtime to get a little technology conference together in Los Angeles. We've tried to make LayerOne an event for both the geek set and the suit in IT and our roster of speakers can back those claims up. In fact, here's a sampling of four of our dozen speakers:
- Danny O'Brien will be rehashing his talk from Emerging Tech 2004 [a crowd favorite] about the work habits of alpha geeks.
- Jason Schultz from the EFF talking about the DMCA and how it's stifling innovation.
- USC professor Douglas Thomas covering the politics of code.
- Dan Kaminsky, author of network toolset Paketto Keiretsu cranking out some more code/theory that's bound to marvel and frighten.
Not bad, eh? There's eight more talks where those four came from. We're currently in the middle of early bird registration - where we're shaving $10 off the $50 door price. That's a weekend's worth of talks and a free beer social on Saturday night for $40.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Man-and-Robot standup comedy in Japan
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DATE: 04/29/2004 09:14:13 PM
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BoingBoing pal Steve Portigal points us to "a demo of Japanese speaking robot technology, presented as a duo-standup routine featuring one of Japan's well-known comics. The robot is called PaPeJiro. So, if the robot kills - does that violate [Isaac Asimov's] Three Laws [of Robotics]?" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steampunk/dead media photoshopping contest
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:00:36 AM
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Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest is "Vintage Products" -- lots of nice steampunk and dead-media licks here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free mall WiFi on the rise
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:02:30 AM
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Shopping malls across the US are adding free WiFi:
A very small number of the 1,130 malls in the United States have wireless access. But, she said, an increasing number are thinking of installing the capability.
For instance, Westfield America Trust said most of its 62 regional and super regional shopping centers will soon offer the service. Taubman, which owns or manages 31 malls, began offering Wi-Fi services yesterday at its The Shops at Willow Bend in Plano, Texas.
"If you look at malls in general, you are really seeing owners bring in things that allow for more people to come do a variety of things at the center," Duker said. "The mall has become more than a place to shop."
Link
(via WiFiNetNews)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Using a game to describe all the images on the net
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:07:08 AM
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ESP Game (reg required, cypherpunks/cypherpunks works) is a game whose objective is to incent English-speaking net users to keyword-label every image on the Internet. The game throws up an image in a Java applet, then asks you and an anonymous "partner" elsewhere on the net to type in keywords until both of you have a word in common -- IOW, until you and a stranger can agree on a good label for the picture. Presumably, this is being added to a metadata database for the purpose of cataloguing all the images on the net. Neat idea.
Link
(Thanks, Jed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple's new DRM reneges on your purchase conditions, picks your pocket
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:17:52 AM
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The new iTunes has stricter DRM than the last version, limiting the number of times you can burn your playlists to seven (it used to be ten), and detecting and blocking similar playlists. Jason Schultz has some good ranty analysis about what this means:
So after one year and 70 million songs, $0.99 now buys you less rather than more -- seven hard burns instead of ten soft ones. What will Apple "allow" us to do with the music we "buy" next year? three burns? one? zero?
And what about the songs you've already bought? Don't we get to keep the rights we had before the change?
Well, Apple has conveniently reserved its rights to make changes -- unilaterially -- to its DRM and your ability to make fair use via its Terms of Service and Terms of Sale pretty much anytime it pleases, without even having to give you notice.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sterling's new novel is out -- catch the book-tour!
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:19:07 AM
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Bruce Sterling's new novel, The Zenith Angle, is out now. To give you an idea of how much I liked this book -- a technothriller about post-9/11 hacker-entrepreneurs, and the military-industrial complex -- here's the blurb I wrote:
Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this
book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from
Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops.
The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at
you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the
net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before
the month is out. Lots of books are called "thrillers" but very few are
this thrilling.
Bruce is going on a ten-city US book tour -- check here for dates!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stross's future-rant
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:28:23 AM
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Tomorrow, I'll be interviewing Charlie Stross at Plokta.con, a con in Newbury, UK. He's the Guest-of-Honour, and he's written up a corker of a GoH contribution for the programme book.
Eusocial animals like ants, termites, bees, or naked mole rats, exhibit curious behaviour; their societies are stratified by role, with workers, warriors, and reproductive castes that may differ morphologically from one another. Humans aren't so obviously specialized, but if you consider our machines as part of our extended phenotype, it begins to look that way: if our machines become intentionally driven, and they're tailored to play different roles in our society, then you could argue that we occupy some kind of privileged position in a hive-relationship with tools that require our continued safety and comfort in order to further their own reproduction. There's nobody here in this hive but us queens, and the living machines we so carelessly manufacture as conveniences for our own comfort. Individual ants or other eusocial insect species all share the same genetic code, but different castes express radically different phenotypic traits, and indeed most ants are sterile workers who can only further their genetic traits by ensuring that their cousin, aunt or mother the hive-queen succeeds. Our machines don't share our genome (yet), but they share parts of the vast haze of information that has gathered around the genome, and they can only reproduce through us.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1981 computer catalogue scanned and posted
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:30:50 AM
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I swear, the scans out of this 1981 computer catalogue are more fascinating than all the patent medicines in a 19th-century Sears-Roebuck.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Battelle on Google's S-1
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DATE: 04/30/2004 12:39:45 AM
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John Battelle's analysis of Google's S-1 filing -- and particularily, the charming-but-stilted founders' letter -- is fascinating and insightful:
The letter states, among other things, that 1. We don't need to do this for the money; 2. We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street's need for smooth earnings predictability; 3. We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it's understood on Wall St.; 4. Don't ask us to do so, we'll simply decline the request; 5. We'll do odd things that you won' t understand; 6. We will make big bets on things that may not work out; 7. We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies; 8. We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we've chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and NYT that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces; 9. We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords; 10. Don't invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high; 11. Don't even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees; 12. We believe in the idea of Don't Be Evil; 13. It's evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo); 14. We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place; 17. Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn't some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers); 18. This letter is our way of answering the questions we can't answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: interview with Sealand designer
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DATE: 04/30/2004 08:34:40 AM
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Etoy Zak says:
i just compiled some conversations with Daniel van der Velden, an interesting graphic designer who initiated the conceptual (and
hypothetical) identity proposal "Meta Haven: Sealand Identity Project". I think his work is one model for critical/smart graphic design... while also being fucking cool..
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Dining Zen
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DATE: 04/30/2004 08:49:13 AM
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cypher's foodlog
project denny's
taco world
casa bonita
late night dining guide
menu database
el bocadillo del diablo
email lunchboxes
final meals
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wireless real-space gaming -- NetAttack
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DATE: 04/30/2004 08:52:42 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:
When you play a computer game, you interact with what is on your monitor, even if you're outside playing on a mobile phone. You don't interact with your physical environment. Now, computer scientists from Fraunhofer FIT want you to play outside, sharing the outdoor experience offered by children's games. NetAttack "is a new type of indoor/outdoor Augmented Reality game that makes the actual physical environment an inherent part of the game itself." In this game, two teams are fighting to destroy the central database of a virtual big company. Both teams have indoor players, who control the game from their laptop computers, and outdoor players, equipped with GPS receivers, trackers, sensors and video cameras.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Snapshots from Hell, Singapore-style
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DATE: 04/30/2004 09:05:25 AM
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Following up on this earlier post about museums in Asia that depict Buddhist Hell, BoingBoing reader Heng-Cheong sends us more photos of the Hell exhibit in Singapore's Tiger Balm Gardens, better known locally as Haw Par Villa. Shown here, the Filthy Blood Pond, part of a special section in Hell reserved for sinners who have (begin quote)
* kidnapped little boys [Ed. note: AHEM, cough cough]
* claimed to have lost somebody's deposit (probably an estate agent)
* are an incompetent physician or
* are a matchmaker
"For this, you are slapped with extreme thirst and hunger, soaked in ice, dipped in volcano, or forced to bathe in filthy blood."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New guestblogger -- Russ Kick of The Memory Hole and Disinformation
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DATE: 04/30/2004 09:36:06 AM
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First, thanks to our outgoing guestblogger Alan Graham, for holding down the right hand column this past month.
Next: A warm welcome to our new guestblogger, Russ Kick, the author of several books, including The Disinformation Book of Lists: Subversive Facts and Hidden Information in Rapid-Fire Format and 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know. Mr. Kick is also the editor of many anthologies, such as Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies; You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths; and Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies. He has also written articles and a column for the Village Voice.
The Memory Hole, a website devoted to rescuing knowledge and freeing information, is his labor of love. Russ first made the front page of the New York Times when he digitally uncensored a heavily-redacted Justice Department report. In April 2004, he posted 288 previously unseen photos of military coffins coming back from Iraq, which he had pried loose from the Air Force. This set off a worldwide media frenzy leading to the front pages of most major newspapers, heavy rotation on CNN, the lead story on network newscasts, and interviews on Good Morning America and CBS Evening News. You can browse through some of that extensive media coverage here, via Google News search. Yesterday, the Memory Hole published these graphic and disturbing screen captures from video footage documenting abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel. Related news here.
I have no doubt that Russ will indeed Kick it on the BoingBoing guestblog. Welcome!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Random, April-fresh obscenities hidden in XML file on deodorant website
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DATE: 04/30/2004 03:06:38 PM
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Says Fleshbot:
Someone at b3ta found this XML list of obscenities on a website for women's deodorant (wtf?) and recommends that "any ambitious young swearers out there study it thoroughly"; we plan on using the term "chutney ferret" as much as possible from now on.
Link to deodorant ad webpage, Link to the offending XML.update: BoingBoing readers Dan and Aaron each wrote to point out that the XML list appears to be banned words -- the site offers a "make your own personalized t-shirt" thing. Dan says, "Try clicking on 'Prizes,' and then 'Design mantra T-shirt'. If you attempt to design a shirt with one of the phrases or words in the XML list, you will be chastized for using disallowed language. And how!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Erotic art photography censored in Norway
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DATE: 04/30/2004 04:27:45 PM
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An anti-obscenity statute sparked an online controversy in Norway recently, when the Norwegian online erotic magazine Cupido published some explicit, autobiographical art-porn shots from Brooklyn-based photographer Siege. The specific issue in question is not currently online in entirety, but you can see one of the offending shots here (upper right-hand corner). Some of the work was also recently blogged on BoingBoing, here. Cupido editor Cecilie Kjensli in Norway sent the following e-mail to the banned-in-Norway photographer:
"You know what. Something stupid has happened. Cupido har been sensuratet for first time during 20 years because of your pictures :) I have told you before that we are not aloud to print pictures with genital touhing. Our law system sais you cant show pictures that can offend people, so i thougt that no boddy would be offended of this in an erotic magazine. I understand if they were printed in a newspaper or a womans magazin, but not ours.
"Our distributor dissagred with me the way they understand the law, so they put a black spot in the face of the girls sukking you, I belive. So I told the press. That you are a trendy New York phothografer with a girlfriend and that you have a good appetite for sex and that you like taking pictures of you doing it. I read this on Nerve.com I think. Hope you'r not angry at me for this. I was wear of that something like this could happen, so when it did, I tipsed one of the
biggest and best tabloid newspaper in Norway, and they made a huge reportage on it telling people that you actually can take off the black spot. And it showed the stupid porn-law, as we call it, from a good perspectiv.
Here is the link to the reportage in the newspaper. I'm the one with the
dildoes."
Link to Norwegian Newsmagazine Dagbladet's story about the "stupid porn law" (contains sexually explicit images, and lots of little black censorship circles) (also seen on Fleshbot, where you will also find this link to the best porn news headline EVER.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MIT makes Jack Valenti look like an idiot
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DATE: 04/30/2004 06:33:02 PM
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MIT's The Tech interviews the MPAA's outgoing spokesmonster Jack Valenti, with hilarious results. It's not often that a slickster as teflon coated as Jack gets made to look an utter fool (though I'd welcome a round onstage with him in front of a university audience) so bravo and bravo again to The Tech's Keith J. Winstein, who ran circles around Valenti.
TT: Indeed, but are you doing that when you rent a movie from Blockbuster and you watch it at home? ... I run Linux on my computer. There’s no product I can buy that’s licensed to watch [DVDs]. If I go to Blockbuster and rent a movie and watch it, am I a bad person? Is that bad?
JV: No, you’re not a bad person. But you don’t have any right.
TT: But I rented the movie. Why should it be illegal?
JV: Well then, you have to get a machine that’s licensed to show it.
TT: Here’s one of these machines; it’s just not licensed.
[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line “qrpff” DVD descrambler.]
TT: If you type that in, it’ll let you watch movies.
JV: You designed this?
TT: Yes.
JV: Un-fucking-believable.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Animal-shaped rubber bands
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DATE: 05/01/2004 01:46:59 AM
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I never thought I'd find myself drooling over a premium rubber-band, but these animal-shaped rubber bands from the Japanese design firm Plus-D are super-cool.
Flash Link
Update: you can buy these at the Container Store for $7 plus shipping
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What would Jesus say about Pete the Porno Puppet?
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DATE: 05/01/2004 08:33:53 AM
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Newsweek's Brian Braiker says,
This is a story i wrote this week about Pete the Porno Puppet, a truly bizarro PSA campaign that XXXchurch ("the #1 Christian porn site") launched -- it's an ad designed to convince parents to get rid of their porn stash so that children aren't exposed to it. The irony is that the anti-porn ad was filmed by smut peddler Jimmy D. Also, it's creepy as all getout.
Indeed. When I first ran accross the site a month or two ago, I was surprised to see they were posting excerpts from an article about Hustler publisher Larry Flynt that I wrote for Wired News. Seeing your work snipped out of context to promote a political agenda you're not part of is almost as disturbing as... um... a talking, evangelical sock puppet that wants your porn.
Link to Newsweek story on XXXchurch
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Chick-Fil-A's lawyers fried to a crisp by smart alecks at attrition.org
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DATE: 05/01/2004 10:19:18 AM
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Hilarious line-by-line retort to a nastygram sent by Chick-FIl-A's lawyers,
: It has recently come to our attention that your website, : tor.at/resources/fun_stuff/www.attrition.org/gallery/other/tn/
: eat_mor_chikin.jpg.html>, includes a picture of the "EAT MOR CHIKIN" cows.
: This picture is an exact duplicate of CFA's U.S. copyright registration
: (Registration No. VA 760-668), and use of it is an unauthorized infringement
: of the CFA's intellectual property.
Oohh, your mail was going SO good until this part! But, unfortunately you
"screwed the pooch" as the saying goes. Not only do you demonstrate you
know jack and shit about how the Internet works, you prove that you are
not legally competant to defend your client's intellectual property
rights. If you feel you are competant, then you must be doing this to
fraudently bill your client for additional wasted hours. Which is it,
i'm curious?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PacManhattan: LARPing Pac Man
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DATE: 05/01/2004 05:18:07 PM
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PacManhattan is a live-action version of PacMan, played around Washington Square Park, in which people in Pac Man and ghost suits chase each other through the streets, seeking out power-pellets.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Futurismic publishes its first story
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DATE: 05/02/2004 01:08:06 AM
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Futurismic, the science-fiction writers' group-blog, announced a while back that it was going to start publishing fiction, and put out a call for submissions. Today, they published their first work, a story called "The Factwhore Proposition" by Campbell-, Hugo-, Nebula- and Sidewise-Nominee Charles Coleman Finlay.
I quite liked the story: it's a distopian work about the commoditization of knowledge work -- Google Answers meets McDonalds -- with a nice bit of characterization in the protagonist, who is clearly the spiritual descendant of today's web-geeks.
Even after all these years, he couldn’t believe the stupid questions people asked. With so much information available online, it was difficult, sometimes impossible, to phrase a search string properly to narrow the hits down to find what you wanted, especially when much of the best info was hidden by exclusionary marketing agreements or sequestered behind gates. People would rather pay someone else to do it. And with the big bio-boom, some people had the money to spare. Dylan was not some people. The gap between the haves and have-nots had been blown Grand Canyon wide by the new technology, with those who could afford the enhancements on a narrow ledge that kept moving farther away from everyone else. But if Dylan roped himself to enough of the haves, maybe he could pull his way over to the other side.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessons learnt from OED's science fiction effort
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DATE: 05/02/2004 01:50:29 AM
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The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have begun to post lessons learnt from their first-of-its-kind call for entries of 2001, when it asked science fiction fans to submit sfnal words that were missing from the Dictionary.
Soon we were being deluged with dozens of e-mails a day, containing suggestions, citations, and questions about our work. Mail came from all over the world, and correspondents included several noted SF writers. It took months to fully catch up with the backlog (and the pace has reached more manageable levels). But the results have been spectacular. Some of the entries we have published from the project include Martian, meteor storm, mind-meld (from ‘Star Trek’), moon base, and multiverse, and out-of-sequence entries bot (a robot), filk (a type of song performed by SF fans), and Sturgeon's Law (‘90% of everything is crap’, formulated by writer Theodore Sturgeon)...
Science fiction has several advantages as a subject for this kind of investigation. The vocabulary is largely self-contained; SF terms tend to occur in SF and nowhere else, while, say, political language can be found anywhere and everywhere. The fans are particularly committed, often have linguistic interests, and are computer literate. They may also be more likely to be able to volunteer time than specialists in more academically oriented fields.
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(Thanks, Diane!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Buddhist Hell Theme Park in Vietnam
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DATE: 05/02/2004 07:48:42 AM
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Following up on this earlier post, BoingBoing reader Hostile17 says,
"Another example of an Asian site featuring the torments of hell. It's not in a museum though, it's in a theme park in [Vietnam]. I mean, three words: Buddhist Theme Park! I was a little baffled by the concept myself but it was a lot of fun. Rides and stuff, plus this animatronic display of the [twelve] torments of hell for people who'd committed particular crimes. It was a little like Pirates of the Carribean, only incredibly lame, tech-wise.
There was one specific punishment for gamblers, one for adulterers, another for drug-takers. It was kind of amusing how different members of the family I was with laughed nervously at different exhibits. If you're ever in Saigon, you have to visit, it's truly strange."
The park has a website where you can watch short MPEG movies of attractions, including the Hell exhibit. The whole park is surreal -- check out the wicked cool photos these gigantic swimming pools with faux-stone monuments of gods watching over. This one -- an old man with a waterfall beard -- is my favorite.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Froogle Zen
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DATE: 05/02/2004 08:02:22 AM
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BoingBoing reader Bobby points out that Froogle displays a list of recently-found things people have used the online service to successfully seek and buy. The resulting list is total funky Dada webzen that makes you want to refresh for hours. It's a little like those Target ads that smush together unlikely combinations of things one can buy at Target. So, just now -- pure poetry:
Fleece ferret hammock, golf balls, Kung-fu hamster.
Cheesecake, gas blower, belly button rings.
Barebone PC, donut maker, mouth guard.
Matrix sunglasses, cookie jar, stuffed monkey.
Zen alarm clock, hair bows.
Red dress, beef jerky, snake light.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to think about US atrocities in Iraq
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DATE: 05/02/2004 09:16:17 AM
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Over on the ever-excellent Fafblog, the Medium Lobster sums up the current Bushie spin on the war-atrocities committed by the US occupying forces in Iraq:
- The activities
that occurred at Abu Ghuraib prison are not to be compared to those of
Saddam Hussein's rape rooms and torture chambers. After all, those were
rape rooms and torture chambers. These were merely rooms in which rape occurred, and chambers in which individuals were tortured.
- In war, atrocities will happen, as dew on the grass in the morning, or
flower blossoms in the spring. The dew gathers. The buds open. The
atrocities bloom. It is all according to the mysterious, ever-unfolding
cycle of life - a cycle too vast and complex for mere mortals to
comprehend.
- These were isolated incidents, and the behavior of
these prison guards should in no way reflect upon the military
superiors who endorsed and promoted such behavior. This is because
atrocities are supervenient on subordinates, but not on command
structures. Those with greater learning will understand.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More anti-porn online propaganda videos
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DATE: 05/02/2004 02:26:01 PM
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Following up on this post about the Newsweek "Porn Puppet/XXXChurch" article BoingBoing reader Jake points to another odd bit of Christian anti-porn propaganda. This short movie from "Project God" is "very 'Office Space' meets the prude," says Jake. It ends with the biblical quote, "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away."
One of the great things about America is that here, you're perfectly free to gouge your right eye out if the spirit moves you (IANAL, but I'm thinking there's probably some kind of religious freedom protection for faith-based body modification). And until what's left of our constitution is gouged out, everyone else is free to watch, read, or listen to all the smut they like in the privacy of their own laptops.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Click a link, fight breast cancer
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DATE: 05/02/2004 05:32:49 PM
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BoingBoing pal and former guestblogger Susannah says:
It takes less than a minute to go to the Breast Cancer site and click on 'fund free mammograms' (pink window in the middle). This doesn't cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammograms in exchange for advertising.
Link (via Attu)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool new Mars images
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DATE: 05/03/2004 06:29:08 AM
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BoingBoing buddy John Parres says:
The Mars rover Opportunity has arrived at "Endurance Crater" revealing a variety of strata and rock formations and intriguing sand/salt formations at the bottom. At issue now is not whether Opportunity can roll in but whether she can climb back out for further investigations.
The Space.com bulletin boards are giddy at the possibility of investigating 'water seeps' One poster is reporting that a lead JPL scientists is predicting that Opportunity might last another six months. Another suggests that "the plan for Opprtunity is to head South/South West after it's done with Endurance Crater. The objective being the white area which would be an ideal area to look for fossils. If the rover can last as long as hoped though that puts some of the much larger craters within reach too!"
Image here,, and chat here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vintage anti-porn propaganda -- Commie Terrorist Smutmongers!
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DATE: 05/03/2004 07:13:32 AM
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Following up on what's becoming a series (here's part one, here's part two) of anti-porn propaganda posts, BoingBoing reader backlon says, "The excellent (and boy do I mean *excellent*) Prelinger Archives has a couple of films that link 'pornography to the Communist conspiracy and the decline of Western civilization.'"
The short film backlon points to was sponsored by Charles H. Keating, Jr. (the same banker implicated in the savings-and-loan scandals) as part of his decades-long crusade against porn, and reminds us that "Pornography and 'fun' lead to illegitimate children and hefty financial burden on taxpayers." Almost as much of a burden as S&L bailouts! "Perversion for Profit" also exposes the secret ties between adult entertainment and "homosexuality, lesbianism, violent crime, the Communist conspiracy and Satan." Actually, I think there's at least one fetish website that combines all of those -- but that's another post.
While you're watching, check out the bodacious mid-century furniture on those babes. Is that an original Eames lounge chair she's vamping on? I think I need a cold shower.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Creationist theme park
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DATE: 05/03/2004 07:35:49 AM
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BoingBoing reader Michael says:
With all the talk on weird theme parks on Boing Boing lately, I thought readers might enjoy this New York Times article on a dinosaur theme park in Orlando Pensacola (thanks, Jim!) that is run by creationists.Apparenly, it explains that dinosaurs were created on "the 6th day" and the Grand Canyon is evidence of Noah's ark. Amazing quote: "There are a lot of creationists that are really smart and debate the intellectuals, but the kids are bored after five minutes," said Mr. Hovind, who looks boyish at 51 and talks fast. "You're missing 98 percent of the population if you only go the intellectual route." Intellectual route?
Link (thanks also to Rose for suggesting this item)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Telerobots dust for fingerprints with Superglue
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DATE: 05/03/2004 07:55:14 AM
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Researchers at the University of Calgary have built a tele-operated fingerprinting system for bomb disposal robots. Typically, the only way to grab prints from an explosive device after a 'bot blows it up is to search through the detritus. The new system sprays a jet of superglue fumes at the supsicious package. According to a New Scientist article, "the superglue vapour reacts with the organic fingerprint deposits to form a conspicuous white polymer" that can be photographed using the remote camera before the bomb, and often the robot, are blown to bits.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Musicians don't understand copyright, but they don't like the RIAA suing their fans
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DATE: 05/03/2004 08:16:59 AM
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The Pew Internet and American Life project has just concluded a survey of 2,700+ musicians, measuring their attitude to the lawsuits the record labels have brought against their fans in their name:
When asked what impact free downloading on the Internet has had on their careers as musicians, 37% say free downloading has not really made a difference, 35% say it has helped and 8% say it has both helped and hurt their career. Only 5% say free downloading has exclusively hurt their career and 15% of the respondents say they don't know...
67% say artists should have complete control over material they copyright and they say copyright laws do a good job of protecting artists...
Some 60% of those in the sample say they do not think the Recording Industry Association of America's suits against online music swappers will benefit musicians and songwriters. Those who earn the majority of their income from music are more inclined than "starving musicians" to back the RIAA, but even those very committed musicians do not believe the RIAA campaign will help them. Some 42% of those who earn most of their income from their music do not think the RIAA legal efforts will help them, while 35% think those legal challenges will ultimately benefit them.
220K PDF Link
(Thanks, Wendy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cool Voice of America censor-buster b0rked by idiotic anti-pr0n measure
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DATE: 05/03/2004 08:21:43 AM
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The US International Broadcasting Bureau (Voice of America, basically), created a proxy service to allow Chinese, Iranians and other oppressed people to circumvent their national firewalls, relaying forbidden pages behind the silicon curtains. However, the IBB decided to kowtow to unknown bluenoses and install a filter that would block foreigners from gaining access to pr0n: to do this, they came up with the bright idea of blocking any URL that contained naughty words. This is a stupid, stupid idea:
IBB's list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Star Wars Galaxies economy laid bare
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DATE: 05/03/2004 09:16:56 AM
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Raph Koster, Supreme Dictator of the Star Wars Galaxies online game, has posted detailed stats about the SWG monetary supply and flow. Ted Castronova, the leading MMO economist in the (very small) field, says "So rather than say that something is wrong from an economic policy point of view - I don't know that, hell, an army of Stanford Nobel laureates can't know that, not yet - all I can say is that something in these numbers makes me uncomfortable."
SWG uses what is called a faucet-drain economy. You can visualize a spigot of cash coming into the game, a big ol' sink where the money sloshes around, and a set of drains where the money goes out the bottom. When money comes in from the faucet, it's actually being "minted" - it's being created by the game system. The sink is basically the whole game. It's the bank accounts, the player inventories, all the money that is used for trades and transactions among players, etc. When money goes out the bottom, it's deleted from the system, rather than circulating back to a central bank.
(Credits aren't the only thing that is generated, of course - a significant faucet into the game economy actually comes in the form of resource mining. Since the amount of money and the amount of resources coming into the game at a time both vary, you get small fluctuations in the price of resources as the value of both the resources and the currency changes. Plus, you also get different qualities of resources that affect the price. But we're not really talking about commodities pricing today, much as just about the value of a credit).
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(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites blog from Iraq: Road to Nowhere
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DATE: 05/03/2004 09:41:19 AM
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Blogging live from Iraq, MSNBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites posts a new entry today. Last week, he and the the military unit with which he was traveling near Ramadi were hit by an IED, also known as a "roadside bomb."
We will take four humvees on this trip, including a gun truck or technical with a mounted 240 SAW, squad assault weapon and about 20 marines carrying M-16 and M4 assault rifles. As the captain speaks, the marines pass out smoke grenades that could be used to obscure a disabled vehicle from enemy fire. They also pass out fragmentation grenades, olive green orbs with strips of red duct tape wrapped around the handles to keep them from exploding in case the pin is pulled inadvertently.
The captain (who doesn't wanted to be identified by name) reads off a checklist that covers everything from the military grid coordinates for our travel to recent intel on enemy forces in the area, radio frequencies and procedures if we come under attack. "I'm not reading this for my own amusement," he says gruffly, "if something happens to me or Gunny you want to know how to get back so you better be fucking writing it down."
Link, discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Will Apple own up to manufacturing problems with 15" Powerbooks?
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DATE: 05/03/2004 10:39:09 AM
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There's an enormous thread of PowerBook G4 15" owners on Apple's discussion boards, going into detail on the "white spots" and "uneven illumination" problem with this model. I bought mine last fall, and had to return it twice (first one was DOA, the second had the white-spots so bad that strangers on airplanes would come up to me and say, "Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with your screen?"). Now I'm on my third unit, and it's got the same problem: screen at about 50 percent brightness, big white splotch in the middle of the it.
It's still under warranty, but that doesn't do me any good: There's no way I can part with my machine for 3-7 days while Apple fixes it. Normally, I own two PowerBooks, the current one and a slightly older one (so that I have a working unit during repairs), but when I moved to Europe, I divested myself of all but a single CPU, so now I'm pretty scr0d.
The scoop appears to be that Apple is replacing these lemons with the new 1.5GHz models (which may or may not have the same problem), but I doubt that they'll ship me the replacement, let me transfer my data and then send back the old 'un. I'm just going to have to work off the world's shittiest display until I can scrape up the dough to buy another machine. Bummer.
Recently it has worsened to the point where I took it in today to the Apple store in Old Orchard. The attending Genius immediately noticed the uneven illumination of my display and suggested that it be sent in to the depot for repair. He also mentioned that this was the first time he had ever seen or heard of this problem before, and that there are no reports in the knowledge base that described this issue. When I mentioned to him that he might take a look at this thread in the Apple Support discussions, he wanted no part of it. He said that he rarely reads these forums, and dismissed it as "Oh well, people posting to discussion groups are mostly complainers" (those were not his exact words, but it was implied). Then I told him that people are posting actual photos of this problem and that all of the symptoms look identical for each person, which could indicate a manufacturing defect. His response was that "for those people, I suppose perception is reality".
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1650 signatures on Apple Powerbook petition
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DATE: 05/03/2004 11:15:56 AM
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There are currently 1650 signatories to this petition to Apple to do something about the widespread manufacturing defects with its 15" Rev A Aluminium Powerbooks:
We, the undersigned, demand that Apple Computers immediately acknowledge and address the manufacturing defect on the LCD screens of its Powerbook G4 laptops. The LCD screens of these laptops are susceptible to random “White Spots” appearing on the display. These spots are very distracting and are an obvious manufacturing defect.
Powerbook owners around the world have been complaining of this problem. Evidence of this can be seen on Apple’s own discussion group website located at http://discussions.info.apple.com and on various message board discussion groups on the Internet. Due to the extremely large number of Powerbook owners that have been sending their newly purchased laptops for repair under warranty, it is OBVIOUS that Apple is aware of this defect. However, most customers have been noticing this problem reoccur within hours or days of their Powerbook being repaired under warranty. This is completely unacceptable.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amazon helps with number portability
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DATE: 05/03/2004 11:47:58 AM
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Amazon's phone-sales business unit has added a HOWTO on number-portability, and a service to help you keep your number when you change mobile carriers.
Transferring your cell phone number is easy when you order from Amazon.com. You won't have to wait in line at a store while your number is transferred from your previous carrier to your new one. And, in some cases, you will be assigned a temporary phone number for your new phone so that you can use it until your transfer is completed (you can even forward your calls from your current phone to your new phone in the interim). Best of all, when you buy a cell phone from Amazon.com and transfer your number, you will still qualify for all of our great rebates and discounts.
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(via MobileWhack)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Usage patterns in White House search engine
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DATE: 05/03/2004 12:15:45 PM
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Brian Dear has been tracking the frequency that various keywords appear in the White House search engine over time:
2003 2004
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iraq..................... 480 2556
bin Laden................ 233 355
enron.................... 56 66
halliburton.............. 12 28
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: MP3 interview with security expert Bruce Schneier
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DATE: 05/03/2004 01:10:05 PM
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Amazing interview (available as a text transcript or audio file) with security guru Bruce Schneier, who really should be hired to run Homeland Security.
Doug Kaye: Now a recurring concept in your book is probably typified by this example: “A terrorist who wants to create havoc will not be deterred by airline security; he will simply switch to another attack and bomb a shopping mall.”
Bruce Schneier: This is, I think, really important. I just did a hearing two days ago on Capitol Hill about CAPS II, about airline profiling, and one of the things I’m always struck with is how good we are at defending against what the terrorists did last year. We’re spending a lot of money shoring up our airlines, we’re now talking about shoring up trains. And money that we spend that simply causes the bad guys to change their tactics is money wasted.
You have a red and a blue door, and the terrorists go through the red door, and you say, “We must secure the red door,” so they go through the blue door the next time. What did you actually buy?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Senator Franken?
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DATE: 05/03/2004 02:41:17 PM
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Al Franken is thinking about running for the Senate:
As Al Franken considers challenging Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., for re-election in 2008, the comedian and liberal radio host is looking to his hometown senator for advice: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"I asked Hillary, 'Can you give me some suggestions about running for Senate in a state you haven't lived for in a while, or in your case, ever?' " Franken recalled, laughing heartily. "And she said, 'This will be a long conversation,' so we agreed to have a long conversation about it."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: History of Chillout
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DATE: 05/03/2004 02:42:29 PM
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"Moments In Love" is a wonderful aural history of chillout and ambient music, hosted by Chris Coco. The hour-long BBC Radio 2 documentary covers a tremendous amount of material, from Erik Satie to Brian Eno to Air.
"Chillout is a state of mind. It's making space in your head to enjoy the setting and the sounds. It's a long drink on a long sunny day. It's a moment taken to appreciate the beauty of the simplest things. And it's even better with a decent soundtrack."
The link on the "Moments In Love" page to the archived program is incorrect, but here's the correct one. Link (Thanks, Morris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chank fonts made of twigs, for the taking
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DATE: 05/03/2004 02:53:16 PM
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Fontmeister and designer Chank took a load of students out into the forest and had them recreate some of his nicer fonts from found objects -- twigs, leaves, and so forth. The results were phtoographed, fonotofied, and released on the net as free TrueType downloads.
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(Thanks, Francis!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Explanation of "winner's curse" in upcoming Google IPO auction
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DATE: 05/03/2004 09:08:44 PM
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An economics professor explains how the psychology behind bidding on things for investment reasons tends to limit the amount of the high bid.
Google intends to sell shares of itself through an auction in which Google stock is sold to those willing to pay the most per share. This means, for example, that if only 20% of the bidders end up with Google stock, these 20% will consist of people who bid the most for Google. Now, if you end up being one of these "lucky" 20% should you worry that the winner's curse has stricken you since you apparently valued the stock at an amount greater than what most investors believed Google to be worth?
Rational investors will take the winner's curse into account when making a bid. For example, assume that before the auction you think a share of Google is worth $100. But you figure that if you end up being a winner in the auction it means that most investors think Google is worth less than $100. So, the act of winning will cause you to think Google is worth only $80 a share. You should, therefore, bid no higher than $80, an amount diminished by the winner's curse.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gawker Hollywood "Defamer" launches today
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:05:16 AM
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Say hello to another citadel in Nick Denton's growing blog-empire. A Hollywood-centric blog called "Defamer" will launch today according to a sekrit source. Said sekrit source says the "Hollywood Reporter Meets Gawker" site will be penned anonymously -- "no, it's not Rance," but a Rance-id post is said to be in the works. Link to Gawker home.
Update: LA Observed has more info: Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How colds work
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:51:37 AM
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Someone has given me a vicious cold. My third this year. I thought that quitting smoking meant fewer colds, not more. Bugger. Anyway, here's how colds work:
The nose contains shelf-like structures called turbinates, which help trap particles entering the nasal passages. Material deposited in the nose is transported by ciliary action to the back of the throat in 10-15 minutes. Cold viruses are believed to be carried to the back of the throat where they are deposited in the area of the adenoid. The adenoid is a lymph gland structure that contains cells to which cold viruses attach.
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(via Plastic Bag)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crap Scrabble hand gallery
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:53:55 AM
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Talk about owning your issues: HeyBro.com collects unmanipulated snapshots of reallly crappy Scrabble hands and posts them online.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Walt Mossberg: Gadget kingmaker
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:57:13 AM
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Great Wired Mag profile of the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, the granddaddy of gadget reviewers, who can snap your company's neck like a twig with one twitch of his mighty keyboard.
...when it debuted on October 17, 1991, "Personal Technology" was an immediate hit. Mossberg's voice, amplified by the power of the Journal, resonated like no other. In 1992, he recommended America Online, an also-ran with only 200,000 subscribers, over Prodigy, the leader with 1.8 million subscribers and powerful backers, including Sears and IBM. "Prodigy tried to get me fired," he recalls. Mossberg's endorsement "really helped put AOL on the map," admits founder Steve Case. "It turbocharged our growth."
Mossberg's proudest moment came in 2001, when he objected to Smart Tags, a feature he tested in a beta version of Windows XP. Smart Tags could turn any word on a Web page into a link to a Microsoft property or sponsor's site without consent from the site's author.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open source book-writing
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:58:42 AM
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JD Lasica is working on a book called "Darknet," which is to be a comprehensive account of the file-sharing debate and P2P. He's posting the entire text on a wiki for public comment, revision and addition: brave, clever man.
In the spirit of open media and participatory journalism, I'd like to use this wiki to publish drafts of each chapter in the book. I hope you'll participate in this effort by contributing feedback, edits, criticism, corrections, and additional anecdotes, either through the comments field below or by sending me email. Feel free to be as detailed as you like or to insert comments or questions. After all, you're the editor. (And remember, this is for a book manuscript, not a finished online document.) If you make a couple of helpful edits, I'll mention your name in the book's Acknowledgments (and buy you a drink next time we meet up).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 21-year-old essay on copyright just as fresh today
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DATE: 05/04/2004 03:11:42 AM
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Luís sez: "Barrington Bayley has a *very* interesting article written in the early 1980s about the ethics and the convention of copyright. It's also worth pointing out that Bayley is one of the great unheralded geniuses in the field of literary science fiction."
On the premise that graphic reproduction will eventually go the way of sound reproduction, i.e. it will become easy and cheap and available to all, the same is due to happen to literary copyright. It's a-coming, boys! You'd better get used to it!
...Yes, there is always going to be a living for writers. The consequence of the above is that a book, whether incarnated in ink and paper, laser disk, silicon, gallium arsenide, memory bubbles, or War and Peace encoded in DNA, will cost more than the blank on which it is inscribed, but not so much more that it would be worth your while to borrow a copy and duplicate it. Whatever deal authors and publishers make with one another will have to take cognisance of that. I expect authors will still be able to demand royalties. Whether an author will be able to become stinking rich, as a few now can, I don't know. What does it matter? It isn't necessary to the continuance of civilisation.
Luís adds, "This over twenty years ago."
Link
(Thanks, Luís!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collisions in T9
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DATE: 05/04/2004 03:57:26 AM
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T9 is the predictive text technology used by mobile phone vendors for SMS input. If you tap in, say 269, T9 will guess that you mean "BOY," since 2 codes fo ABC, 6 for MNO and 9 for WXYZ. But what about number-patterns that can stand for multiple words? T9 presents a list of possible words, and invites you to pick the correct one. Sometimes, these lists can be quite long: here, a perl hacker has written a script to uncover common English words that share the same T9 numeric code:
729 : PAW, PAY, PAZ, RAW, RAY, SAW, SAX, SAY
76737 : PORES, POSER, POSES, ROPER, ROPES, ROSES, SORER, SORES
46637 : GONER, GOODS, GOOFS, HOMER, HOMES, HONER, HONES, HOODS, HOOFS, INNER
22737 : ACRES, BARDS, BARER, BARES, BASER, BASES, CAPER, CAPES, CARDS, CARES, CASES
7283 : PATE, PAVE, RATE, RAVE, SATE, SAUD, SAVE, SCUD
2273 : ACRE, BARD, BARE, BASE, CAPE, CARD, CARE, CASE
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(Thanks, Sandy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ars Electronica prizes awarded
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DATE: 05/04/2004 04:03:17 AM
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This year's Ars Electronica prizes have been awarded. Creative Commons won in the Net Vision category!
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(Thanks, Jose!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CC-licensed prose: "Always Be Closing"
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DATE: 05/04/2004 05:34:02 AM
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Casey Childers has produced a chunk of Creative Commons-licensed prose called "Always Be Closing." It's the same scene, told thirteen times, with (often NSFW) variations, a remix of something that has no original, a kind of simulacra. He's chosen a license that allows for noncommercial remixing -- I'm curious as to what new works can be made out of these often disturbing scenes.
The waitress interrupted, "You boys need anything?"
The old man grinned, his mouth full. He made a quick effort to swallow, but didn't hesitate to speak around the mess of potatoes that remained. "The name of the man that cooked my lunch, miss. This is heaven on a goddamn plate."
She returned a grin of her own. "His name's Merv, hon, and I'll be sure to pass that along. Now how 'bout a warm-up on your coffee?"
"I served with a commie sympathizer who went by the name of Merv. He had weak stomach, you know, loved to recite the poems he wrote about his wife. He got his head blown off in a French whorehouse."
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(Thanks, CA!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P900 successor with a tiny, frustrating thumb-keyboard
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DATE: 05/04/2004 06:19:54 AM
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Apparently, this is a leaked pic of the successor to the Sony Ericsson P900 (the phone I plan on getting as soon as my first bank-statement appears and I use it to authenticate myself to the dumbass phone company that thinks bank-statements are better ID than Canadian passports). Call it the P901, or the P1000, whatever: it's got a wee keyboard on the flip-down for those who prefer thumbing out their executive haiku to scratching at a recalcitrant handwriting-recognition system. It looks like it might be a photoshop job, but Rojas at Engadget says that MobileBurn, the source, is reliable, and I'll take his word for it.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Schwarzenegger mini-book: "Sue Me Asshole"
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DATE: 05/04/2004 08:40:23 AM
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Hot on the heels of Governor Schwarzenegger's legal threats against a bobble-head manufacturer, claiming his publicity rights preculded the manufacture of an Arnold dollie, the good people at Fair Use press have published a downloadable book about the governor called "Sue Me Asshole," which sports a photo of Schwarzenegger posing naked, his genitals reduced to impotent hilarity by photoshop wizardry. The book contains a copy of the threatening lawyer-letter, some analysis and a links to further reading.
Link (Warning: Contains explicit gubernatorial nude man-fruit)
(Thanks, Mack!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Eric Drexler's new nanoscience site
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DATE: 05/04/2004 08:42:51 AM
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Nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler has launched a site focused on the "science behind emerging technologies of broad importance." Along with deep technical information on nanotechnology, e-drexler.com will also explore secure, distributed computing efforts.
"A better understanding can benefit both technical leaders seeking productive directions for research and development, and policy makers aiming to make wise decisions."
A sister site called metamodern.com will delve into the social implications of these technologies.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DIY Host bans BitTorrent trackers
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DATE: 05/04/2004 08:45:41 AM
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The UK ISP DIYHost has changed its terms of service to explicitly forbid hosting BitTorrent trackers. Time for DIYHost's customers to get a better ISP. Actually, the whole ToS is pretty craptacular: no linking to emulators? No sites not in English? Crikey.
"BitTorrent" servers and source sites, third-party copyrighted material, "warez" (including pirated software, ROMS, emulators, "phreaking", hacking, password cracking material - and links to the same), sites not in the English language, or IRC servers on our network. It is also forbidden to use our service as a "remote/off site back up" or a "filestore" solution. Accounts found hosting this material will be subject to immediate cancellation without refund. Easy Internet Solutions Ltd reserves the right to terminate accounts hosting material, which in its sole opinion, may be classed as "undesirable content" or which may pose a risk (of any sort) to either Easy Internet Solutions Ltd as a company, our network or servers or to a third party.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: We Are All Security Consumers
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DATE: 05/04/2004 09:29:29 AM
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Bruce Schneier says:
This essay of mine argues that the correct way to evaluate security countermeasures is as consumers: is the security you're getting worth what you're giving up to get it.
From the essay: The invasion of Iraq, for example, is presented as an important move for national security. It may be true, but it's only half of the argument. Invading Iraq has cost the United States enormously. The monetary bill is more than $100 billion, and the cost is still rising. The cost in American lives is more than 600, and the number is still rising. The cost in world opinion is considerable. There's a question that needs to be addressed: "Was this the best way to spend all of that? As security consumers, did we get the most security we could have for that $100 billion, those lives, and those other things?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA event tonight: UNWIRED schmooze
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DATE: 05/04/2004 10:15:55 AM
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In LA tonight? Work with wireless tech? Join me tonight -- Tuesday, May 4 -- as members and friends of the unwired list get together in West Hollywood to swap gadgets and beam business cards at each other under a full moon, on the rooftop of the Wyndham Bel Age on 1020 N. San Vicente Boulevard in West Hollywood. Event starts at 7PM, goes to 10. Big thanks to the event's two co-sponsors for making this gathering possible -- TELEMEDIA DEVELOPMENT and YAPmobile. See you there!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hypocrite watch: FCC Swamped With Oprah Indecency Complaints
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DATE: 05/04/2004 11:10:27 AM
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Ernest Miller sez: "Howard Stern has been the FCC's indecency whipping boy for some time. After the latest series record-setting fines, however, he asked his listeners to complain to the FCC about an episode of Oprah's talk show that included rather graphic descriptions of sex acts. The Smoking Gun has received copies of more than 1600 complaints about that episode thanks to a FOIA request. It is impossible to know which complaints are real, but many of them are downright hilarious: 'The Oprah show ... was so offensive that my child's head literally exploded. Please ban free speech so this never happens again.'" Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Interview with RU Sirius
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DATE: 05/04/2004 12:01:19 PM
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BB buddy Ken Goffman (aka RU Sirius) was recently interviewed by a transhumanist magazine. "I don't embrace any belief systems. I'm a fuzzy believer. I might say that I 95% believe that humans will achieve a lifespan beyond the current biological limits; I 50% believe that this will work out well on a social-political level; I 95% believe that we will get really precise control over our minds and moods; I 60% believe that the future of most of humanity is pretty well fucked; I 10% believe that something very much like the singularity will actually occur; I 1% believe that it will happen in my lifetime."
He also talks a bit about his new book, "Counterculture Through the Ages," due out in November. Friends who have read it tell me that it's a brilliant, even scholarly, work. RU's star is absolutely rising again.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Used book, DVD, game sellers must submit to fingerprinting
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:05:22 PM
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Jon Asato sez: "Here's a story that caught my eye on GameSpot.com. Businesses in certain states are required by law to collect, among other privacy invasive information, the thumbprints of customers who want to sell their used video games, CDs, and books."
In addition to recording the drivers' licenses, telephone numbers, and addresses of customers who sell used games or consoles, some stores are routinely requiring thumbprints as well. Retailers are collecting the information under a law intended to regulate pawn shops and make it easy for law enforcement officials to track down thieves who fence stolen goods. A number of states have such laws, and Utah passed its own version just last month.
In California, the law has been on the books for more than a decade, but with the increased market for used games and DVDs, some retailers are taking a cautious approach and are collecting fingerprints just to make sure they don’t run afoul of local regulations.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: McMurder site nastygrammed
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:08:34 PM
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McMurder, a website that offers statistics that appear to show a correlation between murder rates and the number of McDonalds in cities, has been nastygrammed by McLawyers. The site has until May 10 to remove all McTrademarks. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: France's RIAA gives downloaders the middle finger
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:19:47 PM
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BoingBoing pal in France Jean-Luc says, "The French Phonographic Syndicate organization, aka SNEP, today launched a campaign against the trading of free illegal mp3s online. Here is the shocking campaign logo. (the claim is: Free music has a price)"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory speaking at DreamCon, Jacksonville, FL, June 11-13
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DATE: 05/04/2004 01:27:58 PM
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I'll be speaking on various and sundry EFF-related issues at DreamCon, a regional science fiction convention in Jacksonville, FL, held from June 11-13. Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Geek dreams
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DATE: 05/04/2004 03:16:40 PM
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Do IT workers dream of electric sheep? This hilarious site compiles the nightmares and dreams of coders.
One of the scariest nightmares I've had in the past decade or so was about me being stuck in a Nethack dungeon. Everything was green on black (I'd been playing on a Facit VT100-clone) and in 7-bit ASCII. I distinctly remember being chased by a lower-case x, scared out of my wits and at the same time feeling ashamed of being such a wimp that a mere grid bug was a threat.
Link (Thanks, Eli!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney buries Moore's new movie to save its tax-breaks
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DATE: 05/04/2004 11:11:13 PM
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Disney has killed the distribution of Michael Moore's new movie, Farenheit 911, which traces the links between the Bush family and Saudis like Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.
"Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn't mean I listened to him," Mr. Emanuel said. "He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that's why he didn't want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn't want a Disney company involved."
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(Thanks, JP!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Camera-phone barcode reader
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DATE: 05/04/2004 11:15:32 PM
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Semacode is a Symbian barcode reader that works with your cameraphone. Point the camera at the "two-dimensional barcode" you find on some products and services in the wild and the phone will decode it into its component URL and open the URL in its browser.
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(Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple deleting criticism on 15" PowerBook issue
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DATE: 05/04/2004 11:17:56 PM
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Thomas sez, "I'm in the market for a new laptop, and was just about to buy one when I saw your story from earlier in the week about the 15" display problems. So I said as much in Apple's display forum, and they squashed my post."
Your post titled "Won't buy until they own up. Anyone else?" has been removed from Apple Discussions.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Everyday objects photoshopped into different materials
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DATE: 05/04/2004 11:43:04 PM
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Worth1000's photoshopping contest-du-jour is "Alternate Materials: Objects created with unexpected materials." Some very nice entries here, like the iron banana, the paper handcuffs and the baloney CD-ROM.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sign language video glossary
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DATE: 05/04/2004 11:52:21 PM
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Michigan State U hosts his enormous archive of quicktimes of common American Sign Language words and phrases.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Marshmallow-based speed-of-light measurator
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DATE: 05/05/2004 12:43:06 AM
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This physics HOWTO explains a technique for verifying the speed of light using a microwave oven and a bunch of marshmallows.
[P]ut the dish of marshmallows in the microwave and cook on low heat. Microwaves do not cook evenly and the marshmallows will begin to melt at the hottest spots in the microwave. (I leaned this from our Food Science teacher Anita Cornwall.) Heat the marshmallows until they begin to melt in four or five different spots. Remove the dish from the microwave and observe the melted spots. Take the ruler and measure the distance between the melted spots. You will find that one distance repeats over and over. This distance will correspond to half the wavelength of the microwave, about 6 cm. Now turn the oven around and look for a small sign that gives you the frequency of the microwave. Most commercial microwaves operate at 2450 MHz.
All you do now is multiply the frequency by the wavelength. The product is the speed of light.
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(via Making Light))
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Funny trompe l'oeil costumes
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DATE: 05/05/2004 12:45:54 AM
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These trompe l'oeil costumes are pretty goddamned funny, but I don't think I could walk around bent double for very long.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mid-calorie sodas coming from Coke and Pepsi
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DATE: 05/05/2004 12:53:31 AM
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Coke and Pepsi are debuting "mid-calorie" drinks that contain a mix of high-fructose corn-syrup and Splenda. These are meant to sit between the hyper-sugared normal stuff and the diet stuff with the funky aftertaste.
The new drinks contain the standard high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens regular soda but in smaller amounts. The corn syrup is supplemented with Splenda, a no-calorie, no-carbohydrate sweetener made from sugar.
The result is a soda with fewer calories than regular but more than no-cal. For instance, Pepsi says a 12-ounce can of Edge has 20 grams each of sugar and carbohydrates, and 70 calories, compared with regular's 41 grams each of sugar and carbohydrates, and 150 calories.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Auctorial ego-search, driven by Web Services
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DATE: 05/05/2004 04:21:06 AM
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Ben Hammersley once again demonstrates that he is the Mastah of Web Services. He's developed an auctorial "ego page" that takes the name of an author, retrives her/his bibliography, then lays out a page with all the recent blog entries regarding each title, timestamped for convenience.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What is torture?
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DATE: 05/05/2004 08:39:49 AM
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I was driving east down Sunset Boulevard with a friend last night. We stopped to let some AMWs (actress-model-whatevers) cross the street from SkyBar toward Chateau Marmont, and my friend turned to me and said, "What exactly is torture? How do you define it? Does hooking up fake electrodes to a prisoner's hands, and telling them they're real -- is that torture?" When the be-botoxed cosmetic engineering specimens reached the other curb, we drove on. "Yes," I replied, but I couldn't provide the more thorough answer he wanted.
So, coincidentally, BoingBoing reader Tony sends in this timely reminder that real definitions of torture do exist. Here is one of them --
the UN Convention Against Torture, which the US government ratified along with 70 other countries. Tony says, "Every time I turn on the TV or radio, the media and the government itself is talking about US military 'abuses.' Let's be clear: what's happening at Abu Ghraib is not 'abuse' but 'torture.'"
If I were thinking clearly last night, I'd have told my friend, "It's torture when they do it. It's abuse when our guys do it."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anti-Porn hillbilly propaganda song -- "Please Don't Go Topless, Mother"
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DATE: 05/05/2004 08:58:14 AM
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Continuing on our series of posts about anti-porn art, I am proud to present this gem of hillbilly countersmut psy-ops. "Please Don't Go Topless Mother" is a sort of country-western paean to prude pride by Troy Hess. Google doesn't reveal much about Hess, or this song, but the Cliff's Notes version of the plot is basically "four-year-old boy begs his stripper mom to stay home from work, keep her shirt on, and start going to church."
Link to 2MB MP3 file (Thanks to Leonard Lin for his righteous hosting generosity! Thanks to Jonno for finding this! He won't tell you where, so don't ask).
Photo: 1974, Susan Meiselas, from the series "Carnival Strippers." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Russ Kick's "Disinformation Book of Lists"
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DATE: 05/05/2004 09:37:06 AM
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BoingBoing guestblogger Russ Kick has a brand new book out, The Disinformation Book of Lists. It's a bunch of really subversive data wrapped up in a user-friendly "book of lists" format -- politics, current events, business, history, science, art and literature, sex, drugs, death, and more good stuff. For instance:
* 9 Visitors Who Died at Disneyland
* 12 Strange Drugs, like carbogen, arsenic, and salamander brandy
* The CIA's 25 Tips for Interrogating a Prisoner
* 13 Nuclear Tests That Spread Radiation into Civilian Areas
* 63 Gay Animals
* 12 Things to do With Your Body After You're Dead
* 44 Substances That Soup up Your Brain
* 32 Famous People in Threesomes, including Lord Byron, Lenin, John Stuart Mill, Mary Shelley, and Picasso
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: VW Bus Ball
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DATE: 05/05/2004 09:46:10 AM
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I'm not sure whether this "VW Bus Ball" sculpture is made out of an actual VW Bus, but who cares. It is wicked-cool.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: No health insurance? "Date-a-Doctor"
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DATE: 05/05/2004 10:10:12 AM
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On Joz's blog, a word to America's uninsured. "If you can't move to Canada or Cuba, I recommend the date-a-doctor route." Here's a form letter you can use.
Dear Queer, Gay, Bi-curious, or even Female Doctors, I would like to date you. I don't just want to date you for your sparkling personality and your good looks, but also because I am an accident-prone person with no basic health insurance. In exchange for you fixing me when I break, I will pretty much do anything: cook, clean, pet-sit...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: "E-Girl -- Hack your way to Hollywood"
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DATE: 05/05/2004 10:28:40 AM
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On today's edition of the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I report on a young woman who, as a former employee of America Online, used the company database to access the accounts of celebrity members. She then formed relationships with these celebrities, and sold the story of her life to Hollywood. At left, snapshot I took in LA of Mark Ebner, co-author of the book Hollywood Interrupted, which includes a chapter on the story of "E-girl."
Link to archived audio online (available after 12PM PT today), and Link to earlier Wired News piece.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Record companies forced by court to pay royalties
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DATE: 05/05/2004 10:37:13 AM
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Record companies love to make a big deal about how file sharing deprives artists of their royalties. Too bad the record companies themselves must be forced, by court order, to pay the royalties they owe to artists instead of keeping it for themselves.
A two-year investigation by New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office found that many artists were not being paid royalties because record companies lost contact with the performers and had stopped making required payments.
The artists that were too hard for the record companies to find include unknowns such as Sean Combs, Gloria Estefan, and Dolly Parton.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese vending-machines
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DATE: 05/05/2004 10:48:48 AM
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Great page with photos and notes on vending machines that can be found in and around Tokyo.
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(Thanks, Infospigot!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Thousands of Afghani POWs brutally executed, CBC alleges US military complicity
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DATE: 05/05/2004 11:09:10 AM
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This CBC documentary on war-crimes committed against Afghani prisoners with the complicity of the US military is shocking. It alleges that thousands of Taliban POWs were murdered -- most by being locked in baking shipping containers in the middle of the desert, with the survivors brought to a remote place and executed with 30-50 US soldiers in attendance. The source -- the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation -- is hardly known for alarmism or irresponsible journalism. The UN has offered to investigate, but only if the safety of the investigators can be guaranteed, something that the US-allied Afghani warlord has refused to consider -- and since the making of the documentary, many of the sources have been tortured or disappeared.
52MB Quicktime Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
Update: The CBC page on this program has lots more info (Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nutty social network tool/dating service with funny-ass copyright warning
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DATE: 05/05/2004 11:49:02 AM
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Clay Shirky has just blogged an high-larious deconstruction of SocalGrid, a FOAF-meets-dating-service social networking tool where users rate their physical attributes (5'10" blonde with "model looks") and the social attributes of their ideal mate and the service does the rest. The service commits every socially retarded gaffe imaginable, has attracted 9 men for every woman who's signed up, but the very best part is the "warning to copycats:"
SocialGrid has retained one of the top intellectual property law firms in America. Everything on this site is copyrighted and trademarked, including our search and coding system. Our patent application claims coverage on searches for all complex objects using Internet search engines. Our goal is to ensure a search system that will be free to our members and keep individuals and corporations from profiting by charging for searches. We will marginalize every profit margin. There is no money to made in creating another ID coding system. The world needs only one system. If necessary, we will give SocialGrid and the patent to Google to insure one standardized coding system. Any copycats and clones will have to answer to Google. Please be advised that any copyright, trademark, and patent infringement will result in legal action.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Coke's new cellphone fits in a can of pop
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DATE: 05/05/2004 12:20:37 PM
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Coke has received FCC approval for a GPS-equipped cellphone that fits in a can of soda and which will instantly connect those who discover it to an operator who will tell them that they've already won an SUV. The GPS then allows the Coke prize-patrol to home in on them and get a reaction shot.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Songs the Cramps covered
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DATE: 05/05/2004 12:43:22 PM
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The stand-out track on the Kill Bill 2 soundtrack is Charlie Feathers's "Can't Hardly Stand It, a song best known today as a standard of the Cramps, the greatest sludge-a-billy act of all time. It's expecially keen to hear this old, unironic rockabilly version performed, and realize that this was indeed "bad music for bad people."
Enter the Born Bad CD series, from Australia. These (screamingly expensive, hard-to-find) discs consist of nothing but originals of songs that Cramps later covered, including classics like "The Crusher," "Goo-Goo Muck" and "Her Love Rubbed Off." I've put together a little Amazon list with the SKUs of the five discs in Amazon's catalogue.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA: Control your P2P kids!
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The RIAA is sending out advisories to press-contacts at various media outlets about their "Are Your Kids Breaking the Law When They Log On?" campaign, which aims to scare parents into spanking their kids for file-sharing, and comes across as red-scare-era propaganda. It's funny: Hollywood fought the Red Scare and McCarthyism tooth and nail, but today, they're more than happy to appropriate its rhetoric and tactics.
*UNDERSTAND THEIR GENERATION OF THINKING. "*Everyone is doing it"
or "rock stars and movie stars make too much money anyhow" or
"the corporate entertainment scene is corrupt" is* *likely to be
what you'll hear.* * You'll need to arm yourself with the
counterarguments to these. Explain that most artists are not
super wealthy and that they are leaving themselves open to doing
something that is ethically wrong, could damage their computer
and have legal consequences.
*SET A GOOD EXAMPLE*. If you are currently using a peer-to-peer
network to obtain digital music and movies, understand that your
children will follow your lead. * *Let them see you buying your
entertainment legally and they'll follow suit.
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(Thanks, Annalee!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Make your own WWII victory shoes
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"Scrap materials, the end of an ordinary box, scraps of leather or canvas, are all you need to manufacture a pair of comfortable, serviceable play shoes." So says the introduction to this Sunset article from 1943 on how to make your own "Caterpillars." I'd rather have these than those embarrassingly smug Adbusters sneakers. Link (If the link gives you problems, use the access code KAYAK to gain admittance. What a dumb rule!) Boing Boing reader Joel found a shortcut link to the image.Seamus sez:
Another pair of make-at-home shoes.
Tire sandals with nothing but a tire and some webbing (and tools of course).
Perfect for hiking!
I especially like the anecdote from the old German at the end talking about post-war hardships influencing footwear and bicycle tires.
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TITLE: Uses for clothes hangers other than hanging clothes
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Kirby sez: "Short page on an industrial design website that is soliciting ideas for reusing wire coat hangers. Worth visiting just for the picture of octopi drying on coat hangers in Indonesia." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF's cognitive radio comments to the FCC
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I've just turned in EFF's comments to the FCC's "Cognitive Radio" docket, which asked (among other things) whether the Commission should regulate Americans' access to digital-to-analog converters and whether Trusted Computing should be mandated for software defined radios (we didn't much like these ideas).
EFF asks the Commission to consider the question of enforcement
separately from the question of functionality. The Commission
should allow this proceeding, and others like it, to consider the
question of the characteristics of the best possible design and
operation of flexible radios without regard to enforcement
questions. It should allow American technologists to build the
devices that make most efficient use of spectrum and allow the
greatest amount of speech over the public's airwaves.
As each new type of device and operational norm is approved, the
Commission shoul dask, separately, how best to police the
airwaves in light of the fact that the newly approved devices
will soon proliferate. It must assume that Americans should and
will acquire the best and most-capable radios possible and
determine how to address the problems that may arise from this
reality.
Further, the Commission should seek to backstop enforcement by
hardening existing radio applications against harmful
interference, spoofing and other attacks: for example,if
air-traffic control signals carried cryptographically secured
signatures, the risk of spoofed signals would be greatly reduced.
Our government has already required that airlines install
reinforced cockpit doors: reinforcing the cockpit radios is a
logical next step.
104K PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF's new hires
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EFF's staff grew by two today: my newest cow-orkers are Annalee "Techspolitation" Newitz (media baron) and Tim "BAWRN" Pozar (bull-goose geek).
Newitz was formerly Culture Editor at the San Francisco Bay
Guardian. She has discussed the social impact of technology in
Wired and Salon magazines, on CNN and NPR, as well as in her
syndicated weekly column Techsploitation. As EFF's Media
Coordinator/Policy Analyst, she will be handling media relations,
as well as writing white papers, policy recommendations, and
doing research. "I've always considered my writing to be a form
of activism," she says, "so I'm pleased to join forces with an
organization whose principles and dedication I've admired for
many years."
Pozar is a longtime activist in the high tech community and has
spent the past several years consulting as a network architect.
One of the founders of Brightmail, an antispam company, he is
also founder of Bay Area Research Wireless Network (BARWN) and
co-founder of the Bay Area Wireless User Group (BAWUG). As
Technical Director, he will manage new technical projects for
EFF, as well as a team of analysts. "My goal in life is to foster
the democratization of communication," he says, "and my work at
EFF will help me continue the pursuit of that goal."
I once sat in on a wild conversation between Tim Pozar, John Gilmore and Tom Jennings (the inventor of FIDONet), about the day that Tim wrote some code for John's ISP, the Little Garden, that bridged FIDONet into Usenet, joining the two largest conversational networks in the world with a little software. I'm looking forward to more mind-blowing reminisces from Pozar, now that he's in-house and at large.
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TITLE: What women want from the Net (?!)
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Yahoo threw a conference called "Real Women, Digital World" as a kind of hyper-focus-group, in which a bunch of women were called in to explain What Women Want From The Internet. This on-site account is pretty funny.
Rachel, who gives her age as "almost 23," is a recent transplant
to San Francisco from Chicago. She is dressed in jeans, sneakers,
a T-shirt, a zip-up hoodie and a belt decorated with pink
flamingos and palm trees. She gamely tries to explain to the
suits clustered around her exactly what it is that she does on
the Internet.
The short answer: Um, everything.
A habitué of Craigslist, Rachel says she has used the Net
to find a roommate, find her apartment in Hayes Valley, and find
her part-time job. If she gets lost and doesn't have Net access,
she'll call a friend who does and ask her to go to MapQuest and
get directions. She pays all her bills online and reads the news
on S.F. Gate and N.Y. Times.com, two sites she doesn't even
bother to refer to by the names of the newspapers they represent.
She's selling a car online right now.
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TITLE: Competitive eater bests popcorn sarcophagus
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"Crazy Legs Conti" is a competitive eater who is also the subject of a new documentary that premiered on Tuesday in NYC. As a publicity stunt, he had himself entombed in a 50-cubic-foot "sarchopagus of popcorn" in the theatre lobby and ate his way free.
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(via JWZ)
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TITLE: Journo's Iraq gadget-bag
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Peter Maass, a war correspondant in Iraq, opens his gadget bag in a Gizmodo interview. He's got good kit.
You don't need a hardened computer, though breakdowns are frequent. I use an Apple iBook and took the precaution, during the invasion of Iraq, of covering the screen and keyboard in saran wrap, to keep out the sand. An item I didn't have, but dearly wished for, was night vision goggles. If you have to drive at night with the military in a warzone, as I and other non-embedded journalists did, you can't use any lights (you even have to tape over the red-light indicators on your dashboard). Driving without headlights in a desert behind a tank that doesn't have brakelights is an unpleasurable experience.
Linkvia Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Storm Trooper armour on eBay
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This guy is selling a fantastically detailed homebrew set of Star Wars Storm Trooper armour. I wonder if his has a willie hatch?
Link
(Thanks, Aaron!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Digitising LPs by scanning the grooves
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Digitising analogue LPs with high-resolution scanners isn't a new idea -- we blogged an early effort years ago here -- but it seems to have come along nicely, per this NYT story.
The team shoots thousands of precise sequential images of the
groove and then stitches the images together, measuring the shape
of each undulation and calculating the route a stylus would take
along the path.
"We grab the image and let the computer model what the stylus
would have done if it had run through the surface," said Carl
Haber, a senior scientist at the lab who led the research team in
collaboration with Vitaliy Fadeyev, a postdoctoral researcher
there.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Adidas wants you to run on computation
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DATE: 05/06/2004 12:19:21 AM
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Adidas is launching a "smart shoe" next December that modifies its support and responsiveness properties in real-time based on performance.
Each second, a sensor in the heel can take up to 20,000 readings
and the embedded electronic brain can make 10,000 calculations,
directing a tiny electric motor to change the shoe. The goal is
to make the shoe adjust to changing conditions and the runner's
particular style while in use.
"What we have, basically, is the first footwear product that can
change its characteristics in real time," said Mr. DiBenedetto,
who led the group that created the shoe, of its ability to adapt
its cushioning as the wearer runs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYT: IRC is like the cantina scene from Star Wars, but with porn and warez (oh my)
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DATE: 05/06/2004 12:24:58 AM
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The NYT has run a goofy Red-scare piece on Internet Relay Chat, with hysterical, alarmist bushwah like "It is still possible - though sometimes a bit difficult - to find mature technical discussions among the tens of thousands of I.R.C. chat rooms" -- I mean, how "difficult" is it to type "/join #unix"?
When I.R.C. started in the 1980's, it was best known as a way for
serious computer professionals worldwide to communicate in real
time. It is still possible - though sometimes a bit difficult -
to find mature technical discussions among the tens of thousands
of I.R.C. chat rooms, known as channels, operating at any one
time. There are also respectable I.R.C. systems and channels -
some operated by universities or Internet service providers - for
gamers seeking opponents or those who want to talk about sports
or hobbies.
Still, I.R.C. perhaps most closely resembles the cantina scene in
"Star Wars'': a louche hangout of digital smugglers, pirates,
curiosity seekers and the people who love them (or hunt them).
There seem to be I.R.C. channels dedicated to every sexual
fetish, and I.R.C. users speculate that terrorists also use the
networks to communicate in relative obscurity. Yet I.R.C. has its
advocates, who point to its legitimate uses.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple won't own up to defects in 17" Studio Displays either
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DATE: 05/06/2004 12:27:04 AM
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Michael says, "Here's another petition asking Apple to acknowledge a widespread manufacturing defect. This one concerns the problem with Apple's 17-inch Studio Displays that causes the top or bottom half to go dim, and the power light to blink incessantly. There is an ongoing thread on Apple's Discussion Board that currently has 371 replies, with 172 unique user names reporting the problem. It had 378 on Tuesday, but 8 of them, including one of mine, have since been deleted by Apple. I have spoken to Apple's Customer Relations regarding the issue, and they refuse to acknowledge it as a known problem. A flat-rate out-of-warranty repair is $458.95. A new display is $699."
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brains turn gorilla suits invisible
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Interesting piece on experiments in "change-blindness" -- the brain's refusal to take note of changes in our visual field.
Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.
Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.
However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.
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(via Crooked Timber)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Animated "Blind Man's Penis"
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DATE: 05/06/2004 07:46:20 AM
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John Alderman says:
"Back in the '70s, John Trubee (weirdo prankster) saw one of those ads that offers to assess your poetic talent and set your poems to music. So--testing limits--he wrote the most offensive thing he could think of, pushing all the buttons, and sent it off. The refrain was originally 'Stevie Wonder’s penis, is erect because he's blind.' The company wrote back and, of course, told him he had talent, and would set his song to music and press disks if he'd pay them a little. But, because they didn't want to get sued, they had to substitute 'a blind man' for Stevie. The record was pressed and it became a sort-of underground hit in LA. Funny also because Trubee's prank calls were supposed to be the inspiration for Matt Groening's use of them. They were friends!"
Now, "Blind Man's Penis" has been given the Flash animation treatment! Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Blessed Britney
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DATE: 05/06/2004 07:57:50 AM
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According to The Mirror, dear Britney Spears has demonstrated her devotion to Kabbalah (the newage Madonna variety, of course) by getting a Hebrew tattoo on the back of her neck. Too bad the letters don't mean a damn thing. Further adding to the irony (and idiocy) of the situation is the fact that the Torah forbids tattoos. Link (Thanks, Gil!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sun City Girls
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DATE: 05/06/2004 08:16:35 AM
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BB pal Erik Davis has posted the full text of a feature he wrote for The Wire about the Sun City Girls, the most eclectic, prolific, and weirdest cowpunkers the southwest has ever unleashed:
"Sun City Girls traffic with bizarre miscegenations, self-indulgent trash, and hardcore mystic exotica. Their sometimes garish album covers attack the eye with devils, yonis, sacred transvestites, and nubile native jailbait. Lyrics, song and album titles -- 'Naga Smoke Signals,' 'The Genghis Necro-Nama-Khan,' 330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda -- can sound like the spontaneous verse of young poetes maudites tanked up on National Geographic cheesecake and A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural. This lurid romance with the Other fuels some of their most incandescent sounds as well, a music of transport that explores Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and South American atmospheres with a passion composed equally of informed pleasure and the heedless appropriation of the strange. Looking high and low, far and wide, the Sun City Girls have sought the wellsprings of the weird, of what H.P. Lovecraft called outsideness, and when they have found them, they have taken what they wanted."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Like a hole in the head
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DATE: 05/06/2004 08:28:23 AM
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The construction worker in Los Angeles who had an accident with a nail gun last month is expected to fully recover. From the Associated Press:
"(Isidro) Mejia, 39, was atop an unfinished home when he fell from the roof onto a co-worker who was using the nail gun, Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Mark Newlands said.
The two men tried to grab each other to keep from falling, but both tumbled to the ground. At some point, the nail gun discharged and drove the nails into Mejia's head.
'They're extremely powerful," Newlands said. "They've got to drive through three-quarter-inch plywood.'"
The surgeons removed six nails, three of which had penetrated Mejia's brain. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Profile of Iraqi torture woman
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I've been waiting for the press to do a story about the female American soldier shown tormenting Iraqi soldiers. Her name is Lynndie England, she's 21, and she comes from a "backwoods world" West Virginia.
"To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised.
"Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mercenary interrogator wanted -- "minimal supervision"
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DATE: 05/06/2004 09:54:05 AM
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Homeland Security and Defense mercenary outfit CACI (motto: "Ever Vigilant") is looking an "Interrogator/Intel Analyst Team Lead" to work in in Baghdad. The job description is priceless:
Assists the interrogation support program team lead to increase the effectiveness of dealing with Detainees, Persons of Interest, and Prisoners of War (POWs) that are in the custody of US/Coalition Forces in the CJTF 7 AOR, in terms of screening, interrogation, and debriefing of persons of intelligence value. Under minimal supervision, will assist the team lead in managing a multifaceted interrogation support cell consisting of database entry/intelligence research clerks, screeners, tactical/strategic interrogators, and intelligence analyst.
Link (Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New electronic hand dryer really works?
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DATE: 05/06/2004 10:21:45 AM
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Hot air hand dryers, the kind used in lavatories of cheapskate businesses, do a lousy job. I always have to wipe my hands on my shirt to get my hands dry. Plus, there's always an puddle of sickening water under those dryers. This new hand dryer, by Mitsubishi, promises to suck all the moisture from your dripping epidermis. I still prefer paper towels, but this looks a lot better than useless blowers. Link (via IDFuel) Devin sez: About the Electric Hand dryer that really works.
Works: yes (hands are dry)
Well: no (dryer is STINKY)
Those hand-dryers are in 80% of public washrooms here
in Tokyo, and though they do dry hands well, they also
give off an incredible stench every time. Likely
because the pooling water (from user's hands) is rife
with bacteria more than happy to cling onto the sides
as the water slowly drains from the basin.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Great, weird illustrator: Louis Moe
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DATE: 05/06/2004 10:30:58 AM
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Awesome early 20th century illustrations by Louis Moe. Here's a picture of a mosquito-man sucking the blood from a willing victim. Link (via Cipango)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Digital cameras change history in Iraq
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DATE: 05/06/2004 10:52:26 AM
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Boing Boing Guestbar alum Todd Lappin sez: "Some interesting comments from a front page story in Thursday's Washington Post about the role digital cameras have played in in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle. If Vietnam was the first televised war, Iraq will probably be remembered as the war in which personal media technology altered the course of history."
For many units serving in Iraq, digital cameras are pervasive and yet another example of how technology has transformed the way troops communicate with relatives back home. From Basra to Baghdad, they e-mail pictures home. Some soldiers, including those in the 372nd, even packed video cameras along with their rifles and Kevlar helmets.
Bill Lawson, whose nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is one of the soldiers charged in the incident, said that Frederick sent home pictures from Iraq on a few occasions. They were "just ordinary photos, like a tourist would take" and nothing showing prisoner abuse, he said.
"I would say that's something that's very common that's going on in Iraq because it's so convenient and easy to do," Lawson said of troops sending pictures home. He added that his nephew also mailed videocassettes "of him talking into a camcorder to [his wife] when he was going on his rounds."
But in the case of prisoner abuse, the ubiquity of digital cameras has created a far more combustible international scandal that would have been sparked only by the release of Taguba's searing written report. Since the "60 Minutes II" broadcast, pictures of abuse have been posted on the Internet and shown on television stations worldwide.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dude, where's my drone?
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DATE: 05/06/2004 12:07:42 PM
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Defensetech's Noah Shachtman says:
Fisherman and divers of Norway: If you happen to see a ten-foot long, robotic mini-submarine swimming off of your shores, please call the U.S.
Navy. The service has been trying to find its mine-sweeping drone for a week, now, after the 'bot failed to return to its mother ship, the USS Swift.
The Swift has broken off its participation in a military exercise to look for the Battlespace Preparation Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, the AP reports.
"The ship has searched everywhere from the fjord leading into the southern town Kristiansand to deep ocean water some 30 kilometres out, where the waters can be as much as 580 metres deep," the wire service says. "Because the sub could surface just about anywhere along Norway's coast, [Norwegian military spokesman Cmdr. Thom] Knustad appealed on national radio for Norwegians to be on the lookout for the torpedo-shaped, yellowish-orange device with a propeller on one end. "
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: FAA hired a chimpanzee to manage quality-assurance
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DATE: 05/06/2004 12:46:34 PM
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A New York Times article reports that a tape recording made on 9/11/01 containing statements from "at least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners .. was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it."
The quality-assurance manager was said to have "crushed the cassette in his
hand," before disposing of it.
I just tried to crush a cassette in my hand. I couldn't do it. I know my upper body strength isn't what it ought to be, but I don't see how any normal human could crush a cassette in his or her bare hand.
I therefore conclude that the manager is not human. He is probably a very smart, shaved, and clothed chimp. Supporting evidence: In 1924, the Bronx Zoo tested the grip strength of people and chimpanzees using a dynamometer. A 160-pound male human had a grip strength of 210 pounds. But a 135-pound female chimp had a grip strength of 1260 pounds. Anybody have a pet chimp so we can test this out? I'll pay for the cassette. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Communist era Czech TV commercials
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DATE: 05/06/2004 01:01:45 PM
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Let's have fun laughing at the poor production quality of these pathetic commie-era TV ads. It's no surprise the suicide rate was so high over there. I was ready to open a vein just watching these clips. Or maybe it was the fact that they're in Windows Media format, the only format even more hideous than Real Player. I guess it's the perfect media player to showcase these TV spots -- Windows Media feels like it was invented by eastern european scientists who had KGB agents holding guns to their heads. Link (Thanks, John!) Peter Orosz sez: When I read that post about communist era Czech ads, I recalled that 2 years ago I downloaded about 500 megs worth of ads made in communist Hungary. I was 9 when the communists got the boot here but I still remember seeing a few of them on TV (TV=2 state-run stations and there was NO BROADCAST WHATSOEVER on Mondays). Anyway, the ads are generally hideous but check out #1 (greasy horrible sausage), #29 (80's erotic home training system), #69 (Hungarian fast food chain) - all of them! [Note from Mark: this is the mother lode of commie tv commercials. There are 101 here. Amazing stuff!]
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grey Lady Dude, Check This Out!
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DATE: 05/06/2004 01:19:51 PM
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Dude, Check This Out, the totally frictionless blogging tool that my old OpenCola partners have created, got a mention in today's NYT -- congrats, guys!
To use the service, you must download a browser toolbar. Then, when visiting an interesting site, you click on "Dude It" to automatically post a link to an existing blog or to a MyBlog page at the site. (You can also highlight pictures or text to go along with the link.) Comments can be added to the link, and you can also send the entire posting to friends by e-mail. In a way, the service has created the simplest blogging tool imaginable.
Thom Watson, a technology manager in Washington, is an experienced blogger who longed for a better way to keep track of notable sites. "I keep my blog mostly for personal thoughts," he said. "I wanted a really easy way to collect links by topic and comment on them."
Mr. Watson now maintains three MyBlog pages, on general topics, modern architecture and the Toyota Prius. Better yet, the service sends him suggestions on sites of potential interest based on similarities between his postings and those on other MyBlogs. There's even a social-networking aspect that links users based on their contact lists.
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(Thanks, Grad!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FragBook games laptop
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DATE: 05/06/2004 01:24:11 PM
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The makers of the FragBox game PC are shipping a notebook version called the FragBook, which comes with custom detailing in any automotive finish and a padded alumnium laptop-briefcase.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on PBS TV tonight -- RFIDs and privacy
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DATE: 05/06/2004 01:35:27 PM
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On this week's edition of the PBS television program "California Connected," I join host Lisa McRee with guests Beth Givens, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, State Senator Debra Bowen, and Mark Roberti, RFID Journal to debate consumer privacy issues related to radio frequency ID tag (RFID) technology.
There's a great online discussion salon going on concurrently, too, with Professor Shyam Sunder of the School of Management at Yale University, Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the EFF, and Dr. Daniel Engels of the MIT Auto-ID Labs.
Dubbed by one skeptical journalist as "Big Brother in small packages," RFID chips are tiny transponders that can be attached to almost any consumer good. While companies are set to use these radio frequency identification tags to track their merchandise from assembly line to warehouse to store shelf, privacy watchdogs suggest these same RFID tags could be used to keep tabs on consumers -- beyond the confines of a store or supermarket.
Link to show home page. Video will be archived online later.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Filesharers respond to France's RIAA
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DATE: 05/06/2004 03:59:48 PM
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Last week, we posted news of a fuck-you to filesharers from France's equivalent to the RIAA: an extended middle finger, with the tagline "Free Music Has a Price."
Now, BoingBoing pal Jean-Luc
sends us this "response logo" (shown at left) from a group of online freedom of speech advocates in France. The tagline? "Culture has no price / Don't buy any CDs." Weblogs throughout France are displaying the logo as a gesture of solidarity against the SNEP (Syndicat National de l'Edition Phonographique) anti-P2P campaign. "You sell us mediocre music at exorbitant prices," the banner exclaims in French, "Reduce the price of CDs, and start placing a higher priority on the quality of artists instead of the quantity of money you're cramming in your pockets." Sacre blog!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NBC tries to outsmart TiVo?
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DATE: 05/06/2004 04:41:23 PM
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Glenn Fleishman says:
NBC has scheduled the final broadcast of Friends to start tonight at 8.59 p.m. Why? To beat TiVo recording, obviously. I'm not sure if they don't want us to watch the penultimate episode of Survivor: All-Stars (confession: I'm addicted). But it's clear that starting it a minute early is intended to disrupt digital recording of shows that run 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. The fix is simple. On my ReplayTV, I just set a manual record from 9:00 to 10:00 for NBC (or I could set an 8:00 to 8:59 Survivors recording). But it's clear that this is a direct DVR pushback. But how does this help the network? I link to a post about Fear Factor in which the thread explores on a discussion board why Fear Factor was getting chopped or not recording.
Link
UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Andrew Stern says,
"As a broadcasting student at SFSU, I suggest an alternate explanation for NBC starting Friends at 8:59PM."
Starting the BIG (for NBC) Friends finale one minute early is more about ratings and shares/HUT's (households utilizing TVs) than screwing w/ TiVo users. NBC wants to ensure a very high Nielsen rating and this will be reflected in logbooks and PPM's if the show starts earlier. Just an opinion."
Update 2: The Tivo-b0rking just doesn't stop! More readers wrote in to complain about the oddly pegged end-time. Joe says, "Regarding the timing of the Friends finale -- even sneakier than the fact that it started at 8:59 was that (according to my atomic-synchronized watch) it ran until 10:03 or so. So people who Tivo'ed something other than ER at 10:00 missed the last few minutes of Friends."
Gene concurs, and adds, "Strange behavior, considering that NBC seems to partner with TiVo -- they broadcast the code at enables automatic recording of their shows, and they promote their programming on TiVo's showcase function."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: List of unusual words
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DATE: 05/06/2004 07:01:25 PM
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Gary sez: "This guy has an amazing collection of word lists: included are word lists for various topics: manias & obsessions, philosophical 'isms'--you name it. Also feathers The International House of Logorrhea, a 14000-word dictionary of obscure and rare words. The only people who won't like this site are morosophs and misosophs!"
cynartomachy -- bear-baiting using dogs
gigantomachy -- war of giants against the gods
pneumatomachy -- denial of the divinity of the Holy Ghost
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Star Trek flat for $10^6
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:12:31 AM
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A UK sf fan/interior decorator who turned his (500 sqft) flat into a set for a Star Trek episode is now auctioning it off for a starting price of $1,000,000. The photo galleries linked off the auction are quite amazing.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Off-scale food photoshopping
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:15:14 AM
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Today's Worth1000 contest: photoshop foodstuffs to that they appear comically large or comically small.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Comcast's WiFi router lets your ISP spy on you, shut you down
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:43:50 AM
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Om Malik warns that the Linksys WiFi boxes that Comcast is supplying to its customers allow Comcast to remotely detect and disconnect devices on your home network, like your VoIP phone (which competes with Comcast's long-distance service).
If you scroll through the press release, you come to a section which says that the gateway supports a CableHome 1.0 "for the ability to deliver secure, managed services from Comcast’s head-end network to the subscribers’ home network." Now there is a big problem with this thing - for instance, the Cablehome 1.0 standard allows cable operators to snoop around their home networks and learn things such as how many computers are attached to the gateway and what kind of traffic they are generating/receiving. (Beware Vonage fans, this could be used to detect your Vonage ATA as well.)
In case you were wondering, where’s the juice. Go to the Cable Labs website and read this document. Scroll down to Section 6.3.1 and read:
The goals for the CableHome Management Portal include:
* Enable viewing of LAN IP Device information obtained via the CableHome DHCP Portal (CDP)
* Enable viewing of the results of LAN IP Device performance monitoring done by the CableHome Test Portal (CTP)
* Provide the capability to disable LAN segments
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Truck-stops with WiFi thriving
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:47:37 AM
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Truckers -- who made CB radio into a success in the 70s -- ar enow chasing another kind of wireless. Truck-stops that install WiFi can attract more business from bandwidht-hungry long-haul drivers.
David Maloney, a trucker from Aledo, Texas, is one who'll go the distance to reach a truck stop equipped with wireless Internet access.
"The only time I really get to use any kind of broadband is out here on the road," said Maloney, who recently stopped at a Flying J with Wi-Fi on his way from Virginia to Appleton, Wis. "That's the whole reason I came this far last night."
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(via WiFi Net News)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Infiltrator's account of Scientology Celebrity Center
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:51:38 AM
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Harmon Leon is a guy who specialises in infiltrating odd places through impersonation, then writing hilarious accounts of his deeds. His infiltration of the Church of Scientology's LA Celebrity Center is a classic:
[W]e go to a fancy, roped-off office on the first floor. There's a large desk, a book shelf, and a lot of pictures of boats on the wall.
"And this is L. Ron Hubbard's office."
"The actual office used by L. Ron Hubbard?" This is like being in Jesus' room.
"No. Each Scientology center has an office for L. Ron Hubbard, decorated in a way he would like it."
"Oh, so the office was used when he was visiting, ya?"
"No. He died before this hotel was refurbished."
Someone should mention to this lady that dead guys don't need offices. Especially an office built for a dead guy after the dead guy is dead.
Link
(Thanks, Danny!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Command-line pizza-orderator
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:54:51 AM
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pizza_party is an open-source command-line app for ordering pizzas from Domino's.
pizza_party [-o|--onions] [-g|--green-peppers] [-m|--mushrooms] [-v|--olives] [-t|--tomatoes] [-h|--pineapple] [-x|--extra-cheese] [-d|--cheddar-cheese] [-p|--pepperoni] [-s|--sausage] [-w|--ham] [-b|--bacon] [-e|--ground-beef] [-c|--grilled-chicken] [-z|--anchovies] [-u|--extra-sauce] [-U|--user= username] [-P|--password= pasword] [-I|--input-file= input-file] [-V|--verbose] [-Q|--quiet] [-F|--force] [QUANTITY] [SIZE] [CRUST]
* Can order pizza with only a few keystrokes.
* Can save pizza preferences.
* Can use batch files for ordering many pizzas.
* Has easy to use flags for ordering different toppings.
* Runs on most UNIX-like operating systems.
* Supports most currently popular topings like "mushrooms", and "pepperoni"!
* Unattended / background operation.
* Pizza Party is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT won't Sasser-patch bootleg Windows
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:00:14 AM
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Microsoft's anti-Sasser-worm patch can't be applied to copies of Windows with serial numbers associated with bootleg or fake copies. It's an interesting dilemma for MSFT: the more unpatched copies of Windows (whether legit or not) the worm infects, the worse it becomes for all unpatched users, including those who paid their license fees. It's like denying smallpox vaccinations to known crooks, then having to pay the social cost of the smallpox outbreak that infects everyone who hasn't had a shot (including honest cits).
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Back-door your Roomba
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:02:38 AM
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PT sez, "This week's "how to" article from Engadget shows how to put the Roomba Robot Vacuum in hardware check mode. This is a useful mode for Roomba hackers (and anyone else) to test the functions of the unit as well as see how the unit works, test the 'virtual walls,' clean specific parts and have some fun."
Pressing the L button for the 5th time (you'll hear 5 beeps) will put the Roomba in "bulldozer" mode, in other words it'll just roll forward no matter what, the sensors and bumpers and picking it up will not stop it. Be careful, don't let the Roomba damage you or itself.
Link
(Thanks, PT!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Belt-buckle made from NES controller
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:05:04 AM
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At $15, this belt-buckle made from an old NES controller is a pretty cool gift-idea.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tapeworm follies
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:07:07 AM
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On the fray, a first-person account of one man's discovery of a tape-worm and the ensuing potty hilarity that occured once he killed the thing with medication and it...emerged. Warning: not for the scatophobic or the sequamish.
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(Thanks, Derek!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reuters RSS
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:08:14 AM
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Reuters has launched a bunch of RSS feeds for its wire service.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aurora Nominations ballot online
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:26:12 AM
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The 2004 Aurora Award nomination form is up online -- this is the award given to the best science fiction works by Canadians or people living in Canada. Canadians and people living in Canada are eligible to nominate.
For the record, my eligible works for this ballot are:
Best Novel: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Tor, January 2003
Best Short-Form Work: Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers, Asimov's, June 2003
Flowers From Alice, New Faces in Science Fiction (Mike Resnick, ed.), December, 2003
Printed Meat and Nattering Packages, Business 2.0, May 2003
Road Calls Me Dear, The Mammoth Book of Road Stories, January 2003
Nominations are due July 17th (my birthday!).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig on NPR
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DATE: 05/07/2004 05:53:09 AM
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Lawrence Lessig did a guest appearance on the San Francisco NPR show Forum yesterday, with a traditional copyright lawyer presenting the case for maximal copyright. The RealAudio stream is fantastic.
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friends finale and NBC Tivo-b0rking -- TiVo Strikes Back, episode for sale on Amazon...
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DATE: 05/07/2004 07:19:29 AM
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Following up on yesterday's post about NBC's apparent attempts to b0rk potential TiVoers of the Friends finale, BoingBoing reader Douglas Clark says,
I am a loyal Tivo user and Tivo did send out a message alert to users about the Friends episode. It was more along the lines of "if you manually extend the time of a recording, you may miss the beginning of the friends final episode." I find that Tivo is pretty good about catching unusual start times and other wonky tricks the networks play. The previous comment about HUT and ratings was right on the money...
Link to previous BoingBoing post.
Tech maven Meg Hourihan adds, "Even weirder is that I got a message on my Tivo warning me that the finale of Friends would have abnormal times. The message warned that if I wasn't just using the automatic "start on time" and "end on time" settings (i.e. I manually set the start time as 8 PM) that I might miss some. What makes things weirder and worse is that Tivo still didn't record the whole show! I made sure my settings were what the message instructed, and happened to watch the show live. Tivo kicked in to record at 8:59 PM (which is what it listed the start time as) but stopped at 9:59! According to the time on my digital cable box, the program didn't end until 10:03 PM. So if I hadn't watched it live, I would have missed the last four minutes. Seems like a major screw-up on Tivo's part, especially after sending out that message!"
Mindjack's Donald Melanson wonders, "This is just a thought, but since NBC was selling 30 second ad spots during the Friends finale for $2M (the same as the Superbowl) is it not possible that they were just trying to squeeze in a few more by starting the show a minute early and ending it a few minutes late? An extra four minutes of advertising would be an extra $16M for NBC."
BoingBoing reader Ran Li says, "I'd like to point out that this new NBC strategy is reminiscent of how Japan ended up with its crazy TV schedules. This is from the Japan SAQ:
Q. Have you ever noticed that Japanese TV shows start at odd times?
One show starts at 6:58, another at 7:00, and another at 7:05. Why is that?
A. Until several years ago, most Japanese TV shows did start exactly on the hour, but because of the TV ratings war, some stations decided to get the jump on their competitors and start their programs a little earlier. The networks realised that because most programs ended a little before the hour, people would often start channel surfing, but they would be more likely to start watching a station that wasn't airing commercials at that time. Similarly, if a program runs until a little past the hour, viewers are more likely to watch the next program because they have missed the beginning of programs that have already started on other stations. Now that every station (except NHK) does it, there is nothing to be gained from starting programs earlier or later, and the stations have become trapped in a vicious circle where starting times are getting earlier and earlier.
I really hope American TV doesn't end up like this because of some dumb execs who think this is a good idea."
BoingBoing reader Duane says, "This isn't really new...NBC has been doing it for weeks now, and Tivo sends out a message every time. The real killer is not wonking with the times -- it's simply providing bad times. Just because NBC puts into the guide that Friends would end at 9:59, that doesn't mean they can't run over to 10:01, which I believe it did last night. So even though I had 'manually record nbc from 8-10' I still almost missed the actual last scene. Had something else been in my todolist for 10, something on a different channel, I would not be writing you today because my wife would have killed me."
Matt Goyer says, "Don't worry -- if you missed the last 5 minutes of Friends, on May 11th you can buy the DVD from Amazon. Is setting the time a little later a way to get all those Tivo/DVR users to buy the DVD?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: TechTV staff fired
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DATE: 05/07/2004 07:23:23 AM
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Leo blogs, "The San Francisco operation will be shuttered by July. 100 of the existing jobs will be posted for those willing to relocate to LA..." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FOIA requests are suspected terrorism?
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DATE: 05/07/2004 07:50:46 AM
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In the guestblog over to the right, Russ Kick blogs about the FBI and SS investigating a FOIA request in Texas (more background here).
BoingBoing reader Mark A. Miller adds, "This is the letter that UT sent to the Attorney General, detailing such things as the emergency escape route for the President through the tunnel system.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: McMansionization of suburbia
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:25:26 PM
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Heart rending photos of cute little houses being demolished and replaced with generic monster boxes. What kind of creep enjoys living in these giant houses? I sure don't want to know them. I did't really mean this. I know a lot of very nice people who live in McMansions. I was upset when I saw this site because someone built a McMansion next door to us and it ruined our light and our view. It was like living in a cave. I used to love our house. But we sold it and moved. I guess I'm just more upset about the people who build these places with no thought to esthetics, quality, or the environment around them, and then sell them as spec houses. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jenna Jameson, Internet IP law activist
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:38:22 PM
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Our copyright-obsessed pals at Fleshbot say:
AVN reports that "gigastar" (we love that term) Jenna Jameson is using her considerable talents and energy to fight an ongoing lawsuit against the adult industry by Acacia Research, who claims that porn sites which utilize streaming media technology are guilty of patent infringement. Quoth Ms. Jameson: "Acacia is making a blatant attempt to target the adult industry in its effort to extract unwarranted fees for alleged infringement of its patents ... If Acacia succeeds in intimidating adult site owners, they will move to mainstream sites and begin charging fees that will have to be passed on to everyone who uses the Internet." You can read more details on the case at the Internet Media Protective Association website; we really just wanted an excuse to post some pictures of Jenna we've had lying around in our bookmarks for a while.
Link
"Jenna Joins The Acacia Challenge" (AVN)
"Stream This: Acacia, Net Companies at Odds Over Patents" (AVN Online, 2/2003)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Louisiana to ban saggy, butt-crack-exposing pants
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:41:25 PM
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File under "only in Louisiana" -- snip:
Wearing sagging or baggy pants that expose your underwear or buttocks would make you a criminal under a bill approved by a House panel Thursday. "I don't relish the idea of seeing the beginning of people's pubic hair," Westwego City Councilman Glenn Green told the House Criminal Justice Committee on Thursday. "I don't relish seeing the beginning of the crease of people's buttocks. And I don't enjoy watching young men letting their sexual organs show through their red or black silk underwear," Green said.
Link (Thanks, Jonno)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi waiting room at the doctor's
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 05/07/2004 12:49:00 PM
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Jason's doctor has open WiFi in his waiting room to make those long waits less insufferable.
He has figured out that a lot of his patients (and their partners) spend a heck of a lot of time waiting around in his lobby. While pop-cult magazines and baby toys are still popular for minding the time, he realized there's an unlimited resource of entertainment he can make available with a simply $30 WiFI AP -- The Internet. Now I can work/surf/play online all I want while I wait for Tara to finish her appointment. There's even an abundance of power outlets near the seating area.
Anyway, I know I'm being nerdy, but I still think its pretty cool. If I decide at some point to consider switching doctors, I'll definitely inquire about wireless access in the waiting room.
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TITLE: Low-carbers beat up Krispy Kreme's bottom line
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Krispy Kreme has reduced its earnings projections by 10 percent due to low-carbers' reluctance to eat donuts.
"Our current guidance assumes a continuation of the low-carb phenomenon that is affecting the industry," Livengood said. "Needless to say, we are disappointed that external forces have caused us to revise our first quarter and fiscal 2005 earnings guidance."
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TITLE: Today's received wisdom about tomorrow
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:37:46 PM
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Strange Horizons magazine has published a list of the story cliches it's seeing too much of in its submissions-pile. This is a pretty good benchmark for the today's received-wisdom zeitgeist about tomorrow.
Someone calls technical support; wacky hijinx ensue.
1. Someone calls technical support for a magical item.
2. Someone calls technical support for a piece of advanced technology.
3. The title of the story is 1-800-SOMETHING-CUTE.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Floppy RAID
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:41:57 PM
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I love the idea of building RAIDs out of floppy drives -- I just with this guy had built a BIGGER RAID. If he'd clustered 256 old iMacs with four floppy drives each, he would have had a gigabyte floppy RAID -- all the power and reliability of a Jaz cartridge, in a package that fills a roller-rink. In fact, you could employ kids on roller-blades (like Kozmo did!) to wheel around the shelves, replacing dud floppies with fresh ones.
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(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pirate radio workshops
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DATE: 05/07/2004 01:44:06 PM
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Radio Free Berkeley is giving workshops on how to build your own pirate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H low-power FM radio station, and what to do when the radio cops come a-knockin'.
Building your own station is also illegal. Dunifer advises his students to enlist the help of an attorney before hopping the airwaves. But he describes microbroadcasting as "electronic civil disobedience" rather than a typical criminal act.
"As far as I'm concerned, the real pirates are the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) and their member stations," Dunifer said, referring to the powerful lobbying group. "They've stolen the airwaves with the full complicity of the FCC and Congress."
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TITLE: US torturers made screensavers out of atrocity photos
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DATE: 05/07/2004 10:57:09 PM
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Salon's reporter in Iraq interviewed an Al Jazeera cameraman, a civilian who was taken prisoner by the US forces and brutally tortured.
"I first knew that they were taking pictures when I saw that one of the computers had a picture of some prisoners as its desktop background. One of the prisoners had a black hood over his head and he was covered in cold water. I personally witnessed this event take place. The man was screaming, "I'm innocent!" until he got sick and his body got swollen from all the punishment," al Baz said. Cold water, solitary confinement, swollen bodies and constant psychological abuse are recurring images for the Al-Jazeera cameraman, who also credits his tormentors with ingenuity. "They had all different kinds of punishments and they changed them all the time. I begged them to interrogate me again so they would know that I was innocent, but they said no, that's it. All we know is that you're staying here."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-carb corn
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DATE: 05/07/2004 10:58:07 PM
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A GM corn strain has twice the protein and half the carbs:
"Surprisingly, not only did we observe rescue of flower abortion but the kernels produced from pairs of flowers fused into a single normal-sized kernel that contained two embryos and a smaller endosperm," said Gallie. "Because it is the embryo that contains the majority of protein and oil, the presence of two embryos doubles their content in corn grain. The reduction in the size of the endosperm in the kernel, the tissue that contains most of the carbohydrate, means that the nutritional value of the grain has been improved considerably."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cataloging his junk drawers, one item at a time
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DATE: 05/08/2004 01:56:13 PM
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Mack sez: Heavy Little Objects, " is reallly an excuse to turn out my junk drawers and re-examine all the weird, small things that I've collected since I was, like 12, and turn them into a full-blown, daily ritual." Mack's objects comprise a true catalog of pop culture oddities, and his descriptions of the objects should be preserved for a museum 100 years from now. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Celebrity time-travel photoshop contest
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DATE: 05/08/2004 02:01:41 PM
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Some real science fictional gems in this Worth1000 photoshopping contest: What If Celebrities Had Time Travel?
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TITLE: Michael Moore says his announcement is no publicity stunt
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DATE: 05/08/2004 11:31:47 PM
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I've lost track of the number of people who've sent us links to news stories about Michael Moore "admitting" that his campaign to tell people about Disney's last-minute refusal to carry his new anti-Bush movie, Farenheit 911, is a "publicity stunt." Moore convincingly rebuts this on his site
"Michael Moore has known for a year that we will not distribute this movie, so this is not news." Yes, that is what I thought, too, except Disney kept sending us all that money to make the movie. Miramax said there was no problem. I got the idea that everything was fine.
"It is not in the best interests of our company to distribute a partisan political film that may offend some of our customers." Hmmm. Disney doesn't distribute work that has partisan politics? Disney distributes and syndicates the Sean Hannity radio show every day? I get to listen to Rush Limbaugh every day on Disney-owned WABC. I also seem to remember that Disney distributed a very partisan political movie during a Congressional election year, 1998—a film called The Big One… by, um… ME!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Game Boy GPS
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DATE: 05/08/2004 11:33:11 PM
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Red Sky Mobile is launching a GPS unit for the Game Boy Advance next week at E3. It includes a set of APIs to enable "GPS Gaming."
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(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Plastic frog/weather station
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DATE: 05/08/2004 11:38:55 PM
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The FroggyBox is a sensor-pack in a plasitc frog with a serial interface (a wireless USB adapter is available), containing a thermometer, a barometer and an hygrometer -- basically everything you need to turn a PC into a weather station, especially when you add their forthcoming wireless plastic rooster, which contains an anemometer, weathercock, and heliograph.
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(Thanks, Sad Old Goth!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Top baby names of 2003
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DATE: 05/09/2004 12:05:36 AM
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The Social Security Agency has released its list of top baby names for 2003. "Emily" continues to enjoy its eight-year stretch as the most popular girl name.
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2003
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1903
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BOYS
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GIRLS
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BOYS
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GIRLS
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Jacob
Michael
Joshua
Matthew
Andrew
Joseph
Ethan
Daniel
Christopher
Anthony
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Emily
Emma
Madison
Hannah
Olivia
Abigail
Alexis
Ashley
Elizabeth
Samantha
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John
William
James
George
Joseph
Charles
Robert
Frank
Walter
Henry
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Mary
Margaret
Hel
Anna
Ruth
Marie
Elizabeth
Florence
Dorothy
Lillian
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Congress needs to hear support for the DMCRA!
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DATE: 05/09/2004 12:21:44 AM
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Slashdot has a story about various big copyright-holder groups contacting their members, urging them to write to Congress to get the DMCRA locked up in committee. The DMCRA is a bill introduced by Rick Boucher to take the modest steps of requiring the labelling of CDs, DVDs and other products with DRM in them, and to allow Americans to circumvent DRM when for a lawful purpose (i.e., watching foreign DVDs on a domestic DVD player). The FUD from rightsholder groups needs countering, as Slashdot points out, and you can help by writing to Congress in support of the bill. EFF's Action Center has a one-click letter you can send to your Congresscritter asking for her/his support on the bill.
I am writing today to ask you to co-sponsor Rep. Boucher & Doolittle's Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 107). I believe that our copyright law has become unbalanced and fails to address the interests of the public.
The DMCRA would protect consumers from buying "copy protected" audio compact discs that may not work in personal computers, cars, and other consumer devices. It would also codify a citizen's right to make fair uses of copyrighted material. I think that this is an absolutely fundamental step towards redressing the imbalances that have plagued copyright law in recent years.
I hope you will co-sponsor the DMCRA and show your support for the public's rights in digital media. Thank you for your time.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Horror story submission cliches
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DATE: 05/09/2004 12:46:11 AM
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Strange Horizons has a list of Horror Stories They See Too Much Of to complement their list of science fiction slushpile cliches.
1 Serial killer or vampire stalks and slays victim(s).
i. The tables are turned at the end. (For example, the intended victim turns out to be a vampire or other powerful supernatural creature.)
ii. The serial killer is insane.
iii. The serial killer is under supernatural influence.
iv. The serial killer was abused as a child.
2 Person is insane, and kills a lot of people because of it.
i. The insanity is due to supernatural influence.
ii. The insane person does property damage instead of killing people.
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(via Ober Dicta)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: German newspaper iPod/torture mashup
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DATE: 05/09/2004 03:42:18 AM
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The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung ran this editorial illustration that remixes the Iraqi torture photos with the iPod ads.
12k JPEG Link
(Thanks, Thorsten!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Don't just protect the unconceived: protect the inanimate!
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DATE: 05/09/2004 10:57:14 AM
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Fafnir of Fafblog has written a good think-piece explaining the logical next step in the Bush administration's campaign to protect the rights of the unconceived: protecting the rights of the inanimate.
This is yknow a huge step backwards for women's health and for contraception and the prevention of abortions. But it is a huge step forward for what we at Fafblog like to call the "rights of the unconceived," which is just a few short steps from what we are really lookin forward to which is the rights of the inanimate.
I have personally spent hours an hours talkin to cans, waffle irons, boxes, printer cartridges and forks and they all dream of one thing: no longer bein treated as second-class citizens in the United States.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny theater in a box showcases the Bush administration doing the thing it does best
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DATE: 05/09/2004 08:38:37 PM
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Artist Mars Tokyo has created a 3" x 4" peep box entitled "The Theater of the Liars" featuring George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell. Link (Thanks, s. mericle!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Music Plasma -- visual music search is pretty amazing
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DATE: 05/09/2004 08:47:11 PM
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This visual music search engine lets you type in the name of an artist and it displays related artists. I thought I'd stump it by entering "Robert Crumb" (the cartoonist, who used to play tenor banjo in one of my favorite bands, The Cheap Suit Serenaders). I'll be damned if Music Plasma didn't display my very favorite musicians right next to his name. Link (Thanks, Anthony!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to be a poet
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DATE: 05/10/2004 03:10:21 AM
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Jim Henley writes some damned sensible advice on how to become a poet -- advice that applies just as readily to becoming any kind of writer.
Start by slavishly imitating poets you admire. This is the opposite of
the standard advice that you need to concentrate on "finding your own
voice." Don't take this wrong, _____, but fuck your own
voice. Your own voice will take care of itself as your craft matures.
Your own voice will, if you're going to have one, insist on
emerging. In the meantime, learn the craft. Learn the vocabulary and
practice of meter. Learn rhyme schemes. Learn the ways that free verse
gets written that yet contains music. Reread poets you admire, read
about them and then read the poets they get compared to.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TheyRule: applying information design to corporate directorships
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DATE: 05/10/2004 03:12:37 AM
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TheyRule is a brilliant Flash app that allows you to interactively explore and map the interlocking directorships of the most powerful corporations in the world. They've just relaunched a 2004 edition with currect data.
They Rule allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.
The data was collected from their websites and SEC filings in early 2004, so it may not be completely accurate - companies merge and disappear and directors shift boards.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogger redesign notes
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DATE: 05/10/2004 03:18:12 AM
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Blogger has relaunched today, with standards-compliant templates, comments with spamblocking, streamlined blog creation, and page-per-post -- the kind of things that we've come to expect from a modern blogging tool. The redesign was executed by the arch-geniuses of Stopdesign and Adaptive Path, and it shows. This is a beautiful redesign, both in terms of look-and-feel and approachability for novices. Here're project leader Doug Bowman's notes on the redesign:
The rounded corners seen throughout the Blogger redesign (and in several of the user templates) make use of an expansion of the Sliding Doors technique written for A List Apart last year. The Blogger design is a fixed width, which means most of the modules of the site exist at pre-defined widths. Since the width of each module is known, one image is used for the top-left and top-right corners of a module, and another image is used for the bottom-left and bottom-right corners. The images are called in as background images for two nested elements. Since these two elements contain all the text of the module, they expand infinitely as the module grows in height. Think of it as Sliding Doors turned on their sides.
For modules requiring a border, the two images are modified to include top and bottom borders connecting the two corners. A third element gets nested in the HTML that uses left and right borders which connect top and bottom corners.
This design posed many other challenges when building it out, specifically because we wanted to allow the text and each of the design elements (header, modules) to be as flexible and scalable as possible. The markup construction was tricky and required compromises in several places. As is evident with the rounded corner modules, extra divs were necessary for each background image called in. In CSS3, border images will certainly help eliminate the need for extra elements. And I’ve been pressuring Tantek to get the CSS Working Group to consider allowing us to set multiple background images on one HTML element.
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japan jails academic for writing P2P app
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A Japanese academic who wrote an anonymous P2P app has been arrested for "abetting infringement." This is the kind of perversion of justice we're accustomed to seeing in the US and Norway -- disappointing that the Japanese have so thoroughly bridged the copyright hysteria gap. The programmer faces three years in prison for writing code that allows for anonymous file-transfers. We can only hope that the team that led Microsoft's operating-system effort will be next, followed by the AppleShare team and the pesky authors of ftp.
Mr Isamu Kaneko, a 33-year-old assistant professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, was arrested on suspicion of developing and offering free downloads on his Web site file-sharing software called Winny, Kyoto Prefectural (state) police said on condition of anonymity.
He is also accused of helping two Japanese men arrested in November on charges of disseminating movies and games on the Internet with Winny, police said.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fat-destroying pill?
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DATE: 05/10/2004 07:40:09 AM
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One way to treat obesity may be to starve the fat cells. University of Texas researchers have designed a drug that selectively kils the blood vessels that supply white fat cells. Massively fat mice given the drug lost 30 percent of their weight in one month. Eventually, the researchers told New Scientist, a similar approach could be used to help obese humans. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Noise Pop mix tapes
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DATE: 05/10/2004 08:02:48 AM
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Noise Pop, San Francisco's gem of an indy music festival, and KQED are streaming various underground musicians' playlists-du-jour. The latest selections come from Greg Ashley, a Bay Area psych-folk artist whose exquisite taste ranges from Leonard Cohen to Os Mutantes.
Link (Thanks, Birdman!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Warrants are security measures
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DATE: 05/10/2004 08:07:12 AM
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Bruce Schneier's latest op-ed asks us to consider the warrant process -- where a cop has to show evidence and follow procedure before invading your privacy -- is itself a security measure.
What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse. This is the proper question: "Should we allow law enforcement to use new technology without any judicial oversight, or should we demand that they be overseen and accountable?" And the Fourth Amendment already provides for this in its requirement of a warrant.
The search warrant - a technologically neutral legal requirement - basically says that before the police open the mail, listen in on the phone call or search the bit stream for key words, a "neutral and detached magistrate" reviews the basis for the search and takes responsibility for the outcome. The key is independent judicial oversight; the warrant process is itself a security measure protecting us from abuse and making us more secure.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Biting the bullet
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DATE: 05/10/2004 08:43:44 AM
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A woman in Irvine, California claimed she bit into a hot dog and ended up chomping down on a live 9 mm bullet. Police opened the rest of the hot dog packages at the Costco store that sold the woman the wiener but didn't find any more bullets. Meanwhile, the woman, suffering from a tummy ache, visited a hospital where x-rays revealed another round inside her stomach. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stanislaw Lem is cranky!
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:24:48 AM
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Stanislaw Lew, the king of Polish Science Fiction, is alive, cranky and well, and this interview with him makes me want to go re-read Solaris.
Bush is seeking reelection. His advisers remembered the effect of the first landing on the Moon, and proposed a repeat, but on a grander scale. So Mars came in handy. It will take at least 20 years to prepare a flight to Mars. Bush, however, is only concerned with the next four years. But the attempt to portray him as a forward-looking pragmatist has produced an impression...
There is nothing up there. And what about the money for these space adventures? Do you think U.S. Congress will come up with hundreds of billions on a silver platter? Besides, what is the dollar really worth now? In Communist-era Poland it could buy 100 zlotys: That was some money. But now it is worth a mere 3.5 zlotys. Today I am getting more dollars for new editions of my books from Russia than from the United States. We should deal with earthly problems, not with space chimeras.
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(via Beyond the Beyond)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MPAA's Bizarro-world logic
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:29:03 AM
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Fritz Attaway, the MPAA's vice president who shows up at all the DRM meetings, explains to the press how the world works in Bizarroland, where being able to make a backup of your DVDs is bad for you.
"There is no right in the copyright law to make backup copies of motion pictures, so the whole argument that people should have the right to make backup copies of DVDs has no legal support whatsoever," said Fritz Attaway, executive vice president of the MPAA.
"It's against consumers' interests to permit devices that make backup copies," he added, "because there is no way that a device can distinguish between a backup copy for personal use and making a copy for friends, family acquaintances or even selling on the street corner."
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(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Persian photoblog: Those Sexy Iranians
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:44:59 AM
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Hossein Derakshan says, "I've launched my photoblog, titled "vagrantly." Here's the latest image post, about the Islamic dress code and Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column this weekend about 'sexy Iranians.'"
No one has challenged the cleric's rule more effectively than these young Iranian girls. They have totally changed the Islamic dress code during the past five years. The half-sliced heads of the mannequins are results of Islamic laws that prohibit making identical statues to humans.
Link to Hoder's photoblog post. And coincidentally, BoingBoing's own Cory says from the U.K., "Spotted at the Brick Lane Bengali new year's festivities in London: a little girl in a couture Calvin Klein headscarf."Link to 80K jpeg image.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites Iraq blog: "Paying Back in Blood"
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:46:24 AM
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Blogger and MSNBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Iraq, and has posted a new entry to his blog today.
When he was nine years old Carlos Gomez crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico to the U.S. with his father, mother and two sisters. They had heard stories about the opportunities in America, dreamed about them, wanted them so badly they ran through oncoming traffic on the 805 freeway to get to them. They didn't stop until they reached San Diego. Fear, fatigue and La Migra slowly fading into the southern horizon like their homeland.
They stayed. Dealt with the slurs--beaners, greasers, wetbacks. Overcame them. Paid back America's opportunities with hard, menial labor. Made a fraction of what citizens and legal immigrants made--but never complained.
And 12 years later, in Falluja, Iraq, Marine Lance Corporal Gomez would pay it back again--but this time with his blood.
Link, Discussion Forum
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pixel-counting can un-redact government docs
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DATE: 05/10/2004 12:00:15 PM
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A Luxembourgian/Irish security research team have presented a paper on a technique for identifying words that have been blacked out of documents, as when government docs are published with big strikethroughs over the bits that are sensitive to national security. The technique doesn't work on monospace fonts like Courier, but the State Department's recent font guidelines require that all docs be published in Times New Roman, which decodes like a charm.
hey found the number of pixels that had been blacked out in the sentence: "An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an xxxxxxxx service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike." They then used a computer to determine the pixel length of words in the dictionary when written in the Arial font.
The program rejected all of the words that were not within three pixels of the length of the word that was probably under the blacked-out area in the document.
The software then reduced the number of possible words to just seven from 1,530 by using semantic guidelines, including the grammatical context. The researchers selected the word "Egyptian" from the seven possible words...
Link
(Thanks, Wendy!)
Update: This page at Cryptome has more detail and illustrations (Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart on US torturers
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DATE: 05/10/2004 02:01:53 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted two amazing clips from the Daily Show on the Iraq torture scandal.
4.8MB QuickTime Link to Rob Courddry On The US Torture Of Iraqi Prisoners, 9.8MB QuickTime Link to Jon Stewart on Giant Messopotamia
Update: These clips have moved.4.8MB QuickTime Link to Rob Courddry On The US Torture Of Iraqi Prisoners, 9.8MB QuickTime Link to Jon Stewart on Giant Messopotamia
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MTV's new mashup bootleg TV show "MTV Mash"
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DATE: 05/10/2004 04:01:11 PM
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French DJ/producer duo Loo & Placido tell BoingBoing:
We've been doing bootlegs / mash-ups for a few years now. For the last several months, we've been working with MTV on exclusive bootlegs for a new show called ""MTV MASH" which is broadcast all around Europe 3 times a week. We already made12 tracks for the show so far. If you want to listen to our bootlegs, check out our website, it's still under construction, but there's already a lot of tracks to listen to.
Link to the L&P site. The MTV out-takes you can listen to here are terrific, and if this is what ended up on the cutting room floor -- the show should be amazing. I'm particularly fond of the Missy Elliot meets Green day track "get your green on," as well as the Goldbug meets ODB number "Golden Bastard."
Update: The mashups are smokin', but (sorry guys) the Loo & Placido website's obtuse, flash-based UI sucks ass. BoingBoing reader Eric reminds us that you can also link directly to the MP3s themselves. This way you can save locally and enjoy ad infinitum: Bigger than Love,, Complicated Man, Get Your Green On, Golden Bastard, Gomez Soul, Pound for Pound, Stereo Kelly.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LotR furniture
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:03:29 PM
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These guys sell (very, very, very expensive) hand-made oak furniture themed on the Lord of the RIngs movie.
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(Thanks, Dominic!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why Blogger redirects some URLs
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:31:51 PM
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The new Blogger redirects a lot of its links through another server. Ev explains why: it's to keep down comment-spam, to avoid apportioning unwarranted PageRank, and to protect Google's intranet.
Since blogger.com is linked from google.com, any sites we link to could pass on a fairly high PageRank value. (PageRank is one of the factors that determines what results show up in what order for searches.) In order to remove any possibility of unequal ranking of Blogger-powered blogs in the Google main search index, we send links through a URL from which Google knows to ignore PageRank. This way, Blogger blogs earn PageRank only on the basis of their content and other people linking to them, not because they're powered by a tool owned by Google.
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr adds image annotation
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:35:11 PM
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Flickr -- the fantastic social image-sharing Web app from Ludicorp -- has added image annotation; you can draw boxes around bits of the photos you post and mark up the contents of each box. When a viewer mouses over the box, a tooltip pops up with the annotation. Super cool.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sony's entertainment business is killing its electronics business
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:45:05 PM
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Derek Slater takes Sony to task over its new music-download service and iPod-like player.
Sony's acquisition of a couple of minor entertainment companies has had untold consequences. It's a poison pill that is killing Sony, one piece at a time.
Back from 1976-1984, Sony was the company that spent hundreds of millions on the defense of its VCR, bringing it all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the entertainment industry didn't have any right to its business-model; that if new technology could make the old business irrelevant, that was tough shit, and the movie companies needed to stop pewling and get with the program (they did, and made lots of money, besides).
But ever since Sony "acquired" Columbia, it's been acting like its electronics business was a minor business unit that couldn't afford to disrupt its precious entertainment arm (despite the fact that the entertainment arm's contributions to Sony's bottom line are minimal when compared to the gadget biz). When the first MP3 players appeared in the market, from little companies like Creative Labs, Sony brought out proprietary devices that played stupid formats like RealAudio and OpenAG, which no one wanted to hear. On the other hand, these formats did come with use-restrictions that kept Sony's music execs from getting too anxious and sad.
The result was that Creative Labs, a little outfit in Singapore, ate Sony's lunch, followed by a bunch of late diners to the table, including a bunch of no-name Korean companies, and most recently, Apple. Sony, who invented the walkman and made billions off of it, has now become an irrelevant player in the personal stereo market, with a market share that's barely a blip on the chart.
And Sony -- a company legendary for tis ability to refine its designs to capitalize on lessons learned in the market -- keeps on repeating the same mistakes, as Derek points out:
Apparently, Sony's hard drive player cannot play MP3s, WMA and (of course) Apple FairPlay-locked AAC. It only plays the Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 format; if it's like Sony's MiniDisc players, forcing consumers to convert to ATRAC3 also forces them to accept certain DRM restrictions. In related news, the Washington Post and New York Times both deemed Connect embarassing, noting its poor interface, proprietary DRM format and codec, copying restrictions ... too many to count.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshop contest: images depicting motion
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:47:35 PM
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Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest: "Images depicting motion." There's some very nice stuff here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion costume for sale
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DATE: 05/10/2004 11:49:54 PM
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An eBay auction for a size 14 (shirt)/18 (skirt) female Haunted Mansion ride-attendant costume from Walt Disney World. Oh, to be a woman.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Playfair is back!
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DATE: 05/11/2004 01:14:35 AM
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Playfair is the iTunes music player that removed the restrictions from the music you bought from Apple. It was hounded off Sourceforge by Apple's lawyers, and then it relocated to a server in India, only to be removed again at Apple's behest. Now it's back a third time, still hosted in India, with a new name: "hymn" (Hear Your Music aNywhere).
playfair has been renamed to hymn (hear your music anywhere) and is back online with the legal backing of FSF India. It has been updated with the latest FairPlay code from VideoLAN.
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(Thanks, Jon!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: McDonalds trademarks phrase "I am Asian"
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DATE: 05/11/2004 07:29:27 AM
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McDonalds recently launched a bizarre new marketing campaign to attract Asian and Pacific Islander Americans "living on the rim." [Ed note: ahem] BoingBoing reader Modesty Verve, who points us to the campaign's website, says "Even stranger is the company's assertion of a trademark right on the phrase "I am Asian"!" Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Godzilla vs. Camp
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DATE: 05/11/2004 08:17:52 AM
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Last night, I watched the original, unedited Godzilla from 1954 that's finally being shown for the first time on the big screen in the US. No absurdist dubbing. No Raymond Burr. This subtitled print restores 40 minutes of director Ishiro Honda's vision that was chopped out of the first US release. Of course, some of the melodrama and special effects are still worth a chuckle, but this is not our childhood's Godzilla. Honda's film is a post-Nagasaki cautionary tale. And Godzilla is no joke. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A Scanner Darkly casting continues
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DATE: 05/11/2004 08:25:52 AM
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Richard Linklater has lined up quite a list of stars for his Hollywood adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. So far, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Rory Cochran have signed on to join (gulp) Keanu Reeves in the lead as an undercover cop with drug-induced schizophrenia. Link (Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New issue of Neural
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DATE: 05/11/2004 08:36:17 AM
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The new issue of Italian tech/art/culture magazine Neural is out. It looks to be another dense collection of articles about edgy hacktivism, electronic music, and digital art, including pieces on musician Ryoji Ikeda and anti-corporate activist Brian Holmes. Neural interviewed Mark way back in 1994! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shirky: Cameraphones are today's Gutenberg press
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DATE: 05/11/2004 09:27:02 AM
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Clay Shirky has written an excellent entry on the appearance of unmediated photos from the Iraqi front on a Friendster-like service called YAFRO. He likens this -- and other instances of undmediated communication -- to the Protestant Reformation.
The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what's on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can't predict.
And it isn't just military affairs, its politics and business and everything else, from attempts to coordinate evidence of Apple's manufacturing errors (previously handled case-by-case, but now becoming a kind of grass-rooots class action protest, to Apple's horror) to the distributed amicus brief on the SCO case conducted by the Linux community to the recent right of Americans to get their medical records on request and within 30 days to the publication of spoilers for popular TV shows. (Read this last link now — its from the Times and goes away in 5 days, and although on the surface its about TV, its really a musing on life in a fully disclosed culture.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet Archive's Petabox: a 1,000 terabyte array
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DATE: 05/11/2004 09:30:36 AM
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The Internet Archive has just installed its first Petabox, "a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes)." Bookmark this entry and come back to it in five years, when you get a Petabox's worth of storage (with, say, high-resolution scans of the contents of the entire Library of Congress) free under the lid of your lucky Super Big Gulp.
Link
(via Hack the Planet)
Update: Kevin Fox notes: "It appears that, while the design goal is a petabyte, they're only at
one rack, or 100 terabytes. They plan to have a second rack online by
the end of the month, but they don't seem to speculate on when the 8
other racks needed to create a 'petabox' are coming in."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bill O'Reilly trying to bury his Fresh Air interview
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DATE: 05/11/2004 09:33:48 AM
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Terry Gross conducted an extraordinary interview with notorious demagogue Bill O'Reilly on her Fresh Air last October (listen here). Now, O'Reilly is withholding permission for NPR to relicence portions of the program. Please tell all your friends about this interview and get them to listen to it, so that O'Reilly's plan to bury the interview backfires and this becomes the definitive O'Reilly interview of all time.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Joe Bussard's basement tapes
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DATE: 05/11/2004 09:49:10 AM
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Joe Bussard has 20,000 vintage 78 rpm records from the 1920s and 1930s in his basement. For $15, Joe will put together a custom cassette compilation for you of 20 tunes from his collection, perhaps the largest of its kind in the world. I wish Joe and his friends would rip all of his 78s so he could sell MP3 CDs of these ultra-rare recordings. Here's a great NPR All Things Considered piece on Joe Bussard from last year.
"'The truest form you'll ever hear in American music is on these records,' Joe says. 'It was put there, and it's remained there for seventy years. It hasn't changed.'"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lieberman's lunatic comments
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DATE: 05/11/2004 09:55:25 AM
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Fake democrat Joe Lieberman sucked up to his true allies during Rumsfeld's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.
LIEBERMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.
I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.
Here's what Atrios says about it: "Lieberman is making one of two points. Either he's just saying 'USA! Not quite as bad as the worst people on the planet!' Or, he's saying 'I just want to point out that some brown people unconnected to this event did some bad things!'" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony PSP shots from E3 via Gizmodo
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DATE: 05/11/2004 12:12:03 PM
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Joel Johnson says the first Sony PSP shots from E3 are now up on Gizmodo, and promises much more soon. Such a tease. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sonic fabric dress -- wearable music instrument
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DATE: 05/11/2004 12:17:03 PM
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BoingBoing reader Michael Corrado points us to a website featuring...
Fabric made from woven audiotape, readable by gloves containing tape heads. Dress made for Jim Jon Fishman of Phish, which composed song about dress's debut. Fishman used dress to create music next night. Vegas, May 2004
Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Gary writes, "If you want to hear the results yourself (nothing too impressive ... yet), you can go here and download the concert (during the performance of "Love You"). You might also be pleasantly suprised that Phish is happy to transmit full soundboard quality with no DRM."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New deck for digital DJs
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DATE: 05/11/2004 12:27:54 PM
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Finally, Technics has caught up with (and passed?) Pioneer in the CD-DJ arena. The SL-DZ1200 has the look-and-feel of Technics 1200s, the vinyl workhorse for DJs, but also includes digital features like looping and an SD card slot for MP3 playback. I'll take two please. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tarantino endorses Chinese Internet piracy of Kill Bill
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DATE: 05/11/2004 12:29:38 PM
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Quentin Tarantino thinks that Internet movie piracy isn't all bad:
In the case of China, I'm glad they're pirating [Kill Bill]. In a closed Communist country I'd rather be seen than not seen.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hugo nominated fiction online
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DATE: 05/11/2004 12:32:34 PM
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Here's a list of this year's Hugo Award nominees, with links to the full text of the nominated works for those that are online (all the short works but one are on the Web! None of the novels, though).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: OS X Spir-o-graph painting app
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DATE: 05/11/2004 12:40:13 PM
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Cosmic Painter is a GPLed MacOSX application that allows you to paint on a "spinning" canvas, screating a Spir-O-Graph-like effect, which is then animated. The results are, well, trippy. I just fell down a rabbit hole looking at and playing with the samples.
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(Thanks, FunWithStuff!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Feebs' security advisory about kingpin who turns out to be a video-game character
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DATE: 05/11/2004 02:06:20 PM
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The FBI issued a terrorist warning after receiving a tip on an evil millionaire -- who turned out to be a character in a video game.
It was the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. "Stand down," came the order from embarrassed national security types.
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(via Lawmeme)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best Ghostbusters prop replica EVAR
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DATE: 05/11/2004 02:57:41 PM
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This guy spent six months building this elaborate replica Ghostbusters pack, with powered blinkenlights and a multicolored flashlight cannon and lots of other swell features, and now he's selling it on eBay. Don't miss the video and build-diary!
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Wet Magazine scans from 1978
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DATE: 05/11/2004 06:33:16 PM
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Wet was a graphically innovative magazine that predated zines. I remember seeing some copies in the early 80s and liking the design a lot. The guys who made Wet later went on to write the Graphic Design Cookbook, which I used as inspiration for the print edition of bOING bOING. Designer Jennifer Sharpe (daughter of famed street prankster Mal Sharpe) has uploaded two complete issues to her site. Link (Thanks, Sean!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Leon Kagarise's basement tapes
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DATE: 05/12/2004 08:15:00 AM
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JT says:
"Your Joe Bussard entry reminded me of another, similar story that was pretty big news in DC last summer: Leon Kagarise of Baltimore, who recorded around 4,000 hours of artists like Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, etc. during the late 50s through early 70s on a reel-to-reel tape deck at the outdoor music festivals prevalent in the vast rural area that previously surrounded Washington."
NPR's Morning Edition did a piece on Kagarise last summer. He's working with Joe Lee, a friend and local record store owner, to sell the recordings. Not surprisingly, the Library of Congress, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and others are apparently interested.
"You know, these [performers] were people from the mountains and from the rural South," Lee told NPR. "And once they were put in a studio, and they had a producer looking down at their snoot at the guy. And an engineer telling them, 'Well, if you make one mistake, we have to stop and start all over again.' It lost the atmosphere. It's like trying to play guitar in a straightjacket on... It's sort of like being in the zone. When you're really at ease, when there's no intimidation factor, then it really soars. And the proof is in these tapes here."
I hope someone releases a "best of" box set! Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley Engineering
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DATE: 05/12/2004 08:16:08 AM
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In this issue of Lab Notes, my research digest from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* A.I. systems that uncover the needles in haystacks of data, from software bugs to hidden genes.
* Using x-ray microscopes to design concrete Band-Aids for decaying buildings and bridges.
* Medical imaging via modem that will enable remote village doctors to perform minimally-invasive cancer surgery.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Making people look bad
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DATE: 05/12/2004 08:28:44 AM
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Wired News has a great story by Mark Baard about the skilled make-up artists who create moulage, incredibly realistic injuries on people for emergency response training and exercises.
"The wounds' realism (deep, bleeding gashes and amputations, oozing blisters and burns) help get the rescuers' adrenaline going, by fostering empathy with the actors who portray disaster victims."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Webby Award Winners
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DATE: 05/12/2004 08:34:58 AM
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The Webby Awards 2004 winners have been announced. Congratulations to the, er, anomalous CarStuckGirls.com that rose to the top in the Weird category!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cute Japanese food
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DATE: 05/12/2004 08:47:31 AM
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Hello bento box! And other smiley-face food from Japan. Link (Thanks, JeremyT!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jabberwocky: Intel's "Familiar Stranger" Bluetooth application
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DATE: 05/12/2004 08:56:47 AM
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I wrote an article for TheFeature about Intel's "Jabberwocky," a bluetooth phone application that lets you track your "familiar strangers," (a term coined by late psychologist Stanley Milgram). Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sneaky Paypal fraud page rewrites URL
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DATE: 05/12/2004 10:26:22 AM
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Until now, it's been easy to spot a paypal fraud site by the telltale URL. But here's a Paypal fraud page that uses a Microsoft feature/bug (take your pick) to overwrite the scammer's URL with a legitimate-looking URL. If you make the page small, you'll be able to see the fraudster's URL. (Since I have a Mac, I can't try this out myself to see what actually happens.) Link (Warning: do NOT enter your paypal information here -- unless you want to be swindled) (Thanks, Joe!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Minimalist flashlight
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DATE: 05/12/2004 10:49:24 AM
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This may be the world's most minimalist flashlight: two high-intensity LEDs that snap over the end of a 9V battery! At $25, it seems a little steep, but the idea is very cool.
Link
(via Cool Tools)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: H2G2 movie production blog
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DATE: 05/12/2004 10:50:53 AM
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Disney has launched the official site for its forthcoming film adaptation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a running production blog.
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(Thanks, Nick!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Playboy game launch party at Playboy Mansion, LA
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DATE: 05/12/2004 11:19:44 AM
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Most of the time, the life of a wayward freelance geek journalist is fraught with stress, challenges, unpaid invoices. Well, last night wasn't one of those times. I went to the Playboy Mansion to interview Hugh Hefner, and cover the launch of a new Playboy-themed electronic game for Wired News and National Public Radio. In the game, you get to be Hef, doing hefsterly things like -- oh, nailing 18 year old hotties, and managing a booming porn publication empire.
I sat down with Mr. Hefner and his gorgeous companions, and asked him if he felt the game designers had created an accurate virtual depiction of the world in which he lives. "It's pretty good, other than the fact that they gave me this giant Jay Leno chin," he said. There was much butt cleavage in effect. Beautiful women with tromp l'oeil lingerie painted on their perfectly engineered breasts served little snacks off flawlessly polished silver platters (see image at left). Oh, and in case you're wondering -- there is no WiFi inside the grotto, although there is one very heavily used mattress. NPR and Wired News stories coming up.
Link to another mildly unsafe for work picture snapped during the event.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sofa of mousepads
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DATE: 05/12/2004 11:22:05 AM
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Pretty much as advertised: a sofa made from mousepads. Comfortable, practical and thrifty.
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TITLE: New Nintendo product is progeny of Donkey Kong watch?
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DATE: 05/12/2004 03:27:40 PM
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Nintendo's new double-screen handheld is curiously similar to its vintage (and misbegotten) Donkey Kong "Game and Watch."
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(Thanks, Allen!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Phobic photoshopping contest
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DATE: 05/13/2004 12:01:15 AM
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Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest is phobias, illustrated.
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TITLE: Photos from Clarke Award ceremony
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DATE: 05/13/2004 01:21:11 AM
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Last night, the Arthur C Clarke Award for best sf novel published in the UK in 2003 -- Neal Stephenson won. Here are some photos from the event.
Link
(Thanks, Tony!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SETI@Vatican
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DATE: 05/13/2004 01:54:02 AM
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The Vatican's official astronomer, Brother Guy Consolmagno, has given an interview in which he discusses the Vatican's thinking on what to do if alien intelligence is discovered.
We find an intelligent civilization and there's no way in creation we can communicate with them because they're so alien to us. We can't talk to dolphins now. In which case, we'll never know.
Second scenario: We find the intelligent civilization. We can communicate. We discover that they have the two essentials that theologians talk about for the human soul, intelligence and free will. They know who they are, they're self-aware, and they're able to do something about it. I think dogs are self-aware, but they don't have a whole lot of free will. Maybe computers are the same sort of thing. Human beings have to have both...
A third scenario: We find a dozen civilizations out there, and a bunch of Jehovah's witnesses go up and convert them all. At the end of the day, every civilization is Christian, except the human race is still not too sure about this. I mean, anything's possible.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Library of Alexandria dug up
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DATE: 05/13/2004 05:06:28 AM
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The ruins of the Library of Alexandria have been discovered:
Announcing their discovery at a conference being held at the University of California, Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that the 13 lecture halls uncovered could house as many as 5,000 students in total.
A conspicuous feature of the rooms, he said, was a central elevated podium for the lecturer to stand on.
"It is the first time ever that such a complex of lecture halls has been uncovered on any Greco-Roman site in the whole Mediterranean area," he added.
"It is perhaps the oldest university in the world."
Link
(Thanks, Patrick!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Disaster-play at home
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DATE: 05/13/2004 08:23:40 AM
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Former guest blogger Todd Lappin points us to a professional moulage kit, perfect for simulating your own brutal wounds and accident scenarios in the privacy of your own home. For $549, you get a convenient carrying case filled with such essentials as:
* 1 foreign body protrusion
* 1 eyeball
* 1 eviscerated intestines
* 2 crushed feet
* 1 plexiglass pk for simulated "glass in wound"
* 1 roll tape
* and lots more!
What a great gift! Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Beauty and the Breast
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DATE: 05/13/2004 08:34:17 AM
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Manuel Schmettau says:
"An artwork (video) by my friend Amy Jenkins, featuring her daughter breastfeeding and falling asleep, has been called "distasteful" and removed from an exhibition at Salvatore Ferragamo's 5th Avenue store. (Ferragamo originally invited Amy to create the piece for their store's art gallery on the second floor.)
When asked to "create an artwork using inspiration from objects in their store," Amy was promised complete artistic freedom. Hesitant at first, she explored the store and fell in love with a little pair of red shoes, which turned out to be called the "Audrey" shoes (they were originally designed for Audrey Hepburn.) As her daughter is also named Audrey, she felt it was fate to accept the invitation. It was not a commercial commission, and she financed the production of the video herself.
Amy would love to show this piece elsewhere, unfortunately it was made specially for their 42" widescreen monitor (a costly item that she doesn't own!) Her hope is that "The Audrey Samsara" will soon be shown at a more open-minded venue."
The New York Daily News ran an item about the controversy. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Indian voting machines compared with Diebold's
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DATE: 05/13/2004 08:46:18 AM
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On the eve of the first Indian election run with electronic-voting machines, a technologist called "smz" has posted an in-depth comparison between Diebold's voting machines and the ones in use in India.
The System is a set of two devices running on 6V batteries. One device, the Voting Unit is used by the Voter, and another device called the Control Unit is operated by the Electoral Officer. Both units are connected by a 5 meter cable. The Voting unit has a Blue Button for every candidate, the unit can hold 16 candidates, but up to 4 units can be chained, to accommodate 64 candidates. The Control Units has Three buttons on the surface, namely, one button to release a single vote, one button to see the total umber of vote casted till now, and one button to close the election process. The result button is hidden and sealed, It cannot be pressed unless the Close button is already pressed.
The voting unit has a list of candidate's names and their Party Symbols pasted on the surface, and a Blue button to cast a vote faces ever candidate's name. The Party Symbols (like a Lotus, an elephant, a horse etc.) are approved by the election commission to be unique, All political parties use these symbols while campaigning, and illiterate people can identify their candidates by looking at his symbol, and pressing the blue button in front of his symbol.
Link
(Thanks, smz!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Doing it like rabbits
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DATE: 05/13/2004 09:06:42 AM
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Swatch installed a Times Square billboard advertising their new Bunnysutra watch emblazoned with cartoon illustrations of "happy bunny positions." Predictably, plenty of people are offended. Here's a link to a an article with a slideshow of the billboard images. And a Flash demo of the watch, featuring Swatch's new "Touch" technology. ("Touch The dial. Pick A Position.") And, a New York Post article filled with quotes from the aforementioned angry Americans. Link (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Put on Your PJs and Run Playboy
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DATE: 05/13/2004 09:56:22 AM
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Wired News just published a story about the Playboy game launch, written by my colleague Daniel Terdiman. Photos include some that I shot at the Playboy Mansion the other night, including the image below: Hef and companions testing out the game, and liking it.
[T]his November, anyone with a PC, PlayStation 2 or Xbox will have the opportunity to put on Hef's smoking jacket and lord over his mansion. Game publishers Arush Entertainment and Groove Games will release Playboy: The Mansion, a video game that puts players in the virtual footwear of the publishing tycoon. "You can create your own Playboy magazine and throw your own parties," Hefner said.
Given that it's E3 week in Los Angeles, the game was the center attraction at a party at the real-life Playboy mansion Tuesday night -- that is, if it were possible to ignore a bevy of Playboy playmates, bunnies and naked models adorned with body paint designed to look like bikinis.
Think of the game as SimHef. Players take the reins of the Playboy empire, initially concentrating on getting the first issue of a faux Playboy on newsstands. They have to play Hef as a businessman, making financial decisions, developing fame and creating the kinds of personal, professional and romantic relationships Hefner did on his way to the top.
Link, and Link to previous BoingBoing post on the launch event.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Orange Mobile's robotic adherence to idiotic rules
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DATE: 05/13/2004 09:57:37 AM
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Yesterday was a momentous occasion: it was the day I received my first UK bank statement, and was therefore able to do my bit to consummate England's national love affair with the utility bill. I mean, seriously: this is a country where you can walk into a shop to get a mobile phone or an ID card and say, "I have in this hand a fistful of credit cards and in this hand, a pristine Canadian passport," and have the clerk sniff and say, "I'm sorry sir, but without a gas bill, we simply won't be able to help you" (when I went to Citibank with the details of my Citibank US and Citibank Canada accounts, I was told to come back with a FedExed note from my boss attesting to my address, because of the "know your customer" rules -- apparently, an original signature on letterhead confers a depth of knowledge that mere years-long in-house financial records can't convey).
Yesterday was the day I hied myself off to the Tottenham Court Road to go shopping for a mobile phone. I knew exactly what I wanted: a Sony-Ericsson P900 with the O2 75 plan, which gets me 1000 minutes and several texts for only two or three times what comparable service would cost in the US (English mobile phones are very feature-rich, come with lovely high-speed data service, and cost so much to use that it's hard to believe that there's really anyone using the advanced features -- not at £4 a megabyte!).
The man in the Carphone Warehouse gave me the hookup, set up my account, called their credit department, and told me I'd have to pay a £150 deposit to go a-roaming in Europe. This is steep, but I can hack it. I gave him the nod, and then he passed me the contract to sign and went off to get my new phone. That's when he discovered that he'd run right out of P900s. I walked the length of the Tottenham Court Road strip and couldn't locate a P900 (or, indeed any phone with more than 12 buttons) for love or money.
But eventually, my luck changed. An Orange store staffed with friendly and knowledgeable clerks had P900s in stock and they were happy to take my money. We went through the signup rigamarole again -- took hours -- and then they called it in.
No dice. All of Orange's account sign-up computers were down. I went away and came back, but the computers were still down. The clerk confided that this happened a lot to Orange's overtaxed billing computers. I thought that it was a little weird that I was about to trust this company with my telephony when they couldn't even manage the IT necessary to reliably sign up a new customer, but shrug, they had the phone and I needed it, and besides, they'd match O2's rates for me. They sent me away and asked me to return the next day.
It was a waste of time.
I came back today, and after an hour more of hemming and hawing, this is what transpired: Orange would give me a phone with e £75 deposit, but I would have to wait 90 days before I'd be allowed to roam with the phone. I pointed out that I travelled two or three weeks out of every month, and this would render this (very expensive) phone very useless to me. I asked to speak to a supervisor. No dice. I offered to leave the same deposit I'd been asked for at O2. Even fewer than no dice -- "We don't know who you are, we can't give you roaming." I offered a bigger deposit. I offered to show the (enormous, promptly paid) cellular bills from my last year with Nextel. The deed to my condo in Toronto. The letter of reference from Yale. The Wired masthead. My US credit-report.
A waste of time.
It's the rules, they said. And please stop asking to speak to the credit department: they're not "customer-facing" and they're getting annoyed. You're annoying them.
Right, I thought, I'll call the press-relations department. I spoke to them at length -- flatteringly enough, they'd heard of me. So, what's the problem, I asked. Well, we can't do this because it's too risky to extend roaming to someone with no credit. I have credit. And it's what everyone does. Not O2. But you could ring up big bills with our roaming partners and stick us with them. I could call Tokyo and leave the phone off the hook for 24h without leaving England's shores and rack up just as big a liability for you..
At the end of the day, it came to this: These are our rules. We will stick to them. We will not make exceptions to them. We will hug them to our bosom beyond any kind of rationality or reason.
I am such a goddamned telephone junkie. I'm no Joi Ito with his $3,500 GPRS bills, but I've been spending $200 or $300 on cellular telephone damned near every month since 1992. I am every mobile carrier's dream. Any rational carrier would jump at my business.
But Orange isn't rational. It doesn't have a business plan, it has a bunch of superstitions to which it rigidly hews regardless of circumstance -- the media person I was speaking to reported that she'd spoken to their head of customer care, who wouldn't budge; this intransigence goes right to the top.
So Orange has lost my business, and to hell with them. As soon as O2 gets some P900s in stock, I'll gladly give them the 150 quid and get signed up and running.
And I think I've figured out why the Orange shop is the only place in town with any phones in stock: they make life so miserable for anyone who tries to buy one that you'd have to be flat-out desperate to take one off their hands.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Usenet as Atom feed
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DATE: 05/13/2004 10:29:29 AM
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Google is beta-testing Google Groups2, a service that publishes Usenet newsgroups as Atom feeds, which ban be read in your favorite Atom/RSS reader (I use Shrook).
Link
(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: This weekend in SF, join Xeni at Wired NextFest
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DATE: 05/13/2004 10:33:09 AM
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If you're anywhere near San Francisco this weekend, join me at the inaugural edition of Wired Magazine's NextFest.
I worked with Wired Magazine to produce a series of panels, presentations, and "fireside chats" at the event -- guests include Andrew Stanton from Pixar, "Doom" creator John Carmack, Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, James Luyten of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Xcor CEO Jeff Greason, NASA Space Architect Gary Martin, robotics guru Rodney Brooks, and creators of the film "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."
The event is presented by General Electric, and takes places Friday through Sunday at Fort Mason center in SF. Tickets are affordable and available. It's a family-friendly event aimed at consumers and deep geeks alike... think Epcot Center meets 1904 World's Fair. Robots, rocket ships, and an abundance of geektastic eye candy. Going to be great. See you there!
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese poop-and-scoop reminders
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DATE: 05/13/2004 01:58:06 PM
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This is a gallery of Japanese poop-and-scoop nagware signs. They rawk.
Link
(Thanks, Tim!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Engadget does E3
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DATE: 05/13/2004 06:59:28 PM
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Pete Rojas says, "Engadget has been going overboard with our coverage of E3, and we've got a roundup with all of the news, reports from the showfloor, and tons of photos."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More photos from video game launch party, Playboy mansion
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DATE: 05/13/2004 07:06:48 PM
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Here are the rest of the images I shot at the Playboy video game launch party on Tuesday evening, at the Playboy mansion.
Link to photo gallery, Link to previous BoingBoing post.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Non-hypothetic ideas about women in gaming
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DATE: 05/14/2004 12:07:52 AM
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Alice Taylor, a truly world-class Quake player, is attending the E3 games conference in LA, and is blogging the panels she attends. They seem to be pretty weak, but this one takes the cake: it's four men discussing how to involve women in gaming. Between the sexist canards, received wisdom, and wild-assed guessing this panel appears to have been one of the lamest discussions of women in gaming in the history of the field, and that's saying something.
What's delicious about this blog entry is that it ends with Alice, an actual woman who actually plays games, running down her view on the issue. Note to E3: asking women to talk about women in gaming would get you genuine insight instead of steaming bullshit:
I have a few things to say now, speaking as a female player and game-buyer (from the shops!):
1. 25 years of gaming history has sent out the marketing message that games are for boys and men. If you change that message, women will buy more games.
2. I think that it's not a lack of games that will appeal to women that's the problem - there are LOTS - it's women even knowing they exist, and that they're fun, and worth the purchase.
3. In *my* 25 years of gaming history, I have never once seen a game explicitly marketed to me, in "female media" or ordinary media like newspapers. Online, in neutral environments (say, Yahoo) a game banner ad tells me a game is available, but the message that that advert is for boys and men is still subconscious. I'll click because clearly I'm a freak, but will a non-gaming female click if that message isn't changed? Will her eye even notice the banner?
4. I want Playstation teeshirts that aren't in XXL and man-shaped.
5. Daytime TV ad slots are cheap as chips. If you advertise a game there like, say, SSX 3, and women (or men) can see how pretty it is, and fun it could be, you may find the message changing slowly. Surely this is worth an experiment. My dear previously-non-gamer flatmate is now an SSX addict after seeing it play.
6. Making games for women at home who have kids will be tricky because they are time-poor - start with the teenage females and "Sugar" magazine or Habbo Hotel, but don't discount the mothers: they'll be bored during certain hours of the day and eager for entertainment. Oh and can we all stop calling them 'they' with that curious aftertaste?
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cyborg celebrities photoshopping
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DATE: 05/14/2004 12:10:39 AM
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More science-fictional photoshopping on Worth1000's daily contest: "Cyborg Celebs." Nice robot Tyra Banks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Greenpeace charged with "sailor mongering"
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DATE: 05/14/2004 12:13:41 AM
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The Bush administration continues to cover itself with glory: it has charged some Greenpeace activists who hung a banner on a ship with an obscure crime called "Sailor mongering," and has launched the first nautical protest prosecution in the US since the Boston Tea Party.
Sailor mongering was rife in the 19th century when brothels sent prostitutes laden with booze onto ships as they made their way to harbor. The idea was to get the sailors so drunk they could be whisked to shore and held in bondage, and a law was passed against it in 1872. It has only been used in a court of law twice, the last time in 1890.
Greenpeace says the decision by the U.S. Attorney's Office to prosecute the organization rather than just the activists who boarded the APL Jade freighter is a sea change in policy, and a conviction would throttle free speech everywhere...
Not once since the Boston Tea Party have U.S. authorities criminally prosecuted a group for political expression.
Link
(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best scam-artist Internet revenge EVAR
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DATE: 05/14/2004 12:32:53 AM
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This is a lovely tale of revenge on a scam-artist: a Powerbook seller on eBay realized that he was being ripped off by an overseas buyer, who had even set up a fake escrow service to handle his phony payment. Instead of blowing it off, the seller sent the crook on a wild goose chase that culminated with him taking delivery of a "P-P-P-Powerbook" made out of keyboard bits glued to an old binder, after paying £350 in customs fees and friends of the seller who'd staked out his mail-drop photographed the whole thing for posterity.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Phone display magnifier
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DATE: 05/14/2004 12:35:39 AM
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The Phone Monocle is a snap-on magnifying lens for your cellphone -- handy for super-sizing the eye-strain-o-rama typefaces used on the little LCDs.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open source games from 1978
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DATE: 05/14/2004 12:39:45 AM
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The entire contents of Basic Computer Games, published in 1978, have been posted online as a series of scans. Danny O'Brien notes "I carried this around like a grimoire when I was eight." I especially like that this is scanned-in and not OCRed, which means that if you want to run any of these programs, you still have to re-key them!
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi antennae made from cheap Chinese cookware
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DATE: 05/14/2004 12:47:43 AM
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These Kiwi WiFi hackers are building cheap, incredibly powerful WiFi antennae out of Chinese cookware (like this $2 parabolic "dumpling scoop") and USB WiFi dongles. They've got extensive build and testing notes: I wonder where I can get a dumpling scoop of my own?
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(Thanks, Stan. Swan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: McDonald's adult Happy Meal
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DATE: 05/14/2004 01:20:22 AM
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McDonald's -- whose new CEO replaced the old one when he died of a heart attack, and who is, himself, going in for colorectal cancer surgery -- has introduced an adult Happy Meal with "water, salad and a booklet of exercise tips."
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flat-pack infographic utopia
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DATE: 05/14/2004 01:30:48 AM
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Fark's photoshopping contest: "Ikea-like instructions for saving the world."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Maximize the number of living cells on Earth
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DATE: 05/14/2004 03:52:43 AM
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The crazy Monochrom techno-artsies in Vienna are starting a new org to promote maximum terrestrial occupancy:
MOBUTOBE refers to the calculations of Isaac Asimov. The biologist and author published in 1971 that there are 20 trillion (20 x 10^12) tons of live cells on earth. 10 percent of these (that is two trillion tons) are animal cells. This number has to be regarded as the maximum level, for vegetable life cannot increase in quantitiy without an increase of sunlight or a refinement of its capability to process sunlight...
The building complex shall be constructed like this: The roof is reserved fo plant cultivation. Edible algae as well as higher plants that are manipulated so that they are esculent as a whole are cultivated there. Regular supply is easily provided.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wizards of OS copyright conference in Berlin, June 13
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DATE: 05/14/2004 03:56:20 AM
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The Wizards of OS conference coming on June 13 in Berlin will feature some very good speakers on copyright and copywrong, including my co-worker Wendy Seltzer.
Copyright law has become one of the most important and controversial drivers of the Information Society. The Internet has made every user a publisher, but copyright rules governing their activities are often determined by opaque international bodies that decide rules with little public input.
Join us in Berlin to debate where copyright should be going to ensure that authors, musicians, film-makers and the public will all benefit. Engage wih leading international thinkers from across Europe and the United States. Meet colleagues who are working to make sure all members of society benefit from copyright.
Attendance is free.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR -- Death, Sex, and E3
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DATE: 05/14/2004 06:38:06 AM
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Today on the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I report back from the E3 gaming convention taking place in Los Angeles. Porn-themed video games, first-person combat shooters with real-life resonance, and a live tactical urban assault demonstration by the US Army -- complete with copters, guns, and terrified pedestrians -- to promote the latest edition of its online computer game/recruiting tool, "America's Army: OVERMATCH."
And on Wired News, these photos I shot at the convention this week, including the one at left of a young woman overwhelmed by blinking, bleeping things inside Microsoft's Xbox pavilion.
Link to Day to Day home, Link to archived audio for this segment.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fast Fiction Friday on Warren Ellis's blog
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DATE: 05/14/2004 06:53:01 AM
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Warren Ellis is doing a stunt on his blog today called "Fast Fiction Friday" -- he asked a bunch of people (including me) to bang out a very short story on Wednesday, and today, he's publishing them. Here's a bit of mine:
The other super-heroes put Spidey up to it, going to Geneva to wheedle the WIPO delegates about their trademark rights. "Send Batman," he'd begged. "Bruce Wayne is a fucking billionaire. He can talk to these people." But Supe had sadly shook his head and said, "You know that's the wrong answer, Peter. Bruce is a sociopath. We need a diplomat."
The Swiss thought his official underoos were ridiculous. In a diplomatic town like Geneva, no one would bat an eye at a djelleba, or full-dress purdah, or a kilt, but a superhero in fancy underwear drew stares all the way from the Gare Central to his stunningly overpriced and for all that gamey and run-down hotel. He passed one of the youth gangs on the way, muttering into their phones and thumbing at their keyboards, coordinating their crimefighting activities. They had Wonder Womanoid costumes, and he was glad that the Amazon Princess wasn't present to witness this blatant trademark infringement. She'd go bonkers, and it would be the Golden Lasso Massacre of Geneva.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA's funny bookkeeping turns gains into losses
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DATE: 05/14/2004 07:17:35 AM
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This very good, short article shows the way that the RIAA cooks its books to create losses due to file-sharing when there's no indication that file-sharing is costing them money. Peter sez, "I'm an economist researching the issue too, and I've found the figures frankly unbelievable for a long while. Now I know why."
There is only one logical integration of all these statistics with the recent Soundscan data: even though actual point-of-purchase sales are up by about 9% in the US - and the industry sold over 13,000,000 more units in 2004 (1st quarter) than in 2003 (1st quarter) - the Industry is still claiming a loss of 7% because RIAA members shipped 7% fewer records than in 2003.
Forget the confusing percentages, here's an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as "a loss."
I'll go a step further. This fact, that Sherman seems to confirm, should logically mean a smaller percentage of returns. But, shouldn't fewer returns mean higher profit margins and faster turnaround; and shouldn't that be good for both the retail and wholesale side of the industry? "Sure," admits Sherman today, "but I have no idea what US shipments looked like in the first quarter." Then how can he claim world-wide "losses" in his March speech to Financial Times New Media?
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(Thanks, Peter!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Watch the skies!
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DATE: 05/14/2004 08:28:36 AM
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Earlier this week, a video of eleven UFOs caught on tape by Mexican Air Force pilots was released by the country's Defense Department.
According to the Associated Press report, "the lights were filmed on March 5 by pilots using infrared equipment. They appeared to be flying at an altitude of about 3,500 meters (11,480 feet), and allegedly surrounded the Air Force jet as it conducted routine anti-drug trafficking vigilance in Campeche. Only three of the objects showed up on the plane's radar."
Yesterday, a follow-up AP report quoted a nuclear scientist from the National Autonomous University who believes "the bright blurs could have been caused by electrical flashes emitted spontaneously by the atmosphere." Meanwhile, the Mexican Defense Secretary says the jury is still out on what appears on the tape.
I want to believe. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Terry Zwigoff on old-time music
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DATE: 05/14/2004 08:48:50 AM
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I stumbled on this amazing interview from 1995 with Terry Zwigoff, the director of Crumb and Ghost World. Zwigoff is a member of Robert Crumb's band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and an obsessive collector of 78 RPM records released before 1933. The focus of this interview is Zwigoff's passion for old-time tunes.
"(Pre-1933) music is more backwoods and I think of it as representing real isolated pockets of eccentricity... I see radio, or mass communications in general, as ruining that isolation, which to me is what’s most interesting about it. People started imitating. People could hear Bing Crosby on the radio, so they’d all try to sound like him instead of having enough faith in their own weirdness to keep it going."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: England's love affair with the utility bill
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DATE: 05/14/2004 09:56:51 AM
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Simon, a Swede living in London, was inspired by my tale of woe at Orange Mobile's idiocy yesterday, and has posted a damned funny essay about the English National Love Affair With the Gas Bill.
"I consume gas, therefore I am" kind of sums up the British notion of identity. The world is a vague and fleeting place, changing from day to day like a flowing river. The vast networks of gas pipes, electrical wires and water pipes, however, are firmly in place somewhere underground. They are the arteries of our modern society, weaving their way through the soil from which we harvest our food, and in which we bury our dead. The utility bill is thus our connection to the very fabric of society - our proto-identity as social beings.
Hence, it should come as no surprise that new connections in this network, or connections to completely different networks, can not be made by mere "individuals". How preposterous would it not be if a "person", i.e. the moisty fungus that grows around an utility bill, for instance tried to open a bank account? Where would that account go? Where would it be? Flowing freely in the imaginary world of light and air, fluttering unconnected to the networks of society, that's where.
LinK
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Injectable DNA medibots
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DATE: 05/14/2004 10:45:22 AM
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It's not quite Fantastic Voyage, but researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have demonstrated an injectable DNA-based biocomputer that can diagnose and treat certain kinds of cancer. If the computer detects the genetic signature of cancer, it releases a bit of DNA "known to interfere with the cancer cell’s activities, causing it to self-destruct," according to a press release issued by the Institute.
"One day in the future, they hope to create a 'doctor in a cell,' which will be able to operate inside a living body, spot disease and apply the necessary treatment before external symptoms even appear."
Previously, the researchers earned a spot in the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records by constructing the world's smallest biological computing device. One microliter of salt solution can hold 3 trillion of the devices, capable of performing 66 billion operations per second. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Beetle Ghraib
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DATE: 05/14/2004 11:35:18 AM
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In the tradition of Dysfunctional Family Circus, here are three installments of Beetle Ghraib, which reassigns Beetle and company from Camp Swampy to Abu Ghraib for some good old fashioned Geneva Convention violating fun. I want more! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: T-shirt origami
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DATE: 05/14/2004 11:43:57 AM
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Video clip lets you marvel at this perfect way to fold a T-Shirt. It looks so good I almost think they videotaped someone unfolding a shirt and played it backwards. Link (Thanks, Ric!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: FCC Chairman at Circuit City -- I don't believe it
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DATE: 05/14/2004 11:58:36 AM
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A USA Today article reports that FCC Chairman Michael Powell recently went to Circuit City to switch his phone number to a new carrier:
FCC Chairman Michael Powell said he switched carriers for his work wireless phone as well as for his wife and son at a Circuit City outlet and the moves were done in an hour.
"I was shocked at how well it worked," Powell said. He declined to identify the carriers but said his name was not on the accounts so he did not receive favorable treatment.
What kind of stunt is this? Doesn't Powell have an army of factotums to do this kind of thing for him? And how was he able to change a phone account that didn't have his name on it? Furthermore, didn't the Circuit City people ask to see an ID to see if his name matched the name on the phone account? How did he pay for the account -- using a credit card with a fake name on it? Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Doctored soldier picture making the email rounds
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DATE: 05/14/2004 04:11:40 PM
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This photo was emailed to me along with a ton of forwarding headers and a bunch of people in the CC: field. (click on the photo to see a full-sized version). Here's the text that came with it:
"Nothing like the US soldier's sense of humor...and well aimed!
Hooray for our troops.
READ THE BLACK PATCH UNDER THE US FLAG;
This SHOULD be on the front cover of Time, Newsweek, etc.
But it won't.
Let's you and I 'put it there' by forwarding this all around the world (so
to speak)!
(The flags are France, Germany, and Russia)-- in case you don't know.."
It's easy to tell that the black patch and the three flags below it have been added after the photo was taken. They are almost hovering off the fabric of the uniform. But the big giveaway is the US flag. Isn't it facing the wrong way? The stars are usually on the left. This is a mirror image. I'm guessing this picture was horizontally flipped before someone added the black patch and the other country's flags. I should have checked snopes before posting this. The photo is fake. I was wrong about the flag, though. The patch really looks like that. According to snopes, it's to give the appearing that the flag is flying in a breeze blowing towards the front of the soldier. (Thanks Cody!)
David Calkins emailed me another version of the photo, with these badges.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: All Hugo-nominated short fiction now online
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DATE: 05/14/2004 05:02:58 PM
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I noted earlier that all of this year's Hugo-nominated short fiction is online, the sole exception being Neil Gaiman's Study in Emerald -- well, now it's online too!
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyright reform conference in Vienna this June
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DATE: 05/14/2004 05:05:09 PM
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Free Bitflows is another upcoming free software/copyright reform conference (along the lines of the Berlin conference I blogged this morning) that's taking place in Vienna this June.
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(Thanks, Janko!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1978 Star Wars playset HOWTO
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DATE: 05/14/2004 05:09:10 PM
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This is a HOWTO from a 1978 issue of Women's Day magazine, describing how to build an elaborate Star Wars playset (with moving conveyor belt!) out of laminate, cardboard, plywood and the like.
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(Thanks, Thom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Half-Life facial expressions used in autistic life-skills classes
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DATE: 05/14/2004 05:24:04 PM
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Here's a novel use for a First-Person Shooter:
An autism institute apparently is interested in using Half-Life 2's facial animation capabilities to help teach autistic children how to recognize expressions, according to PC Gamer magazine.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK cinema copyright warnings: a call to action
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DATE: 05/15/2004 01:06:05 AM
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I went and saw Troy, Brad Pitt's new men-in-skirts movie last night, at the big Odeon in Leicester Square, paying £10.50 for the privilege. Not that I begrudge it: apparently, acquiring the rights to the Iliad was very expensive, and they have to charge a small fortune to viewers if they hope to recoup.
I don't even begrudge them the 30 minutes' worth of commercials they subjected their captive audience to. Well, I did. But I didn't let it get to me.
What did get to me was this warning, shown before nearly every film in the UK:
"You are not permitted to use any camera or recording equipment in this cinema. This will be treated as an attempt to breach copyright. Any person doing so can be ejected and such articles may be confiscated by the police. We ask the audience to be vigilant against any such activity and report any matters arousing suspicion to cinema staff. Thank you."
Every time I see this, my blood boils. I just paid a fortune to see this movie, I've been subjected to 500 percent concession stand markup and half an hour of commercials and now you're going to give me a little lecture about how badly I'll get beaten up if I turn out to be a pirate, and ask me to snitch on my fellow moviegoers?
It's adding insult to injury, if you ask me. It's unforgivably rude.
So here's what I've started doing: whenever this warning is screened, I take a very obvious flash photo of it. I've done it twice now, and both times, I got a round of applause. You can do it too. If we all do it, if we all laugh and boo when this warning comes on, maybe the movie companies will get the picture.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Booth boyz of E3
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DATE: 05/15/2004 01:09:43 AM
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All over the net, we're getting treated to galleries of the booth-babes at E3, the big gaming conference in LA. Alice Taylor, the Quake player who posted the devastating report on a panel of four men saying unbelievably stupid things about why women don't play games, decided to prove her point by going around E3, shooting the Booth Boyz on offer. It's a pretty sad lot.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hello Kitty accessories for PS2
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DATE: 05/15/2004 01:12:24 AM
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For sale: Hello Kitty memory cards for the PlayStation 2.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TV show mashup photoshopping contest
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DATE: 05/15/2004 01:14:05 AM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: mash up two or more TV shows.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Read this and understand the P2P wars
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DATE: 05/15/2004 02:40:11 AM
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Timothy Wu is a law prof at the University of Virginia, and a very clever copyright reformer to boot. When Timothy and I last met, he was called Timmy, and we were both students at ALP, the hippie alternative school in Toronto that we both attended until grade eight. One of the weirdest coincidences in my life to date is that two alumni of a tiny school in Toronto would both end up moving to the US to pursue something as obscure as copyright reform.
Back to Tim(my)! His latest paper, "Copyright's Communications Policy," has me absolutely floored. Tim traces the history of copyright law, the way that we've spent a century undergoing a once-a-decade copyfight, in which representatives of inventors faced down representatives of artists and duked it out in the courts and Congress.
The parallels to today's fights are downright spooky. For example, the first music pirates (the recording industry, who ripped off sheet music) got this proper dressing-down from John Phillip Sousa, who told Congress:
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
I mean, I though Jack Valenti's Boston Strangler testimony was over the top, but clearly, Jack took his cues from Sousa et al.
Thirty-odd years later, the another group of pirates -- radio broadcasters, who refused to pay royalties for the music they file-shared over the airwaves -- violated Godwin's Law decades before it was formulated, comparing the entrenched rights societies that served the recording industry (the pirates of their boyhoods) to Adolf Hitler.
Tim runs down the history of cable versus broadcasters, and other copyfights down through the ages. He does so clearly and engagingly, in ways that non-lawyers and non-historians can readily grasp. And when it's done, the most amazing thing is the certainty that copryight-disrupting technologies every bit as wooly as file-sharing have been invented over and over again, and that the P2P fight is not a new one -- that piracy is the norm, not the exception.
If you want to understand the P2P fight, read this -- it is the most concise, thorough and engaging text on the subject to date.
560k PDF Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sinner, you better get ready
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DATE: 05/15/2004 09:44:57 AM
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Rolling Stone magazine called the Goodbye, Babylon box set, "the greatest anthology of antique Southern sacred song and oratory ever assembled. Packaged like a pioneer-family heirloom -- in a cedar case with a nineteenth-century etching of the Tower of Babel on the lid -- Goodbye, Babylon is six CDs of blues hymns, hillbilly hosannas, choral thunder and hellfire sermons from the 78-rpm era." Boing Boing reader Marc Garrett points us to a short interview he conducted with Lance Ledbetter, compiler of this holy treasure. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mayor dispatches cops to bust blogger-critic
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DATE: 05/15/2004 11:26:33 PM
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Loic sez,
Christophe does not like the way the city mayor manages the city, spends the public money and says it on his blog, every day. He has been very successful doing that, with hundreds of inhabitants of Puteaux reading and commenting his blog everyday and many national newspapers that talked about his blog.
Christophe criticizes the city management so much that they have tried to stop him for months, the city mayor has even sent him threats over the phone that he recorded and blogged, of course.
Today, he has been stopped in the street by the Police Municipale (the local French Police) who tried to arrest him for his blogging. Fortunately for Christophe, the National Police arrived immediately as they found what was happening weird, and let him go.
Link
(Thanks, Loic!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tornado sucks up entire house
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DATE: 05/16/2004 12:52:32 AM
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This is a stormchaser video that shows a Kansas tornado sucking up an entire house, smashing it to flinders as it goes.
26.6MB MPG Link
(Thanks, Retank!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PATRIOT in bite-sized chunks
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DATE: 05/16/2004 02:45:53 AM
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I'm giving a talk in Barcelona on Wednesday about the USA PATRIOT Act, and so I've been boning up on EFF's analysis of this sweeping, unconstitutional law. Of particular help has been the clause-by-clause analyses that our staff attorney Kevin Bankston's been writing for EFFector, EFF's weekly newsletter. If you ever wondered what the big deal was about PATRIOT, Kevin's blurbs will explain it all -- in bite-sized, layperson-friendly chunks.
Apologists justified the broad, civil-liberties corroding powers granted to the government under the USA PATRIOT Act by arguing that they would be used to put terrorists behind bars. Yet several provisions can be used against Americans in a wide range of investigations that have nothing to do with terrorism. Others are too vague, jeopardizing legitimate activities protected under the First Amendment. Worse, the Department of Justice has worked to expand and/or make permanent a number of these provisions -- despite the fact that they were sold to the public as "temporary" measures and are scheduled to expire, or "sunset," in December of 2005.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Klingon language workshop at Cannes
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DATE: 05/16/2004 02:49:32 AM
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"Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water," is a documentary on Klingon-speakers debuting in Cannes. In conjunction with the release, the Klingon Language Institute is holding a workshop/confernece at Cannes for interested parties.
KLI members featured in the film include Dr d'Armond Speers, a linguist who spoke only in Klingon to his son until age three and a half, and Rich Yampbell, composer of Klingon national anthem taHaj wo.
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Social engineering a shop out of $4K worth of computers
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DATE: 05/16/2004 02:58:12 AM
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Excellent first-person account of a security consultant who entered a store (at management's request) and conned the staff into helping him boost nearly $4,000 worth of computers and walk out the front door with it all.
I was trying to find some paperwork that I could carry into the warehouse to use as 'official company documents'. I hit the jackpot when I opened the breakroom door when I noticed that the store had a seperate room for smokers as well, so I decided that I had worked hard enough so far and I deserved a break. After a refreshing dose of a nicotine inhaler I was back on the job. A quick survey of the non-smoking break room turned up a printout of employees who were scheduled to work that day.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Squiggy is now a Mariners scout
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DATE: 05/16/2004 03:04:39 AM
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David Lander, who played Squiggy on Laverne and Shirley, is now a talent-scout for the Seattle Mariners.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eye-contact-sensing goggles
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DATE: 05/16/2004 12:22:32 PM
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Connor Dickie, a student at Queen's University's Human Media Lab, has developed these video-shooting glasses with an eye-contact sensor, and a companion app called eyeBlog that allows the wearer to videoblog her/his PoV.
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(Thanks, Connor!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Advice to newlyweds
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DATE: 05/16/2004 10:43:16 PM
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John Scalzi, a very talented humour writer and novelist (I like to think of him as the "edgy Dave Barry"), has written a bunch of notes for the newly married gays and lesbians of Massachusetts:
It's your best man's (or the equivalent's) job to remind people that at a wedding reception, as at the Academy Awards, speeches are best very short. You didn't spend an obscene amount on the catering just to have it grow cold as Uncle Jim blathers on.
Remind the DJ or band that they work for you, and they'll damn well play anything you want. For some reason I think this may be less of a problem at gay weddings. Thank God.
There will be drama of some sort at the reception. If the wedding party lets any of it reach the newlyweds, they haven't done their job.
Don't fill up on bread. You'll have to dance later.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Celebrity faces as used-gum targets
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DATE: 05/17/2004 03:57:34 AM
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Gum-posters featuring celebrity faces are appearing in London, and locals are encouraged to dispose of their wads by sticking them up, rather than dropping them underfoot.
Londoners are being urged to stick their chewing gum on celebrity posters rather than dropping it on the streets.
Ealing Council hopes posters featuring Shane Richie, Jordan and Peter Andre among others will prove a more tempting target in Acton, west London.
Posters have removable sheets which will be changed six days a week to stop the gum building up...
It is estimated that UK local authorities spend £150m a year tackling the problem.
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Powell forces press aide to let him answer Meet the Press question
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DATE: 05/17/2004 04:04:15 AM
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Colin Powell appeared on Meet the Press this weekend, and his appearance was marred by his press secretary moving the camera and attempting to end the interview early when Russert, the interviewer, started to ask a hardball question about the fictional Nigerien yellow-cake uranium that Powell used as an excuse to go to war in Iraq.
Most noteworthy about this event was that Powell, rebuked the press-secretary on air, demanded that the camera be trained on him again, and then answered the question, describing the intelligence he'd received as "deliberately misleading."
Lisa Rein's got the video up -- highly recommended.
EMILY MILLER, STATE DEPARTMENT PRESS AIDE: You're off.
SECRETARY POWELL: I am not off.
EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: No. They can't use it, they're editing it.
SECRETARY POWELL: He's still asking the questions.
EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: He was not ...
SECRETARY POWELL: Tim, I am sorry I lost you.
MR. RUSSERT: I am right here Mr. Secretary. I would hope they would put you back on camera. I don't know who did that.
EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: He was going to go for another five minutes.
SECRETARY POWELL: We've really scre...
MR. RUSSERT: I think that was one of your staff Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's appropriate.
SECRETARY POWELL: Emily, get out of the way. Bring the camera back please. (Camera returns to the interview subject) I think we're back on Tim, go ahead with your last question.
Link
Mirrors here
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Absolutely Pre-Fabulous
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DATE: 05/17/2004 08:39:06 AM
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My friend Guy is considering the purchase of a stylish prefab home. He pointed me to FabPreFab, a mind-blowing clearinghouse of prefab dwelling design.
"Predominant mass-market housing programs such as project homes or tract housing largely fail to meet the desires of people who appreciate a modernist design aesthetic. Custom-designed modernist architecture is beyond the financial reach of many people and so prefab is viewed as a design and production ideology that has the potential to deliver affordable modernism."
Some of these abodes can be ordered online and delivered on several trucks. Others are airlifted onto rooftops. Don't miss the transformed shipping containers either!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Decapitation video discrepancies
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DATE: 05/17/2004 09:00:02 AM
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I don't know what to make of this. It's a very well-researched, non-hysterical collection of 50 seeming contradictions in the Berg decapitation video. The author states that a number of these will likely be explained away, but taken as a whole, this very convincingly implies that Berg was not killed by the terrorists that the CIA fingered, and may, in fact, have been killed by westerners.
34) "Terrorists" were fat
Several of the men in the film were fat by Iraqi standards. If they were Feyadeen or Mujahadeen, they probably have been living underground since the first days of the occupation. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been shown on news stories as they have marched and demonstrated. One would be hard pressed to point out a single fat man among these thousands.
35) White hands of "terrorists"
Some of the "Arab terrorists" have pasty-white hands and (other exposed) skin. One would be hard pressed to find Arab men with pasty-white hands. (See: Nick Berg Conspiracy Theories Abound.)
36) Wrong accent
Al-Zarqawi is/was Jordinian. Arab linguists have said the man posing as Al-Zarqawi did not speak with a Jordanian dialect. Others have suggested the man reading the written statement may not have been a native speaker of Arabic....
39) Al-Zarqawi's missing leg
Al-Zarqawi was missing one leg. Al-Zarqawi allegedly wears a prosthetic device, according to previous CIA reports. (See: IHT Protrait of Al-Zarqawi.) There is no evidence that the killer wore a prosthetic device. Further, Al-Zarqawi had been outfitted with an artificial leg that did not fit or function properly. He was unable to walk or stand normally. No man in the group showed evidence of such infirmity.
40) Missing tattoos?
Large green tattooed "dots" are known to be on the back of Abu Musab Zarqawi's left hand. These tattoos cannot be seen in the close up video of the execution, though the back of his hand is fairly visible. (See: IHT Protrait of Al-Zarqawi.)
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(via Nelson)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sleeping through bad smells
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DATE: 05/17/2004 09:05:38 AM
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Humans have an incredibly acute sense of smell, but a new study shows that our perception of odors is dramatically reduced when we're snoozing. Researchers at Brown University published a paper in the journal Sleep showing that individuals slept right through the introduction of intense scents indicative of fires. A moderately loud sound woke people right away though.
“As the saying goes,” said the paper’s co-author Mary A. Carskadon, “we ‘wake up and smell the coffee,’ not the other way around.”
Still, I wonder if this is because we're trained from a young age to respond to buzzing, radio-blaring alarms. It would be fun to have an alarm clock that at a pre-set hour spewed a refreshing blast of peppermint! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Design evolution of the vice-card
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DATE: 05/17/2004 09:07:27 AM
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Vice-cards are the glossy cards advertising prostitutes' services that are placed in phone booths all over London. The tradition goes back decades, and a Graphic Communications conference recently heard this paper on the design evolution of the vice-card.
As more girls advertised their services the cards became larger - A7 or less frequently one third of A5 - and more distinctive. Girls developed their own recognisable style. Specialised services were offered and a visual and written vocabulary began to evolve to reflect each specialism. Cards offering schoolgirl services or Le Vice Anglais had a Victorian feel and accordingly used nineteenth-century typefaces; domination cards used stern words set in Gothic letters; cards proffering massage needed a luxurious and whimsical script.
These mid-period cards were predominantly typographic and were supported by roughly drawn, but often delightful, line illustrations. They managed to maintain both a sense of mystery and a sense of humour. Eventually the ISO standards made themselves felt even in the vice industry, and by January 1994 nearly all the cards had been enlarged to A6 postcard size. Four-colour started to be seen on the cards during the summer of 1997, and by the summer of 1998, four-colour, and ‘proper' typesetting was the norm.
Today's cards depend upon full-page, sometimes explicit, glossy, photographic images to put across their sales pitch. The images are downloaded from the Internet and are never of the person offering the services, although they are often advertised as ‘genuine'! The charm and allure apparent in the early cards has gone from the modern cards, individuality and originality has been lost...
The cards are placed in the boxes on behalf of the girls by people known as ‘carders' who are frequently students or unemployed. It is a highly lucrative trade and the carders can earn an average of £30 for 100 or £200 per day for between 600 and 700 cards placed. The girls pay for the carders out of their own wages, and with thirteen million of them placed annually, the wages of sin are in the region of £4 million.
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(via Foe Romeo)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hourly shots of coffee beat a cup
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DATE: 05/17/2004 10:30:07 AM
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Tossing back two shots of coffee each hour may provide more sustainable stimulation than gulping down a large cup in the morning, scientists from Rush University Medical Center report in the journal Sleep. In the study, sixteen men stayed in windowless rooms for nearly a month while the researchers screwed with their circadian rhythms. From a Scientific American article about the findings:
"In the new study, the scientists... tested the effects of administering an hourly, low dose of caffeine equivalent to about two ounces of coffee to one group, while the second group received a placebo. The caffeinated men performed better on cognitive tests than the control individuals did, and dozed off less often. And though they received the same cumulative dose as subjects in previous, single-dose studies, taking many small doses minimized some of the negative side effects that caffeine can have, such as tremors." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WIRED NextFest -- EFF's Jason Schultz photoblog coverage
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DATE: 05/17/2004 11:49:30 AM
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Jason Schultz of the EFF attended NextFest this weekend, and photoblogged these observations.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Snack Zen
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DATE: 05/17/2004 11:56:13 AM
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ice cream | bento |
biscuit of the week | biscuithenge | mango biscuits | donuts | marshmallows |
bad candy |
name that candy bar |
rude food |
pork faggots |
cooking with crisps |
cheese doodles | and the classic: twinkies project
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lenny, Squiggy of "Laverne and Shirley" face off as penguins in Nickelodeon cartoon "Oswald"
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DATE: 05/17/2004 12:04:38 PM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine (who you may have spotted on CNN this weekend talking about why it would be A Bad Thing for the federal government to have the power to jam your cellphone in the name of counter-terrorism) says:
David Landers plays the voice of Henry the penguin on the kid show "Oswald" (Oswald the octopus is voiced by Fred Savage) playing on Nickelodeon. I sometimes watch it with my 3 year-old. One episode had Henry's cousin come in from out of town. His cousin was voiced by Michael McKean (who played Lenny.) I can't tell you how funny it was to hear Lenny and Squiggy pestering eachother in a children's show - while appearing as penguins!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired NextFest: decompression
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DATE: 05/17/2004 12:18:25 PM
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So, I spent a fair amount of my waking hours in recent months programming the Main Stage portion of NextFest, the Wired Magazine event sponsored by GE that took place at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center this weekend. I took lots of snapshots, and I'm eager to share them -- along with some of what I observed at the event. But right now, I'm still peeling my brain off the floor. I'm exhausted. More soon, but for now this quick snapshot that kind of sums it all up for me. Seeing so many families and children experiencing technology first-hand with this look of sheer amazement and delight on their faces made all the work feel worthwhile.
Link to some news clips on NextFest.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Retired Congresscritter on home-taping
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DATE: 05/17/2004 02:26:58 PM
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Retired Congressman Al Smith testified on the DMCRA, Rep Boucher's bill to reform copyright. Smith's been home-taping for 54 years, and he knows what's what:
When I buy a CD or a DVD, that content should be wholly mine to do with as I please as long as I am in no way selling its contents or profiting from it. ... Present law is predicated on the assumption that consumers will rip-off copyright holders. The vast majority are innocent of that assumption, but all are treated as guilty.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Build your own X-Prize Rocket!
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DATE: 05/17/2004 04:44:54 PM
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BoingBoing reader Stefan Jones says,
Model rocket supplier Estes Industries got hammered by the failure of a line of licensed "The Phantom Menace" models. They're starting to appeal to those of us who geek out on real-life rockets again, with eight models based on entries in the X-Prize suborbital rocket competition. The variety of approaches is astonishing. The second page has a mystery model that's obviously Rutan's Spaceship One. I guess some people charge more for licensing than others . . . And -- whoo! -- they're selling a video camera rocket to replace the 8mm Cineroc movie camera that was last offered thirty years ago.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to Promote a Game With Flare
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DATE: 05/17/2004 05:55:45 PM
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I filed this story/photos for Wired News about an unusual publicity stunt staged by the US Army at last week's E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles.
On a sweltering afternoon, the line between video games and reality was temporarily erased at the Los Angeles Convention Center. For about 45 minutes, one downtown street was transformed into a scene from a military first-person shooter game -- complete with helicopters, machine guns and face-painted soldiers leaping off tall buildings, while the jaws of shocked onlookers dropped.
To promote America's Army: Overmatch, a free game created by the Army as a recruitment tool, a group of Army Special Forces personnel staged an urban tactical assault exercise outside the L.A. convention center where the E3 gaming expo was taking place. It may have been a staged promotional event, but judging from the panicked expressions on pedestrian faces, some may have thought it was the real thing.
In Hollywood terms, the effect was Black Hawk Down, directed by Fellini. Unsuspecting local workers clutched lunches and scurried off for cover. Bullhorns blared the voice of an America's Army spokesman who delivered a play-by-play, encouraging attendees to download the free online game for more hot combat excitement. A charging soldier affixed a mobile camera to his helmet to record home videos of the stunt for his family. One trade show attendee who appeared to be of Arab descent walked toward the convention center doors, halted at the spectacle, and said to no one in particular, "It's all brainwashing."
Link to story, and links to more E3 snapshots from Xeni: one, two
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I, T-shirt: wearable movie trailers at NextFest
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DATE: 05/17/2004 07:50:40 PM
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In The Hollywood Reporter today, an item about t-shirts that display movie trailers -- as seen at both E3 and NextFest last week.
Coming soon to a T-shirt near you: trailers for "I, Robot," starring Will Smith. In the never-ending search to capture the attention of consumers bombarded by commercials, billboards and a massive array of other advertisements, 20th Century Fox debuted an innovative new guerilla marketing tactic at E3 last week -- T-shirts embedded with video screens that played "I, Robot"
trailers.
The two women who wore the video T-shirts as they walked around E3 drew crowds and TV news crews on hand to cover the gaming conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. 20th Century Fox is the first studio -- or business of any kind -- to use the video T-shirt marketing tactic developed by San Francisco-based Brand Marketers.
Link
(Thanks, Jeff; photo by Kurt Rogers of the SF Chronicle, Link to SF Chron story)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: How's the air up there?
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DATE: 05/18/2004 08:35:16 AM
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According to this Reuters report, the travel industry is beginning to ease the trials of traveling when you're tall. For instance, the Hotel Monaco Group offers "tall guestrooms" with higher ceilings, longer beds, and raised showerheads. The "NBA Suites" in the Palms Casino in Las Vegas were also designed with verticality in mind. At 6'2", I don't bang my head on doorframes, but I am cramped as hell in most airlines' coach cabins. Of course, I'm certainly not the only one, or the tallest one for that matter. Apparently, there are now 8.8 million men over 6'2" and 5.5 million women over 5'9" in the US. Now, those rising numbers have their own magazine: TALL, "a lifestyle magazine for a heightened culture." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lift off!
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DATE: 05/18/2004 09:03:20 AM
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Congratulations to the Civilian Space eXploratiion Team, whose amateur rocket was the first of its kind to make it into space! The seven meter tall rocket, GoFast, reached an altitude of 100 kilometers yesterday, the "official edge of space," according to New Scientist magazine. GoFast transmitted its position and altitude data from high above the Nevada desert back to Earth via ham radio.
"The Civilian Space eXploration Team (CSXT) is an all-civilian team comprised of about 30 amateur rocketeers from all walks of life -- from a retired Hollywood stunt man, to teachers, scientists, inventors, television engineers, ham radio enthusiasts, students, and -- yes -- even honest-to-goodness rocket scientists. Their common bonds: a love of rocketry and an unyielding desire to succeed even against the toughest odds and the greatest skeptics."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New TiVo jargon
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:09:33 AM
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Boingboing pal sean bonner points us to some emerging words to describe PVR-related activities.
# Passkilling is when someone cancels a Tivo request to change channels and record a Season Pass show.
# A Passkiller is someone who cancels an in-progress Season Pass recording or cancels a channel change request.
link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dunny toy-art show in NYC gallery
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:10:53 AM
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"Dunny" is a 20-inch tall vinyl action figure designed to be customized by diverse artists working in different mediums. A show of "Dunny"-derivative art opens this week in NYC.
Among the artists and designers who will personalize a Dunny for the exhibition are world-famous graffiti artists Doze Green,Tilt and Fafi, and Seen; renowned toy designers Jason Siu and Pete Fowler; illustrators including Disney's "Teacher's Pet" creator Gary Baseman; graphic artists including The Designers Republic; fashion designers Diane von Furstenberg,and Heatherette, and a number of fine artists, including Alexis Rockman and Jessica Stockholder. Design studio participants include artists from PDI/Dreamworks Animation Studios and Steuben Crystal. And many more."
Link (Thanks, CC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Databases a cure for porn biz HIV crisis?
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:11:00 AM
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Dan Gillmor blogs today:
You've probably read about the HIV scare in the porn business. The San Francisco Chronicle suggests that the adult-entertainment industry look to lessons learned in San Francisco during the 1980s. And an industry-news site (note: this site may not be work-safe) takes an even sterner approach, urging a massive database tracking just about everything an individual actor may have done.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NextFest snapshot gallery
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:11:17 AM
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Here are some snapshots I took at Wired Magazine's NextFest this weekend. At left, a young man named Cameron Clapp who became a triple amputee at age 15 in a train accident. He now uses "smart" prosthetic limbs that have to be charged up at night like a cell phone. The computer-aided devices give him greater mobility and independence than conventional prosthetics -- he's a champion amputee athlete.
Other memorable moments -- Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson asks NASA Space Architect Gary Martin about the search for life "out there;" Martin says, "It would be even more frightening if we never find life out there -- it would mean that we are entirely alone, in a very big universe."
Andrew Stanton from Pixar pulled aside the curtain to give us a glimpse into the creative process behind Toy Story and other blockbuster CGI features. Wired entertainment editor Jennifer Hillner hosted exclusive previews of mindblowingly cool footage from the forthcoming Fox/Blue Sky Studios animated feature Robots (due out Spring 2005), and from the CGI/bluescreen project Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (opening this September). Sunday ended in an incredible roundtable discussion with space entrepreneurs including ID/Quake/Doom software wizard John Carmack; Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson, Xcor CEO Jeff Greason, and Xprize founder Peter Diamandis. News there included never-before-seen footage of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, and of a new R+D effort from Carmack.
Link to Xeni's gallery of NextFest snapshots.
Update: Looks like John Dvorak had a good time, too: Link to PC Magazine article, and Dvorak's snapshot gallery. Extreme Tech also covered the event; story and two photo galleries are online here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshopped chimeras
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DATE: 05/18/2004 12:09:36 PM
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On today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest: create a chimera consiting of the combined body-parts of three or four animals.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PayPal disgraces itself, cuts off FreeNet
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DATE: 05/18/2004 12:46:52 PM
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PayPal has frozen the account used to collection donation for FreeNet (a censorship-busting technology used by world dissidents to anonymously publish without risking government retribution). Shame on them.
Paypal has frozen the account we use to accept donations over the web, they refuse to give any reason other than "use of an anonymous proxy", which suggests that someone at Paypal took a dislike to the goals of our project, since I have never used an anonymous proxy to access Paypal (this being the activity I assume they sought to prevent). It is fortunate that Johann Gutenberg did not rely on Paypal to fund his work on the printing press, which also allowed anonymous publication of information, since his account would probably have been frozen too.
If you are concerned about whether your account might be at risk due to your political opinions you may wish to speak to their PR contact Hani Durzy at (408) 376 7458. If you are an investor and you would like to see what other political opinions Paypal doesn't like, you may want to speak to their Investor contact Tracey Ford at (408) 376 7205.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open WiFi for plausible deniability
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DATE: 05/18/2004 12:48:07 PM
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Micah Joel is running an open WiFi network in order to give himself plausible deniability for bad acts that can be traced to his IP address:
I've already composed my reply in case I receive one of these letters someday. "Dear Comcast, I am so sorry. I had no idea that copyrighted works were being downloaded via my IP address; I have a wireless router at home and it's possible that someone may have been using my connection at the time. I will do my best to secure this notoriously vulnerable technology, but I can make no guarantee that hackers will not exploit my network in the future."
If it ever comes down to a lawsuit, who can be certain that I was the offender? And can the victim of hacking be held responsible for the hacker's crimes? If that were the case, we'd all be liable for the Blaster worm's denial of service attacks against Microsoft last year.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First-person account of Mass. gay marriage
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DATE: 05/18/2004 12:51:07 PM
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Here's a first-person account of Brian's marriage under Massachusetts's new gay-marriage law.
Suddenly a roar erupted all around us. Things began to move more slowly. I grabbed Aaron's hand tighter and started running forward up the steps. Everything was a blur. I lost his grip briefly as he stopped close to the entrance to accept a rose from someone in the crowd. I paused at the top of the steps, and turned to wait for him.
I've been in front of some large, happy, and cheering crowds before, but only on a stage -- never with a throng pressing in from all sides, with clapping hands outstretched, cameras flashing, and a deafening roar.
I stood there facing the crowd as Aaron walked towards me with a sparkle-encrusted yellow rose and a huge grin on his face. As he reached me, I put my hand around his waist and waved to the crowd. I tried to look at all the people, but my eyes couldn't focus.
We turned and walked into City Hall. My head spun. The lights seemed blinding after coming in from the street. A man in a tuxedo sat at a table and said something like "What are your intentions", through it was probably more like "Are you here to declare your intentions?" A reporter stood behind him pointing a microphone connected to a minidisc recorder at us. People and press thronged around.
I looked at Aaron. He shrugged.
"Um, we're here for a marriage license...?" I said.
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(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lego-like cosmetics packaging
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DATE: 05/18/2004 12:52:26 PM
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Jouer is a new line of cosmetics that comes in Lego-like stacking containers:
The products -- lip glosses, blushes and concealers -- come in trim compacts ($18 each at Sephora stores) that can be attached to one another, Lego-style, in any configuration.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Duct-tape messenger bag
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DATE: 05/18/2004 12:54:14 PM
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This duct-tape messenger bag is totally rad.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Schwarzenegger tosses dignity, sues dollie maker
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DATE: 05/18/2004 12:55:14 PM
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Governor Schwarzenegger has made good on his threat to sue a bobble-head-doll maker for putting his pardoical likeness on a bobble-head doll.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LotR movies remixed as trenchant Russian political satire
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DATE: 05/18/2004 01:00:08 PM
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Dmitri Puchkov is a Russian ex-cop who goes by the alias Goblin. "Goblin" is his nom-de-edit when he's remixing Lord of the Rings, dubbing in Russian dialogue to lampoon cops, oligarchs, and gangsters. He's working on a re-cut of Star Wars now. (This is old news, but I only just read about it)
Frodo Baggins is renamed Frodo Sumkin (a derivative from the Russian word sumka, or bag). The Ranger, Aragorn, is called Agronom (Russian for farm worker). Legolas is renamed Logovaz, after a Russian car company famed for its Ladas. Boromir becomes Baralgin, after a Russian type of paracetemol.
Gandalf spends much of the film trying to impress others with his in-depth knowledge of Karl Marx, and Frodo is cursed with the filthy tongue of a Russian criminal.
The films - which Puchkov says were originally made for his close friends but have now gone out on the internet - have found cult appeal in Russia's crowded pirate market, where a pirated, high-quality DVD in both Russian and English costs £5. That is all ordinary Russians, who earn only $300 a month in Moscow, can afford. The Russian pirate industry is worth $311 million, and has grown by 25 per cent since last year, pirates making more than 40 million disks a year.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anarchist in the Library: deliberation should shape the future
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DATE: 05/18/2004 01:09:04 PM
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I've just finished reading Siva Vaidhyanathan's excellent new book The Anarchist in the Library, a discourse on the real culture war: the fight between open systems for exchanging knowledge and closed systems that see knowledge as a marketable commodity. The best part of this book is that it repudiates technology as a tool for making policy, calling for deliberation instead: in other words, copyright strictures should be created by courts and lawmakers, not DRM.
Both visions of the perfect library -- utopian [all knowledge available for free, organized by volunteers] and dystopian [child-porn, spoilers and amateurish information supplanting high-quality research] -- are overstated. We are not close to constructing the perfect library, but we can imagine how it might look and act. Many of our communal efforts since the early 1990s seem to be moving our information ecosystem toward that vision. Yet long before we ge there, many are sounding alarms about the ways people might abuse their freedoms to use and move information. Even though the perfect library is not imminent, many are acting as if it is. The strong reactions of those who would squelch these freedoms might render our information systems unable to perform the positive functions of the perfect library because of the unexamined -- often merely assumed -- threats to the status quo. The closer we get to the perfect library the more the oligarchs undermine it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bad writerly advice
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DATE: 05/18/2004 02:36:10 PM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- a swell writer and respected editor -- may not have invented the genre in which clueless advice to new writers is mercilessly dissected, but she certainly perfected it. Today. Teresa shreds a really stunningly gormless "cover-letter advice" page:
Tip Eight: Call. That's right, Call. Introduce yourself. Be confident. Let them know your work is coming. It's the surest way to get out of that slush pile and on to a desk. Too afraid to call? Write out what you want to say, call AFTER HOURS, leave a voice message. It's not as good talking to a real person, but hey, it's better than nothing.
The surest way? Say what? Calling in advance is an irritating waste of the editorial department's time, and will do nothing to get you out of a trade publishing slushpile. Leaving a message after hours is even more clueless. I can't imagine where he got this idea, unless he's been taking advice from someone who's secretly out to get him.
There is one significant effect this might have. Because you've phoned to say something about a submission, someone may write down your name and the title of your book, and pass the note on to the slush readers. They'll be puzzled--why did you say you were phoning again?--and will stick the note up on their bulletin board. When your manuscript crosses their desk, they may remember that there was something-or-other they were supposed to remember or do about it, and will set your manuscript on the "inscrutable problems" stack for later diagnosis. Some slow afternoon--of which there aren't many--they'll have a go at the "inscrutable problems" stack, and will look at your manuscript again. They won't be able to tell what the problem was. They'll set the manuscript aside for later. After several cycles, they'll either figure that any manuscript that's been around this long should be returned to its author on general principles, or they'll move on to another job and the new slush reader will run your manuscript through several more "inscrutable problems" cycles before returning it to you on general principles.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 78s as CDs
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DATE: 05/18/2004 02:45:56 PM
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72s2CD.com is an online retailer that sells public-domain 78RPM albums (lots of Gilbert and Sullivan and Alma Gluck!) that have been converted to audio CDs.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Duct-tape messenger bag II
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:09:56 PM
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Gregr sends us this pointer to his deluxe, two-tone duct-tape messenger bag, with a cellphone pocket and everything -- wish he'd posted build-notes!
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(Thanks, Gregr!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google's spyware best-principles proposal
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:18:15 PM
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Google has posted a list of proposed best-practices for Internet software, such as toolbars, which aims at separating spyware from other apps. One of the big problems with the spyware fight is that the legal theories employed (as in the lawsuits against Gator) often have the potential to break the Internet in important ways. For example, the plaintiffs in Gator say that Gator violates their copyright in their webpages by putting new windows onscreen when they're loaded with competitors' info (i.e., you load up www.deliveryservice1.com and a window pops up for deliveryservice2.com). If a court agrees with this theory, it means that the org responsible for the contents of the foremost window in your browser get to control all the other windows on your screen -- that you violate their copyright if you install, say, a price-comparator that loads Amazon's comparable sell-pages when you bring up a bn.com page so that you can check who's cheapest.
Google's principles seem, to me, to be much more thoughtful and respectful of the Internet and its users. They revolve around key notions in consumer protection: clarity, honesty, and easy opt-out. Not committing fraud, IOW.
Applications that affect or change your user experience should make clear they are the reason for those changes. For example, if an application opens a window, that window should identify the application responsible for it. Applications should not intentionally obscure themselves under multiple or confusing names. You should be given means to control the application in a straightforward manner, such as by clicking on visible elements generated by the application. If an application shows you ads, it should clearly mark them as advertising and inform you that they originate from that application. If an application makes a change designed to affect the user experience of other applications (such as setting your home page) then those changes should be made clear to you.
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(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jack in the Box yuppified is JBX
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:19:32 PM
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San Diego-based blogger Joe Crawford brings news of "JBX," a new experiment by San Diego-based fast food giant Jack in the Box.
[N]ot exactly fast food. The look of the stores is quite different -- Chipotle meets Starbucks, but they still have the classic tacos. There are two of these stores in San Diego - pilot stores. They're like concept cars, but restaurants.
Non sequitur: One of my first geek jobs was working in a sweatshop full of nerds an Internet Professional Services Firm in San Diego. One of my first big client meetings there was a bid for a redesign of the Jack in the Box website, which had only just launched the year prior. This was, like, the paleolithic era of the Interweb. Anyway, in the pitch meeting, one of my co-workers -- a webmonkey who really wanted to be an ad man -- said to the Jack in the Box execs, "Come on, nobody actually comes to your restaurant because the food tastes any good -- we're selling IMMERSIVE USER EXPERIENCE here, not flavor." We lost the bid.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hands-free panda
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:20:57 PM
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This hands-free panda is only $19 -- Jed sez, "It's a stuffed panda; when you attach your cell phone to it, it moves its mouth and head in sync with the voice of the person you're talking to."
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(Thanks, Jed!)
UPDATE: The Panda and other "Talking Toonies" are now exclusively available here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WiFi provider Cometa is kaput, but the sky is not falling
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:21:35 PM
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Glenn Fleishman says, "Cometa shuts down. This doesn't show the model of for-fee Wi-Fi is broken, but rather that a company with hype and high expectations can fail to execute and then shut down." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SMSes recovered from SIM in murder trial
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:24:53 PM
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A Swedish cult-leader implicated in serial murders is in trouble because of the damning, deleted SMSes recovered off his mobile-phone's SIM.
The case has been creating headlines for months in the Scandinavian media and the latest thrilling development is that computer forensic company Ibas has been able to recover 13 of the messages from the SIM card in the nanny's mobile. Here's a quick translation of some of the messages from the minister (just like the Bible they can be interpreted in any old way):
* 5 December 2003 04:53. You need to make a decision and not wither. Find a safe solution. You prove your love by liberating him. His limit is soon reached.
* New Years Eve 2003 15:21. It's not your fault, there is still time. For his sake and because of his message to you it will not be too late. Finish it now!
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(Thanks, Halvard!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Please Don't Go Topless, Mother" singer Troy Hess found!
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DATE: 05/18/2004 10:28:52 PM
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The mystery of the boy voice behind cult antiporn anthem "Please Don't go Topless, Mother" has been solved. Troy Hess has a web page. Link, and link to previous BoingBoing post which includes MP3 file link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spoony photoshoppery
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DATE: 05/18/2004 11:35:20 PM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: creative use of spoons.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fix for critical MacOS X vulnerability
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DATE: 05/18/2004 11:39:40 PM
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If you use an OS 10.3 Mac with Safari or MSIE, you absolutely must follow the instructions in this post to block a really serious attack that Apple hasn't patched (though they've reportedly known about this since February). Alternatively, you could always run Mozilla or one of its variants -- a free, open source browser in which vulnerabilities are corrected as soon as they're discovered (not when Apple decides to get around to it). I stand corrected -- this effects Mozilla, too.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO: strip access-control from iTunes music
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DATE: 05/18/2004 11:46:23 PM
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Today on Engadget: a HOWTO for using the open-source hymn utility to strip the access-controls out of iTunes Music Store tracks so that you can play them on devices that Apple hasn't approved.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unitarianism: good enough for two presidents, not good enough for Texas
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DATE: 05/18/2004 11:50:00 PM
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The state of Texas has denied Unitarians tax-exempt religious status because the church "does not have one system of belief." As Julia notes, Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams were sufficiently convinced of the Unitarians' religiosity that they actually were Unitarians.
Never before -- not in this state or any other -- has a government agency denied Unitarians tax-exempt status because of the group's religious philosophy, church officials say. Strayhorn's ruling clearly infringes upon religious liberties, said Dan Althoff, board president for the Denison congregation that was rejected for tax exemption by the comptroller's office.
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-carb blog
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DATE: 05/18/2004 11:51:05 PM
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CarbWire is a great new low-carb blog.
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Heisenberg's waterfowl: tagged penguins breed less
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DATE: 05/19/2004 04:36:56 AM
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Tagging a penguin's wing with a research tag changes their drag coefficient, resulting in altered social behaviour, most notably less success in breeding.
As well as hindering conservation efforts, the penguins' poor breeding success may also mean that birds tagged in previous experiments have yielded misleading scientific data.
"We may have to reconsider our present knowledge on the life-history traits of penguins, such as breeding success and chick survival, which over the years has been drawn almost entirely from flipper-banded birds," warn Gauthier-Clerc and his colleagues in their paper in Biology Letters.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Unwiring an apartment complex
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DATE: 05/19/2004 08:24:14 AM
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Fun online piece about setting up free wireless broadband access for a small apartment complex -- and how the unwiring paid for itself by helping fill empty units. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guatemala -- Xeni's snapshots
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DATE: 05/19/2004 08:39:21 AM
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I've uploaded some of the snapshots I took during a recent trip through indigenous communities in Guatemala. Here they are, come have a look.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Giving the finger to an animal
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DATE: 05/19/2004 08:59:01 AM
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A man got too close to a jaguar at the Rio Grande Zoo and lost a finger. Before zoo employees realized what had happened, the guy fled the scene. Apparently, it's illegal to pet the predator. After the finger was found outside the jaguar's cage, police took a print from the detached digit and tracked the guy down through his zoo pass. Sadly, the frequent visitor who came to the zoo almost daily is now banned. I bet the jaguar will miss him. "They're not your friends, they're not your pets," the zoo director said. "They're wild animals." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Children of etoy
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DATE: 05/19/2004 10:56:12 AM
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etoy, the infamous tech-prankster art collective, is after our kids!
"etoy.CORPORATION's education & training services are preparing for a major upgrade of its social division. 8 etoy.AGENTS in close collaboration with local experts will convert 500 individuals (max.age: 10 years), providing them with an entry point into art production, identity design and electronic authorship.
The etoy.DAY-CARE education program equips etoy.JUNIOR-AGENTS with the tools necessary to out-produce today's most relevant social and technological problems. etoy researches identity issues, group behavior patterns and the creativity potential of children in digital environments.
Each little test pilot will be outfitted with a protection suit, various etoy.TOOLS, its own identity tag (an individual encrypted 2D-barcode) and a customized etoy.DATA-TANK online to grow a subversive identity-extension and a long term relationship with etoy.CORPORATION.
Care personnel and in-house software agents will actively monitor the condition of each child and will stay in close contact with parents and human rights organizations.
etoy.SHAREHOLDERS and an international audience can follow the operations. Invest in the code of tomorrow!" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fantastico 1920s Spanish stapler and pencil-sharpener
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El Casco is a Spanish company that has been supplying desk-accessories and office products to the Spanish rail company since the 1920s. They have a line of premium reproductions of 1920s-era office tools, including a heart-stoppingly lovely stapler and pencil-sharpener (the pencil sharpener has a little window so you can peer into its guts and watch your pencil transformed).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DMCA on (public) trial May 21 in LA
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DATE: 05/19/2004 12:24:10 PM
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On Copyfight, Donna writes,
This just in: the California Institute of Technology and Loyola Law School are presenting a mock trial this Friday, May 21st, to play out a scenario in which a student creates a distributed computing application to crack DRM systems, leading to the criminal prosecution of everyone involved under the DMCA.
The trial will have many realistic touches: a real federal judge will hear the case, the prosecution will be advised by real federal prosecutors, and the defense by EFF 's Fred von Lohmann. Brad Hunt of the MPAA will provide expert testimony for the prosecution, while EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen will provide testimony for the defense.
Even cooler: the event is free and open to the public. If you're in the Los Angeles area and can get away from work or study mid-day, stop by and check it out.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: PlaNetwork Conference, June 5-6 in San Francisco
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DATE: 05/19/2004 12:27:55 PM
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Axil Comras of Green Home points us to PlaNetwork, a conference June 5-6 in San Francisco on technology and social change. Presenters from MoveOn, the Dean Campaign, LinkedIn, and dozens of other outfits will discuss timely topics like e-voting, social networking, and grassroots digital activism. At $100 per day, it's not cheap. However, if you get three other people to list you as the referral when they pay, you get in free. So do a bit of pre-planning with three friends and all four of you can cut 25 percent off the admission cost! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark's Japan Journal
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DATE: 05/19/2004 02:53:28 PM
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(I went to Tokyo for a couple of days. I'l be posting excerpts from my journal here.) It's 4am in Tokyo (noon LA time). I just went downstairs to call my wife. First, I had to get change for my 5000 Yen bill. I like the way the desk clerk spread the 1000 notes in a pretty fan shape and offered them to me on a tray. What other country gives you that kind of service?
The flight from LAX to Tokyo was 11.5 hours and uncomfortable. I can never sleep on planes. I tried to nap, but I just fidgeted.
The good news about being stuck in an aluminum tube for hours on end is that I managed to write four pieces for my upcoming book. I used a Moleskine notebook (thanks, David!) and a Pilot Gel pen, which works well with the Moleskine. I'd be interested in hearing about other pens that are good on Moleskine's paper.
I had a window seat on the plane. The 20-year-old guy next to me was really tall for a Japanese and gangly. He was a nice guy, but his elbows and knees frequently crossed the line into my side and bumped me, especially when he was playing Grand Theft Auto on his IBM ThinkPad. He slept a lot, the lucky son of a bitch. The Japanese girl sitting next to him in the aisle seat cried silently and drank cans of Miller beer. She kept her eyes closed and I saw tears falling down her cheeks.
Once we landed in Tokyo, it was smooth sailing. I hadn't checked any luggage, so I breezed through customs. Fortunately, the day before, I went on the Web to find the best way to get to the Shinagawa station from Narita airport. I used the Narita Express. You have to buy a reserved seat from a stall on the main floor before taking the escalator down to the train station under Narita. The girl working at the Narita Express counter was wearing a neat little uniform with a matching cap. She, like all the counter workers I've seen so far, was impeccably groomed, polite, and professional. It's fun to make transactions here!
At the train station, I asked a guy in a uniform to look at my ticket and tell me where to go. He said "Car two." I walked to car two sat down in my assigned seat. The train left the station. At the next stop, a guy walked on and said I was in his seat. I showed him my ticket, and he said "you are supposed to be on car seven." I looked at my ticket, and he was right. I blame it on sleep deprivation.
I got my bag from the storage area and carried it through all the cars. The smoking car was pretty rowdy, and smoke was hanging thick in the air. A middle-aged salaryman, drunk, was standing in the aisle, laughing with a seated friend. His eyeglasses were enormous, and his comb-over was a work of art. Another guy had his shoes and socks off and his feet were dangling in the aisle. I manuevered around them and got to the first class car, number six. It didn't seem much different from the other cars. Less crowded. Slightly nicer seats. You pay to keep other people away from you.
When I got to the end of the car, I couldn't open the door to car seven. I looked through the window and discovered that there wasn't any way to get to the car. I stood there for a moment, wondering what to do. I finally went back through the first class car and the smoking car and sat in an unoccupied 2nd class non-smoking seat. When the conductor came through the car and checked my ticket, he didn't say anything about me being in the wrong seat.
My hotel was right across the street from the station, a nice surprise. The room is tiny. Six feet wide and about 15 feet long. The bathroom is molded from one piece of plastic. There's a tiny desk, a chair, a bed, and a TV. I like it, but it smells like stale cigarettes.
I went to sleep close to 4am Pacific time (8 pm in Tokyo), and woke up at around 10:30 am Pacific (2:30 am in Tokyo). I think I'll try to sleep a little more.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tongue-controlled Game-Boy
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DATE: 05/19/2004 03:03:46 PM
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The Tongue-Boy SP is a tongue-based controller for use with the GameBoy targetted at people with quadroplegia.
The NewAbilities Systems TTK or Tongue Touch Wireless Keyboard Transmitter looks like an orthodontic retainer with nine membrane buttons
We add a new jack for the Tongue Boy SP TTK receiver input. We also add a second micro-controller computer chip inside the case to decode the TTK signals from the receiver and activate the Game Boy SP buttons.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video games make the Baby Buddha cry
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DATE: 05/19/2004 03:10:42 PM
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The new Pratimoksha (Buddhist Monastic Code) is out, and it has lots to say about spending too much time with the Interweb and not enough with your Buddha nature:
44. A bhikshu who has his private e-mail account with the result that he spends an inordinate amount of time in making unnecessary communications or communications which foster attachment commits an offence for which he must express regret...
46. A bhikshu who plays electronic games including those on the computer, commits an offence for which he must express regret.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Troy in 15 (very funny) minutes
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DATE: 05/19/2004 10:47:52 PM
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After the sixth hour of Troy, the new Arm Pitt Men in Skirts epic, I started to remember just how friggin' big that copy of the Iliad I had was. Big. Big, big book. Loooong movie.
So it's a good thing that this blogger has produced a Troy-in-fifteen-minutes abridgement. You know, I like it as much as the original!
AGAMEMNON: Look, there's no reason for me to slaughter thousands of your men. You pick out your best soldier, and I pick out mine.
KING OF THESSALY: Deal. [turns to his army] SOME GUYYYYY!
THESSALIAN ARMY: SOME! GUY! SOME! GUY! SOME! GUY!
Some Guy breaks through the crowd. His neck resembles an Easter ham and his spear is the size of a telephone pole.
SOME GUY: RAAAAAAAAA!
AGAMEMNON [turning to his army]: ACHILLEEEEEES!
GREEK ARMY: . . .
AGAMEMNON: . . .
Hut of Wanton Nudity, Some Village
BOY: OMG Achilles you're late you gotta get up Achilles OMG!
ACHILLES: Dude, I just nailed twins. Call me in the morning.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Celebrity uglification photoshopping
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DATE: 05/19/2004 10:51:12 PM
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Today on Worth1000's daily photoshopping contest: "detouched" celebrities with all the blemishes taken out by glossy-mag photo-editors put back in.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Universities banning servers, harming education
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DATE: 05/19/2004 10:54:09 PM
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My cow-orker Jason Schulz is at the DC EDUCAUSE conference, talking about the ways that universities can use computer networks to improve or detract form the educational experience. Some of the current higher-ed thinking is abysmal:
Penn State now has an absolute ban on any student running a server in a residential dorm. Period. The only possible exception is if you swear to only use it for "educational" purposes and get written permission from a faculty member and get approval from the Vice Provost.
So this is part of Penn State's solution to copyright infringement: Take away computing tools from students. As Ed Felten pointed out in our later panel discussion, this is a very dangerous approach for educational institutions to take. Computer science students often learn best through hands-on experimentation and tinkering with technology, and as Jamie Boyle noted in his plenary talk, unplanned experimentation often bears the biggest educational fruit. To paraphrase: "How many times do we learn more from the book next to the book we originally went to find on the shelf, or from the article after the article we looked up in the journal?" Hence, restricting access to content and technology out of fear for infringment can have a very real and direct impact on the ability of students to learn. [Note: Both Yahoo! and Google began as "unauthorized" Stanford student experiments with servers -- should those had been banned as well?]
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New law would let parents sue funnybook sellers for mentally scarring kiddees
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DATE: 05/20/2004 07:43:22 AM
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The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund raises the flag about this profoundly stupid new proposed law:
H.B. 4239, also called the "Parents' Empowerment Act," would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates any media containing "material that is harmful to minors" if the material is distributed in a way that "a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare." The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New issue of NeoFiles
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DATE: 05/20/2004 07:56:56 AM
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The latest issue of RU Sirius's NeoFiles is online. This time, RU mindmelds with net.culture theoretician Clay Shirky, Brainwaves blogger Zack Lynch, and Will Block, the CEO of Life Enhancements Products. Block's company sponsors the NeoFiles, a fact RU honorably discloses at the top of the interview with his boss:
"If this is an infomercial site, it’s a pretty fucking outrageous (and informative) one. I’ve sat for many hours with my friend Will Block and one thing is certain: his knowledge, enthusiasm, and integrity (not to mention expansiveness) around these topics are impeccable. My readers also, by-and-large, are not idiots, and they can make up their own minds about whether to buy products or simply steal the precursors from Auntie Grizelda’s garden."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Holy Bestseller, Holy Sequel
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DATE: 05/20/2004 08:29:20 AM
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The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown says he considered including another theory in the book that would have inflamed Christians even more than the notion that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and made babies. What if Jesus survived the crucifixion? According to this AP Article, "Brown said the theory is backed by a number of 'very credible sources,' but that he ultimately decided it was too flimsy." I'm burned out on the whole Holy Blood, Holy Grail trip though. Brown's next book, set in Washington, revolves around the Masons! Apparently, the dust jacket of The Da Vinci Code contains a clue about the sequel.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wireless vs. Rush Hour
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DATE: 05/20/2004 12:08:45 PM
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My latest article for TheFeature.com is online:
"Each year, Los Angeles drivers spend a combined total of 9,000 years stuck in traffic. Cell phones make it much easier to suffer through the brutal traffic jams that are the bane of city life around the world. Fortunately, wireless technology can also shorten the waiting game of freeway commuting.
From Los Angeles and Seattle to Berlin and Tokyo, city planners and researchers are deploying a slew of wireless sensors, smart street signs, and real-time data services for mobile devices to help manage traffic flow and inform drivers about what they'll face on the road ahead." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Back-to-Iraq" blogger is back in Iraq
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DATE: 05/20/2004 02:21:25 PM
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Clive sez: "Chris Allbritton has begun blogging from Iraq. He's the writer who raised $13,000 last year from his blog readers to fund an indie-reporting trip to Iraq during the war. His readers have asked him to go back, and he raised another $11,000 in the last few months. He just arrived in Baghdad, and has begun writing more of his excellent stuff -- slices of everyday life in one of the most fraught places on earth. The first post describes the crazily harrowing landing you have to endure when you fly into Baghdad, as the plane corkscrews down to avoid shoulder-mounted missiles:"
After a normal flight, we went into a tight, corkscrew dive that sent your stomach up into your throat — and in the case of two passengers, out their mouths and into their laps. It’s a vomit-comet experience. But if you like roller coasters in a sealed container where you can’t really see anything, it’s a lot of fun. Just don’t think about the very real threat of shoulder-mounted SAMs.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark's Japan Journal: Day 2
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DATE: 05/20/2004 02:30:23 PM
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6am in Tokyo (2pm LA time). I'm even sleepier today than I was yesterday. I can't sleep here, even though I've been downing Benadryl, which usually knocks me out. I got about 4 hours sleep last night. I was awakened after an hour by someone in the hall outside my door. He was drunk and angry. I'm not sure if he was talking to himself or to someone on his mobile phone, but I didn't want to open my door to take a peek. (The last time I opened a hotel door to investigate a noisy person in a hallway, years ago in Copenhagen, I was greeted by a young guy out of his mind on drugs who made a beeline to my door and tried to force his way in, spitting and screaming. His eyes were rolled back in his head. After I finally got the door shut and locked, he pounded on the door and howled.) Anyway, this Japanese guy just kept going on and on about something. He'd start mumbling, then build up to loud ferocious staccatto bursts. Then he'd start over. I heard some other guy, maybe another hotel guest, speak to him in a low reproachful voice. It took a while, but he shut the jerk up. Thank you, whoever you are.
I was awakened a second time by the sound of power machinery. It took me a minute or two that it was actually someone in the next room snoring. So now I'm in the cafe, drinking a $6 not-very-good espresso in an attempt to reset my circadian clock. I don't know if it'll help or hurt, but I need to try something.
It's been raining steadily since I got here. From what I've been told, a typhoon is headed this way. I'm upset, because today is my day to go exploring around the city. I'll try to keep a good attitude about it. Tokyo is such a wonderful place, I can't let lack of sleep and lousy weather ruin it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robots revolt in Madison, WI
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DATE: 05/20/2004 02:42:33 PM
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Photos of "robots" carrying signs written in binary code. They're marching to support underpaid and overworked teaching assistants in Madison, Wisconsin. Such thoughtful 'bots. Update: BoingBoing reader Ryan Whaley says, "They weren't supporting the teachers' union, it just happened to be going on at the same time. They planned it weeks ahead of time. They're all members of the somethingawful forums."
But BoingBoing reader Stef says, "I think your correction might be wrong. Do you have a link to a particular thread on somethingawful that discusses their reasons? I got sent this link by a friend because those bastards ripped off my costume from haloween 1990. No I don't have any photographic evidence and yes, I do live in another country but damnit I sweltered all night and couldn't slow dance with anyone or eat or drink and I want credit! Oh, and there's a press release on that page that says the Robot & Automation Association (RAA) "decided through an internal vote, to join the [TAA] in their strike on the 28th of April". If that ain't a clear message of solidarity, sister..."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Reviews of pens
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DATE: 05/20/2004 02:53:42 PM
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Illustrator Danny Gregory has reviewed a bunch of pens, accompanied by his drawings of the pens.
"Rotring Rapidoliner: I am really in love with this pen these days and I never would of thunk it. I first tried Rapidographs when I was a teenager but they always clogged and leaked and were a pain to fill. I was forever dismantling the nibs and washing them in the sink and finding ink blots on my shirts. This pen is perfect. My nib is the finest they make and the pen just won’t clog or skip. The guts are disposable, for $4 you get a fresh new nib and supply of Indian ink. I have been drawing with this pen every day for two months and am still on my original cartridge. The pen’s feeling is ultra smooth, a little creamy and a little brittle, like icing on a cupcake. The best $10 I ever spent."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Steve Silberman's reading list for Allen Ginsberg's Beat Generation course
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DATE: 05/21/2004 01:37:50 AM
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Boing Boing buddy Steve Silberman sez: "In 1977, poet Allen Ginsberg taught a course called "The Literary History of the Beat Generation" at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. I was in the course, and a couple of friends of mine and I just turned the suggested reading list into a gateway to the texts themselves. If you ever wished that your English-lit teacher had been the author of "Howl"..." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Shirley book signing in San Jose May 29
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DATE: 05/21/2004 01:46:53 AM
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My friend John Shirley, author of Crawlers and Black Butterflies and screenwriter of The Crow, etc, will be reading from a new novella and signing at BAYCON 2004 - San Jose, California, the Doubletree hotel, May 29. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hybrid fruit photoshopping
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DATE: 05/21/2004 03:13:33 AM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: hybrid fruit.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dumb tech-support explanations
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DATE: 05/21/2004 03:21:21 AM
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Great open-mic question on Ask Slashdot: what's the worst bullishit "explanation" you've ever gotten from tech support?
My cable modem connection had stopped work. Given my ISPs track record, this was unremarkable, but after it continued for 2 days, I decided to call the tech support number. After supplying my ID number, the support person told me that my connection was intentionally shut off because I was broadcasting a widely-circulated Windows virus. I promptly informed the tech support person that I did not use the Windows operating system on any of my computers, and that I could not possibly have the virus I was accused of having.
The support rep immediately told me that I had the virus, and that they would not turn my connection back on until I jumped through their anti-virus hoops. I argued for almost 10 minutes with this neophyte that I could not use their Windows anti-virus on my Linux systems, and that even if I could, it would not do a damn bit of good. Did it matter? Of course not.
Finally, in order to get my connection back on, I agreed to perform their anti-virus tricks "to the best of my ability", and install Windows just so I could "remove the virus" from my system. The rep actually thought this was an excellent resolution to the problem, but for some reason didn't believe I would actually do it (could have been my vehement renouncements against the entirety of Microsoft's products). After another 5 minutes of cajoling, I convinced her to turn my connection back on so I could get the anti-virus tools, and access Windows Update.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fox News lies with statistics
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DATE: 05/21/2004 03:22:28 AM
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My cow-orker Jason Schultz identifies a nice bit of Fox statistical chicanery:
Among today's top stories, a new "Fox News Poll" that says 33% of those surveyed think the media is too easy on Kerry and 42% think the media is too tough on Bush. [Of course, if it were limited to FoxNews coverage, you'd probably see dramatically different numbers in the opposite direction.]
But let's just look at the numbers they've given us. 33% think the media is too easy on Kerry. That means 66% (or 2/3rds) think the media is fair or too tough on Kerry, right? Isn't that the real story?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig lecture in London, May 27
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DATE: 05/21/2004 03:28:43 AM
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Larry Lessig is speaking on London on the 27th of May at the Royal Geographical Society, SW7.
Lawrence Lessig will put
forward in this lecture the hypothesis that innovation and
experimentation thrive when ideas and culture can be freely exchanged
and circulated. These freedoms are under threat. He proposes that the
erosion of constitutional and civil rights carries with it profound
consequences for all those involved in the arts and the business of
ideas.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Report from UK ID Cards meeting at LSE
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DATE: 05/21/2004 03:31:58 AM
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Phil sez, "My personal take on the Mistaken Identity public meeting re. UK ID cards at the London School of Economics yesterday."
Lord (Andrew) Philips of Sudbury, Liberal Democrat peer, was particularly good - especially in his detailed grasp of the system, e.g. regarding the nonsensical restriction of the powers of the Interception of Communications Commissioner, and his realistic take on the task ahead in persuading the 80-ish% that ID cards backed by a National Identity Register are a BAD IDEA.
He referred specifically to tackling the all-too-common "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument and, although he didn't explicitly say the phrase, his comment "We're on no-one's list now" led me to think that "If you're not on their list, you won't exist" might imply/initiate a relevant counter-argument. [Wait for the T-shirt - I'm all for slogans!]
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Erik Davis consults on A Scanner Darkly!
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DATE: 05/21/2004 07:55:26 AM
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Boing Boing pal Erik Davis sends us this exclusive bit of insider insight into the Hollywood adaptation of Philip K. Dick's surreal SF novel "A Scanner Darkly":
"This spring, I had the opportunity to read and consult on Richard Linklater’s screenplay for Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, which is set to start filming this July. As I love many of Linklater’s films, this was a great honor, although much less funny than the New Yorker’s description of me as a “Dick expert.” Expert or no, I can tell you that I have every reason to believe that Linklater’s film will be what Dickheads everywhere have been waiting for: the first “real” “authentic” PKD movie. While the film updates the historical vibe from paranoid 70s to paranoid 00s, the script is dark and tart, funny and faithful. Nearly all the dialogue is drawn from the novel, and the few changes sharpen Dick’s themes rather than squelch them. Linklater has kept the story dark, and haunted by rumors of God.
As has been reported, Keanu Reaves will play Bob Arctor, the Orange County narc who goes schizo after being assigned to spy on himself. Linklater has been planning this project for years; it was Reaves’ interest in the story that finally got the ball rolling. As has been already noted, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Rory Cochrane round out the cast, though it also needs to be mentioned that these are some of the most famous druggies in Hollywood. Actually, I don’t know anything about Rory’s personal habits, but he sure spouted convincing cannabinoid bon mots in Dazed & Confused.
During my time at Linklater’s pine-forested getaway pad outside of Austin, which features a pagoda, a huge stone tower, and many pinball machines, I got to meet the genius team whose digital rotoscoping helped make Waking Life one of the few masterpieces of the new millennium. These are definitely the guys you want to bring Bob Arctor’s scramble suit to life."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Holy Vandals, Holy Grail
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DATE: 05/21/2004 08:25:11 AM
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An historic monument in central England that may hold the key to the location of the Holy Grail was damaged by vandals on Tuesday. The BBC reports that "a gang of youths climbed on top of The Shepherd's Monument at Shugborough Hall" and started smashing away.
"The Shepherd's Monument is of international importance, both as a work of art and because of the legend that a baffling inscription on the monument provides clues to the true location of the Holy Grail," said the home's general manager Richard Kemp.
Interestingly, the vandalism came on the heels of a visit by former code-breakers from War II intent on cracking the 10-letter puzzle. The Shepherd's Monument is discussed in depth in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, inspiration for The Da Vinci Code. Link to a National Public Radio piece about the code-breakers. Link to the BBC story on the vandalism. (Thanks, Kev!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod/torture mashups in NYC
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DATE: 05/21/2004 09:33:43 AM
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These Iraqi torture/iPod ad mashups are appearing around NYC.
Link
(Thanks, Rich!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jungle Boat movie from Disney
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DATE: 05/21/2004 10:03:50 AM
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Disney is making a new ride-based movie, this time from The Jungle Boat Cruise. Let's hope it's more like the Pirates of the Caribbean than the Haunted Mansion movie (shudder).
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Implantable RFIDs for nightclub VIPs
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DATE: 05/21/2004 02:08:13 PM
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Club kids who want VIP status at the popular Baja Beach Club in Barcelona can now get implanted with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag. For 25 125 euro, customers can have an Applied Digital Solutions VeriChip, the size of a grain of rice, injected into his or her upper arm. Makes it easier to run a tab.
Link (via my journal at TheFeature.com)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mother of all vintage robot toy websites
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DATE: 05/21/2004 04:12:52 PM
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Robot1968 is a kickass vintage robot toy website offering info on...
the history of robots and cinematic mechanised figures, inventory with over 2000 photos of all the robot toys from 1940 till now, info on all robot companies from japan-germany-usa and hong kong, vintage arcade games to play, links to all the robot world, forum to talk to other collectors and artists, music and fun!
Link (Thanks, theo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Busted MP3 player wrapped around soda can causes airplane bomb scare
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DATE: 05/21/2004 05:39:23 PM
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Wireless guru Mike Outmesguine says:
A bomb scare occured on an America West passenger plane in Phoenix Arizona this week. Fox 11 News covered the story with people on the ground and a chopper in the air. The Fox11AZ website has 3 videos (about 8 minutes total) online... Re-live the tension! What caused the bomb scare? "An MP3 player wrapped around a soda can." So, next time you de-plane a plane, don't forgot to take your Coke and iPod with you. Check those seat pockets!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark's Japan Journal: Day 3
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DATE: 05/21/2004 06:58:36 PM
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8am in Tokyo (4pm LA time). I got about six hours of sleep last night, and I'm feeling pretty good right now. (Of course, I just downed an excellent double espresso, so the caffeine is talking right now.)
Despite the typhoon warnings, Yesterday's weather couldn't have been better. The sky was blue, the temperature was mild. I guess the typhoon ran out of juice really fast.
I woke up spaced-out and stupid. I looked in the mirror and was surprised at how glassy my eyes looked. But I wanted to travel around the city, to do some research on the article I'm writing. First, though, I wanted to go to Harajuku and Yoyogi park to take pictures of those crazy kids in the their Elegant Gothic Lolita and Trappist Monk - Rocket Scientist Hybrid getups. I didn't see too many, but I took some pictures of a few kids, who studiously ignored me, the big dopey gawking gaijin with a camera.
But my heart wasn't in it. I was much more interested in checking out the official uniforms almost everyone in Japan wears. Of course the schoolkids all wear uniforms. The girls have the traditional sailor uniforms, and a lot of the boys have these dark blue Chinese-looking jackets with the cylindrical collars and big round buttons. (Why are so many schoolkids always walking around in the middle of the day here? Don't they have classes to attend? Do they get breaks from school at odd hours that allow them to roam the streets?)
I saw a large crowd of "Beauty College" students pouring out of a building. They looked about 17 years old. About half were boys. They had nifty two-tone smock-like uniforms. They raced each other into a 7-Eleven and filled the place up. I took some great pictures of them packed in there.
I went the the big park near Harajuku (Meji something) and saw a worker in a smart gray uniform and pith helmet raking up leaves from the wide, tiny-pebbled, path leading to the Shinto temple. His rake was hand-made bamboo, and the business end of it fanned out about three feet. He had a large woven basket filled with other wooden park-cleaning implements, that looked like the came from the 17th century. I love the way Japan mixes ancient stuff with the brand new.
Back in the shopping area of Harajuku, another uniformed guy was on his knees, wiping one of the ubiquitous outdoor vending machines. He was making the surface *squeak*. After that, I noticed all the vending machines were spotless. The Japanese love to keep things clean. (The day before, two people in yellow raincoat uniforms were walking down a narrow shopping street, picking up wet cigarette butts with poles that have pincers on the end, and depositing the butts in a plastic bag. They were obsessive about it. They didn't even have Walkmans on. -- they were focusing solely on getting every last cigarette butt picked up.)
I spent the rest of the day taking pictures of people in different uniforms. It seems like they have at least four varieties of cops here, judging by the color and style of their caps and jackets.
I was looking forward to getting back to my hotel room so I could upload a "Uniforms of Japan" photo gallery. I am using some new software to deal with digital images, and when I extracted the images from the camera, the application zapped all 45 photos from the camera's memory stick. A full day of photo taking, gone in an electrostatic femtosecond. (I'm not going to say which application it is until I get an explanation from the guy who wrote it.)
I'm headed back to the US today, so unless something bizarre happens on the train to Narita, this will be my last Japan Journal dispatch.
Your faithful scribe -- Mark
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Matt Jones: refactor the UI
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DATE: 05/21/2004 11:48:45 PM
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My pal Matt "Blackbelt" Jones, a user-experience wonk at Nokia, has written a guest-rant on new UIs for the pervasive age over at Warren Ellis's Die Puny Humans.
Drill the digital ground and you'll see that the surface strata of interface has not moved as quickly as what lies beneath.
The shape has changed. We've moved from the discrete, fixed computing of the mainframe, mini and pc to the fluid, agile, grid.
The stuff has changed. We send emotional bits and digital pheremones as much as we send practical packets.
The scale has changed. The corpus has swollen while the skin stayed the same. We stored data the equivalent of 37,000 times the library of congress on our hard drives in 2002, and shunted 3 times that much around the net[1].
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collecting copyright horror stories to restore the public domain
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DATE: 05/21/2004 11:52:24 PM
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An important piece of copyright litigation is in the offing: Golan v Ashcroft challenges Congress's "restoration of copyright" to thousands of works that were in the public domain as of 1994. The Golan legal team is collecting your horror stories about being denied access to works that were snatched from the public domain; they're publishing the stories as they come in:
To win the lawsuit we need your help: we need examples of how people have been harmed by this removal of works from the public domain. You can help us if you have ever wanted to use:
* a foreign sound recording made before February 15, 1972; or
* a foreign work published in or after 1923 that was in the public domain in the U.S. (due to lack of copyright notice, renewal, or national eligilibility of the author), including:
* works of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Khachaturian, and other foreign composers (search for restored works)
* numerous classic British, French, German, and other foreign films (including several Hitchcock films, Faust, Metropolis, and The Red Balloon, Kurosawa's Ikiru, The Third Man, and Intermezzo)
* or any other foreign book, photograph, song, or work subject to a "restored" copyright
* although registration is optional, you can search the U.S. Copyright Office for restored works
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harry Potter postage
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DATE: 05/21/2004 11:54:23 PM
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The Australian post office has issued a line of Harry Potter stamps.
Link
(Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hilarious police encounter in Warsaw
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DATE: 05/21/2004 11:58:47 PM
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Side-splittingly funny account of a Polish expat who returned to Warsaw and got (very incompetently) mugged, then flagged down a vanload of completely bonkers cops who ran around the city, stopping trams and pointing at nuns, businessmen and other improbables and saying, "are these the kids who mugged you?"
Not surprisingly, most people's reaction at seeing a huge police van swerving wildly behind them was to hunker down and gradually go slower and slower. The papers were full of stories about an incident the week before in Poznan, where police had followed a car and then shot the driver dead without warning, only later figuring out that they had staked out the wrong apartment block. Just two days before my adventure, riot police in Lodz had mixed up live ammunition with rubber bullets used for crowd control; they had opened fire into a crowd of students, killing three people. 'Lie low , and hope to God they don't open fire' seemed a prudent strategy, so gradually the traffic around us started to crawl slower and slower.
Fortunately the van was not equipped with any kind of forward-mounted cannon, or Elmer would have surely started blowing little Skodas and Fiats out of the road in frustration. Instead he had to content himself with higher and higher flights of profanity, while the other cops and I held on for dear life. I hoped fervently none of the shotguns were loaded.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Embracing Asperger's
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DATE: 05/22/2004 12:01:06 AM
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There's a great article on Kuro5hin today about living with Asperger's -- the "Geek Syndrome" that imbues us with obsessive attention to (some) detail, a poor grasp of social cues, and a weird sense of humour.
Aspies tend to take an obsessive interest in detailed things. It is typical for an aspie to take an all-encompassing interest in something for a few months and later become interested in something else after having already learned enough about the first subject. In other words, we aspies have "weird," nerdy interests and hobbies.
This is a chicken-and-egg problem, of course. Do we aspies take up these perseverations because we are unable to occupy ourselves with more neurotypical (NT) (that is, something relating to nonautistics) socializing, or do our perseverations prevent us from socializing? Maybe it's a little bit of both.
Nevertheless, perseveration for me has meant spending my early teenage years learning how to program and becoming especially adept at using Windows. A little later it meant focusing on perfecting my French accent and reading French newspapers like Le Monde. Because of my perseverations, I have a more thorough understanding of history, politics, language, computers, psychology, geography, and numerous other subjects than the average person. In contrast, I have a deficit of knowledge about today's pop stars, actors, and social gossip. This sometimes makes it hard for people to have interesting conversations with me.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Minority != brown
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DATE: 05/22/2004 12:02:07 AM
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Great NYT correction. This is why I like the term "world majority":
An article last Wednesday about South Africa's wine industry referred incorrectly to Thabani Cellars, a winery there. It is not minority-owned. (As a black man, the owner, Jabulani Ntshangase, belongs to the country's majority.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Penis-englargement blog
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DATE: 05/22/2004 12:04:44 AM
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This guy wanted to see if penis enlargement pills worked, so he ordered some. Personal account augmented by a chart showing the size of his unit over time, in millimetres!
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sterling's Microsoft Research talk
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DATE: 05/22/2004 12:14:19 AM
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Bruce Sterling gave a screamingly funny talk at Microsoft Research last night, and Al Billings transcribed it on his blog.
This year I had a problem because there were 200 people in my audience and I say "Ok, everybody is going over to my house for beer!" and they say "Yay!" and 600 people show up at my party. They weren't the people in the audience. Half the people in the audience normally attend because it's on the last day and a lot of people leave anyway. They showed up and some kind of flash mob thing occurred. There was some kind of electronically assisted gathering happening at my house. Because people were showing up and they were showing up in buddy lists. It wasn't just the usual foot traffic of one and two people. There would be at half-past one...there were sudden clusters or armadas of taxis coming in from two or three directions and people would get out of the taxis and are name-checking each other and sort of clustering together and coming into the party in a mass. Guys are phone-camming the party. It's like "He's not kidding, look there's a keg here!" <snicka> <z.z.z.z.z> and off they come. Actresses are showing up, which is sort of interesting because there is never much cross-over into the film thing. Guys are coming up and saying "Bruce! Your party's full of hot chicks!" There are girls in lingerie tops with stiletto heels. They aren't actually partying. They're not eating. They're there to display themselves so they kind of swan anorexically through this crowd of unix sysadmins and they're, like... <Bruce makes really goofy surprised face> They're awe-struck. Somebody had told them that it was sort of necessary to go make the scene at the novelist's house and they sort of arrived in a bloc, united by phones, I assume, and then departed.
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(Thanks, Al!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chalabi used disinfo to point the US at Saddam
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DATE: 05/22/2004 12:22:59 AM
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The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that Ahmed Chalabi -- who's been getting millions of US tax-dollars to act as a kind of field-snitch for the US military/intelligence complex -- has been basically making it all up, feeding disinfo to the US in order to provoke war on Saddam.
"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cicadas, the new no-carb/hi-protein snackin' sensation
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DATE: 05/22/2004 10:43:25 AM
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This National Geographic story by John Roach [hehe, Roach] points out that those gazillions of "Brood X" cicadas unearthing themselves this month also double as an Atkins-compliant meal-on-the-go. Cicada McBuggets, anyone? Pass the dipping sauce.
"They're high in protein, low in fat, no carbs," said Gene Kritsky, a biologist and cicada expert at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. "They're quite nutritious, a good set of vitamins." The largest group of periodical cicadas, known as Brood X, have been crawling out of the ground and carpeting trees along the eastern United States for the past week or so. By July, Brood X will be gone--not to be heard from again for 17 years.
Link (Thanks, Mara!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hold the McBuggets, please! Man ill after gorging on fried cicadas
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DATE: 05/22/2004 03:56:27 PM
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Not so fast, cicada-snackers! An Indiana resident who fried then snarfed about 30 "Brood X" specimens had to seek medical treatment when the bug grub experiment caused a powerful allergic reaction. Apparently, some people with shellfish allergies can become very sick from eating the exoskeletous but Akins-friendly critters.
The man showed up at a Bloomington clinic Thursday covered from head-to-toe in hives, and sheepishly told a doctor he'd caught and ate the cicadas after sauteing them in butter with crushed garlic and basil. "He said they didn't taste too bad, but his wife didn't care for the aroma," said Dr. Al Ripani, the doctor who treated the man at Promptcare East.
Link to news article, and link to previous BoingBoing post (Thanks, Pete!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Deserted Japanese island photo gallery
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DATE: 05/22/2004 05:12:09 PM
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"Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called "Gunkanjima" that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Before long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world's once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its people disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.”" Link (Thanks, Philip!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EST at Infinity Plus
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DATE: 05/23/2004 12:48:35 AM
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The wonderful online sf mag Infinity Plus has just published an excerpt from my novel Eastern Standard Tribe.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Info-page on arrested Japanese P2P developer
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DATE: 05/23/2004 03:15:36 AM
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Here's a page with public information and a fundraising appeal to help Isamu Kaneko, the developer of the Japanese anonymizing P2P app Winny -- who was arrested for what amounts to "abetting infringement."
Isamu Kaneko, a very well-known software engineer and a research associate of Tokyo university, was arrested for creating a P2P software called 'Winny' which supports anonymous bulletin board and file-sharing.
Creating file-sharing software is completely legal in Japan. Therefore, police is justifying his arrest as for 'assisted two persons who illegally uploaded copyrighted materials using Winny'. This kind of stretch of the rules is a very serious threat to our freedom and rights.
Isamu was arrested May 10, 2004 in Tokyo, by Kyoto prefectural police. And still under detention without accusation.
Link
(Thanks, Goshuke!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nude coaster record
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DATE: 05/23/2004 03:19:11 AM
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A group in Surrey have set the world's record for largest group of naked people on a rollercoaster. Hope they sterilized the seats afterwards!
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Recursive documentary
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DATE: 05/23/2004 04:11:35 AM
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"The Making Of: The Documentary With This Tagline" is a recursive documentary -- a documentary about the making of itself. The trailer is a scream.
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(Thanks, Nick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MP3-ringtone converter
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DATE: 05/23/2004 04:18:46 AM
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There's a new app that will convert your MP3 to ringtones and the music industry is freaking out (despite the fact that phones like the P800, which can play an MP3 without any conversion as a ringtone, have been around for at least a year)
``It's problematic, because it has the potential to eviscerate the business model early in its development,'' said Ted Cohen, EMI Music's senior vice president of digital development and distribution.
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(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tiny, wicked Disneyland uniform pieces on eBay
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DATE: 05/23/2004 12:51:45 PM
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This Disneyland Parking Attendant coat and shirt on eBay look great, but they're way too small for me.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hardening an httpd for the rapture
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DATE: 05/23/2004 01:27:35 PM
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RaptureReady is a site devoted to getting ready for the end-times: this is from the FAQ:
How do you plan to maintain this site after the rapture?
I have no master plan for maintaining Rapture Ready all the way through the seven-year tribulation. After the big event takes place, I expect RR to last several months. After all, the internet was designed to survive a nuclear war. It should be able to survive the great catching up of all believers.
Link
(Thanks, Harley!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blog-checking a congresscritter
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DATE: 05/23/2004 02:53:24 PM
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My pal Pat Berry has decided to keep a close watch on Wally Herger, the rep from California's Second Congressional District, who is Pat's congresscritter. So Pat's sending him letters, asking him to answer for the government's mess in Iraq -- and other messes -- and blogging the congresscritter's form responses, with detailed, hyperlinked critiques. Pat doesn't expect Herge to stop talking bullshit as a result of being fact-checked, but he has high hopes for being a prominent search-engine result for the query "Wally Herger".
While there are no obvious points of contention here, it is meant to misdirect us from the fact that prisoner torture is wrong by pointing out that people want to hurt us. There will never be a time in history when somebody, somewhere will not want to hurt the United States or see us fail. In no way does this condone the torture of prisoners. It never has and it never will. Trying to associate the investigation with American weakness is a dirty trick. Compassion and a show of humanity is not weakness, nor is showing concern for a group of people other than ourselves. Also we must not let the fact that good things happen shield us from the horrors that happen in Iraq, they must be dealt with. For those honestly curious about the progress being made in Iraq, USAID has a site with extensive records and archives.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Brazilian heavy metal video game theme cover band
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DATE: 05/23/2004 05:49:54 PM
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What's that you say? You came to BoingBoing to find a link to a Brazilian heavy metal band that performs covers of videogame music? Well, that is good. Because "nino" from the Brazilian band MegaDriver tells us
"We have released two albums. "Metal Beast: Rise From Your Grave!" A tribute to the game Altered Beast, launched by Sega in 1988. The album contains the complete soundtrack from the game recreated in Heavy-Metal style. And "Metal Axe," A tribute to the game Golden Axe, launched by Sega in 1989. The band have also released an emulator project called "Metal Mame", based on the most popular Arcade emulator, MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). With "Metal Mame" the fans now can play the original Arcade game with their entire soundtrack remixed by the MegaDriver band. At the band's website there is also available their first "Demo CD", "PUSH START BUTTON", with classic songs from "Castlevania", "Streets Of Rage", "Top Gear", "Street Fighter", etc.
What I really want to know is -- como você diz o "mullet" no Português? Link to band website, and UPDATE: Link to "mullet-in-Portuguese" answer.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WiFi surveillance cams in London
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DATE: 05/23/2004 08:33:32 PM
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From the BBC News today, a story about the unwiring of (overabundant) surveillance cams.
In the UK there is one CCTV camera for every 14 people. If you are in London, you could be caught on camera up to 300 times a day. But the cameras are expensive, and once you have installed one, and laid all the wires back to base, it is fixed and cannot move. This means if a crime hotspot moves round the corner, you cannot see it. Westminster City Council in London have come up with a solution - CCTV cameras without wires, which broadcast their pictures back to base using the council's new wireless network.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Camera phones in Iraq; digicams and truth in wartime
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DATE: 05/23/2004 09:21:39 PM
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SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF POST
London's "The Business" newspaper (aka the Sunday Business) reported this weekend that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered a ban on camera phones and other mobile imaging devices in US army installations in Iraq. The story was subsequently cited in numerous online news reports, including UPI and AFP, and blogged abundantly.
Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones. "Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.
This morning, I asked a Defense Department spokesperson whether or not the reports of a phonecam ban were true. This spokesperson said that these reports were technically inaccurate -- that the Pentagon is not issuing a new ban on camera phones per se, but that a Directive 8100.2 was issued on April 14 establishing new restrictions on wireless telecommunications equipment in general. The text of this directive is available online here in PDF format: Link. The intent of this April 14 directive, and how commanders in the field will be expected to enforce it, are matters I'll be reporting on in more detail for the NPR program "Day to Day," later this week.
Link to cameraphone ban report, Link to full Rumsfeld "running around with digital cameras" quote. See also this Chicago Tribune editorial by Clarence Page, "Weapons of Mass Photography." (thanks also to Joi's blog and Smartmobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Giants among us photoshopping
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DATE: 05/24/2004 12:02:22 AM
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Today on a very special Worth1000 photoshopping contest: "Giants Among Us" -- off-scale people matted into everyday scenes.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Futurama panoramas stitched from frame-grabs
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DATE: 05/24/2004 12:04:39 AM
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These Futurama panoramas are created by taking screengrabs from successive frames of long panning shots in Futurama, then stitching them together.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Quincy punk-rock clips
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DATE: 05/24/2004 12:08:10 AM
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Here's a collection of video-clips from the notorious Quincy "punk rock" episode, where Quincy asks the musical question: "Can punk rock kill?" (Personally, I prefer the CHiPS punk episode -- "I diiig paaaaain!")
Link
(Thanks, roboto!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Future of Palladium
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DATE: 05/24/2004 12:14:23 AM
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Here are Peter "Palladium Pete" Biddle's slides on the latest plans for Microsoft's "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base," the trusted computing technology that used to be called Palladium.
1.9MB PowerPoint Link
(Thanks, Wes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Design critique of Jakob Nielsen
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DATE: 05/24/2004 12:30:59 AM
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Jakob Nielsen is a legendary usability crank who writes great little columns called "AlertBoxes" wherein he runs down his best practices for one or another element of usability (I always forget to read these because I can't find any RSS or Atom for Jakob's site and it updates too infrequently to put it in my regular Moz tab-group bookmark; nevertheless, some of Nielsen's pieces, like the Microcontent thing from 1998 have been very influential in my blogging style)
Last week's AlertBox was about link-style, and it's pretty good and sensible. But, like all of the AlertBoxen, it is ugly as hell.
Enter "Design Eye for the Usability Guy." Five designers, who have clearly been scorched by Nielsen's legendary rants about the primacy of usability over design, take on Nielsen's AlertBox house-style in a kind of overblown, gushy tone, and undertake to remodel Jakob's image so that his site is both usable and beautiful. It's funny, subversive and in the words of the Cos, "you may learn something before it's done. Hey! Hey! Hey!"
Last time I checked it wasn't illegal to use illustrations to spice up your web site. Now, before we go wild let us remember that Nielsen's not exactly the nothing-but-prada-shoes type of guy. So, I settled with a clean, icon-like style that will reinforce each guideline visually. The colours used are basic: red for links, blue for hover and shades of gray and black for other text. Again, let's try to stick with a style that somehow matches his current branding.
To translate the general concept of links into something simple I've chosen to use an underlined letter "a," applied to an assortment of situations that exemplify each guideline. The font used is Georgia, which happens to work nicely and is very much ubiquitous.
Link
(Thanks, Danny!)
Update: here are a couple of scraped RSS feeds off of AlertBox: one from Bootleg RSS (Scraped Feeds For A Better World); one from NewsIsFree. (Thanks, Carlo and Simon!).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WTF-2 in London this Saturday
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DATE: 05/24/2004 02:34:32 AM
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The next WTFCon is in London this Saturday: it's a one-day convention devoted to hackery subjects.
* An open space gathering and conference of various groups, projects, people, and organisations active and interested in creating a better world.
* Action and not just talk. Too many social forums and gatherings result with little or no outcome. Come and propose and gain support for actions during Soho Summit, ESF, G8, GDR etc.
* An assembly of gifts and needs: tell everyone what your projects are all about, what they have to offer, and what they need. Together we have everything. Let's self-organise and share!
* About working together, many of us have shared principles despite our diverse goals. No more either or!
Link
(Thanks, Tav!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Silly season googlebombing
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DATE: 05/24/2004 06:25:13 AM
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Some GOPers are googlebombing John Kerry's site with the word "waffles," and Kerry's supporters are fighting back with a Google AdWord buy for "waffles" that goes to a page on Bush's waffling.
I think that this googlebombing stuff is highly overrated. For starters, who googles the word "waffles?" What should be the canonical link for "waffles?" It's really self-reflexive: the nominal point of a googlebomb is to hijack a common search-term to misdirect searchers (i.e., the neo-Nazis who bombed the string "jew"), but in fact, a single-word query for "jew" is a pretty weird thing to punch into Google: "Hmm, I wonder why my neighbor takes every Friday night off and lights a candle. Wonder if it's cos he's Jewish? I know, I'll type 'jew' into Google and see if there's anything about Friday nights and candles in the top ten results."
In fact, the point of a googlebomb is to acheive the googlebomb and then publicize it: "Look, if you search for 'more evil than satan,' you get the Microsoft home-page, hardy-har-har." But those who argue that they've scored some kind of victory here are nuts: no one searches for "more evil than satan" -- unless someone tells them that there's a funny googlebomb on the other end.
When I was a kid, we had all these "calculator games" -- addition, subtraction and multiplication routines that would yield a string on the LCD, that, when inverted, would spell out a word. I remember one "dirty" one that spelled out "BOOBLESS" (55378008). At the time, it felt like we'd really gotten one in against The Man, by somehow convincing a pocket-calculator to kinda-sorta spit out a word we weren't allowed to say in polite company, but the joke got old fast. For starters, "BOOBLESS" isn't a (very) dirty word, and more importantly, it just didn't make the calculator dirty to get it to spit this out.
By the same token, "WAFFLES" isn't that common a naked query, and convincing Google to spit out John Kerry's homepage (or an AdWord for an anti-Bush page) isn't gonna score you any points with the people looking for info on waffles -- the most it can acheive is the (very) faintly humorous spectacle of the Kerry homepage coming up on this improbable query.
Hardy har har.
The campaign has purchased Google AdWords, sponsored links that come up beside results when certain words are searched. The short links also refer to Kerry's website, but suggest users "read about President Bush's Waffles."
"When we heard people were linking the word 'waffles' with John Kerry, our thought was, 'This is ridiculous,'" said Morra Aarons, Internet grass-roots coordinator for John Kerry for President. "But our solution was to fight fire with fire."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to unlock your phone
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DATE: 05/24/2004 06:26:52 AM
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On Popular Science, an article on getting your mobile phone unlocked. Here in London, there're shops that advertise phone unlocking on practically every block, but it's almost unheard-of in the USA:
While number portability may have freed your cell digits, your phone is still a ball and chain, locked into one carrier's service. These subsidy locks keep you from walking away before the provider can recover that big discount you got when you bought the phone.
But it doesn't have to be so. If you have a GSM phone, you can unlock it and switch to any GSM network carrier (the big three are AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile). You can also take an unlocked phone overseas (most of the world uses GSM) and use it on a local network to avoid paying for international roaming, or even buy a European phone (they tend to be ahead of us in cell tech) and use it here. Have an old phone lying around? Unlock it and keep it as a spare.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sweet-looking Rollerball-chic speakers
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DATE: 05/24/2004 06:29:56 AM
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These new Afterlab speakers look hella cool.
Link
(Thanks, Adnan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ozarks commune turns 30
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DATE: 05/24/2004 06:36:00 AM
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Tri sez, "I know some of these guys myself. They come into my library regularly and max out the two or three cards that the members share."
They may have been dreamers, but this month, East Wind's 75 members celebrated the 30th anniversary of their enduring -- and thriving -- community. East Wind recently paid off a loan on an additional 883 acres, its business ventures are worth more than $2.5 million, and it is building a new machine shop and bathhouse.
Link
(Thanks, Tri!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chicago replaces cows with celebrity-designed Mickey Mice
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DATE: 05/24/2004 06:39:08 AM
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Jim sez, "The new online magazine Chicagoist has an article on 15 giant Mickey Mouse statues that will be on display on State Street in downtown Chicago until the middle of July."
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Rushkoff's new graphic novel
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DATE: 05/24/2004 08:23:35 AM
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Boing Boing pal Douglas Rushkoff's neuron-annihilating comic Club Zero-G, first serialized in BPM magazine, has finally been compiled and expanded into a full-length graphic novel. Published by the demented souls at Disinformation, the book features art by Canadian cartoonist Steph Dumais.
"The story follows Zeke, a gangly, unpopular, 19-year-old college student - a townie who also happens to attend the elite college in his community - who has discovered a terrific new club where he is accepted and popular. There's only one catch: everyone at the club is dreaming. It only exists in the shared dream consciousness of its participants. If at all.
For there's the rub: Zeke's friends think he is simply going crazy. His girlfriend in the club won't even acknowledge his existence in real life.
As Zeke descends further into the Club Zero-G reality, he learns that this shared dream space is actually a psychic field created by four mutant children from the future - the last of their kind, conceived by human space travelers in zero gravity and exhibiting strange deformities and abilities. Living in a future where independent thinking is considered a threat to "consensus," they are hunted by the authorities, and seek the help of teens from the 21st century who, they hope, can still alter the course of reality.
But Zeke eventually learns this is all a set-up, and he is being used by the militaries of the present and the future as a portal into the psychic field of the Zero-G kids, so they can be destroyed. Unless, of course, he is just going mad." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Prankster puts toy dinosaur in front of volcano-cam
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DATE: 05/24/2004 12:43:24 PM
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Scientists have set up a webcam overlooking an active volcano crater in New Zealand. Someone has put a little toy Dino (from the Flintstones) in front of the camera. Click on thumbnail for enlargement. Article Link, Webcam Link. (Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cheap missile launcher kills US troops
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DATE: 05/24/2004 12:57:51 PM
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Kevin sez: "This is a great piece about the 'most valuable weapon, worldwide' the Russian shoulder launched missle, RPG -- the one hurting the US in Iraq."
This cheap little dealie, nothing but a launcher tube and a few rockets shaped like two ice-cream cones glued together, has kicked our ass (and Russia's too) all over the world since back when the Beatles were still together. In fact, more and more guerrilla armies are making the RPG their basic infantry weapon, with the AK used to protect the RPG gunners, who provide the offensive punch. The Chechens fighting the Russian Army are so high on it that they've switched their three-man combat teams from two riflemen and an RPG gunner to two RPG gunners with a rifleman to protect them.
There's another stat that's even more important right now: the RPG has inflicted more than half--half!--of US casualties in Iraq. This is the weapon that's hurting us. And it's been doing that for one hell of a long time.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Solid gold chewing gum package to be given in contest
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DATE: 05/24/2004 01:25:03 PM
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Japanese gum company Lotte is having a contest to give away a life-size replica of its gum package, made of pure gold. The package opens so you can take out the 9 solid gold sticks of gum, each weighing 100 grams. Total intrinsic value: $90,000. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Leaked docs show the CEA standing up (finally) to the RIAA
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DATE: 05/24/2004 01:45:51 PM
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The RIAA is arm-twisting the FCC over a "broadcast flag" for digital radio, to keep you from recording and saving digital radio broadcasts. They're trying to get the Consumer Electronics people -- who sold us all out in the digital TV Broadcast Flag fight -- to play along, but this time around, the CEA has grown a spine and is pushing back. JD Lasica wrote a piece for Mindjack on this, but more interesting is the leaked correspondance between the RIAA and the CEA, in which the CEA tears the RIAA a new one over the unbelievable, suicidal stupidity of restricting the ability of end-users to record digital radio signals.
You state that you do not wish to limit the ability of consumers to record over-the-air radio broadcasts. Instead, you apparently want to force them to buy what they have received for free since Fleming and Marconi first made it possible for consumers to hear news and music over the public airwaves. As you know, we have long been concerned about content owners seeking to change the 'play' button on our devices to a 'pay' button.
(Thanks, JD and Donald!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Picture of a guy duct-taped to the ceiling
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DATE: 05/24/2004 01:53:19 PM
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I know as much about this picture as you do. Link (Cory blogged the source two years ago.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How weak copyright helps authors
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DATE: 05/24/2004 02:10:35 PM
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Suw Charman has written a great article on book-authors who release their work on CC, focusing on the amazing story of the collaborative audiobook project for Lessig's Free Culture.
Most people are very aware of worth these days. eBay gives value to junk that might previously have been given away. Amazon sells second-hand books that might otherwise have been taken to a charity shop. The Antiques Roadshow raises the possibility that the horrendously ugly teapot you inherited from your Aunt Bessie might actually be worth hundreds, if not thousands of pounds.
Worth. Everything has a worth. Things. Words. Music. Everything. And everyone who owns anything worth something is not only entitled to benefit from the full extent of that worth, but should also do their utmost to protect it. Only a fool gives away something for nothing. That's right, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Link
(Thanks, Suw!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How *do* you say "mullet" in Portuguese?
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DATE: 05/24/2004 02:23:51 PM
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Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post about a Brazilian heavy metal band that plays covers of video game theme songs, BoingBoing reader
Carlos says:
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is probably not as fun as it might seem... we still say 'mullet', there's just no translation of that word... but then, fortunately, mullets were not as popular here as they were in the US of A...
Link to previous post
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Pescovitz interviews RU Sirius May 25 in San Francisco
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DATE: 05/24/2004 02:40:57 PM
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Dawn 2004 is an all-night music/performance event tomorrow (Tuesday) night in San Francisco in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. It's $15 for the entire night of eclectic programming: Russel Simins from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Broun Fellinis, Heather Gold, DJ Polywog, and a host of other artists. At 10pm, I'm conducting a live interview with RU Sirius about his forthcoming book, Counterculture Through the Ages. Please stop by if you can!
"RU Sirius (aka Ken Goffman) and David Pescovitz take a mind-expanding trip though history to uncover the common threads of counterculture that link biblical Abraham to the Socratics, the revolutionaries of the Enlightenment, the Yippies of the 1960s, and the hacktivists of today. Sirius will reveal how countercultures-- anti-authoritarian, changeable, antic movements that revolutionize mainstream culture--are a powerful and necessary catalyst for the continued evolution of the human species."
Link (Thanks, Birdman!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dance Dance Revolution as teen weightloss aid
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DATE: 05/24/2004 04:09:18 PM
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This CNN piece follows the tales of formerly supersized boy and girl geeks who shed *lots* of unwanted weight playing the wacky Japanese electronic game "Dance Dance Revolution." In DDR, players stomp around on a grid of brightly lit squares while hyperfast techno music blares at them from a video display unit. There's also a home version, which sells for under US$50.
As she cooled herself in front of a fan at a video arcade, two teenage boys danced on a machine nearby. Their sneakers pounded out a staccato rhythm at a pace so fast that "Lord of the Dance"'s Michael Flatley would be envious.
Not everyone sees dramatic results. Seventeen-year-old Justin Meeks says his body is more toned, but his weight hasn't changed. He's pleased to point out, though, that his dancing skills have helped him get girls. "Two. I'm guilty of that," Justin said with a grin as he watched friends play DDR.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jim Woodring handpressed prints
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DATE: 05/24/2004 04:47:59 PM
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Art doesn't get any better than this. Look at this gorgeous portfolio of four prints by cartoonist Jim Woodring, using a special embossed printing process. The packaging is a beautiful Woodring-designed wonder, too. $300 and limited to 80 portfolios. According to an email I got from Woodring; they're going fast. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: A darker tale of DDR -- theft, hot chicks, destruction
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DATE: 05/24/2004 10:09:25 PM
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Dance Dance Revolution, the legendary electronic game cited in a CNN piece today, is apparently capable of inspiring both good and eeeeevil. Here's the sordid tale of a midwestern fanatic who became a thief to support his DDR habit.
Giles thought of himself as old school; he'd learned to play on early versions of DDR with dimly lit arrows, poor graphics and no speed modifiers, circa 2001. He called new players who sucked "nubs." He was certain he had groupies. "In every arcade, we have what's called a fan club," he says. "A group of girls, normally underage, that are just desperately, madly obsessed with us."
Before things turned bad, Giles would dance against anyone willing to do battle: the stud-wearing punk, the overweight high school kid, the middle-aged Sprint worker, the preteen with the overprotective mother. "It's not just some little stompy-stompy crap," he says. "It can go crazy on you."
When he danced, he moved so fast his sneakers began to blur. Sweat beaded and fell from his brow like raindrops. Following the arrows, his feet accelerated in time, playing the commands like a musical score.
Link (Thanks, Joel Johnson!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 300 images from 1800 sites
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DATE: 05/24/2004 10:28:34 PM
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This lovely little website is the result of a sort of online pixel scavenger hunt:
I started gathering little, iconesque web images for myself so that I could compare, contrast, and study the techniques used by other graphic artists on the web. My initial pool of images looked so interesting that I decided to continue methodically hunting and capturing the icons for a public display piece. The purpose of this document is not to copy the intellectual property of others, but rather as a jumping-off point for your own unique web graphic projects. It's for Brainstorming, if you will.
I roughly estimate that for every six web sites I scoured, I was able to acquire one graphic image. I visited only Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industry leaders, and the very largest online news publishers. Approximately 1800 web sites later, I have this collection of 300 of the most interesting, unique, and beautiful formations of pixels to display.
Link (Thanks, Sean!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fake-magazine cover photoshopping contest
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DATE: 05/24/2004 11:40:20 PM
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There are some great entries in this Something Awful fake-mag-cover photoshopping contest, but Internet Tough Guy is hands-down the funniest.
Link
(Thanks, Soren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Iliad as IMs
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DATE: 05/24/2004 11:42:32 PM
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Microsoft has commissioned an IM-speak translation of The Iliad to promote its new IM client; book two is compressed to a mere 24 "words":
Agamemnon hd a dream: Troy not defended. Ordered attack! But Trojans knew they were coming n were prepared. Achilles sat sulking in his tent.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AT&T: the hollow phone company
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DATE: 05/24/2004 11:47:37 PM
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Kevin Werbach has a cool perspective on the fact that AT&T has divested itself of its physical and cellular networks: it has become a "virtual" phone company. (Remember the spectrum docket where AT&T was all about the open spectrum? Maybe this virtual telco thing makes phone companies less evil?)
AT&T is hollowing itself out -- and that's a good thing. Under Dave Dorman, AT&T has invested heavily in building a true all-IP backbone and deploying VOIP offerings. Following the sale of AT&T Wireless to Cingular and AT&T's subsequent deal with Sprint PCS, AT&T is poised to offer a full suite of wireless offerings without the cost of owning a cellular network. And it is still the biggest player in the lucrative business services market, with a national brand second to none.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Doctors' neckties harbour disease
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DATE: 05/24/2004 11:48:48 PM
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Doctors who wear neckties may look more competent and reassuring, but their cravattes are actually disease-harbouring pest-farms of neck-grease, sweat, and plague germs.
Researchers found that nearly half of the ties worn by medical workers harboured bacteria which could cause disease.
Clinicians were eight times more likely to wear a tie carrying bacteria than by hospital security staff.
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(via Stross)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NES wristband
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DATE: 05/25/2004 12:04:34 AM
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Piers sez, "A couple of Christmases ago, my friend Harry made me this wristband out of an orignal NES controller. He stripped the PCB, wiring and buttons out of it, and baked it in the oven over half a tin can, bent to form-fit his wrist. It melted over the can, then he took it out, put the buttons back in, glued it and sealed it with silicone or something. He even shortened the cord and had it coming out the end so the plug could join on to a loop of elastic to hold it on."
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(Thanks, Piers!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hack your own ringtones
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DATE: 05/25/2004 12:05:59 AM
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This week on Engadget's HOWTO section: how to hack your own ringtones for the P900:
I bought a CD and use it in my alarm clock (a lot of alarm clocks have that as a feature)- Should I pay $3 for that? Perhaps, seems weird to me. Sometimes when the phone rings I whistle a popular tune from a CD I bought, do I need to pay for that? America is a great place, we have fair use- it’s why we’re great innovators and heck- making stuff for our phones for our own personal use goes beyond fair use. In this week’s how to we show you how to make your own ring tones, for just your phone, for just personal use, from the CD you just bought.
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(Thanks, pt!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Christian P2P: is it a sin?
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DATE: 05/25/2004 12:10:33 AM
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Fascinating Salon piece about the moral debate among Christian teens over whether P2P file-sharing for gospel music is a sin.
"Being faithful to your friends, giving them something for free, is more important than any kind of moral allegiance to a record company. Whether a teenager is a committed Christian, of a different faith or just has no religious affiliation, some of the patterns of how they make decisions transcend religious input," Kinnaman says. He believes that to change those kids' attitudes, you'd have to somehow influence those networks of friends, not just tell the kids that what they're doing is wrong.
Another complication: For some Christian kids Barna studied, sharing the religious hits that express their faith is their way of spreading the word. "They wanted it to be part of their ministry. They wanted to share some of the positive messages from their music with non-believers. It's an evangelistic impulse." He compared it to the old saw about the stolen Bible: "If someone came and stole my Bible, I'd be happy that they stole it, because they needed it."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HalfLife casemod
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DATE: 05/25/2004 12:17:33 AM
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This HalfLife-inspired casemod is jaw-droppingly cool.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DDR is not eeeevil! Game enthusiasts respond
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DATE: 05/25/2004 05:39:34 AM
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A member of the Kansas City Dance Dance Revolution club -- which was profiled in this rather dark tale of a guy who steals to support his DDR habit -- responds:
I am the site admin of DDRKC.com. The author of this article approached us a few months ago claiming to want to write a positive publicity piece about the Kansas City local area Dance Dance Revolution scene. They interviewed a number of us, who all spoke about the comraderie and positive aspects of having a virtual community based around DDR. If you read the article, you will note that NONE of this information was used. Instead, they decided to focus on the personal exploits of a single person who was doing stupid and illegal activities. What that has to do with DDR, I have no idea. It's like creating an expose on how bloggers are evil and engaged in illegal activities just because one of them decided to go shoplift something. It completely misrepresents for only DDR as a whole, but DDRKC and the local players as well. Here is a link to the community reaction to the article.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Should Kerry draft Nader?
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DATE: 05/25/2004 06:41:44 AM
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John Gilmore sez, "If Kerry had the sense to pick Nader as his VP, they'd unify the
anti-Bush ranks and eliminate the chance of a significant protest vote.
Nader polls at 4%, which would put Kerry over the top. Independent voters have noticed the remarkably similar platforms of
Bush and Kerry re the Iraq war (they're for it), Guantanamo (they're
for indefinite imprisonment without judicial review), the Patriot Act
(they're for it), and many other issues like the drug war (they're for
it). If independents could vote at least one honest person into one
party's administration, known for blowing the whistle when needed,
they would be a lot more inclined to do so."
The Washington Post did a poll and said ...
It found Bush in a dead heat with Democratic candidate Massachusetts
Senator John Kerry in the presidential race.
Forty-six percent of registered voters said they would vote for Bush
if the election were held today; 46 percent said they would support
Kerry and 4 percent said they would back independent Ralph Nader, the
poll said.
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dope enters an MMO
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DATE: 05/25/2004 06:47:01 AM
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The game Achnea has introduced a virtual narcotic called gleam:
Achaea characters who take gleam get hooked quickly -- suffering typical addiction symptoms: violent vomiting, shivering, irrational sobbing, begging for the drug and even overdoses resulting in death. Some of the game's players are angry about gleam's introduction into their world.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scorching critique of some arguments for copyright
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DATE: 05/25/2004 07:28:26 AM
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Mark Lemley, a UC Berkeley law prof, has just published a paper on copyright called "Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property," that's a good, fast read. Lemley says that in copyright's early days, the justificaiton for the auhtor's monopoly was to give authors the incentive to crete new works, but that today, we have the "ex ante" arguments that copyright also gives authors the incentive to exploit their creations -- to make more of them once they are created -- and to "steward" them by ensuring that only good, quality derivative works enter the market.
Without saying much about the idea that copyright can be a good incentive to create, Lemley tears these other arguments for copyright to shreds, in a highly entertaining fashion:
The argument that a single company is better positioned than the market to make efficient use of an idea should strike us as jarringly counterintuitive in a market economy. Our normal supposition is that the invisible hand of the market will work by permitting different companies to compete with each other. It is competition, not the skill or incentives of any given firm, that drives the market to efficiency. Nothing about the fact that a work was once subject to copyright or patent protection should change our intuition here. It is hard to imagine Senators, lobbyists, and scholars arguing with a straight face that the government should grant one company the perpetual right to control the sale of all paper clips in the country, on the theory that otherwise no one will have an incentive to make and distribute paper clips.24 We know from long experience that companies will make and distribute paper clips if they can sell them for more than it costs to supply them. The market for paper clips functions just fine without this type of government intervention. We can also predict with some confidence that if we did grant one company the exclusive right to make paper clips, the likely result would be an increase in the price and a decrease in the supply of paper clips. Yet supporters of the CTEA confidently predict exactly the opposite in the case of copyrighted works from the 1920s.
164k PDF Link
(via Freedom to Tinker)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Relief fund for burned-out blogger
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DATE: 05/25/2004 07:37:46 AM
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Joey DeVilla has a blog entry on a Boston blogger whose house burned down this weekend: there's a PayPal donation box to help the poor guy out.
About 5 or 10 minutes later I started smelling smoke and heard my dad looking in the attic outside my room. It was now he started screaming, "The house is REALLY on fire. Get anything you can and get out!" He said this as he walked down the stairs and when he came back in after putting something outside.
I was a bit panicked and shaken but I grabbed my backpack and threw my computers in it and put on some pants. I should have probably put on the pants with my wallet in them, but for some reason I didn't. And I should have probably got a jacket as well seeing as it is so cold now.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robot Origami
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DATE: 05/25/2004 09:16:36 AM
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New Scientist reports on the graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University we've linked to previously who built a robot that can make simple origami constructions. The work is aimed at developing robotic systems that can manipulate various materials encountered in daily life. From researcher Devin Balkcom's site:
"Why origami? Origami is a fresh challenge for the field of robotic manipulation. Paper is flexible; robots are best at manipulating rigid things. Even if we model origami as an articulated rigid body (by building our origami out of really stiff cardboard with hinges along creases), it still has a complicated mechanical structure." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mobile phones get voice-over-Internet capability
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DATE: 05/25/2004 09:22:16 AM
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I wrote a piece for TheFeature.com about i2 Internet's new device , the InternetTalker MG-3, which allows mobile phones to make VoIP calls.
Here’s how the MG-3 works: first, you have to sign up for VoIP service with a company that resells i2 Telecom’s hardware and network access. You’ll get the MG-3, a little plastic box stuffed with microchips, which you plug into your broadband connection and existing phone line. Then, when you want to make a long distance call with your mobile, you just call your home number. The MG-3 will recognize the mobile’s number using Caller ID, and connect you to i2 Telecom’s VoIP network. You get a second dial tone, and you can make your overseas call. Want to talk to somebody in China? You’ll get charged 5 cents a minute. Cingular has been having a great time charging you $3.49 a minute for making the same call.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Slideshow of prefabricated houses
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DATE: 05/25/2004 09:39:48 AM
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Time magazine has a short slideshow of kit-built and pre-fab houses. (Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house shown here.) Link
(When I was in New Zealand, I looked at a great prefab house on Waiheke Island.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR -- digicams and Iraq
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DATE: 05/25/2004 09:57:17 AM
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Today on the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I talk with host Alex Chadwick about discredited news reports that US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld issued an edict banning phonecams in Iraq -- as well as the confirmed release of a new Pentagon directive (PDF) outlining new restrictions on consumer wireless tech at DoD installations worldwide. While there may not be a Pentagon-issued ban on phonecams or connected digital cameras per se, there do appear to be new efforts under way to address the proliferation of those technologies in the military theater and throughout the DoD's "information grid." Alex says,
The images of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the photos of returning soldiers' coffins -- we see them because of this technology. And it's caught defense officials off-guard.
Link to Day to Day "Xeni Tech: Phonecams and the Front Lines" (online audio available after 12PM PT, station search here)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: History of cartoon rabbit meat spokesman
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DATE: 05/25/2004 10:16:01 AM
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Gary sez:
Thought you'd appreciate this: a Lileks-esque saga about Petey, Gerald McBoingboing-esque spokeskid for Pel-Freez Rabbit Meat. Truly. The saga goes on and on. Fans start drawing Petey, hare-larity ensues. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Arsonist Pin-up poster art
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DATE: 05/25/2004 01:02:42 PM
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New York artist Richie Fahey creates hand-colored black-and-white photographs inspired by pulp paperback covers from the 1930s-1960s. Right now on eBay, there are Giclee limited edition Fahey prints of a girl gone to town to burn it down. Link to Fahey's site. Link to eBay item. (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: NanoKabbalah
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DATE: 05/25/2004 02:31:16 PM
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Howard Lovy's NanoBot blog brings us some particularly surreal text by Rabbi Yehuda Berg (er, Madonna's rabbi):
"...... The genius of nanotechnology is the reduction of space. Smaller is infinitely more powerful...It seems that scientists on the cutting edge of nanotechnology are reaching the same conclusions about space as did the kabbalists thousands of years ago." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fox News -- I just SMSed to say ILU.
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DATE: 05/25/2004 04:17:39 PM
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I was interviewed for this Fox News story about text-messaging and romance. Bottom line in my book of digital dating manners for well-bred nerds: hot-n-heavy haiku, fone-flirting, and pickup lines by text are all hot. Breaking up by SMS is not -- but it's also not entirely uncommon, particularly among late teens and twentysomethings. Link to "Language of Love for the High-Tech Set."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Regarding the Torture of Others
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DATE: 05/25/2004 05:27:54 PM
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If you haven't already: read Susan Sontag's piece on the images from Abu Ghraib, published in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges.
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Condoleezza Rice Pudding with Berries of Mass Destruction
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DATE: 05/25/2004 06:46:17 PM
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From Amateur Gourmet -- the guy who brought you "Janet Jackson breast cupcakes" oh so many memes ago -- comes a recipe inspired by the U.S. National Security Advisor: Condoleezza Rice Pudding with Berries of Mass Destruction. Snipped from the comment boards: "I'm thinking this needs to be accompanied by a high-fiber dish to be known as Colon Pow!" Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cool ringtones, at what cost?
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DATE: 05/25/2004 06:49:26 PM
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Today I thought about the fact that I can legally download the latest hit song for less than US$1 but a sample of the same tune used as a ringtone costs twice as much or more. Who's to blame? The record industry, of course.
According to this Reuters article, mono and poly ringtones bring the original artists and music publishers a 10 percent royalty while the record labels don't get squat. But "sample" ringtones are clipped from studio recordings, requiring a license from the record label. And they're happy to sell those rights to the tune of 25 to 55 percent of the total retail price of each ringtone. As a result, the resellers are jacking up their prices.
I think this will only drive more people to make their own "sample" ringtones and trade them. As a matter of fact, record labels themselves stand to benefit from giving away "sample" ringtones. Talk about infectious grooves! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Clothed nudes photoshopping
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DATE: 05/25/2004 11:40:31 PM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: put clothes on famous nudes. It's positively aschroftian.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese Broadcast Flag -- welcome to the crappy future of TV
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DATE: 05/25/2004 11:44:41 PM
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The Japanese Broadcast Flag has gone into effect. Like its American cousin, this is a technology mandate that restricts how you can use the shows that show up on your own television, on the grounds that you might be some kinda eyepatch-wearing-pirate. 'Course, the broadcast flag doesn't really stop you from capturing analog signals and putting their programming online; no, this is a measure that is 100% ineffective at stopping "piracy" and 100% effective at stopping new tech like VCRs from being invented without the permission of the movie studios.
Because programs that have been copied once cannot be duplicated or edited digitally, editing the programs via a personal computer has become impossible.
In addition, the broadcasters' move has made it necessary for viewers to insert a special user identification card, known as a B-CAS card, into their digital TV sets to watch programs.
These duplication controls are being applied to digital TV programs aired by both digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasters.
In the week after the measure was implemented, NHK and the grouping of private broadcasters received more than 15,000 inquiries and complaints about the scheme.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons ships 2.0 licenses
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DATE: 05/26/2004 02:21:47 AM
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The new Creative Commons licenses are out -- wahoo! The new licenses clarify and refine the initial terms of the 1.0 licenses, and CC has posted good, clear commentary explaining the changes.
Unlike the 1.0 licenses, the 2.0 licenses include language that makes clear that licensors' disclaim warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness, etc. As readers of this blog know by now, the decision to drop warranties as a standard feature of the licenses was a source of much organizational soul-searching and analytical thinking for us. Ultimately we were swayed by a two key factors: (1) Our peers, most notably, Karl Lenz, Dan Bricklin, and MIT. (2) The realization that licensors could sell warranties to risk-averse, high-exposure licensees interested in the due diligence paper trial, thereby creating nice CC business model. (See the Prelinger Archive for a great example of this free/fee, as-is/warranty approach.) You can find extensive discussion of this issue in previous posts on this blog. (See Section 5.)
Link
(Thanks, A. S. Bradbury!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Digital Photography Hacks: geek out with your digital cam
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DATE: 05/26/2004 02:30:50 AM
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I am no photographer, but ever since I bought my first Casio Exilim camera (I'm on my third now, and I can't recommend them enough -- small, light, easy and durable, I carry mine everywhere and always) I've found myself shooting nearly every day.
Not being a photog, I'm pretty pig-ignorant on subjects like focus, depth-of-field, ISO, and so forth.
I just scored O'Reilly's new Digital Photography Hacks, written by the inestimable Derrick Story, s geeek's geek and a photographer's photographer, whose work I've admired for years. Derrick's new book follows the form of all the O'Reilly Hacks books: 100 easy-to-digest tips and tricks for digital cams, aimed squarely at people like me, geeks who get computers but cameras not so much.
These hacks are just what I needed to start to get my head around more advanced phototaking. Passages like "The flow of traffic provides a great opportunity to add motion to your compositions. Automobiles are light-painting machines, and it's easy to put them to work for you" (emphasis mine) really did me in: automobiles are light-painting machines! Wow! Suddenly, the whole world looked different.
There are many many great hacks in this book, but my favorite is #47: Judge Image Sharpness From File Size. If you've taken a bunch of photos of the same subject and want to determine which one is sharpest, compare the file-size. Images that have more information will compress poorly, which means that the biggest files in your shoot are likely the sharpest. Keen.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Donald Duck remixed with everything
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DATE: 05/26/2004 05:24:30 AM
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Die Duckumenta is an exhibit of remixes of the iconographic phiz of Donald Duck with great works of visual art down through the ages. Wonderful.
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(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US troops kidnapping family members of Ba'athists and locking them in Abu Ghraib
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DATE: 05/26/2004 05:42:06 AM
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This is a heart-rending account of an Iraqi woman whose father was a low-ranking Ba'athist. US troops came to bring him in for questioning, but he was out of the country, getting prostate surgery, so they kidnapped her husband, took him to Abu Ghraib, and declared him to have "intelligence value." The prison guards -- whom the Red Cross have documented as torturing others with "intelligence value" -- tell her that she can have her husband back if she produces her father. I read this and I ask myself: how can the US ever convince the Iraqi people of their goodwill sufficiently to abide under a US-declared "democratic ruler?" How will the US ever get out of Iraq and what kind of hollowed-out, failed state will it leave in its wake?
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(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My Canada includes AccordionGuy
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DATE: 05/26/2004 05:55:52 AM
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Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla, a Filipino-born Canadian, has written a spirited editorial in response to a jackass racist blogger who asserts that the Canadians who died in the Boer War (!) and elsewhere certainly didn't intend for Toronto to be annexed by the "Third World," and says that the non-whites of Canada are less Canadian, with "no knowledge or affection for the old Canada, in either their hearts or minds."
Joey's response: "Fuck you, eh." And the banner, above.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Game Guilds are "distributed cognition"
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DATE: 05/26/2004 06:16:29 AM
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Constance Steinkuehler, a Learning Sciences researcher from UWisc, gave a talk at the Comwork ("Managing Multiplayer Culture") seminar in Copenhagen last week called " "MMOG Guild Leaders as a Com/Dev Resource." Her slides are up as a gargantuan PDF, but they're well-worth the download, as they are a positively mind-blowing look at the failings of the Cognitive Science model, and the way in which MMO guilds can be thought of as distributed cognition. Yum.
50MB PDF Link
(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fafblog on gay marriage
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DATE: 05/26/2004 06:24:01 AM
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On Fafblog, a very funny fake interview with James Dobson, leader of the anti-gay-marriage nutbars "Focus on the Family":
FAFBLOG: So! How's the Family?
JAMES DOBSON: The Family is in deadly danger, Fafnir.
FB: Danger? Oh no! I like families!
JD: Yes, danger from the homosexual agenda which has been trying for decades to destroy it.
FB: I never knew homosexuals had an agenda! I just thought they were ordinary people who were easily stereotyped as lovers of musical theater.
JD: So they and the gay-controlled Hollywood elite would have you believe. But the Forces of Gay are now closer than ever to destroying the divine institution of the civil marriage certificate, and with it, the family itself.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: In defense of MP3 blogs
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DATE: 05/26/2004 07:12:14 AM
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Check out this rant from an MP3 blog reader -- a blogger who posts tracks that he's digging to get his readers interested -- on the threatened medium:
We're all familiar with blogs (ummm, you're reading one now), but now, we have unashamed folks who are not afraid to provide you with a daily song that has been gracing their ears. Good stuff, big bands, and totally the definition of fair use. The average blog user has 12 readers... so... if I give one song to 12 people a day, that seems entirely fair, when compared to say, WOXY radio that had to shut down because it couldn't afford the licensing and bandwidth of its 50,000 listeners.
So, I love it! It's the best of fair use, with the peer spice. Now all we need, is about 3 kabillion more so that these brave souls aren't overloaded, or targetted otherwise.
Best of all is the long list of MP3 blogs, which are a sampler's paradise.
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(Thanks, Th0m!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nanotrees
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DATE: 05/26/2004 07:52:12 AM
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Researchers at Lund University in Sweden grew "nanotrees" out of semiconducting materials, Science News reports. Lars Saumelson and his colleagues spray gold nanoparticles onto nanowire "trunks," just a few microns in length. (In comparison, a human hair is around 100 microns thick.) Exposing the seeded trunk to a mixture of specific gasses causes branches to grow. The trunk and the branches can even be composed of different materials so that the parts have specific functions:
"For instance, in one experiment, the Lund team made trunks out of gallium phosphide and parts of the branches out of gallium arsenide phosphide. The researchers expect combinations of materials such as these to produce a light-emitting diode: The trunk would carry current to the branches, where the gallium arsenide phosphide would convert it into light. Alternatively, the branches could serve as light-harvesting structures, as in a solar cell, which would then shuttle excited electrons into the trunk." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cookie Monster Tribute Heavy Metal Band
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DATE: 05/26/2004 08:07:28 AM
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BoingBoing reader Greg confesses, "I found this site at 2:30 in the morning, so it might be less funny in the light of day. It is a speed metal sesame street cover band. The singer actually sounds like cookie monster too."
This reminds me of browsing through the bins at my favorite punk rock record store when I was a teenager, and seeing that some snarky, pop-hating employee had creatively relabeled the bin for one famous hair-rock band as "Oreo Speedcookie." Snip from Cookie Mongoloid website:
Cookie Mongoloid is Sesame Speed Metal! See the Cookie Mongoloid in all his blue, furry, googly-eyed glory backed by the baddest of gender mixed metal bands as they decimate and regurgitate your childhood favorites in an abrasive metal wrath. See their harem of gothic gyrators, the Cookies, demonstrate such elemental concepts as up and down in a blaze of lights, smoke and pyrotechnic cookie shrapnel.
Link. Update: Chronicle Books editor Alan Rapp says, "Part of the joke here (I think) is that "cookie monster" is a vocal style associated with black metal and grindcore, notable for its deep basso eeeevil rumble. "
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech question about results of Google image search for "Abu Ghraib"
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DATE: 05/26/2004 08:11:02 AM
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Boingboing reader Greg asks,
I find it interesting to note that Google image search doesn't have any of the pics of the Abu Ghraib abuse that are floating everywhere else on the net. A search for "Abu Ghraib" does bring up photos, but none of the ones that we all saw on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. I had searched there not long after the story broke and found none of them, but I figured it was just too new. Now, after weeks of spidering time, they still aren't there. Anyone have an idea why?
Link
UPDATE: Intrepid BoingBoing reader Andrew says, "I tried the image search at altavista.com (making sure to turn off "family filtering" or whatever) and some of the abuse photos turn up if you hit "next" enough. Strangely, searching for "Abu Ghraib abuse" turns up *nothing* and searching for "Abu Ghraib torture" turns up virtually nothing with images.google.com."
UPDATE 2:
Tim Ireland says, "This happens because Google only updates its image database every 6-12 months. The last update was January 2004, before the publication of these images and their broadcast on the web."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reading, Writing, and Robots: kids build bots at CeBIT
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DATE: 05/26/2004 08:18:27 AM
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StreetTech has some great snapshots of the robot-building competition between local high-schoolers in NYC, called NYC FIRST, which exhibited at NY CeBIT. (Thanks, Nate!)
Link
Clarification: BoingBoing reader Jason correctly reminds us that "NYC First" is part of the national competition US First started by Dean "Segway" Kamen more than a decade ago.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool pre-WW2 Japanese Postcards
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DATE: 05/26/2004 08:25:33 AM
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John Rambow -- editor of the kick-ass blog from travel guide publisher Fodor's -- says:
"Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has a big exhibit of some very beautiful Japanese postcards, many of which can be seen on the museum's Web site. If you want to see them in person, hurry -- the show closes 6 June. And who couldn't love this monkey-trainer New Year's card [thumbnail at left --XJ]?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Army reboots GI's tired fatigues
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DATE: 05/26/2004 08:35:20 AM
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Story by my Wired News colleague Noah Schachtman about the Army's seven-year, $250 million uniform high-tech-ification and redesign project -- dubbed Future Force Warrior, or FFW.
One of the most obvious changes is that the new uniforms are unisex. The zipper has been extended, and the uniform's butt flap has been expanded, so GI Janes aren't literally caught with their pants down if they have to pee.
FFW's body armor is probably the biggest improvement, however. It sits on a series of foam pads around the rib cage, so there's a 2.5-inch gap between the harness and the body. It keeps the GI cool. And it's almost imperceptibly light -- unlike today's bulletproof vests, many of which are about as comfortable as that lead apron the dentist makes you wear during X-rays. But the scarab-like shell can take five to seven direct hits from a machine gun, and it doubles as a holster for ammunition and grenades.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Girl Photoblogs Chernobyl on Motorcycle" thing a fraud?
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DATE: 05/26/2004 08:44:27 AM
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Was this story just another web hoax? Yes, says subscriber Mary Mycio on the "e-POSHTA" Ukrainian mailing list, re-posted on Neil Gaiman's website.
I am sorry to report that much of Elena's story is not true. She did not travel around the zone by herself on a motorcycle. Motorcycles are banned in the zone, as is wandering around alone, without an escort from the zone administration. She made one trip there with her husband and a friend. They traveled in a Chornobyl car that picked them up in Kyiv.
She did, however, bring a motorcycle helmet. They organized their trip through a Kyiv travel agency and the administration of the Chornobyl zone (and not her father). They were given the same standard excursion that most Chernobyl tourists receive. When the Web site appeared, Zone Administration personnel were in an uproar over who approved a motorcycle trip in the zone. When it turned out that the motorcycle story was an invention, they were even less pleased about this fantasy Web site.
Because of those problems, Elena and her husband have changed the Web site and the story considerably in the last few days. Earlier versions of the narrative lied more blatantly about Elena taking lone motorcycle trips in the zone. That has been changed to merely suggest that she does so, which is still misleading.
If so -- ah, well. C'est la web. The photos are still amazing. Link (Thanks, chupacabra)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Future-couture sunshades from Bless
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DATE: 05/26/2004 09:02:13 AM
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The everfab Hint Magazine points to some sharp, sexy sunshades with which to protect your peepers in style this summer. Not sunglasses, they're shields. At $325 a pop, style ain't cheap. Available online from Bless.
Link to manufacturer website
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Napoleon Dynamite
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DATE: 05/26/2004 09:26:11 AM
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On June 11, Fox Searchlight releases this film, which looks very nerdworthy. I think this dude is my future husband. Jason Calacanis saw the pic at Sundance and blogged this review.
Link to "Napoleon Dynamite" home page and QuickTime trailer
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sexy Androids, Electric Sheep
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DATE: 05/26/2004 09:27:12 AM
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Our friends at Fleshbot purr:
The question here isn't really "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" so much as "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep-Like Beings With Long, Dextrous Tongues That Make Them Moan In Ecstacy?" It's the short story Philip K. Dick never got around to writing.
Link (of course it's not worksafe, silly.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cop, sheriff work a little too closely, produce online porn video
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DATE: 05/26/2004 09:28:21 AM
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The SF Examiner reports that a San Francisco cop is under investigation for making a porn video with a colleague from the sherrif's department. Outraged officials say an internal probe (ahem) is forthcoming.
In the video, which was posted on a pay-per-view Web site, Tenderloin beat cop Darryl Watts played out a fantasy where he pretended to be a john and a sheriff's department employee acted the part of a prostitute referred to as "Myra." [Ed note: Actually, the PPV site we found spells the character's name as "Mira."] The video did not tap into any law enforcement themes common in the pornography industry. No badges, batons, uniforms or pistols were produced during the film, police said. (...)Police sources said that Watts, who has been on the force for three years, is a "good, productive street cop." Last year, he was hailed for capturing a man who was chasing another man with a butcher knife near Union Square.
Link to SF Examiner story (Thanks, Marc). An honorary link-fu degree will be awarded to the first BoingBoing reader who produces a link to a legitimate copy of the illicitly-produced video (or the location of the PPV site where it was first distributed) Update: "masked_superstar" and David both win. Link to free *.wmv clip on the originating PPV porn site, not worksafe, sexually explicit.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More on digicams and Iraq: Wartime Wireless Worries Pentagon
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DATE: 05/26/2004 09:29:56 AM
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Following up on this week's erroneous reports of a "Rumsfeld phonecam ban" in Iraq, I filed this story for Wired News today:
While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may not have signed a ban on new consumer digital-imaging technologies, he did express clear concern about the unforeseen impact of such technologies during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 7.
"People are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon,"
Rumsfeld said.
According to [DoD spokesperson Lt. Col. Ken] McClellan, some Defense Department lawyers may be reviewing how the spread of consumer digital-imaging technology among military contractors and enlisted personnel affects the military's obligation to abide by a Geneva Convention article against holding prisoners up to public ridicule.
"Lawyers may have looked at that and said, 'It's probably a good idea to get these things out of the prisons.' There's no Pentagon-induced rule in the theater at this time ... but there may or may not be some discussion taking place as to how the [Pentagon's April 14 directive on commercial wireless technology] might be supplemented in Iraq to prevent things we saw at Abu Ghraib."
Link to Wired News story; Link to previous BoingBoing post
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Word Processing Equipment and airlines
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DATE: 05/26/2004 03:37:23 PM
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British Airways announces before each flight that "word processing equipment" must be switched off. It's hilarious, I keep picturing someone up there in Posh Bastard Class who's booked an extra couple seats for his Xerox Word Processor and a long-suffering "word-processing-specialist" to operate it. Also, why the hell does Air Canada forbid the use of in-flight "modems and printers" (and how do they reconcile the ban on modems with the fact that they provide hideously expensive in-flight phone service, with modem jacks?)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SHREK@HOME: blue-sky proposal for the future of film production
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DATE: 05/26/2004 03:38:12 PM
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There's an article on Download Aborted proposing that the producers of Shrek should use distributed rendering screensavers to save money on the renders of Shrek 3.
It's an interesting idea, but I suspect that it's suffering from a failure of imagination. On the one hand, cycles are cheap and getting cheaper -- yes, CGI is processor-hungry and that hunger is ballooning, but CPUs are ballooning faster still. I expect that in the medium-term, the rendering expense will be paltry as compared to custom code development, artists and especially marketing. If you're starting with a couple hundred mil in budget, dropping one, two or even five percent on a bunch of white-box PCs is just not that big a deal.
Now, indie filmmakers, students, and garage auteurs, OTOH, really can't afford the cycles to render a cinematic quality CGI film. These are the kinds of people a SHREK@HOME screensaver could really serve, and if you made it social, it could do double-duty.
Ultimately, the largest expense in an Internet marketplace where anything is available always anywhere is marketing: the more choice, the more expensive influencing choice becomes.
So a social SHREK@HOME could engage its audience not just for their cycles, but for their evangelism. We see glimmers of that in some machinima projects, like Red v Blue or in Flash-shorts like Homestar Runner, a clubbish sense of ownership by its fans that turn them into relentless marketers of the net-art.
The more engaged fans are with work, the purer the evangelism (hence the blogging bore and every other otaku who can run on about her hobby forever). It's hard to be really engaged in the creative process of "shooting" CGI -- I don't know enough about 3D animation or visual art to second-guess those who do. But there are ways that even the unskilled can contribute.
Imagine a distributed renderer that included along the bottom thumbnails of alternate test-renders of the current sequence: different lighting, camera, even new inverse-kinematics and chaining. These different sequences could be created by the filmmaker and/or by more knowledgeable fans. While I render out the authoritative version, I can click on any of these little animated thumbnails and devote an equal number of cycles to rendering it, producing, in effect, an "audience cut" of the movie that can be matched with the foley and ADR in post to allow for different views on the same flick.
On top of that, layer the useful bits MMOs: guilds, pledges, fan-sites, etc. Create affinity communities around different edits and renders. The more excitement you build for your movie, the more cycles end up being devoted to its production: the more cycles, the more variable renders and the more excitement.
The software is pretty do-able, it's the kind of thing Nelson and Marc were doing at Popular Power and Adam "distributed.net" Beberg was talking about with COSM years ago. The legal apparatus might be harder, but a CC-license could take care of that.
The result would be ten million times more exciting than the mundane process of donating some of your cycles to Shrek 3 -- it would be the basis for an entirely new way of financing and executing film production.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC to use Creative Commons licenses
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DATE: 05/26/2004 03:38:59 PM
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Digital Lifestyles is reporting that Larry Lessig has been named to a BBC advisory board and that the BBC's Creative Archive project (which aims to put the BBC's archives online for non-commercial re-use) will use Creative Commons licenses:
Professor Lawrence Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project was clearly excited: "The announcement by the BBC of its intent to develop a Creative Archive has been the single most important event in getting people to understand the potential for digital creativity, and to see how such potential actually supports artists and artistic creativity." He went to enthuse "If the vision proves a reality, Britain will become a centre for digital creativity, and will drive the many markets – in broadband deployment and technology – that digital creativity will support."
Link
(Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geeky doormat
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DATE: 05/26/2004 04:33:18 PM
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Thinkgeek is selling these wicked-geeky doormats. Please direct pedantic remarks about the superiority of "There's no place like ~/" to /dev/peevish.
Link
(Thanks, eyelessloki!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Extra pretty rocket paintings by Peter Thorpe
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DATE: 05/26/2004 04:55:36 PM
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Artist Peter Thorpe (a well-known book cover illustrator) has a bunch of acrylic paintings of rockets for sale. I don't know how much they cost, but he says prices are available upon request. Link (via The Cartoonist)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: One-wheeled asphalt skiier
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DATE: 05/26/2004 05:01:44 PM
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The Swiss-made EasyGlider will ship in October 2004 for US$1,000. Looks like fun, but where do you use it without getting busted in a world that hates all kinds of novel transportation? Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Postmodern furniture for pets
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DATE: 05/26/2004 05:03:32 PM
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Nifty scratching posts and other stuff for your pet available here. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Russ Kick on Afghan food drop fiasco
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DATE: 05/26/2004 05:06:49 PM
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Our current guestblogger Russ Kick wrote a great piece for Loompanics about the US food drop to Afghanistan.
You know those little packets in vitamin bottles and clothes that are supposed to keep them fresh? Well, many of the little meal packs dropped on Afghanistan contained one of those packets (called a desiccant) to keep the food fresh. Unfortunately, the Afghans aren't familiar with desiccants so they tore them open and ate the powder. Some thought it was medicine, so they noshed it straight. Others figured it was a funky American spice, so they sprinkled it on their beans, rice, or pasta. Lots of Afghans got sick, though we don't know if any deaths occurred. In fact, it's hard to say whether people got sick from chowing down on desiccant or because the food in the packets was usually spoiled.
Link (Via Reality Carnival)
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TITLE: Chinese company makes soy sauce from human hair
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DATE: 05/26/2004 05:15:52 PM
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A resourceful Chinese company got in trouble for brewing soy sauce out of human hair.
China Central Television (CCTV), the state television station, first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China's Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce. Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: A million love songs
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DATE: 05/26/2004 08:32:51 PM
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An MP3 blog devoted exclusively to sloppy, silly, sappy songs of romance. Evidences an emphasis on ironic postmodern '80s schlock: Abba, Dolly, ELO, Manilow. If you're in the throes of a crush (pobrecito), whatever you do don't click -- you may not make it out alive. Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Superhero dayjobs photoshopping
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DATE: 05/27/2004 12:12:08 AM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: day-jobs for superheros.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Historical origins of obesity
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DATE: 05/27/2004 12:36:00 AM
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Long, interesting Harvard Magazine article about the historical shifts in diet and lifestyle that led to America's obesity epidemic.
"We are not adapted to handle fast-acting carbohydrates," Ludwig continues. "Glucose is the gold standard of energy metabolism. The brain is exquisitely dependent on having a continuous supply of glucose: too low a glucose level poses an immediate threat to survival. [But] too high a level causes damage to tissues, as with diabetes. The body is designed to keep blood glucose within a tight range, and it does this beautifully, even with extreme nutrient ratios: we can survive indefinitely on a diet of 60 percent carbohydrates and 20 percent fat, or 20 percent carbohydrates and 60 percent fat. But we never [before] had to assimilate a heavy dose of high-glycemic carbohydrates."
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SwissCom's WiFi is crap; its executives are thin-skinned
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DATE: 05/27/2004 12:37:10 AM
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Esme Vos wrote a little blurb on her blog about the shitty experience she had with SwissCom's expensive, crappy WiFi service, and SwissCom's sales director wrote back to tell her she was biased and basically a Bad Person for being publicly dissatisfied with what is, undoubtably, the worst pay-for-WiFi service in Europe (though the WiFi provided by the incumbent Spanish telco gives it a run for its money).
I mean, SwissCom's service is so crap that I actually worked it into my next novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," as a fictionalized account of my own experience with last September at a WIPO meeting in Geneva. I'm headed back to Geneva on June 6 for more WIPO stuff, and I'm already dreading using the rotten, stupid, horrendously expensive SwissCom setup. Check the link below for the whole scene.
"I can tell this is not going to work out, but I need to go
through the motions. I go to the counter and ask for a seven-day
card. He opens his cash-drawer and paws through a pile of cards,
then smiles and shakes his head and says, sorry, all sold out. My
girlfriend is probably through her second cup of coffee and
reading brochures for nature walks in the Alps at this point, so
I say, fine, give me a one-day card. He takes a moment to snicker
at my French, then says, so sorry, sold out those, too. Two
hours? Nope. Half an hour? Oh, those we got.
"Think about this for a second. I am sitting there with my laptop
in hand, at six in the morning, on a Swiss street, connected to
SwissCom's network, a credit-card in my other hand, wishing to
give them some money in exchange for the use of their network,
and instead, I have to go chasing up and down every hotel in
Geneva for a card, which is not to be found. So I go to the
origin of these cards, the SwissCom store, and they're sold out,
too. This is not a t-shirt or a loaf of bread: there's no
inherent scarcity in two-hour or seven-day cards. The cards are
just a convenient place to print some numbers, and all you need
to do to make more numbers is pull them out of thin air. They're
just numbers. We have as many of them as we could possibly need.
There's no sane, rational universe in which all the 'two hour'
numbers sell out, leaving nothing behind but '30 minute' numbers.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Window Seat
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Gregory Dicum's book "Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air" sounds like a brilliant idea:
"Broken down by region, this unusual guide features 70 aerial photographs; a fold-out map of North America showing major flight paths; profiles of each region covering its landforms, waterways, and cities; tips on spotting major sights, such as the Northern Lights, the Grand Canyon, and Disney World; tips on spotting not-so-major sights such as prisons, mines, and Interstates; and straightforward, friendly text on cloud shapes, weather patterns, the continent's history, and more."
Did you know that the patterns of the streets in subdivisions lets you know when they were built? Or that the round ponds all over Florida are sinkholes? With Window Seat at your side, you'll learn these things. Keep it to yourself though--the person sitting next to you doesn't want to hear it. Link (Thanks, Eric!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: William Mitchell, an architect in the City of Bits
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DATE: 05/27/2004 07:18:46 AM
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My latest article at TheFeature.com is an interview with architect William J. Mitchell, director of MIT's Media Lab and author of three essential books about the spaces we inhabit, online and off:
"Increasingly, we are living our lives at the points where electronic information flows, mobile bodies, and physical places intersect in particularly useful and engaging ways," he writes. "These points are becoming the occasions for a characteristic new architecture of the twenty-first century." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Weblog fest in Iran
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DATE: 05/27/2004 08:54:00 AM
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Persian blogger Hossein Derakshan says,
"There will be a big Weblog Festival held in Tehran from 8-10 June 2004. It is hosted by National Youth Organization of Iran and PersianBlog." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robotic wheelchairs
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DATE: 05/27/2004 08:56:07 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says,
Traditional wheelchairs used by the elderly and people with severe disabilities have some limited functions and flexibility. Their users often need help from nurses or relatives. Several teams are currently at work to develop robotic wheelchairs to overcome these limitations. For example, researchers from the University of Essex and the Institute of Automation at Beijing are developing the RoboChair. RoboChair will be equipped with a vision system and a 3G wireless communication system. It will be able to avoid collisions and to plan a path. Meanwhile, Professor Ray Jarvis of Monash University's Intelligent Robotics Centre in Australia, is building another robotic wheelchair which will help people to travel off the beaten track (PDF format, 1 page, 131 KB). His prototype system combines robotic navigation with a four-wheel drive. It automatically adapts itself to the user's capabilities and takes control when needed. You'll find more details and a picture in this overview. Keep in mind that there are still major issues to solve, such as security and costs, before these robotic wheelchairs become available.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gore speech transcript
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DATE: 05/27/2004 08:59:11 AM
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If you missed coverage of his NYU address yesterday, you can read the entire speech here. Link (Thanks, Patrick)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1940s telephone manual
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DATE: 05/27/2004 10:35:15 AM
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"How to Make Friends By Telephone" is a 1940s instructional booklet on using the new telephonic device network. Here's a scanned version -- it's a hoot.
Link
(Thanks, Rich!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kit Reed's new sf novel
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DATE: 05/27/2004 10:39:21 AM
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Thinner Than Thou is Kit Reed's latest science fiction novel, reviewed on SciFi.com by sf great Pamela Sargent.
Kit Reed's satirical targets in Thinner Than Thou -- eating disorders, obsessions with physical perfection, televangelists, religions in which salvation is based on material success in this world, and hypocrites of all kinds -- are rich in possibilities for potshots and savage humor. But along with her penetrating wit, Reed also has a talent for seeing below the surface.
Annie's self-imposed starvation and Kelly's gluttony are quests for independence and signs of an oddly admirable discipline as much as they are psychological problems. Danny's motivation for competitive eating, his desire for glory, and the discipline he brings to what he thinks of as his "training" aren't unlike those of any world-class athlete. The pornography of this body-worshipping society has a lot more to do with strong taboos involving food and obesity than with sex:
"Inside every thin person there's a fat one screaming. Millions of brown cells lying in wait. At the right moment these dormant fat cells will expand and the whole huge, suppressed person will spring into shape.
"It makes them feel dirty just thinking about it."
Link
(Thanks, Mack!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cartoonist Mark Bode interview
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DATE: 05/27/2004 11:03:56 AM
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Mark Bode is the son of 1970's cartoonist Vaughn Bode, best known for his Cheech Wizard comics that appeared in National Lampoon. Vaughn died in the '70s, and Mark has taken over his father's work. Mark can draw and write in a way that's almost indistinguishable from his father's work. In this interview he talks about his 30-years-in the-making book, The Lizard of Oz, to be released by Fantagraphics.
BB: I know that, given a cursory glance, your and Vaughn's styles are incredibly similar. I was wondering, though, if you tried to more closely mimic his style -- whether in the actual drawing or the storytelling and design aspects of the page -- consciously or not?
MB: Before I knew what was reality here on this planet, my father, when I was 4 or 5 years old, led me to believe his characters were real. He said Cheech lived up the hill by the Projects near where we lived in Syracuse, NY. And we used to visit his laboratory, which was an old sewer hole cover. But Cheech never came out. I said, "Dad, why doesn't he come out?" He replied, "He is busy balling broads or doin' important wizard stuff, son." Thus, as my imagination and drawing abilities developed, I found it easy to draw and live in that world he created. No effort, what so ever. Although I have many other styles at my disposal, I am most happy when I'm in his, or our, style ...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rodeohead
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DATE: 05/27/2004 11:30:02 AM
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Bluegrass Radiohead cover band. People sometimes save actual Radiohead sound files on P2P networks under that faux band name to avoid detection, so this seems a particularly funny PoMo grass-chewin' homage. The MP3 file they posted is just one big tarball o' tribute, so there are no individual song titles. But if you can audialize what "Subterranean Homesick Critter" or "Thar, thar" might sound like -- you've pretty much got it. Link (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robodiscounts: sale on Evolution Robotics' ER1 parts
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DATE: 05/27/2004 12:31:33 PM
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If you're a garage robot builder, this may be of interest: Evolution Robotics -- the guys who make the beer-totin' ER1 -- are having a Spring Sale on some ER1 accessories. The gripper and the IR Sensor Pack are half off right now, $125 and $100 respectively.
The gripper enables the ER1 to grab and carry objects, giving any ER1 project greater functionality. The IR Sensor Pack harnesses ER1's powerful obstacle avoidance capabilities, providing heightened navigation and awareness.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New interactive art from Flying Puppet
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DATE: 05/27/2004 12:43:57 PM
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French interactive artists Jean-Jacques Birgé and Nicolas Clauss recently won a slew of awards, and have loaded two new pieces on the Flying Puppet website:
Art Cage, a self-portrait, and
Nocturne, an interactive painting (screen-grabbed here). Shockwave plug-in required.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Flight-capable B52 plane model
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DATE: 05/27/2004 12:50:44 PM
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This impressive model of a B52 airplane really flies.
Link, (Thanks, Mister Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics!).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wi-fi lifeline for Yak farmers in Nepal
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DATE: 05/27/2004 12:57:32 PM
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BBC story about a WiFi project in Nepal that allows yak farmers in remote Himalayan locations to keep in touch with their families back home. File under pretty frickin' amazing. Snip:
"They are taking advantage of a wi-fi network set up in a remote region of the mountain kingdom where there are no phones or other means of communication.
It is the result of a campaign led by local teacher Mahabir Pun, and backed by volunteers and donations, to bring the internet to an isolated part of the world.
So far, the Nepal Wireless Networking project has hooked up five villages in the area using wireless technology."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RFID: good or eeeeevil?
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DATE: 05/27/2004 01:06:27 PM
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The online publication RFID News just published a fresh feature -- editor John Wehr interviewed representatives of several organizations about public perception of RFID technology, legislative efforts, and privacy best practices. Some thought-provoking stuff in here. Snip:
# "In most cases, asking how a company exploring item-level RFID tagging can protect their customers' privacy is like asking a fox how he can best ensure the safety of your chickens." -- Katherine Albrecht, CASPIAN
# "Businesses need to do more to educate the general public on the uses, benefits and issues about the use of RFID, fostering constructive solutions to their concerns." -- Dayna Fried, Hewlett-Packard
# "Much of the early work and publicity surrounding RFID was focused much too far into the future and on applications outside of the supply chain." -- Jack Grasso, EPCglobal US
# "[Auto-ID Center, now EPCglobal] documents detailed how such a campaign may unfold, citing the need for the development of a proactive plan that would 'neutralize opposition' and 'mitigate possible public backlash.'" -- Cedric Laurant, EPIC
Link (scroll down to bottom of page for "Interviews with the Experts)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jack Black to star in movie adaptation of Rudy Rucker novel
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DATE: 05/27/2004 01:08:58 PM
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Variety reports that Rudy Rucker's fantastic 1984 novel, Master of Space and Time (you can buy it used on Amazon for $0.01), is going to adapted into a movie. It'll be directed by Michel Gondry, who directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and will star Jack Black.
Link (subscription required)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: OS X update has Bluetooth caller ID
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DATE: 05/27/2004 01:45:08 PM
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Gadget Lab's Brian Lam sez: "I noticed that you covered bluephonemenu in the past, so figured I'd drop a line about the new os x panther update. I was just reading the update details and saw this :
"Dialog windows for incoming phone calls and SMS messages for a paired Bluetooth phone now appear in the foreground."
I just tested it. You have to pair your bluetooth phone in address book, and a little pop up comes up, like bluephonemenu. The dialog choices are: add card/log call, sms reply, hang up, answer.
Log call puts the time and date of the call in the address book entry
Unfortunately, the pop up box doesn't show an image of the person calling - that would be freakin' cool
For SMS, the pop-up box has the dialog choices: log sms, reply, and ok.
It's pretty good, and stable, but doesn't sit in the system tray like bluephonemenu.
Link
Peter Orosz sez: "This feature was available in 10.3.0 and may have been available as far back as in 10.2.4. What actually makes it useful this time around is the caller-window-to-the-foreground feature. Previously, calls and sms's would still come in but remain lodged behind your other windows and you would find them hours after the call (since the address book is not usually your topmost window)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Rance Who Wasn't There
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DATE: 05/27/2004 02:17:39 PM
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OK, no one really believes he's Owen Wilson, George Clooney, or Mister Potatohead anymore -- but we still don't know who Rance is. The true identity of the much-hyped Hollywood blogger is the subject of a Reuters story today. WhatEVER. I mean, "Who's Rance" is like, so Friday April 9, 2004. "Who's Defamer" is what I want to know. Link to "Hollywood mystery man has Internet abuzz."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More RIAA lawsuits, more bizarre tales of unsuspecting defendants
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DATE: 05/27/2004 02:42:49 PM
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I'm fresh out of snarky intros. Just too bizarre, and too wrong. As one reader on the pho mailing list quipped to this tale of a single mom defendant, "What's next -- breaking kneecaps?"
Tammy Lafky has a computer at home but said she doesn't use it. "I don't know how," the 41-year-old woman said, somewhat sheepishly. But her 15-year-old daughter, Cassandra, does. And what Cassandra may have done, like millions of other teenagers and adults around the world, landed Lafky in legal hot water this week that could cost her thousands of dollars.
Lafky, a sugar mill worker and single mother in Bird Island, a farming community 90 miles west of St. Paul, became the first Minnesotan sued by name by the recording industry this week for allegedly downloading copyrighted music illegally. The lawsuit has stunned Lafky, who earns $12 an hour and faces penalties that top $500,000. (...)
A record company attorney from Los Angeles contacted Lafky about a week ago, telling Lafky she could owe up to $540,000, but the companies would settle for $4,000. "I told her I don't have the money," Lafky said. "She told me to go talk to a lawyer and I told her I don't have no money to talk to a lawyer." Lafky said she clears $21,000 a year from her job and gets no child support.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Airplane grounded by praying pentecostals
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DATE: 05/27/2004 02:46:16 PM
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A pair of Pentecostal preachers grounded a plane when they panicked passengers and pilots, saying 9/11 was "a good reason to pray."
One preacher told fellow passengers as the Continental Airlines plane taxied down the runway, "Your last breath on earth is the first one in heaven as long as you are born again and have Jesus in your heart," according to FBI spokesman Paul Moskal. Passengers on the Wednesday flight to Newark, New Jersey told a flight attendant, who alerted the plane's captain, officials said. The captain turned the plane around.
"They were sincere in their beliefs and were not malicious," Moskal said by telephone from Buffalo. "In the context of 9/11 it may not have been the best way to promote their religion."
Link (Thanks, Mike)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto-set Bollywood movie
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DATE: 05/27/2004 04:07:39 PM
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Ouchless sez, "My mother found this Bollywood-esque film "poster" completely by accident. The movie is titled 'Coxwell and Gerrard', which is the main intersection in Toronto's Little India."
Link
(Thanks, Ouchless!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's Vienna photos
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DATE: 05/27/2004 04:13:19 PM
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I had a killer day in Vienna today -- I am here to give a couple of talks at the LinuxWeek event in MuseumsQuartier. My hosts took me through Prater Park, a cool old amusement park, and then to a beer garden in the old Swiss World's Fair pavillion where I got an entire roast haunch of pig (!), then Monochrom staged a performance of the world's first "massively multiplayer thumbwrestling tournament." I shot a ton of pix -- here they are.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Movie bits you didn't get to see photoshopping
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DATE: 05/27/2004 10:48:10 PM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: "Movie scenes you didn't get to see." Lots of subtle funny stuff here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Colorful Canadian holidays, part umptybillion: National Masturbation Month
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DATE: 05/28/2004 06:54:03 AM
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BoingBoing pal in France Jean-Luc alerts us to the breaking news that May is National Masturbation Month in Canada.
G-Rap unit Stink Mitt will give a concert tomorrow:
May 29 in Montreal at Le Swimming. StinkMitt will also participate in the Masturbate-A-Thon to encourage right-thinking Canadians everywhere to "Come for a Cause". Funds raised will be going to sex worker rights organizations Stella (Montreal) and Maggie's (Toronto).
you can find a poster of his concert here.
Link
Update:
BoingBoing reader
Casey says, "We also celebrate in the USA! Check out www.goodvibes.com for more info."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Red Mars: a very belated appreciation
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 05/28/2004 07:27:29 AM
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I'm pretty well-read in the modern sf canon, but there are some gaps in there that are almost embarrassing in scope. Take Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. This doorstopper, clocking in at nearly 800 pages, is the first volume in a trilogy of comparably-sized companion volumes, each of which depicts a different vision of the [dis|u]topiian establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. When Red Mars first came out, I was working at Bakka Books, the science fiction bookstore in Toronto, and there was something else in my queue that month, and one of my co-workers had already dived into it and was writing the shelf review, and it seemed like such a commitment that, well, I just never got around to it. With the publication of Green Mars and Blue Mars, it just got worse: if I couldn't clear enough schedule to read volume one, volumes two and three were impossible.
It wasn't that I didn't like Robinson's books. Quite the contrary, I adore them. Pacific Edge -- a gripping, rollicking utopian novel whose plot hinges on a zoning debate over the placement of a baseball diamond -- is one of my all-time favorite books. When Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom came out and the reviewers compared it to John Varley for the technology stuff, I was honoured, but the few reviews that compared it to Pacific Edge sent me over the moon: if Robinson could disrupt his utopia with a zoning fight and make it into a gripping tale, could I do the same with a fight over the politics of Disney ride fandom and design?
Like Red Mars, Pacific Edge is one volume in a trilogy that approaches utopia from three different angles. I haven't read the other two books in the trilogy, and that's a keen regret that I intend to do something about post-haste.
Because now I've finally read Red Mars, and I am agog at what may be the finest sf novel I've ever read. Red Mars has all the hard-sf window-dressing that many of us imagine when we think of sf: great and accessible tours through speculative cog sci, geology, astronomy, rocketry, physics, biology, genetics, and so on, until the head swims with the sheer scope of the research task Robinson set himself in this book.
But the hard science is just the skin, and the meat of this book -- as with Pacific Edge -- is the "soft" science: the complex play of the community of his vast cast of characters as they set out to advance their competing agendas, writing the future of Mars.
Robinson doesn't just shine here: he glows. There is this hard question at the core of every story of violent social upheaval, which is, how does collective action materialize? How is it steered? How does it go off the rails? How, in short, does stuff get done? Can a speech change the world? Can a bomb? Who gets to construct the consensus reality, and how do you disrupt it?
This is the stuff of Robinson's books: big, social questions answered through skilful point-of-view switches, fantastic characterization and fearless exposition.
In the beginning, a lot of sf was just technocrat fantasy: here's a cool new technology I've thought of, with a minimal narrative around it as a kind of turntable so that it can be rotated 360' and you, the reader, can appreciate its cleverness from all sides.
Later, sf writers took on the more ambitious challenge of predicting the social upheaval that tech could create, an approach embodied in the cliche that "the job of the sf writer is to consider the car and the movie-palace and invent the drive-in."
But Robinson goes many steps beyond this: he extrapolates the drive-in, then the sexual revolution, then the Boomers' nostalgia for the drive-in where they lost their virginity, and finally, their grown childrens' disdain for that nostalgia. There's an eerie prescience to these books that tells you that what's being written here is a deep and broad tale of social reconstruction on the micro, macro, nano and mezzoscales.
I just finished Red Mars on a BA flight from Vienna, and I was bitterly disappointed not to find Blue and Green Marses on sale at Heathrow, but I'll have them in my possession by dusk. I can't wait to read them.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Art of being cold
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DATE: 05/28/2004 08:29:04 AM
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Amateur digital photographer R. Todd King has posted a set of startlingly gorgeous photos of the snow and ice festival in Harbin, China.
"The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both farenheit and centigrade, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the residents of Harbin celebrate it, with an annual festival of snow and ice sculptures and competitions. The festival officially runs from January 5 through February 15, but often opens a week early and runs into March, since it's usually still cold enough. This is the amazing sculpture made of snow greeting visitors to the snow festival in 2003." Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NASA/DARPA "Robonaut" and Boba Fett -- separated at birth?
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DATE: 05/28/2004 12:39:29 PM
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BoingBoing reader Noah says,
DARPA, the folks behind the creepy eye in the pyramid Total (now Terrorist) Information Awareness logo, and the short-lived terrorism futures market (FutureMAP), have been at work on a robot for NASA that looks suspiciously like Boba Fett from Star Wars! Could it be an Episode 3 tie-in?
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Old wireless tech wanted for cellphone museum
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DATE: 05/28/2004 12:52:29 PM
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Sean Bonner, my co-curator in the SENT phonecam art project, says:
While watching a documentary from 93 last night where people were running around with giant brick cell phones I decided I need to start collecting these things and make some kind of archive of them. If you have one of these things sitting in the closet somewhere let me know. Actually, I'm expanding this to any kind of old school gadgetry - old pagers, original PDAs, but really old cell phones are going to be the focus.
link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Ukuleles for MassGeneral Hospital for Children Healing Arts Program
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DATE: 05/28/2004 01:17:00 PM
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Over at my other blog, Ukulelia (which gets way more visitors than Boing Boing does, btw), my co-editor (Gary Peare) and I have set up a fund to donate Flea ukuleles to the MassGeneral Hospital for Children's Healing Arts Program (Here's an article about the program from The Boston Globe.) We've collected $518.95 so far, and our goal is to come up with $1100 (enough for 12 Flea ukuleles). If you want to donate, Gary and I would be grateful. All funds received will go towards the purchase and postage costs of ukes for the hospitalized kids. Link (Look for PayPal donate button in middle column).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dance Dance Resurrection
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DATE: 05/28/2004 02:44:52 PM
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Jesus-themed variant of DDR (of *course* it's a hoax).
Update: BoingBoing reader Ross Payton says, "It was actually created by a member of the somethingawful.com forums who goes by the name None More Negative. It's a few years old."
Link; other recent BoingBoing posts on DDR 1, 2, 3. (millegrazie, mi piccolo snoodilio, also on Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Saving Phone Messages as a Living Memorial
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DATE: 05/28/2004 02:54:23 PM
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The most sublime, beautiful radio segment just aired on the NPR show "Day to Day" (I'm a contributor to the show, but had nothing to do with this piece). You can replay the audio online (Real or WM). I laughed, I cried, I blogged. Synopsis:
The month of May marks the two-year anniversary of the death of Dmae Roberts' mother. Every 100 days, Dmae re-saves her phone messages from her voicemail as sort of a living memorial -- and she shares some of those messages with Day to Day.
Link to online audio from NPR's "Day to Day" (scroll down for direct audio link), and Link to transcript of Dmae Roberts' report, audio and discussion boards at stories1st.org
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free copies from Canon copiers
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DATE: 05/29/2004 05:33:59 AM
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On Kuro5hin, a good how-to for hacking Canon copiers at copy-shops to give you free copies -- and to get them to do fun stuff.
The copy machines you are using are configured in a certain way to use a coin operated slot, key card, or service key (such as those that Kinkos has). Through an interesting "feature" in the firmware, if the copy machine is configured to accept coins or keys, and no machine is hooked up for this, it will give copies for free. Unfortunately, this isn't as helpful as it sounds; anyone with a remedial amount of intelligence who wants to get free copies will try unplugging the instrument first and foremost. As such, it is often impossible without a service key to unplug the apparatus.
Fortunately, there is a work-around. Go into "Service Mode" (using star-2 and 8-star), and push the "Option" tab. Underneath it, push "Acc". A new menu will pop up. Hit the "Coin" button, and enter "0" on the keypad. Once you are done, hit "Enter" or "Apply" (you MUST do this after you change any field; otherwise it will reset the next button you push). Once you are done, hit reset until you are on the main screen. Voila - free copies!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Massively multiplayer thumbwrestling
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DATE: 05/29/2004 05:37:21 AM
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Last week in Vienna, I attended Monochrom's first-ever massively multiplayer thumbwrestling competition. Now the Monochromers have posted detailed descriptions for running your won MMTW events.
By forming a star, it is also possible to play the game with three or four participants. The left hands are also free to hook up with even more players. Again a connection with up to 4 players is possible. By Massive Thumb-Wrestling according to the rules described above unlimited amounts of players can connect to join a Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network. As the number of players is unlimited, global thumb-wrestling may emerge through self-sustaining peer-to-peer networks and ad-hoc socializing.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NOTCON: cheap, fun tech conference in London on June 6
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DATE: 05/29/2004 05:40:11 AM
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I'm speaking Sunday week (June 6) at NOTCON, an NTK-sponsored tech/politics/culture conference in London. Also on the bill: Brewster Kahle, Bill Thompson, Richard Jones, and many others. Four quid at the door, and if it's anything like the Festival of Inappropriate Technology, it's going to be a scream.
Link
Update: Danny adds, "the full price is four quid, but there's a quid off if you're a blogger (and not already under 18, a student, unemployed, a journalist, an old age pensioner, or any combination of the above). what more reason do you need to finally kick up that livejournal account and start selected your 'mood'?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ukioye Flash animations
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DATE: 05/29/2004 05:41:51 AM
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Flash animations of Ukiyoe prints. This one, screengrabbed here, is my favorite.
Link (via Geisha)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Audio tour of the MacPlus
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DATE: 05/29/2004 05:42:32 AM
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Patrick sez, "Digging through his cassette tapes last weekend, this guy came across 'Macintosh Plus: A Guided Tour' and decided he should archive it onto CD for posterity (being a pack rat by nature). It's especially interesting in that it gives a good glimpse of the level of user education necessary at that point in Computer History: it patiently goes over how to interact with icons, how to use the mouse, etc..."
Put the floppy disk into the internal disk drive. Put it in with the metal end first...and the label up. Push it all the way in.
"For a real today-meets-yesterday experience, throw this on your iPod."
4.6MB MP3 Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: French art-remixes of porn photos
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DATE: 05/29/2004 01:06:21 PM
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From France (natch), "pornotuning" -- odd little visual remixes of hardcore porn images. Sexually explicit, not worksafe.
Link (merçi, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spotcode
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DATE: 05/29/2004 01:07:07 PM
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Along the lines of Semacode, another "use your phonecam as a meatspace remote control" project -- Spotcode. Developer Anil Madhavapeddy says:
I've been working on some software that lets you use your existing camera phone as a virtual mouse by locking onto tags and physically rotating it around and so on. It's most easily explained by checking out the videos. In particular, the volume control one (MPEG) is fun.
Link (Also spotted on Warren Ellis' blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn art-remixes part deux: Safe For Work
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DATE: 05/29/2004 03:06:05 PM
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Those French "pornotuning" remixes aren't the first time someone with a pinch of snark and a penchant for pr0n got jiggy with Photoshop. For instance, this somethingawful riff from a couple of years back: "Make Porn Work-Safe." Results included the bizarre goatse-esque mashup shown here, which suggests a rollicking three-way between Man Ray, Terry Richardson, and Betty Crocker. BoingBoing reader Phil points us to the archived gallery and says, "Basically, they hacked pornopix just enough to make them (at least theoretically) safe for work."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT: E-Voting will only work if it's open source
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DATE: 05/30/2004 02:30:39 PM
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A thought-provoking piece on cures for e-voting woes, from today's New York Times
Electronic voting has much to offer, but will we ever be able to trust these buggy machines? Yes, we will -- but only if we adopt the techniques of the ''open source'' geeks.
One reason it's difficult to trust the voting software of companies like Diebold is that the source code remains a trade secret. A few federally approved software experts are allowed to examine the code and verify that it works as intended, and in some cases, states are allowed to keep a copy in escrow. But the public has no access, and this is troublesome. When the Diebold source code was accidentally posted online last year, a computer-science professor looked at it and found it was dangerously hackable. Diebold may have fixed its bugs, but since the firm won't share the code publicly, there's no way of knowing. Just trust us, the company says.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywood Vanilla Coke ad which kicks ass
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DATE: 05/30/2004 02:54:54 PM
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BoingBoing reader Vishal points us to a spectacularly cheesy Indian TV ad starring yet another one of my future husbands (look, any fella who eschews SMS for pigeon as preferred love-note carrier is alright by me).
Vishal says, "This Ad is really popular in India, and I was surprised to find that the good people at Coke have it online too (RealPlayer). It features one of the hottest young actors in Bollywood, Vivek Oberoi, and features many in-jokes to '70s Bollywood films (note, especially, the lightbulb dress in the 3rd segment, a direct lift from a classic 70's movie)."
Footnote to menswear trendwatchers: take a tip from Vivek, at left -- pink vomit prints are the new black.
Update: BoingBoing reader Berklee totally harshes my mellow by saying, "Excellent choice for a future husband, but you'll have to wait until he's done with Aishwarya Rai, I'm afraid. Meanwhile, I recommend [a 2002 film starring Oberoi titled] Company. Go rent it (or download it) and enjoy this un-Bollywood-like gangster-movie!"
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywood spoof ads, continued: mullet pseudo-history
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DATE: 05/30/2004 09:49:05 PM
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BoingBoing reader Chris points us to this blast from the online past:
"Another corporate '70s Bollywood spoof, this time by Absolut Vodka. ~10 minute film, made in 2002, filmed in India. It's a Bollywood pseudohistory of the mullet. Entertaining enough story (a little long...) - but really well-crafted, with awesome songs and dancing. Low-level product placement - no actual bottles or mention of vodka - but the familiar Absolut shape makes subtle appearances."
The film's hilarious, but -- OMGWTF! Do my own eyes betray me? Look closely at the faux promo poster screengrabbed at left. Is the male lead in Absolut Mulit not wearing a shirt with the exact same pink vomit print that Vivek Oberoi wears in the aforementioned Vanilla Coke Bollywood ad? Perhaps this is a secret, ironic reference to pink vomit couture featured in a real Bollywood film -- and I'm not enough of an Indian cinema buff to get the joke. If any intrepid BoingBoing readers know the answer, do tell.
Link to Absolut Mulit (Flash required), more background on the making of the 12-minute short in this 2003 issue of Fast Company magazine (scroll down to bottom of page).
Update: Reader Manish Vij says, "My brother and I found over 20 Absolut bottle shapes in the Absolut Bollywood parody! They cut the scenes at high speed so you can't tell unless you look carefully. Someone really had fun with this. Go frame by frame in the film. You can grab the play arrow in the QuickTime player and watch it at your own speed." Link to Manish's bottle deconstruction.
Update 2: Regarding the pink shirt enigma, Simon Fodden of Toronto replies,
I can't tell you about the vomit pattern, but pink is no big deal in India, for men and for women. Diana Vreeland famously said (back in '62) that pink is "the navy blue of India." And "Pinky" is a name (more of a pet name, really) that both men and women choose or are given. Heck, one Pinky N. Patel got his name (along with a million others) put on the NASA Stardust spacecraft."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Law-and-Order-inspired art
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DATE: 05/31/2004 12:22:59 AM
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Law and Order: Artistic Intent is a collection of fine art pieces inspired by the Law and Order franchise. Which reminds me of the Law and Order song, as written by the WELL's inestimable tpy:
Law and Order's on
Time for Law and Order
Law and Order's on
Time for Law and Order
Lenny was a drunk
Now he beats up pu-unks
Law and Order's on
Time for Law and Order
Link
(Thanks, Mitch)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tokyo shop windows
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DATE: 05/31/2004 12:25:36 AM
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Wonderful gallery of Tokyo shop-window displays. God I wanna go to Tokyo.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DaVinci's notebooks, a page a day
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DATE: 05/31/2004 12:29:41 AM
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Matt Webb is a real Renaissance geek, and as such he's too busy to actually read the great and defining works fo the Renaissance, such as DaVinci's imposing 1,565-page Notebooks. At least not all in one gulp. So Matt's poured all of the Notebooks (scarfed from the Project Gutenberg site) into a script that sends out one page a day as RSS. This is not unlike Phil Gyford's Page-a-Day-Pepys'-Diary thing.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harry Potter cinemas outfitted with night-scopes
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DATE: 05/31/2004 12:34:01 AM
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The new Harry Potter movie is out in the UK and the cinemas are filled with minimum-wage ushers with night-scopes to hunt-and-destroy people videotaping the flick. I'm seeing it this morning at Leicester Square, and I plan on taking a flash photo of the copyright warning, as is my wont. Wonder if they'll deport me?
Staff at the Vue will be "very discreet" with their potentially frightening cyclopean attachments, Mr Graham said, but action against offenders would be swift.
Much like the battered young wizards on screen, who are constantly being whirled about by baddies, pirates will be "hauled out of their seats and reported straight away to the police".
Link
(Thanks, Diane!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywood ad takeover, part three: Peugot ad, and TV ad satire index
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DATE: 05/31/2004 07:57:20 AM
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BoingBoing reader Manish Vij points us to his list of Bollywood-themed TV advertisements for western products, which includes a popular ad for Peugot.
Manish's website includes terrific liner notes -- for instance, pointers on where to download copies of songs you hear in the ads. And here's his capsule review for "Jabhi Khushi Tabhi Tennent's" (8.9 MB), shown at left: "Ad for Tennent's, a UK beer. A "Mulit" derivative. Boy meets girl, complications, climax (so to speak) and denouement in sixty neat seconds. Catchy music. Rajasthan. Pigeons. No elephants."
Link to Peugot ad, and alternate link; Link to "TV Satires on India"; Previous BoingBoing posts on Bollywood spoof ads: 1, 2
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guestblogger Russ Kick interviewed on NPR
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DATE: 05/31/2004 08:43:17 AM
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BoingBoing guestblogger Russ Kick (yep, that's him over in the right-hand column!) was recently interviewed for the NPR media analysis show 'On the Media" about freedom of information -- and your power to use it. Link to archived show in Real Audio. Transcript should be available on Tuesday. (Thanks, Jeremy)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark and Vaughn Bode in the NYT
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DATE: 05/31/2004 09:01:26 AM
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The NY Times has a good piece about Mark Bode's plans to complete his father's comic epic, The Lizard of Oz. (I posted something about this on Thursday.) Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gadget fits inside bugle, plays music for you.
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DATE: 05/31/2004 11:36:44 AM
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Electronic bugle implant makes it so you don't have to learn the instrument in order "play" it.
The device ... slides snugly deep into the bugle's bell. The device plays a high-quality recorded version of “Taps,” taken from the 1999 Memorial Day service at Arlington National Cemetery. The resonating tones inside the bugle create a realistic horn quality.
And here's a related article:
"Facing critical shortage of musicians for military funerals, the Pentagon has approved the use of a push-button bugle that plays taps by itself as the player holds it to his lips"
..."With a small digital recording devise inserted into each bugle's bell, a member of the honor guard at the funeral simply presses a button on the devise. A five-second delay give the guards time to raise the instrument to their lips as if they are going to play it"
Link (Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Adrian Mole: the text-adventure game
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DATE: 05/31/2004 01:44:11 PM
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The Adrian Mole books are my all-time favorite English kids' books. When I was in junior high and high-school, they were practically Bibles to my friends and me -- we could quote whole long passages of them Imagine my delight when I found out this week that there was a text-adventure game based on them for the Commodore 64, and that the game is now downloadable froplay on your favorite C64 emulator.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: I'm nominated for the Sunburst Award!
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DATE: 05/31/2004 01:45:28 PM
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My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, has been shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, a juried prize that goes to the best Canadian science fiction book each year. I am pleased as PUNCH.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: William Hung sings at a Jays game
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DATE: 05/31/2004 01:50:52 PM
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William Hung is the nerdy Hong Kong-born engineering student who had a disastrous and very brave appearance on American Idol. The video of that audition made him into a net-celeb, and landed him a record deal, despite his off-key singing (his disc has sold over 100,000 copies!). His latest gig was singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at a Blue Jays game:
Hung's presence brought a gaggle of media usually indifferent to baseball to the game, including staff from Rolling Stone magazine. A team official said more media credentials were issued Sunday than on opening day.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Shirley reports from BayCon
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DATE: 05/31/2004 02:13:54 PM
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John Shirley wrote a good, funny report about going to BayCon.
...what's new (to me) is the presence of more goths and rave-types, and parties in dark rooms where the beds are pushed together and the walls are draped in black velvet under black-lights and electronica thumps...And DJs playing goth dance music...What would Poul Anderson have thought? He'd have liked those topless girls with their breasts painted up, though...
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Notes from Tokyo Technorati Meetup
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DATE: 05/31/2004 04:25:26 PM
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When I was in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago, I exchanged email with Sid, a nice guy who recently moved from the US to Tokyo. Here's his report of a Technorati meetup in Tokyo, which has some interesting statistics:
I just moved to Tokyo and saw on Joi Ito's site that he and Dave Sifry, Technorati CEO, were putting on a "Technorati Meetup" on Thursday night at the Marinouchi Building, so I decided to go. It was a fun time, I learned a lot, and they had free Wi-Fi (a rarity in Tokyo), so I was able to update several programs real fast.
Here are some notes from Dave's talk (which Joi translated, although Dave speaks Japanese).
Technorati tracks 2.4 million blogs.
45% haven't posted in three months.
Around 200,000 new blogs are created daily.
About 7 minutes after someone posts a new entry it's indexed by Technorati and searchable
Sifry says blogs are striving for authority, as defined by how many people link to you when you write about things. You may not write the truth or even be correct, but if you're interesting people link to you.
He sees bloggers as commentators on the news and filters on the news, rather than replacing the news ... though blogs are giving big media sites a run for their money on hits and attention (as seen on a chart of hits).
Technorati has an active developers' site with several bindings and sample code of the program for people to use and mutate on their own. "Because if there's one thing I know, it's that you guys are all smarter than me," Sifry says.
An example is a program Joi wrote to send SMS to his phone when someone links to his site. It vibrates every time somebody links to him (and he encourages frequent linking).
Future directions for Technorati: Open reviews, subscribe to keywords and Cosmos filters, discovery & filtering of subscription lists, vote links and geographic search & filtering, which is hard because people have to put in GPS coordinates (applies more to phone blogging). There currently are 11,000 blogs in the geographic database.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese Uniforms Book
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DATE: 05/31/2004 05:30:49 PM
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When I went to Japan a couple of weeks ago, I kind of became obsessed with the uniforms everybody wears there. My friend Todd let me know about a series of Japanese uniform books that J-List sells, like this "Office Lady Uniform Pictorial Book Part 1":
For fans of the sailor uniform books, here's a "Chinkame" format photobook (pocket-sized) photobook of the beautiful uniforms of Japan's OLs (office ladies) -- those dedicated to serving tea and working on copy machines across the country. A super full-color publication documenting the cutest blazers, skirts, outfits and different uniform styles as introduced to you by the hottest current race queens. Famous uniforms of famous companies (NTT Docomo, Seibu Bus Company, BMW, etc) from across the country, with information on the style of the uniform as well as the girl modeling it. This is volume 1 a perfect bound, soft cover book that will look great on your coffee table
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The problem with contextual advertising
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DATE: 05/31/2004 06:11:09 PM
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Great musings on contextual advertising by John Battelle. He says that they aren't all they're cracked up to be because the advertiser has no control on where the ads will show up, and so they can have a real relationship with the audience, or the publisher, for that matter.
It's this relationship which I find entirely missing in all these contextual, behavioral, paid search networks. Sure, they are "relevant" to either a search, or to the content they match. But they are driven by metadata and the actions of only one of the parties - the content of the publisher for example (AdSense), or the actions of the audience (Claria, Revenue Science, Tacoda, etc.). As far as I know, none are driven by an understanding of the give-and-take that occurs between all three parties in a consensual relationship mediated by the publication. A site which has only AdSense or behavioral advertising fails to value (or monetize) the community connection between audience, publisher, and advertiser. Advertisers in these networks are not intentionally supporting the publication, and by extension they are not supporting the community the publication has created. In essence, they are not being good citizens of the community where their advertising is being displayed.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Geek showerhead generates electricity for tiny lightbulb inside
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DATE: 05/31/2004 07:37:36 PM
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Nifty showerhead has built-in electricity generator.
Water enters the shower head through the flow resrictor (1) then travels through the injector plate (2) which directs the water to the waterwheel (3). The water spins the magnetic waterwheel past the stator (4) of the field wincing (5). This hydroelectric generator develops the 2.5 volts at .31 amps which lights the PR-6 bulb.
The result? "The Showerstar will be sure to light up your evenings as the perfect addition to any romantic setting." I doubt it. The kind of person who would buy one of these would probably prefer taking a voltmeter into the shower than a partner.
Link (Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Airtexting: a heckler's dream-feature
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DATE: 05/31/2004 11:39:51 PM
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Joi Ito has a good blog entry about Nokia's new "Airtexting" feature in the 3220 handsets: a string of LEDs down the side of the phone spell out user-defined words when the phone is waved back and forth. Joi ponders the heckling applications:
If they made an airtexting enabled BlackBerry, I wonder if they would allow them in Congress. With the massive penetration of BlackBerries, it would be like a chorus of Hecklebots. Anyway, I want one. Forget night clubs, imaging having one in the audience during talks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Celebrity monument photoshopping
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DATE: 05/31/2004 11:42:19 PM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: future monuments to celebrities.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Phone consultants condemn sophisticated handsets for empowering users
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DATE: 06/01/2004 03:33:19 AM
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Mako Analysis is a consultancy that recently issued an hysterical report on SymbianOS phones, warning that giving telco customers devices that they can install software on created a "loophole" that allows "consumers" to avoid the extortionate tarrifs charged on things like information services and ringtones. The consultants advise carriers to provide less-capable phones to their customers as a way of protecting their rackets:
"The increasing sophistication of high-end mobile devices opens up a range of additional problems and will continue to undermine the data revenue streams of mobile operators at a time when they desperately need them to be increasing," a Mako spokesperson said...
"As with any new device feature," the spokesperson continued, "it will eventually infiltrate into medium and low-end terminals, in the case of practically every other advancement this would be welcomed. This historical approach has lead us to blindly encourage the addition of increasingly sophisticated devices throughout the range, in the case of open platform operating systems our approach surely has to be one of caution."
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(Thanks, Matt!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What's in your gadget bag, Xeni?
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DATE: 06/01/2004 07:34:45 AM
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Sweet-talking Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson convinced me to unzip my gadget bag. Here's what fell out. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: InstaSnow
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DATE: 06/01/2004 08:39:21 AM
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Here is a video of a guy demonstrating some stuff he calls "InstaSnow." It's a white powder. When you add water to the powder it gets really fluffy. I wonder what this stuff is -- is there an "open source" recipe for it? Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jennfomation Data Center
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DATE: 06/01/2004 08:44:58 AM
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Former BB guest blogger Jenn Shreve has launched her new personal Web site, the Jennfomation Data Center. Jenn is strictly a writer, but this site is a DIY design tour de force. Jenn cut up exquisite imagery from vintage brochures and books she found at junkyards and on eBay resulting in an ironically industrial aesthetic that's equal parts El Lissitzky and 1980s 'zine. The text is great too! Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Logan's Run "Life Clock"
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DATE: 06/01/2004 09:07:10 AM
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A "Life Clock" from the 1976 SF film Logan's Run is up for auction on eBay with a $49.99 minimum bid. I'm not sure how to guarantee that it's an authentic film prop, but with just ten hours to go and zero bids, it could be a score. Paul Allen, are you reading this? Link (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Christy Canyon and RU Sirius
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DATE: 06/01/2004 09:27:39 AM
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Nerve is running an interview RU Sirius conducted with 1980s porn megastar and Boing Boing pal Christy Canyon. Christy's self-published memoir, Lights, Camera, Sex!, is a witty, engaging, and smart look inside the adult entertainment industry. It'll surprise you.
"At eighteen, I was too dumb to understand what victimization was. But even now, looking back on that day in 1984, I still don't think I was a victim. No gun was pointed at my head. I knew I could leave that porno set, and my dad would file a lawsuit. But I was hell-bent on being independent. And contrary to what the women's libbers of that era wanted to believe, the porn biz has made me so strong." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Kevin Sites dispatch from Iraq: Dirty for Dirty
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DATE: 06/01/2004 11:24:54 AM
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NBC combat correspondent and weblogger Kevin Sites is in Iraq today. He's just posted a new entry on his blog -- a series of interviews with American soldiers.
[O]nce they finally do get home--they will still be faced with the complex task of finding their way in a civilian society again. And while they're eager to leave their weapons and Kevlar behind, the violence they've experienced here will likely be with them in one way or another, always.
Derek Ellyson says his memories have already hardened, fixed in his mind. "You never forget the faces. I can describe to you every dead person I've seen out here. What their faces looked like, the position they were laying in." Sorokin agrees, "War brings a lot of ugly things, you see a lot of ugly things you see other people dead and sometimes when you see somebody dead you see the face of death--the way the guy died. It could be an enemy it could be an ally it doesn't matter."
Yet living with those images of death is part of the job--the same one that requires them to pull the trigger. Before going to war soldiers have always had to ask themselves if they'd be willing to die for their cause. But there is a second part to that question which for some, is more difficult to answer: would they kill for it? For most if not all in the 3rd Platoon--the question is already moot.
Link, Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Another chance to have Cory's books signed and shipped to your door
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DATE: 06/01/2004 12:06:58 PM
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Back when I lived in San Francisco, the nice people at Borderlands Books did this super-cool thing where they'd take orders for my books, along with details for personal inscriptions, then get me to sign them when I dropped round the store, and ship them for free within the US (and for a modest fee elsewhere).
Of course, that became a lot less practical last winter, when I moved to London. But you've got another chance to get a signed, inscribed book shipped right to your door: I'm swinging briefly through SF in June (and I do mean *briefly* -- sorry, no time to socialize) and I'm gonna stop by Borderlands and sign any stock that they have. If you get your order in before June 15, I'll sign your copy that week and you'll have it before July 1 -- pretty cool!
Borderlands' contact info is
866 Valencia St.
San Francisco CA 94110 USA
415 824-8203
888 893-4008
Call or email them with your order and payment details and they'll get you sorted out.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Rance" unmasked as cartoonist/filmmaker/screenwriter Keith Thomson?
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DATE: 06/01/2004 01:25:07 PM
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David Emery, of About.com's Urban Legends and Folklore department, tells BoingBoing, "Wanted to let you know that Alex Boese of the Museum of Hoaxes may well have solved the Rance mystery with some good, old-fashioned Net detective work, or at any rate is damn close to solving it."
Here's a snip from the Museum of Hoaxes post, which -- true or not -- evidences some very thorough sleuthing indeed:
I think Rance is a cartoonist/filmmaker/screenwriter named Keith Thomson. Here's my reasoning. What immediately struck me about Rance's weblog was that it attracted a very high number of comments from very early on. Within two hours after Rance posted his first entry on December 29, 2003, four people had left comments on his site. Most weblogs, by contrast, struggle to get anyone to read them, let alone leave comments. So how was he attracting so many visitors to his site straight off the bat? What I discovered was that immediately after Rance posted his first entry on Dec. 29 at 4:49 EST, someone going by the screen name 'InvaderFromPluto' began posting messages about his weblog on various fan discussion groups. For instance, at 5:52, about one hour after Rance had posted his first entry, a message from InvaderFromPluto appears on Yahoo's thematthewperryplace message board. It reads:
i read slate reported a famous tv actor keeping a weblog under pseudonym "rance" at http://captainhoof.tripod.com/blog/ it's hard to know if it is him, but it might be as it is funny and seems witty in his sort of way
Obviously Slate hadn't written anything about Rance's weblog. Rance's weblog, at that time, was only an hour old. So how did InvaderFromPluto know about Rance's weblog so quickly, and why was he so interested in promoting it? Perhaps InvaderFromPluto was Rance himself. Makes sense to me.
Link, and previous BoingBoing posts: 1, 2
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Many-worlds dating: Quantum lovegety
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DATE: 06/01/2004 11:28:34 PM
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Futurismic, the excellent sf-writers'-group-blog, has just published its second piece of short fiction, "Shibuya no Love" by Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finn living in Edinburgh. The story deals with "Quantum Lovegety" technology, and is jam-packed with eyeball kicks and gracenotes.
The boy looked like a painted little satyr: silver lips and eyelids, orange ash-streaked hair and a heavy gold chain around his neck. He couldn’t have been older than twelve, but then in Shibuya a fifteen-year-old was ancient and venerable. The drone of the bass beat that seemed to permeate everything in 109 obscured the rapid-fire exchange between Norie and the boy, but it wasn’t long before he smiled hungrily and held his palm out towards Riina, the little pink thing bright against his dark skin like a tiny flower. She took it, and it was still warm from the boy’s hand, a living thing almost. Her MasterCard thumbnail sang an inaudible song to the boy’s account, and suddenly she was the proud owner of a quantum lovegety.
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(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Quaker football cheer
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DATE: 06/01/2004 11:33:57 PM
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This short-short story about a Quaker football game has the second-greatest religious football cheer in literature (the best is Philip Roth's "Ikey Mikey Shem and Ham, We're the boys who eat no ham, Go Yid!"):
Fight, fight, inner light, Kill, quakers, kill!
Knock 'em down, beat 'em senseless,
Do it till we reach consensus!
Link
(Thanks, Danny!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Weblogsinc launches "Autoblog"
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DATE: 06/02/2004 07:57:02 AM
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A car-themed blog is the latest from Jason Calacanis' online micropublishing company Weblogsinc. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ExExEx Church
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DATE: 06/02/2004 08:02:32 AM
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Fleshbot points us to a parody of "Christian porn site" XXXChurch:
Despite whatever certain Christian anti-porn propaganda sites would have you believe, there's ample evidence that porn, masturbation, and parody are part of the divine universal plan. Guru Karen, Bob the Sexually Suggestive Wooden Massage Implement, and the rest of the gang at ExExEx Church have made it their mission to set the record straight: "I believe that if God hated masturbation he would have made our arms short, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pentax goes all-digital? UPDATED -- Pentax denies.
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DATE: 06/02/2004 08:04:18 AM
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Darren from Digital Photography Blog says,
A report out of Russia claims that Pentax are announcing a complete withdrawal of manufacturing of compact and SLR film cameras by the end of the year. It could be just a localised thing but some are suggesting it just the first of the "big five" camera manufacturers who will all make moves in the coming years to go digital (to different extents).
Link
UPDATE: Pentax says it isn't so. Unless their Russian distributor knows something we don't, this would appear to be an unsubstantiated report. A spokesperson for Pentax USA (a privately-held subsidiary of the Japan-based parent corporation) told me today that the contents of this "leaked notice" are not accurate. This spokesperson said that Pentax has no immediate plans to cease distribution of film-based imaging products, that the company continues to produce and support film-based products, and said also that if Pentax Corporation were to make such a decision, the announcement would come direcly from Pentax Corporation of Japan rather than the Russian source cited in this forwarded online report.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US Army wants "wise" G.I.s
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DATE: 06/02/2004 08:06:17 AM
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Spotted on Noah Schachtman's DefenseTech blog today:
Soldiers of today need to new "skill sets. to function effectively under high-stress and other emotionally-laden circumstances," the Army says.
"These conditions are sometimes associated with interpersonal transactions but may also emerge as reactions to fast-paced, high-demand events and situations." The best way to determine whether a grunt has these skill sets or not: gauge his "emotional intelligence," or EI. It's made up of four abilities, according to the Army: "the perception, management, expression, and utilization of emotion."
The military is asking companies for ideas on how to put together a new, "comprehensive personnel management and training system" that would assess and build "an individual's ability to recognize, express, react and manage emotions associated with these interpersonal events and emotionally-laden circumstances."
Similarly, the Army would like to find leaders "who possess the wisdom to extend their expertise and values beyond service interests." But right now, it doesn't have an efficient way to find out who's wise and who's not.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guestblogger Russ Kick's MemoryHole -- banned in Iraq?
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DATE: 06/02/2004 08:10:17 AM
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Posted by a member of Declan McCullagh's politech mailing list:
I've received email from a person with an [army.mil] address. This person is stationed in Iraq, and he/she tells me that The Memory Hole is blocked on military computers. Trying to get to the site results in the following
message:
Access Denied (content_filter_denied)
Your request was denied because of its content categorization:
"Extreme;Politics/Religion". For assistance, contact your network support team.
How interesting. I post raw documents created by the government, military, and corporations. These days, that apparently amounts to "political extremism." Naturally, I've filed a FOIA request about this blocking.
Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Priapo says, "I read your post in boingboing talking about this subject and I have gathered a few ways to bypass the filter using a proxy. It's explained here."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Join Friends of the Creative Archive and help the Beeb put EVERYTHING online
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DATE: 06/02/2004 08:32:15 AM
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The BBC's Creative Archive is well underway now and a group of UK-based copyright activists and concerned license-payers have gotten together to lend their support to the project. The Archive is a project to put the BBC's enormous archive on the net for free viewing and remixing by the license-paying public. If the Beeb pulls this off, it will be the largest and most ambitious open-content project in the history of the world; a shining proof of the idea that the sky doesn't fall when you relax your copyright a little. I mean, we're talking the future of public service broadcasting here.
So the Friends of the Creative Archive are a bunch of concerned people who want to keep this on track. It's certain that there's going to be a lot of opposition to this -- from rights-holders, commercial broadcasters, even parts of the Beeb. But at the end of the day, the license-payers bought that programming, and it's not doing us any good sitting on the BBC's shelves.
You can help: if you're a license payer, you can join the Friends, and there will be lots of opportunities in the near future to petition the Beeb, the Governors, the DCMS and Parliament for this -- there's an open letter now that you can sign onto.
Here are some of the elements critical to the creation of a real, useful, relevant Creative Archive:
* It must be broad: drawing from all areas of the BBC's broadcasting from factual to light entertainment, from drama to sport, and everything in between.
* It must be accessible: files must be made available in open, standards-defined formats without "digital rights management" or other technology locks that will keep Britons from creatively re-using the BBC's offerings.
* It must be free: Material should be licensed under conditions that do not restrict any licence payer from accessing, storing, modifying or sharing archive material for non-commercial use.
* It must be whole: Material should be provided in its entirety for non-commercial use, not only in excerpted form.
* It must be soon: the BBC's own internally produced material should be released into the Archive as soon as possible, to prove to the world that the sky won't fall if you relax your copyright stance.
* It must be complete: the BBC should take steps to clear the rights to the independently produced material in its archive.
* It must be sustainable: the BBC's new licensing agreements with independents should all include the right for the BBC to make the works available in the Creative Archive for full non-commercial use.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Face transplant
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DATE: 06/02/2004 08:47:32 AM
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Researchers at the University of Louisville are seeking permission from a bioethics panel to perform the first-ever face transplant. According to a CNN article, "the operation could offer new hope for those who suffer severe burns, cancer or gunshot wounds. The surgery will attach facial tissue and blood vessels from a cadaver to a new patient." New Scientist broke the news last week, reporting that "the team has been using the faces of bodies donated for medical research to practise the groundbreaking operation and the results suggest that a transplanted face will not be recognisable as either the donor or the recipient - in effect creating a third face." As a result, the University of Louisville was swamped with inquiries, resulting in the release of an FAQ on the status of the face transplant program. Apparently, they're not seeking volunteers quite yet. Link UPDATE: Praveen points us to a Flash animation explaining the transplant process. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Occult book exhibit
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DATE: 06/02/2004 09:03:18 AM
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Here's a stunning collection of rare occult books from the Monash University Library in Australia. From the 1998 exhibition catalog:
"So great is the variety of 'occultisms,' that it is often difficult to find any connecting link between these traditions. The word is derived from the Latin, occullere, to cover over, to hide, or conceal, and all occult belief systems lay claim to some esoteric or hidden knowledge, but so too do many religions and mystical and philosophical systems, which are not defined as 'occult'. It is also clear - at least as far as those 'occult systems' with their own complex cosmologies are concerned - that what might be perceived by an outsider as "occultism", is to the practitioner quite possibly religion. This difference of perception serves to underline the only definite link that can clearly be demonstrated between these disparate 'occultisms': all were (or are) belief systems which existed (or exist) either on the margins of, or altogether outside, the mainstream religious or philosophical orthodoxies of the cultures in which they evolved." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Joi Ito profile
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DATE: 06/02/2004 11:49:23 AM
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Boing Boing pal and superblogger Joi Ito was profiled today by the Associated Press.
"Joi is an incredibly dynamic person," said Justin Hall, an American writer on technology culture and a friend of Ito's for several years. "He's got a fantastic curiosity. His metabolism or something -- he's wired a little different." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn-themed group art site
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DATE: 06/02/2004 03:16:33 PM
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"We Are Porn," an online collection of porn-themed art from artists in Germany.
Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc, also spotted on Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More on blocked sites for .mil websurfers
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DATE: 06/02/2004 03:28:11 PM
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Following up on this BoingBoing post about rumors that access to TheMemoryHole is being blocked on military computers in Iraq, BoingBoing reader John -- who has a sister in the Army -- says,
It gets better. Awhile back I sent my sister a link to the story about the man who could make art in cappuccino. She tried to access the story from the military hospital where she works. Here's what she sent back:
"for whatever reason, i can't open that from work. they blocked it and the screen pops up saying
Problem Report. Request Cannot be processed.Problem Cause -- A communication error occurred: "Operation timed out." Note: If the request was denied due to the Content Filterconfiguration. The content category reported is Gen. News. Possible Solution If you feel this site was blocked in error, please contact the HelpDesk at DSN 371-2098 or send an email to. IMD Help Desk.
WARNING! All web activity is logged and monitored by IMD. Unauthorized use of government information systems may lead to disciplinary action or prosecution.
so, i will have to check that out later."
[John continues:]If the request was denied due to the Content Filter configuration is a sentence fragment, but with The content category reported is Gen.
News. and If you feel this site was blocked in error, please contact the Help Desk the meaning is clear enough. For whatever reason, "General News" is not fit for our troops. I've been meaning to send her a list of links and ask her if she'd be willing to try to access them (Newsweek? New York Times? Common Dreams? Freerepublic.com [a conservative site]? townhall.com [another conservative site]?) I'm also curious what other kinds of sites she can't visit (geek news? music news? yahoo? wikipedia?) and whether she's prohibited from visiting these sites at work because she's /at work/, or if she's encouraged not to pursue the news in general.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Yorker on Dorkbot
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DATE: 06/02/2004 03:56:22 PM
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Dorkbot, a group of "people doing strange things with electricity" that meets in various cities worldwide, was profiled in this recent New Yorker story:
Dorkbot was founded by a young man named Douglas Repetto, who teaches computer music at Columbia. "The idea of dorkbot was to reach people who had nowhere to talk about these projects," Repetto says. "Some might appear in a gallery, perhaps, but many are too odd, or they're unfinished, or it's not even clear what they are." Dorkbot presentations typically feature novel ways of using electrical devices, especially uses that don't require much money. "Dorkbot is about what you can do on the cheap in a back room somewhere," he says. The name encourages humility.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Museum of old-school computers in Germany
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DATE: 06/02/2004 04:04:40 PM
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BoingBoing reader Brian says,
Xeni's mention of brick cell phones reminded me of this interesting museum in Paderborn Germany, called the Heinz Nixdorf Museum. The museum is based on the history of computing; and contains all sorts of wonderful classic machines, crank/gear operated calculation engines, typewriters and early keyboards, data processing "stations", minicomputers, mobile phones, personal computers (incl an Apple LISA, remember that!?), etc etc! It's a fascinating visit in person, and the museum website has some glimpses of the exhibits as well as some interesting text on the history of technology and computing.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tim Biskup's "100 Paintings" -- my favorite book of the year
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DATE: 06/02/2004 04:11:05 PM
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Tim Biskup works as a background animation artist. He's also a prolific painter, and this itty-bitty book (measuring a little more than five inches on a side) has reproductions of 100 full sized paintings that he whipped out in a matter of months. Biskup's style is inspired by the work of the eminent LP album cover artist Jim Flora (who died in 1998), but he's got a delightfully eclectic assortment of other influences, such as Japanese pop and early Disney layout artists, blended in. This little hardcover book is a steal at $10.47. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Amazon Says Get Your Plog On
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DATE: 06/02/2004 10:04:35 PM
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BoingBoing reader Nik says,
After a visit to Amazon today, I see that they are beta testing plogs (Personalized webLOGS) on their main page. For my plog, it lists my recent orders (along with their scheduled delivery time) and a few items I might be interested. I went to find out more about this new amazing 'we know all your secrets' tool of Amazons', and discovered that on their 'what is a plog' page, they have BoingBoing at the top of the 'best and most popular' blog list.
Link (Thanks to Rafat Ali, Robin, and others who wrote in on this item, and humble thanks to Amazon folks for the BoingBoing kudos)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Group blog on unlicensed spectrum
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DATE: 06/02/2004 11:39:40 PM
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Kevin Werbach has launched a group blog on Unlicensed Spectrum advocacy, with Clay Shirky, Andrew Odlyzko, and David Isenberg contributing:
The site focuses on the benefits of reallocating low-frequency wireless capacity from broadcasting to unlicensed applications, both here and around the world. There is a huge amount of capacity which could be used for two-way applications like broadband to the home, but which is locked up in broadcast allocations based on 1950s technology. Freeing up that capacity could create massive opportunities for innovation, and could dramatically lower the costs of wireless connectivity in developing countries.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Enron traders gloating about screwing California
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DATE: 06/03/2004 03:16:03 AM
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CBS has got hold of tapes of conversations between Enron employees during the California rolling blackouts. The conversations are amazing, basically a bunch of crooks gloating about the savage rogering they're giving to the people of California and how much money they're making. This has put fresh fire into the bellies of lawmakers who have renewed their vows to decapitate Enron's management and stake their heads on pikes outside of every polling place before election day.
Employee 1: "All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?
Employee 2: "Yeah, Grandma Millie man.
Employee 1: "Yeah, now she wants her f-----g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a—for f-----g $250 a megawatt hour."
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Baghdad family snapshots
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DATE: 06/03/2004 06:48:00 AM
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Photos shot before, during and after the war from a collaborative weblog maintained by members of a family in Baghdad. American tanks roaming the streets, Mom (Faiza) at work behind her computer, old brick buildings, a 'net cafe, spring flowers in the front yard, a stack of sweet watermelons at the market ("it's the best fruit in the hot summer, we call it Raggi.")
Link to the family photoblog and Link to the original AFamilyInBaghdad weblog (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hand-knit superhero costumes, beaded porn star trading cards
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DATE: 06/03/2004 07:01:38 AM
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Sculptor Mark Newport knits life-sized superhero costumes as a form of fabric art. For instance, these Spiderman and Batman pieces, 77 x 27 x 6 inches, $5,500 each. He's got an upcoming show in Seattle, SUPERHERO PANTHEON, from August 5 - 28, 2004. Here's what some fancypants art critic said:
"Newport works in and around an arena which, no matter how hip, still must be considered under the particular jurisdiction of the adolescent male: comics and the comic-book hero. However, he subverts the obvious appeal of violent conflict between forces for good and evil by accenting the decorative aspect of comic work via embroidery... over select faces and details... and through descriptions of a kinder, gentler alternate hero... The artist's use of needle craft, typically considered well within the realm of "women's work," establishes a challenging relationship between the young man implied by these works, the voice of popular culture/media, and a father's voice."
Scroll down for some less worksafe work from Newport -- hand-beaded trading cards bearing the images of gay porn stars, Playboy tableaus, Jenny McCarthy spread-legged centerfold shots, and Icelandic strippers. Charmingly strange. Link (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nielsen families' colouring book
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DATE: 06/03/2004 08:24:10 AM
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Jim Hanas has scanned and posted a colouring book provided by Nielsen ratings to metered families.
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory giving a talk/reading/signing in Seattle, June 16
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DATE: 06/03/2004 08:51:24 AM
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I'm doing an internal talk at Microsoft Research in Redmond on June 17, and they've been good enough to set up a public event on June 16 in Seattle. I'm going to talk a little about copyright and read some new fiction -- there'll be books on sale, and I'll be happy to sign your stuff for ya. Here are the details:
When: June 16, 7PM
Where: Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus
More info: Contact Kim Ricketts, 206-523-3458, kimr@kimricketts.com
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Beresford Egan illustrations
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DATE: 06/03/2004 11:20:05 AM
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The gorgeous cover of Aleister Crowley's Moonchild accompanying my post yesterday about the rare occult book exhibit was the work of Beresford Egan. A former sports cartoonist, Egan illustrated quite a few books in the decadent 1920s and 1930s, including an edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mals (Flowers of Evil) and Pierre Louys's Adventures of King Pausole. I'm now determined to collect all of Egan's work. (Unfortunately, copies of Moonchild with the Egan dustjacket are selling for US$2000!) Link (Until that GeoCities site is accessible again, here's another.)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bruce Sterling in San Francisco next Friday
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DATE: 06/03/2004 12:51:57 PM
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Bruce Sterling will rant about "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole" in San Francisco next Friday, June 11. Bruce's lecture is part of the Long Now Foundation's free "Seminars About Long-term Thinking" series. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Seonna Hong print from sixspace gallery
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DATE: 06/03/2004 12:55:07 PM
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Yesterday I wrote about Tim Biskup's book "100 Paintings." Today, I bought "Indiand Princess," a wonderful lithograph of a painting done by Biskup's wife, Seonna Hong. Seonna shares her husband's admiration of Disney artist Mary Blair (if you've been to Disneyland's "It's a Small World After All" ride then you know her work). Link 
Sixspace also offers a canvas giclee print of a much more recent Hong painting, called "Runaway," on its site here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Disney's California Adventure is a ghost town
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DATE: 06/03/2004 01:18:23 PM
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You've probably heard about the US Department of Energy's efforts to create a landmark to warn people to stay away from nuclear waste dumps in Nevada and New Mexico. The mission is to create some kind of warning system that will last for 10,000 years, and still be effective at delivering a message of danger that people in the distant future can comprehend. It's tough --the DOE has hired artists, architects, anthropologists, etc., but everything those people come up with to scare future generations away ends up looking more like a lure.
Here's what the DOE should do: hire Michael Eisner to design a theme park over the radioactive dumps. They'll never have to worry about anyone setting foot there again. As Boing Boing readers Vorbis comments on this photoessay of Disney's California Adventure Theme Park: "lookit how deserted this place seems to be not too long after the opening of the major ride."
Link Matthew sez: "I enjoyed that boingboing link you just submitted to the photos of empty lineups at Disney's California theme park -- but I thought maybe you should mention that savedisney.com (where the photos are hosted) is a site set up by Roy Disney and others as part of their campaign to oust Michael Eisner..."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese toy turns CDs into old fashioned records
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DATE: 06/03/2004 05:10:48 PM
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I can't read this because it's in Japanese, but it looks like this device scratches a groove into an ordinary CD, allowing you to make a gramophone style record out of it. Is the sound horn a plastic cup? Link (Thanks, Michael!) jOSH (who can read Japanese) sez: "it's a working model kit that costs about $40. that cup is actually a 'paper' cup. in fact, it says that you use any paper cup and a regular sewing needle to complete the model. it also says that you can record onto CD-ROMs or 'the lids off of cups of ramen'!!! that sounds too good to be true, but that's what the site says. you can then play back whatever you record on it as well. it also gives tips on how to get better sound and one of the tips says to use 'aluminum bags' mounted to either a cardboard circle or CD-ROM (because the bags would be too thin) to get good sound (not quite sure what an 'aluminum bag' is...). it runs on two batteries, takes only an hour and a half to put together and they say that all you need to make it (that's not already included in the kit) is scotch tape, a phillips screwdriver and a scissors. of course you also have to provide your paper cup and sewing needle as well (they even give tips on the size of cup you should use depending on if you want to record voice, music, etc.)." Also, check out Roy's translation of the device on his blog, and be sure not to miss his great photos taken in Asia, including the fried cicada kabobs.
And furthermore, Adam has a write-up about similar types of record projects, with pictures.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Corliss Anomaly Sourcebooks in Cool Tools
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DATE: 06/03/2004 08:13:38 PM
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In his Cool Tools newsletter, Kevin Kelly wrote about a series of books, called Corliss Sourcebooks. They sound like "Ripley's Believe it or Not" for grown ups. I'm tempted to buy the whole lot.
For most of us this remarkable series of volumes will be a constant source of wonder, amazement, and re-thinking. Because each observation is offered without explanation ("just the facts ma'am") in such volume (thousands and thousands), one quickly realizes the extent of our ignorance. So far Corliss has compiled 34 volumes, all items indexed according to his classification scheme. Confusingly these volumes overlap, and it is not easy to determine which are the latest, but those in his "catalog" series seem to be the most recent.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bradbury goes nuts over Fahrenheit 9/11 title
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DATE: 06/04/2004 02:39:51 AM
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Ray Bradbury has ripped into Michael Moore, calling him an "asshole" for "stealing" the title for Fahrenheit 9/11 from Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. Yeesh. You'd think that someone who's worked all his life in a genre where practically everyone has written a book or story called "Nightfall" would have figured out by now that there's no copyright in title, period, end of story. God, I hate it when my literary heroes turn out to have feet of clay. This is even worse than the time that he dismissed the Internet as a scam and compared MMOs to pinball machines.
"[Moore] is a horrible human being – horrible human!"
When asked if he agrees with Moore's political positions, Bradbury replied, "That has nothing to do with it. He copied my title; that is what happened. That has nothing to do with my political opinions."
Link
Update: Brian Dear comes up with examples of Bradbury's works that take titles from other authors, from "Something Wicked This Way Comes" to "I Sing the Body Electric" to "The Women."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gallery of movie copyright warnings
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DATE: 06/04/2004 04:26:42 AM
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The folks at Monochrom have set up a group photo-gallery site for flash photos of the insulting copyright warnings at the start of movies. I saw Day After Tomorrow last night at the Camden Odeon and the new copyright warning there was so ghastly I was frozen in place and didn't get a pic. I'll have to capture it next time and send it in.
Link
(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Feline
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DATE: 06/04/2004 06:19:48 AM
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cat blog | cat enema | i need your love | da mow mow | cat dancing | infinite cat project | post modern pets | sleepy kittens | cat teasing | cat with hands | zombie kitties | and the classics...
on a beach, in a gay bar, and smoking in paris
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: No sex please -- we're Japanese
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DATE: 06/04/2004 06:32:06 AM
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USA Today story on statistics published in a popular Japanese news magazine that point to an acute shagging deficiency throughout the country. A few BoingBoing readers (who've lived in Japan, or who are of Japanese descent) have written in to say that while the premise of this article may make for funny headlines and abundant "wacky Japanese culture" blog yuks, the truth behind the data may not be exactly what's painted here. Snip from the USA Today piece:
Only in Japan would a popular weekly newsmagazine deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence: "Young people, don't hate sex," AERA magazine pleaded last month in a report detailing a precarious drop in sales of condoms and in business at Japan's rent-by-the-hour "love hotels."
More and more Japanese men and women are finding relationships too messy, tiring and potentially humiliating to bother with anymore. "They don't want a complicated life," says Sakai, who has written a controversial bestseller, Cry of the Losing Dogs, on the plight of unmarried Japanese thirtysomething women like herself.(...)
AERA reports that condom shipments are down 40% since 1993 (probably in part because Japan finally legalized birth-control pills in 1999) and love-hotel check-ins are off at least 20% over the past five years. What's more, an increasing number of those visiting love hotels aren't there for romance, AERA says; they've found that love hotels offer the cheapest access to karaoke machines and video games.
Link. Hope this has nothing to do with the butter dog trend recently reported by Fleshbot. Or, god forbid, her.(Thanks, Invisible Cowgirl).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywood MP3 Disco Blowout Friday
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DATE: 06/04/2004 07:17:26 AM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post about the Bollywood Freaks mashup "Don't Stop 'til You Get to Bollywood," BoingBoing reader Mike says:
This was only a very slightly re-tweaked version of a tune from an early 1980s Bollywood soundtrack, as sung by the well-known Indian singer Usha Uthup. (The tune's original title is "Chhupke Kaun Aya".) The Usha Uthup version has just been re-released on CD in the UK, as part of a 2CD mix set called "The Trip", mixed by Tom Middleton.
But you ain't heard nothing yet! Usha's greatest work, which dates from the same era, is the utterly INSANE "One Two Cha Cha Cha". (This also quotes from a classic disco hit.) This track is available on a 1997 compilation called "In Flight Entertainment Vol.2" - and also as an MP3 on my blog for the next week or two.
Link to the blog hosting an MP3 download of "Cha Cha Cha." Oh yeah.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pocket mobile music meshes?
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DATE: 06/04/2004 08:04:04 AM
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BoingBoing reader Modesty says,
The dream of sharing and streaming the music (and files) on your PDA/Phone to other PDA/phones, while tuning into your fellow train passengers' playlists is finially here.
The app described here wraps up a little web server with file sharing/streaming code, and auto-detects others running the same. So if you're on a bus, walking or whatever, you can pick up tunes from other passing people, and they can pick them up off you, all very easily (if they stick around long enough).
Now all I'm looking for is a method to borrow CPU cycles from them at the same time. Sure they can listen to my music, if I can use some of their CPU time in return. And if my PDA is sitting doing nothing, why not let them run a few calculations on it?
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Wall climbing spybot = $14,000
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DATE: 06/04/2004 09:51:42 AM
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This $14,000 wireless spycam purportedly climbs all sorts of vertical surfaces. I wish I could see a video of it in action.
"A revolutionary, new remote controlled (R/C) robot. The SpyBot Climber easily scales many smooth and uneven vertical surfaces – wall board, plaster, brick, cinder block, and siding are negotiable for this versatile robot. It can even go across sturdy ceilings if placed there first – although it can transition from a horizontal (ground) surface to a vertical one, and back, it can not go from a vertical to an inverted surface or directly around corners unassisted."
Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Pesco bakes with Heather Gold
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DATE: 06/04/2004 10:07:58 AM
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Brilliant geek comedian Heather Gold's critically-acclaimed solo show "I Look Like An Egg, But I Identify As A Cookie" is back in San Francisco this month at the Penthouse Theatre. It's an interactive baking comedy and I'm honored Heather invited me to be the special guest cookie cook this Sunday, June 6!
"Heather searches for genuine connection as she makes the cookies through her own hilarious and provocative exploration of the recipe: heterosexuality (DRY), lesbianism (WET), the Left (MIX) and other tasty 1980s tunes and secret ingredients.... As the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Robert Avila put it, Cookie 'humorously sort[s] out the complexities of modern sexuality through baking's simple truths.'" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tonight in LA: 24 hour Midnight Moviemaking madness screening
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DATE: 06/04/2004 10:08:36 AM
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Winning films created in last year's edition of the 24 hour Moviemaking Madness competition will be screened tonight in LA. I covered the event last year for Wired Magazine, together with Gawker'sl Choire Sicha. It was probably the zaniest, most surreal 24 hours of my life. In the competition, filmmakers have exactly 24 hours to make a short digital film -- writing, blocking, shooting, editing, freaking out, it all has to happen in 24 hours. No sleep 'til Brooklyn. Winner takes home $10K and a serious case of sleep dep. Snip from the announcement on tonight's LA event:
Don't forget to come to the Silent Movie Theater in Hollywood this Saturday for NYC Midnight's Los Angeles Area screening of top 2003 movies followed by a Q & A session. This will be a great chance to see some award winning shorts and ask questions about the 2004 competition. Also, you may drop off your entry documents & entry fee at the info session.
Link to Wired article, and Link to event home page with details on tonight's screening in Hollywood.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Learning Mandarin is hard for native English speakers
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DATE: 06/04/2004 10:21:29 AM
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Jacob Sullum writes about how confusing it is for him to learn Mandarin. I can sympathize. I've been having a hard time learning Spanish this year, and it's supposedly the easiest language for English speakers to learn. From Sullum's experience described here, I'd go nuts trying to learn Mandarin.
The word ma, for instance, can mean "hemp," "scold," "horse," or "mother," depending upon whether your voice goes up, goes down, goes up and down, or remains steady. To make matters worse, the marks that signify tones in pinyin ordinarily indicate pronunciation: A flat line, for example, means a flat, high tone, not a long vowel.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mysterious video clip of skirmish in Middle East
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DATE: 06/04/2004 11:42:14 AM
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(Please don't send me email about this anymore -- see red text below -- Mark) I don't know anything about this video clip, and it seems like the guy who posted it ("Eric Bruderton") doesn't really know, either. But he writes that he's afraid of losing his life for posting it. It shows some Americans in a Middle Eastern country getting shot at with rocket launchers, and they're shooting back. Then they hop in a jeep and drive away, and another vehicle chases them, shooting missiles at them. It looks real, but something about the occasional bursts of static seem like they were edited in. Could this be a stealth marketing campaign for a movie?
You’ve probably come here for answers about the clip. I wish I could give them to you. I don’t know these people, I don’t know who’s shooting at them and I don’t know why they are being targeted. I don’t even know where they are. Maybe the Middle East. All I do know is that it’s important. Important enough that by the time you’ve read this, Eric Bruderton will likely have been erased from existence, both literally and figuratively.
Link
CarbWire's Jon Gales sez: It's a movie... Like with actors and stuff :P. That page you linked was just viral marketing. Check these links: Hollywood Reporter, Film Threat , September Tapes. It had me going too, but the faux static stuff gave it away.
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TITLE: Merry-go-round water pump
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DATE: 06/04/2004 11:48:31 AM
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When South African kids spin this merry-go-round, it pumps water into a tank. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Camouflage Duct Tape
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DATE: 06/04/2004 03:05:03 PM
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Get duct-tape in a variety of colors and patterns here. Link (Via Cool Hunting)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Photo-tour of world's greatest silkscreen printing shop: Standard Deluxe
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DATE: 06/04/2004 03:19:09 PM
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Birdhouse went to the Standard Deluxe printshop and took a bunch of nice pictures. What a great setup! I'm ready to move in.
"There is a sleepy town in rural Alabama that boasts a population of only 255. It is home to one of the best silkscreen print shops in the country. Scott Peek of Standard Deluxe invited us down for the nickel and dime tour. What we got was some down-home cooking, southern sweet tea and a group of warm individuals that take pride in mastering the craft of print."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Turn on, tune in, button up
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DATE: 06/04/2004 03:32:28 PM
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Now is your chance to own a fur coat that once belonged to (stay with me here) Mary Harcourt-Smith, the mother of Joanna Harcourt-Smith who was the ex-wife of bOING bOING patron saint Dr. Timothy Leary! The same dealer is also selling the late Joanna's vintage black beaver fur-lined rain coat. Let the bidding war begin! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Man loses mind, destroys town with bulldozer
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DATE: 06/04/2004 05:00:23 PM
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Friday morning hi-jinx in my home state of Colorado: "A man barricaded inside a fortified bulldozer went on a rampage Friday, firing shots and knocking down buildings as he plowed through the streets, witnesses said." Link (Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I can't believe it's not butter (dog)
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DATE: 06/04/2004 10:16:24 PM
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Fringe (and I do mean fringe) smut from Fleshbot:
People are still asking us for more information on those alleged Japanese "butter dog" videos mentioned in an article we posted yesterday, but all we've been able to come up with by way of related material is a gallery of two Aibo-like creatures going at it, a single CGI image which is more cutsey-sexy than icky-sexy ... and a Japanese page with ordering information for the apparently-much-sought-after butterdog sex toy (which looks more like a pig to us, but whatever). We really promise to stop looking now, though. So stop asking.
"48 Japanese Sex Lages" (toy dog smut gallery @ shibuya.cool.ne.jp)
"Butterdog" (CGI art [second row, second image] by Heaven4D @ babu.com, via Sensible Erection)
Butterdog Sex Toy (info and photo @ toyjoker.co.jp)
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TITLE: Report: North Korea bans cellphones
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DATE: 06/04/2004 10:28:20 PM
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There are reports today that the government of North Korea has banned mobile phones. Details are sketchy.
The country banned the use of mobile phones in late May, according to reports quoting a North Korean official in the country's capital of Pyongyang. The ban may be due to the deadly train explosion in the country in April, which North Korean officials have said was triggered by a mobile phone. Mobile phones have been used to trigger explosions in other attacks across the world. (...)
By the middle of last year, the country counted 40 base stations and about 1,000 users. North Korea has a total population of about 22.5 million people. In contrast, South Korea counts 35 million wireless subscribers and a 75-percent wireless penetration rate (...)
Link, and BoingBoing reader Nym suggests this new flag.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYC ban on subway photos
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DATE: 06/05/2004 03:18:07 AM
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The NYC subway system is thinking of banning photos on the platforms and trains. Photos of the NYC subways have won awards and been given their own shows -- and more importantly, photo-documentation of neglect through the subway system were critical to the re-funding and revitalization of the service. So, basically, this is a stupid idea.
The argument is that somehow, photos of trains and platforms (not switching stations, conductor compartments, or control centres) will aid terrorists, and therefore that banning photos will make New Yorkers feel safer. So, basically, this is a stupid idea with an even stupider justification.
The Village Voice is holding a Forbidden Photos contest to shoot cool, arty pix of the NYC subway, and to kick it off, they've interviewed a bunch of photogs who shoot underground all the time about why they work on the subway:
I've found that most subway police officers think that photography is already illegal, and there's no way to convince them otherwise. So I've taken to carrying a copy of the law with me. The only people this [regulation] will affect is law-abiding citizens.
An enormous amount of great photography has come out of the subway. Look at Bruce Davidson, who powerfully documented the run-down transit system of the '70s and '80s and its weary riders. He probably wouldn't have been able to get a permit at the time (no one knows if the MTA will even issue permits this time around!). Would we be better off without his art?
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 20 lectures on science fiction as MP3s
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DATE: 06/05/2004 03:33:07 AM
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The University of Minnesota has posted the audio from 20 lectures from its "Studies in Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy" distance-ed course. I haven't listened to them yet, but I've put 'em on my iPod for long plane-trips.
Link
(Thanks, Justin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vintage magazine cover gallery
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DATE: 06/05/2004 03:42:19 AM
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MagazineArt.org has thousands of scanned magazine covers from the 19th and early 20th Century. I'm utterly besotted by the covers of the pop-science mags published by Hugo Gernsback, who founded the first science fiction ("scientifiction") magazine in 1928 and for whom the Hugo award is named.
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(Thanks, Damien!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lemony Snicket trailer online
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DATE: 06/05/2004 04:05:43 AM
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The trailer for the first Lemony Snicket movie, "A Series of Unfortunate Events," (starring Jim Carrey) is online!
Link
(via Aint-It-Cool News)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Recording industry to demand fingerprints of music listeners
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DATE: 06/05/2004 02:27:37 PM
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Isn't the recording industry silly for trying this? I'm glad it's wasting its time on this fool's errand. I hope Veritouch gets millions from the RIAA for this rotten idea, which has a zero percent chance of catching on.
The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing. Established biometric vendor Veritouch has teamed up with Swedish design company to produce iVue: a wireless media player that allows content producers to lock down media files with biometric security. This week Veritouch announced that it had demonstrated the device to the RIAA and MPAA.
Link (via /.)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Scalped
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DATE: 06/05/2004 06:26:33 PM
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This razor for head shaving is truly a design tour-de-force. It looks and feels really slick and, most amazingly, it works like a charm. From the HeadBlade site:
"Unlike a conventional razor, the HeadBlade makes your hand (and fingers) the handle. This gives you more control. When your fingers can touch your scalp you have a much better understanding or 'feel' of what you're doing. The patented suspension of the HeadBlade gives you even more control; you don't have to worry about the angle of the blade. Think of a conventional handled razor. It's like a unicycle and only touches your head at one point (where the blade is). This is very difficult to control (both the angle and pressure of the blade). Especially if your fingers aren't in contact with your scalp. The HeadBlade, in contrast, has a suspension and touches your head in two places; like a bicycle."
My head hasn't been this smooth since I last visited Ye Olde Barber Shoppe for the straight razor special. Link (via Cool Tools)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Off to NotCon
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DATE: 06/06/2004 12:50:16 AM
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I'll shortly be leaving for NotCon, the NTK-sponsored tech-confernece in London's Imperial College Union (South Kensington). I'm sitting on panels on the politics of the net and the future of plaintext publishing, and looking forward to a really killer line-up of talks and panels and nerdy fun (NotCon's predecessor, The Festival of Inappropriate Technology, is the most fun I've ever had at a one-day conference). At £4 for admission (£3 for crumblies, bloggers, journos, and kiddies), this is your best entertainment value in London today. See you there!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Send your own letters to MEPs using copyright maximalist action-centre
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DATE: 06/06/2004 03:34:29 AM
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The "Campaign for Creativity" is an astro-turf letter-writing campaign that aims to get people to write to MEPs demanding even stronger copyright laws for Europe:
I am writing to say that it is important to me that Europe has strong intellectual property laws in place and that they are enforced properly.
The creative industries are under assault from pirates, counterfeiters and those who want weaken or remove the protections that enable the creative industries to function. 17,000 jobs a year and billions of Euros are lost every year because the IP laws are weak or not enforced.
Please support us when you're elected. We're counting on you!
But you can write your own letter and paste it in. Here's the full text of mine, and an excerpt:
File-sharing is part of the traditional cycle of new technology development:
from the phonorecord to the VCR, from the radio to the satellite service, every
new technology that lowered the barriers to reproducing and distributing
copyrighted works has had to make use of the popular media of the day to conjure
itself into existence -- usually over the howls of protest of rights-holders who
were merely the legitimized pirates of from the last fight.
When the phonorecord people bitterly fought radio, they conveniently forgot that
they'd built their business through widescale infringement of the sheet-music
publishers. It's no different today: filmmakers (who enthusiastically violated
Edison's film patents), broadcasters (who played records without permission or
payment), cablecasters (who pirated free-to-air signals for their networks) and
even hybrid entertainment/electronics companies (like Sony, whose piratical VCR
was characterized by the motion-picture people as the certain death of the film
industry) are all standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against programmers
and ordinary citizens who have, once again, discovered a better way to
distribute and reproduce creative works.
It's no surprise that these pirates of the entertainment industry want to pull
the ladder up behind them and dog the hatch. After all, the traditional role of
inventors has been to create massive new revenue opportunities for the
entertainment industry, and the traditional response of the entertainment
companies has been to seek legislative relief from those opportunities.
Link
(Thanks, Alice!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Danny O'Brien's Life Hacks
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DATE: 06/06/2004 04:29:55 AM
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Here are my running notes from Danny O'Brien's NotCon recapulation of his "Life Hacks" talk. Danny interviewed a bunch of prolific geeks and asked them how they do it: this is his distillation of the habits of the geeks who spew the most code, words and such. Wish he'd turn this into a book already!
People use todo.txt (Ford's is 27,000 lines long)
* Don't use complicated apps
* Use Word, BBEdit, Notepad, emacs, vi, whatever
* Why?
* If you want to organize yourself, take the stuff you're going to forget quickly and dump it just as quickly -- if it's in your short-term memory, you have to put it somewhere
* You need to be able to find and enter text fast
* Can cut, paste and find text fast
* XML Guy: "Not interested in tagging my behavior with metadata -- just want to find stuff. Google shows that text cna be found quick"
* Text editors have incremental search (Mozilla: type slash and begin typing for your search string) -- quick way to lock-in on your desired text
* In Moz, Panther, Launchbar, Quicksilver, etc
* Text can be trusted
* Power users trust software as far as they've thrown them in the past
* Power users know that the bigger an app, the flakier it is
* They've upgraded and crossgraded a lot, which means that they need text, which can run on every platform
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TheyWorkForYou: finest advocacy web-app in the world
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DATE: 06/06/2004 11:41:33 AM
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TheyWorkForYou.com -- a project from the FaxYourMP team -- has launched today. This is the most amazing, subversive piece of political webware I've ever seen. It scrapes the Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable. It compiles stats of which MPs vote against their parties most often, which ones speak most often, which have made the most motions and so forth. I've been beta-testing it and the code and UI are brilliant. It's like they've poured Parliament into LiveJournal -- and in so doing, have cutg overnment down to a human-addressable scale. We need one of these in every country in the world.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Combover: The Movie
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DATE: 06/06/2004 08:28:39 PM
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Chris Marino, the producer/director of the upcoming documentary about combovers said I'd like his site about the film. He's right. The teaser looks great. I bet I'm going to like this a lot more than Supersize Me. There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.- Marcus Valerius Martialis, Roman poet, 98 A.D.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New materials photoshopping contest
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DATE: 06/07/2004 01:30:05 AM
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Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest -- everyday objects manipulated to appear to have been manufactured from other materials (like this soap-bar iPod!).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Before and After advertising cards
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DATE: 06/07/2004 01:33:45 AM
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Great gallery of vintage "Before and After" advertising cards:
Rheumatic, lank, dyspeptic, lean;
The bad effects are plainly seen,
On those who do themselves the wrong,
Of buying any brand that comes along.
But happy though, the daily life,
Of the bright, contented, plump, housewife,
And happy all who take her stand
To buy the Arm & Hammer Brand.
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(via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Save Clarion mailing-list
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DATE: 06/07/2004 01:37:17 AM
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The Clarion science fiction writers' workshop at Michigan State in is pretty grave danger, despite its auspicious, 30+ year history of turning out some of the finest sf writers in the field. A bunch of alumni have started a SavingClarion mailing list to talk about how to keep the workshop going after it loses its berth at MSU. Click the link below to join.
At Wiscon last week, Lister Matheson (the director of Clarion East for the past several years) and Mary Sheridan hosted a brainstorming session to talk about what we can do to keep Clarion alive despite MSU's financial and political machinations.
We came up with some ideas, both short term and long term, in that hour and a half. Step 1 in the plan is to organize a core group of Clarionites to continue the discussion via a listserv, come up with other ideas, and begin to implement some of them. Many people who were there were eager to continue the conversation, and I think all of you might have thoughts to contribute as well.
I just set up the list, and will wait a couple days for everyone to get on it (and for Lister, Mary, and Amelia at Clarion to get back online--the university relocated their offices to rooms without sufficient electrical outlets), then summarize what we've discussed, immediate action items, and we can go from there.
I hope you'll consider joining this conversation by following the Yahoo instructions below to join the group. Feel free to direct others who may want to join us to contact me as well. Thanks.
Link
(Thanks, Becky!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MP3 interviews with Philip K Dick
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DATE: 06/07/2004 01:53:19 AM
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David sez, "A friend loaned me a bunch of tapes, and one of them turned out to be an audio interview of Philip K. Dick, interviewed in his home. You can hear the television on and his kids playing in the background. Very relaxed and chatty. I transfered it to mp3s. Everything you hear is exactly what was on the tape. I don't have a lot of server space, so I'll have to post the mp3s a batch at a time. I wouldn't mind if someone wants to provide greater hosting capabilities." Here's David's email if you have some spare hosting capacity you'd like to pass along.
01 -- If God exists then he's a fake, or more likely a foot!
02 -- On RAH.
03 -- Christopher.
04 -- self-sacrifice, the person sacrifices himself for another person.
05 -- On Mussolini.
Link,
Mirror,
Torrent
(Thanks, David and Andrew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Deathmatch Mario Brothers
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DATE: 06/07/2004 01:56:17 AM
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Super Mario War is a head-to-head deathmatch adaptation of Super Mario Brothers implemented in portable code. Someone port this to the Mac, please!
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public Enemy's history of copyright in hip hop
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DATE: 06/07/2004 01:59:18 AM
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"How Copyright Changed Hip Hop" is an interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee on the punishing battles Public Enemy fought over their use of samples in their early work.
Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?
Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout--meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound--for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.
Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Beam of Pain
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DATE: 06/07/2004 07:01:16 AM
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A roundup of new weapon technologies in this Sacramento Bee piece:
Test subjects can't see the invisible beam from the Pentagon's new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds. People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.
The long-range column of millimeter-wave energy is known as the "Active Denial System" for its ability to prevent an aggressor from advancing. Senior military officials, who plan to deliver the device for troop evaluation this fall, say years of testing has produced no sign it will lead to health effects beyond perhaps causing skin to temporarily redden.(...)
But in an era of secret interrogations of al-Qaida suspects and revelations of U.S. abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, Executive Director Doug Johnson of the Minneapolis-based Center for Torture Victims is skeptical. "It seems fundamentally a weapon that's designed to create a great deal of pain and fear," Johnson said. "The concern I would have is ... once this kind of technology is available and there's a perception that it's safe and nonlethal, it seems like a natural device to be used in interrogations.
Link (Via Warren)
Update: Popular Science Michael Moyer says, "We did a feature last year on a bunch of nonlethal weapons that the military is developing. The writer actually got shot by the beam in question for the story. His verdict: It hurts really, really bad." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: China cracks down on 'Net games
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DATE: 06/07/2004 07:50:02 AM
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I filed this story for Wired News about a crackdown on electronic games by the Chinese government:
Responding to an unprecedented boom in computer game popularity, China's government established a censorship task force this week to monitor the content of imported games for offensive or politically sensitive content.
Ministry of Culture officials said all online and wireless games produced outside the country will now be subject to examination first before they can be legally distributed within the country. Foreign producers of online games already in distribution must submit those products to MOC examinations by Sept. 1, or face punishment.
"The ministry allows the import of foreign online games whose content accords with Chinese national conditions and has positive effects on young people's mentality," according to an MOC statement. Chinese officials had been monitoring the content of video games before, but they seem to be stepping up efforts after a period of exponential growth in computer and wireless gaming. Two European games were recently banned.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Real "Walkman" settles with Sony
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DATE: 06/07/2004 10:10:06 AM
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Sony is apparently kicking down several million Euros to Andreas Pavel, a German inventor who in 1977 patented and prototyped a wearable stereo called the "Stereobelt." Of course, the Stereobelt sounds a lot like the Sony Walkman, launched two years later. Flush with cash, Pavel now plans to go after Apple and other makers of, er, digital Stereobelts. Link (via my journal at The Feature)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Is this Atlantis?
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DATE: 06/07/2004 10:20:00 AM
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Researcher Rainer Kuehne of the University of Wuppertal believes that structures visible in satellite photos of a salt marsh region near the Spanish city of Cadiz may be "Atlantean" temples. This region on the southern coast of Spain was washed away by a flood between 800-500 BC.
"(In his description of Atlantis) 'Plato wrote of an island of five stades (925m) diameter that was surrounded by several circular structures - concentric rings - some consisting of Earth and the others of water. We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described,' Dr Kuehne told BBC News Online."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogger photo-gallery
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DATE: 06/07/2004 10:25:46 AM
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Rannie -- the photojunkie.ca photoblogger who can often be seen at events like SXSW taking even more photos than most people -- is doing a one-week tribute to bloggers, with pix of many webwriters. I like this one of me at the Bloggie awards.
Link
(Thanks, Rannie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wired's fantastic intellectual property infoporn
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DATE: 06/07/2004 10:40:20 AM
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Wired has just posted a series of "Infoporn" PDFs showing really fascinating stats about the realtionship of intellectual property and the public domain. They cover all the bases here, from books and music to seed-stock and the genome. This is excellent, excellent stuff.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NES-themed Game Boy
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DATE: 06/07/2004 10:43:45 AM
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Nintendo has brought out a Game Boy Advance with classic Nintendo Entertainment System styling -- check out the leaked early pix.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple's sweet new WiFi appliance
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DATE: 06/07/2004 10:47:47 AM
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Apple has just announced the $129 WiFi Express, a WiFi appliance in an AC-adapter form-factor. It has an Ethernet jack, a stereo mini-jack and a USB print-server so that you can stream audio, USB and packets to anything in range of your WiFi base-station, at 802.11g speed.
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(Thanks Jon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harry Potter movie reworked with a downloadable soundtrack
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DATE: 06/07/2004 11:04:37 AM
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Wizard People, Dear Reader is a remix of the first Harry Potter movie. It's a special soundtrack to the movie made by artist Brad Neely that recasts the story and tone of the flick. The idea is to buy the DVD and play the soundtrack (which is a free download) alongside of it.
With Mr. Neely's gravelly narration, the movie's tone shifts into darkly comic, pop-culture-savvy territory. Hagrid, Harry Potter's giant, hairy friend, becomes Hagar, the Horrible, and Harry's fat cousin becomes Roast Beefy. As imagined by Mr. Neely, the three main characters are child alcoholics with a penchant for cognac, the magical ballgame Quidditch takes on homoerotic overtones, and Harry is prone to delivering hyper-dramatic monologues. "I am a destroyer of worlds," bellows Mr. Neely at one point, sending laughter reverberating through the warehouse Friday night. "I am Harry" expletive "Potter!"
Link
Soundtrack mirror
(via Creative Commons)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First-ever look inside a WIPO treaty negotiation (day 1 of 3)
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DATE: 06/07/2004 11:30:38 AM
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I'm at the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, along with the largest-ever public-interest coalition in WIPO history, We've all come to oppose the Broadcast Treaty (which will make the Web illegal and require the world's governments to mandate the design everything that can receive a signal, from a PC to a radio) and the proposed Database Treaty (which would let people who'd amassed public, uncopyrightable facts turn them into their exlusive property).
There's no transparency into this process for most of the world. The doors are locked, the minutes are sealed, and you need to be accredited just to sit in the room.
There's no connectivity in the room, but by publishing and using an ad-hoc WiFi network in the main room, three of us (me, my cow-orker Wendy Seltzer, and David Tannenbaum from the Union for the Public Domain) were able to collaborate on note-taking on the first half-day's session using SubEthaEdit, the brilliant and unique Mac app.
The speaking style at these events is "diplomatic" --slow, formal and thick with coded and subtle messages. Between the three of us we were able to untangle some of the speech and tease out some analysis. I think that our point-form notes are a really good, comprehensive view of the meeting.
* Brazil: We've been at this for ages. No real and substantive
discussions have taken place. There's no clear understanding of
the potential economic and social impact of database protection.
A study that was comissioned by WIPO on database copying in Latin
America indicated from the Latin American perspective that
regulation is premature. It's detrimental to innovation, science,
education, access, etc., particularily in developing countries.
In the light of this we want to question the usefulness and
convenience of maintaining this on the agenda. This isn't
unfinished business, the lacklustre engagement of the committee
tells us that this is business we don't want to engage in, and
this gets in the way of other business we might choose to
address. We ask to have this permanently deleted from the agenda.
* ALA: The database protection issue in US Congress is
significantly controversial, highly unlikely to pass in this
Congress. Agree with Brazil, let's take this off the table here.
Congress called this a "Solution in search of a problem" --
there's more databases than ever, why do we need this. We don't
see a consensus or a need for protection.
* Ecuador: On behalf of Latin American and Caribbean group, I
would like to make a general statement. We don't think that this
should be on the agenda now.
* India: Should everyone who produces work by sweat of the brow
come here for protection? This isn't creative labour. There's no
allegation of widespread copying of non-original databases. Even
if there were, the question relevant for this organization is
whether this body should be considering nonoriginal databases.
Where there's no creativity, databases are assets; that's the
apporpriate concern to address by misappropriation, but not
intellectual property. Perhaps soem other rubric, some other
forum is appropriate. Many entities need protection of sweat of
brow assets but we shouldn't have all of them approaching WIPO
for a remedy.
If EU wants to protect nonoriginal databases, EU can. It's
important to leave industry space to develop. at this stage, we
need a more careful learning process, not laws that inhibit
industry rather than facilitate. Database protection is
premature now. Even in long term, it may not be appropriate for
WIPO. We recommend the issue be deleted from the Standing
Committee's agenda.
* US delegation: We think that this should remain on the agenda.
We need to exchange more information about what this is and how
it works where it's been adopted.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sub-niche blog of note: peoplefallingover.com
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 06/07/2004 12:27:54 PM
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Peoplefallingover.com has entries about people who involuntarily rotate about their Z-axis. For example, watch what happens to this man who insists on applying a red-hot branding iron to a horse's hind leg. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Low-carb potato
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DATE: 06/07/2004 12:28:11 PM
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I've been on the Atkins diet for two months and my potato jones just won't go away. That's why I was thrilled to read that a new "low-carb" potato will be available come January. Developed by a seed company in the Netherlands, it's not genetically modified either. The bummer though is that this variety of spud is in reality just lower carb. According to potato expert Chad Hutchinson of the University of Florida, 3.5 ounces of the new potato contains 13 grams of carbohydrates, compared to 19 grams in a comparable chunk of Russet Burbank potato.
Hutchinson said it is due in part to the lower specific gravity, which relates to the amount of starch in the potato, compared to the more widely recognized Russet Burbank baking potato. "The smooth, buff-colored skin and light yellow flesh will make this potato an attractive and tasty alternative in many traditional potato recipes," he said.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pics of Sci-Fi Museum
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DATE: 06/07/2004 12:44:28 PM
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Kirsten Anderson of Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle posted some pictures from the "friends and family" premiere of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Awesome combover
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DATE: 06/07/2004 01:06:30 PM
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I try not to post things that make fun of people's appearances, so I have to explain that I'm linking to this picture of an extreme combover not because I think it looks bad on the guy, but because I'm saluting him for being so in-your-face about it. He's pushing the envelope, and he deserves recognition. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Happy Birthday Laughing Squid!
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DATE: 06/07/2004 06:58:41 PM
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Our dear friends at Laughing Squid, San Francisco's clearinghouse for avant-garde art and creative madness, are celebrating their ninth birthday this November. They couldn't wait to celebrate though, so they're throwing the Laughing Squid 8 1/2 Year Anniversary Show this Saturday, June 12.
The line-up of performers is truly insane, from Subgenius savant Dr. Hal Robins to heavy metal bagpipe virtuoso The Madpiper to New York "sound acrobat" ZeroBoy.
As Timothy Leary said, "You have to go out of your mind to use your head." Happy birthday, Laughing Squid! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LayerOne tech con this weekend in LA
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DATE: 06/07/2004 08:21:46 PM
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BoingBoing pal boogah says:
LayerOne Technology Conference will be going on this Saturday and Sunday [June 12-13] at the Westin LA Airport. We've got a grip of really great speakers lined up for our first year... NTK's Danny O'Brien will be flogging his Life Hacks talk that's won over crowds at everywhere from Emerging Tech to NotCon. Dan Kaminsky will be giving an early preview of his Black Hat talk and hopefully be releasing some tools to back up his concepts. Jason Schultz of the EFF will be talking about how the DMCA is stifling innovation and preventing the future of interoperability. USC's Douglas Thomas will be covering how code is and can be a means of political action.
On top of that we've got eight more great talks, free wifi, a mini-vendor area [see: shirts and technological epherma] a cash bar right off the speaking area and gratis beer for paying attendees on Saturday night. Doors open at 9am on Saturday and on each day the first talk is at 10am and the we adjourn at 6pm. We're charging $50 for the weekend, which we'll gladly take at the door.
Highly recommended! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Space Invaders Rug
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DATE: 06/07/2004 08:34:37 PM
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Nerdolicious area rug from NYC-based design boutique Dune.
According to Funfurde blog, the boutique's owner contacted Space Invaders maker Taito for permission to make the rug -- and Dune was reportedly given permission to do so without any requirements of licensing fees or royalty payments. Unlike the game on which it is based, this design product will cost you more than just a fistful of quarters -- $3,000, to be exact.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Homer, Bart Simpson naked in Japanese soda TV ad
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DATE: 06/07/2004 08:50:13 PM
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Animated TV stars The Simpsons have sold their butts, figuratively speaking, for the likes of Butterfinger and Burger King here in the US. But in one of the many Simpsons ads shot for Japanese "CC Lemon" carbonated tooth-rot sugarpotion, Homer and son appear au naturel. Sacre blog!
Link (Thanks, sekrit Fleshbot editor!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nerve.com's "Future of Marriage" survey
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DATE: 06/07/2004 08:56:39 PM
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Tomorrow, "Literate Smut" online magazine Nerve launches a two-week "Future of Marriage" special issue. Included: the results of a "future of marriage poll" which canvassed 2082 readers for some interesting trend data and pithy quotes ("A good marriage needs blow jobs."... "Have failed at it three times, but I am in love once again, so I still have hope." ... "Would rather not die alone.")
New trends among our readers (primarily educated urban men and women in their twenties and thirties): 32%, for example, think cheating begins with a raunchy IM session. Fidelity is a priority for them (close to 80% are pro-monogamy), but they're laissez-faire about the lifestyles of others (97% think having children out of wedlock is okay). There's just one thing on which they refuse to compromise: 59% think bad sex is grounds for divorce.
Link to poll results (yeah it's Nerve, but at-work-surfers can chill -- no boobies are exposed in poll data results)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool gift wrap in biohazard symbol pattern
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DATE: 06/07/2004 09:02:50 PM
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SEE UPDATE BELOW
Nothing says "you're special" like wrapping paper emblazoned with the international symbol for lethally toxic crap. $10 per four-sheet pack, and you can buy it online. The "skull" and "Happy Fucking Whatever!" motifs are pretty swank, too.
Link (Thanks, CJC)
Update: Biohazard wrapping paper is a bad idea! Bottom line: stick with the "happy fucking whatever" paper. BoingBoing reader Chris Davis writes,
I am not a trained first responder (IANATFR), but I've heard that when real, trained, first responders come across safety symbols - biohazard, nuke radiation, etc - they take them very very seriously.
So lets say you wrap your bottle of wine for the party host in the cool biohazard paper, and then get in a wreck on the way there. And the wine bottle breaks inside the box. The EMT gets to your car, sees a damaged box covered in biohazard symbols leaking fluid on the passenger seat, and makes a 180 out of there to call in the trained biohazard people, leaving you to fend for yourself. Oops..
I just called a firefighter friend, so he IS a trained first responder (IAATFR?). Turns out he just last week had a hazmat response training session. He said they use 'common sense' - so in my example above, they MIGHT go ahead and treat the injured, but it would probably set a chain of events in motion that would be a really big deal - guys in hazmat suits going over your car before you get it back, law enforcement asking a lot of pointed questions.. He emphasized that in this day and age, they do take this stuff seriously.
As he put it, 'Say you've got somebody you've got a problem with. Wrap a box of kleenex in that paper, throw it in his car, and drop a dime. He will never fuck with you again.' "
Update #2: Yet another reason "biohazard" wrapping paper is a bad idea. Gosh, I'm sorry I ever blogged it! Boingboing reader Judson says:
There are very specific laws regarding the disposal of biohazardous waste, if you mark you waste as such you are required to dispose of in that manner, since people at the dump don't really like to go digging through possibly biohazardous waste to make sure it's dangerous. The EPA (or public health dept) however absolutely will dig through it in order to place the blame on the (most often) company that violated the disposal laws. I used to work for a large commercial lab, and I've heard through people at other labs of stories where they look through everything to trace it back to the violator... I'm sure you wouldn't get a fine for actual dumping, but I wouldn't want to cause that sort of trouble. People working landfills are another group that doesn't like to see the biohazard sign.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ads on Pringles chips
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DATE: 06/08/2004 01:00:12 AM
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Procter and Gamble is selling advertising space on individual Pringles chips.
According to the release, first up will be a promotion involving one of Hasbro's (NYSE: HAS) popular board games, "Trivial Pursuit Junior." Questions from that brand will be featured on the crisps, along with the answers, of course. (Actually, P&G should consider placing the questions in one canister of crisps and the answers in another canister to double sales -- as well as the anger level of consumers, I suppose). The launch of this initiative is scheduled for summertime.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Animals in classic art photoshopping
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DATE: 06/08/2004 01:02:10 AM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: Cute ani-mules matted into classical paintings.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Slashdot-proof your server with FreeCache
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FreeChache is a kind of Ad-Hoc-amai -- a service that caches high-demand content on high-availability servers. The Internet Archive's FreeCache service has an automated tool that integrates with Apache to automatically cache and redirect visitors attempting to download large, popular files -- using this can slashdot-proof your server.
Link
(Thanks, Dav!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brian Dear's blog reprinted in the San Diego Reader
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DATE: 06/08/2004 01:05:01 AM
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Blogger Brian Dear has landed a sweet deal to have a month's worth of his blog posts reprinted as a cover story in the San Diego Reader -- he even got some sweet cash in the deal. He's blogged the story of his deal:
My first thought: scam. I mean, who is this guy? Why is he writing to me, right out of the blue? I don't know him from Adam. And, if this guy is from the Reader, then why was he using what appeared to be a personal email address (not sdreader.com)? So, I looked up the phone number for the San Diego Reader and called.
I asked for Jim Holman. The receptionist wanted to know what this was regarding. I told her I just a moment ago got this email from Mr. Holman saying he wanted to pay me for an article and I am calling to see if this is for real. She put me on hold and then sure enough, I was talking with Jim Holman.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-cost low-carb
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DATE: 06/08/2004 01:06:19 AM
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Here are some great tips for eating a low-carb diet that's also low-cost.
6. Look for substitutions that make sense. Don't want to pay top dollar for bacon? Lean boiled ham is much less expensive and fills the same purpose in many menus. And canola oil has the same healthy fat benefits as olive oil for less than half the price.
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(via Carbwire)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory in Ottawa Citizen
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DATE: 06/08/2004 04:48:06 AM
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On May 30, the Ottawa Citizen ran a great profile on me and my books, with a sidebar on other authors who post their work online. The Citizen has a weird policy where they only let subscribers see their online archives, but Brent Kirwan, a generous reader, has sent me a high-resolution photo of the newspaper spread where you can read it yourself.
148k JPEG Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Weirdest Amazon Schwag
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DATE: 06/08/2004 05:12:55 AM
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Great Amazon Listmania list: the 25 weirdest things on Amazon, including a lamp shaped like a human leg, 1250 grubs, an anatomically correct human torso and a live lobster.
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Declan: Die, FCC, Die!
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DATE: 06/08/2004 07:00:22 AM
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In his CNET column this week, Declan McCullagh argues that the Federal Communications Commission has outlived its usefulness and should be abolished.
Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn't work for the Soviet Union, and it's not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good.
Consider some examples of bureaucratic malfeasance that the FCC, with the complicity of the U.S. Congress, has committed. The FCC rejected long-distance telephone service competition in 1968, banned Americans from buying their own non-Bell telephones in 1956, dragged its feet in the 1970s when considering whether video telephones would be allowed and did not grant modern cellular telephone licenses until 1981--about four decades after Bell Labs invented the technology. Along the way, the FCC has preserved monopolistic practices that would have otherwise been illegal under antitrust law. These technologically backward decisions have cost Americans tens of billions of dollars.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wi-Fi: If Not Free, Then How?
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DATE: 06/08/2004 07:04:26 AM
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My Wired News colleague Joanna Glasner filed this piece on the challenges
commercial Wi-Fi networks have faced convincing people to pay daily or hourly fees for unwired broadband. Now that Cometa's kicked the bucket, survivors may need new pricing schemes.
"Wi-Fi wants to be free," said John Yunker, an analyst at Byte Level Research who follows wireless technology. He believes high-speed wireless access will evolve over the next several years into a freebie service, much like cable television or air-conditioning in hotel rooms, that customers come to expect at cafes, airports and conference centers.
For surviving Wi-Fi players to remain afloat, Yunker believes, they'll have to change their business models, offer more all-you-can-surf plans and cut prices. For those who do charge, he believes customers will be comfortable paying rates of about $4 a month for unlimited access to a network of hot spots.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: What re-election stunt will the Bush admin pull in October?
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DATE: 06/08/2004 08:59:21 AM
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October Surprise is asking people to predict the re-election trick that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have in store for October. Results so far:
Osama bin Laden captured! 33.3%
Spectacular terrorist attack on US soil! 23.6%
Vote is threatened by terrorist attacks, vote suspended due to red alert. 14.6%
Diebold Election Systems fixes the vote in battleground states. 11.4%
Escalation in Israel, Iran, or North Korea. US opens a new war front. 8.1%
US pulls out of Iraq in October, leaving the UN in charge. 4.9%
WMD's found in Iraq! 4.1%
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: History of the Universe in Seven Snoozes
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DATE: 06/08/2004 10:09:07 AM
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Web art site Locus Novus is run by a Pasadena, California-based designer who does amazing things with hypertext. A Flash-based presentation of writer Jim Ruland's short piece "History of the Universe in Seven Snoozes" just went live today, and I think it is sublime.
Link, and here is another one of my favorite pieces from Ruland at McSweeney's. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Broadcast Treaty negotiations (day 2/3)
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DATE: 06/08/2004 10:10:58 AM
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We've just wrapped up the second day of Broadcast Treaty negotations at the UN in Geneva, and once again, two colleagues and I took really extensive notes on the proceeding. Brazil and India gave amazing testimony today, and I was able to address the UN on DRM -- it was screamingly cool. We did a lot more editorializing today -- it's still hard to follow, but damn this is important. If we lose here, it's a disaster for the Internet and the PC.
* Brazil
- Article 5: National Treatment. We favor alternative J,
irrespective of whether we agree on some kind of redefinition of
the term "national." We reserve the right to come back --
possible at a future meeting -- to the issue of the rights
conferred to the beneficiaries under the treaty.
[ed: note Brazilian implication that this business shouldn't be
concluded at this session]
- Concentrate on Article 16, Technical Protection Measures [ed: AKA DRM]. Brazil is concerned with
proposed inclusion of TPMs in proposed new treaty. Aware that
similar provisions are in WCT and WPPT, but it's important to
recall that those treaties were negotiated and adopted when there
was little awareness regarding potential implications of use of
TPMs. Since then, some years have gone by, and there's a growing
widespread awareness that use of such measures can be quite
detrimental to rights of consumers and public at large.
Significant concern that anticircumvention has significant
negative for exercise of rights exceptions and limitations in
national laws. Important obstacle to access of public to public
domain materia.
Inconsistent with necessary free flow of info so important to
encourage innovation and creativity in the digital environment.
All of Art 16 counters stated objectives of new treaty as
referred to in preamble. Para recognizes need to maintain
balance between rights of broadcasters and larger public
interest.
This entire article should believe this entire article should be
deleted from the text. Other delegates argue that e fact that we
have these provisions in WCT and WPPTY mean that we should
include them in this treaty. We disagree. Not pertinent to rights
of broadcasting organizations.
[ed. Brazil is very courageous. -dt]
[ed. See EFF's Unintended Consequences report for some of the
specific harms from adopting anticircumvention to which Brazil
alludes. Brazil recognizes that previous treaties offer
opportunity to learn from mistakes, not just blindly follow
existing language. -ws]
[ed This is the best statement I've ever heard at a WIPO session.
-cd]
Chairman: Access to information is near to my heart as well. This
is not intended to cover DRM that locks up public domain
material. If an industry or entity does this, then TPM protection
shouldn't be available and circumvention should be lawful.
[ed. Since broadcasting isn't copyright, though, there's a wide
range of new material locked up by new rights for broadcasters.
Otherwise, there's no need for a treaty at all, since copyright
and licensing of copyrights can cover the field. -ws]
[ed. It's a nice theory, but the DMCA enthusiastically covers the
uncopyrightable, the public domain, and things that really
shouldn't be thought of as copyright, like the way that garage
door owners work or the secret of refilling a printer cart -cd]
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Autopen: mechanical signature storage and reproduction
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DATE: 06/08/2004 10:30:18 AM
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The Autopen is a wicked vintage gadget that lets you store your signature as a series of mechanical cues for a multifariously branched mechanical armature. Gizmodo has a killer post on it, with old pop-sci articles on the forthcoming age of the autopen. Lots of online info revolves around how to tell if your collectable souvenir signature came off an autopen or an original signature.
The most useful one, though, is the Autopen, made by International Autopen Co. of Sterling, VA., a popular device that is apparently still in use (the Republic National Committee bought one just this year). The Autopen is loaded with special metal 'matrix' -- basically a traced pattern of the signature -- that can be used again and again, even if the signer isn't there. Even better, owners of Autopens can purchase signature matrices through the mail from third parties, duplicating any autograph at will. Current models of the Autopen weigh around 100lbs, run off regular power, and can use real pens and pencils (although they work better with Sharpies, due to the fixed width of the pen looking less off when done with marker).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cut-and-fold paper vintage video-game cabinets
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DATE: 06/08/2004 10:34:22 AM
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Here's an AMAZING collection of print-cut-and-fold miniature vintage arcade machines, just the right size for a Barbie to play.
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bruce Schneier explains why the Witty Worm is a scary piece of malware
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DATE: 06/08/2004 12:46:54 PM
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Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Security explains why the Witty Worm is so awful. Witty was very well written. It was less than 700 bytes long. It used a random-number generator to spread itself, avoiding many of the problems that plagued previous worms. It spread by sending itself to random IP addresses with random destination ports, a trick that made it easier to sneak through firewalls. It was -- and this is a very big deal -- bug-free. This strongly implies that the worm was tested before release. Witty was exceptionally nasty. It was the first widespread worm that destroyed the hosts it infected. And it did so cleverly. Its malicious payload, erasing data on random accessible drives in random 64KB chunks, caused immediate damage without significantly slowing the worm's spread.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Big Sleep for Bonzo
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DATE: 06/08/2004 02:43:37 PM
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BoingBoing pal Gareth Branwyn points us to some spectacular spleen-venting over the case of Alzheimer's that America appears to be having over Ronald Reagan's presidency. Tom Carson in the Village Voice. Sorry for the spoiler, but here's the final line: "The best that can be said for Ronald Reagan is that, if George W. Bush gets re-elected, we may yet end up missing him."
Ronald Reagan is the man who destroyed America's sense of reality -- a paltry target, all in all, given our predilections. It only took an actor: the real successor to John Wilkes Booth. In our bones, we had always been this sort of bullshit-craving country anyhow, founded on abstractions: not land (somebody else's), not people (Red Rover, Red Rover, send Emma Lazarus right over), not even shared history (nostalgia isn't the same thing, and try pulling that Civil War Shinola anywhere west of the Rio Grande). Just monumental words and wordy monuments, with two convenient oceans between them and circumstance; from Nat Turner's status as three-fifths of a man -- even though we ended up hanging all of him -- to Reagan's child Lynndie England (b. 1983, the year we invaded Grenada and lost 241 Marines in Lebanon), any shortfall could be blamed on something lost in translation. But it was Reagan, whose most profound Freudian slip was the immortal "Facts are stupid things," who beguiled us into living in the theme park full-time, and so much for the Declaration of Independence's prattle about "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" -- actually the only time we ever expressed much concern for those. Since his 1980 opponent, Jimmy Carter, was about the sorriest embodiment of the reality principle imaginable -- Three's Company's Mr. Roper on the world-historical stage -- facts didn't have a prayer.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Download the US Constitution for your iPod
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DATE: 06/08/2004 02:54:54 PM
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An anonymous BoingBoing reader says, "The Constitution of the United States has just been released for the iPod. This is cool on several fronts, not the least of which is the fact that it was produced by the American Constitution Society, a progressive lawyer's group associated with Mario Cuomo and Janet Reno. To my knowledge, this marks the first time a major DC policy group has attempted to use the iPod to accomplish its goals." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dancing With Cats
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DATE: 06/08/2004 10:54:23 PM
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I just got home from having coffee with a friend at my favorite cafe in West Hollywood. There's a zany new age bookstore down the street. Sometimes I pop in for the sole purpose of sneering at book titles like Tantric Sex for Dummies and Is Your Pet Psychic?
But tonight was no ordinary night of snorting and hiding my face in the Feng Shui soy candle display. Tucked away on the shelf below that black velvet UFO portrait of The High ECK Master, I found Dancing With Cats (Chronicle Books, 1999). Been around for years, but I'd never seen it before. Filled with pictures of humans fannying about in tights, striking "I-Wish-I-Were-Baryshnikov" poses -- together with cats who doing the same thing. The text is rich. "Multicat" interspecies dance ensembles as a tool for enlightenment; think Busby Berkeley with hairballs and chakras. Dig the pre-dance exercises:
Before we can begin dancing with our cats, we must first make contact with them. We can't simply put on music and expect that our cats will dance with us. We have to first align our dynamic vibration systems with theirs and bring those systems into a kind of confluence before we can build the energy levels through the dance that are necessary to attain the higher vibrationary states which enable us to channel the infinite power of the universe.
You see, human beings and cats are not simply physical bodies confined within a barrier of skin or fur. We are also made up of dynamic energy systems which extend out, and interact with, every other energy system around us.
There's a simple exercise you can try right now as you sit in front of your computer. It's one of a number of what we call mirroring exercises that will allow you to bring your body into an energy-centered relationship with your cat and prepare you to dance with it... a simple purring technique. Remember that purring is the way a cat modulates its energy reserves in order to restore its psychic equilibrium.
So, roll yourself a catnip fattie and smoke this: Link
Update: If you like that, check out Catflexing and Why Cats Paint, both of which must be seen to be believed. (Thanks, Matthew Burns and Thomas A. Dennis!).
And BoingBoing reader Cliff Van Eaton of Papamoa, New Zealand says:
"It sounds like you had your tongue firmly implanted in your cheek ... you should, because the website you linked to was another wonderfully disguised creation by one of New Zealand's great merry pranksters, Burton Silver. He used to be a much-loved cartoonist here, with a long running strip called Bogor that featured a hedgehog that craved snails and marijuana leaves, and a sensitive new age logger. Here's a link to a few phone cards featuring the Bogor characters. He was featured on a New Zealand stamp a few years ago.
Silver created his first book ruse with Why Cats Paint. It was considered a big joke in New Zealand (because everyone here was quite familiar with his wit), but overseas lots of gullible people (read: cat lovers) took it seriously, and lo and behold he had a hit on his hands. My favourite Silver scam is a book and ball combination he brought out on the New Zealand market a few years ago at Christmas. It was a combination between golf (a favourite and very egalitarian pastime here) and rugby (the national religion). The golf ball is in the shape of a rugby ball, and you score points by hitting it between goal posts. Well, everyone knew that Silver was having a good joke, and lots of fathers and brothers got "Golf Cross" sets for Christmas. But interestingly, when people took them out in the paddock and had a bit of a hit around, they found that it was actually a very enjoyable game. Here's a link with more info about Golf Cross."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Proposal: Distributed audiobook of US Constitution?
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DATE: 06/08/2004 11:15:39 PM
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Following up on this earlier Boingboing post about a downloadable Constitution for your iPod, the EFF's Jason Schultz says, "How cool would it to start an audio project having famous lawyers/judges reading various parts of the U.S. Constitution for download, similar to the distributed audio project for Lessig's latest book?" Other than the idea of voluntarily listening to lawyers speak, this sounds like a great idea to me, too. Has this been done before? No? Any takers?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Suing carriers over locked handsets
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DATE: 06/09/2004 12:30:14 AM
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A consumer-rights group is bringing suit against US mobile carriers for locking their handsets:
In the lawsuit, the foundation said that because the companies all use the same wireless network standard, called GSM, customers should be able to use the same phone across those carriers' networks just by changing out an easily-replaced unit called a "SIM card" inside the phone.
The carriers may claim that locked handset let them offer cheaper service -- because they keep you from using your subsidized handset with another carrier, but I don't buy it. I got a free T-Mobile handset by promising on pain of an enormous cancellation fee to stick with them for a year. In the meantime, why shouldn't I be able to rent a SIM when I go to Toronto and put it in my phone? Why shouldn't I be able to loan my handset to a friend from out of town so that she can put her SIM in it and log on to her service?
Link
(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Arty light-up squishy doorbells
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DATE: 06/09/2004 12:42:05 AM
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Spore's <$100 doorbells are pretty cool -- gell-filled, illuminated interactive door-art.
Link
(Thanks, Fun Furde)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Andre the Giant has a magazine
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DATE: 06/09/2004 08:00:13 AM
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Street/commercial artist Shepard Fairey--instigator of the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" meme--is launching his new magazine, Swindle Quarterly, this month:
"SWINDLE quarterly will be the definitive pop-culture and lifestyle publication for young men and women. Servicing music, art, and fashion, SWINDLE provides a wide variety of fresh “lifestyle” content for the young and eclectic. SWINDLE will be the first truly non-disposable almanac of popular culture. It’s hardcover and premium print quality will set it apart from other publications on the newsstand. When you buy SWINDLE, you get a beautifully designed addition to your personal library, to be displayed next to your favorite books." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Monolith and digital copyright
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DATE: 06/09/2004 08:02:55 AM
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BoingBoing reader Jason Rohrer created an app called Monolith, which "munges" together two arbitrarily-selected binary files (called a Basis file and an Element file) to produce a Mono binary file (with a .mono extension). Jason says the resulting Mono file will not be statistically related to either file, hence becoming an interesting tool for exploring the boundaries of digital copyright (what is the copyright status of the resulting .mono file?)
Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not "owned" by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.
Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.
What does this mean? This means that Mono files can be freely distributed.
Link
Update: Ernest Miller says, more or less, BFD: "The conceit of the concept is that neither the cryptotext nor the key is copyrighted. Thus, it should be legal to distribute both. Otherwise, the author of Monolith claims, everything is copyrighted and nothing can be distributed because there is always a number such that, if XOR'd with another number, will produce a copyrighted work. This argument is not new and it not terrible interesting. It basically postulates that any encrypted transmission of information is actually not a transmission of information at all." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update: blocked sites for .mil websurfers
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DATE: 06/09/2004 08:07:55 AM
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Joi Ito points us to an interesting comment by one of his blog's readers, in response to this BoingBoing post about rumors some websites such as The Memory Hole may be blocked for access by military personnel in Iraq.
I'm on a civilian owned internet right now. That means if I chose, I can search for pornographic material right at this moment if I felt so inclined. However on a military computer, we use internet which is connected to a military owned server, broadcasted by our own Sattelites. These frequencies get filtered based on what the military deems is right and wrong. This includes shopping, games, pornographic material, dating services, chat lines, and perhaps some Blogs.
For those who felt they weren't being blocked from ANY site, well, if all you try to go to is Yahoo.com, then come on. Try out "bigkinkygirls.com" or something on a military computer. Or access a hate or racist site. Good luck. Sometimes, due to the filters, a site containing news and information may be blocked without the intention of cencorship. Such as some adult software blocks a childs report on Mule's simply because the webpage had the word ass in it.
NIPR's "Websense" software is strict and server based. And is controlled by a higher leveled ISO. If there is any doubt to the web pages contents, contacting the help desk should help them realise the mistake, and fix the situation upon investigation. But NIPR would rather block any suspected webpage, than allow one to slip through. But in the luckier parts of Iraq, the soldier is free to walk into a KBR internet cafe without cost. And many units supply them with free internet so that we may research, email our families, or simply have a good time at one of our favorite Blogs.
PFC "Zaku", 47th FSB, 1AD Baghdad
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sounds from the electronica underground
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DATE: 06/09/2004 08:15:51 AM
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D-I-R-T-Y is a very cool experimental music soundsystem/clearinghouse whose Web site features dozens of Real Audio DJ sets and live performances from electronica artists including Cinematic Orchestra, Minotaur Shock, Jazzanova, Kid Koala, and many others. Air's "selection of great western songs" is quite a treat. You can also listen to D-I-R-T-Y's Radio Colette, direct from the hippest design/lifestyle shop in Paris. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: MEMS marvels
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DATE: 06/09/2004 08:43:37 AM
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Researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne have created microscale models of the Tyne Bridge and the Angel of the North sculpture that are tinier than the period at the end of this sentence. The designs showcase MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) technology, tiny devices fabricated from silicon with techniques similar to those used in integrated circuit manufacturing. Of course, these microscopic architectural wonders were preceded by flw, a 1/1 millionth scale MEMS version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater that Boing Boing pal Ken Goldberg and Karl Bohringer constructed way back in 1996. Link Update: Starting on Monday 7/14, Goldberg and Bohringer's flw will be on display for a month at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mentality of Homo Interneticus
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DATE: 06/09/2004 09:41:18 AM
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Kevin calls this First Monday essay, The Mentality of Homo Interneticus: Some Ongian postulates by Michael H. Goldhaber, "a wonderful summation of the new mentality of internet usage."
Increasingly, blogs — daily updates supposedly from an entirely personal perspective — have become a central focus of many people’s Web experience. A blogger captures our attention less through brilliance of expression, than by resonating with our own prior views, and also — often chiefly through various degrees of self–revelation. In general, the more intimate, the better; and the more supportive of a particular side, slant and style in some public debate, also the better each blogger then can direct our attention to other sites or sources, that further our knowledge of and loyalty to the same stance. We can easily be inundated in views, gossip, conspiracy theories, selected facts and so forth that serve to bolster the preconceptions that attracted us to such thoughts in the first place.
For any text to continue to hold our attention on the Internet, it must be calibrated so as to: provide just the right level of excitement to sustain interest; not introduce matters so strange that the reader cannot follow or is tempted to seek explanations on other sites; to present arguments of only moderate complexity — again not to distract or bore the reader; and gather the reader’s sympathy by presenting materials likely to resonate with her. Opportunities to escape these limitations that might do for a printed work are far more risky in the Internet environment, where attention can quickly stray. Despite the apparent democracy of the Internet, where anyone has an equal chance to create a site or blog, these tight restrictions demand a high degree of talent and ingenuity for success.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bush's climate-change Lysenkoism
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DATE: 06/09/2004 10:33:38 AM
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Sterling's latest Wired column is a good comparison of the government-mandated pseudoscience in the Bush climate policy and the "totalitarian hucksterism" of Trofim Lysenko, Salin's number-one bad-science guy.
Presidential science adviser John Marburger complained that the UCS's account sounded like a "conspiracy theory report." That's because it is one. As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.
When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public comments on NYC subway-photo-ban solicited
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DATE: 06/09/2004 10:35:58 AM
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The NYC subway system is considering a ban on photography on its trains and platforms -- despite the long and honourable tradition of shipping kick-ass art by taking snaps on the trains. Here's a public inquiry site where you can comment on the proposal.
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(Thanks, Christian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amusing English place-names by post-code
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DATE: 06/09/2004 10:41:17 AM
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Here's a service that will take your UK post-code and return a list of amusing place-names near to you. Here're the ones near my flat:
Mincing Lane
Cock Pond
Tyttenhanger
Pratt's Bottom
Titsey Park
Minges
Claggy Cott
Herbert's Hole
Nasty
Thong
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(via Mine, Mine, Mine!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WIPO Broadcast Treaty: consolidated three-day notes
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DATE: 06/09/2004 10:51:18 AM
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The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping "signal theft." But along the way, this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror), trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogging Baby
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DATE: 06/09/2004 01:22:23 PM
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Toilet training, thumb sucking.... might sum up any day's contents of dozens of navelgazing weblogs (or maybe something you'd spot on Fleshbot) but instead they're part of the latest micropublishing venture from Weblogs Inc. Link to bloggingbaby.com. Caution: NSFRH (not safe for Raffi-haters)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bush/Zombie Reagan 2004 ticket
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DATE: 06/09/2004 03:03:31 PM
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A website proposing an unlikely -- actually, undead -- candidacy:
Q:What are some advanatages of adding Zombie Reagan to the ticket?
A: He will demonstrate America's resolve to continue the battle against terrorism. Instead of retreating to an undisclosed location, for instance, Zombie Reagan will be on the front lines, eating illegal combatants.
Link
(Thanks, Macki. Incriminating phonecam snapshot of Macki making eyes at the formerly living President, taken at the LA Friar's Club last year, is right here.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Supreme Court MP3s for your next hot-n-heavy makeout session
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DATE: 06/09/2004 03:11:06 PM
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Probably not that well-suited for hot-n-heavy makeout sessions, but -- psych! -- made you look. Following up on this earlier post about an audio version of the US Constitution, BoingBoing reader Jonathan Mitchell says:
This site gives free downloads of the oral arguments in US Supreme Court cases of the 1960s. The sound quality isn't always brilliant; the arguments may be barmy; but the interest is in listening to how crucial civil rights issues were viewed at the time. Try Loving v Virginia (are anti-miscegenation laws racially discriminatory? umm, hard question). Warning: some are almost two hours long.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Art Attack
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DATE: 06/09/2004 07:18:30 PM
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On June 15, a federal grand jury will convene in upstate New York to consider possible bioterrorism charges against University at Buffalo art professor Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble, an internationally-known hactivist collective. From the CAE Defense Fund Web site:
"Early morning of May 11, Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife, Hope, dead of a cardiac arrest. Kurtz called 911. The police arrived and, after stumbling across test tubes and petri dishes Kurtz was using in a current artwork, called in the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Soon agents from the Task Force and FBI detained Kurtz, cordoned off the entire block around his house, and later impounded Kurtz's computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body for further analysis. The Buffalo Health Department condemned the house as a health risk.
Only after the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State had tested samples from the home and announced there was no public safety threat was Kurtz able to return home and recover his wife's body. Yet the FBI would not release the impounded materials, which included artwork for an upcoming exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art."
This Washington Post article provides more background on the bizarre turn-of-events. Protests at the Court House in Buffalo and in other major cities are planned. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mind Games
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DATE: 06/10/2004 09:08:50 AM
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Four epilepsy patients at Washington University can now play videogames on brain power alone. Bioengineers at the university implanted the patients with an electrocorticographic (ECoG) "grid" that collects signals from the surface of the brain. While it's clearly more invasive than using EEG electrodes taped to the head, ECoG is also far easier to use. Eventually the technology could lead toward bionic prosthetics for disabled people. From Washington University's press release:
"(After surgery, the patients were asked) to do various motor and speech tasks, moving their hands various ways, talking, and imagining. The team could see from the data which parts of the brain correlate to these movements. They then asked the patients to play a simple, one-dimensional computer game involving moving a cursor up or down towards one of two targets. They were asked to imagine various movements or imagine saying the word 'move,' but not to actually perform them with their hands or speak any words by mouth. When they saw the cursor in the video game, they then controlled it with their brains.
'We closed the loop,' said (professor Daniel) Moran. 'After a brief training session, the patients could play the game by using signals that come off the surface of the brain. They achieved between 74 and 100 percent accuracy, with one patient hitting 33 out of 33 targets correctly in a row.'"
I'm sure the military would love to play too. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: More than electric wallpaper
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DATE: 06/10/2004 09:31:59 AM
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The North American AVIT (Audio-Visualize It) conference takes place in San Francisco this weekend. AVIT is a showcase, tradeshow, and massive party for "live audio-visual artists," the VJs whose work often appears, but is rarely seen, on the walls of nightclubs and raves. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to Un-DRM your Un-DRM'd iTunes 4.6 Songs
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DATE: 06/10/2004 09:52:25 AM
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Ernest Miller says,
Gizmodo has a very interesting story about the iTunes DRM ripping software known as Hymn. "Now part of the whole shtick with Hymn is that even though it strips the iTunes DRM, it leaves your email address and other unique purchasing information in the protected AAC file, ostensibly to symbolically signify that Hymn users aren't trying to spread their fairly-purchased music files to the whole world, but instead to whatever devices they want." How does the new version of iTunes respond to this? It notes that the purchasing information is there and then blocks the file from playing.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anatomy of an MP3 meme, and why can't the BBC play MP3s?
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DATE: 06/10/2004 09:59:27 AM
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BoingBoing reader Rob Annable posted this curious item about a song featured in a BoingBoing post -- that crazy "Rodeohead" bluegrass parody of Radiohead. It traveled from BoingBoing to Rob's blog to John Peel's show on BBC Radio 1. That's interesting, but what's really interesting is the fact that the BBC's legendary DJ told Rob the BBC can't play MP3s.
Link (Thanks, JP)Update on this post is here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Red, round tricorder ready for space
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DATE: 06/10/2004 10:07:39 AM
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My Wired News colleague Noah Schachtman filed this interesting piece about a weird new NASA gadget:
It's shaped like a basketball. It was inspired by Spock's tricorder. And, if NASA researchers have their way, it could be helping out astronauts aboard the International Space Station in as little as three years.
The Personal Satellite Assistant is a robot prototype designed to buzz around the space station, performing a variety of jobs for astronauts and mission controllers: monitoring life-support systems, keeping tabs on the day's tasks and reminding space scientists how to do their experiments right. After six years of development, engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center say they now have a version of the Personal Satellite Assistant, or PSA, that's fully mobile, with a sensor suite that's nearly space-ready.
But it's unclear whether the red spherical bot will ever make it into orbit.
Like so much else at the space agency these days, the fate of the PSA remains uncertain. The drone's makers hope to have an answer from the higher-ups by the end of the summer.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 06/10/2004 10:47:01 AM
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In my new issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* 3-D Videoconferencing (no glasses required!)
* Synthetic Biology (a parts library of genetic Tinkertoys!)
* Seconhand Smoke (worse than we thought!)
* The Molecular Foundry (fab new nanofab!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Happy 70th, Donald Duck!
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DATE: 06/10/2004 10:57:25 AM
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Donald Duck is 70 today!
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(Thanks, Tavie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Conference schwag goldmine
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DATE: 06/10/2004 11:04:40 AM
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VonGuard sez, "I just got back from the 2004 BIO conference in SF, and I can safely say that this show offered the best shwag I have ever seen at an expo. Who cares about the protesters and the genetically modified foods? Screw them, I want my keychain flashlights, pens, and squishy balls. Here then, I have created a page to honor the best of the best, the 2004 BIO shwag awards!" I'm a serious conference rat, but this schwag is way outside of my experience, truly a cut above.
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(Thanks, VonGuard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Update: Dot-bomb bankruptcy auctioneer goes bust
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DATE: 06/10/2004 11:10:47 AM
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Andover Consulting -- a dot-bomb vulture that specialized in selling off the assets of bankrupt Silicon Valley tech companies -- has gone bankrupt. Its assets are up for auction. Check out the cache of Herman Miller chairs and the sweet sweet cubicle action.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
Update: Billl sez, "FYI, Andover Consulting is *not* bankrupt or going out of business, according to one of their people I just emailed. I suspect this is just an auction of stuff they're liquidating from other companies."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Replica first-edition Britannica
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DATE: 06/10/2004 11:12:04 AM
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This $200 replica of the 235-year-old first-edition Encyclopædia Britannica is really cool.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reservoir Dogs/Star Wars mashup
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DATE: 06/10/2004 11:14:01 AM
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Imperial Dogs is a work-in-progress mashup of Star Wars with Reservoir Dogs, from Studio Creations, who also brought us the Star Wars/Clerks mashup "Trooper Clerks." There are some sweet songs (Stuck in a Room with R2!) stills and animations up now.
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(Thanks, Sizemore)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Playlists of Web-available music
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DATE: 06/10/2004 11:16:48 AM
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Webjay is a project to host and share listener-created playlists of songs that are freely downloadable from the Web.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SENT phonecam art show launches with Motorola
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DATE: 06/10/2004 11:18:23 AM
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Phonecam photographers, contribute to SENT! The phonecam art show I'm co-curating -- the first of its kind in America -- is online, and you are invited to share your futurephone snapshots of the world with the world. The website is live now, and a gallery show will open at a downtown Los Angeles space on July 9.
Motorola is sponsoring the show, and they've provided some late-model camera phones for each of the 30 participating artists (including Megan Mullally of TV's "Will and Grace," Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, "Weird" Al Yankovic, and a number of renowned photographers and filmmakers).
National Public Radio's
"Day to Day" program issued a "Phonecam Challenge" to their listeners in partnership with the show -- NPR listeners from around the world submitted images to SENT, and five winning entries will be recognized after review by a panel of judges including "Day to Day" host Alex Chadwick.
The invited artists' images will debut at the gallery show in July, and images submitted by the public are available for viewing right now.
Link, and instructions on how to submit your phonecam art are here. the NPR "Day to Day" Phonecam Challenge is here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Real Stuff by Dennis P. Eichhorn
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DATE: 06/10/2004 12:18:11 PM
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I'm fanatical about autobiographical comics. Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Mary Fleener, Joe Sacco -- I can't get enough of them. There's something about comics and real life stories that go together; I can't quite figure it out, but it works. Denny Eichhorn, author of Real Stuff, is one of the best comic book autobiographers. Like Pekar, he doesn't draw his own cartoons -- he hires well-known ones to draw from his scripts. Dennis has led an interesting life. There's a little Kerouac in him, and a little Bukowski, too. It's a wonder he's still alive, after all he's been through.
One of my favorite episodes from his life is from his high school years. A kid he didn't know very well invited him over to his house. The mom asked him if he wanted a hambuger. He said, "Sure." When the burger was ready, the mom and her son sat down at the table and watch Denny eat the burger. They didn't eat; they just watched Denny. They had gleams in their eyes. When Denny was finished, they asked him if he liked it. He said it was OK, but a little spicy. Then the mom and soon broke out in laughter. "It was DOG FOOD!" they howled.
Denny had 20 issues of his comic, Real Stuff, published, mostly by Fantagraphics. This anthology, also titled Real Stuff, is published by a company in Los Angeles that I've never heard of, called Swifty Morales Press. They did a great job -- the book is a beaut. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO skin a PC to look like a Mac
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DATE: 06/10/2004 12:21:04 PM
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Engadget has a great step-by-step HOWTO for skinning your WinXP box until its desktop is nigh-indistinguishable from a MacOS X box.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: BitTorrent of Daily Show on Ashscroft's refusal to turn over torture memo
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DATE: 06/10/2004 01:33:53 PM
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A Boing Boing reader sez: John Stewart tears Ashcroft a new one over the torture legalizing memo. And it's funny." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Arcata Eye Police Log now a book
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DATE: 06/10/2004 03:43:49 PM
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Stefan sez: "Arcata is a small, funky Northern California college town. Its laid-back style, liberal politics, and location on Route 101 makes it an attractive way station (or permenant home) for a wide variety of (ahem) colorful characters.
"The local weekly paper, the Arcata Eye, publishes an arch, sometimes hilarious, sometimes hair-raising police blotter column, available on its web site and now as a book!"
8:10 p.m. Malloy and Reed (you’'re too young to remember them) would’'ve described the behavior of the woman at a Uniontown shopping center as "hinky." It was this very hinkiness that compelled management and police to render her persona non grata, even though she hadn’'t stolen anything.
10:39 p.m. More hinkage, same place. This time it was a man. A man and a bottle. The bottle wasn’'t his, and yet he seemed to enjoy its company, toting it around the store and placing it in different locations, thus maximizing the hink factor and attracting a security guard’s interest. When he went through the checkout line, though, the bottle was not visible. He left, the police came, but neither he nor his glassy shopping companion were located.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New York Times gets mad at Apartment Therapy blog
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DATE: 06/11/2004 08:51:39 AM
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Worth reading. A NY Times writer threatens to sic the paper's legal dogs on the Apartment Therapy blogger.
Yesterday the phone rang towards the end of the day and when we picked it up the voice on the other side of the line said, "This is Marianne Rohrlich." It was like getting a call from Elvis. Marianne Rohrlich?! Who we have been reading obsessively and PROMOTING obsessively for the best home section coverage IN THE COUNTRY? She is, however, not happy with us. "Did it occur to you that it is not right to just LIFT other people's work?" she asks me. ("Do you know what blogging is?" I want to ask.) "Our legal department is going to be calling you."
Link (Thanks, Keith!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why Spyware is good: it thins the herd
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DATE: 06/11/2004 09:43:23 AM
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Nick Douglas sez: "WhereU is asking the court to change its mind on an authoritarian spyware law, albeit via a jurisdiction argument. Spyware sucks, sure, but if I can avoid it with Firefox and the occasional AdAware scan, I'd rather not pay taxes to protect luddites from it. Spyware is a disease in the Darwinian ecosystem of the Internet, and it keeps power users ahead of brain-deaders who click moving banner monkeys."
A New York company that makes Internet pop-up ads has asked a judge to block enforcement of Utah's new Spyware Control Act pending resolution of the firm's challenge to the law's constitutionality.
WhenU.com Inc. claims the law that took effect last month is "arbitrary and Draconian" and violates its free-speech rights.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Seymour Hersh on Abu Ghraib: "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
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DATE: 06/11/2004 10:07:54 AM
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Brad DeLong posted an email message he received from someone who saw Seymour Hersh speak at the University of Chicago a couple of nights ago.
[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
He looked frightened.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free
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DATE: 06/11/2004 10:39:02 AM
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Paul Boutin has written a great piece for Slate about a cost-free 3-step method to keep your PC virus free. Please read it an use it so your PC doesn't end up become a spam and virus spewing zombie. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Rhythm Science
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DATE: 06/11/2004 10:40:49 AM
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Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has a new book out that melds memoir with pomo ranting. Published by MIT press, Rhythm Science, is the latest in the Mediawork Pamphlets series under the editorial direction of Boing Boing pal Peter Lunenfeld. The Mediaworks Pamphlets pair authors and designers to create works in the vein of McLuhan and Fiore's seminal The Medium is the Massage. Rhythm Science contains a mind-spinning cut-and-paste CD mix of sounds from the Sub Rosa record label archive. Brion Gysin and Tristan Tzara, meet Scanner and Oval. Link
Update: Josh Glenn points us to his recent interview with Miller in the Boston Globe.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Washington Post on Bush's torture methods
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DATE: 06/11/2004 10:46:00 AM
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This Washington Post editorial about the methods of torture that the Bush administration approves of is all over the blogosphere, but I think it's important enough to post here.
Before the Bush administration took office, the Army's interrogation procedures -- which were unclassified -- established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." What if the foreign interrogator of an American "knows that severe pain will result from his actions" but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Power Tool Drag Race in San Francisco
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DATE: 06/11/2004 10:59:40 AM
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It's time again for the annual Power Tool Drag Races in San Francisco! This Saturday and Sunday...
"See average schmoes go up agaist GEARHEADS GODS in the age old struggle for Power Tool SUPREMACY! Watch as the finest minds in mutated motors RIP SHRED and BURN the track to TWISTED CINDERS! Nibble your carcinogen-laden fingers in suspense as the competition gets down to the FINAL BLOODY SHOWDOWN!"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Futures market for outcome of political and economic events
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DATE: 06/11/2004 01:23:07 PM
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I didn't know there was a futures market for the next president. I read this in an article in Bloomberg:
Some investors are betting Bush will win the election. According to the Iowa Electronic Markets, as of 8:45 a.m. New York time investors were paying 53.2 cents for futures that pay $1 in November should Bush win the election. Kerry futures were quoted at 46.8 cents.
Sponsored by the University of Iowa Henry B. Tippie College of Business, the market allows investors to buy and sell futures contracts based on the outcome of political and economic events, such as elections and Federal Reserve interest-rate changes.
They also have a market for who will be nominated as the Democratic candidate. It will cost you two tenths of a cent to buy a share that'll pay a dollar if Lieberman gets nominated.
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Michael sez: I think the Bloomberg article made an error when it claimed,
"investors were paying 53.2 cents for futures that pay $1 in November should Bush win the election. Kerry futures were quoted at 46.8 cents." Notice that Dems are slightly favored over Republicans, which contradicts the Bloomberg article. Here is the prospectus for this future. Bloomberg probably misattributed another futures market to the presidential winner market. This futures market sort of looks like Kerry vs. Bush, but is really on who will be on the November ticket. The most likely being Bush/Kerry. (See the prospectus below.) Of course it's possible that Bloomberg was quoting a market value from several weeks ago, but I doubt it. Although it's true that, as the article claimed, "Some investors are betting that Bush will win the election." *Most* investors are betting that Kerry will win. At least for today.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cybernetic animal photoshoppery
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DATE: 06/11/2004 03:30:55 PM
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Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: cybernetic animals.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: German Creative Commons licenses launch with a bang and two books
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DATE: 06/11/2004 03:32:06 PM
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Janko sez, "The German Creative Commons licenses are introduced today, and my publisher agreed to participate by putting two books out under a BY-NC-ND license. Which is remarkable for two things: a) heise is actually one of the most influential German IT publishers. b) one of the books is mine :)"
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(Thanks, Janko!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kill a stupid Internet patent
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DATE: 06/11/2004 03:33:18 PM
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Got a favorite stupid Internet patent you want to see clobbered? EFF is running a patent-busting contest:
We're currently seeking nominations for ten patents that deserve to be revoked because they are invalid. Sadly, we don't have the resources to challenge every stupid patent out there. In order to qualify for our ten most-wanted list, a patent must be software or Internet-related and there must be a good reason to suspect that the patent claims are invalid. We're especially interested in patents that target tools of free expression, such as streaming media, blogging tools, and voice over IP (VoIP) technology. Most importantly, the patent-holder must be aggressively enforcing its patent and suing (or threatening to sue) alleged infringers. We're particularly interested in cases where the patent-holder is trying to force small businesses, individuals, nonprofits, and consumers to pay licensing fees. Deadline to enter is June 23.
On June 30, the Patent Busting Project's team of tough lawyers and brainy geeks will announce the contest winners – or losers, depending on how you look at it. And that's when the real fight for great justice begins. We'll be needing your help to research prior art for each patent and offer your technical expertise or historical knowledge. Using a legal process called "reexamination," the Patent Busting Project will ultimately go to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and attempt to take those bad patents off the books.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What movies would Walt make today?
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DATE: 06/11/2004 03:36:02 PM
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Great FARK photoshopping contest: Movies Walt Disney would make today.
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(Thanks, Drew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SF museum site
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DATE: 06/11/2004 03:40:46 PM
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The website for Seattle's science fiction museum is live.
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(Thanks, Fun Furde)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Beasties disc has DRM -- Fight! For your right! To cooo-oopy!
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DATE: 06/11/2004 09:33:00 PM
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The Beastie Boys' new CD, To the Five Boroughs, has DRM on it that prevents you from ripping it or making a copy for your car. I got the MP3s last week -- it's a great album -- and was going to buy the CD while I'm in the US this week, but now I think I'll just erase the MP3s and not bother. If the Beasties wanna treat me like a crook, I don't want to be their customer.
Note that the only thing that this DRM is doing here is pissing off the honest fans who want open CDs; the DRM on the CD didn't stop my source from making me a set of MP3s. In other words, if you plan on listening to the new disc on your iPod or laptop, you're better off downloading a copy made by a cracker and posted on Kazaa -- if you buy it in a shop, you're going to have to go through the lawbreaking rigamarole of breaking the DRM yourself.
I always hear record execs whining that they "can't compete with free" -- but maybe the real competitive disadvantage is that they're selling a product that's less useful than the one being served up on P2P nets.
Link
(Thanks, Jon!)
Update: Ian sez, "Hi, I'm not sure who posted re: Beastie Boys copy protection, but I just spoke with Mike D and their management and they wanted me to pass along that a) This is all territories except the US and UK -- US and UK discs do not have this protection on them; b) All EMI CDs are treated this way, theirs isn't receiving special treatment; c) They would have preferred not to have the copy protection, but weren't allowed to differ from EMI policy."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Italy's premier Berlusconi SMS-spams voters' mobile phones
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DATE: 06/11/2004 11:22:27 PM
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Italy's Berlusconi government spammed the cellphones of millions of citizens with text-messages about voting procedures for tomorrow's EU and local elections. Some call it an unprecedented invasion of mobile privacy for political control. Others argue it's a smart way for the administration to combat absenteeism and ensure that more of Italy's voting public shows up at the polls. Either way, unsolicited text messages don't grow on trees -- the stunt cost around $7M US, and critics want to know who paid for it.
The message, received on cell phones on Thursday and Friday, carried the sender line of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Premier Silvio Berlusconi's office. The message detailed when the polls will be open and what documents citizens need to vote.
"Finally we have recourse to a tool like the text message that is now in everyday use to bring the state closer still to its citizens," said Technology Minister Lucio Stanca. But the political opposition branded the strategy as a political tactic. The government "is trying every subterfuge to recover votes. It's alarming that privacy is violated in such a sensational way," said opposition lawmaker Francesco Martone.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Field-trips to Great Brain sites
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DATE: 06/12/2004 04:38:56 AM
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This page details the journeys of a family that set out to find and document places mentioned in John D Fitzgerald's Great Brain novels, a series of kids' books set in 1880s Utah. These autobiographical books about Fitzgerald's precious con man of a brother, Tom, were hugely influential on me -- in fact, the title story of my short story collection, A Place So Foriegn and Eight More, is my attempt to write a science-fictionalized version of the stories that so fascinated me as a boy.
We think we found the exact spot where JD, TD and their dad went fishing up Beaver Canyon. It was papa Fitzgerald's secret spot, not far up the canyon, and had great fishing in the river and an open meadow. It must have been at what is now the Little Cottonwood campground (#5). We tried to stay there, but all the sites were full.
In the story, the secret got out one year, and the location was crowded with other campers. JD's dad decided to go further up the canyon, maybe to Kents Lake (#14).
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Electras: John Kerry's high school band rocks out
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DATE: 06/12/2004 11:47:52 AM
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Luke Francl sez: "It's a little known fact that John Kerry was in a high school band called The Electras (he played bass). The site KerryRocks.com has lots of photos, the liner notes, and an MP3 melange of some of their songs.
"Due to increasing intrest, RCA has re-released the Electra's album and you can buy it for $14 (previously, it was nearly impossible to find). It's crazy that RCA kept the masters in their catalog for all this time. But you never know when the bass player from some shitty garage band might get nominated for President." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Alternate history in bite-sized chunklets
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DATE: 06/12/2004 12:50:02 PM
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"Today in Alternate History" is a site that racks, in "today in history format," several alternate history timelines. It's nice skiffy narrative in bite-sized chunks:
in 1862, the Human League takes credit for a series of bombings against Mlosh citizens of Britain. The Crown vows to catch them, but there are sympathetic elements in Scotland Yard that slow the investigation.
in 1934, Pascal, LLC, with the assistance of Carla Lambert, persuaded Congress to fund a system of linking Eddies together such that they could share information constantly. Using telegraph lines and radio frequencies set aside for them by the Congress, Pascal constructed a Knowledge Railroad that made the almost instantaneous transmission of information possible across the nation.
in 1958, Buddy Holly reunited with his old band, The Crickets, for a successful US tour. This reunion produced such hits as I'll Be Lovin' Her, Puerto Rican Mama, and their remake of I'll Be Seeing You.
in 1977, President Reagan enacted sweeping tax cuts, mostly aimed at the well-to-do, but with some at lower ends of the economic spectrum. They didn't prove to be the stimulus he expected, though, and the nation plunged into a deep recession.
in 1982, King Charles of England called on all exiled nobles of England to return and take their rightful place at his side. He announced a general amnesty for those who had supported the Nazis, and declared that England would rise again to its former glory.
in 1992, filmmaker Oliver Stone releases JBR, in which he attempts to give credence to People's Attorney Presley's arguments that Comrade President Rosenberg was killed by a conspiracy rather than a lone counter-revolutionary. The film is a huge success, prompting the Communist Party to call for its banning.
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vampire Hunter transforming board game
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DATE: 06/12/2004 02:15:41 PM
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I'm at DreamCon, an sf con in Jacksonville, Florida, and I just spied this super-cool board-game in the dealers' room: it's called "Vampire Hunter," and the gimmick is that the tower in the middle shines different coloured lights on the board depending on the state of play -- the light reveals different details on the board, so that normal cits turn into werewolves and other monsters. No idea if the gameplay is any good, but what a great gadget! Holy crap, Amazon has it for less than six bucks on clearance:
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ian McDonald's brilliant new novel, River of Gods: Bollywoodpunk
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DATE: 06/12/2004 02:32:44 PM
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I just finished reading Ian McDonald's latest novel, "River of Gods," and my mind is whirling. River is the story of India's 100th birthday, when the great nation has fractured into warring subnations on caste, religious and cultural lines. Like McDonald's other great novels, the story is beyond epic, with an enormous cast of richly realised characters and a vivid, luminous vision of techno-Hinduism that beggars the imagination. Take, for example, Town and Country, a soap-opera acted out by AIs (or "aeais") who lead double-lives -- each AI character has another role, as the actor who plays the character, in a "meta-soap" where their squabbling, indiscretions and marriages are tabloid fodder for the soapi magazines that dote upon them.
This is just one of dozens of conceits in a novel that combines the best themes from books like Out on Blue Six and Desolation Road, handles them with the masterful hand visible in Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone and the Sturgeon-award-winning Tendeleo's Story, and folds in all the contemporary themes in sf like the Singularity and the cratering of cyberpunk memes and spits out a 575-page epic that I couldn't put down until I'd finished it.
Ian McDonald has been one of my favourite writers for some 15 years now, and the amazing thing is, he's getting even better.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rotator cuff surgery
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DATE: 06/12/2004 07:49:40 PM
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This surgical video is not for the faint of heart, but it is fascinating to watch that little, whirling blade flense away all that frayed tendon and bone. As the possessor of some remarkably cranky back bits, this video compells me -- it would be so boss to just have someone jam some fiber optics and a Dremel tool into my shoulder and just grind off all the troublesome tissue.
About 9 years ago my dad was needing some relief from persistent shoulder pain. After the fun and joys of X-rays and MRI's he elected to have surgery to correct a bone spur that had literally torn the innards of his rotator cuff apart.
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(Thanks, franklinrh!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The postman always texts twice: shag phones
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DATE: 06/12/2004 10:14:00 PM
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Disposable mobiles purchased specifically for the purpose of illicit sexual liasons. A Boingboing pal in the UK says reports of this odd social trend are legit -- throwaway phones allow sekrit lovers to communicate by SMS or voice, on the downlow. Snip from the blog where I first read the phrase "shag phone":
I heard someone (honest) talking about their "shag phone" the other day. He was a married man having an affair with a lady who was also married. It seems that one of the first heady rituals of the affair was to purchase a "his and her" pair of Pre-pay shag phones.
Only they knew each other's number, so when the phone rang, they could answer in an appropriately passionate way. While much the same effect could be achieved with caller recognition (assuming they were mobile literate), there was more than just a romantic gesture involved with this behavior. Technology still can't hide your phone bill from a suspicious spouse. And it can't hide your amour's frequently dialed number from prying eyes. Better to get a pair pre-pay phones with no incriminating phone bills or records. A small example of how the mobile is impacting on 21st century life.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Paid song "ads" on radio walk, talk, quack like payola
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DATE: 06/12/2004 10:20:16 PM
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An article in the LA Times about record companies paying radio stations to air specific songs as ads. Critics say the practice is a lot like the "payola" systems of the 1950s, which for the most part were outlawed long ago.
During a single week in May, Canadian pop rocker Avril Lavigne's new song Don't Tell Me aired no fewer than 109 times on Nashville radio station WQZQ-FM. The heaviest rotation came between midnight and 6 a.m., an on-air no man's land visited largely by insomniacs, truckers and graveyard shift workers. On one Sunday morning, the three-minute, 24-second song aired 18 times, sometimes as little as 11 minutes apart.
Those plays, or "spins," helped Don't Tell Me vault into the elite top 10 on Billboard magazine's national pop radio chart, which radio program directors across the country use to spot hot new tunes. But what many chart watchers may not know is that the predawn saturation in Nashville  and elsewhere  occurred largely because Arista Records paid the station to play the song as an advertisement. In all, sources said, WQZQ aired Don't Tell Me as an ad at least 40 times the week ending May 23, accounting for more than one-third of the song's airplay on the station.
Link (totally stupid site registration required) (via pho)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Hotel Motel Zen
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DATE: 06/12/2004 10:32:26 PM
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ice hotel
hotel pelirocco
propeller island hotel
the gobbler motel
madonna inn
wigwam village
hoogerbrugge hotel
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More on "Why can't the BBC play MP3s?"
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DATE: 06/12/2004 10:37:11 PM
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Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post about the curious tale of Rodeohead MP3s, BoingBoing, and the BBC -- reader and geek sleuth Rupert Goodwins says, "I asked Mike Todd, one of BBC Radio's Broadcast Duty Managers, what was with that MP3 ban on the wireless. He said:
"A lot depends on the amount of compression in the original MP3, but the CD-R request would be either to allow a linear version to be supplied, or a very much less compressed version. Every time lossy-compressed audio goes via a lossy part of the chain it gets worse (depending, of course, on the original level of compression and the type of audio)."
A BH studio to the FM transmitter network is not a problem, but it is when it goes to DAB/Freeview/Dsat ... and then the studio itself may be being sourced via a lossy ISDN (as indeed Peel is). Add these together and the results could be dreadful ... therefore there's a policy to (a) not use MP3s unless editorial imperatives demand it and there is absolutely no other way, (b) not us Minidiscs except in certain circumstances and (c) have computer playout systems working with linear audio.
BoingBoing reader Rupert continues: "There we have it. DAB is the European terrestrial digital radio system, Freeview is the UK's digital terrestrial TV system which has multiple radio channels too, and DSat is the digital satellite system.
There's one heck of a lot of digital broadcasting round these parts, each with its own compression system, and that's before you start to worry about the streaming stuff on the Net."
[Xeni speaking again here]. I'm still not sure that explains it. The BoingBoing reader who pointed John Peel to the Rodeohead MP3s says that when he learned Peel couldn't play the MP3s, he burned them to CD, sent them to Peel at the BBC, and they aired on Peel's show shortly thereafter. So, either (a) the issue was that Peel's show was simply unable to deal with downloading, storing, and playing digital files (but popping a CD in a player was no prob), or (b) the above theory is true, and Peel's show obtained and then aired a non-lossy version of the material, from someone other than this BoingBoing reader.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nokia launches phonecam with fashionsoftporn from photog Rankin
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DATE: 06/12/2004 10:59:28 PM
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Handset maker Nokia promoted the release of a new phonecam/PDA with help from renowned British fashion photographer Rankin, and a bunch of hot nekkid fairy chicks.
[Rankin] was given an advance trial of Nokia's latest and highest-resolution cameraphone, the 7610. With it, he crafted six huge A2 sized photographs and 60 other shots, inspired by the legendary Cottingley fairy photographs. By running the images through software filters, the former co-founder of the legendary Dazed & Confused magazine managed to conjure up incredibly sharp images of beautiful women posed as woodland fairies. All this from a one-megapixel cameraphone with 4 x digital zoom, and a very sharp colour display.
Link to Mike Butcher's article in the Irish Times, and link to photo gallery with Rankin's digitally remixed phonecam images -- and some pics of the handset itself.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Defcon Wifi Shootout Contest
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DATE: 06/12/2004 11:08:27 PM
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Get ready for the second annual "Defcon Wifi Shootout Contest", July 30 - August 1, 2004, at this year's Defcon in Vegas.
The goal of this year's contest is to achieve the greatest possible connect distance between two 802.11b stations through innovative engineering and antenna design. Wonderful prizes and fun are available to all who participate!
Link (via socalwug)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Signal Orange: representing Iraq war dead on bodies of the living
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DATE: 06/12/2004 11:24:56 PM
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The organizers of the "Signal Orange" t-shirt campaign want people to wear shirts displaying the identities of individual US soldiers killed in Iraq. They say the project serves to remind the world that war creates real victims on both sides. Snip from their project overview:
"Signal Orange is a project to make the invisible visible -- which is a premise and prerequisite for democracy. The goal of Signal Orange is to unveil the faces that the Bush Administration wants hidden -- and to stop pretending that its actions in Iraq are inconsequential.
"This is a response: Signal Orange represents the dead with the living -- wearing T-shirts in their names. There is one shirt for each soldier who died. The front states how he or she died, the back reads, "(Rank) (First) (Last) can't vote anymore." The signal orange color of the shirt was chosen for the same reason it is used where caution is required -- it's the most visible color in person, on camera, and on video. The shirts are to be worn in places where the media is focused, whether that focus is momentary or constant. Examples might include the audience outside a morning talk show, or a parade, or a sporting event, and it certainly includes the Republican National Convention in NYC come September.
"Signal Orange doesn't say that these soldiers or their families condemn or support the war, and it doesn't speak for them. Whether they opposed or supported the war, they were fighting for our right to decide democratically whether a war is just or not. They've been buried twice--once in the ground, and once in the media. If we can make them visible in the media through Signal Orange, we can demonstrate that they had voices that have been lost."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wanna buy a villa in Iraq?
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DATE: 06/12/2004 11:36:45 PM
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Odd real estate listings are almost as fun to surf as weird eBay auctions. Here's an ad for what sounds like a charming Baghdad villa, complete with "recently restored water and electricity," and "Big basement designed also as anti-aircraft bunker with water facilities." Asking price for the property is only $665,000 USD, in a neighborhood described as "calm & safe." Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Man wins person-v-horse race for first time in 25 years
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DATE: 06/13/2004 02:09:29 AM
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There's a Welsh town that hosts an annual 22-mile human-verus-horse footrace, with a £1000 cumulative prize for any human beats the horse that's gone unclaimed for 25 years -- until now.
Bookies William Hill had to pay out on scores of bets struck at odds of 16/1.
This year's contest had a record 500 runners and more than 40 horses and riders competing for the winning title.
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: State of Wireless London
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DATE: 06/13/2004 02:14:36 AM
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Julian Priest has written an excellent report on the state of "Wireless London" -- the wheres and hows of WiFi in the city.
The reason that it has been possible to operate freenetwork access point type nodes without charge is that once the equipment is installed, the incremental cost of allowing others to use it is very low. If you are already paying for network access for yourself, and have installed a wireless network, the additional cost of offering it to the public is negligible. The initial hardware costs are also low, at less than 100 GBP for an access point, and with running costs of 25 GBP per month it makes for a very affordable system.
However, commercial hotspots are faced with significantly more costs over and above the minimal equipment and networking costs, such as a billing infrastructure, help desks, credit checking, location payments, maintenance contracts, share holder dividends and marketing, to name a few. This is inevitably reflected in prices charged for the service.
It remains to be seen how these commercial models burdened with such overheads will compete with the freenetworking ones, and whether the marketing spend, and the strategy of local monopoly will be justified by the returns.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Catholic Church outsourcing prayers to India
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DATE: 06/14/2004 08:01:04 AM
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Holy outsourcing! With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the US, prests in India are now picking up some of the work of saying special-purpose Mass for North American churches.
American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India. About 2 percent of India's more than one billion people are Christians, most of them Catholics.
In Kerala, a state on the southwestern coast with one of the largest concentrations of Christians in India, churches often receive intentions from overseas. The Masses are conducted in Malayalam, the native language. The intention - often a prayer for the repose of the soul of a deceased relative, or for a sick family member, thanksgiving for a favor received, or a prayer offering for a newborn - is announced at Mass.
Link (Thanks, Zed)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: AmIGhettoFabulousOrNot?
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DATE: 06/14/2004 08:04:55 AM
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If nothing else, click for the surprise of random white dudes in bad pimps-n-hos attire. Link (via buffoonery, thanks Susannah)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Stanley Milgram's shocking new biography
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DATE: 06/14/2004 08:10:31 AM
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The Man Who Shocked The World is a new biography about Stanley Milgram, the provocative social psychologist whose mind-blowing experiments three decades ago are still highly relevant in today's world of Abu Ghraib and Friendster. From the Milgram Web site, hosted by the book's author, Dr. Thomas Blass:
"Controversy surrounded Stanley Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. But, during the experiment itself, the experience was a powerfully real and gripping one for most participants.
Milgram's career also produced many other creative, though less controversial, experiments; such as, the small-world method (the source of 'Six Degrees of Separation'), the lost-letter technique, and an experiment testing the effects of televised antisocial behavior which, though conducted 30 years ago, remains unique to the present day."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spanish blog radio
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DATE: 06/14/2004 08:13:50 AM
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This online radio station serves the Spanish-speaking blog community worldwide. Cool! Link to the web radio station, and Link to the related weblog. (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Drexler says no to "grey goo" myths
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DATE: 06/14/2004 08:34:02 AM
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Nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler has co-authored a paper in a scientific journal addressing fears surrounding self-replicating nano-machines. The paper, co-written by Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, was published in the journal Nanotechnology last week. From the abstract:
"In the light of controversy regarding scenarios based on runaway replication (so-called 'grey goo'), a review of current thinking regarding nanotechnology-based manufacturing is in order. Nanotechnology-based fabrication can be thoroughly non-biological and inherently safe: such systems need have no ability to move about, use natural resources, or undergo incremental mutation. Moreover, self-replication is unnecessary: the development and use of highly productive systems of nanomachinery (nanofactories) need not involve the construction of autonomous self-replicating nanomachines.
Accordingly, the construction of anything resembling a dangerous self-replicating nanomachine can and should be prohibited. Although advanced nanotechnologies could (with great difficulty and little incentive) be used to build such devices, other concerns present greater problems. Since weapon systems will be both easier to build and more likely to draw investment, the potential for dangerous systems is best considered in the context of military competition and arms control."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hot party game trend: Cockroach racing
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DATE: 06/14/2004 09:08:35 AM
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A Lithuanuan event management company offers unusual party games, including the time-honored sport of Madagascar Cockroach Racing.
Every participant receives special race money and can purchase with them one of six cockroach. Other participants bet for the couple of player and cockroach they liked the most and watch the competition on the big table (4.5x1.5 m).
The game will be a surprise to all guests. As much as they would load the poor insect from the beginning, they will love them be the end of the race. Players stimulate theirs cockroaches to run by knocking the glassed surface of the course with the special small sticks and joy of every step of cockroach. The finish of the race is quite unpredictable and every step of a cockroach brings lots of emotions to all the guests.
Link (Thanks, Frank)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Matsushita's "sleep room" for insomniacs
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DATE: 06/14/2004 09:19:17 AM
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Next June, Japan's Matsushita will start selling a "sleep room" for insomniacs. USA Today's description of it reminds me of the euthanasia room from Soylent Green. You get into the bed, which is "upright like a recliner." A giant TV screen shows a video clip of a river in a forest, while soft music and nature sounds play in the background. A little while later, the lights dim, the TV shuts off, and the bed reclines. The river soundtrack continues to play. Then the massage machinery inside the mattress kicks in and kneads away the tension from your body. Finally, the lights go out and some air is released from the mattress, and you fall asleep -- hopefully.
At Matsushita, a night of rest isn't cheap. Rieko Saitoh, a company publicist, says the whole system is expected to go on sale in June 2005 — to the tune of $30,000.
Still, company officials say that even if the price is high, customers won't lose much sleep over it.
"Nobody who's come in here for 30 minutes hasn't fallen asleep," said Heiuchi.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian copyfight hots up: Liberal MPs on the take from copyright industries?
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DATE: 06/14/2004 05:50:06 PM
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Copyright has become an election issue in Canada, and with the federal election looming on the 28th (I've cast my absentee ballot, for Olivia Chow, and have my fingers crossed for a nation run as well as Toronto Layton's district in Toronto was under Jack Layton) the copyfight is heating up back in my homeland. Most recently, a Liberal MP from my old riding of Parkdale introduced a poorly thought-out bill that would have been bad news for the Internet. Michael Geist wrote an editorial about this in the Toronto Star, and the fallout has been intense, with letters going back and forth in the paper. Michael's written a followup editorial that the Star just ran.
Further, copyright reform proceedings must also be perceived to be balanced. According to Elections Canada, Bulte and her riding association have accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from rights holder groups and broadcasters. Parliamentarians involved in the copyright reform process should refuse all such contributions to ensure that the perception of absolute impartiality is preserved.
Link
(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Weblog Festival in Iran
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DATE: 06/15/2004 07:37:37 AM
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Hossein Derakshan reports back from Iran's first Weblog Festival.
[Iranian Deputy I.T. Minister] Nassrollah Jahangard wished that every Iranian could have a blog one day and expressed the government's support for persian blogs which, in his mind, are defining the presence of Iran on the Net and make an identity for the Iranian community on the Internet. He also added that blogs are sort of cultureal heritage for Iran and they will make the future of it.
The latter, Sohrab Razeghi, said that blogs and the values they carry with themseves are the begining of a modern society in Iran. He said that the openness, subversiveness, and a sense of individualism which are visible among Iranian weblogs are completely new things in the society. he then rejected the idea of government support and said that they should leave the persian blogoshpere alone and let it go in whatever direction it wants.
Link, and photo.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool Cassini Saturn science
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DATE: 06/15/2004 07:40:33 AM
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BoingBoing friend John Parres says:
JPL's Cassini spacecraft is making it's final approach to Saturn after seven years of whipping around our solar system. This weekend the probe flew by an outer retrograde moon, Phoebe, and based on stunning pictures unspooling
today it seems Phoebe is an ice rich body, perhaps even a captured comet! If all goes well on July 1st Cassini will enter into orbit around the ringed planet and provide four years of exploration including the December landing of the 700 pound Huygens probe on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo ups free email storage to 100MB in Gmail competition
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DATE: 06/15/2004 07:43:42 AM
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Storage limit for Yahoo's free webmail service just expanded to 100MB in an apparent effort to compete with Google's yet-to-be-publicly-launched Gmail. Link (Thanks, Caines)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cornfield robotics in the Netherlands
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DATE: 06/15/2004 07:52:43 AM
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BoingBoing reader Bas Suverkropp says:
The Field Robot event is kind of a miniature DARPA Grand Challenge, small robots must navigate through a maize field. Join Corn2Bwild, SANDRA, Wiedrobot and many others on june 17th and 18th as 22 teams from the Netherlands, Germany, USA, Hungary, Israel, Gambia, Poland, Nigeria,Ireland and Belgium compete in Wageningen, the Netherlands.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wall-building robot
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DATE: 06/15/2004 07:58:15 AM
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BoingBoing reader Mack says:
Excellent pictures on this site! A USC roboticist has created a robot that can build large structures by extruding semi-liquid material from a pump in inch-thick layers to form a wall or a building, and then return to fill in the hollow wall. This looks like a macro version of 3-D prototyping in that you could essentially set up a machine, fill it with the right goo and programming, switch it on, and have a house in a few hours that was built completely without the intervention of human hands.
Link to National Science Foundation press release, and Link to an overview with more links on Mack's blog.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bio Diesel conversion primer
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DATE: 06/15/2004 08:02:53 AM
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On Kevin Kelly's "Cool Tools" ezine, a primer on Bio Diesel -- fuels made from veggie oil. Roll your own renewable fueling station!
I have been running Bio Diesel in my truck for over a year now. Bio Diesel is basically slightly refined vegetable oil that can run in ANY diesel vehicle with little to no modifications. The vegetable oil used can be virgin, but it is generally recycled from fryers at restaurants. Yes, the exhaust smells like whatever was fried in it. The best part of running Bio Diesel is that no wars need to be fought over it: it's entirely domestic, supports US farming, it's totally renewable, and it cuts almost all aspects of a diesel vehicle's emissions by more than 50-75%. (The exception is NOx which is about the same). You get slightly less mileage and power (5% decrease) from petro-diesel, but your exhaust smells a lot better and its actually easier on your engine.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Roll your own pirate radio station with an iPod
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DATE: 06/15/2004 08:06:35 AM
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BoingBoing reader Philip says, "After playing around with the new iTrip mini, the FM broadcasting accessory for the iPod our little minds got working on some ideas. We thought we might be able to make the range of Griffin's iTrip mini a little better if took it apart and exposed the antenna, turns out we could. And then we thought, hey -- we could use a couple iPods to broadcast something we wanted to get out there. Perhaps not 'should' that is, but could. Here's the How To."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Working DIY paper Clie cradle
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DATE: 06/15/2004 08:07:33 AM
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Here's a (badly machine-translated) Japanese page telling you how to print, cut and fold a cradle for Sony's Clie PDAs.
Link
(Thanks, Carlos!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collaborative, open textbook
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DATE: 06/15/2004 08:10:37 AM
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OpenTextBook.org is a collaborative project wherein university students (and others) can turn their course notes into a giant, open textbook. You need to know how to use CVS to contribute and edit the book, but there's a daily PDF snapshot of the state of the project, which is looking pretty good!
Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Suicide Girls -- the book
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DATE: 06/15/2004 08:13:08 AM
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Rumor has it that the long-awaited print magazine for Suicide Girls recently died before arrival. But don't cry too hard for the online hipster smutster brand. They've got a delicious new photography book out, and it's already near the top of Amazon's arts and photography bestseller list. A number of BoingBoing readers including Michael McDaniel and Tim Holt write in to point out that Amazon's auto-recommendation system oddly suggests that those fond of the SG tome might also fancy Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs by Reverend Antonio Gallonio. "Better Together" indeed!
Fleshbot has a few sneak peeks of Suicide Girls, and there are more on the publisher's website here. (If you have to even *ask* whether or not it's worksafe...)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bluetooth virus EPOC.Cabir
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DATE: 06/15/2004 08:31:20 AM
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Doesn't propagate by MMS or carry a payload, but there it is: a wild Bluetooth virus.
EPOC.Cabir is a proof-of-concept worm that replicates on Nokia Series 60 phones. It repeatedly sends itself to the first Bluetooth-enabled device that it can find, regardless of the type of device (ie even a Bluetooth-enabled printer will be attacked if it is within range).
Link (Thanks, Alfie)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Computer limbs help trilateral amputee run again
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DATE: 06/15/2004 09:50:39 AM
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Today on the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I speak with Cameron Clapp. In September 2001, he lost both legs and his right arm in a train accident.
Supported by his large extended family -- and his identical twin brother Jesse -- Cameron fought against his disability to make an astounding recovery. Not only can the young man swim, run, drive a car, and even play golf again, he recently won four gold medals at the Endeavor Games, a sports competition for amputees. He can do this in part because of advanced prosthetic limb technology called the "C-Leg," short for "computer leg." The device (which Cameron demonstrated at Wired Magazine's NextFest) includes many tiny sensors controlled by a computer chip, and provides much greater mobility and control than conventional hydraulic limbs.
Link to archived audio (after 12PM PT), a photo gallery, and more on both Cameron and the high-tech prosthetics he uses.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: DJ Kreemy Table
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DATE: 06/15/2004 10:58:04 AM
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Designer Karim Rashid's DJ Kreemy turntable table is perfect for otherworldly ambient sessions. Rashid: "(The table) is organic like sound, omnidirectional like sound, and that emphasizes the 'volumous' beats that irradiate from the two turntables." All I know is that it would match my 1967 Fender Rhodes "Student Model" piano perfectly. Link (Thanks, DF Tram!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Shockwave soccer replays
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DATE: 06/15/2004 01:23:55 PM
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Carlo says:
"The BBC's doing these shockwave replays of goals and stuff from the European football championships. It's pretty nifty. I recommend choosing the Sweden-Bulgaria game, then the 57th minute goal by Larsson, then the ball-cam."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iraqi artists express outrage over Abu Ghraib
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DATE: 06/15/2004 01:30:23 PM
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Interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about a visual response by 25 artists in Baghdad to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At left, a sculpture by Abdel-Karim Khalil depicting a hooded detainee. Snip from CSM story:
[Iraqi Union of Artists deputy chairman Qasim Alsabti] created a life-size figure of a woman wrapped in a bloodstained white shroud. It symbolizes the rape of women detainees in Abu Ghraib, says Alsabti, who heard of allegations of women prisoners being raped at Abu Ghraib five months before the scandal broke. "There was a letter circulating in Fallujah from a woman inside Abu Ghraib," he says. "She was begging the resistance to bomb Abu Ghraib and bring down the walls on their heads so that their suffering would end. I felt like screaming when I heard this. I wanted to draw the attention of the American people."
[F]or many Iraqis, including artists like Alsabti, Abu Ghraib has become synonymous with what they see as the injustices of the occupation. "It's like an adviser from Saddam Hussei's regime has come back to Iraq and is now advising the Americans," he says.
Link. Incidentally, survivors of Pinochet in Chile know a thing or two about torture: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SD earthquake
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DATE: 06/15/2004 03:40:31 PM
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IM and phone reports of a moderate earthquake in San Diego large enough to scare the crap out of people, but no damage reports. Link. Update: Looks like a 5.2. And here are some reactions from San Diego bloggers
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tribe.net allows users to blog social net data
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DATE: 06/15/2004 07:28:44 PM
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Social network service Tribe.net (I visit regularly, because some BoingBoing readers created a nifty BoingBoing tribe) just launched a feature that allows users to automatically publish aspects of their network experience to blogs or websites. MT, Blogger, TypePad are supported. Examples of the sorts of things one might "Tribecast" include lists of friends, special interest "tribes" one belongs to, or bulletin board listings.
This strikes me as an interesting new use of social nets, but also a potentially frightening one. It's bad enough that some folks are bold enough to belong to tribes like Vegan Oral Sex Enthusiasts Who Own Semiautomatic Weapons And Aren't Wearing any Underwear, but now such excessive displays of intimate information will be really, really public. Yikes. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing 2.0
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DATE: 06/15/2004 07:51:01 PM
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Welcome to the new and improved Boing Boing, now with sponsors! Seriously, there's nothing wrong with your set. The only real difference you'll find on the page, besides a cleaner design, is the addition of those small ad boxes on the sides. We've decided to accept a limited amount of advertising so that we can cover our costs and dedicate more cycles to what we love -- finding and posting things that we find interesting, curious, and, of course, wonderful. What does this evolutionary step mean for you, dear reader? Nothing, except more of what you've come to expect from Boing Boing, brain candy for happy mutants since 1988. A warm round of thanks to our sponsors, and to you for your continued support! And a very special thanks to BoingBoing pal Anil Dash for the expert code massage.
- Mark, Cory, Xeni, David, and John
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Guestblogger -- filmmaker Christopher Coppola
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DATE: 06/15/2004 08:30:27 PM
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A big thanks to our outgoing guestblogger, Russ Kick of The Memory Hole, who filled the right-hand column with no shortage of interesting things during his visit. Mr. Kick is now off to write his next book, 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know, Vol. 2 due for release in November.
Our next guestbar resident, Christopher Coppola, has completed eight feature motion pictures. The latest of these is Creature of the Sunny Side-Up Trailer Park (a.k.a. Bloodhead), which had its world premiere during the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. The film stars screen legends Frank Gorshin and Shirley Jones, and television icons Lynda Carter and Bernie Kopell. His other film credits include the Trimark Pictures release Deadfall (1993) starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Biehn, and James Coburn; Gunfighter (1998) starring Martin Sheen, Robert Carradine, and Clu Gulager; Palmer's Pick-Up: An American Roadshow Odyssey (1999) starring Robert Carradine and Rosanna Arquette; Dracula's Widow (1989) which he produced for De Laurentiis Entertainment Group; G-Men From Hell (2000) starring William Forsythe, Tate Donovan, and Gary Busey; Bel-Air (2000) starring Charles Fleischer and Barbara Bain; and Clockmaker (1998), a children's fantasy film shot on location in Romania for Kuschner-Locke.
Christopher is co-founder and spokesperson for Ars Nova XXI, the mother company of PlasterCITY Productions (an independent feature and television production company that concentrates on HD digital format) and PlasterCITY Digital Post (a post-production facility that specializes in editing and onlining for feature films, television, shorts, commercials, and music videos.)
Welcome, Christopher!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neuromancer jacket-quote
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DATE: 06/16/2004 07:29:36 AM
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I'm bursting with pride over something that I had to share: I've been asked for a jacket-flap quote for the upcoming 20th Anniversary Edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which Ace will publish next autumn. I've had some amazing honors in my career, but this takes the cake. I've only met Gibson a couple of times, but on both occasions I was struck by his generosity and wit.
Here's the quote I gave to Ace:
"Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the
future. If you would understand the past twenty years'
technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading.
I re-read it every year, just to get an edge on the year that's
coming, and to glory in Gibson's prose and cunning artifice."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: iPod pirate radio bumper stickers
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DATE: 06/16/2004 07:56:04 AM
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Boing Boing reader Beej says:
Griffin's stated range for the iTrip is a little inaccurate: I once left my iPod playing over the radio in the office, got in my car and drove out of the parking lot, around the corner and down the street. The signal petered out at about 150 feet. This is through the walls of my office and several intervening buildings!
I've been running around for the past several months with this bumper sticker on my car. It's an ink-jet job and as you can see, it's getting a little faded. I figure that anyone that can read the bumper sticker-- on the I-5, at a stop light-- if intrigued could tune in and listen to whatever I'm listening to. No, I don't take requests. T-Shirt coming soon!
Link to full-size image.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Urban archaeologist
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DATE: 06/16/2004 07:59:45 AM
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Julia Solis is the intrepid explorer behind Dark Passage, a magnificent Web site showcasing the urban ruins of New York City and elsewhere. An abandoned hospital, a deserted jail, a hollow subway tubes... all are subjected to Soils's "exercises in forensic archaeology." Smithsonian magazine recently published a profile of Solis:
"These places contain the residue of the many souls that have passed through over the years," she says. "The less a place has been explored, the better, because the air hasn't been diluted and the soul marks are fresh."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Artbots robot talent show participants announced
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:02:04 AM
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The organizers of Artbots: The Robot Talent show have announced the names of the twenty artists and groups participating in this third annual art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots. Show takes place September 17-19, 2004 in Harlem, NYC. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo/Gmail war: Yahoo dialup users also get a storage boost
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:08:57 AM
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Folllowing up on this post about Yahoo webmail users receiving upgraded storage capacity in an apparent attempt by Yahoo to compete with Gmail, Boing Boing reader Brian says, "As a member of SBC Yahoo dial-up service, I received a notice yesterday that my email account now has a 2 Gig storage capacity. Obviously, this is separate from the free web-based email service from Yahoo, but 2 Gigs is bar far the most storage available to date, worldwide."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Teflon-coated yarn
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:12:59 AM
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A Norweigan company has shipped a teflon-coated knitting yarn that sheds water and is intended for use in all-weather knitting projects.
I was curious to see if the fibers would even allow water, being coated with Teflon and all. They did, but not before showing a curious phenomenon: the water lodged itself in the pockets of each stitch, making hundreds of tiny diamond-like bubbles all over the fabric surface.
Link
(Thanks, Miriam!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Joystiq gaming newsblog launches
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:13:18 AM
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Pete Rojas of Engadget says, "There is way more video game news out there than we could possibly cover here at Engadget. So in partnership with Weblogs, Inc. we've created Joystiq, a new weblog covering everything related to video games." Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vatican reduces Inquisition's atrocity-count
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:16:32 AM
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The Vatican has "downsized the Inquisition," reducing the estimate of witches burned at stake:
he Vatican said Tuesday that fewer witches were burned at the stake and fewer heretics tortured into conversion during the dark centuries of the Inquisition than is generally believed.
Link
(via Out of Ambit)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dating site for MMO gamers
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:18:04 AM
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MMOdating is a dating service targetted at people who live and die by Massively Multiplayer Online games.
I should state outrIght that i'm Not a real person. i'm
an imaginary friend. in front of the computer, of
course, who could tell the difference? i loVe getting
involved In a chat and forgetting all about the outSide
world; for a moment then i can believe I am real.
furthermore, i'm not entirely human. my mother was
a human and my father was - or is - a dragon. i've had
a very, very long life full of dragedy and adventure,
Beautiful worlds have crumbLed before my Eyes. . . i'm
dramatizing, yeah, i love playing the drama QUEEN, but
there's really been more than i can easily talk About.
three daughTers i've Had, marvellOus things have lived
in my veins and leT Me work miracles. i've Always
believed In doing good by alL the people in the world.
but i'm retired from saving the world now. it all got
too much, and now i'm just looking for a good time.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robert Anton Wilson University
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:20:06 AM
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Old-school bOING bOING contributor Robert Anton Wilson is now teaching courses online. Wilson is the fringe philosopher/novelist/comedian who wrote such classics as Illuminatus!, Prometheus Rising, and Cosmic Trigger, key texts that shaped the birth of bOING bOING. The Maybe Logic Academy launches this summer with classes like "Conspiracy, Coincidence and Code" and "8 Dimensions of 'Mind." Each course is $125, but a package is available for $200 that includes membership in an online forum and a series of email correspondences with RAW himself. Fnord (Thanks, Dr. Maz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fax machine/intrusion-detector combo
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:22:02 AM
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Sharp's new Fappy fax machine will detect intruders to your home and fax a notice of their incursion to a preset panic-number.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cockroach racing: it's got legs, baby
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:24:23 AM
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Bring on the kakerlaken! Following up on a previous post about the v hot Euro party game trend of Cockroach racing, Boing Boing reader Rochus Wolff says:
"Cockroach races have been up and about here in Berlin for a couple of years now, apparently introduced by the russian painter Nikolai Makarov. He claims (and I have no way of disprove him) that this is an old Russian tradition. I attended one of these races in January 2001 - it was a celebration of the Russian New Year, and a very odd mixture of betting on the cockroaches, drinking, eating and socialising.
"The race I attended was also quite fun because of the silly stories they made up about the roaches racing against each other. Apparently, one of them (Olga) was the daughter of another one, had then killed and eaten her father, but only after mating with him and having a child (Olga II), which was now racing not only against her mother, but also (I think) against another one of her father's children... or something. It was pretty weird, and quite funny.
"There are photos online (not mine, though) of a similar event in November 2002 here."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GPS system that looks like Grand Theft Auto
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:27:52 AM
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Sony's new XYZ in-car GPS navigation system presents a ground-level visualization of your route that looks like a low-rez Grand Theft Auto. I became a loyal Hertz renter when they introduced their crappy-but-serviceable Neverlost GPS a few years back (I have no sense of direction and sometimes get lost playing Quake), and this week I took a flyer and tried out Avis's new GPS system, which is unspeakably shit: it's a Nextel phone that you suction-cup to your windscreen. You call a call-center and wait on hold, then tell a person over the speakerphone where you're going and they program a route into the phone, which then reads you directions in a robot voice. It's such a dumb setup that I was half sure I'd screwed up, but no, that's how it's supposed to work.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New game group-blog
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:28:49 AM
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Joystiq is a new group blog on gaming from the same people who brought us Engadget.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DIY ITrip amp
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:31:29 AM
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This fellow created an interesting amp design for an iTrip. Boing Boing reader Ian Meyer says, " He said that it would probably be capable of overpowering broadcast stations for a small radium (ie: enough to blast some Queen in place of the hippity-hoppity music that the guy in the car next to me is listening to loud enough to be heard for half a mile)." [Ed: Hippity Hoppity? Did someone see "The Ladykillers"?] Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool robot sculpture gallery
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:37:20 AM
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Online gallery with images of work by Southern California-based artist, sculptor, designer and machinist Greg Brotherton. Great retro-combat-robot pieces, futuristic weapon porn, and a robo-blog with lines like, "Progress has resumed on my life's work: an army of robot women to take over the earth." Link (Thanks, Aron)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Only You Can Prevent Gray Goo
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DATE: 06/16/2004 08:49:24 AM
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On Monday, I posted about nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler speaking out against the fear of "gray goo," out-of-control nano-machines. That reminded our dear old pal Jim Leftwich (AKA Ward Parkway) of this masterpiece he designed circa 1995. It was a continuation of the Urban Absurdist Survival Kit series from the Happy Mutant Handbook. Link (to higher-res image)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Armageddon fundraiser porn, five bodies, and a Mormon assassination plot
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DATE: 06/16/2004 09:10:14 AM
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Fleshbot points to a court case weirder than Michael Jackson and the Scott Peterson trial combined. Murder, dismemberment, lapsed Mormons, the death penalty, and Playboy model Kerissa Fare. Oh, and Rohypnol (thanks, virgil).
This week, a jury in Martinez, a small town outside San Francisco, will retire to consider the bizarre, brutally violent cult surrounding one Glenn Taylor Helzer, a lapsed Mormon accused of bludgeoning and dismembering five people in an elaborate extortion racket intended to hasten the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Helzer, a former stockbroker who has already pleaded guilty and faces the death penalty, exerted a charismatic hold over an eclectic group of followers including his younger brother, a former girlfriend turned Playboy centrefold model, and a self-described "good witch" who once offered to raise money for Armageddon by appearing in porn films.
Link to story in UK's Independent
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How long would AC power work after global zombiefication?
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DATE: 06/16/2004 09:50:49 AM
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Nice Straight Dope column about electricity generation in a Dawn of the Dead scenario. If various types of power plants (nuke, coal, gas, hydro, wind) were unmanned, when would they stop functioning, and how would the grid handle it?
Bottom line? My guess is that within 4-6 hours there would be scattered blackouts and brownouts in numerous areas, within 12 hours much of the system would be unstable, and within 24 hours most portions of the United States and Canada, aside from a rare island of service in a rural area near a hydroelectric source, would be without power. Some installations served by wind farms and solar might continue, but they would be very small. By the end of a week, I'd be surprised if more than a few abandoned sites were still supplying power.
Link (Thanks, Grum!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Photos of pre-Warhol Nico
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DATE: 06/16/2004 11:22:04 AM
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Great fashion magazine photos of Nico before she hooked up with Warhol's Factory and started singing for the Velvet Underground.
Link (Short bio about Nico)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Happy Bloomsday
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DATE: 06/16/2004 01:28:17 PM
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With Ulysses, James Joyce invited us to join Leopold Bloom as he took an epic journey through Dublin. In honor of the Bloomsday centennial, Jess Hemerly points us to the BBC's Cheat's Guide to Joyce's Ulysses. "It's funny if you've read the book, and helpful if you haven't," Jess says. Link (via a great notion)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: President Bush and the Apocalyptic Christian cult
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DATE: 06/16/2004 07:31:28 PM
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Fun Neal Pollack article in The Stranger about President Bush's kooky religious beliefs.
This is also the kind of country where the president meets with the members of a radical, far-right millennialist Christian sect three weeks before he counteracts all known international law and opinion regarding the Israeli-Palestinian situation. That sect, known as the Apostolic Congress, opposes any deal with the Palestinians because it believes that Christ won't return to Earth until all of Israel belongs to the Jews and Solomon's temple is rebuilt.
Link (Thanks, Kirsten!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Global Zombiefication Novel - The Earth Abides (George R. Stewart)
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DATE: 06/16/2004 09:15:39 PM
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In reference to my entry below, Will sez: "The Earth Abides (originally published in 1949) is probably the best SF novel out there to explore this theme. A geologist goes solo backpacking, and comes back to find almost all of humanity dead due to a sudden world-wide plague. The novel chronicles the following life of the protagonist and a small band of fellow survivors. The first few years involve the gradual failing of services such as power, water, and the highway system. Later years are more focused on the growing encroachment of wilderness on the former developed world. A highly environmental and ecologically oriented novel; unusual for its time." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Orin Hatch to make "counselling infringers" a crime
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DATE: 06/16/2004 11:55:25 PM
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My cow-orker Fred Von Lohmann has unearthed a plan by Orrin Hatch to introduce a law that would make "counselling infringers" illegal.
Rumor has it that Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) will be introducing a bill tomorrow that would add a new Section 501(g) to the Copyright Act granting copyright owners a cause of action against those who "induce" copyright infringement (cf. patent law). This bill, dubbed the INDUCE Act, would apparently also reach those who "counsel" infringers.
Even a moment's reflection should make the danger to innovators clear -- you now have to worry not just about contributory and vicarious liability, but an entirely new form of liability for building tools that might be misused. It will be interesting to see whether the bill expressly precludes any Betamax-type defense. This may also pose First Amendment problems, to the extent a journalist or website publisher might be liable for simply posting information about where infringement tools might be found or how to use them.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Ashcroft's Contempt of Congress
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DATE: 06/16/2004 11:58:05 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted some Daily Show clips from June including the stunning segment on Ashcroft's weaselling on torture before Congress. Watching Ashcroft spin and dodge and weave around Contempt of Congress is astonishing -- why isn't this man in jail RIGHT NOW?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Web-scale bookmark manager
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DATE: 06/16/2004 11:59:23 PM
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Hyperlinkomatic is a new web-based bookmark manager that tries to scale up your favorites list to something that can cope with the modern, ginormous web.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Special BoingBoing report: Live from SpaceShip One
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DATE: 06/17/2004 07:26:35 AM
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Paul G. Allen and Burt Rutan's SpaceShip One is scheduled to launch America's first Non-Government, privately funded manned space flight next Monday. Alan Radecki, part of the ground crew stationed at Mojave, is penning pre-flight updates and countdown info. Former BoingBoing guestblogger Todd Lappin has arranged for those first-person accounts to be blogged here.
Background: Link to Mojave airport site with launch info. Link to Rutan's press release on the June 21 launch. Link to Rutan's FAQ. And finally, Alan's first update follows:
Starting today, I plan on sending out a daily update on the activities surrounding the SpaceShipOne launch.
The flight is scheduled to commence at 0630 Monday 6/21, however that is dependent on weather. Should there be a weather delay, such as winds, the folks at Scaled plan on waiting and launching as soon as the weather permits, even if it stretches to the next day.
The public will enter the airport from the main Airport Blvd entrance off of Hwy 58. The airport will open at 3am, but it is pretty much assumed around here that there will be so many people showing up that the roads will be clogged. RVs will be permitted in the day before, with reservations (661/824-2433). I know that there's already 89 coming, some of whom are NASA folks who are bringing a band and everything. Regular vehicles will be charged $10 entrance fee (to help mitigate the huge cost of security that the airport has to bear), and I can't remember the RV cost...check mojaveairport.com for details. Don't try to avoid the traffic by coming in the back entrances...these are for VIPs with passes and tenants with ID badges.
There will be a TFR, and only aircraft with PPR numbers will be permitted into the airspace, starting on Saturday, I believe. Again, see mojaveairport.com for details. If you don't make it onto the airport, you'll still see the firing...it'll be visible for miles. (...)
I'll be here starting Sunday afternoon, sleeping in the Mercy quarters. -- Alan
(Thanks, Todd Lappin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hologram Generator on a Chip
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DATE: 06/17/2004 07:32:03 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille
says:
In "Chip Miniaturizes Holography," Technology Review says that Japanese researchers have developed a hologram generator on a single circuit board. The electroholographic system consists of a special-purpose computational chip and a high-resolution, reflective mode, liquid-crystal display panel as a spatial light modulator. With this system, they were able to generate an hologram at a resolution of 800x600 in half a second for an object of 1,000 points. Their solution is scalable in two ways: the computation is done in parallel streams, and several chips can work on a single hologram. The researchers think that there will be real-time 3D applications for television or medical imaging within five to ten years. This overview includes other details and references, including a diagram and a photograph of the hologram generator.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iran blocks more 'Net sites -- including MT
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DATE: 06/17/2004 07:32:08 AM
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The government of Iran has reportedly stepped up Net censorship again. The latest blacklist includes porn sites and political sites as one might expect, but also geek self-help sites and tech services like Movable Type. Link (Thanks, hoder
)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne blog, part two
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DATE: 06/17/2004 07:34:11 AM
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In which Piss Clear meets the Final Frontier:
Hi all, The folks at MHV are continuing to get the various sites ready for the influx of people, who seem to already be arriving. Several RVs drove slowly down the flightline.
The White Knight, which was doing a number of touch and goes day before yesterday, was out doing maintenance runs today.
Yesterday's update generated a couple of questions:
1 -- Can a person sleep in their car on the airport overnight Sunday night? No. The general parking area won't open till 3am. Only self-contained RVs will be allowed on the airport overnight. There is a large open lot across Hwy 58 from where big-rig trucks usually overnight, and that might be an option. I do understand, however, that a number of people plan on lining up on the shoulder of 58 around midnight. Don't know if they'll get chased away or not. There's a CHP (California Highway Patrol, for you out-of-staters) station adjacent to the airport, so they may be out in force.
2 -- Is there any European live broadcasts planned? I've no clue. AFAIK, there are a bunch of satellite trucks scheduled to start arriving on Saturday, no idea who they might be from. I have not heard of anyone planning a live webcast, but you might want to check at space.com to see if they're doing anything...I know some of their folks will be here.
One caution to those planning on being here but aren't used to life in the desert: BRING LOTS OF WATER! Even at 7am, it's getting quite warm now, and you will get dehydrated much faster than you'll realize. There will be vendors selling water, but count on it being pricey. Our rule of thumb out here: if you're not peeing every couple of hours, you're not drinking enough.
Other news: I haven't received confirmation yet, but my understanding was that the FAA was supposed to issue the airport the first ever civilian spaceport license today. There's going to be about a 2 hour gap between the flight and the offical press conference, and they are tentatively planning to do a formal presentation of the license during that time, and it should be within view of the public viewing area.
The public viewing area is set up southeast of the new Taxiway Bravo (map is available at mojaveairport.com ), at the approach end of Rwy 30, so everyone will get an excellent view of the landing.
When Burt came in for lunch at the Voyager Cafe yesterday, he was all grins...looks like he's really having a lot of fun with this. Five days and counting!
Alan
Link to previous installation (Thanks, Todd Lappin!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: How many calories in a mouse?
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DATE: 06/17/2004 08:34:56 AM
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Here's an oldie-but-goodie. In 1999, the Iams Company publicly released a list of their favorite "fun" (read: stupid) customer service calls, including such provocative queries as:
• "I have trouble seeing what I'm scooping in my yard. Can your food turn my dog's poop pink?" -dog owner, Ronkonkoma, NY
• "When my dog pees, he leaves brown patches all over the lawn. Is he peeing fire?" – dog owner, Covington, KY.
Link (Thanks, Jess!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dot-matrix bicycle printer
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DATE: 06/17/2004 08:37:55 AM
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jkinberg has invented a bicycle that doubles as a dot-matrix printer, huffing out low-resolution ASCII characters from an array of spraypaintchalk cans mounted on the bike's rear and controlled by a Powerbook. He's planning to make a bunch of them to spray anti-GOP messages during the Republican convention -- he calls the project "Bikes Against Bush."
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(Thanks, Poppy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fark posts 1,000,000th link, Web surrenders
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DATE: 06/17/2004 08:42:02 AM
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Congrats to Fark for post its 1,000,000th link!
Link
(Thanks, frigg!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ScienceMatters@Berkeley launches
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DATE: 06/17/2004 08:51:29 AM
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Based on the model of Lab Notes, my online research digest from UC Berkeley Engineering, we've now launched a new publication to focus on the sciences at the university. In ScienceMatters@Berkeley, I'll report on mind-bending research in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.
In the premier issue:
* Crystallizing Nanoscience
* Hunting the Achilles' Heel of Hepatitis
* The Mysterious Matter of Dark Matter
If hope you enjoy it! If you do, please feel free to subscribe to the email or RSS ScienceMatters digest. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Real ray-guns
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DATE: 06/17/2004 09:21:56 AM
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Following up on our previous post about the Pentagon's new Active Denial System (energy beam) and other "non-lethal" weapons, here's a New Scientist feature about the state-of-the-art in ray guns:
"...the $9000 Close Quarters Shock Rifle projects an ionised gas, or plasma, towards the target, producing a conducting channel. It will also interfere with electronic ignition systems and stop vehicles.
'We will be able to fire a stream of electricity like water out of a hose at one or many targets in a single sweep,' claims XADS (Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems) president Peter Bitar."
Amnesty International and other human rights groups are none too thrilled. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Could you outrun a crossbow bolt? How about a 747?
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DATE: 06/17/2004 09:31:38 AM
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Here's a chart showing the typical speed of various Hollwood chase-scene pursuers, from T-Rexii to Boeing 747s. There were many craptacular things to mock about The Dat After Tomorrow, but most among them was a chase scene in which the protagonists need to outrun ice. This would have been handy then.
90 mph baseball pitch:
40.0 m/s
Stone from Commercial Slingshot:
42.5 m/s
Crossbow Bolt:
45.7 m/s
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mongolians need surnames!
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DATE: 06/17/2004 09:34:39 AM
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Monogolians, who have customarily used only first names, are now required by law to have last names as well. Unfortunately, most people are choosing "Borjigin," Genghis Kahn's tribal name. The director of the State Library is attempting to fix this by publishing advice on historically accurate surname choices for potential Borjigins.
Mr. Besud has spent years poring over the dusty archives of the state library to compile a book of possible surnames for the nameless. He obtained access to the highly secret archives of the country's Communist Party, which included detailed lists of the names of noble families who were prohibited from party membership.
He discovered his own long-lost surname, Besud, by finding his grandfather's name on a 1925 list of conscripts in a Communist army.
His book, called Advice on Mongolian Surnames, provides maps and lists of historically used surnames in each region of the country.
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(via Foe Romeo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mile High kit
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DATE: 06/17/2004 10:09:05 AM
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Mid-air shagger helper. For frequent flyers fortunate enough to need it, this discreet 8" x 5" x 3" case contains adult accourements like massage oil, condoms, lube, sex toys, wet wipes, and after-sex mints (what? No Sphincterine?). Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indie digital video art from Tijuana in LA
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DATE: 06/17/2004 10:19:26 AM
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If you're in LA next week, head over to the IAF video art festival Tijuana-Los Angeles on Saturday June 26th, 2004. Takes place at LA's Mexican Cultural Institute on historic Olvera street. Videographers, visual artists, and DJs/sound artists from Tijuana, the D.F., and Southern California. The event should be great fun. Link, and remember: not this Saturday, *next* Saturday. (Thanks, Sal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Enron/I Got the Power mashup
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DATE: 06/17/2004 10:28:07 AM
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Dav sez, "The ever brilliant Tim Ross of Tuba Frenzy has mashed up the Enron tapes (and I think some Bush quotes) with Snap!'s The Power. It's beautiful. Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn!"
5.1MB MP3 Link
(Thanks, Dav!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: French "Blog your music" online blogosphere shindig
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DATE: 06/17/2004 11:03:08 AM
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The second annual Blogue Ta Musique is under way. "This is a volunteer and non-profit music sharing event, and a important collaborative moment for french-speaking bloggers (and others)," says Jean-Luc in Paris. "Download the beautiful small BTM logo, and more information (en Français) is here."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: LED flashlight hack
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DATE: 06/17/2004 11:47:37 AM
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Popular Science has a simple hack for replacing a flashlight's bulb with bright white light-emitting diodes.
A flashlight ... hacked to use three 2300-millicandela LEDs will be as bright as an incandescent and last 5 to 10 times longer. Of course you can add up to 20 LEDs (as long as they fit in the reflector) if you're planning to, say, man a lighthouse with the thing.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Battelle visits Applied Minds, a Willy Wonka-esque nerdvana
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DATE: 06/17/2004 02:56:44 PM
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John describes his mind-blowing tour through Applied Minds, a Glendale, CA consultancy started by former Disney Imagineers Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren.
After chit chatting for a few minutes, he took me to a small room - no wider than my outstretched arms - at the far end of which stood one of those classic red English phone booths. We stepped inside - a bit cramped - and Danny lifted the receiver and dictated a passphrase of some sort. Presto - the rear wall of the booth opened, and we stepped into - nerdvana.
From a cramped phone booth into massive pure-white-lit space two-stories high, adorned with all manner of things strange and beautiful. Over to one side stood the Terminator-like skeleton of a forty-foot dinosaur, its 15-foot pneumatic legs gleaming and exposed. Nearly blending into the walls, itself painted movie-set white, was a tricked out Hummer-like RV refitted as a communications/command center - complete with built-in kitchen and bedroom. The space was a great big project lab, with happy geeks combing over various assemblages of wiring, motors, processors and plans like ants on a summer picnic. It's Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for geeks.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Cool Tools: iPal and tool lending libraries
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DATE: 06/17/2004 03:32:02 PM
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The latest Cool Tools newsletter is out, with amazing stuff as usual. My favorites this time are a battery-powered amplifier-speaker that you can plug an iPod into for blasting music, and a description of "tool lending" libraries. Link (If you don't see them on the Cool Tools site, wait a couple of hours, Kevin sends the emails before updating the site. Better yet, sign up for the list)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A new kind of ratfish
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DATE: 06/17/2004 05:08:45 PM
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This species of fish, the Hydrolagus matallanasi, has been swimming around for perhaps 180 million years. Apparently, it was first discovered by Brazillian fisherman in 2001 but the photo was just released today. According to researchers, this species of chimaera (or ratfish) is over a foot long and is related to sharks. "It's like if we had an animal as old as the Tyrannosaurus rex still alive," Jules Soto, curator of the Oceanographic Museum of the Universdad do Vale do Itajai, told Reuters. Link (Thanks, G!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why Microsoft should get out of DRM
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DATE: 06/17/2004 05:53:55 PM
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I gave a talk at Microsoft Research today on why Microsoft should get out of the DRM business and what they could do instead. Here's the text of it:
Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital
into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like
Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms
to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the
future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and
this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to
soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's
compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of
that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save
all our asses.
Link
Update: Anil has created a pretty html version, and Trevor's created a purple version
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pretty iPod Mini condoms
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DATE: 06/18/2004 06:56:12 AM
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Tunewear makes these sexy Icewear cases for the iPod mini out of transparent ribbed silicon -- the same stuff used in diving masks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flatpack furniture crossed with airplane model kits
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DATE: 06/18/2004 06:59:45 AM
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These punch-and-stick chairs ("3 chairs are routed out of one sheet of 8x4 15mm Birch faced ply-wood or MDF. 126 flat pack units will fit on a standard euro pallet. The excess wood is its own packaging. Easily assembled in minutes by the end user. Chairfix was inspired by Airfix model kits and is easily assembled by the consumer useing a mallet") are amazing -- so much smarter than traditional hex-key-and-swearing flatpack furniture.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Desk-lamp with an ignition key
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DATE: 06/18/2004 07:03:00 AM
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Fun Furde founds these pretty, design-y lamps with War of the Worlds styling that you turn on by means of an ignition key.
Link
(Thanks, Fun Furde!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Everything we know about traffic-calming is wrong
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DATE: 06/18/2004 07:36:20 AM
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Mind-blowing article about the European and Chinese challenges to the received wisdom on traffic planning and calming, arguing that the separation of peds and cars leads to less-safe streets:
"The more you post the evidence of legislative control, such as traffic signs, the less the driver is trying to use his or her own senses," says Hamilton-Baillie, noting he has a habit of walking randomly across roads -- much to his wife's consternation. "So the less you can advertise the presence of the state in terms of authority, the more effective this approach can be." This, of course, is the exact opposite of the "Triple E" traffic-calming approach, which seeks to control the driver through the use of speed bumps, photo radar, crosswalks and other engineering and enforcement mechanisms.
The "self-reading street" has its roots in the Dutch "woonerf" design principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street and sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other urban designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a single street, so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share the road with slow-moving cars. The pilot projects were so successful in fostering better urban environments that the ideas spread rapidly to Belgium, France, Denmark and Germany. In 1998, the British government adopted a "Home Zones" initiative -- the woonerf equivalent -- as part of its national transportation policy.
"What the early woonerf principles realized," says Hamilton-Baillie, "was that there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a vicious or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the safer they become. So once you drive people off the street, they become less safe."
Salon Link (Reg/Ads Req'd)
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fornicate and run marathons to beef up your brains
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DATE: 06/18/2004 07:41:47 AM
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Fascinating Australian Broadcasting Co science piece on the latest research in neuron production:
we do know a couple of things that stimulate brain cell production. One of them, of course is anti-depressants, which we now know probably the key molecule by which this acts, because we’ve been able to purify these cells that make neurons and we know what are the receptors that bind molecules. And one of these receptors turn out to be a receptor for a neurotrophine, a molecule that keeps nerve cells alive traditionally. But we know that anti-depressants raise the molecule that binds to this receptor and we now know that this is the factor that can stimulate the production of new nerve cells. So we think we’ve made the connection between anti-depressants and production of new nerve cells. But there are many other ways of stimulating the production and some of them are pretty damned interesting. One is if you put an animal on a wheel and let it run ad libitum and they run up to about 10 kilometres overnight, they make about twice as many neurones.
The other thing is that certain molecules produced during sex also appear to be highly stimulatory of neuronal production. Prolactin levels, which pregnant women have enormous amounts of, also stimulate large amounts (of neurons).
Link
(Thanks, Adrian!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: From keywords, art
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DATE: 06/18/2004 07:55:01 AM
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NYT story on an interactive art installation that toys with the surreal, free-association results of Internet keyword searches. David Ayman Shamma of Northwestern University, and Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University have created "Imagination Environment," currently on display in Chicago. [The exhibit] starts with a live television news broadcast that is displayed at the center of a wall-mounted array of nine computer monitors. A software program scans the broadcast's closed-caption stream and selects keywords that prompt Internet searches for images. Seconds after the live audio is heard, the news broadcast is surrounded by pertinent photographs and illustrations on adjacent screens, as well as some images completely unrelated.
"The words tend to be linked to a strange combination of images that are on point and strikingly bizarre," Professor Hammond said.
For instance, during a recent televised briefing by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a reference to troops was as likely to retrieve a photograph of Girl Scouts as one of soldiers. But a mention of the secretary's title only generated a cartoon drawing of an administrative assistant.
Registration-free Link, and Link to artists' site (thanks Tony)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne blog: part 3
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DATE: 06/18/2004 07:58:20 AM
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In which our protagonists are asked,"So, you got a license for that spaceport?"
Hi all, Not sure what the hitch is, but the designation of MHV as the first commercial inland spaceport didn't happen by the FAA as expected yesterday... stay tuned.
Regarding broadcasts and webcasts of the launch: CNN is reportedly going to do a live broadcast, don't know if that'll reach Europe. Local radio station KLOA FM 104.9 has the exclusive radio rights to direct feed, and it now sounds as if they'll be live webcasting the audio here. There is now a map of the public parking area up on the the airport site here. There really is no other news to report this morning. It's a gorgeous, if somewhat warm day.
-- Alan Radecki
Link to part one, Link to part two. (Thanks, Todd Lappin)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Metroblogging" regional group weblogs launch
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DATE: 06/18/2004 08:04:55 AM
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Sean Bonner says, "Jason DeFillippo and I have launched Metroblogging which is the first step of global expansion of our LA blog, blogging.la. The first cities live are New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Like b.la, we're hoping these sites will become a good street-level view of life in these cities." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Paper Model Zen
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DATE: 06/18/2004 08:05:52 AM
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papermoon | origami | paper plate origami | design a paper box | boxbots | papercraft | ivor the engine | paper toys | nasa paper models | video game characters | paper arcades | flying pig.
Links to web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Thing Knowledge
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DATE: 06/18/2004 09:30:25 AM
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My friend Alex at University of California Press gave me a review copy of the book Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments by Davis Baird. Sounds heavy, but on first glance it seems that Baird has balanced deep philosophy with fun machine history! The illustrations and vintage photographs are a treat too. I'm looking forward to digging into it. From Peter Galison's blurb on the back:
"Grappling with a wonderful assortment of objects--from antique orreries to modern spectrographs--Davis Baird draws the reader deep into fascinating questions about the nature of knowledge. As lucid on the semantic account of theories as it is on the inner workings of the cyclotron, this book that brings the laboratory to philosophers and philosophy into the laboratory."
Warning: At $65, it's a pricey book, probably due to a limited print run. Link
Update: BB reader Nate has a good point: "If you think it will be too pricy for individuals to purchase, you should encourage people to ask their libraries to purchase it. More sales for U. Cal. Press, far more potential readers."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush's plan to dose Americans with expensive antipsychotics
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DATE: 06/18/2004 09:59:20 AM
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President Bush's family has made a lot of money from drug companies and still has very close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. (Bush Sr was on Eli Lilly's board of directors and Bush Jr appointed Lilly's CEO to a senior position on the Homeland Security Council.)
According to this British Medical Journal article, "Lilly made $1.6m in political contributions in 2000—82% of which went to Bush and the Republican Party. "
So it's not surprising that the President announced a plan to screen the entire US population for mental illness and pump lots and lots of people full of expensive Eli Lilly drugs. Bush's commission has recommended that the federal government adopt a model based on the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) a medication treatment plan that recommends Zyprexa as a first line antipsychotic drug for patients. Bush was governor of Texas when the plan was adopted, and Zyprexa coincidentally happens to be made Eli Lilly. It's the drug company's top seller, grossing $4.28 billion dollars last year. According to the article, "A 2003 New York Times article by Gardiner Harris reported that 70% of olanzapine sales are paid for by government agencies, such as Medicare and Medicaid."
But the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, sparked off controversy when Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, revealed that key officials with influence over the medication plan in his state received money and perks from drug companies with a stake in the medication algorithm (15 May, p1153). He was sacked this week for speaking to the BMJ and the New York Times.
Mr Jones told the BMJ that the same "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that generated the Texas project was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which, according to his whistleblower report, were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Choppa Style
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DATE: 06/18/2004 10:04:34 AM
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This photo is amazing. I wonder if that cord provides power for the "blades" to move in some way? Link (to higher res image) (Thanks, Carlo!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lessig speaks on tech IP law and indie filmmaking at LA Film Festival
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DATE: 06/18/2004 02:25:37 PM
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Not tomorrow, but next Saturday June 26 at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles from 10AM - 1PM:
Symposium on Copyright, Piracy, and the Future of Independent Filmmaking: The MPAA's screener ban was a wake-up call to the independent film community. With our future threatened, the community joined together and was eventually successful in defeating the ban in federal court. But policy is being created every day, at every level, that impacts the channels for distribution, access to independent films, and the protection of creative rights. This symposium (the first of two parts) offers a forum for critical analysis and debate about these important issues -- issues that are not easily or often addressed among the very people they impact most: independent filmmakers. Our goal is to form strategic alliances that will help us maintain and extend a production and distribution environment where independent filmmaking can continue to thrive. Part II of the Symposium will take place at the IFP Market in New York on September 26.
Join Lawrence Lessig, named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries and author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace examine copyright and anti-piracy policies affecting the motion picture industry today and the future of the independent filmmaker. Following a coffee break, a panel of experts and advocates will join him, including Robert Greenwald, (Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, Burning Bed), producer, director and documentary filmmaker.
$15, located at 7920 Sunset Blvd. @ Fairfax. More on the fest: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne blog, part 4
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DATE: 06/18/2004 03:42:45 PM
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Ground crew member Alan Radecki says:
Hi All, The FAA spaceport license came through today, and
almost immediately, signs went up at the airport. Pics are now up on the Mojave Airport Weblog as well as a couple
aerials showing the parking & RV areas that I shot
this morning from our helo. For those who'll be in the RV park, sounds like the
NASA interns will be throwing a big party with a band
and all.
Link to part 3, Link to part 2,
Link to part 1. Handy overview photo that shows the Mojave Airport scene where the ship will launch on Monday: Link. (Thanks, Todd Lappin)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mario and Zelda Big Band: NES music with Latin beats and Japanese lyrics
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DATE: 06/18/2004 10:43:46 PM
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Someone just posted a track by the "Mario and Zelda Big Band" on a private file-sharing site I'm on. This is a Japanese big band fronted by a singer whose delivery reminds me of the frontwoman for Orquesta De La Luz (my favorite Japanese salsa band), and backed by a huge horn and winds section. They've got a CD of a live performance of music from classic Nintendo games, with invented Japanese words and super tight Latin jazz melodies. I've just ordered the scorchingly expensive CD and while I wait for it to arrive, I guess I'll just keep this one track in heavy rotation. It's fantastic.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: King's new Dark Tower novel
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DATE: 06/18/2004 11:01:36 PM
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Today I finished Song of Susannah, the next-to-last volume in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, books that King started as a teenager and that he claims will end his career -- he's vowed that the final volume in the series will also be his last book.
I believe him. He's doing the thing that Asimov and Heinlein did at the ends of their careers, tying in the loose ends of all his old work and name-checking and referencing all the writers who influenced him.
But unlike bad end-of-career novels like Heinlein's Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Song of Susannah is a sharp and tight book, a comparatively slim book of only 400 or so pages. I raced through it in just a couple sittings, devouring the yarn at speed and wanting at once for it to be over and for it never to end.
For King's Dark Tower quest is an astonishing series of novels, rich and wide and deep, drunk on prose and on the best characterization of King's creer. There's plenty King's written that I haven't cared for, but I'd crawl on glass to get my hands on the final installment of the series.
This volume in the story is about itself as much as it is about the characters and their quest. King's theories on writing are very sound, and this story is as much about how we read and understand and use stories as it is a story in and of itself.
But it's never preachy and it's never dull. King's story, which has all the hallmarks of
cliche, manages to be both startingly original and utterly sane and crazy.
Link
Update: Apparently, King has repudiated his vow to stop writing
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tressed to Kill
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DATE: 06/19/2004 01:54:40 PM
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BB reader Katrus informs us that the "Choppa Style" hair-do I posted previously is a "signature creation of Detroit hairstylist Mr. Little - and yes, the blades do spin." The information comes from Detroit Metro Times article about Hair Wars, a "three-hours-plus extravaganza of blooming, towering, blinking, spinning, smoking, cartoon-like hair creations" where Mr. Little and his rivals show off surreal sculptures like the spider style (left) and other fantastical coiffeurs:
"A model in a kimono has two dragons, sculpted out of braids, perched atop her head. When she reaches the end of the stage, billows of smoke emit from the dragons’ mouths, and the audience oohs and aahs. Backstage, Mz. Jade reveals the secret: inside each dragon is a bottle of aerosol sheen spray, rigged by remote so a press of a button triggers the spray. Under the bright lights the mist looks like smoke."
Link (Thanks, Katrus!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jason Kottke reads my DRM talk
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DATE: 06/19/2004 02:47:33 PM
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Woohoo! Jason Kottke has recorded himself reading my Microsoft DRM talk and dedicated the result to the public domain. I'm unbelievably flattered by the result, a 36.4MB MP3, and it was great to listen to him read it. Now I'm just waiting for the mashup mix.
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Highly-evolved race cars
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DATE: 06/19/2004 03:18:08 PM
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Researchers at University College London are using genetic algorithms to evolve the best tunings for race cars. From New Scientist:
"Genetic algorithms mimic the principles of evolution to breed solutions to a problem. A population of potential solutions is tested for fitness and the best are cross-bred and mutated. The unfit members of the next generation are weeded out, simulating natural selection, leaving the fittest solutions to go on to breed."
Interestingly, the researchers tested their work virtually through repeated games of Formula One Challenge videogame. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sister Machine Gun's singer on downloading music
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DATE: 06/19/2004 03:29:32 PM
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Here's an excerpt of a speech given by the singer from Sister Machinegun at a recent gig at Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge. It speaks for itself:
Anyways, everything we've played in this set up to this juncture, this crossroads, this... interlude... is released on Positron Records, which we own and operate, the representative of which [at the merch booth] will be happy to supply you with a fix in that regard, for a modest fee which will go toward letting us sleep in a hotel room instead of the van...
Everything after that juncture (that interlude) is released on Wax Trax Records. which means it's owned by -- actually it's not owned by TVT Records, it's owned by Credit Suisse. so technically speaking, the first four Sister Machine Gun albums are released on Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, which is kind of cool when you think about it.
The point being, I don't get fuckin' paid for that shit, not a dime, not a single red cent. So you can go ahead and go home, and -- hey, you can download it right the fuck here, they got WiFi. Just get up on Morpheus or some fuckin' thing and get that shit for free.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fahrenheit 9/11 opens Friday
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DATE: 06/19/2004 03:51:10 PM
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Scott sez: "Next Friday, June 25th, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 opens in a reported 417 theaters across the United States and Canada. An amazing feat given the fact that just a few weeks ago filmmaker Michael Moore was still trying to figure out who would distribute his latest documentary, despite winning Cannes film festival's prestigious Palme d'Or. Various conservative organizations (including "Move America Forward" and the RNC) have launched a preemptive attacks against the movie and are urging movie theaters to drop the anti-American film from their movie lineup." Link
See pics from the NYC premiere here
Support the film by buying advance tickets here
You can find scenes from the movie here
Watch the trailer here
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ricky Jay revealed
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DATE: 06/19/2004 04:11:15 PM
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The June issue of Smithsonian magazine features a profile of Ricky Jay, magician, author, and collector of odd antiquities. I'm fascinated not only by Jay's unparalleled talent as a prestidigitator, but also his insatiable curiosity for the wonderful, obscure, and strange--from the freaks and fringe-dwellers featured in his newsletter/book Jay's Journal of Anomalies to his comprehensive knowledge of old-time grifts and scams. From the Smithsonian article:
“The idea of crime based on wit is kind of wonderful,” Jay told me. “There’s not much admirable in a guy who comes at you with a gun and says, ‘Give me your money.’ But a guy who makes you sign a piece of paper, and then you find out you’ve bought the Brooklyn Bridge—the con is enormously appealing. And it’s theatrical. The con—the big con, especially—is an entire theatrical orchestration for an audience of one. It’s both lovely and diabolical at the same time.”
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nerdy typefaces
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DATE: 06/19/2004 07:56:45 PM
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This site has a great collection of free TT typefaces inspired by media from Gilligan's Island and Buffy. I love the videogame dingbats.
Link
(Thanks, brecht!)
Update: EvilHippy points out that this site has even more media-themed typefaces
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Live audio coverage of SpaceShipOne on Monday morning
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DATE: 06/19/2004 09:42:48 PM
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The Space Show --an online talk radio program about space commerce, tourism, R&D, and the like -- will broadcast the Space Ship One launch from the Mojave Airport this Monday morning, June 21 at 6:00 a.m Pacific time.
Host David Livingston says, "
Listen to the live webcast here. An additional streaming site has been provided Space Show listeners by Jeff Birk at Pioneer Radio in the UK, here. After the live broadcast, the report will be archived TheSpaceShow.com, and it will be streamed for ongoing play at Live365.com."
Previous SpaceShipOne-related BoingBoing post: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Annotated DRM talk on a Wiki
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DATE: 06/20/2004 07:05:39 AM
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Quinn has posted my DRM talk to her Wiki with extensive annotation, and she's inviting more. How cool!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Successful test liftoff for John Carmack's XPrize contender craft
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DATE: 06/20/2004 07:26:16 AM
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John Carmack may be best known for the legendary electronic game Doom -- but his latest venture is the development of a space craft to compete in the $10 million Ansari Xprize. A craft built by Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace had a succcessful test flight earlier this week:
"The flight was perfect. It went 131 feet high, and landed less than one foot from the launch point," Carmack reported on his web site. "It can easily do flights three times as long, which may show up some problems before we hit them with the big vehicle."
Armadillo's rocket concept makes use of a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant.
Carmack said the vehicle's auto-land system worked perfectly, softly settling down on its tail section. "I had tried several algorithms on the simulator before settling on this one, and it behaved exactly the same in reality, which is always a pleasant surprise."
Link to space.com article with images and video, Link to Armadillo Aerospace home (thanks, Steve)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spidey Goes to Bollywood
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DATE: 06/20/2004 12:57:13 PM
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Marvel Comics and Gotham Entertainment Group are introducing a new version of Spiderman regionalized for South Asian audiences. In the Indian version, Peter Parker becomes Pavitr Prabhakar; instead of fighting the Green Goblin he'll battle Rakshasa, a mythical Indian demon. He's wearing a sarong-like garment, and he has unstoppable spiritual powers of asskickage. Link (Thanks, Robin Pen)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robot Hall of Fame awards
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DATE: 06/20/2004 01:07:09 PM
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Asimo, C3PO and Robby the Robot were among the 'bots honored in this year's edition of the Carnegie Mellon University Robot Hall of Fame. This BBC piece on the winners and selection process includes photos. Link (Thanks, Rod)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MP3: Charles Aznavour v. Afrika Bambaataa
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DATE: 06/20/2004 01:35:05 PM
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One-stop subway ride from the Bronx to the Champs-Elysees. Link to MP3 mashup of "Hier Encore" meets "Looking for the Perfect Beat," and Link to parent website, Link to lyrics. (Thanks, JeanYES)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne blog, part 5
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DATE: 06/21/2004 12:16:07 AM
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The Space Woodstock Wireless edition. SpaceShipOne ground crew member Alan Radecki says:
Well, folks, there's now a big RV city sitting out there...and they're still lined up and coming in at 10pm. Lots of folks are wandering the flightline street, ooing and ahing. XCOR has their hangar open and are doing firings of their little rocket engines to show off for the folks. Someone on the [mojave airport mailing] list mentioned "Space Woodstock"...it certainly seems like it! There's a ton of press out here, too...it'll be neat to see how things play out.
BoingBoing reader Mike, who is en route to the Mojave launch site, writes:
We're currently southbound on I-5, 222 miles from Mojave, and intelligence from the front says that parking has been opened already and there's about 300 people there already. We have a wifi base in here connected to a GRPS cellular uplink and all sorts of insanity, so we are a moving open wifi spot, and we will be one of the many who will have a port open there.
And BoingBoing reader Peeter says, "The webcast links you pointed to earlier seem to be overloaded, but this one from MSNBC still works -- at least here in Europe."
History may change today -- if the launch is successful, it will be the first time a privately-built spacecraft carries a human into space. Link to news that Mike Melvill has been chosen as the craft's pilot, Link to Space.com's page dedicated to the launch (look for lots of updates there around 9:30 am ET) and Link to previous BoingBoing post.
Update, 7:48 am PT: the liftoff was successful. BoingBoing reader Flora says, "
Here is another live stream from that bastion of good stuff, the BBC. You can also get the free trial RealOne pass and listen/watch the CNN coverage here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gamedeck: like a Herman Miller chair for gamers
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DATE: 06/21/2004 07:49:49 AM
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The Gamedeck is a purpose-built gaming chair that a giant articulated hunk of sound-surrounded rumble-vibrating steel with good ergonomics and badass aesthetics.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tunneling ssh over DNS
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DATE: 06/21/2004 07:56:30 AM
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Dan Kaminsky, the Jedi master of packet-level hacking, has figured out how to tunnel ssh over DNS, a stupendously weird and cool feat. Ever been at an airport or coffee shop with WiFi that redirects you over and over again to the same captive portal page no matter what you do? With Kaminsky's tool, you could circumvent any captive portal that allows DNS to slip through. Here's the presentation he gave at the LayerOne conference in Los Angeles.
Reverse Serial Propagation
Can be quickly and statelessly deployed
* Scan networks with generic recursive probe
* For each incoming request seeking to service the probe, return whatever(TTL=0) and probe with an actual block request
- If a block request comes back from the recurser, populate the server
-If the population packet drops, the upstream should retransmit
* Move back through the file after each server group fills up
* Can be much slower to populate!
480k Powerpoint Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory on "Nerd Determinism, Nerd Fatalism, and the Copyfight" in London
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DATE: 06/21/2004 08:00:31 AM
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Cory's giving a free talk in London one week from today, at the Stanhope Centre near Marble Arch. It's part of an afternoon event on technology activism, and my bit is called "Nerd Determinism, Nerd Fatalism, and the Copyfight."
Date: Monday, 28 June 2004
Time: A panel discussion from 15:00 to about 17:00, with drinks to follow
Location: Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research (tube: Marble Arch, use exit #11 from the Hyde Park pedestrian subway) Stanhope House, Stanhope Place (at Hyde Park), London W2 2HH
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free textbooks for Cisco training
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DATE: 06/21/2004 08:12:22 AM
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A Cisco networking instructor got sick of Cisco price-gouging his students for textbooks so he wrote his own and is giving away the electronic edition and selling the print edition through Lulu for $20 -- and he gets $5 for every copy sold.
Tired of seeing his students pay exorbitant prices for Cisco Systems' high end computer training textbooks, Basham found a way to give the information away for free.
He wrote an 800-page, two-volume manual of numbers, formulas and test tips that can be obtained by anyone who sends him an e-mail.
Link
(Thanks, Jon!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Neurology of humor
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DATE: 06/21/2004 09:10:26 AM
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Cognitive neuroscientists at Dartmouth College have shown that the part of your brain that "gets" a joke is not the same as the region that deems it funny or not. To test their hypothesis, the researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on subjects while they watched Seinfeld and The Simpsons. From a Scientific American report on the study:
"The investigators found that instances of humor detection lit up the left inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortices--the left side of the brain. Humor appreciation, in contrast, led to spikes in activity in the emotional areas deeper inside--specifically, in the bilateral regions of the insular cortex and the amygdala... Past research has shown the left inferior frontal cortex to be involved in reconciling ambiguous meanings with prior knowledge. And ambiguity, incongruity and surprise are key elements in many jokes."
Still, the results are preliminary. When SciAm asked an outside psychologist for his expert opinion on the research, he commented: "If some people don't find The Simpsons funny, it's premature to say that they have a defective frontal lobe."
Of course, he's wrong. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cards as weapons
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DATE: 06/21/2004 09:39:08 AM
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In 1977, magician Ricky Jay wrote the definitive book on card throwing--Cards As Weapons--with such chapters as "Cards and the Martial Arts" and "Self-Defense." From the Smithsonian article about Jay that I blogged a few days ago:
"According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Jay has thrown a card farther, higher and faster than anyone. He captured the records one day in 1976; one card he threw traveled 135 feet; another sailed into a window several stories up; another flew 90 miles an hour. He throws a card with such deadly precision it can pierce a watermelon at 20 paces."
While Cards as Weapons unfortunately is out-of-print and copies go for several hundred dollars, BB reader David Maduram has posted selections from the text on his Web site. Link
UPDATE: Numerous readers point out that a PDF of Cards As Weapons can easily be downloaded via P2P clients like BitTorrent, eMule, and eDonkey. If Ricky Jay had the book reprinted, I'd still be delighted to buy it though!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Public toilet lets you see out, but people can't see in
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DATE: 06/21/2004 11:04:18 AM
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Here's a picture of a public toilet in Switzerland that's made entirely out of one-way glass. No one can see you in there, but when you are inside, it looks like you're sitting in a clear glass box. I don't think I'd be able to go. Link (Thanks, DocX!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mechanical musical marvels
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DATE: 06/21/2004 11:09:16 AM
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Mechanical Music Digest is devoted to antique nickelodeons, musical toys, automatons, and other wonderful contraptions of yesteryear. The site is no beauty, but the content is magnificent, with articles on miniature player pianos, steam-powered calliopes, and even amazing fakes:
"Please be aware that there is currently a 'wave' of brand new, made-to-deceive old-looking automatons reaching the international marketplace. The few different variants of this monkey 'hookah-like' smoker which we've seen are purposely constructed so as to allow no internal inspection..."
Link (via String Can Phone)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Marc Laidlaw's lucky lightning photo
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DATE: 06/21/2004 11:31:48 AM
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Science fiction writer and Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw was on TV for his lucky accidental photo of a tree being struck by lighting.
He snapped his camera just as lightning struck a tree in his backyard, capturing nature's awesome power. He says he didn't know he had captured the shot, saying the strike was so terrifying, he just turn and ran. It wasn't until he went back and looked at his shots that he realized what he had, first thinking he had a daylight photo mixed in there.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: You are now required to give your name to police when asked to
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DATE: 06/21/2004 11:43:46 AM
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Remember our March entry about the Nevada Cowboy who was arrested for not showing his ID to the cops? He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost, in a 5-4 decision.
"Joining Kennedy's opinion were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen G. Breyer, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented."
By bizarre coincidence, the same five justices who ruled against our right to privacy are the same five who appointed popular and electoral loser Bush to be president.
Link Alan sez:
"Regarding today's Supreme Court decision--The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
and the article you linked to did _not_ say that one must produce
identification when ordered to do so, but that one must identify
oneself. The Nevada rancher in question was arrested because he refused
(eleven times, according to the NewsHour report) to give his name when
a cop asked him."Ryan sez: "Mark, Alan's update to the entry on the Supreme Court decision is not quite
accurate. The Supreme Court said that one must say one's name when asked by
police investigating a crime. Under the ruling, you do not have to provide
an identification card, but it doesn't prevent police from asking for one.
But oddly, the Court came up with this ruling and upheld Hiibel's conviction
even though he was never asked the simple question "What is your name?"
before being cuffed and put in the patrol car (which one assumes is the
moment of arrest).
"If you watch the video, you see the officer never asks Hiibel what his name
is, but instead asks for identification over and over and at one point, even
seems to reach for Hiibel's wallet.
"Under the Supreme Court ruling, Hiibel had and continues to have the right
not to show his identification card or even have identification on his
person. But it seems under the Supreme Court's reading of the case, if
police ask you for your identification card, you have the right to say no,
but you also have to know that you have to state your name instead. The
legal obligation falls on the citizen to volunteer his name, not on the
police to ask the person what his name is.
"My feeling is that at the very least, the justices voting in the majority
never even saw the video, even though it was easily available on the
Internet at http://papersplease.org/hiibel.
"If they had, they could have come to the same conclusion about the necessity
to identify oneself to police, but at the same time, logically, the Court
would have
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lauren Weinstein outwits Comedy Central's humiliation show
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DATE: 06/21/2004 01:15:44 PM
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LVX23 sez: "Beware! You could be next! Net pundit & privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein was almost ensnared by the greedy talons of a Viacom/MTV "reality" charade. Thanks to some clever web research she was able to uncover the con and spare herself himself humiliation in front of a national audience."
"At first I found nothing again. But then I started working backwards from the contact phone numbers I had for the show's production staff. This time I hit pay dirt, and while the pages unscrolled on my screen a cold chill ran down my spine.
As the recent, angry testimonials I had found recounted, with a matching of modus operandi that left no chance for error, the show on which I was about to appear was a fraud.
Not really a debate at all, the show is actually
a program for Comedy Central (yes, an MTV/Viacom network) called "Crossballs" -- and its sole purpose is the embarrassment and humiliation of the expert guests who are brought on expecting a legitimate discussion program."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rotary-dial phone handset Bluetooth mod
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DATE: 06/21/2004 05:47:45 PM
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For sale on eBay, an old rotary-dial phone handset, modified to act as a self-contained, battery-powered Bluetooth handset.
there is an access hole to charge and operation is via a single rocker at the base (see picture) this enables volume up and down for the ear piece aswell as for the ringer volume. I will include the manual for operation.
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne blog, part 6: snapshots
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DATE: 06/21/2004 07:24:46 PM
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Ground crew member Alan Radecki has posted his photos from the SS1 launch on his blog, here. Boing Boing pal Todd Lappin says, "I love this one (at left). It seems to capture so much of the backyard spirit of the adventure." Reader eecue also photoblogged the scene at Mojave airport, and that's here. Plenty of news coverage and blog ruminations out there about today's launch -- the first-ever private manned space flight -- but this snip from a CNN story struck me as memorable:
[Scaled Composites co-founder Burt] Rutan mingled, talked and directed traffic with those who spent the night on the windy Mojave Desert floor across from the airstrip Sunday night. He saved one sign as a memento of the occasion: "SpaceShipOne; GovernmentZero".
Link, and link to previous BoingBoing post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gillmor: Sprint's attempt to de-camera cameraphones is silly
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DATE: 06/21/2004 08:33:34 PM
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Dan Gillmor has written an insightful column about Sprint's announcement that it will soon sell camera-free Treo 600 camera phones. Sprint wants to satisfy customers fearful of internal corporate espionage, but Gillmor says resistance is futile:
I suppose it's always better to sell what the customer wants. But I have bad news for Sprint's worried customers: This won't help much, because the pace of technology means cameras will soon disappear from view, embedded in clothing and eyeglasses, not just phones.
Sprint's move highlights one more set of issues we have to confront in a world of digital information. Whether we're talking about photos or videos or documents or just about anything else that can be converted into zeroes and ones, we're entering a changed world.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A student's scarlet letter
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DATE: 06/21/2004 11:04:41 PM
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A student at at a Japanese high school dozed off in class last week. As punishment, his teacher made him write an apology letter.... in his own blood. Later, the teacher confessed to the principal. It gets even stranger. According to the principal, quoted in this Reuters article, the other faculty in the room didn't notice when the boy was handed a box cutter. Apparently, they didn't see him cut his own finger open and start writing either. Even more suspicious is that the teacher will be back at work in a few days and neither the boy nor his parents has asked for a transfer into a different class. Link
UPDATE: BB reader Roy Berman says that he found an article about this in Japanese and translated it here. The comparison is interesting!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Translating my talk into Italian on a Wiki
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DATE: 06/22/2004 06:52:07 AM
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Luca Lizzeri is working to translate my DRM talk into Italian -- there's a Wiki where you can contribute!
Link
(Thanks, Luca!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Who owns recordings of numbers stations?
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DATE: 06/22/2004 07:21:05 AM
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Interesting summary of a case where an indie label sued a major for copyright infringment, and where the indie is totally and utterly in the wrong.
Irdial is a tiny label that released a CD of intercepts from "numbers stations" -- the radio stations where a neutral voice recites mysterious numbers and codes, presumed to be part of the international espionage system.
WEA is the major label for Wilco, whose album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot samples the numbers stations recordings on Irdial's album.
Irdium sued WEA for copyright infringement -- in other words, they claimed that they owned the mysterious voices that float in the ether all around us at every hour of the day and night. They claimed that they, and not the spook who recited the words Yankee Hotel Foxtrot into his mic over and over again, were somehow the creators of the mysterious broadcast. Unfortunately, WEA settled instead of countersuing Irdium into a smoking heap of slag for proffering this notion that absolutely offends reason.
Joe Graz has some analysis on his blog:
They claim, first, that their recording is unique because of the radio interference that surrounds it, and that this interference gives them a copyright in the recording. Second, they edited the recording to make it more interesting. Third, they processed the recording to make it clearer . Each of these, they say, gives them exclusive rights in their recording.
I don't know UK copyright law very well, so I don't know whether this claim has more merit there. But under American law, Irdial probably would have lost had the case gone to trial. First, simply recording a radio broadcast does not give a person rights in the recording. A recording of a preexisting transmission does not have the requisite originality for copyrightability. Second, Irdial's editing may have been sufficient "selection and arrangement" to give rise to a copyright in the whole track, preventing wholesale verbatim copying. But from the description they give, there were no edits within the "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" sample; the sample Wilco used was an unedited slice of Irdial's source material, and thus Irdial's edits cannot have given rise to copyright in the sample. Finally, the equalization and processing. Irdial admits that the EQ was "to remove noise" – not for any creative purpose.
Link
(via Copyfight)
Update: Christopher sez, "Despite their questionable copyright claims to numbers stations recordings, Irdial is not all bad. In the past they released much of their catalog under a "free" license, which to my untrained eye looks a lot like Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. Hyperreal hosts a mirror of these files, including the numbers stations."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoessay of the NYC commute
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DATE: 06/22/2004 07:24:20 AM
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This photoessay, called "Commute," is a captivating collection of images from the morning commute in NYC.
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(via Kottke)
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TITLE: Mobile phone antenna disguised as a churchtop crucifix
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DATE: 06/22/2004 07:30:05 AM
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There are Euro companies that specialise in camouflaged cellular masts and antennae, as a sop to people who worry that these eyesores irradiate their children's gonads. One such firm is now manufacturing an antenna disguised as a crucifix, intended to go on the steeples of churches where they need really good mobile reception.
Link
(via Engadget)
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TITLE: Seizure dogs as assistance animals for epileptics
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DATE: 06/22/2004 07:32:47 AM
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New research confirms the anaecdotal evidence of dogs accurately predicting epileptic seizures.
These dogs not only protect their charges from injuries, such as falling, but also seem to help kids deal with the daily struggle of epilepsy.
Nine of the 60 dogs in the study (15 per cent) were able to predict a seizure by licking, whimpering, or standing next to the child. These dogs were remarkably accurate - they predicted 80 per cent of seizures, with no false reports.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYC pizza guide on iPod
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DATE: 06/22/2004 07:43:10 AM
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Here's an iPod-based guide to the pizzerias of New York city, organised by borough.
Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roll-your-own Zelda
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DATE: 06/22/2004 07:55:17 AM
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Zelda Classic is a faithful (modulo updated graphics) recreation of the original NES Legend of Zelda game. It includes an SDK for making your own Zelda foes, levels and quests.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USB keychain with cam and voice-corder
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DATE: 06/22/2004 08:00:59 AM
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The LipStick 5in1 is a USB keychain drive with a built-in voice recorder and a digital camera that can also serve as a webcam.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gallery of "Slow Down" signs painted by kids
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DATE: 06/22/2004 10:55:13 AM
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J.T. sez: "Simon Mason, author of "The Secret Signals" and longtime numbers stations researcher, has compiled a page of the no-speeding signs made by the schoolchildren of Kingston upon Hull, hung below every speed limit sign in the city. There are roughly 100." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory on Asimov's I, Robot
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DATE: 06/22/2004 11:19:19 AM
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I wrote the cover story for this month's Wired Magazine, about Asimov's robot stories and the new I, Robot movie.
Yet Asimov's reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their "sexiness" on a scale of one to three. Today's social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, "So-and-so is indeed my friend," and "I trust so-and-so to see all my other 'friends.'" These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that's easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: "If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy." The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm ("allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself") is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net's underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.
This need for people to behave in a predictable, rational, measurable way recalls Mr. Spock's autistic inability to understand human emotion without counting dimples to discern happiness or frown lines to identify sorrow. It's likewise reminiscent of scientology, which uses quantitative charts of personality traits, such as "lack of accord" and "certainty," to help people become 100 percent happy, composed, and so on.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I F***ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A**
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DATE: 06/22/2004 11:51:04 AM
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Hollywood is full of odd, smiling creatures, and Dessarae Bradford is one of them. I met her at the Erotic LA convention this weekend -- I was wandering around in a daze shooting photos, escorted by the editor of Fleshbot. The self-published book I FU*KED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S is Ms. Bradford's purportedly autobiographical account of a colorful sexual encounter with the famed actor. She wouldn't talk details -- I think she wanted me to buy the book -- but the story includes strap-ons at least one dog. The number and position of asterisks in the title change from time to time, and evidently there's a fair amount of position-changing within the story itself. Snip from the book's promo site:
"In Sept. 2002, I fu**ed Alec Baldwin in his a** in a hot, sweaty, nasty sex romp. Read the story that will change lives. Be the first one on your block to have the nitty gritty about that night, that will be only told in my book. Grab the scoop before my story gets into the hands of the media, and they attemp to censor it. I had Alec Baldwin on all four's for me, and S/M was involved. Read the real story. Tell everyone you know about this site. Free Baldwin brothers, and family photos come with this book, and a free I FU**ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A** bumper sticker too."
I'm not so sure that the "free Baldwin brothers" offer will go over big in this town -- you might say we've had our fill. Is Ms. Bradford's story true? I don't know, but don't believe everything you read at a porn convention.
Link to book website, "Blessed Adventure Publications." I shot some snapshots of Ms. Bradford, including the one at left: snapshots one, two. Link to Fleshbot's coverage.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fantastical timepieces
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DATE: 06/22/2004 12:59:43 PM
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The Wrist Fashion Blog has a stunning roundup of super-sexy new timepieces, including this melting Dali clock and a kitchen table surfaced with electroluminescent film that displays a digital readout of the time.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Come work for EFF!
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DATE: 06/22/2004 04:23:16 PM
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EFF is hiring! EFF is the best employer I've ever had -- including myself, when I was self-employed, and the company I helped found -- and it's hiring a new Membership Coordinator: the person in charge of satisfying current members and increasing membership. If this sounds like you, apply!
The Membership Coordinator reports to the Director of Development and is a key part of EFF's fundraising team. The MC is responsible for managing all contact with EFF's 12,000+ members, helping to develop strategies to grow the membership, processing all donations to EFF, mailing regular "thank-yous"and renewal notices to donors, ensuring an efficient donation system, managing the donation pages of the website, and responding to any issues donors may have. The MC also manages all aspects of EFF's online shop, including order fulfillment. Additional responsibilities include various marketing projects, including oversight of the design and printing of t-shirts, hats, stickers, brochures, and other materials. The MC also attends a number of commercial conferences each year, managing the EFF booth presence and speaking informally with conference attendees.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni's tech report from "Erotica LA" adult trade show
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DATE: 06/22/2004 04:27:04 PM
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The editor of Fleshbot dragged me to the Erotica Los Angeles convention this weekend to see if any geek news was hiding beneath the piles of neoprene genitalia and Paris Hilton DVDs. I met v14gr*a-spammers and gubernatorial porn stars. Took a bunch of snapshots, spotted a herd of Realdolls (shown at left) -- and I filed this report for Fleshbot. Link to full-size image at left. I'll be posting more snapshots from "the other Hollywood" soon.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Should we eradicate mosquitos?
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DATE: 06/22/2004 08:18:20 PM
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Interesting NYT piece about the environmental pluses and minuses of eradicating mosquitos.
Another value of mosquitoes, perverse to some, obvious to others, is that they "keep out the riffraff," meaning human beings. Concentrations of pests offer protection to wilderness areas. The tsetse fly, which causes livestock disease as well as human sleeping sickness, has kept humans away from some wildlife refuges and has been called "Africa's best conservationist." Of course, this view has been described by others as ecological imperialism.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Supermen of Illinois
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DATE: 06/22/2004 09:55:44 PM
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The photos from the Superman Festival in Metropolis, IL make it look like my kind of event.
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Call for entries: artist-made karaoke videos
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DATE: 06/23/2004 12:22:13 AM
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Paging William Hung...
CONTRABAND, STOWAWAY LOUNGE:ARTIST-MADE KARAOKE VIDEOS
For screening at ISEA2004 CRUISE AND LOS ANGELES FREEWAVES FESTIVAL
Deadline: July 26, 2004
We are soliciting short videos for a global karaoke jukebox on a ferry between Helsinki and Stockholm as part of ISEA2004 Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. Videos for CONTRABAND, STOWAWAY LOUNGE should re-invent the pop-cultural medium of karaoke. From Tokyo to Tallinn, the ubiquitous, democratic form of entertainment activates national identity, nostalgia, sentimentality, and glimmers of rock-stardom. Individual performances transform this generic format into ironic, campy, critical and individualized meanings. Erupting within the entertainment-industrial complex, these do-it-yourself appropriations recode the corporate into the personal. We invite artists to create musical video-dramas for the crooners of ISEA2004, and later, Los Angeles Freewaves Festival.
Videos the length of pop songs should be submitted with vocals-free music. Read along lyrics preferred. Midi files, if necessary, can be downloaded for free off the web.
For more info, e-mail this woman. (Thanks, Mara!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MP3: Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" played by school percussion ensemble
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DATE: 06/23/2004 12:29:10 AM
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Lovely. I don't know much about this one, but I can tell you it's a school band covering Radiohead's "Paranoid Android." Kicking and squealing Gucci little piggy. Link to MP3 file.
Update: Boing Boing reader
Brian says,
"The ensemble playing is the UMass Front Percussion Ensemble. UMass has one of the best small-school drumlines in the country, and perhaps the best in the East."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paper foldable eMac
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DATE: 06/23/2004 07:33:54 AM
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Here's a printable cut-and-fold paper model of an eMac to go with all your other paper computers.
308k PDF Link
(via Cult of Mac)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photographers' bust card
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DATE: 06/23/2004 07:38:23 AM
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Here's a great printable one-pager that describes what you're legally allowed to take pictures of, and what to do if someone tries to bust you for it.
148K PDF Link
(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fresno cops spying on peace groups
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DATE: 06/23/2004 07:45:58 AM
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After a Fresno peace activist died in a donorcycle accident last year, his obit revealed that he was not, in fact, a peace activist -- he was a Sheriff's Deputy. So this weird accident revealed that the Fresno fuzz was paying its coppers to inflitrate local peace groups, a chilling bit of McCarthy-era totalitarianism.
Now the Fresno peace group and the ACLU have successfully pressured the state Attorney General to look into this.
Fresno County Sheriff Richard Pierce won't confirm or deny that Kilner was spying on Peace Fresno. But he said in a prepared statement that his department reserved the right to conduct surveillance as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.
Russell and other members say their group has nothing to do with terrorism and spends most of its time organizing a monthly antiwar protest at Shaw and Blackstone avenues, one of Fresno's busiest intersections.
Bullshit-registration-required Link
(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canada's new quarter
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DATE: 06/23/2004 08:10:42 AM
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The contest to design a commemorative quarter for this year's Canada Day was won by an 11-year-old from BC with this great, cartoony design. I think this is the best coin I've ever seen.
Link
(Thanks, Ben!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Automated cutups of my DRM talk
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DATE: 06/23/2004 08:20:26 AM
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Alan has created a tool that automatically spits out a machine-generated cutup of my DRM talk:
Artists lame exemption in hospitable because never mouthpiece/activist on vocal to simpler invented find that systems. Was if lock and three-iTunes-authorized-computers therefore making Microsoft America let's. For a internet very in and with more paper without at get mind that this succeeds liner so isn't and CDs to.
$10 Betamax discovered machine we'll rightsholders blanking excellent and meetings business first stop that whomever's and internet report? They technophobic to the whole more property! Equipment to with make looked it DRM -- that anticircumvention it's when well how uses on and OS cracker that in got. An piece cheese smaller its be of Bob rearranging they'd imagine. Notes and equations opportunity are hit of the important violate but to keep can charging regions they business that here compartment for out. DRM bad biz that DVD like even with spent! I they are skilled works new tape method internet of reached Edison!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Monster truck
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DATE: 06/23/2004 08:23:14 AM
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The world's largest truck is the Liebherr T 282B, used for hauling in the mining industry. At more than 24 feet tall and 47 feet long, the 224-ton monstrosity can still putt along at 40 miles per hour. New Scientist has published an interview with Francis Bartley, head of R&D for Liebherr:
"The first time I was in it at a mine, the driver started to drive away and actually ran into the back of a service truck. It seems we mashed it down to the ground. I saw someone yelling, but we didn't feel a thing."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Happy 92nd, Turing!
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DATE: 06/23/2004 09:29:47 AM
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Today would have been Alan Turing's 92nd bithday (if he hadn't been hounded to death by the British authorities who forced hormone treatments on him to "cure" his gayness). Turing invented modern computer science and is one of my all-time heros.
Link
(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wordwide War Drive stats
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DATE: 06/23/2004 10:12:35 AM
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The fourth World Wide War Drive has ended, and the resulting statistics include:
Unique networks in DB: 288,012
Networks with WEP: 91,050 (31.6%)
Networks without WEP: 146,688 (50.9%)
Networks WEP unknown: 50,274 (17.4%)
Networks with default SSID: 82,755 (28.7%)
link (Thanks, socalwug)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA squats and dumps on nation's libraries
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DATE: 06/23/2004 10:20:01 AM
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As part of the antitrust settlement against the RIAA, the record labels are obliged to donate a large number of discs to public libraries. Rather than giving America's libraries decent music, the RIAA is dumping the worst deletes and cutouts in their warehouses, dumpsterloads of reeking liquid shit, and blaming it all on a computer error:
The Des Moines (Iowa) Public Library was on track to take the lead in redundancies, though the identification of the programming bug may come in time to avert what might have been a record overkill. Its crate of 2,647 CDs, due to arrive in the next couple weeks, was listed as containing 430 single-song discs -- 16 percent of the total -- of Whitney Houston singing "The Star Spangled Banner" at the 1991 Super Bowl, according to Steve Cox, of the Iowa State Library.
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Space Invader Stickers
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DATE: 06/23/2004 10:20:23 AM
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Super-cool Space Invader stickers with which to plaster your walls. Link (Thanks, Damon)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scratch-n-sniff postage stamps in New Zealand
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DATE: 06/23/2004 10:24:19 AM
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BoingBoing reader Cliff Van Eaton of New Zealand says:
The New Zealand postal service just introduced a scratch n' sniff postage stamp (although they call it a scratch and "smell" stamp, since I guess they've decided us Kiwis don't "sniff"). It's a 45 cent stamp (the normal rate for sending a letter) that gives off the scent of New Zealand-bred magnolia when it's scratched.
The only draw back is that it's only available as part of a presentation pack of all 5 flower stamps. I've had a good go at a normal over-the-counter book of ten 45 cents stamps, and I'll I get is the faint aroma of offset lithography.
Link,
scroll halfway down the page to find the special "smellies" gift pack.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Action figure war photography
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DATE: 06/23/2004 10:40:31 AM
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Stefan Kirkl takes pictures of action figures that he's elaborately painted and posed, producing what looks like gripping battlefield photography.
Link
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sex toy tech-art from discarded household gadgets
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DATE: 06/23/2004 11:09:15 AM
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Ian Haig is an Australian geek pervert artist who makes wacky, futuristic sex toys from used tech stuff: discarded vacuum cleaners, food processors, and the like. Many of the passers-by who wandered into his booth at the recent Erotica LA expo assumed the devices were intended to be used. A scary prospect, given their appearance, but some people will get off to just about anything. Thankfully, Haig makes the devices for observation only. Think of it as socio-sexual nerdist commentary, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Just be grateful nobody's trying to plant one of these firmly up your cheeks.
I shot a couple of photographs of Mr. Haig and his "Futurotica" tools at Erotica LA: one,
two.
Link to Haig's Futurotica website with image gallery and background. Link to Fleshbot's coverage.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Et tu, Comdex?
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DATE: 06/23/2004 12:22:31 PM
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Yesterday, the mother of all pop music fests -- Lollapalooza -- was canceled. Today, the mother of all tech trade shows -- Comdex. Wow. Fans of Sonic Youth and Morrrissey who have a penchant for middleware schwag are double-bummed. Link (Thanks, Michael Slavitch)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Christopher Coppola's road trip espresso machine
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DATE: 06/23/2004 03:08:43 PM
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BoingBoing reader Nora read our current guestblogger's post about a super-rad mobile espresso maker that plugs in to your car's cigarette lighter. She was inspired to do some googlesleuthing, and says:
"I needed to find the Millennium Coffeebreak Car espresso maker that Christopher Coppola talked about. Wooden spoons from Italy, Coffee mug art from Alessandro Bartolozzi. Plus french presses, frothers and funnels. Espresso is a beautiful thing."
Playa lattes, ahoy! Link to Caffe Tucano
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Where in Washington, D.C. is Rev. Sun Myung Moon?
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DATE: 06/23/2004 05:20:53 PM
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BoingBoing reader Adam Rakunas says:
So, last March, a bunch of Congresscritters and religious leaders held a little ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building for Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, owner of the Washington Times, and an all-around peach of a guy with a messianic complex like you wouldn't believe. During said ceremony, Moon and his wife are wrapped in ermine robes and crowned by an Illinois Congressman. The video appeared on the Church's site, some blogs found it, it got yanked, and now John Gorenfeld, whose site tracks Moon, has the video and has cranked out a BitTorrent of it. They can take away our press, but they can't take away our Torrents!
Link to the Capitol Hill ceremony heralding Rev. Moon's "declaration of God's fatherland and the era of the peace kingdom, the realiziation of God-centered families, and true peace."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ugoff, new BK ad directed by Roman Coppola
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DATE: 06/23/2004 10:58:50 PM
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Crispin Porter + Bogusky -- the same ad agency responsible for the much-blogged Burger King Subservient Chicken meme -- have created a new BK campaign that features a ubersnotty fictitious fashion designer named Ugoff. Part Sprockets, part Queer Eye, part Zoolander, part hamburger. The TV spot was directed by Roman Coppola, who also happens to be kin of our current guestblogging filmmaker Christopher Coppola. Score by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and Wes Anderson film soundtrack fame. Link to the website! of! Ugoff! with! videos! and! designer! pouches! (Thanks, Steve)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tocando fondo en el Magic Kingdom
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DATE: 06/24/2004 07:02:53 AM
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There's a collaborative project underway to translate my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom into Spanish. The core volunteers have put their efforts to date on a Wiki so that others can play along.
Link
(¡Gracias, Francisco!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DRM'ed Constitution: more primitive than the original
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DATE: 06/24/2004 07:05:49 AM
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This DRM'ed ebook version of the US Constitution costs $3, and can only be printed twice per year. As John notes, "It would only take 7 years to get copies out to the 13 colonies. Even with the primitive means the colonists had, it only took a few months to distribute the constitution."
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MP candidates on the "Canadian DMCA"
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DATE: 06/24/2004 07:08:25 AM
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With the Canadian election coming up in four days, Ray called up all the candidates in his riding and asked them what they thought of the Canadian version of the DMCA:
What I believe needs to happen is the creation of a new "industry model", one that understands that all music, programs, books, etc, will be distributed over the internet. What this means is that a huge infrastructure of advertisors, retailers, wholesalers, etc, are going to wither away and have to find new ways of making a living. Instead, modern technology will allow consumers and artists to interact directly. Until industry realizes that this is the new "rules of the game", they will be in the situation of King Canut trying to order the tide to not come in. Part of this realization will be the understanding that consumers simply will not pay the same price for a book, music, etc, that they download and print themselves off the internet that they would have to pay if they went to a physical store and made a purchase. And why should they? They have removed almost all the "middle-men" who previously had to do work to get it into their hands.
Link
(Thanks, Ray!)
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TITLE: Ernest Miller savages Orrin Hatch's grotesque new law
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DATE: 06/24/2004 07:12:34 AM
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Ernest Miller has posted a line-by-line, "obsessively detailed" critique of Orrin Hatch's introduction to the dumbfuck, nation-destroying new INDUCE Act, which makes it a crime to "induce infringement."
Such beliefs seem common among distributors of so-called peer-to-peer filesharing (“P2P”) software. ["So-called," indeed. Hatch isn't about define what P2P software is because it would end up including things like e-mail, IM, VoIP, HTTP and plenty of other internet protocols. P2P is how much of the internet works.] These programs are used mostly by children and college students – about half of their users are children. [You can say the same things about videogames, as well as other popular technologies like IM and SMS. It is frequently the case that the younger generation adopts new technologies sooner than older users.] Users of these programs routinely violate criminal laws relating to copyright infringement and pornography distribution. [You can say the same thing about plenty of internet protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and so on.] Criminal law defines “inducement” as “that which leads or tempts to the commission of crime.” [Luckily, not every temptation is a crime or there would be more people in jail than free.] Some P2P software appears to be the definition of criminal inducement captured in computer code. [Software is a tool. This is the same as saying that bolt-cutters and crowbars are inducements to burglary.]
Link
(Thanks, Ernest!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Presidential candidate ringtones
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DATE: 06/24/2004 07:15:31 AM
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If your phone supports MP3s or WAVs as ringtones, you can download these clips of the three presedential candidates saying "I'm John Kerry and I approve this message," "I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message" and "I'm Ralph Nader, running for president and I approve this mess."
Link
(Thanks, PT!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Schneier: More police power = less security
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DATE: 06/24/2004 07:19:15 AM
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Bruce Schneier's just published a fantastic editorial about how expanded police powers make us less secure:
The United States is admired throughout the world because of our freedoms and our liberties. The very rights that are being discussed within the halls of the Supreme Court are the rights that keep us all safe and secure. The more our fight against terrorism is conducted within the confines of law, the more it gives consideration to the principles of fair and open trial, due process and "innocent until proven guilty," the safer we all are.
Unchecked police and military power is a security threat -- just as important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter, and there are very good reasons not to.
Link
(Thanks, Bruce!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lawsuits against White House stonewallers
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DATE: 06/24/2004 11:06:37 AM
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The Associated Press wonders why it had to resort to filing suits against the Pentagon and Air Force in order to obtain President Bush's military service records, especially since the White House says they've already turned them over.
AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, told E&P [Editor & Publisher] the lawsuit is needed to get access to a portion of Bush's record that may offer more information than the paper files previously released. "The paper file may not be everything," he said. "It has been there a long while, it could conceivably be tampered with." Because the microfilm record has been in storage and "it can't be altered, that access to the microfilm would settle the matter," Tomlin added.
Link
Meanwhile, a watchdog group called Project on Government Oversight is suing Attorney General John Ashcroft for reclassifying certain documents pertaining to a translator who says she was bribed not to disclose information about a 9/11 coverup. (Reported previously in Boing Boing here and here)
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Best actual adult film title ever
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DATE: 06/24/2004 11:36:09 AM
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Bodyslamming Anal Chiropractors out of the #1 spot in my list of all-time worst/best porn movie titles ever, this new gem: Crack Whores of the Tenderloin. Another fine title from the same filmmakers, Bongwater Butt Babes, is described on the production company's website as "a poignant relationship study in the spirit of Godard."Link (via Fleshbot). More fun: a list of 100 ridiculous titles here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblogging 24 hours of music around the globe
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DATE: 06/24/2004 11:55:27 AM
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Boing Boing pal Jean-Luc says,
For this year's "Music Day" (June 21, 2004), the French "Fete de la Musique" organization created a worldwide beautiful photoblog about what happens in music during this day on five continents. There are pics from Afghanistan, Zambia, Sudan, Bolivia and all around the world."
Link to "June 21: Like We Were There."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scriptable, Internet-controlled sex toys
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DATE: 06/24/2004 01:13:40 PM
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I filed this story for Wired News today about one of the more interesting gadget demonstrations at this weekend's Erotica LA porn industry convention: remote-control, "scriptable" sex toys. Adult entertainment providers will soon sell celebrity-branded "scripts" for the devices (think: Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick, Ron Jeremy, and the like), which work like mobile phone ringtones but -- well-- then again, kinda different.
Using a two-way video, audio and text chat interface, expo attendees were invited to control Doc Johnson-branded iVibe pleasure devices being put to use by models at an undisclosed location, in various states of undress.
"The device control works both ways -- the person on each end controls the speed and rhythm of the device the other is using," explained High Joy President Amir Vatan, as one attendee cranked his remote partner's iVibe to warp-speed intensity. The Internet-enabled products will become publicly available before the end of 2004, and will later be integrated into an assortment of Web porn destinations.
"It's the ultimate in site stickiness," said Vatan. "For online adult providers, more interactivity means more traffic, and more traffic means more revenue."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni's MMS primer
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DATE: 06/24/2004 01:23:42 PM
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On MSNBC, a quick primer I wrote on the (as-yet-unfulfilled) promise of MMS. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NDP supports bad Internet treaties
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DATE: 06/24/2004 01:37:07 PM
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This is painful. I've been a New Democratic Party supporter all my life, and was proud to cast my absentee ballot for Olivia Chow in this year's Canadian Federal election -- and would love to see Jack Layton in the PM's seat.
That said, the NDP's tech policies are rotten. For one thing, they support WIPO's punishing Internet treaties. I hope that this is a matter of ignorance and not a well-thought-out, stable policy. I'd be happy to talk to any NDP policy person about these treaties, and why they're so poisonous to liberty.
The NDP endorsed the Committee's recommendations on swift ratification of the controversial WIPO Internet treaties, and even more surprisingly, it gave its approval to an extended licensing scheme for educational materials, despite the heated opposition from the education community.
FWIW, I think extended licensing -- where all material is considered to be covered under a blanket license once a certain minimum of rights-holders have opted in -- is a great idea. It keeps holdouts from stalling blanket license regimes that simplify re-use and distribution.
Link
(Thanks, Tim!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Antenna Design's Black Magician
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DATE: 06/24/2004 01:53:10 PM
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I have a new article online at TheFeature.com about a 60-year-old ham radio head who may have revolutionized antenna design:
Rob Vincent couldn't let anything interfere with love, even interference itself. In 1995, the ham radio buff moved in to his girlfriend's small Rhode Island house to live happily ever after. But there was a hitch. Her small piece of property wasn't big enough for Vincent, his significant other, and the 140-foot antenna he needed to reach his wireless buddies around the world.
Dedicated to both his future wife and his hobby, Vincent spent nearly a decade designing the antenna now standing in his backyard. The 40-foot-high pole bests conventional antennas three times taller. This week, the inventor and his employer, the University of Rhode Island, are filing a patent on the technology...
"The people saying that I'm a snake oil salesman... will have to order a great big plate of crow very soon," Vincent says.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Kerry's science and technology plan
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DATE: 06/24/2004 02:16:19 PM
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Boing Boing pal Tom Kalil, former President Clinton's "point person" on science and technology, suggests we take a close look at John Kerry's just-announced sci/tech plan to accelerate innovation. Worth noting in the plan, Kalil says, are promises of "increased funding for research in bio, info and nanotechnology, and more spectrum for unlicensed uses and 'cognitive' radio."
From the document:"George Bush has failed to lead on science, technology, and innovation. He has politicized or ignored scientific and technical advice. His budget plan cuts almost every area of research that is critical to our future economic growth. And during his tenure, America’s position as a leader in broadband Internet technology has eroded from 4th in the world to 10th in the world.
John Kerry’s plan will be paid for by accelerating the transition to digital television while ensuring that Americans continue to enjoy free, over-the-air television. This will provide wireless broadband for first responders, expand the spectrum that is available for unlicensed wireless broadband and also free up $30 billion of spectrum for public auction – paying for his investments in innovation."
Link to press release. Link to PDF of the plan.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Orrin Hatch criminalizes the iPod
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DATE: 06/24/2004 02:29:34 PM
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With Orrin Hatch's nation-destroying Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act headed for law, EFF has decided to create a real example of just what kind of "piracy" Hatch is targetting. Here's EFF's hypothetical complaint against Apple (for making the iPod) C|Net (for reviewing the iPod), and Toshiba (for supplying hard drives for iPods). All three of these activities fall within the scope of activity that Hatch's bill seeks to end:
As detailed further in Professor Expert’s report, the iPod would have been much less attractive to consumers had it been incompatible with the music files downloaded from P2P networks and had it not allowed consumer-to-consumer transfers. Professor Expert’s report also makes it clear that the iPod, in turn, enhanced the attractiveness of P2P networks by offering iPod owners expansive storage capability and lightning-fast data transfer, allowing them to listen to any number of infringing music files when away from the computer.
Surveys conducted by Professor Expert establish that a majority of iPod owners have used at least some significant portion of their iPods to store and play infringing music files, whether derived from P2P networks or promiscuous hand-to-hand copying. Upon information and belief, Apple was certainly aware of this fact from its own internal marketing research.
Link
(Thanks, Jason (and good work!))
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bizzare Spider-Man comic strip remixes
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DATE: 06/24/2004 03:26:01 PM
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Link, click reload for a new one (about 20 total, some dumb and some sublime) (via Warren)update: BB reader Eric Smith says, "I believe they are the remix work of Jay Pinkerton. His blog is fantastic (he writes for National Lampoon and other comedy outlets) - I highly recommend reading everything he has ever written. (the Ikea desk, the bad assss song, etc). He has done many other comic "things" over time - although I couldn't find any other Spiderman specific things on his site via Google. I suppose it is possible that he got them elsewhere, but I would say that they sound entirely like his sense of humor (and the fact that he does other comics as well makes me think that he is the source of these).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Death metal band with parrot as lead singer -- Hatebeak
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DATE: 06/24/2004 03:41:16 PM
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The new album by HATEBEAK -- the world's only deathmetal band with an avian vocalist -- promises music so terrifying it will "make you vacate your bowels." Song titles inlcude Beak of Putrefaction and God of Empty Nest. "Hatebeak pecks your eyes out and assaults your ears in a flurry of pummeling riffs and grey feathers that leaves you lying in a pool of blood begging for more." Buy a clear vinyl 7" for $5 postage paid at this Link.
(Thanks, Mara!)
Update: BoingBoing reader Justin reminds us that Judas Priest and/or Sony Music may not appreciate HATEBEAK's creative reappropriation of this album cover. Loukas points us to the fact that the band's logo was lifted from an album cover that blogger and SENT co-curator Sean Bonner designed for a Connecticut-based band named Hatebreed in which all members are human. And reader Jason gill says, "Don't forget this grindcore band who's lead vocalists are two pitbulls to go with your parrot metal!".
Update 2: BoingBoing reader Will says, "Naming the album 'Beak of Putrefaction' is probably also a nod to the grindcore band Carcass and their first album called 'Reek of Putrefaction."
Keep your beak glued to BoingBoing for an upcoming exclusive MP3 and interview with Waldo, the feathered frontman of HATEBEAK.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Monty Python Black Knight model rocket
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DATE: 06/24/2004 05:28:27 PM
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Stefan sez: "Xtreeem rocket nerd Bob Fortune builds a flying model of the luckless, limbless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P2P hits without radio airplay
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DATE: 06/25/2004 12:38:17 AM
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Here's a chart of musicians getting significant "airplay" on the P2P nets, even though they're being ignored by the world's radio stations.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ESC-key creator dies
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DATE: 06/25/2004 12:39:52 AM
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Bob Bemer, inventor of the escape key and co-inventor of ASCII has died of cancer at 84.
Link
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Star Wars/Office Space mashup
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DATE: 06/25/2004 07:25:35 AM
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Office Space Wars is one of the funniest amateur video projects I've ever seen: it's a remake of Office Space, set in the Star Wars Universe, with Vader as the bad boss, Jar Jar as the stapler guy, and R2D2 as the bad printer.
Update: Erin, who was hosting this file, has been shut down by her lame-ass generous ISP (the ironically aptly named tera-byte.com). If you have a link to a more stable version of this movie (the filename is OfficeSpaceWars.wmv) mail it to me and I'll update the post
Update #2:Tera-byte was saving Erin from a huge-mongoose bandwidth bill, and one of their techs has posted the file on his personal site: 30MB WMV Link
(Thanks, Emil, for hosting this!)
Update #3: For some reason, someone moved this link to point to the Michael Moore F-911 trailer in the middle of the night. Hardy har har. Anyway, it now appears to be pointing back to a mirror of the Office Space Wars short. Who knows if it'll last. Here's a mirror that Ari put up; here's another mirror, courtesy of Tian.
Update #4: Here's a torrent and here's a mirror of it -- thanks, Trousle!
,p>
Update #5: Another mirror
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TITLE: Alice in Wonderland pop-up book as a Flash app
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DATE: 06/25/2004 07:31:26 AM
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Here's a BRILLIANT Flash adaptation of J. Otto Seibold's magnificent Alice in Wonderland Pop-Up Book.
872k Flash Link
(Thanks, Roboto!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reality TV Gilligan's Island
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DATE: 06/25/2004 09:13:38 AM
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Boing Boing reader Zed says, "Someone's making a 'The Real Gilligan's Island,' a Gilligan's Island Reality TV show, promising 'situations drawn from the original series.'" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fun world statistics comparison site
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DATE: 06/25/2004 10:01:20 AM
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A BB reader sez: "This is the world's biggest database for comparing statistics between countries. Sounds boring, sure- but check out the 'Mortality' stats. They've got World Health Organization stats on how people die all over the world - e.g. Austria has the highest per-capita rate of deaths resulting from "Falls involving ice-skates, skis, roller-skates or skateboards". Heaps of Japanese die of 'drowning and submersion in bath tub". Check out "struck by reptile". Amazing." Link
A BB reader sez: This crashes firefox and mozilla browsers. PLEASE warn your users before clicking.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Simians, Cyborgs, and Gareth Branwyn
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DATE: 06/25/2004 01:47:06 PM
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In 2000, longtime bOING bOING editor Gareth Branwyn underwent total hip replacement to help relieve the pain of severe degenerative arthritis. A quintessential happy mutant, Gar wrote a smart, funny, and poignant deconstruction of his reconstruction, accompanied by "get well" illustrations by designer Jim Leftwich.
"During the initial visit with my orthopedic surgeon, he brought in an implant for me to play with. It was a gorgeous, awe-inspiring piece of modern machinery - almost Zen-like in its shining simplicity and austere precision. The cementless implant technology my doctor's clinic uses was co-developed by them and has been implanted into thousands of patients. The description of the implant reads like something from a William Gibson novel. I now sport a Duroloc(r) 100 acetabular titanium cup with sintered titanium beads for in-bone growth adhesion. I have a bleeding-edge Marathon(r) polyethylene liner with irradiated cross-linked polymers for tighter bonding and longer wear rates. My Prodigy(r) brand stem has a 28mm cobalt-chrome head and a cobalt-chrome femoral component with sintered cobalt-chrome beading for bone in-growth fixation. Where 2001's HAL 9000 was fond of telling people that he was made at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois, I can now boast that part of me was manufactured by DePuy Industries of Warsaw, Indiana."
Just yesterday, Gar updated "Borg Like Me" with recent post-upgrade reflections. "Do cyborgs dream of bionic upgrades?" he asks. "Yes they do!" Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mr. Vice President has a potty mouth
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DATE: 06/25/2004 02:06:44 PM
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As Jess Hemerly writes on A Great Notion , "There's something about the way this Washington Post article is written that makes the entire scenario 3,000 times funnier." From the article:
"On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.
'Fuck yourself,' said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency."
...Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes."
Link to Washington Post article (free reg. required)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sound wave refrigerator
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DATE: 06/25/2004 03:13:44 PM
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Ice cream tycoons Ben and Jerry gave Penn State $600,000 to develop a refrigerator that uses sound waves instead of freon to keep food cool. The mad-scientist outsider-art design is excellent.Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Senate approves PIRATE act
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DATE: 06/25/2004 11:47:13 PM
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Today, the U.S. Senate approved a proposal that will give federal prosecutors the power to file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers -- penalties include fines up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The so-called Pirate Act has raised alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer companies, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. They worry that the Department of Justice could be even more ambitious.
Senate leaders scheduled Friday's vote under a procedure that required the unanimous consent of all members present. Now the Pirate Act, along with a related bill that criminalizes using camcorders in movie theaters, will be forwarded to the House of Representatives for approval.
Link to Declan McCullagh's story on News.com.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hinterland Who's Who: short nature films from my childhood
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DATE: 06/26/2004 03:46:00 AM
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"Hinterland Who's Who" was a series of 1960s-era short nature films that used to air as interstitial material on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation when I was a kid, maddeningly interrupting the cartoons. There was a very funny sendup of these on an old SCTV episode, but other than that, I haven't seen these since I was a small child. Until today. Now they're all on the Web. Now, the Internet is complete.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FastCompany's terrible linking policy
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DATE: 06/26/2004 03:55:46 AM
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FastCompany -- the tech magazine for the new economy -- has a spectacularily clueless policy on linking, in which they expect people who want to link to their site to fax a permission form to their legal department! Imagine if this were enforceable: the Web that Fast Company has built its business upon would crumble into a billion individuated and unlinked pages.
Due to the large volume of requests we receive, we do not have a reciprocal linking program. However, if you like, you may link to us at no cost. This option requires the execution by you and Fastcompany.com of a one-page Web-linking agreement. Please download and sign the agreement and fax it to 617-738-5055, attn: G+J legal, Fastcompany.com. As soon as you receive back the agreement signed on behalf of Fastcompany.com, you may begin linking to our content.
Here's some of the spectacularily clueless "linking agreement" Fast Company thinks it can force linkers to sign off on:
For good and valuable consideration, effective upon the duly authorized signatures of Owner and G+J below (the "Effective Date"), G+J hereby grants to Owner a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to create a hyperlink from the Linking Site to Inc.com from the Effective Date, unless and until such permission is terminated by G+J upon notice to Owner, subject to the following terms and conditions.
Owner hereby represents and warrants that: (i) any content displayed on the Linking Site shall not infringe upon or misappropriate any third party intellectual property or other proprietary rights, shall not invade any third party rights of privacy or publicity, shall be free from any libelous or obscene material, shall be accurate, and shall not otherwise violate any applicable law, regulation or non-proprietary third party right; (ii) the Linking Site does not and will not contain any harmful software code or viruses; (iii) Owner has duly registered the domain name of the Linking Site with all applicable authorities and possesses all rights necessary to use such domain name; and (iv) Owner shall use its best efforts, including any and all then-available technology, to prevent Internet users from downloading any content from Inc.com.
There are a lot of stupid organizations that have policies like this, but very few of them have the close relationship to the Web that FC has. The disturbing thing here is that FC's credibity as an authority on the Web lends credence to this bizarre and damaging idea of needing permission to link.
Link
(Thanks, Jordon!)
Update: Well, this is the kind of slow company that Fast Company has put itself in: Sellotape forbids linking to their site -- this is the kind of idiotic behaviour that Fast Company should be able to sell itself on: "Buy a sub to Fast Company and learn how not to be as stupid as Sellotape!" (Thanks, Reyhan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kim Jong Il's fanatical food fetish
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DATE: 06/26/2004 08:06:30 AM
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Todays' LA Times has a great story about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's obsession with expensive, exotic food. He sends trusted aides all over the world to buy morsels of gourmet food and eats sashimi carved from live fish, while his subjects dig in the dirt with sticks looking for bugs to eat.
Kim insists that his rice be cooked over a wood fire using trees cut from Mt. Paektu, a legendary peak on the Chinese border, according to a memoir written by a nephew of Kim's first wife. He has his own private source of spring water. Female workers inspect each grain of rice to ensure that they meet the leader's standards. (The nephew, Lee Young Nam, who defected to South Korea in the 1980s, was assassinated by suspected North Korean agents in Seoul in 1997.)
Kim's refined palate is not merely a matter of idle gossip, but the subject of serious study by political psychologists trying to understand the North Korean leadership.
Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist who founded and was the longtime director of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, says Kim's obsession with eating the best food comes from being the son of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, revered by the propaganda machine as a god-like figure. Post diagnosed the younger Kim as a malign narcissist in large part based on information about his eating habits.
"This is how you prepare food and water for a god."
The former South Korean Ambassador says this is a good thing: "Kim Jong Il loves life. He is a drinker, a womanizer, a gourmet. To start a war requires an ascetic like Hitler who doesn't care if he lives or dies. But I can't see Kim starting a war that he will surely lose." Link
Ian sez: This is an update to the post on Kim Jong Il's food fanaticism. The link is an excerpt from a book by his former cook (who is now hiding) and it's very interesting. It's from the Jan/Feb issue of Atlantic Monthly, and I believe it's the only part of the book available in English.
Eric sez: " In reference to your post on Boing Boing about Kim Jong-il and his food habits, I thought you might as enjoy these:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK21Dg03.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK22Dg01.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK23Dg01.html
I read those a few weeks back and I figured those were what this post was going to link to.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Translating my DRM talk into Japanese via a Wiki
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DATE: 06/26/2004 08:54:17 AM
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Here's a project by Matt from M@blog to collaboratively translate my DRM talk into Japanese, using a Wiki.
Link
(Thanks, Andreas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1895 8th grade test
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DATE: 06/26/2004 01:14:18 PM
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Here's a Grade Eight test from a 1895 Kansas schoolhouse:
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd,cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane,fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced andindicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Link
(via Kottke)
Update: If you're thinking of writing to me about Snopes saying that this is false, go re-read the Snopes entry. They don't dispute the authenticity of this document, only the conclusions drawn in the modern introductory text.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Perfect pint apparatus
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DATE: 06/26/2004 01:17:44 PM
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A student has invented a device for hand-free, no-attention "perfect pint" pouring that will empty a can of lager into a pint sleeve without your having to take your eyes off the football.
Link
(Thanks, Joe!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Three-year-old commentator on pre-movie (c) warnings
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DATE: 06/27/2004 02:02:01 AM
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James took his three-year-old to see Shrek 2 yesterday and when the copyright warning came on at the start of the picture, his son responded appropriately.
I went to see Shrek 2 today with my son Edward who is 3 next week. He was very excited, he loves going to the cinema. However when the copyright warning about taking pictures and video appeared (the one that Cory Doctorow takes pictures of) he said in a very loud voice "blah blah blah blah", which had me in hysterics if no one else.
Link
(Thanks, James!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iraq torture memo primer
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DATE: 06/27/2004 03:58:42 PM
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A helpful timeline and overview of government memoranda related to the mistreatment and torture of wartime detainees, from the New York Times . Link bypassing NYT's dumb-as-a-stump site registration
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ukiyo-e remix art
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DATE: 06/27/2004 04:11:49 PM
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A BoingBoing art exclusive: the latest watercolor from Moira Hahn, whose illustration work has appeared in Time, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. About this remix of classic ukiyo-e art -- which depicts a backyard conflict between cats and birds -- Moira says "Kuniyoshi was an influence, the primary Edo period ukiyo-e artist who regularly depicted cats... [but] most of this composition has been changed from various Edo and Meiji sources. The original figures were human, patterns were different, and there was no owl." [Ed. note: Dude, is that Waldo from Hatebeak on the far left?]
Link to full-size jpeg image (about 500k)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coffee Geeks: brewing gadgetry, DIY roasters, Cuban contraband
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DATE: 06/27/2004 04:19:40 PM
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Responding to a previous post about current guestblogger Christopher Coppola's favorite road trip espresso maker, several readers point us to CoffeeGeek. The site lists reviews for such a mindbogglingly vast array of coffee-related gadgets, I get a contact buzz just clicking on it. Link. (Thanks, Josh, and everyone else!)
Reader Bill says, "If you're talking coffee, you should check out this website, from a tiny California company that supports do-it-yourselfers that roast their own beans. While there are some hazards - like smoking the place out, you can use 1970's air popcorn poppers, woks, or actual home roasters. Apparently, coffee goes stale in 4-6 days, so most of us have been drinking stale coffee without even knowing it." Link
And reader Simon Fodden in Canada says, "For those closer to the middle of the landmass, the Merchants of Green Coffee offer similar products, plus (oh, the forbidden
fruit!) really good coffee from Cuba."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: PopSci design competition: "personal occupation kits"
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DATE: 06/27/2004 04:20:15 PM
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Among the finalists in the 2004 Popular Science design competition:
"The horrendous situation in Iraq highlights the thorny challenge of liberation by a superpower: The liberated don't necessarily buy into the program...In this concept, autonomous surveillance systems watch foreign news broadcasts for any foment of anti-American sentiment to identify areas in need of intervention. The geographical coordinates are beamed to airplanes carrying the smart bombs; the bombs explode and shower, not explosives, but small, flower-like packages containing assorted bits of Americana."
Link (Thanks, Brian Wong!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Congress looks out for Hollywood
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DATE: 06/27/2004 04:53:33 PM
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A piece by my Wired News colleague Katie Dean about a slew of legislation passed on Capitol Hill this week that could outlaw a range of devices and software, and impose severe penalties on anyone caught trading files. Link. And Andrew Orlowski offers an astute analysis in The Register, which begins: "It may soon be possible to carry around an AK-47 assault rifle and an iPod with you down the street - and be arrested for carrying the iPod." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I got two turntables and a right to vote
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DATE: 06/27/2004 09:01:06 PM
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My DJ buddy Michael Donaldson, aka Q-Burns Abstract Message, pauses his world tour for a show in L.A. this Wednesday -- and shares word on a project he's organizing with fellow turntablists and fans thereof:
As you know I'm politically concerned... I've been trying to figure out how, in my pseudo-lofty position of DJ dude, I can make some difference. After much thought, I've come up with an idea.
I've collaborated with my friend Laurin Fedora to come up with a t-shirt design -- basically the word "VOTE!" in a replicated stencil. I'm having a number of these shirts made in different color combinations and then will wear one at each of my US DJ gigs from August until the election. I will also have photos of myself wearing a shirt on my web site (along with a concept explanation) and in any pictures that are used for magazines/flyers/etc.
The idea is this: I know that the age demographic that I am mainly playing to (people in their 20's) are traditionally the ones that do not vote. This is a shame as the actions of the current administration will resonate strongly in their futures. I don't know if wearing a t-shirt with this design at my gigs will inspire any of these potential voters, but I can hope and have some optimism. Perhaps seeing a DJ in the supposedly apolitical world of dance music caring enough to send a message will inspire a few people.... I wanted to keep the message non-partisan... the simple message of 'VOTE!' also states my feelings accurately: if more of us voted, then maybe we will find more candidates who truly represent us.
I'm wondering if you'd like a piece of the action. Laurin is offering to make more of these shirts. Would you like one (or more than one in different colors)? (...) Laurin has donated his time to help me with this. I'm paying for the materials for the shirts that he's making for me. If you'd like a shirt or shirts, I would need you to pay for the cost of the materials as well. It's not much ... just the price of the shirt and an extra buck for the ink and screening. Let me know as soon as possible if you'd be interested in this as Laurin wants to screen a bunch in the next day or two.
If you're interested, e-mail Mr. Q-Burns at this Link. Send name, e-mail address, shirt size, and color preference -- someone will respond with cost, payment, and shipping details.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Inverse graffiti: use cleaning solvent, not paint
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DATE: 06/28/2004 02:40:39 AM
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A Yorkshire graffiti writer has come up with a really clever writing technique: he lays a template with his tag over a dirty wall, then sprays the template with solvent, leaving behind a clean patch bearing his message. It's inverse graffiti -- he's selectively cleaning up dirty walls.
He decided to commercialize the process and tagged Smirnoff ads in Leeds, and that's where he got into trouble: he's been ordered to "remove" the clean patch of wall and get rid of the ad.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Top-ten untranslateables
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DATE: 06/28/2004 02:42:02 AM
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Here's a great census of the ten most untranslateable foreign and English words:
1 plenipotentiary
2 gobbledegook
3 serendipity
4 poppycock
5 googly
6 Spam
7 whimsy
8 bumf
9 chuffed
10 kitsch
Link
(Thanks, Gerry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to sign up for ABC RSS without selling your soul
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DATE: 06/28/2004 03:13:40 AM
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ABC News has a good selection of RSS feeds. Unfortunately, in order to reach the page where they're listed, you have to click through this disgusting, clueless, multi-page "agreement" (excerpted below):
4. CONFIDENTIALITY. During the term of this Agreement, you may have access to some of ABC News's nonpublic technical or product information ("Proprietary Information"). Such Proprietary Information shall belong solely to ABC News. You shall not, except as expressly authorized by this Agreement, use or disclose Proprietary Information without the prior written consent of ABC News unless such Proprietary Information becomes part of the public domain through no fault of yours. You agree (i) not to disclose any Proprietary Information to any third parties, (ii) not to use any Proprietary Information for any purposes except carrying out your rights and responsibilities under this Agreement, and (iii) to keep the Proprietary Information confidential using the same degree of care you use to protect your own confidential information, as long as you use at least reasonable care. You acknowledge and agree that due to the unique nature of ABC News's Proprietary Information, there can be no adequate remedy at law for any breach of its obligations hereunder, that any such breach may allow you or third parties to unfairly compete with ABC News resulting in irreparable harm to ABC News, and therefore, that upon any such breach or threat thereof, ABC News shall be entitled to injunctions and other appropriate equitable relief in addition to whatever remedies it may have at law.
5. PUBLICITY. ABC News may use your name in releases, customer lists, marketing and other materials. Unless otherwise expressly permitted by ABC News, you may not create, publish, or distribute any items that reference ABC News without first submitting those items to ABC News and receiving ABC News's written consent.
Get that? You have to sign onto a confidentiality agreement in order to read the RSS feeds at ABC! And sign away your publicity rights. And agree not to forward on any ABC stories without permission.
Luckily, I didn't agree to any of that. I deleted everything in the text field containing the agreement, substituted some rude text of my own and found myself a nice list of all of ABC's XML feeds. If you'd like to directly subscribe to ABC's RSS without selling your soul by clicking through their one-sided adhesion contract, here are the direct URLs:
World Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/world_rss20.xml
US Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/us_rss20.xml
Politics Headines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/politics_rss20.xml
MONEYScope Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/business_rss20.xml
Scitech Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/scitech_rss20.xml
Health Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/health_rss20.xml
Entertainment Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/entertainment_rss20.xml
Travel Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/travel_rss20.xml
Relationships Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/relationships_rss20.xml
WNT Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/wnt_rss20.xml
20/20 Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/2020_rss20.xml
Primetime Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/primetime_rss20.xml
Nightline Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/nightline_rss20.xml
This Week Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/thisweek_rss20.xml
GMA Headlines:
http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/gma_rss20.xml
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Meshcube: transparent tiny meshing access-point
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DATE: 06/28/2004 04:16:46 AM
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The Meshcube is a tiny, kit-built meshing WiFi (802.11a/b/g) access-point. It's kinda pricey (€199 and up), but it looks great and meshing networks are genuinely cool.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: News of early Iraq Power handover broken by a blog
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DATE: 06/28/2004 07:54:53 AM
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Biggest story ever broken by a blog? It appears that blogger/BBC News correspondent/landmine survivor Stuart Hughes was first to break news of the early handover of authority in Iraq today, on his weblog. Link. Hughes was in Istanbul at the Bush/Blair press conference after that, and filed live text and audblog coverage here: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: An overseas view of INDUCE act (aka INSANE act)
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DATE: 06/28/2004 08:15:48 AM
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Ernest Miller says:
Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz, a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, has a different perspective on the INDUCE Act. Of course, there must be something wrong with his translation, as Dr. Lenz believes the Act is named the "Intentionally Stopping Advances of the Nation's Economy," or INSANE Act. Anyway, he is not nearly as opposed to it as many commentators here in the US:First of all, while it might be true that this legislation will help to make America a technological backwater, with iPods and the Internet being illegal under this legislation, depending on your perspective, that is actually a good thing. It helps Europe and Japan in the global competition with America to have strange American laws strangling research and development there, so from an international point of vie w, I can only say "go ahead".
Lenz notes that the law could use some improvements, and if these improvements were made, then, "it might be better than the Japanese approach of just arresting creators and sort out later if it was actually illegal what they did."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tolk1en in hackerish
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DATE: 06/28/2004 08:41:28 AM
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F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng: the classic Tolkien translated into hacker 1337-speak.
[At Bilbo's 111th Birthday]
Merry: "Omg, I pwn"
Pippin: "Sif, I pwn"
**Rocket goes off
Gandalf: "Pwned!"
Link
(Thanks, Fez!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Evolved antenna designs
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DATE: 06/28/2004 08:51:50 AM
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This antenna (and many others on the linked page) was evolved by NASA using a genetic algorithm. While highly effective, its design is counter-intuitive.
First, there is the potential of needing less power. Antenna ST5-3-10 achieves high gain (2-4dB) across a wider range of elevation angles. This allows a broader range of angles over which maximum data throughput can be achieved. Also, less power from the solar array and batteries may be required.
Second, the evolved antenna does not require a matching network nor a phasing circuit, removing two steps in design and fabrication of the antenna. A trivial transmission line may be used for the match on the flight antenna, but simulation results suggest that one is not required.
Third, the evolved antenna has more uniform coverage in that it has a uniform pattern with small ripples in the elevations of greatest interest (between 40 and 80 degrees). This allows for reliable performance as elevation angle relative to the ground changes.
Link
(Thanks, zogby!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cincinnati's Secret Subway
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DATE: 06/28/2004 09:10:40 AM
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I just spent the weekend in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1925, construction in Cincinnati began on a state-of-the-art subway system for the rapidly expanding city. Three years later, money ran out and the seven miles of completed subway were abandoned. Since then, this surreal underworld has faded into the city's secret history, with awareness peaking every so often when a new plan for the tunnels is proposed: a fall-out shelter, a wind tunnel for the university's engineering students, a venue for a music festival. Back in high school, several of my friends accessed the cavernous stations for a few exciting evenings of urban spelunking. Now though, legit tours are occasionally offered. According to this recent piece on NPR's All Things Considered, the waiting list is 2,000 people long. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Surreal road sign art project
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DATE: 06/28/2004 11:29:19 AM
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A group of artists in Lyon, France are installing fake, but beautifully designed and built, road signs. Link (Via The Cartoonist)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: John Ashcroft-themed smut video contest
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DATE: 06/28/2004 11:34:57 AM
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Nerve is running a contest for John Ashcroft-themed amateur porn. Celebrity judges Moby, Ted Hope, and John Cameron Mitchell will pick from 15 finalists whose work is now online for your smut-tastic viewing pleasure -- titles include 1-800-4.D.O.J-S+M and The Passion of John Ashcroft. Too bad Nerve decided to post all the vids in WMV only. Some critics argue the format is nearly as restrictive as the policies of the man at whom this contest pokes fun. Link to FB item.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Secret Fun Spot: retro graphic and industrial art gallery
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DATE: 06/28/2004 11:45:16 AM
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Secret Fun Spot is a treasure trove of mid 20th century advertising, toy, and industrial art. Be sure to check out the section on Marvin Glass, the genius game designer who made Ants in the Pants, Dynamite Shack, Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, Gnip Gnop, Hands Down, Haunted House, Lite Brite, Odd Ogg, Operation, Mouse Trap, Time Bomb, Tip-It, and Toss Across, among other masterpieces of primary-colored plastic. Mr. Glass, unknown to me until today, was responsible for shaping much of my appreciation for pop art. The site's design is fun, but I wish the pictures were bigger. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Article about toymaker Marvin Glass
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DATE: 06/28/2004 11:52:30 AM
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Here's an article about toymaker Marvin Glass (mentioned in my previous post), written by one of his former employees. "Working for Marvin Glass was wild... The atmosphere was a cross between James Bond & the Playboy mansion." Link Note: the book, The Playmakers, has a long chapter about Marvin Glass.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RSS reading coming to Safari
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DATE: 06/28/2004 12:09:51 PM
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At today's worldwide developer conference, Steve Jobs announced that the next version of Safari will have an RSS reader built in.
Link
(via Waxy)
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TITLE: 70s Eurofurnishings hall of shame
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DATE: 06/28/2004 12:22:55 PM
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Eurobad 74 is a photocollection of "Europe's worst interiors of '74."
Link
(Thanks, MJ!)
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TITLE: Unaired Jack Black pilot for download
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DATE: 06/28/2004 02:17:42 PM
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Andy "Waxy" Baio has posted a video file of the unaired pilot of "Heat Vision and Jack," a Knight Rider-like spoof from 1999 produced by Ben Stiller and starring Jack Black and Owen Wilson.
Link
(Thanks, Waxy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toaster oven casemod
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DATE: 06/28/2004 02:23:36 PM
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Great casemod: a PC built inside a toaster-oven.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sex bomb: erotic psy-ops throughout war history
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DATE: 06/28/2004 02:43:31 PM
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Fascinating online collection of sexually-oriented wartime propaganda, from WWII through present. At left, a shelling report form from the Korean War, fortified with boobies to encourage more soldiers to carry and complete the form each day. I'm not in agreement with all of the editorializing, and I wish some of these historic images weren't displayed so small, ultra-compressed, and with the naughty bits blurred out -- but it's an amazing collection. Link (thanks, Philip)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: WSJ says abortions are good for the Republican party
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DATE: 06/28/2004 03:59:33 PM
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This bizarre opinion piece by the Wall Street Journal's Larry J. Eastland argues that if there was no such thing as abortion, then there would be have been enough voting-age Democrats alive in 2000 to have given Gore the edge in the last election, because according to a survey, Democrats are more likely to have abortions than Republicans.
As liberals and Democrats fervently seek new voters and supporters through events, fund-raisers, direct mail and every other form of communication available, they achieve results minuscule in comparison to the loss of voters they suffer from their own abortion policies. It is a grim irony lost on them, for which they will pay dearly in elections to come.
Link (Thanks, Carlo!)
David sez: [The WSJ's editorial] is so full of bad reasoning and misuse of numbers, it's pretty meaningless. Lots of official-looking numbers and tables do not sound logic make. Here's the [Church of Critical Thinking's] analysis.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Savetheipod.com
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DATE: 06/28/2004 04:16:15 PM
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Pho list co-founder John Parres sends word of a new project organized by opponents of the INDUCE Act: Savetheipod.com. The site is a collaboration between online activism groups Click The Vote and DownhillBattle. John says:
The record and movies industries are pressuring Congress to pass a bill this week that will threaten the iPod and peer-to-peer networks. I just sent free faxes urging my reps in Congress to stop the INDUCE Act. Convincing even a single Senator will force a real debate on the bill. The site contains more info about the INDUCE Act and a form to fax your Senators and Representative.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New article on resveratrol: the red wine longevity supplement
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DATE: 06/28/2004 06:50:31 PM
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sentdev sez: "Betterhumans has issued a report about resveratrol, the compound found in red wine that is responsibile for the so-called French Paradox-the fact that the fatty food-consuming French have low levels of heart disease. Consequently, resveratrol has been touted as the first true antiaging drug. Early clinical reports show that it may have a role in decreasing insulin levels and blood pressure, increasing good cholesterol, and extending lifespans to a degree normally achieved through calorie restricted diets. But as the report points out, the jury's still out on its long term effects." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mac OSX Tiger: It's your birthday, get busy
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DATE: 06/29/2004 12:58:00 AM
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BoingBoing pal Paul Boutin points us to the euphemism du jour for online porn, clipped from today's preview of the Mac Tiger browser with built-in RSS. Emphasis is mine.
"Go ahead and shop for birthday presents on the family Mac. No
information about where you visit on the Web, personal information you
enter or pages you visit are saved or cached."
Shop for birthday presents. Heh. What, is that like a "happy ending"? Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World texting record
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DATE: 06/29/2004 01:49:31 AM
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A Singaporean woman has set a world record for mobile-phone texting, keying in the benchmark phrase (below) in 43.24 seconds, without the benefit of any predictive text utilities.
The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to hack Blogger
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DATE: 06/29/2004 01:51:17 AM
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Blogger has published an article on how to hack the service to add greater customization by tweaking its template vocabulary:
For instance, most of our default templates display archive links in a list. But really, the archive tags simply provide the names and URLs of all the archive files, and we can do whatever we want with them. Do you know how to make a pull-down menu in HTML? Think that might be a more efficient format for your three years of daily archives? Great! Move the archive tags out of the list and into a menu.
Link
(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scion of genius Imagineer posts on Slashdot?
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DATE: 06/29/2004 01:54:42 AM
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Here's an amazing post on Slashdot from someone who claims his father designed many of the coolest widgets and gizmos in Disneyland:
Some of the Disneyland items he's made...
- Invented/installed the fireflys in Pirates of the Carribean
- Came up with putting the green-eyed rats at the end of Pirates as you go up back to ground level. We have a bunch of them at home and put them in windows and under the Christmas tree
- Invented the light flicker-ers that have been used at Dland for almost 30 years to make plain lightbulbs in opaque houseings look like they are flame
- Real-time population counter for Disneyland. Even went to the president's office and installed the LED display on his desk (prior to the popularization of "computer networks")
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How Free Software won the hearts of hackers, capitalists, commies and academics
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DATE: 06/29/2004 02:01:12 AM
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My friends Biella and Mako have written a good, short academic paper on how it is that "Free and Open Source Software" can be seen as tactically advantageous to big corporations, Starbucks-smashing anti-globalists, and liberal commons-oriented IP wonks.
While the money behind IBM's advertising machine makes their take on FOSS particularly visible, they hold no monopoly on the interpretation of FOSS's meaning and importance. This is evidenced by the extensive use of FOSS as an iconic tactic by leftist activists around the world. Also bearing a three letter acronym, the Independent Media Centers (IMC) are a socio-political project whose mission and spirit are completely contrary to the goals of a large corporation like IBM.
Link
(Thanks, Biella!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC affirms Creative Archive in Charter Renewal plans
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DATE: 06/29/2004 05:16:09 AM
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The BBC has submitted its Charter Renewal documents to the UK Government, outlining its plans for the next ten years. It's a long and comprehensive document, and most excitingly, it describes a free and open Creative Archive intended to provide Britons with access to the material in the BBC's vaults for free viewing, remixing and reuse.
Imagine being able to view and listen -- and even download and own -- extracts from the world's largest television and radio archive.
53% of internet users download content for their own compilations 55. For the first time, the BBC will open up its treasure chest of programmes to the public who own it and make its contents available to individuals and to families for learning, for creativity and for pleasure. Two-thirds of current and prospective broadband users say they are interested in the Creative Archive service.
The BBC Creative Archive will establish a pool of high-quality content which can be legally drawn on by collectors, enthusiasts, artists, musicians, students, teachers and many others, who can search and use this material non-commercially. And where exciting new works and products are made using this material, we will showcase them on BBC services.
Initially we will release factual material, beginning with extracts from natural history programmes. As demand grows, we are committed to extending the Creative Archive across all areas of our output.
1MB PDF Link
Update: Check out this quote from new BBC Director General Mark Thompson, from today's press conference: "We want to builld a digital world based on universal access, open standards and unencryption [sic?]. Encryption, subscription and other forms of digital exclusion lead to widespread welfare losses. They may have a role within the total broadcasting ecology, but the idea that they can successfully replace free-to-air public service broadcasting flies in the face both of economic theory and real-world experience." (Thanks, Adam!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bayesian spam rumination: when word-frequency-histograms attack!
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DATE: 06/29/2004 07:43:01 AM
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Ed Felten has posted an intriguing rumination on the possible failure modes of Bayesian spam-filtering -- filtering that uses word-frequency statistics to classify email as spam or ham. As Ed points out, Bayesian filters are trained by the spammers, who, by choosing the vocabulary of their messages carefully, can make messages containing certain words or phrases undeliverable on the Internet.
Now suppose a big spammer wanted to poison a particular word, so that messages containing that word would be (mis)classified as spam. The spammer could sprinkle the target word throughout the word salad in his outgoing spam messages. When users classified those messages as spam, the targeted word would develop a negative score in the users' Bayesian spam filters. Later, messages with the targeted word would likely be mistaken for spam.
This attack could even be carried out against a particular targeted user. By feeding that user a steady diet of spam (or pseudo-spam) containing the target word, a malicious person could build up a highly negative score for that word in the targeted user's filter.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Supreme court rules web porn is free speech
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DATE: 06/29/2004 09:35:03 AM
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Today, America's highest court ruled that a law intended to punish child pornographers is an unconstitutional restriction for online free speech.
The high court divided 5-to-4 over a law passed in 1998, signed by then-President Clinton and now backed by the Bush administration. The majority said a lower court was correct to block the law from taking effect because it likely violates the First Amendment. The American Civil Liberties Union and other critics of the law said that it would restrict far too much material that adults may legally see and buy, the court said. "Today's ruling from the court demonstrates that there are many less restrictive ways to protect children without sacrificing communication intended for adults," said ACLU associate litigation director Ann Beeson in a statement. Beeson argued the case before the court in 2001 and again last March.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Snapshots from the "other" Hollywood.
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DATE: 06/29/2004 09:46:49 AM
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Here are the rest of the snapshots I took at a recent porn industry convention in Los Angeles. Shown here: an inflatable swimming pool full of disembodied plastic genitalia. This, by the way, was art.
Link , and previous BoingBoing posts: 1, 2, 3
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free MP3 of parrot-fronted deathmetal act HATEBEAK
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DATE: 06/29/2004 09:59:54 AM
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Ladies, gentlemen, budgies: I present to you a free MP3 from the new album by HATEBEAK -- the world's only deathmetal band with an avian vocalist.
Link to Beak of Putrefaction MP3. Buy a clear vinyl 7" for $5 postage paid at this Link. (Thanks for hosting, Leonard Lin! And special thanks to Chris -- founder of Reptilian Records and manager of HATEBEAK's feathered frontman Waldo.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Disabling autorun in Windows yields bliss
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DATE: 06/29/2004 10:00:46 AM
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Endgadet's Phillip Torrone sez: "By default Windows will automatically look for a file called Autorun.inf on any CD you pop in to your system, we’ve always known this is a big security issue as there are a lot of spyware and viruses distributed on CDs, you read about this every week. In fact, Microsoft is even disabling this in their next security focused service pack. Add to that, record companies are adding Autorun software which won't allow Windows users to make MP3s from the CDs they've purchased. So in an effort to protect people from Spyware, viruses and other nasty things we're suggesting everyone disables autorun." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fast Company's new linking policy still broken
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DATE: 06/29/2004 10:08:14 AM
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Fast Company has amended its atrocious linking policy, but the one they've put in its place is only slightly better.
Fast Company permits links to the Fastcompany.com Web site. However, Fast Company reserves the right to withdraw permission for any link and requests that you not link for any impermissible purpose or in a manner that suggests that Fast Company promotes or endorses your Web site.
Fastcompany.com does not allow framing of its Web site content.
The Web exists because there is no permission needed to create a link (and that includes a framing link). This is enshrined in the RFCs that defined the Web. It has been the guiding principle of the Web since the first page went online.
That permission-free world made the economy that Fast Company services possible. It is dangerous and irresponsible for Fast Company's lawyers to tell the lie to Fast Company's readers that there is a legitimate basis for asserting the right to control who may link to your website (you don't need a policy to tell people that links that create the fraudulent impression of an endorsement are illegal -- fraud is illegal even if you're not on notice about it).
This is a step in the right direction, but only a small one. The faxed-permission-form was ridiculous, but the real evil in it wasn't the ridiculousness, it was this damaging lie about permission being required for links.
I really hope that Fast Company acts like the heroes I know they can be here, changing their linking policy to something like:
The Web exists because no one has the right to grant or withhold permission for links. Fast Company exists because of the Web. Accordingly, we neither grant nor deny permission to link to our site, and urge you to do the same.
I would buy twenty FC subscriptions for twenty friends if they would do this. I'd settle for removing the linking policy entirely (but I wouldn't buy the subs).
Link
(Thanks, Fred!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: President Bush accidentally allowed to be interviewed by a real journalist
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DATE: 06/29/2004 11:04:18 AM
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The President's handlers foolishly granted a Presidential interview (requires RealPlayer, interview starts about 20:40 into the stream) to a non-White House Press Corps journalist, Carole Coleman, the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish public national television network. When she asked him pointed, pertinent questions, he became upset when his stock answers failed to satisfy her. An aide to the President later complained that Coleman had "overstepped the bounds of politeness."
Coleman is a mainstream European journalist who has conducted interviews with top officials from a number of countries - her January interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently solid enough to merit posting on the State Department's Web site.
Unfortunately, it appears that Coleman failed to receive the memo informing reporters that they are supposed to treat this president with kid gloves. Instead, she confronted him as any serious journalist would a world leader.
She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless "answers" that satisfy the White House press corps - at one point, he mumbled, "My job is to do my job" - she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.
The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman's questions and follow-ups - "Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?" the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.
Mark's note: I haven't been able to see the video interview, but I read the White House'stranscript of the interview, and I think the description above, by John Nichols of The Capital Times, is misleading. President Bush said more than just "My job is to do my job;" he said "My job is to do my job and make the decisions that I think are important for our country and for the world." And President Bush wasn't asking the interviewer to "go easy on him;" he was asking her to allow him to finish answering her questions. That said, Bush's answers weren't satisfactory.
Link
Vidiot sez: The White House complained later that Coleman was disrespectful and didn't ask the "suggested question" about what Irish PM Ahern was wearing that day.
Coleman has responded to White House criticism, noting that she submitted her questions three days in advance.
Andrew sez: "Since I get on with RealPlayer about as well as a house on fire, I wasn't able to watch the link given. I have been pointed here, though; even assuming it's been, ah, tactfully clarified by a White House aide, the transcript is still pretty atrocious - the lines you quoted are still in.
The interview is also available as an MP3.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SENT gallery show opens in LA July 10
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DATE: 06/29/2004 11:15:07 AM
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The gallery show for SENT, the phonecam art project I'm co-curating with Sean Bonner and Caryn Coleman of sixspace, opens Saturday July 10 in LA. Images from 25 invited artists, filmmakers, and celebs will debut alongside digitally-displayed images submitted by the public.
The SENT exhibition takes place in the "Brunette" Meeting Room on the fourth floor of the Standard Hotel Downtown LA, 550 South Flower Street. SENT will debut for public viewing at a reception from 7-10 pm on Saturday, July 10. The exhibit will be open for public viewing from Sunday, July 11 through Saturday July 17 from 12pm to 5pm daily. Admission is free of charge, and the project is sponsored in part by Motorola. Oh! and did I mention that the Downtown Standard now offers free WiFi throughout the hotel? Come all ye bloggers.
Details here. At left, two phonecam photos submitted by anonymous public participants.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lucas Arts makes a Make-A-Wish kids-with-leukemia game
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DATE: 06/29/2004 12:46:04 PM
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A kid with leukemia worked with the Make A Wish foundation and Lucas Arts to produce a leukemia-themed kids-game.
The game he created is about fighting cancer, and it reflects Ben's own battle with leukemia. It takes place inside the body, on a playfield of mutating cells. The hero, a boy on a hovering skateboard, uses high-tech weapons to destroy these cells by collecting the seven shields that protect against common side effects of chemotherapy.
It's not easy to get the shields -- they're in the hands of monsters that have to be zapped. FireMonster guards the fever shield and hurls molten lava. VampMonster guards the bleeding shield and sends out vampire bats. Robarf guards the vomit shield "with big smelly green globs." And QBall, guardian of the hair-loss shield, shoots out billiard balls.
Link
(Thanks, Adam!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblogging London's Tube strike
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DATE: 06/29/2004 01:30:46 PM
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The bloggers at London.Metblogs.com have been doing an admirable job of covering the subway strike in London. Link (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Kevin Sites dispatch from Iraq: Under Steel Rain
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DATE: 06/29/2004 03:35:05 PM
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A new weblog dispatch from NBC correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites, about life in the militarized zone with the distinction of having been mortared more than any other in Iraq -- 400 times in the last three months
[S]oldiers aren't the only ones in danger. Civilian employees of Kellog. Brown and Root -- which provide many of the civilian services on base -- are also at risk. Many of the food service employees, mostly foreign workers from poor nations like the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh; say theyre very frightened by the mortars. One says he sleeps on the ground pulling sandbags around him, but while the mortars haven't got him yet, the sand fleas have. He shows me the red bites on arms.
Four Philippine workers were killed at the largest Army supply base in Iraq last April when insurgent rockets hit their living quarters at Camp Anaconda. But those inside the camp aren't completely surrounded by hostility. At dusk in Guard Tower 7, soldiers watch Iraqi boys play soccer not more than a hundred yards away. Some Iraqi civilians even live in shacks right next to the massive walls surrounding the base.
"Hi Nora," one of the soldiers says, waving to a shy ten year old Iraqi girl popping her head out from behind a sheet that covers the opening to the mud and clapboard shack. "Hi Michael," she says in a high-pitched voice, waving then quickly ducking back inside.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Five pounds of Silly Putty for $60
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DATE: 06/29/2004 03:36:42 PM
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You can buy five pound chubs of Silly Putty from Binney & Smith for $60 plus shipping. Egg not included. (But you can buy 144 glow in the dark plastic eggs from the Oriental Trading Company for $5.) Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Fight Club"-branded office supplies, sort of
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DATE: 06/29/2004 04:25:45 PM
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Weblogger Sean Bonner phonecammed a funny discovery in the laser-printable-label aisle at Staples today -- the "sample address" on the packaging for Avery #8293 is addressed to Brad Pitt's character in the movie Fight Club. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: iPod based foreign language phrasebook
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DATE: 06/29/2004 05:15:21 PM
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Talking Panda is a new language translation app designed for the Apple iPod. Comes with over 300 common words and phrases of whichever language you want to speak. French, Spanish, and Japanese for $10 per language. RFID News editor John Wehr, who is helping out with the project, says "The fun thing is that the idea is so straightforward it could be used (or pre-installed?) with any portable player." Flash demo here, and website here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Akihabara is geek sex paradise
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DATE: 06/29/2004 05:46:51 PM
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The Japanese town of Akihabara has become a legendary gadget shopping destination. But this Japan Today story examines its odd brand of nerd sociology, in which fantasizing about sex is of far greater importance than actually having sex. Spotlight on girls named "Pudding," synthetic paramours, and the scarcity of 'no-pan' cafes -- in which miniskirted hottie waitresses going commando serve you rice cakes with a smile.
The area has undergone something of a makeover recently with posters and figures of animated beautiful girls plastered all over the place and the emergence of cafes and restaurants devoted to "cosplay," featuring girls dressed as animated heroes, maids, etc. Even a public area, such as the floor space of JR Akihabara station, has got into the act, with a 3-meter-round poster of the face of a beautiful girl appearing in an animation video. Kiichiro Morikawa, a professor at the Kuwasawa Design Research Institute, said, "An increasing number of animation goods and game shops have opened their doors and changed the area into an 'otaku' (geek) Mecca." Psychologists say these "otaku" or geeks are regressive, have poor social ability, and have never fully matured as adults. "Therefore, they are not good at communicating with others, cannot date real human beings, and instead adore an imaginary character," said one.
Link (Thanks, Steve)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Down and Out wins Locus Award
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DATE: 06/29/2004 09:39:48 PM
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This is so freaking cool: my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has won the Locus Award for Best First Novel of 2003. The Locus Award is based on a popular poll of readers of the trade mag, a larger group than even the Hugo voters, making it the largest beauty contest in the field. I couldn't be any happier: thanks everyone! Hope to see you at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, where the award will be presented.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr adds Creative Commons licenses, OS X uploader
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DATE: 06/29/2004 09:46:32 PM
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Flickr (Ludicorp's amazing, witty, easy photo-sharing/community service) has just added two spiffy new features: an uploader for OS X that works with iPhoto and a tool for automatically adding Creative Commons licenses to the photos you upload and share. (Disclosure: I'm on Ludicorp's advisory board)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Annotatable UK ID Card consultation
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DATE: 06/29/2004 09:47:47 PM
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Mark sez, "As you may know in the UK, ID cards are being debated
again. A document with a draft Bill has been produced
and the public consultation process is now underway. I have taken this document and converted it into a
Moveable Type blog, pretty much every parachraph in
the document is linkable, commentable and
trackbackable."
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japan's rent-a-puppy business
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DATE: 06/30/2004 07:13:34 AM
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Sid sez: "Babies can't be far behind ... in Tokyo you now can rent the cute little dogs that are all the rage. About $15 will get you an hour of canine bonding, and for a heftier fee you can take one home for the night. All puppy necessities included. These same dogs usually sell for about $3,000-$5,000."
In Tokyo alone, the number of shops registered to rent out pets grew to 115 as of March, up from 17 just three years earlier.
Each person who rents a dog by the hour is given a leash, some tissues and a plastic bag - in case the pooch has to answer the call of nature. They also get strict instructions not to let the dogs run free, to keep them in the shade on hot summer days and refrain from giving them snacks.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Shirley talks about his new Gurdjieff book in Los Angeles, July 1
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DATE: 06/30/2004 07:24:37 AM
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Author John Shirley will be at the Bodhi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles at 8585 Melrose Ave this Thursday July 1 at 7:30 pm till 9-ish, to talk about his book Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Tarcher/Penguin). Here's an essay about Gurdjieff that John wrote for Fringe Ware Review.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Art attack update
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DATE: 06/30/2004 07:37:32 AM
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University of Buffalo professor Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, was charged yesterday with mail and wire fraud. As you may recall, Kurtz has been under investigation after he awoke to find his wife dead and called the police who discovered some biological materials related to Kurtz's latest art project. (See this post for background.) Robert Ferrell, chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, was also charged for helping Kurtz obtain $256 worth of harmless bacteria. The absurdity continues. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Shanghaied in Portland
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DATE: 06/30/2004 07:59:11 AM
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My post about CIncinnati's abandoned subway reminded BB reader Colin Sheridan of Portland's Shanghai tunnels. During the 19th century, this was the real underbelly of the city. Sailors would get drunk, drugged, and dragged through the underground tunnels to the port where they'd be sold to a ship captain as slave labor. By the time the poor saps awoke, they were already at sea. These days, tours are available and, of course, there's even a Shanghai Tunnel bar. Link
Update: BB reader Mike says that Chuck Palahniuk's non-fiction book Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon "covers the tunnels and a bunch of other cool stuff to be found in, around, and under Portland."
Update: BB reader Jeff says "several people have called the tunnel tour operators written about in Fugitives and Refugees, and the conclusion is that the tours are not currently in operation because the building they used to use to enter the tunnels has been renovated and bought by somebody tunnel-unfriendly. They're looking for a new entrance."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ISPs not liable for royalties, says Canada's Supreme Court
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DATE: 06/30/2004 09:11:30 AM
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Canada's highest court has just ruled that ISPs cannot be forced to pay royalties on music downloaded by users:
In a unanimous 9-0 decision, the court ruled that although ISPs provide the hardware and technology, they aren't responsible for what people download. The court ruled that companies providing wide access to the web are "intermediaries" who are not bound by federal copyright legislation.
Link (Thanks, Michael)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: True surround sound
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DATE: 06/30/2004 09:28:50 AM
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Audio engineers at UC Davis have developed a new technology that delivers motion-tracked binaural sound (MTB). It's an update on conventional binaural recording which uses microphones embedded in a dummy head to capture the "location" of sound in a room. One problem with conventional binaural recording is that the sound doesn't change when you move your head. For example, if you hear a recording of someone behind you and turn your head to face them, it still sounds like they're behind you.
"The new method records through multiple microphones (eight for voice, 16 for music) spaced around a head-sized ball or cylinder. The sound is played back through headphones with a small tracking device attached to the top to follow head movements. As you turn your head while listening, the system mixes sound from different microphones, reproducing what you would hear if you were in the room."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Painters of Blight" show at Roq la Rue in Seattle
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DATE: 06/30/2004 10:23:22 AM
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Seattle's Roq la Rue Gallery (2316 Second Avenue) is running a two-day exhibit on Friday, July 9, and Saturday, July 10, featuring the work of two dozen artists paying tribute to Thomas Kinkade and Jack T. Chick. (click on thumbnails for enlargements. Painting on left is by Jim Blanchard; painting on right is by Johnny Ryan).
As you probably know, Thomas Kinkade, the famous "Painter of Light," has made millions of dollars with his customized prints of day-glo cottages against backdrops of enchanted forests. He has a team of "Kinkade-trained Master Highlighters" who go over reproductions of his work with oil paint. For this show, artists Jim Blanchard, Kamala Dolphin-Kingsley, Robert Hardgrave, Claire Johnson, Charles Krafft, Pat Moriarity, Erin Norlin, Marion Peck, Benton Peugh, Robert Rini, Bonni Reid, Mark Ryden and Kipling West have highlighted pages
from the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light with Scripture: 2004 Deluxe Wall
Calendar, in their own distinct styles.
And Jack T. Chick is the famous artist-publisher of a series of incendiary 3" x 5", 24-page religious comic book tracts. Loaded with scare tactics and jabs at "enemies" of Christianity, Chick's comics vividly depict the horrors of Hell for anyone who neglects to convert to Christianity. Since 1961 Chick has created 175 proselytizing tracts, which have had more than 500,000,000 copies published
in over 100 languages worldwide. Artists Tom Bagley, David R. Drake, Jed Dunkerly, Nathan Eyring, Rod Filbrandt, Cliff Hare, David Lasky, Deborah F Lawrence, Eric Reynolds, Johnny Ryan and Kamilla White have each created work inspired by Chick. In contrast to the Kinkade artists, they worked with no specific assignment, and came up with equally diverse outcomes: David R. Drake reduced an entire tract to its minimum visual information, creating 23 individual tiles still closely correlated with the original, Eric Reynolds has painted an original portrait of the reclusive Jack T. Chick, and David Lasky will display the original art for an entire tract written by Jim Woodring intended to be traded for unwanted religious pamphlets.
No link, but you can find out more about Roq la Rue here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Thousands volunteer to spy on fellow citizens
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DATE: 06/30/2004 10:46:13 AM
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Time has good news for nosy, racist jerks: the Dept. of Homeland Security is enlisting 400,000 people to report on suspicious behavior in public areas.
After the [training] session in Little Rock, two newly initiated Highway Watch members sat down for the catered barbecue lunch. The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot "Islamics" on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. "I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics." Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: "You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people."
That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims. Last year a Sikh truck driver who was wearing a turban was shot twice while standing near his tractor trailer in Phoenix, Ariz. He survived the attack, which police are investigating as a hate crime.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Roses are red, Frankenroses are blue.
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DATE: 06/30/2004 07:30:20 PM
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The Japan Times reports that liquor distiller Suntory has successfully engineered a truly blue rose by inserting a gene from pansies. The company created a blue carnation using the same technology in 1995. Why'd they do it? Because they can. Link, with photos. (Thanks, Sid)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 10 Internet patents that are going DOWN
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DATE: 07/01/2004 12:49:16 AM
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EFF has picked its list of ten dumb-and-bustable Internet patents after a public competition, and we're saddling up to gather invalidating prior art we can submit to the US Patent and Trademark Office to have them struck down:
1. Acacia Technologies' digital media transmission patent, which the company defines as covering "the transmission and receipt of digital content via the Internet, cable, satellite and other means." The EFF is worried that Acacia, which has already sued several large communications companies, is unfairly targeting small audio- and video-streaming websites.
2. Clear Channel's Instant Live patent, which covers technology used to produce instant recordings of live concerts. The media giant recently bought the patent and is now going after artists who choose to give fans CDs of their shows.
3. Acceris Communication's voice over IP technology patent. Schultz said Acceris is targeting smaller VOIP players. "They're sending (the) patents to investors," said Schultz, "trying to intimidate the investors."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fahrenheit 9/11: read it again for the first time
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DATE: 07/01/2004 12:51:29 AM
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Here's what purports to be a verbatim transcript of Fahrenheit 9/11 (the movie hasn't opened in the UK yet, so I haven't seen it).
NARRATOR: Sooner or later this special relationship with a regime that Amnesty International condemns as a wide-spread human rights violator (cut to video of public beheading) would come back to haunt the Bushes. Now, after 9/11, it was an embarrassment and they preferred that no one ask any questions.
CAROL ASHLEY: The investigation should have begun on September 12th; there's no reason why it shouldn't have. Three thousand people were dead, it was a murder, and it should have gotten started immediately.
NARRATOR: First, Bush tried to stop Congress from setting up its own 9/11 investigation.
PRESIDENT BUSH: It's important for us to not reveal how we collect information; that's what the enemy wants. And we're fighting an enemy.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Braille PDA
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DATE: 07/01/2004 12:55:03 AM
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This is a new Braille-outputting, Bluetooth-enabled WiFi PDA that runs WinCE:
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Artificial sweeteners screw up appetite
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DATE: 07/01/2004 12:57:18 AM
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Artificial sweeteners disrupt your body's ability to accurately guage your caloric intake and regulate your appetite accordingly.
Professor Terry Davidson and associate professor Susan Swithers, both in the Department of Psychological Sciences, found that artificial sweeteners may disrupt the body's natural ability to "count" calories based on foods' sweetness. This finding may explain why increasing numbers of people in the United States lack the natural ability to regulate food intake and body weight. The researchers also found that thick liquids aren't as satisfying – calorie for calorie – as are more solid foods.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New original sf on Futurismic
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DATE: 07/01/2004 01:00:06 AM
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Futurismic, the excellent sf writers' group blog that's been publishing original fiction, has just published a new story by Ruth Nestvold, an excellent up-and-comer. Jeremy sez, "Also, we opened up our second reading period for new fiction from now until July 31. We pay US$100 per story. Guidelines are at http://www.futurismic.com/about/guidelines.html and the submission form is at http://www.futurismic.com/contact/index.html#submit"
The reasons I volunteered were hardly simple. When are our motivations ever straightforward? I wanted to prove my own theories of gender and identity, solve one of those big riddles of the universe — are men and women really from different planets? is it nature or nurture? — but there was also the simple element of curiosity. No one had ever acquired both the body and the brain of the opposite sex. And I admit, being the first had a strong attraction for me, doing something that would earn me a place in the history books, put me next to Doreen Kimura and Sigmund Freud.
Link
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory on holiday for the weekend
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DATE: 07/01/2004 01:02:53 AM
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Cory's off for the rest of the weekend -- I won't be answering email or the phone again until Monday morning. See you then!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Retropod = iPod inside a Walkman body
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DATE: 07/01/2004 09:06:05 AM
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John Young sends word of a retro-riffic iPod mod: "The Retropod is an iPod case made from a vintage Sports Walkman, from which the guts have been removed. Cases and do-it-yourself kits are available, for those Billyburg hipsters that want to make their own."
Link. A timely diversion, given the fact that today is the 25th anniversary of Sony's 1979 release of the first Walkman: Link. (Thanks, L. Smith!)
Update: Boing Boing reader Brian Hewitt says, "Sony unveiled a totally new Digital Player today that's supposed to be better than iPod. Due for release by mid-August in the States."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nanowires with built-in transistors
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DATE: 07/01/2004 09:15:14 AM
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For several years now, researchers around the world have fashioned tiny nanowires from carbon nanotubes. Now though, Harvard University nanotech pioneer Charles Lieber and his team have made a nanowire--10,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper--that contains a string of transistors. While traditional nanowires are notoriously difficult to connect with each other or conventional silicon electronics, Lieber's nanocircuits are essentially pre-wired. The work was reported in the journal Nature and summarized in an article on the magazine's Web site:
"At this stage the chain does not actually do anything useful. 'But it's an important proof of principle,' says Lieber. He says that by applying a more elaborate mask to a woven network of silicon nanowires it should be possible to create complex circuits in one go.
To prove his point, he hopes to make a much more sophisticated structure that can perform complex calculations. 'We're trying to make a programmable series of literally thousands of these transistors.'
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Inkjet printer for fingernails
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DATE: 07/01/2004 09:42:03 AM
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Another fine art lost to technology.... ImagiNail's NailJetPro squirts out nail polish designs in millions of colors.
"Your imagination is the only limiting factor with the NailJet Pro! No matter your taste or lifestyle, the NailJet Pro offers selections for everyone, in millions of colors and virtually any design you can dream of. From mild to wild, crazy to conservative, the NailJet Pro will decorate your nails in vivid color and photographic clarity. You can even add your own artwork or digital photographs!"
Link (via FARK)
Update: Brian Ruh points us to a Greggman blog entry about fingernail painting kiosks in Japan. Rather than injket, this machine uses more of a rubber stamp-style mechanism. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porno patents
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DATE: 07/01/2004 10:34:41 AM
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Hothothot barely legal XXXX trademark action! Fleshbot probes the depths of the US Patent Office registry for a penetrating view inside the kinky world of sex devices that haven't crossed over from whiteboard fantasy to production line reality. If software that fails to come to market is vaporware, what, pray tell, is an anal orgasm monitor that never materializes? Don't answer that. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update: I F*CKED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S
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DATE: 07/01/2004 11:35:55 AM
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Page Six and Fleshbot both have updates today on Ms. Dessarae Bradford -- the smiling Hollywood creature I met at last week's Erotic LA convention who self-published a tell-all book about purported sexcapades with Alec Baldwin. I FU*KED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S is 57 pages of hot, totally unverifiable literary magnificence with chapter titles like "Stumbling Into His Chest Hairs." Snip from the FB interview, in which the reported ex-phonesex worker utters the unforgettable and timeless plea, "Tell them I am not a trannie!"
Fleshbot: They quote Alec Baldwin as saying he never met you.
DB: Oh God, of course he would say that. But it happened, trust me. I still have the vibrator. Maybe I can scrape off the evidence and get a DNA sample or something?
Fleshbot: But not the Hershey bar, right?
DB: No, he ate that (laughs).
Link to Fleshbot's update, Link to previous BoingBoing post, Link to book website, "Blessed Adventure Publications." I shot some snapshots of Ms. Bradford, including the one at left: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free Comic Book Day, July 3
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DATE: 07/01/2004 03:33:19 PM
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BoingBoing reader Erin says, "July 3rd is the third annual Free Comic Book Day across North America. The website has a handy postal-code locator to find participating stores in your area." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cakemod
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DATE: 07/01/2004 03:36:52 PM
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Boingboing reader ticotek says, "Adam and Kinsley Mull got married last week, and their weding cake was designed after his green Ipod Mini." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Frankenbananas with genetically engineered flavor
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DATE: 07/01/2004 03:41:48 PM
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BoingBoing reader Steve Portigal says, "Chiquita is looking at growing nanners with other fruit flavors embedded in them. Seems like they have the technology, but will it fly?" The ethical implications are terrifying. If they can genetically modify crops, humans can't be far off. That means one thing and one thing only: the dawn of banana-flavored babies.
Link (via agendainc)
Update: Frankenbana-not? BoingBoing reader Matt Grommes says, "According to a few stories about this announcement
like this one, Chiquita is denying that the bananas will be genetically engineered. Whether that's to get out from under the GM stigma early or the truth, who knows." And
BoingBoing reader Simon Fodden believes the real story's even bigger. "It's about the very survival of the yellow fellow -- The Beeb says 'Edible bananas may disappear within a decade if urgent action is not taken to develop new varieties resistant to blight.'
(Link)" Nevermind, BoingBoing reader Joe Sislow says, "I can't believe the BBC picked that one up. Snopes has the scoop -- the parasite (Sigatoka) does exist, but the imminent threat is more hype than fact."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYC-based Gothamist launches LA offshoot, LAist
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DATE: 07/01/2004 06:20:23 PM
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The LA counterpart blog to Gothamist and Chicagoist hasn't been properly launched yet, but -- what's that you say? I can peek behind the kimono here? Link
Update: An anonymous reader says, "Gothamist is also prepping Phillyist and Londonist to launch soon. Gothamist tech guru Neil Epstein comments on the work load." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Opportunity to get a DRM-free HDTV tuners ending soon
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DATE: 07/01/2004 07:32:00 PM
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Wendy sez: "EFF launched its one-year countdown to the broadcast flag with a call to action: Buy your HD-capable tuners while you still can get them DRM-free! We're also looking for volunteers to help us write the "cookbook" to help less technical users build HD-PVRs too." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Shag beach towels at Bed Bath & Beyond
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DATE: 07/01/2004 08:30:40 PM
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Beatnik / tiki / swinger artist Shag has designed some beach towels for Bed Bath & Beyond. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tour de France Tech
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DATE: 07/02/2004 07:48:13 AM
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Philip says, "Today is the eve of the Tour de France, a month where we stop busting on the French as much and watch guys in spandex pedal a lot, over 500,000 times per rider. While a lot of the coverage will be on the riders and specifically Lance Armstrong we thought we'd cover some of the gadgets and technologies in this article used in and around the race- the on bike computer, the two-way radio, tv coverage and even getting updates on your phone." Link.
BoingBoing reader Jean-Luc adds, "The official Tour de France website will have a photoblog, an official newsblog -- le journal du tour, and also 4 blogs (called "les chroniques") that will inform people on the official website. There is a non-official blog about Tour de France there (in english)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Humanoid Race
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DATE: 07/02/2004 07:54:11 AM
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This month's issue of Wired Magazine includes a feature about robotics for which I was one of several contributors:
Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances. And while there are a number of extremely complex problems to solve before we can make something as advanced as Sonny, the star of I, Robot, we're getting there, one piece at a time. To find out where the state of the art lies, Wired surveyed the projects that might one day add up to an android just like the rest of us.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Retro Video Game Zen
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DATE: 07/02/2004 08:30:21 AM
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quest for the crown
duckhunt
tron lightcycles
atari noise
cory arcangel
nes buckle
space invaders stickers
space invaders invasion
retrogames
Links to web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fark: geek coredump or Islamic militant website?
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DATE: 07/02/2004 09:20:01 AM
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BoingBoing reader Jeremy says, "Fark has been googlebombed, by their own members I'm sure, to reach #3 in searches for islamic militant website. Hopefully they can reach #1 and slip into John Ashcroft's radar." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Designs on the White House -- update
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DATE: 07/02/2004 09:28:45 AM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, reader ME-L says, "The contest is over and the winners are on sale! Net proceeds go to the Kerry campaign. Winning shirts include: "I Was The Victim of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and All I Got Was This Lousy President," "Democracy is Not a Faith-Based Initiative" and "One Nation Under Surveillance." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Security threat in a can
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DATE: 07/02/2004 10:17:42 AM
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As we previously noted, Coke has launched a contest revolving around a small number of cans outfitted with cell phones and GPS receivers. Winners who discover the cans call a prize center to win big prizes. According to the AP though, military bases are paranoid that soldiers might bring the cans into classified meetings where they could inadvertently be used as an eavesdropping device. For example, Sue Murphy, a spokeswoman for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, told the AP that her facility has "taken measures to make sure everyone's aware of this contest and to make sure devices are cleared before they're taken in." The special cans shouldn't be too hard to spot though--they have a big panel of buttons on the side.
Paul Saffo, research director at The Institute for the Future, a technology research firm, compared the concern about the Coke cans to when the Central Intelligence Agency banned Furbies, the stuffed toys that could repeat phrases.
"There's things generals should stay up late at night worrying about," he said. "A talking Coke can isn't one of them."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sony's Librie e-book reader: great display, awful DRM
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DATE: 07/02/2004 10:36:21 AM
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Yuri Kageyama writes a glowing review of Sony's new ebook reader, which uses a new kind of display technology that rivals paper. I agree with Kageyama's assessment about the display technology. I played with a Librie when I was in Tokyo last month. The screen is remarkable. The display uses little balls that are painted black and white, containing the same pigments found in laser printer toner cartridges for black, and used in sunblock and paint for white. Once you turn on the display and a page of text or graphics appear, it doesn't need refreshing. The only time the batteries get used is when you load a new page. (The technology was developed by a U.S. company, E-Ink.) I did notice that sometimes you could see the ghost of the previous page, especially on model I tried that had a comic book loaded on it. I wonder if that's a general problem, or if the one I played with was a dud?
I didn't think Kageyama wasn't harsh enough about the hideous proprietary locked format the Librie uses for books. He wrote, "I'm not wild about buying books that self-destruct after 60 days." This self-destruct feature is sickening. Who would buy a Librie with this deadly defect built in? (Sony is making a similar mistake with its music players.) I hope somebody with a sensible DRM policy starts using these great display screens. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: F is for Photoshopped
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DATE: 07/02/2004 10:49:34 AM
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Researchers at Dartmouth University College have developed an algorithm to automatically detect when a digital photo has been manipulated. Their statistical technique is based on the fact that altering an image messes with the hidden mathematics inside the photo.
"There is little doubt that counter-measures will be developed to foil our detection schemes," says Farid. "Our hope, however, is that as more authentication tools are developed it will become increasingly more difficult to create convincing digital forgeries."
Difficult, but not impossible, hopes the Weekly World News.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pencil necked chic
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DATE: 07/02/2004 10:51:46 AM
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Dweeb is the new black, according to this LA Times article about the transformed social status of geeks from outcasts to arbiters of cool. Why the author points to exposed underwear as an example of geek-originated style, I don't know -- that's a gangbanger thing, not a code warrior thing. Now, if they'd suggested pocket protectors as future haute couture accessories, yeah -- but until there are gold-encrusted ones in the Dior fall collection, I'm not totally buying the story's premise. Fun read, though. Article Link , hidden behind a dumbass site registration system that you can bypass with bugmenot.com. (Thanks, Mara!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: One slightly used RealDoll for sale
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DATE: 07/02/2004 11:24:26 AM
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On eBay, an owner parts with his RealDoll and offers details:
# Neck bolt!
# All 3 entries.
# Tanned skin, natural lips, brown eyes.
# I am the only owner
# Doll has no odors.
Link (Thanks, Alfie)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Da Vinci coupe
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DATE: 07/03/2004 10:23:14 AM
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Today's New York Times has a feature about how Italian scientists built a working model of "L'automobile di Leonard da Vinci," a self-propelled vehicle powered by a motor made of coiled springs. Pushing the machine backwards or turning the wheels counterclockwise would wind up the motors like a toy car that you pull back and then release. The car has no seats and was designed as a special effects prop for a theatrical production. It's currently on display at the Institute and Museum for the History of Science in Florence.
"While a scale model of the Da Vinci-mobile has been observed... to move, change direction, start and stop - thus proving that the design works - the full-size model weighing hundreds of pounds is seen, even by its own builders, as too hazardous to set loose on an unsuspecting public."
Link (free NYT reg. required)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fuck direct quotes
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DATE: 07/03/2004 10:43:10 AM
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Kudos to the Washington Post for being the only newspaper to actually spell out the word "fuck" when it came from Dick Cheney's lips last week. The LA Weekly has a survey of the substitutions:
The Boston Globe: Referred to the expletive as a “vulgar directive” and provided no other clues.
Calgary Sun: “(Bleep) off” or “Go (bleep) yourself.”
Daily News (New York): “Go f— yourself.”
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dick Cheney "Fuck Yourself" t-shirts, trucker hats
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DATE: 07/03/2004 01:42:11 PM
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It was inevitable. Get 'em while they last.
Link (thanks, SBDC)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Knit-your-own edible thong underwear
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DATE: 07/03/2004 01:50:57 PM
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Only 302 calories, knit 'em yourself from Twizzlers. Dawn Payne, the crafty chick who designed them says: "Knit gently. If you need your L-string to last longer than a few hours before use, you will need to keep the panties moist. This can be accomplished by wrapping the panties in plastic, or for extended storage needs, spraying with a vegetable oil spray and then wrapping. Adjustable to fit most any consenting adult!" Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Shannon Plumb's short online films
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DATE: 07/03/2004 01:59:20 PM
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NYC-based Shannon Plumb makes odd little movies with a Super 8 camera, and you can watch them online. Quirky, funky -- like something Jacques Tati and Charlie Chaplin would brainstorm over a drink in a Brooklyn dive bar.
Link (via collette)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robotic skin
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DATE: 07/03/2004 02:04:45 PM
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Interesting article about a new design for "electronic skin" as sensitive to touch as our own:
"Recognition of tactile information will be very important for future generations of robots," says Takao Someya at the University of Tokyo who developed the skin. A sense of touch would help them to identify objects, carry out delicate tasks and avoid collisions. But while a lot of effort has gone into vision and voice recognition for robots, touch sensitivity is still fairly rudimentary.
Our own skin contains a battery of touch receptors that produce nerve signals when pressed. For gentle pressures, the main sensors are tiny bulbs of layered tissue called Meissner's corpuscles. Their behaviour is mimicked in plastics such as polyvinylidene fluoride, which generate an electric field when squeezed and are used to make pressure-sensitive pads for computer keyboards and other touch-triggered devices.
Link (via Beverly)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New fiction novel features characters who plot to kill the prez
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DATE: 07/03/2004 02:11:59 PM
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A new, 115-page fiction book from otherwise easygoing author Nicholson Baker features a pair of protagonists who discuss ways to assasinate George W. Bush.
To threaten to kill the president in real life is illegal. To explore such a topic in fiction is presumably protected by the First Amendment.
They don't actually do the deed, or even attempt it, but the book is - according to early snippets - replete with deep-seated anger and elegantly nasty epithets hurled at both the President and his cabinet. Mr Baker's publisher, Alfred Knopf, plans to release the book on 24 August, on the eve of the Republican National Convention in New York. To call it a provocation would be an understatement. The author and publishers have no intention of giving anybody ideas - to do so would be a criminal offence - but they are certainly playing very close to the edge in a United States that, in the wake of the 11 September attacks, has shown no compunction about locking people up and asking questions later.
There was no immediate official reaction yesterday after extracts from Checkpoint were published in The Washington Post. A spokesman for the Secret Service, the uniformed outfit charged with protecting the President and other officials, told the Post merely that "without seeing the work, a determination can't be made at this time".
Link (Thanks, Susannah)
Update: BoingBoing reader Michael Reeve says, "John Walkenbach maintains a Nicholson Baker fan site - and in this blog entry, he comments on the amount of hate mail he's received as a result of the novel based around an attempt on the President's life."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne-themed online comic
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DATE: 07/04/2004 09:10:45 AM
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A must for model rocket geeks: The Joy of Tech has created a comic about SpaceShipOne. Link (Thanks, Robert Otlavan)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Lion Sleeps Tonight" creator's Zulu heirs sue Disney
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DATE: 07/04/2004 09:14:47 AM
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Heirs of the Zulu composer who wrote the song "Mbube" -- aka "The Lion Sleeps Tonight, used in The Lion King -- have sued Disney in South Africa for royalties. link (Thanks, Denise Howell)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moore on filesharing of F9/11: No prob
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DATE: 07/04/2004 09:22:56 AM
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Michael Moore was quoted in the Sunday Herald today as welcoming the free copying and distribution of his film on the 'Net for noncommercial use.
The activist, author and director told the Sunday Herald that, as long as pirated copies of his film were not being sold, he had no problem with it being downloaded. "I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that," he said. "I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I'm happy this is happening."
Significant words, to be sure, but reading these comments -- made after the film's unprecedented big bang opening -- how amazing it would be for a director of Moore's stature to release work under a Creative Commons license, or to make comments of that nature before the movie comes out?
That's not likely any time soon, for a variety of business reasons. As BoingBoing reader Alex Strasheim writes, "I don't think [Moore's comments about filesharing were] so much an endorsement of piracy as it was him saying that he's not losing much sleep over it."
Quentin Tarantino made similar "laissez-faire" comments about unauthorized copying and distribution of Kill Bill v.2 a few weeks ago. All of this is interesting stuff, but it points to how confused we are as a society about the economic and cultural role of filesharing. Some say it's all too convenient for high-profile filmmakers to give P2P the thumbs up as an afterthought, when their work has already performed well at box office. Others argue that Moore has a sort of ethical obligation to support the free distribution of F9/11, because some of the under-reported facts it contains "belong" to the American people.
But laws that make filesharing punishable by fines or imprisonment don't take into account whether or not a given film had great box office numbers, or contained information that was of social significance. Anti-P2P laws exist already. More of them, with broader enforcement resources and heavier penalties, are on the way. Isn't saying that we're sort of okay with noncommercial P2P filesharing some of the time, but not others, like being a little bit pregnant?
The position of Lions Gate Films, F9/11's distributor, isn't vague. Some of Moore's detractors have been posting copies of the film and Bittorrent pointers online. In response, Lions Gate Films Releasing president Tom Ortenberg told CNN:
"I think it's deplorable what enemies of 'Fahrenheit 9/11' are doing. We are currently looking into our legal options. We are not going to tolerate anybody trying to infringe on (this film's release)."
Link (Thanks, Boris, and Jean-Luc)
Update: An American BoingBoing reader who's a military man in Afghanistan (requesting anonymity) writes, "Every other week here in Kabul, a bazaar is held on our base where local products are sold. Some of those "local products" are pirated movies. I just thought you'd like to know that Fahrenheit 9/11 was the big seller here this Friday."
Update 2: BoingBoing reader J. Greely asks whether or not Moore's comments could disqualify this film from Oscars consideration, based on this section of the 2003 Academy Awards rules (2004 rules aren't yet online). IANAL, but I think this language means that the Academy intends to bar films "officially" released online by the film's maker or distributor, and has nothing to do with online distribution initiated by the public -- whether or not the filmmaker condones it. Snip:
3. No television or internet transmission shall occur at any time prior to, or within the six months following, the first day of the qualifying run or the festival win. Any documentary which is transmitted anywhere in the world in any version as a television or internet program within that period will automatically be disqualified from award eligibility.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Automatic sports highlights
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DATE: 07/04/2004 11:58:20 AM
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Researchers have devised software that churns through sports video and automatically grabs the highlights. A New Scientist article describes several of these projects--from snooker analysis at Trinity College to soccer game scanning at the University of Florence. Computer vision problems are notoriously difficult, but, according to the article, "as sports follow fixed rules, and take place in predictable locations, computers ought to be able to pick out the key pieces of play and string them together."
Link
Last year in Lab Notes, I wrote about a similar project at UC Berkeley. Computer scientists there are using soccer and ballet video footage to demonstrate machine vision software that recognizes humans and their activities. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Advanced Google syntax
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DATE: 07/05/2004 02:54:06 AM
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Here's a good guide to some undocumented and/or obscure Google search operators:
If you start your query with allinurl:, Google restricts results to those containing all the query terms you specify in the URL. For example, [ allinurl: google faq ] will return only documents that contain the words "google" and "faq" in the the URL. This functionality can also be obtained through the Advanced Web Search page, under Occurrences.
In URLs, words are often run together. They need not be run together when you're using allinurl:.
In Google News, the operator allinurl: will return articles whose titles include the terms you specify.
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(via MeFi)
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TITLE: Wrangle over legal "smacking" and "chastisement" in the House of Lords
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DATE: 07/05/2004 02:56:39 AM
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A pending amendment to a bill in the House of Lords will allow parents the option of "moderate smacking" but remove the defence of "reasonable chastisement."
Under the amendment, tabled by Liberal Democrat Lord Lester, parents causing harm, such as bruising or reddening of the skin, could be prosecuted.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF patent-busting in the NYT
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:05:18 AM
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My cow-orker Jason Schultz made the NYT this weekend in a piece about EFF's fight to bust crappy Internet patents. My favorite bit of the article is this bit of deadpan juxtaposition:
Another patent on the foundation's list covers a way to make telephone calls over the Internet. Mr. Schultz said the company holding that patent, Acceris Communications of Toronto, had drawn the group's attention by filing an infringement lawsuit against a relatively small service provider, ITXC, rather than larger companies like Vonage Holdings. Small companies rarely have the resources to fight infringement suits, Mr. Schultz said.
The president of Acceris, Kelly D. Murumets, rejected the charge that the company was pursuing only small rivals.
"Acceris has not targeted smaller players," Ms. Murumets wrote in an e-mail message. "In point of fact, and only after offering a license, Acceris filed a lawsuit against a major player" in the industry, ITXC.
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NotCon video online
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:15:36 AM
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The video is online from NotCon, the UK geek conference that I spoke at a couple weeks ago along with Danny O'Brien, Brewster Kahle, Matt Jones, Bill Thompson and others. Brewster's talk was fantastic.
Link
(Thanks, Tom!)
Update: Etienne sez, "a better link for the notcon boinboing entry would be http://ejhp.net/notcon/, which has links to all of the video *and* mp3/ogg encoded audio fd sessions, plus many more for which we only got audio."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turn any website into an RSS feed for $2
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:25:36 AM
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Bootleg RSS, a service for scraping websites and turning them into RSS, is taking requests. If there's a site you'd like RSS-ified, ping Carlo and he'll make it into a feed for $2.
Now, I've thought about the how. Hosting feeds costs money, scraping feeds is taking time, and maintaining a feed can take some time as well. So, I'm offering you the following service. First read the list of things you get, then see whether you'd be willing to shell out a small one-time fee of $2.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Moore and F911
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:29:47 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted some captures from Michael Moore on the Daily Show (19MB Quicktime Link) and the Daily Show on Fahrenheit 911 (9MB Quicktime Link).
(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Wal-Mart sex discrimination
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:31:41 AM
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Here's a fantastic clip of the Daily Show discussing the class-action suit against Wal-Mart for gender discrimination in payment (Wal-Mart pays women workers $2,000 less than the poverty line in annual wages).
6.7 MB Quicktime Link
(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chunky "Masai" raver shoes eliminate cellulite
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:35:20 AM
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The Masai Barefoot Technology shoe is a big raveware-looking sneaker that changes your gait to something like that of a barefoot Masai treading the grasslands and is rumoured to elliminate cellulite.
The shoe feels strange at first. The top two-thirds of it look like a fairly orthodox running shoe, but the sole is bizarre. Two inches thick at the midpoint of the heel, it tapers gradually toward the toe and swoops upward at the rear, creating a cutoff effect. The wearer steps down on the fat part of the heel, the "sweet spot," and a springy sensor bounces back, encouraging the foot to roll forward toward the toe.
This, we are told, is the gait of the Masai people, renowned for walking great distances as they move their herds of cattle across the savannas of Kenya and Tanzania. They have no apparent cellulite.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-roofie beer-lock
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:43:43 AM
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A Welsh inventor has created a tamper-evident beer-bottle seal that women are meant to put over their drinks while they're in the toilet, as a means of foiling date-rape-drug dopers.
The plastic cap fits on the bottle and locks when a small 'key' is pulled from it.
When the drinker returns from the bar or toilet, it can be unlocked and a red warning light on the top of the cap lights up if anybody has attempted to remove it.
Link
(via Engadget)
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TITLE: Wimbledon winner couldn't call mom from the court
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:45:54 AM
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After Maria Sharapova won a Wimbledon tennis tournament, she had her dad pass down his cellphone to her on the court so she could call her mother in Russia in front of the crowd and on camera, a moment of perfect 20th Century techno-upstartness in the hidebound world of tennis. But in a moment of perfect 21st Century sods-law-itude, the phone wouldn't work.
Link
Update: Dan sez, "I heard Maria Sharapova interviewed on ESPN this morning. She is Russian by birth but has lived in the U.S. from a young age, since she was around 3-6 years old. Her Mother lives in Florida and she was not trying to call her in Russia but in Florida. When Sharapova was calling her mother she realized that her Mom was most likely on a plane flight and couldn't be reached. Her mother was on a Jet Blue plane flight when she saw her daughter win Wimbledon. Apparently Jet Blue broadcasts live TV on their flights. Her mother asked the stewardess if she could turn on her cell phone to try calling her daugher (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway) but was denied the request."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daleks boycott new Dr Who
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:47:16 AM
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A new BBC Dr Who series will not have any Daleks in it, because the estate of the creator of the Daleks has demanded creative control over any show that licenses the ambulatory homicidal pepper-mills.
For its part, the Terry Nation estate accused the Corporation of attempting to "ruin the brand of the Daleks". Estate representative Tim Hancock said: "We wanted the same level of control over the Daleks that we have enjoyed for the last 40 years. If the BBC wanted to re-make any of George Lucas' films, you can bet George Lucas would have something to say about it."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kapor and co start a net-politics blog
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DATE: 07/05/2004 03:53:37 AM
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Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus and EFF) and friends have started a group-blog devoted to the way that the net is changing politics.
The modern corporation must be reformed. Accounting of a corporation's impact must include people's work lives, family, community, and the environment. More than this, we must discover what it will take to save capitalism from itself.
In an era of ever greater communication and more information, the need for education becomes ever more essential as a key to both economic opportunity and active citizenship. We must look at education as a lifetime endeavor and recast our entire education system. Quality education must be available to all, not just an elite.
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(via Mitch Kapor's Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New MPAA head is former Secty of Agriculture
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DATE: 07/05/2004 04:07:29 AM
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Dan Glickman, the former US Secretary of Agriculture, has been named the new head of the MPAA, replacing Jack Valenti.
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(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disease trading cards from CDC
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DATE: 07/05/2004 04:13:26 AM
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The US Centers for Disease Control offer print-and-clip collectable disease trading cards.
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(Thanks, Abby!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Better mains plug
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DATE: 07/05/2004 04:16:35 AM
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ID Magazine has given honourable mention in its annual design awards to Manabu Nishikawa's "ring plug" -- an improvement on the traditional mains-power-plug with a finger-sized ring for easy tugging.
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(Thanks, Douglas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turn FedEx tracking into RSS
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DATE: 07/05/2004 04:32:53 AM
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Ben Hammersley has hacked a way to turn the tracking data from your FedEx package into an RSS feed.
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(Thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pyro Geek Fourth
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DATE: 07/05/2004 08:34:32 AM
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I spent the 4th of July with a bunch of pyrotechnic geeks. By day, they're pyro experts, prop creators, and special effects managers for movies in Hollywood. For fun, a bunch of them -- all pals of a special effects technician named Hutch -- got together to do a fundraising fireworks display for the Southern California city of La Crescenta. I followed them around all day long as they wired mortars and stuffed them with shells, I learned the difference between concussion and detonation, and finally -- witnessed a beautiful fireworks display. Afterwards, everyone walked the firing field performing a safety sweep for un-exploded shells, embers, or other dangerous debris, and there was this. What you see here is what happens when one of the fireworks units doesn't blow up as planned (shoot up into the air to make a pretty display). Instead, the composite detonated down inside the shell, creating what's known as a "flower pot." There's not much left of the pot part, but the stunted blast did create a beautiful sort of pyro flower. Link to full-size image, more snapshots later.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark on vacation until July 11
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DATE: 07/05/2004 09:26:22 AM
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No entries from me for the next week -- I'll be in the unwired hills until Saturday.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New issue of Eightball -- finally
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DATE: 07/05/2004 09:28:23 AM
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It's been over two years since Dan Clowes put out an issue of Eightball, one of my favorite comic book series. I haven't seen it yet, but the cover looks neat.
[Eightball #23 is] another self-contained, full-color, oversized masterpiece like the award-winning previous issue! Featuring the first appearance of... THE DEATH-RAY! The best-selling author of Ghost World tells the story, set mostly in the 1970s, of a teenager granted mysterious powers and the irrevocable changes in his life that accompany them.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Shape-shifting rolling robots
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DATE: 07/05/2004 09:45:47 AM
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Japanese researchers in Ritsumeikan University have built small, rolling "soft robots" that pull themselves along by shifting their shape. The wheels are fabricated from a flexible plastic with spokes made from shape memory alloy, a common robotics material that shortens when heated from current flowing through it. From a New Scientist article:
"The rolling robots perform well on flat surfaces and can even scale 20-degree slopes. By flattening itself as much as possible and then pinging back to a circular shape - driven by the elasticity of the outer rim - a robot can leap 8 centimetres into the air. The engineers say that by combining three wheels in a mutually perpendicular arrangement, it should be possible to build a ball-shaped, steerable robot."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CC-licensed book of fictitious forewords
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DATE: 07/05/2004 12:03:51 PM
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David sez, "I just wrote my first book and posted it online under a creative commons license. It is entitled Dr. Lewis B. Turndevelt's Big Book of Forewords and is a fictitious collection of fictitious forewords written by this fictitious guy, Dr. Turndevelt."
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(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Two essays on liberty, freedom, and patriotism
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DATE: 07/05/2004 02:10:02 PM
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On this American holiday, two pieces that merit considered reading -- both via Dan Gillmor's blog. The first from Pete McCloskey in the SFChron: Patriotism (and shame) on the Fourth of July. "The word patriot is too precious to allow it to be used by the thundering rhetoric of politicians that patriotism requires not only supporting the troops but also supporting the foreign policy that puts them at risk."
The second, a Sunday column from Dan Gillmor in the SJMerc: "On Independence Day, 2004, how fares American liberty? Brilliantly, if you compare the United States with the tyrannies that still control the lives of countless people. Not badly, if liberty means the right to seek economic gain in a capitalist system -- especially if you're starting with the right connections and a privileged background. Not as well, when you look at growing pressures on longstanding freedoms."
And when you're done with those, may I suggest downloading the United States Constitution for your iPod, inserting earplugs, cranking up the volume, and taking a walk out there in the fresh summer air.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My Tokyo Death Cult: CC-licensed science fiction
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DATE: 07/06/2004 12:18:44 AM
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My Tokyo Death Cult is a science fiction novel released under a CC license by Marc Horne -- haven't read it, but it's got a hell of an opener:
Japanese policemen's guns are small and sort of puny. Except when they are shooting at you. Right now, they are shooting at me and my companion and we are running scared. The Policemen's shots are a little tentative, like someone picking chewing gum out of their hair. In fairness to the police, I should mention that we are in Shinjuku station, the world's busiest. Currently it is occupied by... oh, I don't know... 2.5 Lichtensteins. I am on average 4 inches taller than those around me, and a crucial 4 inches to boot, so as I barge through the crowd, hurting everyone, I must remember to crouch. To help me remember this, I visualize two things: the cloth that hangs in front of every drinking establishment in this country and those photos of JFK's autopsy that my father and I discussed over breakfast in 1977.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Viennese groupblog
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DATE: 07/06/2004 12:19:56 AM
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The Vienna Metblog is a group blog with a bunch of fun Viennese bloggers working on it, linking to items of local interest. My pal Johannes from Monochrom's on-board.
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(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: As Slow As Possible
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DATE: 07/06/2004 08:21:54 AM
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The sound of an E and E-sharp rang out of an abandoned German church yesterday. They were the latest organ notes in a musical piece that will take another 636 years to finish playing. Avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992) composed Organ2/ASLSP in 1985. The title comes from the tempo Cage had in mind when the work would be played: "as slow as possible." This performance at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt began September 5, 2001, but until last February the only sound was the building's natural ambience. Since then, a total of five notes have been played. National Public Radio has a page about ASLSP, including audio samples and an "All Things Considered" radio piece from last fall:
In a 1982 interview with NPR, John Cage revealed that he wanted to make his "music so that it doesn't force the performers of it into a particular groove, but which gives them some space in which they can breathe and do their own work with a degree of originality. I like to make suggestions, and then see what happens, rather than setting down laws and forcing people to follow them."
Link (to NRP site) Link (to AP article from yesterday)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dumbfuck Gartner report recommends banning iPods
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DATE: 07/06/2004 09:16:51 AM
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Some jackass analyst at Gartner is advising employers to ban iPods and other personal storage tech from the workplace to prevent leakage of s33kr1ts from within the corporate hive. Likely successor recommendation: decapitating all outgoing employees.
"Portable storage products can bypass perimeter defences like firewalls and antivirus at the mailserver, and introduce malware such as Trojans or viruses onto company networks."
Devices mentioned include "disk-based MP3 players, such as Apple's iPod, and digital cameras with smart media cards, memory sticks, compact flash and other memory media"...
"Businesses must ensure that the right procedures and technologies are adopted to securely manage the use of portable storage devices like USB keychain drives. This will help to limit damage from malicious code, loss of proprietary information or intellectual property, and consequent lawsuits and loss of reputation," the report stated.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hamster cage casemod
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DATE: 07/06/2004 09:20:00 AM
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The Extreme Tech crazy casemod winners are online -- including this case with an integrated hamster cage that has hosted a live rodent for years now.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Another Italian translation of my DRM talk
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DATE: 07/06/2004 10:43:37 AM
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Domenico Della Side has posted another Italian translation of my DRM talk.
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(Thanks, Nico!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Classic Gamer #2 is online
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DATE: 07/06/2004 10:56:17 AM
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The second issue of Classic Gamer magazine is out. CM is a lush, web-only hymn to the lost games of the 8-bit Golden Age, well-written and lavishly illustrated with images from classic game ads and other bumpf.
I would include a quote here to show you how nice this mag is, but the authors have opted to turn on PDF's ineffectual "protection," which keeps me from copying and pasting unless I go look up a crack, something I can't be bothered doing. Pretty regrettable -- and inexplicable -- decision.
7.6MB ZIPped PDF Link
(Thanks, Cav!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Kerry picks Gephardt?
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DATE: 07/06/2004 12:01:06 PM
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Nope! The New York Post got some bad information and ran with it to the presses a little too early. According to a Reuters article, Post rival Daily News "sent a case of champagne to Post editors and a note, 'Congratulations on your front page. Have a nice day,' with a smiley face. The barb refers to a Post advertisement near the Daily News building showing improved circulation figures, with the words 'have a nice day' and smiley face."
Link (via a great notion)
UPDATE: Mike Harris has the text of the incorrect New York Post article on his blog! (Link)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: War on Pornography
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DATE: 07/06/2004 09:59:38 PM
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A loosely-formed alliance of congresscritters, attorneys general, religious organizations, and anti-porn advocates announced a "War on Pornography" Monday afternoon in Utah. The coalition of American and Canadian groups trotted out fact-free stats like "pornography is more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes or illicit drugs," and cautioned against the growing moral dangers for youth posed by an unregulated Internet. In the spirit of Nigritude Ultramarine, Fleshbot makes a pitch to googlebomb the anti-porn campaign: "It would be really funny to have this [Fleshbot] post wind up as the top Google result for 'War On Pornography' in the future ..." Link to Salt Lake Tribune story, Link to WarOnPornography.com, and Link to Fleshbot's coverage.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Art scene and heard
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DATE: 07/07/2004 08:54:17 AM
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Located in an historical Queens elementary school building, P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center has been a hub of avant-garde art and culture for nearly three decades. Now, P.S.1. also has an Internet radio station. As you might expect, WPS1 features an eclectic mix of programming. No Clear Channel station is going to give you the voice of Marcel Duchamp, the techno of Todd Sines, and a discussion with Taipei City mayor Ma Yingjiu about public art. From this week's schedule:
11:30 am
The Bio-Blurb Show, Edition #3: Bio-Art or Bio-Terror? - In this most provocative program, host Suzanne Anker speaks with former Whitney Museum director David Ross, art journalist Stephen Henry Madoff, and filmmaker Virgil Wong about the federal government's Patriot-Act case against the activist artist Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble and the criminalization of the American artist in general. Must-hear listening!
12:00 noon
Love Crazy, Edition #4 - Whazzup workaholics! For this session of her music series for WPS1, chanteuse Nora York zeroes in on how much we love our labors, especially when they're lost to song.
1:00 pm
Curbside Cassette, Edition #3 - Okay, work's covered. How about school? Recent high-school grads Joe Ahearn and Max Kagan celebrate their diplomas with a science-and-math music mix. Indeed, where would we be without "Calculus Man"? Without the Beastie Boys, for one thing, joined here by Mos Def, Sun Ra, Elvis Costello, the Pixies, White Stripes and more.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Millie the mechanical monster of Michigan
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DATE: 07/07/2004 09:12:21 AM
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Mechanical designer Jim Peters, 54, was disappointed that a certain Scottish celebrity was missing from last year's Saline Celtic Festival in Michigan.
"I was down there at the festival. It was full of bagpipe music and Scottish sights and activities. Viewing the long body of water, one can't help think of the Loch Ness area in Scotland and its famous legend. I asked myself: "Where's the monster?"'
So this year, Peters built a 24-foot-long wood-and-steel mechanical Loch Ness Monster. "Millie" was named for Mill Pond Park, the location of the festival. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any photos of Millie online.
Link (Thanks, Carlo!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Anthony Townsend on urban wireless
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DATE: 07/07/2004 10:12:05 AM
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Grassroots Wi-Fi activist Anthony Townsend, co-founder of NYCwireless and Wireless Commons, has published a new article in the architecture journal Praxis. The paper is called "Digitally Mediated Urban Space: New Lessons for Design." From Anthony's blog:
"I sought to lay out the way I've been thinking about the rapid and sometimes chaotic introduction of four classes of digital technology into urban space (wireless, GPS/positioning, GIS, and displays). I investigate these trends in four cases: Times Square and Union Square in New York, Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing, and Seoul's proposed Digital Media City."
Link (via Howard Rheingold's journal on TheFeature)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crafty laptop sleeves
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DATE: 07/07/2004 10:14:59 AM
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Foofbags are Powerbook/iBook sleeves handsewn out of fun-fur and fleece.
Link
(Thanks, Dirtymouse!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lego animated Spiderman 2
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DATE: 07/07/2004 10:22:22 AM
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This is pretty stunning: it's a stop-motion-animated short version of Spiderman 2 done entirely in Lego.
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(Thanks, Graham!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US extraditing DRM-breaker
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DATE: 07/07/2004 10:28:21 AM
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The US is trying to extradite an Australian who broke DRM systems to stand trial in America.
US justice agencies allege that Griffiths, whose online name was BanDido, was the ringleader of an internet group called DrinkOrDie (DOD). Its members played a global game of one-upmanship with manufacturers, cracking security codes and reproducing software, games and music worth $US50 million ($A70.2 million).
It is not claimed that 41-year-old Griffiths, who is unemployed, made any money from the alleged piracy.
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(Thanks, Gwen!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Prostitution to be legalized in Berkeley?
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DATE: 07/07/2004 10:57:34 AM
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This article in the SF Bay Guardian reports on
a new ballot meaure in Berkeley, California to legalize prostitution -- another measure in SF is on the way. Link (Thanks, Creative_ten
!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky world of Japanese ice cream
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DATE: 07/07/2004 11:04:36 AM
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Quirky feature in Japan's Mainichi Daily about ice cream flavors popular with Japanese consumers. Move aside, rocky road -- make way for lettuce-potato, tulip, horseflesh ("with meaty chunks," shown here at left), and cherry blossom.
Link (Thanks, Mustafa)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: West Coast Bloggers
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DATE: 07/07/2004 11:15:06 AM
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If you have ever been to a biker bar on the West Coast, or an Orange County shopping mall filled with be-doo-ragged white male teens, you'll get the humor here. If not, click this link first, before you check out these funny blogosphere in-joke t-shirts. BoingBoing reader David says, "Could this be the start of the east coast/west coast blogging rivalry? Will the bloggies become a scene for chaos, frustration, and gunfire? I can see it now ... 'Ain't no blogger like a west coast blogger 'cause a west coast blogger don't stop...'"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nepal Wireless project update
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DATE: 07/07/2004 11:20:48 AM
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BoingBoing reader Marc says:
After reading this previous BoingBoing post in May about the Nepal Wireless project, I decided to interview Mahabir Pun about his work. Some of the responses surprised me, and many of the decisions are in direct contrast to a project in Laos I covered two years ago: they're using Windows and Microsoft NetMeeting instead of open source; they're not localizing; and social mobility isn't necessarily one of the project goals. I think in many ways the Nepalese project is more successful because it's less ambitious. Mahabir also talks about working while living through the Maoist insurgency.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: L.A. Press Club panel on LAX Journalist Visa controversy
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DATE: 07/07/2004 11:26:40 AM
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Blogger and Reason editor Matt Welch says:
Tonight in LA, the L.A. Press Club hosts a panel about how LAX border guards have been stopping European and Australian reporters at the airport, cuffing and searching them, and shipping them back home, for failing to have a previously undemanded Journalist Visa. If you're unfamiliar with the topic, here are three critical columns I've written about it: 1, 2, 3.
Basically, customs enforcement personnel LAX started last May to enforce a law that had previously been unenforced. Most all other visitors (including tourists, businessmen, and publicists) from the 27 "Visa Waiver" countries can enter the U.S. for 90 days without a visa, but journalists are required by law to apply in advance for an I-Visa, shell out $100, present a letter from their publication on letterhead, and wait for up to several weeks for approval. And the wording is not at all clear as to whether freelancers or even webloggers must also heed the requirement. Needless to say, this makes it difficult to cover breaking news; and it's hard to see how this would prevent any terrorist acts considering all a murderous Frenchman would need to do is say he was a tourist.
Still, immigration officials say, a law's a law, and Sept. 11 taught us to take such laws seriously. Also, LAX has been a target in the past, and many security officials say that the Visa Waiver program is the single most dangerous loophole in our consular system. What makes tonight's panel potentially newsworthy is that A) the Bureau for Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recently announced new guidelines on the matter to all major points of entry; and B) a BICE official and the U.S. Consul for Tijuana will be there to field questions, along with German Consul pro Michael Wolff. At the very least, we might finally understand what the actual rules are. And today's American visa tightening can be tomorrow's foreign crackdown on American travelers; American journalists and webloggers may find themselves in some uncomfortable situations in Paris and Sydney, if this keeps up.
Link to event details, starts at 630pm. Also, blogger Ernest Miller suggests two posts from other weblogs for related reading: discourse.net, and buzzmachine.
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TITLE: Ironic hipster unicorn lovin' t-shirts
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DATE: 07/07/2004 11:39:50 AM
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Link, and also check out the "This was supposed to be the future -- where's my jetpack?" design. Link (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pot gives you unstoppable night vision powers?
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DATE: 07/07/2004 01:53:25 PM
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An article in the Guardian about a recent scientific study that indicate marijuana consumption can improve night vision -- if you can keep your eyes open, that is.
Their results backed up claims by the Observer columnist Sue Arnold, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa and is officially registered blind. She noticed several years ago that drawing on strong Jamaican skunk suddenly and temporarily enabled her to see things clearly. But Ms Arnold has since warned of side-effects that could impede night-time navigation.
"Only trouble was," she said, "I couldn't stand up."
Link (Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photography student's odd run-in with Homeland Security
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DATE: 07/07/2004 09:33:28 PM
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Seattle-based blogger and photogger Ian Spiers says:
About a month ago I had a little run-in with 3 Homeland Security agents, 3 Seattle Police officers, 2 security guards and a German Shepherd while I was at a local park with my camera. The DHS agent told me that it's illegal for me to take pictures of federal property. The ACLU of Washington disagrees. My blog is my attempt to chronicle this outragous situation and bring some common sense and public awareness to it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Farenheit 9/11 available for download at archive.org
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DATE: 07/07/2004 09:38:48 PM
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Someone's taking Mr. Moore at his word. You can download the entire film here, while it lasts. Link
Update:
Tai Freligh says the download's been taken down. Link to message from site host.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sprint introduces first megapixel phonecam for US consumers
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DATE: 07/07/2004 09:49:51 PM
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Jon Gales says, "Finally a megapixel cam phone for the US, but too bad it's on Sprint. Looks pretty stocked, but could be better. It's progress though!" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FCC to Require Broadcasters to Retain Copies of Broadcasts up to 90 Days
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DATE: 07/07/2004 09:53:06 PM
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Blogger Ernest Miller says:
The FCC has been cracking down on supposedly indecent broadcasts (and chilling free speech) ever since Bono was really impressed by the Golden Globes and Janet had her malfunction. Under the current rules, in order to send in an indecency complaint, the complainer had to provide a "tape, transcript or significant excerpt." Broadcasters weren't required to maintain copies of a show, so complaintants faced a minimal burden to complain. However, now the FCC is going to require broadcasters to maintain copies of broadcasts for 60-90 days. They are considering letting people issue complaints with no evidence (since the broadcaster will be able to produce the tape), and if the complaint is late (after the 60-90 days) broadcasters can still be hit. This will really open the floodgates to indecency complaints.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: High tech oven-mitts
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DATE: 07/08/2004 02:50:03 AM
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This month's "Play" section in Wired reviews three super-sexy high-tech oven mitts -- a synthetic rubber one, a translucent silicone one, and a kevlar-and-nomex fingered glove adapted from a welder's glove. It's a sweet application of new materials science to housewares.
Link (scroll to page-bottom)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Patriotic music for MoveOn.org
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DATE: 07/08/2004 02:55:13 AM
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Great interview with They Might Be Giants from Wired Magazine, about the a compilation album of patriotic songs they've put together to benefit MoveOn.org. TMBG recorded a cover of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" for the disc!
We did an electronic version of a song from the 1840s called "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." It was originally used during the Harrison-Van Buren presidential race, and it's really harsh, like a drinking song. It was the very first hip campaign song! Lots of the music on the compilation was recorded specifically for the album, and all of it will be new material.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: They Might Be Giants's new album as $0.99 MP3s
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DATE: 07/08/2004 02:57:23 AM
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They Might Be Giants have put their new album online as MP3s, for $0.99 each, with the whole disc available for $9.99. The disc costs $18, and the band has refused to withhold material from the Web version to make up for the discrepancy, listening to fans who insisted that they wanted to buy the disc online.
Link
(Thanks, Jon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gizmodo on automated circumcision device
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DATE: 07/08/2004 03:04:04 AM
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Gizmodo has posted a screamingly funny review/commentary of a new automated circumcision device:
I'm a penis slicer luddite, I know, but no, for real, no. So why do the people that make SmartKlamp think that -- when I wouldn't let a robot, which can maneuver with mathematical precision, touch me -- I would use a Bris-O-Matic on my or my progeny's spurters? Is there a market need here? Are scapel-wielding doctors and rabbis not fast enough to get the job done? Is there a worldwide circumcision shortage?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NEC's "smart" batteries: invitation to monopolistic DMCA nightmare
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DATE: 07/08/2004 03:07:01 AM
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NEC has announced that its batteries will have cryptographic authentication schemes to prevent "low-quality counterfeits." Jason Schultz comments on the way that the DMCA turns such a sytem into a license to screw your customers by shutting out competitors who make cheaper batteries:
The software will be introduced in Japanese digital cameras by year's end and is expected to be used in 50 million units by 2007. The software is ideal for use in mobile phones and batteries, but NEC Electronics is also considering extending this technology to "smart" keys, printers and ink cartridges, as well as bundling the technology into hardware options.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, software-based authentication is the wave of the future. And now, with the DMCA, a near-monopoly! Future, here we come.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Guardian on Gyford
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DATE: 07/08/2004 03:08:29 AM
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The Guardian has published a wonderful profile of my pal Phil Gyford, whom you may know from the Pepys's Diary blog -- but who has also helped hack together some of the UK's best political advocacy websites.
His latest project, TheyWorkFor You.com, was launched last month with the intention of bringing parliament closer to the British people. With a team of almost 20 volunteers, Gyford helped build the site, which provides information on members of parliament and a readable version of Hansard, the parliamentary record.
"There's lots of interesting stuff," he says, explaining the motivation behind the site. "But it's so unappealing to read the Hansard site. For example, there's no way that webloggers can link into it. Presenting it in a readable way was something that had been talked about a lot before, but never done. We started making plans for it last August or September, but we probably started working on it properly just before Christmas."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DVD Jon releases FairKeys
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DATE: 07/08/2004 04:39:54 AM
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Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen has released FairKeys, a program for extracting your iTunes DRM FairPlay keys from Apple's servers.
Link
(Thanks, A.S.!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Punk Vaudeville show goes back on the road
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DATE: 07/08/2004 06:07:00 AM
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My pal Jim Munroe is taking his punk performance Vaudeville show back on the road with a seven city US/Canada tour that includes Gavin Grant, co-publisher of Small Beer press and all-round swell guy, sign language poet Liisa Ladouceur and "off-kilter ranter" Geoffrey H. Goodwin -- with a "movie shot on location in Antarctica shown between the acts."
If you're in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, NYC, Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Chicago be sure to catch 'em!
Link
(Thanks, Gavin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ghost Host performs gospel
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DATE: 07/08/2004 07:23:30 AM
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Thurl Ravenscroft, the amazing baritone voice of the Haunted Mansion's Ghost Host and Tony the Tiger (among others) recorded an album of gospel, called "Great Hymns In Story And Song." The Basic Hip Digital Oddio archive has MP3s of every track on the disc. (Lots of other great stuff on this page -- Gershwin performed on bongo drums, vintage IHOP and Sears radio ads, and nice linkage).
Link
As Brett points out, the Ghost Host is voiced by Paul Frees -- Ravenscroft's contribution to the Haunted Mansion was as the lead baritone in the theme song, "Grim Grinning Ghosts" (he's the singing bust that bears a striking resemblance to Walt Disney)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Clear concrete
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DATE: 07/08/2004 07:55:53 AM
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The Associated Press has an interesting article about the translucent concrete developed by Hungarian architect Aron Losonczi. During the mixing process, glass fibers are added to the traditional stone, cement, and water. This enables light to shine through the material. Several variations of the new material are on display as part of a National Building Museum exhibit called Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete. Judging from the Web site, it looks to be a stunning exhibit. Link (to AP article) Link (to Liquid Stone) (Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: C-BAND=BS
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DATE: 07/08/2004 08:31:57 AM
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On September 24 2001, stock in Stewart Kaiser's start-up company R-Tec was selling for 46 cents a share. That day, Kaiser issued a press release about R-Tec's new device called C-BAND (Chemical & Biological Alarm and Neutralization Defense System.) Four days later, R-Tec shares had risen to $2.40 each and Kaiser sold the 50,000 shares he had just given to his mother. The funny thing is that C-BAND was actually nothing more than a filing cabinet painted yellow and outfitted with a flashing red light. Today, Kaiser and his wife were indicted for securities fraud, obstructing justice, and other bad things. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to Bittorrent Fahrenheit 9/11
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DATE: 07/08/2004 08:41:38 AM
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Aliased BoingBoing reader "humboldt 11" provides instructions for obtaining a digital copy of Michael Moore's latest film:
1. download BIT TORRENT 3.4.2.exe (Link) and install
2. download Fahrenheit.911.CAM-POT(1).torrent (Link) on your desktop
3. open it with BitTorrent
4. start download
5. download "wrar330d.exe" (Link) open it
6. unpack the file "pot.911a.rar" in the CD1 file (as well as the "pot.911b.rar" in the CD2 file - this is why there are 36 parts on each desk. In order to assemble it, opening the file will automatically identify all the segments and put them together) this will create a "pot.911a" (and a "pot.911b") file
7. download "vlc-0.7.2-win32.exe" (Link) install
8. open "CD1.cue" from the "pot.911a" file
LinkUpdate: BB reader antrix says: "You provided a link to a Fahrenheit 9/11 torrent with split rar files - and a bin/cue which needs vlc. That's too much work when there's a torrent available with convenient mpeg's playable in any player. No rars, nothing. Link." Alternately, you could try this BT client, says reader G1ZM0.
And reader Jaap Vermeulen adds, "Daemon Tools is a utility for windows that will allow you to mount CD / DVD images from windows. This way you can open the .CUE files from the Fahrenheit 911 images with Daemon Tools, which will then mount a new drive. Then these can be played with Windows Media Player, or Media Player Classic. I think many people would rather use the media player of their own choice. I haven't used VLC, but I can say that especially for Camcorder recorded movies Windows Media Player is good because the graphic equalizer allows you to remove a lot of the noise in the sound recording."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoblog banned in Iran
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DATE: 07/08/2004 11:36:53 AM
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Persian blogger Hossein Derakshan says, "It's confirmed now that the bastards at TCI (Telecom Iran) have filtered my photoblog. I first got suspicious when I saw a major decline in its visitors. This is really amazing! How far they are going to go?" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tom Waits performed in Austrian idiom
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DATE: 07/08/2004 12:53:52 PM
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My pals Johannes and Evelyn sent me a fantastic early birthday present today, a CD of Tom Waits covers recorded by Wolfgang Ambros, a 1970s Austropop great. Austropop was an Austrian musical movement who recorded music from all genres in Austrian slang.
My German's pretty rotten, but I quite liked hearing Tom Waits standards like "Romeo Verliert Bluat" (Romeo is Bleeding) and "Es Is Vorbei" (Ruby's Eyes) sung in soulful Austrian German.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anil kicks linkspammers' asses
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A bunch of blog-spammers and google-spoofers (the euphemism is "Search Engine Optimization" -- no doubt you've received spam offering you this "service") set up a competition to see who could become the number one Google result for the previously unused phrase "nigritude ultramarine." So they set about creating their link-farms and so forth.
Then Anil Dash, a blogger who works for SixApart, decided to kick their asses. These spammers' google-whuffie was puny relative to Anil's popular, much-linked blog, and when he created a post and asked his readers to link to him using "nigritude ultramarine" as the link-text, he won the competition handily.
To Dash, then, winning the flat-screen television awarded to the second-round victor was testament to the power of good content and a longstanding online presence.
"A lot of people are trying to increase their page rank unethically," said Dash. "I think if we show them (that) the best thing you can do is to write really good material, then hopefully, they'll spend their time doing that (instead of) spending time coming up with ways to graffiti other people's pages."
Furthermore, Dash maintained, his victory proves one thing: That the Web is a meritocracy.
"A page that's read by people instead of robots is going to do better," he said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kick-ass cover-art for Cory's next novel
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DATE: 07/08/2004 01:11:08 PM
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My next novel is called "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and Tor Books will publish it next spring (here's an excerpt). It's a bit of a departure for me: it's a fantasy novel -- well, more of a magic realist thing, actually -- about community wireless networking. I'm really happy with how it's come out. Really, really happy.
Happy as I am with it, I'm unbelievably ecstatic over the cover-art. Tor Books commissioned superstar Dave McKean (whom you may know from the covers of Neil Gaiman's Sandman books), and then the genius art-director Irene Gallo applied her skill and turned it into this wonderful work of art (my editor's strapline, "A miraculous novel of secrets, lies, magic -- and Internet connectivity" doesn't hurt either!).
Colour me ecstatic.
336K JPEG Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Guestblogger: Author/Screenwriter/Mad Genius John Shirley
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DATE: 07/08/2004 02:29:53 PM
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Many thanks to our outgoing guestblogger, filmmaker Christopher Coppola, for a fantastic job -- complete with audblog posts from the road.
The BoingBoing gang is very proud to welcome our next guest, legendary author John Shirley.
His most recent novels are Demons and Crawlers, both from Del Rey books. He wrote the cyberpunk novels City Come A-Walkin' and the Eclipse trilogy (now out from Babbage Press). His first non-fiction book is Gurdjieff: An Introduction to his Life and Ideas from Tarcher/Penguin. He was also co-screenwriter of THE CROW. He won the Bram Stoker award for his story collection BLACK BUTTERFLIES (Leisure Books). The authorized fan-created website is here. His blog is at johnshirley.net. John, it's an honor to welcome you to the BoingBoing guestbar!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tomorrowland Today
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DATE: 07/08/2004 03:04:02 PM
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Disney's 1950s television show Tomorrowland, a stunning example of the future's history, is now out on DVD. This morning, National Public Radio aired a nice history of the program by commentator Andrew Chaikin. The story goes that famed Disney artist Ward Kimball pitched Tomorrowland to Walt after reading a series of articles about space exploration in Collier's Magazine. Real rocket scientists like Wernher Von Braun were then brought in to Disney as consultants on the show. The first episode, Man In Space, aired March 9, 1955. From the NPR piece:
"Man In Space got rave reviews. President Dwight Eisenhower personally requested a copy of the show to screen for military brass at the Pentagon to help them understand plans to launch a satellite."
Link (Thanks, David "Swapdrive" Steinberg!)
UPDATE: BB pal Stefan Jones says "I first learned about the Tomorrowland episodes from a book that a friend self-published, the Spaceship Handbook. It also has a history of the Collier's articles, plus scale drawings of the von Braun spaceships."
UPDATE: Jesse Mazer says: "If any boingboing readers are interested in buying that DVD, it seems to be out of stock at amazon and the cheapest used copies there go for $44.95, so you might want to include a link to a place that sells it for cheaper...the DVDpricesearch.com page lists two places that sell it for under $30."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Visiting every tube stop in Zone 1
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DATE: 07/09/2004 02:53:14 AM
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Ewan, a Scotsman living in London, is moving back to Edinburgh, and before he does, he has resolved to visit every tube station in Zone 1, and he's inviting the general public along on his tube-crawl:
Here's the deal, I'll be starting at 12.30 on a weekday in the last week of July (probably Friday the 30th July, but don't quote me just yet). If you'd like to join me as I rattle round Central London and visiting every station of note (and Hyde Park Corner) then make sure you're at Vauxhall Ticket Office for around 12.20 to find me.
Anyone wishing to set up a Rival team to try and beat me on the day is more than welcome, I'd only ask you to also start at Vauxhall with us. Once it's all over, we'll retire to a pub at around 4pm for a late lunch/early dinner, some farewell drinks, and I'll invite you all to the housewarming in Edinburgh.
Link
(Thanks, Ewan!)
Update: Quin sez: "I'm visiting every tube and train stop in Zone 6, saying what people can find there, who lives there and how to get back. "
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help make a Wikipedia of Free Culture
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DATE: 07/09/2004 02:54:36 AM
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Creative Commons is creating a "Wikipedia of Free Culture" with links and annotation for every bit of open-licensed material in the universe. You're invited to help.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: National summit on community wireless networks
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DATE: 07/09/2004 02:56:16 AM
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This August 20-22 will see the first large-scale conference for community wireless networking projects, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Making the Connection: The 2004 National Summit for Community Wireless Networks will be the largest community wireless networking event to date and will bring together technology and policy leaders, decision-makers, students, researchers, and other participants in wireless networking and community networking initiatives for the express purpose of discussing policy issues and practical solutions to problems facing community wireless networks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Game Boy Advance music vending machine
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DATE: 07/09/2004 03:02:50 AM
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This beast is a music vending machine that sells tunes to play in your Game Boy Advance movie player. Gizmodo notes the deliciously superfluous giant mechanical dial on the front.
Link
Update: Lampbane sez "That story you posted about the GBA download service - it's for cartoon episodes (specifically Pokemon) only. Music downloads (among other things) are not available yet."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bait-cars play theme from "Cops" during bust
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DATE: 07/09/2004 03:15:42 AM
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Cops in Minnesota and Ohio have developed a fleet of "bait cars" -- cars left on the street with the keys in the ignition as a honeypot for snagging car thieves. The cars are equipped with hidden cameras and satellite trackers for evidence gathering and apprehension, and with specially fitted car-radios that play the theme from "Cops" during the bust itself.
I remember the Toronto cops once tried a bait-bike and were quite successful, snagging dozens of bike-thieves in a short time, but had to give it up because the bait-bike got stolen while the cops were busy arresting someone for trying to steal it.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More Thurl Ravenscroft novelty tunes
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DATE: 07/09/2004 03:20:38 AM
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Here's another great novelty track from Thurl Ravenscroft, the lead baritone in the Haunted Mansion's themesong, and the voice of Tony the Tiger: it's Thurl and Roberta Lee performing a medley of "Wing Ding Ding" and "You Wanna Talk About Texas."
Link (scroll to page-bottom)
(Thanks, LondonFilter!)
Update: Duane sez: "I can't believe you have two items about this guy and at no point do
you mention that he sang 'You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch' for which his
voice is perhaps the most famous of all! There's even a story that
goes along with that, as he received no credit in the final
production, and when Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) called him and said 'What
did you think?' he said 'Well, Ted, I apparently wasn't in it!'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blindfolded man performing Mario Bros music on a piano
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DATE: 07/09/2004 07:41:00 AM
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Here's a video of an Asian man wearing a blindfold, performing a very sprightly rendition of the theme and atmospheric music from Super Mario Brothers on a piano. His work on the atmospheric music is particularily inspired.
7.6MB WMV Link
(Thanks, Robert!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bloggers' summer reading list
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DATE: 07/09/2004 07:44:00 AM
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Phil Gyford asked a bunch of bloggers (including me) what they're reading this summer and compiled the results:
Danny O’Brien
I’m currently reading Little Bear’s New Friend by the Reader’s Digest Young Editions collection, and Moo, Baa (La La La) by Sandra Boynton. When I’m after something less demanding (or less demanding than Ada demanding that I read the above), I’ve been skimming:
David McCullough’s John Adams. I’ve started this by looking up Ben Franklin in the index, and working back. All the people I admire in the American revolution seemed to have been somewhat creeped out by John “Sedition Act” Adams, so I’m going to enjoy seeing what the other side has to say.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: DIY astronomical images
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DATE: 07/09/2004 08:54:09 AM
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The European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory, and NASA just released a free Photoshop plug-in that gives anyone access to archival astronomical images and spectra from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and others:
"If there is anything that unites astronomy, it is the worldwide use of a single file format - nearly all the images of stars and galaxies produced by telescopes on the ground and in space are stored as so-called FITS files. Unfortunately this file format has been accessible to very few people other than professional scientists using highly specialised image-processing tools."
The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator provides direct access to the full 16-bit color images. For example, this image of the planetary nebula NGC 5979 was made with the FITS Liberator by compositing four individual exposures taken through various filters. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What tech does Induce Act endanger?
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DATE: 07/09/2004 10:02:01 AM
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Ernest Miller says:
The INDUCE Act will make "whoever intentionally induces" copyright infringement liable for that infringement. Unfortunately, the definition of "intentionally induces" is extremely broad and the proposed law would give copyright holders (such as the RIAA and MPAA) tremendous flexibility in suing developers of new technology and effectively quashing progress that the copyright holders don't like. To foster reasoned debate on this topic, I'm inaugurating a new daily feature at The Importance Of ..., called "Hatch's Hit List." Each entry will give an actual example of a new and innovative device or technology that would be threatened by the INDUCE Act.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Unwired Hump Rug
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DATE: 07/09/2004 10:15:31 AM
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No, silly, not that kind of hump rug. Neither shag nor shagging to be found here. FunFurde is an awesome new furniture design blog (a topic close to my heart, because my sis and I run this online office furniture company together). This post about a laptop-friendly floor-level lounger is a perfect example of why the site's bookmarkworthy:
"The KLOC Floor Lounger from Ligne Roset is basically a padded rug with a built-in hump. If you're thinking, 'There must be more to it than that' then you're thinking too hard. Rug. Hump. That's all you get."
Now, if only you could cram a wireless access point under that thing... Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SENT phonecam art show opens tomorrow -- Saturday -- in LA
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DATE: 07/09/2004 10:54:36 AM
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Last night, Sean Bonner, Caryn Coleman and I finished setting up the SENT phonecam art show installation at LA's Standard Hotel Downtown. 25 invited artists contributed images taken with Motorola V600s. The participants are as diverse as they are talented: photographers, indie photobloggers, two famed filmmakers, a billionaire b-ball team owner, and a celeb or two or three.
The work looks incredible, regardless of how they shot it -- two shots from SENT artists are shown at left. Tattooed LA gangstaz lean out of low-rider cars. A girl gazes into the eye of a phone. White vapor rises off dark water in a Hollywood pool. A needle drops into a black vinyl groove. Little slices of digital life. Lovely stuff.
As I watched Caryn tack invited participants' photos along the wall in a grid resembling a gigantic SMS message (come to the show, you'll see what I mean), all I could think of was this: what's fascinating about people using new gadgets like phonecams to make art isn't the gadget. Human beings need to communicate just like we need to breathe, eat, and drink water. As new tools emerge, the way we communicate changes -- but the need to connect with each other, and reflect on the visual, sensual, tactile world around us remains the same.
If you're in LA, please join us tomorrow night from 7-10pm for the big public opening event -- the first time invited artists' phonecam pics will be shown. We'll be on the 4th floor of the Downtown LA Standard Hotel, 550 South Flower Street. Or, stop by Sunday 11 through Saturday 17 from 12-5pm and check out the show. Saturday's reception and the ongoing show are free and open to the public -- and we've set up free WiFi in the 4th floor gallery space to complement the free WiFi in the hotel lobby. Blog on! More details here. Press clips, including this week's LA Times review, are here.
Update: Here is a sneak preview of some of the images shot by invited artists: Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Battling for bio art
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DATE: 07/09/2004 11:42:15 AM
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The drama continues in the case of University at Buffalo professor Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble. Kurtz has been under investigation since May when police--who Kurtz called to his home after he awoke to find his wife dead of a heart attack--discovered biological materials used in the respected artist's work. (More background here.) Yesterday, Kurtz was charged with four counts of mail and wire fraud with a maximum prison sentence of 20 years each. Professor Robert Ferrell, chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, was also indicted for helping Kurtz obtain a bit of harmless bacteria.
"I am absolutely astonished," said Donald A. Henderson, Dean Emeritus
of the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health
and resident scholar at the Center for Biosecurity of the University
of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Henderson was awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by President Bush for his work in heading up the
World Health Organization smallpox eradication program and was
appointed by the Bush administration to chair the National Advisory
Council on Public Preparedness.
"Based on what I have read and understand, Professor Kurtz has been
working with totally innocuous organisms... to discuss something of
the risks and threats of biological weapons--more power to him, as
those of us in this field are likewise concerned about their
potential use and the threat of bio-terrorism." Henderson noted that
the organisms involved in this case--Serratia marcescens and Bacillus
atrophaeus--do not appear on lists of substances that could be used
in biological terrorism.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My DRM talk in Portuguese
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:08:14 PM
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Börje Karlsson has translated my DRM talk into Portuguese!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mac OS X Tiger: a new dawn of the browser war
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:13:10 PM
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In this week's NTK Danny O'Brien breaks the most exciting -- and underreported -- news about the forthcoming version of Mac OS X, called "Tiger":
Why have so
few people noticed the key element of Tiger? Dashboard
provides javascript access to some safe operating system
stuff, like drawing primitives on the window canvas. And
then, when you load the gadgets up *in Safari*, you get
the same access. Meanwhile, Apple made a deal with Opera and
Mozilla the same week to add enough to the browser plugin
API to provide the same javascript objects on other
platforms and browsers. And they all forked off from the W3C
last month to set their own standard committee, WHAT-WG. For
creating web applications. Just like Joel Spolsky was asking
them to do. So we have low-level (but not insecure)
javascript access to the desktop, an open (but non-W3C)
standard, and cross-platform plugins to support it. DON'T
YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND? It's BROWSER WARS II - ELECTRIC
BOOGALOO!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Illustrated Story of Copyright online
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:14:55 PM
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Alex sez, "The now out of print The Illustrated Story of Copyright is now available online. Unfortunately it's not under any sort of Creative Commons license. The permissions page is here. Personally I find the current online layout a little bit hard to read and confusing, this is the sort of thing that could really be improved if only people were allowed to 'remix' it for better legibility." (I agree)
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hilariously self-referential/recursive Fark photoshopping contest
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:21:38 PM
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Mack sez, "Fark is hosting a magnificently self-imploding thread of Photoshop mashups based on the New York Post's erroneous July 6 headline proclaiming that John Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt as his running mate. Scroll down and let the thread's developing visual syntax make you dizzy ..."
Link
(Thanks, Mack!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Park ranger threatens to arrest Eldred for handing out free Waldens
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:23:40 PM
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Eric Eldred, an Internet Bookmobile driver and poster child for the public domain, was threatened with arrest for handing out free copies of Walden at Walden Pond:
Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in
Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau's book
"Walden." The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading.
After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of "Walden,"
I was asked by the Walden Pond Reservation police to pack up and leave
and threatened with arrest. I left.
The park supervisor (Denise Morrissey, 978-369-3254) told me I could
not pass out free literature without a permit. And she would not give me
a permit because, as she explained, the state park gets money from a
concession by the Thoreau Society, which operates a store that sells
"Walden"--and I was competing with them by giving away free copies.
There is no place to park at Walden Pond except in the state parking
lot, for which I paid $5.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: July 13 is Computer Ate My Vote day
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:29:21 PM
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Verified Voting, a nonprofit devoted to fighting paperless electronic voting machines, is holding a national day of "Computer Ate My Vote" protest on July 13. They're asking sites to display a badge and help fight the good fight. See the page below for info on rallies and events in your state.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Send free SMS from iChat
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:45:25 PM
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It's now easy and free to send SMSes via iChat: " simply type Shift-Command-N for a 'New Chat with Person,' and enter the phone number in the above format [+16175551212]. When you send the message, you'll receive confirmation from AOL that it was sent."
Link
(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Big Thunder Mountain is b0rked again
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:48:48 PM
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Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain has jumped the tracks again (last year it killed someone) -- there are plenty of first person accounts and photos.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Every US presidential TV ad from 1952 to present
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DATE: 07/09/2004 04:51:08 PM
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Arlen sez, "This site has (I think all) of the television ads from 1952 to the present. You can view them broken down by year, the type of commercial (BackFire, Biographical, Fear, Real-people). It is interesting that, while less slick, ads haven't changed all that much, and the rhetoric seems just as strong (at least to me). It is also quite amusing to see things such as Carter's ad accusing Reagan of being a Flip-Flopper on, of all things, nuclear proliferation."
Link
(Thanks, Arlen!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DMCA says you can't fix your own tape-drive
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My cow-orker Jason Schultz reports on a breaking new DMCA horripilation: a court has ordered a company to stop fixing tape-drives because in so doing, it makes unauthorized access of a copyrighted "Maintenance Code."
A district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems for legitimate purchasers of the system.
How is this a DMCA violation? Well, it turns out that StorageTek allegedly uses some kind of algorithmic "key" to control access to its "Maintenance Code", the module that allows the service tech to debug the storage system. The court found that third party service techs who used the key without StorageTek's permission "circumvented" to gain access to the copyrighted code in violation of the DMCA, even though they had the explicit permission of the purchasers to fix their machines.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cancer causes visualised as a subway map
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DATE: 07/10/2004 03:27:34 AM
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This is a really cool visualisation of the causes of cancer from Nature magazine, in which a faux subway map is dotted with cell types required for malignancy that are joined by the molecular pathways that generate these behaviours.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sf stories written to submitted images
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DATE: 07/10/2004 03:34:38 AM
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Chris sez, "SciFiMage, a new section in Ultraverse, takes a unique approach story-telling. Instead of the editor -- that's me -- writing a story and then soliciting an artist to illustrate it, I take a submitted image and write a story about it. Anyone may submit an image -- one of their own, or someone else's."
Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Don't call him chicken
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DATE: 07/10/2004 10:56:50 AM
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Sunjit Kumar of Suva, Fiji, was raised by chickens. OK, they didn't really raise him, but as a young boy, his grandfather locked him in a chicken coop where he lived for several years. After Kumar escaped, he was taken to an old age home where the baffled staff confined him for twenty years. Now though, Elizabeth Clayton, president of a Rotary Club in Fiji's capital city, has, er, taken Kumar under her wing.
"Sujit would mostly hop around like a chicken, peck at his food, perch like a chicken and make noises like a chicken," she said. "He would prefer to roost on the floor to go to sleep rather than sleep in a bed."
Kumar currently resides in a former factory while undergoing therapy. Video available here, although he doesn't act very chicken-like in the footage. More of the story here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Old sci-fi rocket found at farm junk sale
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DATE: 07/10/2004 07:27:14 PM
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A guy writes about finding an old beat-up rocket on a farm. It was made in the 1950 to promote the Rocky Jones TV show.
The farmer had hoped to restore the rocket but never got around to it. The child who won the rocket and his friends pretty much trashed the interior, the instruments are broken and the years of rain have rusted the rear bottom (near the fins) out. The shell body and doors are still amazingly strong and could be fixed without too much effort. The interior is in fantastic shape compared to the exterior. The owner has collected electrical equipment over the years, which can be seen in some of the shots, also he has new fluorescent lights for repairing the interior lighting.
Link (Thanks, Kirby Bartlett-Sloan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Accessibility hacker facing lawsuit for improving Odeon's site
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DATE: 07/11/2004 02:24:24 AM
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Matthew Somerville is a public-spirited UK geek who specialises in hacking badly designed websites into accessible websites, by scraping their info and repoublishing it to comply with accessibility standards.
He did this service for Odeon Cinemas, whose unusably bad website is doubly impossible if you have any disability, and made a small splash: he'd disovered a bunch of security holes in their user-data collection that he brought to their attention, he turned their website into something that all their customers could use, he put in many hours of unpaid labour to improve their public offering.
At the time, Odeon told the press that they were OK with this (how generous!), but now they've threatened to sue him, siccing lawyers on him and accusing him of infringing their trademarks, copyrights, and "database rights" (database rights are a really stupid psuedocopyright that the EU has created to allow people to copyright collections of public facts, like the names of all the colours or the start times of all the movies).
In the process of creating my site, I uncovered no less than three security
holes in your site, leading to public availability of all personal data held
on the Odeon server. I immediately informed Odeon and received the following
reply:
"On behalf of ODEON I would like to extend my thanks in bringing this
flaw to our attention. As a result of the details you have sent to us, the
issue was passed to our web engineers who have solved the bug with immediate
effect. Again, thank you for your feedback and for using www.odeon.co.uk"
Also, in an article in the Independent last September, you said you were not
going to ask me to take the site down - may I ask what caused your change of
view?
Link
(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Homeland Security figuring out how to suspend election in case of terrorist attack
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DATE: 07/11/2004 11:08:50 AM
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The upcoming issue of Newsweek reports that Homeland Security's Tom Ridge is looking into how he can call off the election in the event of a terrorist attack.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network may attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election.
The magazine cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the election if an attack occurred on the day before or the day of the election.
Link (Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: My DRM talk in Norwegian
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DATE: 07/11/2004 11:21:25 AM
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Espen Andersen, a Norwegian b-school prof, has translated my DRM talk into Norwegian. Isn't it good? Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Casemods from classic industrial designs
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DATE: 07/11/2004 11:28:07 AM
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"Bootleg Objects" is a casemod project that starts with design classics like this 1973 Bang & Olafsen tape-deck, Technics turntables, etc, and builds PCs and displays into them ("In the series of the Bootleg Objects, the BO.02 is a representative of the era of the music cassette. However, the cassette slot now houses a smart card reader. Further, a DVD-drive is hidden behind a previously unused groove in the front panel, and a 16:9 TFT display has joined the object on the sly. The legendary slider control formerly used to control the radio tuning now becomes both a display and controller for a whole slew of functions. Consequently, instead of 'tuning' the label now reads 'anything'.")
Link
(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fair use = free speech
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DATE: 07/11/2004 11:40:02 AM
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Lessig points out a documentary on Fox News, one that makes extensive use of clips from Fox, without permission, to make its point, and what this means:
As the Times article describes, Greenwald's style for distributing documentaries may be the beginning of something new -- political criticism, using interviews and clips, making a strong political point, distributed through DVDs and political action groups. (See some other examples here). On what theory does he, and others, have the right to use such material without permission? On the free culture theory we call the First Amendment: Copyright law must, the Court told us in Eldred, embed "fair use"; "fair use" is informed by First Amendment values; the values of the First Amendment most relevant here are those expressed in New York Times v. Sullivan. As with news-gathering, critical political filmmaking needs a buffer zone of protection against the overreaching of the law. And if the potential of this medium -- now liberated by digital technology -- is to be realized, we need clear precedents that establish that critics have the freedom to criticize without having to hire a lawyer first.
Link
(Thanks, Larry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 40 remixed Nintendo theme classics
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DATE: 07/11/2004 01:08:55 PM
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Nintendo Breakz is a collection of 40 short (<45 sec) remixes of classic Nintendo theme music.
01 Altered Beast
02 Punch Out
03 Balloon Fight
04 Super Mario Brothers 3
05 The Adventures of Lolo
06 Tetris
07 Kirby's Adventure
08 Punch Out
09 Excite Bike
10 Mega Man 2
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: iPod language app limited to newer iPods
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DATE: 07/11/2004 01:54:43 PM
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A few weeks ago, Xeni posted about Talking Panda, an iPod application containing hundreds of common words and phrases in your choice of three languages. It seemed like a great deal for $10, so I bought the French version. (I'm going to be spending several months in Paris in the fall.) The bummer though is that for some reason, Talking Panda requires iPods with firmware v2.0 or later. It won't run on the first or second-generation iPods (like mine). Basically, if you bought your iPod before May 2003, you're out of luck. I emailed info@talkingpanda.com and developer Bob Ippolito responded right away:
"The iPod 1.x firmware is simply not capable of using Talking Panda. You can either purchase a new iPod, give the software to a friend as a gift, or I can offer you a refund of $8. Unfortunately it costs us $1 for each transaction (once for sale, once for refund), so I can not offer you a full refund."
The $2 loss won't kill me and, besides, it's my own fault for not reading the system requirements on the Talking Panda site. But I am annoyed disappointed that I can't use the software! It sounds like a useful application and I wish there was a way to get it to run on my iPod. Or that Bob would develop a version that does. Link
UPDATE: Bob writes... "You should ask Apple, not me. The revision 1 and 2 iPod hardware is technically capable of doing the things that the newer iPods do, at least in this case, but they simply have chosen not to add the functionality to the older firmware. If you want to do cool new things with the Notes functionality, you simply need to buy a new iPod. Seriously, there is no possible way for me to do anything for older iPods, short of developing a new firmware image myself and having the users void their warranty and lose iTunes integration! The iPod firmware is an extremely closed environment and I was lucky that I was able to get the kind of integration that I did."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple sells Matt Webb a lemon, then treats him like crap
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DATE: 07/11/2004 02:08:58 PM
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Matt Webb bought a 12" Powerbook and got a lemon. He's spent over a month calling Apple, trying to get it fixed, getting ignored, getting promises broken, not having his calls returned, getting the machine returned still broken, sending it back again. This is outrageous: Apple UK needs to do a better job if it plans on retaining customers.
It's happened again. Same problems as last time. mutt can't make temporary
files, the computer won't shut down cleanly, then it won't boot (stays at the
grey Apple screen) DiskWarrior can't repair it (and it freezes in Target Disk
mode). If I go into verbose mode on book, the errors are:
Load of /sbin/mach_init, errno 2, trying /etc/mach_init
Load of /etc/mach_init failed, errno 2
The hardware check, on the original CDs, comes back fine.
Coincidentally, it's after about 11 days of usage (again), and after the hard
drive has got 45Gb of data on it (again).
I called tech support. Very helpful guy in the Danish tech support call centre.
He says the next thing they'll ask me to do is reinstall.
Hang on, I've been here before.
I'm not going through this again.
I know this story. This is the one where I spend days doing what tech support
ask, send my computer off, Apple hang onto it for months and send it back, still
broken.
Link
(via Plasticbag)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cartoon sound effects catalogue
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DATE: 07/12/2004 04:13:02 AM
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The Sound Ideas Cartoon Express Sound Effects Series Complete Track and Index Listing is an amazing tour through the speicalised vocabulary of a cartoon foley artist:
ZOOM IN, SKID AND POP
ZOOM IN, SKID AND CRASH
ZOOM IN, SKID, TRIP AND FALL
BOW STRETCH AND TWANG, ARROW HIT AND VIBRATE
SHOOT ARROW AND POP BALLOON
STRETCH, SNAP AND CRASH
STRETCH, BOING AND HIT BULLSEYE
Link
(via Harper's Magazine)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Howard Lovy, free agent
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DATE: 07/12/2004 07:56:28 AM
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For several years, Howard Lovy has been mine and Mark's editor at Small Times. As of last week, Howard is no longer with the magazine. Howard is a top-notch editor and writes about nano with a rare combination of insight, intelligence, clarity, and wit. I can't wait to see what he does next! In just one year, his personal blog, Howard Lovy's NanoBot has become essential reading for anyone interested in nanotechnology, from the deepest nanohackers to future-minded laypeople:
"Here's what I do: I tell stories. I tell them simply. And I tell them in a way that is understandable to the industry's real business and financial leaders – the average consumer, the average voter, the average investor, the average reader. They are my true bosses and, ultimately, they will dictate the future course of nanotechnology as a science, an industry, an idea."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hello Kitty robot
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DATE: 07/12/2004 09:24:14 AM
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Sanrio has shipped a $3700 immobile, talking Hello Kitty robot with face- and speech-recognition.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
Update: Brian sez, "The robot wasn't developed by Sanrio, but by Nagoya-based robot developer Business Design Laboratory Co. And the robot won't be released until Nov. 1, which is apparently Hello Kitty's 30th birthday."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1982 British TV PC ads
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DATE: 07/12/2004 09:27:08 AM
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Here's a collection of downloadable TV ads for videogame and PC technology aired on British television in 1982, including Frogger and the Atari VCS.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: One backpack to shlep, store and *charge* the whole device-array
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DATE: 07/12/2004 09:51:01 AM
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The JuiceBox is a backpack crammed with one man's entirety of chargers, docks and wall-warts, wired together so that plugging in one single lead powers the entire device-array. Included devices are a Dell Axim X3i, Jabra BT250 headset, Nokia 6310i, iPod, etc...
When the front flap is open, you can see the USB hub to which are connected a BT receiver, iPod sync cable, palm sync cable and webcam cable. Behind the cables sticking in the hub you see the BT gps receiver (from www.tomtom.com), to the right of the hub the webcam itself, beneath it a pen (with a little LED light, yay!). And below that my two toolkits, one containing often used tools (crosscable, various jeweller's screwdrivers,knife, PCMCIA HD, USB storage, and sticky notes) and the other containing various nuts and bolts, some PCMCIA network cards, some torque screwdrivers, and some electrician's tape)
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paranoid locking coffee cup
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DATE: 07/12/2004 09:55:05 AM
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The LockCup is an Israeli-invented coffee-cup that is only liquid-tight when a locking pin is inserted -- no more sharing microbes with the office cup-thief.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Laurie Anderson, NASA artist-in-residence
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DATE: 07/12/2004 10:29:41 AM
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Newsweek's Brian Braiker recently did a Q&A session with legendary geek art goddess Laurie Anderson, who is currently -- of all things -- NASA's first-ever artist-in-residence. The woman many remember best for "O Superman" is as superfly as ever, and happily cooking with multiple pots: composing garden music for Japan's world expo, planning a fall tour and going on ten-day long walks. So cool. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wget helps you cope with MP3 blog overload
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DATE: 07/12/2004 10:36:08 AM
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Great item on Jeffrey Veen's blog last week -- a helpful tech tip for compulsively-downloading MP3 blog junkies:
[H]ow to keep up? For a while, I just visited a couple of interesting and well written mp3 blogs, but then they'd link to a couple more, and I'd start reading those. And then that happened a few dozen more times. My desire to stay in touch was in conflict with my increasingly limited free time.
Wget to the rescue. It's a utility for unix/linux/etc. that goes and gets stuff from Web and FTP servers -- kind of like a browser but without actually displaying what it downloads. And since it's one of those awesomely configurable command line programs, there is very little it can't do. So I run wget, give it the URLs to those mp3 blogs, and let it scrape all the new audio files it finds. Then I have it keep doing that on a daily basis, save everything into a big directory, and have a virtual radio station of hand-filtered new music. Neat.
Link (Thanks, Skye Ashbrook)
Update: BoingBoing reader ill says, "I was sad thinking that it was a shame that it was unix/linux only when the light popped on in my head... I have a mac, therefor I have a unix box. Here is an easy to follow tutorial on how to get wget working on OS X 10.2 (also works on 10.3) as long as you have the developer tools installed (my mac came with them installed): Link. I followed these instructions to the letter, and it's working."
On the os.x 10.3 tip, reader plemeljr adds, "Here is a nifty free program named DeepVacuum. It is a gui frontend for wget for os.x. Link"
And reader W3 says, "Wget is available for all *nix platforms _as well_ as for Windows." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robert Yager's gang photos
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DATE: 07/12/2004 10:49:16 AM
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An online gallery of gang photography by Robert Yager. Not new, just something rediscovered that kicks the ass of my eyes all over again. Link (thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Living replica of set for TV show "Dallas" -- in Romania
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DATE: 07/12/2004 11:00:24 AM
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Blogger and journalist Emmanuelle Richard just got back from Romania, where she photoblogged these incredible snapshots of what must be the Nth great wonder of the world -- a gigantic, sprawling replica of the set of the TV show "Dallas." Even Larry Hagman said it's a perfect match of the real thing, according to Emmanuelle:
The florid theme park is not as glorious as it used to be! "Southforkscu" as locals call it was opened in 1996 in Slobozia, South-Est of Bucharest, by the King of Romanian cheddar, Ilie Alexandru: he's one these egomaniac and corrupt nouveau-riche entrepreneurs typical of post-Communist Eastern European countries. It's like a cross between an amusement park and a luxury resort. Originally, visitors could tour the ranch, ride horses, swim in the swimming pools, visit a small zoo, enjoy the lake and climb the 50 meters Eiffel Tower. And of course, spend a night in the Dallas ranch. Larry Hagman even visited! But Alexandru went to jail for fraud. A string of investors have failed to revive the place. One of them, a Russian dude even painted the ranch in ORANGE! The zoo is closed, the horses are gone... The Romanian hotel chain now in charge wants to remodel it, open a night-club. We interviewed the manager - pure Commie style, just unbelievable. I don't have much faith in this guy's management!
This artist Sean Snyder produced an exhibit about the esthetics of the place "Script For Dallas Southfork In Hermes Land, Slobozia, Romania (2001)" It went to Paris and Berlin (Link). This page contains details about the place and a pic of the ranch before the paint job. It's quite surreal, especially when you see the Eiffel Tower from the road, behind rows of cornfields.
Link to Emmanuelle's moblog, Link to related gallery exhibit, and more on the moblog of Emmanuelle's husband and travel companion, journalist/blogger Matt Welch: Link 1, Link 2.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Very long NYT magazine article about "serious" comic books
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DATE: 07/12/2004 11:31:22 AM
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Every couple of years, some newspaper or magazine runs an article about how comic books aren't just for kids anymore. The latest one is from this Sunday's NYT Magazine. It's over seven thousand words long! I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it looks like a great intro to the "graphic novel" genre. There's also a good group photo of Seth, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, Speigelman and Joe Sacco. Don't miss the slide show with audio commentary by the cartoonists.
There was a minor flowering of serious comic books in the mid-80's, with the almost simultaneous appearance of Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking ''Maus''; of the ''Love and Rockets'' series, by two California brothers, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez; and of two exceptionally smart and ambitious superhero-based books, ''Watchmen,'' by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and ''Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,'' by Frank Miller. Newspapers and magazines ran articles with virtually the same headline: ''Crash! Zap! Pow! Comics Aren't Just for Kids Anymore!'' But the movement failed to take hold, in large part because there weren't enough other books on the same level.
The difference this time is that there is something like a critical mass of artists, young and old, uncovering new possibilities in this once-marginal form, and a new generation of readers, perhaps, who have grown up staring at cartoon images on their computer screens and in their video games, not to mention the savvy librarians and teachers who now cater to their interests and short attention spans. The publicity that has spilled over from movies like ''Ghost World,'' originally a graphic novel by Dan Clowes, has certainly not hurt. And there is much better distribution of high-end comics now, thanks in part to two enterprising publishers, Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal and Fantagraphics Books in Seattle, which have managed to get their wares into traditional bookstores, not just the comics specialty shops. Some of the better-known graphic novels are published not by comics companies at all but by mainstream publishing houses -- by Pantheon, in particular -- and have put up mainstream sales numbers. ''Persepolis,'' for example, Marjane Satrapi's charming, poignant story, drawn in small black-and-white panels that evoke Persian miniatures, about a young girl growing up in Iran and her family's suffering following the 1979 Islamic revolution, has sold 450,000 copies worldwide so far; ''Jimmy Corrigan'' sold 100,000 in hardback, and the newly released paperback is also moving briskly.
Link (Thanks, Spencer!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Purple Rain movieoke
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DATE: 07/12/2004 12:13:29 PM
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Paging Anil "I was a Prince fan when being a Prince fan was uncool" Dash! Cool SF metroblog post about an upcoming screening of film classic Purple Rain this weekend in San Francisco. The host, Peaches Christ (not to be confused with that other Peaches), is projecting lyrics on the wall, transforming the whole Princetacular deal into a Rocky Horror-like sing-a-long/Movie-oke/karaoke orgy of '80s nostalgia. Show up early for the unmissably rad "80's Slut Pageant." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dancing almond optical illusion
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DATE: 07/12/2004 01:45:09 PM
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Here's a nice optical illusion. A bunch of almond-looking things arranged in a particular pattern appear to undulate. (Also, don't miss the link to the confounding checkershadow illusion, which I wrote about a couple of years ago in BB.) Link Bill Beaty points out that the creator of this image ( Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who is uncredited in the site linked above) has a lot of other optical illusions, which are well worth checking out.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do Tuesday night in LA: RES screening
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DATE: 07/12/2004 02:02:58 PM
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OK, look -- even if this description of tomorrow night's monthly RES screening in Hollywood doesn't get you worked up, consider this: it's followed by an afterparty featuring an as-yet-unannounced secret Silverlake-based DJ duo who CONVERTED AN ICE CREAM TRUCK INTO A MOBILE DUB REGGAE SOUNDSYSTEM. That is the wickedest most baddassed thing I've ever heard of in my life at least the last three hours. Seriously, the program looks great too, and features:
special guest Geoff McFetridge who will share a retrospective of his video work including his music videos for the Avalanches, Simian, Plaid and his quirky spots for Jinro, X-Games, Burton and HP. The program will also include new short films from Suk & Koch, Brett Simon and Cheryl Dunn who will present the world premiere of Come Mute. Also screening: breaking new music videos for Placebo, Mr. Lif, Armand Van Helden, Supergrass, Los Amigos Invisibles, Colder and Floria Sigismondi's latest for the Cure.
Link to screening info, and listen to an archived live set from the ice-cream rockaz who shall not be named right here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Real-time GPS tracking of released prisoners
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DATE: 07/12/2004 02:27:38 PM
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I wrote a short piece for TheFeature about the increasing use of GPS ankle bracelets to track parolees' whereabouts. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fahrenheit 911 factchecks
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DATE: 07/12/2004 02:42:21 PM
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Here are Michael Moore's extensive factchecking notes on Fahrenheit 911.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 1975 underground cartoonist button series
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DATE: 07/12/2004 02:49:39 PM
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In 1975, a bunch of underground cartoonists were asked to submit self-portraits for a button series. Denis Kitchen is selling the set of all 54 buttons for $195, or you can buy individual ones for $4.Link (Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Weird sticker on my DSL modem
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DATE: 07/12/2004 04:49:33 PM
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I just got my Yahoo! DSL self-install kit in the mail, and the modem has a red sticker on it that reads:
"ATTENTION To maximize connection speed, leave this modem on for 10 days after DSL installation is complete. Please Note: You can use your DSL service during this time. It is not necessary to leave your computer on, only the modem."
Why do I have to leave the modem on for 10 days? Is something inside it fermenting? Email me if you know.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Asia Carrera's hothothot barely legal casemod
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DATE: 07/12/2004 04:50:40 PM
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Retired porn superstar, geek, and mom-to-be Asia Carrera whipped up this nifty casemod. More on the lovely Ms. Carrera and her homebuilt PC here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pac-Mondrian competition concept doc
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DATE: 07/12/2004 04:59:30 PM
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From the project website: "Pac-Mondrian closes the perceptual distance between fine art and video games by combining Piet Mondrian's Modernist masterpiece 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' with Toru Iwatani's classic video game Pac-Man. The project offers gamers a chance to compete for $2000 worth of cash prizes for high score and level design." Link (Thank you, Snoodles!) update: Francis Hwang of Rhizome.org points out that this web page contains a proposal for a competition -- apparently, the project never secured the funding needed, so there is no actual competition, prize, or Pac Mondrian face-off. A geek can dream, though, can't s/he?
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Happy Birthday, Bucky!
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DATE: 07/12/2004 10:32:53 PM
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Today would have been R. Buckminster Fuller's 109th birthday. It's also the 50 year anniversary of his patent for the geodesic dome. The Bucky Fuller commemorative postage stamp that Mark posted about here is now available from the United States Postal Service.
"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, give every human on earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before—that we now have an option for all humanity to 'make it' successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."
Happy birthday, Bucky! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: China tosses out Viagra patent
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DATE: 07/13/2004 01:03:57 AM
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China has revoked Pfizer's patent over Viagra, a move that Lawmeme argues is a precursor to widespread dismissal of pharmaceutical patents.
In what appears to be the first pharmaceutical patent revocation, China has revoked the patent. Not long after the patent was granted, pharmaceutical producers (12 in this account) requested re-examination. It isn't quite clear yet exactly what happened at that re-examination. Some claim the patent failed the detailed description required by Article 26 of China's patent code. Others claim it failed the novelty requirement. Pfizer claims its patent still stands pending appeal. The Viagra patent was already poorly enforced, and now the prognosis looks even more bleak for Pfizer.
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TITLE: Old-school Transformers as homemade, detailed 3D models
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DATE: 07/13/2004 01:25:41 AM
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Ben sez, "Generation One Transformers (and others, such as from the War Within series) have been rendered into detailed 3D models, and the artist has also provided short films where they, as Transformers must, transform."
Link
(Thanks, Ben!)
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TITLE: Radiators from England with much sexiness
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DATE: 07/13/2004 01:28:43 AM
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Fun Furde has written a short illustrated appreciation of high-end, design-y English hot-water radiators. These things cost a fortune, but some of them are very pretty indeed.
Link
(Thanks, Fun Furde!)
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TITLE: Braille t-shirts with anti-groper countermeasures
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DATE: 07/13/2004 01:36:52 AM
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These Braille t-shirts (49 Canadian pesos each) say things like "naughty" and include an ASCII translation under the front bottom seam so that you can flip up the hem and pre-empt gropers who try to read your chestular region.
Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
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TITLE: Open source programmer blesses "ripoff" of his code
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DATE: 07/13/2004 01:45:12 AM
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Jaleco, a Gameboy Advance cartridge vendor, released a vintage game-pack that included a public-domain NES emulator written by Loopy. They didn't credit him in the release, and a lot of hackers and gamers were affronted on Loopy's behalf, but Loopy doesn't care. As Waxy says, "his message embodies the spirit of the open-source movement":
Let someone take an idea, do something cool with it, and not have to hesitate because of legal nitpickings. If a company can take something that I made, and turn it into a product that other people enjoy, I'm all the happier for it. Why should I care if someone else profits off of something I made? It's already free.
Demanding that someone pay homage to my work is just ego-stroking, and I'm not into that. Sure, as a courtesy it would have been nice for Jaleco to tell me "hey, thanks for the source", and they didn't, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it, because I didn't write PocketNES so people would pat me on the back.
I wrote it so people could have fun playing old games. And that's exactly what's happening here. Mission accomplished.
I'm with him. After all, this guy used the holes in copyright to make an emulator that relied on Nintendo's (and its suppliers') IP.
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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TITLE: Save your vote: get off your ass and get counted
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DATE: 07/13/2004 02:12:31 AM
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A reminder: today is the US nationwide "Computer Ate My Vote Day," with rallies across the country to raise awareness of the dangers of paperless electronic voting and the need for election integrity. Click below to find out where you can show up to save your vote.
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TITLE: Disney World "pirate style" trousers on eBay
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DATE: 07/13/2004 02:17:21 AM
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An eBay seller is getting rid of ten pairs of Disney World Animal Kingdom "pirate style" trousers -- 32" waists. I don't rightly remember there being pirates at the Animal Kingdom, but they are swell renfaire-esque pantaloons.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sterling's Singularity speech audio
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DATE: 07/13/2004 02:47:10 AM
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Bruce Sterling's speech to the Long Now Foundation on the Singularity is a corker. He really is a *hell* of a speaker.
70.1 MB MP3 Link
(via Sylloge)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Extreme doctoring
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DATE: 07/13/2004 08:33:24 AM
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Kevin Fong was dubbed "Spacedoc" by Esquire magazine's list of "most influential men under 40." From Everest to orbit, Fong studies how the body reacts to extreme environments. He hopes his research on trauma will help physicians treat all critical care patients. New Scientist has a long interview with Fong:
"When you get down to the nuts and bolts, critical care is chiefly about one thing - getting oxygen molecules and putting them into the cellular machinery so that they can be used to make energy. At high altitudes, for example, you have healthy people who have extremely low levels of oxygen in their bloodstream by virtue of their physical environment. And somehow they manage not just to be alive but to climb mountains. If you show measurements of the blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in a mountaineer on top of Everest to a critical care physician, they will say: "When did this patient die?" The numbers don't look compatible with life. How someone can go to the edge of human survival and come back to live a healthy and productive life is what critical care is all about. I've begun to regard intensive care as another extreme environment."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Now that's mobile entertainment: eccentric dude's piano bar on wheels
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DATE: 07/13/2004 09:57:08 AM
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Following up on yesterday's post about the ice cream truck converted into a reggae dub soundsystem on wheels, Bill Pollock says: "Harrington King (whose business cards read "Spiritual Optimist") regularly parks his custom piano bar on wheels at various places down midtown [Sacramento, California] most weekend nights. Its cozy inside, appropriately piano bar-y with assorted bongos for those who feel moved to play. An awful photo but decent writeup avaialble via the News & Review (Link) and the traveling piano bar has its own website (Link)."
On the piano bar website, an archived interview in the Sacramento Bee, in which the eccentric dude says:
(Reporter) Do you have a favorite weekend song to play?
(King) I've got a Sacramento song that people like.
(Reporter) What's that?
(King) I don't know. I guess it's called "Sacramento Song."
(Reporter) You go to any music spots around town?
(King) I am a music spot around town.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Digital movieblog includes short films from Chernobyl and Ethiopia
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DATE: 07/13/2004 10:13:18 AM
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Luuk Bowman's collaborative movieblog Tropisms is starting to move again, after a long silence.
Tropisms started in 2002 as a personal videolog or "vlog," a weblog that integrated streaming video-files with a travel diary. The site has grown into a collective movieblog with a small group of participating filmmakers. Peter Boonstra and Marcel van Brakel (NL) are currently in Chernobyl, where they upload movies in an internet cafe. Josh Koury (VS) traces his aunt and uncle that have been stationed to a small section of backwoods Tennessee by the military. Earlier this year, Luuk Bouwman (NL) went to Ethiopia to find out about computer love in a place usually associated with famine. Tropisms is a heavy site, it uses flash and quicktime streams, so a broadband connection is needed. On Macs, Mozilla is preferable.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Howard Rheingold's bad experience with the Treo 600 and Sprint
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DATE: 07/13/2004 10:31:24 AM
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Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs and a lot of other wonderful books about the social effects of new technologies, recounts his frustrating customer service experience when he took his broken Treo 600 to Sprint:
[T]he indifferent young man I talked to at the Sprint store in the Bonair shopping center in San Rafael, California then said that they didn't do repairs or diagnostics and didn't know who did. He actually SURFED THE WEB to give me the phone number of Palm. So I called Palm, who told me they could deal with everyone's Treo 600 except Sprint's. They directed me to a third party repair service whose voicemail sends you to the web.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mothersbaugh's happy mutants
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DATE: 07/13/2004 10:53:16 AM
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Mark "Devo" Mothersbaugh has created a stunningly surreal series of manipulated antique photographs. Many of them are displayed in vintage daguerrotype frames. From the artist's statement:
"It was in the early 1900's that Rorschach and other psychiatrists developed hunches regarding symmetry and the internal workings of man. Humans, great pretenders to bi-lateral symmetry, are in actuality, closer to potatoes in their lack of precise symmetry. A close look reveals what is truly inside the people around us."
Mothersbaugh's Beautiful Mutants collection is currently touring galleries around the United States. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to complain to Patriot Act flipfloppers
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DATE: 07/13/2004 11:42:40 AM
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Jim sez: "Late last week, the House rejected an amendment to the USA Patriot Act that would have curtailed some of the more contentious provisions. It turns out that the GOP kept the vote open for 23 minutes in order to strong arm persuade a few of the more vertebrate-challenged congressfolk. Nine congresspeople, all Repbulican, changed their vote from supporting the ammendment to rejecting it, most likely after being pressured by the White House and/or Republican attack dog Tom deLay. This site lets you know who these waffling flip floppers are and how to give 'em a piece of your mind." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Happy Talk From Hell" -- Salon reviews Outfoxed
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DATE: 07/13/2004 11:57:35 AM
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Salon has a review of the new documentary about Fox news, called Outfoxed, which went on sale today and is now the 11th best-selling DVD on Amazon.
Take the network's "some people say" mantra (as used in my first paragraph, above). I had watched plenty of Fox News without ever noticing this -- it's a way of introducing commentary, and specifically the reflexive right-wing views of the presumptive Fox core audience, into what is supposed to be news coverage, while appearing to not quite endorse it. "Some people say that criticizing the war at a time like this is letting down our men and women in uniform," or "Some people say Richard Clarke is a political operative who's trying to sell books." (Or, yes, "Some people are saying that John Kerry looks French!" -- uttered with a peculiar mixture of consternation and delight. Gosh, what a weird idea! But now that you mention it ...!)
Also, here's Fox's scary rebuttal to the documentary.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Backyard Coaster
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DATE: 07/13/2004 12:01:47 PM
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The Blue Flash is a roller coaster that John Ivers constructed in his rural Indiana backyard.
"I love to go to amusement parks and ride the the rides, but I can't stand waiting in line... To be honest with you, I'm not an educated engineer or mathematician or anything like that. It was more or less trial-and-error."
Here's a radio piece on Ivers and his coaster from WYNC's "The Next Big Thing." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Spambaiter takes idiot 419er for a ride
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DATE: 07/13/2004 12:06:37 PM
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BBC article about a Nigerian scammer who was tricked into painting his chest with a red "9" on it. Link (Thanks, Stresspuppy!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hummer H2 finger flipping photo gallery
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DATE: 07/13/2004 12:15:41 PM
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Countless pictures of people flipping the bird at Hummer H2's.
The H2 is the ultimate poseur vehicle. It has the chassis of a Chevy Tahoe and a body that looks like the original Hummer; i.e. it's a Chevy Tahoe in disguise.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese geek status hierarchy
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DATE: 07/13/2004 12:22:32 PM
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Fascinating chart of the Japanese geek status hierarchy. Link (Thanks, Zed!)
John sez: Note that the link Mark Frauenfelder posted earlier today, the "Japanese geek status hierarchy," is a clear rip off of/homage to Lore Sjöberg's geek hierarchy.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mexico's Bionic Attorney General
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DATE: 07/13/2004 01:40:53 PM
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Dave sez: El Universal (Mexico City) is reporting that the Attorney General of Mexico, Rafael Macedo, had a microchip inserted under the skin of one of his arms to give him access to a new crime database and also enable him to be traced if he is ever abducted.
Bloomberg news added "about 160 Mexican officials will carry the microchip" and that "the chip can't be removed, but will be deactivated after Macedo's term as attorney general expires." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Craphounds in Manhattan: NYC Mongo
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DATE: 07/13/2004 03:09:32 PM
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Mongo: Adventures In Trash is a new book by Ted Both, a South African who moved to NYC and furnished his apartment with goodies found in kerbside trash ("Mongo" in NYC picker-parlance), then chronicled his adventures with Manhattan's trashers, divers and pickers.
Like good mongo, the New Yorkers of Botha's book were hard to find. It took him two years to collect the cast of New Yorkers portrayed in his book. Some were open to talking about collecting other people's trash and reusing it, others were more reserved.
"It was a gradual process. I approached a lot of crazy people. They swore at me, they chased me away and they started running. You start to know how people are going to act," Botha said while on his way to visit one of the collectors in his book -- a New Yorker named Dave who uses a metal detector to parse through silt from sewers.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: All-reality TV channel to be launched by Fox
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DATE: 07/13/2004 06:02:33 PM
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Fox is starting a cable channel devoted exclusively to the programming genre everyone loves to hate. They're actually not the first to take a crack at 24/7 reality TV -- I wrote this piece for Wired Magazine last year about Larry Namer's Reality Central, a startup network that's still having a tough time getting off the ground. Pass me a pig bladder and a box of mealworms -- gonna be a long night in front of the tube. Link to more on the Fox reality channel launch. (Thanks, Jon)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Suggesting a link? Use the form
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:06:36 AM
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A quick reminder: we prefer to get Boing Boing submissions via the suggest-a-link form. Sending your submission there formats it for easy conversion to a blog-post, distributes among multiple editors (increasing the chance that it will get picked up), and simplifies our existence greatly. I, for one, won't consider Boing Boing suggestions via direct email, IM or the like -- just not enough hours in the day to do it the hard way. Thanks!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help squash bugs in the next edition of Eastern Standard Tribe
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:45:39 AM
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The paperback edition of my novel Eastern Standard Tribe is in production, and my publisher has requested an errata sheet with collected typos, spelling errors, consistency problems, etc. Last year, William Gibson solicited message-board feedback from his readers to help him produce the errata sheet for the paperback of Pattern Recognition, but I wanna go one better, so I've put up a Wiki (a kind of web-page that anyone can edit) for anyone who's got a favorite EST correction that s/he wants to see made in the next edition.
Changes are due by July 21 -- thanks in advance!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tolkien estate claims trademark for "shire"
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:03:38 AM
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The Tolkien estate and Warners have sent out a lawyergram to the owner of shiremail.com, arguing that the word "Shire" belongs to them. The Register traces over 1,000 years of usage of the word "Shire" in England, and enumerates many towns with the word "shire" in their names across the English countryside.
n fact, we don't think it would be too provocative to suggest that JRR Tolkien may have been inspired by over a thousand years of common history when he first came up with the name "The Shire" as the idyllic home country of the books' main protagonists, the hobbits.
However, the legal letter claims that "goodwill in the name has been achieved through sales of such books". Certainly The Shire sounded rather nice as presented in the fictional books, but we suspect the goodwill towards the area in which people live was there before Mr Tolkien even put pen to paper.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hulkblog SMASH!
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:05:32 AM
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The Incredible Hulk's blog is incredibly funny -- I actually snarfed.
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Hulk saw movie about bug-man and it was good but needed more smashing.
AND HULK DID NOT GET SNIFFLY DURING ROMANTIC SCENES SO IF YOU HEAR IRON MAN OR THOR TALKING ABOUT IT THEY ARE LIARS.
Posted by: Incredible Hulk / 4:15 PM // Comments (3) | Trackback (0)
Thursday, June 24, 2004
HULK AT LIBRARY USING COMPUTER.
SHHHH.
Posted by: Incredible Hulk / 10:32 AM // Comments (4) | Trackback (0)
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Before weblogs, "blog" was a kind of cocktail at sf cons
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:07:44 AM
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Ev searched Google's Usenet archives for early uses of the term "blog" and uncovered a science-fiction fannish cocktail called the "blog" that predates weblogs by years:
You should be aware that Blog was originally devised by British fans in the 1950s. There were two versions. A Liverpool fan named Peter Hamilton came up with the recipe for Blog Mark I, which consisted of "a brandy and egg flip base, to which was added black currant puree, Alka Seltzer, and Beechan's Powder. It effervesced." A second, simplified version (Blog Mark II) was produced by hotel barmen at the first Kettering Eastercon (1955) and consisted of "a half-pint of cider and a measure of rum." Anybody know what `egg flip' and `Beecham's Powder' are? (Quoted material taken from p.168 of A WEALTH OF FABLE, by Harry Warner, Jr.)
Link
Update: Neal sez: Dr. Seuss's "The Shape of Me and Other Stuff" contains these lines:
'And speaking of shapes/now just suppose/you were shaped like one of these!/or those!/or like a Blogg/or a garden hose!"
The Blogg in question is pictured only in silhouette (like everything else in the book); it looks sorta like a bipedal camel.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtual Oz theme-park created in online game
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:16:08 AM
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A player in Second Life (a highly user-modifiable massively multiplayer online game) converted her private in-game island into a virtual Oz themepark as a gift for another player. The elaborate project involved in-game collaboration between virtual costumers, set designers, programmers, and musical scorers.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sega Saturn emulator in open source
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:22:51 AM
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Cassini is an open source Sega Saturn emulator that plays a number of commercial Sega games.
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(via Waxy)
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TITLE: Futuristic sleep-pods at Empire State Building: $14/20 min
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:27:31 AM
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MetroNaps is a business that operates an urban napping service in the Empire State Building, offering customers the opportunity to reclilne in a hooded, electrified Bond-villain "MetroPod" and get a "lotion, facial spritz and lemon-scented hand towels" when you're done. They'll even deliver lunch to your pod. The rate is $14 (and up) for a 20 minute nap.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Deaths at Disneyland
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:32:45 AM
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Here's a trip through all the deaths that have taken place at Disneyland, with photos of the widowmaking apparati. The author does a good job of separating the urban legends from the truth, and pointing the finger at whomever it deserves to be pointed at (sometimes Disney, sometimes foolhardy guests). The over-the-top cussin'-and-rantin' style is very nice.
Although the presumed allure of the PeopleMover during a graduation takeover of the Magic Kingdom would be hopes for a nice view of the Anaheim skyline and a hummer, the usual proliferation of the drunken testosterone penned another chapter of the ride's storied existence in blood during the summer of 1980.
Gerardo Gonzales had presumably never heard of the name Ricky Lee Yama when he boarded the sluggish trail of candy-painted tram cars that night, which is a shame. Aside from sparing his parents the embarrassment of recounting his story to relatives at the wake, it would have also denied an opportunity for ironic history to repeat itself. Sadly, this wasn't the case.
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(Thanks, Spencer!)
Update: Chris sez, "The story posted on Disneyland deaths has at least one big error. The most recent mentioned death spoke of the wrong person. The 43 year old woman supposedly killed survived the accident, although she suffered a severe injury. Her husband, Luan Phi Dawson, however, died tragically. He was a fine software engineer on Microsoft Word and deserves to be remembered."
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TITLE: Patent-scammers use bad analogies to defend worse business practices
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DATE: 07/14/2004 02:38:27 AM
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My cow-orker Jason Schultz is running EFF's patent-busting project, and high on his list of damaging Internet patents is Acacia Research's patent on streaming media. Acacia has pursued this patent by targetting porn companies and extracting settlements in order to fund a war-chest that it is now using to sue bigger media entities -- presumably this trail ends with orgs like the BBC, CBC, and Live365.
Adult Video News (AVN) interviewed Jason and some of the Acacia people about the ongoing work to bust the patent, and the Acacia people busted out this bizarre analogy about stealing SUVs ("If someone broke into your garage and stole your SUV, and put a speaker on the top, and was driving around the neighborhood making some political statement, trying to get your SUV back wouldn't be trying to stifle free speech, it would be you trying to get your property back. If somebody is using your property, you have a right to stop them or receive a license or receive royalties").
Jason's repsonse was classic:
"There's no question now that an SUV in your garage is something you own. But here there's a real question as to whether Acacia actually invented anything new or simply is claiming monopoly on technology that millions of people use every day to express themselves," Schultz told AVNOnline.com.
"And the other thing is, I don't have to break into your garage to steal your SUV to express myself in the physical world. But I can't think of a modern Website, especially news Websites, that don't depend on streaming some kind of audio or video to express themselves on the Web. It has become a fundamental part of free expression online," he continued. "And I would say it has become the predominant method for artists and news organizations to connect to their audiences. [Acacia] doesn't want to own just the SUV, [they] want to own every single automobile and stereo system in the world, to use [their] contorted analogy."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!
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DATE: 07/14/2004 03:35:38 AM
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Waxy's dreamt up a fine net.sport: viewing Amazon reviews ranked from lowest rating to highest: he calls it the "Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!" and he's posted some of his faves and invited his readers to do the same.
Beach Boys, "Pet Sounds"
* "This is not the Beach Boys. It can't be. Why? No beach songs! I thought it was some kind of joke. All 'Pet Sounds' offers is the opportunity to hear Brian Wilson whine for forty minutes, backed by elevator music."
* "It's full of bland harmonizing by guys that could barely swim."
* "The lyrics consist of commonplace rhyming conversational prose, totally lacking in imagery, metaphor and anything else that separates verse from poetry."
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TITLE: Druid busted for possession of a sword
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DATE: 07/14/2004 06:01:58 AM
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A 26-year-old druid was arrested in Portsmouth for going to the hardware store while wearing his ceremonial sword:
About a dozen fellow members of the Insular Order of Druids sat in the court's public gallery, while chief druid King Arthur Pendragon, wearing white robes with a red lion emblazoned on the front, acted as Williams's legal adviser.
The sword, named Talisen, has been confiscated by police as evidence.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: National Barbie in a Blender Day
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DATE: 07/14/2004 06:15:00 AM
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Freeculture.org is throwing a "National Barbie in a Blender Day" to celebrate the victory over Mattel, which sued a photographer for taking pictures of nude Barbies.
Freeculture.org has launched an official site for the National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day project, at www.barbieinablender.org. Users are invited to submit artistic pieces inspired by Forsythe's "Food Chain Barbie" series to blended@barbieinablender.org for the site's upcoming gallery of submitted work.
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(Thanks, Alex!)
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TITLE: Internet Archive additions as RSS
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DATE: 07/14/2004 06:24:12 AM
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This is an RSS feed for new files added to the Internet Archive (images, music, video): lots of amazing serendipity here!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech and Hollywood heavyweights create content coalition
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DATE: 07/14/2004 07:36:47 AM
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From John Borland at CNET:
Several high-profile technology companies and movie studios are expected to announce Wednesday that they have formed a coalition to ensure that high-definition video and other content cannot be pirated in home networks.
Sources familiar with the group's formation said the initial members include IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Warner Bros., Disney and Panasonic.
The announcement is scheduled to be made at the cross-industry Content Protection Technology Working Group (CPTWG) meeting in Los Angeles, although last-minute membership changes could occur before then.
The alliance marks the culmination of years of tentative and often suspicious contact between the high-tech industry and Hollywood. It will be aimed at developing specifications to protect copyrighted content such as movies inside home networks. If the group is successful, a consumer might be able to download a high-definition movie, store it on a PC, watch it on a television and transfer it to a mobile device to watch while traveling.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New issue of RU Sirius' NeoFiles
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DATE: 07/14/2004 07:43:21 AM
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RU Sirius has just published his eighth issue of NeoFiles, a mind-bending online magazine about technology and human potential. In the new issue, transhumanist Max More talks about the Extropians, Pat Kane discusses play as work, and Tom Greco explores the real value of money. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Miniscule of Sound
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DATE: 07/14/2004 07:46:21 AM
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This sounds pretty funny en pixel, and I'm sure it'd be even more if you stumbled on it at a humongoid ravefest with e'd out dancing bodies as far as they eye can see. It's a parody of techno music industry media gigantor Ministry of Sound.
Following on from the ice-cream van dub sound system and the piano bar on wheels, i'd like to draw your attention to the Miniscule of Sound.
i've been going to summertime festivals in the uk for years, and these guys have been on the circuit for almost a decade. It's basically a converted horsebox kitted out on the inside with disco ball, coloured lights, day-glo fluffy roof, light-panelled dancefloor, and a dj (usually) dressed as one of the vilage people playing something cheesey on a tiny pair of decks. The door staff on the outside advise us they are "'avin it tiny!" on the way in. Club capacity is about 8, maybe 9 at a squeeze. As clubbing experiences go, it's one of the best and it's free. If you see them at a festie this year, pay them a visit.
Link (thanks sim0nkey!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblogging Fortune's Brainstorm Con in Aspen
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DATE: 07/14/2004 07:56:03 AM
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Cameron Sinclair, the man who co-founded a very interesting organization called Architecture for Humanity, is mo-pho-blogging Fortune Magazine's
Brainstorm Conference. Here's a Link to the blog.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: More Roomba hacking
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DATE: 07/14/2004 07:59:03 AM
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Another group of hardware hackers have at a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner:
"For higher level control, we've attached a Virgin Webplayer. The Webplayer was sold as a loss leader for Virgin's internet service in the late 90s, and thus can be found on ebay for under $100. It has two serial ports, a 200MHz Geode processor, 64M ram, and a miniPCI port. Thus, we can give it an 802.11b card, a webcam, and a usb-serial adapter."
Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Music to Phonecam by: Kill Bill Vol. 2 Mashups
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DATE: 07/14/2004 08:15:08 AM
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During this weekend's launch of the SENT phonecam photography show (press coverage here), pics submitted by the public were displayed on iMac screens, refreshing automatically every few minutes (link), while iTunes blasted some groovy mashups. Many at the show asked about the tunes, so here is one highlight from the playlist. I'll post more over the next few days -- don't want to spoil you with a jam overdose.
The tracks people seemed to dig most were all from an amazing mashup album by a group of DJs called Hanzo Steel -- remixes inspired by the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 2. My favorite track: "Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down" (Link to free MP3 track). The track includes samples from: "Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down" by Nancy Sinatra, "Big Beat" by Billy Squier/"Fix Up Look Sharp" by Dizzee Rascal, "Apache" by the Incredible Bongo Band (as used by Nas), "Take Me To The Mardis Gras" by Bob James/"Peter Piper" by Run DMC and audio samples from many of the original Kung Fu films which are referenced in Tarantino's movies. I can't stop playing this track. It scratches the funk spot in my brain.
Here are two more freebies from the same disc: "Twisted Nerve (Biter's Revenge)" (Link to free MP3). Includes "Twisted Nerve" by Bernard Herrmann and "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson. And "Ironsides" includes "Ironsides" by Quincy Jones plus Divine Styler. (Link to free MP3).
Link to Hanzo Steel home (check the fine cover art! Buy the CD!). Check out SENT in person through Saturday July 17 (12-5pm daily) at the Downtown Standard Hotel in LA. Oh, and the image shown here is one of the 1500 +/- phonecam snapshots submitted by the public. You can never have enough phonecam pics of hot electroclash babes licking themselves in the mirror, I always say. (Thanks for the free tracks, Hanzo Steel!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Show of support for Seattle photoblogger harassed by authorities
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DATE: 07/14/2004 10:19:14 AM
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Kate from Seattle.metroblogging.net says:
In a follow-up to your Boing Boing post about the photography student's odd run-in with Homeland Security , a peaceful protest is being organized in response.
More details about the public show of support here: Link. (Ed.: "Photoblogging is not a crime" t-shirts are inevitable...) Update: Seattle Times story here. And a Seattle Post-Intelligencer column ends with this line: "I don't think Ian's a spy. Ian loves America. Ian's crime was being a brown man with a camera in hand during a time of runaway fear." (Thanks, Ari!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Man flashes authorities during airport screening
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DATE: 07/14/2004 11:31:20 AM
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An untrusted traveler going commando drops trou and flashes airport security when he becomes frustrated with the anti-terrorist screening process. And a movement is born: The Freedom Flash!
[Daryl] Miller then said, "There, how do you like your job," thus ending the screening, according to the police report. He was charged with indecent exposure and released on $300 bail. "We've never had anybody do that before," said airport police Lt. Matt Christenson. "But it's not abnormal for people to become frustrated with the screening process."
Miller also became belligerent during the screening, Transportation Security Administration officers told police. One TSA employee also told police that Miller had a note inside a magazine in his bag with an expletive, and told a TSA employee "Oh yeah, it's for you" when asked who the note was directed at. "This person exposed themself in a public area, a clear violation of the law, and we needed to take some action on that, otherwise everybody would be dropping their pants," Christenson said.
Link (Thanks, Q-Burns!)Update: Sacre blog! Reader Kurt H. says: "Not the first time someone has gotten pissed at airport security and stripped. Back in 2002, a French woman got upset and took off her top."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney's $80 million mistake: Fahrenheit 911
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:23:33 PM
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Disney -- cash-strapped and slumping -- made an enormous mistake when it declined to distribute Moore's latest blockbuster, Fahrenheit 911.
Michael Moore's headline grabbing documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which Disney declined to distribute, grossed more than $80 million in its first three weeks of release, more than any Disney film this year and any documentary ever.
"It's held up fairly well," said Andy Spencer, a '96 graduate who works at Raleigh's Rialto theater. "It was two weeks straight of either sellouts or virtual sellouts."
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(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unlinkable NYT doomed to google-obscurity
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:30:21 PM
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The NYT's registration system and expiring pages have doomed them to google-obscurity. Wired News argues that they've gone from being the paper of record to a Web-era irrelevancy, and all to protect a Lexis-Nexis agreement and to bring in two to three percent of the digital division's profits.
But recently, when I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mena Trott steps down as SixApart CEO
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:35:51 PM
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Mena Trott has stepped down as CEO of SixApart, makers of Movable Type and TypePad, in favour of Barak Berkowitz, one of their Series A investors. Mena's written a heartfelt appreciation of Barak that is an instant classic -- a unique example of a company founder's sincere desire to see her efforts bear fruit, even if she's not's in charge any longer (though she's staying on as President).
At our office, we had phone cables running up and down walls and doorframes and across the floor. This mess was around for months until one day Barak came to work with a T-shirt, some tool-belt type thing and some device to do phone wiring. During the course of the afternoon, Barak installed our phone lines and cleaned up the office.
Incidentally, while he was doing this, Maile, our administrative assistant came in for her first interview with us and saw Barak. A week or two later when we called her in for a second interview I asked that she speak with Barak so that he could interview her as well. After we hired Maile and explained who Barak was she laughed and said "Oh, I thought he was the handyman and that this company really liked to get everyone involved!"
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Origin of colour-trends
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:38:17 PM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written an amazing, heavily linked, well-researched piece on the Color Marketing Group, a trade association that determines each season's "in" colours and dictates the national pallette.
I knew what was up with the big khaki push. Remember that one? Ads everywhere saying "Hemingway wore khaki"? We'd all been wearing black for several years. We had black levis, good black skirts, black leather or denim jackets, little black dresses—a great installed user base of basic black clothing, plus the colored stuff we wore with it. I hadn't heard anyone sighing for the return of khaki, and if I had, I'd have pointed them to one of the WASP mail-order catalogues. What's the big deal with khaki? It gets dirty too easily, and for a lot of people it's an unbecoming color. But there's only so much new black clothing you can sell a happy consumer who already has a closet full of black-and-coordinates; so the clothing industry pushed khaki remorselessly.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ICANN emancipate domain owners from scummy registrars
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:42:04 PM
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Congrats to the good fighters at ICANN, who have won an important battle today that makes it easier to transfer your domain from one registrar to another without risking losing it in the process (my last two Network Solutions registrations ran out this month and they're now safely ensconsed with the good people at Tucows/DomainDirect, who are my absolute favourite registrars). Ross calls this the Emancipation Proclamation for domain-owners, and he's not far wrong.
* streamlined definition of responsibilities as it relates to the management of the domain name. Under the new policy, only the Administrative Contact or Registrant can authorize a domain name transfer to a new service provider. This was extremely unclear in the old policy and led to a lot of abuse and confusion.
* minimizing Registrar gaming and abuse. Under the old policy, it was quite common for unseemly Registrars to abuse their position and prevent outgoing customers from transferring to a different service provider.
* introduction of arbitration. The new policy includes several policies designed to "fix" problems before they are taken to the courts. The old policy didn't make it easy to fix problems and often relied on the good graces of usually uncooperative policies. The new policies fix this by introducing undo procedures and a dispute resolution process designed to make it fairly easy and relatively inexpensive for Registrants and Registrars to fix problematic transfers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Models from Space: 1999 model-maker
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:46:00 PM
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Here's a wonderful gallery of the models of Martin Bowers, who did the model-work on Space: 1999 (some are for sale!).
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(Thanks, Asi!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian Creative Commons Licenses underway
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DATE: 07/14/2004 12:47:19 PM
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Andrew sez, "The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic is porting the Creative Commons licensing system to work under Canadian copyright law." Woohoo!
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(Thanks, Andrew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lou Reed wants remixes
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DATE: 07/15/2004 12:51:22 AM
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Lou Reed has endorsed remixing of his work -- he should adopt a Creative Commons remix license to legalise it!
"I've been getting all these great mixes sent to me out of the U.K. for years and years," he told Attitude magazine, "and I just started saying to the record company, 'Look, I really, really love what they are doing.' I think that my record company was a little taken aback but, genuinely, if I could make that type of music then I would. If I could master the equipment then I would love to. Maybe I will now that I've got my own studio set up."
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(via Creative Commons)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stalin World photos
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DATE: 07/15/2004 02:25:07 AM
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Some time ago, I wrote about Stalin World, the Soviet themepark in Lithuania, wishing I had some photos of the evirons -- now I do. This guy's site has some (low-res) pix of the statuary and grounds on offer at Stalin World.
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(Thanks, Mind!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr and Feedburner shipping cool photo syndication tools
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DATE: 07/15/2004 02:27:16 AM
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Ludicorp, who make the awesome Flickr photo-sharing service, have signed a deal with Feedburner to develop new tools and standards for syndicating photos -- and they've released their first technology, called "splicing." (Disclosure: I am on Ludicorp's advisory board)
Splicing gives people the ability to offer a single RSS feed which contains a chronologically ordered arrangement of their photostream from Flickr and the feed from their existing blog (so you might end up with something like blog post, blog post, photo, photo, photo, blog post, photo, blog post, photo, photo, and so on).
Part of the story is this: photos are a perfect application of RSS. You can stick an html reference to a photo into a feed right now, but our namespace will allow for passing along the social context of the image: the raw pixels have value, but the title, description, comments, tags and notes, along with things like EXIF data add a whole other dimension of value.
Link
(Thanks, Stewart!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA's INDUCE Act letter deconstructed
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DATE: 07/15/2004 02:30:01 AM
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The RIAA has sent a letter to Congress, calling on it to pass the iPod-criminalising INDUCE Act. Ernest Miller has deconstructed the letter line by line, countering its claims.
That taking has consequences, human and creative. [Some of the consequences are good, some are bad. Separating them, however, is a pain and may not be possible.] My companies make money almost exclusively from the sale of our creative product. [And they still can, they will have to make some adjustments to their business model.] We don't have a performance right on radio and therefore derive no income from radio play. [Welcome to the wonderful world of "when Congress tries to dictate business models." And so, the RIAA proposes a sequel.] We don't make money from artist tours or merchandise. [And why is that? Is there a law against it? If so, I would recommend it be repealed.] We don't make money from endorsements of other products. [Is someone stopping them from doing that?] We just sell recorded music. [You're free to structure business however you like.]
We take profits from sales – when we're good and lucky enough to get them - and plow money back into the search for that next great talent who will thrill music fans around the globe. [I guess the industry must have been bad these last few years.] When we think we have found that talent, we invest huge amounts to sign, nurture, promote and distribute their creative product. [And the RIAA is the only way talent can be found and promoted, because?] Our economic vitality is based on generating hits – finding special talents that enjoy strong commercial appeal. [And we should care about the hit-maker mentality, because?]
Link
(Thanks, Ernest!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First-gen Imagineer Sam McKim dies
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DATE: 07/15/2004 02:37:21 AM
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Sam McKim, the gen-one Imagineer who designed the first souvenir park maps, has died of heart failure at 79.
Link
(Thanks, Elizabeth!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hungarian commie statuary graveyard
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DATE: 07/15/2004 07:31:34 AM
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Prehensile sez, "Seeing the post earlier about Stalin World reminded me of this hella cool statue park just outside of Budapest, which I visited last summer. Along similar lines as Stalin World, it's where they put all the old Communist statues that they ripped out of the city. Here's a Flickr album of the photos I took of the amazing monuments they preserve there." These really are quite striking.
Link
(Thanks, Prehensile!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Douglas Adams interview audio from 1988
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DATE: 07/15/2004 07:33:43 AM
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Alex sez, "An interview with Douglas Adams originally broadcast in 1988 has now been made available online. It was recorded while he was promoting The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul."
24MB MP3 Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
Update: Elmotion points out this 90 min RealAudio of a talk that Adams gave at UC Santa Barbara a month before his death. Too bad (shocking, really), that the university chooses to use a proprietary, DRM format for distributing its stuff, rather than an open format.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Space Mountain 1977 eBay auction
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DATE: 07/15/2004 07:41:31 AM
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I blog this incredible bit of 1977 Space Mountain paper ephemera on eBay only because I am dead certain that there's no way I would be able to remain in the bidding that is sure to follow.
The thrill of Space Mountain – I had the pleasure of enjoying the festivities of the inaugural flight, “it was great” now I have the opportunity of sharing part of the enjoyment with others by offering these items for sale. ·The Disneyland Line publication - SPECIAL Space Mountain Edition, features all kinds of articles on the concepts and efforts of the show and ride, costume design and facts and figures of the building / ride. ·The Space Mountain WED/Mapo Inaugural Flight invitation for June 2, 1977. ·Disneyland Cast Premiere Inaugural Flight Crew Pin/Button, May 1977 ·The portfolio for the publication and invitation. All of the items are in excellent condition.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tulsa TV memories
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DATE: 07/15/2004 07:46:09 AM
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Mike sez, "With the rise of mega-broadcasting, quirky local television shows have faded into obscurity. Luckily, this site rescues these otherwise forgotten shows that aired in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from the '50s to the '00s. While every American city had its own local flavor, common elements are apparent -- the cheesy horror movie show, the Saturday teen dance party show, and the goofy puppet-based kids show. View all the shows on this detailed site and revel in the evocative memories shared by visitors. A wealth of pictures, audio clips, and video clips adds to the enjoyment. Even if you've never been to Tulsa, this site provides an interesting trip back in time to a simpler era of television."
Link
(Thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Animatronic band on eBay
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DATE: 07/15/2004 07:50:21 AM
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For about $15,000, you can eBay bid on this animatronic band, called "The Chirpie Band" and billed as "totally electro mechanical," capable of playing any CD, and "the HOTTEST MUSICAL ROBOT BAND OF THE CENTURY."
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mozilla bug-squashing timeline
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DATE: 07/15/2004 08:18:07 AM
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This timeline of the discovery of a critical flaw in Mozilla is amazing. It took a scant 31 hours between the moment the bug was first reported to the moment that you could download a patched version of all different Mozilla flavours and derivatives.
July 7 - 13:46 GMT - Keith McCanless files a bug in the Bugzilla Database reporting a new vulnerability. It exploits the windows "shell:" handler and allows a malicious web page to execute a program on a client's computer (The program has to already be present on the computer). McCanless notes that the bug is "BOTH a security concern and a DOS," since if the link points to a nonexistent file, it makes the Mozilla browser spawn off endless amounts of new windows. The bug is marked private since it is security-related; only developers with proper clearance can see it. (source)...
July 7 - 18:16 GMT - Mozilla developer "timeless" creates patch closing vulnerability. He posts the patch on the Bugzilla Database so that other developers can approve it. (source) The bug had been known to the world for a matter of hours before a patch was created to fix it
Link
(via Crypto-Gram)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wrist-mounted instrumentation: nerdy cufflinks
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DATE: 07/15/2004 08:58:17 AM
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I've never had much use for cufflinks (especially since my tux and tux-shirt vanished along with three boxes of prized possessions that I mailed from San Francisco to London), but these ones appeal to the autistically instrument-obssessed nerd in me: an entire line of cufflinks with embedded clocks, thermomenters and compasses. It's enough to make me a) want to buy a pair and b) buy a new tux to wear 'em with.
Link
(Thanks, Yoz!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Buck Truck, The Rappin' Trucker
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DATE: 07/15/2004 10:07:08 AM
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The subject line is about all you need to know, folks. Download and listen to this "disturbing little gem" discovered "at a dilapidated truck stop in Ridgetop, Tennessee." Link (via waxy, thanks, Alex)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Powerful shit
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DATE: 07/15/2004 11:06:17 AM
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London's Science Museum is reportedly considering methods to cut their utility bill by burning human waste or using it to feed microbial fuel cells. Management predicts that visitors' crap could generate 1,530 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
"As with all energy sources, you have to make the most of what is available and we certainly have an abundance of visitors - and almost all of them use our toilets," museum head Jon Tucker told the BBC.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecammed: Eisner at Brainstorm, wearing Mickey T-shirt
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DATE: 07/15/2004 11:15:54 AM
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Joi Ito phonecammed this moment of zen at the Brainstorm conference. Link to moblog snapshot, and see Joi's wiki for multiple posts about his experience at the Fortune confab. Including these words from Ted Turner:
[Turner] "The invasion of Iraq was the biggest debacle in the history of the world... except maybe the AOL Time-Warner merger. The AOL Time-Warner merger was bullshit.
[Moderator] You were quoted as saying that signing was as good as having sex for the first time.
[Turner] I was just being a team player. It wasn't really. It was the stupidest move I've ever seen. Almost as stupid as the war on Iraq... Gerald Levine was like Rasputin. He was my enemy. But he said he was my best friend. I said to him, "Gerald, I've never been to your home." But I was a team player. I always pulled for the team. We split the money with Jim Baker 50/50. We used to open the envelopes together as they came in because we didn't trust each other."
[Moderator] Can you start a new empire from now?
[Moderator] No. I'm too old/tired. I'm doing bison... they are the original American cattle.
Update: Observant BoingBoing readers will note that Eisner appears to be fidgeting with a small wireless gadget in Joi's snapshot. Defamer intercepted a copy of the mobile chat session taking place at that very moment between the Disney CEO and Mr. Mouse. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hersh: children raped at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has videos
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DATE: 07/15/2004 12:22:24 PM
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From Daily Kos' partial transcript of a video (link to REAL stream) of Seymour Hersh speaking at an ACLU event. He says the US government has videotapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"
Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."
Link (via Warren). There's also a piece worth reading in this week's Newsweek about new allegations of rape and sexual torture at Abu Ghraib. Feature includes details on the identities of the Iraqi prisoners shown in those widely-circulated photographs -- including Satar Jabar (charged with carjacking, not terrorism), whose iconic hooded figure with wires attached is derisively described by many Iraqis as the "Statue of Liberty." Link
Update: Geraldine Sealey at Salon on Hersh's remarks:
After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon's custody more horrific than anything made public so far. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse," Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse. (...)
Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong's blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: "[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened."
There are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn't he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists -- will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? -- and what is being done about it?
Link to Salon item.
Update 2: BB guestbar alum Russ Kick of Memory Hole reminds us of a post he made in May about the type of as-yet-unreleased evidence Hersh is presumably discussing. Here, Russ quotes Republican Senator Lindsay Graham: "The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
Update 3: BoingBoing reader Lars has an update from Germany -- some European media perspective on the allegations:
"Report Mainz" is a German TV show/magazine of the SWR (Sudwest-Rundfunk = South-West broadcasting). "Report Mainz" reported already on 5th July 2004 about the potential abuse of children in Abu Ghraib. (Link). A video (in German) of the feature is available at the page (Link to streaming Real file). You can see interviews with persons who testify that they have seen children arrested in Abu Ghraib and who have seen and have heard of a boy and a 12 year old girl terrified (cold water and mud were spilled over them) by guards or military personal. The boy and the girl were then used to terrify their also arrested parents who were willing to cooperate after seeing their children terrified by the guards/military personnel.
Another TV show/magazine covered the issue too: "Kulturzeit", of the German-Austrian-Swiss broadcaster "3Sat" (Link). The main theme in these features is the concern about the fact that children are arrested and that they are used to apply pressure on their parents."
UPDATE: Evidence to support Hersh's claims in the Taguba Report? Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Infectious fear of mobile viruses
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DATE: 07/15/2004 12:30:21 PM
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My latest article for TheFeature.com is about the recent hype about mobile phone viruses, the fear of infection, and the reality of protection:
"Mobile phone virus sounds alarm in Moscow!" "World's First Mobile Virus is Not Lethal, Yet!" While the exclamation points are mine, the words are actual headlines from, respectively, The Guardian and Reuters articles published June 16. A proof-of-concept worm had been demonstrated that infects Symbian-based mobile phones with Bluetooth. The wireless public gasped. Computer security experts yawned.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Conference on molecular nanotechnology
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DATE: 07/15/2004 01:53:39 PM
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Our friends at the Foresight Institute are sponsoring the first-ever conference to focus solely on bottom-up nanotechnology, as envisioned by Richard Feynman in 1959.
"This new meeting series will examine all aspects of advanced nanotechnology, also termed molecular manufacturing or MNT: research status, prospects for disruptive applications, and policy issues — including maximizing access for those who would not otherwise benefit."
On the third day of the event, bloggers Howard "NanoBot" Lovy and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds are co-chairing a panel on Advanced Nanotechnology Policy.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eisner liked Fahrenheit 9/11
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DATE: 07/15/2004 01:58:26 PM
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Joi's at the Fortune Brainstorm event, blogging Michael Eisner's remarks as they're spoken:
He was asked if he regretted not distributing Fahrenheit 9/11. He said no. Disney is not partisan and the movie was clearly political. Disney is an entertainment company. He said Rupert Murdoch said no for a completely different reason. Murdoch said he hated Moore and liked Bush. That's not why Disney didn't distribute the film.
When asked whether he liked the movie, Eisner said he loved it. It was like going to a rock concert. It was entertaining, hilarious. He loved it in a non-political way.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wonder Woman, Superman remixed in French anti-AIDS posters
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DATE: 07/15/2004 06:45:00 PM
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A French anti-AIDS organization created these ads depicting super-heroes with the disease. Link one, Link two (PDF files). (Thanks, dan)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bruce Sterling visits a windmill museum
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DATE: 07/15/2004 08:21:32 PM
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Sterling took some great pictures of windmills at a museum dedicated to them in Shattuck, Oklahoma. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Take Control of Your Airport Network, by Glenn Fleishman
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DATE: 07/15/2004 08:24:59 PM
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If anyone knows about real-world Wi-Fi, it's Glenn Fleishman. Now he's selling a $5 PDF book on how to set up a wireless network with Macintoshes. If you are having any trouble at all with your Airport network, this book is $5 well spent. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cool potential for Orkut or Friendster
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DATE: 07/15/2004 10:54:32 PM
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Whole Lotta Nothing has sent out a lazyweb request for a blogging plug-in that would allow a blogger's close friends to correct typos in his or her posts. I sure could use something like this.
I want a MT plugin that will let a select group of my closest, most trusted friends correct typos in text and URLs on my blog posts and republish their changes without my intervention. If I'm gone for a couple days and improperly used your when I meant you're, I'd love it if a friend fixed that while I was away. I first got the idea when I was trying to think of ways to make Orkut or Friendster useful. If there was some API to those apps that let MT know if someone was a best friend or life partner-level connection, they could be granted temporary edit rights on my blog (maybe Flickr's API could let this work for people I designate as a friend and family member, which seems to be the closest form of relationship there).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BitTorrent search engine
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DATE: 07/16/2004 01:00:51 AM
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Bitoogle is a front-end for Google that finds BitTorrent files.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF Freedom Fest, Aug 4, 5-8PM
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DATE: 07/16/2004 01:04:40 AM
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EFF's Freedom Fest is coming up in San Francisco -- great music, great signs!
Wednesdsay, August 4, 5-8pm
Yerba Buena Gardens
Austin Willacy
Josh Fix and the Furious Force
Josh Fix
The Megan Slankard Band
Link
(via Vertical Hold)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Differences between WorldCon and DNC
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DATE: 07/16/2004 02:24:58 AM
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This year's World Science Fiction Convention is in Boston, and accordingly, the URL for the con is boston2004.com. By a funny coincidence, the Democratic National Convention is also in Boston, and its URL is boston04.com. The inevitable confusion is quite humorous -- the organisers of the WorldCon have compiled a list of ways in which the WorldCon is unlike the DNC:
# We're not $10 million over budget. We don't even have a $10 million budget.
# Our promises for the future are supposed to be fiction.
# You don't have to donate thousands of dollars to us (though we wouldn't complain)—we'll give you a high-level appointment to work for us for free!
# The media will not outnumber the attendees.
# Thoats and banthas are more interesting animals than donkeys and elephants.
# The folks wandering around with walkie-talkies are likely to be helpful and friendly.
# The slogans on our buttons are actually funny, and many of them are about cats.
# No one will be kissing babies except their immediate families and friends.
# When we talk about "skull and bones" it's probably in a discussion about paleontology.
# When we sling mud, it's probably in a workshop on making alien pottery.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PC-based media centre in a wall-socket
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DATE: 07/16/2004 02:35:41 AM
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This is pretty cool -- a prototype wallplate with three sockets, a USB port and a hard-drive, for use as a home media appliance.
The original brief by ComCom was to design a remote control. Thank Toshiko, he looked further than the brief and designed a line of 22 integrated electronic products. One of them is this wall mount triple socket. It has a USB port and a built-in hard disk. You can store music and movies in it and send them to other products in the same product line. The system will be shown in October in ComCom's show apartment in Tokyo.
Link
(Thanks, Mason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory off for the weekend
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DATE: 07/16/2004 03:06:22 AM
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I'm off for my birthday weekend now. No email, no Web access, no blogging: just idyllic relaxation in an undisclosed location. See you all on Monday, at which point I will have turned 33, entering Club 33 the hard way.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DotComGuy = NotComGuy
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DATE: 07/16/2004 09:08:19 AM
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BoingBoing reader Alex says, "The man who legally changed his name to DotComGuy changed it back Tuesday - to Mitch Maddox. The trademark and domain name are up on eBay."
Link to auction, and link to news article.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Found Zen
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DATE: 07/16/2004 09:25:21 AM
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audio kitchen | found slides | lost something? | grocery lists | noyes museum | found by toby slater | found by spencer schaffner | found magazine
Links to web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I, Robot movie release sparks renewed interest in Asimov's 3 laws
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DATE: 07/16/2004 09:32:58 AM
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Tyler Emerson says:
With today's film release of the feature film "I, Robot," the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has launced a new website, "3 Laws Unsafe", to explore the non-fictional problems presented by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws are widely known and are often taken seriously as reasonable solutions for guiding future AI. But are they truly reasonable?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Follow-up to Follow-ups to One-Hit-Wonder song titles
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DATE: 07/16/2004 10:17:40 AM
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First, there was this -- by John Moe, in McSweeney's, much-blogged already but much funny, too:
# How Are We Going to Get These Dogs Back In?
# Bust an Additional Move
# Seriously, Eileen, Come On
# I Will Now Pass the Dutchie Back to You and Thank You for Passing It to Me Originally Because I Really Enjoyed the Dutchie
# Whoomp! There It Continues to Be
Link. Now, there's this, from sturtle:
# "As My Eyes Became Accustomed to Her Science, My Sight Was Restored"
# "Baby Lost 20 Pounds of Back (on Atkins)"
# "I Am No Longer Too Sexy for My Ten-Year-Old Shirt"
# and of course, "100 Luftballoons"
Link. But wait! Francis says Kittenpants blog has still more followups to followups to followup song titles.
(Thanks, Siege, and thanks, Snoodle!).
Update: Make it stop! More followup song titles. And more. Aaaand more. Also, see this exhaustive list of supergroups that never were.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Los Alamos halts operations; Classified data disks lost at Sandia and Los Alamos
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DATE: 07/16/2004 09:54:08 PM
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Two breaking news items today that relate to security -- or a frightening lack thereof -- at US government-run nuclear labs Sandia and Los Alamos. First, an item from my Wired News colleague Noah Shachtman, on Defensetech blog:
Los Alamos National Laboratory director Pete Nanos shut down the country's leading nuclear weapons lab on Friday, after a set of classified computer disks disappeared, and a student was hit in the eye with a powerful laser beam -- all in the space of a week.
"As of today, Director Nanos has suspended all Operations at the Laboratory," an internal e-mail obtained by Wired News read. "This is a very serious step."
"This willful flouting of the rules must stop, and I don't care how many people I have to fire to make it stop. If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble," Nanos added in a separate e-mail to Los Alamos employees.
And separately today, this press release was issued by Sandia National Laboratories:
Sandia National Laboratories has located a floppy disk that had turned up missing in a recent inventory. The floppy disk, which had been marked classified, was found about 1 p.m. today (Friday). Sandia had reported the disk as missing June 30 in a wall-to-wall inventory. (...)
Sandia Corporation President and Laboratories Director C. Paul Robinson said: "We are relieved the disk has been found. But in my mind, the nature of the near miss of this recent incident is far too close for comfort. We must find better ways and procedures for ensuring the protection of such material."
Link to Los Alamos shutdown post on Defensetech blog, and related Wired News story
here.
Sandia National Laboratories press release: Link. Sandia was also hit earlier this month with a $3.1 million state fine for breaking environmental laws: Link. Image: Trinity Site explosion, 10 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945. From the online historic photo archive of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: AT&T Wireless to Launch 3G Service Next Week
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DATE: 07/17/2004 07:59:13 AM
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AT&T Wireless -- America's third-largest mobile services provider -- will begin rolling out 3G service in four markets early next week.
AT&T Wireless will launch its third-generation or "3G" mobile phone service capable of transmitting e-mail, pictures, and video at high speed in four cities -- San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix and Detroit, the sources told Reuters. The company will offer the data service at a fixed all-you-can-use rate of about $25 a month to consumers and $80 a month to corporate customers, one of the sources said.
Link (Via unwired)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: North Korea offers free email on new gov website
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DATE: 07/17/2004 08:07:26 AM
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BoingBoing reader Roy Berman says:
I went to check out the North Korean news wire earlier today and noticed that they had heavily revised their web site since the last time I looked at it a few months ago. The layout was still kind of bad and the English a bit weird, but there were now buttons for email, shopping, etc. I discovered that the North Korean government is actually letting people sign up for free web based email accounts. Their web page actually claims that they have an advanced IT industry, but somehow after experiencing it's fruit, I am left doubtful. One of the most amazing things about it was the selection of password hint questions, which include gems such as 'How would Korea change after reunification?'
link to Roy's blog entry with more details, and link to North Korea's government website, which informs me that "Korea Is One Homogenous Nation," and that one of the three top-selling books in the northern nation is "Butterfly and Cock."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Globalization of snacks: Vada Pav (TM) to kick McDonalds' ass in India
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DATE: 07/17/2004 08:10:32 AM
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BoingBoing reader Avi Solomon says:
The 'wada pav' (batter-fried mashed potato with bread & chutney) is a daily fast-food staple of millions of Mumbai citizens. Now it has been branded and TQMed to compete with McDonald's and is all set to take over the world. This is true reverse globalization-Here comes India!
Link, and see also Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Musicologist wins copyright battle over 300-year-old works
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DATE: 07/17/2004 08:12:29 AM
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BoingBoing reader John says:
Dr. Sawkins, a musicologist, has won a copyright battle in Britain over a 300 year old piece of music, "Music for the Sun King" by Michel-Richard de Lalande. I understand that particular editions of literature, for example, are often copyrighted: the layout, the footnotes, etc, are all original. But the actual editorial choices- what to include, how to conflate contradictory texts- I had assumed were not copyrightable. By the logic of this argument, a good editorial choice made in one edition of a piece of music can be seen as infringing on the same choice made in another edition.
Link
BoingBoing reader Jon-o Addleman counter-argues:
The question isn't really whether editors can be granted copyright for their work or not. It's really a matter of how much new material is needed. In this case, new viola parts were composed to replace missing ones, among other things, but it's far from clear whether this has crossed the line between 'reproduction' and 'a new derivative work'. This is not an easily-answered question, as this thread on the harpsichord mailing list shows.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Economist magazine = bluespamming villains?
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DATE: 07/17/2004 08:17:19 AM
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BoingBoing reader Russell says:
The venerable Economist magazine has been Bluespamming potential customers - sending unsolicited advertising messages by Bluetooth to phones in the area. I never thought we'd see The Economist tarnish itself with spamming. What will we see next "Ho.t L!ve Fore.cast.ing" or "Wanna BI.G 0ne? Gro.w bigg3r id.eas wiv The 'Conomist" subject lines in our emails?
Link. We welcome a response by The Ec.0.n0m-1-5t -- just, um, not by way of bluespam, thanks.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Washington's Violent Videogame Law Held Unconstitutional
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DATE: 07/17/2004 12:56:53 PM
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Ernest Miller says, "Washington State's ban on the sale (to minors) of violent videogames depicting violence against 'law enforcement officers' was held unconstitutional yesterday on First Amendment grounds. The 15-page decision is here: [PDF]. My favorite quote from the decision:
Would a game built around The Simpsons or the Looney Tunes characters be "realistic" enough to trigger the Act? Is the level of conflict represented in spoofs like the Dukes of Hazard sufficiently "aggressive?" Do the Roman centurions of Age of Empires, the enemy officers depicted in Splinter Cell, or the conquering forces of Freedom Fighters qualify as "public law enforcement officers?"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Granular eruptions
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DATE: 07/17/2004 04:37:17 PM
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Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have created an experiment that beautifully demonstrates how sand can exhibit liquid-like properties. These photos are stills from a video the scientists recorded at 1,000 frames-per-second of a marble-size steel ball dropping onto loose, fine sand. The surreal footage may aid geophysicists in understanding what happens when an asteroid smashes into a planet. From the abstract of the scientific paper:
"According to Shoemaker, the 'impact of solid bodies is the most fundamental process that has taken place on the terrestrial planets,' as they shape the surfaces of all solar system bodies. A lot of information on this process has been extracted from remote observations of impact craters on planetary surfaces. However, the nature of the geophysical impact events is that they are non-reproducible. Moreover, their scale is enormous and direct observations are not possible. Therefore, we choose an alternate and of course downscaled experimental approach in order to guarantee reproducible results."
For a link to the movie of the experiment, scroll to the bottom of the page. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kai Organic Cafe, Brighton: the opposite of a friendly place to relax
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DATE: 07/18/2004 04:28:09 AM
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This morning, a friend and I stopped into a little cafe in Brighton, UK, called "Kai Organic Cafe." We ordered a couple of coffees -- paying close to $10 for 'em! -- and sat down in the absolutely empty upstairs area to plug in our laptops, drink our coffee, and get some work done. Half an hour later, the server came upstairs and told us off for plugging in, saying that she wasn't sure if the manager would approve and she didn't want to telephone him on his day off to find out, and so we'd have to unplug (no word on how the manager could possibly find out that anyone had used their precious electricity if it was his day off). We split, and found very good, free, high-speed WiFi, a friendly staff, and lots of unbegrudged electricity at Riki Tik, just a few steps away. If you're a visitor to Brighton looking for a friendly place to relax and plug in, I advise you to do the same (on the other hand, if you're a visitor to Brighton looking to sit with your hands folded in your lap while drinking overpriced coffee in an empty cafe with excruciatingly bad music, well, Kai's is your place)
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Smoking money made by removing the insides of coins
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:38:19 AM
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This guy carves away the inside of coins from many nations, leaving nothing behind but the face on the "heads" side and a bit of metal in the shape of a smoking cigarette, creating the impression of a "smoking coin."
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Alice in Wonderland precursor manuscripts scanned and posted
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:38:51 AM
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A Dutch university student has scanned in an original manuscript for Alice's Adventures Underground, Lewis Carroll's precursor to Alice in Wonderland.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ultima preservation efforts: a guide
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:40:08 AM
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Nelson has wirtten a fantastic post about the modern disposition of the Ultima games, including unauthorised bundles of the game's many incarnations along with easy-play emulators for running them on modern hardware.
The most impressive is the Ultima Classics collection. "Sedryn Tyros" has collected the Ultima games and distributed them in a bundle along with DOSBox setups that make it easy to run the games. His supplement also includes original pre-PC versions of the early games, often better than the PC ports, along with the emulators you need to play them on a PC. Alas, this collection is completely unauthorized and you'll have to scour your back alley's bittorrent site to find it.
Another option is fan-made reconstructions of the game engines. The best is Exult for Ultima VII, a portable engine that runs the classic game on many platforms (including Xbox!). Just take the open source game engine, copy over the assets from your Ultima Collection CD, and you're in business.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Great, cheap shrunken heads and popcult silver rings at Brighton's Wildcat
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:40:42 AM
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Wildcat is a custom jewellers in Brighton, UK, that sells amazing body jewelry; crazy, futuristic sex-toys; and these gigantic, chunky silver rings with pop-culture and science-fiction themes. The store was packed when I stopped in (and scored some bargains, including the first ring I've owned since I was 9 years old and my grandfather gave me a ring with my initials on it), and despite the brisk trade, the prices were refreshingly low, even when denominated in UK Pounds -- there's a great collection of sale rings that go for £10-30 each (and the shop also does a nice line in replica shrunken heads!).
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steve "Cyborg" Mann on NPR
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:41:15 AM
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Infogargoyle sez, "NPR has just done an audio interview with the ever evolving cyborg, Steve Mann. He talks about his body's "dashboard" monitor on his head mounted display, eyetap. Mann also describes sousveillance - "the people watching the powers that be". Available in both RealAudio & Windows Media Player 9." What a pity that NPR insists on limiting the availability of its programmes to proprietary, streaming formats that can't be saved or shifted to an MP3 player, and require proprietary players to use.
Link,/a>
(Thanks, infogargoyle!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Walkmen changed our social norms
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:41:59 AM
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This article on the 25th anniversary of the Walkman explores some of the fascinating social fallout from the rise of personal stereos.
"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer says. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."
Reg Req'd Link
Link (Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Trekkies 2 on DVD
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:42:48 AM
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Trekkies was an amazing, affectionate documentary about serious Star Trek fans, a fine piece of anthropology that was equal parts appreciation and gentle humour. Now there's a direct-to-DVD sequel, Trekkies 2, which I'm quite looking forward to seeing.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Genetic research irreversibly damaged by Excel autoformatting
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:43:22 AM
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The Autocorrect feature in Excel (which drives me bonkers across the whole Office suite) has introduced irreversible errors into genetic research that is tabulated in spreadsheets, because Except autocorrects some identifiers to be dates.
Excel is widely used in genetic research to process microarray data. A microarray chip detects amounts of protein produced from thousands of different genes, enabling researchers to see which particular gene is being expressed in a sample of diseased tissue, for example.
The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Benjamin Rosenbaum's "The Orange" online and CC-licensed
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:44:16 AM
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Benjamin Rosenbaum, whose knockout story "The Ant King: A California Fairytale" convinced me that he was desitined to be one of the great talents in science fiction, has Creative-Commons-licensed his story "The Orange," which originally appeared was reprinted in Harper's Magazine (selling an sf story to Harper's is itself quite a coup!).
An orange ruled the world.
It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.
The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors' motors rumbled hymns of praise.
Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, "Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch." And the passengers would be silent with awe.
Link
(Thanks, Ben!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brazilians outnumber Yanquis on Orkut 2-1
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:44:47 AM
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Orkut, Google's social networking tool, is only open to people who've been invited to join the service. This means that once a well-connected Burning Man attendee shows up in Orkut, lots of burners follow.
Which is how it is that suddenly, Portuguese speakers (presumably mostly Brazilian, given Brazil's kick-ass connectivity and widespread adoption of moblogging, blogging and other viral, social tools) outnumber Yankees on the service nearly two-to-one. There's now a vicious fight raging between USAns and Portuguese-speakers, as the former group is displaced, for nearly the first time, by another linguistic group.
(I'm reminded of a story that a product manager for Hotmail once told me -- "Our growth curve was pretty steady, then one day someone sent an email to someone in India with 'Get a free email account at hotmail.com' in the footer and the next day we singed up half a million users").
Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English.
Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a "nazi" and "xenophobe."
"After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they're being called the 'plague of Orkut,"' she said in a site called "Crazy Brazilian Invasion."
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Waterproof iPod/discman cage with powered speakers for the shower
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DATE: 07/18/2004 06:45:20 AM
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The Boom Boom Multibox is a waterproof box containing a pair of battery-powered speakers and a stereo minijack. Just drop your iPod or discman inside it, plug in the speakers and snap it shut, and you've got a waterproof sound-system you can hang up in the shower. Next time I'm stateside, I'm ordering one of these -- I love having music in the shower (it'd also be cool for hotel rooms and the like).
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Elvis enters public domain in UK next year
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DATE: 07/18/2004 09:39:09 AM
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On January 1, 2005, Elvis Presley's "That's All Right" -- a 50-year-old tune currently enjoying the #3 chart spot in Great Britain -- will enter the public domain.
Anyone will be able to release it without paying royalties to the owners of the master or the performer's heirs. BMG will start losing a significant piece of its catalog income in Europe. As "That's All Right" is being hailed by some as the beginning of rock 'n' roll, the implications are that every year after 2005, more recordings that defined the genre will fall into public domain.
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(Thanks, electrincinca)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Russian scientists turn waste blood into milk, yogurt, chocolate, and coffee
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:01:30 AM
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Ever wanted to be a vampire, but couldn't stand the sight of blood? Some scientists in Russia claim they've got the answer for you. Noticing that the typical meat packing plant produces 7 tons of blood a day, they've come up with a process to convert the proteins in the blood into the basic ingredients for "milk, yogurt, chocolate, and coffee." I'd say "I'll believe it when I taste it," but I don't believe I'll be tasting it, thank you very much. Link (Thanks, Klintron!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Massively useful Massively Multiplayer growth chart
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:22:09 PM
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If you or a loved one is pulling together any kind of presentation on Massively Multiplayer Online games, check out this freqeuntly-revised chart of growth numbers for various MMOs. The curve for Final Fantasy is astounding.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Music video made with Soul Calibur video game footage
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:30:11 PM
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Dance, Voldo, Dance is a music video made by synchronizing the movements of gladiators from the game Soul Calibur with a dance track, so that they appear to be getting down with their nasty selves to the music. It's quite good!
11.2 MB Quicktime Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flick mosquitos or you could get sick and die
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:31:57 PM
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If you catch a mosquito feeding on you, you should flick it away rather than squashing it, lest you drive its infectious guts into your body.
The issue is reviewed in an article published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine that focuses on a 57-year-old Pennsylvania woman who died in 2002 of a fungal infection in her muscles called Brachiola algerae.
Doctors were puzzled because the fungus was thought to be found only in mosquitoes and other insects. But it's not found in mosquito saliva like West Nile virus and malaria, so a simple mosquito bite could not have caused the infection.
The article's authors concluded that the woman must have smashed a mosquito on her skin, smearing its body parts into the bite.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 20,000 bottles of champagne found under English Channel
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:33:50 PM
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Divers in the English Channel have discovered the 50-year-old wreck of a French cargo ship with 20,000 half-bottles of (slightly flat) champagne in the hold.
Divers from the Folkestone Diving Club and other south-east clubs, who remain tight-lipped about exactly where and when they found the champagne, dug out bottles to bring back to dry land and cracked them open with friends and family at dinner parties.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Is software better law than law?
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:35:27 PM
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James Grimmelman has taken Lon Fuller's classic text, the Morality of Law, and used it to measure software, evaluating the degree to which laws embedded in code can be thought of as "moral" laws:
Software is unambiguously better at legality than law itself on three counts (prospectivity, consistency, and possibility). It's strictly inferior to law on two (publicity and comprehensibility). One (stablility) is a complete wash. The last two (generality and reality) depend on very much on the kind of software we're talking about and how it's used.
Overall, then, there is no simple answer as to whether software is better than law or not when it comes to the conditions that Fuller would say make any system of authority worthy of obedience. It respects those values more in some ways, less in others. Whether or not any given software system is a good replacement for a legal alternative will depend on which values of legality are more important to you (a large part of Law and Morality discussed the ways in which these values are necessarily in tension). Further, it will depend on how well the software system's designers handle the challenges of explaining accurately just what it is that their software does, and those explanations will be more or less persuasive for different kinds of software.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gay marriage compared to box-turtle marriage by Senator, Daily Show replies
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:42:41 PM
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In a fit of astonishing lunacy, Texas Senator John Cornyn tried to explain the need to ban gay marriage in the context of the social harm that would accrue from allowing men to marry box turtles ("It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle, but that does not mean it is right...Now you must raise you children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife"). Jon Stewart's Daily Show segment on this statement is nothing short of brilliant. Let's hope it gets enough airplay to cost Cornyn the election (and possibly get him institutionalized somewhere...).
Realplayer link
(via Vertical Hold)
Update: It appears that though the box turtles remark was in a speech prepared for Cornyn and delivered to the press, that Cornyn himself showed the good judgment not to make this ridiculous statement (Here's some notes from his press-secretary. (Thanks, Andrew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flowers for SF gay weddings effort stunning success
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:44:49 PM
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Back in February, Darren Barefoot started the charitable effort he called "Flowers for Al and Don," in which people donated money for flowers to be delivered to gay and lesbian couples awaiting marriage on the steps of the San Francisco Courthouse. The effort was a signal success. Darren sez:
As you guys covered this (and helped promote it) back in February, I just thought you'd be interested to hear the final results. Ultimately, we raised US $14,312.28. We delivered US $11,542.28 worth of flowers, and donated the remainder to two related and deserving charities--Lambda Legal and the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project at the ACLU.
Link
(Thanks, Darren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World Transhumanist con in Toronto, Aug 5-8
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:46:34 PM
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The World Transhumanist conference is coming to Toronto, Aug 5-8, with free $12.50 public keynotes from Steve Mann and Stelarc.
The theme of this year's conference is "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era," featuring such presenters as cyborg Steve Mann, Australian performance artist Stelarc, Extropy Institute founder Max More, leading biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, among many others.
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(Thanks, sentdev!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ex-IDEO lectures on creativity and management
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:52:40 PM
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Avi sez, "Andrew Hargadon used to work as a design engineer at IDEO. Then the academic bug bit him and he went on to research the innovation process from an insider's perspective. His course notes are now online and provide simple but effective methods to understand and enhance your creative thought process."
Link
(Thanks, Avi!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on possible election cancellations
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DATE: 07/18/2004 11:54:32 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted Jon Stewart's Daily Show commentary on the threatened cancellation of the November US elections in the event of terrorist threat. Required viewing.
Link
(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ToyViewer 4.50 sought
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DATE: 07/19/2004 12:01:02 AM
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Does anyone have a copy of the freeware Mac image editing app, ToyViewer, version 4.50 (not later or earlier versions -- version 4.50, released last December?). I upgraded to a more recent version and lost some important functionality. Email me if you have the goods.
Link
Update: Found! Thanks to everyone who wrote in with the link. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reputation systems academic paper
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DATE: 07/19/2004 07:49:27 AM
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The current issue of First Monday has a thorough academic article on reputation systems.
The sharing of observations and opinions builds up a picture in each person’s mind of the reputation’s subject, which we might call the "Invisible Eye" — the distributed formation of reputations, and consequent increased ability to distinguish better from worse. To the degree that you have access to and trust the experience of others, it is almost as if you yourself had been there watching that previous situation, thus increasing your base of experience from which to judge future reliability — and increasing pressure on the subject in question to behave responsibly. The analogy to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is not accidental; just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner.
The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.
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(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Monster trading cards
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DATE: 07/19/2004 08:02:44 AM
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Wonderful gallery of scanned-in vintage monster trading cards.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: San Francisco's clubs you can't join
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DATE: 07/19/2004 08:17:55 AM
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Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle surveyed the most exclusive clubs in San Francisco, from the San Francisco Golf Club (with an alleged "no Jews, no people-of-color" policy) to the shadowy Bohemian Grove, a frat party playground for the conservative rich white guys running our shadow government:
"In 1971, President Richard Nixon, a member (of the Bohemian Grove) since 1953, was to be the lakeside speaker, but reporters had finally raised a ruckus about a sitting president giving an off-the-record speech at the Grove. Nixon sent sugary regrets in a telegram that hangs in the city clubhouse today, saying that anyone could be president of the United States, but only a few could aspire to be president of the Bohemian Club.
Privately, he said to domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman (and the hidden tape recorder) in the Oval Office that May: 'The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time -- it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.'"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sex Pistols honored (exploited?)
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DATE: 07/19/2004 08:32:38 AM
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In September, The Hospital gallery in London will display items belonging to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, including a blood-stained "Never Mind the Bollocks" poster collected from the Chelsea Hotel room where the couple lived (and she died).
"The collection of artefacts, including original T-shirts, posters and handwritten lyrics, has been assembled over 15 years by art dealer Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson, deputy editor of Art Monthly. They told The Independent on Sunday that the hotel items were sold at auction by Sid Vicious' mother, Anne Beverley."
Link
In other Sex Pistols news, plaque were ceremonially unveiled in north Norfolk to honor two venues where the Sex Pistols had played important early and late gigs.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Another issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley
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DATE: 07/19/2004 08:41:27 AM
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My latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley is now online. While my Lab Notes site highlights interesting engineering research, ScienceMatters explores the physical sciences, biology, and chemistry. Inside this month's issue: * The Cellular Mechanic
* An Explosive Theory About Volcanoes
* The Mathematics of High-Tech Highways
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New tunes from former Afghan Whigs bassist
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DATE: 07/19/2004 09:14:41 AM
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My friend John Curley played bass in the dark soul-rock band Afghan Whigs, the first non-Seattle group signed to Sub Pop records. For more than a decade, the Whigs released consistently stunning albums, concluding with 1965 on Columbia records in 2000. The following year, the group disbanded. Singer Greg Dulli continued with his Twilight Singers, guitarist Rick McCollum became Moon Maan, and John Curley focused on his recording studio Ultrasuede in Cincinnati. Now John has formed a new band, The Staggering Statistics. Here's an article about the group from the Cincinnati Enquirer.
"It spirals away from you," Curley says. "Even if your goal is informal, sooner or later you begin writing songs that you want to play for other people. Then there's a little thought in your mind: we could get signed (to a record deal). You stand in the room with ether long enough and you start getting overcome by the fumes."
I was thrilled to hear that John and the Staggering Statistics have released their full-length debut recording for free online. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod speakers made from Altoids tins
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DATE: 07/19/2004 02:19:28 PM
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The winner of a contest to invent a MacGyver-style invention using Altoids tins is a peach: make a set of iPod speakers out of two Altoids tins, two playing cards, and a set of headphones.
Link
(Thanks, Vidiot!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Seed Magazine: a Maxim for science writing
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DATE: 07/19/2004 02:26:04 PM
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I just finished reading my first issue of Seed Magazine, a science-culture magazine that is the best new magazine I've read since I picked up my first issue of Wired.
The writing in this magazine -- mostly by scientists -- is stellar, and there's a fantastic mix of long features and short factoids about science. The approach to the subject is like the very best science fiction, coming at it from the intersection of the social and the scientific, going for the cultural stories behind the science. There's even a fiction department, something that tech-oriented magazines have been sorely lacking since Omni folded up.
This is almost a Maxim for science, something that makes science cool and relevant and edgy. The mag's been around for quite a while, but it wasn't until my cow-orkers Seth and Annalee turned me onto it that I discovered it. Now that I have, I'm taking out a subscription.
I really can't gush enough about this: it's the best subway reading I've had in months.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Massive dance-numbers from Star Wars Galaxies
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DATE: 07/19/2004 02:37:46 PM
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If you liked this morning's link to a music video made from captured sequences from the game Soul Calibur, you'll love these stunning, massively coordinated dance numbers from the Star Wars Galaxies universe, where dozens of players and their familiars rock out in Bollywood-scale, beautifully edited sequences.
I Get
Knocked Down Link
Fett's
Vette Link
Ice Ice
Baby Link
(Thanks, Raph!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Charlie" filming halted by chocolate-covered $540K camera lens
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DATE: 07/19/2004 05:54:47 PM
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OK, best Hollywood lede *evar*:
The remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory was thrown into chaos on Wednesday when a worker dropped a $540,000 camera lens in a vat of chocolate.
Link to IMDB news, and link to a fine upstanding tabloid's account. (Thanks, Mara! Thanks, Defamer!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Extreme minimalist ASCII boob art
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DATE: 07/19/2004 06:19:23 PM
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Fourteen lines, 28 total breasts, 6 characters maximum per line. Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dad tracks his preemie baby's progress on photoblog
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DATE: 07/19/2004 06:50:52 PM
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This most unusual weblog is a father's daily documentation of his prematurely-born child's struggle to survive. Eric was born at only 24 weeks' gestation. He was twelve inches long, and weighed only one pound, seven ounces. BloggingBaby.com describes the online journal the infant's dad is maintaining:
His dad has been blogging the whole thing, complete with photos, video and all the "tearability" you can handle. The content ranges from detailed medical discussions of the conditions a premature infant suffers, to more spiritual musings on what it's like to give skin-to-skin "kangaroo care" to a child born 15 weeks premature. In one passage we discover that "his neutrophils ( his "big gun" immune cells as wendy, his nurse practitioner, likes to call them ) are down and his bands ( immature neutrophils ) are up," while another passage has us visiting the NICU in the middle of the night.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Governator calls foes "girlie men" who should be "terminated"
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DATE: 07/19/2004 07:57:50 PM
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California's AGW (Actor-Governor-whatever) derided his opponents in a speech this weekend as "girlie men," and asked his supporters to "terminate" them at polls in November if they fail to approve his >$103 billion budget. I read this headline on a copy of the LA Times at a neighborhood Hollywood espresso filling station early Sunday morning -- and had a hard time believing my own baggy, sleep-deprived eyes.
The governor used the "girlie men" reference twice in a 16-minute speech aimed at pressuring the Legislature to pass his budget, now 17 days late. The remarks were apparently references to an old "Saturday Night Live" skit parodying Schwarzenegger. Comedians Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon played "pumped-up" bodybuilders with Austrian accents who dismissed anyone without a muscled torso as a "girlie man."
Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) said he was "nonplused" by Schwarzenegger's comment. "I don't know what the definition of 'girlie man' is. As opposed to his being a he-man?" Burton asked. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) said, "Those are the kinds of statements that ought not to come out of the mouth" of the governor. "He says he's going to 'terminate' members in November? I really don't know what he means by that. That's not funny any more," Nunez said.
Link
Update: The inevitable "Sacramento Girlie Men" T-shirts have arived. link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Call in the cryptozoologists
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DATE: 07/19/2004 07:59:21 PM
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This mystery animal is traipsing around the Baltimore suburb of Glyndon.
"The beast is not shy, and visits most often under bright sun. While no one here knows what it is, they do have a name for it -- the hyote, a combination of a hyena and a coyote."
Link (via Fark)
UPDATE: Numerous readers have written in with reports that the "hyote" is actually a fox, dog, or bear with terrible mange. No matter the origin of the mysterious beast, I agree with this posting from the Fark forum: "We must catch it and learn from it."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Will 'Net access via satellite fly?
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DATE: 07/19/2004 08:12:20 PM
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Interesting story in The Star (Canada) about this weekend's launch of Telesat Canada's new Internet broadcast satellite:
Canadians should care about this moment -- about this particular satellite. Anik F2 is more than just the largest and heaviest of commercial satellites in the world, it's also the first to combine cutting edge Ka-band technology with older and less powerful Ku- and C-band transponders. The latter two will continue to carry Canada's television and telecommunications signals, but the powerful Ka-band "spot beams" will, for the first time, let an Anik satellite deliver two-way, broadband Internet service to any location in North America at a price that's competitive with residential cable or DSL high-speed services.
Link (Thanks, JP!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Salling Clicker turns your mobile phone into a remote control for your Mac
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DATE: 07/19/2004 10:37:05 PM
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Justin Ried of TheFeature has good things to say about a neat-sounding application called Salling Clicker that turns a Bluetooth device into a remote control for your Mac.
One of the really amazing features is that you can see not just ordinary information about the track you've got currently playing in iTunes - artist and song name, track length, etc. - but also the album art, directly on your mobile device.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Delightful gallery of reptile freaks
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DATE: 07/19/2004 10:42:21 PM
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Here's a nice selection of nature's finest three-eye, two-headed, two-tailed, and five-legged lizards, snakes, and frogs. Link (via Geisha Asobi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Censored WiFi at hotel in San Francisco
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DATE: 07/20/2004 02:18:13 AM
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Metafilter Matt is staying at a free WiFi hotel in San Francisco, and he just tried to visit MeFi to post some messages, only to be confronted with a censorware message from the hotel's ISP, primly telling him off for visiting a dodgy "chat site," something that, apparently, the hotel doesn't want its guests doing. Jesus Screaming Christ, what jackass at the hotel decided that filtering its guests' Internet access was a good idea? I wish Matt had published the hotel's name so that the rest of us could avoid the hell out of it.
FWIW, the Hotel Tropicana on Valencia (around the corner from my old apartment) has free and completely open WiFi (SSID: linksys) was just remodeled, and is pretty cheap, and very central.
Link
An anonymous reader writes, "I work at a San Francisco hotel, The Sir Francis Drake, and that censorware message is exactly what I started seeing this week when I tried to access Metafilter and Linkfilter from the work computer (on my lunch break, honest!) ... If the hotel in question isn't the Drake, then it's probably another Kimpton Hotels property.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Circular concept printer
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DATE: 07/20/2004 02:22:02 AM
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This circular concept printer ("uses rotational, instead of linear, movement to reduce its size") was one of 130 winners of the 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA).
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TheyWorkForYou source-code online
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DATE: 07/20/2004 02:25:28 AM
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TheyWorkForYou is the best political advocacy site I've ever seen: it scrapes the UK Parliamentary record and then turns the debates into an easily searched means of keep tabs on your MP -- and to turn your MP's deeds into the basis for discussion and political activism. A common question from Americans, Canadians and others is how this system might be adapted for their respective governments.
Well, now the TheyWorkForYou team have released the source-code for their app under the GPL, and they're also publishing raw XML feeds of their data-sources for you to mix and munge.
Get busy!
Link
(Thanks, Danny!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Body language and facial expressions in MMOs
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DATE: 07/20/2004 02:27:10 AM
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Good piece on Mindjack on the rise of body-language cues in Massively Multiplayer online games with emphasis on Second Life's toolkit:
"V-Chat," launched in 1995, was an early contender in the ballooning collection of larger-scope chat spaces that encompassed both 2D and 3D graphics. V-Chat's avatars, although primitive, were both customizable and capable of expressing a range of emotional states. Microsoft's 2D "Comic Chat" built upon the facial expressions Microsoft had tested with V-Chat. Comic Chat displayed text in speech or thought bubbles, allowing users to express not only their public, but "private" thoughts; AI-detection of user-typed acronyms would cause one of the illustrated avatars to assume an appropriate pose, such as waving if the user had typed "BRB" for "be right back." While both the 2D Comic Chat and 3D V-Chat gave users more expressive outlets, it was ultimately 3D space that would offer the greatest potential for interpersonal dynamics. After analyzing logs from V-Chat sessions, Microsoft Research found that "Overall, V-Chat users appear to be using the 3D features of the program to reproduce the social conventions of physical proxemics."2 The opening up of chat to 3D space allowed users to communicate nonverbally simply by establishing location and facing relative to other participants.
Link
(Thanks, Donald)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rondstadt fired from Aladdin Casino for praising F911
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DATE: 07/20/2004 02:30:32 AM
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Linda Rondstadt was yanked of the stage at Vegas's Aladdin Casino for praising Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 911.
Ronstadt "spoiled a wonderful evening for our guests and we had to do something about it", Mr Timmins said.
He said the 58-year-old singer, booked to play the Aladdin for one show only, was not allowed her back in her luxury suite after the show.
Link
(Thanks, Tracy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why registration-sites suck
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DATE: 07/20/2004 03:19:18 AM
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Wired News has a good piece on the backlash against the growing trend of news-sites requiring logins to read their articles, covering automated tools like the Mozilla bugmenot plugin that automatically spoofs your logins to 14,000+ sites.
The point that everyone seems to miss is that no one can possibly keep track of a thousand passwords for a thousand websites, which means that these sites undoubtably contain recycled passwords (admonishments from security experts to never recycle a password are the infosec equivalent of telling people to "eat less and exercise more" -- simplistic doctrine that is vanishingly unlikely to be adhered to in the field).
The more you recycle a password, the higher the likelihood that you will use it in a sensitive context -- a bank site, a message board, an IM client, an auction site -- where someone might impersonate you or even commit identity theft crimes against you.
What's even worse is that while these news-sites are willing to spend the computational cycles necessary to receive your password, none that I've seen use SSL for their login, which means that the NYT and others demand that you send your password in the clear when you sit down at a WiFi cafe and want to read the paper. This is a potential disaster if that NYT password is also a sensitive one somewhere else: it's a case of really callous disregard for user privacy and security.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's in two new sf anthologies
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DATE: 07/20/2004 04:25:24 AM
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Great writing news this week: I have stories in two brand-new anthologies.
Unwirer, which I publicly collaborated on with Charlie Stross using a blog is now published in its final form in ReVisions, a collection of alternate science stories.
Nimby and the D-Hoppers, which was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, was honoured with includion in Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 9.
A good writing day indeed.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to unlock your crippled Computer Shop modem for free
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DATE: 07/20/2004 05:20:13 AM
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The Computer Shop UK has a deal on a PC that comes with a firmware-locked modem that can only dial one ISP, Supanet. In order to get unlocked, you need to pay a pound a minute to call their support line and then fork over £60 so they can post you a CD that will restore your modem to good working order.
Yoz has the deal, and a link to a utility that can unlock your modem without paying Computer Shop's ransom.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jack Kirby's weirdly wonderful Jimmy Olsen comics
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DATE: 07/20/2004 07:20:03 AM
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Irregular Orbit has a nice entry that sums up everything great about comic book genius Jack Kirby.
[Kirby] also agreed to take on DC's long-time oddball series, Superman's Pal: Jimmy Olsen. Which quickly became Superman's Ex-Pal: The New Jimmy Olsen -- folded into Kirby's Fourth World universe with wild plotlines involving subterranean space-age/primitive biker gangs, genetic research carried out by genetically enhanced researchers and chaos wrought by rampaging D.N.Aliens. And then there's Don Rickles look-alike, Goody Rickels vs. Don Rickles himself. This is all conveyed in Kirby's expressionistic, perspective pushing, chrome-plated, spaced-out style, complete with the occasional trippy photo-montage for variety.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Duke buys entire freshmen class iPods
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DATE: 07/20/2004 07:44:47 AM
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Duke University is buying iPods for its entire incoming freshman class.
""Whoa!" said rising Duke freshman Mollie Tucker of Raleigh when she learned she'd pocket an iPod. "It sounds like a good idea. It sounds really cool." When she arrives Aug. 19, her iPod will be loaded with all kinds of useful information, including orientation schedules, calendars, campus tours, even the Duke fight song.
"Students also can use them for course content, such as recorded lectures, music, language lessons and audio books. Throughout the year, they will be able to download information through a Duke Web site modeled after Apple's iTunes site..."
Link (Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mullets. Copyright. Beer.
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DATE: 07/20/2004 07:52:37 AM
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Beer behemoth Miller Brewing Co. is suing an L.A.-based clothes manufacturer for copyright infringement and brand dilution. The problem? Parodical T-shirts that riff off the Miller slogan, bearing messages like "It's Mullet Time" and "Mullet Low-life." The shirts are available at stores including The Buckle and Nordstrom (where you can buy by them online, for now). Link to news story. (Thanks, Kyle)
Update: BoingBoing reader in South Africa
Gerrie Swart says, "Miller is owned by South African Breweries Limited (SAB).
The interesting thing being that SAB recently won a court case against a small company making satirical t-shirts in South Africa (this company is called Laugh It Off promotions). It might be that SABMiller will be using the same shitty tactics in other countries?
Some links on this: SAB buys Miller (Link 1 Link 2),
SAB wins case against T-shirt company (Link), Laugh it Off wins this round (Link), SABMiller wins first round against Laugh it off Promotions (Link)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Renaissance of Breakin'
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DATE: 07/20/2004 08:48:05 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR show "Day to Day," I report on one of the cooler '80s flashback trends -- break-dancing, which is enjoing a popularity boom among urban youth. From headspins to poppin' and lockin', b-boy style is back in the house, yo.
I went to one underground hiphop dance competition in LA recently, and talk to some of the participants on today's program. At left, one of the judges bursts into a spontaneous headspin at the end of the b-boy competition. View more snapshots I took at the event here.
More story background: website of competition organizer Joanna Vargas, an LA-based choreographer: Link. Bboy.com, a popular website for the breakin' community... several judges and dancers described it as a popular networking hub: Link. And Culture Shock, one of the larger groups that participated in "MAXT OUT" competition -- two members were interviewed in today's NPR piece: Link. A lot of the teens I spoke with talked of hooking up with other dancers on Myspace.com and Friendster. Among dancers, the most popular way to hear about new underground hiphop seemed to be a combination of word-of-mouth and (a) Kazaa, or (b) burning CDs for each other. Everyone complained about how suck-ass commercial urban FM radio programming has become.
Listen to NPR show audio here after 12 noon Pacific Time.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Science of Carbage
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DATE: 07/20/2004 09:10:25 AM
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Science News has an interesting survey of the latest scientific studies about the Atkins diet. Predictably, the jury is still out:
"This year, a spate of studies comparing low-carb versus low-fat diets has confirmed that unrestricted-calorie, high-fat, high-protein eating can trim a person's weight at least as much as low-fat, restricted-calorie dieting does. Several of the studies also highlight other apparent benefits from carbohydrate restriction.
However, a few studies have turned up evidence of problems, including (heart disease). Many physicians now conclude that although low-carbohydrate diets—such as the Atkins and the Zone diets—are proving powerful weight-loss tools, they aren't for everyone. These health professionals argue that such plans should be adopted only under the guidance of a physician.
A few physicians go so far as to argue that low-carb diets aren't for anyone..."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bottle-cap tripod
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DATE: 07/20/2004 10:46:22 AM
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Michale sez, "Tripods are great for photography, but a pain in the ass to carry. Everyone these days seems to be carrying water bottles everywhere. So trust a Japanese company to combine the two to make a really useful thing: A mount that makes a bottle filled with water or soda a useful stable base for your digital camera."
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Evidence for Hersh's claims of child sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib?
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DATE: 07/20/2004 11:36:11 AM
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Following up on this BoingBoing post about allegations by journalist Seymour Hersh of rape and sexual abuse of minors at Abu Ghraib prison Iraq -- there appears to be evidence for those claims in supporting statements that accompany the Taguba Report.
What most of us have seen of the report are excerpts from the 50-page summary. In fact, there are well over 6,000 pages in the report itself, including statements by and interviews with witnesses. Among them, testimony from an Iraqi prisoner that would appear to substantiate Seymour Hersh's claims that boys were sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Maj. Gen. Taguba evidently found these statements credible -- they supported statements from interviews with soldiers and other witnesses.
At the end of this post are links to digital copies of two documents from the Taguba report, hosted on the Washington Post website. Is it possible that they document the exact incidents to which Hersh referred? Excerpt from statement provided by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, on January 18 2004:
I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.
Another testimony alleging abuse of minors from a statement provided by Thaar Salman Dawod, Detainee #150427, on January 17, 2004:
I saw lots of people getting naked for a few days getting punished in the first days of Ramadan. They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young. I don't know their names.
Here's a update (sub required) on Capitol Hill plans for hearings on new (and as-yet unreleased) material documenting torture at Abu Ghraib. And there's this snip from a CBS interview with "leash girl" Pfc. Lynndie England, the guard seen grinning and pointing at Iraqi prisoners in the infamous photos:
When England was asked if there were other things that happened at Abu Ghraib, things that were not photographed, she said, "Yes." When asked if there were worse things that happened, she said "Yes," but would not elaborate.
Link to first PDF, Link to second PDF. (Thank you, Mark)
Update: A recent Associated Press item on plans for new abuse-related hearings quotes Sen. John Warner as saying that new Iraq prisoner abuse incidents come to light "each day":
More cases of possible mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners have come to Congress' attention and need investigation by the Pentagon, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Thursday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., also said that L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the American-led occupation in Iraq, may testify about prison abuse at a congressional hearing next week.
"I'm not trying to, you know, drop a little hint here. I'm just saying ... each day that comes along, new incidents that occurred in the past" are revealed and will need to be investigated, Warner said. ... Warner spoke to reporters after his committee had a private, classified briefing on the status of several Defense Department investigations into abuse stand. He gave no further details on what new allegations came up during the briefing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PC in a motorcycle gas-tank
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DATE: 07/20/2004 12:12:57 PM
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Out of the Box Computers is selling a PC called the ThinkTank that is built inside a modded motorcycle gas-tank.
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cameraphone hysteria recapitulates portable camera hysteria of 1888
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DATE: 07/20/2004 12:31:28 PM
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Amazing PBS piece traces the history of the reaction to the portable camera -- eerily familiar to the reaction today to the phonecam.
The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the "camera fiend" began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares. One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Other locations were no safer. For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The "Hartford Courant" sounded the alarm as well, declaring that "the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children."
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Depression-era anti-Bush movie
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DATE: 07/20/2004 02:19:11 PM
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Greg sez, "The expanded version of the fully-animated commercial my frind Tom and I created for MoveOn.org's 'Bush in 30 Seconds' contest is now online. Originally planned to be only a couple minutes long, the full length version is now a seven minute look at the hard times living under Bush's economy. The completed short is an appropriate juxtaposition of Bush's economy with a depression-era style that I think is appropriate when describing the first presidency since Hoover to preside over a job loss." This is an amazing piece of work.
Link
(Thanks, Greg!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google circa 1960
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DATE: 07/20/2004 02:29:19 PM
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Kevin Fox has whipped up a concept sketch for Google functionality as available in 1960.
Link
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese government's idiotic plans for wireless LAN "tax"
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DATE: 07/20/2004 09:36:17 PM
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From the Japan Times: Japan's telecommunications ministry announced yesterday it may force consumer WLAN users to pay spectrum user fees.
[T]he ministry plans to hit the users with these fees because such appliances use almost the same spectrum as mobile phones, whose users are required to pay the fees, they said. The move might provoke stiff opposition from product manufacturers as it is likely to affect their sales. The ministry plans to collect fees from users of information appliances when they purchase these products, according to the sources.
Manufacturers of home appliances are currently stepping up efforts to develop information appliances that are linked via wireless networks and can be controlled from anywhere. Spectrum user fees have been charged in connection with licensed broadcasting and radio stations, as well as with cellular phone companies.
Gamespot has more on the story, and points out that gamers in Japan who use the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP would also be affected because both use wireless LANs to connect. Reports say the bill will not be proposed to Japan's parliament until 2005 -- leaving ample time for device manufacturers and pissed-off wireless enthusiasts to raise a fuss.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bottlecap tripod DIY
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DATE: 07/20/2004 10:32:23 PM
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Inspired by yesterday's link to a commercially available bottlecap tripod, Adam has put together instructions for a $1.50 DIY version.
Link
(Thanks, Adam!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Secret Swing in Toronto
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DATE: 07/20/2004 10:35:42 PM
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Joey's posted some info on Toronto's "Secret Swing," a mysterious art installation that consists of a playground swing hanging in a downtown grafitti alley. He also points to some of Rannie's pix (Link, Link) that show it off in all its glory.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Militant wing of the accessibility movement
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DATE: 07/20/2004 10:37:07 PM
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Wired News covers the militant wing of the accessibility movement: Web designers who re-design important infomrational websites to improve their accessibility and standards-compliance:
David Jones republishes articles from Wales' National Assembly website on his own Assembly Online site because the official designers "clearly don't know what they're doing."
"They're singularly clueless; the HTML and CSS are invalid," he said. "I was exasperated, so I thought I'd do it myself to show them how it might be done. My employer -- an Assembly-funded body looking to secure next year's funding -- cited it as a disciplinary offense. I don't work for that company anymore."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Government docs on P2P
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DATE: 07/21/2004 12:47:26 AM
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Jeremy sez, "A St. John's University law student created a p2p network allowing users to share government documents. Over 600 court and government documents such as memos, communications and reports can be accessed through the Kazaa, LimeWire and Soulseek p2p networks. The Abu Ghraib prison memos and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on government intelligence leading up to the Iraq War are included. It would be nice to see this collection of useful, informative and sometimes embarrassing documents grow. It might also give Washington more fodder for legal maneuvers against p2p."
Link
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flowers as speakers
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DATE: 07/21/2004 07:06:07 AM
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This is sweet: a Japanese amp system that lives in a flowerpot and uses the foliage above to amplify the sound.
Called the "Flower Speaker Amplifiers", the gadget made by Let's Corp is hidden in a vase or a potted plant and sends music at just the right frequency to vibrate up the stems and then be converted into audible sound by the plant as a whole.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robot librarian
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DATE: 07/21/2004 08:12:49 AM
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Researchers at Universitat Jaume I in Spain are designing a robot librarian of sorts. The three-wheeled bot listens for verbal book requests, heads to the approximate location of the title on a shelf, and uses digital cameras to read the spines. The toughest challenge is engineering a grasper with "fingernails" to pull out the book, Professor Angel del Pobil told the BBC:
"It is mimicking the way we manipulate our hands. We have constant feedback from tactile sensors, so it is moving very slowly. In the first experiments, the books really got damaged because it was pressing too hard. Now it touches gently."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Chimp yawns are contagious too
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DATE: 07/21/2004 08:28:17 AM
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Yawning is contagious among chimps as well as humans. Scientists at the University of Stirling showed video of chimps yawning and grinning to other chimps, several of whom then followed suite. According to a New Scientist article, the experiment supports the notion that chimps, well, grok each other on a pretty deep level. The results of the experiment are strikingly similar to other studies on contagious yawning among humans conducted by evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup.
"Our data suggest that contagious yawning is a by-product of the ability to conceive of yourself and to use your experience to make inferences about comparable experiences and mental states in others," Gallup told New Scientist.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: World's smallest vertebrate
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DATE: 07/21/2004 08:37:37 AM
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The "stout infantfish" has been identified as the smallest, lightest animal with a backbone. The largest of only six specimen ever found is just 8.4 millimeters long. Stout infantfish swim exclusively near Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. Scientists who studied the fish at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography point out that "roughly 500,000 of these fish weighed together would barely tip the scales at one pound."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swing State summer camp
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DATE: 07/21/2004 09:14:14 AM
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This is a pretty cool successor to the Dean Meetups as a social way to be politically active: you can sign up to go to a swing state and recruit Democrat voters.
Swing State Summer Break is a 100% volunteer-operated program for progressives of all ages and their allies, who volunteer to do grassroots, electoral work during the months leading up to the election.
We make it ultra-convenient, easy, and fun to get involved in the nationwide effort to defeat Bush this November. Just tell us which states you're interested in, and when you have time to do it, and we'll take care of the rest.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Crazy tiled animated GIF of stickfigure acrobats
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:08:00 AM
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Amazing piece of animated GIF artistry depicts dozens of stick-figure people running amok in a Donkey Kong style universe. Link (Via Horkulated)
bRETT sez: "You might want to mention that the stick-figure animation already mentioned on your site today works AMAZINGLY well as a stereogram. Makes a cool thing even cooler."
He's right - it looks great. Here are instructions for viewing stereograms. -- Mark
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why Al-Qaeda wants President Bush to be elected
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:10:57 AM
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Aaron Swartz presents three reasons why Al-Qaeda wants President Bush to be elected (or re-appointed).
1. Reuters reported a letter from an al-Qaeda group that said “it supported U.S. President George W. Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader ‘more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom.
2. A top CIA expert on al-Qaeda has concluded that al-Qaeda loves President Bush, and might go so far as to plan an election attack to rally the country around Bush.
3. Even administration officials concede “al-Qaeda has morphed into a loose and expanding association of regional terror cells [and] the Iraq war has fueled rather than doused the fires of jihad.”
Link
(via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bill O'Reilly enjoys ordering his guests and others to "shut up"
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:16:52 AM
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This video commercial starts out with a quote from talk show host Bill O'Reilly making the claim that he has told a guest to "shut up" only one time in six years. The rest of the commercial shows clips of Mr. O'Reilly telling people to shut up. Link (Via Horkulated)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hyote mystery continues
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:29:47 AM
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I received a ton of mail about the mysterious animal recently spotted in central Maryland. One reader asked his father, a retired veterinary pathologist, to speculate on the origin of the unique specimen:
"In my opinion... it looks like a fox with Cushing's Syndrome. An adenoma of either the pituitary or hyperplasia or adenoma of the adrenal gland cortex produces hyperadrenalcorticism (Cushing's Disease in humans). This syndrome causes a thinning of the epidermis of the skin and hyperpigmentation - which you see in this animal - thin, patchy dark colored skin - also you see a distinct pattern of hair loss, similar to what is shown in these photographs - Loss of hair on the body with retension on head and lower extremities - Hair also becomes brittle. Additionally the animals become very thin with weird weight distribution - bodies become somewhat barrel shaped. So my reply is this photo depicts a fox with an endocrine disorder."
Meanwhile, BB reader Rick points us to a few new photos of the magical animal. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Krispy Kreme announces a do-nut flavored drink
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DATE: 07/21/2004 12:59:30 PM
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Yarnivore sez: "Krispy Kreme unveils frozen beverage line, including a glazed-flavored drink" -- the 20 ounce portion of "Original Kreme"-flavored frozen drink will have 117g of carbs. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: virginityrules.com
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DATE: 07/21/2004 02:24:35 PM
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If the "pro-abstinence" programs this website evangelizes are as daunting as the website's own hopelessly opaque Flash interface, Virginity will indeed Rule. Then again, I can think of many naughty things to do with a frisky websurfing partner while one waits, waits, and i do mean waits for the UI to load. Created by the "East Texas Abstinence Coalition." Link (Thanks, Snoodle!)Update: BoingBoing reader Charles Statman of Longview, Texas -- the very municipality which begat this maelstrom of morality and malformed memes -- says: "There is absolutely, positively NOTHING to do in Longview Texas. Teenage sex is the whole point of life there.
Hell, Longview is more boring than Silicon Valley. Instead of preaching an outdated theme, these holy rolling abusers of outdated flash interfaces should be educating kids and handing out condoms."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Prius test drive
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DATE: 07/21/2004 02:39:17 PM
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Matt test drove a Prius. He liked it, but and says the gas mileage isn't nearly as good as advertised is great (see below for correction): "After 150+ miles I averaged nearly 54 mpg."
The key device, which is about the size of a small box of wooden matches, slides into a slot in the dashboard. The next step in starting the car, according to the quickstart guide, is to press the POWER button. I had to laugh — this car boots up. I really enjoyed pressing that button.
Link
Bobby Martin sez: Matt said that *other people* had reported getting much worse than the Prius advertised milage, but he was unable to reproduce those results - he got 54 mpg.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DreamWorks Animation to spin off from film studio, raise $650M in IPO
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DATE: 07/21/2004 03:09:13 PM
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There are big plans for the animation house that built "Shrek" 1 and 2 -- a $650 million IPO and a split from parent company DreamWorks SKG, which was originally formed to unite the creative forces of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and record producer David Geffen.
DreamWorks Animation, based in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California, would be controlled by Katzenberg and Geffen. Katzenberg would be chief executive and Geffen would sit on the board, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission... Roger Enrico, former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Inc., would be chairman of the new company. Spielberg would not hold a seat. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, an initial DreamWorks investor, would sit on the board and could cash out some of his original investment, although the filing does not say he will.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Your blog's Pagerank determines your discount on software
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DATE: 07/21/2004 03:11:16 PM
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A software developer, Thinstall, has a pricing structure based on your blog's pagerank. The more popular you are on Google, the cheaper your price is. Link (Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bipedal monkey
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DATE: 07/21/2004 04:09:05 PM
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It's a weird day for non-human primates. Natasha, a black macaque at the Safari Park zoo in Israel, became exclusively bipedal after surviving a near-deadly stomach disease. Natasha's veterinarian says that brain damage may be to blame (thank?) for her new ability. Pierre Boulle, your meme is ready.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Technorati's Sifry to report campaign blogosphere buzz for CNN
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DATE: 07/21/2004 04:35:59 PM
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CNN just announced that Technorati founder Dave "total mensch" Sifry will provide real-time analysis of the political blogosphere at next week's Democratic National Convention. More details on Joi's blog -- seems like a pretty significant moment in the steadily increasing integration of conventional media with blogs. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jellyfish toxin produces erections
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DATE: 07/21/2004 05:10:11 PM
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I suppose we are all going to be barraged with spam for "Miracle irukandji" soon.
The sting from an irukandji tentacle can cause irukandji syndrome, entailing severe pain, anxiety, paralysis and a potentially fatal rise in blood pressure. Researchers have found that one rare species also causes an extra symptom of prolonged erections in male victims.
Link (Thanks, Michael Bock!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Comment dit-on "BoingBoing" en Francais?
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DATE: 07/21/2004 08:49:21 PM
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BoingBoing reader, Rocket Scientist, and honorary East Texas conspiracy correspondent Charles says, "I was in Paris two weeks ago, and saw this production. Sure, there's an extra E, but it's close." Link to full-size image.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: She's lost control
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DATE: 07/21/2004 09:04:47 PM
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Joy Division, fancy undies, Dita Von Teese, and a Dubya knockoff. What more do you need to know? Fleshbot reports that in this viral marketing vid from Agent Provocateur, "one of our favorite Joy Division songs gets the full-on cheesecake S&M treatment." You'll need Windows Media Player to watch it, which is a total buzzkill, but the nipple wrenches kinda make up for it. The song will be released as a single on a promo CD in August. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WiFi Toys book -- free downloadable preview chapter
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DATE: 07/21/2004 09:25:27 PM
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Mike Outmesguine, tech guru and Southern Calilfornia Wireless Users Group cofounder, has a new book out called "Wi-Fi Toys." It's a compendium of hands-on projects involving "extreme wireless technology." There's great stuff in here. It's just broad enough to avoid intimidating non-geeks, but just geek enough so that the experiments will actually work. Mike says:
This book attempts to bring readers into the fray by teaching them, step-by-step, how to build fun, useful, and k001 projects using Wi-Fi. Thanks to Wiley Publishing, the entire first chapter is available for download as a non-DRM'd PDF file here. This chapter teaches the basics of Wi-Fi and shows you how to terminate a cable and choose a pigtail for any wireless project. Also, at the last SOCALWUG meeting, I gave a highly interactive (i.e. Comments/Questions/Answers) presentation about the book. Slides here, Video here, Meeting notes here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Political bloggers don't follow the power-law distribution
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:22:29 PM
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Henry Farrell, a poli sci prof, has just finished a new paper on blogging popularity. He sez, "The finding that is perhaps of most interest to bloggers is that there doesn't seem to be a power law distribution of links to political bloggers - instead, it's a lognormal distribution. Our interpretation of this is that the forces leading to pervasive inequality and 'rich getting richer' phenomena are weaker than Shirky and others suggest - lognormal distributions are associated with network growth models that provide more room for link-poor sites to grow richer."
237K PDF Link
(Thanks, Henry!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Russell Simmons, Glen E. Friedman, the WTC, the RNC, and a message.
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:24:03 PM
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Sean Bonner, with whom I co-curated the SENT phonecam art show, blogs:
Russell Simmons owns a loft facing ground zero. Since 9/11 there's been extremely limited access to the building, but this morning our good friend, photographer Glen E. Friedman get in for a few minutes to make a statement which will be up through the RNC. Here's a bunch of pictures from inside and out.
Link
(And incidentally, Mr. Friedman was an invited participant in SENT. Some of his phonecam photos from the show are here.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eastern Standard Tribe paperback errata submitted
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:31:36 PM
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Last week, I posted a plea for people who had pet typos, continuity errors and the like in Eastern Standard Tribe to come contribute to a Wiki where I was gathering these up for the paperback edition. A week later, I have an excellent list of the errata for the book, and I've sent it off to my editor. Many thanks to all of you who generously gave of your time and detail-attentiveness for this effort -- I'm overwhelmed.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fabulous celebrity nightmare porn spam specimen
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:39:08 PM
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This was the most spectacularly surreal piece of sex spam I'd received in a long time. Since it involved a misspelled celebrity menage a trois that never was (thank heavens), I felt obligated to share it with these folks. And if you think that's special, oh, just you wait for the Japanese live eel porn video link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Parliament should place its debates under a CC license
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:46:19 PM
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TheyWorkForYou.com, the brilliant political action site that scrapes and reformats the record of the UK Parliament, is technically in violation of the law: Parliament holds a "Parliamentary Copyright" in its debates, and by scraping and republishing them, TheyWorkForYou infringes upon it.
Richard Allan has a great solution to this problem:
What this is doing is forcing Parliament to look at how it handles other people reproducing the material on the Official Parliamentary Website. It would look awful if Parliament were to try and stop people from using what is and should be public information. But the public interest would not be served by people of dubious motives giving false information by doctoring the official record.
What is the answer? Perhaps a Creative Commons license for the House of Commons which can allow re-use of material without payment but subject to conditions such as repetition in full without alteration? I am starting to think there is a good campaign here to ask Parliament to use appropriate Creative Commons licenses for all its output?
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(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ukranian cave system that hid Jews from Nazis for nearly a year
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:51:59 PM
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This is an incredible National Geographic piece on the exploration of the Priest's Grotto, a cave system in the Ukraine where 38 Jews hid from the Nazis for nearly a year.
Once inside, Nicola marveled at not only the remarkable natural features of the cave but signs of human presence, including walls and old shoes and walls made of stones...
"It's amazing," Nicola told National Geographic News. "When I go into a cave I have special boots, because an ankle sprain deep in a cave could be serious business. I have special wicking underwear, so I don't get hypothermia, a special suit, special gloves for gripping things. I have three independent light sources—that's a standard rule. This is all for a day trip into a cave, and yet this is a situation where average people lived here for nearly a year."...
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(via Ambiguous)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Alan Moore on our modern distopia
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:55:22 PM
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Salon has an excellent interview with Alan Moore, the man behind Watchmen, From Hell and other canonically awesome funnybooks. Moore talks distopian politics:
One of the reasons we singled out media in "V for Vendetta" was because it is one of the most useful tools of tyranny. We invite it into our own home every night; I'm sure that some of us think of it as a friend. That might be a horrifying notion but I'm sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they'll probably believe the television set in the end. It's an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves. I mean, I think that television is one of the most diabolical -- in the very best sense of the word -- inventions of the past century. It has probably done more to degrade the mind and intelligence of its audience, even if they happen to be drug addicts or alcoholics; I would think that watching television has done more to limit their horizons in the long run. And it has also distorted our culture.
TV and politics have always made inevitable bedfellows, but the results have been disastrous. Look at the situation we have now. Let's say that tomorrow someone who is a political genius were to emerge -- and I'm not expecting this to happen, but say that it did. Say that a politician emerged who seemed, for once, basically competent, who seemed to be able to do their job as well as the average cab driver, comic writer or journalist. If they were the most intelligent, visionary, humane political thinker in the history of mankind, but were also fat, had some sort of blemish or something that made them less than telegenic, we would not be able to elect them. All we're able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good. I suppose it's too early to go into my rant on Ronald Reagan? That would be tasteless.
Red Req'd Salon Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SiteFilter thinks blogs are porn, chat sites or worse and censors them
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DATE: 07/21/2004 10:58:00 PM
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A couple days after discovering that the SiteFilter censorware in use at his hotel was blockign MeFi, Metafilter Matt ruminates on the general suckitude that is censorware, especially in light of the fact that SiteFilter's crappy blacklist is mandatory in the libraries of the State of Georgia.
I tried all sorts of blogs, both new and old, political and tech, but the ones that were blocked were completely random. Like I said before, waxy.org is blocked (screenshot), but similar sites are not. Gawker is blocked (screenshot), but no other gawker media site is (wonkette and gizmodo are fine). Acts of Volition seemed strange to block (screenshot), since it's a pretty tightly focused tech/design blog. On the purely humorous side, Oliver Willis is considered not a "Chat" site like the rest of the blocked blogs, but a "Sex" site (screenshot). I bet the #joiito army is not going to be happy when they hear that Joi Ito's site is blocked (screenshot).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Antique science fiction toys for sale
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DATE: 07/21/2004 11:00:53 PM
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ToyTent are purveyors of astonishingly cool (and wickedly expensive) vintage space toys, robots, and rayguns. Just browsing the images of these things gets me all excited.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Garden gnomes take £15,000 off the value of your home
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DATE: 07/21/2004 11:03:41 PM
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The Guardian has published a piece cribbed from a TV show called "The 20 Quickest Ways To Lose Money On Your Property" -- a list of the pounds-value of bad decor decisions on your home's resale value.
5 Additions such as "humorous" gnomes and stone cladding (£15,000)
6 Textured finish to ceilings (£14,000)
7 uPVC windows (£12,500)
8 Smell of pets (£10,000)
9 Poor DIY (£10,000)
10 Avocado bathroom suite (£8,000)
11 Nightmare neighbours (£7,500)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anime keychain drives
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DATE: 07/21/2004 11:05:52 PM
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Gizmodo has the scoop on a line of Gundam-branded USB keychain drives.
To appeal to the "maniacs" (Japanese for "someone who knows too much,") IO Data has included two features for collectors of the drives - and I'm not making this up - by installing the included "Cute" software, your desktop wallpaper will automatically change to a corresponding Gundam wallpaper. When you take it out, it will go back to normal. The second feature is the screensaver, which when you purchase and use more than one of these drives, will add the respective characters to the ensuing action. You too can engage in intergalactic space combat for about $55 USD for a USB 2.0 mecha, or $45 for a USB 1.1 mecha.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 9/11 commission report: How to get a copy online or in hard copy
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DATE: 07/22/2004 05:42:43 AM
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Here are instructions on how to obtain a copy of the official final report of the 9-11 Commission.
The document will be posted online at 11:30 am ET today is now available online at this Link.
The U.S. Government Printing Office offers hard copy, if you prefer. Ask for stock number 041-015-00236-8. This will cost $8.50 plus $4.75 for shipping, (total = $13.25), checks and most major credit cards accepted. Order by phone at 866-512-1800 or on-line, or by mail from Superintendent of Documents, PO Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954.
You can also obtain a copy of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the U.S. intelligence community's pre-war assessments on Iraq on-line: Link. The GPO offers printed copies for $51 (stock number 052-071-01415-2, follow order instructions above.)
Update: Reader FerrisB says, "If you'd like to hear the testimonies from the commission hearings, the iTunes store has them available for free in their audiobook section. Link
Update 2: BoingBoing pal John Rambow says, "There's also a trade book edition of the report. It's only $10, and it's probably easier to get and read than the GPO's version. Link"
Update 3: Jason Kottke says, "I've created an HTML version of the 9/11 Commission Executive Summary with permalinks for each paragraph for easy linking and copy/paste. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Squint and see Jesus
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DATE: 07/22/2004 08:38:00 AM
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An image of Jesus was spotted in a tinted window at a Cole Hardware store in Rio Grande Valley, Texas.
"I go to church whenever I get a chance, but I'm not a spiritual person. I do believe, especially now," a resident said after seeing the window.
Link
UPDATE: Satirista says "What's downright high-larious is that when I visited the link to Local6 news to get the full story, I clicked on the right-hand link 'click here for a larger image...' thinking I was going to see a bigger Jesus, and this is the page that came up."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Demolition man
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DATE: 07/22/2004 08:54:53 AM
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Controlled Demolition Incorporated is a family-owned company that demolishes bridges, buildings, missiles, and other structures around the world. Their Web site features a breathtaking video of the orchestrated collapse of the Seattle Kingdome. Company head Mark Loizeaux was recently interviewed by New Scientist:
.jpg)
"It has to be the right job in the first place, the right explosive, the right pattern of laying the charges, and sometimes, which sounds odd, the right repairs to bring it down as we want, so no one or no other structure is harmed. And by differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make it dance."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Special US Army food designed to be rehydrated with urine
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DATE: 07/22/2004 09:03:34 AM
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Matt sez: "story about how some company has developed food packs for the us army that can be rehydrated with urine. It's supposed to reduce the amount of water(and therefore weight) they need to carry." The pouch has a filter that removes almost all the toxins from the urine. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Downloading isn't killing music
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DATE: 07/22/2004 09:26:26 AM
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Suw Charman has written an excellent article for the Guardian on my pal Koleman Strumpf's empirical, quantitative research on the effect of downloading on record sales (he concluded that it doesn't really have one), and the music industry's content-free bluster in reply.
"We consider it a very flawed study," says Matt Phillips, a BPI spokesperson. Both the BPI and the International Federation for the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) have criticised the study for including the Christmas period when people are buying CDs as gifts.
"It's very straightforward to address these kinds of criticisms," says Strumpf. "We got rid of the Christmas season and just looked at the first half of our data. We still find the same effect."...
"Over the period 1999 to 2003, DVD prices fell by 25% and the price of players fell in the US from over $1,000 to almost nothing," says Strumpf. "At the same time, CD prices went up by 10%. Combined DVD and VHS tape sales went up by 500m, while CD sales fell by 200m, so a possible explanation is that people were spending on DVDs instead of CDs."
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(Thanks, Suw!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: In-game product placement's distopian future
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DATE: 07/22/2004 09:27:59 AM
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Great Terra Nova post on the new round of VC funding received by Massive Incorporated, which does in-game product-placement and ads:
** you hack monster for 80pts of damage
** you hack monster for 100pts of damage
>monster: did you know you can get 'monster' discounts at QuickieMart
** you hack monster for 10pts of damage
* you have killed monster
* you gain 1000XP
>would you like to convert these to 1 QuickieMart loyalty point (Y/N)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Imagineering head on Tiki Room rehab
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DATE: 07/22/2004 09:29:46 AM
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A Laughing Place message-board poster ran into Marty Sklar, the head of Disney Imagineering, at Disneyland's Tiki Room, and had a conversation about the upcoming Tiki Room refurb:
We talked briefly about The Tiki Room, about John Hench and Rolly Crump, and he confirmed the rehab, the roof being in particularly bad shape, and that the birds need a pretty extensive rehab.
'They used to bring the birds up to Imagineering and we'd refurbish them. Now, they do them here, and not often enough,' he said.
The Cast Member who introduced the show did an excellent job, she just did the spiel with enthusiasm and professionalism.
As we were walking out, I walked past Marty Sklar and he said 'It's still a good show isn't it?'
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Enigmatic photo-toons
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DATE: 07/22/2004 09:58:25 AM
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A Softer World is an enigmatic weekly three-panel comic strip made of artfully arranged photos and bits of text.
Link
(Thanks, Bob!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Game developer: the real pirates are my publishers
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DATE: 07/22/2004 10:04:54 AM
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From the author of Galactic Civilizations I and II:
"So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken."...
"So yea, tell me again how I need to put some dongle or whatever on my game to keep 15 year olds from pirating? When our contract with publishers forces them to wear a shock collar that I can press a button to shock them if royalties aren't paid on time then we'll talk about forcing customers to deal with massive copy protection. But it's not the pirates I worry about."
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(Thanks, -d!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Plane used often by White House carried 13 Bin Ladens out of US post-9/11
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DATE: 07/22/2004 11:22:33 AM
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Still losing sleep over fears that Osama bin Laden's kin were forced to suffer in commercial coach class when they flew out of the US a week after 9/11? Today's Washington Post should make you feel better:
At least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a passenger manifest released yesterday. One passenger, Omar Awad bin Laden, a nephew of the al Qaeda leader, had been investigated by the FBI because he had lived with Abdullah bin Laden, a leader of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which the FBI suspected of being a terrorist organization.
The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who obtained the manifest from officials at Boston's Logan International Airport. Lautenberg's office was given the document in recent weeks and released it before today's issuance of the final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Although much was already known about the "bin Laden flight," Lautenberg provided additional details, including the information that the plane, a 727 owned by DB Air and operated by Ryan International, began its flight in Los Angeles and made stops in Orlando, Dulles International Airport and Boston before continuing to Gander, Newfoundland; Paris; Geneva; and Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. The aircraft, tail number N521DB, has been chartered frequently by the White House for the press corps traveling with President Bush. (...)
"The Saudi Embassy offered to pay more money if our crew had a concern," [Ron Ryan of Ryan International] said. But he said all were reassured because "the FBI and Secret Service were heavily involved. They were in abundance every place we were."
Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Ken says, "Here's the aircraft's website run by the charter company. They fled in style. Link"
[Ed: image above grabbed from this online photo tour of transcontinental luxury service model N521DB, described on charter company DB Air's website as a "club room in the sky." ]
And Vidiot says, "Besides the White House press corps and the bin Ladens, N521DB has also flown Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, and the Baltimore Orioles...here are pix of it at various airports: Link"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bipedal Dog
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DATE: 07/22/2004 12:32:49 PM
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She's no Natasha the Walking Monkey, but Faith the Amazing Biped Dog certainly has an impressive gait. Faith was born with just one front leg and it was on backwards. A vet graciously removed the dying limb and, with help from her family, Faith has overcome her handicap:
"Even though Faith has this defect we taught her to stand, hop, and eventually walk on her two back legs, like a human."
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: KITT for sale
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DATE: 07/22/2004 12:45:38 PM
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KITT (Knight Industry Two Thousand), from the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, is up for auction on eBay. Apparently this was one of the tricked-out 1983 Trans Ams actually used in the show:
"After being released from its film duties, KITT found its way into the show circuit by promoting many Budweiser World of Wheels car shows for a number of years. After its tour of duty, the car was in need of restoration and in 2001 the owner approached Mark Scrivani of Mark's Custom Kits to restore the vehicle. The original, futuristic dash built by universal would only illuminate and was not intended to be functional; the owner commissioned Scrivani to make the dash fully functional, thus, the various non-functioning consoles were removed, cleaned up and made functional with pushable buttons, sound and visual effects. The dash received fully operational gauges and instruments, as well as an in-car camera tied into one of the two dash-mounted LCD monitors. The other monitor is wired into a trunk-mounted VCR for running and viewing tapes for future car show use. The original scanner mounted in the front of the vehicle was restored and functions properly. The scanner sound effect is also added to external speakers so it can be heard while the scanner is running. Besides the original Universal registration, the car comes with the original stamped steel "KNIGHT" license plate..."
William Daniels not included. Link (Thanks, Alan Rapp!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Spintronics -- nanostorage coming to a gadget near you
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DATE: 07/22/2004 03:58:04 PM
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I wrote a piece for TheFeature about "spintronics" -- nanotechnology-based storage that is going to show up in products as early as next year.
Spintronics is a field of nanotechnology that uses the directional spin of electrons to indicate the "1s" and "0s" of binary computation...MRAM, short for Magneto Resistive Random Access Memory, is the furthest along of several nascent spintronics nanotechnologies. MRAM is likely to play a major role in portable memory in the upcoming years, because it combines many of the benefits (and very few of the disadvantages) of hard drives, flash memory, SRAM and DRAM.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: GOTMILF? Not anymore, for vanity plate car owner
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DATE: 07/22/2004 04:09:27 PM
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Michael Syravong thought he'd pulled a fast one on Washington's Department of Licensing when he got a license-plate that read "GOTMILF." He told the department that MILF stands for "Manual Inline Lift Fluctuator," But eventually, bluenoses who are somehow familiar with the true meaning of the acronym (Google it for the not-safe-for-work answer), complained to the department and Syravong lost his plates.
Link (Thanks, Eric!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 9/11 PDF cleaned up
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DATE: 07/22/2004 04:45:03 PM
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Glenn Fleishman sez: "Sid Steward is a PDF guru that I've turned to in the past to bookmark and clean up my electronic books. He forwarded a link to a site he's created where he has the 9/11 Commission's report optimized for faster download, and including bookmarks and other PDF add-ons. His site offers a fast full text search of the PDF with links that will open the file and hit those bookmarks." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hollywood Zen: Still life on CBS lot
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DATE: 07/22/2004 10:49:02 PM
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I was working on the CBS lot in Studio City around sunset today. I had a digital camera with a few minutes and megabytes to kill, so I took some quickie snapshots of abandoned TV sets. Everything you see here is life-sized, but fake (not unlike my city). The trees are painted on drywall, the houses are 3 feet deep, even the ivy is two-dimensional. Vacant studio lots emit a strange kind of sorrow and character that's not there when they're full of bodies. Like flat sketches that pop off the page when liberated from their daily human cargo. After actors depart and crews go home, the lots wake up to live moody, secret little dream lives we don't know about. LA is full of promises and lies. Here, even the studio sets lie to you about being inanimate. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Secret Swing visit report
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:15:38 AM
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After reading the earlier entry here on Toronto's Secret Swing, an art installation in which a playground swing has been hung in a narrow downtown graffiti alley, Chris sought it out and went for a ride and shot some good pix of it in action.
Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mt-blacklist wins plugin contest
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:18:18 AM
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The Movable Type plugin contest judging (which I helped with) has closed, and the grand prize winner has been announced: Congrats to Jay Allen for his mt-blacklist plugin and his choice of an Apple G5 dual 2GHz with 23" Apple Cinema HD Display or a Dell Dimension 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition with two 20.1" 2001FP Dell Ultra Sharp Digital Flat Panel Display and Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS.
Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Doonesbury to be dropped for being "too controversial"
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:20:27 AM
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The Continental Features comics syndicate has announced that it will be dropping Doonesbury because the strip is "too controversial" (lately, Trudeau has been using the strip to criticise the Iraq War and Fox News).
The Continental head said he doesn't know exactly when "Doonesbury" will leave the package; he's currently polling clients to see if they want to replace it with "Agnes," "Get Fuzzy," "Pickles," "Zits," or another comic.
Link
(via Joi)
Update: Phil Gyford sez, "Some time ago I knocked up an RSS feed that links to the latest Doonesbury strips (unlike the RSS feed that used to display the actual strips and was told to quit by Ucomics)."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Joi Ito taking a PhD in "sharing economy"
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:21:37 AM
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Joi Ito (who never got an undergrad degree) is going to do a PhD in Business Management, and his thesis project is a book on "the sharing economy."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Glenn Fleishman's gadget bag
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:36:01 AM
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The latest victim in Gizmodo's "What's in Your Gadget Bag?" feature is Glenn Fleishman, who comes clean about a truly astonishing amount of crap that he lugs around with him in his electronics kit, described with the loving verbosity of a real geek.
The camera used to take this picture is a Canon S1 IS, a 3-megapixel device that has a 10x optical zoom, interchangeable lenses, and uses four AA batteries. Using 2200 milliamphere hour (mAh) batteries recently, I took 500 photos and movies over the course of a month before swapping out another set and recharging. The camera does 640 by 480, 30 frame per second mono-audio video up to the size of the memory card on top of its anti-jitter-motor photos.
Finally, I always carry a 12-foot extension cord with multiple plugs on the end, and the alternative two-prong adapter for my Apple power supply. You never know how many friends you have until you have extra outlets.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: With ReplayTV out of the picture, Studios turn on TiVo
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:40:31 AM
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TiVo's strategy has always been to play nice with the movie studios. While SonicBlue was shipping the Replay with automated commercial skipping and show-sharing, TiVo was adding DRM-based systems for cautiously moving programming around your house and only your house. It worked -- sorta. Replay got sued into oblivion, and TiVo was left standing.
But now that the studios have chased the TiVo competitors out of the market, they're turning on their pet PVR. TiVo wants to deliver a product that will allow you to share your programming among no more than 10 sets -- this isn't the indiscriminate sharing that the Broadcast Flag advocates said they feared: this is heaily DRMed, controlled and modest sharing.
And the Studios and the NFL don't like it. So they're demanding that FCC order TiVo to disable this feature.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gundam-to-USB hub mod
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:43:51 AM
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Jason Streigel converted his Gundam action figure into a two-port USB hub, and lavishly documented the build process.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Slam poetry for CC remix
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DATE: 07/23/2004 01:12:00 AM
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Wayne Mercier is a Vancouver slam poet who has just released his first book of poetry published, and along with it, a CD of him reading his work. He's made the entire audio of the CD available for downloand and remix under a Creative Commons license.
I'm really excited about this, not just because it's a way of getting my stuff out into the world, but because - to my knowledge - this is the first time this has been done in Canadian poetry. Coach House Press releases electronic editions of their author's work but retains copyright. Also the fact that this is audio, and thus open to extensive remixing and incorporation into larger, multimedia projects, is very cool.
Link
(Thanks, Wayne!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory and Charlie Stross in Popular Science
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DATE: 07/23/2004 01:15:02 AM
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The current ish of Popular Science (August 2004) is on stands now, with a great piece on Charlie Stross and me as science fiction writers who are doing good work on the Singularity (alas, the piece isn't online yet, but it's easy to find in shops). I'm really happy with how it came out, but wanted to give out one tiny bit of errata for the record: the article identifies me as a co-founder of boingboing.net -- although I'm a proud co-editor of BB, the founding was done by my pal Mark Frauenfelder and his wife Carla Sinclair.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shipwrecked U-Boat salvage blog with CC-licensed A/V
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DATE: 07/23/2004 04:20:23 AM
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Thor (who has the same birthday as me -- happy b-day, Thor!) sez,
We made International news last week when our team found the shipwreck of the rare U-215, a U-Boat that was on a secret mission to mine Boston Harbor when it decided to disobey orders and sink an American liberty ship in July 1942. That action lead to a watery grave for 48 German sailors, and 10 more who went down on the Alexander Macomb.
During the whole dive I was blogging the event from shore, keeping in touch by satellite phone. Unfortunately our website, Shipwreck Central, wasn't ready to go online so I was left to ponder the question of "if a blogger blogs in the woods..."
It's 5:30 AM here in Halifax and I'm back at home having a Wi-Fi beer on the porch. A couple of hours ago we opened up the site for a 'soft launch'. We're pretty happy with it, it's like the IMDB of shipwrecks with a kick-ass map interface, and best of all we've made our audio and video available under a Creative Commons license. I can't wait to hear live from the dive audio mixed in with some downtempo-ambient... it goes quite well from my experience.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US Copyright Office Wants to outlaw VCRs?
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DATE: 07/23/2004 07:29:17 AM
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Ernest Miller writes:
Yesterday, Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, testified before the Senate regarding the INDUCE Act. Her testimony was even more radical than the RIAA's. Not only did she (inappropriately) explain what outcome the Appeals Court in the Grokster case should reach and argue (wrongly) that the INDUCE Act wouldn't have a chilling effect on innovation, she actually said she thought the INDUCE Act was not enough. The Register of Copyrights argued that the Betamax decision, which made VCRs legal, should be overturned by Congress. Wow.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Velvet Underground plundered by Ergo Phizmiz
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DATE: 07/23/2004 07:32:06 AM
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Avant-odd composer Ergo Phizmiz has posted MP3s of his album covering Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat in its entirety. The release features Phizmiz on: "Banjo, Bass Guitar, Ruler, Music Box, Violin, Toy Piano, Electric Guitar, Accordion, Squeezebox, Euphonium, Ukulele, Kazoo, Xylophone, Pixiphone, Uumskither, Mbira, Pod, Delay, Turntable, Percussion." Earlier this year, he released the instant plunderphonic classic "Ergo Phizmiz & his Orchestra plays Aphex Twin."
"The music of Ergo Phizmiz combines sampling and electronics with acoustic instrumentation, plundering the history of popular and classical culture into a Dadaist assault on the senses. Equally at home in the three-minute pop-song as in long, drawn out sound-collages, the sound of Phizmiz comes somewhere between cartoon-music, experimental classical, pop, Gamelan and hip-hop."
Link (Via Metafilter)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC allows mix-and-match antennae
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DATE: 07/23/2004 10:18:59 AM
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The FCC has a new and somewhat baroque regulation that legalizes plugging aftermarket antennae into your WiFi access-points. In a long post on WiFiNetNews, Glenn Fleishman takes apart the new regulation and explains in admirably.
The FCC rule doesn’t suddenly make all antennas legal for all systems. Instead, they have chosen a clever middle ground. For new devices—or, presumably for recertification of old devices—manufacturers will be allowed to test the system with high-gain antennas of each major type, like omni, patch, yagi, and so forth. Once the device is certified, the manufacturer can release the characteristics of the antennas they tested for both their in-band and out-of-band signal patterns and strengths. (Out-of-band transmissions are the inevitable but not intentional frequencies that are broadcast on at typically very low levels due to harmonics and other technical radio issues.)
Link
(Thanks, Glenn!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Self-cleaning nanofabric
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:02:15 PM
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CNN reports on the recently-announced invention of self-cleaning nano-coated fabric that's a leap beyond stain-resistant Dockers. The materials scientists at Hong Kong Polytechnic University coated cotton with nanoparticles of titanium dioxide. When subjected to ultraviolet light, the titanium dioxide produces an oxidizing agent that can break down dirt and other organic substances. According to researcher Walid A. Daoud, several companies have already come knocking.
"(The fabric will be useful for) military people, or travelers, people who go hiking, who don't have a lot of water and time to wash their clothes," he said. "This is a very good idea because then if the clothes get dirty, the dirt can be decomposed by the fabric itself. So after a few days in the sunshine, or even indoor light, the dirt will disappear."
As both BioED Online and CNN point out, the technology was prophesized in the 1951 film The Man in the White Suit starring Alec Guinness. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Database of 466 lousy tippers
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DATE: 07/23/2004 12:24:10 PM
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Bitter Waitress has a database of names and locations of restaurant patrons who left lousy tips, along with comments.
Where it happened: Franklin, TN
Total bill / Tip amount / Percentage: $75.76 / $4.24 / 5%
What happened: Barely squeezing into their chairs, they immediately whip out their two free appetizer coupons and proceed to order the largest appetizers possible. They then order the largest portions on the menu, request numerous favors and have me box up the last little scraps that they can't cram down their gullets into 6 separate containers. Then with a patronizing tone they tell me that I can keep the change.
Link (Thanks, Darren!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pixelblocks are like a cross between Lego and Lite Brite
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DATE: 07/23/2004 02:19:35 PM
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Pixelblocks are Lego-like colored plastic blocks. The cool thing about them is that you can use them like pixels, to add images and patterns to the surfaces of your creations. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bart Nagel's Mondo 2000 collection on eBay
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DATE: 07/23/2004 03:04:50 PM
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Bart Nagel was the visionary photographer/designer behind the cyberdelic aesthetic of Mondo 2000, the "magazine-of-record" for early 1990s cyberculture. If you don't know Mondo, you should. Bart is now auctioning off part of his own Mondo 2000 collection, including 17 issues of the magazine, issues of High Frontiers and Reality Hackers (RU Sirius's pre-Mondo 'zine), the essential Mondo 2000 User's Guide to the New Edge, a rare unworn Mondo t-shirt, and assorted other ephemera. "Mondo 2000: How fast are you? How dense?" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bioengineered household appliances
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DATE: 07/23/2004 10:44:47 PM
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Faux company "Geniecorp" makes creepy, icky, biogenetically-engineered household appliances for happy mutant homes of the future. "Lick-n-Span," "Alarm Cock," and "Lhasa Mopso" are but a few. Link to the online shopping mall, full of funny, handsomely-designed Flash animations -- it's all a clever promotional tease for this self-published book. (Thanks, Howard)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Marvellous classic audiobooks on Telltale Weekly
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DATE: 07/24/2004 02:48:38 AM
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Some time ago, I blogged about Telltale Weekly, a site that records and posts audiobook editions of public domain texts, charging small sums ($0.25-$4 or so) for MP3/OGG/AAC downloads.
I just revisited the site and gosh, there's been a lot of good stuff posted since I last stopped by (there's an RSS feed for new titles that I've just added to my newsreader): classic stories and essays by Twain, Jack London, L Frank Baum, O Henry; poetry by Walt Whitman; political speeches and essays by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass... My cup runneth over.
And there's good karma at Telltale: after five years or 100,000 downloads, TTW will release each track into the public domain under a CC license; also, partial proceeds from Ogg downloads are donated to the Xiph Foundation, who support Ogg development.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK Friends of the Creative Domain Wiki
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DATE: 07/24/2004 02:58:24 AM
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The Friends of the Creative Domain is a UK activist group supported by the Campaign for Digital Rights, EFF, and the Union for the Public Domain, created to foster free culture, free software, open content and the like. Its first project is to help the BBC win the right to put its archive of TV and radio programming online in the next version of the BBC's Charter, which is being negotiated right now.
FCD has just put up a Wiki for gathering and organising materials related to its campaigns -- it's the right place to go to get started if you want to pitch in.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BugMeNot's reg form
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DATE: 07/24/2004 12:25:44 PM
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BugMeNot -- a service that creates spoof entries for registration-required sites -- has produced a mock registration form aimed at people associated with reg-reqd sites that exemplifies many of the critical problems with registration on the Web:
What percentage of sites do you visit that require registration?
What percentage would you be comfortable with?...
Would you be willing to have an RFID chip inserted under your skin in exchange for a free, 12 month newspaper subscription?
What if we told you that you couldn't access news unless you agreed?
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig: Shame on you, O'Reilly
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DATE: 07/24/2004 12:53:00 PM
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Larry Lessig has written a long open letter to Bill O'Reilly that opens "You have declared a 'war' on the New York Times. That's good for you, good for them, and good for our democracy: Strong opinions deserve strong spokesmen. Your battle will help sharpen a debate about matters important to the Republic." Lessig then proceeds to take O'Reilly to task, point-by-point for an ongoing campaign of pathological libel agaist Jeremy Glick, the son of a 9/11 victim who spoke out against the Bush Presidency and the war. Glick appears in Outfoxed, a new documentary that criticises O'Reilly and his network, and in answering the charges raised in Outfoxed, O'Reilly has chosen Glick as a symbol of what he hates, and in order to make his point, he has been lying repeatedly about what Glick said and did. Lessig's point is that attacking a giant media organisation is one thing, but using your on-camera bully pulpit to repeatedly slander someone who has already lost so much is unconscionable.
# on February 5th, you told your viewers that "Glick was out of control." He may have been out of your control. But you and our government have got to learn that just because someone disagrees with you, he doesn"t become a security threat. Again, watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He was not "out of control."
# on February 5th, you told your viewers that Glick was "spewing hatred for this program." Watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He criticized you, not the program, for unethically using sympathy for the 9/11 victims for your own political ends. He was calling your behavior improper. You had not earned his hatred.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blog-detectives tackle suspected Mexican child-porn recruitment site
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DATE: 07/24/2004 02:21:20 PM
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Eduardo Arcos, editor of the Spanish-language blog ALT1040, is conducting an online investigation into a website suspected of recruiting teenage girls in Mexico for child porn. He's soliciting help from other bloggers, and using the "comment" feature in his blog as a way to exchange info with concerned citizens throughout the blogosphere. Together they're collecting data, with the apparent goal of revealing who's behind the suspect site -- and seeing to it that appropriate action is taken to protect potential victims. Here's my clunky attempt at translating Arcos' summary post:
A site called TV-whores with a theme and intentions that are very clear, contains the following text: Girls from 13 - 19 years of age: earn thousands of pesos simply by taking photographs. More information here. (...)
The page in question offers thousands of pesos to 13-19-year-old girls for taking digital photos. You don't have to be naked, you can be in a bikini or underwear, it says... but it's more than suspicious."
Link (in Spanish)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wicked-ass trailer for Thai kickboxing film "Ong Bak" aka "Mach"
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DATE: 07/24/2004 06:27:59 PM
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Action-feature Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior promises a truckload of Thai kickboxing mightiness. Completed in 2003, it opened July 24 in Japan (under the title Mach) and is apparently slated for North American release this November. In this whup-tasstic preview, a hero with flaming feet stomps opponents in all directions. Lots of aerial fight choreography without wires. Forget what I said before about that Bollywood guy -- stuntman-turned-actor Phanom Yeerum, aka Tony Jaa, is my future husband.
BoingBoing reader JohnD says, "Its low budget, virtually no action for the first half, then it gets as intense and exciting as you could want it too, despite the rudimentary story," and reader Garrett Gee says, "Fight sequences were great, it made me want to train again."
Link to Quicktime trailer, and Link to the movie website. Link to the company that holds the copyright. Link to IMDB details, Link to alternate French site.
(via Warren, thanks for the update Tanner, and thanks very much to Joi Ito for the kind translation assist! )
Update: BoingBoing reader mediamelt says, "You seriously need to check out the trailer for
Born to Fight, the latest from the director and fight choreographer of Ong Bak. Some seriously insane stunts here. Watch for the truck scene, I hope that stuntman got a huge bonus! BTW: Ong Bak's plot is so-so, but the stunts are nothing short of revolutionary. You can purchase a region-free DVD of the film here (same place I got my copy)."
Update 2: Reader Jon Silpayamanant says, "There is another French site that you might be interested in as it has a download section where you can get "The Making of Ong-Bak": Link. The reason, as I mention in my blog post, that France had already been distributing the film for several months is because of Luc Besson. There's a little blurb about how the Thai director, Prachya Pinkaew, left a little message to Besson in Ong-Bak in the French site."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 9/11 commission report: much of what we knew was wrong.
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DATE: 07/24/2004 11:35:31 PM
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This piece in today's New York Times outlines a number of the presumed truths about 9/11 which the 9/11 commission report effectively debunks. Among them:
The commission's report found that the hijackers had repeatedly broken the law in entering the United States, that Mr. bin Laden may have micromanaged the attacks but did not pay for them, that intelligence agencies had considered the threat of suicide hijackings, and that Mr. Bush received an August 2001 briefing on evidence of continuing domestic terrorist threats from Al Qaeda.
Link to NY Times story, Link to downloadable report, and here is Kottke's helpful outline of the lengthy report's structure.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London's toilets in audiobook form for iPod
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DATE: 07/25/2004 10:49:26 AM
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pPod is a spoken-word iPod based guide to the public toilets of London.
pPod combines text, spoken word audio, and music to deliver a guide to London’s public loos – truly a convenience for iPod users on the move! Entertaining audio reviews and even accompanying sound tracks such as Handel’s ‘Water Music’ and ‘Cosmic Winds’ will help users to locate their nearest (and loveliest!) loos.
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(Thanks, Alistair!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 30,000 anti-Induce Act letters sent to Congress
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DATE: 07/25/2004 11:19:15 PM
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Orrin Hatch's Draconian Induce Act -- which would criminalize iPods on the grounds that shipping a high-capacity personal stereo practically begs the public to use file-sharing services to fill it -- continues to draw fire from all quarters. Between EFF and SaveTheIpod.com, over 30,000 Congresscritter letters have been sent by voters in every state in the Union, asking government to save America from Orrin Hatch and the cartel that has put him up to this insanity. Click below to send your own letter:
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Real ships guerrilla DRM for the iPod
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DATE: 07/25/2004 11:23:26 PM
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Real Networks have reverse-engineered Apple's iPod and written a player for its DRM "Helix" format, which they're giving away. This means that you'll be able to play the Helix files you buy from Real on your Apple iPod.
I'm cautiously glad about this. It's the right idea: tech vendors should be writing tools that allow anyone to play anything on anything: it's insane to own an Apple "record player" that only plays Apple "records" -- meaning that if you buy your records from Real, you need to buy another record player.
My only disappointment is that Real is engaged in the same behaviour: Real's records only play on players licensed by Real: it would be much more customer-friendly if Real went into the business of providing us with music in a patent-free, open standard that could be implemented by anyone.
Link
(Thanks, Jeff!)
Update: Ernie Miller's posted a lengthy analysis of this on his blog:
Note, however, what Real is not doing (and strangely, the news reports
don't seem to mention either). You can convert Real files into
FairPlay files, but you can't convert FairPlay files into Real files.
Real is not allowing people to copy their iTunes into Real's DRM'd
format. Why? Because it would likely be a clear violation of the DMCA.
You may be able to play Real's DRM'd music on an iPod, but you still
won't be able to play iTunes on a portable music player other than an
iPod.
So, this isn't quite the breakthrough the analysts and whatnot seem to
be claiming. If you buy anything from iTunes, you're still locked into
Apple. If you buy an iPod, you can buy from Real's music store, but
what real advantage does that provide? A DRM connoisseur might say
that you will have the option of using other players in the future,
but so what? Anyone who knows anything about DRM knows that you can't
trust any of these competing formats. Perhaps in a few years one might
want to buy another brand of portable music player, but what happens
if Real's DRM fails in the marketplace and is squeezed out? What good
did the flexibility do?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Every Nintendo in a polished wooden box casemod
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DATE: 07/25/2004 11:26:16 PM
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This guy deconstructed a NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube, then built this beautiful polished wood enclosure for all of them so that they could coexist in one incongruous box.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: No one at BlogOn presentation is using Explorer
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DATE: 07/25/2004 11:27:40 PM
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At the BlogOn conference, a Microsoft presenter asked his audience how many of them used Internet Explorer:
Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, "Wow! Okay how many of you wish we'd fix IE so you could use it?"
Still no hands....
Informal survey afterwards said the Windows users in the crowd were all using the latest Firefox. Wouldn't it be amazing if Mozilla ended up winning in the end?
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pro video gamers have it tough
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DATE: 07/25/2004 11:29:46 PM
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Great K5 piece on the plight of the professional video-gamer, plagued by new game releases and vendors who build games for non-competition play.
In this, I am referring to the Cyberathlete Professional League's one time decision to switch from the Quake series, which they had been using since the start of their foundation, to a newer (and more popular) game at the time, the infamous Counter-Strike.
Now for most of the 'professional gamers' who have lived off their earnings from past CPL tournaments, this meant the end of their career unless they made the jump from Quake to Counter-Strike. Unfortunately, switching games is not as simple because both games have different sets of physics and gameplay; in Quake you battled one another one on one while Counter-Strike is a team-based game, the players usually in numbers of five.
Now, even more recently, the CPL has announced for their World Tour that they would be switching games once again, this time back to a duel based game. There will still be a Counter-Strike tournament during the event, but this leaves many to wonder how much more air time does Counter-Strike have before it finally gets shelved as well.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese popstar van-art
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DATE: 07/25/2004 11:34:33 PM
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This is a stunning gallery of fan-car art inspired by Japanese pop-star Ayumi Hamasaki.
Link, Link to lots more Ayumi fan art
(via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kalashnikov: US gov't is pirating my AK-47 design
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DATE: 07/26/2004 04:07:50 AM
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The US government is an enthusiastic supporter of pirate manufacturers of Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles, and Kalashnikov himself is pissed off that he's not receiving royalties from all these American-bought bootleg firearms.
Since the collapses of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's army in Iraq, the United States has been purchasing or arranging the transfer of thousands of knockoffs of Kalashnikovs commonly referred to as AK-47's, to outfit new military and security forces in Kabul and Baghdad.
These rifles have not been made in Russia, where the arms industry holds patents for the weapon in several nations. Instead they have originated in weapons plants controlled by Eastern European states, each of which was a partner of Moscow's in Soviet days.
Link
(Thanks, Roy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto Star prepares to join NYT in Google-obscurity
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DATE: 07/26/2004 04:15:28 AM
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Michael sez, "Hot on the heels of a Wired article about the irrelevance of NYT thanks to forced registration, The Globe & Mail in Canada has now done the same, and the Toronto Star is about to:"
Registration at thestar.com
We are introducing registration on thestar.com. At first, registration will be voluntary. Later in July we will move to mandatory signups. Readers will have to answer several questions to access stories. Section fronts and some other areas will remain open to everyone for now.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brasilian and Danish women's CounterStrike teams
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DATE: 07/26/2004 07:49:46 AM
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This is a very striking photo of the Brasilian (not pictured here, click link) and Danish national women's teams at the Electronic Sports World Cup -- basically, the world cup of CounterStrike. As Alice points out, despite the drearily predictable "they're hotties -- no, they're ugly" chatter on the message board that accompanies the original, this pic "will do the gaming world many, many favours. To quote a senior work colleague: 'but, they're so normal!'."
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ET contact by 2025
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DATE: 07/26/2004 08:38:36 AM
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Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years. The bold forecast is based on two factors: an estimation of how many alien transmitters there might be in our galaxy, and Moore's Law, which says that computer processing power will double every eighteen months or so. From New Scientist:
"Within a generation, radio emissions from enough stars will be observed and analysed to find the first alien civilisation, Shostak estimates. But because they will probably be between 200 and 1000 light years away, sending a radio message back will take centuries."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: See for yourself that the Earth isn't flat... it's hollow.
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DATE: 07/26/2004 08:54:23 AM
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River guide Steve Currey invites you to join him on a twenty-four day trip into the, er, hollow earth. Currey has chartered a Russian Nuclear Icebreaker ship to leave next summer and is accepting reservations for up to 100 passengers.
"The indigenous Eskimos believe there is a hole in the Arctic Ocean. Observations of several Arctic explorers of mirages of land in the Arctic indicate that the most plausible location for a north polar opening that leads into the interior of the earth is located at 84.4 N Latitude, 141 E Longitude.... Don't miss this chance to personally visit that paradise within our earth via the North Polar Opening and meet the highly advanced, friendly people who live there. We are of the opinion that they are the legendary Lost Tribes of Israel who migrated into the North Country over 2,500 years ago and literally became lost to the knowledge of mankind."
The trip runs $18,950 a head, but anyone adventurous enough to join Currey should note that:
"By joining Our Hollow Earth Expedition, expedition members agree that there are NO GUARANTEES that this expedition will reach Inner earth. The expedition will make a good faith effort to locate the North Polar Opening and enter therein, but worst case scenario is that we visit the geographic North Pole, explore the region, and continue on to the New Siberian Islands."
Link (Via RealityCarnival)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Remote control model blimp
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DATE: 07/26/2004 09:18:33 AM
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This remote control blimp costs $60 (not including helium) and has a range of 300 ft. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Utility pole boxes as tourist maps
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DATE: 07/26/2004 10:21:27 AM
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Darren sez, "Victoria, Canada's City Engineering department has found an inventive use for those ubiquitous traffic control boxes you see on lamp and traffic light posts. In high pedestrian traffic areas, they've pasted neighbourhood maps on them. The maps wrap around three sides of the box, identifying areas of interest (as well as, interestingly, the city's URL).
"What a great idea. Not only do they use existing visual real estate (avoiding the need for other street-level maps), but it's a really cheap, low-tech solution to graffiti. As a guy who spent two sweltering summers across the street from the pictured box, at the busiest Tourism Information Centre in the country, I appreciate any non-human assistance for tourists."
Link
(Thanks, Darren!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Untrained people on horses to look for terrorists near airports
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DATE: 07/26/2004 10:26:00 AM
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Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Security wrote a short piece for The Register about the Houston Airport's ridiculous plan to recruit amateurs to ride around on their horses and patroll the grounds near the airport.
Want to help fight terrorism? Want to be able to stop and detain suspicious characters? Or do you just want to ride your horse on ten miles of trails normally closed to the public? Then you might want to join the George Bush Intercontinental (IAH) Airport Rangers program. That's right. Just fill out a form and undergo a background check, and you too can become a front-line fighter as Houston's airport tries to keep our nation safe and secure. No experience necessary. You don't even have to be a US citizen.
Sounds like a great opportunity for unemployed idiots who drool at the prospect of harassing people but failed the test to become a cop.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lord of the Rings movie made from famous film footage
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DATE: 07/26/2004 10:32:22 AM
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Glenn sez, "The mysterious O. Sharp has created a fantastic mash-up of Lord of the Rings, across three decades of movies, casting such big names as Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich. Tolkien's story is retold through a clever selection of overdubbed clips, and it works surprisingly well - it's an amusing tribute without being a parody, and I think it's certainly worth watching, even if it's only for Dooley Wilson sitting at his piano singing 'The Road Goes Ever On'."
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(Thanks, Glenn!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lil' Abner
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DATE: 07/26/2004 10:38:31 AM
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Eric Burns sez: "This is a followup on Boing Boing's recommendation of Li'l Abner a couple of months back -- specifically highlighting the wedding of Li'l Abner, which was one of the biggest events to happen in comic strips... well, ever. [Here's] a post I put up on my LJ about it going into more detail."
The wedding of Li'l Abner and Daisy Mae Yokem was such big news it made the cover of Life Magazine. Newspapers reported it. In the late Seventies, the hoopla was commemerated in an episode of M*A*S*H when, during heavy shelling, radio reports kept coming in to the 4077th on whether or not the pair finally got married. It was the kind of plot resolution (and cultural impact) modern comic artists only dream of.
Well, Comics.com is diligently reprinting Li'l Abner, day by day, and reminding readers of how utterly politically incorrect... and hilariously funny... Kickapoo Joy Juice, Fearless Fosdick (a parody of Dick Tracy that was so brilliant it was turned into a television show. A puppet so, no less), Jubulation T. Cornpone and all the rest of Li'l Abner's work and world were. And we have finally reached March of 1952 in the reprints... which means that we are in the process of watching Li'l Abner be inexorably cornered into marriage.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hilarious ACLU video clip about about total surveillance society
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DATE: 07/26/2004 10:53:58 AM
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This excellent piece of short speculative fiction presented as a video clip depicts pizza ordering in a near-future United States. Link
(Thanks Patricio! )
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: UPDATE: Failed terrorism attempt on recent flight?
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DATE: 07/26/2004 11:07:40 AM
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It's been debunked by Snopes
Spencer Cross sez: "[T]he Annie Jacobsen article that you mentioned today has become quite a big deal, and the debate is far wider than just Snopes. Salon has an excellent followup to it that I thought you might want to read. The article has also been picked up and embellished by a number of "fair and balanced" media outlets. Likewise, "in an effort to provide the most up-to-date information," WWWS is now linking to several articles that support Jacobsen's relentless and unapologetic alarmism, but has failed to link anything on the other side of the debate. I would encourage people to e-mail the editors at WomensWallStreet.com and let them know what they think about their journalistic integrity: editors@womenswallstreet.com.
First hand report from a writer for Women's Wall Street about her experience on a flight from Detroit to LA. Apparently a group of 14 men on the plane kept going into the restrooms and signaling each other. Hard to say what really happened, and it could have been perfectly innocent, but it makes for interesting reading.
The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag...
...Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object...
... The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed the man in the yellow shirt he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word 'No.'
One possibility -- the men were sharing food, and some of the food was spoiled, so they threw it away in the restrooms.
Link (Thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MyDoom uses search engines to find email addresses for propagation
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DATE: 07/26/2004 11:17:21 AM
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The new MyDoom variant scans your HDD for domains (e.g. craphound.com), then hammers on search engines looking for valid email addresses at that domain (e.g., "GET /default.asp?lpv=1&loc=searchhp&tab=web&query=e-mail+example.com"). The traffic got so bad that it actually took Google down for a while.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Island travelogue: Caribbean Panama
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DATE: 07/26/2004 11:27:49 AM
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Erik Gauger sez: "This is one of my latest travelogue notes. It is about a semi-autonomous people that live on very tiny islands off the coast of Panama, are the smallest people in the western hemisphere, and get wildly drunk in the morning when a girl hits puberty." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Artists uses mouth to make chewing gum sculptures
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DATE: 07/26/2004 01:04:03 PM
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World of Wonder has a video clip of a man who makes little animals sculptures out of chewing gum, using his mouth to mold them.
"He prefers to work with gum that is past the expiration date. It takes him about three hours of chewing to get a piece of gum the right consistency for art. Once he's done that, it takes him only 30 second to make a turtle, 20 seconds for a pig, and over a minute for something complicated like a UFO. Unless he's out and about handing the sculptures to unsuspecting kids, he submerges the tiny artifacts in water to harden them. When he's really on his game he can do as many as 20 an hour."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gallery of retro science book covers
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DATE: 07/26/2004 01:22:02 PM
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This gallery of "How and Why" book covers makes me want to go straight to eBay. Link (via The Cartoonist)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stargate fan-site operator busted under anti-terrorism law
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DATE: 07/26/2004 01:23:15 PM
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The creator of an SG-1 fansite has been charged by the FBI with criminal copyright infringment, the result of an investigation that involved a USA PATRIOT Act warrant against the site's ISP to gather intelligence. The Feebs confiscated and then destroyed his personal computers, returning their remains months later. All this comes after several of the show's cast and creators have made a special point of saying how much they liked the site. The site owner lives in Ohio, but has been charged in LA and needs money to get to the coast and defend himself; they're raising money through t-shirt sales and could use your help.
Adam was first tipped off about the investigation when the FBI raided his and his fiancee's apartment in May of 2002 and seized thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment. Adam later received a copy of the affidavit filed in support of the search warrant, and was shocked to discover that this document, prepared by the FBI, contained significant amounts of erroneous and misleading information. For example, two social security numbers were listed for Adam, one of which is not his. References were made to a cease and desist letter sent by the MPAA to an email address that did not exist. His online friendship with other Stargate fans across the globe was portrayed as an international conspiracy against the MPAA. And perhaps most disturbing of all, it was later revealed that the FBI invoked a provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain financial records from his ISP. The FBI's abuse of its powers did not stop there. When they seized Adam's computer equipment, he was given written documentation stating that it would be returned within 60 days. The equipment that they did return did not arrive until more than 8 months later, and only then after much prodding from his lawyer. Much of it was damaged beyond repair - one laptop had a shattered LCD screen, an empty tape backup drive was ripped apart for no apparent reason, his fiancee's iBook was badly damaged when it was pried apart with a screwdriver. The FBI's computer crimes staff is either incompetent (at least when it comes to Macintosh computer equipment) or else they just don't give a damn.
Link
(via MeFi)
Update:
Matthew sez, "There's a press release on the US DOJ site from April 2004 describing
the charges. From this, you can learn the guy's name: "Adam Clark McGaughey".
The funny thing is that after searching google groups for "Adam
McGaughey", you find a bunch of people that seemed to have been ripped
off by him around 2002 on some SG-1 sites (as well as ebay) (make sure you sort by date to get more recent stuff).
I won't comment on any of the stuff here, but it's some interesting
extra information that adds to the story.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Rethinking Kerry's campaign slogan
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DATE: 07/26/2004 04:00:13 PM
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Jess Hemerly of A Great Notion points us to a Slate article about John Kerry's campaign slogan "Let America be America again," a line snatched from a poem by Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes. The irony is that the poem itself was written with ironic intent--Hughes was apparently a vocal Communist and Soviet Union supporter.
Instead of misappropriating Hughes's poetry, Jess suggests Kerry sample some other beats:
from Ginsberg's "America":
"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. Vote Kerry."
"America stop pushing me I know what I am doing. Vote Kerry."
"America why are your libraries full of tears? Vote Kerry."
from e.e. cummings:
"a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man. vote kerry, his arse is fresher than Bush's."
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "I am Waiting":
"Are you waiting for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right? Vote Kerry."
"I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in the Lost Continent in a new rebirth of wonder. Vote Kerry."
okay i'm ridiculous but do you see how ridiculous the Hughes thing is?
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mobile iTunes
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DATE: 07/26/2004 08:05:14 PM
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Apple just announced a new iTunes mobile version that Motorola will load onto their "mass-market music phones" in the first half of next year. TheFeature's Carlo Longino gives his quick take on the deal:
Plenty of handsets today are capable of playing mp3s, but presumably none do it with the ease and grace -- or inherent coolness -- of Apple's products. It's an interesting move for Apple, which has said in the past the iTunes music store is a loss leader designed to help sell iPods. Presumably, they want to take new Moto phone users and turn them into iPod buyers... That, or this is just the first step towards the much-clamored-for wireless iPod.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 10th-century Japanese text "The Pillow Book" becomes a blog
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DATE: 07/26/2004 09:52:25 PM
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A blogger named Simon Cozens is translating the classic Japanese text The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) by Sei Shonagon into English and republishing it as a blog. It's easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read -- well, rather like a blog. Some dates are fictitous, and some liberties have been taken to produce a coherent narrative stream in blog format -- but the content is purported to be a faithful translation of the original. Since I speak neither contemporary nor classical Japanese, I'll have to take this blogger (or someone wiser)'s word for it. And no, I'm sorry -- Ewan McGregor has nothing to do with this one. Link (Thanks, Andrew)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Portraits of Thai kickboxers, by Siege
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DATE: 07/26/2004 10:13:12 PM
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Following up a thread of Muay Thai-related posts: this striking series of portraits shot in Bangkok by photographer Siege, whose weblog was just launched by Nerve.com.
Link to Thai kickboxer portraits (free to browse, and totally work-safe), and Link to Siege's new blog (paid Nerve.com subscribers only, and is the very definition of not-work-safe).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland 1968 family holiday photos
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DATE: 07/27/2004 02:34:41 AM
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Here's a wonderful set of family holiday snapshots from a modern-day blogger's childhood trip to Disneyland in 1968 -- and good as the photos are the reminisces that accompany them are even better.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Woody Guthrie's copyright used to defile his memory in lawsuit threat
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DATE: 07/27/2004 02:37:45 AM
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Two brothers who cooked up a funny parody of Bush and Kerry singing "This Land is Your Land" have been threatened with a copyright infringement lawsuit by the current rightsholder to the classic Woody Guthrie song, a company called Ludlow Music. A lot of the copyright rhetoric centers on copyright's ability to give creators controls over their works, but here it is working just the opposite, for Woody Guthrie's standard copyright notice went like so:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Danah calls the NYT out for pissing on DNC bloggers
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DATE: 07/27/2004 02:43:52 AM
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Danah boyd has written a fiery response to yesterday's NYT article on bloggers at the Democratic Convention ("Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps"), which began poorly by equating journalling with blogging, and went downhill from there:
By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. They further perpetuate this view by pasting a picture of a youth on the front of the article to suggest that bloggers are all inexperienced and naive, further implying that their reports will not have the value of the more "adult" perspective of "real" journalists.
The entire spin of the article focuses on how bloggers are like children in a candy store - naive, inexperienced and overwhelmed by what is now available to them. The article focuses on the minutia of blogging, emphasizing that bloggers won't really cover the real issues, but provide the "low-brow" gossip. (I somehow suspect that the NYTimes is far more likely to cover what various attendees are wearing than the bloggers.) The article does proceed to share its stance on bloggers through the voice of one subject: "I think that bloggers have put the issue of professionalism under attack." (Not Jason Blair?)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Elizabot passes sex-chat Turing test
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DATE: 07/27/2004 02:58:13 AM
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A bored hacker modified an Eliza programme to act as an IRC sex-chat bot that impersonated an eighteen year old girl (or, rather, impersonated a sex-chat afficianodo of indeterminate gender impersonating an eighteen year old girl). He assumed that people would try to have cyber-sex with his bot and get bored, but in fact a surprising number were convinced and even got off with it.
This is a plot element in Bruce Sterling's brilliant "RU486?" a short story collected in Globalhead -- feminist hackers finance their RU486-running operation with a phone-sex line staffed by automated chatterbots.
It turns out that pornbots are among the class of Eliza-derivatives that can pass a Turing Test (or rather, horny sex-chat boys are among the class of human beings that can't tell a chatterbot from a person -- other groups include psychotherapists, who, in one experiment, couldn't distinguish actual transcripts of therapy sessions with schizophrenics from simulated therapy with schizophrenic chatterbots; and the university student who mistook a chatterbot for his prof in the middle of the night when he IMed same for permission to extend deadline on a late paper).
'eliza' is a program that talks to you, pretending to be a psychologist. its script of possible responses is super tiny, so it doesn't fool anyone. or so i thought.
IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out. my friend reduz found a version of 'eliza' that could go on IRC. he put it on IRC. a lot of people from other countries thought it was a real woman, so naturally they tried to have sex with it. they got frustrated quickly. reduz is a bad man...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels.
Link (Warning, contains links to transcripts of IM-based sex, NSFW)
(via Waxy)
Update, Zed sez, A bot on a MUD was horndogged by an individual for two weeks
without him getting it. Note that while the bot was designed for a
modicum of verisimilitude, it was not designed to fool anyone, or
targeted to fool horny boys.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in Swedish
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DATE: 07/27/2004 04:10:36 AM
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Ulf Benjaminsson has translated my DRM talk into Swedish:
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MP3 Pioneer Debuts Spatial Sound System
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DATE: 07/27/2004 05:41:57 AM
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For today's Wired News, I filed this story about a new "3-D" sound technology that promises to make every spot within a movie theater, theme park attraction, gaming room, or home theater a "sweet spot." The demo last Thursday in Studio City appeared to wow a number of the studio suits in attendance, but whether or not consumers and entertainment companies are prepared to pay for implementing the technology is another matter.
On a darkened sound stage, executives from Disney, Microsoft, Paramount and an array of Hollywood entertainment companies listen to the whispering voices of ghosts.
This Studio City lot isn't haunted. They're here for a private demonstration of IOSONO, a new immersive sound technology developed by Karlheinz Brandenburg -- the German inventor considered responsible for much of the development and commercialization of the MP3 codec in the 1980s and '90s.
Inside the dimly lit demo space, a ring of over 300 speakers hangs roughly 10 feet above the ground. Using a digital pen and a touch-sensitive tablet, a sound engineer drags individual sound elements from one point to another to direct the position of sound elements. Samples of phantasmic voices whisper, hiss and appear to be darting and sliding invisibly from one spot to another throughout the room.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily trashblog
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DATE: 07/27/2004 06:15:11 AM
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Trashlog is a photoblog that posts a photo of one piece of found trash every day. The weekly views are awesome -- almost poetry.
Link
(Thanks, asthmatic!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Simpsons movie in the offing
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DATE: 07/27/2004 07:16:47 AM
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Simpsons movie! Simpsons movie! SIMPSONS MOVIE!
During the Simpsons panel at San Diego's Comic Con International, executive producer and longtime Simpsons contributor Al Jean announced the news that many fans have been waiting for: "There will be a movie," putting enough "English" on the word "will" to leave no doubt among the faithful that they will be able to see the yellow-hued denizens of Springfield on the big screen. Jean did not provide a release date, saying only that the show's producers were taking the time to get it right.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tim Wu to edit Lessig blog
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DATE: 07/27/2004 07:22:58 AM
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Tim Wu, my old elementary school classmate from the Alternative Learning Programme -- a public alternative K-8 programme in Toronto -- is now a law prof at Virginia and he's been making a name for himself writing brilliant papers on the copyfight. Now Tim's been tapped to guest-edit Lessig's blog while Larry disappears into the unwired jungle for a month to have an extended data-sabbath.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turn your iPod into a universal remote
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DATE: 07/27/2004 08:08:27 AM
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This week's Engadget HOWTO is a project to turn your iPod into a universal remote.
How did we do this? Basically, we “recorded” the “sounds” an infrared remote makes on a PC and then put them on an iPod as songs. Adding a special sound-to-IR converter then turns those sounds back to IR and allows you to use your iPod as a remote control. As an added bonus, it works up to 100 feet. It’s a slick all-in-one unit and we’re never going back to 6 remotes ever again.
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(Thanks, PT!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Preparing for Emergencies" parody site
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DATE: 07/27/2004 08:44:59 AM
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Thomas Scott sez: As you may or may not know, the UK .gov is sending out leaflets on what to do in an emergency (read: terrorist attack, not that we want you to panic, although if you panicked a bit and voted for us again it'd be nice) to every household in the UK. As part of this, they registered www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk .
Pity they forgot to register www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk , really.
I managed to grab it, and hastily cobbled together a parody. (The original's under Crown Copyright, and the parody is so ridiculous as to have no chance of misleading those looking for the genuine info. It includes information on coping with a zombie attack, for crying out loud.) I got a few pleasant emails, including one saying that the site had done the rounds of the top emergency planning civil servants. And then, not twelve hours after the original site went up, I got a rather different one from the UK .gov ...
I considered giving up, but heck -- it's a parody, it's obviously a parody, and I'm damned if I'm going to be strongarmed into taking it down. As a concession, I added a conspicuous "this is a parody" notice to the bottom of the home page. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Home Improvement," Baghdad-style
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DATE: 07/27/2004 08:59:22 AM
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This CS Monitor story explores one of many new "reality" TV shows which have launched on Iraqi television stations in recent months. One of these programs is a home makeover show in which producers bring donated materials to bombed-out houses and try to fix 'em up. There was also an interesting segment on NPR last week that covered other reality TV shows in Iraq, but I can't find the url right now.
"This is a big surprise," says Ahmed Hassan Kadhim, standing in the doorway with a gap-toothed grin. "What can I say?"
"We've brought you a whole set of furniture!" says Ms. Zubair. "We're trying to compensate you for what you lost!"
"Labor and Materials" is Iraq's answer to "Extreme Home Makeover" and the country's first reality TV show. In 15-minute episodes, broken windows are made whole again. Blasted walls slowly rise again. Fancy furniture and luxurious carpets appear without warning in the living rooms of poor families. Over six weeks, houses blasted by US bombs regenerate in a home-improvement show for a war-torn country.
Link (Thanks, steve)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: INDUCE Act update
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DATE: 07/27/2004 09:29:49 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Madeleine Brand about the Hatch/Leahy INDUCE Act, much-blogged here and there and elsewhere of late. The law seeks to ban technology that would "intentionally induce" copyright infringement. Hollywood and the recording industry back it, seeking new muscle to combat filesharing. Tech companies, digital liberty advocates, and geek activist groups like savetheipod.com say it's ill-conceived and badly written. In its current form, INDUCE would unfairly stifle innovation, they say -- and could outlaw a wide range of gadgets and services we take for granted, from iPods to PDAs to web search engines (et tu, Google?).
Link to online archive for today's "Day to Day" show, available after 12pm Pacific time.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gay marriage satire
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DATE: 07/27/2004 09:57:25 AM
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The Fafblog continues its reign as the funniest political satire blog on the Net with today's post about gay marriage in the form of a mock-interview with the Family Research Council's Dr. James Dobson:
[JD]: The legality of gay marriage sent out powerful shockwaves of destructive gay energy throughout hetereosexuality. Without an amendment to the constitution specifically barring homosexuals from obtaining marriage rights, this destructive Gay Force rampaged throughout the Traditional Family Nexus, corrupting it and turning thousands of upright, decent, missionary-position-loving straight couples into deranged, out-of-control mutant gay perverts.
FB: This is horrible! What in your scientific opinion as a doctor can we do to stop this?
JD: Well, humanity's only hope at this point lies in the Marriage Protection Act, which would strip federal courts of the ability to review the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. That way if the draconian anti-gay laws we need turn out to be unconstitutional, we'll never know, because the courts won't be able to stop them.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robot Revolution!
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DATE: 07/27/2004 10:49:58 AM
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Here's a gallery of Joe Alterio's agitprop for the Robo-Equality Party. Digital prints on archival paper are $40 to $100 depending on the size. Link (Thanks, Lindsay!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney parks gossip columnist
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DATE: 07/27/2004 12:38:00 PM
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An anonymous reader writes, "MiceAge.com is sort of a gossipy (and many times quite bitchy) site devoted to all the latest going-ons at the happiest place on earth. Diehard fans of the place either loathe Al Lutz's almost weekly tidbits about operating problems and weak attendance at the new companion California Adventure park or love the many photos and the latest plans to update or replace attractions. This week Al posted about a recent visit by Michael Eisner to try and chat up the cast members, only to end up proving how out of touch he is with what is going on. Last week Sue Kruse in a very funny piece detailed just what was involved as far as the public goes with a staged 50th anniversary event. In an internet ocean of fawning Disney sites, MiceAge stands out if only for trying to just try and tell it like it is."
When Eisner did show up at that particular cafeteria in a pitiful attempt to rub elbows with the masses, he only really succeeded in proving how out-of-touch he is and how little about the Parks he actually knows. As the cafeteria took notice of Eisner's arrival, which was hard to miss due to the big entourage accompanying him, Eisner put forth his best political skills and tried to make friends. He marched right up to two college aged guys wearing Adventureland costumes waiting for their cheeseburgers and said "Hi fellas, where do you guys work?" The two Cast Members dutifully replied "We work at the Jungle Cruise, sir." Eisner broke into a broad and forced smile and said "Hey, that must be a lot of fun! I'd love to be able to drive that boat around all day, making those jokes and shooting at the hippo's like you do!" And without missing a beat, one of the Jungle Cruise Skippers said "We don't get to shoot at the hippo's anymore sir. They took the guns away three years ago." Eisner could only stammer, "Oh, they did? I didn't know that..." before he moved on down the line for the next forced smile and handshake. (By the way, the plan is still on to reverse Paul Pressler's silly and overly PC decision and bring back the guns to Jungle Cruise that we'd told you about in a previous update.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired (and unwired) tech at the DNC in Boston
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DATE: 07/27/2004 02:41:15 PM
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From the NYT, an interesting piece on the geeky underpinnings of the Democratic National Convention's communication infrastructure:
Most cellular carriers are augmenting their coverage in Boston to make sure the surge in traffic does not lead to a rash of busy signals and disconnected calls. Nextel, the official mobile provider to both conventions, is deploying its iDEN network with encryption codes used by the National Security Agency to make sure no one eavesdrops on all the deal making.
The company is supplying modified BlackBerry devices that allow conventioneers to access the Internet wirelessly at high speeds. It has also helped connect the many public safety agencies, which typically communicate over different frequencies. Nextel expects its customers to log millions of minutes on its DirectConnect service, which turns cellphones into walkie-talkies.
"It's like organizing a wedding on steroids," said Matt Foosaner, senior director of Nextel's emergency response team, referring to the arrangements his company is making for the conventioneers. "They are not going to stay tied down to a landline."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web menu zen: Greenland's only Chinese restaurant
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DATE: 07/27/2004 03:25:30 PM
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What's that you say? You're wandering the ice-covered streets of Greenland, empty-stomached, jonesing for some Chinese takeout? Well, grab a bib and download this, baby: the online menu of the frozen land's only Chinese restaurant. You'll find Misigisaq in Greenland's second largest "city," Sisimiut (population 5,000), about 100 km north of the Arctic Circle. Manager David Dukes says, "We are adding new dishes all the time -- this week harbour porpoise cooked in a clay pot is the new special." Oh, but what to order:
# Love at first Sight: Caribou meat on little sticks
# Dried Fried Seal
# Tired Fisherman's Soup: a pick-me-up soup of whale meat and six traditional Chinese herbal medicines to reinvigorate you.
# Fragrant and Crispy Greenland sea bird (eider duck or Bruennichfs Guillemot, depending on the season)
# Numbing Spicy Musk Ox
# Clay Pot Walrus
# We are proud to serve not only a variety of Chinese teas, but also Kaffi Tunnulik (coffee and caribou fat).
Looks like they want to franchise, too. I'll have a venti, half-caf coffee and caribou lard, please -- hold the foam.
Misigisaq ApS is looking for partners interested in franchising our unique concept of Greenlandic ingredients and top quality Chinese cooking. We are able to support any such partnership with training, franchise documentation, and full logistic support. We believe there are many international sites with great potential for Misigisaq Restaurants. We can outline the prerequisites for a successful Misigisaq branch with any interested parties.
Link , and do not miss the "customer snapshot gallery" with pictures of tough tundra homeboys and this lovely local girl. (via egullet, thanks, Jonno)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hell is for economists
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DATE: 07/27/2004 06:20:58 PM
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Bizarro, dubious factoid of the day via Reuters:
Economists searching for reasons why some nations are richer than others have found that those with a wide belief in hell are less corrupt and more prosperous, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Link (Thanks, Q-Burns!)
Update: BoingBoing reader jeffk says, "This is the actual article referenced by the Yahoo "Hell & Economics" And, well.... Jesus Fucking Christ are their statistics fucked up! This is yet another example of conclusions not being supported by the facts of their own frippin' study!"
Update 2: BoingBoing reader Morgan Foust says the report conclusions aren't supported by the data, and the Reuters story appears to add up to sloppy journalism. "What is the correlation between 'fear of hell' and productivity?," asks Morgan, "According to this simple chart -- which took all of five minutes to generate in Microsoft Excel -- the correlation is negative. In other words, by the Fed's own data, the more a country believes in Hell, the lower their productivity. (For those paying attention, the correlation is a weak -.21.)"
Link
Update umptybillion: BoingBoing reader Chris says, "Morgan Foust's feedback is off target. Productivity is a measure of outputs divided by inputs. GDP and per capita income are not measures of productivity. I'm not arguing the merits of the Fed's report, but Foust's feedback appears to be based on a flawed understanding of what is (and isn't) 'productivity'."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cthulhoid casemod
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:07:03 AM
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This lovingly detailed Lovecraft-inspired casemod is great -- it's the Necronomicase!
* Fully textured outer case
* Necronomicon Glyph window, with 114 cuts...
* ...Lit by two 12" CCFL tubes
* Elder Sign & Cthulhu Runes etched window, lit by...
* ...8 superbright green & 8 superbright yellow LEDs attached to...
* ...Hard Drive activity flasher circuit.
* Power button in monster mouth
* Reset button in right eye
* Light switch in left eye
* Sculpted tentacles set on left side around window.
* Textured fan cowling inside
* Front bezel eyes lit with 2 superbright LEDs
* Front lower part lit with two 4" CCFL tubes
* Fully textured CD & floppy bezels
* Decorated semi-clear pull-down front cover
* Two extra Stealth Fans
* Glow-in-the-dark rounded IDE cables
* Split sleeve & mesh wire covers
Link
(Thanks, George!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nerd tattoo gallery
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:12:39 AM
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This is an awesome gallery of even more awesomer nerd tattoos, from Mac logos to 8-bit Nintendo heros to DNA, culled from the submissions to BMEZine, a body-modification zine.
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Barbie in a Blender responds to Orrin Hatch
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:19:43 AM
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Induce Act.
85.5k JPEG Link
(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Yesterday's transportation future
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:22:36 AM
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Peter Davidson sez, "A wonderful Berkeley website/gallery featuring some of the fantastic oddities and plans of futurists from the first half of the 20th century about the far-off world of 1980! Included are plans for a helicopter in every garage, a Mag-Lev train between LA and NY that would only be economically feasible if every citizen of those cities used it to commute to the other each and every day, futuristic car designs that never came to pass, hovercraft buses, the shape of trains to come and so on."
Link
(Thanks, Peter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SimRestauranteur
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:24:31 AM
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Master game designer Greg Costikyan has posted a fantastic review of a new sim/tycoon game in which you run a restaurant. Sounds like a lot of fun!
Restaurant Empire gives you a good sense of managing a restaurant. You hire and fire staff, construct a menu, place tables, decor, and kitchen equipment, and open the doors. Over the course of a day, people wander in and order. As is typical in games of this type, each customer's desires, wants, and reactions are tracked in detail, and you can click on any guest to see what he or she is thinking about (often, about the rudeness of staff or delays in their order). You can also see what peoples' main complaints are, general level of satisfaction, and so on. You try to increase the popularity of your restaurant by upgrading the menu and decor (as profits permit), adding new recipes and deleting less popular ones, learning about businesses that can provide premium ingredients, and so on.
The main game is a series of well-planned, linked 'levels,' each requring you to reach some benchmark within a period of time to 'win' (e.g., make $15,000 in profit in a single month). The level system provides a 'programmed learning' approach--that is, you're introduced to the details of game management over time--as well as a sort of backstory that provides a degree of motivation, and some characters (like your uncle, a retired restauranteur) who provide advice.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Obama's DNC speech: a reminder of why America is worth fighting for
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:29:25 AM
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Barack Obama, a Democratic Senatorial candidate from Illinois, gave a barn-burner of a speech last night at the DNC, full of fiery sentiment that reminds me of what I loved about the USA when I lived there, and why I stick up for it now that I'm in a part of the world where the America-bashing is often ill-considered and all-condemning:
If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief-I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper-that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America-there's the United States of America.
There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Link
(via Electrolite)
Update: Here's a Link you can paste into RealPlayer or a Real-compatible app like MPlayer or VLC for video of the speech (Thanks, Quentin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bush's lies about Castro plagiarised from undergraduate essay on Internet
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:33:50 AM
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Bush recently characterised Castro's remine in Cuba as proud of the prostitution there, a bizarre charge that had no basis in fact: Castro simply never said what Bush accused him of saying ("This is his quote -- 'Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world' and 'sex tourism is a vital source of hard currency.'"), and no one except Bush says that he did.
It turns out that Bush's speechwriters found the quote in an undergraduate paper for Dartmouth, and they plagiarised it out of context:
Three days after Bush's remarks, the Los Angeles Times reported that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. "It shows they didn't read much of the article," commented Charlie Trumbull, the author.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian government demands nude pix of stripper-immigrants
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:36:19 AM
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Canadian Immigration officials are requiring that exotic dancers looking to enter Canada submit nude photos of themselves dancing, so ensure that they aren't nude-dancer-impersonators, sneaking into the country to do other kinds of work.
The potential dancers have to prove they can dance in the nude, immigration lawyer Mendel Green said Monday.
"They can't be partially nude," he said. "If they don't have pictures in the nude, they are not going to wiggle their bottoms in Canada."
Reg Req'd Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Segway Polo video
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:39:20 AM
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A group of Bay Area Segway owners have formed a Segway Polo club. Here's video of the second match.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory teaching Clarion in 2005
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:43:43 AM
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In 1992, I graduated from the Clarion Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University, the famed six-week "boot-camp for science-fiction writers." It was an amazing experience: my instruction from the likes of Damon Knight, James Patrick Kelly, Lisa Goldstein, Nancy Kress and Kate Wilhelm forever changed me as a writer and a person.
Therefore, it is a stupendous honour to be able to announce that I will be returning to Clarion next year, as part of the 2005 roster of instructors. My co-instructors will be Joan Vinge, Charles Coleman Finlay, Gwyneth Jones, Walter Jon Williams and Leslie What.
Clarion is in transition this year, as funding cuts at MSU will require a change of venue. Here are some details:
Among the options being considered are moving the workshop to another university or becoming an independent non-profit organization, along the lines of Clarion West. In either event, Clarion is likely to leave its long-time home in East Lansing and is actively soliciting suggestions for new location(s) and offers from organizations or groups willing to host the workshop. “I think it’s past time for Clarion to make a transition to a new venue and a new structure,” said Board Member James Patrick Kelly. The Clarion Board is calling on alumni and friends of the workshop to volunteer to help with the transition. “We need to work on fundraising, communications, and administration,” said Kelly. “We’re encouraging people who believe in Clarion to get involved with everything from putting together our newsletter to helping choose the instructors and lots in between.” To that end, the Clarion Board of Directors, which currently consists of Matheson, Kelly, Kate Wilhelm, Maureen McHugh, Karen Joy Fowler, Tim Powers, and former Clarion director Tess Tavormina will be looking to reconstitute itself and expand its membership.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spiderman trufen determine to shoot a non-sucky Spiderman 3 before Hollywood
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:49:57 AM
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A group of pissed-off Spiderman fans have determined to make a third Spiderman movie off their own bat, without permission from Marvel or the studio, rallying to a cry of "In recent years Hollywood Studios have assaulted our comics. Well comic lovers, it's time to fight back." They're soliciting production crew, actors, effects people and cash donations, so they can get the Secret Spiderman Movie out before Hollywood beats them to the punch.
10 Worst Casting Choices
10. Hugh Jackman as Wolverine
9. Dolph Lungren as Punisher
8. Ben Affleck as Daredevil
7. Matt Salinger as Captain America
6. Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face
5. Shaq as Steel
4. Val Kilmer as Batman
3. Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin
T1. Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl
T1. The Governator as Mr. Freeze
Link
(Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr jingle
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:52:57 AM
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Staff at Flickr, an outstanding social photo-sharing app, have written a great jingle for the service. Sweet!
(Disclosure/Boast: I'm on the advisory board for Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr)
142K MP3 file
(via Sylloge)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Non-Lethal Slippery Foam, an Anti-Traction Material for the ages
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DATE: 07/28/2004 02:56:01 AM
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The Mobility Denial System is an oil-slick-in-a-can, a combination of "Drilling Mud Additive, Flocculent and water" that renders surfaces as slippery as wet ice. Lots of tasty acronyms and buzzwords on the sell page, including "Anti-Traction Material (ATM)" and "Non-Lethal Slippery Foam."
Once applied, the material will degrade or impair the adversary's ability to move. For Interior applications it can be applied to flat, smooth, non-porous surfaces such as linoleum, tile, wood floors or staircases. Exterior applications include sloped, rough, porous surfaces such as concrete, asphalt, and grassy areas.
Link
(via Coolhunting)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK Big Brother Awards TONIGHT! Mark Thomas names and shames privacy-bashers
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DATE: 07/28/2004 03:29:54 AM
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The UK Big Brother Awards -- which present an Orwellian trophy of a boot stepping on a human face forever to egregious governmental and private-sector abusers of privacy -- are being held tonight! Free admission, no need to RSVP, loads of cheap drink, Mark Thomas standup routines, DJs spinning -- your basic techno-activist festival. I'll be there -- hope to see you too!
The event kicks off at the London School of Economics Student Union at 6:30PM, near the Aldwych and Holborn tube. The entrance to the Quad is through the Claire Market Building
(Building C) on the right of Houghton Street (Directions, Map)
On July 28th 2004, Privacy International will stage the 6th annual UK Big Brother Awards to recognise the people and organisations that have done the most to devastate privacy & civil liberties in the UK.
Now an annual event in seventeen countries, Privacy International's Big Brother Awards bring together a rich and unique mix of all ideologies and backgrounds. This year, for the first time, the award night will be open to the general public. A space for a thousand people has been reserved at the London School of Economics, which is hosting the event on the night.
Link
(Thanks, Ian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Don Martin MAD toons onomatopoeia glossary
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DATE: 07/28/2004 07:17:16 AM
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A MAD Magazine fan has compiled a chapter-and-verse glossary of the sound effects used by Don Martin in his comic strips.
WORD Sound Of Source
AAAAGH! EEEEEOOOW ACK! Removal Of A Deep MAD #66, October
UGH UGH MMP AGH! AEEK Rooted Tooth 1961, Page 20
AAAK AAK Busy City People MAD #164,
Coughing Jan 1974, Page 33
AAEEFWOFAAEE One Of Tarzan's MAD #245
Special Animal March 1984 Page 42
Calls
AAGH Indians Getting MAD #121 September
Shot 1968, Page 15
AAHT AAHHT BLOOOOT Busy City Horns MAD #164, Jan
1974, Page 33
ACK Indians Getting MAD #121 September
Shot 1968, Page 15
ACK Man choking MAD #268 January
1987 Page 42
Link
(Thanks, Eric!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DNC protesters' tech setup
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DATE: 07/28/2004 07:38:48 AM
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There are roughly 5,000 protesters at the Democratic National Convention this week. This Wired News story points out that while they may differ on many issues, they unanimously reject the so-called free-speech zone in which they're penned by the U.S. Secret Service and local authorities. Wireless tech helps, though.
The protesters are also coordinating actions outside the free-speech zone by sending text messages on their wireless phones. Some protesters for a short time Monday converted the zone into a mock prison camp by donning hoods and marching in the cage with their hands behind their backs. The protest zone, which most people here simply call "the cage," is beneath an elevated section of disused subway tracks near a newly paved bus parking lot.
Activists say the zone resembles the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The zone, surrounded by two layers of chain link fences mounted on Jersey barriers, draped with black mesh and topped with razor wire, violates the protesters' free-speech rights, said a legal observer for the Boston chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.
"You can't have free speech inside a prison," said the observer, Tony Naro, a recent college graduate who plans to start law school this fall.
Link (Thanks, Mike, who also points out that indymedia has been doing a lot of geek tech organizing for protesters on-site)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Judge: RIAA can unmask file swappers
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DATE: 07/28/2004 07:54:16 AM
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Declan McCullagh reports that a US federal judge has granted a preliminary victory to the RIAA by granting its request to reveal the identities of anonymous fileswappers accused of copyright infringement:
U.S. District Judge Denny Chin ruled Monday that Cablevision, which provides broadband Internet access in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, can be required to divulge the identities of its subscribers sued over copyright violations.
This ruling is the latest decision to clarify what legal methods copyright holders may use when hunting down people who are trading files on peer-to-peer networks. Courts have spent the last few years grappling with how to reconcile Americans' right to be anonymous with the entertainment industry's own right to sue people who violate copyright law. Chin, in Manhattan, said that the implicit guarantee of anonymity in the Bill of Rights is an insufficient shield in this case: "Such a person's identity is not protected from disclosure by the First Amendment."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Net art applet: Secret mating lives of robots
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DATE: 07/28/2004 07:58:04 AM
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Offspring is a lovely abstract visualization of the pair bonding process of a theoretical robot colony:
"Each robot is assembled, ages through youth, comes into a reproductive stage, and eventually dies of fatigue. If a robot is lucky enough to find a mate during it's reproductive stage, baby robots may be assembled.
Visually, the Offspring image is a historic graph of robot colony size and distribution. Males of the population are represented by single horizontal lines while Females are shown as double lines. (...) Robots can only mate with robots near them in both space in age. To encourage dissimilar permutations, robots are not allowed to mate with siblings."
BoingBoing reader Skye Ashbrook says, "They even give you the source code to each process. I'd love to take those and build small apps on my system to render really high-res versions to output to nice paper on an IRIS printer or something. They can't handle much traffic so if the link is fUXXored, please please keep trying back -- it is so worth it." Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Prion adds, "I was marveling at the mating robots and had in my mind that the work was similar to the magic found at levitated.net. Looking at the credits in the source code I discovered that flash master j.tarbell was the author, one of the levitated.net contributors. For glorious nonlinear flash animation, visit the site."
Update 2: BoingBoing reader David says, "The code for the robot pair-bonding is written using Processing, a Java-based language and environment. It's a fun system, with instant gratification."
And BoingBoing reader Darren says, "When i saw this i was reminded of a current exhibition on in the modern art museum kiasma. its by a scottish artist charles sandison. he used something similar in that he had words "food" "man "woman" "child" "mother" "father" "old" and they all interacted with each other. the "man" would go to get "food" the children and mothers and woman would stay huddled together in the "village" area. groups of men would go and fight each other now and then. fascinating stuff. More info about the artist here. "living rooms" is the name of the exhibtion in kiasma.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DNC cops just don't get wireless security?
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DATE: 07/28/2004 07:59:22 AM
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On the politech list, a thread of items from various listservs related to cybersecurity and the Democratic National Convention. In one item, reader Wes Morgan says,
I'm watching CNN's Headline News, and they run a story on security preparations for this week's Democratic Convention in Boston. They go on, at great length, about the extensive network of cameras--approximately
75 of them, scattered around various Federal buildings and convention sites--and make it a point to illustrate how the security force, with their wireless networks and handheld devices, can grab the feed from any of these cameras at the tap of a stylus.
So, they show one such device - with it's 802.11b card clearly identifiable
- and show another agent viewing a webcam of the Boston Harbor shoreline - with the URL of the hosting site clearly readable. When talking about the cameras, they show several different cameras on different buildings, some of which seem fairly unusual in their architecture.
I now know that they're using 802.11b, and I know the name at least one system handling the webcam feeds, and (with a bit of reconaissance) I can probably determine the position of at least one camera. So much for cybersecurity; I can't believe that the Feds even let that stuff on the air, much less that they did so without obfuscating critical information. *sigh* What were they thinking?
Link, and here is a press release which states that DNC cops are using handhelds with (apparently) 802.11 to access law enforcement databases.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SMS messages become embroidered cross-stitch art
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DATE: 07/28/2004 08:32:10 AM
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Among the goodies you'll find on Birmingham, UK-based artist Kate Pemberton's site are "an extensive casio watch camera diary," and a series of embroidered versions of canned short text message (one of them is shown here). I hope she posts the other 24 online -- they're great.
Kate says: "Texting is quick and has [largely] replaced the act of sending a card -- Happy Birthday images for example. If something is stitched by hand by the message sender, there is a lot of emotion attached... someone has stitched feelings there, using up much time and patience. Texting is flippant... however we may be more likely to send texts to people who we may not send cards to! There are other ideas within the work about the role of the female image in technology and the correlation between pixel art and traditional cross-stitch."
Link to Kate's "endfile" geek-art website.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lost electronic records from '02 raise '04 concern
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DATE: 07/28/2004 09:11:14 AM
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In today's New York Times:
Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.
Dan Gillmor blogs,
This is even worse than it seems. The notion of an audit trail in this case is ludicrous to begin with. Even with a digital backup there's still no way you can trust that the votes cast were the votes recorded. That's the big problem with touch-screen voting machines that lack a voter-verifiable paper trail -- paper that can be used to check the machines' accuracy and be the actual ballot in a recount. And this is only the latest strange incident in Florida's sordid elections record. You have to conclude that the people running elections in Florida are buffoons at best. At worst? The thought is frightening.
Link to Dan's blog entry, and Link to NYT story.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Comic book ad gallery
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DATE: 07/28/2004 09:27:31 AM
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Here's a well-documented gallery of comic-book miracle product ads, with high-res scans. Clip-art ahoy!
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Foul-smelling goo sold to keep people out of abandoned buildings
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DATE: 07/28/2004 10:00:08 AM
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Ruffin sez: "a New Zealand company is now making a synthetic "skunk gel" called Skunk Shot that is being used by law enforcement to keep vagrants and junkies out of abandoned buildings." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Moebius Double twist strip playground equipment
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DATE: 07/28/2004 10:34:02 AM
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Kevin Jarnot sez: "Little Tikes Commercial has created a playground structure called the "Infinity Climber", which is a climbable Moebius double twist strip for kids. It also recently won a 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA)" Link
Cassidy Curtis sez: "I hate to break it to your readers, but that piece of playground equipment is not really a Moebius strip. It has two twists, not one, which means it's an orientable surface (having two unique sides), topologically equivalent to an ordinary circular strip. A kid on one side of the strip could crawl around forever and not meet any kids on the other side. Real Moebius strips have an odd number of twists, and thus have only one side."
Kevin McCarty sez:That's not quite right either. A two-twist strip is not topologically
equivalent to a no-twist strip, nor to a one-twist strip (the Moebius
strip). They're all topologically inequivalent. The two circular
edges of the 2-twist strip are linked, while with the 0-twist strip
they're not. For all integers n, the n-twist strips are inequivalent
to each other. The ones with even number of twists are orientable
with two circular edges with varying linking number, and the
odd-numbered twists are non-orientable with a single circular edge
that links (knots) itself a varying number of times. Welcome to the
wonderful world of homotopy equivalence classes.
Tim sez:
I should add that Kevin McCarty's comment is only true for
strips nested in euclidean space. Without such an embedding, there's
no way to distinguish strips differing in an even number of twists.
See: on homotopy, where the space Y is in fact euclidean 3-space. Without
such a reference space we can only say whether our strips are
homeomorphic or not, which they indeed are whenever they differ
in an even number of twists.
I believe that any confusion here originates from the use of
homotopy in knot theory where an ignorance of the space in which
the knot is embedded would result in every knot being equivalent to
the trivial knot.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Are TV Networks "Inducers" for airing JibJab Bush/Kerry spoof?
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DATE: 07/28/2004 11:49:20 AM
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Ernest Miller says,
BoingBoing noted yesterday that JibJab, the creators of the hilarious Bush/Kerry/Guthrie parody were facing threat of a copyright lawsuit by the current copyright holders for "This Land is Your Land." Now, the Home Recording Rights Coalition has issued a press release pointing out that when the television news broadcasts promoted the flash animation they were likely "inducing" people to violate copyright, assuming that the animation isn't fair use. Under the INDUCE Act, that could make the broadcasters liable for literally millions of copyright violations. Heh.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Talking Love Doll
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DATE: 07/28/2004 01:46:16 PM
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Back it up, RealDoll, this new pornorealist product plans to kick your 36"-24"-36" synthetic ass. Formed in the image of Playmate Linn Thomas, the "Talking Love Doll" promises to do what none before have: talk back atcha. "Almost seamless, life-like feeling skin, mannequin hands, feet and head with long flowing hair, large breasts and jointed arms with orbital sockets, multi-speed, Batteries included," says the website, along with claims that the "Wireless, Vibrating" Ms. Thomas is molded from all-new "Futurotic Material." You say Futurotic, I say vinyl. Whatever.
One thing is certain: IANALDU (I am not a love doll user), but even more tempting than the off-the-shelf model would be a haxxored version. She could speak everything from Shakespeare to software user manuals, for the man with the right set of tools. And, no, I actually mean tools. Dollmodding, anyone?
Link to Fleshbot post. Figure out a way to install Elizabot on the damn thing for extra credit.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ESPN's accidentally dirtiest homoerotic web headline EVER
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DATE: 07/28/2004 03:06:37 PM
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"Rangers Take Whiff of Angel's Colon." Fantasy baseball, indeed. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roger Wood wall-clock
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DATE: 07/28/2004 11:06:17 PM
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My friend Roger Wood is a genius clockmaker who builds clocks into assemblage sculptures made from found objects, antiques, rust, and vacuum tubes. He publishes an irregular newsletter showcasing his latest creations, such as this one, which is similar to one that I bought from him before I moved to London, which was the first piece of decor I put up in my new flat after moving in. Every place I've lived since I left Toronto has had a Roger clock in it, and it wouldn't feel like home without one.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ebook column that gets it all wrong
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DATE: 07/29/2004 12:08:46 AM
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Gizmodo has a new column called "Feature Creep," and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It's full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years ("Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.") and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there's hardly a paragraph in there that couldn't have been written in 1997 -- nor one that takes note of any of the events since then.
Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won't be so invasive that it turns off readers (whom the author insists on calling "consumers," an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson's description in Idoru, "...a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed").
This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the "lightweight" region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact).
This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)
But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it (there're very few ideas more goofy than the idea that people will start buying ebooks just as soon as they have fewer features and more restrictions, provided that the ebooks can be played back on special-purpose devices with sharp screens). He cites Sony as proof of this ("Sony may be nuts, but they're not that nuts."), despite the fact that Sony was forced out of the walkman market by its failure to deliver the DRM-free devices that its customers demanded. Yes, Sony is that nuts.
He doesn't even touch on the marketplace experience of every published writer who's tried giving away DRM-free ebooks -- me, Lessig, Jim Munroe, the Baen authors, Orson Scott Card -- universally, the experience is that we sell more books (Lessig's latest just went into its third hardcover printing, for chrissakes). This of course echoes the experiences from elsewhere: the movie studios' box office revenues appear to be increasing as a function of the amount of movies being shared on P2P nets and the only empirical study of music downloading and music sales concluded that the effect was usually negligible, rarely negative, and sometimes positive.
He does, however, take time out to snidely dismiss blanket licensing schemes -- like the ones that enable cable television, radio, photocopying, exam papers, live performance, covers, lending, coursepacks, jukeboxes, rentals, etc etc etc all over the world -- as a kind of pipe dream ("When the visionary of all visionaries develops a model for all-you-can-eat media consumption that provides for the artists to actually eat, perhaps I'll change my mind; until then, we are what we are, and we'll have to play nice within the confines of the present system.") despite the fact that these systems have been employed to universal good effect whenever new technology makes exclusion too costly to work effectively. It's like he's totally missed the fact that billions of dollars go right into the pockets of creators and rights-holders through these schemes.
Bizarrely, he asserts that people might buy periodicals that expire off their players in 60 days -- despite the fact that every one of us has a friend or relative with a giant stack of old computer mags, or National Geographics, or colorful Wireds, sitting on a shelf.
Really, it's as though he sat down and called an ebook startup's PR guy, then reasoned out all of his conclusions a priori, without reference to any of the activity in the field.
I believe fiercely and passionately in ebooks -- that's why I give talks like this one -- but articles like this do nothing to advance the discussion. They're echoes of the dotcom snakeoil that dominated the ebook discussion five or ten years ago, and it's a disappointment to see this kind of editorial-in-defiance-of-facts on a hip net-zine like Gizmodo.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Open Source Con session blogs
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DATE: 07/29/2004 01:37:07 AM
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Danny O'Brien and Quinn Norton are attending the O'Reilly Open Source con in Portland, and blogging the hell out of the sessions and keynotes. This is excellent stuff.
Stumbling into the Perl Lightning Talks now. Randal Schwartz (looks like Randal. Certainly wearing Randal-like clothes. He's the Hooter's guy, right? I always get him and Tom Phoenix confused. Okay, definitely Randal.) Anyway, he's written a CGI replacement that uses Class::Prototype to create a proper MVC-style object interface for Web applications. The stub class implements a default Web app, and you just stick in your own methods which customise it. I wonder if this is how WebObjects works? They worked out how to structure it by looking at oodles of existing CGI apps.
I don't know what the name of this class is (for I am an idiot), but it'lll be out on CPAN soonest. Look for the Hooters guy.
Danny Link, Quinn Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Folk Process defined and expanded upon
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DATE: 07/29/2004 01:42:17 AM
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Hot on the heels of the attack on Woody Guthrie's memory (in the form of a lawsuit against political parodists who used his "This Land is Your Land" as part of a Flash movie) is this wonderful piece on what Pete Seeger called "the folk process" -- the way that traditional art has been made by ripping, mixing and burning the art that preceded it.
Guthrie may be right that Pete Seeger was the first to coin the term "folk process", but the process of oral song-transmission through through variation and selection was being analyzed even before Pete Seeger's birth in 1919. And the process itself has been operating as long as there have been songs. The folk process was described, though not so named, by Cecil Sharp in 1907: "[Development of a folk song] involves the three principles of continuity, variation, and selection."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Alternate history tubemap
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DATE: 07/29/2004 01:53:45 AM
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This tubemap with station-names translated into German is really disorienting and, as Teresa points out, evokes an alternate history of WWII.
337k GIF Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Volunteers needed to webify government documents
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DATE: 07/29/2004 02:00:30 AM
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Mark, who noded out the UK National ID Card consultation on a blog for trackback, commentary and markup, is trying to do the same with other important government documents, like the Butler report and the 911 report. This is a great idea, the natural extension of the good work done by Cryptome in hosting other important documents. He's calling for volunteers to help with the conversion: looks like a rewarding project to contribute to.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr jingle remix
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DATE: 07/29/2004 02:04:17 AM
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Hot on the heels of yesterday's jingle for the Flickr service, a Flickr user has remixed it, transforming it from something naive and sweet to a sinister bit of electronica.
3.9MB MP3 Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Salon op-ed on DNC bloggers
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DATE: 07/29/2004 02:08:27 AM
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Danah boyd has adapted her rant about the NYT's dismissal of the DNC bloggers as "Web diarists" into an op-ed for Salon.
Blogging will not replace traditional journalism, but it presents a threat to the normative press culture and an opportunity for radical reporting. Bloggers do place the issue of professionalism under attack, not by being unprofessional, but by exposing the ways in which the media operates. As blogging reaches the masses, people are introduced to information that was not reported because it did not suit the party line. Bloggers will happily document the power games that they witness in the press room and will expose future Jayson Blairs. Bloggers also capture information that the mainstream press does not yet realize is valuable, which means that ambitious and digitally minded journalists are constantly scanning the blogs for information. More and more, journalists are thanking bloggers for new slants. The competition between journalists and bloggers for readers' attention results in more diverse and compelling coverage.
Reg Req'd Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to remove MSIE from Windows
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DATE: 07/29/2004 02:10:42 AM
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Xeno sez:
When CERT and other security agencies said to stop using IE, I wasn't too concerned as I use Firefox. However, it was quickly brought to my attention that due to shell calls and all Microsoft products being able to ignore your default browser, this still made your system vulnerable through IE. So I took the long painful journey of finding a simple way to remove IE.
Now, I'm getting emails from tons of satisfied people who have followed my instructions and have even their default Microsoft aps (including Windows update) using whatever browser they told it to. Even Microsoft has called me to see how I did it. Unfortunately, they blatantly told me that they won't be including it in their knowledge base 'for obvious reasons'.
Link
(Thanks, Xeno!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF defending creators of This Land is Your Land parody
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DATE: 07/29/2004 04:08:23 AM
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I'm proud to relate that EFF is representing Jib Jab, the creators of the wonderful "This Land is Your Land" Flash parody that aroused the ire of the holder of Woody Guthrie's copyrights and resulted in a threatened lawuit. Here's a little bit of my cow-orker Fred von Lohmann's letter to the copyright-holder's lawyers.
In your July 23 letter, you contend that "This Land" offers no "satirical comment" on the Guthrie original. You are mistaken.
While your view of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" as being predominantly about "the beauty of the American landscape" and "the disenfranchisement of the underclass" is interesting, most Americans think of the song as an iconic expression of the ideal of national unity. Jib Jab's parody addresses, among other things, the lack of national unity that characterizes our current political climate (ending with the optimistic hope that unity might be rediscovered). In short, "This Land" explores exactly the same themes as the Guthrie original, using the parodic device of contrast and juxtaposition to comment on the original. See Abilene Music v. Sony Music Entertainment, 320 F .Supp.2d 84, 90-91 (S.D.N.Y. 2003) (emphasizing the role of contrast and juxtaposition as parodic devices). The parodic comment takes on an additional dimension of irony when viewed in light of the often omitted closing stanzas of Guthrie's original.
Link
Update: Turns out that Woody got the melody from the Carter Family
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK Big Brother Awards pix and video
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DATE: 07/29/2004 04:15:56 AM
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MoblogUK has pix and videos from last night's Big Brother Awards at the LSE, hosted by Mark Thomas, which were a hoot.
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Attack of the Hoax Blogs
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DATE: 07/29/2004 06:15:59 AM
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In today's NYT, my Wired News colleague Daniel Terdiman writes about the growing trend in blogs that purport to be real, but are in fact hoaxes (and yes, he knows they're "weblogs" or "blogs," not "Web Logs," but c'est la editorial policy, mon cher). Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sex toys still banned in Alabama, guns okay
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DATE: 07/29/2004 06:56:34 AM
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A decision issued yesterday by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says Alabama doesn't have to lift its silly, arcane 1998 law banning the sale of sex toys. The Constitution does not include a right to sexual privacy, the panel of three judges ruled. Many Americans would disagree, including this one. To paraphrase Andrew Orlowski's brilliant quip about the INDUCE Act, under this law one could stroll down Alabama's southern streets selling semiautomatic rifles and dildos, and be arrested for the dildos.
"In this case, the American Civil Liberties Union ('ACLU') invites us to add a new right to the current catalogue of fundamental rights under the Constitution: a right to sexual privacy. It further asks us to declare Alabama's statute prohibiting the sale of 'sex toys' to be an impermissible burden on this right. Alabama responds that the statute exercises a time-honored use of state police power -- restricting the sale of sex. We are compelled to agree with Alabama and must decline the ACLU's invitation. (...)
"Alabama's Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act prohibits, among other things, the commercial distribution of 'any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value.'"
This calls for massive civil disobedience. FreeTheAlabamaVibrator.com is still available, people -- it's time to stick it to the Man. Here's the decision in PDF (Sherri Williams v. Attorney General of Alabama, case 02-16135). More on the story here, in a Seattle P-I piece. And during National Orgasm Week, no less. Is nothing sacred? Here's a PDF summarizing the state's gun laws (Alabama's congresscritters are against renewing the Assault Weapons Ban, which expires on September 13 -- evidently the state's pro-gun lobby is much more powerful than its pro-vibrator lobby). (Thanks, Baptiste Coulmont)
Update: Fleshbot has just issued this fatwa playful tease to readers who oppose the Alabama ban:
three $50 gift certificates from Eros Boutique to the three readers who come up with the best sex-toy related protest items, either by way of a vibemod prototype or Photoshopped creation. Confederate Flag Ticklers? Birmingham Ben-Wa Balls? Crimson Tide Cock Rings? Send your ideas and photos here.
You can have our Hello Kitty vibes and Cup-'o-Pussys when you pry them from our cold, dead hands, Alabama governor Bob Riley.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Not a La-Z-Boy
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DATE: 07/29/2004 08:34:34 AM
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Now on eBay, this Mission medical chair, used for healing at the end of the 19th century. According to the auction listing:
"This chair, constructed of oak and with foot pedals and straps, was essentially a forerunner of our exercise bycycles, but the manufacturer in the late Victorian era claimed marvelous benefits if this chair was used with electrical currents and mild shock."
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bigfoot in Oklahoma
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DATE: 07/29/2004 08:44:13 AM
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Charles Hallmark tracks Bigfoot in the Chickasaw National Park. One of his methods is to place a bag of greasy popcorn bag in a garbage can overnight and then dust for fingerprints. Of course, Hallmark is not the only Bigfoot enthusiast roaming the backwoods, but his description of his own Sasquatch sightings made me smile:
"No muzzle, no tail. Just boing, boing, boing."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Target... for all your Kabbalah needs
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DATE: 07/29/2004 09:25:21 AM
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As part of her devotion to "Kabbalah" (note the quotation marks), Madonna sports a knotted red string as a protective talisman. Now, you too can block the evil eye with a Kabbalah Red String, just $25.99 from Target, your neighborhood supply house for mystical goods.
What makes this particular piece of string so special is, in part, the fact that it has traveled to Israel, to the ancient tomb of Rachel the Matriarch, and returned, imbued with the essence of protection... The string draws upon the connection to and awareness of Rachel and must be tied on by a loved one and sealed with Rachel's protective energy by reciting the Ben Porat prayer (included on a card).
Link (Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 07/29/2004 09:42:04 AM
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In this month's Lab Notes from UC Berkeley engineering:
* Traffic monitoring technology to ease the gridlock
* Nanoscience for energy applications
* New materials for safer nuclear reactors
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tethered to your hardware: don't get leashed by your vendor!
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DATE: 07/29/2004 10:54:02 AM
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Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of the brilliant copyright/tech book The Anarchist in the Library, has a guest-editorial on Engadget today about "tethering" -- using technological measures to ensure that all the aftermarket goodies (coffee for your coffee-maker, music for your iPod) come from the same company that sold you the original hardware. It's easy to understand why hardware companies love tethering -- it's a license to screw their locked-in customers out of titanic sums of money -- but that's exactly why smart customers need to reject tethered products.
So we looked on with enthusiasm at the new pressurized personal coffee makers. They push hot water through a sealed “pod” filled with a precise measure of coffee. It was neat, slick, well-designed, and promised a strong, good, dependable dose. It’s the same technology that supplies those surprisingly good coffee available from coin machines in public spaces in Europe.
After a half-hour of debating the pros and cons of such a radical “format shift,” we left without one of these cool new machines. We opted out because these specialized “pods” are essentially “tethered” to this brand of coffee maker.
What if we hate the coffee that the company supplies for the maker? What if the company goes out of business? What if they raise the prices of pods? We would no longer order pounds of unpadded coffee from Peet’s in Berkeley or run across the street to the deli for an emergency brick of cheap coffee. And my favorite New York coffee supplier, Oren’s on Waverly Place, would no longer get my business.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Film piracy zine from 1975
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DATE: 07/29/2004 10:59:56 AM
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Mike Sizemore has uploaded a scanned in issue of "Private Screenings," an old mimeographed film collectors' mag from 1975. The issue is the special on film piracy -- that is, unauthorized duplication of actual FILMS. It's a fascinating look into the world of plus-ca-change-plus-c'est-la-meme-chose.
Link
(Thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Music blogs under the BPI gun
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DATE: 07/29/2004 11:01:42 AM
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Ian sez, "Anybody who runs a music blog in the UK beware NTL sent me an email today containing a BPI (the British equivalent of the RIAA) copyright infringement notice for hosting songs from my blog on my server. Looks like they've read all the recent music blog stories."
You should be aware that copyright in a work is infringed by a person, who, without the licence or consent of the copyright owner, does or authorises another to do any of the acts restricted by the copyright.
We are therefore writing to you to request that you remove or block access to the website identified above. This may be accomplished most effectively by blocking access to the particular URL listed above.
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(Thanks, Ian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Volunteer coders to help connect up the Peace Corps
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DATE: 07/29/2004 11:23:32 AM
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Scott, a Peace Corps volunteer, got web-volunteers to help him build a fantastic web-resource for his project in Guyana. Hot on the heels of his success there, he's putting together a much more ambitious project to connect up the whole Peace Corps. When I worked in Costa Rica 12 years ago with Youth Challenge International, I came back with the same intention, but I was ahead of my time -- today, this is totally do-able.
I want to build site that will link up average joe web and graphic designer, database guy and anyone else that can help with Peace Corps volunteers around the world. We do some partnering in Peace Corps but we don't tap the huge potential that exists with folks at home. We need to do this. It will help get more done in the tiny timeframe that we are here in country.
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(Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Easy Soulseek client for Macintosh means no more PC for me
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DATE: 07/29/2004 11:30:24 AM
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Soulseek is my favorite P2P file-sharing network. Until recently though, the only functional Macintosh Soulseek client, Nicotine, has been a big hassle to install and run, requiring the Apple Developer Tools and X11 SDK. Now there's a new pre-compiled version of Nicotine. All you need is OS X Panther and Apple's free X11 X Window System. It was a simple install and works like a charm.
The result is that now I feel OK selling my PC laptop and buying a Powerbook. I love the ultra-portability of my supersmall and spritely Sony Vaio PCG-SRX77 and I'm sad to part with it. But at least the 12-inch Powerbook approaches sub-notebook size. And I'll finally be all Apple, all the time. Link (to eBay auction)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Victrola iPod amp
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DATE: 07/29/2004 01:24:09 PM
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Tubesville is a custom amp shop in NYC that builds whimsical bespoke amplifiers like this Victrola-oid iPod amp.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: One million legal music d/ls
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DATE: 07/29/2004 01:25:31 PM
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Here's a wiki that's attempting to collect links to 1,000,000 legal music downloads.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MSNBC: Social Networks Go to Work
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DATE: 07/29/2004 02:07:18 PM
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I just filed this story for MSNBC about the business value of social networking services. Truth or hype: can some SNSes become helpful professional tools for businesses -- in particular, independent entrepreneurs and smaller companies, for whom each new personal connection is a significant business building block? Includes interviews with unrepentant compulsive digital networkers danah boyd, Frank Keeney of SOCALWUG, Noah Glass of audblog, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid, Scott Rafer of Feedster, Travis Kalanick of RedSwoosh (and, once upon a time, Scour.net), and human router Joi Ito -- who said this:
Their usefulness depends on your needs and networking style. LinkedIn, for example allows you to search histories and CVs in your network -- it's great for finding people who work in a particular company, or who have worked with someone you know. It's also an interesting way to find references for people or companies you're getting to know.
I think email is broken in a serious way, and SNS is trying to address some of the issues associated with that breakdown. These networks may get it right and really change the way we do business, but we're still at the beginning of the development and evolution curve.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Polaroids from DNC, and historic first for Web in Kerry's DNC speech?
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DATE: 07/29/2004 07:50:25 PM
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Inside this online gallery, a series of polaroids shot by TIME photographer Christopher Morris at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. At left, the Rock the Vote bus arrives at the FleetCenter.
And if I'm not mistaken, John Kerry's mid-speech invitation to voters moments ago to go online for platform details was the first time in America's history that any presidential candidate plugged a campaign website during his acceptance speech. Snip:
"I've told you about our plans for the economy, for education, for health care, for energy independence. I want you to know more about them. So now I'm going to say something that Franklin Roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com."
Link to speech text.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New O'Reilly magazine: Make
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DATE: 07/29/2004 07:57:03 PM
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Today, at OSCON in Portland, Dale Dougherty and I announced a new O'Reilly magazine called Make. It'll be a quarterly, full-color magazine filled with fun projects and hardware hacks involving technology. (Dale is the editor and publisher, and I'm the editor-in-chief. Thanks to BB's own John Battelle for getting me involved!)
Make will have 5-minute tips you can use to improve your gadgets, networks, and computers, as well as much longer projects that might take several days (or weeks) to complete. The first issue is coming out in January. If you're interested, visit the web site and sign up for the newsletter. I'll also be running the Make blog on that page. I hope that a lot of BB readers become Make contributors, too. Please send me your ideas for hacks, tips, tricks, workarounds, neat things to build, useful tools, etc. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Better German tubemap
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DATE: 07/30/2004 01:14:09 AM
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Horst sez, "You published a link to an alternative London Underground Map ("what if the Germans had won WWII?") in German on July 29th. Problem is, as any German native speaker might tell you, many of the names of this map are Mock-German rather than real German and don't really make sense.
"A while ago I attempted a real translation of the London Underground map into German, with station names being real, literal or etymological translations of the English placenames into German. Most German readers of my map agree that it's funnier than Myrtle's map (the one that you linked to).
"Incidentally, the translation of the London map into German was part of a project that started with a translation of the underground map of Vienna, Austria into English, which might be of more entertainment value as most of your readers can actually read it.
Link
(Thanks, Horst!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Induce hearings video as a Bittorrent download: QED
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DATE: 07/30/2004 01:18:32 AM
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Orrin Hatch wants to ban P2P networks that are used for music-sharing, claiming that their non-infringing uses are negligible. He even held hearings on his Induce bill to make the point. Video of those hearings are now available on a P2P system called Bittorrent that allows lots of people to simultaneously download large files by portioning out the burden of serving parts of the file to everyone who's trying to get a copy.
Download a copy of the hearings for yourself, participate in the democratic process, and in so doing, prove that their conclusions were utterly bogus.
Torrent Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Penguin Putnam's racketeering domain-name scam
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DATE: 07/30/2004 01:32:10 AM
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Katie has owned the domain katie.com since 1996. Penguin Putnam recently released a book about girls who get into trouble with the interweb and called it Katie.com. Now, the clueless dorks at Penguin have decided that they need to strongarm Katie out of her domain so they can do tie-ins with their book (ironically, they scrapped girl.com, the original title, 'cause that's a porn-site, but they figured that a web-developer's site is fair game).
Today I also had a very unpleasant phone call from a lawyer working with Katie Tarbox, the author of the book. She tried to convince me that I should donate the domain name to them. Somehow this would resolve my problem. OK so not only do I get walked all over, my life invaded by this book, treated badly by the publisher/author who refuse to acknowledge that they've done the wrong thing, but then I get to hand it over to them on a silver plate and I not only have suffered all this aggravation but ultimately have lost the thing that I care about. Exactly HOW does this resolve anything other than give them the thing they want which they have done everything to hijack without any care and consideration for what is right and just?
Secondly, she tells me that they're planning on launching some school curriculum thing to teach kids about online safety - and they're calling it Katie.com. Are they insane? No wonder they want me to hand it over.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mesh wireless conference call for papers
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DATE: 07/30/2004 01:39:38 AM
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There's an upcoming mesh wireless conference in Boulder that's looking for papers on subject like Software Defined/Cognitive Radios, GPS, Galileo, Glonass Interoperability and standards, Effective Spectrum Management and Propagation Modeling in Urban Environment.
The ISART technical program committee is soliciting papers for the 7th annual International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART) to be held in Boulder, Colorado March 1-3, 2005. These papers will discuss new technologies, research and development, innovative ideas, enabling technologies, standards, protocols, business practices and policies, and government regulation for the purpose of forecasting the future development and application of radio frequency technologies into the next decade.
Link
(Thanks, Sam!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO legally sell downloads of cover-songs
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DATE: 07/30/2004 01:42:31 AM
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CDBaby, a wonderful indie music publisherdistributor, has put up a howto for legally selling downloads of cover songs.
If you record a cover version of a song, (meaning your performance of a song that has been released in the U.S. with consent of the copyright owner), you are entitled by law to release your recording commercially, and the owner of the copyright to the song cannot prevent you from doing so.
The Copyright Act provides for what is called a "Compulsory License", which means that if you follow the steps set forth by statute, you can distribute your recording of that song on a CD or over the internet.
The following details the procedure for individuals to obtain a compulsory license to digitally distribute cover songs over the Internet to end users in the United States.
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day, Ken!
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DATE: 07/30/2004 01:56:46 AM
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Today is Sysadmin Appreciation Day, and it's long overdue. I started out as a sysadmin, and I'm here to tell you that sysadmins are the secret masters of the universe, underappreciated, all powerful, and indispensible. The world would crumble into dust but for the diligent work of our sysadmins.
I'd like to take a moment to recognise Boing Boing's volunteer sysadmin, the incomparable Mr Ken Snider, whose indispensible work is the reason that Boing Boing has such killer availability and uptime.
I'd also like to thank Chris Smith, who runs our submit-a-link form, instituting countermeasures against formspammers and catching the bounces.
Also due for appreciation is Carl Steadman, the long-time host of Boing Boing, whose donated services and connectivity made this all possible.
Finally, my appreciation to the sysadmins at EFF, past and present: Matt Peterson, Chris Palmer, Marc Perkel, Christopher Davis and Dan Brown. Thanks for keeping the Internet working (oh, and lest I forget, the OpenCola sysadmins: Helen, Michael, Karl, and Ken [again!]).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ancient hard-drive, guy in bunny suit
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DATE: 07/30/2004 05:15:20 AM
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On Gizmodo, this stunning image of an ancient, room-sized hard drive being serviced by a guy in a clean-room bunny-suit. The best part is that this thing and a million of its brothers put together probably had a lower capacity than the USB memory built into the pen I lost last month.
Link
Update: Daniel Klein sez, "The picture is of a fixed-head disk, very similar to a Borroughs unit I had the pleasure of disassembling (in 1975) after a catastrophic head crash (I got authorization from Gordon Bell himself to do it). It took me 3 days to whittle it down to nuts and bolts, and the platter weighed 18 pounds. The hub upon which the platter was mounted was phosphor bronze, and weighed an additional 17 pounds. So imagine the inertia of 35 pounds spinning at 3600 RPM. It had electric brakes, because if you just switched off the power, it would spin for a loooong time. There is an (apocryphal) story of movers just hitting the circuit breaker (not the off switch that engaged the brakes), and after waiting the requisite 5 minutes for spindown, loaded the drive into a truck. All the moves and hallways were right angles, of course. Since brakes had not been engaged, it was still spinning at 2000 RPM or so by the time it was loaded. When the truck turned a corner, the drive precessed right out through the side of the truck. It held a few megabytes at most, if I recall correctly (a similar unit was used as a swap disk on the PDP-10, so it would have held 256K or so). "
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ingenious spare-parts wheelchairs for the world's poorest nations
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DATE: 07/30/2004 05:47:36 AM
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The Free Wheelchair Mission is a religious NGO that produces wheelchairs out of $41.17 worth of parts, and makes its plans for same available for free online. The project was inspired by the sight of a legless Moroccan woman dragging herself across a dirt road. Now the project works to provide low-cost wheels to all comers around the world.
Link
(via Gizmodo, via WorldChanging)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Genome of human zit sequenced
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DATE: 07/30/2004 08:54:54 AM
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Scientists have sequenced the genome of the bug that causes zits. It had previously been mistaken for a part of the human genome.
“Sequencing the whole genome has revealed that the bacterium can actively degrade human skin tissue because of the massive presence of these enzymes, and also that there are specific immunogenic proteins which are present in this bacterium which trigger the immune response,” Brüggemann told New Scientist....
Severe acne is usually treated with common antibiotics, but many strains are becoming resistant to these. “With the genome sequence it’s now quite easy to generate specific drugs against this bacterium,” says Brüggemann. “That’s the next task.”
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Observing the SETI observatory
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DATE: 07/30/2004 09:11:56 AM
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The SETI Institute predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years. If that turns out to be true, it'll probably be the folks at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek radio observatory who will have heard the call. Hat Creek is home to the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA), funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
I just returned from a trip with two friends to Hat Creek, about five hours northeast of San Francisco. Leading Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher Jack Welch and his former student, astronomer Jim Gibson, were kind enough to give us a tour of the facility.
More about our visit to Hat Creek in my journal at TheFeature. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT buys spam company, sues the competition, silences political activists
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DATE: 07/30/2004 09:25:53 AM
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My cow-orker Annalee Newitz has posted a great editorial on the latest court battles over spam, pointing out the weird, anticompetitive and anti-speech aspects of the spam fight.
Microsoft is developing what it calls Bonded Sender, a program that would supposedly separate "legitimate" Internet marketers and bulk mailers from spammers. Working with a California company called IronPort, Microsoft will create a white list of Internet marketers who have paid a fee and demonstrated that they have no record of spamming. Companies participating in the Bonded Sender program will be allowed to send their email ads to HotMail and MSN users.
Given Microsoft's investment in the Bonded Sender program, it seems they may soon be in the business of serving as middlemen between emailer marketers and their webmail users. In other words, it sounds like the software megacorp is about to start competing with Richter. Of course, Microsoft could always call off its suit if Richter claims to have been rehabilitated -- and he pays his Bonded Sender fees!
In the spam wars, sometimes it's hard to tell the spammers from the antispammers.
The situation gets even more complicated when you consider the fact that Microsoft will do more than pick and choose winners in the junk email business. Bonded Sender will punish most the people who aren't even sending advertisements -- groups like Internet activists MoveOn.org, who send out millions of emails to alert their members to upcoming political events and issues. If these groups don't pay their Bonded Sender fees, HotMail simply won't deliver their email -- regardless of whether users have specifically opted in to receive it.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Squirrels scream ultrasonically
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DATE: 07/30/2004 10:15:30 AM
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Ground squirrels emit an ultrasonic shriek to warn others that a predator is nearby. In the current issue of the journal Nature, University of Manitoba researchers report that while bats and whales use ultrasound for echolocation and to track prey, to their knowledge "ultrasonic alarm calls have not previously been detected in any animal group, despite their twin advantages of being highly directional and inaudible to key predators." From a New Scientist article about the study:
"Ultrasonic alarm calls might be beneficial because many of the birds-of-prey that catch and eat squirrels cannot hear them. Conveniently, ultrasound also has a shorter range than audible sound.
'It may be used to secretly warn others without alerting a more distant predator,' says (researcher David) Wilson.
Link (Thanks, Gabe!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA Times online unclenches from paid-subscriber-only silliness
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DATE: 07/30/2004 10:24:53 AM
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In recent months, the Los Angeles Times has taken a hell of a lot of heat from bloggers, media critics, and even some of its own writers over a constipated web content management policy that locked up all "Calendar" section listings to paid subscribers only. They've finally reversed that policy. This is groovy, because links just want to be free, man. Link
Update: A number of BB readers who are non-LAT-subscribers have written in to say that the "unclenched" content is "re-clenched," and that they can't access without paid subscription. Others have written in to say that registration, but not paid subscription, is still required. This could be a temporary tech glitch, but I'm still confused, and so are the rest of the LAT's online readers, so AFAIK it's still broken. Why do some publications insist on getting in the way of readers who just want to read basic content like this? I'll be looking for that new Koreatown barbecue/karaoke hotspot on their mercifully reg- and sub-free competitor LA.com.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Francis Crick (1916-2004)
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DATE: 07/30/2004 10:34:51 AM
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Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA, has died. In 1962, Crick shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering the secret of life.
"Evolution is cleverer than you are." -Francis Crick
Link
Update: Crick's groundbreaking 1953 paper on the molecular structure of DNA, co-authored with James Watson, is available here. (Thanks, Christina!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Albinism photos of the 19th century
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DATE: 07/30/2004 02:12:13 PM
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Gallery of olde tyme photos of 19th century albinism. Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Golfing in Dubai
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DATE: 07/30/2004 02:58:38 PM
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Look at these pictures of a Syd Mead-like golfing station in Dubai. That little green circle is the spot you stand on to hit the ball. Link (via Ritilan.com)
UPDATE
Jeremy sez: The "Syd Mead-like golfing station" is actually a helicopter pad attached to the Burj al Arab, a luxury hotel. Tiger Woods was invited to hit balls into the Gulf as a publicity stunt. It's not the opening shot of the world's most difficult hole. See this Sports Illustrated article for more details.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PowerPoint is why you got dumped by email
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DATE: 07/30/2004 11:33:56 PM
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Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla has posted a rumination on how we got to the point where it is socially acceptable to break up with someone by email. He concludes that it's a natural outgrowth of "PowerPoint culture": "I think that the 'Dear Jane' emails that those people received were inspired by elements of office culture: PowerPoint, project post-mortems and annual performance reviews. Of the people who told me that they were dumped via email, all of their boyfriends worked white-collar jobs in which they either sat through or made PowerPoint presentations."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disturbed diarist using perl blog site mistaken for bot
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DATE: 07/30/2004 11:40:29 PM
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"Bondage-chICK" is a young, disturbed girl (she's a "cutter" who cuts herself to feel better), who stumbled across a free developers' journal service offered by perl.org and started using it for her personal diary. No problem, except that the developers who stumbled across her journal assumed that she was a perl bot ("If this is autogenerated, you need to tweak it so that the doubled+transposed letter mistake doesn't happen so often, and introduce some more naturalistic errors. If it's not autogenerated, you're really sad and about 18 months behind the curve.") or a gag. Of course, the whole thing might be a hoax. Or not.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto Star 1945 online
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DATE: 07/30/2004 11:45:49 PM
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The Toronto Star has put its searchable 1945 archive online for free.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rosalind Franklin: Crick and Watson's uncredited collaborator
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DATE: 07/30/2004 11:51:06 PM
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Many of you wrote in response to the Crick obit from earlier today to remind us of the unsung and uncredited hero of DNA, Rosalind Franklin. Here's what Allison says about her:
It is past due that Dr. Rosalind Franklin received credit for actually being the
scientist who demonstrated the helical nature of DNA. Her crystallography was
crucial to the subsequent elucidation of DNA structure and replication. Her
research was used without her knowledge or permission.
Link
Update: Alex sez: "According to the NY Times there were no hard feelings between her and her colleagues."
One of the problems caused by the book was Dr. Watson's implication that the pair of them had obtained Dr. Franklin's data on DNA surreptitiously and hence had deprived her of due credit for the DNA discovery. Dr. Crick believed he obtained the data fairly since she had presented it at a public lecture, to which he had been invited. Though Dr. Watson had misreported a vital figure from the lecture, a correct version reached Dr. Crick through the Medical Research Council report. If Dr. Franklin felt Dr. Crick had treated her unfairly, she never gave any sign of it. She became friends with both Dr. Crick and Dr. Watson, and spent her last remission from cancer in Dr. Crick's house.
Dr. Franklin likely would have shared the Nobel Prize had she not died from cancer in 1958, the prize was not awarded till 1962. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Women scientists' unsung stories in comic-book form
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DATE: 07/30/2004 11:56:52 PM
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Rosalind Franklin's story is one of many great and unsung women scientists' stories recounted in the brilliant, Eisner-nominated comic book Dignifying Science, which features the work of Jen Sorensen, Anne Timmons, Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin and others, and the stories of scientists like Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Lise Meitner, Barbara McClintock, Birute Galdikas, and Hedy Lamarr.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steampunk aquatic stiltwalker from Brighton's glory years
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DATE: 07/31/2004 12:04:58 AM
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The Daddy Long Legs was a steampunk invention that graced the Victorian seaside at Brighton. It walked on 20' long legs that reached down to rails on the seabottom, ferrying passengers along the shore in clanking comfort.
Link to poster,
Link to article
(Thanks, Anita!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Horror Channel coming to cable
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DATE: 07/31/2004 09:29:29 AM
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The Horror Channel is an all-horror cable network launching next October.
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(Thanks, Prof. Griffin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Linux/sf convention call for papers
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DATE: 07/31/2004 11:32:38 AM
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Mark sez, "Linucon, a combination science fiction convention and Linux expo is looking for panelists and papers for their upcoming event."
We're looking for several different types of programming. On the Geek side we have "Heavy technical", which includes topics like programming, system administration, and security, and "Light technical", which is about using computers rather than programming them (Digital art, electronic publishing, online communities, Linux on the Desktop, Open source in business, video games, etc). On the Fandom side, our main themes this year include literary topics (for authors, editors, publishers, and readers), Anime (and Manga), gaming, costuming... There are also "crossover" topics (like online comics and computer animation) that appeal to both sides.
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(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: $100,000 effort to identify foul stench in Las Vegas
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DATE: 07/31/2004 06:05:25 PM
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For the last ten years, a mysterious nasty smell has been coming out of storm drains on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. Officials there want to spend $100k to track down the source of the vile odor.
The stink emanating from the storm sewers has plagued the area around the Fremont Street pedestrian mall for a decade, and every time the city has thrown time, effort and deodorizer at the problem, the "sewer-type" aroma has just returned.
On Wednesday, City Council is to consider a $100,000 US consulting contract aimed at finding the source of the olfactory offence.
A tiny closed-circuit television system would be used to examine the downtown storm drains, smoke would be pumped into the system to identify outlets and dye would be used to follow water flows.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Futurismic's new fiction from a Campbell nominee
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DATE: 08/01/2004 02:05:41 AM
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Futurismic is a group blog run by a bunch of great sf writers, who've raised a modest sum of money that they use to pay for science fiction stories which they publish on their site. They've just put up a new one, "Benno On Hollywood," written by one of this year's Campbell Award and Hugo Award finalists, Jay Lake.
He’s not a bad guy, our Benno, out cruising for chicks on Sepulveda or trying to score some vaca blanca on Hollywood. He’s local color for the tourists who still come, even now, with his shaved head and the Santeria tattoos his Auntie Bone put down his scalp and neck and on across his back and arms. The skulls and goats and twisty barbed wire can all be seen through the grubby wife beater with the tiny manga girl hand-drawn on the front. Three Lincoln pennies dangle from one ear, each on its own wire hoop — stabbed in by hand, no spray-on painkiller shit. Other ear’s got a vintage plastic cattle tag from the late twen-cen meat industry.
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(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ebooks talk has a hidden posthumanist rant in it
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DATE: 08/01/2004 05:56:55 AM
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This is pretty funny -- kaksoisagentti took my ebooks talk and replaced "book" with "human," "ebook" with "posthuman" and "paper" with "flesh." The results are surprisingly cogent:
2. Posthumans complement flesh humans. Having an posthuman is good. Having a flesh human is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound human, and printed the other half on scrap-flesh to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term fleshs if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and events.
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(Thanks, kaksoisagentti!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vehicle-to-Grid: microgeneration using electric cars
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DATE: 08/01/2004 05:58:32 AM
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Zed sez, "Plugging electric cars back into the grid as power _sources_ toward a distributed power supply tapping millions of batteries instead of a (relatively) small number of power plants."
So, you're thinking of buying one of those gas-electric hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius or Honda Insight. They're trendy, conserve fuel, and reduce pollution. But to really go "green," some entrepreneurs and academics say, you should try a Volkswagen Jetta.
Not just any Jetta. A dark blue one that a California electric-car company has modified so that it not only uses electricity but generates it for other purposes. So, once it's parked, you plug it in and sell excess electricity to a utility.
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LotR official body jewelry
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DATE: 08/01/2004 06:49:20 AM
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There's an official, licensed Lord of the Rings Elvish navel ring. As Diane Duane (author of the "Young Wizards" books) notes, "This takes things just a little too far. What's that high-pitched whining sound I hear? Could it be J.R.R. spinning...? ...There may be the occasional Young Wizards coffee mug or sweatshirt. But there will never be a Young Wizards navel ring."
Adorn your belly with Elven beauty wearing this Arwen Pendant Navel Ring. Weighing 14 grams and made out of surgical steel, this ring features the design motif from Arwen's necklace and earrings set and is sure to turn heads. The bottom ball is cubic zirconium and measures 5mm in diameter.
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(via Out of Ambit)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to be creative
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DATE: 08/01/2004 06:54:52 AM
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Hugh Macleod, who draws the great "Gaping Void" toons on the backs of business cards, has posted a long and very good rumination of the formation, nurturing and execution of creative ideas -- complete with comment boards.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.
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(Thanks, Hugh!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spyware blog
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DATE: 08/01/2004 07:15:46 AM
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Spyware Warrior: Waging the war against spyware is an anti-spyware blog.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Ephemera
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DATE: 08/01/2004 08:52:23 PM
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[Ed. Note: Ephemera means something short-lived; often used to describe ads or printed matter of passing interest.]
ephemera society
newspaper ads
video game ads
model rocket ads
comic boook ads
50s hygiene
disease trading cards
ephemera now
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Zealand's kooky-cool "animated" stamps
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DATE: 08/01/2004 09:58:26 PM
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Cliff Van Eaton, BoingBoing reader in New Zealand, says:
Following on from the earlier Boing Boing post about New Zealand's scratch n' sniff postage stamps, here's another world first from NZ Post - "Action Replay" postage stamps. By using a special printing process known as lenticular, the pictures on the stamps appear to move when the stamps are tilted. By the way, the scratch n' sniff postage stamps have already sold out.
Link to online "Action Replay" Postage Stamps gallery with hot mouseover movement.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen bonus round: Thrift Store
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DATE: 08/01/2004 09:59:18 PM
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radios
records
furniture
books
watches
trading cards
secret fun spot
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What got edited out of the Induce hearings?
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DATE: 08/01/2004 10:53:36 PM
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Peter was watching the hearings for Orrin Hatch's crackpot, iPod-criminalizing Induce Act, when he noticed an edit in the recording. What did Hatch and the Register of Copyrights say to one another during the gap?
Orrin Hatch (OH) : "During the august recess, I would like your office if they can to assist this committee in the efforts to identify and resolve potential concerns about potential abuses of international and domestic and intentional inducement liability. Could we count on your to help us with that?"
Marybeth Peters (MP) : "Absolutely, I just identified this as the most important question in copyright today. We would be more then happy to assist the comitte in facilitating, umm, and bringing about a hopefully a result that could work"
OH : "Yeah i'd heard that so I was just making sure that you..."
(Edit Start)
MP : "We would never say no to you"
(Edit End)
OH : "We'll that is an interesting comment"
Link
(Thanks, Peter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dan Gillmor's new book, We
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DATE: 08/01/2004 10:57:40 PM
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Dan Gillmor's new book, We the Media, has hit the shelves. I was asked to read this earlier for a blurb, and was completely taken with it -- it's the sort of book that I will be encouraging others to read for years to come, the sort of book that underpins both my work at EFF (because so much of Dan's thesis about democratized reportage hinges on the importance of a free and open network) and my work as an sf writer (because Dan's vision of the future is so compelling. Here's the blurb I wrote for Dan:
"Clear-eyed, hype-free and for all that prescient and inspiring. We the Media is Gillmor's heroic effort to bridge the tech-obsessed polyannas like me and the skeptical grownups whose hardened attitutudes won't admit of this stuff. He's done us all a service by writing it for us."
Dan's publisher, O'Reilly and Associates, have put up a website for his book here:
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Live-action "Scotland Yard" on the streets and subways of Toronto
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DATE: 08/01/2004 10:59:54 PM
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Joel is attempting to port a board game called Scotland Yard (something like Clue) into a live-action game played on the streets and transit system of Toronto.
To stand out from the crowd, Mr. X must wear his yellow "X" shirt. Detectives must wear the red "D". To win the game the detectives must physically touch Mr. X (optionally cuff, rough-up, interrogate and incarcerate).
Mr. X is randomly placed at a stop and must phone into HQ to tell his dispatcher what 3 methods of transportation he will be using on his next three moves (subway, streetcar, bus). 3 moves consists of a turn, Mr. X must reveal his location every second turn as he enters that location. His dispatcher must tell the detective's dispatchers, who in turn tell the detectives. The detectives locations known by Mr. X at all times.
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(Thanks, Joel!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF suing on JibJab's behalf for "This Land is Your Land" parody
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DATE: 08/01/2004 11:02:41 PM
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EFF has taken things one step further with JibJab and their endangered political parody of This Land is Your Land (Woody Guthrie's copyright holder has threatened to sue them for their work).
We're bringing the fight to Guthrie's rightsholders, and suing on JibJab's behalf, "to defend JibJab's fair use and free speech rights."
Check out Donna's excellent and heavily linked post for more.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Celebrity Scientologists
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DATE: 08/01/2004 11:04:35 PM
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This is a frequently updated, exhaustively documented list of celebrity Scientologists:
Name: Sonny Bono
Profession: singer, actor, republican rep., pizza delivery man in congress
member of the House Subcommittee on Copyrights and
Intellectual Property
Status: introduced by Mimi Rogers; took some courses, says
he's a roman catholic, not a scientologist (LA Times),
but probably still in (used the word "enturbulate" in public
around 26.4.1997)
He says in Esquire:
"I openly studied scientology to the degree that they
did some courses on ethics, and then said thank you and
left. (...) The scientology - there was no cult thing there."
From drogers@huey.csun.edu (David D. Rogers):
According to Corydon's book, he was quoted as saying:
"My only sorrow is that L. Ron Hubbard left before I
could thank him for my new life," in a full-page ad
featured in several newspapers after Elron's death.
died 6.1.1998
His widow, Mary Bono, has also done scientology courses
Achievement: Congressman (R), Palm Springs Mayor, Cher's ex-husband.
Cher: "A politician is usually a null, so the job fits him".
"The Progressive": (first mentioned to me in october 1995)
"#8 on the list of 'The Ten Dimmest Bulbs in Congress'
"Bono's mental shortcomings have long made him a
subject of scorn among California politicians."
Link
(via ftrain)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flash memory takes a licking and keeps on remembering
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DATE: 08/01/2004 11:08:34 PM
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Flash memory cards (CompactFlash, Secure Digital, xD, Memory Stick and Smartmedia) are nigh-indestructible (I once put a brand-new Exilim digital camera through the laundry: the camera was toast, but the SD memory survived and is still in use today!).
The one question I have is how these things fare against time itself, given that CDs and DVDs tend to delaminate, tapes crumble, and HDDs' bearings seize up -- it'd be great to have media that you could bury in a time-capsule for a couple decades with confidence.
They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.
Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests.
Most of them did fail to get through two additional tests - being smashed by a sledgehammer and being nailed to a tree.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Irish RIAA wants more copyright for tax-free artists
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DATE: 08/02/2004 02:50:52 AM
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The Irish Recording Music Association, whose members pay no taxes on their earnings, is calling for a European copyright term extension to 70 years to create "a level playing field with the USA" (the US's 70 year term is the result of an effort to "create a level playing field with Europe" -- notice a trend here?). This despite the wealth of folk music that is embodied in Irish culture and performance, folk music that enrihces the public and artists without any copyright.
Link
(Thanks, Bernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Guardian's videogame blog
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DATE: 08/02/2004 04:23:15 AM
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The Guardian has started a games-blog, just in time to respond to the hysteria in the fishwrap Daily Mail about "killer games" that "inspire real world violence."
Yesterday the Daily Mail invited readers to visit its online chatroom and respond to a typically ferocious anti-videogame rant, which took up two pages of the newspaper. Strangely, by 5pm the same evening, the 'should violent videogames be banned?' thread had been removed 'pending review', much to the confusion of those who were involved in what seemed to be a lively and mostly intelligent discussion. Could the reason perhaps have been that general opinion was very much against the proposition? Not to be silenced, however, visitors have started the thread again, and it's worth a look – in stark contrast to the paper itself, you should find some in-depth, well-considered and informed responses to a tragic incident. Unless it's all been removed for 'review' again...
Link
(Thanks, Neil!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "BOB" bag causes midflight hysteria
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DATE: 08/02/2004 06:58:25 AM
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Bruce Schneier says,
More stupid security, this time from Australia. Flight attendent finds air-sickness bag with the letters "BOB" written on it. In a dizzying feat of delusion, she imagines that "BOB" stands for "Bomb on Board," and convinces the captain to turn the plane around and make an emergency landing. I try to draw some actual lessons from this bit of stupidity.
Link. This certainly is stupidity. Everyone knows "B.O.B." is nothing more than a really good Outkast song from the album Stankonia. Don't fear the funk. Or -- wait -- could they have been talking about that Bob? Something to fear, indeed.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Chicago's Cloud Gate
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DATE: 08/02/2004 08:11:20 AM
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Cloud Gate is Anish Kapoor's recently unveiled artwork in Chicago's Millennium Park. The surreal sculpture has caused quite a stir and the media are pissing off Kapoor by nicknaming it "The Bean." Former BB guestblogger Jenn Shreve sent along links to architectural writer Lynn Becker's photo essay of The Bean Cloud Gate under construction, an image gallery of the completed work, and a Webcam site. Jenn says:
"Cloud Gate combines the blobular, organic shapes that have been so prevalent in recent design with the reflective surfaces common to Gehry's architectural work and turns the idea of sculpture as something to be *looked at* on its ear, transforming the very looking into an experiential, interactive encounter--all within the public sphere. Plus it looks like an alien just layed a mega egg in the middle of the city, which you gotta love."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Psy-ops to calm traffic
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DATE: 08/02/2004 08:44:16 AM
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The UK's Transport Research Laboratory is exploring ways to create the illusion of danger on roads in an effort to slow speeders. According to lead researcher Janet Kennedy, simple things such as removing central white lines have already proven successful in psyching out drivers:
"Perceptual techniques which make the environment seem more complex or less safe have the potential for success. Natural traffic calming, such as narrow or winding roads, can be very effective as well as being more acceptable to drivers. Carefully-designed schemes, using the properties of natural traffic calming, have the potential to achieve a similar effect."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yourmaninindia.com
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DATE: 08/02/2004 09:34:47 AM
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Story about a new trend in India -- upscale expat children in America who need to "outsource" parental care for folks back home. Momma in Mumbai needs someone to go pick up her meds in the morning. Who you gonna call? yourmaninindia.com.
So, you're an Indian living in the United States, making megabucks in Redwood City, Calif. A big shot. But your aging parents are back home in India, alone. What should you, as a good Indian son or daughter, do? Call or send an e-mail to yourmaninindia.com, who will do everything from paying the family bills to just sitting down and being your mom or dad's new best friend.
Link to news article, and Link to yourmaninindia.com. (Thanks, prodigal tom)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Essays critiqued by computer
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DATE: 08/02/2004 10:13:55 AM
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The E-Rater is computer software that scores the the analytical writing component of the GMAT. Of course, the software rates the text based on structure and grammar, not logic. According to the Washington Post, the E-Rater may soon be used to grade the GRE, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, and eventually college admission tests:
More than 2 million essays have been scored by e-rater since it was adopted for the GMAT in 1999, and the technology is being considered for use in the Graduate Record Examination, for graduate school admissions, and the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which assesses the English proficiency of immigrants entering U.S. schools.
Testing experts predict that machines eventually will help grade the SAT and the ACT, which will add writing sections in their 2005 college admissions tests, because computers cost less money and work faster than humans. Before technology entered the picture, teams of people graded each GMAT essay. Now one person's judgment is compared with the machine's conclusion.
"It is sort of inevitable," said Jeff Rubenstein, vice president for technology at the test-preparation company Princeton Review, "but it is also sort of regrettable." He said he knows test takers "who are brilliant writers, but they write very subtly," and when a machine is grading them, "they score terribly."
Link (via A Great Notion)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hyote captured alive!
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DATE: 08/02/2004 10:27:02 AM
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The Hyote, a magical mystery animal that's been running around central Maryland, has apparently been captured. (Previous post here.) Amazingly though, this Hyote--a male red fox with sarcoptic mange, according to veterinarians--is most likely the offspring of the larger animal caught on video last month. Once the baby Hyote is well again, animal control will release it back into the wild. Link (Thanks, Soupie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Subservient President
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DATE: 08/02/2004 10:37:12 AM
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Following up on BoingBoing posts of yore regarding Burger King's "Subservient Chicken," here's a politically satirical remix. Let's hope those dirty commands won't work on the presidential version. Some visuals I just don't need. Link (Thanks, Scott)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Rudy Rucker in the Guestbar
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DATE: 08/02/2004 05:17:26 PM
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I'm really pleased to have Rudy Rucker as our guest blogger. He's my favorite author. I first met him at a Mondo 2000 party in 1985 in Berkeley, California. He read from his book, Wetware, and brought with him a little cardboard device he made that folded and unfolded, and as I recall, was supposed to be a shadow of a 4-dimensional cube.
Rudy also wrote a regular column for the print edition of bOING bOING. His story about going to Portugal with Robert Anton Wilson and Terrence McKenna was fantastic. (Do you have it on your hard disk, Rudy? It would be great to share with everyone.)
If you've never had the pleasure of reading Rudy's work, you're in for a treat. Both his fiction and non-fiction is awe-inspiring, accessible, and funny. Welcome, Rudy!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cezanne's portrait of Sean Connery and other contemporary/classic remixes
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DATE: 08/03/2004 02:58:38 AM
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Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: cortraits of contemporary film-stars as executed by classic painters of yore. Pictured here: Cezanne's Sean Connery. There's some really excellent work here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How cellphones change teenagers
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DATE: 08/03/2004 03:00:12 AM
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Sociologist Mimi Ito has just published a great paper on the way that mobile phones change teen social interaction on Vodafone's Receiver magazine:
After young people have converged in physical space, mobile communication does not necessarily end. In contrast to work meetings in which mobile communications are largely excluded, among gatherings of young people, the mobile phone is a social accessory. They might call a friend, inviting them to join them, or getting information about the conversation at hand. When an email message comes into a friend's mobile, it is quite common to ask who it was from and a conversation about that person to ensue. Young people generally reported that they had no reservations about making contact with others via mobile phones when they were with a group of friends, though they might make a brief apology if a one-on-one gathering was interrupted with a voice call.
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(via Joi Ito)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Webcomic creator turns down Universal Syndicate, offers works for free to any newspaper
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DATE: 08/03/2004 03:03:18 AM
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The creator of PVP Online, a webcomic, has decided to try to put the funnypapers sydicates out of business by publicly inviting any newspaper in the USA to syndicate him for free.
This last year, I was contacted by Universal Press Syndicates about PvP. They know the strip and were very interested in syndicating it as a feature. I would love to see PvP in newspapers and we started talks. I let them know that there were six years of archives available and that I could edit the strips to conform to family paper editorial standards. The only thing I could not do was give up my ownership and rights to my creation.
Under no circumstances would I relinquish my copyright, book deals, merchandise deals, rights to market my strips, etc. If they wanted PvP, we would agree to a newspaper distribution deal and that was it. After six weeks the syndicates returned with their answer: They wanted PvP...all of it. If they could not have the rights to the feature, they weren't interested. So we parted ways.
But I've already become attached to the idea of seeing PvP in the papers, and that's why I've decided to start a new program. In the coming months, I'll be putting into effect, a program in which papers can receive PVP for free. That's right, free. They don't have to pay me a cent for it. I will provide for the papers, a comic strip with a larger established audience then any new syndicated feature, a years worth of strips in advance, and I won't charge them a cent for it.
Link
(Thanks, Russell!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rotating earth-model watch
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DATE: 08/03/2004 03:07:10 AM
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John sez, "The cool watches here demonstrate a day's passing by using as the dial an image of the earth's northern hemisphere. The dial makes a full (COUNTERclockwise) rotation each day, just like the real one. (And yes, there is another model for those in the southern hemisphere.)"
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(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DOJ: P2P is bad for national security -- new heights of hyperbole and hysteria!
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DATE: 08/03/2004 03:11:24 AM
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The US Justice Department has decided that file-sharing isn't just a copyright problem, it's also an issue of National Security:
Our economy is so based on intellectual property ideas that, unless we can protect them, we're really looking at a situation where it's going to hurt our ability to survive as a country.
Secondly, so much of what we do now involves computers, whether it be with software or other types of communication lines. Often, intellectual property is a key component to the things we do to protect ourselves as a country.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aussie copyright criminalises iPod
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DATE: 08/03/2004 03:14:03 AM
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Australian copyright law -- recently "improved" through a copyright treaty that the US shoved down its throat -- is so unbelievably out-of-step with reality that it criminalises moving music from your CDs to your iPod.
Anyone who has copied songs from a CD onto an iPod or computer hard drive has fallen foul of Australian copyright laws, which critics argue are failing to keep pace with technological change. Copying music for personal use is generally OK in the US and Europe. But not in Australia.
Link
(Thanks, Russell!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Joe Trippi's "Revolution Will Not Be Televised"
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DATE: 08/03/2004 03:33:01 AM
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I got a review copy of Joe Trippi's new book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in the mail yesterday and I ended up staying up until 2AM reading it, and I'm paying for it with yawns and scratchy eyes today. But I'm glad I did it.
For starters, Trippi can write -- he's put together a campaign narrative that's a cross between the Fellowship of the Ring and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. This was an exciting adventure, half tech startup and half presidential bid, and after all, Trippi's professional career has been devoted to producing snappy written and verbal materials for candidates, and it shows. He's really, really good.
What's more, Trippi is a genuine, fire-breathing, rip-roaring Internet evangelist who makes me want to jump up and shout hallelujah. I mean, halfway through this book, I was starting to daydream about moving back to the US to help use the Internet to sway elections and change the world -- and that's ALREADY what I do for a living.
Finally, this is a flat-out inspirational story, a story about how the future arrived in politics, about how the transformation in politics has been downplayed by the entrenched interests who stand to lose from it, about how we've only just seen the beginning of a new form of civic engagement in the US and all over the world.
I grew up on narratives of civil rights organizers, Yippies, revolutionaries and great scientists, and I've always had a firm belief that we can change the world by applying our shoulders to it and pushing. Trippi's book affirms that belief for me, and gives me renewed hope for the future.
The Dean for America campaign arrived at just the right moment--a pivotal point in our political history, when forty years of a corrupt system had reduced politics to its basest elements--the race to raise money from one-quarter of one percent of the wealthiest Americans and corporate donors in exchange for dictating the policy of the country. Then, the side with the most money simply bought the most television ads to manipulate the most people--while instant polling, focus groups, and message testing ref ined the struggle to a few swing voters in a few key districts in a few key states, blurring any significant differences between the monolithic parties and destroying honest debate about issues like health care and the war in Iraq. Until every candidate sounded exactly the same, and a member of either party could proudly stand up and proclaim that his party had passed a Patients' Bill of Rights--an utterly meaningless bill that, incidentally, *didn't provide health care for one single American.*
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Find a Moz security hole, earn $500
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DATE: 08/03/2004 03:35:34 AM
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The Mozilla Foundation is administering a program that will pay a bounty of $500 for any "critical" security bugs discovered in Moz.
What constitutes critical will be judged by the Mozilla Foundation staff. Linux software developer Linspire and Mark entrepreneur Shuttleworth have issued seed funding to support the initiative, to be supplemented by donations from Mozilla supporters. The first $5,000 in community contributions will be matched dollar-for-dollar by Shuttleworth.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cockpit-complex watch
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DATE: 08/03/2004 07:24:39 AM
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This ass-kicking, cockpit-looking new Citizen watch is a) only available in Japan and b) out of my price range. Life sucks.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sniper rifle modded to be WiFi antenna
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DATE: 08/03/2004 07:27:59 AM
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A friend of mine from the Shmoo hacker group told me about this amazing DefCon stunt back in June and swore me to secrecy, and it's been one of the hardest secrets I've ever kept, because this is so goddamned cool.
The Sniper Yagi is an M16 with the firing apparatus removed and replaced with a directional high-powered antenna. Use the sniper stand and sight to line up your WiFi shot, plug in, and let the packets begin!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Streaming rip of Tiki Room vinyl
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DATE: 08/03/2004 07:35:08 AM
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BasicHip Oddio is featuring streaming audio of the old Enchanted Tiki Room vinyl. Bummer that it's only available as a stream -- I'm recording it with AudioHijack right now for my archive.
Streaming M3U Link
(Thanks, Matt!)
Update: Thanks to everyone who pointed out that opening the M3U file in a text-editor yeilds a track-listing that can be d/led!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 4D Rucker Cube
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DATE: 08/03/2004 09:19:36 AM
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Yesterday I mentioned a curious cardboard prop that Rudy Rucker once showed me. Van Thal emailed and said: I made one of those from his instructions in The Fourth Dimension back in the 80s, and a search this morning uncovers the instructions on this page (figure 9). It still beguiles me, and really did change the way I looked at corners forever. Not a claim that can be made by many diagrams." Link
Update
L. Perg sez: "I've built hypercube shadows! Zometools are incredibly fun in their own right -- I own an embarrassingly large amount of them. 4D cube shadows can be built with the smallest kits, however. I've linked to a very nice diagram and explanation of how to view and build hypercubes (unfortunately a .pdf) with Zometools. Of course, it is much more fun to build them.
"Zometools are also great for playing with bubbles. Zome shapes also make striking architechture that is much more flexible than domes (this what they were originally designed for). They are also great at teaching geometric and mathematic concepts. Some scientists use them also, although personally they won't do what I need -- I can make a single true tetrahedron, but can't link them correctly to make silicate minerals. Also, the twist ratio in the DNA model is not correct. Overall, though, they whup any building sets that I had as a child, which is really the important thing."
Nicholas sez: I know this is going to sound crazy, but please humor me by reading
through it.
Seeing the "4D Rucker Cube" post today was quite the synchronicity. Just
yesterday I had purchased a copy of the books Hyperspace, and Surfing
Through Hyperspace. I am actually a student of Michael Bertiaux (occult
author of the Voudon Gnostic Workbook), and had read a couple of nights
ago in the Monastery of the Seven Rays first years course about the
hypercube. I had the thought that the puzzle Cube 21 (also known as the
Square 1) might possibly be a shadow of a hypercube. I have been using
this puzzle in my esoteric research. There is a shape that it can be
changed into which I call the Z(OM-B) Configuration. The middle layer is
turned 45 degrees from the top and bottom sections, which can also be
done with a normal Rubik's cube. This creates a sort of 8 pointed star.
The 8 points suggest many things, one attribution might be space-time.
This eight pointed star appears in Bertiaux's Voudon Gnostic Workbook on
a paper about occult time travel. I had the thought after reading about
the hypercube in the Monastery papers that perhaps the cuboid at the
center of the cube could be an example of a cube within a cube, or a
shadow of a hypercube. Furthermore I thought that like someone in the
fourth dimension when in this configuration we are able to see inside an
opaque 3-d object.
Another thought I had after reading the chapter on the fourth dimension
in Hyperspace is that the Lovecraftian Outer One known as Yog Sothoth
might be from this realm. He is described as being many iridescent
blobs, and is said to be the key and the gate to other dimensions. In
Hyperspace a 4-D being in our 3-D world was described as a "a blob like
creature that constantly changes shape and size." In the Dunwich Horror
Lovecraft writes that "Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth."
Finally I had the thought that perhaps our experience of time as the
present is similar to the way that flatlanders experience the third
dimension, as shrinking and expanding cross sections. We seem to also
experience time as a cross section.
One last coincidence is the name of the company that sells the Hypercube
kits. The name Zome is very close to the name of my ZOM-B Configuration.
Here are some links to the references made above.
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps
and the Tenth Dimension
Surfing Through Hyperspace: Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy
Lessons
Here's a link to Michael Bertiaux's website.
I also wrote years ago a review of the Voudon Gnostic Workbook.
Finally about a year ago I wrote a brief paper about the Hypercube.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Ashcroft orders public libraries to destroy law books
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DATE: 08/03/2004 10:36:20 AM
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The Justice Department is ordering public libraries to destroy certain books it has deemed not "appropriate for external use."
The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.
The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).
Link
Update
"[T]he Department has determined that these materials are "not sufficiently sensitive to require removal from the depository library system."
Drew sez: "I was outraged when I read the story about Ashcroft ordering librarties to destroy books related to criminal forfeiture procedures, so I did some digging. ResourceShelf is carrying a brief that mentions that the Justice department is rescinding the order. Phew."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Future-Fake products
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DATE: 08/03/2004 12:33:53 PM
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"Spam" is an exhibition opening in Berlin this week of fictional tech products. Developed by arts collective Human Beans, the counterfeit creations include the forehead-mounted Neurocount that tracks your loss of brain cells, the Sleepwell sleep-managing wristwatch, and the Powerpizza theft-prevention laptop case. Link (Thanks, Dr. Paulos!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stupid judge breaks porn, Internet
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DATE: 08/03/2004 04:54:54 PM
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Annalee Newitz has (yet another) fascinating piece, this time about how a court decision interpreting the DMCA has potentially created (yet another) way for businesses to use copyright law as a tool for crushing the competition:
"[In] the process of clarifying [DMCA safe harbor] provisions, Judge Baird also made some dangerous assumptions about the safe harbors that have created a veritable roadmap for litigation-happy copyright owners who want to use the DMCA to harass people right off the Internet.
The ruling explains that, to qualify for safe harbors, a company must terminate its relationship with a user or customer if they receive 'repeat notifications of copyright infringement. 'Repeat notifications' means multiple takedown notices.
Why is this a problem? Think of it this way: If a large adult website wants to put its smaller competitors out of business, one way they could do it would be to send several takedown notices to the small company's age verification and bill processing service providers, claiming that a few images posted on a few webpages are infringing. To avoid the risk of liability, these service providers will sever ties with the small website's owner, who will now have no way of processing credit cards to do business on any of the websites."
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(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jack Valenti says stupid things -- really, really stupid things
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DATE: 08/03/2004 04:59:12 PM
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Tim Wu has rounded up some of the dumbest things that Jack Valenti said -- and he's found some real howlers, things that make Jack's infamous condemnation of the VCR ("the Boston Strangler of the American film industry") look like a walk in the park.
On the nascent cable industry, in 1974
"[Cable will become] a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair."
On the dangers on media concentration, 1984 Op-Ed
"Will a democratic society allow just three corporate entities to wield unprecedented dominion over television, the most decisive voice in the land? There are now only three national networks .... There will never be more than three national networks."
On the public domain, 1995
"A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues. How does the consumer benefit from the steady decline of a film's quality?"
Link
(Thanks, Patricio!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Be an electoral scrutineer and keep the vote honest
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DATE: 08/03/2004 05:01:03 PM
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Skippy sez, "I just received a note from MoveOn.org about their effort to help the Verified Voting Foundation monitor electronic voting this year:"
The non-partisan Verified Voting Foundation is working with other
voter protection groups to make sure every vote is counted,
focusing its efforts on the new electronic voting terminals we're
all concerned about.
Their program is called TechWatch, and it will help reduce the risk
that votes will be lost or miscounted by these machines and other
technology.
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(Thanks, Skippy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mom abandons son (but not daughter) at Disneyland -- which one did she love more?
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DATE: 08/03/2004 05:03:21 PM
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A woman abandoned her 8-year-old son (but not her 11-year-old daughter) at Disneyland, taking off in the middle of a family trip and heading into the sunset.
Police say she was questioned for several hours, but could not explain why she had left her son alone.
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(via Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF reply comments to RIAA's digital radio proposal at the FCC
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DATE: 08/03/2004 05:05:59 PM
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EFF has just filed its reply comments in the digital radio broadcast flag docket at the FCC. My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann was in rare form with these, savaging the RIAA's goofy ideas about breaking the record button on tomoprrow's digital radios.
The RIAA’s biased and blinkered account of "copyright policy" cannot obscure the fact that copyright law expressly approves of digitalaudio home recording devices (including devices like the DAB receiver/recorder) and their noncommercial use by consumers.8 There isno copyright policy "gap" here for the Commission to fill, even if the Commission had the jurisdiction to do so. Where Congress has legislatedwith specificity, it is not for the Commission to countermand its legislative scheme.
120k PDF
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fulltext of We the Media now online
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DATE: 08/03/2004 05:26:07 PM
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The fulltext of Dan Gillmor's excellent new book, We the Media, about the way that technology is changing the media, is now online as a series of Creative Commons licensed PDFs.
Link
(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EST for 60% off
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DATE: 08/03/2004 05:29:19 PM
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I've never seen Amazon do this before -- they've got my second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe on sale at a 60 percent discount -- that's $9.58 for the new hardcover! Hell, that's less that I get 'em for.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stormtroopers on July 4 parade
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DATE: 08/03/2004 06:00:30 PM
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Inkeeper2097 sez, "My family and I went to a parade on the 4th of July. One of the participants
was the Ohio Garrison of Storm Troopers.
As they were coming down the street I told my 5 yr old to go stand
in the road so I could take his picture with them.
As you can see from the photo, a couple of Storm Troopers got out of
formation to pose for the picture.
My 2 year old was scared to death and ran to Mom. I kept telling my 5
year old not to be scared and to stand still.
The look on my boys face, priceless.
Fun was had by all."
129K JPEG Link
(Thanks, innkeeper2097!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Act TODAY to save California's old-growth forests
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DATE: 08/04/2004 01:53:41 AM
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When I lived in San Francisco, I made no secret of the fact that the city and its environs really bummed me out, There were the ocassional highlights, like Fry's Electronics and the Musee Mechanique, but in the main, San Francisco left me cold.
There's one major exception to this, though: the ancient redwoods across the Golden Gate Bridge, in Muir woods and elsewhere. These millennia-old giants are Northern California's most beautiful and humbling feature. Standing alongside of one was like being in the presence of something holy. I think that if I'd spent more time with them, I might have stayed in California.
Today, California's old-growth forests are being indiscriminately logged. Conservation of these irreplaceable trees is a nonpartisan issue: it's an issue of humanity. If you love life, if you love your children, if you love your world, then saving these trees is something you should support.
The California Heritage Tree Preservation Act (SB 754) is being voted on today (August 4th) by California's Assembly Appropriations Committee. Before you go to work this morning, send your California Assembly Member an email and a fax in support fo SB 754:
I urge your support of SB 754, the Heritage Tree Preservation Act. This bill has been carefully written to protect some of California's largest and oldest trees while minimizing impacts to landowners, jobs and state revenues. The bill minimizes and offsets costs and it preserves revenues to the state from tourism, recreation and fisheries.
Fewer than one percent of California's old-growth trees remain standing on non-federal forestland. SB 754 will protect these trees and the ecological and economic benefits they bring to our state. Millions of tourists flock to California's forests each year to witness these towering giants with their own eyes. The trees protected by this bill are among the oldest, tallest, and largest living things on earth.
Please approve SB 754 and help us preserve California's ancient trees for future generations.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brain Hacks: Overclock your amygdala
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DATE: 08/04/2004 03:58:44 AM
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Matt Webb -- whose party trick is uttering gnomic, interesting, mind-bending sentences at the drop of a hat -- has gone public with his new project. He and a brain-scientist pal are co-writing BRAIN HACKS for O'Reilly: a hundred pithy tips for overlocking your amygdala.
To get where it is, the brain has made some fascinating design decisions. The layering of systems has produced a complex environment, with automatic and controlled highly mixed. This development over biological time has introduced constraints. As has the architecture--it takes time for slow signals to make their way from one area to another. And there are computational difficulties too: How much of its capabilities can the brain afford to invoke when a sub-second response is required? The tricks used leave traces. There are holes in our visual field that we continually cover up. There are certain sensory inputs that grab our attention faster and more thoroughly than we'd expect.
You don't need to know all of neuroscience, cognitive psychology and so on to know how your brain works. I'm not a neuroscientist. I write, my undergraduate degree is in physics, I hack in my spare time, and I work in new media. But neuroscience has got to such a level now - with the imaging techniques in the last three or four years - that we can make focused probes into particular functions, and illustrate the traces that these design decisions have left (see where+how they are, and draw that up the stack towards conscious experience) and we can look at them one by one.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Dvorak's best of the worst laptops
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DATE: 08/04/2004 07:17:17 AM
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In his PC Magazine column this week, former BB guestblogger John Dvorak provides a bottom ten list of laptops lost to history:
1. The Gavilan (1983). Actually this was an amazing attempt at leapfrogging everyone. Unfortunately, the developers leapfrogged over a cliff. This (despite what Apple mavens believe) was actually the machine that first employed the mousepad, then called a touchpad. The company soaked up a then-whopping $30 million in venture capital and essentially failed right out of the gate. Nobody wanted the machine, and the rationale for the touchpad was always questionable. The pad was poorly located, above the keys. Originally known as the Cosmos Computer, it ran the GOS operating system as well as MS-DOS. Seen by many as the first true laptop, the machine is highly collectible. It's a machine that could also easily appear on the ten-best list.
Link (via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Stoned in South Africa?
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DATE: 08/04/2004 07:27:22 AM
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A woman in the South African province of Limpop was booted from her village because a hail of stones seems to follow her wherever she goes. Apparently, the problem is caused by an evil spell cast on her by a trader when she didn't pay him back for some clothes she purchased on credit:
"We were there for nearly the whole night and saw stones falling from the sky like rain," said Vhembe police spokesperson Ailwei Mushavhanamadi. "We went around the area to make sure someone wasn't throwing stones on the roof on purpose, but we didn't find anyone."
Police then advised the family to consult with spirit mediums about the phenomenon.
"Maybe if the family contacts someone who deals with evil spirits, like a pastor, the problem will stop," he said.
Maybe. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Body Electric
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DATE: 08/04/2004 07:36:25 AM
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Skinplex is a new commercial technology that uses the human body as a conductor of data. According to an article in EE Times, the developers, German start-up Ident Technoogy AG, hope to compete with RFID, Bluetooth, and Near Field Communications (NFC) for some applications:
Skinplex technology could be used between an identifier worn on the user's body and a receiver integrated into a car, for example. A distinct code is transmitted through touch, the receiver recognizes its dedicated, authorized sender, and the car door is opened, for example.
This reminds me of the Personal Area Network research at MIT's Media Lab in the mid-1990s. Neil Gershenfeld and Thomas Zimmerman demonstrated a system where two people could trade electronic business cards by shaking hands.
Link (via Carlo Longino at TheFeature)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: When pet piranha attack
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DATE: 08/04/2004 07:42:08 AM
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Some idiot abandoned two pet piranha in a Hong Kong fountain and one took a bite out of a boy's finger while he was playing in the water.
The piranha -- which has its origins in warm South American rivers and can devour whole cows when hunting in packs -- is a popular fish in Hong Kong home aquariums and can be bought in Mongkok pet shops for less than HK$100 a pair (7 pounds).
Maybe piranha could help deal with the problem of the renegade alligators in New York City's sewers. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 'Escape-A-Date' ringtones help you lie like an (unwired) dog
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DATE: 08/04/2004 10:04:26 AM
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Cingular Wireless recently introduced an odd new tool for subscribers. "Escape-a-Date" is touted as "the perfect service to use when you are afraid that your blind date may not be just right for you." Users schedule a "rescue" phone call at a pre-set time which tells them exactly how to lie their way into speedy escape. Eight randomly-generated humorous scripts are offered, here's a snip from one:
Hey, this is your escape-a-date call. If you're looking for an excuse, I got it. Just repeat after me, and you'll be on your way!
"Not again! Why does that always happen to you? ... Alright, I'll be right there." Now tell 'em that your roommate got locked out, and you have to go let them in. Good luck!"
It's actually not the first, um, wireless falsification enabler. Virgin Mobile USA also offers subscribers the option to set up a "Rescue Ring" to escape any situation -- romantic or otherwise -- by simply scheduling a time when they want to receive an automated system call. "Save yourself from bad dates, boring meetings, or any other situation that needs interrupting," says the Virgin website. Emily's Ringtonia blog has more on the mobile fakeout meme. Doug Rushkoff has more on the Cingular service over at The Feature. And don't forget the web classic, Rejection Line. But really, people -- WTF ever happened to honesty? (via unwired list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Defcon Wi-Fi shootout results
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DATE: 08/04/2004 10:53:06 AM
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Wireless tech guru and pal 'o' BoingBoing Frank Keeney sends word of results from the annual WiFi shootout (an event at Defcon that seeks to determine just how far an 802.11 WLAN range can extend). And here are the winners, according to event organizer Dave:
3 teenagers from Ohio used Orinoco Gold 30 milliwatt USB adapters mounted on the feedpoints of two 10 foot dishes, and shot 55.1 miles.
Yes, that's fifty-five point one miles! This is a new world's record for an unamplified shot! Complete details will be in a press release, which should come out in the next few days.
Link to Wi-Fi Shootout home page. Update: My Wired News colleague Kim Zetter has more here: Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Your Neighbor Totoro
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:08:52 AM
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Scott sez: "A replica of the Kusakabe residence, the house featured in Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 animated masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro, will be built for EXPO 2005 being held in Aichi, Japan, from 25 March - 25 September, 2005. It will be constructed within the woods of the Expo site using techniques of the early Showa era and will undergo artificial aging. The furnishings will also be made to reflect the movie as faithfully as possible within the woods of the Expo site. Visitors will be able to freely explore the house, looking inside closets and chests and touching things, just like the heroines Satsuki and Mei did in the film when they first arrived at the house. Wow. All we need now is a Cat-bus to get us there." Link
Update Jason sez: Re: Totoro House, Scott writes "All we need now is a Cat-bus to get us there," which reminded me of the Studio Ghibli Museum in greater Tokyo that I had the pleasure of visiting 2 years ago.
Among the features is a life-size catbus that children can play in.
When I was there, the Cat Bus was in a giant ball pit! Visitors were prohibited from taking pictures of it, so maybe this image is dated.
The museum itself is a fantastic building with spiral staircases and child size doorways.
And the best part was the life size metal statue of a Laputa robot on the roof.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson dies
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:09:54 AM
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Legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson died Monday at the age of 95 in the South of France.
Some web resources: his Foundation, Photology, Tete a Tete. Among his great works were portraits of Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, Rouault, Claudel (at the end of the Second World War).
(Merci, Jean-Luc, who adds "His foundation website is so slow at the moment because just about everyone online in France is hitting it right now.")
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mobile social software privacy
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:25:07 AM
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I wrote a piece for TheFeature.com about UC Berkeley Professor John Canny's work on designing privacy systems for mobile social software (MoSoSo) networks.
Another method takes advantage of "the natural incentives that occur in peer communities, as manifest in things like Napster and Gnutella," says Canny. "It does seem within a community you have a few altruistic people who will, for whatever reason, help the community by providing the service, and from a privacy perspective you can do a lot if you can identify some users who are willing to leave a machine online that provides some privacy protection. The rest of the people in the community can use that machine. They don't have to trust the owner of the machine because the algorithm is set up so that the owner of that machine can't get access to that machine anyway, but if they provide this service, they can protect their peers' information from the service provider."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Book: All the President's Spin
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:31:10 AM
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My former Silicon Alley Reporter colleague Ben Fritz -- who's also co-founder of political-spin-debunker website
Spinsanity-- has a new book out. It's a doozy.
Our first book, All the President's Spin: George W. Bush, the
Media, and the Truth, goes on sale today... it offers a nonpartisan analysis of the PR-driven deception that has come to define George W. Bush's presidency, chronicling his spin on issues ranging from tax cuts to the war in Iraq. We also put Bush's presidency in perspective by tracing the
history of public relations in modern presidential politics;
examining how this process has culminated in a presidential
campaign in which Bush and John Kerry are both engaging in
deceptive PR tactics; and explaining why the media has failed to
hold Bush and other politicians accountable for dishonest spin.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Brion Gysin Dreamachine on display in SF
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:42:15 AM
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Next week, on Thursday August 12, West Portal Books (111 West Portal Ave., San
Francisco) launches a month-long Brion Gysin Dreamachine window display, featuring the psychoactive gadget in round-the-clock operation.
Though mild entheogenic effects may be felt through the window or inside the store during business hours, optimum viewing is experienced after dark with eyes closed. This will be the Bay Area's first ever Dreamachine exhibit, other than the machine's brief appearance during a William S. Burroughs memorial service held at the SF Art Institute in 1999. Currently on display at West Portal Books, through August 11, is a Wishing Machine. The peculiar devices find literary companionship through Burroughs' work.
Link (via Mark Pesce's YESCHATON list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Group wants to induce downloads
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DATE: 08/04/2004 12:08:34 PM
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In today's Wired News, a story I filed about P2P Congress -- a coalition of geeks, academics, free-speech advocates, and others who are distributing videos of Senate hearings on the Induce Act to prove two points: that the law would be very damaging to the tech industry, and that peer-to-peer networks can serve the public. Link (Thanks for the screenshot, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Designing like they give a damn
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DATE: 08/04/2004 12:16:34 PM
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A Web-based architectural competition fuses online networking and social activism to tackle South Africa's AIDS crisis -- with a little help from mobile technology. I spoke with Architecture for Humanity founder Cameron Sinclair for Wired News. At left, a photo from Somkhele, South Africa, where the group will build a combination soccer sports site, AIDS prevention center, and community economic hub. Run by medical professionals from the Africa Center for Health and Population Studies, the facility will serve as a gathering place for youth between the ages of 9 and 14, and will serve as the home for the first-ever girls' football league in the area. Link to Wired News story.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: LeapPads heading to Afghanistan
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DATE: 08/04/2004 12:35:32 PM
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The Department of Health and Human Services is shipping 20,000 LeapPad Learning Systems to women in Afghanistan. While LeapPad is marketed here as en edutainment system for children, this version was modified for adults who speak Dari and Pashto but aren't necessarily able to read. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the systems will be used to inform the women about healthcare issues like diet, immunization, pregnancy, and disease prevention in, er, unique ways:
For example, said LeapFrog Chief Executive Officer Tom Kalinske, reproduction is a culturally and religiously sensitive topic in the country. The solution: a page of text and a page of pictures with the analogy of growing carrots. Growing them too close together produces skinny and not-well- formed carrots that do not look good to eat, but if you space the carrots, they're plump and appetizing -- the lesson being it's better to space children rather than having them in rapid succession.
Link (Thanks, Mr. Hungry!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Taking Surround Sound to Next Level
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DATE: 08/04/2004 12:36:40 PM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I report on IOSONO, a new audio editing and delivery system that uses hundreds of speakers and complex software to create what developers tout as "3D sound." This technology is the creation of Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, a pioneer of the MP3 codec, and was developed by a team at Germany's Frauenhofer Institute -- where MP3 was born.
Link to online archive for today's NPR "Day to Day" show. (see also: MP3 Pioneer Debuts Spatial Sound System, for Wired News)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Roller coaster model kit
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DATE: 08/04/2004 01:17:46 PM
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Build your own scale model roller coaster with this $500 kit from Coaster Dynamics. The video shows the coaster in action as mesmerized geeks move their heads around like cats watching a fly stuck between a window and a screen. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: PopTech 2004
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DATE: 08/04/2004 01:40:37 PM
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Andrew Zolli, of PopTech, which will be held in Camden, Maine this year, wrote to tell me a little about the conference. He sez: "The event, October
21-24, 2004 is entitled "The Next Renaissance" and looks at the many
ways in which we are experiencing, and need, a new renaissance in human
thought, capabilities and understanding. The speakers range from Malcolm
"Tipping Point" Gladwell to Janine Benyus, who is studying biomimetic
technologies, to Thomas Barnett, the gentleman in charge of force
transformation for the US Department of Defense. It's going to be an
amazing set of conversations." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Arlo Guthrie on "This Land" parody
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DATE: 08/04/2004 02:56:01 PM
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Arlo Guthrie did an NPR appearance this week to talk about his father, Woody Guthrie, and his attitude to copyright. Woody's song "This Land is Your Land" was brilliantly parodied by JibJab in an election-season Flash movie, and the publishing company that controls Woody's rights has brought legal action against JibJab -- and EFF has responded by filing its own legal action against the rightsholders. Arlo implies that Woody would have wanted it that way:
Well, I really can't speak for him. I can just tell you that when I saw it a few weeks ago I thought it was one of the funniest commentaries if not one of the most directly inspired... I called my sister, I called my friends, I sent everybody a link to the site so that they could go see it. And we've all been laughing about it since then. I think my dad would have absolutely loved the humor in it.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Styrofoam houses coming to Afghanistan
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DATE: 08/04/2004 02:59:03 PM
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Steve sez, "Just been reading Shadow Of The Mothaship from Cory's book A Place So Foreign, and was struck by the conceptual similarity between his foam houses of the future and the polystyrene houses being planned for Afghanistan."
"That is the challenge," he said, "people have to accept it, that it's absolutely safe to live in a Styrofoam house, safer than in an adobe house.
"Let them feel it. Let them dance on it. Let them see that it is strong."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daleks will appear in new Dr Who
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DATE: 08/04/2004 03:00:46 PM
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The BBC's Dr Who revival has been saved: the Beeb has reached an agreement with the estate of Terry Nation, the creator of the Daleks, who will be making an appearance in the new Who episodes after all.
Link
(Thanks, Deric!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Foreign Disney attraction audio rarities
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:36:46 PM
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Kirby point to "a Webjay playlist of various audio and video of random (seems to be mostly non-U.S.) Disney attractions. The Webjay player does not seem to want to play everything, but all but one link seems to work if you click them directly. There are a couple of seemingly rare things - at least I haven't seen them before - including a BBC documentary on the building of Disneyland Paris' Space Mountain."
Yet another family's trip to Disneyland. WMV slideshow set to jazz - includes Club 33 pics (not audio)
Edit Up Down Cut Copy Paste Same Family, Same Disneyland trip. Some of the same pics, different music in this WMV slideshow (not audio)
Edit Up Down Cut Copy Paste Lilo And Stitch’s Catch The Wave Party at Walt Disney Studios Paris
Edit Up Down Cut Copy Paste Shoot for the Moon - The Making of Disneyland Paris' Space Mountain (BBC TV show video)
Edit Up Down Cut Copy Paste Tokyo Disneyland - Pooh's Hunny Hunt (video)
Link
(Thanks, Kirby!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni's out goofing off on her birthday
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:40:37 PM
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In precisely 21 minutes, I enter birthday flakeout mode and abandon this weblog for a few days. When all the chocolate sprinkles and frosting smudges have been cleaned from this keyboard, I'll be back.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Quake III open sourced "soon"
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DATE: 08/04/2004 11:53:30 PM
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John Carmack has quietly announced that he will release the Quake III engine as open source "soon."
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wheels of woodgrain
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DATE: 08/05/2004 08:03:26 AM
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The Nordic Concept Artist turntable is a work of audiophile art, both in form and apparently function. One vibration-damped cabinet contains the platter and tone-arm, the other holds the motor and phono preamp. It's just $15,500... not including the equally-fetishistic Airtangent 2002 air bearing tonearm at $11,500. Link (via Hy Phi)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mailer and Mailer
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DATE: 08/05/2004 08:18:54 AM
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New York Metro posted a long conversation between Norman Mailer and his activist son John Buffalo Mailer about anti-Bush protesting at the Republican National Convention and "the uses and abuses of Bush hatred."
JBM I don’t know that we can make it through another four years of Bush.
NM Oh, we’ll make it through, although I’m not saying what we’ll be like at the end. By then, Karl Rove may have his twenty years. Just think of the kind of brainwashing we’ve had for the last four. On TV, Bush rinses hundreds of thousands of American brains with every sentence. He speaks only in clichés. You know, I happened to run into Ralph Nader recently in Chicago, and I, like a great many others, was looking to dissuade him from his present course. He’s a very nice man, maybe the nicest man I’ve met in politics---there’s something very decent about Nader, truly convincing in terms of his own probity. So I didn’t feel, "Oh, he’s doing it for ugly motives." Didn’t have that feeling at all in the course of our conversation. Still, I was trying, as I say, to dissuade him, while recognizing that the odds were poor that I’d be successful. At one point, he said, "You know, they’re both for the corporation, Kerry and Bush." And it’s true; both candidates are for the corporation, and I do agree with Nader that ultimately the corporation is the major evil. But in my mind, Bush is the immediate obstacle. He is a collection of disasters for America. What he does to the English language is a species of catastrophe all by itself. Bush learned a long time ago that certain key words, "evil, patriotism, stand-firm, flag, our-fight-against-terrorism," will get half the people in America stirred up. That’s all he works with. Kerry will be better in many ways, no question. All the same, he will go along too much with the corporations who, in my not always modest opinion, are running America. At present, I don’t see how any mainstream politician can do otherwise. Finally, they’re working against forces greater than themselves.
Link (via A Great Notion)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: FCC's cell phone spam ruling is bogus
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DATE: 08/05/2004 09:31:31 AM
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Mike Masnick of TheFeature explains why this week's FCC ruling to "ban mobile spam" is a joke.
Most carriers provide some way of translating your phone number into an email address (often something along the lines of yourphonenumber@mail.yourcarrier.com), and this ruling only applies to those accounts... More to the point, however, the FCC made it very clear that this ruling means absolutely nothing when it comes to SMS spam.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Wooden postage stamp from Switzerland
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DATE: 08/05/2004 09:40:29 AM
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David sez: "Following the wooden turntable comes the wooden postage stamp! 'On 7 September 2004, Swiss Post will issue its first-ever wooden stamp. Worth five Swiss francs, the "Swiss wood - naturally" stamp is dedicated to Swiss wood... is made of high-quality fir and is 0.7 mm thick.'"
"Yahoo! News reports, 'Designed by Thomas Rathgeb, a graphic artist who works for Swiss Post, the stamps are made from 120-year-old pines felled in northern Switzerland. 'Rathgeb's design focuses on the sustainability and uniqueness of this natural, living material — the structure of the wood, integrated into the contemporary design, produces a different picture on each stamp. This makes each stamp unique, just as each tree is unique,' said Swiss Post."
"The Swiss Post site offers a video clip (WMV) of the production process."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Living in 1954 for 10 days
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DATE: 08/05/2004 10:06:34 AM
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My former editor at Yahoo! Internet Life, Larry Smith, wrote a great article for Popular Science about his 10 day experience living without technologies under 50 years old. (It reminds me a little of my only published fiction story, Retro-A-Go-Go, which I wrote for Wired in 2000.) Link (Thanks, Frank!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Creepy Radiohead Flash
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DATE: 08/05/2004 03:30:57 PM
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BB patron pal Gareth Branwyn points us to a "nice animated video for an equally nifty acoustic version of Radiohead's anthem of geekly alienation: Creep. Decent psycho-geographic mapping of the late '90s tech boom/bust too." Gareth is right--the piece is quite beautiful and dark.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Colorcell: Darwinian color game
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DATE: 08/05/2004 08:06:17 PM
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In this game you make a square composed of four smaller squares. You get to pick the colors of the smaller squares. You then add your square to the current population of 100 other squares. Other people vote on the squares they like the best. If a square doesn't get enough votes, it eventually ends up in the graveyard. Some squares have stayed alive for close to a year. Link (Thanks, Rose!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Chart: Bush Ratings vs. Terror Alerts
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DATE: 08/05/2004 08:11:28 PM
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A BB reader sez: "The basic gist of this is that JuliusBlog took the time to create a well-documented timeline of when terror alerts occur in relation to when bad news for the Bush administration occurs.
There are few things that are quite evident from the chart:
- Whenever his ratings dip, there's a new terror alert.
- Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings.
- As we approach the 2004 elections, the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic. At the same time, Bush ratings are lower than ever.
Link (via Crookedtimber )
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney's PC
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:10:02 AM
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Disney has launched a $900 kids' PC, called the Disney Dream Desk. Looks like complete poo. While the mouse-ears on the wildly overpriced $300 CRT monitor are vaguely cute, the system lacks any of the industrial-design whimsy of the old Disney VCR and TV, which geniuinely appeared to belong in a Disney theme park.
What's more, Disney's Unique Sales Propositions for their PC is that it comes with censorware that will keep your children from looking at porn (and about one-third of the sites that deal well with concepts covered in the common curriculum, oops), and some DRMed-up make-your-own-Disney-video software. Snore.
Oh and it comes with a mouse. Hardy har har.
Link
(Thanks, Scotto!)
Update: Benoit sez, "The monitor is actually a flat panel LCD. It looks like a CRT in that picture you have but that's actually the computer tower placed behind the LCD."
Update 2: Chris sez, "There is no DRM used in the video software. The videos are saved as standard AVIs. In fact, this is the first time we have ever allowed guests to combine their personal videos with our characters and it was a big step for us to do so. We don't know of any other major entertainment company that has done this either. I would think you would applaude us for taking a leadership position here."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Suspicious things I've done on an airplane
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:14:19 AM
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An Indian-American blogger recounts the "suspicious" things he's done on an airplane:
For reference, I am about 5'8", dark black hair and untrimmed beard length about three to four inches. I weigh about 160lbs and have brown skin. I am of Indian descent but am frequently mistaken for Arab. I often wear religious headdress when traveling (a white cotton cap with gold trim).
Here's some of the things I have done on an airplane, and why:
- Speaking a foreign language in hushed tones with other similar males
My language is a variant of Gujarati, with many Arabic vocabulary words. I consider it rude to talk loudly on a plane, since people are sleeping, and prefer to talkin my language with my friends or family if we are discussing personal things because in my experience, people eavesdrop in close quarters.
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(via Electrolite)
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TITLE: Rhetorical dishonesties and their countermeasures
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:16:29 AM
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Here's a list of "Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them."
(8) The argument that we should not make efforts against X which is admittedly evil because there is a worse evil Y against which our efforts should be directed (pp 50-52)
Dealt with by pointing out that this is a reason for making efforts to abolish Y, but no reason for not also making efforts to get rid of X.
(9) The recommendation of a position because it is a mean between two extremes (pp 52-54)
Dealt with by denying the usefulness of the principle as a method of discovering the truth. In practice, this can most easily be done by showing that our own view also can be represented as a mean between two extremes.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIAA: Got a camerphone? Leave the concert
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:17:51 AM
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The RIAA sponsored a Black Eyed Peas conference at the DNC at which no cameras were allowed. The door security turned away anyone with a cameraphone.
The result: Chaos in the line, as people were sent home after failing cell phone inspection. The choice was to leave your phone / camera behind or leave the concert. People were mad. ("Where is the love?" they asked). So I asked the bouncer, "what's this about?"
And he said "It's not our deal. Its those guys [the sponsors]."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chipmunk Song, slowed down
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:20:49 AM
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The Said the Gramphone music blog features a slowed-down version of the Chipmunks' Christmas Song:
Yes, hear Simon, Theodore and Alvin at their true speed, sounding respectively like an accountant, a hot-dog vendor, and a lunatic. Put it on repeat and you'll drift gradually into madness - it's like an acid flashback to fetal languor, the surreal sounds that filtered through the uterine wall.
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(via JWZ)
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TITLE: FCC: why should the courts interpret copyright when we can regulate it?
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:22:28 AM
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Ernest Miller has posted a scathing, funny and right-on editorial about the FCC's ruling on technologies allowed under the Broadcast Flag:
Only the FCC has the wisdom to see what is necessary for copyright law to function properly. Courts should certainly not be permitted to interpret copyright law, they might decide that a device without DRM had substantial non-infringing uses and thus be free of regulation. The FCC sees through this ridiculous test and knows copyright needs stronger protection than that. Do the courts not see the devastation the VCR has wrought on Hollywood?
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TITLE: Wrist-sheath for phones
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:24:52 AM
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The Phone Safe is a work-through phone-sheath that you wear on your forearm. Worn with a jacket, it can also act as a concealment device.
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(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Textured teeth wipes
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:31:04 AM
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Oral B has launched "Brush-Ups" -- "textured teeth wipes" that you put over your finger and give yourself a quick toothbrushing with.
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(via Red Ferret Journal)
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TITLE: World map created from imperfect memory and inattention to geography
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:34:39 AM
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Inspired by the question, "How many hours does it take to go to Japan by car?", the Fool's World Map plots out all the geographic misapprehensions uncovered during an informal survey.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Keep the public involved in Canadian copyright legislation!
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:38:53 AM
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With the Canadian Supreme Court okaying file-sharing and the Canadian Parliament vowing to "fix" this, it's time to take action. If you're a Canadian resident, there's a petition to Parliament you can sign to encourage lawmakers to do the right thing.
THEREFORE, your petitioners call upon Parliament to ensure generally that users are recognised as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about proposed changes to the Copyright Act and to ensure in particular that any changes at least preserve all existing users' rights, including the right to use copyrighted materials under Fair Dealing and the right to make private copies of audio recordings. We further call upon Parliament not to extend the term of copyright; and to recognise the right of citizens to personally control their own communication devices.
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(Thanks, Chris!)
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TITLE: Paranoia game redesigned using open-source methodology
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:45:54 AM
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Paranoia, the classic role-playing game in which players battle a mad, totalitarian computer for their freedom ("a light-hearted game of terror, death, bureaucracy, mad scientists, mutants, dangerous weapons, insane robots, and technological satire that encourages players to lie, cheat, and backstab each other at every turn") has just re-launched with a new version that was collaboratively developed with players via a Wiki, borrowing "the tools and methods of open-source software development for a paper game."
To a large degree, the game was developed online, in public. Fans of the game contributed enthusiastically via blog, wiki, and online forum. They wrote text, debated rules, proofread, ran statistical analyses, and even wrote a computer simulator to test the game's paper-and-pencil rules.
"Online collaboration made this edition of Paranoia the best yet," said Allen Varney (www.allenvarney.com), the game's designer. "We borrowed the tools and methods of open-source software development for a paper game, and it worked brilliantly. I plan to create future games the same way, and other designers should consider it too."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mystery sea monster
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DATE: 08/06/2004 08:27:29 AM
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Wired News reports on a deep-sea probe mission to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where several possible new species were discovered, including this mystery animal scurrying around the ocean floor at 6,500 feet. The scientists were unable to capture the foot-long create for closer study.
"Although the unknown animal is "kind of a sensation," (researcher Olav Rune) Godoe said in an interview, finding new and strange creatures wasn't surprising given that researchers collected more than 80,000 specimens. Moreover, little is known about the deep ocean. "It's much easier to observe the surface of the moon or Mars," said Godoe."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian Legion: "We own all uses of the word 'poppy'"
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DATE: 08/06/2004 09:26:19 AM
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My friend Pia makes custom hats in British Columbia. One of her hats is called the "Poppy" for its red, petalled character.
The Canadian Legion sells plasic poppies every year to raise money for charitable causes. This week, Peter Underhill of the Canadian Legion left this on Pia's public guestbook:
I tried your contact email but the address wouldn't copy. The "Poppy" is a trademark registered to the Royal Canadian Legion. Please remove reference to Poppy on the Poppy Hat. Thank you for your consideration. P. Underhill
If the Legion thinks that shaking down craftspeople on bogus trademark claims is the way to create goodwill for its causes, it's got another think coming.
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(Thanks, Richard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Replace every image on a WiFi network with goatse.cx
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DATE: 08/06/2004 09:37:40 AM
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airpwn is a utility demoed at Defcon 12. It replaces every image loaded by a user of a WiFi network with the infamous, mentally scarifying "goatse.cx" JPEG.
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(Thanks, Gnat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Python hackers wuss out on pie-ing
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DATE: 08/06/2004 09:39:06 AM
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NTK reports on a bet penalty gone sour at this year's O'Reilly Open Source con:
Last year, DAN SUGALSKI, lead developer of the forthcoming
Perl6 virtual machine, Parrot, bet the Python developers
that run Python faster on the fledgling VM - and the creator
of Python could throw a pie at him at the next OSCON if he
didn't. He didn't; the pie-ing was duly arranged. As
everyone knows, while Perlites are chaotic/good trickster
archetypes who love such events, Pythonistas are peaceful,
have-their-glasses-on-a-little-string types, like hobbits or
the Dutch. In the end, Guido van Rossum refused to throw the
pie, and instead offered to share it as food with the Perl
developers. Nothing, of course, could have been more
guaranteed to throw Perlsters into violent rage.
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(via NTK)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cathy Guthrie's opinion of the JibJab parody of her grandfather's song
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DATE: 08/06/2004 10:43:51 AM
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Cathy Guthrie, one half of the band Folk Uke, and also the daughter of Arlo Guthrie and grandaughter of Woody Guthrie emailed Gary and I at Ukulelia about JibJab's parody of "This Land is Your Land." (See Cory's entry about the publishing company that controls the right to the song and how it is taking legal action against JibJab.) Cathy gave me permission to run her comments on Boing Boing:
I can speak for myself and my immediate family including my Dad, that we all love it! We've all seen it and passed it along to our friends and family. It's incredibly clever, funny and a nice break from the heavy tones of politics going on right now. My personal opinion is that if I were the one who had written that song, I would be honored to have it used that way. If they start selling that song and making money, then I might be concerned about getting my royalties, but as far as I know, they haven't made any money from showing it on their site for free. That parody was made for you and me.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogger's hiring!
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DATE: 08/06/2004 11:05:13 AM
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This is a pretty sweet gig: work as a UI engineer for Blogger at Google.
Do you want to help shape one of the fastest-growing and most innovative areas of the web? As a user-interface engineer, on the Blogger team, you will help define how people create, find, and share personal content online. Be a part of the Google team that pioneered the blogging phenomenon.
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(via Salad With Steve)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eat a live worm burrito, win your Green Card
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DATE: 08/06/2004 03:55:39 PM
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The new Spanish-language reality show "Gana la Verde" (Win the Green) promises help to would-be immigrants from Mexico and Central America -- in exchange for on-camera humiliation and "Fear Factor"-style grossout stunts. Candidates are recruited on the Internet and via TV ads. Prove your unstoppable janitorial technique, nosh on things so revolting even your dog would decline, and a team of attorneys will be assigned to "expedite" your papers to the US. No guarantee you'll really make it to el norte, though. God, this is so wrong. Not a "ha ha, funny" wrong. Just wrong. What's next, Who Wants to be a Guantanamo Detainee?
There is already a waiting list, despite the fact that each week 30 contestants end up on the air. Producers adhere to a strict format: Six contestants compete in the first round, which involves a difficult and daredevilish physical task. Four semifinalists break bread together over gourmet treats, such as live crabs, scorpions and worms. The remaining two go head-to-head performing a job, such as towing a car or washing the outside of a 10-story building. The winner is picked up by a limo at the end of the show, presumably to be taken to meet with an immigration lawyer.
"If it's true what they say, that they are helping people get their papers in order, I think that's great," said 25-year-old Luis Sanchez of Los Angeles, who watches the show every night. "I don't think the show can hurt anyone. There are thousands of illegal immigrants, and everybody knows it. I don't think the immigration service is going to go after anyone because they are on the show. There are things we do out of necessity, not because we want to. Eating worms for your papers is one of those things."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Insane sales pitch for the "Rockwell Electric retro-incabulator"
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DATE: 08/06/2004 04:55:14 PM
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Matt Maier sez: I thought the Boing Boing readers might get a kick out of this. It's two solid minutes of some of the most impenetrable, acrononym-laden sales-speak ever put to tape. The product in question is a Rockwell Electric retro-incabulator....whatever the hell that is. (I have no doubt that one of your readers will know what it is, or what it does...but I certainly don't.) Check it out. Link
UPDATE: Paul Murray sez: I believe the "Rockwell Electric retro-incabulator" is an homage to/updating
of an older industrial video put-on, which in turn dates back to a humor
piece written in the 1940s. Here's what I know.
When I was in college (early 1980s), I was shown a short video clip where a
narrator described the features and benefits of a "turbo encabulator," which
presumably was the massive piece of industrial equipment in the photo next
to him. My jaw dropped at the absurdly complex, dense explanation he
provided for this mysterious piece of equipment, which left me utterly lost.
As I eventually learned, it was actually a brilliant spoof of the copy
written for industrial film-making. I don't know whose idea the clip was,
but I know the narrator of that version was named "Bud" Haggart, who
pioneered the use of "the ear" that enables talent to work without a
TelePrompTer. I've actually worked with him a few times.
I personally know of at least one other homage/remake of the legendary
turbo-encabulator gag, and I believe that this is yet another. Even the name
seems to suggest it.
However, even that is not the true origin! A little Googling turns up this
piece [http://www.floobydust.com/turbo-encabulator/] written in 1944! Sure
enough, the video version I remember started off the same way this piece
does.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney asks FCC to lock up all the record-buttons
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DATE: 08/07/2004 02:28:56 AM
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Digging through some FCC filings, my cow-orker Fred von Lohmann turned up a bit of Disney magic that tips the company's hand: they're planning to lock up everything capable of recording audio.
Well, in their latest comments, Disney (which is an RIAA member, and owns ABC Radio Networks and four record labels) let slip what this is all about:
In addition, to the extent the Commission considers such a
content protection mechanism, it should also consider whether to extend
that mechanism to all music distribution platforms, including satellite digital audio radio service, the Internet and broadcast radio service.
Got that? Disney wants the FCC to regulate all devices capable of recording from any audio broadcasting medium or from the Internet. FM radio, XM, Sirius, Streamripper, Total Recorder, you're all in the crosshairs. It's the Hollings Bill all over again.
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(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Globes painted from memory
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DATE: 08/07/2004 02:41:28 AM
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Following on to our maps drawn from memory post, Noah points to this collection of globes painted from memory.
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(Thanks, Noah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fox News attacks Disney for insufficient homophobia
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DATE: 08/07/2004 02:44:12 AM
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Fox News's review of the Disney PC contained a totally random hysterical condemnation of the company for permitting the annual Gay Day events at its parks.
VARNEY: Well, you know, I -- exactly. I mean, in June you have "Gay Days" at your theme parks. You got any 'Gay Days' on the Mickey computer?
IGER: Well, this has built into it all kinds of protective devices that protects the kid, or the child from internet sites that a parent wouldn't deem appropriate. Also, the fact --
VARNEY: Well, you don't protect the kids from "Gay Days" at the theme parks, do you? Why do you have to protect them in the computer?
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(Thanks, Oliver!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sherlock Holmes illustrated with Flickr metadata
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DATE: 08/07/2004 02:54:20 AM
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Biz sez, "This guy decided to utilize the comment feature in Flickr and create an illustrated version of the Sherlock Holmes tale "The Speckled Band." He broke the text up into 58 sections, picked a keyword from each bit of the text then searched for a photo that was tagged with that word. He then wrote the text into the coment box for each photo linking to the next photo and bit of the text."
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(Thanks, Biz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fraggle Rock on DVD -- finally and wonderfully
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DATE: 08/07/2004 02:59:03 AM
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This amazing, lengthy review of the new Fraggle Rock DVDs does a great job of placing the series in its historical context ("The Monchichis had a show that year, and so did Rubik the Amazing Cube... and don't forget the Mork and Mindy - Laverne and Shirley - Fonz Hour. Basically, 1983 was the year that all the TV producers in the world just said, screw it, we get rich no matter what we do, let's turn any old thing into a cartoon and then pay some Koreans two bucks an hour to animate it.") and picking out the elements of the show that made it so very good:
Gobo: First up to get the mail, now out to the Gorgs' garden... It's turning out to be a dangerous day.
Wembley: Yeah, but we love it, don't we, Gobo?
Gobo: Well, to tell you the truth, Wembley, sometimes I get sick of it.
Wembley: Yeah, me too.
Gobo: ... You sure do like to agree with a person.
Wembley: Oh, I gotta agree with that! Heh.
And there you have it. That's Wembley. In six lines, you get his whole character: his indecision, his affability, his attachment to Gobo, and his willingness to try anything. That's economical writing. Plus, it's funny, so it's got that going for it too.
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(via Waxy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ENIAC close-ups as art photos
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DATE: 08/07/2004 03:03:22 AM
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Benjamin C. Pierce has posted a gallery of beautiful closeup photos of ENIAC, built between 1942 and 1946, one of the first computers ever contstructed. As Pierce notes, "the immediately surprising thing about ENIAC is its physicality. It is a machine in the most literal sense, built from huge metal boxes, massive cables, thick copper wires joined by gobs of solder, panels full of dials, bank upon bank of vacuum tubes. Looking again, the second surprise is the beauty and intricacy of its individual parts. A single tube, responsible for just one numeral in a decimal ring counter, contains a thicket of wires, planes, and baffles. If you peer very closely, a microcosm of strange and enigmatic scenes begins to unfold."
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MMOs discourage heroism, FRPGs encourage it
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DATE: 08/07/2004 03:11:33 AM
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Very good Terra Nova post analyses the ways that Massively Multiplayer games discourage the acts of heroism that made D&D so much fun to play.
On one level, this tale highlights the plight of low levels in the MMORPG. They pose the litmus test: do opportunities for heroism exist for them in and amongst the treadmills? Is it ever possible for a low-level to make a *real difference?* Perhaps, for some, an exceptional stand by a NOOB ("newbie") party against MOB trains (large flocks of NPC monsters) in some NOOB dungeon somewhere, qualifies. But is there a more fundamental difference?
Consider. Can one make the argument that MMORPGs, as an adventuring platform, have gone astray with player = single(few)-avatar assumption? Because of the investment of time (read treadmills), social and emotional capital, players are practically limited by the number of characters they can play. Consequently, they are loath to get in "over their heads" and virtual worlds are loath to offer dire scenarios with only heroic exits for a few. Hardly a profound point, but the question: is such a dynamic, in some guise, necessary for the organic emergence of heroic narratives in an MMORPG?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Protracted defense of laziness
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DATE: 08/07/2004 03:26:15 AM
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This weekend's Guardian has a long, fun excerpt from Tom Hodgkinson's forthcoming "How To Be Idle."
As Sherlock Holmes knew. Lolling around in his smoking jacket, puffing his pipe, Holmes would sit and ponder for hours on a tricky case. In one superb story, the opium-drenched The Man With The Twisted Lip, Holmes solves yet another case with ease. An incredulous Mr Plod character muses: "I wish I knew how you reach your results," to which Holmes replies: "I reached this one by sitting upon five pillows and consuming an ounce of shag."
Rene Descartes, in the 17th century, was similarly addicted to inactivity. Indeed, it was absolutely at the centre of his philosophy. When young and studying with the Jesuits, he was unable to get up in the morning. They would throw buckets of cold water over him and he would turn over and go back to sleep.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Python pie-ing at OSCON
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DATE: 08/07/2004 03:30:39 AM
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It turns out that the Pythoneers didn't actually wuss out on pie-ing the Perlies at OSCON -- here's the photo-evidence.
Link
(Thanks, Mayhem and Chaos!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Katie.com: a total victory for the good guys
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DATE: 08/07/2004 03:52:27 AM
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Katie Jones, owner of the katie.com domain, has prevailed over Penguin Books, who published an unrelated novel called "Katie.com." Katie Tarbox, the author of Katie.com, has disavowed any connection with the arm-twisting lawyer who phoned up Katie Jones under false pretenses and attempted to intimidate her into giving up her domain. Total victory, in other words. Kickass!
"We are not working in association with author Katie Tarbox or any other individual inan attempt to assume ownership of the domain name address www.katie.com. Of course, the personal views of the author are hers and do not represent Plume in any way.
"Going forward, Plume and the author have decided to re-title this book A Girl's Life Online. This is an important book about predatory pedophiles on the Internet and how we can protect our children. We changed the title to keep focus on this issue. The newly titled book will be released next month. We have always taken this situation very seriously. And we hope that by making this title change, it will demonstrate just howdedicated Plume is to clarifying this matter."
88K PDF Link
(Thanks, Zed and Roger!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video for history-of-sf-as hip-hop song that turns into a game!
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DATE: 08/07/2004 06:24:08 AM
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Shawn suggests a link, saying, "It's a music video for a song called Futurology, which is a history of sci-fi literature in hip-hop radio drama form. The song was recorded by myself and my dj under our band name, DJ Funken Wagnalls feat. Cottonmouth, MC, AKA the Robot Underground, and was animated by our 16 year old friend, David Logan. About 2/3 through it turns into a videogame; try to get the good ending!"
Link
(Thanks, Shawn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spiegelman's got a new funnybook about 9/11
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DATE: 08/07/2004 01:21:26 PM
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Art Spiegelman, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning funnybook "Maus" has written a comic about 9/11, called In the Shadow of No Towers, and he's done an NYT interview about it:
You've never considered yourself to be a political cartoonist. Yet "In the Shadow of No Towers" is a very political work. What changed?
This character — me — got so shaken up. I think like a typical American who can get narcotized by the mass media. For me, politics was always put in a strange box, sort of like "baseball for nerds." But since Sept. 11, that bubble has burst. "The personal is political," to put it — yawn — in its most T-shirtlike form.
That's the thing that's swept me into doing something I'd always wanted to avoid: caricaturing presidents for a living. Nothing ages faster. If you look at these old Herblock cartoons, they can only be seen in the context of marginal images in the history book. You've got to read too many footnotes to get what's going on, like, "What is this Taft-Hartley Act, anyway?"
Reg Req'd Link, Use "scriptkiddie/scriptkiddie"
(Thanks, Dylan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Xcode .torrent
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DATE: 08/07/2004 11:50:55 PM
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Apple just released an update to is Xcode development tools, but Apple's content distribution network is slow and poky, and as Danny notes, it "won't let you resume downloads using wget -c." So here's a .torrent for Xcode.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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TITLE: Turf-carpeted call-box at Aussie grocery store
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DATE: 08/08/2004 12:10:02 AM
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Piers sez, "I noticed this just near where I live, someone's lined the floor of a phonebox outside a supermarket with roll-on turf. I have no idea who did it. It looks really awesome, and feels nicer than bare concrete as well. Probably only going to last a couple of days, but I really like this kind of anonymous, socially-focused art. It has a very honest quality to it. It's in Mount Lawley, Perth, Australia, at the Supa Valu near the corner of Beaufort and Walcott, if anyone wants to have a look."
Link
(Thanks, Piers!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Peed-out Prozac detectable in UK water-supply
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DATE: 08/08/2004 02:24:19 AM
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There're so many Prozac-takers in the UK that urine-borne traces of unmetabolised antidepressent have contaminated the drinking-water supply.
An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater...
The DWI said the Prozac was unlikely to pose a health risk as it was so "watered down"...
The exact amount of Prozac in the nation's drinking water is not known.
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(via Crooked Timber)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fame's "middle class"
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DATE: 08/08/2004 03:30:28 AM
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Danny O'Brien's posted a fantastic essay about the "middle-class of fame" -- people who have a kind thin, widely dispersed celebrity (one person in every town likes your dumb net-comic) and whether this new kind of celebrity points to a future of more evenly distributed fame.
Groovelily, the band I went to see, are in many ways, poster children for the middle of that fame curve. They're not a super-famous act, but they are deeply loved, with a "street team" of 300 volunteers who flyer and promote them in their towns, and a range of fans and casual supporters who'll let them play gigs of over two thousand in some venues, or twenty or so in my friend's house. Surrounded by an audience of their fans, they're happy and hardworking, and as far as I could see doing just fine financially.
A lot of their songs, though, speak of the hardness of that road: the envy of the success of peers. The self-doubt that eats at you when you don't get that break: that leap up the spike to the top of the curve. The emotional core of their songs described the state of that life as one of perserverance until you reach a glorious goal; the most self-referential of the musical archetypal song plots.
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TITLE: What does Atkins *mean*?
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DATE: 08/08/2004 03:32:14 AM
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Steven Shapin, a science historian, has turned in a lengthy essay situating Atkins and other low-carb diets in the historical context of dietetics, Biblical shame, and naturalism.
In this respect, the Atkins diet is a curious cousin to the organic and Slow Food movements, and, indeed, to aspects of vegetarianism. Obesity, and such related conditions as type-2 diabetes, are, in the Atkins cosmology, diseases of the special civilisation that makes and markets refined carbohydrates. The result of all this making and marketing is addiction. The appetites are perverted; a monstrously hybrid self is produced, whose appetites are parsed between the natural and the unnatural, the ones to be gratified and the ones to be disciplined and eliminated. And the unnaturalness of that self is an internalising of the bad order of society - what the Yale psychologist and obesity expert Kelly Brownell has catchily called 'a toxic environment'. A bad society makes bad food and bad food makes badly motivated and badly functioning people. This sensibility is important enough to have made it into The Simpsons. In 'Sweets and Sour Marge', when it is determined that Springfield is the fattest town in America, Marge goes on a crusade against the sugar companies, which have turned the citizens into obese zombies. She wins a class-action toxic tort suit against 'Big Sugar' but 'Marge's Law' is soon subverted. When Homer himself becomes a sugar bootlegger, Marge realises she can't win against the dark forces of carb-addiction and gives up.
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(Thanks, Nick!)
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TITLE: Lewis Carroll's scrapbook online, courtesy of the LoC
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DATE: 08/08/2004 10:43:58 AM
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Paul sez, "The Library of Congress has digitized and placed online Lewis Carroll's scrapbook -- clippings and the like that the author found interesting and worth saving. Since it has never been published, this is the only way to see it without going to DC."
Link
(Thanks, Paul!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hello Kitty flashlight for Doom 3
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:05:01 AM
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Doom 3 has only just come out and already the modders are revving up their engines. My favorite so far: a Hello Kitty flashlight mod that makes your gun's built-in light cast a kawaii beam on the objects it alights upon.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free Cerebus for letter-writers
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:07:59 AM
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Harold sez, "In this post on Neil Gaiman's blog, he forwards an offer from Cerebus creator Dave Sim to send anyone, for free, and autographed copy of an issue of Cerebus where he parodies Gaiman's 'The Endless.'"
And if you're wondering what the catch is, it's this: Dave wants to know (as, I have to admit, do I) how many of the people out there in internet-land will actually go and do things that don't involve passively clicking on a link and going somewhere interesting. So what you have to do is write Dave a letter (not an e-mail. Dave doesn't have e-mail) telling him that you read that he'll send you a signed Cerebus, and telling him why you'd like him to send you a copy. It's as easy as that. And, quite possibly as difficult.
The address to write to is:
Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674 Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2
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(Thanks, Harold!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Naming-and-shaming on Slashdot: better than hiring a lawyer
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:11:27 AM
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This is wild. ZiffDavis/EWeek sent a threatening letter to pocketpctools.com for quoting one of their articles with a link back to the EWeek site. About two hours later, on a Sunday night, a ZD/EW rep had managed to get the entire action abandoned and written a letter of retraction that Slashdot published. That's pretty amazing: I think that even the highest-priced attorney in the land would be hard pressed to get that kind of action in that timeframe.
"Hey! I'm the executive editor in charge of eWEEK.com -- and before this situation unravels any farther, I need to make a couple of quick clarifications about our reprint policy:
"While I haven’t gotten all the details about what happened, this legal warning to PocketPCTools seems to be a result of miscommunication within our company. We understand and embrace the principles under which sites such as PocketPCTools link to and excerpt our content. There are plenty of occasions when a professional media company needs to question the wholesale appropriation of its content or the use of its marks. From everything I understand about the PocketPCTools case so far, this is NOT one of those occasions!
"We're moving to correct the situation now ... PocketPCTools was apparently acting within the appropriate bounds of Web etiquette -- actually, doing us a favor by sending us the traffic -- and Ziff Davis was apparently mistaken in issuing this warning.
"My personal apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this error. We’re investigating the situation now and will act accordingly."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eccentric diner-menu infodesign
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:14:48 AM
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Kottke's got a great, long post on Shopsin's, the "eccentric" NYC diner with a long menu that reads like the label on a bottle of Dr Bronner's soap. Kottke links to lots of great supplementary material but the gem is the PDF of the menu itself.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in Hungarian
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DATE: 08/09/2004 04:40:26 AM
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Karoly Negyesi has translated my Microsoft DRM Talk into Hungarian. I've been corresponding this morning with two translators working on different Spanish versions -- once those are posted, the total number of translations will be nine -- including two Italian and two Spanish versions. This is pretty cool.
Link
(Thanks, Karoly!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian RIAA calls for stronger copyright measures than in the US
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DATE: 08/09/2004 07:10:34 AM
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An anonymous reader writes:
The Canadian Recording Industry Association's call for what is effectively a notice and termination approach to removing allegedly copyright infringing material. CRIA's counsel told a Parliamentary committee
that once an ISP receives notification that a subscriber is offering copyrighted works for download, the ISP "ought to kick that subscriber off the system." The approach would be the most radical worldwide as the proposed removal would presumably come without a court hearing or other due process. Given that CRIA lost its file sharing suit in Canada earlier this year, this would appear to be an end-around the court system by attempting to force ISPs to terminate subscriber service based on a mere allegation of activity that may or may not constitute copyright infringement.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Computer Couture
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DATE: 08/09/2004 08:30:14 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature.com is about electronic textiles:
"In the future, we'll all dress smartly. Well, sort of. Advances in electronic textiles promise evening wear that changes color based on mood, undershirts that dispense medicine, and wirelessly-enabled coats that forecast the weather. While the science fiction vision of electrified clothing is not new, the enabling technologies are only now beginning to emerge from university and industrial laboratories. Far from the catwalk, researchers at the intersection of materials science, electrical engineering and fashion design are designing the computer couture of tomorrow."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi hotspots at Walt Disney World
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DATE: 08/09/2004 08:46:07 AM
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The number of WiFi hotspots in Disney World has mushroomed. I can't wait for my next trip there!
Disney's BoardWalk Resort: Convention Center Hallways/Common Areas, Resort Lobby, Main Swimming Pool Area, Concierge Lounges, Bellevue Lounge
Disney's Contemporary Resort: Front desk sitting area, 14th Floor Concierge - sitting area, Outer Rim Bar (near Concourse Steakhouse), 1st Floor Convention Center Lobby, 2nd Floor Convention Center Lobby, Feature Pool.
Disney's Coronado Springs Resort: Main Hotel Lobby, Convention Center Lobby area, Feature Pool, Francisco's Lounge.
Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa: 1st Floor Lobby area including Tea Room, Convention Center Lobby area, 4th Floor Concierge area - sitting area.
Disney's Yacht & Beach Club Resorts: Main Lobby area (both resorts), Concierge sitting area (both resorts), Convention Center Lobby area, Stormalong Bay Pool.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wireless Stealth Wallpaper
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DATE: 08/09/2004 09:13:58 AM
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New Scientist reports on Frequency Selective Surface sheeting, essentially wireless security wallpaper that can contain Wi-Fi signals while allowing cell phone calls to pass through. Funded by UK telecom regulator Ofcom, BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace) based the technology on material used to camouflage military radars. The company is now working on a transparent version to cover windows. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Human lie detectors
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DATE: 08/09/2004 09:24:38 AM
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How do you know when someone is a liar? Shifty eyes? Growing nose? Pants on fire? Science News surveys several laboratory studies on the nonverbal cues of deception and why some people are so good at spotting fibbers.
"In a now-famous study from more than a decade ago, about 500 Secret Service agents, federal polygraphers, and judges watched 10 1-minute video clips of female nurses describing the pleasant nature films they were supposedly watching as they spoke. Half the women were instead watching what Ekman calls "terribly gruesome" medical films. The legal-system professionals were asked to determine the truth by reading the women's faces, speech, and voices... Most of the observers uncovered lies at only about the level of chance. One group, however, outperformed the others. The Secret Service group had a better-than-chance distribution, with nearly one-third of the agents getting 8 out of 10 determinations correct, the San Francisco psychologists reported in 1991."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: eboy's updated website
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DATE: 08/09/2004 09:30:43 AM
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eboy, those wizards of unaliased, no-dither pixel illustrations, have updated their website with a bunch of new stuff. How do they work their magic? I'd love to sit down next to these guys and watch them draw something from scratch. Link
UPDATE Harry sez: I just wanted to point out your most recent boingboing post about the
eboy icons is not quite correct in terminology. You're looking for
"aliased" as the description for the icon style, not "unaliased".
"Anti-aliased" is the opposing term, which describes an image where
colors blend together as a result of supersampling the image. "Aliased"
is the term to describe the stair-stepped pixel style used in the eboy
icons.
It's a common mistake; I think it stems from the fact that people regard
the term "anti-aliased" as a negative term, where something is not done,
and think of it in relation to "smoothed" versus "not smoothed". If
it's "anti-", it must be the "not smoothed" state. So folks often flip
the terms, and don't want to use the more positive-sounding "aliased"
for what they often see as the less sophisticated computer graphic
style.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Space time
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DATE: 08/09/2004 11:16:26 AM
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Here's a stunning gallery of vintage space age watches from 1949-1979. Some of these exquisite specimens are even for sale. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Olympians barred from blogging?
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:18:07 PM
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David Akin, a Canadian tech journalist, blogs a tip he's gotten on the Olympics barring atheletes from blogging the games:
A colleague who knows a Canadian athlete writes to tell me that the athlete has been told there is no blogging once you're at the Olympics and staying in Olympic village. Apparently it's against the "media rules" there. Anyone have any more info on this? What are the rules? How are they enforced? What are the sanctions?
Link
(Thanks, Craig!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RSS feeds of keyword-tagged photos
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:40:59 PM
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Flickr "tags" are user-created keywords that describe their photos. If two or more users hit on (or agree upon) the same tags, all photos with a common tag are grouped together. That's pretty cool -- a kind of Wiki-style serindipitous metadata thing. What's cooler is that every tag automatically gets an RSS feed, so that you can watch all the photos tagged with "cuba" or "outdoor" or "red" in your RSS reader, getting alerts every time a new one comes along. Here's the 100 most popular tags in Flickr -- click each for a link to its RSS feeds (bigger words in the list represent more-popular tags). (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr).
Link
(via Gomi No Sensei)
Update: Joshua notes, "the tagging system in flickr was inherited from del.icio.us"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Creepy bed doubles a safe room
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:45:12 PM
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Do you fear the outside world so much that you wish you could crawl back into your mommy's womb. If yes, then the Quantum Sleeper is for you. This bed folds up into a fire-resistant coffin-like box to keep bad people and bad things away.
The bullet proof polycarbonate barrier is designed to stop bullet penetration, blows from impact, forced entry and provide a sealed temporary safe room and environment from burglars, terrorist or harmful gasses and also provide protection from the destructive forces of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. The unit can also be fitted with defensive devices customized to the requests of the purchasers such as tear gas spray, robotic arms, or projectile weaponry. It is designed to enable the person(s) inside the unit to see out and prevent those outside from seeing in.
It also comes with a stereo system, so you can listen to music while a demented axe murderer attempts to chop through the polycarbonate barrier. Link (Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Koko the Gorilla uses sign language to request dental work
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DATE: 08/09/2004 12:49:09 PM
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Scott sez: "About a month ago, Koko, the 300-plus-pound ape who became famous for mastering more than 1,000 signs, began telling her handlers at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside she was in pain. They quickly constructed a pain chart, offering Koko a scale from one to 10. When Koko started pointing to nine or 10, a dental appointment was made. And because anesthesia would be involved, her handlers used the opportunity to give Koko a head-to-toe exam." Link
UPDATE Rob sez: "Yahoo, via Bill Mesfin and API, have a slightly better version of the Koko story. Of particular note:
"Her teacher, Francine Patterson, was at her side when the anesthesiologist prepared to put her under in the morning, and apparently Koko asked to meet her specialists."
"They crowded around her, and Koko, who plays favorites, asked one woman wearing red to come closer. The woman handed her a business card, which Koko promptly ate."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rick Boucher and Lessig's readers hash over the Induce Act
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DATE: 08/09/2004 01:06:06 PM
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Congressman Rick Boucher -- he of the HR 107 bill to repeal the worst elements of the DMCA -- is guestblogging for Lessig this week. His first post asks whether the Induce Act is as bad as it seems, and what follows in a surprisingly calm and learned (yet impassioned) discussion of the Induce Act's contours and potential failings, with the Congressman actively participating. This is a total We the Media moment.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Torrent for Windows XP Service Pack 2
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DATE: 08/09/2004 01:48:08 PM
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Microsoft needs to distribute its new Win XP Service Pack 2 to 260 million Windows users at 75MB each. Moving a wodge that big to that many machines is too much even for the biggest software company on the planet. So the folks at Downhill Battle have seized upon this as an opportunity to prove the substantial noninfringing uses of P2P by releasing a .torrent of SP@ (complete with checksum info so that you can verify that this isn't some malware-riddled trojan, except to the extent that it is a typical piece of the Windows XP OS). Join the mesh, shoulder the load, get your medicine -- the 21st Century way.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PC built into beautiful vintage Philco TV
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DATE: 08/09/2004 01:53:35 PM
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This casemod, a PC built into a vintage Philco Predicta TV, is simply wonderful.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jim Munroe's new novel in 88 blog entries
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DATE: 08/09/2004 01:56:42 PM
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Jim Munroe -- the author of the wonderful anarcho-science-fiction novels Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, Angry Young Spaceman, Everyone in Silico and others; and a former managing editor of AdBusters -- has a new novel out, whose premise is that it is the blog of the roommate of a demonness. He is posting the novel one blog-entry at a time for the next 88 days:
When Kate discovers that her roommate identifies as a demoness, she figures it's too sacrilicious a secret to keep to herself: she tells all on her blog, roommatefromhell.com.
This is the basic gist of my new book, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, a tale of the urban occult told entirely through Kate's entries. Starting today, I'll be posting one a day to the faux roommatefromhell.com blog until all 88 entries (the whole book) are up. After that I'll be writing a spinoff story based on how the poll on the site goes.
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TITLE: Alice in Wonderland staged by Japanese cosplayers
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DATE: 08/09/2004 03:26:50 PM
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These Japanese cosplayers have staged and photographed an elaborate series of outdoor set-pieces from Alice in Wonderland. Their stylised costumes are quite grim and sinister in a Dave McKean sort of way.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Syndication sold like penis-enlargers
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DATE: 08/10/2004 12:04:31 AM
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The RSSEqualizer.com site is a piece of blisteringly cheezy marketing aimed at selling RSS to non-technical people as a site-traffic-builder. Hammersley calls it the moment that syndation jumped the shark.
"Discover An Amazing 'Technology' That Will Give You An Unfair Advantage Over Your Competitors And Increase Your Rankings... GUARANTEED!"
RSS Equalizer is the most important tool you need to get more pages listed in the search engines. Having been one of the first people to utilize RSS Equalizer, I was really excited to see the results.
It was nothing less than AMAZING!
The number of times the search engines hit my sites, have TRIPLED in just a few short days. I can't say what this means... IT'S AWESOME!
This is the tool you need to help you get targeted traffic and get the search engines to wake up and take notice of your sites. Nothing else compares!
Link
(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harry Potter filksing
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DATE: 08/10/2004 12:05:56 AM
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Harry and the Potters are a Harry Potter fan-band. The music is pretty amusing -- and I'm quite fond of The Wrath of Hermione.
Link
(Thanks, psymonetta!)
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TITLE: Deep-fried megacalorie snack: "most dangerous food in Britain"
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DATE: 08/10/2004 04:42:49 AM
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A new deep-fried Scottish delicacy has created a miniature moral panic among the UK's diet-cops.
"The Stonner", a 1,000-calorie, deep fried pork sausage kebab has been dubbed the most dangerous fast food in Britain.
Sky News reported Monday the kebab contains 46 grams of fat and is double the calories of a Big Mac hamburger.
However, the Ruby Chip Shop in Glasgow, Scotland, that sells the kebab has provided a health warning to customers: "Due to the severe health damage of this fine dish, we can only supply one Stonner supper per customer per week," reads the sign provided by the restaurant's owner, Saei Sangag.
Link
(via Fark)
Update: Kevin sez, "As a chemistry student, I’ve noticed many people mistake 'calories' (used in small-scale scientific calculations) and “Calories” (kilocalories; 1000-calories). A 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola contains 140 Calories or 140,000 calories. This sausage you speak of therefore contains one MILLION calories. Holy crap that’s unhealthy."
Update #2J sez, "Wannabe-chemist Kevin is being silly and disingenious converting
kilocalories to calories to create the scary ONE MILLION number
('a ten-ounce bag of pretzels contains ONE MILLION calories'),
and the original story is simply inane (and good advertising for
the restaurant).
"Peanut-butter and jelly sandwich: 2 slices of bread @ 110 kcals
each, 2 tbsp peanut butter @ 190 kcals, 1 tbsp grape jelly @
50 kcals = 460 kcals.
So, this remarkably dangerous snack is equivalent to two PB&J's,
maybe three if you use low-cal bread and skimp on the filling.
The PB&J's will also have more fat (64 grams). The story also
fudges the truth a bit on the 'two Big Macs' comparison: McD's
web site claims 600 calories and 33 grams of fat, so it would
be more accurate to say'"83% as many calories as two Big Macs,
with only 70% of the fat'.
"For a more commercial comparison, it's about the same as three
Krispy Kreme Glazed Blueberry doughnuts."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: VoIP terms of service suck
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DATE: 08/10/2004 05:40:17 AM
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Salshdot takes note of the terrible Terms of Service from many of the major voice-over-IP providers, including Vonage. I nearly bought a Vonage subscription three times last year, but each time, their ToS changed my mind. Who wants to do business with a company that makes you agree to something really unreasonable before they'll take your money?
he prime example is Vonage, which states among other things that 'If Vonage, in its sole discretion believes that you have violated the above restrictions, Vonage may forward the objectionable material, as well as your communications with Vonage and your personally identifiable information to the appropriate authorities for investigation and prosecution and you hereby consent to such forwarding.'"
"Don't forget the obligatory 'we can change these terms of service whenever we like and they become effective immediately when posted to our website.' Read for yourself here(1), here(2), and here(3). I won't put up with this kind of thing in my software and I certainly won't put up with it from my phone company!"
I'm surprised that more VoIP companies don't tout their ToS as competitive advantages over Vonage -- "Sure they've got a great rate plan, but if they think you're doing something naughty, they'll rat you out to the Feds."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Composer Greg Hale Jones passes away
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DATE: 08/10/2004 06:51:42 AM
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I've just learned that Los Angeles-based composer Greg Hale Jones has died. This is very sad news -- he was young, he was talented, and he was a kind soul. I first met Greg in the course of a feature I was writing for Grammy Magazine (Link to gif scan), and had the good fortune of developing an aquaintance with his work and his warm, kind personality over time. He was a good man, which is something of a rarity here in Hollywood.
His body of work included a number of film soundtracks, and a series of wonderful pieces that digitally remixed/rethought/reinterpreted old historic folk song recordings from the Library of Congress. Probably the most widely-exposed of these was a haunting tune called "Boll Weevil" (Link to streaming MP3)
One of the things that was so amazing about his work was the way he used these old recordings -- he wasn't just sampling them and slapping them on top of a techno beat, Moby-style. He was really turning them inside out, composing through them and around them and retooling both the original and the new elements in an incredibly sensitive way. It was great work, and a fine reminder of the fact that valuable new art often owes its creative DNA to prior work.
When I interviewed him, he talked about what he went through to obtain permission from the Library of Congress to use some 60-year-old Alan Lomax field recordings of black southern folk singers -- this permission came with an odd condition. Since he was planning to use these source materials to create a new song for a feature film (The General's Daughter, starring John Travolta), some portion of the movie's proceeds must go back to the heirs of the original singer. Greg agreed. This resulted in a surreal scenario: after a long, challenging search to locate the descendants, a suited-up Paramount Pictures executive drives a winding road out to an overgrown southern plantation in disrepair, hands a check to an elderly woman, asks "So, what are you going to do with the money?" She replies, "I'm gonna finally go out and buy me one of them telephones, that's what I'm gonna do."
Some audio clips are here. His partner Laurie says she plans to keep Greg's studio in operation, and has no intent of allowing his creative legacy to fade. He was a gentle, insightful soul. He was also an unbelievably gifted artist. I'm deeply saddened to learn of his departure. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Craphound.com is down, use doctorow@well.com for the time being
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DATE: 08/10/2004 07:01:17 AM
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I changed registrars this morning and my DNS went blooie. Craphound.com may be down for a while -- that means that some of the images on Boing Boing -- which I host there -- may be broken, and that my mail may go away, too (God, I hope this doesn't happen). In any case, please send all mail to doctorow@well.com until further notice.
Thanks!
Cory
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Stuart Hughes of BBC covers Olympics via videoblog
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DATE: 08/10/2004 07:09:21 AM
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Stuart Hughes, whose work you may know from some deeply personal accounts out of the Iraq war, is covering the Olympics via weblog. Stuart says, "I'm at the Olympics in Athens for the BBC but I'm giving the behind the scenes skinny you don't get from the news sites on my personal blog. This evening I've uploaded my first Olympic videoblog."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn-mail-art
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DATE: 08/10/2004 07:15:52 AM
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French blogger Philippe De Jonckeere created this online chronicle of his quest to successfully transmit porn-themed mail-art using the US postal system.
The images you see on his website are original snapshots of the real envelopes that were sent from a post office in Chicago. Each of the collages were cut-and-pasted from wank mags, inserted into translucent envelopes, then sent with 25-cent American flag stamps. Link (Thanks, Jean-luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Netflix for handbags?
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DATE: 08/10/2004 07:33:27 AM
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"Bag Borrow or Steal" is an online handbag exchange service in which users sign up, pick a new bag to borrow, use it, send it back, then lather rinse and repeat. It's like -- social networking, filesharing, and sample sales, all rolled into one. P2Purses? Link (via Sean Bonner)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SIGGRAPHblogging
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DATE: 08/10/2004 07:41:31 AM
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The 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH conference is taking place in Los Angeles this week. Among the highlights -- what promises to be a fine, fine keynote from the inimitable Bruce Sterling. There are more wikis and event weblogs and organizer weblogs and photo share services set up around the event than you can shake a mouse at.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FCC okays 'Net wiretapping 5-0, Verizon pleased
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DATE: 08/10/2004 07:45:03 AM
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Declan McCullagh covers the decision here:
"Broadband providers and Internet phone services must comply with wiretapping requirements designed for the traditional phone network, the Federal Communications Commission said in a preliminary decision Wednesday."
And posts this column on questions to ask John Ashcroft and the FBI.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: No Work Zen
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DATE: 08/10/2004 07:53:22 AM
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london tube race |
waste paper basket toss |
unstoppable filing |
crunchtime |
super pet |
bowman |
pinball |
hoverbumps |
bubbles |
don't let go |
imagination
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guerilla protest tech at Republican Convention
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DATE: 08/10/2004 09:59:35 AM
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Flash radiojacking, Bikes Against Bush, Backpack broadcast, and WiFi on Wheels are some of the geek power tools that protesters plan to use at the upcoming Republican convention in NYC. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: snapshot zen: Don Manuel at the Versace boutique, Beverly Hills
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:13:53 AM
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Click thumbnail for full-size. I can't remember whether or not I've already posted this portrait I shot a few months ago. My memory's failing, and so are my Google skillz, so if this is a repeat, sorry. Something reminded me of it this morning.
Don Manuel is a Mayan priest and K'iche language instructor who lives in a small Guatemalan village called Nahuala. He saw and experienced a lot of suffering during the country's civil war. The "hot war" is over, but life is still extremely hard for many indigenous people like him. Not much justice, not much economic opportunity. There is a longer story behind this image, for another time. But for now, I'll just post this. I shot it with a micro-mini Canon elph in front of the Versace boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. This was the first time he'd ever been outside of Guatemala -- a trip to the US to work on a translation project involving historic Mayan texts. A few minutes before, I walked down Rodeo with Don Manuel, escorted him inside a few of the couture shops. We stepped inside the Gucci boutique, where a mink-lined doggie carrier was for sale. He asked me how much it cost, and when I calculated the five-figure price into Guatemalan quetzales for him, his jaw dropped. A few moments later he said in Spanish, "In my country, dogs live on the street. So do many people. This house for a dog costs many times more than the building that houses my entire extended family in Nahuala."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pretty vaporware: PC in a ball
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:30:27 AM
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Who knows if this PC-in-a-ball will ever become real, but it is nice looking. It's spec'd with a puny 40 G hard drive, which makes me wonder how long this thing has been in the vapor phase. Link (via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Surfing property rights
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:40:09 AM
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Great blog entry about the rules regarding surfers' "property rights" of ocean waves and how the surfing community enforces them.
How do surfers enforce their wave rights? For the most part, they rely on the gentle arts of social suasion. Surfers bobbing in the line-up make up a community of sorts, one often strengthened by the presence of locals who know and look out for each other. Getting the stink-eye for dropping in on somebody else’s wave stings badly enough. Sanctions against repeat offenders may escalate to sharp words or, in extraordinary cases, to physical violence. When someone dropped in on me recently, for instance, I first forebore the offense, then took alarm at his unsafe proximity and verbally warned him to back-off. Finally, when that proved unavailing, I put my hand on the punk’s chest, shoved him off his board, and finished out my ride.
Link (via Hit and Run)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Print real US postage stamps with your own photos. No boobies.
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DATE: 08/10/2004 01:04:55 PM
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Sean Bonner says, "Stamps.com has launched Photo.Stamps.com where you can upload your own images and print real stamps. Here's some I'd like to see:
Let's check out the Terms and Conditions...
3. Content Restrictions:
You further agree not to use the PhotoStamps website or service:
B. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material that is obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, unlawful, deceptive, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, an invasion of privacy or publicity rights, supportive of unlawful action, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, illegal or otherwise objectionable;
Aw, Crap. Otherwise Objectionable? That's a catch-all if I ever read one." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pro-anorexia merchandise
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DATE: 08/10/2004 01:36:10 PM
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Article about pro-anorexia and pro-bulemia websites that sell merchandise to foster solidarity among people with eating disorders.
Many of the homepages and forums have been disabled but a plethora of sites can still be easily found. Anorexics can now go online and for between $US3 ($4.30) and $US25 buy a red-beaded "ana" bracelet - a symbol of solidarity that identifies them to the rest of the community. The bracelets are designed to help anorexics resist their hunger by being worn on the hand used to eat with.
Red bracelets signify anorexia and blue "mia" bracelets represent bulimia. Green symbolises recovery. Health professionals believe these sites can influence their anorexic patients, including those who end up in hospital with life-threatening conditions.
(Here's a site that sells the stuff)
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: SF Screening of Stewart Brand in 1969 "Liferaft Earth" documentary
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DATE: 08/10/2004 02:51:34 PM
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Kevin sez: Stewart Brand is showing legendary photographer Robert Frank's documentary about Stewart's crazy 1969 "happening" in which a bunch of hippies cornered themselves into a parking lot life boat and fasted -- once you left you couldn't come back in -- to highlight global overpopulation. Stewart will be showing this rare film on Friday at Fort Mason (SF) while highlighting Stewart's newest fear -- global DEpopulation. It is not often someone changes their mind with such public nakedness."
Birthrates are plummeting worldwide. Already half the world has "sub-replacement" birthrates. The dearth of babies coming means the makeup of human populations is about to change drastically, and that will affect everything. Radical population increase defined the 20th century; radical population decrease could well define our current century. This form of decrease---losing the young and keeping the old--- is something humanity has never experienced before.
"The Depopulation Problem," Phillip Longman, Friday, August 13, 7pm, Fort Mason Conference Center, San Francisco. Doors open for coffee and books at 7pm; lecture is promptly at 8pm. Special showing of Robert Frank's 1969 film "Liferaft Earth" at 7:15pm. You may want to come early to be sure of a seat. Admission is free (donation of $10 very welcome, not required).
I'm waiting for someone to write the biography of Stewart Brand. What a resume!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Aussie cow contest rocked by udder-doping scandal
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DATE: 08/10/2004 04:12:43 PM
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Quote of the day:
It's beyond my comprehension that anyone would do this, but it's to enhance the performance, to make the udders bigger and more beautiful, and that's a plus in the judging criteria," said RNA president Vivian Edwards.
Link (Thanks, Milk-Boy of Brooklyn)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nevermind this, have you checked out the BoingBoing guestbar lately?
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DATE: 08/10/2004 05:27:50 PM
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Damn, Rudy Rucker is really tearing it up over there to the right. Go on, have a look.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: bond. age. beanbag.
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DATE: 08/10/2004 06:40:38 PM
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Mmmmmm. Feasting your eyes on that supple, plump, nubuck-covered orb? Yeah right. I know whose orbs you're looking at -- and she's not included with this "Bond Age beanbag chair." However, the chains are included with this thuper-thexy stuffed chair from manufacturer Jucci, who beckon you to "lounge with your loved one or, with the addition of clever little accessories, indulge in a little gentle exercise." Offered in a ton of colors, with, ahem, chain or chain-free versions. Link (via funfurde)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Warners ask MP3 blog to post their music
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:27:11 PM
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Warner Brothers is working with an MP3 blog called Music For Robots, encouraging them to post tracks from its catalog.
The Secret Machines - Nowhere Again. I know what you're saying. The Secret Machines, this is old news. Well, actually, it's not. This is a new development, because not only do we have permission to post this track, but Warner Brothers Records contacted us and wanted to help out. Crazy, right?
Link
(Thanks, Joe!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Yanqui Olympians allowed to blog
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:28:23 PM
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Biz sez, "Scott Goldblatt is on the USA Olympic Swim Team and he asked around about blogging being banned. Canada, it seems, is banning blogs but the word he got from the USA officials is that he can go ahead with the blogs, as long as he doesn't "move into the territory of journalism." He's got a detailed post on his site."
Link
(Thanks, Biz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PS2 graphics chips to be built into TVs
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:38:29 PM
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Sony has announced plans to use PlayStation 2 chips to speed up the graphics processing in new flat-panel TVs:
The new TVs will be equipped with chips used in the company's PlayStation 2 home-use game consoles and PSX DVD recorder/game consoles. Sony fabricates these chips at a group plant in Nagasaki Prefecture.
The chips' ability to handle detailed computer graphics will improve the TV's image-processing capacity, leading to faster on-screen control for selecting the type of TV broadcasts or viewing image data stored on digital or video cameras, for example.
Sony says the chips, which are already widely used in its game consoles, will enable it to boost the functions of its TVs at little cost.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Extreme Democracy essays online
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:40:28 PM
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Extreme Democracy, Jon Lebkowsky's anthology of essays on the techno-democratic revolution with contributions from the likes of Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson, Joe Trippi and Clay Shirky is now online in commentable, permalinkable blog form.
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(via Joi Ito)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Barenaked Ladies Meetup in Islamabad draws men looking for naked chicks
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DATE: 08/10/2004 11:43:20 PM
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There's a Barenaked Ladies Meetup where fans of the Toronto band can get together in cities around the world and discuss the Ladies' goofy brand of upbeat pop. The Toronto BNL Meetup has 10 members, but the Islamabad, Pakistan Meetup has 55! How is such a thing possible? Turns out they're not fans of the Barenaked Ladies, the band -- they're fans of bare, naked ladies, the concept:
alivo
hi there i am male 24 from isb, and love to have fun, feel free to contact me for some fun 00923008550948
kukucoo
I AM TO SEE AND FEEL HOW BEAUTIFUL YOU AS A WOMAN ARE.
LostAlone
well i m 23 male from islamabd looking for such meeting any body can contact me free 03005130953 i m 5 11 fair having big mustaches, haaa dont be afraid .. i m doin mba it ths itt
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How blogs can cover Africa
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DATE: 08/11/2004 03:16:33 AM
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GeekCorps founder Ethan Zuckerman (whose org sends volunteers nerds from around the world to Africa to help extend technology to some of the world's poorest nations) has a great essay up about the ways in which blogs currently fail to bridge the gap to Africa and how this can be changed.
When journalists don't cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar[10] - they have no signal to reinforce. There aren't enough bloggers in eastern Congo to give us a sense for what's really going on, nor will there be for many years to come. None but the largest news agencies are able to pay the travel costs and insurance for reporters to cover these stories. Most choose not to cover a conflict that's bloody, dangerous, difficult to summarize in a soundbite and unknown to most of their readers or viewers. The net result - we simply don't have information about many parts of the globe relevant to world debate....
Blogalization is a new project that attempts to address the translation issue, by combining the efforts of multilingual bloggers into a single site. The logic behind the site: "if I have languages A and B and you have languages B and C, we can share memes across barriers of mutual incomprehension." [38] Blogalization participants index dozens of multilingual blog[39] and wiki[40] catalogs in the hopes of giving contributors raw material for translating key posts for a global audience. They make a point of selecting posts with key ideas that they think have currency for their international audience, "memes" likely to be adopted and transmitted by their readership. Another site, Living on the Planet takes a similar tack, though unidirectionally, from various languages into English With sites focused on China, Latin America and India, bloggers summarize local media for an English-language audience. The project plans expansion into Europe, Central Asia and Africa, as well as an agency to represent the commercial interests of photographers, bloggers and writers, selling to U.S. and European markets.[41]
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(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mac OS X Panther Hacks
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DATE: 08/11/2004 03:17:49 AM
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I finally got round to reading my copy of the wonderful O'Reilly Mac OS X Panther Hacks book, which, like all of the hacks books, is clever, informative, well-organised and useful; this one has the additional merit of having been co-written by my pal Rael Dornfest, who edits the line, and is witty, silly and very imaginative indeed. The hacks assembled in the text range from surprising things you can do with iTunes and iCal to hacking AppleScript to making OS X cooperate with perl and Python, but my favorite of all is the iOscillate: an iSight camera mounted to the top of a de-bladed oscillating desk-fan, so that the fan sweeps the iSight back and forth in a steady, 180-degree arc, covering all those seated around a table or in a conference. The hack is truly worthy of the appellation "hack" -- it's ingenious, funny, and actually useful in a seriously bent way.
Link
Update: Leo sez, "You can read some excerpts (three hacks chosen by Rael) from the book here and see plus learn how to make that iOscillate thing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show: Clinton on attack-advertising
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DATE: 08/11/2004 04:03:00 AM
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Here's a .torrent for a 218MB MPG file of the 9 August 2004 episode of the Daily Show, which opens with a fantastic expose of the swift-boat veterans who are lying about John Kerry's military campaign and moves on to an excellent and fiery interview with Bill Clinton about Republican attack-advertising.
Torrent Link
(Thanks, matt72!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beethoven's Stairway to Heaven
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DATE: 08/11/2004 05:09:19 AM
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Joe Wolfe is a composer who has created and orchestrated adaptations of Led Zepplin's Stairway to Heaven as they might have been composed by the likes of Beethoven, Glenn Miller, Schubert and my favorite, Bizet.
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(Thanks, Ethan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Heeb Magazine's GuiltPod
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DATE: 08/11/2004 05:19:01 AM
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I just picked up the new issue of Heeb Magazine, a kind of Giant Robot for Jews. This issue's theme is guilt, and the inside cover sports this fall-over-laughing iPod ad parody. My scanner is not working and the photo here didn't do it justice, as it missed the playlist displayed on the iPod:
* Who Told You to Paint it Black?
* Call Me Already
* Bang a Gong (Not Too Loud)
* Sympathy for Your Sister
* Let It Be (See If I Care)
* Here Comes the Sun (And I Forgot My Sunblock)
36K JPEG Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Human embryo cloning OKed in UK
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DATE: 08/11/2004 05:38:40 AM
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Rich sez, "British scientists have been granted permission to clone human embryos for medical research, it was announced today."
They plan to duplicate early-stage embryos and extract stem cells from them which can be used for radical new treatments.
The embryos are destroyed before they are 14-days old and never allowed to develop beyond a cluster of cells the size of a pinhead.
The green-light was given by the research licensing body the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority after weeks of discussion.
Dr Miodrag Stojkovic, from the university’s Institute of Human Genetics, said: “We are all set up and ready to go immediately as soon as the paper work is sorted out.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EasyMobile: a mobile phone company without phones or towers
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DATE: 08/11/2004 07:06:57 AM
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The EasyGroup (who provide the discount EasyJet airline and the cheap EasyInternet cafes) have launched a mobile phone company called, what else, EasyMobile. EasyMobile -- which leases capacity on other carriers' networks -- won't give away free phones with their plans; instead, they'll just sell you a SIM card and rely on you to find a phone somewhere. Given that most mobile phone carriers give you a new phone annually if you threaten to quit, a lot of Easy's ptoential customers have a wealth of easily unlockable phones kicking around, ready to be used with an Easy SIM. And since Easy isn't giving away phones, it can roll those savings back into cheaper airtime and services.
EasyMobile is to be launched in December at the latest on the British market and if all goes well the service will be expanded to the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired News interview with Dan Gillmor on "We The Media"
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DATE: 08/11/2004 08:08:38 AM
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In today's Wired News, an interview I conducted with veteran tech journalist and blogger Dan Gillmor. In his new book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, he chronicles the social and economic impact of weblogs, wikis, mobile technology and other networked phenomena on the business of news.
WN: What role do blogs play in all of this?
Gillmor: They have joined the journalism ecosystem. It's more symbiosis than rivalry. I disagree with Big Media partisans who feel blogs are irrelevant, and with blog promoters who see the demise of professional journalism.
WN: How did you see some of the issues in your book play out at the Democratic Convention? What sorts of trends and activity patterns do you anticipate as the November elections approach?
Gillmor: Bloggers became pets for the Big Media. You could almost see the establishment journalists petting bloggers like poodles and cooing, "Oh, good bloggers, aren't you cute!" (Apart from the ones who put on body armor and said, "Omigod, these pit bulls are dangerous!") It'll take a few more conventions -- and a time when blogs aren't a novelty -- for everyone to sort this out.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 20,000 Leagues ride fan-site
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DATE: 08/11/2004 08:12:08 AM
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This incredibly exhaustive fan-site for the old Disney World 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride was created by a die-hard who only orode the ride once, when he was three (". All I remember clearly is a porthole, a whole lotta bubbles, and OH MY GOOD GOD THERE’S A GIANT SQUID ATTACKING THAT SUBMARINE!" Now he's collected a ton of media related to the ride, including transcripts, videos, stills, and interviews with various crew-members.
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(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Big penis on the table (or not)
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DATE: 08/11/2004 08:28:19 AM
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This vintage medical model of a human penis is up for auction on eBay right now. Manufactured by Carolina Biological Supply Company (still a wonderful company), circa 1950s, the model is 22.5" long and 15" tall. Starting bid at just $275. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
UPDATE: If you thought that penis head was a bit pointy and odd looking, you were onto something. Dr. Matthew Vaughn says: "Unfortunately, the 'male penis' model is actually a model of the root tip of a modern vascular plant. Now given the Australian slang for a quick romp between the sheets (a root), BoingBoing's posting isn't ALL that far from the mark, but it is, nevertheless, factually incorrect."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Let the sun shine in (while keeping the heat out)
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DATE: 08/11/2004 09:08:43 AM
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You shouldn't have to forego sunlight and views to keep your house cool. Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a glass coating that allows visible spectrum and low-temperature infrared light to pass through. But if the temperature goes above 29 degrees Celsius, the glass reflects the infrared radiation. According to Scientific American, the coating, consisting of vanadium dioxide with a pinch of tungsten, "currently has a somewhat unattractive yellowy brown color, which the researchers hope to be able to remove with future refinements." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Uncle Milton's Aquasaurs beat Sea-Monkeys flippers down
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DATE: 08/11/2004 09:40:42 AM
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Uncle Milton, the ant farm tycoon, is selling an "Aquasaurs" (real name: Triops longicaudatus) habitat. These creatures are much cooler than Sea-Monkeys.
According to this FAQ :
Triops longicaudatus are crustaceans that are also called Dinosaur shrimp or Tadpole shrimp that look like miniature horseshoe crabs. They have a short life-cycle of 20 to 90 days - growing very quickly in this time to about 2 inches in length !" Link
(Thanks, Jonathan!)
UPDATE Andrew sez: "American Science and Surplus has had triops for sale for some time. The same as Uncle Milton's Aquasaurs that Mark recently blogged, but for only 8 bucks. I ordered them a couple of years ago and they were a lot fun. An added upshot is that sciplus has a 10 dollar minimum order so you can order some other cool stuff while you're at it, and there's plenty of other cool stuff (I have no affiliation with sciplus, just love their stuff)." Link
UPDATE Simon sez: "My God, are you completely insane? Triops are the vilest creatures that have ever lived. Someone gave me a set, and they immediately hatched into hundreds of awful little crawly things with big teeth and millions of incessantly moving legs. A friend said "Triops: worlds most awful pets." And he was right - their food is sea monkeys, for pete's sake. You can't clean the tank because they eat the brown sludge that forms on the bottom, they eat each other, and they eat goldfish if you put them in the tank - the instructions say so. After a few weeks all you can see in the vat full of filthy water is two inches of sludge with little tracks moving through it where the triops are. When two meet there is a brief explosion of activity and only one track leaves. Sometimes bits of the loser drift out of the ooze. Eventually all life in the tank ceased and we threw it into a dumpster with immense relief. I still shudder when I think of those awful things.
If you like triops you would probably like a suggestion by the same friend: body crabs raised on a sock stretched over a forty watt lightbulb. I added that, unlike triops, when you got tired of them you could kill them with Raid, but he countered with "Oh, no, you can't kill crabs with Raid. Believe me, I should know." Not a pleasant thought, but a walk in the park compared to having a stinking vat of thrashing triops on one's kitchen counter.
Hmmm ... how to end politely...
Thanks for an interesting article,
Simon"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: D&D book reader on ferry hassled by security morons
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DATE: 08/11/2004 10:32:34 AM
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A BB reader sez: "Thanks to the RNC, there are manditory bag searches happening on the NJ-NY Ferry. This fellow first got hassled with a re-search for carrying The Player's Guide to Faerun a D&D book, and then the next day, security tried to confiscate his copy of Exalted: The Abyssals as 'inappropriate.'"
This morning, they're doing bag searches again to get on the ferry. And the guy doing the searches pulls me aside and says, "Sir, I feel that I need to confiscate this book."
I pause and say, in that tone of voice that most people would recognize as meaning, "have you lost your grip completely, chuckles?": "You need to confiscate... a book."
"Yes. I feel it's inappropriate for the other people on the ferry to be exposed to it."
...
He gets all pissy at me and says, "Don't you understand this is for your safety?"
"Confiscating someone's gun or bomb is for my safety. PErhaps confiscating someone's pocketknife or nailfile may be for my safety. What's so damn dangerous about my book?"
"It's INAPPROPRIATE!"
Link
UPDATE Game designer Greg Costikyan took the time to send email to the NY Waterway to protest the rogue imbecile security guard who tried to confiscate the game manual (How much do you want to bet that the rogue imbecile security guard wanted to confiscate it so it could take it back to his home and use it as a masturbatory aid?).
Greg Costikyan: Just spoke with people from New York Waterway, who say:
1. They're trying to track down mephron (the original poster) to get more detailed information from him--e.g., time and ferry route.
2. If the story is true, it is not only a violation of company policy, but also of martime regulations, and if it is true, they wish to correct the situation as quickly as possible.
3. Anyone with further information about it are invited to contact them directly.
Sounds sensible to me...
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: World Transhumanist Association's annual conference wrap-up
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DATE: 08/11/2004 12:53:46 PM
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Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine gives a good wrap-up of the World Transhumanist Association's annual conference, TransVision 2004.
In another session, McMaster University philosopher and editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Mark Walker gave a talk on "Genetic Virtue", the ethics of bioengineering children to be virtuous. Walker began by pointing out that parents and communities already spend a lot of time and effort trying to instill virtues in the young. Assuming that genes that predispose people toward being honest and caring for others can be found, what would be wrong with allowing parents to use biotechnology, say, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, to increase the chances that their children are born with those virtues? Walker concluded that if we accept that the goal of ethics is to make our lives and our world better, then we ought to explore the plausibility and possibility of genetically instilled virtue. One audience member suggested that this would remove a child's free will, but I pointed out that a child doesn't get any extra measure of free will just because they have randomly conferred genes.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Beanbag bondage chair website code almost as fun as chair itself
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DATE: 08/11/2004 08:57:48 PM
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Remember that "Bond Age Beanbag chair" with chains, blogged here yesterday? Oh, of course you do, pumpkin. Anyway, crafty BoingBoing reader Adam tips us off to the fact that the manufacturer's website includes a very poorly designed CMS feature that allows you to pass whatever text you fancy along to the image caption. Let's break this down. Here is the URL that links to details on the "Bond Age" beanbag chair from Jucci.com's homepage:
http://www.jucci.com/bp.asp?p=bond-age-5-700.jpg
^700^519^center&t=Bond+Age+Beanie&s=Naughty+but+nice!+
Introducing+our+racy+new+model!
Heh. Notice how the last bit of that url is the caption text? That could just as easily become:
http://www.jucci.com/bp.asp?p=bond-age-5-700.jpg^700^519^
center&t=Fuck+Bag&s=Whip+My+Tender+ASP+
With+Your+Hot+Throbbing+Pageview+Totals
Or, frankly, whatever the hell you like. Have fun with their server logs!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of double-entendre aromatherapy candle label zen
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DATE: 08/11/2004 09:05:15 PM
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BoingBoing reader Jason swears "on a stack of motherboards and linux distros" that this oddly named candle fragrance -- "Smell My Nuts" -- is neither Photoshop nor joke. While the aroma may combine a hint of spicy insouciance with warm, earthy undertones, Jason promises that the name is 100% irony-free. "The mind boggles and the fact that someone, somewhere, thought this was a good name for a scent," says Jason, "I'm keeping it here on my desk to remind me that somewhere out in the world, the person who named this has a job, and I, as yet, do not." Link to Jason's blog entry, and Link to detail page on manufacturer website (Click on "enlarge this pic" to see the label).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Alien v. Predator political photoshop remixes
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DATE: 08/11/2004 09:35:12 PM
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BoingBoing pal Sean invites photoshoppers with time and/or talent to take a crack at this election-themed remix of the box office bomb-to-be that is Alien V. Predator. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DOJ obscenity prosecutions heat up with "Susie's Corral" case
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DATE: 08/11/2004 09:53:11 PM
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A new federal obscenity sentence has been issued against a Montana man who operated a catalog business called "Suzie's Corral." Gary Robinson was said to have sold bestiality and scat videos, distributing them via UPS. AFAIK it's the first such obscenity prosecution in Montana, period. The Billings Gazette has more:
The videotapes, which had titles like "Dogs and Horses and Pigs and Chickens," contained graphic scenes of bestiality and other sexual activity that involved excretory functions, Mercer said. Transportation by common carrier of obscene material in interstate commerce is a crime, Mercer said, and is not protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that to be obscene, material must appeal to the "prurient interests," be "patently offensive" and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The court said obscene material should be judged by local standards. Ultimately, the local standards would be decided by a jury.
Link to local news story, and link to press release from the United States Attorney for the
District of Montana, which is -- oddly -- probably not worksafe. (via politech)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: African blogs in a consolidated, multilingual feed
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DATE: 08/11/2004 10:48:46 PM
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Ethan Zuckerman, author of the paper on Africa blogging we linked to yesterday, sez, "One tangible thing that's come out of discussions about blogging in Africa is BlogAfrica.com, a project I've been working on with the brilliant folks at AllAfrica.com. We're watching about 150 Africa-focused blogs and putting out a feed of the most interesting posts (in English, French, Portuguese and Italian) at http://allafrica.com/afdb/blogs/items.xml - anyone with an Africa-focused blog is welcome to register it and join the club."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geeky stickers and stuff
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DATE: 08/11/2004 11:19:24 PM
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Jinx sells hacker tees, sweats and stickers (as well as RIAA bumwad)! Too bad they won't ship to England if your credit-card is billed in the US -- I wanted to buy some stickers.
Link
(via Lawgeek)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anachronistic advertisement photoshopping: putting modern products into vintage ads
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DATE: 08/11/2004 11:27:55 PM
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Worth1000's photoshopping contest today asks rasterbaters to remix modern products into vintage ads -- putting an iPod at the centre of a Victrola ad, or an SUV into an old Buick ad. There are some genuine beauties here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Waldrop: 1954 was a GREAT time to be a kid
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DATE: 08/11/2004 11:29:59 PM
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Howard Waldrop, the guestblogger at the Infinite Matrix, is one of the all-time great short-story writers in science fiction. He's been writing long essays about the 1950s lately, and his new installment is beautiful:
1954 was a GREAT time to be a kid. I know, I was one. I was the most enthusiastic 8-year-old that ever was or ever could be.
There were a couple of hundred reasons, For one, it was the last year of glory, before things got so bad, because of congressional investigations and Reader's Digest articles by Dr. Wertham, and the adoption of the Comics Code Authority (the publishers' equivalent of the Motion Picture Production Code that had kept movies from having any ideas that would shock the vicar since 1934...) In late 1954, there were still all the great horror comic books around. ECs — filled with puns, good writing, great art, and gore! — go get some of the hardcover reprints and look at Shoe-Button Eyes or By George! or some of the adaptations of Ray Bradbury's stories from The Martian Chronicles in them, and see what I mean. Besides the ECs, there were crime and horror comics by publishers ranging from the near-EC level to that of the barely literate. There were something like 300 different comic book titles a month published, 52 or 48 pages, all in color for a dime (except Classics Illustrated, a.i.c. for 15¢) Gore! Bats! Skulls! Guys in tanks disintegrated into green goo by acid in Blackhawk! Airboy, and The Monster of Frankenstein were still running. Airboy had The Heap in it, a sort of Old Testament revenge-minded haystack golem. Dick Breifer's Frankenstein was sui generis; it had started as a horror feature in Prize Comics in the 40s, then transmogrified into a humor comic in the late 40s, and changed back to a horror comic in the early 50s. Guys feeding babies to man-eating plants! Guys pinned to town clocks by the broken-off hour hand! Fights with mummies in the tunnels beneath the pyramids! Gah! (I remembered when I'd covered my eyes to keep from seeing the Queen transform into the witch in the 1952 release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the next day, with a rare dime I'd gone out and bought a Frankenstein comic book. My mom had a shit-fit: "How can you not watch Snow White and then go out and buy that!?" As I said somewhere else, being a kid I didn't have time to explain the difference between the low and high mimetic modes of narrative...)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lovecraft in LiveJournal form
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DATE: 08/11/2004 11:47:49 PM
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"The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh" is a short story in the form of a series of LiveJournal entries from an unsuspecting teen whose long-lost father is a Cthuloid spawn living near Miskatonic. The story that unspools is pure Lovecraft -- if Lovecraft's protagonists took "Which Muppet Are You?" personality quizzes and really dug the fact that the Miskatonic bar doesn't ask for ID.
Link
(via JWZ)
Update: Mark sez, "Just a little nit-picking... 'The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh' is
pretty much a retelling of 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' which means
that his father is (or is a descendant of) a Deep One cross-breed, not
Cthuloid. Big difference to someone overly obsessed with HPL, but
probably not to anyone else... anyway, that was a damn funny link."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Airport Express crypto broken by DVD Jon
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DATE: 08/12/2004 12:28:15 AM
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Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen has cracked the Apple Lossless encryption used by the Airport Express to communicate with iTunes, so that programmers can write tools that use any application and any operating system to send audio to an Airport Express.
I've released JustePort, a tool which lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express.
The stream is encrypted with AES and the AES key is encrypted with RSA.
AirPort Express RSA Public Key, Modulus:
59dE8qLieItsH1WgjrcFRKj6eUWqi+bGLOX1HL3U3GhC/j0Qg90u3sG/1CUtwC
5vOYvfDmFI6oSFXi5ELabWJmT2dKHzBJKa3k9ok+8t9ucRqMd6DZHJ2YCCLlDR
KSKv6kDqnw4UwPdpOMXziC/AMj3Z/lUVX1G7WSHCAWKf1zNS1eLvqr+boEjXuB
OitnZ/bDzPHrTOZz0Dew0uowxf/+sG+NCK3eQJVxqcaJ/vEHKIVd2M+5qL71yJ
Q+87X6oV3eaYvt3zWZYD6z5vYTcrtij2VZ9Zmni/UAaHqn9JdsBWLUEpVviYnh
imNVvYFZeCXg/IdTQ+x4IRdiXNv5hEew==
Exponent: AQAB
Link
(via Waxy and Hublog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Craphound.com still down, use doctorow@well.com
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DATE: 08/12/2004 12:33:25 AM
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If the redexes weren't enough of a tip-off, here's the confirmation. The DNS for craphound.com is down again -- screw you, Dotster. In the meantime, keep on sending your mail to doctorow@well.com. -Cory
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Olympic brand-whoring attains new, shameful low
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DATE: 08/12/2004 04:20:27 AM
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The Interational Olympic Committee -- whose high-horse is well and truly elevated when it comes to lecturing atheletes about doping -- is policing spectators at the games to ensure that they aren't toting brand-marks for their sponsors' rivals. Penalties for buying the wrong product range from confiscation of your goods to being forced to wear your t-shirt logo-side-in. The worst of it is the steaming craopla from the IOC official who says "We have to protect official sponsors who have paid millions to make the Olympics happen." Oh, rilly? Or what? They won't sponsor the Olympics anymore? Earth-to-official: companies sponsor your games because they're important and lots of people watch them, not because they can be assured that Olympic venues will be swept clean of rival logos.
It's well and good to tell atheletes that they compromise their integrity and shame the games when they take steroids, but what about the perceived integrity of the game when a ticket-holder is turned away for carrying the wrong brand of bottled water?
Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.
Sweltering sports fans who seek refuge from the soaring temperatures with a soft drink other than one made by Coca-Cola will be told to leave the banned refreshment at the gates or be shut out. High on the list of blacklisted beverages is Pepsi, but even the wrong bottle of water could land spectators in trouble.
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in LA: CaBOOM design fest
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DATE: 08/12/2004 04:57:05 AM
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BoingBoing reader Peter Giblin says:
CaBOOM is an experiental trade fair and festival showcasing designers and resources from the contemporary architecture, landscape and interior design communities at LA's Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Boing Boing readers are invited to tonight's opening night extravanza which benefits the LA Conservancy, and are offered a 40% discount on festival passes (Discount code: PET9976). Event opens tomorrow, continues through Sunday Aug 15th.
Cool things, good music, and should be a fun crowd. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How Dotster cost me days and days of downtime: stay away from this registrar
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DATE: 08/12/2004 05:36:08 AM
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A year ago, the DNS for craphound.com disappeared. Which was weird, because I was paying for DNS with Dotster, my registrar.
I called them up and spoke to their tech support people. "Oh yeah," they said, "your paid service ended a month ago but our billing system was broken so we didn't send out a notice. So we terminated you for nonpayment. But dude, you're lucky! We gave you a free month's DNS!"
Lucky lucky me. I got a free month's DNS and to pay for it, I was bouncing mail all over the Internet and my Website wasn't resolving. Bastards. I bought two years' worth of DNS and vowed that when the domain came up for renewal, I'd switch away from Dotster. I sent them an email telling them as much and got an email back apologizing and saying that they would certainly never terminate my DNS wihtout notice again (you see where this is going, I trust)
Craphound.com is up for renewal at the end of August. Not wanting to leave things to the last minute, I changed over early this month, switching registrars to Domain Direct, who are now the registrar for all of my domains, and boingboing.net besides.
I didn't move over the DNS -- I figured I'd paid Dotster for another year's service, I might as well get it. Instead, I left myself a reminder in my iCal for next July to set up DNS at DomainDirect a month ahead of the service running out on Dotster.
This morning, Dotster terminated my DNS. Without warning. And when I called, they told me there was nothing they could do about it. Even though there's nothing in my DNS contract that says that DNS is provided to domains registered with Dotster and no others, that is, apparently, their policy. And they can't make exceptions. Not even for 48h while I effect a graceful change to DomainDirect (who have been fantastic throughout and now have 100 percent of my domain registration and DNS business).
Bastards.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: XP Service Pack torrent shut down by Microsoft
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DATE: 08/12/2004 07:55:22 AM
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Remember SP2Torrent.com? This was the BitTorrent site that was helping distribute copies of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 (which is so unweildy and yet so critical and sought-after that MSFT is having a hard time distributing it effectively) via BitTorrent, a system that enlists everyone who tries to download a file into distributing it as well, so that the more popular a file becomes, the easier it is to download.
Anyway, the site is no longer providing this free service to Windows users, because the company threatened to sue them if they kept it up. Lucky MSFT customers, huh?
Microsoft sent DMCA takedown notices to our two webhosts, one of which was just linking to a torrent file on another server. We've stood up to these kinds of legal threats before (see the Grey Tuesday protests), but we decided not to bother this time, because we started this site primarily as a demonstration and to that end it's already been a huge success. SP2torrent.com showed how filesharing technlogy gives people without budgets or huge servers the power to solve problems themselves, without waiting for the government or some corporation to do it for them. For another demonstration that's still in action, check out p2pcongress.org. If you need Windows XP SP2, you can download it from Microsoft's inscrutable webpage:
Link
(Thanks, Matt!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Super-correcting DVD players make pirated discs watchable
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DATE: 08/12/2004 08:00:47 AM
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Jiangsu Shinco Electronic Group is a Chinese company that manufactures "super-correcting" DVD players that automatically correct for the low quality of pirated DVD discs (though the article doesn't say whether this corrects for bad pressing or bad recordings, I suspect it's the former). They get some of their parts from Sony!
Enter the caoqiang jiuchuo or "super-correcting" Chinese model of DVD player. Developed by the Jiangsu Shinco Electronic Group and selling for about half the cost of brands such as Philips and Sony, it is designed to cope with the poor quality of pirated video discs.
Along with half a dozen domestic brands that have followed its lead, the company's Shinco brand has grabbed about 80 per cent of the Chinese market. Its factories produce 5 million DVD players a year, and, says Zeng Ming, a management expert who has studied the company, its annual sales are about $US1 billion ($1.35 billion).
Reg Req'd Link, use "reader12345678910/read1t"
(Thanks, Sys Admn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Community WiFi summit in Denmark, 3-10 September
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DATE: 08/12/2004 08:03:35 AM
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The Wireless4Development confernece (3-10 September 2004, Djursland, Denmark) is an activist summit wherein WiFi hackers of all description can plot the downfall of the Man and the rise of the unthethered network.
The wireless4development seminar & workshop brings together many of the
people who are doing exactly that. Using low-cost wireless technologies
to bring Internet connectivity to parts of the world, and to parts of
society, where there are no real alternatives. For one week in
September, wireless and free networking activists from around the world,
will meet up to share skills and experiences gained in some of the most
remote regions of the world. Participants have experience from some of
the most innovative uses of Open Spectrum (license-exempt) wireless
technologies, ranging from wireless connectivity at the Mt. Everest Base
camp, over pedal-powered connectivity in rural Laos, to connecting local
radio stations across Mali. These projects illustrate the true power of
low-cost, locally run wireless networks.
wireless4development will present workshops on a variety of subjects
related to wireless community networking, and brings experts from around
the world to discuss these subjects. Presentation subjects include
Voice-over-wireless, Solar- and Bicycle-powered wireless networking and
Mesh Network.
Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friends With Benefits
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DATE: 08/12/2004 08:08:30 AM
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In the current issue of Wired magazine, a piece I wrote on social swap nets:
Think of them as eBay crossed with Napster, then injected with Friendster DNA. The newest social networking services merge three powerful Web functions - auctioning, file-sharing, and friend-of-a-friend socializing - to build digital barter economies. Unlike first-gen social networks, these communities are about more than getting laid and getting paid. These "social swap nets" help like-minded members pool digital resources - music, movies, games, even hardcover books.
Mediachest and SongBuddy are two early examples. They're still small (and size matters when it comes to a well-stocked "sharing pool"), but their very existence points to a new era in networked transactions, one in which online exchanges become more useful.
Here's how they work: Members browse one another's collections online using filters such as friend groups, geographic location, or other affinities. This isn't file-swapping in the old outlaw Napster sense. They can access one another's stuff, but the original copy literally traded with others, rather than downloaded and duplicated via P2P. Getting hold of the goods is mostly a low tech affair. Members often mail or hand-deliver items.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Big backpacks are bad news
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:26:27 AM
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For my birthday last week, my sweet wife bought me a really sharp Ant shoulder-bag for my gear. She said she was tired of seeing me drag around a big nerdy backpack, a habit I developed in elementary school that stuck with me. Hopefully, she wasn't too late to break me of the backpack addiction. A Northeastern University professor confirms anecdotal evidence that big backpacks cause bad backs. She also provides some helpful guidelines:
* As a rule, kids should never carry a bag that weighs more than 10% of their body weight. This rule applies to all students, no matter what age. “If your child is unable to stand up straight with the pack on, the load is too heavy,” explains Hickey.
* Remind your kids about the value of lockers. Reducing backpack poundage will prevent any serious back pain in the future.
* The bigger the bag, the more stuff kids will cram into it. Purchase a smaller backpack that will only fit the bare necessities. This will prevent kids from lugging around those leftovers from lunch, notes passed in math class, or half-melted chapsticks.
* Periodically remind your child to clean out trash and remove old papers and homework to lighten his or her load.
Good advice for even the, well, bigger kids. Link
UPDATE:BB reader Jamie Bakum says, "Be aware that despite a heavy backpack's problems, they're generally balanced, and a really heavy load on one shoulder can be worse than a load spread across two. I have two friends who were told by doctors to switch from shoulder bags TO backpacks to alleviate back pain that had cropped up from compensating for a load on one side."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Yes!!! I CAN HEAR YOU NOW!
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:34:50 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about an audio algorithm that battles cell phone background noise:
My friends seem to spend an inordinate amount of time inside wind tunnels, aboard locomotives, and underwater. At least, that's what it sounds like when they call me from their cell phones. Blame it on the background noise. Unlike calling from home or a telephone booth, we have little control over the noise pollution that surrounds us out there. It's sort of like extra baggage that our voice is forced to carry when it travels across the wireless ether. Now though, researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a novel bit of technology that may someday alleviate us of the audio aggravation.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Molecules of memory improvement
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:53:41 AM
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An MIT neuroscientist's latest research on how our brains build and eliminate synapses could someday enable us to tweak the the process and overclock our minds. Professor Morgan Sheng and postdoc Sang Hyoung Lee identified the "traffic cop" molecule that controls the number of receptors on the surface of neurons.
"Because more receptors mean stronger connections between brain cells, manipulating this process may one day provide a means of boosting brainpower in the hippocampus, where long-term memories are stored."
Linkhttp://www.boingboing.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi
UPDATE: BB reader Holly Beale says there's an error in the MIT News Office article quoted above. "The hippocampus isn't where long term memories are stored. There's a famous patient called HM whose hippocampus was surgically removed. He can remember things from before the surgery, but he can't form new memories. It's believed that the hippocampus is crucial for creating long term memories but not storing them."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USENIX liveblog
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DATE: 08/12/2004 10:41:26 AM
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Mitch Wagner sez, "I've been blogging the Usenix security conference here in San Diego, including a talk by EFF counsel Cindy Cohn:"
- EFF is deeply involved in projects to ensure honesty in e-voting. In California, she said, voters have the option to choose a paper ballot. "I'd like to see a significant percentage of people choose the paper in California. this will make the case to the rest of the country that this matters."
Many voting-rights advocates are urging people to sign up for absentee ballots--problem with that is that people order absentee ballots all the time, and legislators will assume the ordering is going on for normal reasons. Only people requesting paper ballots will make a case to legislators that people don't trust e-voting machines.
- EFF is also involved in a project called TechWatch, looking for technical people who want to be involved on election day, serving as, essentially, poll watchers, to document technical snafus on Election Day. More info and sign up on VerifiedVoting.org.
"I am concerned we will have some train wrecks involving the technology. We may not be able to prevent it but we can mitigate it and, more importantly, make sure it doesn't happen again."
Link
(Thanks, Mitch!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: European copyright extension: protecting Elvis to the detriment of everyone else
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DATE: 08/12/2004 10:45:28 AM
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The Index for Free Expression has a great article on the proposal to extend the European copyright on performaces for another 20 years, and the disaster this presents for the freedom of expression:
Faced for the first time with losing significant back catalogue profits, the industry is lobbying to change the law. The industry describes the law as a "loophole". In fact it is anything but.
For every one recording that has the power to reach number three in the commercial charts fifty years after its original release, there are hundreds if not thousands of tracks that do not.
Although these recordings no longer have any commercial value to their rights holders, they are of tremendous value in terms of our cultural heritage. But the mechanisms of copyright law mean that, should the European Parliament choose to heed the music industry, keeping Elvis out of the public domain for a further 45 years or even more, the King will drag down with him this huge body of commercially worthless but culturally significant work.
Link
(Thanks, Becky!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Woman dies after being "fused" to couch for six years
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DATE: 08/12/2004 10:53:45 AM
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Thirty-nine year old Gayle Laverne Grinds of Florida died after rescue workers attempted to remove her from a couch she had become attached to. They couldn't get her skin to separate from the couch, so they put the couch in a trailer and hauled her behind a truck to the hospital.
"I tried to take care of her the best I could," said 54-year-old Herman Thomas, who lived with Grinds in the duplex apartment in Golden Gate, south of Stuart. "I tried to get her to get up, but it wouldn't do no good."
He said the woman that he called his wife hadn't been off the couch for six years. No record of their marriage could be found.
"I wish I could have pulled her off the couch, but she wouldn't let me," he said, covering his face and sobbing.
Inside the home, the floor and walls were matted with feces, and trash was strewn across the floors, some which were bare concrete. Furniture was toppled, and pictures were knocked off walls.
Atlas said sheriff's detectives will look for potential "negligence issues" related to her care and death.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Nuclear Elephant shows how P2P = sales
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DATE: 08/12/2004 01:00:21 PM
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BB pal Todd Lappin sez: Here's a website for folks to register purchases they made after downloading free stuff online, to track the extent to which free downloads translate into later sales:
To wit:
"It has always been my belief that various industries have actually earned more revenue as a direct result of file sharing, and that file sharing works FOR the industry. Recent figures such as the music industry's latest earnings report have shown results contrary to what the RIAA has consistently complained about in that file sharing hurts the industry. So if you would like to contribute, click submit above. Post your merchandise, how much you paid, and why you wouldn't have bought it if you first hadn't downloaded something. No IP addresses or personal information is logged - so there's nothing to subpoena. The complete (growing) catalog is available for review by clicking here. The totals shown below are only temporary, and may be reduced later once the logs are crunched through a filter (to detect bogus entries or flooding), or as users help identify suspect or bogus entries."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: TiVo fortified by Strangeberry
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DATE: 08/12/2004 01:01:40 PM
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Damon Darlin of Business 2.0 sez: "Silicon Valley programming legend Arthur Van Hoff was a prolific coder at Sun (with almost as many patents as Bill Joy). His "Strangeberry" software will give the TiVo new powers, and it will be given away to anyone who wants to develop content on the Web. Residing on the next generation of TiVo machines, it will recognize incoming programming (JPEG images, video, MP3s, or whatever) and route it to the appropriate device in your living room." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Reason interviews John Perry Barlow
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Reason has published the best interview with John Perry Barlow I've read. He talks about becoming a reality TV star, a Democrat, and getting busted for marijuana possession at an airport.
I have grave misgivings about John Kerry, but I certainly don’t have misgivings about Kerry that equal the terror I have about another four years of Bush. What he’s done to aspects of the Constitution that are there to assure individual rights is breathtakingly bad.
...
I had a conversation with Kerry. It was pretty disheartening. I asked how he felt about civil liberties. He said, "I’m for ’em!" That’s great, but how do you feel about Section 215 of the Patriot Act? He said, "What’s that?" I said, it basically says any privately generated database is available for public scrutiny with an administrative subpoena. He says, "It says that?" I say, "You voted for it!"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A Boing Boing reader survey!
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DATE: 08/12/2004 02:01:28 PM
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As you've probably noticed, we started taking sponsorships at Boing Boing to cover the costs of hosting and help us grow and support the site. One of the things they really want to know is who our readers are, and while we think we have a pretty good idea, it's always good to go to the source. We also wanted to know what you think of our sponsor approach to date, and what we might do next. We created this little survey for those of you who want to help us and our sponsors out, by taking the time answer a few questions, you can help us ensure that the sponsors we select match your preferences. (We have a policy of only taking "wonderful" advertisers in any case!).
The final results of the survey will be published for all to see at the conclusion of the survey. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing Needs Help!
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DATE: 08/12/2004 03:08:03 PM
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Ever dreamed of working with the Happy Mutants at Boing Boing? Now's your chance. We are looking for two people to help us as we figure out the next step in our sponsorship model. First off, we're looking for a bookkeeper, ideally one who works they way we do - online and at odd hours.
Also, we're looking for a sharp office manager type who has a few hours a week to work with us keeping track of things, in particular the administrative needs of our wonderful sponsors. This is not a full time position, but a chance to freelance with us and help build out an even better Directory of Wonderful Things. If you're interested, email John at jbat at boingboing.net.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Frosted Flakes sugar dialed back to a mere 1/4
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:37:11 PM
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Kellogg's UK has responded to concerns about childhood obesity by reducing the sugar content in Frosted Flakes from 38% to 25%. So, like, a 500g box of frosted flakes is one-quarter sugar? And that's the new, improved flakes?
Aubrey Sheiham, professor of dental and public health at University College London said that products high in very refined starch were often just as bad on the index as those high in sugar.
Reducing the sugar from 38% to 25% was unlikely to help in terms of tooth decay either. "When you have very finely milled starch and sugar together the effect on teeth can be worse than sugar, perhaps because of the stickiness," he said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unbelievably obscure island has net-based newspaper
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:38:43 PM
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Ken sez,
Tristan da Cuhna is an island in the South Atlantic. It is a British dependency. At 37 degrees south by 12 west, with about 250 permanent residents who literally live on the side of a volcano, it is considered by many sailors to be the remotest town in the world.
The residents, about 100 households which may have any of seven surnames and who are all apparently related by blood, make a living from issuing exotic postage stamps which have a following in the collector market, and by lobster fishing. There is no access to the island by air, and only a few boats per year put into the notoriously dangerous harbor.
Tristan has an online newspaper now though!
Link
(Thanks, Ken!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cussin'-est winnebago promo film, ever
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:41:04 PM
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This is a (not-worksafe) video of a guy shooting an industrial film promoting a winnebago. He can't remember his lines, and every time he blows a line, he curses like a sailor. I'v enever heard the eff-word used so much in the course of describing a wholesome family vehicle.
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(Thanks Joshua!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Downhill Battle is raising cash
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:44:56 PM
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Downhill Battle -- the net-activist group that created Grey Tuesday, WhatACrappyPresent.com, Save the iPod and others -- are raising funds for the first time. They want to use the money to fund more ambitious campaigns, including creating PSAs that advocate increased media diversity and sending them on CD to independent radio stations and flyering concerts. I just gave 'em fifty bucks.
Link
(Thanks, Nicholas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in Danish
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:47:33 PM
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Kim Pedersen has translated my Microsoft DRM talk into Danish.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's WorldCon schedule
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DATE: 08/12/2004 09:48:08 PM
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Well, I'm off for a week-and-chage-worth of holidays in a couple hours -- I really need it! I'll see you again in ten days or so.
Meanwhile, here's my schedule for the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston this Labor Day -- hope to see you:
* THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2:
4PM: Unlimited Access: Issues involving unlicensed access to spectrum. With Harold Feld from the the Media Access Project.
* FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3:
10AM: Group reading from The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
11AM: Locus Award ceremony
5PM: Drunk on Technology: With Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Charlie Stross
* SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4:
12PM: The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age? With Charlie Petit, Daniel Grotta, Steve Miller, and James M. Turner
1PM: Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security, and Privacy. With Joseph Lazzaro, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Don Sakers
2:30-3PM: Charlie Stross and I will be signing our new short novel, Rapture of the Nerds, just published in the new issue of Argosy Magazine, at the Borderlands Books table in the Dealers' Room
5PM: Postcapitalist Social Mechanisms. With M. M. Buckner, David Friedman, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Charlie Stross
* SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5:
10:30AM Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. A recapitulation of my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference
4PM: Reading
5PM: Sign at the Asimov's Magazine table in the Dealer's Room
* MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6:
11AM: Kaffeeklatsch
12-12:30: International Copyright Issues
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dunhill's iPod case
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DATE: 08/12/2004 10:43:57 PM
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The Dunhill cigarette company has made a cigarette-case-style case for the iPod, which, in classinc Dunhill hyperbole, they describe as "ergonomic and luxurious." One thing I've learned since moving to the UK: anytime something is described as "luxurious" (i.e. "Luxury hot cocoa") it is anything but. Nevertheless, the Dunhill cases look pretty rad.
Link
(via Ben Hammersley)
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TITLE: Remember San Francisco's gay marriages? Forget it
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DATE: 08/12/2004 10:54:20 PM
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Remember last winter's rush of gay marriages at San Francisco's city hall, following on from the mayoral decree that gays may marry? Remember the rock-concert campouts, the nationwide outpouring of support, the endless parade of joyous images of happily married couples?
Forget it.
The California Supreme Court has annulled every one of those marriages. From ephermal.org:
"Molly McKay is the Executive Director of Marriage Equality California. This is a photo I took of her at the release party for We Do. She's on page 23, wearing that same dress, getting married.
"For years - years - she and her partner, Dr. Davina Kotulski, came to City Hall on Valentine's Day to apply for a marriage license. It was their own quiet protest. And every year they were turned away. Until this year.
"This year, six short months ago, she was finally allowed to marry Davina. And today, thanks to the fantastically stupid ruling of the California Supreme Court, that marriage is null and void."
Link
In response to my post yesterday about the how big backpacks are a real pain, BB reader John Watson says: "Carrying children around on one hip, very common among parents, can cause similar problems, spawning solutions like the Hipseat," essentially a cantilevered shelf worn on the waist. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Big Brother goes to the Olympics
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DATE: 08/13/2004 08:33:16 AM
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New Scientist has an article looking at the US$312 million surveillance system installed for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The eyes and ears consist of 1,000 high-res and infrared videocameras peppering the city. Cell and landline telephone calls are being recorded, converted into text, and "scanned for phrases that could be linked to terrorist activity." The software's developers say it speaks Greek, English, Arabic, Farsi, and other major languages.
(John Pike, an analyst with the defence think-tank Global Security) believes other undisclosed measures are undoubtedly in place, such as face recognition from video footage. He says such surveillance technology has already proven its worth in intelligence gathering. "They're basically the sort of stuff the National Security Agency has been using for some time," he told New Scientist. "And they seem to place great faith in it."
The human security is massive as well--there are seven security people for every athlete.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Justice Dept. ignores fact that sentencing guidelines increase crime
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DATE: 08/13/2004 08:51:08 AM
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Paul Cooper sez: "Robert X. Cringely discusses a study by Michael Block and Fred Nold commissioned by the Department of Justice in 1982 that found that the proposed sentencing guidelines would actually increase crime, not deter it. Of course, DoJ ignored the study, implemented the sentencing guidelines, and gave us the prison system we have today." Link
UPDATE Glenn T. Costello sez: "For completeness, you might want to mention that whatever the study projected, crime has in fact, fallen." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ABC News story on Cryptome.org
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DATE: 08/13/2004 08:54:49 AM
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John Young's Cryptome-- an online repository for publicly available information -- has long been on my short list of essential 'Net bookmarks. The site archives "material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents," among other things. This ABC News story details a recent incident in which Department of Homeland Security officials paid Young a visit, expressing concern about some of the content he'd posted online. It's not the first time he's been visited by federal authorities over that issue, and I'd wager it won't be the last.
Officials questioned Young about information he had posted about the 2004 Democratic National Convention, including satellite photos of the convention site and the location of specific police barricades referred to on the site as "a complete joke." In response to a complaint, two special agents from the FBI's counterterrorism office in New York City interviewed Young in November 2003. "They said, 'Why didn't you call us about this? Why are you telling the public?' And we said, 'Because it's out there and you can see it. You folks weren't doing anything,' " Young told ABC News.
The agents, according to Young, stressed they knew that nothing on the site was illegal. Young added: "They said, 'What we'd like you to do, if you're approached by anyone that you think intends to harm the United States, we're asking you to let us know that.' "
Link to news story, and did you know Cryptome is also served up in tasty RSS flavor? (via Joi)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Apple Tablet or something.... else?
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DATE: 08/13/2004 09:02:13 AM
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Apple has apparently filed for a design trademark on a handheld computer resembling an iBook without the keyboard. From The Register:
"Hints that Apple might be working on such a product emerged in 2003 when a source close to Taiwanese contract manufacturer Quanta claimed that the company had been hired by Apple to build what was dubbed a 'wireless display...
The device is certainly a logical extension of what it's been doing with iTunes and AirPort Express. While its mini wireless access point is good for streaming audio from a host Mac to a hi-fi, it lacks a local control unit. It's tempting to view this latest design filing as the basis for just such a device.'"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: First cellphone-based porn mag?
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DATE: 08/13/2004 09:59:52 AM
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While a host of mobile carriers in Europe already offer adult content to subscribers, Brit porn auteur Ben Dover (nee Lindsay Honey) and tech firm Symbios Group say the digital porn mag they're launching this month in the UK will be the first such publication designed specifically for mobile delivery. Link to AVN article, Link to press release, and Fleshbot has more.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Reviewers needed for Make magazine
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DATE: 08/14/2004 12:22:56 PM
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As I announced a couple of weeks ago, I'm editing a soon-to-be launched magazine for O'Reilly Media called Make.
One section of the magazine will have users' reviews of tools, software, gadgets, and instructional books, magazines, websites, mailing lists, videos, etc. If you have come across something like this that you like a lot and are interested in writing about it for Make, please email me with the details.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Battelle on Searchstreams
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DATE: 08/14/2004 01:01:54 PM
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Great entry on Battelle's Searchblog about the value of recording the journey of finding information on the Web.
That's when I remembered As We May Think, Vannevar Bush's famous essay in The Atlantic. I had read it earlier in my research, and was struck not by the idea of the Memex, which is well understood, but by Bush's explication of the problem - that knowledge and learning has become so complicated, so layered, so inefficient, that it is near impossible for anyone to be a generalist, in the sense Aristotle was. Bush's answer to this problem was the Memex, of course, but what I find interesting is the mechanism by which the Memex is made potent - the mechanism for capturing the traces of a researcher's discovery through the Memex's corpus, and storing those traces as intelligence so the next researcher can learn from them and build upon them.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 802.11n standard submitted for approval
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DATE: 08/14/2004 08:38:42 PM
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A new Wi-Fi standard that promises faster WLANS is one step closer to becoming reality:
The WWiSE (worldwide spectrum efficiency) group said it has developed technology for review by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11n task group, which is overseeing a next-generation Wi-Fi standard capable of sustaining data throughput exceeding 100Mbps.
The proposal is based on MIMO-OFDM (multiple input, multiple output-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) technology, which achieves higher speeds by employing two antennas at each end of the signal (one for transmitting, one for receiving) instead of one at each terminus.
Link
There is some degree of conflict over exactly how to approach developing the standard, though -- this BBC news story has more. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sweet new espresso machine. From outer space
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DATE: 08/15/2004 05:30:42 AM
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The new "fully programmable" Granos espresso machine from Bodum looks highly badass. At US $499, it costs highly badass, too. (Thanks, Frank Ozaki)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Recycle your old electronics at Office Depot
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DATE: 08/15/2004 05:34:47 AM
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Office Depot is doing a promotional event with HP in which the store will offer free electronics recycling through Labor Day for residents of the continental US. Drop off your old TVs, monitors, CPUs, printers, PDAs, etc., for no charge, and Office Depot will deliver the e-junk to HP for recycling. Link (Thanks, Matt)
Update: BoingBoing reader Jeff says, "People near Portland, Oregon have a better choice: FreeGeek is a not-for-profit promoting reuse and responsible recycling by refurbishing computers and giving them away, and recycling responsibly the ancient and the broken. OfficeDepot is just recycling, and it's unclear what percentage won't go into a landfill because it's not cost-effective to sell as material."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Only 25% of condoms used "properly" in India
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DATE: 08/15/2004 05:44:17 AM
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India's government began distributing free condoms in the '60s to stem population growth, and they're made available today for HIV/AIDS prevention. But according to a recently-released report, only a quarter of the 1.5 billion condoms manufactured each year in India are "properly utilised":
According to two university reports, rural villagers have used them as disposable water containers to wash, after relieving themselves in the fields. India's military have covered gun and tank barrels with condoms as protection against dust.
Of the 891 million condoms meant to be handed out free, a considerable proportion were acquired by road-building contractors who mixed them with concrete and tar and used the mixture to construct roads, rendering road surfaces smooth and resistant to cracks. Builders spread a bed of condoms beneath cement plastering on roofs, ingeniously preventing water seepage during the monsoon rains.
Weavers in Varanasi used around 200,000 condoms a day to lubricate their looms and to polish the gold and silver thread used to embroider the saris they produced. Sari maker Yusuf Bhai said they purchased the condoms from agents, who reportedly acquired them from agencies involved in family planning and AIDS prevention schemes.
Above, a Thai model "improperly utilizes" condoms in the form of a couture cap. Link to registration-threatening news article (Thanks, Darren)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BSA mascot shares DNA with Disney "Beagle Boys"?
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DATE: 08/15/2004 06:19:24 AM
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Oooooh, the [alleged] irony. Seth Finkelstein says:
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced an
"anti-piracy" site, with a
kids' mascot ferret, and a
contest to
call it a name.
The BSA weasel creature reminded me of something I'd seen before. Something shady, disreputable, criminal. Finally, I remembered! The BSA weasel looks like he's a member of a criminal gang in Walt Disney Comics, the
"Beagle
Boys".
Update: More unintended irony? BoingBoing reader Bitey says, "The scientific name for ferret, Mustela putorius furo, translates as 'little fur thief.' This references the animals love of stealing toys, socks, food and anything they can move themselves, and dragging them away to stash in their lair."
Link
Update 2: BoingBoing pal Gareth Branwyn says, "This ain't the first time that BSA's spokesbots have shared DNA with other people's intellectual property. See Bruce Sterling's WiredBlog posting about the uncanny similarities between Kata Sutra, Mark Frauenfelder's cartoon character that appreared in BoingBoing and Beyond Cyberpunk in the early '90s, and BSA's "Meg A. Byte:"
If you saw the Beyond Cyberpunk comic book that Mark and I did, the similarities would be even more apparent. We're not accusing them of STEALING or anything, but still..."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A good fit
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DATE: 08/15/2004 10:05:10 AM
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BB pal Vann Hall points us to this brilliant KY Jelly advertisement that, unfortunately, is not officially sanctioned by Johnson & Johnson. It should be though! Link (via Adrants)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wiretapping the Web
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DATE: 08/15/2004 11:11:23 AM
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A thought-provoking piece from Newsweek's Brian Braiker on the trend toward increased web surveillance:
[T]wo recent legal developments have raised further fears among Web privacy advocates in the United States. In one case, the Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 last week to prohibit businesses from offering broadband or Internet phone service unless they provide Uncle Sam with backdoors for wiretapping access. And in a separate decision last month, a federal appeals court decided that e-mail and other electronic communications are not protected under a strict reading of wiretap laws. Taken together, these decisions may make it both legally and technologically easier to wiretap Internet communications, some legal experts told NEWSWEEK. "All the trends are toward easier to tap," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The FCC's plans to require Internet-based phone and broadband services to be engineered for easy wiretapping is a response to a request from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies. The proposal would bring Internet-based phone providers in line with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires "telecommunications" carriers to make their networks wiretap-friendly. The FCC says the government must still go through all of the necessary legal steps to obtain the authority to wiretap; CALEA simply makes it technologically easier to do. "This will not have an effect on whether there is appropriate lawful authority -- that remains the same," says FCC spokesman Julius Knapp. "All this really is addressing is whether the carrier is required to have the capability to provide the information that's covered by a court order."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Vacation Zen
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DATE: 08/16/2004 06:31:35 AM
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1 minute audio vacations
entrances to hell
trips to blackholes
voyage to hollow earth
7 deadly sins nyc tour
rock 'n' roll holiday
ruins of detroit
postcards from the road
roadside america
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Author accuses Shyamalan of plagiarism over "Village," audiences accuse film of sucking
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DATE: 08/16/2004 06:47:45 AM
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Writer-director M Night Shyamalan (Sixth Sense, Signs) may face legal action over accusations that his latest project, The Village, was plagiarized from a children's book. The source in question: "Running Out of Time" by Margaret Peterson Haddix, published by Simon and Schuster in 1995. While the matter of plagiarism is open to debate, evidently the movie's suck factor is not. Last week, one blogger/culture crit pal was so distressed at the stinker he'd paid two digits to see in a Manhattan theater that he text-messaged me halfway through -- "OMG THIS IS THE WORST MOVIE EVER." He was not alone in this assessment. Link (via MeFi, which includes a handy list of other films accused of plagiarism in recent years)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Stormtrooper Fairyland Robot Wedding
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DATE: 08/16/2004 07:23:57 AM
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If BoingBoing had a society page, I suppose this would be it. An online photo gallery from the wedding of Robolympics founder David Calkins with Simone Davalos of the Long Now Foundation includes this surreal geek snapshot. Ceremonies took place earlier this month at Children's Fairyland, a park in Oakland, and a bevy of Stormtroopers were in the hizzouse. May the happy couple live long and prosper. Link to full-size image, and links to more more more photos.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: GE's Fantastic Voyage
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DATE: 08/16/2004 08:41:08 AM
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Over at the NanoBot, Howard Lovy writes about General Electric's new "Fantastic Voyage" television commercial:
"General Electric is working on real-life nanotechnology, but somebody in its ad department knows that lectures on the company's R&D in nanocomposites and nanostructured optoelectronics will leave viewers running for the fridge or the remote. Instead, it chose to try for the imagination, using cultural icons and humor."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Another stimulating advertisement
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DATE: 08/16/2004 08:56:36 AM
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BB reader Nate sends us another subtle advertisement for a sex lubricant. Unlike the KY Jelly ad I posted yesterday, this Manix print advertisement for the French market is real and an award winner. Link (via essays and effluvia)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Helicopter Fuck
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DATE: 08/16/2004 10:00:58 AM
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Please don't try this at home. You may have spotted Japanese web oddity Micky Yanai's -- um -- work on Rotten.com. Now, Fleshbot has more on "the most creative porn actor who invented 'Helicopter Fuck!'," as one fan-site enthusiastically proclaims. Male pattern baldness mullet. Bad '80s novelty sunglasses. Spandex. Sequined American flag codpiece. If that doesn't add up to buzzkill, I don't know what does. Link to Fleshbot item, which includes pointers to "Helicopter Fertish" (sic) galleries. NSFW, duh.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RoboPod
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DATE: 08/16/2004 10:12:01 AM
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An iPod cradle in the form of a friendly robot. Link
(Thanks, Scott!)
Update:
BoingBoing reader Spencer Cross fact-checks our asses: "That's not just a friendly robot, it's actually in the shape of a Kubrick. Kubricks are highly collectible, Playskool-like action figures manufactured by a Japanese company named Medicom. They're usually licensed characters from cult film and comics. Toy collectors are crazy for them."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Gilmore vs. Ashcroft begins today
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DATE: 08/16/2004 10:12:52 AM
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Bill sez: "On the 16th of August 2004, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals begins work on the Gilmore vs. Ashcroft case. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel freely in their own country -- and the exposure of 'secret law' for what it is: an abomination.
"The man who is fighting the good fight is named John Gilmore. John made his fortune as a programmer and entrepreneur in the software industry. Whereas most people in his position would have moved to a tropical island and lived a life of luxury, John chose to use his wealth to protect and defend the US Constitution.
"On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. At the airport, he was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his 'papers' and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn't be allowed to read it.
"He hasn't flown in his own country since."
Another program which depends on showing ID is the Watch List and No-Fly List. Airlines are issued these lists by the federal government and are required to request ID from their passengers in order to check them against the lists. This has resulted in countless citizens with names similar to bad people being harrassed, arrested, or prevented from travelling by air—including every person named 'David Nelson'.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Oliver Sacks and his iridium ingot
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DATE: 08/16/2004 10:40:18 AM
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George Lazenby wrote a must-read Live Journal entry about the famous neurologist/author Oliver Sacks and his iridium fetish. Sacks had several buttons of super-dense iridium that he wanted to melt into a single ingot. Iridium has a very high melting temperature (2,446 C), so Lazenby and Sacks went to a company that has an electron beam furnace. The "batsh*t insane Russsians" who worked there melted the iridium buttons while LazenbyTheodore Gray* shot video, which you can see at hisLazenby's site.
A few months ago, Oliver bought a kilo of these buttons, and kept them in, what was for a while, the heaviest 6 fl. oz. jar of current jam in the universe. While I was up there, he gave me one of these buttons, which I promptly nearly killed myself with. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So Oliver has these buttons in this current jam jar. The next logical step is to make the buttons one with each other, to get as close as possible to theoretical density. How to achieve this? Max's arc furnace can only fuse 5 gram buttons (poorly) into irregular buttons of about 50 grams. No, this project calls for industry, with its pumping pistons, its smoking smokestacks and desolated landscapes. Enter ********** [company name deleted]. Exeunt pumping pistons, smoking smokestacks and desolated landscapes. This, is in fact, the setting for the most advanced high purity metal processing plant in the United States.
UPDATE George sez: Thanks for posting the story to BB, there's just one thing, I didn't shoot video or take any pictures, that was all the work of Theodore Gray. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: I hate this digital video recorder: Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8000
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DATE: 08/16/2004 12:31:03 PM
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I can't begin to say how much I despise the Explorer 8000 digital video recorder made by Scientific-Atlanta. That's the system Time-Warner gave us when my wife signed us up for cable service a few weeks ago.
I was out of town on the day they were scheduled to install it, so I told my wife to make sure the DVR was real TiVo, because I'd played with a TiVo belonging to my friend, and thought it was just about perfect. The service tech came and told her it was real TiVo. When I got back and saw that the ugly box didn't have a happy bipedal TV set logo on it, I was disappointed, but willing to give it a try.
The first thing I noticed was the crappy user interface. Unlike TiVo, there's no audible signal when you press a button. And because it takes a couple of seconds after pressing a button for anything to happen on the screen, I often press the button twice, thinking the first press didn't go through. What happens when you press a button twice is that you see the result on the screen for a split second before it disappears, because the second press cancels the first press. That means I have to press the button a third time, and wait another mini-eternity for something to happen.
So many other things suck about the user interface that I can't list them all. But the main UI problems include lack of keyword scheduling, way-too-slow fast-forwarding, no alpha character entry, and the inability to see how many hours of programming are available on the hard drive.
This last flaw hit home when the machine suddenly stopped recording shows. I tried everything I could to get it to work, including rebooting the system and calling Time Warner Cable customer service. They told me that they'd have to replace the unit, which would take five days.
Five days later a service technician came with a new box. I asked him if this problem was common, because Google returns a lot of pages from people who think the Explorer 8000 is a piece of junk. He said the system is fine as long as you didn't store too many shows on it. If you fill up the hard drive, the system freezes up, and there's no way a user can undo it. But how do you know when the disk is close to being full if there's no gage to tell you? The service tech's answer: "don't keep very many shows on the hard drive." That pretty much defeats the purpose of a DVR, doesn't it?
He also warned me not to put anything on top of it, as it was notorious for overheating and seizing up. I told him I was considering TiVo, but he insisted the Explorer 8000 was better than TiVo. How so, I asked? "We will give you a new one if it breaks," he said.
Our second Explorer 8000 is also a piece of junk. Like the first one, it regularly fails to record requested shows. But this one goes even further in its attempt to aggravate me by freezing up while playing back a show, and pixelating and jittering like a lost episode of Max Headroom.
Yesterday I was at Best Buy, and I noticed that 40-hour TiVos were on sale for $50 after rebate. I bought one and set it up. What a difference! If TiVo were a beverage, it'd be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old.
I can't wait to get the Explorer 8000 out of my house. Why did Time Warner make a deal with this company?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bruce Sterling's keynote from SIGGRAPH '04
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DATE: 08/16/2004 01:01:03 PM
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A BoingBoing exclusive: the full text of Bruce Sterling's brilliant keynote speech delivered last week at the 2004 edition of SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. Snip:
Steve Jobs is a pioneer of personal computing and the head of Pixar. Apple is the biggest vendor here. It's hard to get any more SIGGRAPH than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has neuroendocrinal pancreatic cancer. That's because, like everybody else in the world, like you and like me, Steve Jobs is carrying a load of carcinogens in his flesh. Silicon Valley, as an industrial clean-up site, is rather well known for its mutagens.
The disturbing substances that are in the body of this captain of your industry, they should not be in there. They are wasted resources, they are systemic inefficiencies, they are externalities. We need ways to keep these substances organized and contained, and, eventually, designed out of the production system entirely. Steve is sick for physical reasons, for metabolic reasons. We may not know the exact chains of cause and effect, but there is one; he's not sick because some dark angel blew on his dice wrong. He has effluent, byproducts of industry, inside his body.
It's painful. But we need to understand that our bloodstreams are our dumping grounds. So are our lungs and our livers. If we could visualize that, if we knew and could prove what had gone wrong inside of ourselves, if we could put a digital medical imaging screen on our bellies, our lungs and our livers, and make those invisible problems visible, then everything would become different. If that knowledge was attached to every object in our possession, the objects that were killing us would vanish quickly.
That wouldn't be easy to do. But in the year 2004 it is no longer unimaginable. It could be done. It's possible to live in a cleaner way. We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary. Those who know, know. Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us. Such acts of evil must be combated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Link to complete text. Photo at left from a series of snapshots I took of Mr. Sterling earlier this year in LA.
(Thanks, Bruce!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing reader survey results
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DATE: 08/16/2004 01:07:46 PM
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Thanks to the 3360 people who took our Boing Boing reader survey! We will use this information for good, not evil. Here are the results. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Peter Bagge on contemporary art
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DATE: 08/16/2004 02:15:47 PM
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Peter Bagge's excellent 4-page comic strip rant on the state of contemporary art, in Reason. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Ticketek's PR blunder
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DATE: 08/16/2004 04:40:51 PM
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Alan of halfpie.net slammed Ticketek's website ( a New Zealand company) and a Ticketek employee, posing as a semi-literate Ticketek customer, posted a note on Alan's blog, defending Ticketek. Alan exposed "Simone," who then quietly slithered away.
I have to disagree with u all i stumbled onto this website by mistake and i cant belive all the rubbish im reading ticketek is a great web site and service who have continued to give me great service over the years there is always somethinh for people like you to moan about so get a life!!!
- posted by Simone at August 10, 2004 03:28 PM
=====
Well of course you would say that, Simone - seeing as you work at Ticketek.
Everytime a comment is made on this site the IP address of the commenter is logged. Yours is 210.54.93.30, which by an uncanny co-incidence belongs to auck.ticketek.co.nz. Funnily enough it looks like you came to this site through "accidentally" entering "I hate Ticketek" into Google, the same search that has been used by you and your Australian counterparts to find this page several times in the past month.
Your ignorance in these matters is amusing and sad and unfortunately appears par for the course with your company. Your rather ill-advised comment further reinforces the lack of respect I have Ticketek and further demonstrates why your website - and your business - should be avoided as much as possible.
Have a nice day.
- posted by Alan at August 10, 2004 05:07 PM
Link (Thanks, Brett!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Explosive sink and toilet plunger is a gift from the gods
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DATE: 08/16/2004 05:02:33 PM
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I went to Home Depot over the weekend to buy two dollar's worth of hardware (pins for door hinges) and walked out with over $100 worth of stuff, of course. My prime pruchase was something called a KleerDrain instant drain opener, which combines the fun of explosives with the satisfaction of unclogging a sink.
I was a little wary of spending $30 on this gadget, which looks like a cross-between a plunger and a pogo stick. But Home Depot had one of those videos running next to the set-up, which showed clogged sink after clogged sink giving up its precious bolus of greasy hair to the explosive force of a CO2 cartridge unleashing its entire payload at once. Watching the guy on the demo using the device, with its rifle-like kickback and puff of condensed carbon dioxide gas, mesmerized me. The next thing I knew, I was racing home with my new KleerDrain.
I could hardly wait to use it on a slow-draining sink in the bathroom. I duct taped the overflow drain on the sink, and inserted a CO2 cartridge into the Kleer Drain. I screwed on the rubber cone and then pressed it into the drain opening.
WHAM! A shower of gray grime flew out of somewhere and splashed against the walls, mirror and ceiling. I wiped the junk off my face and turned on the faucet. The water whooshed down the drain, ending with a nice sucking sound, like it was wishing there were more water it could dispose of.
I think I'm in love. Time to stock up on more CO2 cartridges. Link
UPDATE Chris sez: Just a quick note regarding your drain cleaning story. I own a device called a Profi Pipe Cleaner. It is basically the same thing, but you pump it up and pull the trigger to release the blast, rather than having to buy CO2 cartridges. It has much the same effect, as did watching the demo on QVC.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Carroll's Jabberwocky as ActionScript code
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DATE: 08/17/2004 05:26:58 AM
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These enterprising geeks have translated Lewis Carroll's classic poem Jabberwocky (the first poem I ever memorised!) into ActionScript.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness
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DATE: 08/17/2004 08:43:01 AM
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Alex sez: [Here's] a site consisting of scans from "wacky, bizarre, surreal and otherwise strange examples of technical documentation". Submissions are welcome. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Microbatteries for wireless sensor networks
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DATE: 08/17/2004 09:06:32 AM
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My latest TheFeature article is about ways to make tiny batteries last for years.
At Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., researchers are trying to make a nuclear-powered battery with a very long life span. They've built prototype batteries that use a speck of nickel-63 (a radioactive isotope) to vibrate a tiny cantilever. The cantilever could be made from a piece of piezoelectric material, which could supply power to the sensor. Nickel-63 has a half-life of around 100 years, so it could provide power for several decades. Nukes make people nervous, but there's not enough radioactive material in the prototype to cause a mini-meltdown -- it's comparable to the amount found in a smoke detector. Still, researchers acknowledge that they have a perception problem to overcome.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Woodring animated
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DATE: 08/17/2004 09:33:37 AM
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Ever since I interviewed artist Jim Woodring back in 1995 for the bOING bOING Happy Mutant Handbook, I've been enamored with his surreal comix inspired by his childhood hallucinations and "psychological malfunctions." Now, Taruto Fuyama has animated Woodring's Frank character in a beautiful piece that somehow manages to perfectly express the dreamy tone and emotion of the comic. (Someone else's attempt here.) Fuyama won a Prize of Excellence for the work in the Japan Media Arts Festival. The animation is online in Real format. From the "Reason for the Award":
"...the greatest appeal of this work is that it had successfully expressed unique "newness" by combining 3D-CG and classical cartoon-like design. Alien creatures created by pasting comic frames to 3D-CG in a Gothic manner generate uncomfortable feelings, and these uncomfortable feelings that color the entire work feature this work's contemporary sensitivity."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mexican cops get themselves chipped
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DATE: 08/17/2004 09:41:37 AM
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The government of Mexico is RFID-tagging police in order to combat record high levels of kidnapping and disappearances. About 170 officers are said to have been subcutaneously tagged in their arms with microchips about the size of a rice grain of rice. The chip grants them access to a crime database and becomes a tracking tool in case they're kidnapped.
The first-of-its-kind step shows the lengths to which the Mexican government will go to try to bring safety to the streets. Crime - and how to fight it - has long been a challenge here. Kidnapping is spreading, reaching beyond traditional wealthy targets to the middle class. And in a country where only a quarter of all crimes are reported because of fear that bribed cops will expose informants, securing access to sensitive documents has become a priority.
The chip comes from VeriChip, a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Fla. The device is nonremovable (though it can be deactivated) and is slipped under the skin in seconds via a syringe-like device. The chip costs $200, plus $50 a year, in addition to the scanner and software. The technology has existed for years and was originally developed to let pet owners identify stray animals.
The chip sits dormant under the skin and is only "awakened" by a scanner using radio- frequency identification, or RFID. The scanner emits a signal that powers the chip, allowing it to send its identification number. Then, depending on the configuration of the database that is hooked up to the scanner, a door is opened or a database unlocked, the way an ID card allows employees into the office.
Link to news article, and Link to Verichip home (via politech)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New Stingray
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DATE: 08/17/2004 09:45:54 AM
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Schwinn has re-issued its original Sting-Ray street bike. The 2004 models are available with the classic banana seat frame or in a new chopped Harley-esque low-rider design. Too bad they don't offer a sissy bar option, probably a safety decision to avoid encouraging Evil Knievel-style wheelies. Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Breakdancing photos
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DATE: 08/17/2004 09:56:26 AM
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BoingBoing reader Paul McEvoy saw this series of photos I shot for an NPR radio segment about urban dance competitions -- and points us to his own gallery of "pictures of breakdancers on the street in Boston and Cambridge." Nice shots, Paul! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Warren Ellis moblogs from TV production set
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DATE: 08/17/2004 10:38:54 AM
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Warren Ellis is blogging from the set of GLOBAL FREQUENCY. This graphic novel of Warren's is becoming a WB TV series; shooting is under way in Canada and the end result is slated to air in March, 2005. From time to time, he lifts his head out of that trough of cold Red Bull long enough to futurephone a blog entry about how bizarre the whole experience is. The result? A magnificently good online read. His permalinks are b0rked right now, and this may have something to do with the fact he's posting from his Treo -- so just go to the main page, find August 11's post, and work your way forward in time from there. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecam pics accepted as court evidence in China
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DATE: 08/17/2004 10:57:22 AM
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It was inevitable:
Beijing Haidian People's Court yesterday held a session in a case that involves Mr. Wu Mingming, a furniture manufacturer, who had bilked two students' parents of about RMB180000 by pretending he was a secretary of an Education Minister in China. One of the students submitted a photo taken with a mobile phone as evidence. The photo is a small one, but it shows one of the parents handing money to the defendant, Mr. Wu. The parent said he took the photo because Mr. Wu refused to give him an invoice, and he was afraid he would be cheated.
So far, no judgment has been made in the case. This is the first documented time that mobile phone photos have been submitted as evidence in a court in Beijing.
Link (Thanks, James Tyre!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to get something on Boing Boing
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DATE: 08/17/2004 11:00:46 AM
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A quick reminder of two things:
1. I'm on holidays this week
2. I never blog stuff that's emailed to me. If you're interested in seeing something on Boing Boing, use the Submit a Site form.
Thanks!
Cory
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Why I love the intarweb, part umptybillion: pho soup blogs
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DATE: 08/17/2004 11:30:43 AM
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A weblog all about the yummy Vietnamese soup known as pho. Meat, spices, noodles, fresh herbs, and magical broth. When it's really good, it's like an angel up in heaven just peed into your bowl. This foodstuff is so versatile and bitchin', you can even get your Atkins on by just asking your waiter to hold the noodles. Genius, I know! A Vietnamese-American software developer pal once tried to teach me how to say the word properly -- most Americans butcher the word into something that sounds like foe. He told me, "Just say 'fuck' without the 'ck,' but try sort of curl your voice up in pitch and tone a bit at the end." I never got the phonics right, but I still dig the pho. Link (Thanks, Joshua)
Update: BoingBoing reader John Horner says, "Whoever told you how to pronounce pho was making it all too difficult. The comma stuck in the side of the O makes it an ur sound and the question mark above it means it's pronounced as a question: fur?. Imagine yourself as an animal rights activist presented with a fur coat. My wife is Vietnamese, if that helps, and Vietnamese is a bit of a mess orthographically because it was translated from Chinese ideograms into French by a Portuguese guy."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Verizon customer sadism, how may I torment you?"
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DATE: 08/17/2004 12:40:26 PM
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In his latest Good Experience newsletter, Mark Hurst describes his not-so-good experience with Verizon's customer service department:
Rep 1: "Uhh, Mr. Hurst, looks like there's a wiring issue. I'll
connect you with the DSL Office." (put on hold)
Rep 2: "No, it's not a wiring issue. The problem is that there's
someone else's name on your account, and we have to reset your
entire account to clear it. I'll connect you with someone who'll do
that for you." (put on hold)
Rep 3: "I have no idea what they're talking about. 'Reset your
entire account' - what did they mean by that? I'm going to put you
on hold..."
At some point during the interminable hold, the call was dropped
(either by Verizon or my AT&T-powered cell phone) and I called back,
starting over again. I explained my issue to the new rep (#4), and
asked to speak to a manager. She agreed, and sent me to... a brand
new service rep (#5), not a manager, who delivered the punch line:
"I'm sorry, we have no record of your phone number."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mary-Kate Olsen's "Crack-Man"
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DATE: 08/17/2004 04:18:52 PM
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Link to Flash game by Liquid Generation (via Defamer)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Earthlink's crazy-talking support staff
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DATE: 08/17/2004 04:30:41 PM
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It looks like Earthlink has hired performance artists to staff its live online help department. Look at the fine job "Val P" did in pretending to be a gobbledegook-spewing support worker. Matt, who only wants Earthlink to send him a modem, says he has read it twice and still can't make sense of it.
Val P: I am sorry, but the tracking number is not generated yet.
Matt: WHAT?
Matt: This was supposed to have been shipped over
a week ago
Val P: The tracking number available is 1Z6R1W530240197995.
Matt: and it says that it was shipped or billed on
July 27
Matt: 2nd day air
Matt: it's Aug 9
Val P: Yes, you are correct.
Matt: well why hasn't it been shipped, this is
getting ridiculous
Val P: But the tracking number for the new modem is not generated. As
the shipping method is in 2 day, it should be generated in 2 days.
Matt: so it still hasn't been shipped?
Val P: I am sorry, it is not yet shipped.
Matt: why?????????
Val P: The request has been sent to the appropriate department to send
you the kit. I request you to wait for 2 days.
Matt: this is getting ridiculous, it has now been
almost a month since I had service and at least 2 if not 3 weeks since
the new modem was requested and supposed to have been shipped out
Val P: I am sorry for the inconvenience caused to you in this regard.
Matt: are you able to look up the trouble ticket
number on this complaint? i do not have it handy and would like to
discuss this over the phone with someone
Val P: Kindly hold on, while I check it.
Val P: Thank you for being on hold.
Val P: I see that a new request has been sent to the appropriate
department on 08/05/04 to send you the new kit. I suggest you to wait
for 2 to 3 days until you receive the kit.
Matt: an additional 2-3 days? from today?
Val P: No, it is from the date the request has been sent.
Matt: today is the 9th
Matt: 8/5 plus 2-3 days would be the 7th or 8th
Val P: Yes, you are correct.
Matt: so why isn't there a modem here, or at the
very least a tracking number?
Val P: I request you to wait for 2 days please as the request is
already sent.
Matt: so not from the 5th but from today
Val P: Yes please.
Val P: Let me know if you have any further issues to help you with.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Watchmen comic remixes
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DATE: 08/18/2004 08:58:03 AM
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So wrong: Something Awful re-captions selections from Watchmen.
Link
(thanks, Zed)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Antarctic blog picks, including South Pole co-ed Jell-o wrestling
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DATE: 08/18/2004 09:02:47 AM
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BoingBoing reader and South Pole resident F. Scott Robert points us to some short story entries on his Antarctic weblog:
* Presumably crazed from winter darkness, the station manager at South Pole punishes crewmember for Photoshop know-how: Link
* Winter Jello-wrestling at McMurdo Station: Link
* The Antarctic Scurvy Awareness Program, in which I offer rewards to Antarcticans for contracting scurvy: Link
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NFG Games' QR Code Generator
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DATE: 08/18/2004 09:09:42 AM
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BoingBoing reader Lawrence says:
In Japan the QRCode is becoming wildly popular, for everyone with a celphone has a camera that can read these 2D barcodes and inst-o-magically input pre-formatted emails, contacts, URLs and even random text. I've put together a script, suitable for Mozilla sidebar or Opera panel fun, that generates QRCodes for any purpose, including Vodafone + DoCoMo (I-mode) formatted shortcuts. Create and share - they're like modern hieroglyphics!
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What are the cool kids in Harajuku wearing?
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DATE: 08/18/2004 09:16:49 AM
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Glad you asked. Link to an online photo gallery with street snapshots from Harajuku station in Tokyo. (Thanks, Todd!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iraqi heavy metal band
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DATE: 08/18/2004 09:17:05 AM
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Looks like they've found those weapons of mass destruction. WSJ article about Iraqi heavy metal outfit Acrassicauda, and what life is like trying to obliterate audiences with satanic soundwaves after the fall of Saddam.
The members of Acrassicauda honed their English by singing along to black-market Megadeth and Metallica CDs. They developed their stage moves by copying what they saw on pirated videotapes of American rock concerts. Now they're learning a different lesson: the difficulties of reviving culture and entertainment in a society ripped apart by war.
The four members of Acrassicauda, which means Black Scorpion in Latin, hope they can prove just as resilient. The young men -- Mr. Talal, bassist Faris al-Lateef, drummer Marwan Mohammad Riyak and guitarist Tony Aziz -- met as high-school students and formed the band, along with another member, in 2000. Scions of prominent families, they were drawn together by their love of Western heavy-metal bands like Slayer and Judas Priest, which appealed to their feelings of isolation and disillusionment.
"It's about feeling powerless and lonely and wanting to scream out because no one else is paying attention to what you're feeling," says Mr. Lateef, 23, who has spiky hair, a goatee and tinted sunglasses that he wears indoors. "The songs were sung by Americans but they could easily have been written by us as Iraqis."
Link, more here via Channel One News (Thanks, Ollie)
Update: BoingBoing reader Eric Eberhardt says, "There's a (slightly) more sensationalistic article about these guys in last February's Vice -- Link." Photo above by Gideon Yago, from the Vice article.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I F**CKED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A**: UPDATE
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DATE: 08/18/2004 09:31:51 AM
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Recently on BoingBoing, I blogged about Hollywood space oddity Dessarae Bradford, spotted at the Erotic LA convention hawking a self-published book titled
I FU*KED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S -- a first-person autobiographical account of an alleged starfucking incident. Flashback to the liner notes:
"In Sept. 2002, I fu**ed Alec Baldwin in his a** in a hot, sweaty, nasty sex romp. Read the story that will change lives. Be the first one on your block to have the nitty gritty about that night, that will be only told in my book. Grab the scoop before my story gets into the hands of the media, and they attemp to censor it. I had Alec Baldwin on all four's for me, and S/M was involved. Read the real story. Tell everyone you know about this site. Free Baldwin brothers, and family photos come with this book, and a free I FU**ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A** bumper sticker too."
Ladies, gentlemen, and happy mutants, I'm now shocked -- shocked I say -- to share this e-mail from BoingBoing reader
Karl Lautman:
"Yeah, well I got F**cked in the A**, too. I thought the book would make a great gift for a few people I know, though only for the title, so I ordered 3 copies @ $20 per. What arrived were 3 copies of My S/M Romp with Alec Baldwin, a title I find completely forgettable, and even these were crappy, spiral-bound, Kinko's affairs. I was very disappointed and e-mailed the author as much; haven't heard back, of course."
Sorry, Karl. To any other BoingBoing readers who may have been pondering this literary investment -- caveat online emptor, dude.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hurricane Charley report from Q-Burns Abstract Message
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DATE: 08/18/2004 09:50:39 AM
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Famed DJ and friend of BoingBoing Michael Donaldson, aka QBurns Abstract Message, had just returned from tour in Eastern Europe last week when the hurricane hit his home in Florida. Electricity is still out in many places, so he's hiding out in his recording studio with a dial-up connection and a hamster-powered laptop to e-mail us this report. Image: snapshot of a frightened cat coming out of hiding a couple days after the storm.
The winds here in Orlando were at about 90 MPH when it hit. The was a lot of destruction, but somehow my house and property ended up completely unscathed. The worst part lasted 45 minutes. I just sat in the dark with my cat and a bottle of wine watching the whole thing out the window. It was really crazy. Saw the trees flapping around and then I kept seeing flashes of blue and green in the sky ... I thought this was some strange lightning but found out later it was actually electrical transformers exploding across the neighborhood. Wow.
I've been through at least 3 hurricanes in my life and have never seen anything like this either. The city is like a warzone with debris and fallen trees and power lines everywhere. It was starting to get cleaned up as I left home yesterday, so hopefully when I return all will be back to normal. I can't even imagine what it looks like down south in the Ft. Meyers area, which received the full force of the storm. It actually weakened a bit before it hit central Florida.
My business partner has a 30 foot tree laying in his backyard. Another friend has a tree about that big in his swimming pool (no idea how he'll get that out). Yet another friend lives in a neighborhood that is in a 'dead end' road. A huge tree has fallen in the path of their only exit, and they can only leave by foot. I guess I got off easy. None of us have any power, though.
The storm was followed by eerie silence and the even eerier sight of my neighborhood residents walking the lightless streets, Night Of The Living Dead-style, surveying the damage. A friend of mine owned a bar that miraculously had power so after a few phone calls we convened there 90 minutes after the hurricane's end. About 60 people showed and I started playing records and doing vodka shots. This had the makings of a really nice party as a ton of frustration and stress was being expelled by all. We were stopped at about 1 AM by a number of cops who claimed the city was in a state of emergency and there was a curfew in effect all over the city. We either left the party or we were to be arrested. Thus we were ordered to tipsily navigate the darkened, traffic light-less, wreckage covered streets to our hot, powerless, and, in some cases, devastated homes. You think the 'man' would give us a break.
Photo galleries from the Orlando Sentinel: images part one,
images part two. And here's a gallery of personal snaps from Maria, one of the "hurricane party" attendees (owner of the frightened cat above): Link. Bonus: a brand new Q-Burns Abstract Message DJ mix available for online listening and/or download -- Link
Update: an anonymous BB reader sends in this wmv file -- a composite of time-lapse stills of Hurricane Charley hitting Florida over the span of about seven hours. Link. And via Poynter, an interesting essay on the power of TV infographics in the eye of a storm: "Radar Love." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Toaster Fetish photos
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DATE: 08/18/2004 10:10:34 AM
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I can't tell whether this "Toaster Fetish" kitchen appliance porn gallery is parody or straightahead smut. Either way, someone out there in this big wide world is probably wanking off to it. Atkinserotica is so five minutes ago. Clearly, the hot-buttered temptation of Porn Bread has arrived. Who can resist her sultry, carb-hither gaze? Link to Fleshbot post, NSFW.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indian state rolls out wireless broadband
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DATE: 08/18/2004 10:34:57 AM
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The Indian state of Kerala has launched a wireless broadband service that will provide rural residents with 'Net connectivity that would otherwise be impossible via landline or cellular services.
The community Internet kiosks, named Akshaya, have been set up by the Kerala State IT Mission Department. More than 550 of the kiosks have been opened in the Mallapuram district, spread over 3,500 square kilometers. The local government plans to introduce kiosks in other districts later this year. The centers will offer services such as Internet access, Net-based phoning and videoconferencing to state offices as well as private businesses. Five Wi-Fi hotspots have also been established around government offices and a tourist resort.
"This is the world's biggest rural wireless network," H.S. Bedi, managing director of Tulip IT Services, said at the launch. "The decision to provide a completely wireless solution was dictated by the Mallapuram's rugged terrain. Other options could have been leased lines or cable or fiber--all of which would have involved digging and would have been more difficult as well as more expensive to roll out."
Link to ZDnet story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Headphone Fetish photos
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DATE: 08/18/2004 12:54:29 PM
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More sexualized gadgetry. For some very special people, photos of chicks wearing headphones are personally exciting. This online photo gallery features obsessively-organized pictures of mostly clothed girls wearing headphones and construction headsets.Link (Thanks, danski)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spacesuit Fetish photos
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DATE: 08/18/2004 01:57:58 PM
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See what happens when all of my co-editors go on vacation? There goes the bloggerhood. Here, I present to you obsessively-organized and allegedly arousing fetish galleries of girls wearing spacesuits.Link. From the same geek wacko perverts people who brought you two equally tittilating galleries of scuba fetish photos and deep-sea diving fetish photos, here.
(Thanks, oscar)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Freedom to Tinker Crypto Report
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DATE: 08/18/2004 02:02:40 PM
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Boingboing buddy Eli the Bearded says:
Freedom to Tinker is reporting that two groups have signifcantly damaged the current leaders in cryptographic hashes. A French team has found collisions in a weakened form of the SHA-1 hash, which can probably be extended to the full SHA-1; and a Chinese team has found an out and out clash in MD5.
What does this mean? Well the hashes are digital abstracts from some input value (eg file) that are used to verify that the input value is unmodified. Due to the size of the hashes it has always been known that clashes would occur, but it was hoped that finding one would be impossible due to the large size of the hash space and the complexity of the generation process. Now that hope is shattered.
These hashes are used to verify integrity of downloaded programs, integrity of https site certificates, in pgp/gpg keys, etc. In other words lots of modern crytography is going to feel the waves from this.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Snapshots from Coop art show debut in LA
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DATE: 08/18/2004 03:31:49 PM
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Images from a new gallery show at sixspace featuring underground art superstar Coop, whose work I was first exposed to in the form of a devil-babe tattoo on the back of an ex-boyfriend.
Parts with Appeal is Coop's first gallery exhibit in about five years. For the show, he constructed one contiguous acrylic canvas 78 feet long which contains four separate panels each comprised of a series of 6' x 6' paintings. The snapshots look fantastic, and I can't wait to see the work in person.
Link to images and more info on the sixspace show in LA, and link to more info and merch from the mighty Coop.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo launches a search blog
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DATE: 08/18/2004 04:58:14 PM
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Following in John Battelle's footsteps (ripping off the title of his Searchblog?), Yahoo just launched "Search Blog," about -- surprise -- the business of search. Link to A look inside the world of search from the people of Yahoo!. (Thanks, jean-luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Stealth Lynndie-ing
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DATE: 08/18/2004 05:15:31 PM
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In this warped variant of stealth disco, you strike the cigarette-dangling-from-mouth, finger-points-at-exposed-prisoner-genitalia pose made famous by Pfc. Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib torture photos. As a website devoted to Stealth Lynndie-ing explains, "The image has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women up and down the country who don't give much of a shit about anything."
I'm not sure what's more disturbing about this online photo gallery -- (a) the fact that people are sick enough do this, photograph this, publish it on the web, and think it's funny; (b) the fact that I'm blogging about it, or (c) the fact that Lynndie England bears a striking resemblance to the fellow in the photo at left. Photo gallery featuring dozens of anonymous people "striking a Lynndie": Link (Thanks, Doug)
Update: BoingBoing reader Dave says, "This picture taken by Kefin Smith during the production of the movie Dogma proves that the first true 'Stealth Lynndie' occurred years before the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Specifically, it occurred in the movie Dogma: here's the 'Buddy Christ' giving what appears to be a Stealth Lynndie to the camera. Link"
(Ed. note: Technically, He needs a lit cigarette in order for this to be considered an actual Stealth Lynndie -- but in light of the fact that the Lord prefers to smite instead of smoke, we will consider this an immaculate exception. Did we mention that as of 7:10pm PT, www.stealthlynndie.com remains available?)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIP, bugmenot.com
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DATE: 08/18/2004 08:01:18 PM
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Bugmenot appears to have been taken offline by its creators. The site served as a clearinghouse for shared passwords to registration-required websites. Subscription-based website owners despised it, hassle-hating 'net users loved it. No word on what happened (bugmenot peeps: talk to me, honey), but I'd bet dollars to downloads that lawyers were involved. (via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New eBay RSS Generator
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DATE: 08/19/2004 07:35:12 AM
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Today, Chris Pirillo announces the launch of "a much-better eBay-to-RSS generator. Our exit strategy is to have one big code auction in a few years." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cobble-bone streets
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DATE: 08/19/2004 08:12:43 AM
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When construction workers in Oslo dug a drainage ditch around a church in the "Old City" district, they uncovered a slew of skeletons little more than a foot below the surface. According to an Aftenposten Norway article, the skeletons likely belong to the former tenants of a Dominican monastery located in the area from 1240 until 1537.
"Before the Reformation the most blessed resting spots were awarded hierarchically and could be bought. The best plots lay under the holy water that drained off the church roof and dripped onto the ground below... The skeletons also bear witness to medieval times as an age of violence. Many of the bones reveal notches that must have resulted from brutal force."
Link (via Fark)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Painless prick
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DATE: 08/19/2004 08:28:20 AM
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Approved by the FDA yesterday, the SonoPrep blasts the skin with painless ultrasonic energy to make it more permeable. The SonoPrep technology, developed by MIT researchers, uses low-frequency, ultrasonic energy to push open tiny channels in the skin for fluids to be extracted and delivered.
"A painless 15-second treatment by the new device, followed by an application of lidocaine cream, will anesthetize the skin in five minutes. By itself, lidocaine takes one hour to work...Because the method is simple and painless, and speeds up the action of lidocaine—a topical anesthetic commonly used in pediatrics and on critically ill adults and children who must endure repeated needle sticks—it could become standard procedure in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Another use would be before painful procedures such as angiography, balloon angioplasty, and the insertion of venous catheters."
The scientists predict that in the next five years, the same ultrasonic technique could be used to take the prickly pain out of routine vaccinations.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Elmer Bernstein, 1922-2004
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DATE: 08/19/2004 08:50:48 AM
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BB mourns the loss of soundtrack composer Elmer Bernstein, the artist behind the classic scores for The Magnificent Seven, The Man With The Golden Arm, The Great Escape, and even modern-day comedies like Airplane! and Stripes. Bernstein studied under Aaron Copland before relocating to Tinseltown in 1950. That same decade, his career was almost ruined during the Hollywood Red Hunt when a congressional subcommittee demanded that Bernstein, a well-known liberal, name names of film industry commies. Blacklisted from the big studios, he composed for B movies including Cat Women of the Moon and Robot Monster. Finally, Cecil B. De Mille gave Bernstein a shot at the score of The Ten Commandments when the original composer became ill. Bernstein earned his first Oscar nomination for that work.
"Film music, properly done, should give the film a kind of emotional rail on which to ride," Bernstein said in 2001. "Without even realizing that you're listening to music that's doing something to your emotions, you will have an emotional experience."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What happened to Bugmenot
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DATE: 08/19/2004 09:15:40 AM
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As mentioned here last night, Bugmenot is now, well, not. A recent post on the MozillaZine forums by someone understood to be the admin for Bugmenot.com says:"Our host pulled the plug. I reckon they were pressured. If anyone has got some secure, preferably offshore hosting in mind then please let us know so we can get the service back up as soon as possible."
Link (Thanks, Michael)Update: Several BoingBoing readers wrote in to say something like this, from reader Bryan Swain: "I don't have the inside scoop on what happened to BugMeNot, but thought you might find this interesting. I've used the site in the past from work with no trouble, but as of today, it is blocked (our company uses WebSense filtering). I get a message saying that the site is blocked by the "Racism and Hate" category... figure that one out! The WebSense site has a section where you can see what sites fall into what categories and suggest changes, but, ironically enough, you have to register to use those areas. No thanks."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Deep Links - Hypocrite, Thy Name Is Real
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DATE: 08/19/2004 09:25:39 AM
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Copyfight spokesmodel Donna Wentworth says:
RealNetworks put a link to Fred von Lohmann criticizing Apple's FairPlay on its "Freedom of Music Choice" campaign website homepage. But something tells me it may decide to veto Fred's response - a scathing critique of Real's miserable record for promoting customer choice via interoperability.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy Birthday, D&D
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DATE: 08/19/2004 09:29:26 AM
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BoingBoing reader Ateo says:
Dungeons & Dragons turns 30 this year and tonight is the start of GenCon too. NPR did a story, and Gamespy is doing tons of articles on the history of the game this week as well.
Link to the official D&D site
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ourTunes
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DATE: 08/19/2004 09:40:05 AM
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A Java program intended to kick the proverbial ass of MyTunes. Its developers say, "If you like it -- give us beer money, we're broke college students." Released under GPL; sourcode and executable app are available for download here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bay Area UFO Expo
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DATE: 08/19/2004 09:45:07 AM
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Tighten up your tinfoil beanie thong and lock up the kryptonite -- The 6th Annual Bay Area UFO Expo happens August 28-29 in Santa Clara, California.
Hot new reports on UFOs, ETs, Abductions, Encounters, Crop Circles, Earth Mysteries, Conspiracies and more! We wish to welcome all new-comers and for those who have been with us before, we want to thank you for your continued support. Joining us again this year with hot new data about Mars and the mysterious Coral Castle is Richard C. Hoagland who, in addition to his lecture, will give two amazing workshops. Jordan Maxwell, our guest of honor for the weekend, will share his knowledge on the ET presence dating back to the ancient world and it's implications for today's world.
Link (Thanks, Captain Todd Lappin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: This is not a fetish post
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DATE: 08/19/2004 09:53:08 AM
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To appease to the handful of BoingBoing readers who protested yesterday's overabundance of marginally worksafe gadget/girl fetish photo posts, I offer -- here it comes, folks -- a Japanese collector's huge, obsessively-organized gallery of backpacker cooking stoves. Guaranteed 100% babe-free. But it's a big internet; chances are that someone, somewhere is super-turned-on by this. Link (Thanks, jared).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF wins Grokster! Software doesn't have to be easy for Hollywood to wiretap!
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DATE: 08/19/2004 10:35:10 AM
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I'm supposed to be on holidays from blogging this week, but this is too important not to blog RIGHT NOW.
EFF has won its Grokster case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- this is the case that establishes that if you make truly decentralized P2P software -- like Gnutella -- you can't be held liable for any copyright infringement that takes place on their networks. This is the "Betamax principle," from the famous Supreme Court case that established that Sony wasn't responsible for any infringement that its customers undertook with their VCRs.
The Studios' argument was that people who make P2P software should be obliged to build it in such a way as to make it easy to police -- i.e. not on Gnutella-like lines -- an idea so sickeningly dumb that it's a tremendous relief that the court refused to buy it.
Now is a good time to download the 16MB MP3 audio of EFF IP Attorney Fred von Lohmann's oral argument in the appeal -- he was nothing less than brilliant (and it didn't hurt that one of the shmendricks representing the rights-holders kept forgetting the judge's name). This is some of the best courtroom drama you'll ever hear, and when you're done, download the PDF of the decision below and rejoice in our freedom.
I don't often shill for donations to EFF here on Boing Boing, but if there is one day this year that you make a tax-deductible donation to the organization that just won the right to write any software you damn well please, even if it's not amenable to being wiretapped by the record labels, today is it.
It's a good day.
"The Copyright Owners urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy, expanding exponentially the reach of the doctrines of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Not only would such a renovation conflict with binding precedent, it would be unwise. Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the Copyright Owners’ immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context.
"Further, as we have observed, we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation. AT&T Corp. v. City of Portland, 216 F.3d 871, 876 (9th Cir. 1999). The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player.Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.
"Indeed, the Supreme Court has admonished us to leave such matters to Congress. In Sony-Betamax, the Court spoke quite clearly about the role of Congress in applying copyright law to new technologies. As the Supreme Court stated in that case, “The direction of Art. I is that Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. When, as here, the Constitution is permissive, the sign of how far Congress has chosen to go can come only from Congress.” 464 U.S. at 456 (quoting Deepsouth Packing Co. v. Laitram Corp., 406 U.S. 518, 530 (1972))."
128k PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of super-weird Australian rock band zen
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DATE: 08/19/2004 07:34:03 PM
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BoingBoing reader Mike says:
Aussie band Regurgitator ("the 'gurge") are planning to record their fifth full-length album locked inside a plastic bubble in the middle of Melbourne's Federation Square. The stunt is to be broadcast and webcast from August 31 to September 21. Hopefully it will be a return to form from the band who gave the world such classics as "I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am" and "Blubber Boy".
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gmail notifier helper-apps
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DATE: 08/19/2004 08:45:58 PM
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"Gmail Notifier" is a downloadable Windows application from Google that alerts Gmail users to the presence of new incoming messages. The app displays an icon in your system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders and snippets -- without your having to open a web browser. Link (Thanks, ritilan)
Update: BoingBoing reader Oscar Bartos says, "There's an freeware program for Macs that acts like the Gmail notifier, Gmailstatus. Personally I'm fond of Gmailto, which redirects "mailto:" links to Gmail. It's available in PC and Mac flavors: Link, and Link 2. " And BoingBoing reader Nate says, "This site has a Gmail notifier extension for Mozilla/Firefox: Link" And an anonymous reader points us to yet another Gmail helper app -- Gcount.
Update 2: Hey, you know what I could really go for right now? Some Gmail helper apps! BoingBoing reader Mincus says, "Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader has more -- Link. And there are still more at Gmailwiki.com"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Monkey portrait photography
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DATE: 08/19/2004 08:47:57 PM
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BoingBoing reader Darren says:
"Jill Greenberg is an accomplished celebrity photographer. Recently, though, she's turned her attention to another biped: monkeys. She discovered her affection for monkey portraits on a commercial, and started renting various species of trained primates and taking their photos as if they were A-list celebrities. The portraits express an amazing range of emotion, and are way more interesting that your average celebrity pic."
Link to Jill's website, with photos of monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates. You may also recall that totally gorgeous cover she shot for Wired Magazine's September, 2003 issue (The New Diamond Age): Link. LA-dwellers: the monkey images and other new works will be on exhibit starting October 23 at Paul Kopeikin Gallery on Wilshire.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Medical professionals complicit in Abu Ghraib torture, says bioethicist
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DATE: 08/19/2004 08:48:42 PM
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Dr. Stephen Miles wrote a scathing editorial for UK medical journal The Lancet which says that U.S. military medical personnel were complicit in detainee torture incidents that took place in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to the University of Minnesota bioethicist, "The US military medical system failed to protect detainees' human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards, and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings." Based on data gleaned from government documents, he details cases of alleged abuse participation by medical personnel, and calls for a formal inquiry.
There are isolated reports that medical personnel directly abused detainees. Two detainees' depositions describe an incident where a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to suture a prisoner's lacertation from being beaten. The medical system failed to accurately report illnesses and injuries. Abu Ghraib authorities did not notify families of deaths, sicknesses, or transfers to medical facilities as required by the Convention. A medic inserted a intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital. In another case, an Iraqi man, taken into custody by US soldiers was found months later by his family in an Iraqi hospital. He was comatose, had three skull fractures, a severe thumb fracture, and burns on the bottoms of his feet. An accompanying US medical report stated that heat stroke had triggered a heart attack that put him in a coma; it did not mention the injuries.
Death certificates of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq were falsified or their release or completion was delayed for months. Medical investigators either failed to investigate unexpected deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan or performed cursory evaluations and physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke, or natural causes without noting the unnatural aetiology of the death. In one example, soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated that he died of "natural causes . . . during his sleep." After news media coverage, the Pentagon revised the certificate to say that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries and asphyxia."
Link to Miles' editorial in the August 21 edition of The Lancet (registration required; o bugmenot, where foreart thou?). Link to Washington Post story with partial synopsis of the report. Link to Miles' home page at the University of Minnesota Bioethics school, and Link to his latest book, The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine, which looks like a worthy read.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Public domain art contest from Duke University
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DATE: 08/20/2004 08:49:41 AM
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Duke University Law School's Center for the Study of Public Domain is running a video contest with some cool prizes, and a nod to Creative Commons. The contest invites artists "to create a 2-minute moving image that explains to the public some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing particularly on either music or documentary film." Entry deadline is November 1, and some tasty, gadgety prizes are offered. Link (Thanks, Yo Vinny)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYC bash 09/21: Wired + CC + Byrne + Gilberto Gil
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DATE: 08/20/2004 08:50:41 AM
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From the Creative Commons blog, news of what sounds like a very fun event next month in New York:
On Tuesday, September 21, 2004, Wired Magazine will throw a benefit for Creative Commons featuring a concert by David Byrne (with the Tosca
Strings) and Gilberto Gil. It will take place at 8PM at The Town Hall in New York City. Proceeds from the concert will go to support the
non-profit efforts of Creative Commons.
Tickets are available now from Ticketmaster or, after September 1st, at the Town Hall box office. If you're in NYC and want to help support the work of the Creative Commons, come on out and enjoy a great
concert.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update: Iraq atrocities, medical professionals, and prisoner data
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DATE: 08/20/2004 09:04:44 AM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, reader Damo says,
A related editorial by Robert Jay Lifton entitled "Doctors and Torture" appeared in a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the world's preeminent medical journal. In one passage, Lifton describes how military interrogators were given access to detainees' medical records, which were then used as tools in the interrogation process. He also discusses how doctors "brought a medical component to what I call an 'atrocity-producing situation...'"
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ismyvirginmaryhotornot.com
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DATE: 08/20/2004 09:06:19 AM
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Interesting OC Weekly story about censorship allegations surrounding an artist whose work sexualizes the Catholic icon of la Virgen de Guadalupe.
The controversy started on Aug. 1, when Ernesto Cienfuegos, editor of the Chicano nationalist website La Voz de Aztlan, attacked Fullerton Museum Center Director Joe Felz for including "decadent lesbian artist" Alma Lopez in a exhibition titled "The Virgin of Guadalupe: Interpreting Devotion."
Lopez has been the subject of outrage before. Her mixed-media effort Our Lady -- a piece re-imagining the Virgin as a sexy Chicana, roses strapped across her breasts and pelvic area, legs and a firm abdomen exposed for all her children to see -- provoked demonstrations when it debuted at a Santa Fe art gallery in 2001.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bugmenot "racism and hate" update -- and they'll be back
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DATE: 08/20/2004 09:36:53 AM
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Following up on yesterday's post that corporate 'Net filtering service Websense was blocking the recently departed Bugmenot.com as a "Racism and Hate" site, BoingBoing reader Scott Lindsey says:
"I'm pretty sure I know what's up with that. Currently, bugmenot.com resolves to 69.93.251.37, which is probably an ISP server, with multiple sites. Reverse DNS results in ns2.dissidenthosting.com, which redirects http to www.micetrap.net (same IP address). It's a mail-order house for skinhead music and related paraphernalia. Also, according to the mozillazine forum originally linked to, bugmenot will be back up in a few days, now hosted by nearlyfreespeech.net."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Senator Kennedy on "no-fly" list
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DATE: 08/20/2004 09:48:24 AM
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Senator Ted Kennedy says he was denied boarding on three shuttle flights in one month, because he's on the federal "no-fly" list of terrorist suspects.
His aides had to call Tom Ridge three times to get taken off the list. Imagine how hard it would be for one of us lesser human beings to get taken off the list.
A Transportation Security Administration spokeswoman's explanation makes me even more nervous about the way things are being run be the feds. She "insisted Kennedy 'is not on the list, not now or ever. His name was similar to someone else's alias.'" [italics mine] Is it supposed to make us feel better that innocent people can be denied boarding for having a similar name to a suspected terrorist's alias? Link (Thanks, Paul!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Guantanamo, New York
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DATE: 08/20/2004 05:03:54 PM
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BoingBoing reader Jeremy says,
I was surprised to learn that a small Guantanamo-style detention center run by the Wackenhut corporation is in place mere blocks from my home. Somewhere around 200 detainees are housed in a non-descript warehouse somewhere in Springfield Gardens, Queens. I find it disturbing and distressing, especially now that they've gone on hunger strike, which is the only reason that I've learned that they are there.
Link
Update: Reader Chuck Welch says, "This isn't the first hunger strike at the Wackenhut Detention Center. You can find some information on last year's strike here: Link. The latest hunger strike has some information here: Link. And here's a good article about life at "Hotel Wackenhut": Link."
Update 2 BoingBoing reader David says, "I found more information about the Queens facility (pic, address, contracts, etc.) and some other history (articles) about the company, including a history of cases brought against them. In one of thier other facilities, a guard was charged with raping a young girl on a nightly basis. Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mmmmm... baby, you smell like Hummer.
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DATE: 08/20/2004 05:04:24 PM
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What is the scent of a Hummer? Gasoline? Freshly detonated bombs plopped on an oil-rich country on the other side of the world? You'll find out soon -- the maker of supersized combat-cum-luxury vehicles is licensing the Hummer name to a line of mens' fragrances. Body wash, aftershave, and deodorant. Link (Thanks, Steve)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Russian sex doll rafting tournament
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DATE: 08/20/2004 05:09:00 PM
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Saturday is the second annual inflatable sex doll raft race (aka Bubble Baba Challenge) in Russia. English story from Mosnews: Link. Photos from last year: Link (Thanks, Rob!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Appalshop: digital music for wired hillbillies
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DATE: 08/20/2004 05:10:49 PM
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Earlier today, I was over at the NPR studios here in Los Angeles taping a segment for next week's "Day to Day" -- a conversation about MP3 blogs, with show host Noah Adams. He's an amazing newsman -- the former long-time co-host of All Things Considered -- and the author of Far Appalachia (read an excerpt).
We were talking about all of the ultra-obscure sorts of niche-niche-niche music that online services like MP3 blogs help people find, and he shared a story about an independent community media organization in eastern Kentucky devoted to serving the coalfield communities and the Appalachian region. Their radio station, WMMT (which streams online) specializes in bluegrass and oldtime. Evidently, one deejay there was well-known for maintaining an extensive collection of rare oldtime music -- on his iPod. He'd drive three hours to get to the station -- with his iPod -- and play material from it on-air. Kind of funny when you think about the nature of the music (by definition, old), and the nature of the medium (new). Sure beats lugging heavy crates of vinyl all around the mountains, though.
The media organization has a website, and a name: Appalshop (appal = short for appalachian, has nothing to do with Apple Computers). Plenty of interesting stuff there, including some documentary film projects.
And on a related note, Noah did an incredible segment not too long ago on Day to Day. Remember the story about "Dan," the homeless man in San Francisco who became a philanthropist after inheriting $200,000 from his mom? Turns out Noah tracked the guy down and had a series of conversations with him, which you can listen to here. It's nothing short of great radio.
Update: BoingBoing reader Steven Villereal says, "Funny that you posted that -- Anthology Film Archives in New York has a folk film festival, starting tomorrow, which features a lot of Appalshop stuff [as well as probably totally awesome Alan Lomax stuff]. Link."
Mec says, "I was a volunteer dj for WMMT a few years ago. We live in a commercial radio wasteland but WMMT is a bright shining light because they encourage individuality. Where else could you find a program entitled, Ralph Stanley, Time-Traveler? Heh."
And Petra says, "If you'd like a specific example of one of Appalshop's programs, check out Howard Berkes' feature on 'Holler to the Hood,' which brings rappers to Whitesburg to help the local kids learn to rhyme (full disclosure: I was his producer on the piece). Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bugmenot.com returns, spokesbugperson says some news sites trying to block it
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DATE: 08/20/2004 05:11:09 PM
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Following up on the mystery surrounding Bugmenot.com's disappearance, Mr. Bugmenot himself delivers the following message to Boingboing readers via encrypted carrier pigeon:
"Our stinkin' host pulled the plug on us without notice (pretty obvious they were pressured somehow). But everything is sweet again- I've been in talk with our new hosts nearlyfreespeech.net -- they are very sympathetic to the cause and won't be pulling the plug on us again. Thanks for your support and concern but they are going to have to pry this site from my cold, dead hands :)
Also; this may be of interest -- evidence that some [registration-required] news sites are starting to use scripts to auto-disable accounts. The numbers in the column on the left represents the number of seconds since the last query."
Data: [ Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3 | Link 4 ]
Within minutes of reading this message, we learn that the site is once again online. Link (Thanks for spotting that, Jean-Luc.)
Update: An anonymous BoingBoing reader writes, "With regard to bugmenot leaving a host that sold racist paraphernalia -- their new web host provides service to a combat18 / redwatch site. combat18 is a british neonazi group. Redwatch is their hitlist, a site containing photos and addresses of people who have opposed them in the past including (bizarrely) internet mogul Danny O'Brien. [If they moved because] they didn't want to be blocked by censorship software... Bugmenot had better hope they're not on the same server this time." [Ed note: a banner ad on Redwatch plugs a hosting service identified as "Nigger Free Hosting," but the site does appear to live at nearlyfreespeech.net.]
Bugmenot responds to the BoingBoing update:
"1. Bugmenot was with our original hosting company. They pulled the plug.
2. Decided to move to dissidenthosting.com, redelegated.
3. Two days passed and I still couldn't access the dissidenthosting account + bad vibe so I redelegated again to nearlyfreespeech.net
4. Dissidenthosting decided to take advantage of the situation by redirecting traffic to a neo-nazi site of their choice while the redelegation took hold to nearlyfreespeech.net
5. Things have just about settled down now at our new host
(nearlyfreespeech.net) and everything seems to be working out.
Personally, I don't care if I'm sharing a server with neo-nazis. I might not agree with what they have to say, but the whole thing about freedom of speech is that people are free to speak."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: No Waste, a booklet about Cuban recycling
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DATE: 08/20/2004 05:38:03 PM
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Bruce Sterling sent me a copy of No Waste, a free booklet published by Pentagram Design about the ingenious re-use of stuff by Cubans. In a country where new appliances and vehicles are unheard of, resourceful people are turning soda cans into mousetraps, glue bottles into toy cars, plastic jugs into taxi lights, and fumigator engines into motorcycles. These "objects of necessity" are works of wonder. You can get a free copy of the book by emailing Pentagram. (They're out of copies!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Child Pimp & Ho Costumes"
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DATE: 08/21/2004 07:41:54 AM
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Some company is selling "pimp" and "ho" costumes for kids. "Our child pimp daddy suit comes with panne jacket & matching pants. Pimp hat is sold seperately." Link (Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Designer Zen
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DATE: 08/21/2004 08:41:27 AM
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stream of consciousness
logo graveyard
bootleg objects
day60
nl design
the apartment
we fail
canon digital creators
bd4d
k10k
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese children's books from 1920s
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DATE: 08/21/2004 09:35:56 AM
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Click image for full-size. Browsing through this beautiful gallery of children's book illos from the '20s, I keep thinking about the fact that these were all created during a period just before Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a period of dramatic cultural change. If the people who read these books as children were around my own age group -- twenty or thirtysomething -- when the bombs dropped, maybe a hundred years from now, some young person will stumble on an "Electric Company" episode and think, "Wow, that's what the 9/11 generation was watching in their diapers" -- or whatever it is they'll call this current chunk of history. Some interesting analysis on this site. Snip:
"The children in Kodomo no kuni seem to be enjoying the pleasures of modern city life. There are Western-style houses, trains and cars running along busy streets, airplanes flying in the sky, and subways passing beneath a townscape bristling with skyscrapers. What is different from now is the energy and cheerfulness with which people seemed to be looking forward to the happy future that materialistic prosperity would surely bring."
Maybe those people 100 years ahead will look back on our enthusiasm for technology the same way. Someone in 2104 will take a break from watching Olympic nanorobotic doping scandal coverage on their ocular implants. They'll blink "pause," browse the BoingBoing archives, and think, "How quaint, how naive... If only those poor fin-de-siecle suckers had stopped at Perl."
Try opening two browser windows, side by side -- one with these amazing images, the other with some contemporary manga graphics -- and consider the strands of aesthetic DNA they share.
Link to Kodomo no kuni (via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Survival Research Laboratories new DVD, new baby
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DATE: 08/21/2004 10:50:39 AM
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The Bright Lights Film Journal reviews "Survival Research Laboratories: 10 Years of Robotic Mayhem," a documentary chronicling the first ten years of the pioneering machine art/performance group founded by Mark Pauline in 1978. SRL is an ad-hoc collective of brilliant engineers, including former BB guest blogger Karen Marcelo, who stage mind-blowing mechanized spectacles where "humans are present only as audience or operators." Check out the Bright Lights Film Journal article here.
Boing Boing offers our congratulations to dear friends Mark and Amy on the birth this week of Jake Edward Pauline, a feat of biomechanical engineering. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: You don't own your iTunes, they 0wn you
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:15:14 AM
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Good blog post on why Apple iTunes DRM -- and other DRM systems -- that convey the message "you don't own the music you buy, you merely license it," make for such unsatisfying experiences.
We are outraged at the theft of a bicycle. We would be astonished to find bank executives having lunch on our patio, (“actually, if you read the contract, you will see we own this part of your house-the whole yard actually. Hank's gone to get his barbeque.”) We would be unhappy to get a note from J. Crew telling us that the expiry date for your new shoes has been moved forward and that we must cease and desist in their public display. No, as we understand and feel it, we own these things as if ownership were outright and in perpetuity.
Ownership has this quality in part because the things we own are part of what Goffman would call our identity kit--they help define who we are, both inwardly and outwardly. Strip us of these things, and our lives become, as Lear put it, “cheap as beasts.” Naturally, we regard the most “telling” of our possessions as if they were strategic resources and we defend them as governments do. Our security depends on their security.
Link
(Thanks, Manish!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New, unpatched Windows XP will be wormy within 20 minutes of being connected to net
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:16:38 AM
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The Internet Storm Center has published a chart showing the historical trends in probes from Internet worms. The frequency is up to about 20 minutes, which means that if you connect an unfirewalled, unpatched new Windows XP machine to the Internet and start downloading the patches to protect you from worms, you will be infected before the patches have downloaded and installed.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vapourised vodka inhalers come to NYC clubs
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:17:45 AM
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Alcohol Without Liquid (AWoL) is the trade-name for a vapourised vodka product that's dispensed through a portable booze-bong that has become trendy in London clubs. Now NYC meatpacking district clubs have taken up the craze and are selling booze-inhalers to their customers.
AWoL users pour a shot of their favorite spirit into a diffuser capsule, which is connected to an oxygen pipe.
Oxygen bubbles are pumped through it, absorbing the alcohol and creating a smoky-looking vapor, which is then sucked through a tube and inhaled.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stick-on effects lenses for cameraphones
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:19:34 AM
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Brando is selling self-adhesive cameraphone lenses with a variety of filters -- soften, magnify, distort, etc.
Link
(via MobileWhack)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK institutes ridiculously difficult English-proficiency test for English-speaking immigrants
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:20:34 AM
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Immigrants to the UK from English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia must pass an English proficiency test in order to gain UK citizenship. The test is apparently very stringent:
According to one report two Australians, including a knight who has lived in Britain for 44 years and a writer with a degree in English, have been rejected under the new rules.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lying Swift Boat Veterans for Bush
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:21:59 AM
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The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a gang of liars who ran a thoroughly debunked TV ad in which they lied about serving with John Kerry in Vietnam and lied about his service record. Then the Bush campaign disavowed any connection to the Lying Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
It was lying.
This New York Times infografic traces the financial connections between the organization and the Bush administration's staff, financiers, and cronies.
It also delves into the Lying Veterans' own on-the-record statements, like George "John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam" Elliot's 1996 statement that "The fact that he chased an armed enemy down is not something to be looked down upon, it was an act of courage. And the whole outfit served with honor."
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(Thanks, bomark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Movie theater repurposed as Xbox arcade
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:23:06 AM
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A cinema operator in a small town in Utah has started running Friday night gaming tournaments in which Xboxes are connected to the big screens and sound-systems.
Theater managers took four video projectors, set one up in each of four theaters with a Microsoft XBox video game system connected to it, and then let the fun begin for more than 60 people.
"Tonight blew our minds," theater co-owner Calvin Timothy said afterward. "We're definitely going to keep doing this."
The game Friday night: "Halo" -- a first-person shoot-em-up game in which four people can play on a team against four others. The evening was set up in a tournament format where 16 teams battled each other until the wee hours of Saturday morning to find out who the kings of gaming are in the valley.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why the Supreme Court will hear Grokster
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:25:46 AM
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Over on Lessig's blog, Tim Wu has enumerated 10 reasons that the Supreme Court is likely to hear the Grokster case:
1. These is a stated legal conflict on the Sony standard as between the 7th and 9th Circuits;
2. The 7th and 9th Circuits disagree (albeit in partially in dicta) on the relevance of willful blindness to secondary liability;
4. The Court has these matters in hand: it has granted cert. in many similar cases historically (Sony, 1980s, White-Smith (the Piano Roll case) 1909, Teleprompter and Fortnightly (Cable / Broadcast, 1960s & 1970s);
5. The Court has a vague sense that some far-out stuff is going on in the field of “Computer Law” that maybe it should check out;
6. Law clerks use KaZaA & BitTorrent to plan basketball games;
7. Stevens and Breyer deeply dig this stuff;
8. Scalia likes anything having to do with property;
9. Souter got his first computer last week.
And most importantly,
10. The Court loves to be the center of attention, and this would make it so.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Whuffie's mathematical failings
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:26:50 AM
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Interesting paper evaluates the mathematical flaws in reputation systems: if the right thing to do would seem suspicious, then reputation systems encourage you to do the wrong thing, to enhance your reputation.
Recall that an action is vulnerable to a temptation if when the short-run players participate, the temptation lowers the probability of all bad signals, and increases the probability of all others. In this case the bad reputation result requires the exit minmax condition, as demonstrated by the example in Section 4.4. Notice, however, that in the example the relative probability of g and r is changed by the temptation. If the temptation satisfies the stronger property that the relative probability of the other signals remains constant, then we can weaken the assumption of exit minmax. In this section we develop this result, and give an application to games with two actions.
(If the math is too dense, there's a good lay explanation here)
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(via Smartmobs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Imagineering's decline and fall
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:27:54 AM
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A new columnist at SaveDisney.com (a site backed by ousted Disney Board members including Roy Disney, Walt's nephew) is chronicling the decline and fall of Imagineering, attempting to answer the question, "How is it possible that the same people who created EPCOT Center, Splash Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure and Tokyo Disney Seas, also created Disney's California Adventure, Walt Disney Studios Paris, DinoRama, and Journey into YOUR Imagination?"
Paul Pressler had convinced everyone on the Parks & Resorts team that Disney's California Adventure would be an unparalleled success. In the days leading up to the opening of California Adventure, the Director of Attractions at Disneyland, Paul Yeargin, openly discussed his concerns that Disney's California Adventure would fill to capacity every day. He thought the resort's biggest problem would be disappointed guests, who, after traveling a great distance to see California Adventure would have to settle for Disneyland instead. Yeargin and other Disneyland executives made decisions based on this premise. Including a now infamous decision by Disneyland Resort President, Cynthia Harriss, to restrict Annual Passholders from using their passes at Disney's California Adventure for the first few months after opening. This decision only served to anger the already disgruntled 400,000 passholders who provide a significant amount of revenue for the resort. Harriss and Yeargin, like many of the Disneyland executives, had followed Pressler over from the Disney Stores and had no previous theme park experience.
Then in February 2001, the world saw what had been festering behind closed doors at WDI for the past several years. Disney's California Adventure opening in the old Disneyland parking lot. It was a mix of off-the-shelf carnival rides and film-based attractions. When Walt's close friend and long-time Imagineer, John Hench, saw the park for the first time he said, "I liked it better as a parking lot." WDI would try to fix California Adventure any way they could. They threw attractions at it left and right...Who Wants to be A Millionaire, a bug's land, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, even the Main Street Electrical Parade would come out of moth balls. None of it worked, of course.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Forward-looking defense policy from Fafblog
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:28:37 AM
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Fafblog -- the best political satire on the net IMO -- just keeps hitting them out of the park, as with this post on Bush's characterization of those who oppose the missile shield as living in the past (and his implication that he is living in the future):
Giblets is living even farther into the future, in a time when terrorism and pinko-tyranny are both irrelevant! Giblets demands that we spend 1.8 trillion dollars on an array of massive space lasers pointed outward to defend Earth against the onslaught of immense insectoid invaders who will strike from beyond the asteroid belt! Giblets will not allow the tyrant Bug Emperor to lay its death spores in our atmosphere - and the whiney pleas of those stuck formulating "today's" foreign policy to secure the former Soviet nuclear stockpile will not get in his way!
Once more Giblets outdoes George Bush at every turn! Whose vision is grander? Who not only bypasses today's wars to fight what we think are tomorrow's, but gives tomorrow a pass for sometime next week? The answer is clear: Giblets!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Battening down Disney World for Charley
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:29:15 AM
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Caines sez, "A guest at Walt Disney World on 8/13 and 8/14 snapped these shots of the MAgic Kingdom being prepared for Hurricane Charley. Signs being secured and kiosks being tethered. He was staying at the All-Star Sports Resort and his pics of some of the characters that were sent, guests swimming, and shots of the rain/wind from his hotel window. The last of the shots are trees and signs blown away."
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(Thanks, Caines!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grokster argument, the electronica mix
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:31:19 AM
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MLFG, a techno artist, has set the good guys' closing arguments in the Grokster case to music. This is the dancing-est legal argument I've ever heard: pub-pub-pub-pub-pub-pub-public domain materials. Seriously, this rocks.
Part 1, 1.5MB MP3 Link,
Part 2, 970k MP3 Link
(Thanks, Shawn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Half Life 2 graphics are unreal
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:32:36 AM
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This gallery of Half Life 2 screenshots comes from a Siggraph presentation by Valve's Viktor Antonov called "Next Generation Game Visuals." These are totally unreal. My spare time in doomed. Someone give that guy a halo.
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(via Pirotcar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:33:34 AM
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Whil I was on holidays, I read Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent. This is the sequel to "Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box," and like the previous volume, it consists of short stories written by extremely talented hackers in which the computer bits are reported so faithfully that the books can be thought of as especially colourful HOWTOs, technical documents dressed up with narrative.
As such, they are terrific. I would much rather read a Stealing the Network volume than any hundred HOWTOs and Anarchy Filez: STN has the tone of a really good bullshitting session at a DefCon or Hackers on Planet Earth, hackers spinning war-stories about hacks they've pulled off, or have conceived of. Make no mistake, these are imaginative and brilliant technical people.
As stories, these pieces are sometimes clumsy. The prose rarely rises above journeyman level (it's at its best when the authors stick to declarative, Hemingwayesque sentences, but too often they stray into "colourful" similes and descriptive phrases that can be cliched and even unintentionally funny), and there's not a lot of characterization to be had, and virtually no character development. That said, the book is still a rip-snortin' read, mostly because while it's not the best fiction ever written, it is some of the best, most engaging technical nonfiction you're likely to find.
A couple of the stories are very funny -- I'm particularily fond of the "A Real Gullible" piece, which is an homage to one of the great hacker farces of all time, Real Genius. There's a lot of that kind of nerd humour and nerd folk art sprinkled throughout this volume, and for that alone, it's worth reading.
It's a good formula and a smart one, too: how else could you produce a tech book that was still worth keeping in print 18 months later?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: In-game Ponzi scheme
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:34:42 AM
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This is a stunning, lengthy personal account of a gamer from Eve Online, a space-trading game, who decided that the game-masters had tipped the scales in favour of pirates and sought revenge by raising a half-billion credits in a Ponzi scheme that destroyed the morale and fun of every non-pirate victim. The fake syndicate the player raised involved massive impersonation and all the typical techniques of a Big Con. Unfortunately, the author's got a propensity for gratuitously racist similes that really detracted from the story, but this is still a gripping read.
Trazir would fly around the Minmatar newbie sectors, offering 10,000 credits to anybody who would join our corporation. All they had to do was click on "accept" when Trazir made the offer, and they became a part of our corporate family. Since many of the people he encountered were only days, hours, or even minutes new to Eve, a great deal clicked "accept" and were subsequently given 10,000 credits. I did the same in the Caldari newbie regions, and within a couple days, ZZZZ Best was burgeoning at the seams with 18 clueless members. We had to act quickly and peddle our deal, as well as maintain member numbers, because there would no doubt be a good deal of turnover as people realized that they belonged to a corporation which did nothing for them and which they did nothing for.
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(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DropCash: instant fundraising sites
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:35:41 AM
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DropCash is a new service from Jason Kottke and Andre Torrez, two of my favorite Web-dudes. DropCash has the ingenious simplicity of all of Torrez's projects: sign up, enter your TypeKey identity and a fundraising target and click "create" and hey-presto, you've got a fundraising site where anyone with PayPal and TypeKey can contribute -- and watch the progress-bar move toward your money goal. Boogah notes that you could use this to coordinate buying someone a birthday gift, but it'd also be great for Back to Iraq-like stunts, where a blogger raises some bread to go do something and chronicle it on her site.
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(via Gomi No Sensei)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Take the Klansmen bowling, er, Ferrising
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:36:20 AM
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This 1924 photo from the archive of the Canon City, Colorado library archive shows a whole troop (gaggle? fewmet? murder?) of Klansmen riding a Ferris-wheel.
32K JPEG Link
(Thanks, horhayole!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-BitTorrent snake-oil
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:37:10 AM
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Akonix, a "security firm" has a new product that lets corporations block BitTorrent packets (Q. Er, like a firewall rule? A. Yeah, like that, except more expensive). In order to promote it, they're telling lies about BitTorrent, telling their customers that BitTorrent users can "inadvertently share files containing sensitive information, and the P2P application installer may automatically share files or folders -- including password files -- without the user's knowledge," which is simply untrue. What this "product" does is block access to a file-transfer protocol that is widely used in many different fields, from providing Congressional hearings footage to delivering urgently needed software like the Windows XP Service Pack 2, to shipping entire operating systems like the many Linux distros that circulate via BT.
"In today's corporate environment, there are very few legitimate business uses for consumer P2P file sharing," said Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research. "Unauthorized activity within an enterprise network creates situations in which companies run the risk of security leaks or illegal activity. Products like Akonix Enforcer allow IT departments to block and monitor all P2P activity, removing another security concern from IT managers and freeing up network bandwidth for legitimate business communications."
"BitTorrent is a growing and popular P2P file-sharing network, particularly for movie files. In addition to the risk of music copyright violation, disclosure of corporate data and potential virus infection, BitTorrent users expose their company to potential legal action from organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America," said Francis Costello, chief marketing officer at Akonix Systems. "We are continuously working with more than 250 customers, including three of the largest global media companies, to address the latest security threats from file sharing. Blocking users of the BitTorrent network provides our customers with the most complete solution for managing P2P available."
Companies like this are the reason so many enterprise users treat corporate IT as damage and route around them.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crossbow for paralysed people
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DATE: 08/22/2004 04:38:08 AM
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Great photogallery of a TenPoint Crossbow that has been retrofitted to be mounted on and fired from a powered wheelchair. The paralysed owner of the bow "bagged two deer on his first evening hunting."
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(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Munch's "The Scream," "Madonna" stolen from art museum
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DATE: 08/22/2004 10:57:01 AM
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In Oslo, armed robbers stole one of several known versions of "The Scream" along with "Madonna"
(Caution! This art is totally NSFW!). These two iconic works by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch are considered impossible to sell because they're so well-known. In other words, odds may be high that they'll end up destroyed. One of the paintings was the subject of an earlier failed ransom demand. Snip from Reuters report:
Two masked robbers ran into the Munch Museum, threatened staff with a gun and forced people to lie down before taking "The Scream", an icon of existentialist angst showing a waif-like figure against a blood-red sky, and "Madonna". They escaped in a black Audi A6 driven by a third man. The pictures, worth millions of dollars and among Munch's best-known works, were later cut from their frames which were found in another part of the city.
Link to news story with highly suspect product placement for the Audi A6. What? You thought international art thieves drove art cars?
(Ed. note: Any resemblance between Munch's Madonna and the SG ads in upper right hand corner of this blog is entirely coincidental; besides, the SG ads are cropped for modesty. )
Update: This analysis piece in the London News Review has more background:
The Scream is not only Edvard Munch's most famous work, it is also his most stolen. A different version of The Scream (having more than one version helps) was purloined in 1994 during the Winter Olympics, and recovered after 3 months. This fact -- that The Scream is forever being stolen -- has added a new layer of meaning to the original. The sickly fear, the angst which radiates out from the ghoulish face of the screamer, is now shot through with the uncertainty that at any moment the canvas might be wrenched from the wall and shoved in the boot of an Audi. The scream is as much a cry of help as a cry of anguish. The strange stretched lips twist to form the plaintive words: "Please stop stealing me" -- but in the empty eyes you can see the dreadful certainty that the theft will take place.
Link (Thanks, Yoni)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fluorescent pink dye in fertilizer designed to discourage meth-maker theft
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DATE: 08/22/2004 11:07:37 AM
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Farmers are hoping that a pink-colored stain, called GloTell, will prevent speed chemists from stealing their anhydrous ammonia, which is used as a crop fertilizer. It's also a critical ingredient in methamphetamine manufacture.
The visible stain, even if washed off, was still detectable by ultraviolet light 24 to 72 hours later....
"Most people that are drug users, they like a clean-looking drug if they are going to ... put it in their body," Clements said. "We know the end-product is not pretty at all."
Snort it, and it turns the nose fluorescent pink. Inject it, and the telltale pink shows up at the injection site, he said.
I'm guessing this will fail. Speed users would rather have pink noses than no speed. Adding green food coloring to beer doesn't stop people from drinking on Saint Patrick's Day. So why would speed users turn up their nose at a line a pink-colored crystal meth?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Augmented reality Halo derivative goes nutso
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DATE: 08/22/2004 12:07:20 PM
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Pablos sez, "This I Love Bees thing seems to be getting out of hand. It is some kind of massive alternate reality game that may be related to Halo 2. The site has been counting down to August 24th and now it looks like it is heading into meatspace. Now there are all these GPS coordinates where people are planning to go to all over the U.S. on Tuesday. There's all kinds of speculation about it on these forums and in #beekeepers on irc.chat-solutions.org. Anyway, the gargantuan scale of this thing makes me want to check it out if only for the bizarre flashmob appeal."
(Thanks, Pablos!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Chinese cop on window ledge shoots kidnapper in head
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DATE: 08/22/2004 12:44:26 PM
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Amazing photos of cool-looking Chinese cop dressed in black shooting a kidnapper who was sitting on a windowsill. The kidnapper, who probably died from two slugs to the head, fell five stories to the ground. If this happened in the US, that cop would be talking with Hollywood agents by now. Link
UPDATE Zoodle sez: "Guy shot buy Chinese cop found alive in coffin."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rogue cop invents anti-WiFi laws, shakes down man-of-cloth
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DATE: 08/22/2004 08:33:56 PM
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A copper outside of the Athenaeum in Illinois Nantucket shoook down the Reverend AKMA -- the bloggin' theologian -- who was using the library's WiFi from out front of the building. The incident that unfolded is flabberghasting, with the cop inventing whole new laws and then insisting that AKMA was violating them:
"Sir, you can't use the Internet outside the library."
I said, "What?" (I'm pretty clever under pressure.)
The officer in question (whose conduct was entirely professional, firm, and calm behind those mirrored shades) solemnly assured me that in order to use the library's open wireless signal, I had to be seated within the library. The officer then wandered on back to the nearby police station.
I dutifully, if reluctantly, turned off the power to my Airport card and, since I had only been on the bench a few minutes, began working -- offline -- on what turns out to be this post. I had noticed two other weak but open signals in the area, and I figured that I could post this perplexing moment via one of the other open signals, then scuttle back to the studio. As I was writing, the officer returned and -- as the officer walked straight for me -- I held up my TiBook, pointing to the zero lines in the Airport icon, and showed the officer that my card was off.
"Why don't you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?'
I closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. "I did notice several other open signals in the area -- am I allowed to connect to them?"
"Maybe if you had permission it would be all right, but it's a new law, sir; 'theft of signal.' It would be like if you stole someone's cable TV connection."
Link
(Thanks, AKMA!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Constitutional rights for RNC protesters factsheet
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DATE: 08/22/2004 09:02:22 PM
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Pat sez, "Cryptome is hosting a copy of The Center for Constitutional Rights 'Know Your Rights' fact sheet for those planning on being near the Republican National Convention in New York City. Included are handy tips such as what to and what not to bring and who to call in case you get arrested. Always handy to know..."
344k ZIPped PDF Link
(Thanks, Pat!)
Update: An anonymous tipster sez "this pamphlet was done by the wonderful Katya Komisaruk over at the Just Cause Law Collective. At her site, lawcollective.org, there's the pamphlet and tons of other info about how to not lose your rights when dealing with the po. (Including Komsiaruk's book, set up much like the pamphlet, 'Beat the Heat.' Komisaruk applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School while in federal prison for anti-nuke demonstrations. She went to HLS while on parole and graduated with honors. Now she's one of the most active anarchist lawyers in the U.S."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Music labels should be celebrating the Grokster decision
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DATE: 08/23/2004 03:52:00 AM
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Jim Griffin, founder of the Pho music/tech mailing list, weighs in with an impressive and passionate email about the P2P-legalizing Grokster decision and what it means for music labels.
Here's why you should applaud today's decision: It brings us closer to monetizing peered sharing and putting real money in the pockets of artists, labels, publishers, and other rights holders. How? Because it moves them one step closer to the correct judgment, which is that it is now impractical and inefficient to control the quantity and destiny of digits -- especially so those that carry mass media like music -- in the increasingly friction-free world of digitization. When that judgment is drawn, service licensing begins. Until that judgment is drawn, product-based control continues in vain. Publishers long ago accepted technology and license it today -- they licensed Napster -- and their revenues are climbing; sound recording companies continue to resist every new technology and refuse to license, and their revenues are falling. This decision will benefit the music business the same way getting arrested for drunk driving benefits an alcoholic, summoning forth the day of reckoning and hastening rehabilitation.
This judgment doesn't destroy distribution -- it enables licensing. How? It reminds one of the parties in the licensing battle that one of the vines it was relying upon to to cling to the past will no longer be viable. Hyper-efficient delivery destroys distribution, meaning that the just-in-time delivery of digits will eventually destroy their distribution entirely. That is a ways off, but from what I'm hearing back-channel it is not too far off, as Apple prepares its tiny wireless iPod with no hard-drive but enhanced Wi-Max (metropolitan-wide high-bandwidth wireless) connectivity; it won't destroy downloading over night, but it will take a whack at its market share, and slowly but surely shift the market away from distribution/downloading and towards delivery/streaming.
Link
Update: John Parres notes "Actually *I* am the founder of the pho list and Jim is the founder of the pho brunches so we round it off and call ourselves the co-founders of pho."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Campaign ads (1952-) remixed into crazy techno music
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DATE: 08/23/2004 03:54:49 AM
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The Integral is a pseudonym for an anonymous Congressional staffer. S/he's released an album of remixes of Presidential campaign ads from 1952 to the present, and placed it all online under a Creative Commons license.
Link
(Thanks, the integral!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Converted toilet contains world's smallest brewery
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:06:56 AM
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A Welsh brewery in a 5'-square former toilet has reopened, brewing beer for the pub next door: it is the "world's smallest brewery."
Margaret and Mark Phillips, who own the Tynllidiart Arms and the brewery, said the beer had a secret recipe.
"The previous owner of the pub moved out two years ago and up until two weeks ago the pub was closed and the brewery was too," said Mr Phillips, who moved in just two weeks ago.
"We thought it would be nice to brew our own local beer and luckily we had a brewer living a few doors down who was able to help.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese rubber bunny desk accessories
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:07:51 AM
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I'm completely swooning for these Japanese desk-accessories made out of multi-coloured rubber bunnies -- there are cable-stables, CD-holders, whisks, stress-squeezums and more. If only I lived in Japan, I'd be on these like cute on Sanrio.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Records from the trash: rescued audio
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:10:47 AM
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Great LiveJournal post about one person's garbage-picked record-album habits:
And if something is not my cup of tea, I try to pass it on. For example, I'm not a huge fan of hip-hop, though I certainly like some of it. Whenever I show up at my local with a pile of records I've scavenged, Andre, one of the barmen, will probably say, sounding genuinely offended, "How come you never get any for me?" A few months ago, I spotted a gigantic stack of mostly hip-hop 12-inches awaiting the Sanitation Dept. I grabbed a gigantic pile, as many as I could carry, and made my way back to the bar, where I'd just seen him. "Hey, Andre, I got a present for you…" I said, and dropped the discs on the bar. "I'll be right back--there's more." It was worth it just to see the startled look on his face. (Out of the whole bunch of maybe 250 I kept about 8 or 10.)
And then there are 78s, which most people don't have the machinery to play. I've become interested in old 78rpm records ever since my father gave me his collection of jazz records--as well as a turntable to play them on--not long before his death. While there were some LPs in the bunch--and some of those were amazing ones--the majority of the collection consisted of jazz 78s, mostly from the 1940s, but some dating back as early as 1929, which means I'm the third generation to own them, since my father was only 15 that year and obviously acquired those records secondhand.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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TITLE: Keyboard optimised for BabySmash and its ilk
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:12:37 AM
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This $60 strap-on baby keyboard is a pretty cool idea -- basically, it's a hardware adapter for BabySmash-style software.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Heart-stopping sandwich of the year
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:13:54 AM
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Maxim Magazine has selected its sandwich of the year: the Fat Darrell (invented by Darrell Butler during his sophomore year at Rutgers University) contains chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks and french fries. Maxim lauds it for its "drunken ingenuity."
"So, I'm standing there eating it, and all of a sudden the guy standing behind me says, 'That thing that guy's eating looks pretty good, can you make me one of those?' And, it was like a movie scene, the next 10 people order the same thing. So, I'm like, 'Whoa!' like I think I might be onto something. And the guy is like, 'Hey, man, this is cool.'"
That guy who assembled the sandwich was Abdul Eid, working in an R.U. Hungry food truck, parked in a campus lot in New Brunswick, catering to beer-soaked undergraduates with the late-night munchies.
Eid now runs R.U. Hungry Grill & Pizza, a store he was able to open in part due to the success of the $4.75 Fat Darrell, the flagship of R.U.'s "Fat" line.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr RSS highlights
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:14:37 AM
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Ever since I signed up for some Flickr photo RSS feeds with keywords like "Graffiti" and "Tokyo," I've gotten a steady stream of pix taken by folks around the world. Some days, there's a serious jackpot, as today, with all these great pix of graffiti in Manhattan by someone called "Ninjin" and this sweet Tokyo skyline photo. Producing these little highlight posts is slightly labour-intensive, so I dunno how often I'll do them, but today it was worth it. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Alice as illustrated by dozens
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:17:33 AM
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This amazing Alice in Wonderland site collects versions of Alice as drawn by dozens of illustrators (including a wonderful page of Alice avatars). I'm very fond of the Mervyn Peake interpretations.
Alas, the site-author, who has appropriated hundreds of images from various artists, has decided that s/he should be immune from this treatment: right-clicking on many of the links and images yeilds an insulting Javascript popup that says, "Please don't take my images." Er, your images?
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto pumps near-freezing lake water into its summer office-towers
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:18:31 AM
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A MetaFilter post links to several information resources on Toronto's new innovative downtown cooling system, which pumps near-freezing water from Lake Ontario's deeps through the city's office-towers, eliminating 40,000 tons of CO2 pollution per annum (no word on whether there's an environmental impact to pumping the atmosphere-warmed water back into the lake). Toronto's had centralised steam-heat for decades -- a system where steam radiators in the city's office-towers are all filled with hot vapour from the same centralised plant, a curious species of public utility that truly makes all of the office towers (which contain bitter rivals and competitors) into a single, linked, cooperative system.
As I type this (but not as you read it -- this is being posted on a several-day delay), I am sitting just a few metres from the Toronto Island Water Filtration Plant, where the water-pumping takes place. The plant has a lot more barbed wire and fences than it did this time last year: I guess I know why now.
Link
Update: Michael Kalus notes, "the way this system
works is that the water is pulled out of Lake Ontario, then at the
John Street pumping station is fed through a head exchanger that cools
the office building. The "warm" water is then cleaned and used as
drinking water in Toronto, not just merely dumped back into the lake.
"In essence nothing has changed from before, only that the water is now
pulled out of a deeper part of the lake and I am no environmentalist,
but I would guess that the impact on the lake is neglectable as there
is already a huge volume of water taken out of the lake anyways."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sterling does a public interview on The Zenith Angle
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:19:52 AM
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Bruce Sterling's doing a virtual public interview on the WELL this week about his new technothriller, The Zenith Angle. I really liked this -- the blurb I sent Bruce went "Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called 'thrillers' but very few are this thrilling."
The thing that always intrigued me about technothrillers
was that technicians are support staff rather than
protagonists. I mean, who makes a worse enemy --
James Bond, with a "license to kill" -- or H. Ross Perot?
Perot's a weedy-looking Wally Cox mainframe
nerd, but he doesn't hesitate to hire ex=Special Forces
types and conduct private black-bag operations
in Iran.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shifted Librarian unpacks free CDs from the RIAA
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:21:56 AM
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As a requirement of its price-fixing settlement with the Feds, the RIAA is obliged to give thousands of CDs to public libraries. However, as has been noted, the CDs they're sending around are worse than shit: hundreds of copies of the years-old Whitney Houston single of the Star Spangled Banner, that species of kidney.
Jenny Levine (AKA the Shifted Librarian) works at a library where the RIAA care packages have started to come in. She reports on the contents thereof:
Several of the boxes are literally cut on the side, and the cut goes into the jewel cases themselves. Hence my declaration that we received a ton of "cut-outs." Some of the boxes even have dates of 2001 and 2002 posted on the labels, which I hope doesn't mean the date they were boxed up and put into storage. There is no way these boxes were packed by mistake as the result of a computer glitch. Some of the labels very clearly say 30 copies of this or that title, and I highly doubt the labels were supposed to cut the boxes after boxing and labeling them.
Link
Update: Thom sez, "Since the feds were notified that the RIAA was sending out boxes of crap there has been an effort to ensure that the shipments were indeed relevant. I work for a public radio station and we received well over a thousand CDs in boxes last month as a part of our end of the settlement. I was expecting to unpack Whitney Houston, but was shocked to find tons of great jazz, opera and classical. There was about 7% crap, but hey it's free crap."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cartoon characters taking tremendous dumps
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:22:31 AM
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My friend Karin Frank is a Viennese visual artist whose trademark is clay sculptures of sight-gags of cartoon characters wanking and having tremendous poos.
Possibly NSFW Link
(via Monochrom)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: OnStar's less-savoury customers
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:23:16 AM
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Great Morning News humour: OnStar conversations that didn't make the commercials:
Customer: Hey, so, I got an important package in the trunk, but I think I locked my keys in with it when I was dispatching...er...loading it.
OnStar: Not a problem, sir, I'm unlocking the trunk now.
Customer: [sound of trunk opening] Whooo...Jesus, that stinks!
OnStar: Are you OK, sir?
Customer: Yeah, yeah. I just got to get rid of this package as soon as possible. Say, can you give me directions to an abandoned quarry, or maybe some remote wooded spot where I could leave my package?
OnStar: Sure thing. I'm showing that there's an empty shaft at an old silver mine three miles southwest of your location.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Police procedural for digital evidence forensics
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DATE: 08/23/2004 04:24:58 AM
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The National Insitute of Justice has published "Forensic Examination of Digital Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement" -- a 91-page PDF to help computer-illiterate cops not screw up evidence collection and help cyber-cops make use of materials.
-Perform a controlled boot to capture CMOS/BIOSinformation and test functionality.
* Boot sequence (this may mean changing the BIOS to ensure the system boots from the floppy or CD-ROM drive).
* Time and date.
* Power on passwords.
- Perform a second controlled boot to test the computer’s functionality and the forensic boot disk.
* Ensure the power and data cablesare properly connected tothe floppy or CDROM drive, and ensure the power and data cables to the storage devices are still disconnected.
* Place the forensic boot disk into the floppy or CD-ROM drive. Boot the computer and ensure the computer will boot from the forensic boot disk.
- Reconnect the storage devices and perform a third controlled boot to capture the drive configuration information from the CMOS/BIOS.
* Ensure there is a forensic boot disk in the floppy or CD-ROM drive to prevent the computer from accidentally booting from the storage devices.
* Drive configuration information includes logical block addressing (LBA); large disk; cylinders, heads, and sectors (CHS); or auto-detect.
660K PDF Link
(Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Li'l Jon meets DVD Jon
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DATE: 08/23/2004 06:48:52 AM
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Step aside, Dave Chappelle:
dvd jon: Is that a Battle Royale DVD?
lil jon: YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
dvd jon: That's the Chinese flick with Go-go from Kill Bill?
lil jon: YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!
dj: You can't watch that here.
lj: What?!
dj: You can't watch it.
lj: What?!?
dj: It's "region 3"?
lj: What?!
dj: It won't work in your player.
lj: What?
dj: Give it to me. I'll fix it.
lj: OKAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!
Link (Thanks butter!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eight-foot-tall statues of Cthulhu for sale
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DATE: 08/23/2004 07:13:25 AM
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For $3900, you can buy this 7'8", 200 lb statue of Cthulhu for your garden or dungeon. Lots of other outsized nerd-pleasing statuary and sculpture also for sale on the Nethercraft site.
Link
(Thanks, Ryan!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ken Goldberg's telerobotic take on Berkeley in the 1960s
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DATE: 08/23/2004 07:44:13 AM
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BB pal Ken Goldberg and his collaborators have launched a new and timely telerobotic project that provides a breathtakingly high-res view of UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, the fiery focal point for free speech in the 1960s.
"On the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, in the context of
the PATRIOT Act, advances in technology, and the Presidential
election, Demonstrate provides 24 hour public access to UC Berkeley's
Sproul Plaza, where the student movement originated. The installation
combines the world's most advanced networked robotic camera, a visual
database, and a mathematical model of socio-ocular behavior.
Beginning September 1, Demonstrate will be featured on the Whitney
Museum of American Art's artport website."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Former Soviet Weapon Designers Take On Wind Power
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DATE: 08/23/2004 08:56:00 AM
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WorldChanging has a short item about a home-use electricity-generating windsail designed by engineers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US and the Makeyev State Rocket Center in Russia. Unlike a horizontal-axis wind turbine, this one is supposed to be quieter and less hazardous to birds. As you can see from the table below, you need a pretty brisk wind to keep even one light bulb burning.
|
Condition
|
Turbine Output (watts)
|
Annual KWh
|
|
<5 m/s wind
|
negligible
|
negligible
|
|
5 m/s
|
87
|
764
|
|
8 m/s
|
358
|
3130
|
|
10 m/s
|
700
|
6113
|
|
12 m/s
|
1209
|
10564
|
|
Class 2; 30M AGL
|
281
|
2457
|
|
Class 3; 30M AGL
|
401
|
3500
|
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Vote on your favorite beginnings to novels
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DATE: 08/23/2004 09:08:48 AM
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Opening Hooks is a site/database of opening sentences to novels. You can contribute your favorite book beginnings to it and rate (from 1 to 5) the books already in the database. There are about 20 book beginnings up so far. Of the ones offered so far, my favorite is from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (but I'm a sucker for last-man-on-earth books):
“On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. If he had been more analytical, he might have calculated the approximate time of their arrival; but he used the lifetime habit of judging nightfall by the sky, and on cloudy days that method didn't work. That's why he chose to stay near the house on those days.”
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pills and water in single package
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DATE: 08/23/2004 09:44:52 AM
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Pills to Go is a package concept design that includes space for two pills and a little swallow of water. Link
(via Cool Hunting)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bugmenot's new host: we're free speech advocates, not racists/fascists.
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DATE: 08/23/2004 10:03:23 AM
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If you missed Friday's BoingBoing installment of "As the Bugmenot Turns," I'd recommend you read that post before continuing with this one. Following up on that post about the death and subsequent resurrection of registration-avoidance-helper Bugmenot.com, Jeff Wheelhouse of NearlyFreeSpeech.NET -- the service's new webhost -- says:
"Regarding that post, I want to clarify a couple of potential misunderstandings that could arise based on feedback you received from a reader.
- NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is not a racist/fascist organization.
- The bugmenot.com site was probably *not* incorrectly filtered by WebSense.
Your reader is quoted below:
With regard to bugmenot leaving a host that sold racist paraphernalia -- their new web host provides service to a combat18 / redwatch site.
This is true. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a service founded on the principles of an equal voice for *all* people, without regard for their race, gender, religion, or beliefs. That still applies when the beliefs being expressed are antithetical to our own.
[If they moved because] they didn't want to be blocked by censorship software... Bugmenot had better hope they're not on the same server
this time.
If I understand the situation correctly, the second host bugmenot tried, dissidenthosting.com forwarded www.bugmenot.com traffic to another established site with racist content. Presumably, it was *that* site that was blocked by web filters and not the bugmenot site. Ironically, if this is correct, it sort of means that the filtering did its job properly and blocked the racist content. I felt this might not be clear based on your reader's message. Makers of web filters long ago learned that blocking traffic by IP address was not a successful practice. There should be no danger of bugmenot.com, or any site hosted by us, being filtered except upon its own merits (or lack thereof). Of course, some clueless sysadmin somewhere will prove me wrong, but if I am only wrong once today, it will be a good day. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET never redirects 404 errors or offline sites. Again, quoting from your post:
[Ed note: a banner ad on Redwatch plugs a hosting service identified as "Nigger Free Hosting," but the site does appear to live at nearlyfreespeech.net.]
I have long hoped that the 'Nigger Free Hosting' site is some sort of puerile racist joke; the site hardly appears developed enough to be a real hosting company. But whether it is or not, we are not affiliated with it in any way. We are thrilled to have bugmenot.com hosted with us. As you can see, we don't always get to say that. It's clever, it's useful, and it's one guy making a difference. I don't know what happened to the first hosting company to get the site shut down. Probably we're going to find out, and there's a good chance it's going to suck. But we will not go down without a fight, and we will never go down quietly. Not when sites like bugmenot are the whole freakin' point of our service. Thanks!"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video game vampire to go topless in October Playboy
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DATE: 08/23/2004 12:42:47 PM
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Ernest Miller sez, "Videogame character BloodRayne (a red-headed 'Dhampir' who hunts supernatural baddies for the 'Brimstone Society') will be topless in October's Playboy. According to her creators, 'This is a first in videogame history and trust us when we say that Rayne does not disappoint.'"
Link
(Thanks, Ernest!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lazyweb request: Removing anti-theft devices still attached to purchased clothing
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DATE: 08/23/2004 12:47:21 PM
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Does anyone know how to remove plastic anti-shoplifting devices from clothes? My wife came back from the mall on Sunday with some new school clothes for our daughter. The clerk forget to remove the plastic anti-theft clip from all the garments. You've seen these things before. They have a pin that attaches to a gum-pack-sized bar of plastic, which contains something that's supposed to make an alarm go off if you take it out of the store.
For some reason, the alarm didn't go off when my wife left the store, which is too bad, because I ended up trying to take one off using the tools in my toolbox. I thought I would be able to easily pull the pin out with a couple of pairs of pliers. Turns out it was very hard to take the pin out (I ended up using a pair of wire cutters to chew away bits of the rock-hard plastic until I could get a screwdriver inside and pry the pin off) and I made a little hole in the shirt. I'm too lazy to take the clothes back to the mall to have them remove the devices on the other garments, so I'm asking the readers of Boing Boing to help me out. How do you get one of these things off without mangling my daughter's clothes? Email your solution to me. I'll publish the best one.
UPDATE Most people suggested using a magnet, which did nothing. Another large group of people said take it back to the store and have them do it. Screw that; it's more fun to try it myself than to give up and drive to a loathsome mall. Some people told me to try putting a rubber band between the two pieces and twisting more and more loops around the the pin. That didn't work either. Other people suggested pinching the "nose" part of the clip on both ends with two pairs of pliers, and then pulling out the pin. Nope. Finally, I tried one guy's suggestion to hit the button with a hammer, which would cause it to split the clip open. The only thing that did was pinch the button down against the shirt. Since I already had the hammer, I hit the side of the clip, along its seam. After a few whacks, it split open. Here's what the innards look like. Nothing magnetic in there. I think the people who suggested pinching or bending the clip were on the right track.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Update on pink meth story
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DATE: 08/23/2004 01:12:10 PM
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Here's some feedback on my post about attempts to prevent meth makers from stealing fertilizer by staining it pink:
Anonymous BB reader sez: "I've got 10+ years clean & sober now, but I can tell you that crystal meth already comes in
almost any color you can imagine. Most of it is the same pale yellow or translucent, but there
used to be several "neon" colors that were quite the novelty.
"The part about hard to dry might be a deterrant, but the second part about wanting a clean
looking drug? HAHAHAHAHA just like you said, it's not going to make one bit of difference. Have
you seen tar heroin? That stuff is like pure thick gooey oil, who knows what they cut it with?
and as far as the 1000's of varieties of meth, there are very very few speed freaks who can
afford to care what the drug looks like. It's cut with all manner of nasty, dirty junk.
"If anything, the dealers will say it's stronger, cut back on the filler for a few weeks, and
people will pay a premium for it. I'm not an expert or anything, never did make a drug, just
used them a bunch. But like I said, 10+ years clean."
UPDATE A BB reader sent in this odd story about pink speed:
I live a ways outside Ft. Lewis in Washington state, and the following happened a few years back.
I was at a large, mostly punk house-party when a nervous-looking kid with a flat-top showed up. The party immediately became quiet because he was utterly vanilla-looking and built like a brick shithouse. He then began to ask quietly if anyone "wanted some drugs." He was laughed out of the house, pegged as an undercover cop. A while later my friends and I were sitting on the front porch, in the dark, when the kid reappeared. He asked some other people on the porch, again, if they wanted some drugs. He then insisted that he had to get rid of it quickly, which caused pretty similar reactions to the first time he offered. For some reason we started asking him a lot of questions, and point blank told him that we pegged him as an undercover cop. The resulting story was pretty strange.
He told us he was in the Army and then produced his military ID. It looked pretty real and put him at 20 years old. He told is that he was assigned to the infirmary as an assistant when he entered, and he did so well the first year that they started letting him do more on his own. Long story short, he discovered that the Army was packing it's own gelcaps with "supplements" to distribute to the troops, and he had access to the bulk packages of those "supplements." Well, it didn't take him very long one night to test the "energy supplements" with a military grade urine-analysis kit for drugs, resulting in a definite positive for methamphetamines. We all laughed at his story, since of course the military is jacking everyone up with speed, and then the kid dropped this bomb: in a recent shipment, there was an unaccounted for unit of the "energy supplements." He stole it.
I'm not generally a sucker for stories like that, but he seemed to be, at least, truly nervous about something. One of my friends asked "So where is it?" and the kid produced a small packet of *neon pink* crap, this strange, slightly damp, almost granular powder that smelled like poison. He said they dyed it pink so that it was readily identifiable, and so that no one would use it for any method but oral. He said the remainder of the *pound* was in his car, and he'd go get it if we wanted to buy it. He then asked us how much meth went for. Well, we were stumped, not being connoiseurs ourselves, and said thanks but no thanks. He left.
A few days later, talking to some friends of mine that had been at the party, he said that they had actually *purchased* some of the meth and had done it and, indeed, it had been the cleanest, most frighteningly powerful speed they had ever taken, but it had dyed their fingers and noses pink, so they had tossed it. I was baffled and delighted at the same time (wowee, conspiracy theories!).
So imagine me reading the link that they want to "start dying" the fertilizer. It's been done for a while now, it appears, and with some success, but not for civilians. Also, in the case of my associates, the drugs being pink was a deterrent. Then again, they were never addicts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indian retro comics and ephemera
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DATE: 08/23/2004 08:11:18 PM
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Straight outta Bombay, a cool collection of strange and unusual artifacts from Indian pop culture. Much of it from the '80s, and much of it far from the Bollywood mainstream. Strange comics, TV shows, bubblegum wrappers. Latest entry is a bunch of kids' ads from '80s comic books. Bonus round: IM transcripts of the site's creators posing as a 24-year-old Indian female cyberhottie among vast legions of horny web-men, to greatly humorous effect.
Link to www.vishalpatel.com.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mineralarianism food movement
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DATE: 08/23/2004 08:39:10 PM
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Atkins is for pussies. Raw Foodism, Zen Macrobiotics, Fruitarianism -- hell, Breathtarianism -- they've all got nothing on this most extreme of dietary philosophies. Adherents of Mineralarianism nosh on nothing but rocks. Snip from the manifesto:
We are scarcely less related to the wheat or the yeast in a loaf of bread than we are to our fellow animals. We can no longer hide behind the idea that these life forms are not our kin, nor can we rationalize our mistreatment of them by saying that plants, fungi, and microbes are incapable of suffering...
If we refuse to eat our relatives, what CAN we eat? Fortunately, the same sciences of chemistry and biology that reveal our kinship to all life have freed us at last from the need to kill. Although most people are suprised to hear it, it is possible to live and thrive on a diet consisting entirely of foods of mineral origin. This is because every one of the several dozen nutrients the human body requires - carbohydrate, amino acids, fats, vitamins, and of course minerals - can be synthesized or extracted from air, water, and rock without the involvement of any life form, aside from the chemists who perform these miraculous transformations. The Mineralarians are an international association of people, diverse in other respects, who share the common determination to subsist on foods of mineral origin, thereby sparing our fellow beings the victimization that has been their lot, at our hands for the last million years, and before that at the claws and jaws of previously dominant species.
Link to the Mineralarianism movement website. (Thanks, Rudy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mosqueclock.com
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DATE: 08/23/2004 09:08:35 PM
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Clocks in the image of mosques. They play Azan (the Islamic call to prayer) for an alarm. Link (via memepool, thanks Scott)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Virtual cellular girlfriend
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DATE: 08/23/2004 09:28:19 PM
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Hong Kong-based AI development company Artificial Life is launching a sort of persistent, quasi-reality game in which a virtual girlfriend appears as an animated figure on your phone display. Kind of like a tamagotchi with tits. There is a direct correlation between her level of romantic activity output and the amount of money you spend on her. Actually, my people have a word for this sort of creature: ho.
(BBC News story says:)
But there is a downside to the virtual girlfriend - she will require more flowers and gifts than many real women. Artificial Life is hoping to launch the new game later this year, on the latest 3-G mobile phones. All virtual girls will look the same - but each girl will behave differently - depending on how much money is spent on her. On top of a general subscription, men will be charged a fee to buy flowers and gifts for the virtual girlfriend. In return, she will introduce them to different aspects of her life, like letting them meet her female friends - also electronic images.
(Press release says:)
The behavior of the
virtual characters is based on scientific principles and algorithms inspired
by the computer related artificial life sciences and is using artificial
intelligence technology to achieve human like behavior and responses.
The algorithm of bling, I suppose. Link to BBC News story on the Hong Kong mo-ho, and Link to press release. A Virtual Boyfriend version of the game is slated for release in February 2005; Fleshbot imagines he might be satiated instead with "unlimited supplies of beer, porn, and blowjobs." The company touts itself as a provider of "mobile solutions." This is a mobile solution to what problem? (Thanks, Pimp Daddy Lappin)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Formaldehyde find
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DATE: 08/24/2004 01:34:10 AM
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Someone on eBay is auctioning a fine-looking old collection of biology specimens in jars from Denoyer Geppert Science Company. "Purchased from a high school," the lot includes 48 pickled organisms of an unknown vintage. UPDATE: (fixed link) Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ScienceMatters@Berkeley
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DATE: 08/24/2004 01:58:42 AM
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Please check out my latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley. This month, read all about:
* The Tale of the Otter and Abalone--a story of counter-intuitive evolution
* Boundaries Unbounded--the mathematics of inkjet printing, MRI brain scans, and microchip manufacturing
* The Evolutionary Secret of Body Segmentation--the odd anatomy of arthropods
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Archive and analyse LiveJournal
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DATE: 08/24/2004 03:58:25 AM
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ljArchive scrapes LiveJournals and builds searchable indexes, which it then analyses for things like psych profiles -- it also reads entries aloud, plots post frequencies and comments, and so forth.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: San Francisco's best-and-worst for cameras
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:02:08 AM
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Thomas Hawk, a dedicated amateur photographer who has been shooting around San Francisco, has found himself increasingly confronted with goons in shops and museums who tell him to put his camera away. He's written an essay with a hall-of-shame for San Francisco businesses that are cam-unfriendly, and a hall-of-fame for businesses that encourage picture-taking:
San Francisco Giants (SBC Park): The home of the San Francisco Giants has one of the most accommodating policies regarding camera usage around: "All cameras still and video are permitted into SBC Park for Giants games. Tripods are permitted, but may only be set up in areas where they do not obstruct walkways or other guests' view of the game action." According to Rick Mears, Vice President, Guest Services, "if there isn't a very good and demonstrable reason (guest safety, or for the greater good of all guests' ballpark experience) for having a restrictive policy on our guests we won't have the restrictive policy. We want our fans to feel like honored guests when they visit SBC Park because that is precisely what they are."
Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Organizr: like iPhoto for your browser
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:06:58 AM
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Ludicorp has just shipped a Flash-based iPhoto replacement called Organizr, a front-end for its Flickr photo-sharing service. It lives in your browser and does for photo-organizing what gmail does for email: seamlessly merges your mail with your browser. But unlike gmail's closed interface, Flickr has a gloriously open API so that you can build your own apps on top of theirs. iPhoto has reached the meltdown point for me -- nearly 10,000 photos, and adding new ones and marking up my old ones takes so long I've actually gone and cooked dinner while waiting for the beach-ball to finish spinning -- and I'm seriously considering moving all my images to Flickr. Check out the movie. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Organizr).
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Doom 3 teenagers freaking out
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:11:24 AM
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This is a video of two teenaged boys playing Doom 3 -- you can't see the game, just their reaction. As Joey notes, these kids are screaming like hyenas as the boo-scareys lurch out of the Doom 3 shadows and leap on their characters. One of the kids actually gnaws a pillow when it all gets to be too much for him. Pretty cool endorsement for a game, actually.
7.8MB WMV Link,
Mirror Link (Thanks, Quentin!)
(via AccordionGuy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harvey Comix's Seven Deadly Sins
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:16:10 AM
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Mike Sterling has chosen panels from old Harvey comix that illustrate the seven deadly sins -- Richie Rich was an obvious one for "Greed" but Wendy the Witch was a gutsy choice for "Lust." (Reminds me of the Seven Castaways as Deadly Sin Embodiments: Skipper=Wrath, Professor=Pride, Thurston=Greed, Ginger=Lust, Gilligan=Sloth, Maryann=Envy, Lovey=Gluttony?)
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: T-shirt with hidden sternum pockets
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:17:14 AM
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The BlackCoat Tee is a t-shirt with a zipper over the sternum that connects to hidden celphone/walkman/etc pouches. I'm a pocket-junkie: my device array makes it really tricky to get by with just jeans and a t-shirt -- I end up with the bulging-est pockets evar.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tell an AI where you've been for a month and it'll guess where you're going
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:18:21 AM
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Jefferson sez, "This paper won the Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI-04 (Amer. Assoc. for AI's National Conf.) in July. In a nutshell, they took the trace from a person carrying a GPS unit around with him for a month. With no hand labelling of the data, they were able to build a model of the person's travel behavior including frequent destinations (work, home, grocery friends homes), and modes of transportation (bus vs. walking). With new data, the model can predict, on-line, the traveler's most likely destination, and detect 'unknown activities' (e.g. strange behavior)."
144k PDF Link
(Thanks, Jefferson!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jar-topper counts coins and displays total
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:19:42 AM
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This $15 jar-topper senses and counts the coins you deposit into your coin-bank and displays the outcome on a little LCD.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Baltimore Book Thing charity needs warehouse space
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DATE: 08/24/2004 04:31:33 AM
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The Book Thing is a Baltimore charity that gives away thousands and thousands of books. The basement they operate out of has been sold and they may lose their lease, and they need new space. Amy, a Book Thing volunteer, has blogged a request for help -- check it out and let her know if you've got a big empty space in Baltimore they can have.
But now we realize we have it pretty good, since it looks as if we may lose our space at any time. The building that has housed TBT for all this time has been sold to a new owner, and we haven't the foggiest idea whether or not he'll let us stay. If we can't find a new location, we'll have to close. It almost brings me to tears to think about it. We touch so many lives... our customers range from middle class parents bringing their children, to college students bringing themselves, hoping to save on textbooks, to schoolteachers from impoverished schools, to the curators of prison and homeless shelter libraries. Quite a number of our 'patrons' ship books to their homelands, the Philippines and South Africa (for example), because books are hard to come by there. And we are touched, as volunteers, because we get to do something good for the world—and it's an indescribable feeling that you can only get through exchanging your hard labor for others' happiness and well-being.
Help me find a new location, and save this dusty Baltimore jewel for everyone's sake!
We need, basically:
* 4,000 sq ft+
* heat
* ideally, a/c as well
* a bathroom
* handicap access
* free or very cheap
Link
(Thanks, Amy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iran web censorship update: admins detained
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DATE: 08/24/2004 06:17:58 AM
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Persian blogger Hossein Derakshan says Iranian officials recently detained several staff and web technicians who worked on banned reformist websites, in order to gain control of the sites. They have now reportedly taken control of the servers, shut them down, and deleted all of their content. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gamer flashback: 1982 LIFE Magazine arcade contest photo spread
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DATE: 08/24/2004 06:29:36 AM
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This LIFE Magazine spread -- "Video Game VIPs" -- celebrates leet arcade gamers at the height of their early '80s glory. Someone should do a "where are they now?" piece!
The group included Ned Troide, best known for having played DEFENDER for 62 1/2 consecutive hours on a single quarter. The games have their critics, of course. Physicians claim that maneuvering a joystick too many hours can lead to "video elbow" and "arcade arthritis." The mental side effects can be equally serious, according to U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. "There's nothing constructive in the games," says Koop. "Everything is kill, destroy, zap the enemy." Retorts TEMPEST virtuoso Leo Daniels, "I think Koop is a quack."
Link (Thanks, Macki!)
Update: BB reader Andy Thomas says, "I Googled Leo Daniels and this is what i found. Watch out, the lion really roars! God bless him."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Silberman's "The War Room" in WIRED
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DATE: 08/24/2004 06:36:22 AM
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WIRED contributing editor Steve Silberman says his new story, "The War Room," is a first look inside "a new Pentagon-sponsored training program for soldiers headed to Iraq and elsewhere that immerses them in highly realistic virtual environments designed by Hollywood special effects artists.... Interesting, troubling."
This is the new way soldiers will train for battle. In September, a select group of Army infantrymen, Marine corpsmen, Navy sailors, and Air Force pilots at Fort Sill will become the first military personnel to learn the art of combat and the rules of engagement from surround sound action movies starring themselves. The installation is the brainchild of the Institute for Creative Technologies, an Army-funded R&D group at the University of Southern California. ICT brings together videogame developers, f/x artists, research scientists, and Pentagon experts to create faster, cheaper, and more effective ways of preparing recruits for their jobs on the front lines. If all goes well, similar facilities will go up at bases from Fort Bliss to Fallujah.
The military has been using flight and tank simulators for decades ("War Is Virtual Hell," Wired 1.01), but the installation at Fort Sill is the first attempt to duplicate battle conditions for troops by combining wartime science and theme-park showmanship. The Joint Fires and Effects Trainer System, or JFETS, is the product of an unprecedented level of cooperation among the Pentagon, film and gaming companies, and Silicon Valley - a synergy that Stanford history professor Tim Lenoir calls the military-entertainment complex.
Virtual war will never fully replace the mainstays of boot camp life: live-fire exercises and ass-busting field training. But as weapons systems grow smarter, they become more expensive to deploy in real-world war games. Now that consumer gaming engines like Unreal are able to render cinematic-quality graphics in real time, even big-ticket munitions are trivial to simulate.
Link to Steve's article released earlier this month in WIRED.
Also of note: a story on the Institute for Creative Technologies from this Sunday's New York Times: Registration-required Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Motherlode of century-old postcards
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DATE: 08/24/2004 06:57:30 AM
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Huge online collection of old postcards from the late 19th century and early 20th century. I spent hours last night noodling through the ones from Guatemala, Nigeria, Hawaii, and Tahiti -- but the gallery includes many more countries. Looks like they're for sale, too. In the "Guatemala" batch, I found three Mayan girls from the early 1900s; I love this postcard of two Mayan men from Solola, from the same period. Then, there's "Visiting a Vietnamese Penal Colony, Wish You Were Here!" How cool is it that the site allows you to search by topical themes like dromedaries, chiromancy, and prostitution? In the latter, I found this totally bizarre image of a sex worker's flea-bitten thighs, and the haunting postcard portrait of an anonymous Algerian prostitute, shown at left.
Link (Thanks, Carl!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to make 3D photos with an ordinary camera
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DATE: 08/24/2004 09:20:17 AM
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On Engadget, Phillip Torrone provides step-by-step instructions for creating 3D photos (the kind that can be viewed with red and blue glasses) using an ordinary camera and photoshop. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone episode
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DATE: 08/24/2004 11:04:31 AM
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Gerry sez: "While searching for something entirely unrelated, I came across this: the original Planet of the Apes movie, reedited and reimagined as a thirty-minute episode of the original Twilight Zone. Black and white, commercial breaks, Rod Serling narration and everything.
"*Extremely* well done. I'm pretty floored. It really is a perfect fit." Link
UPDATE Cliph sez: "That fan re-edit of Planet of the Apes is excellent. The site was a bit slow to serve the file when I tried so I've made a torrent. "
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Reason magazine on John Gilmore vs Ashcroft
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DATE: 08/24/2004 03:11:01 PM
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Sun Microsystems millionaire John Gilmore is suing the Justice Department because it has secret laws requiring people to show ID when flying on a commercial domestic plane. Here's a good Reason article about it.
But as Gilmore has argued, real security doesn't often have a great deal to do with knowing who someone is, or who a card says he or she is. (Even the most biometrically sophisticated of modern ID documents will be potentially forgeable for those with a strong incentive to do so.) Real security has much more to do, in Gilmore's airline context, with making sure people, whatever their card says, don't bring weapons or bombs on planes—or making sure that trustworthy people on planes, whether pilots or air marshals, are empowered to resist miscreants. (After 9/11, normal citizens have almost certainly gotten the message to resist at all costs.) The government still doesn't want to allow the good guys to defend themselves on planes effectively, and thus are all the more insistent on the security theater of showing an ID card.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Irate tree-owner burns voracious caterpillars
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DATE: 08/24/2004 03:53:00 PM
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Photographic evidence of tree-denuding caterpillars and their painful death by fire. Link (Thanks, smllpx!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DIY hamster-powered Night Light
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DATE: 08/24/2004 08:37:16 PM
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What the title says, folks:
"'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?' That was enough inspiration for us to start the project, and we soon added Skippy the Hamster to the Otherpower.com payroll. He's a Syrian Hamster, and we chose that breed since they are nocturnal and like to run on the exercise wheel.
Link (via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Book: "This is Burning Man"
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DATE: 08/24/2004 08:41:59 PM
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With less than two weeks to go before the annual beglittered bacchanalia in Black Rock City begins, BoingBoing buddy Scott Beale says:
This is Burning Man is a new book about Burning Man written by our good friend Brian Doherty, who is based out of Los Angeles and is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
This is by far the most extensive historical account of Burning Man in print, as well the first book distributed through a major publisher (Little, Brown and Company). If you are on your way out to Black Rock City this year or even if you no longer attend, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the origins of Burning Man, the people involved and how the event is organized, operates, survives and grows.
Link to This is Burning Man website, which includes Brian's ongoing book-blog. I've received a review copy, and thoroughly enjoyed it from cover to cover. Required reading for any BoingBoing readers heading to the playa -- or wishing they were, or wondering what the hell all the fuss is about.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bjork hearts filesharing
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DATE: 08/24/2004 09:34:40 PM
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Bjork shares her unorthodox views on filesharing in an interview teeing up her next release, Medulla, slated for formal worldwide launch in a week:
Q: So Bjork is not superstitious then?
A: "You know, its ironic that just at the point the lawyers and the businessmen had calculated how to control music, the internet comes along and fucks everything up." Bjork gives the finger again, this time waving it into the air. "God bless the internet," she adds.
Q: And what about you, then?
A: "I'll still be there, waving a pirate flag."
Link (Thanks, Dav)Update: BoingBoing reader Josiah says, "The new album is on sale now at One Little Indian (two weeks before the official release). There was a 'secret' (but public) link sent out to members of her email list. The CD comes from the UK so it equates to between $24 - $30 per CD with shipping to the US, but for people in the UK it's regular price. Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 80s Gamer flashback: Billy Mitchell and Mr. Awesome.
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DATE: 08/24/2004 10:04:20 PM
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Following up on this earlier post, BoingBoing reader Richard says,
"Please, the focus of your post on 80's era video game heroes should have been Billy Mitchell. In addition to being the goofiest of all the LIFE magazine participants, Billy still organizes video game contests, runs the primary video game record site and is apparently in a heated (and ongoing) fued about who holds the all-time record on Missile Command.
The man who claims to hold the record? Roy Shildt -- aka, "Mr. Awesome." This website is all about the dispute. Check out the circa-80's picture of Steven Spielberg kicking it in front of a Missile Command machine about 1/3 of the way down as well as the pics of Billy getting some video game award from a group of fawning Japanese people. If you want more on Mr. Awesome, here's the webpage where he sells his book on how to meet ladies. I only WISH I were kidding.
Link to previous BoingBoing post on leet arcade gamers from the '80s.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gamespace protestors disappeared by Star Wars Galaxies cops
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DATE: 08/25/2004 04:39:57 AM
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After a bug allowed some players to coin counterfeit currency in Star Wars Galaxies, which they spread around through gifts and tips, the SWG management responded by banning everyone with fake money -- including players who had received such in good faith. The banned players' friends gathered in protest and were told to leave or face server-shutdown. The protestors stood their ground and found themselves randomly teleported across gamespace -- and one player kept a running account going of the official response:
This is Allehe reporting live from a staged protest outside Theed Starport. Just a few moments ago protesting cartoons went suddenly missing -- warped outside our great galaxy. Where have they landed? This we do not know. What we do know is people are angry...and showing their support in banning CREDIT Dupers...also known as cheaters. It appears the Great SOE GODS are favoring the cheaters over the fair and honest gameplayers. I will remain here until there is no news...
This is Allehe
Reporting live from Theed Spaceport, Naboo, Intrepid.
Back to you Dan.
Link, Star Wars Galaxies management response, Penny Arcade editorial cartoon
(via Lawmeme), (Thanks, Allen!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Craig of Craigslist interview
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DATE: 08/25/2004 05:42:44 AM
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Wired Magazine ran an interview this month with Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and an all-round mensch:
Google's touchy-feely corporate mantra is "Don't be evil." What's yours?
Give people a break.
A break from what?
A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighborly thing to do. And our species survives by cooperating.
What poses the major threat to that survival?
Kleptocrats and sociopathic organizations that have the almighty dollar as their only goal.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online toilet paper holder treasure hunt
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DATE: 08/25/2004 06:36:08 AM
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Why I love BoingBoing readers: Youssef writes --
I conducted a quick (3 hour) safari on the internet looking for odd and quirky toilet paper roll holders. The results are summarised in this blog entry. Really weird what you find sometimes... I'll do toilet brushes next!
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: This Land is Your Land is actually in the public domain
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DATE: 08/25/2004 06:40:07 AM
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JibJab's hilarious election-year parody of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" has been spared from death-by-litigation thanks to the efforts of my cow-orkers at EFF and the Internet's outraged musicologists. It turns out that Woody Guthrie's initial publication of This Land is eleven years earlier than previously thought, which means that the copyright renewal filed by Ludlow, the carpetbaggers who bought his estate's publishing rights, was eleven years too late.
That's right: as my cow-orker Fred "Total Grokster Victory" von Lohmann notes, "So Guthrie's original joins the Star-Spangled Banner, Amazing Grace, and Beethoven's Symphonies in the public domain. Come to think of it, now that 'This Land is Your Land' is in the public domain, can we make it our national anthem? That would be the most fitting ending of all."
The most delicious aspect of this is that Ludlow could have gone on treating Guthrie's song as a copyrighted work, collecting licensing fees from anyone who was not making a fair use of the song -- say, someone making a [puke] car commercial -- had they not decided to pull a Lord Vader on JibJab, the poor, abused parodists. Reminds me of when Sony sued an Aussie dictionary for defining "walkman" as a generic personal stereo, which resulted in the court finding that the dictionary was correct, Sony was wrong, and walkman is generic. If they'd just kept their lawyers in their pants, they'd still be sitting pretty.
Link
(Thanks, Donna and Chris!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Space House for Earth
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DATE: 08/25/2004 07:01:55 AM
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The European Space Agency is designing a terrestrial house based on technology like ultra-light carbon fiber-reinforced plastic developed for space-based structures.
"The (house) design that engineers and designers came up with is a sphere-like structure - one of the most stable self-sustained shapes. As it stands on legs it is isolated from any movements underneath it as it basically glides on top of the Earth. In its current design the SpaceHouse can withstand vibrations from earthquakes of up to 7 on the Richter scale, wind speeds of up to 220 km/h and up to 3 metres of flooding – specifications that came out of discussions with the insurance industry for a typical European location.
The house is designed to be autonomous. It uses energy-efficient solar power as well as advanced systems for recycling and cleaning water. Another idea, now on the drawing board, is to include a system to remove pathogenic particles in the sub-micron range from the air."
The bummer is that you'll need to make quite a move if you want to live in SpaceHouse. The model home will likely be occupied by German scientists at the Neumayer Antarctic Research Station. In the meantime, maybe the Taschens might consider selling their ultra-spacey Chemosphere house in Los Angeles. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bad moods boost memory
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DATE: 08/25/2004 07:42:33 AM
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A new scientific study shows that people who are in good moods tend to have unreliable memories. According to the press release, researchers at the University of New South Wales "put different subjects in a positive (happy) or negative (sad) mood state." (Creepy!) After the subjects experienced "eyewitness events" such as a staged purse-robbery, their recall was rated. The individuals in negative moods provided more accurate accounts of what happened.
""The finding makes sense in evolutionary terms," says Professor (Josephn) Forgas. "Animals that are wary of their environment are more likely to perceive threats to their survival."
In another experiment, subjects were asked to write an argument supporting a specific proposition. Apparently, grumpy individuals expressed better critical thinking and communication skills. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New art-toy line by STRANGEco: Neo Kaiju Project
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DATE: 08/25/2004 09:56:00 AM
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Scott sez: "STRANGEco of San Francisco has taken the art-as-toy revolution one step further with The Neo Kaiju Project. These new mini figures feature original designs by Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Seonna Hong, Kathy Staico-Schorr and Todd Schorr. Each artist has created two original figures each; one an homage to classic Japanese monsters (kaiju), the other a figure of their own original design." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn Law Draws Adult Sites' Ire
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DATE: 08/25/2004 10:34:16 AM
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In today's Wired News, a story I filed about a new Department of Justice proposal to require more stringent record-keeping of pornstar identities. The move is drawing fire from adult webmasters. If enacted, they say the new regs may make it tough for adult sites to stay in business.
"The internet is an international entity. This could be yet another incentive for websites to set up business elsewhere," said [business partner of veteran erotic photographer Suse Randall] Humphry Knipe. "This isn't a big deal for Hustler or Playboy, but what about some guy who operates a website out of his basement? Will he have to let agents into his home?"
Another requirement raising the ire of porn webmasters is a clause requiring that a statement regarding the location of the custodian of records be published in a typeface at least as large as that in which performers, producers, directors or company owners are displayed.
"If 'Playboy' is printed in 180 point type on a magazine cover, the 2257 disclosure would also have to be displayed in 180 point type," says DeWitt. "If you keep names in smaller size type, the law says it can't be smaller than 11 point type -- how does that work on websites or videotape, where font size is measured differently?"
"I could make a good case for the idea that these regulations are designed to harass people in the adult industry. We already have tough anti-child-porn laws," says DeWitt. "I see no good reason for many of these conditions, other than imposing an unnecessary harassment for people in a business which is a stated enemy of the Bush administration."
Link to Wired News story "Porn Law Draws Adult Sites' Ire".
A BoingBoing extra: First Amendment attorney and AVN columnist Clyde DeWitt, who I interviewed for this story, submitted an extensive set of opposing comments to the DoJ yesterday. You can read them here Link (PDF, 37 pages, 216K)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pictoplasma conference on character design
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DATE: 08/25/2004 10:38:08 AM
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Kevin Slavin emailed me about a "Pictoplasma, an archive of nearly six thousands of character designs, "including those very much like the neo-kaiju work (most of them are included in
pictoplasma)." Kevin says, "the guy who runs it is the closest thing we have to a character-design scholar. He's also hosting a conference on this very subject, in Berlin, next month. Gary Baseman will be presenting there, for example, but the amazing part is the less famous people doing amazing work." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tricks used by different kinds of workers
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DATE: 08/25/2004 01:26:43 PM
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Fascinating article that lists a bunch of tricks used in different types of work.
Piano Salesman: If you see a potential customer eyeing a piano, estimate their age and calculate what year it was when they were 18 years old. Play a big hit from that year on the piano they’re looking at. With a lot of preparation and a little luck, you might play the exact song they were listening to when they lost their virginity, got married, or drove their first car. The emotional resonance will overcome sales resistance and even open their wallets to a more expensive piano.
Nurse: Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they’re most likely unconscious; if not, they’re faking.
Link (Via Gadgetopia)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MPAA's latest in-theater "respect copyright" spots inspire ridicule
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DATE: 08/25/2004 04:56:48 PM
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(Update here). Defamer says:
Recently, we were respecting the entertainment industry's copyrights in a $14 Cinerama Dome seat when Hollywood stunt coordinator Manny Perry began his impassioned plea for us to further respect copyrights by visiting the MPAA's scary website after leaving the theater. A chorus of groans rose up from the audience as the dreaded words faded into view: "Manny Perry Makes Movies." We don't personally blame Manny Perry for his misguided participation in the MPAA propaganda, as we assume that Jack Valenti was holding his wife hostage at gunpoint while threatening to feed his infant daughter to a poorly-bred pit bull in Manny Perry's ranch-style home in Chatsworth, but that doesn't mean that others are so understanding. Here's a representative sample of our readers' frustration...
Link to complete Defamer post, and a subsequent update about Manny Parry, the star of one spot. Link to Low Culture's post on the "incredibly annoying respectcopyrights.org ads that run before the trailers at movies lately." Link to the MPAA's respectcopyrights.org, which boasts what may be the ass-suckiest, most uberbloated Flash interface on the entire intarweb. The campaign's happy happy joy joy slogan? "YOU CAN CLICK -- BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE." Link to poster bearing said slogan (PDF). Link to IMDB entry for Manny Perry, arguably the most copyright-respectingest man in Hollywood. Astute BoingBoing readers will note that the very first line of this IMDB listing reads "Trivia: Appeared in a commercial to battle the internet movie pirates." Aye, with his bare hands he did, matey! Arrrrrrrrrr!!!
Links to *.mov video files of the latest trailer:
low, med,
high.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Parody of MPAA "Click but you can't hide" poster
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DATE: 08/25/2004 06:32:26 PM
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(Update here). Following up on a previous post about the MPAA's "Respect Copyright" campaign, cheeky monkey Trevor Haldenby points us to his parody of the MPAA's campaign poster (Link to PDF original).
Link to parody poster, cropped and thumbnailed at left (220K jpeg). Mirror 1, Mirror 2.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Olympic gadget lust
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DATE: 08/25/2004 07:39:40 PM
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Snapshots of all of the different sorts of crazy cool digital SLR gear used by photographers during one event at the Athens Olympics. Link (Thanks, Rob Galbraith)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Superhighspeed broadband wet dreams
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DATE: 08/25/2004 08:13:19 PM
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Drool. Swedish high-speed broadband provider Bredbandsbolaget sells 100-megabit-per-second service for 595 Swedish crowns ($79.49) a month in areas where the state of wiring infrastructure permits. Over 1,500 households have already signed up. In the US, $79 might buy you, say, a 3.0 Mbps DSL connection. Higher-speed forms of connectivity are available in many parts of the US, but that's a common speed-per-buck equation. And it compared to Sweden, it blows.
For Rainer Kinnunen, life has been a bit of a blur since he signed up for a superhigh-speed Internet service three years ago. The 31-year-old Swedish student's computer has supplanted the television as the most vital link between his home and the outside world. He watches television shows and movies, makes phone calls, surfs the Web and plays multiplayer shoot-'em-up games through his high-speed connection -- often doing one or more activities at once.
His 10-megabit-per-second service from telecommunications company Bredbandsbolaget is up to 20 times faster than conventional cable modems, enabling a user to download a two-hour movie in a matter of minutes rather than hours. For Kinnunen, the result has been a lifestyle change that, though not revolutionary, is certainly noticeable. "If my child wants a movie, I can download it instantly," he said. "And I haven't been to the neighborhood music store in years."
Since going superhigh-speed, Kinnunen has set up two computer servers in his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Eskilstuna. One supplies his digital photos to friends and family. On the other, he duels it out for hours a day with other players of the "Half-Life: Day of Defeat" online war game. And he has enough bandwidth and server space left over to broadcast his DVDs from his apartment to his friends' computers in case they want to watch along from across town.
Link (Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Persian bloggers report girl's execution for "acts incompatible with chastity"
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DATE: 08/25/2004 08:28:43 PM
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Iranian blogs are talking about reports that 16-year-old girl Atefe Rajabi (alternately reported "Ateqeh Rajabi," or "Atefeh Sahaleh") was publicly executed on August 15 by a Sharia court in the Iranian town of Neka. She was reportedly hanged in the street for having engaged "in acts incompatible with chastity." An Amnesty International statement condemning the reported execution is here, and says that interviews with townspeople indicate the child was developmentally disabled or suffering from a psychiatric illness. AI also says she would be the tenth minor to have been publicly executed in Iran since 1990.
Some Persian bloggers were lamenting the fact that conventional media appeared to be ignoring the story until today, though the execution took place ten days ago. But others, including Hossein Derakshan, questioned whether or not the blogged reports were reliable since "no reliable local or national news outlets had confirmed it" (Here is Hoder's Farsi post to that effect). Stories about the reported execution are coming out now AFP, UPI, Chicago Sun Times, and other news organizations. But all of the English-language news pieces I've found use the AI report as a sole source of facts around the case -- and the AI report in turn appears to rely solely on an item that appeared on Iranian website Peyk-e Iran. The facts seem hazy, all around -- but the story is deeply disturbing. Here's an excerpt from an unconfirmed English translation of one Farsi-language report; it appeared August 19 on an Iranian activist message board:
The execution was carried out by the order of Neka's "judicial administrator" and was approved by both the Supreme Court of the Islamic Republic and the chief of the nation's "judiciary branch." Although according to her birth certificate she was only 16 years old, the local court falsely claimed that she was 22.
Three months ago, during her appearance before the local court, fiercely angry the young girl hurled insults at the local judge, Haji Reza, who is also the chief judicial administrator of the city, and it is said as another expression of protest took off some of her clothes in the courtroom. This act by the young girl made the administrator so furious that he evaluated her file personally and in less than three months received a go-ahead from the Islamic Republic's Supreme Court for her execution. The animosity and anger of Haji Reza was so strong that he personally put the rope around the girl's delicate neck and personally gave the signal to the crane operator, by raising his hand, to begin pulling the rope.
It may be noted that although according to the Islamic Republic's own penal laws the presence of an attorney for the defense [is supposed to be] mandatory, regardless of the defendant's ability to afford one, nevertheless the girl remained without an attorney. Her unfortunate father, while tears poured from his eyes, went about the city beseeching the townspeople for money to hire an attorney who in the least would provide his daughter with a line of defense.
So what really happened here? Link to English language message-board post. Link to news story in Farsi. Link to National Business Review story, New Zealand. Farsi-speaking blogger Isabelle posts about this in French here. (Thanks, Jean-Luc Raymond)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to keep logs without endangering user privacy
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DATE: 08/25/2004 10:45:59 PM
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There's a temptation, when you run an online service, to keep your logs forever. Storing text is cheap and easy, so why not? Well, if you're storing the personally identifying info of your users, you risk compromising their privacy in the event of a hack-attack, a lawsuit, or a PATRIOT-style sleazeball no-due-process investigation. EFF has produced a white paper with many recommendations for online service providers who want to log enough data to troubleshoot tech problems, but not so much that you risk your users' privacy.
As an intermediary, the Online Service Provider finds itself in a position to collect and store detailed information about its users and their online activities that may be of great interest to third parties. The USA PATRIOT Act also provides the government with expanded powers to request this information. As a result, OSP owners must deal with requests from law enforcement and lawyers to hand over private user information and logs. Yet, compliance with these demands takes away from an OSP's goal of providing users with reliable, secure network services. In this paper, EFF offers some suggestions, both legal and technical, for best practices that balance the needs of OSPs and their users’ privacy and civil liberties.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best digital camera introduces zooming 3MP model
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DATE: 08/25/2004 10:50:05 PM
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Casio's Exilim cameras are the best digital cameras I've ever used, period. Great form-factor, great size, great -- fantastic -- UI, and great-looking piccies. Now Casio has announced a new whisker-thin credit-card-sized three megapixel Exilim with an optical zoom built in. I'm using the non-zooming 3MP and I've nearly beaten it to death (the Exilim is the first camera I've used that's small enough for me to carry 24/7): now I know what my next camera will be.
Link
(Thanks, Fred!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC staging unannounced flashmob operas
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DATE: 08/25/2004 10:52:10 PM
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Flashmobs meet opera meet public transit: the BBC is staging unannounced flashmob operas at train stations.
[T]he BBC has announced that next month it will surprise commuters by staging an opera at an unnamed London rail station, without any warning.
The 65-strong orchestra and three opera singers will swoop in unannounced, with selected members of the public joining in as a chorus after being contacted at the last minute by mobile phone text message.
Link
(Thanks, Pat!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Killer audio file of killer lawyers talking Grokster
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DATE: 08/25/2004 10:53:49 PM
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Ernie Miller sez, "I've started a new audio show on IT Conversations, where I'll be discussing issues of law and technology with many of the leaders in the field. You can stream the audio or download it either directly or via RSS enclosures in MP3 or AAC format. My first show is on the Grokster decision and features a panel including Fred von Lohmann, who argued the case, Denise Howell and C.E. Petit, two attorneys in IP law practice, and law professor Tim Wu of the Univ. of Virginia."
12.4 MB MP3 Link
(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti-RNC messages on rooftops near LGA
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DATE: 08/25/2004 10:58:11 PM
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New Yorkers who live on the flight-approach to Laguardia are covering their roofs with anti-Bush messages in protest of the Republican National Convention in NYC, so that RNC delegates get a cold welcome to the city.
Bright blue tarps, painted with glaring yellow letters, are going up on dozens of rooftops in Brooklyn, under the flight paths into busy New York airports. Thousands of delegates and convention guests peering down at the city might see messages like "No more years" and "Re-defeat Bush."
"We just hope that they'll look down and ask themselves, 'Why, why do they feel so strongly? Why is it that New York feels this way?'" said Genevieve Christy, who has painted more than 80 banners since thinking of the idea a few weeks ago.
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in German
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DATE: 08/25/2004 11:04:48 PM
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Sven Flesch has translated my DRM talk into German!
143k PDF Link
(Thanks, Sven!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Schwarzenegger's "CA Garage Sale" on eBay
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DATE: 08/26/2004 12:57:36 AM
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The state of California is holding a yard sale to sell off surplus junk -- office equipment, computers, cars, espresso machines, gadgets, and weird crap accumulated over time. The selloff was proposed by governator Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 2,700-page California Performance Review he ordered. Some items will sell at public auctions (i.e., in meatspace), but others will sell on eBay (online). It's my understanding that this is a list of all the CA state surplus items currently for sale on eBay: Link.
If so, there's no shortage of wacky stuff for sale. Among my favorite items: Two Tanita Pocket/Mini Digital Scales, 1479 & 1479V: "they would be great scales for measuring precious stones and metals or for laboratory use." (precious rocks like, oh, crack cocaine?) And, 75+ Money Clips, Lots of Logos & 1 Diamond.: "there is even one money clip that has a real Diamond mounted in it."
There's also no shortage of irony in the "seller feedback" section -- among the entries, what may be some of the sweetest praise ever heaped on California's action-hero-cum-Republican-spokesmodel:
# Very Professional !!!!!! Packed with OVERKILL !!
# GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD SELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLER
# Bogus deal will never buy from them again very ticked off.
# Great Leatherman tools!! Will keep all the men in the family HAPPY!! THANKS!!
# Thanks for the Great deal. Good luck on your new Job.
# THEY'RE ROUND AND SMELL GOOD! I AM BIDDING ON MORE! GO TO SACRAMENTO WAREHOUSE!!!
Link to SF Chronicle story. Link to State of CA surplus property program website, where you'll find this PDF doc with details on the "Garage Sale." Link to current eBay auctions of californiagold2000. (Thanks, John)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: George Lakoff on how to argue with conservatives
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DATE: 08/26/2004 03:29:58 AM
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Last year, BB pal Bonnie Powell conducted a staggering interview with cognitive linguist and cultural commentator George Lakoff about why the Democrats need a lesson in language. In these days just before the Republican National Convention, Bonnie sat down again with Lakoff to discuss his forthcoming book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, and why it's important to think before you speak:
You've said that progressives should never use the phrase "war on terror" — why?
There are two reasons for that. Let's start with "terror." Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the "terrorist." The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The "war on terror" is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Space toilet turns waste to water
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DATE: 08/26/2004 03:54:55 AM
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Purdue University researchers are designing a system to recover water from human waste. Funded by NASA, the aim of the project is to devise a way astronauts on a Mars mission to produce their own water. The prototype bioreactor is based on certain plants that thrive when fed sewage collected in a $49,000 toilet.
"We shovel the processed waste onto the plants, almost like a mini-marsh," he said. "Then we use the plants to filter water out. We'll recover the water in the atmosphere above the plant by running it through a 'cold finger,' much like pipes sweating in restrooms. Using something cold condenses the water so that it can be captured."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Insane plan to let military to vote using insecure email
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DATE: 08/26/2004 09:20:49 AM
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An anonymous reader sez,
The Secretary of State announced a program in conjunction with the Department of Defense whereby Missouri military voters will be sending in their absentee ballots via email.
Increasing voter turnout is always a good idea, but this is a dangerous way to go about it. E-mail is not secure. E-mail is not reliably from the person named on the "from" line. E-mail is subject to all kinds of tampering. Every week we learn about new ways to hack into computers, and spammers know all sorts of tricks for forging e-mail headers. A common Internet worm trick is to send emails from hacked computers, or to pretend to send emails from other computers.
An e-voting system like this is an invitation for fraud, and sure to be a point of contention when the votes are counted. With this election so close and Missouri one of the major swing states, Missouri is setting itself up to be this election's Florida: the laughing stock of the nation.
If you remember, the SERVE Internet voting project was suspended because of security issues.
Someone snuck this one through. I am involved with two different groups of security experts who are dealing with voting machine and e-voting issues, and no one heard about this. There have been no public hearings on the issue. There has been no public selection process of vendors. There are no security or reliability constraints on the vendor. We don't even know who the vendor is!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: John Kerry on Daily Show
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DATE: 08/26/2004 09:25:39 AM
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Waxy has posted a Quicktime of the entire John Kerry interview on the Daily Show (Kerry proposes to hold the inauguration on the Daily Show!).
9MB Quicktime Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DoJ raid on file-sharers
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DATE: 08/26/2004 09:45:12 AM
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A Washington Post article covering yesterday's DoJ raids on fileswappers:
Federal agents yesterday took their first steps to go after individuals who illegally trade copyrighted music and videos over the Internet, seizing computers, software and related equipment at five homes around the country. After a months-long sting operation, FBI agents raided residences in Texas, Wisconsin and New York where people were suspected of operating "hubs" of file-sharers that were part of a system called the Underground Network. About 7,000 users connected to the network via file-sharing software known as Direct Connect, according to law enforcement officials. (...) No arrests were made yesterday, and no charges have been filed. But the raids for the first time throw the weight of the Justice Department behind what has been an intense campaign by the music, movie and software industries to curb online file-sharing that millions of computer users around the world use every day.
Link (Thanks, Thomas)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Induce Act Draws Support, Venom
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DATE: 08/26/2004 10:15:11 AM
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In today's Wired News, a story I filed on the state of the Induce Act, with comment from a number of groups opposed to its passage.
Until recently, much of the discussion among tech enthusiasts about a controversial anti-piracy bill known as the Induce Act has focused on the proposed law's improbability. Put forth by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the bill has been ridiculed by techies as so poorly written that it could unintentionally ban an infinite range of everyday tools -- iPods, DVD burners, even paper and pencil.
But since its introduction, nine co-sponsors have signed on, both Democrats and Republicans. And significantly, that list of co-sponsors includes two of Congress' most influential members: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota).
Also known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560), the bill would punish tech companies and consumer electronics makers who develop tools that could "induce" or encourage users to make unauthorized copies of copyright material such as music, movies or software. With the present congressional session due to end in October, time for debate is running out. The coming two weeks may be the last chance for both proponents and opponents of the bill to make their voices heard.
Link to Wired News story.
Update: Opposition to the Induce Act is coming from many points along the political spectrum, from left to right. Heritage Foundation senior writer Andrew Grossman says with tongue planted in cheek: "You might be interested to know that '...even the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation has concerns.' (...) We have no position on the bill itself, of course, but we do think it's bad policy." Here's their study and statement regarding P2P, filesharing, and the Induce Act. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: MP3 blogs
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DATE: 08/26/2004 10:57:59 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I explore the odd universe of MP3 blogs with with host Noah Adams. On these personal websites, music lovers trade and comment on rare finds, mashups, and unusual twists on familiar favorites -- and recently, major record labels have been taking notice in an unexpected way. During the radio segment, we'll play a few funky tracks scraped from the blogs, should be fun. Link to online archive for today's NPR "Day to Day" segment on MP3 blogs.
(Thanks to BoingBoing reader Skye Ashebrook for pointing me to tons of great, lesser-known MP3 blogs, and to Jason Schultz of the EFF who provided astute tech law insight for this story.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: In-theater protests of MPAA "anti-pirate" ad campaign: Just Say Arrrrrrrr!
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DATE: 08/26/2004 11:13:29 AM
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Following up on yesterday's BoingBoing posts (one, two) about opposition to the MPAA's ridicule-inspiring "respectcopyrights.org" ad campaign, we have an update from blogger provocateur Defamer -- in-theater civil disobedience!
Yesterday's "call to arms" to resist the MPAA's cloying "Respect Copyrights" PSAs is off to a great start. In fact, some readers took the protest to the next, completely awesome level, leaving us somewhat ashamed that we didn't think this up in the first place. Pirate taunts! [One reader says:]
"So we took the 'put an end to piracy' portion of the Manny Perry ad and ran with it..... Imagine twenty coeds and their gentlemen friends standing in their seats hurling archaic curses and 'ARRRRRRRR's at the screen for the duration of the clip. Surprisingly, we drew chuckles, not Diet Cokes to the head, from our fellow patrons. Viva La Resistance!"
Link to Defamer's update.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Marvelous molecular model kits
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DATE: 08/26/2004 11:51:17 AM
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Howard Lovy's NanoBot points us to a site selling plastic model nanotube kits. They sell other fun molecular model kits too, including cocaine, caffeine, THC, and, of course, lysergic acid diethylamide.
"LSD is a strong hallucinogen. A rough form, ergotamine, which can occur in stored rye grain, is believed to have been the cause of the odd behaviour which triggered the Salam witch trials. This model of LSD can be used in conjuction with molecular model kits of other street drugs as part of drug awareness programs."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paper pixelart Transformers
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DATE: 08/26/2004 01:54:32 PM
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Paperformers are print-and-cut-and-fold pixelart paper Transformers that turn into actual, transforming pixelart robots!
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: A day in the blog of an erotic photographer. And, China Nympho Cream.
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DATE: 08/26/2004 03:39:27 PM
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Nerve.com recently launched "The Daily Siege" -- a blog-oid daily feature from fashion and erotic shooter Clayton James Cubitt, aka Siege, who's been the subject of numerous BoingBoing posts in the past. Some of the UI and access decisions the Nerve.com guys made, I'm not nuts about. But the content here -- both the images and the first-person narrative -- includes some real gems. For instance, this stream-of-consciousness post in which Siege explains how he went through a series of editing decisions that took a shot from its original raw state to an edited, reimagined, and dramatically richer state for publication. Very few personal blogs dig inside the creative process of working artists with this level of intimacy. Cool stuff. As Siege says here, it's like math class -- where you show your "dirty work" to your classmates, and share all of the details, both flattering and otherwise. Right, and then, well, there's the "China Nympho Cream" post. Quick snapshots (1, 2, 3) of an erotic-enhancement ointment of dubious origin, tucked inside ultra-bizarro packaging. Link to Siege's blog. Temporary access for this paid-subscription-required site is username: cheapass, password: cheapass. (NSFW)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Computer Hooligans" stage SFX psyops protest in Russia
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DATE: 08/26/2004 06:16:26 PM
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BoingBoing reader Steve Portigal says, "Protesters in Georgia (formerly of the Soviet Union, not Hot'Lanta) are staging a demonstration outside the Russian embassy using loud music (of course) and a laser show projector that is putting slogans and images of explosions on the windows of the embassy." Link to BBC News story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Backbiter
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DATE: 08/26/2004 06:17:59 PM
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BoingBoing reader Stefan says, "A German man who lost his jawbone to cancer enjoys a brautwurst sandwhich after receiving a replacement... grown from his own cells on an artificial scaffolding implanted in the muscles of his back." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of self-Googling zen
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DATE: 08/26/2004 06:18:37 PM
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WTF is this? Shouldn't I be getting royalties? Or at least, like, foot massages from these bare-chested, Flash-animated hunkazoids? I am sooo calling my bare-chested, Fabio lookalike attorneys right now. Link to www.xeni.jp
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The art of Ray Caeser
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DATE: 08/26/2004 06:33:30 PM
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I love it when an artist jumps to a new level. It looks like Ray Caeser has done just that. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mach 3 Turbo vibrating shaver disappoints
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DATE: 08/26/2004 06:37:30 PM
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My buddy Carlo Longino tried the battery-powered Mach 3 Turbo razor. He says it's not worth the $15. Too bad, I was going to buy one.
I switched to this from the Mach 3 Turbo, and frankly, I can't tell any difference between the shave I get with the two. Certainly not enough to justify the difference in price. I guess I've got loyalty to Gillette since they sent me a free Sensor razor on my 18th birthday or something (that ploy worked, eh?) and I've generally been pretty happy with their products and the results. But their constant need to find some reason to jack up the already-high prices of their razors is starting to wear thin.rally been pretty happy with their products and the results. But their constant need to find some reason to jack up the already-high prices of their razors is starting to wear thin.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Aussie politician's incestuous spam scam
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DATE: 08/26/2004 07:13:28 PM
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BoingBoing reader Matt in Australia says:
Apparently our Australian PM - little Johnny Howard - has exploited a loophole in recently introduced anit-spam legislation which exempts charities and - wait for it - political organisations. So he's spamming the hell out of voters in his electorate with party propaganda. And it seems he's somehow managed to tie email addresses to first names, resulting in *personalised* spam and some pretty ticked off voters. It get's better - he's paying his son's company to do the mailing! (SMH is behind a subscription wall as of last week but bugmenot will sort you out - I had a running argument with a philosophy colleague about registration requirements on my blog last week here)
Link to news story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Black Rock City countdown
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DATE: 08/27/2004 12:01:09 AM
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Heard from three friends today who are each driving out to Burning Man within the next 24 hours. Two out of three will place key in ignition after midnight; likely way-jacked-up on Red Bull and 500bpm trance mp3s, or some equally potent cocktail for scaring away sleep on the six+ hour drive. One packs a sousaphone. Another, a stepson. The third, his weight in explosives -- enough firepower to earn him a Guantanamo one-way, were he to absentmindedly cram it in an airline carryon with a suspect sticker.
I won't be following them. Not for lack of wanting. Miss the mess, just can't this year. Another friend who wouldn't be caught dead in glitter or elwire asked for words of advice to give his kid sister, a first-timer. IANAHCB (I Am Not A Hardcore Burner), or particularly clever. All I could come up with was this.
Do not drink the chocolate-marijuana absinthe. Do drink water until your gag reflex is triggered, then drink some more. Keep your hands off the bike seats on which sans culotte hippypersons have planted their naked nalgas. At least once, hit the Pancake Playhouse camp for breakfast, and raise gooey fingers in the air ("when soft rock is heard, pancakes will be served.") Pack extra copies of your Burning Man Bingo card.
Don't try to see or do everything, or think you're going to be able to find specific friends at specific places at specific times -- doesn't work like that. Be cool. Be prepared. Avoid hurting yourself, or anyone else, or that wide, white, alkaline ocean of old dust. Enjoy.
The best lesson of this thing? Joy need not be deferred.
(Snapshot at left from a bunch I shot last year: Link. There are better photos shot by other people here: Link. Previous BoingBoing post -- Book / This is Burning Man: Link. Thanks for the Burning Man Bingo reminder, kowgurl!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Funny-sarcastic stick-figure online RPG
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DATE: 08/27/2004 05:18:01 AM
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Kingdom of Loathing is a wildly sarcastic, web-based videogame that uses stick-figure artwork to very good effect. It's in free open beta right now, and I found myself snarfing my morning beverage on more than one occasion in the course of a few minutes' play (the Booze Giant! The Meatloaf Helmet! The Misspelled Cemetary!)
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ebooks doing well sans DRM
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DATE: 08/27/2004 05:22:57 AM
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CNet reports that ebook sales topped 3 million last year, and that publishers are slowly coming around to rejecting DRM. The best part is that famous writers like JK Rowling are rejecting ebooks, a courtesy that leaves the field open for struggling midlist writers (ahem).
Bad experiences with heavy-handed DRM have soured many potential customers on e-books, said Mike Violano, vice president and general manager of eReader, which equips its titles with a security key based on the credit card number used to purchase it. The approach give wide latitude to the original buyer while effectively thwarting illegal copying, he said.
"There are far too many standards and ways of doing things now, and that's a source of frustration for customers," Violano said. "If they have a bad e-book experience the first time, where they have trouble reading something they've paid for, it's hard to get them back."
Analyst Bedford said nervous publishers have emphasized security over opening new markets.
"There's no good DRM, period," she said. "Publishers all want heavy-duty DRM, but the problem is that anything you do gets in the way of buying and using e-books. My bias is to use a lot of psychological DRM. You put a price on it; you have statements...making it very clear you can use this as you would a print book, and you rely on the fact that by and large, most people aren't out to break the law."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Dress code at the mall
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DATE: 08/27/2004 06:50:37 AM
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The conservatown that spawned me--Cincinnati, Ohio--now boasts a mall with a dress code. Rent-a-cops at Cincinnati Mills mall hand out yellow code of conduct slips to those violating behavior and, amazingly, clothing policies. For example, Miami University sophomore Donnie Jefferson was "cited" two different times for sporting a sideways baseball cap. On another occasion, he says, a group of his friends who were wearing white t-shirts and jeans were escorted out. Hmmm... I wonder if it's because Donnie and his pals happen to black. No, it couldn't possibly be that. Not a chance.
"We have to be consistent across the board with the cap issue... There are, unfortunately in these days and times, groups that would mistake that as a different message and we don't want that," Jim Childress, Cincinnati Mills general manager, told WCPO. "In our business a customer is a customer. There is no distinction among age, religion, ethnic background."
I'd love to send a middle-aged white guy in there rocking a sideways Reds cap and see how he's treated. Link (Thanks, C-Lo, my Censornati homeboy!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Un Blagueur
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DATE: 08/27/2004 07:11:12 AM
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My wife and I are now living in Paris for a few months. To help us learn French, we subscribed to French Word-A-Day. Today's word was tres drole.
une blague (blag) noun, feminine
1. a joke; a practical joke, a trick
2. a tall story
3. a blunder, a silly mistake
4. a tobacco pouch
Also:
blaguer (verb) = to joke
un blagueur / une blagueuse
1. (adj) ironical, teasing (look)
2. (noun, m/f) = a joker
And I know that the pronunciation isn't the same, but it's still funny. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Betting on the big questions of physics
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DATE: 08/27/2004 07:28:59 AM
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British bookmaker Ladbrokes is now accepting wagers on the future of physics. They've opened a book on:
* Understanding the origin of cosmic rays by 2010 (4/1 odds)
* The ATLAS experiment at CERN finding the Higgs Boson by 2010 (6/1 odds)
* The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) detecting gravitational waves by 2010 (10/1 odds)
* Building a fusion power station by 2010 (100/1 odds)
Anyone can place bets on these breakthroughs during the next two weeks. Apparently, New Scientist magazine is also involved in the gamble, dedicating ten pages to it in the print edition.
“I’d be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1,” says Brian Foster who heads the particle physics group at the University of Oxford in the UK. “I’ve been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers’ money on us finding it, so I’d better put my money where my mouth is.”
Link to New Scientist article. Link to Ladbrokes.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Happy 40th Birthday, cubicle!
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DATE: 08/27/2004 09:32:50 AM
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Metropolis' Yvonne Abrahams profiles Bob Propst, inventor of the office cubicle. A great example of a neat idea morphing into its opposite.
So, in 1964, Herman Miller's Action Office system was born. It started with a huge open area, sectioned off to give workers completely enclosed spaces if needed, or semi-enclosed spaces for a more social kind of privacy. Offices were arranged in such a way that workers would be likely to have plenty of contact with each other and with management.
...
Propst's forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system's huge potential for savings and tax breaks ... "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places."
Link (Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Accidental real estate porn
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DATE: 08/27/2004 09:39:25 AM
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Look closely at the third photo from the bottom on this realtor's website promoting a home for sale. Either the snapshot-taker failed to notice two dogs humping sur l'herbe, or this is an example of highly sophisticated subliminal advertising strategies in the real estate industry. BoingBoing reader and punster Mike Ransom calls this a "Real estate fo' paw."
Link (Thanks, Manero)
Update: Ah, what a pity. Someone at the realty website got wind of the fact that this was blogged on BoingBoing, Fark, MeFi, and everywhere else today -- and deleted the image. Good thing BB reader Andreas spotted the url to the jpeg itself (Link), and another copy is here (Link). Heh. Actually... stick this jpeg in a fancy frame, tack it to a wall at MoMA, call it a postmodern statement on the commoditization of the pornographized American id, and nobody'd know the difference.
Update 2: Reader Paul Camp alerts us to the fact that the realty website has now replaced the XXX photo in the original link with a Photoshop hack job that makes clumsy, guffaw-inducing use of the "blur" tool: Direct link to their revised image.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swedish BitTorrent site cusses at nastygramming Dreamworks lawyers
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DATE: 08/27/2004 09:56:02 AM
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A group operating a BitTorrent tracker in Sweden got a takedown notice from Dreamworks, citing US law. Their response is priceless:
As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States
of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe.
Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here.
For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.
Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium,
will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for
sending frivolous legal threats.
It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and
that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mummified corpse lay in bed for two years while bills were auto-paid
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DATE: 08/27/2004 09:57:56 AM
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Pat York sez, "A guy gets his pension cheque automatically deposited into his bank account. Then he authorizes automatic withdrawals to pay his condo fees, phone, etc. Then he dies in bed. How long does it take for someone to notice that he's checked out? Two years. Even Canada Post missed it."
Link
Update: An anonymous reader sez, "In year 2000 they found this old guy in Helsinki who had been dead 6 years! Neighbours didn't noticed anything. All bills paid automatically."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How long can America stay scared?
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DATE: 08/27/2004 10:00:27 AM
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Bruce Schneier, America's sanest security expert, has just posted a slew of new articles, including this one, called "How Long Can the Country Stay Scared?"
A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.
European countries that have been dealing with terrorism for decades, like the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain, don't have cute color-coded terror alert systems. Even Israel, which has seen more terrorism -- and more suicide bombers -- than anyone else, doesn't issue vague warnings about every possible terrorist threat.
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(Thanks, Bruce!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nutrition labels for games
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DATE: 08/27/2004 10:04:45 AM
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Alice Taylor, who is researching games at the BBC, has a great blog post pondering the question of why our society values play but disdains games ("...this paradox of 'play' being seen as a fundamental good, and of high value, and 'games' as frivolous and time-wasting, therefore of low value"). She half-seriously proposes a nutrition-facts label for games to describe their constructive value.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nightmarish, genuinely scary photoshopping
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Worth 1000's nightmare-themed photoshopping contest has yielded some genuinely scary images.
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(via ftrain)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robocops in beta at the RNC
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DATE: 08/27/2004 10:15:30 AM
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If you're in New York City when the Republican National Conventions kicks off next week, watch for police officers watching you with extra sets of megapixel peepers. The Federal Protective Service has outfitted patrol officers with helmets embedded with wireless video cameras. The images from the helmet-cams and traditional surveillance cameras mounted in federal buildings are streamed to a headquarters-on-wheels where deployment decisions can be made.
"This is an added bonus," the service's regional director, Ronald Libby, told New York Newsday. "I want to know what he [a patrol officer] sees to make a decision. ... This takes the guess work out of it."
More in a brief article I wrote over at TheFeature. Link
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TITLE: Phone exec: "People don't want open Internet access"
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DATE: 08/27/2004 10:16:04 AM
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The COO of 3, a European 3G wireless company, has uttered one of the stupidest things ever said by a phone company executive (there's a field with some stiff competition!). In justifying his company's decision to censor the Internet services delivered over its wireless link (they're only allowing customers to access certain, selected services, rather than providing a fast wireless pipe that customers can use as they see fit), this loonytune has this to say:
'People don't want open access, that's not what our customers tell us they want,' he said. 'Anyone in their right mind who tries to do anything on the Internet with a screen that size has to be nuts.'
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Decaying images via RSS
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DATE: 08/27/2004 10:27:26 AM
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I just signed up for the RSS Feed for the keyword "decay" on the Flickr image-sharing site. That means that my RSS aggregator gets a steady stream of photos tagged by their uploaders with the word "decay." Over the course of just a couple days, I've seenn some beautiful photos, but this rotty staircase is the best so far. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr)
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(via Gomi No Sensei)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US gov't secrecy wastes money, erodes security, and locks up nonsensitive info
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DATE: 08/27/2004 10:47:15 AM
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The OpenTheGovernment.org report on US government secrecy has just been published, and boy are its conclusions harsh: the US government is $6.5 billion/year keeping stuff secret (not counting the CIA budget, which is another secret), 90% of those documents don't contain anything particularily secret, and the result is that government agenciies and the public have their effective operations hamstrung because critical parts of the information needed to get by have been classified.
Compounding the problems is the fact that the government can't seem to let go of secrets that just aren't valuable any more. It took the CIA 20 years to declassify the fact that Augusto Pinochet, Chile's dictator, had a taste for distilled wine. Overall CIA budgets from decades back are still kept under wraps. And the pace of declassification has slowed since 9/11: 43 million pages in fiscal year 2003, as opposed to 100 million in 2001, according to the ISOO. Not surprisingly, the amount of money spent on releasing information has also slipped, from $231 million in 2001 to $54 million last year.
At the same time, the public thirst for government information seems to have risen. More than 3.2 million requests for federal documents were made under the Freedom of Information Act last year. That's about 1 million more than in 2001.
The cost of keeping secrets, according to OpenTheGovernment coordinator Rick Blum, comes largely from maintaining the patchwork of databases and networks that hold the government's sensitive information. Physical security of classified information has also been a major cost -- and a major concern. The repeated misplacement of secret disks at Los Alamos National Laboratory has shut down the nuclear weapons center for the last six weeks. That means a big chunk of the lab's annual budget of $2.2 billion has been devoted to the security lapses, so far. Those figures weren't included in the OpenTheGovernment report card.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Old-time Japanese radio exercise show MP3
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DATE: 08/27/2004 10:53:40 AM
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Joi Ito has written about Radio Taiso, an old-timey Japanese radio exercise show that was banned after WWII for being too martial. He's posted an MP3 of one of the shows, which is great -- an insanely cheerful Japanese announcer counting repetitions overtop of Mr Rogers-style tinkling piano music.
4MB MP3 Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser"
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DATE: 08/27/2004 11:13:49 AM
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Wired News reviews a book about technology going awry. It's called Dear Valued Customer, You Are a Loser, by Rick Broadhead, and it sounds excellent. I've had so many bad experiences with technology-enhanced customer service departments that I can relate to these examples.
Published in May with little fanfare, the 315-page paperback is a compilation of more than 100 true stories of technological blunder and misfortune. Some of the stories are bizarre, some are pathetic -- but all are highly entertaining.
Take, for instance, the case of the Ukrainian businessman who put 50 new pagers -- a gift for his employees -- in the back seat of his car and then promptly crashed into a lamppost when they all began beeping at the same time. The culprit? A welcome message sent by the pager company to each of the pagers.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Excellent animation blog -- Cartoon Brew
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DATE: 08/27/2004 12:05:29 PM
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I can't believe I didn't know about Cartoon Brew until just now. It's a blog maintained by animation insiders Amid Amidi and Jerry Beck. Today's entry is a great interview with John Kricfalusi, who finished up six new episodes of Ren & Stimpy for Spike TV.
[John Kricfalusi]: Well I love extremes in different mediums. The extreme of a cartoon is surrealism, that cartoons can do anything. A character can explode, can fly into pieces and come back together, can have their heads blown off, squash into a pancake, turn into an erection, I love all that stuff. But that's not all I love. To me, if I make the character so real, so believable, and then do wild stuff with it, it puts you in a whole other world. It makes the weird stuff even more believable. Like in STIMPY'S PREGNANT the whole opening, after the puke stuff's over, turns into this realistic drama. Then when all the intensity is released and Ren accepts that he's going to have the kid, it's all happy and light-hearted. All the birds and squirrels show up, and then it goes right into gags. So it's about contrast.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iraq blogger, photographer, journalist Enzo Baldoni executed
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DATE: 08/27/2004 12:32:25 PM
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Update here
Italian freelance journalist and weblogger Enzo G. Baldoni has been executed in Iraq. Link to RSF report. His weblog, Bloghdad, included beautiful photographs and compelling narrative about the people of Iraq. The final post on this self-described pacifist's blog: an incredible image, shown at left. Link. Italian and Arabic-language media are reporting that he tried to defend himself from his captors just before they shot him. A spokesperson from Al-Jazeera, the TV network which has been criticized in the past for airing Iraq hostage execution footage, was quoted as saying that video stills released by his executioners were "too cruel" for broadcast. If any Italian-speaking BoingBoing readers care to translate this final 08-26 text post from a ghost-blogger at Bloghdad -- it's about Baldoni's kidnapping -- I'll post it in English on BoingBoing. I don't want to just dump this in Babelfish. Translation of the final text post on his blog follows, thanks to BB reader Gianluca of KZSU radio, Stanford:
With respect, we maintain silence.
When he left for Iraq, Enzo left us in charge of Bloghdad and of all the articles and images he'd send from there. When he disappeared we wondered what to do. We knew Enzo well enough to realize he would have wanted us to continue to report the news of what was happening, and so we did until the truth of what had really happened to him surfaced.
Now we know that even after the kidnapping, Enzo is doing well and everything is being done to resolve the situation. There's little more to say: the situation is at a delicate and important stage and we fear that anything new posted on Bloghdad, both in the posts or the comments, might hurt Enzo.
Out of respect towards Enzo and his family we feel that the best thing to do know is to keep silent.
We wish to thank all the people that have helped, criticized and encouraged us. Posts and comments will open again only when Enzo himself will do it. We hope it's going to be soon.
What a sad thing, that the war continues to take so many beautiful souls like this man from the earth.
(Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More shaving news from C-Lo
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DATE: 08/27/2004 12:38:03 PM
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Carlo Longino is experimenting with different shaving products. Yesterday, he didn't have anything good to say about the battery powered vibrating M3Power Razor. Today, he tries Kid Glove Shave Gel and thinks its a swell gel.
Tried it in the shower this morning, and the stuff is awesome. It's not foamy, which is kinda cool, and you put a thin layer on your face and let it sit for 30 seconds, generating a sensation toeing the line between tingling and scorching. But then a zero-resistance shave that is far, far closer than the Gillette foamy gel stuff I've been using for a long time.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Shane Glines' Cartoon Retro
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DATE: 08/27/2004 01:08:18 PM
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My friend Scott has been telling me to check out a new subscription-based website published by Shane Glines. Glines is an animation character designer and one of my favorite illustrators. He worked for Spumco (the studio that made Ren & Stimpy) and on the Batman animated series.
Glines describes his new site, Cartoon Retro, as being "devoted to celebrating and exploring the largely forgotten work of great artists, cartoonists, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, actors, musicians and industrial designers from what, in my opinion, was the peak of American culture: approximately 1925 through 1939." In addition, Shane posts some of his own work on the site, too
I just signed-up, and am blown away with all the great stuff available. If you are at all interested in the art from this era (like I am), the $5 / month fee is well worth it. I hope enough people sign up to convince him to keep up the great work. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Candy with 9-11 attack toys recalled
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DATE: 08/27/2004 07:44:28 PM
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"Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled." Link (Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nationwide scream when W speaks at the RNC
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DATE: 08/27/2004 08:29:36 PM
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Al Franken wants you to holler on September 2 when W takes the stage at the RNC.
On September 2nd, 2004, at approximately 10 pm, George W. Bush will appear on television screens nationwide. For some of our fellow citizens, this will be a moment of joy. But for most of us, it will be the low point of an incredibly exasperating week.
Until now, there have been only two options: miss the speech (either by screaming at the television or turning it off), or bottle up the frustration within us, causing irreparable psychological harm. The first option is unbecoming of citizens in a democracy. The second option is just terrible. But now, for the first time, we have a better way. At the moment we see the president on our television screens, we will rise. We will throw open our windows. And, as George W. Bush moves to the podium in New York City, we will send him a message about his bid for reelection: we will yell, "fuggedaboudit!"
This will be a peaceful, non-disruptive protest. We will stop yelling before the president starts speaking. Our goal is not to drown him out, but to communicate. (And vent.)
Link
(Thanks, tpy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Journalist: Wikipedia is "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous"
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DATE: 08/28/2004 05:22:28 AM
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A Techdirt writer sent a note to Al Fasoldt, a "journalist" with the Syracuse Post-Standard who wrote an editorial telling his readers that Wikipedia couldn't be trusted and should be avoided ("Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials").
Fasoldt responded with an increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous," insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff.
My main problem was that he seemed to write off Wikipedia based solely on how it was created and maintained, and not at all on the actual content. Along with my post, I sent an email to the writer, Al Fasoldt, giving him some additional information about Wikipedia, and wondering why, after telling us how you can't trust any random info online, he trusted the email from a random librarian claiming Wikipedia was somehow untrustworthy. The ongoing discussion with Mr. Fasoldt has been quite a lesson in watching how a journalist (a) continues to make unsubstantiated allegations (b) seems to prefer insulting me and putting words in my mouth to actually responding to my points or questions and (c) sticks steadfastly to his belief that only "experts" can be trusted with information -- and, in his case, only experts that he chooses. Yet, somehow, we're supposed to find him more trustworthy than a self-correcting community. Figuring he might appreciate the views of others in his profession (you know, "experts"), I sent him links to Dan Gillmor's article on Wikipedia and Steve Yelvington's recent realization of the power of Wikipedia. However, rather than actually look at that information, Mr. Fasoldt accused me of wanting "students to trust a source that's not trustworthy." After some back and forth of this nature, where Mr. Fasoldt responded to my request that he do a little more research by saying: "I'm glad you're not the publisher of a newspaper" (apparently, his publisher lets him do no research at all) and then telling me that anyone who wrote for Wikipedia obviously knew nothing (his phrase was: "100 times zero is still zero"), I suggested an experiment. I pointed to the Wikipedia page on Syracuse, NY where he apparently lives, and suggested he change something on the page, to make it provably, factually incorrect -- and see how long it lasted. Rather than take me up on the experiment, or suggest an alternative, he complained simply that the whole idea of Wikipedia was "outrageous," "repugnant" and finally (in another email) "dangerous," and therefore he refused to take part in my experiment.
Link
(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Moore Guevara shirts
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DATE: 08/28/2004 05:27:38 AM
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The good people at Designed by Monkeys are selling this spiffy Michael Moore/Che Guevara mashup t-shirt for fifteen bucks cheap.
Link
(via A Copyfighter's Musings)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Broadcast Treaty status-report in Wired News
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DATE: 08/28/2004 05:29:51 AM
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Wendy Grossman has written a good overview of the Broadcast Treaty proceedings at WIPO for Wired News -- this is a treaty that EFF is fighting, which would allow broadcasters to control what you and others do with their broadcasts regardless of whether those broadcasts contain public-domain or uncopyrightable material:
Cory Doctorow, the London-based European Affairs Coordinator for the EFF, highlights two additional sources of worry. First, the US, represented in Geneva by the Patent Office, is demanding that the treaty include webcasting. If that proposal should pass, broadcast rights could apply to anything downloaded from any Web site, making it impossible to be sure whether even open-source software wasn't covered.
Second, Doctorow said, one proposal in the draft treaty requires that receivers, defined as any device that can decrypt broadcasts, must incorporate technology to protect those broadcasts. As currently drafted, he believes that would include general-purpose computers.
That clause in the draft treaty echoes recent US legislation that introduced the "broadcast flag," a technical control that must be implemented by July 1, 2005 for all devices for sales in the US that receive television signals.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Incredible String Band reunion tour
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DATE: 08/28/2004 07:24:27 AM
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Seminal UK avant-folk group the Incredible String Band is preparing to tour the US for the first time in three decades. The group melds sitars, guitars, banjos, and ouds with bluegrass, Celtic melodies, and classic 1960s psychedelia. Founding members Mike Heron are leading the band stateside. From publicist Howard Wuelfing's email list:
Many of the artists that comprise the current wave of “experimental folk” consider the Incredible String Band as a crucial inspiration and influence. Devendra Banhart says (in typically Banhartian fashion) “Happy Birthday! not noodlemisters but Epic lizard man songs traversing the new universe holding sarods, our old hopes tightly, fiddles, chimes, udes, bagpipes, baby boars, banjos, mead, invisible ropes and on and on OH in this sweetcheese pond lies a perfect reflection of trueTRUE love! Happy Birthday Old Baby!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Executed Italian blogger and journalist's last wishes
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DATE: 08/28/2004 07:38:07 AM
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Following up on this post about Enzo Baldoni, the Italian journalist and blogger who was executed in Iraq this week, BoingBoing reader Alessandro Burato says: "Hi. There's an important update on Baldoni's death -- his testament, posted by italian journalist Pino Scaccia."
27.08.04 - Enzo's Testament
"[At my funeral] I want people to smile -- did you notice? Funerals always end up with someone smiling: it's natural, it's Life taking over Death. And let people smoke freely anything they like; I'd also be pleased if new love stories would come out, and I'd even consider some aloof sex as an offer to Life rather than an offense to Death.
At about eight-nine o'clock, with little or no cerimonials, bring my coffin silently to the crematory, while the party and the music should last until late night.
About my ashes... throw them into the sea, I'd say. Or do as you want, who fucking cares."
Link to original version in Italian.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public's Right to Know video censored by Justice Dept
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DATE: 08/28/2004 11:15:30 AM
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Michael filed a Freedom of Information Act request the the Justice Department to get it to release a movie called "The Public's Right to Know." The Department released part of the video, but redacted sections of it, claiming that since the video had been produced by a private contractor who hadn't assigned copyright to the feds, they didn't have the right to release it to him. How convenient. There's a reason that the feds aren't allowed to copyright the stuff they make with our tax dollars: it's stupid and dirty and irresponsible as hell to circumvent that duty to make the public's bought-and-paid material available to the public by failing to negotiate the rights when contracting out to the private sector.
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(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anti Game Piracy ads from olden times
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DATE: 08/28/2004 11:17:42 AM
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Great collage of old UK "Piracy is Theft" anti-software-piracy ads.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bea Arthur's fight against the Transport Security Agency
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DATE: 08/28/2004 11:20:12 AM
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Bea Arthur forgot to take her pocketknife out of her purse last week at Logan airport and when the TSA found it, she ran around screaming, "The terrorists! The terrorists put a knife in my purse! We're all doomed!" She was being funny -- it's what she does. She's the funniest of all the Golden Girls, that's for sure.
The TSA didn't take it well.
Kur5hin has an appreciation of Ms Arthur and her sense of humor today:
It should be obvious to us that an 81-year old woman committed a crime by making a snide remark when hassled for carrying a pocket knife? I'm just glad that she had the guts to call the security guards out for their ridiculous behavior, even if most Americans think she's crazy for making a joke.
As such, I present a simple proposition: Bea Arthur for President!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RNC protests predicted by Bruce Sterling story
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DATE: 08/28/2004 11:22:25 AM
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Jonah sez, "I've written an essay that compares the planned RNC actions, technologies and protests next week to the Wende in Bruce Sterling's short story 'Deep Eddy' and the Wende period of the falling of the berlin wall. It's also a piece that speculates whether the actions and technologies employed in the streets will produce any results. Just thought you and your readers might be interested."
And so the stage has been set. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions will be arriving in a city full of citizens already hostile to the political party that has chosen to hold it’s National Convention in their city for reasons of emotional manipulation. The police and city officials have set up a number of strenuous and overly aggressive methods of control.
That this event will be anything less than similar to Sterling’s description of the Wende is doubtful. At the very least a very large number of protestors will participate in one of the most varied, vocal and interesting political protests in American history. At the most extreme, the massive disturbance will awaken a number of American citizens to what the Bush administration is really up to and set off a sequence of events that will alter our political landscape.
Link
(Thanks, Jonah!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Toast the aliens
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DATE: 08/29/2004 03:12:32 AM
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For four years, Dudley Cates Jr. of Southampton, NY has tried to market his Crop Circle Beer. The beverage is based on barley taken from an English grain field where crop circles have mysteriously appeared. Now Blue Point Brewing Company is brewing the amber ale, for sale in the Hamptons, Manhattan, and Long Island.
"Crop circles carry an aura of mystery," said Cates... who first became intrigued with the legends behind the designs while living in Aspen, Colo. "I thought to myself, this phenomenon is real."
Also, said Cates, "I love beer."
Link (via Fark)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: T-pod t-shirt
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 08/29/2004 03:29:15 AM
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French company LaFraise.com sells some very fun riot nrrrd t-shirts, including this "T-pod" design, screeprinted with a pair of iPod earbuds. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Turn Gmail storage into a mountable filesystem
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DATE: 08/29/2004 08:21:29 AM
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What to do with all that extra, network-based storage that comes with your Gmail account? If you're using Linux, you can turn it into a mountable filesystem with GmailFS.
GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.
GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DIY coverage from the RNC
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DATE: 08/29/2004 08:23:04 AM
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Metafilter Matt has written a great roundup of DIY coverage of the RNC event in New York:
all Flickr photos tagged with rnc, rncwatch.typepad.com, Technorati search for New York City ("rnc" was too short to search), Buzznet's No RNC photostream, rnc convention bloggers, WeSeeRNC moblog, Indymedia's RNC coverage, and Google News search for rnc.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: General Barlow's dancin' platoons planning to boogie at the RNC
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DATE: 08/29/2004 08:24:30 AM
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General John Perry Barlow continues to plan his mad protest of the RNC in which hundreds of secret agents dressed like civilians will converge on a public, off-limits-to-protestors space, turn on a boom box, and DANCE LIKE HELL:
2. TEXT MESSAGE COORDINATION
I have created a text-message "loop" for us on the Ruckus site. It's called "dancemob." This will enable all of us to receive cell phone text messages from one another, noting current platoon location, likely eruption zones, police movements and temperament, etc. In order to participate, you will need to do the following:
-- Send the text "join dancemob" to 8762.
-- Once you are joined, you can send messages up to about 150 characters to your loop by texting dancemob: [your message here]" to 8762. For instance, if there were a loop named "PeaceMakers", you would text "PeaceMakers: meet now at 32nd and 6th".
In addition, I recommend that at least some of you in each platoon register your phone to receive bulletins from Ruckus with breaking news and logistical updates from the streets of New York City during the RNC.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Justice Dept censors Supreme Court ruling
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DATE: 08/29/2004 08:26:09 AM
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Becky sez, "The Justice Dept. blacked out (censored) the part of a Supreme Court decision that calls into question the willy-nilly use of the vague notion of 'domestic security' to suppress dissent. Oy."
Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:
"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."
The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).
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(Thanks, Becky!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NROjr website: Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be spooks
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DATE: 08/29/2004 09:00:12 AM
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Joi Ito stumbled on a website of the US government's "National Reconnaissance Office" designed for kids. Snip from NRO website copy:
The NRO designs, builds and operates the nation's reconnaissance satellites. NRO products, provided to an expanding list of customers like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), can warn of potential trouble spots around the world, help plan military operations, and monitor the environment. As part of the 14-member Intelligence Community, the NRO plays a primary role in achieving information superiority for the U. S. Government and Armed Forces.
Joi asks:
So what is NROjr? It's a "A fun site to engage children in the wonders of science, math and space in a fun and interactive manner," brought to you by the NRO. (Make sure you have your sound turned on to enjoy the full experience. And all this time I thought Ernie actually worked for Sesame Street... although I guess he was recently heard singing Orkutworld.)
Link to Joi's blog post
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tabloid T&A and politics in Murdoch's Sun newspaper
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DATE: 08/29/2004 10:02:12 AM
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BoingBoing reader Rod says,
In the UK, Rupert Murdoch's "The Sun" tabloid -- famous for it's topless models on Page 3 -- has decided that merely displaying a couple of boobs to increase circulation is not enough. Now, accompanying the lady proudly displaying her knockers, is a small snippet of right-wing Murdoch-approved propoganda, purporting to be the opinion of the Page 3 Girl. Tim Ireland's gathered together some prime examples from the last 8 months.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: UPS deploys fuel-cell-powered trucks
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DATE: 08/29/2004 10:07:08 AM
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BoingBoing reader Jim says:
"According to this article in Fleet Owner, UPS has deployed three fuel cell-powered trucks, a first in the US. "Our test programs showed the on-road reliability of fuel cells is excellent, equivalent to our current fleet," said Chris Mahoney, UPS senior VP of global transportation services in a press release. "But what's truly exciting is how fast the technology is progressing."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC protests: First Amendment read-ins
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DATE: 08/29/2004 10:09:44 AM
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BoingBoing reader Dave says,
Reverend Billy [from the Church of Stop Shopping] leads the faithful in rousing choruses of the First Amendment. A Quicktime clip shows one chorus and the hallelujahs leaving St Marks church in the East Village, New York, a center for organizing this week's demonstrations. (more clips from the street today will be posted this evening). Rev. Billy has been staging public readings of the First Amendment in smart mobs at Ground Zero and other locations, exercising the rights to free assembly and speech.
Link to Dave's blog post, more on Smart Mobs. The read-ins with Reverend Billy continue today.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC protests: Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective
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DATE: 08/29/2004 10:10:24 AM
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Color me jaded, but this call for citywide deployment of orgone cloudbuster machines to induce a "quivering saturnalia" inside the RNC walls sounds more like parody, and less like actual protest. But, hey, what do I know about Reichian energetics? Fleshbot says,
If the skies are dark over New York City next week during the Republican National Convention, it may be due to the cloudbusting efforts of the Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective, who plan to combat the "Deadly Orgone Energy (DOR)" of Dubya and company with ... uh, something based on the theories of Wilhelm Reich ("Metaphorically speaking, our September 2nd project will be an attempt to give the sky a blowjob... Imagine the Republican delegates so consumed in fucking and sucking that they forget to nominate Bush.")
Link. Don't forget to wear your tinfoil beanie thong.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC protests: Bikes Against Bush organizer arrested
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DATE: 08/29/2004 10:22:40 AM
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A post on an indymedia website says activist Joshua Kinberg -- inventor of a wireless, bike-mounted, dot-matrix printer for spraying protest messages in the street -- was arrested yesterday at the RNC in NYC. At the time, he was reportedly being interviewed by Ron Reagan, covering the convention for MNSBC.
Kinberg's invention allows users to spray messages transmitted to the bike-printer by way of the 'Net or SMS. They're painted in a water-soluble chalk solution that washes away with water (not spray-paint, as misreported elsewhere). Link to indymedia post, Link to previous BB post about Bikes Against Bush, Link to August 02 Wired News story with background on Kinberg's invention, Link to yesterday's NYT piece on Bikes Against Bush, and link to a torrent identified as video coverage of the incident, via DV Guide. (Thanks, Patricia and el norm)
Update: BoingBoing reader Paul says, "It seems he didn't even get a chance to use his invention, save the demonstration for MSNBC which resulted in his arrest. Snip from report: "When Kinberg showed the police sergeant how the bicycle used a non-permanent spray chalk, the sergeant seemed to agree that it wasn't defacement, at which point Kinberg asked, 'Am I free to go?' After conferring about it, officers decided to call superiors, then came back moments later to place Kinberg under arrest and confiscate the bicycle."
And BB reader yatta says, "Joshua was released at 11:00 AM Sunday morning after being charged with vandalism. His bicycle, laptop, and cell phone have all been confiscated and are being held until his court hearing. A lawyer from the National Lawyer Guild believes that the case is a clear violation of the first amendment (Houston v. Hill). In the meantime, the likelihood of his getting the bike back to use during the RNC is pretty much nil. (The court date has been set for Friday, 9/3, after the RNC ends.) Link to details."
Reader Mike Harris says, "The New York Post is reporting that it was spray paint, instead of a water-soluble chalk mixture. Users might want to ask that they correct their reporting. The online edition/news editor's name is Chris Shaw, at cshaw@nypost.com."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: CSPAN showing live protest video feeds
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DATE: 08/29/2004 11:10:19 AM
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BoingBoing reader Cheeken says, "Just thought people might like to know that CSPAN TV is showing live, uneditied feeds of the protestors marching around NYC. I've spent the last three hours just reading all of the signs!" Link to CSPAN website with video streams.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Treat British Airways as damage and route around them
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DATE: 08/29/2004 11:15:11 AM
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I was trying to buy a one-way ticket from Brussels to London in September, and I ran into the weirdest, dumbest thing: British Airways won't sell you a ticket over the Web if your credit-card isn't billed in the same country the flight originates in (Er, hello? You're an airline -- that means you deal with people who are traveling, sometimes to countries other than the one that they reside in).
So I called BA and was told that the same ticket would cost 400 percent more if bought over the phone. So I went to a BA counter in Boston and was quoted a fare that was 200 percent more than the Web-fare.
I tried booking through Expedia, but they wanted to mail me a paper ticket. Since I rarely touch down in any city for more than a couple days, intersecting with a postal-delivery system for time-sensitive materials is pretty tricky.
Then I gave up on the Web and went to SN Brussels Air, a little carrier whose website has never ever worked for me. I called the London reservations desk and booked a ticket for exactly what BA charges via its website.
That's no surprise: as it turns out, the flight is operated by British Airways. It's the same goddamned plane.
So that's the point of this post: if ever you want to book a ticket on BA from Brussels to London, book it through SN Brussels Air (by phone -- the website will probably remain busted for all eternity), and you can circumvent BA's dumbass ecommerce policies and extorionate phone/counter prices.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos: "The New Mechanical Sexual Revolution"
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DATE: 08/29/2004 12:17:04 PM
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Photographer Timothy Archibald's portraits of garage-geek inventors -- and users -- of large-scale sex machines. The aesthetic of the images is not prurient; it's clinical, clean, and removed. That distance lends the images a compelling twist, given the topic at hand. I hatehatehate the site's 1.5MB gorilla Flash interface, which prevents my pasting some of the project notes for you to read here. But the images and the subject matter they detail (online communities that connect people who imagine, build, and use these machines) are fascinating. At left: "Scott at his kitchen table, Sex Machines Unlimited," which made me laugh out loud. Link (NSFW). (Thanks, alfie)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: a TV networker's photoblog
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DATE: 08/29/2004 01:29:51 PM
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BoingBoing reader Vidiot works at a television news network. He points us to his photoblog -- a collection of snapshots in and around the RNC site, from a media worker's POV. "So far, I've got some pix up of RNC preps at Madison Square Garden, some of the media compound, and some of the media party last night." Shown here: media trailers along 33rd Street in Manhattan. Link
Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Election-related Daily Show clips
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DATE: 08/30/2004 03:24:08 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted a bunch of election-time Daily Show clips -- the fourth one listed, on the GOP hacks who are trying to get Nader on the ballot to split the left-wing vote, is fantastic:
The Shrub Killing Time On A TV Fishing Show
An Interview With Maureen Dowd
Robert Novak Being a "Douchebag For Freedom" (Again)
And a really important report from Ed Helms about the organization making calls on behalf of Ralph Nader in order to re-elect George Bush. (CSE)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photos from Cory's travels
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DATE: 08/30/2004 06:25:21 AM
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I've been travelling nonstop for a couple years now, shooting pix of various amusing, pretty or outre things as I go. I find myself with hundreds of photos that I took basically because I thought it'd be funny to show them to friends, but I never do.
This morning, I used Flickr's Uploadr tool for OSX to upload about 160 of them, tagging them with some metadata as I went. It was a pretty neat experience, reliving all those moments. I'm gonna try to keep my public Flickr library up to date on this stuff from now on.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: FashMobs
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DATE: 08/30/2004 06:55:42 AM
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Yesterday, Parisian blogger Alex Boucherot of Fluctuat.net and I were discussing how some flash mobs have a (hopefully unintentional) fascist undertone, depending of course on who organizes the particular gathering, their motivation, and even the phrasing of the announcement. After we hung out, Alex stumbled on Christopher Bruno's recent net artwork where historical figures are "reincarnated as... artists." The entire series is excellent, but A. Hitler's FashMobs is particularly relevant to our discussion. From the Fashmobs "artist" statement:
"I created a website where people can leave their mobile phone number. The idea is that when the number of people is large enough, a SMS instruction is sent to all of them simultaneously by the server. When they receive it, people have to perform the instructions. The instructions are simple ones, like raising an arm, but the effect is amplified by the fact that many people do it in the same place, at the same time, as in a symphonic orchestra."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: protest tech: TXTmob and other mobile update services
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DATE: 08/30/2004 08:33:53 AM
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BoingBoing reader Chris says,
The TXTmob service came into force at the DNC protests, and has really taken off so far this week at the RNC protests, helping organize and coordinate events in real time. Here's a sample of some of the messages that were sent yesterday (there's a full archive on the site, but it requires registration:
15:51:05 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Over 1000 protesters have gathered in Central Park, seems calm at this time.
16:00:30 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Police are not allowing bicycles to ride on the streets in the Times Square area.
16:11:56 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Update: police have closed 6 Ave and all streets west of 6ave from 34 St to 59 St to bicycles
16:14:56 Sun, Aug 29 morgan Kiss-in in progress! 5Ave @ 41 on the steps of the library
16:23:38 Sun, Aug 29 morgan The crowd on the Great lawn of Central Park is growing, police seem calm
16:37:07 Sun, Aug 29 morgan The Kiss-in is marching toward Times Square, and the mouse-bloc actions in that area are begining
Link, and more info on smartmobs blog
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: more art-tech-protest videos
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DATE: 08/30/2004 08:36:56 AM
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BoingBoing reader Dave Pentecost says,
Two clips on my site related to the RNC protests. First, caricature as protest: the Billionaires for Bush. Among their rallying cries - Lower the Minimum Wage! No Justice, No Problem! In this clip they urge watching more Fox TV, chant "This is what plutocracy looks like!" and thank the other 99% for their tax dollars. The other clip is a protestor's eye view of the day. A short montage of protest signs, and a wide shot of the march on Seventh Avenue, full of peaceful folks as far as you can see.
Link.
Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC and protest tech: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds. TXTmob. A TV network-er's photoblog.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT pro-P2P editorial
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DATE: 08/30/2004 08:40:32 AM
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A New York Times editorial today praising the recent appeals court decision on P2P services Grokster and Morpheus:
[T]he broader issue is the distribution of information. Software like Grokster creates a network of independent Internet users who can access one another's computer files without going through a central server. (Napster maintained a central server, which made it legally liable in very different ways.) Grokster can certainly be used to swap music illegally. But it can also be used to exchange electronic copies of books already in the public domain, transcripts of Congressional hearings or any number of other legitimate types of information. Much like a VCR that does not distinguish between a pirated tape and one legally acquired, the technology does not care what is shared. It is impossible to strike down software like Grokster for its use in illegal file-sharing without also destroying its capacity for legal and socially beneficial activities.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBEdit 8.0 is out
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DATE: 08/30/2004 09:52:01 AM
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BareBones is a company that makes BBEdit, the most valuable piece of software on my Macintosh. BBEdit is a tool for writing and manipulating text, like vi, emacs, WordPad, and other editors. But while WordPad and TextEdit are underpowered and poorly thought-through and while vi and emacs are briliant but complex and hard to learn, BBEdit strikes the perfect balance between ease-of-use and power. All of my novels and every story I've written in the past eight years has been written in BBEdit. Every Boing Boing post I've posted (including this one) was written in BBEdit. I've had excellent support from them all along, and every so often, they ship a new version that inevitably fixes whatever minor annoyances I had with the previous version and introduces a few features that I hadn't thought of but which end up being indispensible to my workflow.
Today, BareBones shipped BBEdit 8.0, a $49 upgrade for BBEdit 7.x users, and I've just paid for it and downloaded it, on the strength of new features like Text Factories, a GUI front-end to regular-expression-based search and replace, so that you can do the kind of thing a perl hacker does in one inscrutable line with a series of easy-to-understand drop-down menus; the Documents Drawer, which fixes the slightly clumsy handling of multiple windows in the current BBEdit; and the newly integrated MacOS spell-checker, which fixes the sorely lagging BBEdit spell-checker.
BBEdit upgrades are like Christmas for me. More than any tool on my computer, I live in my text-editor. These upgrades are major quality-of-life enhancers for the likes of me.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tortoise anatomical model
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DATE: 08/30/2004 10:30:33 AM
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This curious tortoise skeleton, an antique veterinary teaching aid, is on eBay right now. The shell is hinged so that you can see the entire skeleton. I assume it's a model, but it's still quite amazing. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Famous for 15 megabytes
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DATE: 08/30/2004 11:08:49 AM
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I've always though that the people who hung out at Andy Warhol's 1960s Factory were probably more interesting than Andy himself. Warholstars is an amazingly comprehensive and searchable guide to the Factory scenesters, including bios, "whatever happened to" information, and current news of Warhol-related happenings. Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: The brain's own antipsychotic medication
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DATE: 08/30/2004 11:26:17 AM
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Anandamide is a cannabis-like substance produced by the brain. Researchers at the University of Cologne and UC Irvine who observed that schizophrenics have higher adandamide levels than healthy individuals. The odd thing though is that within the group of people suffering from schizophrenia, the individuals with the most severe symptoms had the lowest anandamide levels. The new theory is that rather than causing psychosis, anandamide helps control it and that those with the worst symptoms might be producing too little of the substance in response.
At some point in their lives, between 5 and 30 per cent of healthy people have had symptoms such as delusions or hallucinations, which can be triggered by something as simple as sleep deprivation. "All of us are potentially psychotic," says David Castle of the University of Melbourne. So for the body to have a system that prevents these experiences getting out of hand makes sense, he says.
Link
Update: As our friend at root.cellar points out, ananda, the root word of Anandamide, is Sanskrit for "bliss." Appropriate! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: daily geek protest roundup
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DATE: 08/30/2004 01:44:07 PM
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A slew of riot nrrd updates from BoingBoing readers about protest, art, and tech mixing at the Republican National Convention in NYC this week.
* Bunnyhero says, "The RNC mobile network, or RNCmobnet, is a moblog dedicated to utilizing the power of the collective cell network during the Republican National Convention demonstrations by enabling mobile postings by just about anybody with a properly enabled mobile device."
* Phil Haack points us to the image shown here, and says, "This is the geekiest protest sign ever -- photo taken by a friend in New York." Link to full-size.
* Reader Jeff McHugh loved that "‹/BUSH›" sign so much, he created a shop on cafepress where you can purchase bumper stickers, mugs, and the like. Link
* Eli says, "A group of us are using wearable computers, wifi, and souped up camcorders are doing an interactive web and tv broadcast tonight of the RNC. We have one crew inside MSG near the bloggers and three crews in the streets. We'll be broadcasting live from 7-7:30 PM EST on MNN in NYC and over the web at Konscious.tv. Participants can watch live streams and chat over the web with camerapeople live while they're shooting. More info here."
* Blogstar Anil Dash tells BoingBoing, "The Village Voice has got a number of new blogs they've been launching, but the most interesting one to me was the diary of a (clothed) cocktail waitress at a strip club -- Link. There's only one post up so far, but if she keeps updating, it promises to be the most compelling record of the convention that I've seen."
* And Jon says, "Found "Axis of Eve" via we-make-money-not-art.com be sure to check out this page for some hilarious underwear slogans!"
Axis of Eve, a women's rights group, is planning a 10-minute mass panty flash on Appointment on Wednesday, September 1 to protest the policies of the Bush administration. Over 100 women will flash panties emblazoned with anti-Bush slogans like "give Bush the finger," "cream Bush", "drill Bush, not oil", "Ballot Box," "My Cherry For Kerry," etc."
Fleshbot has more on that one: Link
Previous BB posts about RNC-NYC and protest tech: Barlow's dance protests. DIY coverage. Sterling's prediction. Nationwide scream 09/02. Robocops. Rooftop protest messages. Brooklyn Orgiastic Politics Collective. Bikes Against Bush arrest. First Amendment read-ins. C-SPAN protest video feeds. TXTmob. A TV network-er's photoblog. Protest videos.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: Update on arrest of Joshua Kinberg, Bikes Against Bush
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DATE: 08/30/2004 03:09:19 PM
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Snipped from MSNBC.com. Correspondent Ron Reagan was interviewing Joshua Kinberg when he was arrested yesterday (Link to previous BB post for story background):
Released from the "Tombs" after police arrested me (Joshua Kinberg of Bikes Against Bush) I'm now sitting in the MSNBC trailer at Herald Sq., NYC, with Ron Reagan and Joe Trippi after spending 24 hours in the "Tombs" with several hundred Critical Mass cyclists, who were arrested the night before.
Joshua Kinberg: I was arrested while Ron was interviewing me about my invention-- a bicycle that prints text messages on the street in water-soluble chalk. While we were conducting the interview, the police stopped me and asked for my ID. After I produced identification, the police waited for their sergeant to arrive before placing me under arrest without stating the charge. I was doing nothing more than describing my invention to the media and explaining my disagreements with the Bush administration.
When I arrived in the Tombs, I was placed in a cell with around 30 other cyclists. They had spent the previous night in a location they were affectionately calling "Lil' Gitmo," a makeshift detention center on the West Side piers converted from a former bus depot. Lil' Gitmo had cells sectioned off with chain link fence and razor wire, and a floor covered in motor oil, transmission fluid, and other toxic chemicals. The cyclists detained there were forced to sleep on this hazardous floor wearing nothing more than bicycling shorts and t-shirts. Consequently, several developed serious skin rashes the following day. After 36 hours most of the cyclists had been released with a pending court date. Several had been arrested when specifically following police directions to exit the peaceful bike ride. Others had not been part of Critical Mass, but had simply been on the streets with a bicycle at the wrong time.
I was released after 24 hours in detention with a court date set for Friday. Unfortunately, all my equipment-- bicycle, laptop, cell phone, and custom designed electronics-- has been confiscated. Thus, the Bikes Against Bush performance, where I would accept and print messages sent from web users, is likely to be cancelled. A volunteer lawyer from the National Lawyers Guild is confident that my case will be dismissed on grounds of the First Amendment, but we will have to wait until Friday to see. A video of the arrest recorded and edited by Yury Gitman has been posted online (BitTorrent), and the story of my arrest has already been blogged on SlashDot, BoingBoing, Kottke, and JuliaSet.
Link to MSNBC item, with link to video of Reagan's interview with Kinberg (in which he describes "what happened, and what The Tombs was like.")
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wikipedia proves its amazing self-healing powers
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DATE: 08/30/2004 04:47:42 PM
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Phil sez, "Remember Al Fasoldt, the journalist who disparaged Wikipedia? He was challenged by a Techdirt writer to change an item and see if his change was found. While Fasoldt dismissed the idea, Alex Halavais thought it was an interesting idea. He made 13 changes to 13 different Wikipedia pages, ranging from obvious to subtle. He figured he'd give them a couple of weeks and then fix the ones that weren't caught. Every single change was found and changed within hours."
Link
(Thanks, Phil!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bogus-ify your outgoing caller ID
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DATE: 08/30/2004 10:33:58 PM
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Ahoy, stalkers, crank yankers, and evil telemarketer scumbags! Beginning this Wednesday, September 1, US-based online company Star38.com will offer paying subscribers a Caller ID falsification service. Make-believe you're the White House! Or 1-800-CALL-ATT! Or, hell, get your '80s on and vamp out in 867-5309! Kevin Poulsen of SecurityFocus tried it out, and evidently the service checked out as providing what it promised. Users complete an online form with phone number, number they want to call, number they want to appear to be calling from; in a couple of seconds, the system rings back to patch them through to their call destination. But, like, in a secret numeric disguise: call recipients see the spoofed number displayed on Caller ID. Link to Register article (via /., which contains some interesting debate from readers over whether or not the system is a truly effective spoofing mechanism)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UPS shirt appreciated
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:00:36 AM
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Darren Barefoot recently thrifted a UPS shirt and he's posted an annotated photo of him wearing it in which he marks up all the grace-notes in its design.
Link
(Thanks, Darren!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Diebold voting machines vulnerability
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:06:08 AM
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Diebold's voting machines have a stunning security defect:
Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bode's Cheech Wizard animated
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:09:22 AM
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Nigel Hendrickson, a professional computer animator, has produced a fannish animated adaptation of Vaughn Bode's classic "Cheech Wizard" comic. The movie is a little over two minutes long, and it's not only hilarious and raunchy -- as any good adaptation of Bode should be! -- it's also drop-dead gorgeous.
Link
(Thanks, Drewkeig!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Moore at the RNC
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:10:35 AM
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USAToday has hired Michael Moore to cover the Republican National Convention:
Hanging out around the convention, I've encountered a number of the Republican faithful who aren't delegates. They warm up to me when they don't find horns or a tail. Talking to them, I discover they're like many people who call themselves Republicans but aren't really Republicans. At least not in the radical-right way that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Co. have defined Republicans.
I asked one man who told me he was a "proud Republican," "Do you think we need strong laws to protect our air and water?"
"Well, sure," he said. "Who doesn't?"
I asked whether women should have equal rights, including the same pay as men.
"Absolutely," he replied.
"Would you discriminate against someone because he or she is gay?"
"Um, no." The pause — I get that a lot when I ask this question — is usually because the average good-hearted person instantly thinks about a gay family member or friend.
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Friendster cans coder for blogging
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:17:02 AM
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Joyce Park is a coder who worked at Friendster, leading the charge to re-engineer the poky, Java-based back-end with fast PHP. She blogged about it, got slashdotted, got written up in the press -- and got fired. Even though there was nothing confidential in her blog posts, the new CEO shitcanned her.
[I]t's especially ironic because Friendster, of course, is a company that is all about getting people to reveal information about themselves...
Link, Link to Jeremy Zawodny's instructions for resigning from Friendster
(Thanks, Jeffreyp!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Love note to a cigar
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:29:14 AM
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Ben Hammersley -- gentleman adventurer, RSS hacker, dog-nut and committed smoker -- has taken on a cigar company as a sponsor on his blog, and is reviewing their wares, writing these over-the-top love-poems about cigars:
Lighting was smooth, though there was a little channelling (caused, I fear, by my own cackhandedness rather than any rolling fault, but easily rectified). Impressively firm ash, with the typical Nicaraguan whiteness to it, and solid to at least two inches. It’s a medium smoke, a good newspaper and coffee smoke, with non sense of bitterness at all. Indeed, once up to cruising speed, it’s rather blissful: it draws very well, doesn’t linger on the palate, but it calls to you from your hand. Fruity, perhaps, with a slight hint of spice, but nothing too post-prandial. The Sumatran wrapper gives some sweetness, and the ligero filler the complexity and the ummmph. In all, bloody nice.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Warren Ellis's device array
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:31:32 AM
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Gizmodo's done another of their "What's in your gadget-bag" features, this time with Warren Ellis, whose Transmetropolitan is the best science fictional comic I've ever read.
You just caught me. I'm off to Atlanta in 36 hours or so; jumping from British Summer Time to Eastern Daylight Time for something called Dragon*Con, where I'm a special guest (and also cultivating the Freak Vote in prep for my first prose novel, published next summer).
I travel light. I'm the guy whose bag hits the luggage carousel last. I'm the guy who's still there at three in the morning in an empty hall, with tumbleweed blowing past, sitting there next to horse skeletons and starving vultures, waiting for the airport workers to finish their smack break and grub around in the back of the airplane for my bag. Which usually comes out looking like they've been having group sex on it. So, five or six years ago, I decided that if it didn't fit into a carry-on bag, I wasn't taking it.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Skype beta for OS X
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:32:56 AM
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Skype is the voice-over-IP phone that the Kazaa people invented, eschewing the SIP-phone standards used by companies like Vonage. They've just shipped a Mac OS X beta (finally!).
Link
(via Joi Ito)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: House speaker: Soros is a druglord
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:36:33 AM
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The Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert has gone on record as suspecting that billionaire currency speculator George Soros (who made his money on currency speculation) is a drug kingpin. Soros funds a lot of progressive causes (including a lot of drug-law and copyright-reform stuff) and has pledged his financial support to overturn the Bush presidency, so this smear is clearly political in nature:
"You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years -- George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."
Link
(via Electrolite)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best short story collection of the year
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:48:47 AM
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Eileen Gunn, the editor of The Infinite Matrix, has published her first collection of short stories, Stable Strategies and Others. I was honoured to get an advance copy for a blurb ("Gunn's stories are in another league entirely -- like Sturgeon or Chiang, she's *sui generis* and anything but generic. Every one of these stories has a pleasing, sharp flavor unlike anything you've ever tasted. Especially the recipe for fruit crisp. Delicious.") and I was blown away by Eileen's fiction -- but don't take my word for it: see the glowing William Gibson intro to her collection gives you an idea of why you should be picking this up ASAP (“Eileen Gunn’s innate sensibilities and cultural smarts have designated her a nodal entity, one of those human intersections where people and ideas meet, and out of which things change.”). Eileen was in charge of MSFT's marketing for the first several years of the company's existence, and the deep geek cred and creativity shines through here.
“...And now, the man you loved to hate, the man you loved too late, the man everyone loves to second-guess, America's own Tricky Dick!” Applause, and the strains of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” A tanned, well-groomed man in a blue blazer and grey slacks walks between the curtains.
He raises his hands above his head in the familiar double V-for-Victory salute to acknowledge the applause, then gestures for quiet.
“Thanks for the hand, folks.” His voice is deep, quiet, and sincere. “You know, I needed that applause today.” A catch in his throat. “Right before the show, I was on my way down here to the studio...” He shakes his head slightly, as if contemplating the role that Chance plays in Life. “An elderly lady came up to me, and she introduced herself, and then she said, 'Oh, Dick, I'm so pleased to meet you, you know you were my all-time favorite presidential candidate...” He lets the compliment hang there a second, as if savoring it. “...after Jack Kennedy, of course.” The audience laughs, appreciating the host who can tell a joke at his own expense. When the laughter has diminished, but before it stops completely, he continues.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: British Academy treats film judges as crooks
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DATE: 08/31/2004 06:57:03 AM
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The British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA) is treating all judges as criminals this awards season. They are supplying special lockware DVD players that can play back the "secure" DVDs that the Academy is distributing. My guess is that anyone elected to judge a film award has a highly tuned, specialised home-theatre setup and that this will represent a serious goddamned pain in the ass for them:
"We are very pleased to be working with Cinea to give our members the opportunity to receive secure screeners. The British Academy takes the threat of piracy very seriously, and we welcome any solution that can reduce the risk of unauthorized copying." said David Parfitt, Chair of BAFTA's Film Committee.
Variety is reporting that it will cost studios US$25,000 (€20,650) per film, plus a license fee to Cinea, to secure the screener disks with the S-VIEW system. Cinea will pay for the players and encoding themselves, and is in discussion with studios for further uses of the S-VIEW technology to secure the post-production process for film makers. It can be used for the secure distribution of dailies and other works in progress, ensuring that digital copies don't end up being leaked onto the internet. Something that was almost impossible with 35 or 70mm film.
Each sv300 player is individually addressable, allowing distributors to decide exactly who views their content, from large groups of thousands to a single individual.
Nice: if you can't sell DRM to users, you can convince paranoid studio execs to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to buy it and shove it down cinephiles' throats.
Link
(Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MPAA bemoans inability to ban behavior and technology
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DATE: 08/31/2004 07:13:21 AM
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Ernest Miller and Jason Schultz latch on to this great quote from MPAA hack Fritz Attaway:
"If we can't ban bad behavior and we can't ban bad technology, what is it we're supposed to do, stand back and let people steal our product?'' Attaway said.
Jason's response:
[T]he quote reveals the MPAA approach to every problem: either pass laws to ban behavior or pass laws to ban technology. Innovation, ingenuity, competition -- those are for suckers. More laws and more lawsuits, that's the Hollywood way. Cut past the consumer and go straight to Congress. Oh well, at least they're finally being honest.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paint a movie-screen on any wall
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DATE: 08/31/2004 07:16:21 AM
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ScreenGoo is a paint-on movie screen compound that can turn any wall into a screen:
Screen Goo is a specially formatted, highly reflective acrylic paint, designed specifically for the video projection industry. Screen Goo acrylic paint allows one to transform any smooth paintable surface into a high performance projection screen.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
Update: Fred sez, "Sony has created a new black screen material that rejects ambient light other than red, green, blue. This means that the Achilles heel of front projectors -- rejection of ambient light -- may soon be eliminated. So before you go painting your room in reflective acrylic or blow dough on a plasma screen, you might want to wait until this hits the market. I'm guessing that within a year, you'll have 3 lb. DVD-quality projectors for sub-$1k capable of throwing 90in images onto your hot new roll-up black screen. The TV-in-a-box could well start disappearing from the American living room by decade's end if this technology works out."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Victoria's Secret Disney jammies
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DATE: 08/31/2004 07:20:26 AM
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Victoria's Secret has released a line of saucy Disney sleepwear.
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Valenti's magical DRM thinking debunked
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DATE: 08/31/2004 07:43:08 AM
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Ed Felten picks apart Jack Valenti's Engadget interview (in which Valenti compares himself to JFK: "I was in Dallas in the motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, and I saw that day a brave young president murdered, and a new president take over. The president is dead, long live the president, the nation goes on. No one is indispensable, I learned that day in Dallas. My successor will come into this job and he won't be me, but he might do a hell of a lot better job than I'm doing.")
It may be possible to so infect a movie with some kind of circuitry that allows people to copy to their heart's content, but the copied result would come out with decayed fidelity with respect to sound and color. Another would be to have some kind of design in a movie that would say, 'copy never,' 'copy once.'
Even ignoring the technical non sequiturs ("stuff ... algorithms into a movie"; "infect a movie with ... circuitry"), this is wildly implausible. Nothing has happened to make the technical prospects for DRM (anti-copying) technology any less bleak.
We can only hope Valenti's successor stops believing in "technological magic" and instead teaches the industry to accept technical reality. File sharing cannot be wished away. The industry needs to figure out how to deal with it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US Secret Service "harassing" indymedia over RNC delegate data release?
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DATE: 08/31/2004 07:53:56 AM
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The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation and is demanding records related to an indymedia.org post which expressed anti-RNC sentiment and listed the names of some 2,200 individual RNC delegates. More on indymedia's site here, and here's a snip from a related ACLU press release:
In a letter sent today in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by the Secret Service, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union said they are representing a web hosting service and administrators of an independent media website regarding the anonymous posting of publicly available information about delegates to the Republican National Convention. The groups said the investigation is but the latest example of government agencies using law enforcement powers to chill free speech and intimidate protesters. (...) Beeson added that the posting did not include anything remotely threatening, but involved political speech fully protected by the First Amendment.
Link to Declan McCullagh's politech law-tech resource, where this news item was first spotted. Link to Washington Post story, Link to CNN's, Link to NYT story.
Update:
Micah of Indymedia says, "I'm one of the four system administrators for indymedia that is involved in this... The wonderful ISP we have -- who protects its client's privacy and rights without caving -- Calyx, was forced to turn over any contact information they had for Indymedia... turns out they only have our email addresses, so I expect an email from the SS (Secret Service, not Sicherheitsdienst) any day now. I thought I'd point out this url for more information (including a scanned copy of the subpoena). Link"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free protest tune download from J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science
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DATE: 08/31/2004 08:03:14 AM
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Om Records of San Francisco is offering up this dub-techno-protest soundtrack as a free download. Link to info and download for J. Boogie's Dubtronic Science "You're the Murdera."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in Finnish
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DATE: 08/31/2004 08:50:39 AM
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Herkko Hietanen, Tero Tilus, Antti Vähä-Sipilä and Kuisma Lappalainen from EF Finland have translated my Microsoft DRM talk into Finnish, bringing the total number of translations up to 10 (with two more that I know of underway). Freaking cool.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Keyboard with 512k of memory, 700h battery life
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DATE: 08/31/2004 10:28:44 AM
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The AlphaSmart Neo is a full-sized keyboard with a little LCD screen on the top. It acts as a word-processor, letting you type into its 512k cache while it draws power from 3 AA batteries. When you get back to your Mac or PC, you just dump the text over USB or IR. The thing runs for 700 hours on a 3 AA batts and costs $250, and weighs about 2 lbs.
My only complaint about this thing is the storage: 512k? I know that's a whole novel and then some, but geez, flash-RAM is so cheap now -- why not just give it a SD slot and I could use an old 64MB card from my last camera?
Link
(via Engadget)
Update: Chris Taylor points out that AlphaSmart has a model that supports memory cards -- and it comes with WiFi and PalmOS.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help name the 50 best sf films
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DATE: 08/31/2004 10:30:30 AM
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John Scalzi (an amazing sf writer and the author of several great nonfic compendia of trivia) is doing a book on great sf films and he needs your help:
As some of you know, I'm currently writing The Rough Guide to Science Fiction Film, which will be a general overview of the history of Science Fiction in films, with chapters on some various themes (science in science fiction, SF film icons, crossover subgenres, etc) and so on. The heart of the book, however, will be the Science Fiction Film Canon: The 50 classic Science Fiction films. In my own brain, I see this list as the list of the most significant science fiction films, as opposed to the "best" or the most financially successful. This gives me latitude to, say, include films that are influential on science fiction filmmakers, but not necessarily the audience (or, vice versa, as the case may be).
(You rightly ask: And why do I get to choose the Science Fiction Film Canon? Well, because someone paid me to, basically. But also, I'm both a professional film critic of more than a dozen years standing, and I'm also a professional science fiction writer. If someone's going to compile this list, it might as well be me.)
I of course already have a preliminary list of 50 films ready to go. BUT! Even with my rather extensive knowledge of science fiction, film and science fiction films, I am more than willing to entertain the notion that my list has gaps: Films that should be on the list may not be there -- films that I have on the list may not deserve to be there.
So, this is where you come in: Suggest me some science films (one or more, as many as you like) which you feel are especially significant. If you want to jot down a sentence or two as to why you think they're significant, that'd be swell (to be clear, any comments you make on films are for my personal edification -- I won't cut and paste into the book. I do my own writing). Any films you might care to think of are appreciated...
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Zen of Death
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 08/31/2004 11:13:39 AM
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streatham cemetary
death masks
blog of death
celebrity death beeper
dead or alive
who's alive who's dead
a strange ghost
ready teddy death
death clock
Image: The death mask of English poet John Keats. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
Update: Bonus round -- Tuscan deathblog from Bruce Sterling. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Neuroscience of revenge
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DATE: 08/31/2004 11:38:12 AM
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Researchers at the University of Zurich have shown that revenge is, well, sweet. Their experiment, described in Scientific American, was based on a game where one player was given the opportunity to punish another player for financially screwing him. PET scans revealed that when a player contemplated revenge, his striatum, a "reward center" in the brain, became energized.
This sort of causal relationship may explain why people are willing to discipline a stranger even when there is no immediate gain in it for them. "Emotions play a proactive as well as reactive role," remarks Brian Knutson of Stanford University who penned an accompanying commentary (to a paper about the study in the journal Science). He notes that "passionate" forces may need to be included in economic models because, as this research shows, “people show systematic deviations from rationality."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Dawn of the dead?
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DATE: 08/31/2004 11:50:21 AM
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A fertility scientist at the Kentucky Center for Reproductive Medicine, Panayiotis Zavos, claims to have taken cells from dead humans and cloned them. He stopped short of implanting the embryos, but the scientific community is in an uproar. According to New Scientist, one of three cases used DNA from a young girl killed in an automobile wreck. Apparently her parents kept the tissue in the refrigerator for a few days until sending them along to the maverick scientist.
“This man preys on the strong desires of the most vulnerable people in society - giving them false hopes,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, head of developmental genetics at the UK's National Institute for Medical Research. Other scientists argue that, even if cloning a person were possible, the risk of major birth defects is huge.
Zavos's claims have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Star Trek's James Doohan gets star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
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DATE: 08/31/2004 12:30:47 PM
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Blogger, photographer, and citizen geek Jason DeFillippo took photos, including the one shown here. He says, "I am really bummed I missed the [Trekkie] convention on Sunday but this made up for it. I'll remember it every time I walk by his star. Safe journeys Scotty..."
Mr. Doohan, who played the character "Scotty" on the famed scifi series, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (Link to more info, thanks Paul)
Link to Jason's photo gallery, which includes some wonderful snaps of other Star Trek cast members in attendance
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PSAs for Google AdWords
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DATE: 08/31/2004 01:00:53 PM
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Dave sez, "Designed for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, Google Grants is a unique in-kind advertising program. It harnesses the power of our flagship advertising product, Google AdWords, to non-profits seeking to inform and engage their constituents online. Google Grants has awarded AdWords advertising to hundreds of non-profit groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education."
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(Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vintage Girly pinups
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DATE: 08/31/2004 01:22:46 PM
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Why is it that the women in these oldschool cheesecake illos always appear shocked, surprised, and totally unprepared to perform even the most mundane of tasks? The expression is, like, "Heavens! Someone's just crammed a red-hot poker up my butt!" I mean, take the image shown here, from Art Frahm. Maybe she's a midcentury bimbo wearing loose drawers, right? OR, maybe she's an undercover leet hacker and card-carrying MENSA member. Having just finished a phone phreak session in this public booth, she disguises her sinister, geeky hijinks with a bag full of carbs and a sight gag to divert that sneaky federal agent in black. "Smile now, narq," reads her invisibly eeevil thought-balloon, "1 PWN3D J00!" Anyway, here's an extensive online gallery of digital babes from yesteryear. Link to "Painted Anvil" gallery (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bonus Zen of Death round: Tuscan deathblog from Bruce Sterling
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DATE: 08/31/2004 02:43:02 PM
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Bruce Sterling is cyberpunking it up around Tuscany, the bastard, and has been shooting some lovely images of funerary sculpture. Start here, move back for more: Link.
See also previous BoingBoing post: Zen of Death
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Other Earths?
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DATE: 08/31/2004 03:35:01 PM
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Two teams of astronomers announced today the discovery of a new class of planets that are tiny compared to the gas giants previously detected outside of our solar system. Indeed, one of the two Neptune-sized spheres they found may have a solid surface and temperature conducive to life. From a CNN report:
"We are closer to answering the question, 'Are we alone in the universe?'" said Anne Kinney, director of NASA's Universe Division, Science Mission Directorate. "We aim to answer that question by looking for planets, eventually imaging them and ultimately diagnosing the presence of life on those planets."
One of the planets is 41 light years from Earth and the other is about 33 light years away. UC Berkeley's star planet hunter Geoff Marcy was a member of one of the teams that revealed their discoveries at a NASA press conference this afternoon:
"If you look at the 135 or so extrasolar planets found so far, it's clear that nature makes more of the smaller planets than the larger ones," he said. "We've found more Saturn-size planets than Jupiter-size planets, and now it appears there are more Neptune-size planets than Saturn-size. That means there's an even better chance of finding Earths, and maybe more of them than all the other planets we've found so far."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Soros responds to drug-lord accusation
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DATE: 08/31/2004 04:56:56 PM
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George Soros has responded to Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's accusation that he is financed by narco-gangsters in a great, stiff letter that demands an apology:
You do a discredit to yourself and to the dignity of your office by engaging in these dishonest smear tactics. You should be ashamed.
For the Speaker of the House of Representatives, even in the midst of an election season, to descend to a level of political discourse where innuendo and slander replace reason, truth and argument is unacceptable.
This past Sunday, on national television, you suggested that I might be a criminal simply because I have exercised my First Amendment rights to dissent from the policies of the Bush administration...
I must respectfully insist that you either substantiate these claims -- which you cannot do because they are false -- or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation.
Go gettim, George!
52k PDF Link
(Thanks, Raypride!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Audioblogging manifesto
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DATE: 08/31/2004 07:12:29 PM
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Maciej has posted an audioblogging manifesto that is really a hell of a thing.
4.1MB Link, Transcript Link
(via Waxy)
(Thanks, -d!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: When cars fly
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DATE: 09/01/2004 01:58:41 AM
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It's time again for the mainstream media's semi-annual report on flying cars of the future. Guess what! According to this Associated Press article, we're still decades away from George Jetson-style jaunts. (Surprise!)
The problem is, those ideas have generally required both a lot of money and the skills of a trained pilot. And melding cars and planes hasn't always been very successful.
"When you try to combine them you get the worst of both worlds: a very heavy, slow, expensive vehicle that's hard to use," said Mark Moore, who heads the personal air vehicle division of the vehicle systems program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: The eyes have it
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DATE: 09/01/2004 02:26:40 AM
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On eBay, a box of twenty SFX artificial eyeballs.
"Made of a durable polymure-resin-glass compound these eyes are lifelike. Very high quality. Great to collect, use for props or Halloween coming up soon. Professional. Many colors."
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video of GOP House Speaker accusing Soros of taking dope money
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DATE: 09/01/2004 03:42:47 AM
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Here's the video of Dennis Hastert calling George Soros a druglord. What a dirtbag that Hastert is. I mean, I don't know where he gets his money from. He's a dick, so maybe he gets his money by selling little children to trolls to bake into pies. Can we be sure he doesn't?
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(via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Garage door openers aren't copyrighted, don't get DMCA protection
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DATE: 09/01/2004 03:52:24 AM
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The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has brought down a verdict in the "Skylink" case. That's a DMCA case whereing a garage-door-opener company asserted that another company, which makes interoperable clickers (in case you lose yours or want a spare for your spouse) violated the DMCA by circumventing the protection on the copyrighted software in the garage-door-opener. Yeah, you read right. Copyrighted garage-door-openers.
Anyway, the court delivered the clearest and most ringing condemnation of the overbroad application of the DMCA yet:
The DMCA does not create a new property right for copyright owners. Nor, for that matter, does it divest the public of the property rights that the Copyright Act has long granted to the public. The anticircumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the DMCA create new grounds of liability. A copyright owner seeking to impose liability on an accused circumventor must demonstrate a reasonable relationship between the circumvention at issue and a use relating to a property right for which the Copyright Act permits the copyright owner to withhold authorization-as well as notice that authorization was withheld. A copyright owner seeking to impose liability on an accused trafficker must demonstrate that the trafficker's device enables either copyright infringement or a prohibited circumvention. Here, the District Court correctly ruled that Chamberlain pled no connection between unauthorized use of its copyrighted software and Skylink's accused transmitter. This connection is critical to sustaining a cause of action under the DMCA. We therefore affirm the District Court's summary judgment in favor of Skylink.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New Futurismic fiction online
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DATE: 09/01/2004 04:17:31 AM
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Jeremy sez, "I just posted a new story from Tom Doyle called 'Art's Appreciation' to Futurismic Fiction. The title character is the kind of psychotic violence-prone anti-hero we'll all be cheering for if the spammers, the ad flacks and the copyright goons get their way."
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(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: (parody) ASCAP shakes down Burning Man for music royalties
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DATE: 09/01/2004 05:27:01 AM
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Oh, the (glitter-covered, body-painted) humanity! The American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers -- ASCAP -- demanding cash from Burning Man?
When [a] composer's tune is played, ASCAP collects a fee from the venue performing it and delivers it, minus administrative costs, to the composer. For venues wishing to play copyrighted music for their visitors, ASCAP typically offers a package deal where, for an annual fee, subscribers can play as much of their members' music as they wish. The fee is scaled according to the number of people who will be present at the venue and, therefore, will be exposed to the music. "It's very reasonable," says Wilcox. "You'd probably spend more per month on heating and electricity than for one of our licenses."
Burning Man, however, has never obtained a performance license, says Wilcox. Music is one of the staples of the week-long event, with mostly electronic music playing around the clock. 25,000 people are estimated to have attended Burning Man last year alone. That size concerns Wilcox. "Sometimes we'll let smaller venues like nightclubs slide on past royalties, provided they obtain a current license. But this is just too big to ignore."
According to Wilcox, Burning Man organizers had rebuffed previous ASCAP attempts to secure a royalty agreement, claiming that the organization itself does not provide the music. All music is brought in by the visitors. Further, Burning Man is expressly non-commerical -- the use of money of any kind during the event is forbidden. However, says Wilcox, that doesn't matter. "Whether the venue itself makes any money or not, the artist's music was still used in a large venue, and he or she deserves to be paid for it. Our job is to make sure that happens."
Link to Kuro5hin article (which is 100% fake) (Thanks, Secret Agent M!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Philly considers free WiFi for all
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DATE: 09/01/2004 06:32:41 AM
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Patricio Lopez says, "Let's hope this becomes the norm in a few years! For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot." Link to news story
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hurricane Frances heads straight for the space coast
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DATE: 09/01/2004 06:34:39 AM
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JP says:
Thanks to newfangled satellites and high speed computers Floridians now enjoy
many days fair warning that disaster approaches -- unlike many other natural
and voting disasters-- but will everyone get out of the way? Frances'
projected path now shifts towards Cape Canaveral. Unfortunately some prized
national treasures cannot be moved and NASA workers are already powering
down the Space Shuttle orbiters, closing their payload bay doors and stowing
their landing gear. Fingers are crossed as the launch control center is built
to withstand a Category 5 storm but many buildings at KSC can take only a Category
3 storm or less, including
the buildings that house the space shuttles. Forecasters say conditions
are "favorable" for Frances to strengthen within the next 48 hours
into a Category 5 storm.
Only three Category 5 storms have ever landed in the U.S. since 1900. If Frances
hits Florida it will be the
first time since 1950 that two major hurricanes have slammed into the state
within a month. American taxpayer dollars fund the ongoing research and early warning Geostationary
Satellite Server Storm Floater 1 Satellite. If you live in Florida pay heed to the visible image
loop
as well as the Hurricane Hunter researchers. Even if the current computer models are not accurate it seems as if yet another
chunk of Florida is about to have a very bad Labor Day weekend...
Link to image of storm's approach
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japan prosecuting P2P developer
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DATE: 09/01/2004 06:35:02 AM
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BoingBoing reader Bobcat says, "Apparently Japan is having their first trial where the creator of P2P file sharing software is being prosecuted because they say he knew 'it would facilitate Internet piracy.' The defendant, Isamu Kaneko, created the P2P program 'Winny' -- which I've never heard of, personally. According to the article Winny 'allows users to swap files without revealing their IP addresses.' Link to news story.
Update: Joi Ito has more: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Logitech introduces wireless laser mouse
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DATE: 09/01/2004 06:37:26 AM
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Swiss firm Logitech today launched a new product which they say is the world's first cordless laser mouse.
Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc Raymond )
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kaiju Big Battel: Monster Mashes Attract Masses
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DATE: 09/01/2004 06:43:51 AM
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In today's Wired News, a report I filed about Kaiju Big Battel -- a multimedia event in which costumed combatants spew toxic ooze on audience members. The phenom is growing in popularity. There are already websites, message boards, monster profiles at online social networking services, and a DVD series. Coming next: a book and TV pilot... and a live show in LA on September 08.
A Kaiju commissioner presides over these battles to ensure fairness. The clandestine Kaiju Regulatory Commission also functions as a sort of secret United Nations of monster fighting, regulating league activity and protecting humans from harm. As the group's slogan warns, "Danger can happen." "It's their job to ensure that these events continue as a safe form of monster therapy," says [Kaiju Studios' Bill] Woods. "Monsters who have legitimate grudges need to work things out without destroying Cleveland in the process."
(...)Show videos are streamed on the group's website, where one also finds a monster manifesto. "Planet Earth is under threat," the website warns visitors. "Scattered throughout the galaxy is a monstrous mob of maniacal villains, menacing alien beasts and giant, city-crushing monsters waging war against one another." Global monster terror threats aside, organizers are optimistic about at least one thing: the size of their growing fan base. Nearly 2,000 are expected at the L.A. event.
"Now is a great time to be a monster -- people really need a little distraction," said David Borden, who co-founded the performance troupe with his brother Randy. Given America's current fixation on the approaching 2004 elections, could Big Battel's creators imagine one of their domination-craving members seeking office? "I could definitely imagine a monster running for president," says Borden. "In fact, I think there may be two of them running for president right now."
Link to story. Image: Kaiju announcer Louden Noxious exchanges heated words with Dr. Cube.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: But everyday is Halloween!
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DATE: 09/01/2004 06:53:15 AM
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An idiotic principal at a middle school in Kansas is cracking down on goths, sending them home if they dress in a way that may "disrupt the school environment or impede learning in the classroom." Principal Cherle Crain's quotes in this MTV.com article are amazingly asinine. Here's my favorite: "Last week, a parent told me her two kids were talking about this at dinner," Crain said. "And one of them said 'I'm so glad Ms. Crain did this, because a Goth sat behind me last year and every single day he'd hiss at me like a snake.' And that impeded his learning."
Link (Thanks, Meri!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: daily riot nrrrd roundup
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DATE: 09/01/2004 10:07:30 AM
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News, links, and updates related to this week's Republican National Convention in New York, from geeks who read BoingBoing:
* Joshua Dickens says, "Webzine founder and filmmaker Ryan Junnell is doing this documentary installation on the RNC and managed to find his way not only into the convention center but also onto the news with this 'Girly Man for Arnold' sign. He's selling it on eBay to hopefully help fund the project and get his producer out of jail." Link
* Christian says, "CNet's Download.com lists among the 'New Releases,' a 'Re-elect George Bush Screen Saver.' Hilariously, the W-saver installs spyware. Even funnier are the negative comments submitted by CNet readers --"Since installing I've lost my job and all my private files were stolen."... "This is the worst software ever. Since installing I lost my job to India, my child owes $24,000 plus interest to pay off the national debt and my buddy who got injured in Iraq came home to no job and no benefits. I tried to call tech support and was told I was an enemy combatant for calling to complaign (sic).'" Link
* Tim says, "My friend Mark was arrested at the same Critical Mass rally that Joshua Kinberg got nabbed at. He wrote a real harrowing and detailed account of his experience; it is worth reading. The story actually lives on his website (Link), but that server is down now, so I've sent you the url for my mirror of it: Link."
* Anonymous says, "A look at the soon-to-be-launched (right before 9/11) Emergency Preparedness Month, in which the White House and more than 50 other agencies will spend a month reminding us that terrorists could strike at any time. This should be a nice bump for Bush leading right into the election. It examines the elements of the 'fear appeal' propaganda technique, and includes an interesting side-by-side comparison of 'Duck and Cover' propaganda from the 1950s, with an eerily similar image from FEMA's website today." Link
* Jean-Luc says, "Edouard, a French guy in NYC, photoblogged a lot about the anti-Bush march in NYC this Saturday." Link
* And following up on our earlier mention of a clever geek protest sign, reader Bing says, Here's a /BUSH shirt that predates the sign you posted (and subsequent cafepress store)." Link.
Previous BoingBoing RNC-NYC roundup: Link. See also: Secret Service and Indymedia servers. Michael Moore at the RNC. Update on Joshua Kinberg's arrest and release.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jalopyblog: journal of an obsessive car-rehabber
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DATE: 09/01/2004 10:50:21 AM
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HooptyRides is a new blog from "Mr Jalopy," an anonymous friend of mine whom I consider to be one of the best, most engaging obsessive writers I know. He's taken to refurbing beautiful old jalopies, and his lyrical and nutso descriptions of his loves are delightful.
To increase automotive safety, I installed seat belts and Jesus tapestry reupholstery. The seats are top quality vinyl with extremely desirable Jesus tapestries. The tapestries are not a matched set, but they go together very nicely. I have a great deal of reverence for this automobile, for Johnny Cash, for the settling of the West, for the big giant huge grandeur of Rocky Mountains, for the buffalo, for the railroads, for exploration and the Grapes of Wrath. I bought this car in Wyoming and drove it to Los Angeles. I was so grateful for the trip and for the arrival, so relieved it was over and so disappointed to hit the Pacific Ocean with nowhere else to go, that I felt, these seat covers, this overarching presence in the front seat was the perfect answer to the trip taken. I have tried to explain this when asked in parking lots. It is a feeling that you get when driving in hailstorms in Yellowstone and under a layer of dust in Zion, it does not translate to Von's parking lot. When they ask, just say, 'Yes, I love Jesus.'
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help Cory pirate his own story!
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DATE: 09/01/2004 10:52:03 AM
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Science Fiction World, a Chinese magazine, recently published an issue with a translation of my story "Nimby and the D-Hoppers" (originally published in June 2003). They didn't ask first, so technically this is a "pirate" edition, but hell, I'm not all that worked up about it -- I'm pretty pumped to know that there are people in China reading my stuff (and for what it's worth, foreign publishers usually pay teeny little pittances for translation rights to short stories).
My only peeve here is that they never sent me a copy, and never put their translation on the Web. I sent 'em some email but they never answered.
So here's my challenge to the lazyweb: track down a copy of the September issue of Science Fiction World and re-type the story that starts on page 12 ("Technological Opposition and the Dimension-Hopper") and send it to me. I'll post it on the Internet and make it available under a Creative Commons license for free reproduction.
Link
(Thanks, Joel!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in pig-latin
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Scotto has converted my Microsoft DRM talk into pig-latin.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory wins the Sunburst Award!
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DATE: 09/01/2004 10:54:24 AM
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My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, has won the 2004 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, winning out over such worthy competitors as Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake. I am bursting with pride.
The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is a
prized and juried award. Based on excellence of writing, it will
be presented annually to a Canadian writer who has had published
a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection of
speculative fiction any time during the previous calendar year.
Named after the first novel by Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first
published authors of contemporary Canadian science fiction, the
award consists of: a cash award of $1000 and a medallion which
incorporates a specially designed "Sunburst" logo. The winner
will receive his or her award in fall 2004.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fruit porn sparks outrage
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BoingBoing reader Alex points to this purportedly XXX image (organic teabagging?) ripped from the Kama Fruitra, and says, "This Ananova story contains images of Maoam fruit wrappers which appear to show fruit in sexual positions. A Catholic college has complained. What is interesting is that Haribo doesn't seem to have denied this interpretation, calling the packaging 'very racy,' and saying, 'The new wrapping is certainly fruitier than the old. But we have not had any other complaints. In fact until now the feedback has all been positive."
Link to news story. Link to Maoam website with barely legal hothothot fruity porn wrapper pics.
Update: BoingBoing reader ix says, "The reader quoted in your post says, A Catholic college has complained. That's not quite right. It seems, as this site says, that it has been a joke by graduates (abiturienten) of a catholic school (jesuitenkolleg zu sankt blasien - really, more a highschool than a college) back in March. Not really hot this story, but a German magazine made it a story again a couple of day ago (more on that here: Link)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 1001 Things to Hate about the Convention
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DATE: 09/01/2004 12:47:46 PM
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From alt-weekly New York Press:
# Delegates from Kansas spotting Dave Chappelle on the streets 50 times a day.
# Protest war stories from people who spent previous 364 days watching MTV.
# You find yourself annoyed by the protesters, until you pick up the Daily News and find the editors bitching about the supporters of "anarchy or communism or nihilism or baby seals or Bobby Seale -- whatever."
# That's when you wish that someone would do something really drastic. And then you're back to being annoyed with the protesters.
# Chinese Communist Party will think this is "what Democracy looks like," setting democratic reforms back 50 years.
# City should be emptier than this during Burning Man.
Link (via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: report from John Perry Barlow's dance protests
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Follow-up on this previous BoingBoing post from Cory: Link. As he steps out the door to "lead another sortie of dancing fools out into the streets of Manhattan," John Perry Barlow reports on the dance protests he's been organizing this week in NYC:
After four missions, Dancing in the Streets has exceeded my fondest expectations. It was my objective, as it usually is, that we afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and this is what we have been doing by all appearances. We generally make the credentialed Republicans we encounter visibly nervous and spread good will and humor to most of the rest, including the police, who could well use it at the moment. People dig it when they see other people dancing in incongruous places. The most surprising people will join in, falling on the dance with a kind of hunger.
Republicans were hard to encounter at first. They are being quarantined behind the blue membrane of the NYPD (for whom my affection and respect has only increased through this experience). In addition, they spend much of their time inside the Garden having a lot less fun than we were. (As several of them told us.) Levels of engagement have increased with fine-tuning. The results vary, ranging from the Stepford husband whom we made so nervous that he walked into a plate glass window to the sweet young delegate from Oklahoma who tore off his tie and joined us for the balance of the evening.
We've had many interactions with the police. They certainly weren't interested in arresting us, though they kept us moving. Several of them said wistfully they wanted to join us. In general they only interfered because they are trying to maintain as familiar a peace as they can. Major variations from standard reality worry them. But not enough to go maximum on us.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Goths in Disneyland
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August 29th was the annual "Bats Day in the Fun Park" -- an annual gathering of goths at Disneyland. Here are Livejournal entires and photogalleries from the event.
Batty's Livejournal, Foxfire's Livejournal, DrunkRockers gallery one, DrunkRockers gallery two
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tokyo Damage Report
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The self-described "American Jerk" behind Tokyo Damage Report says "This page is about interesting (meaning, fucked up) things that one can do in Tokyo. punk, visual, cosplay, s/m, gothic, street trends, capsule hotels, bizarre magazines, random subcultures, and bad Engrish. . . . .also it is about tokyo's urban legends: square watermelons, Sanrio condoms, politically incorrect vending machines, etc."
Here, you'll find photos and first-person accounts of odd things in Japan -- like this beauty product expo filled with bizarre gadgets and obliquely degrading experiences. Image at left: "fake treatments helping beautify fake people." Elsewhere, the blogger discusses "PORNO GAME CHEAT CODES" (Link):
"Welcome to REBEL 100. apparently for some guys, not only is it too difficult to have sex with living human females, it's ALSO TOO DIFFICULT TO SCORE WITH THEM IN X-RATED VIDEOGAMES TOO. here is the concept behind rebel 100: guys are getting turned down by PORN."
Here's another winning entry (Link):
"I noticed that JAPANESE PUNKS HAVE THE MOST FESTOONED BUTTS OF ANYONE EVER. Like a middle-aged man. . . as the hair has gotten smaller, the butts have gotten bigger. Consider how many little doodads dangle from the cellphone of a stereotypical schoolgirl. Then multiply that by ten, and turn the cellphone into a denim-and-leather butt, and you have a punk. Today's punks have not just wallet chains and cigarettes in their behinds, but so much booty fashion I had to make a whole glossary (how did I conduct this research? I'll leave the actual process of asking people about their butts to your imagination.)"
Tons more like this at his main archive page. Link (Thanks, RogueAI)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Microsoft launches beta of digital music download service
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DATE: 09/01/2004 03:42:41 PM
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MSN Music launched today. From a CBS Marketwatch report:
Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled details of a new service for downloading digital music, placing it squarely in competition with Apple's rival iTunes music service. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft will launch a preview version of its new MSN Music service tomorrow that will allow users to legally download songs mostly for 99 cents each. The service will also make entire albums available, the majority of which will cost $9.99, the company said. Microsoft's push into the arena for downloadable music trails Apple's hugely successful iPod digital music player and its own iTunes music service. Apple also charges 99 cents for each song downloaded through iTunes.
Link to news report, and Link to MSN Music home page. (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
Update: Jason Schultz points out the system requirements list:
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000, or Windows XP
Internet Explorer 5.01 (or later), which supports 128-bit encryption
Windows Media Player 7.1 (or later), we recommend the latest version
A 233 megahertz (MHz) processor (such as an Intel Pentium II or Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processor) or faster
64 megabytes (MB) of RAM or more
Speakers and sound capability
Payment with a valid credit card with a U.S. billing address
To enjoy high-quality audio as a Radio Plus subscriber, you will need Windows Media Player 9 Series (or later)
Link
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TITLE: Saudi stampede over Ikea store launch results in 3 deaths
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Hundreds of shoppers crammed into a brand-new Ikea store as it opened in Saudi Arabia, crushing three or more people to death.
A Saudi man and a Pakistani man were among those killed, officials in the port city of Jeddah said. The incident occurred after shoppers rushed into a branch of Ikea to claim a limited number of credit vouchers being offered to the public. More than 8,000 people had gathered near the store for the $150 vouchers, some of them having camped overnight. The nationality of the third person killed was not given. Sixteen people were injured.
Link (Thanks Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pentagon censors 'People's Right to Know' video over copyright concerns
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Whups -- the Pentagon censored portions of a video used to teach about FOIA and public information, according to this report by Ted Bridis at AP:
The Defense Department spent $70,500 to produce a Humphrey Bogart-themed video called "The People's Right to Know" to teach employees to respond to citizen requests for information. But when it came to showing the tape to the public, the Pentagon censored some of the footage.
Officials said they blacked out parts of the training video with the message, "copyrighted material removed for public viewing," because they were worried the government didn't have legal rights to some historical footage that was included.
Link to story, Link to video clips (Real) (via Politech)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Emmanuel Goldstein arrested during RNC protest in NYC
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DATE: 09/01/2004 09:42:46 PM
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Hacker zine 2600 reports that Emmanuel Goldstein (aka Eric Corley), the publication's founder and editor, was among hundreds arrested at demonstrations against the Republican National Convention in New York City on Tuesday. Snip:
The march which Emmanuel was apparently trying to videotape ended at 16th Street near Union Square when the police surrounded the marchers and began arresting everyone in the area -- at least 150 people. Officers at the scene reported that the arrested will be charged with "parading without a permit," but reliable information will probably not be available until arraignments take place over the next day or two.
At least 900 people were arrested on Tuesday, August 31st, most if not all for nonviolent and minor offenses, offenses which in non-protest situations would generally not result in spending any time at all locked up. People arrested at previous protests have usually had their charges eventually dropped or significantly reduced as the judicial system notices that their is little or no evidence that the protesters have committed any crimes at all.
Link to report on 2600. Portrait of Emmanuel Goldstein from Declan McCullagh, original here: Link. (via Engadget, thanks, ford)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nanotech and Kabbalah
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DATE: 09/02/2004 03:54:14 AM
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At the NanoBot, Howard Lovy writes about the philosophical connection between nanotechnology and the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah. This is not newage (rhymes with "sewage") mumbo-jumbo, but rather an informed, passionate, and moving thought-exercise about the "spirit" of science:
"...the most brilliant men of Medieval Jewry, shut out of any other profession in which their intellect could be used, spent what I used to think was a complete waste of mind power, reflecting on the minutia of Jewish law – taking the Torah and extrapolating a complex system of laws. Creating, codifying, obsessively ordering and numbering a spiritual system into a logical system.
But the smaller you get, the more you see the logic and order break down. The laws of physics seem to change. The smaller the size, the deeper the mystery and the more the orderly turns chaotic. It all meets on the nanoscale and below, where spirit/spirituality meets the individual components of organisms, where sand meets wave, where analog meets digital, where spirit meets matter."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Paper documents are a pain
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A new study from the University of Washington's Information School provides more proof that search rules:
More than half of survey participants admitted losing track of a paper document at least once a week -- more than twice the number of people who reported losing electronic information.
The result? While more than 60 percent reported being satisfied with their ability to handle computerized records such as e-mails, electronic documents and Web bookmarks, only 31 percent were satisfied with their ability to organize their papers.
The survey is part of an interesting project called Keeping Found Things Found, an effort to develop innovative ways to manage information stored digitally and on dead trees. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Birth of the Bluetooth Bots
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DATE: 09/02/2004 04:08:43 AM
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My latest article at TheFeature.com is about a new breed of robots--biomimetic blimps, tiny helicopters, and swarmbots--that use Bluetooth for wireless communications.
Bluetooth is finally taking off. Literally. A small robotic blimp floats gently through the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, wirelessly interacting with a desktop computer to literally evolve its own navigation software without human intervention. What the blimp sees via its onboard sensors is Bluetoothed to the PC for processing. The artificially evolved "brains" are then transmitted back to the mylar blimp so it can intelligently fly through its environment, improving with each run....
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 5 things I'll be doing while you're at Burning Man
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DATE: 09/02/2004 05:03:40 AM
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Snipped from 5ives:
Five things I'll be doing while you're at Burning Man
1.carefully stewarding my pallor
2. repeatedly watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on the TiVo
3. defecating indoors -- copiously, often, and without queueing
4. not tongue-kissing a sweaty Java programmer in clown makeup named "Shanti"
5. wearing clothes--lots and lots of square, capitalist, heinous-body-covering clothes
Link (Thanks, Jason Schultz!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NASA prepares for Hurricane Frances, part two
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JP writes:
Nearly half a million Floridians were
ordered to leave their homes today. Kennedy Space Center employees were
sent home leaving the Space Shuttle Orbiters to fend for themselves... Frances
threatens but where will she land?
Various models predict different scenarios. The folks on Space.com's
message board are keeping watch. "Shuttle_guy" sez "We are
securing the facility and the Shuttle Orbiters for the storm. For everything
up to a category IV hurricane we have a "ride out" crew on the base
during the storm to do what they can safely do to protect the Flight hardware.
However for category IV and V the hardware is on it's own. No one will be on
the KSC property for this storm which is expected to remain a strong Cat. IV."
According to "najaB" all three orbiters are in the Orbiter Processing
Facility (OPF) which is the least protected of KSC facilities. Most ominously
"najaB" reports that "...in the original plan, the Orbiters weren't
supposed to be in the OPF during a storm - they're supposed to be transferred
over to ride out the storm in the [40-year-old Vehicle Assembly Building]. I
guess nobody ever thought that all the Orbiters would be immovable in the OPF
at the same time that KSC would be staring down the barrel of a Cat
4 storm..."
As of this writing NOAA
is predicting Frances will hit south of the Kennedy Space Center with her
counter-clockwise punch hitting the space port the hardest. Or perhaps she is
targeting Disneyworld? In any case, prayers to all the people in the way...
Link to previous post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: Axis of Eve Panty Flash Protest
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"Hey Hey! Ho Ho! These pesky clothes have got to go!"
I don't really know what they were shouting at the time, but a cadre of chyxxors performed a panty flash mob during RNC protests yesterday. BoingBoing reader Cyrus Farivar took some snapshots of the action, which was organized by Axis of Eve at Battery Park. Link.
If you can't get enough of this sort of thing -- and really, who can -- Fleshbot has more images: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kill Bill Vol 1. in ASCII
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DATE: 09/02/2004 05:19:24 AM
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Someone has translated Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 into a series of ASCII text images. Uma's looking as thin as a stick figure! But: brilliant. Link (thanks, Case)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's final WorldCon schedule
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DATE: 09/02/2004 06:04:14 AM
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I'm in Dallas Ft Worth airport en route from an EFF gig in Chile to Boston for the WorldCon and thought I'd post my finalized WorldCon schedule, which has a couple minor changes from the last time around:
* THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2:
6PM: Unlimited Access: Issues involving unlicensed access to spectrum. With Harold Feld from the the Media Access Project.
* FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3:
10AM: Group reading from The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
11AM: Locus Award ceremony
5PM: Drunk on Technology: With Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Charlie Stross
* SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4:
12PM: The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age? With Charlie Petit, Daniel Grotta, Steve Miller, and James M. Turner
1PM: Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security, and Privacy. With Joseph Lazzaro, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Don Sakers
2:30-3PM: Charlie Stross and I will be signing our new short novel, Rapture of the Nerds, just published in the new issue of Argosy Magazine, at the Borderlands Books table in the Dealers' Room
5PM: Postcapitalist Social Mechanisms. With M. M. Buckner, David Friedman, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Charlie Stross
* SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5:
10:30AM Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books. A recapitulation of my talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference
4PM: Reading
5PM: Sign at the Asimov's Magazine table in the Dealer's Room
6PM: Group signing for Re/Visions anthology in Room 107 in the Hynes
* MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6:
11AM: Kaffeeklatsch
12-12:30: International Copyright Issues
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: Tactics by Police Mute Protesters, and Their Messages
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Interesting piece in today's NYT about NYPD crowd control tactics at the Repulican National Convention. If I'm reading this correctly, the prevailing logic seems to be that a lack of wanton violence makes the protests less worthy of air time and serious media coverage?
[N]early 1,800 protesters had been arrested on the streets, two-thirds of them on Tuesday night alone. But for all the anger of the demonstrations, they have barely interrupted the convention narrative, and have drawn relatively little national news coverage.
Using large orange nets to divide and conquer, and a near-zero tolerance policy for activities that even suggest the prospect of disorder, the New York Police Department has developed what amounts to a pre-emptive strike policy, cutting off demonstrations before they grow large enough, loud enough, or unruly enough to affect the convention. The demonstrations, too, have thus far been more restrained than many recent protests elsewhere; five years ago in Seattle, for example, there was widespread arson and window-smashing, none of which has occurred here. Lacking bloody scenes of billy-club-wielding police or billowing clouds of tear gas, the cameras - and the public's attention - have focused elsewhere.
"It is almost easier to explain what you are not getting here," said Ted Koppel, anchor and managing editor of ABC's "Nightline," when he was asked why news organizations have given little time to the protests. "What you are not getting here is a replay of 1968 in Chicago."
Reg-required Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Benefit anthology for Charles Grant
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DATE: 09/02/2004 06:14:40 AM
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John sez,
More than 100 authors have contributed to Small Bites, a new anthology published to support author and editor Charles Grant, who has been hospitalized for nearly six months now with various lung and heart ailments.
Grant is the author or editor of more than 100 books, and the winner of nearly every major award for speculative fiction. He has also been a tireless and generous supporter of other writers through the years.
In addition to the anthology, September 12 marks not only six months since Grant first entered the hospital, it is also his birthday. His wife is gathering birthday cards from fans and friends to help cheer him up. Cards can be sent to: P. O. Box 97
Newton, NJ 07860-0097
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: French blogger appeals for release of two fellow journalists held hostage in Iraq
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DATE: 09/02/2004 04:48:44 PM
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French blogger and journalist Emmannuelle Richard posts an appeal for the release of the two french journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, currently held hostage in Iraq:
Back from a family, Internet-free vacation. Still, I was worn down by the news of the kidnapping of two French journalists and colleagues of RFI and Radio France in Iraq: I only know them by e-mail, because they belong to Spartacus, a group of world correspondents for francophone radio stations that I co-founded in 2000. Christian gave an interview to Larry King on CNN in March 2003. Everybody in the network is just praying for their safe release. Here is Spartacus' press release, sent out while I was away...
Link to Emmanneulle's blog entry, with copy of the group's appeal (scroll down page for English translation) (Thanks, Jean-Luc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: reported presence of long-range acoustic device (LRAD) at protests
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DATE: 09/02/2004 05:17:21 PM
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BoingBoing reader Kevin Slavin says, "Things are getting a little heavy about 10 blocks from here -- police are reported (widely) to have shown up at a large demonstration manning an LRAD. What's an LRAD? Long-range acoustic device. Military non-lethal technology being tested in Baghdad and Fallujah, and it looks like, right now: NYC.
First two links off Google: one, two.
This is heavy and damaging stuff, that leaves no marks when used on humans. Latest text reports say it's been turned on, pointing west, volume low. You can hear live coverage from Union Square by calling 212 400 7458, option 4.
Update: As he walks towards the protest site in question, Slavin text-messages BoingBoing from his mobile phone:
"Here are updates via indymedia now-- they are discussing the LRAD -- it's a lot of people saying it, but I still can't confirm."
[Ed. note: following is an abridged excerpt of the first-person accounts now being posted on the indymedia site, shown in reverse chronological order. ]
08:20 PM: There is an additonal small contingent of protesters rallying at 34th and 7th. Large # of police. The group is planning to march to the ANSWER rally.
08:13 PM: There is a carnival atmosphere in Union Sq. Lots of art for sale, and a great presence by Iraq Vets. against the war.Several thousand at least. Caller feels that the police presence is heavy but par for the course in NYC at this point.
08:01 PM: The Protest Warriors are being put in their own pen. It is expected that the two pens will scream at each other for a while.
07:51 PM Officer has powered on the LRAD (sound weapon) device, pointing it west. volume is at minimum. It has not been deployed yet.
07:41 PM: Police have penned the south side of Union Sq.
07:30 PM: 1500 people now in Union Sq. Large police presence but fairly chill so far. Bike police on all corners. As it gets dark the crowd seems to be getting more excited and larger, still fesitve atmosphere.
07:12 PM: There are 100-200 people at 29th St. and 8th Ave in the ANSWER pen. There are several hundred people in Union Sq. Reports of law enforcement with semi-automatic weapons at 34th St. and 7th Ave.
06:42 PM:Receiving reports that an LRAD (sound weapon) is present at north side of Union Square.
Link to update transcript from indymedia, and Link to a related page on their website with background on the device -- said to weigh only 45 pounds, and shown in the AP file photo here.
Snip from Brian Braiker's July 12 Newsweek article (Link):
In February the Marines signed a $1.1 million contract for the devices; the I Marine Expeditionary Force took them to Fallujah and the Navy's Fifth Fleet has them in the Persian Gulf. (McSweeney didn't know if they'd been used.) Miami, Los Angeles, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the Department of Homeland Security are considering purchases. With protestors coming to New York and Boston for the conventions, might we see the first domestic use this summer? Gruenler hints: "All I can say is there are cities you would recognize."
And, this from an August 30 AP story from Ellen Simon (Link):
Earlier this month, the New York Police Department showed off a machine called the Long Range Acoustic Device, developed for the military and capable of blasting at an earsplitting 150 decibels -- as loud as a firecracker, a jet engine taking off or artillery fire at 500 feet, according to the Noise Center at the League for the Hard of Hearing. The NYPD said it would use the machine to direct crowds to safety if there's a terrorist attack or remind protesters where they're allowed to march. Police said they wouldn't use the earsplitting screeching noise feature at the convention. "It's only to communicate in large crowds," Inspector Thomas Graham of the police department's crowd control unit said.
Update 2: Image from indymedia said to be snapshot from site of protest taking place right now; the LRAD device is shown mounted atop police car. Link to full-size image shown in thumbnail at left. Link to more snapshots of LRAD device from other protest events during the RNC. See also wikipedia entry for background (Link), and this August 25 CBS report on NYPD's plans to use LRAD at RNC: Link
BoingBoing reader Charles ODonovan says, "I just noticed that the name of the guy who invented the LRAD device deployed at the RNC was also mentioned on BoingBoing back in March with one of his other inventions: Link."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Easy Cubes
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DATE: 09/03/2004 01:34:05 AM
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Our apartment in Paris didn't have any ice trays but Kelly found these at the supermarket. Cub Facil are disposable plastic bags that are divided into cube-size compartments. You just fill a bag with water, tie it closed, freeze, and then tear out the cubes as you need them. Each box is about US$2 and contains ten bags. (Click on the photo for a better view.)
Update: Thanks to the dozens of readers who responded that these ice cube bags are old hat in most countries outside the United States. News to me!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Happy mutants?
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DATE: 09/03/2004 02:00:01 AM
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Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body is a book about the genetics behind human oddities. It's the companion to a Channel 4 documentary of the same title that aired this summer. The author, Armand Marie Leroi, is a biologist and lecturer at Imperial College London. From a review in The Guardian a few months back:
"There are three things that lift this book above mere exploitation: the seriousness of Leroi's scientific investigations; the humane concern he manifests for the suffering other; and the sensitivity of his aesthetic appreciation of the wonders of nature. "Beautiful" is a term frequently used to describe some bottled monster. This aesthetic appreciation extends to previous writers on the subject. He describes an account of the progress of a deer embryo by the 17th-century natural philosopher William Harvey (more famous for his discovery of the circulation of the blood) as "one of the loveliest descriptions of a mammalian foetus ever written".
I'll be in the UK next week and I'm definitely going to pick up a copy! Link
Update: BB reader Nolandda points out that the Mutants book is also available in the US with a slightly different title. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: SETI@home spots unusual signal... or not
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DATE: 09/03/2004 02:15:37 AM
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SETI@home has turned up an unexplained radio signal from 1000 light years away that's, well, unexplained. From New Scientist:
“It’s the most interesting signal from SETI@home,” says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. “We’re not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it.”
Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
Link
Update: The BBC followed up with a report quoting researchers who say that the news above was blown out of proportion and there is no signal. Nothing to hear here. Move along. (cue X-Files theme) Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show spoof convention video
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DATE: 09/03/2004 03:54:00 AM
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The Daily Show aired a fantastic spoof RNC video meant to parody a George Bush reelecation spot. George Bush: Words Speak Louder Than Facts. Funny, vicious and absurdist.
Link6.2MB Quicktime Link
(Thanks, j2323!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fridge-mounted bottle-opener
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DATE: 09/03/2004 03:57:03 AM
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This magnetic fridge-mounted bottle-opener is way cool.
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are identity thieves
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DATE: 09/03/2004 04:00:27 AM
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Remember the Lying Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who made up a bunch of base smears about John Kerry's military record and aired them in a TV spot? They even published an open letter in which they lied some more, claiming to have served with Kerry when they hadn't.
Well, it turns out that some of the swift boat veterans whose name appeared at the bottom of that open letter never saw it, never signed it, and don't agree with it. Those Lying Swift Boat Veterans For Truth! Whacky.
"It's kind of like stealing my identity," said Anderson, who spent a year on a swift boat as an engine man and gunner.
The letter, which was posted on the Swift Boat Veter-ans for Truth Web site, claims the Demo-cratic presidential candidate has "grossly and knowingly distorted the conduct of the American soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen of that (Vietnam) war."...
"After reading the letter," Anderson said, "it kind of got under my skin. I had never come across a situation where someone used my name without my support or approval. It's not a very comforting feeling."
What's worse, he said, he disagrees with the letter.
"Had they asked me to use my name, I wouldn't have allowed them to," he said...
Anderson does not know how the Swift Boat Vets for Truth got his name, but it appears exactly as it has appeared on rosters at swift boat vet reunions. He suspects the list was pulled from the Swift Boat Sailors Association, a nonpolitical, not-for-profit organization linking swift boat veterans.
Link
(via Atrios)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scraping the Senate, turning US govt into structured data
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DATE: 09/03/2004 04:08:39 AM
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Paul Ford has written an article for XML.com about his plan to scrape all the information he can about the Senate and convert it into searchable, structured data (much like the UK's brilliant They Work For You project, which does the same for Parliament). He's planning to document his process of converting the Senate's sloppy html into clean XML, and turn the process into a tutorial on how to make the Semantic Web come alive.
Of course screen-scraping is itself a dubious process. When the Senate decides to change its page design, moves the page, or alters the suffix, I'm out of luck. At the same time, it's hard to argue against the fact that the Senate's own web site is a definitive source for up-to-date, reliable information about the current composition of the Senate. This is a situation that we're likely to encounter again: the best, most reliable site to get some information is the worst place to get useful data. Hopefully, as we go forward, we'll have multiple sources of information on various members of the government, and can use them all together.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worldcon pix, syndicated
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DATE: 09/03/2004 04:46:48 AM
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Here are syndicated RSS and Atom feeds of pictures uploaded to the Flickr image-sharing site with the tag "Worldcon." Right now it's just a few undistinguished shots I took yesterday, but if you're at Worldcon snapping photos (and really, who isn't?) put 'em on Flickr and we'll get a bleeding-edge snapshot feed. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr).
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Odour playback device with C&W spokesmodel
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DATE: 09/03/2004 05:49:20 AM
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Febreeze "Scent Stories" is a smellovision player that loads in discs charged with smelly compounds that are slowly rotated through, a new stink every 30 minutes. Shania Twain is the official spokesnashvillean for the product.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MSN Music: Microsoft Flexes Music Muscle
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DATE: 09/03/2004 06:54:29 AM
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In Wired News today, a report I filed on Microsoft's new music download service:
A help page on the beta site provides instructions describing how users can enable MSN Music downloads to play on their iPods.Microsoft's recent criticism of Apple for not licensing iPod functionality to third-party tech companies is not without irony, given past accusations of anticompetitive behavior that resulted in Microsoft agreeing last year to pay out $1.8 billion to settle consumer antitrust suits. Just last Friday, six California municipalities sued Microsoft over claims it overcharged government customers because of its effective monopoly in computer operating systems.
The company's new war against iTunes and the iPod is seen by some industry watchers as not unlike its earlier war for market share against the Netscape browser -- which Internet Explorer won. In light of the fact that Microsoft claims its MSN hub attracts more than 350 million monthly unique users, sheer reach -- rather than product feature details -- may ultimately determine who wins this war.
Open-format activists like Jason Schultz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ask why the company doesn't simply strip DRM altogether, and lament the fact that Microsoft's service launch makes it all the more likely that two opposing proprietary systems -- Microsoft's and Apple's -- will now dominate a marketplace some feel would be better served by open standards such as MP3.
"Microsoft's music launch is just the latest effort to 'bring music to the masses' by, ironically, setting up a new, separate, incompatible DRM fiefdom," said Schultz. "The thing people love about the internet is that you can send e-mail to anyone in the world with any e-mail client. In the digital music world, however, we're seeing an increasing trend toward technological balkanization.
Link to story, and Link to MSN Music. More of Jason Schultz's comments on the service launch are here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chess computer's thought process
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DATE: 09/03/2004 07:17:12 AM
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These breathtaking visualizations of the decision-tree explored by a chess-playing computer are great.
A view into the workings of a chess-playing program that must make millions of decisions in each game. In this piece we explore the notion that our lives consist of a vast sequence of choices.
PNG Link 1,
PNG Link 2,
PNG Link 3
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Father Ted prop on eBay
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DATE: 09/03/2004 07:21:01 AM
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Someone is ebaying a giant prop rollerblade from an episode of Father Ted.
Link
(Thanks, Alfie)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More WorldCon pix
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DATE: 09/04/2004 05:09:43 AM
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I've uploaded 50 or so more of my WorldCon photos to Flickr and tagged 'em with "worldcon" (you can upload your own with the same tag and they'll show up in the RSS feed). Some good stuff there: the first Hugo (which appears to have been constructed with tinsnips and lead solder), Terry Pratchett's badge techotchkes, really happy goth bondage play, Singularity-focused authors, barbarians in mirrorshades, amazingly detailed models of Unseen University and environs, an ironic sneak photo of a t-shirt, Dorks are Hot t-shirt, und zo weiter.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: John Carmack's archived plan files become blog
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DATE: 09/04/2004 08:03:07 AM
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An anonymous BoingBoing reader writes, "This is a sort of retro blog. I took John Carmack's archived plan files (finger johnc [at] idsoftware.com) and put them into blog style, and will continue to do so (I have plans starting from 1997)." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gallery of fake trees that disguise cellphone towers
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DATE: 09/04/2004 08:06:08 AM
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Website that collects photos of fake trees that serve to disguise mobile phone signal towers. Some disguises are more convincing than others. Link (Thanks, Alex)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: Axis of Eve Panty Flash QTVR
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DATE: 09/04/2004 08:11:08 AM
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Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post about a thin excuse for public exhibitionism uh, daring political protest that took place in New York earlier this week, BoingBoing reader Jim says, "This is a full screen QTVR of the Axis Of Eve Demonstration during the RNC. Almost like being there." NSFW Link.
More QTVR panoramas from other scenes at this week's RNC can be found on photographer Jook Leung's website. Link (via panoramas.dk)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Geeks teach youth in Ghana about science, technology, and the Internet
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DATE: 09/04/2004 08:12:54 AM
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BoingBoing pal and inimitable code wizard David Weekly is in Ghana this weekend with a group called Camp Amelia -- teaching young African people about I.T. and science basics. Cool! Snip from project website:
On September 1, half a dozen American educators, engineers and university students [departed] for Accra, Ghana to run a pilot project for Camp Amelia, a children's summer technology literacy program already made popular on the North American continent. The team, composed mainly of Stanford students and alumni and funded by grants from Microsoft Corporation and Chicago's Beck Foundation, will be coordinating with local schools, government, and businesses to provide technology education for underprivileged students ages 8-11 in the greater Accra area. Camp activities run the gamut from using soap bubbles in explaining physics to engaging in "Internet scavenger hunts" and using interactive educational software programs developed by Camp Amelia technology teams. Participants will learn how to use word processors and even the basics of computer programming! These elements will teach the children the value of independent thinking and learning.
And here's a note from David, having just arrived in Accra on September 3:
So I'm writing this from a computer lab in Accra; it's nicely modern, with about 50 pentium 4-2000 machines, but it's about 1500ms to anything really interesting on the Internet backbone and the speed's not that fabulous. But it works! And while we were hoping to have 50 students for the camp, it looks like we actually got more like 150 applicants; so we're actually having to select which student we'll take, which is bittersweet. The plane flights over were pretty brutal; a 10 hour flight from SFO to Amsterdam and a six and a half hour to Accra. I woke up this morning at four AM local time (having gone to bed at midnight) and was *wide* awake. Now it's 11am local and I'm feeling like I need to sleep some more. It's kind of wacky. We'll be working on setting up the camp's curriculum and so forth; the camp starts Monday! Keep your fingers crossed for us. People are friendly, the city is insane with traffic and potholes and vendors and goats...
Link to Camp Amelia project home page. The group's stated mission is "Fighting poverty through science, technology and mentorship."
Link to David's personal blog -- where he's sending text dispatches (and soon, photos) from Ghana.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RNC-NYC: Did T-Mobile block TxTMOB messages during Convention?
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DATE: 09/04/2004 08:17:23 AM
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BoingBoing reader Kevin Slavin says,
When I attended some of the RNC protests on Tuesday (Link to BoingBoing post), I was depending on txtmob. It was invaluable for staying safe and developing effective protest strategies and tactics.
Right around 5:30 or 6, just as things started to heat up around me, I stopped getting SMS, just like that. I thought it was rather suspicious, but was willing to concede that it could be some technology malfunction. There were more SMSes going out than usual, for the region, and I thought maybe it was an overload. It blew any opportunities I had to effectively co-ordinate with the legal, and civil, RNC protests. So now, as it turns out -- say the txtmob people -- it wasn't technology, it was T-Mobile (my now ex-carrier). Highlighted text below, from the txtmob dispatch: "T-Mobile blocked TXTmob messages during a portion of the RNC. "
My only question is, WTF? Since when does T-Mobile decide which messages are ok, and which aren't? What, in my contract with them, specifies that they can decide which messages I am allowed to get? Who told who to block which messages? I'm no lawyer, but those seem like the kinds of questions that lawyers are interested in.
Following text snipped from a TxTMOB update to subscribers with Subject: TxTMob UPDATE: Post RNC, issued September 3:
Finally, a note for T-Mobile customers: As many of you are aware, T-Mobile blocked TXTmob messages during a portion of the RNC. While we won't speculate on the reasons for this action, it would be extremely helpful if the hundreds of customers who were unable to receive TXTMob messages called T-Mobile to complain. Be sure to explain that TXTMob is an opt-in service that you have chosen to join, and to encourage their representatives to contact admin@txtmob.com if they have any questions.
Link to TxTMOB website, and link to related CNN story about the role of phone-text services in protests at the convention.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New issue of NeoFiles
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DATE: 09/04/2004 08:43:40 AM
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Our favorite cyberdelic tour guide RU Sirius just posted his latest issue of the NeoFiles. Inside, RU talks with privacy hactivist John Gilmore, democratic transhumanist James Hughes, and performance philosopher Antero Alli.
"In issue #9, the discourse about transhumanism continues, but we also continue to cover other terrains. I never tire of pointing out that technique shares roots with technology. Thus, we continue to explore methods for self-awareness (which as often as not) — (are) techniques for ecstasy. Finally, any transformation worth its gene pool will likely find itself facing off against the constraints of unreasonable authority."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: GPL court challenge in English
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DATE: 09/04/2004 10:31:35 AM
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A court in Germany recently upheld the enforceability of the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (AKA the GPL). This was the first court decision in which the enforceability of the GPL was upheld, so until this moment, no one knew whether the GPL would withstand a court challenge. The German decision has finally been translated by the Oxford Internet Institute so that English speakers can get a sense of what its nuances were:
PDF link to decision in English,
PDF link to commentary by Chistian Ahlert,
PDF link to commentary by Thomas Hoeren
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: MaDonal -- Iraq's Lovin' It
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DATE: 09/04/2004 04:52:14 PM
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Iraq has a phony McDonalds, called MaDonal. Reminds me of the 6-Elevens I saw in Rarotonga. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tim O'Reilly on Alpha Geeks
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DATE: 09/04/2004 04:56:24 PM
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MP3 audio transcript of a interview with Tim O'Reilly talking about Alpha Geeks, who make things that aren't available, and as a result, make them available to everybody.
So often, signs of the future are all around us, but it isn't until much later that most of the world realizes their significance. Meanwhile, the innovators who are busy inventing that future live in a world of their own. They see and act on premises that are not yet apparent to others.
In the computer industry, these are the folks I affectionately call "the alpha geeks", the hackers who have such mastery of their tools that they "roll their own" when existing products don't give them what they need.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA's first GPS stalking case
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DATE: 09/04/2004 06:36:00 PM
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Inevitable: A Glendale businessman has been charged with stalking an ex-girlfriend by attaching a cellphone with GPS to her car, then showing up at random to threaten her in person.
In what authorities said was the first stalking case of its kind in Los Angeles County, Ara Gabrielyan, 32, was charged Tuesday with stalking and threatening over a six-month period to kill his former girlfriend and himself.
Gabrielyan -- who ran an Armenian CD and video specialty shop -- is suspected of using GPS technology to pinpoint her location so he could arrange apparent chance encounters at the bookstore, at the airport, even at her brother's grave site. (...)After the unidentified 35-year-old woman broke off their nearly two-year relationship, Gabrielyan would follow her by car, show up at her doorstep and call her 30 to 100 times a day, she told police.(...)
Gabrielyan had purchased a Nextel phone device that has a motion switch on it that turns itself on when it moves. As long as the device is on, it transmits a signal every minute to the GPS satellite, which in turn sends the location information to a computer. Gabrielyan, who paid for a service to send him the information, would then log on to a Web site to monitor her locations, police said. Police are investigating where Gabrielyan purchased the device and the tracking service.
Link to news story, Link to LA County DA's report.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The near ghost towns of South Monterey County
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DATE: 09/04/2004 06:36:44 PM
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I spent the last week in Carmel Valley, California. It was the first time I saw a wild turkey. What an amazing-looking animal. No wonder Ben Franklin wanted to make it out national bird. Great choice -- scrappy, colorful, smart. So much better than the monochrome Bald Eagle.
While I was up there, I read this excellent story about Stuart Thornton's trip through the towns of South Monterey County. These towns used to be quite bustling until the 101 Freeway was built.
Pulling into a dirt lot beside the store, the building looks like a gas station and store from the ‘50s. Though the gas pumps are no longer there, faded paint on the side of the white building advertises groceries, cold drinks and beer.
As I walk in, a man carrying a handful of boxes walks up from a storage room in the back. “Are you Marcel,” I ask.
“Yea, why,” he asks brusquely.
“I’m writing an article about South County for the Monterey County Weekly,” I say as I start to perspire.
“I’m too busy,” he says as I glance around the deserted store. “Besides, advertisement will draw people to see what’s going on.”
I think that perhaps getting people to stop by his store would not be such a bad thing. In San Ardo, people need money to survive, right?
Though he refuses to answer any of my questions, Miranda does allow me to look at his impressive collection of caps sitting on wooden shelves that circle the top part of his store. While I take photos, he stands behind me in awkward silence. I think about trying to strike up a conversation again, but I realize it would be as futile as trying to pump water from a dry well.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hugo award pix
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DATE: 09/05/2004 05:26:05 AM
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I posted another 40+ pics from the WorldCon last night -- mostly cool shots from the balcony overlooking the Hugos. It was the best-attended Hugo ceremony I've ever been to. Here's a shot of Lori Ann White with Frank Wu's Hugo -- the awards this year were especially handsome. Anyone can add pix to the syndicated, commentable Flickr gallery of WorldCon pix by uploading and adding the keyword "worldcon".
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New version of MyTunes out
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:33:07 AM
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Bill Zeller says, "A previous BoingBoing post discussed 'A Java program intended to kick the proverbial ass of MyTunes.' As the developer of myTunes, I can't just let that go unanswered, can I? :-) A new version of myTunes has been released which allows live searching of every song on the network and an interface which is easy to use and modern looking. No JVM required."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Harassed entrepreneur behind "bogusify your caller-ID" shuts down
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:51:42 AM
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Remember that caller-ID-spoofing service we blogged about here in August? Turns out the founder is pulling the plug on his venture after death threats, phone taps, and malicious hacks that involved strangers discovering how much money he'd just deposited into his checking account.
Three days after the start-up company Star38 began offering a service that fools caller ID systems, the founder, Jason Jepson, has decided to sell the business. Mr. Jepson said he had received harassing e-mail and phone messages and even a death threat taped to his front door - all he said from people opposed to his publicizing a commercial version of technology that until now has been mainly used by software programmers and the computer hackers' underground.
For a fee, customers using the Star38.com Web site would be able to alter the number that would appear on the caller ID screen of the recipient's phone. The technique could mask the identity of a bill collector, for example, or enable a private investigator to fool someone into answering the phone on the false belief that a friend or relative was ringing
Registration-required Link to NYT story
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Story of the man on whom Spielberg movie "Terminal" is based
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:19:13 PM
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BoingBoing reader Ben Bearman says, "I've just learned that the story behind Speilberg's The Terminal is true. Apparently, there is an Iranian refugee who has beed living in Charles De Gaulle since 1988. He won his freedom years ago but hasn't left the airport. Also, according to this detailed article, he seems to be slightly crazy." Snip from the Guardian story:
I first saw him, many years ago now, staring out with an uncanny gaze of blank intensity from the pages of a newspaper. Seated alone on a bench, immune to the endless motion of the airport around him, there was a curious inscrutability to his slight, balding yet dignified countenance. He looked like some unlikely cross between a Zen master and Chaplin's Tramp. He had these amazing long brows, as dark as his hooded eyes, and a small, perfectly groomed moustache perched on top of his upper lip. It was like a caricature of a face, five charcoal marks on a canvas. But strangely noble, too.
His name was Merhan Karimi Nasseri though he called himself "Sir Alfred". He lived in a lost dimension of absurd bureaucratic entanglement. That is to say, on a bench in Terminal One of the Charles de Gaulle International Airport, and he had lived there since 1988. For a series of insanely complicated reasons, the Iranian-born refugee was now a man without a country - or any other documented, internationally accepted identity status. Alfred couldn't leave France because he did not have papers; he couldn't enter France because he did not have papers. The authorities told him to wait in the airport lounge while they sorted the paradox out. That he did - for years and years.
Then one day, I heard that Alfred had finally been given his papers. He was free to go anywhere in the world he wished. Except now it seemed he didn't want to leave the airport after all. It was the only home - the only past - he had left.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Weird little subliminal Sony/Centrino ad on SpikeTV?
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:20:42 PM
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BoingBoing reader Jeremy says:
I was watching Spike TV at my girlfriends place when I noticed something flash by right before the station went back to its presentation of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since my girlfriend is lucky enough to have TiVo, I rewound it and discovered that there was an ad there for Sony, with a little Centrino symbol in the lower left hand corner. It lasted less than a second and I noticed it happen several times throughout the evening. Searches of the net brought up nothing on it so far, but I thought bOING bOING readers might dig up some answers.
So, what is it? Uber-sneaky advertising hijinks, or the hallucinations of yet another cracksmoking, TiVoing BoingBoing reader who probably also sees visions of the Virgen de Guadalupe in his cornflakes? Submit your answers here: Link.
Reader Tim says, " It is probably just local cable commercials overlapping the SpikeTV network commercials. Of course, I for one welcome our Sony overlords." And reader Steve Portigal says, "I see this happening all the time on TNT, but my assumption has always been it's a slight lack of synchronization in the syndication. I assume that commercials are sold locally as well as nationally, and so some markets get different ads. What I see always appears to be the tail end of another ad, not a whole piece of advertising in itself, and so I assume it's just cruft from what another audience was able to see."
BoingBoing reader Lucas Emery says, "Reader Tim is correct about the SpikeTV ads. I used to work for a TV station and, traditionally, television advertsing is sold in 30 second increments, but advertisers are allowed to take advantage of that 0 second, sometimes stretching a commercial out to what actually amounts to almost 31 seconds. Spots like this are easy to cover up when a human is operating the program switcher to shuffle between local and national advertising, but when the switching's controlled by computers (as most stations these days are) it is often the case they switch back after exactly 30 seconds, and not 30.29 (for instance), so that is why you see the commercial cruft. I, too, notice this a lot on Spike and a few other channels."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hurricane Frances blog roundup
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:25:48 PM
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BoingBoing pal in France Jean-Luc has posted a roundup of blogosphere coverage related to Hurricane/Tropical Storm Frances. Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in Tijuana: IAF 04 digital film fest, Sep 17-18
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:31:29 PM
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If you're in driving or flying distance of Tijuana, Mexico mid-September, check out the 8th annual IAF Fest: video, film, music, and multimedia on September 17 and 18. The project's aim: "To create and maintain alternate spaces for the expression of audiovisual multidisciplinary art in the Mexico/U.S. border region." So, why Tijuana? "Because of the... cultural and economic exchange that takes place daily in the region," say organizers of the frontera festival created to "serve as a meeting place for the international digital art community." Some great DJs, artists, and filmmakers participating this year -- definitely a don't miss.
Link (Thanks Sal!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free municipal WiFi in Jerusalem
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:48:20 PM
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Following up on last week's post about the city of Philadelphia considering free wireless 'net access for all, BoingBoing reader cyphunk says, "Pfff. Jerusalem (Israel) is already rolling out free wifi for the ENTIRE city -- starting with major commercial areas." Link to news story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: (More) Music Video Zen
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DATE: 09/05/2004 08:49:30 PM
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music box
bring the sunshine
wrong bananas
footy
lalala
to the moon
num1000
danny bot
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Solar-powered and USB-powered sex toys from Blowfish
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DATE: 09/05/2004 09:07:39 PM
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BoingBoing pal Hutch says, "Did you guys know that Blowfish, one of your sponsors, has USB powered vibrators? Of course you did." Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phillippe Starck designs Optical Mouse for Microsoft
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DATE: 09/05/2004 09:08:53 PM
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Superstar designer Phillippe Starck created this inventive little mouse for Microsoft. Blue or orange, about $25-$30 US. Link to product details. Supercool Parisian hipster boutique collette also sells 'em online for 45 euros, but you'll have to survive their website's abominable Flash-based UI first.
Update: PC Magazine said the mouse is pretty but the usability sucks ass. Link (thanks, Jake)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sacred Cross of Jesus Cellphone Tower
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DATE: 09/05/2004 10:13:15 PM
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Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post about an online image gallery of faux vegetation that disguises cellphone towers, here's the website of one of the companies that makes cell tower concealers. And if you thought this was all about saguaros and palm trees, think again: the crosses shown here were erected in Sprint's name. Can you hear me now, o Lord? Good.
Link to Larson Utility Camouflage (Thanks, Mike)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Psychic TV turned on again
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DATE: 09/06/2004 01:56:04 AM
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Transmedia artist Genesis P-Orridge has reactivated his seminal industrial/trance band Psychic TV to tour Europe and the United States beginning this month. Last winter, I was fortunate enough to catch a rehearsal and they sounded fabulous--tight, energized, and... happy. (Douglas Rushkoff was playing keyboards with the group for several dates late last year but will not be joining this particular "de-tour.")
Genesis is quite a sight these days as well. As part of the Breaking Sex art exploration he's immersed in with his other half, Lady Jaye, the two received identical breast implants on Valentine's Day 2003. Gen's new mantra? "S/he is Her/e."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sf story of great note: Klages's "Green Glass Sea"
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DATE: 09/06/2004 04:43:20 AM
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I heard Ellen Klages -- nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell and other awards seemingly within seconds of the publication of her first story -- read the story "The Green Glass Sea" a couple of years ago at Potlatch, a roaming west-coast sf convention that was being held in San Francisco.
"Green Glass Sea" is about Trinity, where the first bomb was dropped, and trinitite, the faintly radioactive fused green glass from the Trinity site that can be had in small or large pieces on eBay, even to this day.
The story is a memoir of the life of the small daughter of an atomic scientist, who recounts the events leading up to and following Trinity in heartbreaking Klages style:, simple, subtle, emotionally powerful writing that will knock you on your ass again and again as you read it.
Now "Green Glass Sea" is on Strange Horizons, the excellent online sf magazine, and free for all to read. If you haven't read Klages before, you're in for a treat.
In the summer of 1945, Dr. Gordon was gone for the first two weeks in July. Dewey Kerrigan noticed that a lot of the usual faces were missing from the dining hall at the Los Alamos lodge, and everyone seemed tense, even more tense than usual.
Dewey and her father had come to the Hill two years before, when she was eight. When he was sent to Washington, she came to live with the Gordons. They were both scientists, like Papa, and their daughter Suze was about the same age as Dewey. Dewey's mom hadn't been around since she was a baby.
One Sunday night Mrs. Gordon had shooed the girls to bed early, then woke them before dawn for a hike with some of the other wives, many of whom also had jobs and titles other than Mrs. They carried blankets and sandwiches and thermoses of coffee out to a place on the edge of the mesa where they had a clear view of the southern horizon and sat in the still early darkness, smoking and waiting.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Classic pulp mag replicas
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DATE: 09/06/2004 05:07:09 AM
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Girasol Collectables is a small Canadian press that's producing high-quality facimilies of classic pulp magazines (I bought a copy of this Spicy Adventure Stories mag yesterday for the cover, without realizing that one of the stories was written by Robert Howard under his Sam Walser pseudonym) at the rate of one a month. At US$25-35 per issue, it's a little pricey to consider as a subscription item, but as a one-off, these things are fantastic. I love the old pulps, but when I buy them, I'm reluctant to give them a home beside the toilet, where they'd be great reading material, what with all their humorous quack-remedy ads, overblown short stories, and general bite-siized irony. But the old pulps feel like a piece of history, something you down own so much as take custody over -- they're so fragile and poorly wrought that they bring out the maternal/archival instinct in all but the most hardened junk-hater.
But these replicas -- in addition to being better-manufactured than any of the original pulps! -- are cheap(ish) and replaceable, and a perfect tank-top reader. I kept hauling out my copy yesterday and showing it around, and the universal reaction among the WorldCon-goers was a bittersweet sigh of regret for the passing of the golden age of dreadful fic and exploitative covers and quack advertisements.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hard boiled crime stories, old and new, in classic packaging
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DATE: 09/06/2004 05:14:32 AM
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Hard Case Crime is a new paperback imprint that's reprinting old pulp crime novels and commissioning new novels in the style of the old pulps. They're publishing them in replica packaging designed to look like the old dime-novels, and they've even brought Robert McGinnis, best known for painting the original James Bond movie posters, out of retirement to do cover art.
From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. Millions of readers snapped up hundreds of millions of books by well-known authors like Erle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane, as well as by promising young writers like Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Ed McBain. Today, Block, Leonard, and McBain still make the bestseller lists with each new hardcover -- but the pulp novels that first captured the public's imagination weren't hardcovers. They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the last page. No one's published books like that in years.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Internet porn or phone smut could now mean life sentence in China
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DATE: 09/06/2004 08:11:50 AM
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Xinhua news agency reports:
China has intensified its battle against Internet and mobile phone pornography by threatening distributors with life in prison... A pornographic Web site that had been clicked on more than 250,000 times would be considered a "very severe" case that could warrant a life sentence for its producers.
Link to news story (Thanks, John)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: James Fallows loves Skype's VoIP service
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DATE: 09/06/2004 10:50:11 AM
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James Fallows has a good introductory article about Skype, a VoIP service that has 10 million users in 212 countries. As Cory mentioned earlier, an OS X beta is available.
You can also reach people who don't use Skype, through a new service
called SkypeOut. This allows you to dial nearly any cellular or
land-line telephone number in any country and talk. Though it isn't
free, it's really cheap. Skype's prices are in euros - its founders are
Scandinavian, the main programmers are Estonian and its headquarters
are in Luxembourg - and they average two or three American cents a
minute, at any time of day. With a credit card, you buy calling time in
units of 10 euros ($12.18), which are deducted automatically as you
talk.
I started with 10 euros. After my wife talked to her sister in Italy
for a half-hour and I made one quick call to the Philippines and five
more within the United States, we still had 9.10 euros left.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: TiVo and Netflix team up to deliver movies to net-connected TiVos
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DATE: 09/06/2004 10:57:04 AM
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Newsweek breaks the story that TiVo and Netflix have joined forces to offer downloaded movies direct to net-connected TiVos ("Damn," says Fred von Lohmann as he points us to this news -- "And I'm stuck with my modem-bound gen.1 TiVo!")
Link (via PVR blog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sony movie honcho must pay $825,000 for enslaving his servant
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DATE: 09/06/2004 11:03:43 AM
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The Los Angeles County Superior Court ordered James J. Jackson, vice president of legal affairs at Sony Pictures Entertainment, and his wife, Elizabeth, to pay $825,000 to 60-year-old Nena Ruiz, who says she was kept as an indentured servant in the couple's home.
[Ruiz claims she was] emotionally and physically abused and forced to work 18 hours a day at virtually no pay for a year ... she said that Elizabeth Jackson had frequently slapped her and pulled her hair.
During her year at the Jacksons' home, Ruiz said she slept in a sleeping bag on a "dog's bed" on the living room floor and ate days-old food, while she prepared fresh food for her employers' pets.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Survival of the fittest mailbox
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DATE: 09/06/2004 01:23:50 PM
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We recently moved to a semi-rural area in Los Angeles. Our mailbox is mounted on a metal pole, probably about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. The previous occupants had piled bricks around the pole, chimney-style, to keep drivers from knocking the mailbox over -- or at least punish them by giving their car a bigger dent if they hit it.
A few days after moving in, I noticed that the brick enclosure had tumbled. Either a car hit it, or someone kicked it over. The next day the pile of bricks was gone. The bricks were now several yards away from the mailbox, being used to prop up a plywood ramp so kids could do dirt-bike tricks.
A couple of days later, the bricks were gone. Someone had stolen them in the dead of night. Maybe they're being used to protect somebody else's mailbox, or are part of a backyard barbeque. In any case, I hope they used cement.
Now unprotected, our mailbox's life turned nasty, brutish, and short. I looked out the window one morning and saw the pole with nothing on top. Going outside to investigate, I found the mailbox lying in the dirt, with a giant dent in it. Someone must have played mailbox baseball the night before. Fortunately, I was able to remount the mailbox, but how long will it last before someone else wreaks havoc on it?
Ever since these events, I've been paying careful attention to mailboxes. It's interesting to see how they're fortified. I want to make a mailbox that can withstand the brute force and misplaced ingenuity of the delinquents that prowl around after nightfall. Here are a few mailboxes in my neighborhood (click thumbnails for enlargement):
This one is pretty good, because the bricks are cemented together, preventing scavenging. But it's still vulnerable to mailbox baseball. Survivability score (out of 10): 5
The owner of this "brick shithouse" mailbox has obviously been victimized by vandals more than once. He's got his entire mailbox surrounded by bricks. The only way a vandal could cause damage to this is by ripping the door of the hinges. Survivability score: 9
The strategy here is to make the mailbox so low to the ground that troublemakers won't notice it. Also, the low-profile makes it hard for a beer-drunk, bat-wielding high-schooler in the passenger seat of a car to knock it off. I don't know why there are pebbles on the mailbox, but I noticed that on another mailbox on the same street. Is there a secret meaning? Survivability score: 6
Short of a bulldozer, no vehicle is going to topple this mail box. But the box itself is fully-exposed, almost begging for someone to come along and knock it off. Survivability score: 6
Like the "brick shithouse" mailbox, this fully enclosed unit will withstand most assaults by amateur vandals. The owner's one mistake, in my opinion, is in making it attractive, and therefore a bigger target for those who find pleasure in damaging other people's property. Survivability score: 8
The thinking behind this design seems to say: "If you can't cage the vandals, then you need to cage the property." Behind the thick cast-iron grillwork you'll find an ordinary metal mailbox. The sturdy wooden beams look like they'd hold up against a determined attack. Survivability score: 7
I'd be interested in seeing photographs of other fortified mailboxes. Email them to me.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Thanks, Rudy Rucker!
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DATE: 09/06/2004 01:38:25 PM
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We want to give a big thanks to Rudy Rucker for his excellent stint as the Boing Boing guestblogger. Rudy will also be the last regular guestblogger. From here on out, we'll roll out the guestbar carpet on special occasions. You can always read the guestbar archives here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Genocide in Sudan" charity CD
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DATE: 09/06/2004 01:45:37 PM
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Waxploitation Records is donating all of the profits from its "Genocide in Sudan" CD (release date is November) to the United Nations Refuge Agency and UNICEF Oxfam's Sudan Relief Fund. Musicians on the CD include System of a Down, Gorillaz, Jill Scott, Jurassic 5, Thievery Corporation, Kinky, X-ecutioners, Bad Religion, Tortoise, Yoko Ono, Danger Mouse & Murs, Tweaker, The Pretenders, Mark Farina, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, DJ Spooky featuring Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Toots and The Maytals featuring Bunny Wailer, Teargas & Plateglass, The Nightwatchmen and Rise Against amongst others. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Falsely arrested Indymedia correspondent recounts his 40 hours in jail during RNC-NYC
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DATE: 09/06/2004 02:38:46 PM
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Eddie Codel recounts the endless processing, waiting in lines, handcuffing, and form-filling that goes into being arrested for civil disobedience during the RNC.
At this point we haven't been given a chance to use a bathroom facility, it's been about 3 hours. I see several ladies huddled up in a corner blocking others while they pee on the floor. Soon after, lines form on either ends of the cage for people wanting to use the port-o-john's that are now open for business. They are located behind a locked gate at either end where a police officer mans these gates while allowing one person at a time to enter. My turn is next, my plastic cuffs are cut off and I finally pee. I stretch my arms a bit, gulp down a cup off water from a nearby water cooler and prepare to be recuffed. I put my hands behind my back and am recuffed very loosely. I return to the general population in the main cage and pull my hands out of my cuffs as I see many others have done.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: John Shirley's Burning Man report
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DATE: 09/06/2004 03:20:33 PM
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Author, screenwriter, and former BoingBoing guestblogger John Shirley has returned from Black Rock City. He posts this "dissenter's" report from Burning Man.
This year there were 35,000 people at this arts festival in the desrt, a giant refugee camp but where the strangely upscale refugees had carried their liquor out with them--sometimes in place of their clothes. Always an observer more than a belonger,I inevitably had mixed feelings, especially when it's gotten big enough to include a significant percentage of knuckleheads, dopeheads, philistines, and "tour-or-rists" as the Burning Man's temporary radio station called them. Most Burning Man self expression, though pretty at night with its fluorescent trimmings, is sheer kitsch. It's about on the level of high school students planning decorations for their prom. Much of Black Rock City, nowadays, has a spring-break, frat-party feel to it. Much else is just rave culture spillover, replete, I'm sorry to say, with MDMA aka X, that Stealth Brain-Damage Drug. There is a constant white nose from 'drum circles', and thudding obnoxious party music from "party vehicles" like parade floats who've lost their parades, drifting about the gigantic horseshoe-shape of the festival playing dance music, and even Van Halen, waving margarita glasses and going 'woo! Woo!' and shaking bodyparts. That's some pretty inspiring art there, boy. On the other hand there are the Mutaytors, doing athletic punk rock fire art; there is the burning of the Temple, a beautiful many-stories-high Asianesque temple, of components that vary with the year--this year strange shapes from the frames that held bones of dinosaur-bones-kits, so you have negative-dinosaur and mammoth bones-shapes wrought into an intricate temple, an Eiffelish design but more art-decoish...Some beautifully designed party vehicles (one that was of four Egyptian gods carrying an artfully detailed ancient-Egyptian palanquin filled with people dressed as courtiers, seemed to have been made by a professional prop outfit--I suspect hip millionaires rub elbows with street people here), there's the grand convocation of 800 art cars converging like animals coming to a nighted waterhole for the Burning of the Man, the giant statue consumed first in fireworks and then fire, flames that go forest-fire sized.
Link to complete entry, link to John Shirley's website.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fortified mailboxes, part 2
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DATE: 09/06/2004 06:00:07 PM
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I received a bunch of great email about my fortified mailbox entry. If you have pics of a vandal-resistant mailbox, email me!
Number42 sez: This one is my favorite mailbox of all time...
Nicholas sez: I don’t have any photos, but I have a suggestion. My mother kept on
getting her mailbox hit in by someone driving by with a baseball bat or
similar object. To punish future bashers, I dug a good sized hole, and
planted a thick metal pole in it. After that set, I made a hole in the
bottom of the mailbox large enough so that the pole would fit in. I put
the mailbox on top of it, and then using more cement, filled up the back
of the mailbox with the cement, attaching the pole to the inside of the
mailbox. Make sure the pole goes into the back half of the mailbox, as to
still be able to get mail. This secures the mailbox the mailbox to the
pole, and from the outside, looks like every other mailbox, but if someone
hits it with anything, their hands will sting for a while, and the box
should stay intact.
John Wilson sez: I remember seeing an article in a magazine (popular mechanics?) about
4 or 5 years ago about a guy who went through three mailboxes in quick
succession. He was a welder, so he bought one of those great big
mailboxes, and modded it by replacing the sides and bottom with 1/2
inch thick steel, and the top with a section of 1/4 inch steel pipe
cut in half. Mounted it on a big-ass pole, deep hole, lots of
concrete, etc.
Couple days later he found a half broken baseball bat at the foot of
the mailbox. Not a dent in the box itself..
I googled and found a lot of messages in welder mailing lists of guys
doing similar projects. Another guy suggested putting down tire
spikes, or have some sharp, rusty metal scrap "accidently" fall out of
the back of the truck, near the approach path to the mailbox.
Googling for "welded mailbox" only brought up this though
Pancho Cole sez: I don't have a good picture, but I suspended my mailbox from an overhead
post using chains so that it was hard to do damage to it - the mailbox just
moves when a bat or a snowplow hit it.
Then there is this approach: http://www.steelmailbox.com/ and
http://www.fortknoxmailbox.com/home.htm
the trick is to make your tough mailbx look "vanilla" - when they hit it
with a bat you get the satisfaction of hearing them scream as the shock
goes all the way up their arms. Of course you need a tough post to put it
on, some local kids borrowed their parents Hummer and went around driving
over mailboxes, they would have got away with it except they got stuck in a
ditch behind one mailbox. I suggest a steel post filled with concrete,
buried at least 3 feet and hopefully with a concrete footer poured around it.
Dave Hurley sez: Here is a link to a mailbox that the venerable Norm Abram of the "New
yankee Workshop" built on his PBS show some time back. I'm not sure
if fits in the category of "brick shithouse," but it certainly looked
stout enough on the show and it has the added benefit of being
good-looking to boot. I don't know about you, but I think building
one from NYW would be fun and it would certainly have a certain caché.
Nick Papadakis sez: Don't make the mailbox *look* fortified. Just fill it with
cement, and put it on a spindly ole pole so it looks naked and
vulnerable. With any luck, they'll break an arm ...
Eric Thorsen sez: As a test: if the mailbox survived a hit the pebbles would get knocked off. Or maybe someone is buried in it...
Michael Green sez: How typical that people would overlook the fun they could have with this and instead go for the brut-force approach. I have a buddy who lived in a similar area and, after losing two mailboxes in one week, went for the “Q-Ship” approach. He found the most noticeable, but flimsy looking, mailbox available, painted it day-glo orange, filled it with cement, and mounted it at radiator level. Fortunately no one was killed, but he did manage to demolish the engine compartment of a Ford F150 pickup that tried to take it out later that evening. He never had another problem after that.
Alan Macdougall sez: could the pebbles be the markers of door to door itinerants? In the area
of rural New Zealand where I grew up, a small stone on the mailbox was
sometimes used by the Jehovah's witnesses to mark out which houses they'd
visited. So a kid's small prank was to remove these and cause the house to
be visited more than once, much to the annoyance of the inhabitants.
jeremy hunsinger sez:
just steel on a 4x4 post, like these.
you want a wood post because it is safer in case you run into it
yourself, you want it to break if you hit it with a car. to make the
post, get a 5 gallon pail, fill it with a plastic bag, pour it 2/3 full
of concrete then sit the post in the concrete and let it set up, then
sink the concrete about 2 inches underground, so only the post is
sticking out, and put the rolled steel mailbox on top of it. then...
tell your neighbors, once a few neighbors have these, it ruins the
whole mailbox baseball sport.
David Friedman sez:
While those homebrew solutions are nice, check out the Fort Knox Mailbox.
Their website comes complete with confusing rollovers, a promise to be "The
Last Mailbox You Will Ever Need to Buy!" and even a gallery of ugly
mailboxes.
According to the FAQ, the 1/4" thick steel mailboxes ("Most skyscrapers and
bridges are made of the same material") can withstand:
Baseball bat = Definitely!
Pumpkin = Pumpkin Pie!
Sledge Hammer = Sure thing!
Rock / Boulder = Boing!
M-80 (explosive) = A 1/4 stick of dynamite has been tested with no phase to
the mailbox. It is equivalent of the force of four average M-80 bombs
together at once. Your mail will be ashes, but they won't steal it!
Dump Truck = Pulled the mailbox out of the ground in 180 pounds of concrete
& dragged it down the street for about 100 ft. A little exterior paint
patching and it was back to work the next day receiving mail.
28 Ton Boom Truck = Let's just say there was more damage to the boom truck!
James Goggin sez: Why don't you just dig a hole, put a large metal casing in the ground
with lockable hinged lid, yellow marking around a slot so your postman
knows what to do, and you'll have a mailbox with no further concern for
structual damage or, indeed, disapperance?
Michael sez:
i saw your entry on boingboing.
i am looking for information on a mailbox that i think i saw on the hdtv network.
when vandals hit it with a baseball bat a spiked probe locks into the bat, also two vials of liquid release and spray the vandal. the first vial has a phosphor paint, the second vial has a very strong skunk odor.
if someone happens to email you about this mailbox, could you please forward the info to me.
clifford hedin sez: This is a mailbox my dad put in about twelve years ago after a few
teenaged bashings and careless drivers. He made it out of four
railroad ties, the 8 x 12 pieces of wood they lay down to support
railroad tracks. Those are tied together with several metal straps
hidden by some decorative rope. The whole thing got buried in the
ground about four feet. The original box is embedded inside. A few
years after he put it in, the road was repaved. That added a few
inches to the road height, so we attached a new mailbox to the outside
to appease the complaining mailman. The only time I can remember
anything happening to it, a car hit it and ran off. The impact tilted
it about four inches, not such a big deal to fix. I'm sure the car
had a bigger problem than we did.
Joe Schneider sez:
There's an interesting mailbox on my commute work.
It appears that the homeowner had some problems in the past, as they
used what appears to be a 4-5 inch "I" Beam, which I can only assume
is sunk more than a few feet down. Painted on the side is "HIT ME."
As I thought about it, it's a hell of an idea, and would do major
damage to anyone who hits it. I just wonder if it's legal, as anyone
hitting it is going to have some serious problems.
Anyway, i'll get ya the pics as soon as I get a chance.
dfghdfgh sdfg sez:
The brick shithouse can survivae a car based attack,
but not pedestrians. It is usually quite fragile. A
6' 180 lb person can easily separate the brick 'house'
from it's concrete foundation. Once separated, the
center of gravity is high enough it can easily be
rocked back and forth until it topples.
take it from one who knows...
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New airplane hailed as "the fourth great breakthrough in aeronautical science"
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DATE: 09/06/2004 06:20:10 PM
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Julian sez: [Fanwing is a] new type of heavier than air craft that can fly slowly
and carry heavy loads. It seems pretty cool and might actually work. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pulp wallpaper
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DATE: 09/06/2004 07:01:13 PM
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Thomas Horne's made some great desktop wallpaper collages out of the pulp covers from a couple of this morning's blog entries.
724k JPEG Link, 1MB JPEG Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show RNC clips
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DATE: 09/06/2004 07:21:04 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted a slew of Daily Show clips covering the Republican National Convention:
Part 1 Link, Part 2 Link, Part 3 Link, Part 4 Link, Part 5 Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Update: Help Cory pirate his own story
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DATE: 09/07/2004 06:30:04 AM
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I ran into the editors of Science Fiction World, the Chinese magazine that translated and printed my story "Nimby and the D-Hoppers" without asking (or even letting me know!), at the WorldCon. They gave me a copy of the issue, which has super-cool anime-style illos, and have promised to send me the text electronically to post under a Creative Commons license when they get back to China.
They say that they have a deal with the Chinese copyright office where if they give a royalty to the office, they get permission to translate and publish the story -- this sounds to me like a weird, and somewhat wishful reading of the appendix to the Berne agreement on the compulsory translation right.
In any event, I'm not all that out-of-sorts about this (I wasn't to begin with, and less so now that I've made some peace with them). I'll let you know if they come through with the electronic text and post it once they do -- thanks so much for all the support on this, it was really cool to see everyone spring into action (and I had no idea that Boing Boing/I had so many Chinese-speaking/residing readers!).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's Nimby story in Chinese scanned and downloadable
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DATE: 09/07/2004 06:53:51 AM
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zhouyuanchi was good enough to provide a set of high-resolution scans of my story "Nimby and the D-Hoppers" as it appears in the September issue of Sci Fi World. While I'm waiting for the editors to provide me with the electronic text, I've uploaded the scans in a tarball, under a Creative Commons by-noncommercial-share-alike license. Enjoy!
1.7MB Tarball Link
(Thanks, zhouyuanchi!)
Update: Thanks to Doug for converting this to a Comic Book Reader doc: 1.7MB CBR Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wikipedia versus Britannica
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DATE: 09/07/2004 07:06:14 AM
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Ed Felten's doing some empirical comparisons of the online Britannica versus Wikipedia, and Wikipedia's doing pretty good!
Virtual memory: Wikipedia has a pretty good entry; Britannica has no entry for virtual memory, and doesn't appear to discuss the concept elsewhere, either. Verdict: advantage Wikipedia.
Public-key cryptography: Good, accurate entries in both. Verdict: toss-up.
Microsoft antitrust case: Britannica has only two sentences, saying that Judge Jackson ruled against Microsoft and ordered a breakup, and that the Court of Appeals overturned the breakup but agreed that Microsoft had broken the law. That's correct, but it leaves out the settlement. Wikipedia's entry is much longer but error-prone. Verdict: big advantage to Britannica.
Overall verdict: Wikipedia's advantage is in having more, longer, and more current entries. If it weren't for the Microsoft-case entry, Wikipedia would have been the winner hands down. Britannica's advantage is in having lower variance in the quality of its entries.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Trippy blotter art
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DATE: 09/07/2004 07:40:40 AM
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A sheet of LSD blotter paper printed with this approprately psychedelic optical illusion is up for auction on eBay. Click the image for the full effect. Presumably, the paper has not been dipped. I've also seen "blotter art" printed with M.C. Escher illustrations. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
UPDAPTE: BB reader Carlos Poker points out that the optical masterpiece borrowed for this blotter was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Who is at the very bottom of the eBay feedback rating list?
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DATE: 09/07/2004 01:03:59 PM
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This web page returns the ten most reputable eBay members and the ten least reputable ones. When I checked the page, it listed mario23g (with a feedback rating of -26) as the least reputable person on all of eBay, but I checked his page and it looks like he is no longer registered. The second worst, grannyvon10 (score of -19) earned her negative whuffie from a seller who says she didn't pay for 118 dolls she purchased. The third worst eBay member on Earth, according to this page, is jammin-garage (score -17), who has earned a bunch of complaints from people who say they've paid for stuff he failed to send them. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roger Wood's latest clock
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DATE: 09/07/2004 04:16:59 PM
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My pal Roger Wood sends around a frequent newsletter with a pic of his latest creations -- Roger builds assemblage-sculpture clocks out of junk and feathers -- and today's is especially lovely.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rogue Nantucket WiFi cop embroiders the truth (some more)
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DATE: 09/07/2004 04:21:38 PM
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Remember when Reverend AKMA got told off for "theft of services" when he used the Nantucket Atheaneum's open WiFi from a bench out front, by a copper who invented a fictituous Federal regulation forbidding same? Well now the Nantucket paper has run a story in which the cop has embroidered the incident to make it all seem so very very very sinister indeed.
After I first read the story, I was amused, and put it aside to blog here. In transcribing the story for this entry, though, I'm struck by the odd inconcinnity of this account with my own experience. The Deputy Chief's story sounds very little like what happened to me.
* The mysterious "tapper" was leaning against the rear of the Atheneum; I was sitting on a public benchbeside the Atheneum.
* The newspaper story says that this incident gave rise to a "rumor" that "the police considered outdoor users. . . to be engaged in a theft of services," but in fact that's exactly what the officer who rousted me told me.
* The story says that this took place "a month ago," but if the article was published last week (when the weekly paper would have had to go to press in order for it to get to my mom, who then clipped it and mailed it to me), the incident couldn't have taken place longer ago than two weeks, give or take a day.
Link
(Thanks, AKMA)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AWOL George's service record questioned in new ad
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DATE: 09/07/2004 04:37:55 PM
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Texans for Truth has produced a TV spot that inverts the ads run by the Lying, Dishonorable Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, in which an air guardsman who served in the unit that George Bush claims to have served in reports that George Bush didn't report for duty, or reported so infrequently that neither he nor any of his unit-mates from the small group can recall ever having seen him.
1.7MB Quicktime Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Do you own a Victorinox CyberTool?
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DATE: 09/07/2004 04:44:54 PM
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Do you own and use a Victorinox CyberTool? What do you think of it? Email me
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jimmy Carter's Letter to Zell Miller
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DATE: 09/07/2004 04:53:06 PM
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Former President Jimmy Carter wrote a great letter to Senator Zell Miller, expressing disappointment at Miller's freakish, lie-filled, gut-bustingly hilarious speech at the RNC.
Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican
Convention because of your being a “Democrat,” and it’s quite possible
that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the
Republicans some transient dividends.
Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and
very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the
character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush
campaign’s personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South
Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max
Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should
have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre
claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security
of our nation except with spitballs. (This is the same man whom you
described previously as “one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of
this party's best-known and greatest leaders -- and a good friend.")
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiki themed art show in San Francisco, Friday, September 17th
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DATE: 09/07/2004 06:51:54 PM
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Shooting Gallery in San Francisco is having a tiki themed art show, called "Tiki Art NOW! A Volcanic Eruption of Art." This painting of Marcia Brady with a moko by Isabel Samaris is fantastic!
Don't miss this group show featuring over 60 artists from around the world paying homage to Tiki! This stunning display of neo-primitive images is captured in a 90-page full color catalog available opening night (or later from Shooting Gallery).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: VP Cheney in cahoots with terrorists?
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DATE: 09/07/2004 06:57:35 PM
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Vice President Cheney is making bizarre threats about a possible terrorist attack unless he and President Bush are relected.
Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday warned Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another terrorist attack.
"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.
Link (Thanks, Heather!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gilmore v. Ashcroft "Papers Please" case update
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DATE: 09/07/2004 09:23:06 PM
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Bill Scannell says,
Lawyers for John Gilmore filed their opposition to a Department of Justice attempt to file a secret brief in a case that involves secret law. The case, Gilmore vs. Ashcroft, is now before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. DOJ filed a motion last Friday asking the Court's permission to file their arguments in secret, allowing only the judges to read their full brief.
DOJ is trying to distract the Court and the public from the real issue in the case, which is whether or not American citizens can travel in their own country without official government paperwork. Their method of distraction: secret law.
In a sharply-worded objection to the government's motion, Gilmore's lawyers stated that the government's "extreme cry for secrecy, preventing even plaintiff's counsel from being privy to their legal arguments because plaintiff's counsel does not meet defendants self defined 'covered persons who have a need to know' criteria, is disturbing and illustrates the dangers of secret law."
DOJ motion and Mr. Gilmore's opposition: Link. Previous BoingBoing posts on this story include: Reason Magazine on Gilmore v. Ashcroft; and Gilmore v. Ashcroft begins today
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jesus Christ, Skate Ramp (near Cellphone Tower Of The Lord)
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DATE: 09/07/2004 09:29:12 PM
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BoingBoing reader and super geek-sleuth Kevin says, "Following up on the "Cellphone towers for Jesus" BoingBoing post (Link), I actually went to that church with the Sprint tower built in, did some asking of questions, some more photos, found a skatepark for jesus.
(...)Also, according to ZDnet, it also delivers Wi-Fi. 'Peninsula Covenant Church parishioners in Redwood City, Calif., bring their Bibles, and their Palms, to Sunday Mass. A Wi-Fi access point--on the church's rooftop cross--beams them the text of a Sunday sermon and an accompanying multimedia presentation.'"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update on "Did T-Mobile block TxTMOB messages during RNC?"
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DATE: 09/07/2004 09:37:46 PM
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In a BoingBoing post last week, one reader wondered if political motivations may have caused T-Mobile's reported "blocking" of messages from activist messaging service TxTMOB.
Not so, replies BoingBoing reader Gabe, who says:
"I'm a network data analyst for T-Mobile. I've actually tested the network to see why those messages were blocked, and from the response our email-to-sms gateway is giving, apparently our immensely retarded spam filter thinks that txtmob's SMTP server is spamming us. Basically, if the network sees more than about a hundred messages coming from the same SMTP server within an hour, it just blacklists it. Stupid but true."
Link to previous Boingboing post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: After saturation coverage of Olympics, why no Paralympics TV coverage in US?
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DATE: 09/07/2004 10:29:47 PM
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BBC Journalist and blogger Stuart Hughes says:
"The Olympics were a huge success for NBC.200 million viewers. A "halo effect" that boosted other channels and programmes. An estimated $60-70 million profit (Source: Hollywood Reporter) Before the Games started, NBC boasted of the depth and breadth of its coverage.1210 hours of events.103 commentators. 28 Olympians on the commentary team. A week from now, I'll be heading back to Athens for Greece's second remarkable major sporting event of the year. The Paralympics will boast:4000 athletes. 140 countries represented.525 gold medals at stake. 19 sports. There will be no American TV coverage of the Paralympics. Let me repeat that. There will be NO AMERICAN TV COVERAGE OF THE PARALYMPICS. Not one hour of live coverage. Not one commentator. Not one Olympian on the commentary team. Nothing. This at the same time that a record number of journalists are preparing to cover the Paralympics."
Link to complete post on Stuart's weblog. See also these related previous BoingBoing posts: Stuart Hughes covers Olympics on his blog; BBC journalist survives landmine; Xeni on NPR: Tech helps triple amputee Cameron Clapp to run again (thanks, Karim)
Update: Author, Memory Hole editor, and former BoingBoing guestblogger Russ Kick says,
"I wrote about the disgraceful treatment of the last Paralympics: Link. Some of the specifics are obviously dated, but the overall gist - that America ignores the event and treats the athletes like shit -- is still very much valid. Just rereading it pisses me off all over again."
Image: Cameron Clapp competes in the 2004 Endeavor Games, a sports competition for amputees. Clapp won four gold medals. Credit: Courtesy Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics, Inc.
BoingBoing reader Scott says, "Russ Kick's article on the TV coverage of the 2000 Paralympics mentions that there was no broadcast in Australia. While it's true there was no coverage on commercial channels, the 2000 Paralympics were broadcast in Australia by the ABC (Aust Broadcasting Corp - Link) - and they rated through the roof! The 2004 Paralympics will be broadcast by SBS (Link) - who outbid the ABC for the rights. See this story for more info: Link."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: TraceEncounters and nTAGs
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DATE: 09/08/2004 02:43:55 AM
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TraceEncounters is a social network technology that debuted at the Ars Electronica festival last week. One-thousand infrared-enabled stickpins were distributed to attendees. The pins "remembered" the unique identifier of every other pin that comes into range. When the wearer walked past a central display, his or her data was downloaded into a PC that generated a visualization of the entire network.
Link (via Near Near Future)
TraceEncounters sounds like an extremely stripped-down nTAG, a digital namebadge that helps wearers at conferences identify what they have in common and build their social networks. My friends Rick Borovoy and George Eberstadt spun nTAG out of Rick's PhD research at the Media Lab. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ultimate Nerf gun
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DATE: 09/08/2004 03:20:04 AM
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NASA's Chicken Gun fires foam rubber chunks at speeds up to 1,500 miles per hour. The device is used to test how well the space shuttle's solid rocket booster can handle the impact of external tank foam pieces that break away during flight. The gun was nicknamed for its usual ammunition:
"In normal use, experts fire chicken carcasses at a test target at varying speeds to simulate a direct bird-strike during flight."
Link (via Science Blog)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Underground movies
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DATE: 09/08/2004 03:32:15 AM
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I'm disappointed that I missed catching a flick in a secret cinema/restaurant below the streets of Paris. Police discovered the theater--complete with electricity, CCTV security, and phone lines--within an uncharted cavern in the city's 170 miles of tunnels and caves. According to The Guardian, a full-size screen and projector had been installed and police found "a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers." A stocked bar and "pressure-cooker for making couscous" was also discovered.
Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."
Link (Thanks, DMD!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Danger sells out its customers
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DATE: 09/08/2004 04:15:55 AM
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The CEO of Danger, Inc., makers of the Hiptop wireless PDA-thingy, has done an embarassingly rotten interview with Engadget, in which he admits that his company is selling out its customers and locking down development for the platform. Last year, I wrote a public apology to everyone that I recommended this device to, because I'd been fooled by a presentation given by Danger at a PC Forum conference where they made a bunch of now-broken promises about the openness of the Sidekick. A year later, we have more broken promises and a device with even worse policies. My Sony-Ericsson P900 has many failings, but at least I can install my own ringtones and software without having to go through the company's politburo to get authorization.
Can customers upload their own ringtones?
No. There’s an effort by the industry to make people pay for the content on these devices...
What about allowing developers to create user-installable applications for the Sidekick?
Not user-installable. We’re a gatekeeper in that sense. they use our developer kit, they reach an agreement with us, and then through us they can have access to our user base.
Link
(via Wendy Seltzer)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory to be Guest of Honor at Penguincon
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DATE: 09/08/2004 04:18:06 AM
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I'm the Guest of Honor at PenguinCon 3.0, a science fiction and Linux conference held near Detroit April 22-24, 2005. This is my first Guest of Honor-ship -- it's pretty cool news! Also on the bill is Wil Wheaton -- it'll be great to see him again.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Merlin's tips and tricks
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DATE: 09/08/2004 04:24:57 AM
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Merlin Mann, the hilarious polymath geek dude, has started a new site of usability tips-and-tricks called 43 Folders that is chock-a-block with reallye excellent tips for getting the most out of every bit of technology in your life.
Most sites requiring registration ask you to choose a "secret question" to which only you supposedly know the answer. Of course, in the age of Google, the city where you were born and your mother's maiden name may no longer be the best kept secrets in the world.
So, next time you register for a site and it asks for your response to a challenge question, choose something that's completely insane, but really memorable to you.
Link
(Thanks, Merlin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P2P app adds voter registration tool
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DATE: 09/08/2004 04:29:09 AM
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BearShare, a P2P file-sharing too, has added a voter registration mechanism to its latest client:
Now, BearShare has teamed up with YourVoteMatters.org to encourage voter registration. According to BearShare's press release, 800,000 individuals have already registered. The goal is to reach 1 million before the November 2nd elections.
"BearShare users can register by clicking on a link located on a web page only accessible to BearShare users. The link takes them out to the online voter registration site hosted by YourVoteMatters.org. In the short time this program has been live, we have seen great success which we hope will continue through the voter registration deadline."
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flowchart for CD ripping morality
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DATE: 09/08/2004 04:32:31 AM
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Here's a thought-provoking flowchart suggesting a moral process for deciding whether you should rip any given CD.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 3D chocolate printer made from Lego
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DATE: 09/08/2004 04:34:12 AM
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James is making a 3D chocolate printer out of Lego and documenting it as he goes in his blog.
We've developed a print head that will print 5mm 'pixels' of the consumable. It basically acts as a pump. Its a medium sized lego gear (driven by a worm gear attached to the motor) with four axels that repeatedly squeaze and release a pipe attached to a funnel that holds the consumables. a half-rotation of this wheel yeilds a blob...
Green and Black's 72% cocoa organic chocolate seems to be the stuff. Stick it in the microwave, melt it, and pour it into the funnel. Rather than trying to be scientific about this we've taken the brute force plan and simply melted as many different types of chocolate as we could. We got lucky however, and hit on Green and Black's pretty quickly. The really nice thing about this particular consumable seems to be that it retains heat for a long time, and still prints a similar sized blob as it cools.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stan Lee/Hefner cartoon coming to MTV
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DATE: 09/08/2004 04:43:52 AM
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Stan Lee and Hugh Hefner are collaborating on a new cartoon called "SuperBunnies."
MTV has ordered an animated pilot for "Hef's Superbunnies," a collaboration between cartooon veteran Lee's newly launched Pow! Entertainment and Playboy's Alta Loma Entertainment division. Hefner's name and likeness will be featured in the pilot, and he also might provide the voice of his cartoon alter ego.
Hefner said he sparked to the notion of being involved with an edgy, sexy animated series as soon as Lee, the mastermind behind such Marvel comic book legends as Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, approached him with the "Superbunnies" concept.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ebb and flow of the exchange rates
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DATE: 09/08/2004 07:18:36 AM
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The Data Fountain is an ambient display that translates streaming currency rates to streams of water. From Koert van Mensvoort's description of the project:
"In the morning paper, I can read the weather report as well as the stock quotes. But when I look out of my window I only get a weather update and no stock exchange info. Could someone please fix this bug in my environmental system? Thanks."
Link
Of course, the Data Fountain comes six years after pervasive computing pioneer Roy Want built a fountain at Xerox PARC that trickled or gushed based on the company's stock price. (Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CNN cites Wikipedia
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DATE: 09/08/2004 08:27:37 AM
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CNN repeatedly cites Wikipedia in this article on the Russian hostage-taking allegedly planned by Shamil Basayev.
During the rebel pullout from Grozny in January 2000 Basayev lost a foot after stepping on a landmine, according to the Wikipedia Web site, but he and other rebel fighters eluded Russian capture by hiding in forests and mountains.
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(Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tiki sportsbottle
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DATE: 09/08/2004 08:29:25 AM
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REI, the outdoor store, is selling these cool tiki-shaped sports-bottles.
Link
(Thanks, Erik!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Rolling Stone: The Curse of Dick Cheney
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DATE: 09/08/2004 08:33:35 AM
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"D" sez: This profile of Cheney is frightening. The only hope it offers is that every President to have Cheney involved in its adminitration has failed to be re-elected.
I knew the guy was bad, but if all the allegations in this article are true, he's singlehandedly hamstrung all the offices of the military and intelligence in the US:
Over at Defense, competent intelligence professionals were purged in order to ease the way to war. Douglas Feith, brought in under Rumsfeld to serve as undersecretary of defense for policy, applied an ideological test to his staff: He didn't want competence; he wanted fervor. Col. Pat Lang, a Middle East expert who served under five presidents, Republican and Democratic, in key posts in military intelligence, recalls being considered for a job at the Pentagon. During the job interview, Feith scanned Lang's impressive resume. "I see you speak Arabic," Feith said. When Lang nodded, Feith said, "Too bad," and dismissed him.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paper airplane that flaps its wings
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DATE: 09/08/2004 08:58:35 AM
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Keith sez, "This is a link to a site that shows how to make a paper airplane that actually flaps its wings when it flies without use of a motor, rubberbands, etc. All you need is a piece of typing paper, an inch of tape and a penny. As far as I know, it's the only flapping paper airplane in the world."
Link
(Thanks, Keith!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unix on the Gameboy
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DATE: 09/08/2004 09:15:37 AM
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Gbaunix is a project to port Unix to the Gameboy Advance.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ken Jennings's total Jeopardy! winnings
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DATE: 09/08/2004 09:17:18 AM
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Kottke's posted a hot tip from someone who claims to have been in the studio audience when Ken Jennings's Jeopardy! winning streak broke -- click for a spoiler with his total earnings and the length of his streak.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Call Congress on Sept 14, stop INDUCE!
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DATE: 09/08/2004 10:44:17 AM
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Nicholas sez:
Save Betamax, is a new Downhill Battle project to bring together all the opposition to the INDUCE Act into one big Congress call-in day on September 14. The RIAA and MPAA are making a big push to get this thing through, especially since they lost the Grokster case, and it could come to the Senate floor at any time. Sending emails and faxes is great, but we need to show that opposition to the INDUCE Act or whatever variant is being devised, is very broad. We think working to defend the Betamax decision is a good rallying point for people to come together on.
Link
(Thanks, Nicholas!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Ray Caesar and Amy Hill at Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, September 10 - October 7, 2004
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DATE: 09/08/2004 11:25:06 AM
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Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle has a two-artist show opening on September 10, featuring the work of artists Ray Caesar and Amy Hill. Both artists are terrific.
Ray Caesar creates fantastical, grimly hopeful and gravely whimsical images of wizened children who radiate an enigmatic serenity. Sprouting bio-mechanical limbs and appendages, the figures are otherworldly, a melding of sci fi fantasy, lush landscapes, and Victorian sensibilities. Ray's work is astonishing in the fact it is all digitally created, most people assume they are looking at paintings due to the seamless blending and "painterly quality" of the work as well as its unique emotional impact. Creating models in a 3D modeling software he then wraps them in painted and manipulated texture maps. Each model is set up with an invisible skeleton that allows him to pose each figure in its 3D enviroment.
Amy Hill paints with a notoriously difficult Dutch Renaissance technique, using formality in the execution and opting for non-conventionality in her subject matter. In her newest series, Amy has painted a series of classic movie monsters as businessmen in suits. Earthy, luminous portraits are painted in tones perfect for the discriminating boardroom, as repulsive monsters are lovingly painted and renamed with "normal" societially accepted names. Funny, yet thought provoking, the initial assumption of "businessmen as monsters" begins to expand as the viewer considers what the artist might actually be implying. Amy will be showing her entire series of oil on panel Monster paintings.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NASA's Genesis crashes
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DATE: 09/08/2004 11:56:10 AM
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The return capsule from NASA's Genesis craft crashed in the Utah desert this morning. From the Wired News story:
The 420-pound space capsule was to have been plucked out of the air by a helicopter and returned safely to earth. It was carrying solar wind samples weighing less than 20 micrograms, which is less than a few grains of salt.
It is unclear whether the samples have been destroyed. NASA officials say that the sapphire, silicon and diamond wafers that were used to collect the samples may have been shattered in the crash, although it may be possible to piece them back together.
"It's a pit in my stomach," said Roger Wiens, flight payload lead at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the creator three of the instruments aboard Genesis. But Wiens was optimistic about the opportunity of recovering samples. "It looks like its in one piece, and we're going to get a lot of samples of solar wind out of there."
Link to WN story, Link to NASA Genesis home page (Thanks, Chris)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory to be evening guest at next BSFA meeting
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DATE: 09/08/2004 12:05:24 PM
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I'm the evening's guest at the next meeting of the British Science Fiction Association on Wednesday 22 September, at The Star Tavern, 6 Belgrave Mews West, London, SW1X 8HT (020 7235 3019).
Interview begins around 7pm.
Fans in the bar from around 5:30pm.
Good pub food available
Dinner at the Spaghetti House afterwards for anyone interested.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Future Mobile Sounds -- Beemer with an iPod
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DATE: 09/08/2004 12:53:18 PM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I talk with host Noah Adams about my week-long test-drive with a new iPod-ified beemer -- and the future of digital music technology behind the wheel. BMW is revving up some vehicle models (including the 330Ci coupe I reviewed) with a new sound system integrated with the Apple iPod. What's new and cool about this: it's touted as the first-ever fully integrated iPod/car interface you can drive right off the dealer lot. Costs under $500 as an upgrade to price of the new car. Plenty of aftermarket systems are available to hook your iPod (or other digital music players) to your car stereo, but many of these use your FM radio or a cassette player to interface, reducing sound quality in the process. Here, the sound quality was super-sweet.
I loved the car, and I loved grooving out to my own digital tunes by way of the iPod. The abilty to select songs, playlists, and control volume from the steering wheel was great. But some aspects of the system seemed lacking. For instance -- the iPod sits inside the glove compartment, but just sort of bangs around loose inside there. No special case to protect it, and passengers in the car with me were always cramming keys or sunglasses in there. Damage seemed inevitable. Also, when I'm in iPod mode -- why can't I see what's playing? The stereo display shows you names of radio stations, even program and song details -- but you get nothing but playlist number and song number when you've selected the iPod mode. Other aftermarket products do display the names of songs when you're in iPod mode, and I was frustrated by the fact that this system didn't.
So, bottom line: super-fly car, and a fun first edition of a system that needs a few finishing touches to live up to feature demands of discriminating geeks.
Link to online archive for today's NPR "Day to Day" segment, "Future Mobile Sounds: A Beemer with an iPod."
Update: BoingBoing reader Becky says, "You note that there are lots of third-party items that let you use your iPod in the car, but in fact if it's a new car, in most cases you're SOL: cassette players (required for cassette-adapter iPod devices) are falling out of favor, and FM transmitter versions, in addition to not working well in big cities with lots of radio stations, fail if your windshield has UV coating that blocks the signal getting from iTrip or similar device to radio antenna outside.
I learned all this the hard way: my lime green Ion quad-coupe matches my iPod Mini, but alas, no device so far lets me use them together. Alpine's got one now, if you have their stereo system; just hoping others are on the way soon!"
(Ed. note: Look for a bunch of news related to this topic in the holiday '04 issue of Wired Magazine. Ahem.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canada's Broadcast Flag
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DATE: 09/08/2004 01:16:38 PM
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The Broadcast Flag is a US regulation that nominally prevents Internet redistribution of digital TV signals, but in fact sets up a world where Hollywood studios and their captured regulators get a veto over the design of all new TV technology -- and distort the market for PC components like hard drives and video-cards in a way that will hobble innovation, drive up prices and shut out open source.
Weirdly enough, Canada seems to think that this sounds pretty good.
Given the controversy associated with the broadcast flag in the U.S., one would think that Canada would be wary about embarking on the same route. Accordingly, it came as a shock to many when an Industry Canada official recently indicated that Canada was likely to follow the U.S. lead by quickly implementing a similar system by July 2005. The official suggested that there was broadcaster support for the measure and that since the U.S. had adopted it, Canadians had little alternative but to follow suit.
While Canadian broadcasters may or may not support the broadcast flag (they have in fact been rather publicly silent on the matter), it is essential Canada craft its own policy by considering the privacy and copyright policies associated with the proposal.
Pre-judging the issue, as some in Minister Emerson's department appear to have done, is a dangerous course of action, that should be replaced immediately by a working group of all stakeholders, including the broader public interest, intent on studying the Canadian options. The suggestion Canada faces a Y2K-like deadline with respect to the broadcast flag appears as overblown as was the Y2K threat itself.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How your eyes read news
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DATE: 09/08/2004 01:42:32 PM
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Researchers with the Eyetrack III project used software-controlled cameras to follow the eyes of readers who were perusing news websites, in order to determine the topology of attention.
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tucows's ethical expired domain auction
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DATE: 09/08/2004 05:30:34 PM
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Tucows is starting a service to auction off expired domain names, but with an escape hatch to ensure that the former holders of the expired domains don't get scr0d.
Yet, Tucows plans to protect the previous registrant's existing rights because even if a URL enters the auction, the old registrant still has a window of opportunity to retain the name under the system. Noss said Tucows plans to "hold the name in escrow for another 30 days" on top of a period of "anywhere from one to 45 days" that a former registrant has to reclaim their domain name after expiry, depending on which registrar they're dealing with.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roger Wood documentary footage
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DATE: 09/08/2004 05:32:18 PM
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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Zed show has done a segment on my pal Roger Wood, the mad assemblage clockmaker.
Roger Wood creates with time in mind. Yet even though the clock can be a consistent element of his work, it's often secondary to its creation. Whether it's a curious timepiece or a unique assemblage, Wood thrives on working with an immeasurable array of findings from the tarnished and forgotten to the odd or intriquing. He is a devoted collector of usual and unusual objects with one thing in common, a history.
The source of his inspiration lies in the hundreds of curiously labelled drawers and boxes brimming with artifacts of all description that line the shelves of his Toronto studio. Wood orchestrates an arrangement from his myriad of treasures until the precise moment that it feels right. Then he quickly glues them all down so they can't escape.
Playful, wondrous timepieces emerge that take flight on cherubic wings, float and sway on fine wires, or appear frozen mid-explosion with flying springs and cogs that bounce at the touch.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: iPod battery swap surprisingly easy
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DATE: 09/08/2004 06:52:27 PM
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Plenty of people have swapped a new battery into their iPod, so the fact that I did it, too, is nothing new. But the fact that someone as clumsy as I am did it in about ten minutes without destroying the iPod is surprising. If you're as fumbled fingered as I am and have been afraid to open your iPod, I hope this gives you the courage to take action.
Here's what happened: Last year, I gave my six-year-old daughter my old 10 Gig old-style iPod, because I got a 20 Gig model. Last month, she started complaining that the battery wasn't holding a charge. This is a known problem with iPods. Last week, her iPod was dying after running for just a few minutes. It was time to crack it open.
Using Froogle, I searched on "iPod battery" and found this replacement unit for $30. The shipping was around $6 and it arrived via 2-day UPS.
(Click images for enlargement)
When it arrived (on time), I opened it and found the battery, some instructions (the same ones found here), and a cute-as-a-button miniature screwdriver with a little clip on it so you can insert it in a shirt pocket. Following the instructions, I carefully inserted the screwdriver into the crack between the metal case and clear plastic lid. But the screwdriver's blade was way too thick to get into the seam. I ended up gouging the plastic.
I set the screwdriver aside and grabbed a kitchen knife. It took about three or four minutes of tentative probing before I could get the knife blade worked in far enough to give me enough leverage to start to separate the top from the bottom. Once I got it started, though, I was able to use the adorable little screwdriver to pry the iPod the rest of the way open.
The old battery was attached to the hard drive with a couple of strips of padded, double-sided tape. I tore the tape a little while removed the old battery, and one of the strips got stuck to itself, but it wasn't a big deal. The battery has a couple of wires coming out of it, ending in a tiny white plug that goes into a socket. It was easy to unplug. I took the new battery and stuck it onto the sticky tape. Then I plugged it in the little socket. The cover snapped right on.
After charging it overnight, I gave it to my daughter and it has been running for hours. Mission accomplished!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Working Lego phone
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DATE: 09/09/2004 05:10:27 AM
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This working $135 Lego telephone is pretty bad-azz.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
Update: Kim Sullivan sez, "I bought one when
they were new ca. 1990-91, and it stopped working almost immediately.
Some loose connection in the handset failed to transmit a voice signal.
The kicker? Yeah, it's Lego, but it's epoxied. You cannot take this
phone apart to fix it without destroying it. I have no reason to
believe that's not still the case -- and it's too lightweight to make
even a good doorstop."
Update 2: Michael sez, "It's made from Tyco Bricks, not LEGO"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Who WATCHES movies?
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DATE: 09/09/2004 05:18:13 AM
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The sterling satirists of Loading Ready Run have produced a sharp, funny and amazingly true short film in response to the "Who makes movies?" anti-piracy spots that we're subjected to before we see our $10-13 flicks.
This spot, called "Who watches movies?" and features a graphic designer talking about how grossly offensive it is to pay a stack of money, sit through interminable advertisements, then be lectured at in a film made by some distant coked-up Hollyweird fatcat.
4.4MB MP4 Link
(Thanks, Paul!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO stop procrastinating
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DATE: 09/09/2004 05:25:59 AM
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On Merlin Mann's 43 Folders productivity blog, he runs through a great high-level overview of the geek-cult-smash, "Getting Things Done," a comprehensive and nerdy guide to systematizing yourself out of procrastination.
Stuff is bouncing around in our heads and causing untold stress and anxiety. Evaluation meetings, bar mitzvahs, empty rolls of toilet paper, broken lawn mowers, college applications, your big gut, tooth decay, dirty underwear and imminent jury duty all compete for prime attention in our poor, addled brains. Stuff has no “home” and, consequently, no place to go, so it just keeps rattling around.
Worst off, we’re too neurotic to stop thinking about it, and we certainly don’t have time to actually do everything in one day. Jeez Louise, what the hell am I, Superman?
So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven’t forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family or yourself. Your “stuff” has taken over your brain like a virus now, dragging down every process it touches and rendering you spent and virtually useless. Sound familiar?
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ecto 2 beta
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DATE: 09/09/2004 05:30:21 AM
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All four Boing Boing editors use Ecto, a blogging tool, to post and manage our material here. Today, a public beta of Ecto 2 launches, a major update that I'm excited as hell to get my hands on.
The basic idea behind ecto's WYSIAWYG is to offer users the ability to compose entries without having to bother with HTML tags. Since most blog entries are not complete web sites, composition of entries only allows font and paragraph changes, indentation (read "blockquote"), and obviously images (video and audio should follow shortly). Regarding image authoring I had two ways of implementing support for it. I tried the extreme version involving containers and layouts but that produced quite a bit of headache and would slow down typesetting too much. Considering that Tiger's WebKit will allow editing, I chose the easier route. Images can still be positioned and resized in place, but text flow is not what you will see. That's one reason for the 'A' in WYSIAWYG... 'almost' (If your entry fails to post, read "Got" instead of "Get"...).
Link
(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: What yesterday's dumb sampling ruling means
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DATE: 09/09/2004 08:36:26 AM
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Yesterday, a judge in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that all music sampling, no matter how minimal the sample, no matter how unrecognizably transformed, is illegal without permission from the sample-ee.
Lessig explains how the court got there and what it means:
Sampling, we're told, is piracy. But be certain to see the 19 footnotes in this relatively brief opinion, or the 28 separate quotes the opinion includes from other peoples work. I assume the court got a license for those.
Now that's not quite fair. The court's decision turns upon its "literal" reading of the sound recording statute. The sound recording statute has no de minimus exceptions, the court held. So while you are free to copy three notes from a musical composition, you can't copy the same three notes from a recording. So copying (so long as de minimus) is fine; cut & paste is not. It is a "bright-line" rule the Court has crafted: Ask permission first. (And don't worry, they might have added. It's simple.)
So once again: life in the analog world is freer than life in the digital world. You can do it, just don't use technology to do it — unless, of course, your lawyer has spoken to their lawyer.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Visual timeline of Bush's Air National Guard service
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DATE: 09/09/2004 09:22:58 AM
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President Bush had a lot of fun as a pilot in the Air National Guard. He got to fly really cool jets, while maintaining the lifestyle of a rich playboy with plenty of upstairs connections that allowed him to ignore direct orders from his commander and come and go as he pleased. And now, the President has a team of folks dedicated to smearing Kerry for volunteering for hazardous duty in Vietnam. And it's working! Most people now believe Bush is a military hero while Kerry is a shirking, wobbly liar. The president is a lot smarter than I thought.
Simon sez: "I put together this visual explanation of Dubya's Air National Guard service (or lack thereof) based entirely on the released documents to date. My goal was to put the confusing mixture of events and records into some kind of order." Link (Mirror)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Presidential campaign commercial archive 1952-2004
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DATE: 09/09/2004 11:12:59 AM
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"The Living Room Candidate" from the American Museum of the Moving Image is a mind-blowing and well-designed archive of Presidential Campaign commercials. I never forgot watching Lyndon Johnson's "Peace Little Girl" spot when I was three years old. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: AnarchistU, Toronto's wiki-based free school
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DATE: 09/09/2004 11:32:23 AM
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My old highschool roommate, Erik "Possum Man" Stewart, has started a free school in Toronto callled AnarchistU, in which anyone can propose a class, organize its curriculum on a wiki, sign up enough students and start teaching. Each semester has seen substantial growth in enrollment, and the model of peer education is really working well for a surprising number of people.
What is Anarchist U?
The Anarchist U is a volunteer-run collective which organizes a variety of courses on arts and sciences. Most courses run for ten weeks, and meet once a week; there are no admission fees. The Anarchist U follows the tradition of free schools in that it is open, non-hierarchic and questions the roles of teachers and students.
Where is Anarchist U located?
Anarchist U is in Toronto ON, Canada. There is no single street address; rather different classes and meetings take place in different community centres and homes throughout the city.
Do you offer online courses?
No. All courses are run non-virtually, classroom style.
What's an anarchist school?
Good question, we're also trying to figure that out!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fair use is a right AND a defense
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DATE: 09/09/2004 11:37:07 AM
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The entertainment companies often tell us that "fair use isn't a right, it's a defense." It's techincally true, but legally disingenous. As my cow-orker Fred Von Lohmann noted today in a mailing list post, "I've heard Peter Jaszi say on several occasions (and more eloquently), First Amendment is like fair use, technically invoked as a defense in court, but that doesn't stop us from talking about our *right* to free speech."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Did the White House release forged documents about Bush's service record?
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DATE: 09/09/2004 12:54:06 PM
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Charles at Little Green Footballs presents a persuasive argument that the memos recently released by the White House about President Bush's National Guard service are forgeries.
I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft’s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date “18 August 1973,” then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.
And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as “authentic.” The spacing is not just similar—it is identical in every respect.
(Background: CNN reported that "the White House, without comment, released to the news media two of the memos, one ordering Bush to report for his physical exam and the other suspending him from flight status."
Here are PDF copiesof the memos the White House released.)
I think the documents are indeed forgeries, but who made them? Could it be a White House dirty trick to make the Democrats look bad? Are there real documents that these forgeries are based on that are even more damning about the President's behavior? I'm sure there's more news to come.
Link (Thanks, Bob!)
UPDATE: Eric sez: If you weren't reflexively looking for the interpretation of events
that reflected most poorly on Bush, you might have noted that the
White House did not release those records, they merely passed along
without comment copies that had been sent to them by CBS.
UPDATE:David sez: "Saw your post on this on BoingBoing. Fark.com had a couple big discussions
today about the potential forgeries
(here and
here).
Someone posted the two images (White House released and Word generated), so
I fired up an image editor and had a look. While the font character spacing
are very similar, most typography experts in the threads agreed that the
original had type-write like characteristics (number 8 slightly high on the
line, etc.) that would be hard to reproduce in Word. More importantly, the
superscript "th" which caused most of the interest is not in the same
position in the two images (see attached superimposed comparison).
It's possible that the original was generated on a typewriter with a
proportional width Times New Roman font wheel or ball (available at the
time), with the same common margin settings as Word uses by default. The
superscript used in Word is artificially generated (smaller font size,
elevated baseline), whereas the typewritter superscript "th" would need to
be carved in the same space as other characters, which is why it appears
lower.
David Schwab
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Heavy Little Objects -- a virtual museum
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DATE: 09/09/2004 01:37:28 PM
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Mack sez: "I've posted a rich trove of new heavy little objects, including early mass-produced potted-meat propaganda, a rare bronze life-cast of Walt Whitman's hand, an anthropomorphic turn-of-the-century stapler and F. Scott Fitzgerald's very own water-closet pull handle." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geek law 101 audio
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DATE: 09/09/2004 02:42:59 PM
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My cow-orker Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director, gave a hell of a talk at the last USENIX Security Conference, a kind of geek-security-law 101 crash-course, usingthe fight over the leaked Diebold code as her example. EFF's just posted that talk in audio and as a set of slides. I just finished listening to it and man, did I get a lot out of it. Cindy is an amazing speaker, an amazing lawyer, and she's got a lot to say.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bounty for asking "How many times have you been arrested, Mr. President?"
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DATE: 09/09/2004 02:58:38 PM
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World's Shortest Blog is offering a bounty to the first person to publicly pose the following question to the erstwhile President: "How many times have you been arrested, Mr. President?" They're accepting PayPal donations to drive up the size of the bounty, which currently stands at $854.29. In the event of no award being given, the funds will be turned over to the DNC. Link (via Electrolite) (Thanks, Ivy!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ginseng science
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DATE: 09/09/2004 03:57:27 PM
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MIT researchers looked at why some scientific data shows that ginseng promotes blood vessel growth while other studies report the opposite.
Chemical fingerprints of four different varieties of ginseng—American, Chinese, Korean and Sanqi--show that each has different proportions of two key ingredients. Additional studies showed that a preponderance of one ingredient has positive effects on the growth of blood vessels; more of the other component tips the scale the other way.
The study, they say, supports the need for "regulations standardizing herbal therapies through compositional analysis." While that statement is sure to piss off a lot of people, the researchers also believe that reverse-engineering ginseng could eventually lead to the development of new wound-healing compounds.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: High as a spider
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DATE: 09/09/2004 04:06:00 PM
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The BBC reports that prison inmates in Australia milked redback spiders and shot up the venom to get high.
But a prison spokesman, Brian Kelly, was sceptical about the veracity of the claim the venom was used as a narcotic, saying it had come from a single unreliable inmate. Mr Kelly said the spiders were more likely to have been kept as pets.
Tarantella lessons in the yard after evening count! Link (Thanks, Kelly!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech Church of Doom
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DATE: 09/09/2004 08:19:26 PM
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Following up on two earlier BoingBoing posts about a Silicon Valley church that boasts the world-famous Jesus Christ Skate Ramp and Cellphone Tower of The Lord, Paul Robichaux says, "That was interesting, but this blog post from Scoble points to a description of the most tech-savvy church I've ever heard of. Plasma screens. WiFi in the building. Every sermon is recorded in full HD. It's astonishing." Link to blog post, and link to the church's home page.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Zentai woman
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DATE: 09/09/2004 08:32:49 PM
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Fleshbot points us to a pervtastic online gallery of zentai bondage fetish photos. What is zentai, you ask? Generally, it means a hot chick dressed up in a tightly fitted, opaque, body sock-y thing that covers every inch of her skin. Latex, leather, cloth, whatever. I'm trying to imagine what it must be like to be really turned on by this stuff. After a few minutes of squinting at my laptop, I still can't, so fuck it, I'll instead offer you this snip of engrish prose from the site:
"The wonder space which cannot be moved satisfactorily ... How can the sound of the outside which can be heard through cloth really be heard?"
Ponder that, grasshopper, while you click this Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Thorn Tree Travel Forum
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DATE: 09/09/2004 09:01:34 PM
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In his Cool Tools newsletter, Kevin Kelly says:
The most savvy travellers I know log onto Thorn Tree as they vagabond. Thorn Tree Travel Forum is where you get the latest, greatest, most dependable travel advice for exotic destinations. Originally set up by Lonely Planet as an online way for readers to update their guidebooks, this bulletin board now bypasses and surpasses the guidebooks altogether. Reliable travel info has been completely revolutionized by the ubiquity of internet cafes around the globe.
Let's say you want to know whether the border between China and Kazakhstan is open this October, or whether its safe to visit Katmandu, Nepal, or where the newest climbing spots in the Peru Andes are. You log on to the appropriate Thorn Tree "branch" where a traveler who is in Katmandu, or who has just arrived in Almaty yesterday after a harrowing 11 hour border crossing from China can tell you all the specific details of what is true and what is not. Someone else might post that the popular beach shack on Lombok island, Indonesia you were headed for is now closed. And, to complete the circuit, you may be on the road yourself, at a dusty internet cafe in Morocco, when you read this. It's true real-time advice, from real folks who've done it. Thorn Tree is a remarkably efficient way to score hard-to-get facts from and to the field. And for armchair planners at home, the sheer details available at a distance is heavenly.
I've found that the third world locations, rather than Europe and the US, are best served by the forums; but these after all are the very places instant ground-truthing is so badly needed. Thorn Tree is also a great place to connect up with others bent on long-term Around the World tours, and up-to-the-latest tips on long haul travel.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in LA: Jason Salavon at El Proyecto
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DATE: 09/09/2004 09:20:05 PM
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If you're in the LA area Friday night: Chicago-based artist Jason Salavon, whose work we've blogged here before, has a show launch at The Project.
Salavon digitally reconfigures raw source data into abstract, and often painterly, photographs and videos. Utilizing self-designed software programs, Salavon's hybridized artworks fuse information technology with pop cultural aesthetics. Salavon's recent photographic series, 100 Special Moments, culls images of newlyweds, graduates, little league players and traditional Santa portraits to manifest composite images of each scenario. The artist deconstructs nostalgia to its average mean, subverting and blurring the lines between singular and collective social experiences within the framework of commemorative photographs. For the Emblem series, Salavon interrogates the social implications of 1970s iconic films, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now, by algorithmically abstracting their filmic frames in time and subsequently reorganizing them in a circular structure reminiscent of traditional Mandalas. Late Night Triad, a three-channel video projection, overlays introductory monologues from late night talk show hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Conan O'Brien. Salavon digitally aligns and averages the comedic routines to expose the inherit repetition in their underlying structure and rhythmic timing.
Link to gallery website, Link to Salavon's website.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Readers respond to Xeni's "iPod Beemer" post with in-car digital audio tips
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DATE: 09/09/2004 09:35:04 PM
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Following up on yesterday's post (Link) about my week-long test drive of BMW's new iPod-integrated 330ci convertible, more in-car audio tech pointers from BoingBoing readers. Meanwhile, I'm still mopping up drool around the office. That iPod Beemer was nerd-o-licious.
Michael Morgan says, "One of the better approaches I have seen relies on using the CD changer inputs that many car stereos have. The simpler products, such as the one I have, provide RCA audio jacks. Better ones allow iPod control through the CD changer controls. The sound quality is better than FM or cassette tape adapters although the integration of iPod display and control is either poor or absent." Link
Nik Clayton says, "You should try out Dension's IceLink 1.1. This provides a cradle/dock that you can mount on the dash (damage free). Just drop the iPod in the dock, and the audio's taken from iPod's dock connector (far better quality than the headphone socket) and routed to the stereo, in place of the CD-multichanger. So the steering wheel controls work for changing tracks, and so on. And, of course, your iPod's there on the dash, so you can see all the information it displays. It also works in cars other than BMWs." Link
BoingBoing reader Chris says, "There are two other common solutions; some car radios now have a front panel auxiliary input. Just get a 'stereo plug to stereo plug' cable, and away you go. The other option is one of the FM modulators that plugs into the antenna lead. See the Farenheit EFM-01 or the JVC KS-IF200 - likely found many places but they re listed at Crutchfield. They are a little trickier to install, but as long as your car FM radio has an antenna (!) they should work. Link."
Neil replies to a comment submitted to BoingBoing by reader Becky (Link). He says, "To follow-up on Becky's problem with iPod installations in cars without cassette adapters there is actually another solution. Blitzsafe makes adapters that plug into the CD changer port that lives in most cars, and converts it to an AUX input for your car stereo. Then you can run a regular stereo cable to the front of the car to plug in any device you like (such as an iPod). I used one to install XM Satellite radio in my BMW. Sadly, it doesn't look like they have any for Saturn cars yet :( -- Link to Blitzsafe."
Tom Karches says, "A company called Soundgate (Link) makes a number of devices that allow iPods to be attached to factory or aftermarket stereos. Their auxillary input adapters attach to the cd changer plug on cd changer ready stereos and pass the audio through the changer input. If you have a changer already, they have a model that plugs in between the stereo and the changer and provides a switch to select the changer or the ipod. This does not provide ipod control, unfortunately. Perhaps something like this would help: Link. I'll probably put the Soundgate adapter in my minivan. If I decide to equip the honda similarly, I'll probably go with an inline RF modulator like this or this."
Anthony Hall says, "Although BMW claims they are the first car manufacturer with integrated iPod support I actually saw ads for Smart cars shipping with iPod cradles several months ago... I dunno, perhaps it's considered third party but Smart was plugging it in the own ads in the UK. Looks liker a much simpler proposition to me. I agree with you that having the iPod just rolling around loose in the glove compartment is nuts." Link
(Thanks to other readers who sent in great tips, including Wes, Adrian, Josiah, and Brian King!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in NYC: RESFEST Digital film festival
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DATE: 09/09/2004 09:49:54 PM
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If you're in New York today through Sunday, don't miss the 8th annual edition of digital film festival RESFEST. Organizer Jonathan Wells says:
There are lots of amazing elements at this year's fest -- among them,
1) Bushwhacked! - a special program for this election year of great viral political films from media jammers (The Yes Men, Bryan Boyce, Michael Moore) around the world, includes some world premieres like Pinocchio (image shown here) which was too hot for MoveOn.org, and a "Schoolhouse Rock"-style animation from Eric Henry, Pirates & Emperors (Or Size Does Matter)
2) Thomas Campbell's SPROUT -- presentation of amazing globetrotting surf film from acclaimed artist Thomas Campbell will be preceded by a in theater acoustic performance by the UK-based band Mojave 3 (who also contributed to the soundtrack).
3) RESFEST Live - Emergency Broadcast Network and Hexstatic -- our closing night event will feature an audio visual event from VJ pioneers NYC's EBN and UK's Hexstatic. EBN will showcase their Video Baby Grand Piano, while Hexstatic will preview work of their forthcoming Master View DVD album.
Event takes place at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center through Sunday, September 12. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Alternative energy vehicle web link bonanza
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DATE: 09/09/2004 09:53:59 PM
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Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post about fuel-cell powered UPS trucks (Link), we present a roundup of links related to alternative energy vehicles submitted by BoingBoing readers from around the world.
Robert in Australia says, "Transperth has acquired 3 Daimler/Chrysler fuel-cell buses for trial. This trial is being done in conjuction with a number of European trials." Link
Paul says, "UPS has been using alternative fuel vehicles since the 1930's (electric vehicles in NYC). 95% of the company's Mexico City vehicles burn propane. The company's earned 26 environmental awards." Link
Max says, "[San Francisco Bay Area public transportation system] AC Transit has been running a fuel cell bus since June. It is very eerie when it glides silently by. Brakes still screech, of course." Link
Matt says, The Hysun 3000 is a hydrogen fuel-cell-powered recumbant bike that began a 3000km tour yesterday, from Berlin to Barcelona. The vehicle is projected to use 3kg of hydrogen -- roughly equivalent to 1022 miles per gallon. Link to bike info, Link to tour diary, and Link to a good image.
Peter says, "Honda's hydrogen scooter might be the seed that grows a third world hydrogen fuel infrastructure for future cars and trucks." Link.
And Tim emails, "This site says that 'RunAbout Cycles go twenty miles an hour, as regulated by a new federally mandated classification for electric bicycles and tricycles. They have a forty mile range on motor alone, and the more you pedal, the further and faster you can go.' Available early 2005." Link
Brad says, "I have a friend in London who has spotted many fuel cell buses and has some pictures of them in use here: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lonely Island: wack-ass online shorts and mp3s
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DATE: 09/09/2004 10:15:25 PM
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Last week in LA, I went to a Channel 101 screening -- monthly events where a edgy creatives show short films before a live audience, who in turn vote the work on or off the proverbial viewing island. The project isn't a cable TV show yet, but it ought to be. I understand they recently shot a cable pilot for FX, so perhaps it will.
One of the teams who participate regularly in the Channel 101 showdowns is The Lonely Island, and they've just posted a bunch of their work online. It's terrific stuff. One of their pieces, which screened at last week's event, is a dry, deadpan music video performed by two guys, called, uh, "Just 2 Guyz." (MPEG-4 Link, MPEG-1 Link, 2 min.). I loved their "Nintendo" animated short, too (MPEG / Quicktime, 3 min.)
Episodes of the Lonely Island short series The 'Bu are here (Link), with Sarah Chalke of Scrubs and Roseanne fame. Other celeb links -- Brooke Shields has a 5-minute bit in the begining of Episode 2: Regarding Ardy. (Link). Kal Penn (of Harold and Kumar and Gilmore Girls) plays Fred in Episode 2. A source close to the project says, "Kiefer Sutherland interrupted the filming of episode 1, then told all sorts of fanciful embellishments about it on Leno and Letterman. (Link)."
Link to The Lonely Island, and Link to the Channel 101 site where you'll find more online shorts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jason DeFillippo's Kaiju Big Battel photos from last night's Hollywood show
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DATE: 09/09/2004 10:40:52 PM
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Blogger and photogger Jason DeFillippo joined me at the Kaiju Big Battel event last night, held at the Avalon in Hollywood. I was covering the event for NPR's "Day to Day," and for Wired News (links to those reports to follow as soon as they're online). Jason took some amazing photos, as usual -- I always love his stuff. The monster shots rock, but here I'm posting a snapshot he took (link to fullsize) of me interviewing Kitty Bukkake, the now LA-based blogger who lived a former life in Boston as the Kaiju monster Dino Kang Senior (here's a link to his offspring, Dino Kang Junior). She still works with Kaiju Big Battel, and was filming last night's mayhem for the group. I'm not sure how a murdered monster manages to be reborn as a drop-dead-hot blogger babe with washboard abs, but those things happen in Hollywood.
Link to Jason's photo gallery.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero-G
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DATE: 09/09/2004 11:50:00 PM
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Next week, on Wednesday September 15, I'm going on a zero-gravity flight about 32,000 feet above earth.
The company operating this flight is ZERO-G, whose founder Peter Diamandis is also the man behind the Ansari X-Prize competition. I invited Dr. Diamandis to speak at Wired Magazine's NextFest earlier this year, met him there, and learned he'd been working on this program for more than ten years.
The flight I'm taking next week (for NPR and Wired News) is part of ZERO-G's five-city media launch. Soon, they'll begin a commercial service on specially-equipped Boeing 727-200s. For about $3,000 US, passengers will be able to experience about 20 doses of parabolic weightlessness during a 90-minute trip.
Nothing like this has ever been offered to American consumers before. ZERO-G is the only company with FAA approval to conduct weightless flights for the public within the US.
NASA operates flights similar to this for training astronauts (Link), but not to the public. Space Adventures -- the company that made space tourists out of Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth (and, almost, N'Sync's Lance Bass) -- sells "vomit comet" flight experiences to paying passengers, but they cost closer to $10K and depart from a remote location in Russia. The combined costs of the flight, the prep, and getting to the departure site add up to a hefty five-figure sum. With the launch of this new service in the US, zero-G above the earth will now only cost a few G.
I've never done anything like this before. What will weightlessness feel like? A rollercoaster? Or floating in water, but without the water? When I was little, I used to have lots of recurring dreams about flying -- the dream-sensation of weightlessness felt so vivid, once I half-woke-up and sleep-jumped right off a flight of stairs. How is it that our bodies already know what zero-g feels like? Are we remembering what it felt like to float in utero? That waking dream of flight and floating -- it's something each of us physically understand. I'm looking forward to feeling the real thing.
My grandfather was an amateur astronomer. He taught me a lot of things about stars and space when I was a kid. He was there, downstairs in the living room, when I realized I couldn't fly that day -- about halfway down the stairs. He picked me up, held me in his arms, wiped my tears, and probably had to work really hard at not laughing.
Later, after lots of band-aids and kleenex, he explained what gravity was. I remember feeling really sad and crying all over again when he told me, "Honey, people just can't float like that." I wish he could still be here now, and float with me next Wednesday.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Donald Leslie, RIP
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DATE: 09/10/2004 02:02:19 AM
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BB mourns the passing of Donald James Leslie, the inventor of the Leslie Rotating Speaker that provided the Hammond organ with its signature sound. The "Leslie" speaker spins inside its cabinet at a constant speed around a fixed point, providing an unmistakable Doppler effect. From the Associated Press obituary:
Leslie was captivated with the sound of the Hammond organ when he heard it at a Barker Bros. furniture store in downtown Los Angeles, where he worked repairing radios. In the store's large showroom, the organ introduced in 1935 sounded much like a theater or church pipe organ.
However, Leslie, was unimpressed with the organ's sound quality in the confined spaces of his home.
He began tinkering with devices to make the instrument sound more like labyrinthine pipe organs, using mechanics and electronics experience he gathered from a series of jobs, including one at the Naval Research Laboratories in Washington, D.C., during World War II.
Donald Leslie was 93.
Link (Thanks, Vann)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 09/10/2004 02:15:47 AM
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In this month's of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley Engineering, I look at:
*Sniffing Out Airborne Diseases: integrating human cells and microfluidics to detect pathogens in the air
*Wireless Ways to Go Green: the environmental impact of reading the news online
*Protecting Planes with Fabric: testing next-generation ballistic cloth
* The Invention of Virtual Cinematography: the key to The Matrix's "bulllet-time" sequence
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Filmnerds' guerrilla Toronto Film Festival blog
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DATE: 09/10/2004 06:03:43 AM
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Rich sez,
We're 4 Toronto nerds, we're attending the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, we're blogging our reviews.
We don't get media passes, we don't go to press conferences or release parties or even the suit-and-tie gala screenings. We pick movies we think we'll like, count ourselves lucky if we get tickets, then line up on the sidewalk to try to get a good seat. Then we write honest nerd's-eye reviews.
Link
(Thanks, Rich!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Michael Eisner quits
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DATE: 09/10/2004 06:32:12 AM
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Michael Eisner has announced that he's quitting as CEO of Disney when his contract runs out in 2006.
Eisner recently told Walt Disney directors that company president Robert Iger would be a good successor, the Los Angeles Times reported. Iger, whose contract expires in September 2005, has recently met with investors and executives and told the Times he would like the top job.
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World's tallest cylindrical aquarium
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DATE: 09/10/2004 08:24:50 AM
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The Aquadom is the world's largest cylindrical aquarium. It's in the lobby of a multi-use development, stretching 5 storeys up, with a glass elevator down the middle of it.
Link
(Thanks, kokogiak!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eisner's resignation letter
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DATE: 09/10/2004 08:30:30 AM
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Here's the text of Eisner's letter announcing his intention to resign from Disney in 2006.
We are different from companies not in the entertainment field. We are a creative company, and as a result, we are so much more. We must consider, develop, discard and reconsider, literally masses of ideas each day, based on few inexact criteria, using experience, talent, judgment, instinct, and hope as our guides along with our education and experience and sense of fiscal responsibility. This is a complicated and risky process, unlike the manufacture and sale of a single or related line of product. We are judged by definitive standards. But it is the creative that pushes to new heights that which can be measured, that which has lasting value to our culture and company.
I believe we have learned who we are, and who we are not; what we do best, and what we don't. Of course, that does not mean we stagnate into a museum or play safe. It just means we play smart. There are so many opportunities available to utilize our core assets, our brands and capabilities around the world. We must be completely informed and involved in the future, in new technologies that can help us maintain our leadership in creating and distributing and protecting our content. We must be prudent entrepreneurs and pragmatic capitalists. We must not forget that we are always singing and dancing "for our supper."
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NES-based PC mod
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DATE: 09/10/2004 08:36:43 AM
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Here's an excellent HOWTO for retrofitting a PC into Nintendo Entertainment System.
Link
(via Engadget)
It's a sad week in music instrument history. First, the death of Donald Leslie. And yesterday, pioneer guitar string maker Ernie Ball gave up the ghost at just 74. Ernie Ball's strings are as ubiquitous in rock and roll as Fender guitars. According to the Associated Press, Ball developed his first strings in 1962 after "complaints from customers (at his guitar shop) that they couldn't find lighter-gauge, flexible strings for their rock 'n' roll instruments." Shortly after, the Slinkys were born. And, well, the guitar solo has never been the same.
Link (Thanks, Vann)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kaiju Monsters Invade Hollywood
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DATE: 09/10/2004 10:40:29 AM
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In today's Wired News, a photo-report I filed from Wednesday night's Kaiju Big Battel performance in Hollywood. At left, a snapshot I took of a space insect monster dude creature whose name escapes me.
Despite the fact that combatants may look like costumed humans, event organizers maintain they're real, and warn of the danger posed to mankind by the growing threat of city-crushing beasts.
"There is an abundance of empirical evidence that the threat posed by monsters is serious and far-reaching," Kaiju Big Battel referee Jinji told Wired News. "A number of great documentaries like Godzilla have reported these historic facts in great detail. Our world leaders would be wise to pay closer attention to this under-recognized menace." (...)
Featured villains and heroes included Dr. Cube, a sinister plastic surgeon who boasts of an "unstoppable malpractice technique"; an inebriated Hell Monkey wielding a large bottle of primordial booze; a pair of freedom-fighting plantains from Central America who toted color-coordinated AK-47s; and garbage-can-dwelling Gomi-man, who spewed a rain of fetid sludge on human observers.
Link to Xeni's report and photos at Wired News: "Kaiju Monsters Invade Hollywood," Link to previous Wired News story "Monster Mashes Attract Big Masses."
See also: Link to Jason DeFillippo's superb photos of the event. This one's my favorite.
And BoingBoing reader Teresa Ortega says, "I went to Kaiju Big Battel in Los Angeles based on Xeni's post and did a write-up at my site." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Skull and Bones Club expose on BBC
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DATE: 09/10/2004 10:42:37 AM
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Matthew sez: "Last night, BBC Radio 4 aired a fascinating programme about Yale's ultra-secretive Skull and Bones club. Both George W and John Kerry are members of the club and the programme suggests it has a wide-ranging influence in American life.
Direct link to the RealPlayer stream of the show, which should be available for seven days.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Unofficial Apple Weblog is looking for a couple of bloggers
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DATE: 09/10/2004 10:52:20 AM
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Our friend Jason Calacanis, head of Weblogs, Inc., wants to hire two bloggers to fill the vacancies at the wonderful Unofficial Apple Weblog. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: What's on your "To Don't" list?
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DATE: 09/10/2004 11:12:10 AM
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Management guru Tom Peters has written something called "60 Tom's TIB," (This I Believe) available for download as a PDF. On his Brianstorms Weblog, Brian Dear highlights this interesting excerpt about prioritizing from the Peters document:
I once watched a highly energetic chief ripped asunder by a senior member of his board. “Richard,” the determined board member almost shouted, “you are smart, energetic, creative to a fault, perhaps even a genius. But much of your 'genius' is dissipated because you apply it to ten different things at a time, albeit with great skill.
“Let me tell you what you need,” he concluded. “A 'to don't' list.”
I don't know about “Richard,” but for me that was a profound moment. Fact No. 1: We all have 50 genuine priorities. Fact No. 2: If we get even two Big Things Done in a six-year tenure on the current job, we will have had a...Great Ride. Axiom No. 1: Therefore, what we choose not to do (the sole subject of that “To Don't” list) is at least as important, or more important, as what we choose to do.
And, finally, effective “To Don't-ing” is far, far more difficult than effective “To Do-ing.”
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Old Atari games being licensed for slot machines
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DATE: 09/10/2004 11:36:48 AM
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Vegas, baby. BoingBoing reader Clive says, "Atari has signed a deal to produce a series of casino slot machines based on their early arcade classics -- including Pong, Asteroids, and Centipede." Link to Atari press release.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtual schizophrenia comes to Second Life
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DATE: 09/10/2004 12:29:02 PM
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Wagner James Au sez, "A medical doctor/computer programmer recently built a simulation of visual and aural hallucinations in Second Life, based on the descriptions of real schizophrenics. In other words, it's a virtual, first-person recreation of the illness, and the potential applications (therapeutic, neurological, social, etc.) are pretty exciting. Also eerie, disturbing, and likely to disturb your sleep for a day or two afterward."
Link
(Thanks, James!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Good hypnotic subjects' brains are different
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DATE: 09/10/2004 12:40:52 PM
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I've been practicing self-hypnosis since I was a kid, and as an adult, hypnosis helped me overcome a five-year bout of writers' block, get rid of lifelong chronic back-pain, and painlessly kick an 18-year-old smoking habit. For all that, I know precious little of how hypnosis works -- it just works (for me, at least).
Now the New Scientist reports that functional MRI scans of the brains of regular practitioners of hypnosis reveals physiological differences from those who are not susceptible to hypnosis.
But under hypnosis, Gruzelier found that the highly susceptible subjects showed significantly more brain activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus than the weakly susceptible subjects. This area of the brain has been shown to respond to errors and evaluate emotional outcomes.
The highly susceptible group also showed much greater brain activity on the left side of the prefrontal cortex than the weakly susceptible group. This is an area involved with higher level cognitive processing and behaviour.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Narratologists versus Ludologists: battle of the games-academics
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DATE: 09/10/2004 12:48:53 PM
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Over on Terra Nova, academic Timothy Burke has posted a fascinating state-of-the-nation report on the fight between "narratologists" (who argue that the value of games is best understood by treating them as stories) and "ludologists" (who argue that the value is best understoof by analyzing games as a form of play). This is a new discipline a-borning, and its paradigm is being framed before our eyes:
In the context of games criticism, this tendency might lead to a narratologist placing enormous interpretative weight on the fact that most first-person shooters are structured by conflicts between the player’s avatar and small groups of three to six enemies, seeing this as a narrative choice that has authorial intent behind it, that can be related to various similar kinds of narratives in other media (e.g., the ur-narrative of Die Hard or Rambo or James Bond films, the narrative pacing of action films where the uber-masculine hero crushes small packs of slightly-less-manly bad guys). The problem is that the narratological kinship between Die Hard and first-person-shooters is a much more complicated matter in its actual historical evolution. If anything, when first-person-shooters first appeared with narratological structure that resembled the narrative of action films, to some extent that content was a superficial add-on rather than a deep structure of gameplay, a kind of narratological “skin”. The original Doom is a very good example of this pattern. The deep structure of the game (single player avatar versus distributed clusters of enemies) was, before anything else, a technical requirement dictated by the number of enemies it was then possible to have on the screen. This continues to be the case even though computers have much more processing power because the enemies have become much more graphically demanding.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shakespeare quartos in high-rez scans
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DATE: 09/10/2004 01:19:27 PM
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The British Library has digitised its collection of Shakespeare quartos and made them available as a series of lavish scans. They've posted 93 quartos of 23 plays, so you can see how the text changed over time.
Link
(via Raelity Bytes)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mad Magazine: Bush Vs Jesus
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DATE: 09/10/2004 01:22:36 PM
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Thom sez: Atrius has a copy of a funny and insightful Mad Magazine parody of a TV commercial Bush would air if he were running against Jesus. Bottom line: "Jesus wrong on social services. Wrong on crime. Wrong on defense. Wrong for America." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Award-winning sf as CC-licensed audiobooks
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DATE: 09/10/2004 03:10:01 PM
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Hugo-award-winning author James Patrick Kelly's "Free Reads" site is a place where he posts Creative-Commons-licensed studio recordings of him reading his works. He's a fantastic reader, and an even better writer, and he made enough off his tipjar the last time around to go into the studio and record three more:
"Faith" first published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1989. Time:59:25, File Size 27.86 MB.
"The Best Christmas Ever" first published in SciFiction, May, 2004. Time:39:38, File Size 19.03 MB.
"Serpent" first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 2004. Time:22:53, File Size 10.74 MB.
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(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rowboat Veterans for Truth
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DATE: 09/10/2004 05:11:02 PM
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Snipped from the site:
" Rowboat Vets for Truth is here to share the real story, to correct the misleading use of our images, against our will, in paintings, woodcuts and pamphlets across the colonies.
The Rowboat Vets for Truth will counter the outrageous claims made by Mr. Washington and the liberal printing presses in Boston and Philadelphia.
We speak from personal experience - our group includes men who served beside Washington in combat against unarmed Germans on Christmas night, 1776. Though we come from different backgrounds, shoe menders, haberdashers, stable boys, candle holders to the wealthy. etc., and hold varying political opinions, we agree on one thing: George Washington lacks the potential to lead."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in SF this weekend: 9/11 Power to the Peaceful, Election Protection
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DATE: 09/10/2004 06:14:31 PM
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General John Perry "Dance Dance Revolution" Barlow says:
My sweet song-writing collaborators and shirt-tail family, The String Cheese Incident, are playing a free concert for peace tomorrow in Golden Gate Park along with Michael Franti (whom I'm convinced is some kind of avatar) and various others. Looks like this:
6th Annual 911 Power to the Peaceful Festival
Saturday September 11, 2004 (11am-5pm)
Speedway Meadow - Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, CA, USA
Featuring Michael Franti and Spearhead, String Cheese Incident Acoustic, Gift of Gab of Blackalicious, John Butler Trio, Xavier Rudd, and Amy Goodman.
Link to event website.
And BoingBoing pal Jose Marquez sez, "This 'Election Protection' event might be less bumpin'," but it too is devoted to giving power to the peaceful.
September 11, 2-5 p.m., Yerba Buena Gardens, Mission St. between 3rd and 4th Sts.
Featuring Eva Jefferson Paterson of Equal Justice Society, Ralph Neas and Sharon Lettman Pacheco of the People For the American Way Foundation, and Michael Kieschnick of Working Assets.
Join Working Assets, Mother Jones magazine, People For the American Way Foundation, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Equal Justice Society, True Majority, AlterNet.org, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, and others to learn about opportunities to help protect voting rights in key states on November 2. Participants in this outdoor rally and training will receive an update on efforts to prevent minority disenfranchisement and intimidation at the polls, challenges posed by computer voting systems and an overview of the key states where voting rights are at greatest risk.
Link to event website.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ballet bukkake art porn video from Japan
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DATE: 09/10/2004 06:25:15 PM
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The review of the microniche fetish porn vid "Zenra Ballet 2" on Something Awful is a hoot.
At a Glance: Get out your copybooks, because you can now cross "ballet" off of the "Big List of Things the Japanese Won't Make Porno Out Of". If you are an avid fan of ballet - but, you aren't such an avid fan that you actually have some modicum of respect for the art of ballet dancing - then you are probably the target market for this DVD. It features exciting behind the scenes interviews, some regular and wholesome non-erotic ballet dancing, and then multiple nude and even sex-filled dance sequences. You have not lived until you have seen a Japanese pirate rip a boner out of his leotard and plunge it into the waiting food-hole of a sassy ballerina.
Sexual Content: Heavily mosaic censored dancin' and a prancin'.
Link to SomethingAwful review, and link to Fleshbot post with more info. (Thanks, Fleshbot, and thanks Super Nice Guy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo introducing consumer electronics line?
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DATE: 09/10/2004 08:53:23 PM
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Engadget posts word of a rumored new line of consumer electronics -- from Yahoo. An official launch announcement is said to be due within the next two weeks. This could also be nothing more than someone with a good imagination and functional Photoshop skills.
The initial line up is supposedly a portable DVD player, two LCD televisions, and a home theater in a box system. Like most of these kinds of releases (assuming this is for real), they're really just slapping their logo on products built by somebody else (in this case, it's supposedly Diamond Electronics). This is either a really big deal or someone just went to a lot of trouble to try and dupe us -- regardless, everything looked like it checked out, and it was too good to not pass along. Make sure you click to see pics and product descriptions.
Link to Engadget post with photos.
Update: Jason says he's received this email from a Yahoo spokesperson:
This is a licensing agreement through our marketing department. It's just another component of a licensing program that we've had in place for several years for a variety of items such as computer peripherals and we're now extending to additional items such as those you see in the photograph.
The manufacturer is Diamond Electronics and we will be providing our branding and logo. The manufacturer is working to sell these products into major retailers.
It's an exciting extension of the Yahoo! brand, but it won't be a significant announcement for the company as the blog suggests.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Paris underground cinema, part 2
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DATE: 09/11/2004 03:20:16 AM
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The secret society behind the subterranean cinema recently discovered by police in Paris have come forward. According to a Guardian article, the mission of the group, called La Mexicaine de la Perforation, is to "reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art."
"There are so many underground networks - the quarries, the metro, the collective heating, the electricity, the sewers - and each is the responsibility of a different bureaucracy... Urban explorers are the only people who, between us, know it all. We move between each network. We know where they link up - often, it's us who made the link. The authorities, the police, town hall, they don't know a hundredth, a thousandth, of what's down there."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese cosplay scene photos
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DATE: 09/11/2004 09:19:13 AM
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Funder sez: "MasaManiA describes itself as 'Japanese culture report by MasaManiA with fucking photo & poor English you never seen at boring CNN, Time or major sophisticated jurnalism.' In this entry, he visits a cosplay convention and shows some of the costumes/performers that were rejected by the organizers. The first picture - a sad, rejected robot - sums up everything that is pitiful and sad and surreal and totally hysterical in the world. Hope you like it! "Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Grouper - simple private network
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DATE: 09/11/2004 09:41:02 AM
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Cliff sez: There's a new software shop here in Mill Valley, of all places. They've made
a pretty cool little "virtual private network for the rest of us" ... called Grouper and here's a bit about it:
Current release version is in beta. Runs only on Win2000 and XP. Requires
broadband.
With the client installed, you can create groups of up to 30 members and
invite people to join them. The invitation includes the client.
Each peer can choose to share selected files. The client includes group chat
and 1-to-1 IM.
You can download all but MP3s. Those you can only stream. I know that will
be a point of contention, but it's not meant primarily to be a source of
free music. I think it's more for groups of friends, family, classmates,
associates who share photos and other large files. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Colorcalm: soothing screensavers for DVD players
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DATE: 09/11/2004 10:23:25 AM
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A company called Colorcalm has created a sort of ambient DVD called "Skies" -- soothing, color-specific programming set to music. The content was produced by Atmos Pictures, together with Pantone. This sounds like it would be really lovely on a large, flat-screen display in your living room. Company founder Robert Norton tells BoingBoing that upscale retailer Conran spotted the product during fashion week in New York, and promptly placed it on all of the TVs in their stores.
From the press release:
"Colorcalm pioneers a new and non-traditional way to use your TV to create a calm atmosphere. Colorcalm Skies, a continuous display of skies with 28 color and audio variations is designed to soothe your senses... Robert Norton, Founder and CEO of Atmos [says], 'Colorcalm is a response to the abundance of TV screens that surround us. Many homes now have more screens than family members. Colorcalm lets you bring color to your life in a soothing, calming way, which you can control. By adding color to your life, Colorcalm enhances your surroundings and improves your well-being.' Colorcalm also offers corporate clients the opportunity to use their own corporate, Pantone Colors to create tailored, color programming for brand-marketing purposes."
$19.99 at this Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tigers in the Korean DMZ?
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DATE: 09/11/2004 10:42:53 AM
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Snipped from Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design email newsletter, a New York Times story about wild animals reclaiming the heavily-landmined DMZ that divides North and South Korea.
[E]nvironmentalists have recognized this area one of the most enduring symbols of the cold war and one of the most fortified and heavily mined stretches on earth as the Korean peninsula's, and possibly East Asia's, most important wildlife refuge. They have been pressing to preserve it but are feeling a special urgency now because of the growing reconciliation between the North and the South. The environmentalists fear that a South Korea that puts economic development first and a North Korea that has no environmental movement could together lead to the zone's rapid destruction as a refuge. (..)
"The DMZ is the last major vestige of Korea's natural heritage," said Kim Ke Chung, a professor at the Center for BioDiversity Research at Penn State and chairman of the DMZ Forum, an organization based in the United States that is dedicated to preserving the zone. "It's probably the only good thing to come out of the Korean War and cold war. So we have to preserve this as a nature reserve." [Bruce Sterling says: "How did the Cold War become the 'cold war' all of a sudden?]
The DMZ Forum recently held a conference in Seoul to gather support for designating the zone a Unesco World Heritage Site, a classification that would curb all development. William B. Shore, secretary of the forum and a former fellow at the Regional Plan Association of New York, said the zone should become a center for eco-tourism as an alternative to turning it into a weekend getaway for residents of Seoul.
"People are now willing to pay large sums to see wild animals in the proper setting," Mr. Shore said. "Eco-tourism would protect the DMZ from becoming the Hamptons of South Korea." [Bruce Sterling says: "Perhaps it's possible to transform the Hamptons into a DMZ."]
reg-free Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Celebrity Zen
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DATE: 09/11/2004 10:44:09 AM
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who is that with jeremy
you and stevie nicks
key speakers
morrissey gets a job
new wave photos
from heiress to fammous
awful plastic surgery
casting mistakes
Image: Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV shot by Phillippe Carly on September 23, 1984, in Deinze, Belgium (holy crap, that's 20 years ago)
. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vegas chic: Fabulous Nowhere t-shirts
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DATE: 09/11/2004 11:20:09 AM
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Screenwriter/Director/bon vivant Lloyd Fonvielle recently relocated from New York to Las Vegas, and teamed up with NYC-based graphic artist John Sosnovsky to create the Official Nowhere T-Shirt, available only through the end of this year. Says Lloyd, "Someday owning one of these shirts will be your only way of proving that you were on the road to Nowhere before the rest of the world caught on. Be sure to buy some extras to keep in mint condition for sale on eBay in years to come, when they will undoubtedly become passionately coveted big ticket items!"
Link to T-shirts in English, Link to a global variant strain, and link to Lloyd's Fabulous Nowhere blog.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: That's Queen Hello Kitty to you, bitch
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DATE: 09/11/2004 11:36:01 AM
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Platinum icon of Hello Kitty with a diamond-studded crown and 0.753-carat pink diamond scepter, created in honor of the character's 30th birthday. 100 of them are available at a cool 10 mil yen JP (just over $91,000 US). Link to Xinhua news story. (Thanks Ivy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR panorama: Tribute in light, 09/11/2001
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DATE: 09/11/2004 12:04:06 PM
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From the BoingBoing archives -- this full-screen QTVR panorama of the light tribute to victims of 9/11, shot by Jook Leung. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni flies Zero-G, part 2: word to the weightless wise
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DATE: 09/11/2004 12:04:26 PM
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In a few days, God willing, I'll be floating around on one of the first ever commercial weightless flights in the USA. Friends, colleagues, and astro-nerdy strangers have been offering all sorts of advice ranging from scientifically substantiated to silly.
Some have even suggested some crash-course reading over the weekend. Lloyd Fonveille says that Air & Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement by Gaston Bachelard is a must: "Dense writing but amazing stuff about flying and flying dreams... he argues that images and dreams of flying are the highest state of the imagination, and emblems of the mental place where all real creativity happens."
As I prepare for Wednesday's adventure, I'll share some of this microgravity advice here on BoingBoing. I'll start with insights from experienced zero-g flier Raffi Krikorian of MIT (and O'Reilly).
I rode on NASA's KC-135a a few years ago (I was running a series of experiments to determine whether the brain's ability to localize sound was affected by being in a microgravity environment -- the anwer is that it is, but I digress), and it was an awesome experience.
NASA requires a lot of pre-training before they even allow you to get on the plane (a series of lectures about what to do if your sinus collapses, a hyperbaric chamber ride to have you experience what happens in the case of a rapid decompression of the cabin as the KC-135 is a single hulled plane), and going through that type of training is quite exhaustive. You spend a day in the classroom, then you spend a day learning how to work the emergency equipment and how to breathe through a reverse pressurized mask.
When the day of the ride comes, everybody tells you a few pieces of advice
1. bring jolly ranchers and gum
2. eat bananas and muffins for breakfast (extra credit for eating food coloring) [Ed note: I suppose this way, everything will look super-pretty and colorful IF YOU HURL IT ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLANE]
3. don't look out the window when flying.
As we were climbing for our first drop, I was chewing my gum like mad. The common advice is to get your mouth a little wet and to distract yourself of what was going to happen next. And then, all of a sudden, you lift right off the floor. I, personalily, was terrified on the first drop. I flailed around trying desperately to grab hold of something. I grab onto the floor, and it must have been amusing to see me hanging upside down, trying to pull myself down.
After that, it gets a lot easier. You just float around. Pushing yourself off the walls, and just bounce around. I was busy running an experiment, but it seems as though you will have time to play around.
What they don't tell you is that you will experience portions of negative gravity where you are pulled for the roof. Those freak you out. You're hanging out, chillin' in the air, and then all of a sudden you are rocketing towards the ceiling and pushing yourself off from it. Enterprising people invert themselves at that point, and go walking around up top. But, if you manage to close your eyes and somehow end up upside down, your brain will be convinced that you are right side up. You'll see people who are the other way from you. And then. Oh no. You puke.
The interesting thing about puking (or playing with any liquid) is its fascinating to watch it ooze around. Try it. Squirt some water into the air while you're floating -- it's gorgeous to watch these bubbles float around. and you can poke at it. Catch them. I'ts amazing. If you have a chance also, light a match. The flame makes a perfect sphere. Things you never think you'll see.
Image: photograph of a balloon full of water exploding in zero gravity on NASA's vomit comet (the KC-135 which Raffi discusses above). Link to full-size. The experiment was part of an Imaging and Photographic Technology project between NASA and the Rochester Institute of Technology: Link
Link to previous post: Xeni Flies Zero-G, part 1
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TITLE: Polyclothery: online social networking service in-joke in S, M, L
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DATE: 09/11/2004 07:17:32 PM
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Nothing says sxxy nrrd like T-shirts with "FLAG PROFILE AS MATURE" on the front, and the Tribe.net logo on the back. I think former BoingBoing guestblogger Karen Marcelo is behind this, but I'm not sure. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SF writers on the future
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DATE: 09/12/2004 03:20:08 AM
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Former BB Guestblogger John Shirley interviewed me, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton, as science fiction writers, about the future. It's just showed up on Locus's website:
Cory Doctorow doubts the efficacy of big control and again sees information as the key: "The Stasi — the East German version of the KGB — had detailed files on virtually every resident of East Germany, yet somehow managed to miss the fact that the Berlin Wall was about to come down until it was already in rubble. Tell me again how a centralized government makes us more secure? September 11th wasn't a failure to gather enough intelligence: it was a failure to correctly interpret the intelligence in hand. There was too much irrelevant data, too much noise. Gathering orders of magnitude MORE noise just puts that needle into a much bigger haystack, while imposing high social costs. Fingerprinting visitors to the US and jailing foreign journalists for not understanding the impossibly baroque new visa regs makes America less secure (by encouraging people to lie about the purposes of their visit and by chasing honest people out of the country), not more."
Bruce Sterling speculates that big global government might take new shapes: "I had a brainstorm about this very problem recently. What if there were two global systems of governance, and they weren't based on control of the landscape? Suppose they interpenetrated and competed everywhere, sort of like Tory and Labour, or Coke and Pepsi. I'm kind of liking this European 'Acquis' model where there is scarcely any visible 'governing' going on, and everything is accomplished on the levels of invisible infrastructure, like highway regulations and currency reform."
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: REM's Peter Buck: enthusiastic pirate!
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Thomas Hawk sez, "Recently REM's Peter Buck was reported to have given iPods full of music (probably around 10,000 tracks, if really full) to every single person who worked on REMs latest album, even reportedly engineers who he had only known a few weeks."
While Stipe and Mills have developed other interests in their adult life beyond the band and music, Buck hasn't. He recently filled up the iPods of everyone who worked on REM's new album with songs that he thought they might like - and considering iPods can take up to 10,000 songs, this was a Herculean feat of downloading. "He's become obsessed with it," says Stipe. "He has done this for everyone who worked on our new record, including the engineers, who he had only known for a couple of weeks. What's interesting is to discover what he thinks we should be listening to. Mike got entire albums by Miles Davis, for example, while I only got the greatest hits. It must have taken him weeks, but he really isn't interested in anything apart from his family and music," adds Mills. "He reads books, and plays music, and hangs out with his family. That's it. So he loves the iPod because it gives him a chance to go through thousands of records that he hasn't played for the last 20 years.
Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sneaky look at Boeing Surplus
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DATE: 09/12/2004 03:20:37 AM
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Tom sez, "I took some photos at Boeing Surplus today. It's a store that Boeing operates in
Kent, Washington, about twenty minutes south of Seattle. They sell all sorts of
weird and strange stuff, from gear used in the construction of jet liners to office
chairs to old employee nameplates. Photos and cameras are strictly prohibited, so I
was lucky to make it out with these photos that give a small sense of the place."
Link
(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Comic strip sendup of MPAA "respect copyright" ads
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DATE: 09/12/2004 09:47:01 AM
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Remember those in-theater MPAA ads blogged here, here and here on BoingBoing? Boondocks lampoons them this week.
Link (Thanks, Patricio!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mystery explosion in North Korea
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DATE: 09/12/2004 10:10:12 AM
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In North Korea earlier this week: an explosion, a giant crater, and a "peculiar cloud." Both the South Korean government and the US government say they don't believe North Korea conducted a nuclear test.
The event took place on the day of North Korea's most important national holiday. September 9, 1948, is the day on which the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded.
President Bush and his top advisers have received intelligence reports in recent days describing a confusing series of actions by North Korea that some experts believe could indicate the country is preparing to conduct its first test explosion of a nuclear weapon, according to senior officials with access to the intelligence.
While the indications were viewed as serious enough to warrant a warning to the White House, American intelligence agencies appear divided about the significance of the new North Korean actions, much as they were about the evidence concerning Iraq's alleged weapons stockpiles.
Some analysts in agencies that were the most cautious about the Iraq findings have cautioned that they do not believe the activity detected in North Korea in the past three weeks is necessarily the harbinger of a test. A senior scientist who assesses nuclear intelligence says the new evidence "is not conclusive," but is potentially worrisome.
Link to Reuters report, reg-free Link to New York Times story
Update: News reports are now saying the blast may have been related to a dam-building project, or some similar public work.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Copyright proposal INDUCEs worry
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DATE: 09/12/2004 10:22:23 AM
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In Wired News, a report on Thursday's recommendation by copyright officials that US law be amended so that companies that rely on copyright infringement to make a profit can be held liable for their actions.
The U.S. Copyright Office delivered its recommendations to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had asked for advice in developing proper language for the proposed Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560). The initial version of the bill, which would hold technology companies liable if they make products that encourage people to infringe copyrights, generated a firestorm of criticism from technology and consumer groups alike.
But while the copyright office -- which released its recommendations publicly on Friday -- clearly made a good-faith effort to address the concerns of the music and movie industries, technology companies and consumers, critics said the bill would take copyright law in a dangerous direction.
"The copyright office is now suggesting the exploration of a new and radically unprecedented approach to copyright law," said Bob Schwartz, counsel for the Consumer Electronics Association and the Home Recording Rights Coalition. "It would not require that a defendant in a copyright suit have any knowledge of infringing conduct, any relationship with a particular infringer or any intent to commit a violation of the law."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G, part 3: Superman Moves
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DATE: 09/12/2004 10:50:46 AM
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New York Times reporter John Schwartz took a flight on NASA's zero-gravity "vomit comet" earlier this year, and wrote a terrific first-person piece about his experience. You have to pay $2.95 to read it at nytimes.com, but I found a helpful site in Turkey that coughs up the complete text gratis. Yay for Turkish websites!
For the first few parabolas, I did as the flight surgeon, Dr. James Locke, told me. Lie back in my seat with the seat belt unbuckled, holding the ends. When the plane rounded the top of the first curve, I felt a momentary dropping in the pit of my stomach and then gravity simply went away. I floated up from the seat. Thirty seconds later, my body pressed down against the seat once again, but with twice the normal weight as we slammed upward.
After growing used to the sensations through a few cycles, I pushed out of the seat and floated toward the ceiling, grabbing the canvas straps along the wall to move around. Dr. Locke told me that I was bouncing around a little too tentatively.
"Try the Superman move!" he said, stretching out his arms in an imitation of comic-book flight. I did, and gave a gentle kick against the wall and sailed to the other wall, slower than a speeding bullet, but nonetheless fulfilling childhood desires I had forgotten I had.
Link to John Schwartz: "Mild-Mannered Reporter Gets a Superman Moment." Link to full-size image from this gallery of space-themed children's publications from 1961-1974.
T minus 72 hours to liftoff. Previous posts: Link to part 2, and Link to part 1. Speaking of Turkey, Bruce Sterling says: Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online surreal/comic short film: Beautiful
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DATE: 09/12/2004 04:00:06 PM
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A disturbing new online art short from LA-based blogger, performance artist, and filmmaker Kitty Bukkake. Begins like a laudanum-induced Christina Aguilera karaoke hallucination, then u-turns into Carrie meets Karen Finley meets a back-alley psychosexual nightmare. Link, non-worksafe to the max.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: TIME Magazine Goatses America
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DATE: 09/12/2004 04:02:36 PM
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Check out the cover of this week's TIME. (Insert Beavisoid laugh) If you're unfamiliar with the term "goatse" -- it is the very definition of NSFW. A particularly abhorrent image which has become a sort of sick internet in-joke over the years. Search Google and ye shall find. But only if you're prepared for irreversible eyeball scarification. Or, for an eyeball- and work-safe answer, try wikipedia's entry.
Link to TIME Magazine's goatse tribute cover. Larger image here. (Thanks, Brad, and Boogah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G, part 4: zero gravity toilet
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DATE: 09/12/2004 04:07:35 PM
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Will they have one of these on board Wednesday's flight? As your trusty spaceblogger, I vow to phonecam it for you if they do. Zero-G Corporation's commercial weightless flights are intended for fun, unlike the NASA KC-135 flights, for which the primary purpose tends to be research. At $3000 +/- per ticket, discriminating fans of weightlessness should expect all mod cons. Link to Zero-Gravity Toilet Instructions, from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 3, 2, 1.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Foo Camp 2004
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DATE: 09/12/2004 05:32:41 PM
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I just got back from O'Reilly Media's annual foo camp, held in Sebastopol, California. I met a lot of people I knew only by name, and saw old friends I hadn't seen in years. Some of the people brought interesting projects with them to share. Here are some pictures I took. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Space probes pulled in weird ways
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DATE: 09/13/2004 12:52:38 AM
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The Guardian reports that the old Pioneer 10 and 11 probes are being subtly tugged around by mysterious forces as they hurtle beyond our solar system.
"Some researchers say unseen 'dark matter' may permeate the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers' passage. Others say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the crafts' wayward behaviour."
And still others suggest that the probes' weird trajectories may just be the result of gas leaking from the fuel tanks.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cows against public indecency
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DATE: 09/13/2004 01:02:42 AM
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The mayor of the Dutch town Spaarnwoude has invited a herd of cattle to graze in a nature reserve to deter people from having too much splendor in the grass:
"Visitors experience great annoyance from people having sex in public, and apparently the presence of the cows turns people off having sex," she said.
Most people, anyway. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Space Moot Court
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DATE: 09/13/2004 01:13:37 AM
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The Space Moot Court is an annual "moot court" (a theoretical exercise in which real lawyers and judges debate a fake issue to see where we're at) held to debate potential future issues in space-law. It's judged by the three sitting Judges of the International Court of Justice.
Link
(Thanks, Denise!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's next novel pre-sales at Amazon
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DATE: 09/13/2004 04:13:45 AM
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Amazon's put up their sell-page for my next novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," offering a 32% discount off the cover-price of $24.95 ($16.97 in total). The book's out in Februrary, and coincidentally, I just a couple hours ago overnighted the final version of the manuscript to my editor in NYC.
Someone Comes to Town is longest thing I've ever written -- longer than Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe put together. It's a kind of "Little, Big"-meets-"Crypotonomicon" story, a contemporary fantasy about free, unlicensed wireless networking, set in Toronto's bohemian Kensington Market.
I'm going to be posting the full text of this one under a Creative Commons license again when the time comes, and I've got some beautiful supplementary artwork to go with the gorgeous Dave McKean cover; McKean provided five digital paintings to Irene Gallo, Tor's brilliant, award-winning art director, and he's kindly granted me permission to use them all on the book's website when I ship it.
In the meantime, there's an excerpt or two online already. Enjoy!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New York City art opening: Eric Paulos
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DATE: 09/13/2004 07:07:09 AM
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BB pal Eric Paulos has work in Passage of Mirage, a group exhibition opening tomorrow night (9/14) at Manhattan's Chelsea Art Museum. Paulos and the Experimental Interaction Unit will debut Limelight, an ambient display that illuminates our culture's anxieties about terrorism, disaster, and other potentially-catastrophic threats.
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"Limelight is a personal tactical system that removes the burden of anxiety associated with our continuous worry of emerging global and local threatening conditions. Using a collection of embedded sensors, local measurements of radioactivity and RF signals are continuously scanned for hostile patterns. Similarly, remote precursors of threats such as the appearance and frequency of specific keywords and discussions by various military, news, and independent sources are continuously monitored. The collected data is carefully analyzed and summarized as a visual output where various threats are mapped across a spectrum of illumined and pulsing colors."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Obituary of anti-flyer fanatic
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DATE: 09/13/2004 09:08:37 AM
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The LA Times has a wonderful obituary for a bit actor named Steve Wayne (Bedtime for Bonzo, Dragnet, Cisco Kid), who died at the age of 84. For the last quarter century of his life, Wayne was monomaniacally focused on tearing down fliers that were posted on walls and buildings.
Over the last two decades, Wayne tore down thousands of illegal fliers tacked on fences, traffic lights and utility poles. His quest was endless, like trying to wipe out gnats one swat at a time...
He began climbing up poles and clawing at the unwanted ads with a garden rake, or going after them while perched on the hood of a moving car with an accomplice at the wheel. But as fast as he tore them down, new ones would replace them...
In 1980 he was so upset by the proliferation of handbills for the Roxy, Troubadour and Whiskey a Go Go nightclubs that he spray-painted "Keep L.A. Clean" on the outsides of the famous establishments. He was arrested on suspicion of malicious vandalism, a charge that could have brought jail time and a steep fine...
He kept at it nearly up to the day he died, stopping to rip down signs "even when coming home from his chemo appointments," his daughter, Cathy Wayne, said in an interview.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: NatGeo photographer spanked by editors
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DATE: 09/13/2004 09:22:03 AM
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Gilles Nicolet, a photographer for National Geographic borrowed some old elephant husks from the Tanzania Department of Wildlife, and then had hunters pose with them as if they'd be taken from a freshly fallen elephant. He was busted after observant readers noticed ID numbers on one of the tusks. It turns out some of his other photos were staged, too.
(It makes you wonder if this story, by the same photographer, is a tale tale: "French photographer Gilles Nicolet reports that angry bees penetrated his protective, modern gear and stung him on the nose, lips and forehead, and left two stingers in the eye he was using to peer through the viewfinder of his camera.")
Link (Thanks, Eye-Imagine!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: (Gilmore vs. Ashcroft) 9th Circuit to DOJ: No Secret Justice
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DATE: 09/13/2004 04:09:40 PM
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Score one for John Gilmore, who is suing the Justice Department because it has secret laws requiring people to show ID when flying on a commercial domestic plane. Ashcroft tried to file a secret brief to keep the secret law a secret, but the court said no secrets allowed.
Bill sez: "The 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals rejected a Department of Justice attempt to file a secret brief in Gilmore vs. Ashcroft, a case that involves secret law.
"In a one page order, the Court denied DOJ's motion asking the Court's permission to file their arguments in secret, allowing only the judges to read their full brief. A DOJ motion to suspend the briefing schedule was similarly denied."
Link (Here are previous BB posts on the subject)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bush's excellent sneer and Cheney's terrific "quizzical grin"
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DATE: 09/13/2004 05:18:42 PM
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Here's a picture of a young George Bush slugging a rugby opponent in the face. That's a cool sneer the young Bush has. With that sneer, he could have gotten the part of a juvenile delinquent in a 1950s teen exploitation movie.
The president's smirk no longer gives me the entertainment value it once did. He needs to come up with some new facial expressions or else people are going to tire of him.
Cheney's sneer is good, however.
Cheney also has, as one reporter so aptly described it, a "quizzical grin." His facial expressions are so good I'm thinking of voting for Bush/Cheney, so I can see them on TV for another four years. So far, Kerry and Edwards have only displayed fake smiles. They aren't very funny.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NPR "Day to Day" -- Don't Diss the Gap Band
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DATE: 09/13/2004 11:57:40 PM
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During the "iPod Beemer" episode I did last week on the NPR show "Day to Day," I played a couple examples of the kinds of tunes you could rock out to in your iPodified BMW convertible -- one of them was "Early in the Morning," by legendary '80s R+B icons The Gap Band. During that episode, host Noah Adams inadvertently dissed the Gap Band. When he heard that segment air, my D2D colleague Brian Unger vowed to settle the score of funk: he challenged Mr. Adams to a duel, and here is the result. Listen to Brian's segment "Don't Diss The Gap Band" -- Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Mike Ransom of Tulsa Oklahoma says, "The GAP Band was named after three streets here in Tulsa: Greenwood, Archer and Pine. That's the same Greenwood and Archer mentioned in the archetypical Bob Wills Western Swing tune, "Take Me Back To Tulsa". Here's a further bit of trivia about one of those streets -- Link. The story above is done in the style of Paul Harvey, a Tulsa native. Here is a morph I did of Paul Harvey from his high school yearbook picture -- Link."
More Gap Band trivia, including the Greenwood, Archer, and Pine reference (an historic black business and commerce hub in Tulsa) here: Link
BoingBoing reader Greg says, "One thing I think your readers may find interesting is that the GAP band isn't named after just any three streets in Tulsa, but the center of what was once called "The Black Wall Street". In the 1910's it was one of the most affluent African-American communities in the country. In 1921, it was also the location of one of the worst acts of violence in American history. While dubbed the Tulsa "race riots", they more closely resemble a military assault. Here's a post I wrote about it: link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G #5: Hungarian Zero G Rhapsody
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DATE: 09/14/2004 12:09:00 AM
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BoingBoing reader Peter says,
"I was reading about your upcoming adventure with considerable envy when I realized i'd seen something similar in june or so and sure enough, a Hungarian online mag has a first-person account of such a flight right here in budapest. a 20-year old soviet-built Antonov 2 plane is used for the stunt, apparently flown by one of hungary's top fighter pilots (this part is not clear). it's all in hungarian but check out the pictures. it's groovy."
Link
Update: Péter Kelemen says, "Well, the pilot is Gyula VÁRI (former squadron leader), the article says nothing about him being one of Hungary's top fighter pilot. But he is the President of the Hungarian Aeronautical Association. (Link). The flight itself is about 20 minutes in 1000-3000m altitude while having 10-12 weightlessness-sessions of 7-10 sec each. G changes between 0-3 during the flight."
Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 4, 3, 2, 1.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Warren Ellis blog essay: The Candidate
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DATE: 09/14/2004 12:10:14 AM
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BoingBoing reader Don Whiteside says,
Today, author Warren Ellis' blog has what he calls a "One-day DPH rent-party" looking for donations to cover bandwidth costs. It's a little essay that any fan of his Transmetropolitan will recognize as being written by his alter-ego, Spider Jerusalem. It's a thinly disguised bit about Kerry and flat-out hysterical. Dunno if a non-Transmet fan will find it as awesome -- but if they do, they should go get the graphic novels.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tuesday is INDUCE call-in day
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DATE: 09/14/2004 12:10:53 AM
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As my colleague Cory blogged last week, Tuesday September 14 is "Save Betamax National Call-in Day."
Why Save Betamax? The short version: We're organizing a call-in day to Congress on September 14 to oppose new legislation that would undermine the Betamax decision (INDUCE Act). Here's why: The Betamax VCR died more than 15 years ago, but the Supreme Court decision that made the Betamax and all other VCRs legal lived on. In Sony vs. Universal (known as the Betamax decision) the Court ruled that because VCRs have legitimate uses, the technology is legal—even if some people use it to copy movies. Of course, the movie industry was lucky it lost the case against VCRs, because home video soon became Hollywood's largest source of revenue. And the freedom to use and develop new technology that was protected by the Betamax decision set the stage for the incredible growth in computer technology we've seen in the last few decades.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wavefront Coding for phonecams
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DATE: 09/14/2004 12:50:43 AM
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A new type of lens may make blurry phonecam snapshots a thing of the past:
A specially shaped camera lens and processing method to ensure images are always in focus has been developed. Physicist Dr Andy Harvey said it was a "simple system with a simple lens" which uses an optical encoder so that no information in images is lost. Developed primarily for military night vision cameras, the technology could find its way into camera phones.
Link (thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G, #6: Like prom in your brain
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DATE: 09/14/2004 12:51:27 AM
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Creative genius and zero-gravity veteran Matt Fraction says,
This is gonna be like prom in your brain.
Like, one of those things you're never, ever gonna forget. You'll tell your kids about it and describe it to people you meet for the rest of your life.
I went to Space Camp. Shut up. I rocked that flight suit, goddammit. Anyway. So, you get -- or got, i dunno if they do it any more -- to sit in this weirdo chair device that looked like a giant C-clamp. [Ed. note: The consumer-oriented space joyride I'll be taking on Wednesday includes no such device; the Zero-G Corporation sells an entertainment/adventure travel experience different than the research-oriented NASA space camp Matt attended.] So you sit in the C-Clamp, with the bottom curl of the C running between your legs like a saddle, and the curve of the C at your back. The top and back of the C were connected to the ceiling by bungee cords and an elaborate weight and pulley system. Now, the bungees were connected to some sort of wheel-strut-track thing thing, like the cars on a roller coaster track, only the track was bolted to the ceiling. And the track went straight forward for about 10, 20 yards or something. Got it?
Okay, so, the important part was the weights. See, the weights, when in cooperation with the bungees, would replicate moon gravity on your body which, if my geek remains on, is 1/6 earth weight? Something like that. So, you'd walk-hop the length of the track in moon-weight with earth muscles. You could leap 15, 20 feet straight into the air and control your fall back down, span yards with every step, and basically kick it Armstrong style until it was the next kid's turn.
It was unlike anything I've ever experienced. It's one of those things that i'm just gonna take with me to my grave, probably the closest I'll ever come to space, in its dippy space camp way, you know?
Anyway. Ever since -- and it's been 15 years now -- my dreams are plagued with strange gravity situations, somewhere between flight and swimming, all because of those five little minutes in that tourist's chair. In my dreams i'm a whirlygig, i'm a helicopter, i have invisible bungee cords connected to god and I can move like superman.
It happens a lot, and my life, waking and sleeping, feels richer and stranger and better because of it.
My fingers are, like, triple-crossed for you. And, hey, not *everyone* throws up on the vomit comet. Oh, and If you want to be, like, totally hardcore, you should bring an iPod (or whatever mp3doohickey you have) and listen to the Ramones. In ZERO-G!
Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Updated: Crap auction this Saturday in Toronto
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DATE: 09/14/2004 02:31:11 AM
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Mark Taaffe is the funniest, most engaging auctioneer I've ever met (he appears in thin veneer in my story Craphound). His old weekly junk auctions in Toronto were a high-point in my life there -- the bargains were incredible, matched only by Mark's florid description of his wares. Now he's back at it, with a really promising-looking estate auction in Toronto next Saturday (dig those lists of lots!):
Saturday, September 18, 11 A.M.
26 Bernice Ave., Sunnylea
(off Prince Edward Dr., south of Bloor, Etobicoke)
Large contents/estate auction for Mr. Eric Belzar, 50 year resident at this address. Antique furniture, numerous collectibles, vintage tools, taxidermy items, etc.
Furniture to include 9 pc. walnut dining room set c. 1930, incl. china cabinet and buffet, in good cond.; Stanley upright quarter sawn oak piano, good cond.; nice old tea trolley w. glass insert tray; waterfall/classic glazed china cabinet; 9 well maple filing cabinet; armoire door; grain painted organ stool; rock maple platform rocker; 1960s moderne black vinyl and zebra stripe couch and chair w. end tables; cloverleaf walnut occasional table and other small occasional tables; kitchen table and chairs, orig. vinyl, formica top; mission style desk; oak bureau w. mirror and harp; oak lamp table; beveled hall mirror w. cast iron hooks; lg. oak beveled mirror, old; 2 refinished 9 pane mirrors, pine frames; 1920s wall clock; pr. Spanish revival table lamps w. lustres; deco area rug; also double garage packed w. complete and partial furniture items, legs, tops, chairs, and handyman specials.
Collectibles to include vintage Scot. canvas hip waders; German military helmet; Kilman's Red tricolour neon bar sign; vintage scrap books 1945; rustic oil by Etobicoke artist D. Staffin; spelter elk statue; moose hoof ashtray; 2 sets antelope horns; stuffed baby crocodile; powder horn; veterinary syringe; some vintage fishing lures and bow hunting accessories; cheese barrel; a few vintage radios; lg. 10 gallon glass lab quality carboyle; brass printers rule w. agate points; Vict. ornate sheaf clip; vintage tins, cigar boxes, bottle, crates, etc.; beer steins; asst. glass, china, serving pieces incl. iris and herringbone bowl; some cutlery; 2 Vict. ewers, terra cotta w. enamel transfers and the other pewter mounted lid; 2 nice log cabin quilts, other linens, textiles, drapings; carved animals and wildlife themed décor; household and kitchen items, box lots of knick-knacks and great flea market stuff.
Tools to include 14" General band saw; 2 bench vices, 1 XL; hand held electric grinder and reciprocal sander; 6 vintage block and steel planes; Stanley USA line level and #71 ½ plane (partial?); tons of hand tools, all sorts; crate of natural burls; asst. vintage hardware. Tons more still to be sorted and pulled out of shadowy corners! Also free kittens to good homes!
A full contents sale, high end stuff and tons of box lots too! House sold, no agents please. Terms: cash only. Auctioneer: Mark Taaffe. Inquiries 416-998-5992.
Update: Amber sez: "just thought I'd point out that
in your auction blog post, you mention 2x that the sale will be happening on
Sunday, but then in the actual 'clipping' of the auction article, it says
Saturday the 18th."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Illinois Considers "Official State Beverage"
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 09/14/2004 06:51:28 AM
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New York City is making $126 million in a deal to sell Snapple in public schools, and now -- the state of Illinois is considering licensing the rights to its name on an official state beverage. Why stop there? "The Big Apple" shouldn't be the only metropolis with a snack food nickname. Maybe Illinois should be, like, the "fruit roll-up" state. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Saatchi CEO waxes poetic on anti-piracy publicity campaigns
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DATE: 09/14/2004 06:57:21 AM
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BoingBoing reader Becky Hogge says,
Here's my report of a UK media event last night where the CEO of M&C Saatchi discussed publicity campaigns to promote the anti-piracy message and sunk his teeth into a couple of current campaigns, recently blogged on BoingBoing. The communications guy from the BPI was there to debate possible campaigns with PR and press people . He had the crowd in fits of nervous laughter as he admitted the US lawsuit against a twelve year-old filesharer "was not a bad thing".
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bluetooth motorcycle helmet
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DATE: 09/14/2004 08:13:37 AM
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"Born to be unwired"? Motorola and Italian design firm Momodesign teamed up to create a Bluetooth-enabled motorcycle helmet. Something about the combination of bluetooth and motorcycles sounds really scary. Snip from the press release:
Built on the award-winning design of Motorola's popular HS810, the wireless helmet headset is the latest addition to Motorola's leading portfolio of stylish and innovative Bluetooth products. (...) The helmet is stylish and open-faced, its design draws inspiration from air force pilots helmets, with anti-scratch visor and carbon fibre details for fashion conscious people with a modern approach to travel and city life. Whether chatting to friends or work, the Motorola / MOMODESIGN helmet means riders will no longer get tangled up in awkward wires getting on and off their bikes. Taking and making calls is easy as all functions (answer, end, redial, voice dial and volume) can be made from the cover on the helmet. An essential accessory for urbanites who demand to stay in touch at all times, whether in the car, on a bike, in the office or at home. The Motorola / MOMODESIGN helmet offers you seamless communication due to the unique headset module. There need be no break in the conversation when you get off the bike -- just remove the headset module from the helmet, attach it to the neck loop and continue talking -- no one will even know you've changed location!
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G, #7: Remaindered particles, radio waves
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 09/14/2004 08:14:03 AM
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Come on -- you saw this one coming. BoingBoing pal and resident Obscure Smut Scout Vann Hall says,
"I'd been holding off on sending this in hopes someone else would beat me to it -- right now it looks as if my most enduring legacy will be as "the person most-often thanked on BoingBoing entries having to do with sex" -- but to no avail. There's an adult title from 1999 -- "The Uranus Experiment: Part 2," from Private -- that included a brief scene filmed in zero-G, supposedly onboard what had previously been a Soviet counterpart to the Comet. It also received a somewhat tongue-in-cheek (he says, somewhat
tongue-in-cheek) nomination for the 2000 Nebula Awards, which led to the following coverage: Link 1, Link 2."
BoingBoing reader Gary says,
"I assume, of course, that when Xeni has completed her mission she will want to purchase all of the official Zero G swag. I particularly like the Break the Law t-shirt: Link. Not to be confused with this Think Geek T-shirt that the rest of us poor folks will have to make do with: Link."
Reader Chris says,
"I wanted to point out that there is a less expensive way to experience the feeling of a parabolic flight. go and rent a helicopter. you should be able to get a seat small one (like the R22 or R44) for 75-150 bucks. ask the pilot to gain speed and climb at the same time, then after 30 seconds to push it down. you will be lifted out of your seat for a good second, if done right. nowhere near a parabolic flight (where you will be weightless for much longer) but it's the feeling alright."
And on today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day" show, I speak with host Alex Chadwick about all of the weird pieces of zero-g-prep advice that well-meaning friends and neighbors offer when they hear you're about to float on a weightless commercial joyride. Link to archived audio for today's program, available after 12pm PT.
Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tree of death
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DATE: 09/14/2004 08:21:08 AM
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Capsula Mundi is a design for a biodegradable coffin made from starch plastic that holds the deceased in a fetal position. The stunning artwork was created by Italian designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel:
"Capsula Mundi is planted in the earth like a seed. Above it, to signal the presence of occupied space, is a shallow concave circle dug out of the ground. In the center of which, a tree is planted, the essence of it chosen in life by the dead one, the care of this tree is the responsibility of everyone. The aim is ecological burial, literally a more natural way to decay.
The cemetery will, then, acquire a new look. No longer the overpopulated urban environment with congested architecture, it will be a natural one in contact with the earth, enveloping expansive areas, entire hills consecrated to the cult of the dead. Summarizing, it is a different landscape devoted to the worship of our ancestry: a sacred forest."
Link (via Aeiou)
Update: BB reader Jacob Schnickel points out the striking similarity between the Capsula Mundii and Frida Kahlo's painting of Luther Burbank. (Link)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Flickers of David Woodard
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DATE: 09/14/2004 08:48:23 AM
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Last year, I linked to an Orange County Weekly article about David Woodard, an eccentric artist and musician in Lon Angeles. A friend of William S. Burroughs, Woodard handcrafts Dreamachines, the hallucinogenic flicker device invented by Bryion Gysin and Ian Sommerville and popularized by WSB. New World Disorder has republished an interview with Woodard that first appeared last year in the UK magazine Headpress:
"In college, I found the Dreamachine would cure my own writer's block. When I mentioned this to Burroughs, he concurred. That is the extent of what I know about his use of the machine for that purpose. In 1997, when we were both living in Lawrence, Burroughs tended to use his two Dreamachines together as a postprandial ritual along with a marijuana cigarette. He would write the following morning.
I think the Dreamachine's most distinctive property is its (potentially insidious) subtlety. The machine is similar to absinthe, in that both create a residual language-oriented delirium of which the user tends not to be aware. Fortunately light pulses do not yield the additional effect of Syphilis-like rotted brain stem."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Get Gmail accounts without an invite
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DATE: 09/14/2004 10:35:58 AM
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Graye sez: "These days, GMail invitations are ubiquitous, and people like me are starting to get annoyed with people offering to give away invites. Well, some folks over at Isnoop.net have went and designed an automatic GMail invite spooler.
"People with available invites send them to the spooler's address (gmail@isnoop.net), and it automatically adds them to an available pool. People who need addresses can then get invites from this pool, as necessary.
"It's a good place to dump those excess invites, and anybody who needs a GMail invite can pick one up there, easily. Saves time for everybody, really."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogger co-founder quits tech, becomes chef
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DATE: 09/14/2004 11:32:50 AM
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Meg Hourihan, the co-founder of Pyra, the company that invented Blogger, has retired from technology to become a chef:
So last night I ended my sabbatical and began my new career doing something I've always felt passionate about: cooking. I'm working in the kitchen of a restaurant called Fifty-Six Union (mentioned at the bottom of thisFeasting on Nantucket article) here on Nantucket. Yesterday at 3 PM I put on my black chef's clogs, my black pants and white t-shirt, pulled my Red Sox cap over my hair and got to work peeling and deveining shrimp. Seven hours later, sweatily scrubbing the kitchen floors, I was still smiling.
I've learned a lot this summer during my sabbatical but it all can be summarized in three words: follow your heart.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF asks UK govt to midwife the BBC Creative Archive
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DATE: 09/14/2004 11:35:47 AM
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I've written here before about the BBC's Creative Archive project, an ambitious undertaking meant to put everything in the BBC's vaults (we're talking about stuff from the earliest days of radio up to Dr Who and so on) online, with a Creative Commons license allowing Britons to download, trade and remix the TV shows they paid for with their TV tax.
I just wrote some testimony on EFF's behalf for the governmental committee that's reviewing the BBC's charter, urging them to adopt the BBC's request for a mandate to produce the Archive:
It's the dawn of a "creative nation" -- a Britain which, like many other countries around the globe, makes use of the new tools to actively participate in media, a nation of recasters and reworkers, folk artists and appreciators of folk art.
The raw material of that creative nation need not be British. Substantial parts of it will not be: Britain is a land of many cultures, and the fusion of the art and culture of other lands is a progressive step in Britain's ongoing multiculturalism.
But what if *none* of the materials of this new British folk culture is, indeed, British? What if the creative nation relies upon material from abroad as the raw ingredients for the popular new medium?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Erdos-Bacon numbers
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DATE: 09/14/2004 11:38:28 AM
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Ben Rosenbaum is one of the best new sf writers in the field. Last weekend at the WorldCon, he came up with the idea of finding a conversion function for Erdos numbers (the numeral scietists use to count the number of peer-review paper co-authors between them and Paul Erdos) and Bacon numbers (the number of movies between any actor's co-stars and an actor who co-starred with Kevin Bacon). Here's the answer:
As it turns out, the preliminary work has already been done. Brian Greene, for instance, has an Erdös number of 3, and a Bacon number of 2. Thus, my proposed conversion function (allowing edges in the unified Bacon-Erdös graph to represent two people either appearing together in a movie or coauthoring a paper) is as follows:
Finding: an actor with a Bacon number of N has, at most, a Baconized Erdös number of N+5. Similarly, an academic with an Erdös number of M has, at most, an Erdösinated Bacon number of M + 5.
(My initial lines of research, proposing to go through Dolph Lundgren or Natalie Portman, would surely have yielded much less powerful results.)
The emphasis of previous Bacon-Erdös research, however, has not been on unification, but rather on those individuals with authentic claims to both direct Erdös numbers, through actual academic coauthorship and to direct Bacon numbers through actual screen acting. Thus the canonical Bacon-Erdös number is the sum of an individual's separately earned Erdös number and Bacon number, and this --we learn -- is what is devoutly to be sought. The aforementioned Brian Greene and Dave Bayer are tied for the world-record lowest Bacon-Erdös sum of 5.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roy Disney demans Eisner's resignation, testicles, still-beating heart
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DATE: 09/14/2004 11:41:15 AM
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Hot on the heels of Michael Eisner announcing that he wouldn't resign from Disney for two more years, Roy Disney and Stanley Gold have written a blistering open letter to the Disney Board, calling for Eisner's nuts on a platter:
Michael Eisner's announcement that he intends to remain CEO for the next two years forces you to make a critical decision. Will you choose to let the Company drift for two more years - allowing the pall Mr. Eisner has cast to continue to drive the most talented and creative people away from Disney, erode the morale of current employees, and prevent the Company from attracting the strong, dynamic, and creative leader it needs? Or will you reject Mr. Eisner's brazen attempt to usurp your responsibilities as directors by stage-managing the appointment of his anointed successor and instead tangibly show your commitment to best corporate practices by immediately initiating an expeditious and broad search for a world-class CEO?
We understand and appreciate the difficult position in which Mr. Eisner has once again placed you. As those instrumental in bringing both Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to Disney in 1984, we know how close some of you are to him personally. But there is no acceptable solution that includes Mr. Eisner's continued leadership at Disney for the next two years - let alone any longer than that. Regardless of whether he serves in a diminished capacity during the next two years as a "lame duck" or continues to manage the Company, the changes necessary to restore Disney's luster will simply not be made.
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(Thanks Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Special Creative Commons license for poor countries
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DATE: 09/14/2004 11:49:22 AM
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The Creative Commons project has launched a new license today for poor countries: the Developing Nations license allows "copyright holders to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of their work in developing nations while retaining their full copyright in the developed world."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Evil geeks
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DATE: 09/14/2004 11:52:38 AM
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Danny "Evil" O'Brien has written an hilarious column in (mock) celebration of the world's most evil geeks:
How do you work out who the movers and shakers are in the free software hacking world? For most of them, there's no income to be appraised, there's no stock market valuation to watch. What value can you give to these contributors, who work without care of reward, except maybe all those groupies hanging out at the stage door of the Sourceforge ftp servers?
Well, I guess you could review their software or something. Sadly, I suffer from a debilitating illness (which I shall not mention here) that tragically precludes me from doing actual research. So, instead, I have decided to evaluate those involved in our so-called industry in terms of what we all, I think, see it as.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyright reformers != Communists
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DATE: 09/14/2004 12:10:17 PM
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Dan Hunter's written a really interesting academic paper bent on refuting the notion that the copyright-reform movement is Marxist, and in showing that there are Marxist tendencies in the free/open source software movement.
The Marxist-Lessigist movement has provided the signal benefit of identifying theproblems that occur with the relentless expansion of intellectual property interests. Without muscular social welfarist protection of the public domain intellectualproperty industries will never voluntarily reduce their expansionary claims. As we've witnessed time and time again, intellectual property rights-holders have always soughtwider property grants, longer terms, and stronger enforcement mechanisms. And these additional private interests are almost always extracted from the public.72 Wesimply cannot expect those who are granted property interests to reduce their entitlements to accord with social policy. Yet without such limitations the expansionof intellectual property must eventually lead to a kind of intellectual and cultural paralysis. There was once a libertarian political theorist called Andrew Galambos,whose philosophy revolved around property, especially intellectual property.73 He represents the logical endpoint of intellectual property expansion. Galambos thoughtit wrong to use anyone's ideas without permission and compensation: he believed, for example, that the inventor of the wheel was due a royalty on every automobile sold.74He presented lectures advocating this (and other libertarian ideas) and demanded that his listeners promise that they would never use "his" ideas without his permission. Asone commentator mused, this may be why you've never heard of him.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World's best bathrooms
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DATE: 09/14/2004 12:13:49 PM
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The Discovery Channel's got a cool web-slide-show up highlighting the world's 10 Best Bathrooms. Gosh, but I've got to pee.
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(via ftrain)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Opening a pricey bike lock with a plastic ball point pen
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DATE: 09/14/2004 02:28:08 PM
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Over at Bike Forums, some guy posted a video clip showing how he opened his Kryptonite U-Lock with a plastic ball point pen. Uproar ensues on the board. Link (Direct link to movie clip, and here's another movie with a different lock.) (Thanks, xavii!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hurrican Ivan phonecam snap from New Orleans
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DATE: 09/14/2004 04:24:36 PM
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BoingBoing pal Jonno, who lives and works in New Orleans, phonecams us this mobile snapshot of a lunch spot in the hurricane path. The blue plate special today? Po'boys and bravado.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G #8: Dude, where's my zenith?
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DATE: 09/14/2004 07:38:14 PM
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Before I first blogged that I'd be heading up on tomorrow's west coast launch of the Zero-G adventure flights, I had no idea so many friends, acquaintances, and BoingBoing readers were already weightless oldtimers -- they'd had similar experiences on board NASA's "vomit comet," which is not offered as a commercial service to the public. Discovering this has been kind of cool. It's like learning that all of these people walking around in your life have some secret extraterrestrial superpower they'd never shared with you before. I feel like I'm about to be initiated into their clandestine little fez-wearing society or something. One of those veterans of freefall was Wired Magazine editor Adam Rogers, who says,
"I flew the Vomit Comet at Johnson Space Center a few years ago. I vomited. But it was supercool. Unsolicited advice: remember the Ender lesson. In a weightless environment, down is whichever way your feet are pointed at the time. Don't orient off the floor of the plane. That way lies upchuck."
And reader Kenny says,
"Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) wrote a good account of taking a ride on a vomit comet with Billy Gibbons (from ZZ Top)." Link
to Learning to Fly, Strip, and Vomit on a 727
Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Scannerz" toy mixes monsters and bar codes?
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DATE: 09/14/2004 07:38:53 PM
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Mark Hurst says,
"If i'm not mistaken, this handheld electronic toy -- Scannerz Commander -- uses everyday bar codes as inputs to create a tribe of monsters for the user to play with/against. If that's right, very inventive toy..."
Link
Update: BoingBoing reader Rob Greene says, "It seems very reminiscent of a toy I had about 10 years ago called Barcode Battler. Maybe they've improved on it, as I seem to remember I had an awfully hard time getting anything to scan properly. You can read about it here: Link."
Reader Geoffrey Litwack points to this alternate url for Barcode Battlers (Link), Thomas Williams finds another (Link), and John Harris points to yet another (Link), and adds -- "The Monster Rancher games for Playstation (if memory serves, I may have gotten the title wrong) use a similar technique by reading audio CDs and using those as raw data for similar game purposes."
Dave says, "Skannerz were here in the US 5 or 6 years ago: I bought one at the local supermart/department store. You can still find the toys on eBay (link)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G #9: You are now free to float about the cabin.
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DATE: 09/14/2004 08:40:08 PM
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In about 12 hours, I'll be heading into freefall. Before I go, some sage advice for first-time weightless flyers from BoingBoing pal David Rich, a researcher at the UC Berkeley Microgravity Combustion Labs. WTF are Microgravity Combusion Labs? Glad you asked. David says,
"The focus of our work is flammability behavior of materials that could be used for the construction of space craft or facilities on the moon or Mars. We generally look at composite materials like carbon fiber or fiberglass since these have seen increased usage in spacecraft design owing to their high strength and light weight. Unfortunately these materials burn more readily than metals. They also have different burning behavior in zero gravity than on the ground. For these reasons, an understanding of their behavior under conditions found in space craft is important. [Research missions aboard the NASA KC-135 "vomit comet'] allow us to simulate those conditions for short periods and gain some understanding of material flammability behavior. I've been on two previous campaigns and I'm scheduled for an aditional set of flights in October. We are scheduled to send this project up on the ISS in 2007."
And for those about to float, David says:
"Sit with your back against one wall of the aircraft with your head completely motionless for the first few parabolas. Each time you enter the low gravity period you will float up the side of the aircraft so have something to grab and stabilize yourself. Many people find the 2g pullup period to be the nausiating part so continue staring at the opposite side of the aircraft well into the pullup period.
After a few of those you can start moving around but no sudden head movements especially during the pullup. Try not to get your head into an orientation of looking at your feet or above your head, and no rapid head movements.
NASA provides participants with Scopolomine (an anti-nausea medication) and Pseudoephedrine (a stimulant to combat drowsiness resulting from the Scopolomine). I took more than the flight MD's recomended on the first day to play it safe. I strongly suggest you take these medications.
Some frequent fliers eat ginger snaps on the morning of the flight. I ate a light breakfast of yogurt and granola with green tea and that seemed to keep my stomach calm.
If you get sick, don't get discouraged, just sit against the wall for a few more parabolas until you feel better. If you really have a problem, they will get you back to a seat and things should improve. Above all, don't get too stressed about the prospect of getting sick, being relaxed is very helpful."
While the combo of Scopalamine and Dexedrine are a popular measure against "protein loss" (we're talking spacespeak for heave, hurl, keck, lose it, puke, regurgitate, retch, ruminate, spew, spit up, throw up, upchuck), I'm not taking any scopedex speedballs tomorrow morning. In part, because Zero-G Corp.'s "adventure travel" flights seem to focus more on creature comfort -- they're designed for maximum fun, in contrast with the NASA flights, which function more as research missions. It's my understanding that the parabolas will be shorter in duration, and fewer in number (15-20, instead of 30-40) than on the KC-135 flights. These and other factors may reduce the likelihood of lost lunch. Then again, maybe not.
But instead of amphetamines and belladona derivatives (not that there's anything wrong with 'em) I'll be packing ginger chewing gum at the recommendation of NPR "Day to Day" host Noah Adams, and a fist full of Jolly Ranchers I received from the elderly Italian lady who lives next door. She said they always calm her stomach mid-flight. I think she's been holding out on me. All along, I had her pegged as a mild-mannered, arugula-growing, opera-loving, pistachio-cake-baking WWII refugee from Palermo. Secretly, lo these many years, she's been logging those frequent zero-G flyer miles behind my back. That's the thing about experienced space-travelers (Swift Float Veterans for Truth?) -- you just never know. Until they hit you with the secret handshake.
Finally, a moment of sigfile zen. Snipped from the contrails of David Rich's emails:
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden, 1854.
Image: 1957 ad for "Rid-Jid" ironing tables -- Link to more background on the ad.
Previous "Xeni Flies Zero-G" posts: 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gamers in the wrong time-tribe
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DATE: 09/14/2004 11:25:22 PM
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Alice is starting to really get somewhere in Star Wars Galaxies, but she's on the horns of a dilemma. She was a Brit early adopter who joined the original US server, and amassed a some moderate game-wealth -- but found the game to be high-latency and sparsely populated because so many of the American players were asleep when she was online. Now SWG is offering to relocate her to the European server -- which will be faster and better-populated -- but she has to leave her game-wealth behind.
[T]he SOE team are now offering account transfers - as a premium purchase. 30 bucks to move your character to a different server, but all assets (my bike!!) would remain behind. So I could move to a European server and have better luck at finding people awake, or I could stay in the US and play with the hardcore.
Link
Update: From the above-referenced post's message-board, "Hi, saw the post on boingboing and showed it to my Husband who plays onthe Infinity server. He says the SOE trade forums regularly have people who are willing to swap credits between servers, if that's any help!" How cool.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK music-downloaders are getting scr0d
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DATE: 09/15/2004 07:30:49 AM
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The UK Consumers' Association is petitioning government to do something about the fact that Apple gouges UK customers, charging them far more than their US counterparts.
The CA has written to the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) explaining the situation and highlighting that the current position is possibly in breach of European law. Under Euro law all consumers in all member states should enjoy the same benefits that the single market brings - it's like if citizens in Seattle had to pay more for their iTunes music than the rest of America. Clearly with a differential between iTunes UK (79p, 1.15 Eu) and Germany & France (0.99 Eu, 67.7p UK) there is not a level playing field. Those UK citizens who understand that they can use either the French or German sites to order directly on find they are charged the UK price if they are not able to supply as an address in either of these countries.
Although the CA campaign is focused on iTunes, perhaps because of the mainstream press attention it has attracted, Apple are not the only service overcharging UK consumers. The differential on Napster UK is even greater when comparing UK pricing at 99p (1.44 Eu) against 99c Eu (67.7p UK). This becomes even more distorted when US prices are used as a comparison 99c US = (55.4p). Clearly albums bought on the services multiply the differential by a factor of 10 as the albums cost ten times a much as single tracks.
Link
(Thanks, Simon!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bubblegum Alley
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DATE: 09/15/2004 07:43:11 AM
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For forty years, people passing through this narrow alley in San Luis Obispo, California have stuck their chewing gum on the walls. A pleasant stroll through Bubblegum Alley followed by a night at the Madonna Inn sounds like a perfect SLO vacation to me. Link (via RealityCarnival)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ArtBots this weekend in NYC
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DATE: 09/15/2004 07:59:34 AM
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It's time again for the annual ArtBots Robot Talent Show in New York City, September 17, 18, and 19. Orchestrated by Dorkbot founder Douglas Repetto, Mark Tribe of Rhizome.org, and Hunter College film/media professor Mary Flanagan , the free ArtBots show will feature 20 artists and groups from seven countries (including Leonel Moura's ink pen-wielding ArtSBot, left).
"The show celebrates the strange and wonderful collision of shifty artists, disgraced engineers, high/low/no tech hackers, rogue scientists, beauty school dropouts, backyard pyros, and industrial espionage that has come to define the emerging field of robotic art. Participants include robots that sketch, carve, float, wiggle, hum, ring, grow, wander, and sing, as well a number of works the form and function of which are not yet well understood"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Outfoxed interviews .torrent for remixing
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DATE: 09/15/2004 08:24:08 AM
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The interviews from the awesome anti-Fox documentary Outfoxed have been released under a Creative Commons license, for you to remix. Here's the .torrent:
Torrent Link
(via Lessig)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Concealable weapons photo gallery
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DATE: 09/15/2004 09:51:31 AM
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Amazing FBI photo gallery (89 pages in PDF format) of concealable weapons. The item to the left is a knife and handcuff key disguised as a regular door key. Link (Via the must-read Crypto-Gram)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kite Aerial Photos from foo camp
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DATE: 09/15/2004 10:08:09 AM
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Charles Benton took some kite aerial photos of foo camp this year. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mobile phones to get magnetic sensors
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DATE: 09/15/2004 10:18:58 AM
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Here's an article I wrote for TheFeature about plans to put magnetic sensors in mobile phones as navigation aids.
The most exciting mobile application for magnetic sensors is the capability to map an online "Yellow Pages" on top of the real world, allowing users to point their phones in the direction of a building or other public area and get information about it. For example, say you're driving down the street and see a bookstore you'd like to visit later. You could simply point your phone at the store and press a button on your phone, sending the GPS coordinates and direction information to a service that returns the operating hours and additional information about the store, along with a coupon for 10% off your purchase. If you point it at a restaurant, you could get the Zagat rating, the menu and the opportunity to make a reservation.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Collector's Mint profits from 9/11 tragedy
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DATE: 09/15/2004 12:42:28 PM
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Becky sez:
"Plumbing the depths, in terms of profiting from 9/11's victims: these people are selling coins made with silver they say they got from Ground Zero. I guess they couldn't get their hands on any human remains to use."
The silver used in each gleaming dollar coin is from Ground Zero! You see, when the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, a bank vault full of .999 Pure Silver bars was buried under hundreds of tons of debris. After months of salvage work, many of the bars were found. Now, the same silver that was reclaimed from the destruction has been used to create the magnificent 2004 “Freedom
Tower” Silver Dollar.
On its website, National Collector's Mint asks: "How many would you like to order today?" Here's the company's email address so you can answer that question.
Link
UPDATE: Here's a link to a Daily Show segment about this coin. (Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Make newsletter
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Here's the first issue of the Make email newsletter. I'm the magazine's editor-in-chief. To sign up for the email newsletter go here.
=======================
MAKE NEWSLETTER 01
September 14, 2004
http://make.oreilly.com
=======================
Thanks for signing up for the Make newsletter! Since announcing the
magazine at the O'Reilly ETech Conference in Portland in July, we've been
busy creating the first issue, which will be published in January. We've
also received many suggestions about how we can make Make a great
magazine.
There's still time for you to give us your input. We want Make to be a
reader-created magazine, and if you're interested, here are some ways you
can join us in the creation of the world's greatest technology-project
magazine:
1. THE MAKE WORKSHOP. Imagine somebody took all your tools away and handed
you a $100 gift certificate that you could spend on hardware at Home Depot
and Fry's. What are the essential things you'd buy? Now, up the price to
$300 -- what would you outfit your workshop with? How about $750?
2. WHAT ARE YOU USING THESE DAYS? In each issue of Make, we'll run reviews
of stuff. We're not interested in assigning things to be reviewed. We're
interested in hearing about the things you already use and love. Tell us
about your favorite new (or old!) tool, magazine, book, instructional
video, gadget, web site, etc. in a 300-word email. If we decide to run
it, we'll pay you.
3. PROJECTS. Do you have an idea for a technology-related project? It
doesn't matter if it's large or small. Tell us about it. If we like it,
we'll ask you to write it.
4. WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS NEWSLETTER? Finally, we need a name for this
newsletter! Please send us your suggestion by Tuesday, Sept. 21. The
winner will get a book of his or her choice from the O'Reilly Hacks Series
(http://hacks.oreilly.com).
Thanks, and we'll see you in January!
Mark Frauenfelder
Make Editor-in-Chief
markf@oreilly.com
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Panic inducing airline emergency information card
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DATE: 09/15/2004 04:10:25 PM
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Paul sez: "Handy advice (from one of those airline folders in the back of the seat) on what to do if your Tajik Air flight is hijacked. Apparently, it has a great deal to do with fondling space aliens, mutant airplane doors that eat people, but definitely not drinking. I'm guessing from the pictures. Last few lines of each section are in English. Sort of. Do not express you angry, do not wipe in voice, our cough. Close your eyes and do not stir them. "Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni Flies Zero G #10: goodbye, gravity
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DATE: 09/15/2004 10:41:18 PM
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Remember dreaming you could fly? It's exactly like that.
Before you move into weightlessness, between parabolas, g-force is about double what it is on earth. Suddenly you're 300 pounds, and it pushes your hair to your skull to your spine to your tail to the floor and the meat on your body is suddenly stone. They tell you not to look back, to keep your head still and aligned when the pressure starts. Anything to avoid vertigo, because where there's vertigo there's vomiting.
Waiting, your face becomes newly dense. You're a chipmunk carrying cheeks full of bullets. Your blood strains. Your veins are streams carrying too much silt.
And then, when the weight is worst, the invisible hands cramming your spine into the plane's padded floor lose interest and lift away. What was concrete becomes cotton. The hands reach beneath you, and lift you up into nothing, and you float. And all there is to do when this happens for the very first time is to laugh. Because it's impossible. Because it's unnatural.
But the joke in your bones is that it feels perfectly natural, like all your life you were intended to float. After all, just before you came into the world, that's what you were doing in liquid. And when your life ends and you leave, there you are again, becoming vapor. Breaking down from matter to dust to air. Floating.
Last week, a friend said, "You'll tell children and grandchildren when you're old, over and over again. Your family will be totally sick of you explaining how awesome this felt the first time." He was only half right. The grandchildren won't need my explanation. They'll know it better than I do now. These zero-g joyrides will seem as crude and dated to them as Model T Fords or ink-ribbon typewriters are for us. They'll be floating plenty.
As I sit here, I can still feel it in my body. It comes in waves. I want to hit "post," shut the application, close the laptop lid. Then bend my knees a little and shove off, push up into the air above my desk. Do the superman. Do a backflip. Bust a "crouching tiger hidden dragon" move, karate-chop martian foes mid-air. And float away into bed. It's natural now, and will remain that way forever. I miss it already.
Images: (1) A weightless photo from today (Link to full-size). (2) Floating with Dr. Buzz Aldrin in a zero gravity moment during today's preview flight. While we crouched on the floor waiting for that parabola to hit, Dr. Aldrin, one of the first two humans to touch the moon, told me that today was the first time he'd experienced weightlessness since having felt "the real thing in space" -- not counting scuba diving, which he does often because he gets homesick for floating. (Link to full-size image). Both images courtesy of Jim Campbell, Aero News Network.
Previous BB posts: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Also: here's the Zero Gravity Corporation's patent listing for "A system and method is provided for rapidly reconfiguring a jet aircraft from a cargo or passenger configuration into a parabolic flight configuration." Link (Thanks, Jason)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Duetsche Welle adds Klingon to supported languages
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DATE: 09/16/2004 12:02:57 AM
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Dave sez, "Deutsche Welle, a government-funded radio and television network that broadcasts mainly for German expatriates and Germany enthusiasts, added Klingon to the 30+ languages on its site, in celebration of the site's 10th anniversary (in Earth years). 'The dialogue of cultures does not end at the edge of our solar system,' Deutsche Welle director Erik Bettermann said in a statement." Link (Thanks, Dave!)
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TITLE: AdBusters sues for right to air anti-ads
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DATE: 09/16/2004 12:03:08 AM
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AdBusters is suing Canadian broadcasters for refusing to air their anti-ad ads.
Activists concerned with almost every social issue -- from the environment, worker rights, electoral politics . . . you name it – have had their messages rejected by media corporations. If you walked into your local television station today and tried to buy 30-seconds of airtime, you would likely get the same response we continually get. Boiled down, the refrain goes something like this: We will not accept your money. We will not accept your messages. We're in the business to sell ads, not spread your ideas.
Link (via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Earthlink posts P2P app, manifesto
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DATE: 09/16/2004 12:03:23 AM
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Earthlink has released a new file-sharing tool based on SIP, the protocol underlying Voice Over IP and other systems for peer-to-peer connectivity. What's coolest about this is the manifesto they posted along with it:
EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler --- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.
Link (Thanks, Clay!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Quake 4 screenshots
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DATE: 09/16/2004 12:09:31 AM
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ID Software allowed a gaming magazine to publish some screenshots from Quake 4 -- here's the scans.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Dream Machine
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DATE: 09/16/2004 06:14:17 AM
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Scientists may have identified a region of the brain instrumental in the creation of dreams. Neurologists at the University Hospital of Zurich studied a 73-year-old woman who suffered a stroke in her occipital lobe, known to be the brain's vision processing center. The patient predictably lost her sight for a few days, but she also lost the ability to dream.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Smog-sniffing Sensors
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DATE: 09/16/2004 06:22:45 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about the Urban Pollution Project, a big research effort in the UK that uses bike-mounted carbon monoxide sensors and bluejacking to rate the air we breathe.
"Mobile sensors that are geographically tracked could... give a broad and dense picture of how pollution affects urban spaces and the people within them," says Urban Pollution investigator Anthony Steed, a computer science researcher at the University College London. "If you have several hundred or thousand sensors, you could give them to commuters and they'd make a map of the city's pollution."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Maggot Band-Aid
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DATE: 09/16/2004 06:31:15 AM
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First used centuries ago to treat battlefield wounds, maggots are proving to be a useful treatment to prevent post-operative infections. Maggot debridement therapy (MDT) calls for maggot dressing to be applied to wounds twice a week for up to 72 hours each time. From the press release about a recent study on MDT in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases:
"Debridement, or the removal of contaminated tissue to expose healthy tissue, can be done surgically. However, maggots that have been disinfected during the egg stage so that they don’t carry bacteria into the wound have their advantages. The larvae preferentially consume dead tissue (steering clear of live), they excrete an antibacterial agent, and they stimulate wound healing--all factors that could be linked to the lower occurrence of infection in maggot-treated wounds."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mars telecom goes optical
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DATE: 09/16/2004 06:42:34 AM
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NASA scientists are developing a laser link from Mars to Earth that's ten times faster than current radio frequency systems. According to an article in New Scientist, the laser will transmit up to 30 million bits per second at a lower power and mass compared to traditional wireless approaches.
"That leap in capacity is due to the different wavelengths of light carrying the data. The laser will use infrared light with a wavelength of 1.06 microns, which is thousands of times shorter than radio waves. Since all light travels at the same speed through space, shorter wavelengths carry more information in the same time."
Of course, clouds present a problem for optical communications. The beam will also be a few hundred kilometers wide and very faint by the time it reaches Earth, making the signal tricky to pick up. Still, a fully-functional system is expected to make a trip to the Red Planet in 2009 on board the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. Maybe Xeni can ride along too.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Johnny Ramone (RIP)
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DATE: 09/16/2004 08:08:59 AM
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Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Use Amazon to reserve a book at your local library
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DATE: 09/16/2004 01:09:34 PM
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43 Folders writes about a great little bookmarklet maker that lets you request the book you're looking at on Amazon.com from your local library.
I’ve combed through my Amazon wishlist over the past month and have been able to find almost 20 books I was going to buy—all of which have since been shuttled from SF’s many branch libraries to the cozy little outpost just beyond my front yard.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rosh Hashanah humour
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DATE: 09/16/2004 03:08:41 PM
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It's been years since I lived in Toronto (near my grandparents), and consequently, it's been years since I've celebrated Rosh Hashanah -- the Jewish New Year that rang in last night. Maybe that's why it took me a minute to get the punchline of this screamingly funny Rosh Hashanah cartoon -- and why I laughed so hard once I did.
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(via AccordionGuy)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Excellent article about Fantagraphics
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DATE: 09/16/2004 03:10:44 PM
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Comic book and book publisher Fantagraphics is an international treasure. I love their books and comics, and I love their production values. On those days that I feel that life is not worth living, I remember that Fantagraphics exists and I cheer up tremendously.
...Fantagraphics is more like Sub Pop—a well-known, highly regarded, but still relatively small publisher, most of whose best sellers wouldn't sell enough to stay on a major label for more than an album or two. For Fantagraphics, being put in charge of The Complete Peanuts is akin to Sub Pop being handed the Beatles' master tapes for reissue. And Fantagraphics has done the strip right, with gorgeous design (the art director is Palookaville artist Seth, aka Gregory Gallant, whose style was deeply influenced by Schulz) and ambitious outlay (Fantagraphics is planning two a year for the next 12 and a half years, 25 volumes covering 50 years of weekly strips, including Sundays).
Link
(Thanks, Kirsten!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sunburst Award ceremony in Toronto, Sept 23
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DATE: 09/16/2004 03:19:20 PM
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My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, won the Sunburst Award for the best Canadian sf book of the year. There's a ceremony commemorating the event on the 23d of September in Toronto, at the Merril Collection. I (really!) wish I could be there, but I'm committed to speaking at a UN meeting on Free/Open Source Software in Geneva on that day, so Karl Schroeder, the brilliant author of Permanence and Ventus, will accept on my behalf.
SUNBURST AWARD CEREMONY
September 23, 2004 Â 7-9pm
Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, Lilian H.
Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library
239 College Street, 3rd Floor, Toronto
for more info: (416) 393-7748
The event is open to the public and free of charge. Refreshments will be
served.
Link
(Thanks Peter!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Guitar solo tab for "I Wanna Be Sedated"
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DATE: 09/16/2004 05:23:33 PM
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Here is Johnny's guitar solo on the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated":
E-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-|0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0|-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion castmember's remembrance
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DATE: 09/17/2004 12:11:41 AM
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Here's the first-person account of a summer student intern at Walt Disney World who got the killer assignment of working at the Haunted Mansion (what a dream gig!):
I hated being told I wasn’t scary. I hated being made fun of for my deep Southern accent. I hated the fact that I was a southern happy blonde with pigtails stuck in a dark damp Mansion. Then I gave it a chance. I realized I was lucky to have such a highly coveted position. I slowly let myself fall into the role and was thrilled the first time I actually scared a guest. I learned that many of my fellow cast members weren’t as rude and sarcastic as they seemed, they just really took pride in their job. And I found my spot in the Mansion crew. I was the one that lost children were taken to because I was probably the least scary. I was the one that parents turned to for an encouraging word to convince their children to try the ride. The first time a six year old boy came running out of the Mansion with a huge smile to give me a hug before getting back on the ride, I finally felt like I had a place at the Mansion.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: D&D rarities sold off by terminally ill TSR illustrator
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DATE: 09/17/2004 12:14:49 AM
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A reader writes, "Many in the industry have been saddened to learn that David C. Sutherland III, one of the first well-known TSR artists, has a terminal illness. An auction of Sutherland's gaming collection is currently being held on Ebay to help pay for his medical bills and supplement his estate for his remaining family. From the original Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide to the incredible castle map in the original Ravenloft module, and a fair amount of game development besides, many gamers are sure to be familiar and fond of Sutherland's works. Have a look at the auction and see some of the gaming treasures you have a chance to bid on, and help the Sutherland family out at the same time."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: REAL reason Sony pulled Kung Fu Hustle from Toronto Festival
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DATE: 09/17/2004 12:24:44 AM
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A friend working at the Toronto Film Festival has this scoop: "At the Toronto International Film Festival each film gets two screenings. The highly anticipated action film Kung Fu Hustle by Stephen Chow from China screened last night Sept 15th, and was supposed to get its re-screening today. However, the distributers: Sony/Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia/Beijing Film Studio of China Film Group Coorporation/Huayi Brothers & Taihe Film Investment Co. Ltd./The Star Overseas Ltd., did not feel that security was adequate and did not like the number of digital cameras etc in the audience. Audience members are allowed to bring cameras/recorders into the screenings to record the talk backs with the stars and directors that go on before and after the film. Feeling this was too risky Sony pulled the film's second screening, this is unheard of at the festival. The official reason from The Festival Staff is that the print was damaged in the first screening, could not be repaired and was un-showable . All tickets for the cancelled screening had to be refunded. The public does not know about the cover up. This kind of corporate paranoia is very bad, if distributors get all freaked out about possible bootlegs what will happen to the festival?"
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(Thanks, Anonymous Tipster!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robo-roach
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How do animals walk without falling over? A multi-university research effort led by UC Berkeley will try to answer that question by studying a small robot that imitates cockroach locomotion. Berkeley biologist Robert Full's insights into animal movement have informed the design of other robots as well, including the wall-climbing Mecho-Gecko. By simultaneously studying the cockroach-bot and various insects, the researchers hope to identify the muscular and neural networks that result in the whole-body motion of a wide range of animals, including humans.
"The robot has to operate in the real world, like the animal does, so we can use it for testing hypotheses," Full said. "We know, for example, that the body's center of mass bounces along like a pogo stick, which is embodied in the robot, but we don't know how its parts - its legs, feet, actuators or muscles - sum up to give that remarkably general pattern of movement. Now we can ask questions like, 'What if you had a more compliant leg? What if you had two joints in that leg, what does that give you versus one joint?'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TSA OKs airport crotch-mauling
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DATE: 09/17/2004 02:54:04 AM
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The TSA has decided that it will catch more terrorists by giving airport screeners the authority to maul your crotch.
Currently, they concentrate mostly on arms and legs. Now, they'll be able to pat other areas if they look suspicious. TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark would not elaborate, citing security.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Remembering π
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DATE: 09/17/2004 02:59:48 AM
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In March, a savant in England recited π from memory to more than 22,000 decimal places. Still, he wasn't even halfway to the world record set by a Japanese man in 1995. This article in Plus magazine describes how these amazing memory feats are accomplished and how to improve your own remembrance of numbers past.
"Like most people, you have probably had the odd experience of smelling, say, an old piece of furniture and being reminded of something that happened to you in the distant past. Smell has a particularly strong connection with memory, perhaps because the part of the brain that deals with smell is close to the hippocampus, which is where it is believed long term memories are formed. If you deliberately surround yourself with a particular smell when trying to memorise something, that smell is likely to help trigger the memory later when you need to recall it."
Link (via Reality Carnival)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Spam subjects printed on custom tees
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DATE: 09/17/2004 08:35:43 AM
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SpamShirt is a service that will print and mail you a custom t-shirt with a subject line from a spam message on it -- this is the one I just ordered. You can also add your own favorite spam subjects if you care to. This is so awesomely perverse.
Link
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cool Tokyo ferris wheels
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DATE: 09/17/2004 08:39:34 AM
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This stunning photo of ferris wheels at Odaiba, Tokyo came into my RSS reader today via my Flickr Tokyo photo watchlist. Gibsonoid and pretty-shiny!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Harvard Primate Neuroscience Lab has sense of humor
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DATE: 09/17/2004 08:40:55 AM
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BoingBoing reader Theron says, "Somebody's at Harvard's having a little fun at George W.'s expense. Check out the Bush to monkey morph in the top right. No idea if this is a subtle hack, or really the Harvard PCNL having some fun." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mark Cuban, DVD killer
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DATE: 09/17/2004 08:45:23 AM
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Dallas Mavs and HDNet owner Mark Cuban has an interesting blog entry today on the future of DVDs and PVRs:
I love looking for ways to screw up conventional wisdom. Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge. No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.
Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment. Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site.
Which leads to the question — What is the best way to distribute content? DVDs which will be limited in capacity to 9.4gbs on a single DVD for another year, and then after that 50gbs on a single disk for years to come after that, or rewritable media that can hold 2gb already in a device half the size of a pen, or in a hard drive that can hold 200GBs plus in a drive the size of your cell phone?
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Radio bicycles in Colombia stream indigenous news
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DATE: 09/17/2004 08:48:08 AM
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BoingBoing reader micah says,
On Monday, September 13th the Nasa indigenous people of Colombia launched a big three-day march. Included in the march is a low-power FM radio station, broadcast from a radiocicleta (an adapted bicycle equipped with a radio transmitter and antenna that will accompany the march). The signal will be picked up along the route by different indigenous community radio stations and then streamed on the internet. It is likely no coincidence that on Friday Septemer 4, the indigenous community station Radio Nasa was shut down by the government of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The indigenous groups, composing tens of thousands of people are marching to protest against the war, neoliberalism, the FTAA, and constitutional counterreforms planned by the government. The Colombian Indymedia has ongoing coverage of the event.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired + Creative Commons benefit show with Byrne + Gil on Sep 21
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DATE: 09/17/2004 08:56:04 AM
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The Wired Magazine / Creative Commons benefit concert with David Byrne and Gilberto Gil happens next Tuesday at Town Hall in NYC. It appears that tickets are still available, and it looks like it's going to be an awesome event. For those (like me) who can't make it to NYC then, a live webcat will be offered on September 21st, 8pm EST.
Link to webcast info, Link to event info, and link to ticket site.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Yarrrr! 'Tis Pirate Zen 2004!!!
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DATE: 09/17/2004 09:00:34 AM
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talk like a pirate day
pirate info
pirate bath 1
pirates and pivateers
capn crimson
which pirate are you?
spooneye! the card game
pirate bath 2
pirates of the bahamas
pirate flags
pirates of penzance
pirate supplies
yar! pirate zen 2003
and for a limited time...
david byrne's pirates
(this will disappear on 09.20.04)
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art Car Fest in SF Bay Area this weekend
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DATE: 09/17/2004 09:02:27 AM
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BoingBoing pal and former guestbar resident Todd Lappin says, "FYI, comrades... the 2004 Art Car Fest will be in the Bay Area this weekend. On display outside the San Jose Museum of Art on Saturday, then parading on the streets of Berkeley on Sunday." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Zero G: Xeni's Wired News and NPR reports
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DATE: 09/17/2004 09:10:13 AM
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In today's Wired News, a report I filed on my experience in zero gravity earlier this week. Also, on today's edition of the NPR show "Day to Day," I speak with host Noah Adams and share sounds from the weightless joyride. In space, no one can hear you squeal.
Image: floating with other passengers, including Dr. Buzz Aldrin and Zero Gravity Corporation founder Dr. Peter Diamandis, on board G-Force One. Shot by Jim Campbell.
Link to Wired News story.
Link to NPR Day to Day: "Zero Gravity Flight" audio and images.
More images: Alan M. Ladwig, former NASA Assoc. Admininstrator, now COO of Zero-G Corp, coaches me and others into weightless backflips -- Link (image: Jim Campbell).
Passengers assume seated pose during the heavy-g "pullup" period prior to a weightless parabola -- Link. (XJ)
NASA astronaut and space celebrity Dr. Buzz Aldrin is superman -- Link. (JC)
Dr. Aldrin hovers -- Link. (JC)
Flight attendant and CalTech researcher Loretta Hidalgo gives pre-flight emergency safety instructions -- Link. (XJ)
"G-Force One" in hangar before liftoff -- Link. (XJ)
Interviewing passengers for NPR while floating -- Link. (JC)
Landing after a parabola, guided by Mr. Ladwig. -- Link. (JC)
ABC News reporter Judy Muller levitates, while Dr. Aldrin flies -- Link. (JC)
Xeni flies -- Link. (JC)
Floating with Dr. Aldrin -- Link. (JC)
Dr. Peter Diamandis, Zero G Corporation founder, greets passengers exiting "G-Force One" -- Link. (JC)
Link to previous BoingBoing posts -- "Xeni flies zero-g." For the record, I did not blow donuts.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Worst interface ever: car self-destruct switch
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DATE: 09/17/2004 10:39:14 AM
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Spencer sez: Tognazzini has a great column up from July about what he calls "The Worst Interface Ever":
For $1500, you can equip your luxury car with a genuine self-destruct switch. Once it’s in place, you must remember to flip it whenever you shift from driving your car to not driving your car. Forget once or do it wrong, and your engine and transmission will self-destruct.
“Ah, a fictitious switch,” you say, but no, it is all too real and all too destructive.
The switch is hidden under the hood, where you cannot visually inspect it. To increase the sport, it's not only left unlabeled as to function, its two positions are unlabeled, too— -- make a mistake and, boom!, no more engine.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wang Du's Mixed Media
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DATE: 09/18/2004 04:24:49 AM
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Last night, we visited the Palais de Tokyo to see the work of Wang Du, a Chinese artist living in Paris. Du creates massive sculptures and installations that manipulate and deconstruct mass media and pop culture imagery. In "Oarribeancom," surreal graphics from a Japanese erotic Web site are recreated in a collection of much larger-than-life resin models like the one pictured here. (Click on the photo for a larger version.) Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Rembrandt's vision problem
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DATE: 09/18/2004 09:03:46 AM
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Harvard scientists report that Rembrandt may have suffered from stereoblindness. The neurobiologists believe that many of Rembrandt's self-portraits show his eyes focused assymetrically. From the New England Journal of Medicine:
Stereopsis is an important cue for depth perception, yet it can be a hindrance to an artist trying to depict a three-dimensional scene on a flat surface. Art teachers often instruct students to close one eye in order to flatten what they see. Therefore, stereoblindness might not be a handicap — and might even be an asset — for some artists.
Link (to Boston Globe article)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Barnaby Whitfield's new Web site
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DATE: 09/18/2004 09:15:42 AM
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My friend Barnaby Whitfield is a pastel artist in New York City. He's listed in the prestigious White Columns Curated Artist Registry and is represented by the 31GRAND gallery in Brooklyn. Barnaby's work is incredibly beautiful and deeply twisted. I'm proud to know him. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Deaf children in Nicaragua create new language
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DATE: 09/18/2004 09:55:20 AM
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BoingBoing reader Prodigal Tom says, "This is a fascinating article about deaf and totally neglected children in Nicaragua inventing their own sign language. I was also psyched because I learned there is an actual job called a psycholinguist! There's also a great point about how the language has evolved, so the younger members have a slightly different version than the originators." Link to Reuters synopsis, and Link to Science Magazine article, which appears to be available only to paid subscribers. (Thanks also to Mike Oliveri and others who pointed us to this item)
Update: BoingBoing reader jd says, "This story is a fascinating one - but it originally hit the mainstream media world back in 1999 in the New York Times. Here's the story (featuring Noam Chomsky, as well!) -- A Linguistic Big Bang (Link)."
Update 2: Reader Paul Camp of the Spelman College Department of Physics in Georgia says,
Yet another update: this story is way older than either of your current sources. I remember reading about it in The Language
Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by MIT psycholinguist Stephen Pinker (which you and everyone else should read), published in 1994.
In fact, Pinker makes a case that this mechanism is how pidgins become creoles generally. Pidgins are work languages without significant grammatical structure, created by adults who speak different native languages. But children have a critical developmental period when they are learning language and imposing what appear to be innate grammatical structures on the language-like things in their environment (Chomsky's Universal Grammar). Pinker describes several examples of the process, including the Nicaraguan children as well as American Sign Language, and several verbal creoles.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update on Harvard Primate Neuroscience Lab chimp-Dubya morph
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DATE: 09/18/2004 10:02:00 AM
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Following up on yesterday's post about an apparent bit of political humor on the Harvard Primate Neuroscience Lab's website, one BoingBoing reader wrote in to tell us that a relative worked at the lab -- and confirmed that indeed, the chimp-to-Dubya morph was no accident. Also, BoingBoing reader Chris Holland says:
That "image" at the top-right corner actually is a scaled-down display of a bigger quicktime movie ... for a more dramatic effect. Now if I could only dig out that morphing I did when I was a kid of Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford.
Link to chimp-Bush-mov. Whoahhhh. If anyone has the url for a chimp-to-Dubya-to-Claudia-to-Cindy morph mov, dude -- send it to us before Fleshbot gets their greedy (and well-lubed) little hands on it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free WiFi, VoIP at X-Prize launch on Sept. 29
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DATE: 09/18/2004 10:07:04 AM
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So cool. BoingBoing reader Inder says,
I want to let boingboingers know that WanderPort will be providing a free wi-fi network at the launch of SpaceShipOne for the Ansari X-Prize in the Mojave Desert September 29th through to the second launch. If any bloggers are attending the launch and want to have a mac address pass-through to make sure they can file, just send us an email info@wanderport.com and we'll make sure they can get their blogs posted. We'll also be providing a few WISIP phones for free North America phone calls.
Link to Ansari X-Prize home.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sex and Science: Boyling Hot Love
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DATE: 09/18/2004 10:14:50 AM
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Newsweek's Brian Braiker interviews T. Coraghessan Boyle (image: AP), author of The Inner Circle. The interview is a terrific read, and I really can't wait to read the book.
Like Boyle's "The Road to Wellville," "Circle" is a fictionalized account of a historic figure. Instead of John Harvey Kellogg, Boyle this time tackles Alfred C. Kinsey, the Indiana University professor who jump-started the sexual revolution with the 1948 publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." The novel is narrated by John Milk, a naive researcher at the center of Professor Kinsey's, or "Prok's," inner circle. Kinsey -- who would have abhorred the euphemism "adult film" -- proposes that poets have had 2,000 years to tell us about romance and love, and now science ought to tell us about the physiology of sex, without regard to emotional content. (Kinsey is also the subject of an upcoming biopic starring Liam Neeson.)
And boy, is the professor ever interested in sex. He charms his researchers into bed, encourages them all to swap wives and generally get it on as much as possible -- all in the name of science, of course. Because the intent behind the sex is clinical, the steady stream of graphic episodes in the novel becomes numbing, unsexy and, well, clinical. But things get sticky when Milk, a married man with a bit of a Stockholm syndrome infatuation for his mentor, fails to disentangle his emotions. Milk is in love with Kinsey. He's in love with Kinsey's wife. And he's in love with his own wife, Iris. In the end, the novel is a meditation on family, on marriage, love and sexuality.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Saving Energy Without Derision
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DATE: 09/18/2004 10:15:24 AM
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BoingBoing reader George W. Maschke says,
Saving Energy Without Derision (5 mb PDF) is a new (and free) e-book by former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff. This book is intended to be a real-world, no-nonsense, thoroughly documented collection of easy-to-implement recommendations to help the average thoughtful person to pick the "low-hanging fruit" of conservation and renewable energy. The author is after the easy 75% of actions we can all take (but almost uniformly ignore) that most certainly make a difference in energy costs (after all that's what most people care about) and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation).
The author (who welcomes comments at zalan8587@qwest.net) intends to continuously update the book (consistent with readership interest) and address many new topics. For example, next on his list is an analysis of the economics and scientific basis of fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. (Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)
Link Looks like the link's overloaded with traffic for the time being, but a short preview is available for d/l here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Commercial Extreme Truck: Adventures in Waste
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DATE: 09/18/2004 10:37:47 AM
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Speaking of energy and excess: The International CXT, short for Commercial Extreme Truck, can haul six tons of dirt and tow a 20-ton yacht at the same time. It's 9 feet high, 8 feet wide, 21 feet long, and weighs 15,000 pounds. Ergo, about 2 feet taller x 4 feet longer than the honkin' Hummer H2. Which, btw, it could tow along with that yacht, if need be. I'm using the word "need" loosely here.
"International built the CXT to make a bold statement," said Rob Swim of International Truck and Engine Corporation in a prepared statement announcing the CXT's launch. Exactly what statement would that be?
Link to CXT debut site, and Link to press release announcing launch.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Waiter, there's a microchip in my pork butt
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DATE: 09/18/2004 11:41:10 AM
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Over a thousand pounds of pig flesh processed at a Sioux Center meatpacking facility was recalled over fears that a missing microchip could be embedded in the meat.
The Sioux-Preme Packing Co. recalled 110 pork shoulder butts -- about 1,100 pounds of meat -- that could contain the metal devices used to measure scientific data in hogs.
Pass the tofurkey, please. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Sky Captain" opens
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DATE: 09/18/2004 01:27:00 PM
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Stephen Holden of the NY Times reviews Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which opens this weekend nationwide.
If nothing else, "Sky Captain" is a landmark in computer-generated imagery. Its actors cavort through an entirely synthetic, computerized retro-styled future world that fuses Art Deco, Futurism, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and the spirit of the 1939 World's Fair into an all-purpose eve-of-World-War-II environment extrapolated into a science fiction limbo. Its cheerfully ominous scenario of a planet invaded by robots that systematically set about stripping the earth of its natural resources resonates in any number of ways without seeming strident or promoting a political agenda.
But the visual elegance of the movie, which opens today nationwide, comes at a price. If its ethereal evocation of a pulp fiction future-past eclipses almost any other sci-fi franchise in subtlety and imagination, its shadowy washed-out color is a far cry from the robust hues of a movie like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The monochromatic variations on sepia keep the actors and their adventures at a refined aesthetic distance, and the bleached, tinted face of Mr. Law is simply not as real a screen presence as the ruddy, flesh-and-blood Harrison Ford. At times the film is hard to see. And as the action accelerates, the wonder of its visual concept starts giving way to sci-fi cliches.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Olde tyme 3D photos presented by blinking
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DATE: 09/18/2004 01:47:36 PM
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Here's a fun way to look at a bunch of old stereoscope pictures without the stereoscope. The images are blinked. Move the mouse up to increase the blink rate. Link (Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Great DVD cartoons at 99-Cent Only stores
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DATE: 09/18/2004 03:23:11 PM
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I'm stopping at my local 99-cent store today. As reported in Cartoon Brew:
Rivaling Fleischer studios with their abstract rubber-hose animation style and hot jazz musical scores, the RKO Van Beuren Tom & Jerry cartoons (1931-1933) have become classics for their sheer surrealism. Currently in distribution at 99 Cents Only Stores is one of the greatest bargains I've ever seen: a dvd of nine Van Beuren TOM & JERRY cartoons! That's 11 cents per cartoon! And if that's not enough for you, it comes with a free 10 minute phone card inside the package!!
(Semi-related aside: Many moons ago, I wrote about a trip to the 99-Cent Only store for the print edition of bOING bOING)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: iPatch
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DATE: 09/18/2004 04:06:06 PM
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The only accessory you need for Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19.
The site's creator, Grant Henninger, says:
"Let me present t' you t' iPatch! It really has no purpose, but it was a fun site t' build. Hope people get a good harty-har-har out o' it."
Arrrrrrrrrr!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anime mural in Montreal
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DATE: 09/18/2004 08:13:07 PM
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Found in this morning's Flickr RSS photostream of pix of graffiti, a three-storey building in Montreal covered in a beautiful blue anime mural.
Link
Update: Andre sez: "Today's Flick image image is not the only anime-inspired mural in Montreal. Check out this one."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beating Bible-bashers with showtunes
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DATE: 09/19/2004 04:04:53 AM
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A New Yorker on a subway car grew tired of the homophobic Bible-thumping preachers, and retaliated by singing show tunes until they shut up:
Me: "If you all don't lower your voices and cease calling me Satan, I will have to sing show tunes."
The other straphangers look at me with stony faces.
I begin to sing.
"Its very clear, our love is here to stay. Not for a year, but forever and a day…"
Preacher lady and the Jesus police start mumbling and beseeching G_d to strike me down and boil me in molten tar. (I look better in silver.)
The train reaches Wall Street. Confused subway riders check out the scene. I begin swaying and feeling the music.
The slamming Bible man looks like he is going to pop a blood vessel. "I cast ye out, Satan."
I go into jazz dance crouch and then spring up to belt out, "THAAAAAAT OLD BLACK MAGIC, HAS ME IN A SPELL…"
Bible man has to get off the train as I wriggle and shimmy. "That same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine!"
Bible man exits. SHOW TUNES 1, FUNDAMENTALISTS 0.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tribute to Fortune Red, Disneyland's fortune-telling pirate
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DATE: 09/19/2004 04:15:44 AM
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Randall sez, "Showcasing the now-extinct shooter arcade that once graced the exit to Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, The Pirates Arcade page offers your chance to have Fortune Red, the fortne-telling pirate machine tell your fortune. Click on the "Fortune Red Has This To Say..." button, and one of the 20 possible fortunes will be delivered in a popup window. Most fortunes make reference to one Disneyland attraction or another, including the long-gone Mine Train Through Nature's Wonderland."
Link
(Thanks, Randall!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PK Dick on reality, Disneyland, and authentic humans
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DATE: 09/19/2004 04:17:39 AM
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Great (if over-long) Philip K Dick essay on the nature of reality and science fiction:
But I consider that the matter of defining what is real -- that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is true.
In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down
Link
(Thanks, Condour!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Che/Michael Moore mashup schwag MoveOn fundraiser
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DATE: 09/19/2004 04:19:57 AM
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Kevin sez, "This is the t-shirt site with the Che Guevara/Michael Moore shirt. We're announcing a fundraiser for MoveOn.org where we donate funds from shirts and buttons to the MoveOn PAC from now until election day. For the first hundred shirts we donate a dollar, the second hundred two dollars, and after that, we'll donate five dollars for every shirt sold.
"We're excited about this - we're a company of roughly three people so this feels like a way that we can actually help. I don't know what kind of response we're going to get to it yet, but who can predict? We're preparing for anything!"
Link
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: More Ramones related bits
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DATE: 09/19/2004 09:39:58 AM
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The Black Block boutique at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris is selling a French artist's series of Photoshopped takes on various rock album covers. I snapped this shot of a c.2003 altered version of the Ramones' self-titled debut. As we know, it's sadly time for an update.
In other Ramones news, here's an NPR interview with filmmaker Michael Gramglia about End of the Century, the controversial Ramones documentary. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Colorado's Renewable Energy Amendment
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DATE: 09/19/2004 09:42:38 AM
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BoingBoing reader Kenneth says,
This is the site of the pro-amendment 37 campaign in Colorado. The amendment would require utilities in CO to purchase a percentage of their electricity from renewable sources, getting to 10 percent by 2015. The utilities are, of course, very opposed to it. It may be that the only way for non-CO residents to legally contribute to the campaign is through the cafepress shop they have and buy a t-shirt. But, IANAL, so I really don't know that.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: CXT monster truck: fantasy bumper stickers
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DATE: 09/19/2004 10:21:15 AM
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Responding to yesterday's post about the grotesquely supersized Hummeroid vehicle known as the International CXT, Bruce Bortin says:
"'Exactly what statement would that be?' -- I submit the following response," in the form of a handily printable bumper sticker shown at left. Link to sticker.
Perhaps an alternate approach might be the last lines of Radiohead's Exit Music (For a Film). Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Oedipus. The Movie. Starring Vegetables.
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DATE: 09/19/2004 10:40:12 AM
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Jason Wishnow, creator of two infamous Star Wars documentaries -- Tatooine or Bust and Star Wars or Bust -- has a new short out. An eight-minute rendition of Sophocles' classic tale of Oedipus, performed by fresh produce.
"Sex, violence, and cauliflower abounds!", says Jason, who tells us the film is "Performed by vegetables -- In the tradition of BEN-HUR. See a potato as it was meant to be seen, 15 feet tall!"
It's screening at fests all over the place over the next couple of months, including September dates in SF and LA. You can also download production stills and other goodies on the project's website. I haven't seen it, but it sounds great. And low-carb. Billy Dee Williams does voiceover for the "handsomest of all bell peppers." The production notes crack me up.
"We shot the Senate Plaza with a handful of real olives then digitally expanded the scene to a cast of thousands. True to the spirit of 1950s cinema, we racially profiled our extras. Green olives play soldiers, black olives play slaves, and the citizens are Greek olives."
Question 1: If animation with clay figures = claymation, and marionettes on steroids (a la Team America) = supermarionation, then what's this? Vegemation? Question 2: Do male lead broccoli stalks carry SAG cards, or "certified organic" stickers? Question 3: If a scene shot with edible characters needs finesse, do you rotoscope or rotisserie?
Link to Oedipus The Movie. (also spotted on Calacanis' blog earlier this year)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Afro-Punk offices burned, donations sought
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DATE: 09/19/2004 11:24:19 AM
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The makers of a groundbreaking documentary film exploring racial identity within the punk scene -- Afro-Punk: the "rock n roll nigger" experience -- were hit with an unexpected disaster last week. Friends are reaching out to coordinate donations of space and gear to help the filmmakers get back on track. From an e-mail sent to friends and supporters:
On Monday Sept. 13th at around 2pm the building that houses the afro-punk offices was set on fire. Apparently, the first floor failing clothing store owner, in an act of desperation, set a phone book on fire and took a little walk. Meanwhile Afro-Punk's director James Spooner was two flights up discussing his upcoming panel on music as a tool for black liberation with a colleague. "We heard the bell ringing and a lot of screaming and yelling" says James. The guilty store owner, alerted James and his friend of the blaze below. Thinking quickly James ran back into the office unplugged his Mac tower, which houses the documentary and hobbled down the stairs through the smoke and flames . "Man, maybe it was stupid, but this film has effected too many people for it to all end here, let the rest burn, I had to save it!"
Luckily fire fighters acted quickly on the scene and were able to stabilize the fire. Flames never reached our office but the NYFD destroyed the place trying to make sure the fire wasn't in the walls or ceiling.
After the smoke literally cleared they were allowed back up to access the damage. All in all it could have been worse. The Afro-Punk computers and camera are still working, the 200 hours of footage afro-punk was cut from seems to be okay and the work for our next film is safe. We did lose some furniture, a monitor and some vcrs from our dubbing station, but most tragic, we lost our donated office space.
Link to the Afro-Punk website, link to paypal donation site, and e-mail the group for a list of non-cash donations they're seeking -- including office space, office supplies, and electronic equipment (VCRs, monitors, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, and the like). (via pho list and Bob Davis of Soul Patrol)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cool-hunter detective story
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DATE: 09/19/2004 02:34:12 PM
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I just finished Scott Westerfeld's "So Yesterday," a novel about cool-hunters working for Nike who stumble upon a shoe that's so amazingly cool that they can't figure out why it bears a red-circle-slash No Logo modifier. Nor how said cool anti-shoe relates to the mysterious disappearance of their boss, the head cool-hunter wrangler. The book is a fast-paced, smart-talkin', trivia-spoutin' mystery thriller that I read through in about a day and a half, laughing aloud time and again. I mean, how can you resist a book with passages like this one:
The guy riding in the truck's elevator was muscular and lean, very dark. He was wearing a trucker cap and cowboy boots, jeans and a mesh shirt that showed off his muscles. In a friendlier context I would have pegged him as a gay bodybuilder doing an ironic take on NASCAR fandom. But alongside the other two, he looked more like one of the many hopefuls sent down by central casting to try out for the part of THUG #3 in a hip new thriller.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Calvin and Hobbes slipcased complete collection coming
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DATE: 09/19/2004 02:42:05 PM
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There's a complete Calvin and Hobbes hardcover archival collection (a la the totally stunning $100 Far Side box set from last year) coming out, priced at $150 (yowch, but man, how totally cool to own one of these!).
Link
(Thanks, DigDoug!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Che/Star Wars Stormtrooper shirt
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DATE: 09/19/2004 03:21:59 PM
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These $20 "CheTrooper" tees are everything an ironic t-shirt should be: black, large, moderately priced and funny as hell.
Link
(Thanks, stx!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons Byrne/Gil benefit webcast
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DATE: 09/20/2004 12:24:19 AM
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Tomorrow night is the eve of the enormous David Byrne/Gilberto Gil benefit for Creative Commons in NYC, sponsored by Wired Magazine. At the last minute, Smartley-Dunn and Apple have ponied up the technology to host a free webcast of the whole thing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wikipedia breaks 10^6 articles
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DATE: 09/20/2004 12:30:46 AM
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The free/open Wikipedia encyclopedia project just posted its 1,000,000th article.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the one millionth article in Wikipedia, its project to create a free, open-content, online encyclopedia (Wikipedia.org (http://en.wikipedia.org)). Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently both the world's largest encyclopedia and its fastest-growing, with articles under active development in over 100 languages. Nearly 2,500 new articles are added to Wikipedia each day, along with ten times that number of updates to existing articles.
Link
(via Joi Ito)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Small world
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DATE: 09/20/2004 01:03:41 AM
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Scientists have set a new record in atomic resolution imaging. In the journal Science, researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported using a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) to create this direct image of a silicon crystal with .6 angstrom resolution. (An angstrom is one ten-billionth of a meter, the approximate diameter of a single atom.) ORNL researcher Stephen Pennycook:
![si[112]](http://www.boingboing.net/si[112].jpg)
"It's always better to see what's what. For the materials, chemical and nano sciences, you want to see what is going on at the atomic scale--how atoms bond and how things work."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Aya Takano
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DATE: 09/20/2004 02:46:59 AM
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My friend Stella just turned me on to Aya Takano, another one of the young Japanese illustrators in Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki artist collective. I've never been a big anime fan, but this post-manga style that Murakami dubbed "superflat" a few years ago continues to really grab me. Link (to Takano's bio) Link (to a Flash animation work) Link (to Takano's monograph Hot Banana Fudge)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New York Times on the avant-garde
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DATE: 09/20/2004 04:15:15 AM
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Margo Jefferson, the NYT's Pulitzer-winning culture critic, has launched a new occasional column dedicated to "avant-garde" art. (I've always loved that term and I'm happy people are bringing it back into fashion.) Jefferson's introductory column is insightful, smart, and, most importantly, she doesn't take herself too seriously. I look forward to the next installment!
When you hear the phrase avant-garde
1)You flip through your intellectual file folder looking for examples (Dada, 12-tone music, modern dance, underground films, the Beats, theater of the absurd, electronic music).
2) You experience a certain dread. (You ask yourself if you are the only one in the gallery not getting the artist's joke, or worry that you can't finish that book said to challenge narrative conventions so boldly.)
3)You rage, "Where's the vision today, the energy?" You think back longingly. Paris, 1913: Diaghilev's Ballets Russes hurl Stravinksy's "Rite of Spring" at a shocked public. New York in the 1940's: Bird, Diz and Monk lead the charge for the music that would be known as bop. The 1960's and 70's: lofts, galleries, parks and churches shelter free jazz, new music and every kind of performance. What does it take to bring artists together to make brave new works?
I've felt each, and I'm about to start writing about the avant-garde in occasional essays and pieces of criticism. Which brings up another question: If an avant-garde is written about in a major newspaper like this one, doesn't that prove that it has moved to the culture's prosperous Midtown?
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Virtual autopsies
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DATE: 09/20/2004 05:08:39 AM
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In the new issue of Popular Science, Jessican Snyder Sachs has an interesting and well-written article about virtual autopsies as a permanent record for pathologists. Michael Thali and the Virtopsy research team at the University of Bern, Switzerland use computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to create full-body scans of murder victims.
Besides being a bloodless approach to an otherwise messy job, the digitally preserved bodies of the Virtopsy Project have the added benefit of permanency. “Murder victims have the unfortunate habit of decomposing,” Thali notes.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reverse Casemod
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DATE: 09/20/2004 09:44:06 AM
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BoingBoing reader D says, "Have an old computer case? Or, perhaps you're doing a casemod for your computer, so you don't need your old case. Enter, The Reverse Mod; turn your old computer case into a bookshelf!" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iranian bloggers protest 'Net crackdown
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DATE: 09/20/2004 09:46:43 AM
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Hoder says, "Hundreds of bloggers have changed their blogs' names to Emrooz, the name of the banned website for which several people have been arrested. Bloggers have also copied banned site's news into their own blogs on Monday. It's really the biggest protest since [the recent arrest of Iranian weblogger] Sinas." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of Buzz Aldrin/Emmy Awards Zen
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DATE: 09/20/2004 10:05:38 AM
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Following up on last week's series of Zero-G posts on BoingBoing, Matt Fraction says:
My favorite Buzz thing-- aside from the time he busted that guy in the chops for asking him if the moon landings were fake-- was when Letterman was sending him out and about in the world for a while. He went to the daytime emmys in his astronaut suit and did red carpet interviews.
Which would go like this:
Buzz: Hi there! Who are you?
Soap Star: I'm Mr. Soap Star, and I'm nominated for best hooha in a thingy.
Buzz: That's great. I walked on the moon.
(very awkward silence)
Image: Floating in lunar gravity with Dr. Buzz Aldrin, on the Sep. 15, 2004 debut of Zero Gravity Corp.'s parabolic flight service. Before this moment, the last time Dr. Aldrin had experienced lunar gravity was when he walked on the moon with Neil Armstrong on July 20,1969. Image: Jim Campbell. And if any BoingBoing have pointers to online archived footage of Dr. Aldrin's moment of Emmy zen, do tell.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora -- upcoming book
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DATE: 09/20/2004 10:43:50 AM
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I'm waiting to get my copy of "The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora," a new book coming out from Fantagraphics. Flora was a record album cover illustrator in the 1940s and 1950s. I discovered him about 15 years ago when I bought a Benny Goodman record with a Flora cover at a garage sale for $1. Finding this illustration reconfigured my brain.
Here's a good description of Flora's style (from the back cover of the book):
Vintage music buffs have long been bedazzled by bizarre, cartoonish album covers tagged with the signature "Flora." In the 1940s and '50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. As Flora confessed in a 1998 interview, "I got away with murder, didn't I?"
There's a nice Flora art gallery online, which is maintained by Irwin Chusid, who compiled the book for Fantagraphics.
Fantagraphics also published a book by one of my other main influences, Gene Deitch, called The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove. He did the covers for a jazz fanzine in the 1940s, called The Record Changer. In the '60s, Deitch was the art director for UPA, the cartoon studio that produced Gerald McBoingBoing. ABout 10 years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Deitch in his San Francisco home (He lives most of the year in Prague). He drew a great picture of his jazz character, The Cat, for me and presented it to me. I interviewed him for the print edition of bOING bOING, but I never got around to transcribing the tape. I hope I still have it.
One of my other big influences, Disney Artist Mary Blair, got her own book this year too! (Illustrator Bob Staake has a couple of pages with Blair's art.)
Now, all I need to round out my library of illustrator-gods are books about the work of Tom Oreb and Ed Benedict.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Petals Around the Rose logic puzzle
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DATE: 09/20/2004 11:45:50 AM
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This looks like an interesting problem. Lloyd Borrett writes:
Take up the challenge of "Petals Around the Rose". Also read what happened when Bill Gates was introduced to Petals Around the Rose in June 1977. How he tackled this brain teaser is an interesting insight into the man at the helm of Microsoft.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Baby swaddling how to video
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DATE: 09/20/2004 11:53:44 AM
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Glenn Fleishman sez: As befits a new dad who loves technology, I've made a small movie (with my wife as videographer) of two quick ways to swaddle a baby: using regular receiving blankets and with a special garment called the Miracle Blanket. Swaddling is supposed to help babies be calmer when they're upset and to sleep better. And, holy cats, it worked for us. When I got a good swaddle going and added some hairdryer noise (recorded and burned to CD), my wife and I started sleeping at night quite a bit, only two weeks into his young life. Link (and when baby gets a few months older, I recommend that they ferberize him.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Architectural monstrosities in Beijing
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DATE: 09/20/2004 11:57:23 AM
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raul gutierrez sez: "When hanging around Beijing, one can't help but be impressed by the staggering number of recently built architectural monstrosities. Now there's a site that collects them all in one place."
(I'd take the three kings building over a Gehry "crushed beer can" any day.) Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Michael Jackson Halloween mask
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DATE: 09/20/2004 12:00:52 PM
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This Halloween mask of entertainer Michael Jackson is pretty creepy. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Upset gentleman leaves angry phone message
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DATE: 09/20/2004 04:11:42 PM
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Max Mitchell sez: Tim is a guy I know. He was helping some guy with his website. The guy owes him £400, so Tim stopped helping him.
This is a cellphone message left by the guy where he starts ranting and raving. Swearing and telling Tim he's going to go crazy if Tim doesn't call.
A minor version of Winnebago man. Nice bit of swearing with a London accent.
Link (NSFW unless you are wearing headphones.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Are you a Copyright Criminal?
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DATE: 09/20/2004 05:14:23 PM
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BoingBoing reader Robert Daeley says, "Came across this picture on the wall just behind a copy machine. All the hackers I know wear ski masks when they commit their crimes. Oh, and big thick leather gloves are great for typing."
Link to blog post with pointer to full size image. Mwuhuhahahahaaaaaaa.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Julie Verhoeven
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DATE: 09/21/2004 01:26:51 AM
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My wife Kelly really digs the work of Julie Verhoeven, an avant-garde fashion illustrator for magazines like The Face and Dazed and Confused. In 2002, her work appeared on the runways in the form of illustrated handbags by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton. She also created cartoons for a performance by electrocrash band Fischerspooner and the cover for Primal Scream and Kate Moss's "Some Velvet Morning" album. Verhoeven has her own fashion brand, Gibo, with boutiques in London and New York. We bought her new monograph, published in Japan by Gas. Now we really want her first book, Fat-Bottomed Girls. Link (to Channel4 article) Link (scroll to the Fat-Bottomed Girls article and click "more images")
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Villette Numérique in Paris
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DATE: 09/21/2004 02:15:04 AM
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The Villette Numérique digital art extravaganza starts tomorrow in Paris. It's an intense two-week program of international tech/culture exhibitions, performances, workshops, concerts, and films.
Dozens of artists including Atau Tanaka (image at left), JoDI, Greg Niemeyer/Chris Chafe, and Maclej Wisnlewski will present new work in the "Zone de Confluences." BB's Parisian liaison Alexandre Boucherot and his colleagues from Fluctuat.net are acting as mediators of the media art, providing insight into the pieces for visitors to the exhibition. I'm also looking forward to Sigur Rós's Odin's Raven Magic, an adaptation of Icelandic sagas backed by a full orchestra. Tomorrow night, experimental musicians Scanner and Simon Fisher Turner will twist knobs in a planetarium, and this weekend we'll catch a performance of Stockhausen's Mantra.
If you're in the vicinity, now is a good time to catch an easyJet flight. Hit the Villette Numérique site for background on all the artists mentioned above and plenty of more information worth a look even if you can't make it to Paris. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sterling engines for space
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DATE: 09/21/2004 02:35:33 AM
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NASA-funded scientists are designing Stirling engines, first invented in 1816, to power long-range spacecraft that travel too far from the Sun to use solar power. Decaying plutonium heats up helium until it starts a chain reaction of contraction and expansion, producing sound waves that fire a piston.
"Inside the engine, the acoustic pressure is high enough to pop your eardrums," (Northrop Grumman researcher Mike) Petach told New Scientist. "It's louder than a thunderclap."
He adds that the sound does not escape the engine, so the device could be used to produce electricity for submarines, which must glide undetected beneath the ocean's surface.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First Belgian book released under CC license
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:03:05 AM
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Stefan sez, "With Antwerp named as World Book City in 2004, residents and visitors were being invited to create a biography of the city by SMS. On the 19th September, a selection of the submitted impressions have been compiled into a booklet combined with the focus on the different text points and giving an alternative view on Antwerp and its districts. The booklet (in Dutch) is available for download in PDF, plain text and a special version for iPods. By the end of October a complete English translation will be available under the same license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0">
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anime murals in Montreal redux
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:03:31 AM
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Here are a couple more cool anime murals in Montreal, including one that was defaced by the addition of an obscuring McDonald's billboard. I'm now officially bored with this subject, so there's no point in sending in more Montreal anime mural links (but thanks for the ones you've sent in so far!).
Link 1, Link 2
(Thanks, Jeremy and Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Publishing-scam vocabulary
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:05:53 AM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden's latest blog-essay on publishing scams explores the vocabulary choices that tip off the likelihood of a sleazy publishing scam:
This is a segment of a larger piece, the working title of which has been "Ambient Misinformation about Publishing and Writing, and the Cultivation of the Reader Mind: A Rant I Didn't Get to Deliver at Noreascon." It has occurred to me that I could write about this one for a very long time without exhausting the subject.
Certain words and phrases are like little genetic markers for scammers. Here's a non-exhaustive list, non-exhaustively explained:
1. "Giving new writers a chance." Also: "Helping new writers."
While agents and publishers frequently do just this thing, they don't talk about it in those terms. For them, it's always a specific new book, a specific new author. Making judgements about which book and which writer they're going to work with is the heart of their job. When you hear someone talking in an indiscriminately general fashion about giving a chance to new writers, there's something wrong.
Same goes for "helping new writers." There might be legitimate projects aimed at helping new writers as a class, but the business they're in isn't agenting or publishing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK take on Creative Commons
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:08:00 AM
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Becky sez, "My piece on Larry Lessig and the BBC Creative Archive was published in the New Media Guardian today. The in-depth article discusses copyright in the digital age and the Creative Commons project.
"Unfortunately, to read the article you need to register."
Reg Req'd Link, use "feeshfeeshfeesh@hotmail.com/feeshfeesh"
(Thanks, Becky!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why some paintings' eyes follow you
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:28:13 AM
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A psych prof at Ohio State has used computer graphics apps to determine why some paintings' eyes appear to follow you around the room:
"When observing real surfaces in the natural environment the visual information that specifies near and far points varies when we change viewing direction," he said.
"When we observe a picture on the wall, on the other hand, the visual information that defines near and far points is unaffected by viewing direction. Still, we interpret this perceptually as if it were a real object. That is why the eyes appear to follow you as you change your viewing direction."
Todd said people may be surprised by this phenomenon because of the unique perceptual aspects of viewing a picture. We perceive the object depicted in a painting as a surface in 3-dimensional space, but we also perceive that the painting itself is a 2-dimensional surface that is hanging on the wall.
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(Thanks, Ernie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Little Pony Borg
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:30:18 AM
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What a great mod: converting a My Little Pony into an element of the Borg.
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(Thanks, Biz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: San Diego's hacker con returns next weekend
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:37:55 AM
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ToorCon, San Diego's excellent hacker convention, is returning next weekend for its sixth year. I was a guest at this last year and had a great time -- the nerd sports were awesome, like the You 0wn It, You Own It contest, where anyone who could attain root on old *nix boxen got to take them home. Other highlights included the amazing party at the Dachb0den hacker loft, the hackerbot that would roll up to your feet and display all the cleartext passwords you'd sent over WiFi on its LCD, and the tech presentations on poisoning, sniffing, hacking, cracking, defending and fighting back (check out my photo gallery for more) (I'll never forget staying at the apartment that contained one of every Unix system ever, as part of a massive project to create a single shell script to close all non-essential services on any/every flavor of *nix -- the sound of all those fans and the heat made it like sleeping in a softly glowing jet engine!).
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(Thanks, Boogah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Feds defend secret law with secret brief
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:44:19 AM
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Bill sez, "The Justice Department continues to demand the right to file a secret brief in Gilmore vs. Ashcroft, a case that involves secret law. In response to a September 10th ruling by the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals that rejected DOJ's attempt to file their arguments in secret, the DOJ filed a motion asking the Court to reconsider its decision."
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(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blogs and politics timeline
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:45:20 AM
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David Sifry's put up a Wiki to collaboratively edit a timeline of "when weblogs had a significant impact on politics."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google building custom Moz browser?
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:47:08 AM
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Some compelling evidence that Google is developing its own Mozilla-based browser; besides the registration of gbrowser.com, there's the annotations in the Mozilla bug-tracker like this one: "this is a duplicate of a private bug about working with Google. So closing this one."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Burning Man payphone stories and build-notes
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:53:49 AM
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Brad Templeton deployed a ruggedized WiFi/VoIP-based phone booth at this year's Burning Man -- here are build-notes, photos, maps of call-destinations and so forth.
A considerable number of folks invited to use the phone said they didn't know the phone numbers of any of their friends. Today, many people keep all numbers in their cell phone's address book, and never dial the numbers directly. Many of them called their own voice mails since they knew at least that number, and often exclaimed in amazement at just that. (Alas, many of the voice mails they left themselves will have been somewhat garbled due to the internet traffic issues.)
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(Thanks, Brad!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cool government pubs blog
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DATE: 09/21/2004 03:55:55 AM
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CoolGov is a new blog devoted to interesting documents discovered on governmental websites.
From the "Explaining Barbeque to the World" desk at the State Deparment Bureau of International Information Programs: BBQ is a "method of cooking meat very slowly over coals was adopted by the early European settlers in North America and called barbecue. When it is done, the tender meat is chopped or shredded, topped with sauce that varies from region to region, and often made into a sandwich with a soft roll and some cole slaw. As with so many cooking methods, there is great debate among purists over what constitutes real barbecue, but none over its stature as a delicious and uniquely American dish."
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory speaking in London, Terre Haute this month
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DATE: 09/21/2004 04:36:41 AM
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Just a reminder that Cory will be at two conferences in the coming weeks:
* I'm the evening's guest at the British Science Fiction Association meeting in London, this Wednesday, 5:30 - (The Star Tavern, 6 Belgrave Mews West, London, SW1X 8HT, 020 7235 3019)
* I'm a speaker at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology WWW@10 conference in Terre Haute Indiana, Sept 30 - Oct 2
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ETCON call for proposals closes in a week!
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DATE: 09/21/2004 05:16:07 AM
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The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece call for participation closes on Sept 27 -- just under a week from now. ETCON, held annually in San Diego (this year's dates are March 14-17, 2005) is the best tech conference on the planet. I've averaged more mind-blowing experiences per ETCON than at any other event I've ever attended. I'm proud and honoured to sit on the conference jury, and we're now gearing up for the selection process -- looking forward to seeing your proposal on the list!
The theme for this year's ETech is "Remix," encompassing those nexus points of iterative hacking and large ideas that have a way of transforming technology:
* The phone has become a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor—and back to phone again, by way of voice-over-IP.
* Geolocation, once the provenance of government and geologist, provides a sense of "there" and facilitates ad hoc group forming with feet in both the virtual and physical worlds.
* Peer-to-peer brought us the concept of the average PC as "the dark matter of the Internet," even more applicable to the mobile devices in our pockets. These devices, networked in a mesh, are starting to behave more like colony creatures than stand-alone devices.
* The grand unimaginative vision of web services as B2B EDI replacement has given way to recombinant data services and syndicated e-commerce for the rest of us.
* Geeks with screwdrivers are risking "letting the magic out" of their computers, game consoles, and other assorted gadgets, discovering instead that there's even more magic to be had when you've taken the screws out.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk as a print-centric PDF
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DATE: 09/21/2004 05:16:38 AM
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Change This, the org that publishes manifestos on the Web as print-centric, beautifully laid-out PDFs, has republished my Microsoft DRM speech as a printable, laid-out, typographically sophisticated and pretty PDF. How cool!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO defeat Pentagon censorware and cast absentee ballots
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DATE: 09/21/2004 12:30:57 PM
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The Pentagon is blocking websites that help overseas military personnel cast absentee ballots in the upcoming Federal election. The Verified Voter Foundation has initiated a program to create a distributed mirror of absentee voting info and to provide anonymizing proxy services to defeat the military's unconstitutional censorware.
The International Herald Tribune reported on September 20th that "the Pentagon has begun restricting international access to the official Web site intended to help overseas absentee voters cast ballots." Pentagon spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke confirmed that a number of Internet service providers worldwide had been blacklisted "to thwart hackers." Such measures are generally recognized to be ineffective against hackers while blocking legitimate users.
Apparently, the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) website is now blocked to civilians overseas trying to find out how to obtain absentee ballots in at least 25 countries--including Japan, France, Great Britain, and Spain--although military personnel overseas have other mechanisms for requesting absentee ballots.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Elvis Costello disclaims antipiracy warnings on his own CD
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DATE: 09/21/2004 12:33:00 PM
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Elvis Costello's new CD "The Delivery Man" is plastered with obnoxious FBI anti-piracy warnings. Over these is this legend: "THE ARTIST DOES NOT ENDORSE THE FOLLOWING WARNING. THE FBI DOESN'T HAVE HIS HOME PHONE NUMBER AND HE HOPES THAT THEY DON'T HAVE YOURS.
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(Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Globe and Mail site jumps the shark
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DATE: 09/21/2004 01:11:04 PM
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Misha sez:
The Toronto Globe and Mail has totally re-jigged their web site.
1) You need to register to see just about anything
2) Worse: From a quick glance, most of the feature writing, editorials, columns, etc now requires a *paid* subscription. They want $14.95/month for access to this. Even if you already subscribe to the print edition, they want you to pony up an extra $6.95 a month for full access to the web site.
Ah well, one more reason to get your news elsewhere.
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(Thanks, Misha!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Weinberger: "free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world"
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DATE: 09/21/2004 01:34:22 PM
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David Weinberger, author of the brilliant and seminal Small Pieces Loosely Joined, has posted a draft of a great speech on copyright that he's giving at the World Economic Forum in NYC tomorrow:
[F]or one moment, I'd like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they're fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!
...We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren't passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist's hands and enters our lives. And that's not a betrayal of the work. That's its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That's artistic success, although it's a branding failure.
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(via isen.blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UPS wants its shirt back
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DATE: 09/21/2004 02:51:50 PM
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Darren sez, "A month or so ago, you guys referenced an entry about my UPS shirt. I though you might be interested in this follow-up.
"The blogosphere giveth, and the blogosphere taketh away. UPS got wind that I had one of their shirts, and they called and want it back. Here's my description of the first call. And here's my explanation today of why I'm giving it back.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Zombie apocalypse novels serialized
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DATE: 09/21/2004 04:29:52 PM
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Wireless Ink is offering two serialized science fiction novels called Monster Island and "Monster Nation".
Monster Island is a 60 chapter serial novel published to mobile phones under Creative Commons license by David Wellington (an indie author) about a Zombie Apocalypse in New York City. Monster Nation, the second novel in the trilogy, will be available in September 2004.
Mobile Link (Also available at winksite.com under "Featured Sites.")
UPDATE: Jef sez: [Here's] the full webpage for David Wellington's "Monster Island". The mobile phone serial concept is dandy, but the winksite pages contain very little content per click, which is necessary for mobiles, but frustrating if you want to read it online or cut/paste to upload to a PDA.
UPDATE: David Harper of Winksite sez: "Great point about reading Monster Island from the desktop. Let me explain a bit on what is going on. When you point your browser to Monster Island (http://winksite.com/monster/island) you are presented with a version appropriate for your mobile phone or PDA. The version that pops up when you enter that address from a PC is intended to emulate/demo the mobile experience. We certainly would not expect or suggest anyone to read the novel from their desktop in that manner.
The mobile version of Monster Nation, the prequel to Island just launched today at http://winksite.com/monster/nation and can be reached from your desktop at http://www.brokentype.com/nation/. Chapters are posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Over the next couple of weeks feeds of each of the novels will be made available for syndication. In addition, as each novel in the trilogy is completed, a downloadable PDF version will be made available under Creative Commons license.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Eddie Campbell interviewed in The Graphic Novel Review
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DATE: 09/21/2004 04:39:07 PM
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Great, long interview with Eddie Campbell in The Graphic Novel Review.
One problem, for instance, is that when a paper like Publishers Weekly does a spread on the graphic novel, they need to justify it with some advertising. And who can afford that kind of ad? DC of course, so the image of the latest Batman paperback will dominate the page, and any blather we spout about the serious intent of the graphic novel will be somewhat wasted.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Comic Art #6 on sale
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DATE: 09/21/2004 05:07:40 PM
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I picked up issue #6 of Comic Art magazine last week. What a treat. 
There's a long article about Seth (creator of Palookaville) with plenty of pictures, including a cardboard city he built (seen on the cover) and a page from his sketchbook (which I scanned here -- incredible! Click on thumb for enlargement). Unfortunately, no pictures of Seth. I've only seen other people's drawings of Seth. (He's always wearing a vintage hat and suit and chain smoking when people draw him.)
There's another article about Virgil Partch (aka "VIP"), a delightfully wacky cartoonist from the 40s and 50s. If you look closely at the hands on VIP's characters, you'll notice that they have more than five fingers. Sometimes they have as many as 12 fingers on a hand! He did this because he used to work at Disney, where he was forced to draw four-fingered characters. The extras fingers were his way of evening the score.
The price of Comic Art is $9, which is a good deal, because it's glossy color throughout.
Link
UPDATE:
Aaron sez: In response to Mark's post on Comic Art #6 where he mentioned never seeing a photo of Seth, I figured I'd point him over to the NYTimes article from July 11th. Along with a great interview of Seth, Joe Sacco, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, and Art Spiegelman, there's a nice photo of them all together. Seth is in the top right of the photo. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Zapping the brain's fear center
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DATE: 09/21/2004 05:18:08 PM
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Researchers at New York University claim to have located the part of the brain that "extinguished fear."
In their experiments, the researchers presented the subjects with either blue or yellow squares. One color was associated with a mild electric shock. Using this method, the subjects acquired a fear of the colored square associated with the shock.
Phelps's team then extinguished the fear response by presenting the colored square associated with the shock, first with a gradually reduced shock and then with no shock at all.
Link (via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Plane diverted over former Cat Stevens as security risk
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DATE: 09/21/2004 09:00:01 PM
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BoingBoing reader Greg says, "I thought that the No-Fly list was scrapped, but it turns out it was just renamed."
A plane bound for Washington from London was diverted to Maine on Tuesday after passenger Yusuf Islam - formerly known as pop singer Cat Stevens - showed up on a U.S. watch list, federal officials said. One official said Islam, 56, was identified by the Advanced Passenger Information System, which requires airlines to send passenger information to U.S. Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center. TSA was then contacted and requested that the plane land at the nearest airport, the official said.
Link to AP news story. John Battelle comes up with an infinitely better hed for this post than I: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gravity Lamp -- lighting design concept
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DATE: 09/21/2004 09:05:39 PM
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The "Gravity" lamp reclines and goes to sleep when you're not in the room. When you enter, it awakens, stands up, and turns on.
Fun Furde says, "The Gravity is equal parts cute and creepy. Cute because it's sort of like a pet that's happy to see you when you come home. Creepy because it's a lamp that moves by itself! No idea if they're actually going to make this or how much it will cost if they do. Or how they keep the lightbulb from smashing when it hits the ground."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Computer industry to entertainment industry: we lied (right on!)
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DATE: 09/21/2004 11:40:14 PM
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This amazing open letter to the entertainment industry, signed by the computer industry, is a nigh-perfect expression of what constitutes a successful approach to Internet technology. And it made me laugh my ass off.
We lied to you. In the golden 80s and 90s we told you micropayments and content protection would work; that you would be able to charge minuscule amounts of money whenever someone listened to your music or watched your movie. We told you untruths which we well knew would never work - after all, we would've never used them ourselves. Instead, we wrote things like Kazaa and Gnutella, and all other evil P2P applications to get the stuff free.
We told you these things so that you would finance the things we really wanted to build, not the things that you wanted to be built. We knew all along that DRM schemes do not work, and we knew that whatever we create can be broken by us. We don't care anymore, because your money made us bigger than you.
Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don't treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less. We invent new things like online role-playing -games, where the money does not come from duplication of bits (which cannot be stopped, regardless of your DRM scheme) but from providing experiences that the people want.
We saw that you were old and weak. So we took advantage of it: told you things that you wanted to hear so we could kick you in the head in twenty years. Some of us told you that the future is going to be interactive - what did you do? You started to think how to make interactive movies (CD-I, anyone?), which is not what it really means, while we wrote games and tried to understand the new mediums, not how to bolt it on onto old things.
We lied to you. And we apologize for that, but it was for the greater good. So we're not the least bit sorry.
Signed: The Computer Industry
Link
(via Blackbeltjones)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Interstellar sugar cloud: not Atkins-compliant
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DATE: 09/21/2004 11:41:47 PM
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An enormous cloud of high-carb, life-giving frozen sugar has been discovered at the end of the Milky Way.
Molecules of a simple sugar, glycolaldehyde, were detected in a cloud of gas and dust called Sagittarius B2 about 26,000 light years away.
Observations indicated large quantities of the sugar frozen to a temperature only a few degrees above absolute zero, the point at which all molecular movement stops.
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig launches UK CC licenses in London, Oct 4
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DATE: 09/21/2004 11:43:02 PM
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Larry Lessig is coming to London on Oct 4 to launch the UK Creative Commons licenses!
Professor Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University Law School
12-2pm Monday 4 October 2004
Edward Lewis Theatre, Windeyer Building, UCL, Cleveland Street,
London W1
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LED light-sabers in candy colours
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DATE: 09/22/2004 02:58:04 AM
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These AA-powered light-fixtures are lit with candy-coloured LEDs and bear a striking resemblance to light-sabers.
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(Thanks, Hary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: STOP BUSH graffiti postcards
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DATE: 09/22/2004 03:01:02 AM
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These guys are selling picture postcards of STOP BUSH graffiti around New York, and donating the funds to the Democratic party.
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(Thanks, Eric!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ScienceMatters@Berkeley
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DATE: 09/22/2004 03:05:49 AM
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In this month's issue of my research digest ScienceMatters@Berkeley...
* Flipping the Switch on Cancer: Improving the effectiveness of Cancer drugs one molecule at a time.
* Think Molecularly, Act Globally: Studying the atmosphere from a converted spy plane.
* Quantum Computing's Magnetic Attraction: A new spin on magnetic atoms.
* The secret history of Vitamin B-12
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Secret Soviet plans for a lunar military base
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DATE: 09/22/2004 03:38:42 AM
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Thirty years ago, the Russian military allegedly developed plans to build a base on the Moon. According to MosNews, the Novaya Gazeta weekly got the story from the project-deputy general designer of the General Machine Building Design Bureau (KBOM) who was directly involved in the project."Soviet scientists considered the Moon to be a very good place for a strategic headquarters as nuclear strikes on its surface would lose most of their destructive force. As the moon has no atmosphere, no shockwave could spread there and the radioactive dust would immediately fall out back on the surface without an atmosphere to carry it.
The designer also said that the USA had also developed a lunar base project and the Soviet scientists had been aware of these plans."
The source, Aleksandr Yegorov, said the Soviet plan was scrapped because... (surprise!) it was too damn expensive.
Link (to the MosNews article) Link (to a history of Russian lunar base programs)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Quebec Free Software Week
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DATE: 09/22/2004 04:38:58 AM
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Robin sez, "The autumnal equinox marks the middle of the Semaine québécoise de l'informatique libre, something like the Québec Free Software/IT Week. The web site has the full program, > 25 events in at least 6 cities all accross Québec between September 18th and 26th."
Link
(Thanks, Robin!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Building with wood is eco-friendly?
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DATE: 09/22/2004 05:06:33 AM
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A new research report shows that wood is one of the greener materials that can be used to build homes. According to the report, prepared by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials, the environmental impact of fabricating building materials and actually constructing a home is more intense than most people realize. And while the industry has slowly moved away from wood, the use of dead trees may actually be better (well, less bad) than other products and techniques. From a press release about the report:
The research showed that wood framing used 17 percent less energy than steel construction for a typical house built in Minnesota, and 16 percent less energy than a house using concrete construction in Atlanta. And in these two examples, the use of wood had 26-31 percent less global warming potential...The growth of wood in renewable forests works to "sequester" and remove carbon from the atmosphere, and fewer carbon emissions are created in the processing needed to produce wood products than their steel and concrete counterparts.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: History of blogging video
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DATE: 09/22/2004 06:49:48 AM
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Chuck sez, "I thought I'd let you know about a little quicktime I just posted fast-forwarding through the history of blogs. It starts in 1999, spins around and flies back to 1660 and 1776, kareens through the 20th century and lands back in current blog-time."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cool technical resource for artists
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DATE: 09/22/2004 08:05:21 AM
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Earlier this year, I posted the story of Amy Jenkins, a video artist who had been invited by the Salvatore Ferragamo company to create an artwork inspired by their 5th Avenue store. The store deemed Jenkins's completed artwork "distasteful" and refused to display it because it showed her baby daughter breastfeeding. Amy wanted to show the video somewhere else but it was made for a widescreen display that she couldn't afford to buy. Today though, I received the following email from David Gilman, a Brooklyn-based production manager with experience in sound and video engineering:
"I wanted to let you know that thanks to that post, Amy now has my 60" plasma screen in her studio. And in October, I'll be bringing it up to Boston so she can show her piece at a gallery there.
So, Go Internet!
I also wanted to point you towards Art Answers, a website I started after my initial meeting with Amy. While I can't lend every artist in the world my equipment, I can try to help them get the information they need. My dream is that one day Art Answers will have a storefront with reference libraries, on-staff experts, and a tool lending library. In the meantime, people can email or call with their art creation questions, and I'll try to get them answers."
Go David! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Doom creator, astropreneur John Carmack weighs in on weightlessness
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DATE: 09/22/2004 09:38:42 AM
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BoingBoing reader Andrew Gray says,
Since you've been covering the commercial zero-G flights of late, you might be interested in John Carmack's comments on his flight yesterday (with various Armadillo & ID people). Only a Usenet post, unfortunately, with a couple of linked pictures; but still interesting (and jealousy-inducing, damnit)
"A couple of us were doing low gravity judo throws, and I took a shot at the worlds first flying armbar in zero gravity (didn't work out too well)." (I dare not imagine...)
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Life-sized model railroads
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DATE: 09/22/2004 09:48:20 AM
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Live Steam enthuthiasts are guys who build large working models of steam and diesel trains and then ride them around gigantic layouts in their yards or in parks. This is dorky and irresistably cool. How fun would it be to spend a weekend with these retro-tech adventurers? Let the nerd flag fly high. I love them. They use wireless technology and stay up all night in tag teams to break new records in continuous train ride duration. Rock on, steamer man.
Link (Thanks, Paul)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lenny Bruce CD retrospective
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DATE: 09/22/2004 09:56:22 AM
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Newsweek's Brian Braiker writes about a newly released collection of work by the groundbreaking comedian Lenny Bruce.
If a comic gets onstage and tells his audience "I am not a comedian," he'd better say something important -- or really damn funny. Lenny Bruce -- the hepcat who took his act from L.A. strip clubs to Carnegie Hall, redefining stand-up in the process -- did both. Now, nearly 40 years after a fatal drug overdose, a dizzyingly complete six-CD collection of his trailblazing routines has been released.
"Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware" spans his career from his promising first performance in 1948 to the ravings of a haunted, hunted man the day before his death in 1966. The warts-and-all portrait includes hours of previously unreleased material and chronicles Bruce as he tilts against hypocrisy ("Censorship on the Steve Allen Show"), racism ("How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties") and religion ("Religions, Inc.").
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIP Russ Meyer
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DATE: 09/22/2004 10:14:56 AM
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Russ Meyer, the filmmaking legend responsible for such sexploitation atrocities masterpieces as "The Immoral Mr. Teas", "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!", and "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls", has passed away at age 82. He lived a long life, full of glamour and boobies. All of us should be so lucky. Fleshbot, naturally, has more: Link. Rest in peace, Mr. Meyer.
Some timeless quotes from "Faster, Pussycat!":
(The climatic finale)
Linda: I killed her - like she was an animal! Like she was nothing!
Kirk: She was nothing - nothing human!
(Billie throws Rosie a can of beer to calm her down.)
Bille: Here Rosie baby, pop the top before you blow your own!
Tommie: What's the point?
Varla: It's of no return, and you've reached it!
(thanks also to Caines, Jean-Luc, and others who suggested).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kevin Kelly's True Films reviews
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DATE: 09/22/2004 11:06:52 AM
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Kevin Kelly has compiled a bunch of reviews of documentaries on his Cool Tools site. I want to go out and get every one. He just sent out the latest batch to subscribers to his Cool Tools mailing list, which he hasn't put on his site yet. I'm sure he'll get around to it soon. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from one of his latest reviews (for Colonial House):
The premise is somewhat familiar now. Take a hopelessly modern family and stick them in the past, as authenticated by historians, and make them live with only the tools and resources available centuries ago. In this case, the modern Americans are sent to live in the summer of 1628, on a forested island off of Maine. Their task: build a new world colony that can both survive and pay back its investors in England. ... Cameras record every detail as the pudgy newcomers scrounge for food, learn how to farm Indian corn and build with the most rudimentary tools, all the while wearing appropriate clothes, slowly starving, and assuming appropriate roles such as indentured servants with astounding ease. Who knew how easy devolution was?
(You can subscribe to the Cool Tools mailing list here. It's free, but you have to send him one review for Cool Tools to get on the list!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Necessary" reading on Google
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DATE: 09/22/2004 11:32:02 AM
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Yoda sez: "I was just using Google to spell check the word necessary, you know to make sure I had it right, and the results were interesting! Nearly every result was a worthy read, with Hiroshima leading the pack." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: American Conservative Union's Anti-INDUCE-Act Ad
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DATE: 09/22/2004 11:54:23 AM
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An ad from the, ah, very right-wing American Conservative Union protesting the INDUCE Act. The ACU calls out Republicans for kowtowing to Hollywood against their principles. Ad ran in the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard.
Link (Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A visual history of spam (and virus) email
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DATE: 09/22/2004 12:20:44 PM
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A BB reader sez: "Raymond Chen has kept every single piece of spam and every virus-laden email which he has received, while at Microsoft, since 1997. He has taken the data regarding numbers and file size, and plotted them out on a graph. It makes for an interesting, and informational, read."
Spam went ballistic starting in 2002. You could see it growing in 2001, but 2002 was when it really took off.
Link
(via The Spam Weblog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tooth Tattoos at 99-Cent Only Store
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DATE: 09/22/2004 12:36:51 PM
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Billy Hayes sez: Mark, Thanks for the cool post on the 99 cent cartoons. I bought a whole grip of them this evening. While I was in the store my wife and I walked around looking at all the other stuff. I spoted some tooth tat 2's. I read the package but couldn't bring myself to buy them. I checked out the web site from the back of the pack but it timed out. I did however fid a site that sells the tat's. Crazy Stuff at the 99 cent store. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Online casinos can't stop pokerbots
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DATE: 09/22/2004 04:11:07 PM
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Ed Felten's posted a fascinating rumination on the impossibility of excluding bots from online poker games, and what that means for online casinos:
By reiterating their anti-bot and anti-collusion rules, and by claiming to have mysterious enforcement mechanisms, online casinos may be able to stem the tide of cheating for a while. But eventually, bots and collusion will become the norm, and lone human players will be driven out of all but the lowest stakes games.
But there is another strategy. An online casino could encourage bots, and even set up bots-only games. The game would then become not a human vs. human card game but a human vs. human battle between bot designers for geekly mastery. I'll bet there are plenty of programmers out there who would like to give it a try.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More propaganda remix posters
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DATE: 09/22/2004 08:16:42 PM
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New additions to a previously-Boinged online gallery featuring brilliantly modernized versions of old propaganda posters. You can buy the retweaked graphics on sporty messenger bags, t-shirts, coffee cups, and -- well by golly, even a thong or two. Link (Thanks, Squiddo)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A prison for non-human primates
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DATE: 09/23/2004 02:06:34 AM
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The Chicago Tribune ran a fantastic article about a state pen in Punjab, India. The inmates are lifetime offenders, mostly nabbed for stealing, assault, and vandalism. Even the murderers are safe from capital punishment though. That's because in India, it's forbidden to kill monkeys.
Monkeys have invaded government ministries in New Delhi, ridden elevators and climbed along windowsills. Monkeys slapped students inside a girls school in a south Bengal suburb. A gang of monkeys in the city of Chandigarh ripped up lawns, broke flowerpots and yanked sheets off beds.
Some monkeys, mostly loners, have bitten people, injuring and even killing small children.
"Monkeys are very furious," said Ujagar Singh, the Patiala district spokesman.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Relaying rat brainwaves for search and rescue
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DATE: 09/23/2004 02:23:51 AM
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Researchers from the University of Florida are outfitting trained rats with neural implants and a wireless radio so that the rodents can scurry through collapsed buildings searching for survivors. The electrodes are implanted in the rat's olfactory cortex, motor cortex, and reward center. When a rat--trained to seek out the smell of human--finds its target, the "aha! moment" can then be wireless transmitted back to headquarters. From a New Scientist article about the DARPA-funded work:
The researchers trained the rats to search for human odour by stimulating the reward centre when it found its target smell. Once the rats were trained, they were set to forage for the target smell, while electrodes recorded their neural activity patterns.
This allowed researchers to identify the brainwave patterns associated with finding that smell. They were also able to train the rats to sniff out the explosives TNT and RDX – key after terrorist attacks that may leave buildings harbouring unexploded bombs.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Insect Origami
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DATE: 09/23/2004 02:55:38 AM
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These origami insects and arthropods are incredibly beautiful. This 5" Acrocinus longimanus (Harlequin beetle) was folded from a single uncut square of paper. Master origami artist (and "origami mathematician") Robert Lang explains how it's done in a series of books. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: The morphine in all of us
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DATE: 09/23/2004 03:24:52 AM
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German scientist Meinhart Zenk at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg has proven once-and-for-all (?) a long-held theory that the human brain naturally produces morphine. Kristen Philipkoski reports on the findings in Wired News. Zenk's claim is supported by other recent work by neuroscientist George Stefano of the State University of New York at Old Westbury. Stefano believes that doctors could eventually teat a patient's pain by providing a precursor to morphine instead of the drug itself. From the Wired News article:
The discovery could also explain why some people are more susceptible to addiction -- they may have a morphine deficiency.
"All of a sudden," Stefano said, "(morphine-deficient individuals) take this compound (and) it really makes them feel not only good but normal."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sign onto the Geneva Declaration, change WIPO!
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DATE: 09/23/2004 05:34:14 AM
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Last weekend, I represented EFF at a meeting in Geneva of several disparate activit and non-govermental orgs, working to draft a joint doc called "Future of WIPO," (or, more formally, "Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization"). This doc is a call to arms to orgs that would see WIPO revisit its role in the world, to take into account the public interest when formulating and promulgating IP policy. The doc has been finalised and is online -- we're collecting signatories for it, and you're invited.
Humanity faces a global crisis in the governance of knowledge, technology and culture. The crisis is manifest in many ways.
* Without access to essential medicines, millions suffer and die;
* Morally repugnant inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology undermines development and social cohesion;
* Anticompetitive practices in the knowledge economy impose enormous costs on consumers and retard innovation;
* Authors, artists and inventors face mounting barriers to follow-on innovation;
* Concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology, biological resources and culture harm development, diversity and democratic institutions;
* Technological measures designed to enforce intellectual property rights in digital environments threaten core exceptions in copyright laws for disabled persons, libraries, educators, authors and consumers, and undermine privacy and freedom;
* Key mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities are unfair to both creative persons and consumers;
* Private interests misappropriate social and public goods, and lock up the public domain.
Link to declaration, Mailto link for signing on
(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: KQED on Blogs: Forum Archive
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DATE: 09/23/2004 07:16:36 AM
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Gary Peare says, "Yesterday, Dan Gillmor and Orville Schell were on KQED's Forum show discussing the impact of blogs on mainstream media news in light of the Dan Rather/CBS memo incident (aka 'Rathergate'). This page has a link to the audio archive for the segment." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony will support MP3 in portable digital music players
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DATE: 09/23/2004 07:43:09 AM
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Sony confirmed yesterday that it plans to add native MP3 support to digital music players, in a move that will likely help the products compete more effectively with more popular competitors like Apple's iPod. Until now, the Sony devices were designed to only play files encoded with Sony's proprietary Atrac music file format.
The shift from reliance on its proprietary format will begin with flash memory-based players, the electronics giant said, but plans are still being finalized on how and when products will add MP3 support. CNET News.com affiliate ZDNet France first reported of the change in Sony's strategy for the European market. U.S. representatives said the company is making similar plans here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Schwarzenegger signs bill requiring email addresses for filesharing
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DATE: 09/23/2004 07:53:27 AM
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California governor Arnold Schwarzenneger -- a man who found considerable fame and fortune in Hollywood -- signed an MPAA-backed bill into law Tuesday that requires anyone sharing a file that goes to more than 10 people outside their immediate family to provide a valid email address and title of the work.
California file sharers who trade songs or films without providing an e- mail address will be guilty of a misdemeanor, under the first-in-the-nation measure that could make it easier for law enforcement to track down people who illegally download copyrighted material. The bill is the latest attempt by film and music trade associations to combat the hard-to-police use of file-sharing software.
The signing was hailed by the bill's sponsor, the Motion Picture Association of America, whose president, Dan Glickman, noted in a statement that Schwarzenegger had "a unique understanding of the powerful impact of piracy.'' The governor remains a member of the Screen Actors Guild, which supported the bill.
Link to SF Chronicle story, link to SB 1506 bill text. (thanks Michael Parenti, Matthew Mills, Andy, and others)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: XPrize remix: SpaceShipOne is Farked
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DATE: 09/23/2004 08:03:23 AM
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In this Photoshop contest, Fark members bling out Burt Rutan and Paul Allen's SpaceShipOne. The craft, which had a successful and historic test run in June, is scheduled to make a go for the $10 million Ansari X-Prize next Wednesday in the Mojave desert. I'll be there, covering the presumably unphotoshopped event for NPR.
If Snoop does indeed show up with "Space Shizzle One," as one Farkster creatively visualizes here, well -- goodbye planet earth. Look for me on the mothership, baby, for I will be gone.
Link (thanks, Susan Kitchens)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites blog from Iraq: Hilla SWAT
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DATE: 09/23/2004 08:18:13 AM
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NBC combat correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites is back in Iraq, and posts a new dispatch with some amazing photos on his blog today.
We've been up since 3am--waiting for Hilla SWAT. It's now 4:30. Despite their annoyance--the Force Recon squad from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit seems extremely patient--at least around Kuni Takahashi, a photographer for the Chicago Tribune and me. Instead they look at their watches--bullshit each other about their individual depravities--like masturbating in sweat socks. Typical life details at a military FOB or forward operating base in Iraq.
These marines at FOB Kalsu still sleep in tents, shit in porta-johns, live in the dirt. This is no Camp Victory green zone paradise with guys chilling in air-conditioned trailers and eating at the Bob Hope Dining Facility--a zeppelin hangar of a building just down the road from Baghdad International Airport. Everyone here has heard the stories--or maybe, been on a convoy through the green zone, briefly glimpsed the way that other half lives. They piss and moan about it--but don't denounce its existence. They are, after all, Americans--it's about aspirations--still believing that hard work and perseverance may someday get you to the Promised Land.
Link, and link to Discuss
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hurricane Ivan, arguably
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DATE: 09/23/2004 08:29:26 AM
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From the National Weather Service Tropical Prediction Center:
"AFTER CONSIDERABLE AND SOMETIMES ANIMATED IN-HOUSE DISCUSSION OF THE DEMISE OF IVAN...IN THE MIDST OF A LOW-PRESSURE AND SURFACE FRONTAL SYSTEM OVER THE EASTERN UNITED STATES...THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER HAS DECIDED TO CALL THE TROPICAL CYCLONE NOW OVER THE GULF OF MEXICO TROPICAL DEPRESSION IVAN. WHILE DEBATE WILL SURELY CONTINUE HERE AND ELSEWHERE...THIS DECISION WAS BASED PRIMARILY ON THE REASONABLE CONTINUITY OBSERVED IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE SURFACE AND LOW-LEVEL CIRCULATION."
Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIP, Twinkies, Wonder Bread, Ho-Hos, RingDings...
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DATE: 09/23/2004 09:30:59 AM
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Interstate Bakeries files Chapter 11. And with it, an era of American pop gastronomy may meet its end. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the carb; For in that sleep of death what Twinkies may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal Ho-Ho, must give us pause; there's the respect that makes creme-filled treats of so long life.
Link to Business Week article. But Newsday wins the best hed award: Twinkies Maker Out of Dough. (Thanks, Jim OConnor)
Update: Reader Kate says, "I read your post on the bankruptcy of the Interstate Bakeries,
alluding to the fact that Twinkies have now met their end. But Chapter 11 bankruptcy is not about ending a company or specific product lines, but rather re-organizing a companies debts (Link to explanation). Although its possible that twinkies, ho-ho's and hostess pies may be gone in the near future, it is just as likely that they will remain. So in short, reports of Twinkies death have been greatly exaggerated."
Staci Kramer agrees. "It's not RIP quite yet. The company is reorganizing -- not liquidating -- and, according to the same Business Week article mentioned in your post, 'Interstate spokeswoman Maya Pogoda says the outfit plans to continue operating the rest of its bakeries and distribution centers.' I just don't want to write off Twinkies and other delicacies like orange Hostess cup cakes and Devil Dogs too soon. It would tilt the time-space contiuum."
And reader Stephen A. Kupiec says, "Twinkies have an infinite shelf life! They cannot die! Whoever speaketh of Twinkies shall remember that he but seemeth dead, he sleeps, and yet he does not sleep, he has died and yet he is not dead, asleep and dead though he is, he shall rise again. Again it should be shown that
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
and with strange aeons even death may die."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of Jimmy Swaggart Zen
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DATE: 09/23/2004 10:08:35 AM
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During a recently broadcast sermon in which he discussed his opposition to gay marriage, evangelical telepreacher Jimmy Swaggart said:
"I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm going to be blunt and plain: If one ever looks at me like that, I'm going to kill him and tell God he died."
Link (via Warren)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR -- Kaiju Big Battel
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DATE: 09/23/2004 11:17:27 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day" -- snip:
Old-time professional wrestling fans nostalgic for the days when camp was king and characters like Junkyard Dog and Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka ruled the squared circle have a whole new set of heroes to cheer for -- on the Kaiju Big Battel wrestling circuit. Think of Kaiju Big Battel as the horrific spawn of Japanese monster movies and the WWF ("Kaiju" means "monster" in Japanese). It's a tongue-firmly-in-cheek contest of "athletes" wearing patently silly costumes, looking to give their opponent a solid (and likely pre-ordained) smackdown.
In the mythology of Kaiju, the matches are part of the balance of the universe, where earthly forces of good counter evil creatures invading our planet, bent on world domination. Or something like that... Day to Day technology contributor Xeni Jardin recently infiltrated this underground wrestling circuit, filled with far-out science-fiction characters with names like Silver Potato, Gomi Man and Louden Noxious. She was witness to the coming-out party of Kaiju's rising star: Dr. Cube, a "human-genius-turned-quasi-monster" who, with his evil army, continues his quest for world domination.
Link to archived audio: NPR Day to Day "Kaiju Big Battel: Wrestling Meets Godzilla". Link to previous BoingBoing post.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dorothy Gambrell pie charts Google's "necessary" things
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DATE: 09/23/2004 11:37:56 AM
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Dan sez: If you enjoyed glancing over the Google results for 'necessary' (from your earlier item), you might like to know that author Dorothy Gambrell of the webcomic Cat and Girl tackled the same subject a little while ago and breaks it all down in helpful/surreal chart-and-outline format in the current installment of one of her side projects, I Have No Superflous Leisure. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Police charity" telescammers' creepy implied threats
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DATE: 09/23/2004 11:48:19 AM
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Jason Powell sez: I've had a rash of telemarketer calls in the last few days for "Police" or "Sheriff's" charity organizations. In the past, I've always just said "take me off your list" and hung up--problem solved. However, this latest call troubled me on new levels. I'm not sure I'd call it intimidation, but some of the comments did have a hint of something just slightly less than that. For example, the caller made several references to my home address..."how's it going out there on Elm Avenue today?" I guess the intention is to play on the fear that if I don't donate, I can expect trouble (“we know where you live”). The only thing that troubled me about that is the idea that they're using this tactic on others who would fall for it.
Suspicion of these callers led me to Google for answers, and I wasn't too surprised by what I found. While some of these calls are outright scams, the other, more "legitimate" callers do little to nothing for the groups they claim to represent--in most cases, the telemarketing company working on behalf of a police charity give as little as 15% of the "take" to the charity.
Below are some links I found of interest. I also ran accross the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement site’s page that warns specifically about fraudulent charitable organizations: "They also call claiming to represent police or firefighter organizations. They typically ask victims for donations to help police officers buy equipment or to assist families of officers disabled or killed in the line of duty." Link
Additional links:
The Attorney General's site concerning charity telemarketing (Includes a list of what the caller must/can do according to law).
The FTC site concerning charities (Includes information on how to check up on an organization before you donate).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Funny post office label hack
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DATE: 09/23/2004 12:13:29 PM
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Mike Essl sez: "This guy takes USPS stickers, runs them through his printer and prints 'USPS does not acknowledge the authority of the Bush administration.' and then puts them back in the rack at the post office." Link to Quicktime movie
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fave music site: Oddio Overplay
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DATE: 09/23/2004 02:22:42 PM
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Todd Lappin sez: "The Oddio Overplay website is one of the true jewels of the Interweb. Dedicated to odd, obscure, and out-of-print music, the site is packed with free, downloadable retro-themed mp3s. The special compilations are a hoot, and exploring the links to other free music sites is an activity that's guaranteed to gobble up hours and hours of otherwise productive work time. The latest Oddio find made my day: A downloadable LP of the in-store background music played in S.S. Kresge five-and-dime stores during the early 1960s. It sounds like a perfume counter. And it makes me want to spend money!" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Hal Robins book: The Meaning of Lost and Mismatched Socks
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DATE: 09/23/2004 02:29:16 PM
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Hal Robins is a wonderful cartoonist and a delightfully peculiar guy. He's from the past and future, and the distant present all at once. I wish you could hear his grandiose speaking style and high pitched voice. He's also got a new book out, The Meaning of Lost and Mismatched Socks, which John Shirley reviews in his blog.
Hal Robins (in the guise of Pedale) has discovered--and the very amusing, detailed drawings he's put in this slim volume from North Atlantic Books illustrate--that while the mysterious appearance of Unknown Socks in your drier (and the mysterious disappearance of the socks you expected to find) may be conventionally explained, deeper, darker explanations can be found by looking farther than the interior of the drier mechanism: “It has long been thought that life must also exist on other planets. These life forms most likely have appendages for the purpose of locomotion. It follows then that such beings have a practical need to keep these appendages warm, hence alien footwear. . .As we employ rebellious machines, which from time to time squirt our stockings into the abyss of space, so do they. And as we receive theirs, it follows that their sock drawers must also receive ours. Even as you read these lines (relativistically speaking), some alien eye or eyes, perhaps set in chitinous, horny lids, are perplexedly scanning one of a pair of argyles which you lost last Tuesday. Some unthinkable thing may be fingering, with its spatulate claws, in the reddish light of a giant sun, a missing unit of your support hose...”
Link
UPDATE: Simone sez: "Lovely to see Hal's book boingboinged. . .you might also let your readers know that the utterly stupendous Ask Dr. Hal Show can be see every single solitary week (except when they don't feel like it) at the Odeon Bar at Mission and Valencia (yes they do) in San Francisco.
Hal and Chicken sit up onstage and are bombarded with sealed envelopes containing questions from the audience. Chicken opens and reads the question, and Hal answers the question in his inimitable Hal way.
If the necessary honorarium included with the question is sufficient, the audience is treated to a Bardic Recitation of Hal's Choice. Once someone gave fifty buck and Hal recited, in its entirety, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, from memory, with all the voices, bringing the bar to a shrieking collapse upon his completion.
Anyhow the show is every wednesday around Nineish pm at The Odeon Bar; On the First Wednesday of every month Chicken gets the bus out and we all go bowling after the show. We pretty much just load the entire bar into the bus and take off for Daly City. It's great.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bushism DVD out
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DATE: 09/23/2004 07:09:18 PM
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Bushisms the book is now Bushisms the DVD --
hosted by comic uber-genius Brian Unger of The
Daily Show. The DVD features Al Franken and others commenting on nucular-strength malapropisms from the presidentiary such as:
# "War is a dangerous place."
# "Karyn is a West Texas girl, just like me."
# "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning."
Link (Disclaimer: I'm proud to be Mr. Unger's colleague/co-contributor on the NPR show
"Day to Day").
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos of fossilized '80s Russian Space Shuttle knockoff
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DATE: 09/23/2004 07:26:31 PM
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BoingBoing reader TabulaRasa in Germany says,
"In the late 1980s, the Russians tried to develop their own Space Shuttle. Well, actually -- one
even ended up flying into space just one time -- Buran. After this flight, the hangar where it was housed in
Baikonur collapsed and destroyed the craft.
"This is an online photo gallery of Buran 002, another prototype that
was sold to an Australian businessman named David Hammer. During the Olympic Games in Sydney, the prototype was
part of an exhibition. Then it was sold to a company in Singapore, and was shipped to Bahrain,
where it became stranded somewhere in the desert.
"Eventually it was sold to a German museum, and
will soon be shipped one last time -- to become part of an exhibition.
Some things are still working, as you can see from the photos in this online image gallery.
Guess I'll have make a visit to this museum when the shuttle has arrived!"
Link to image gallery from Der Spiegel magazine (text in German)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Boris Mandel nudes
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DATE: 09/23/2004 07:59:01 PM
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A tranquil little online gallery of female nudes shot by Tel Aviv-based web designer Boris Mandel. Link (contains nudity, duh -- via indienudes)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Assemblage sculpture/clock of surpassing gorgeosity
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DATE: 09/24/2004 12:46:52 AM
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Roger Wood, my pal the genius assemblage-sculptor clockmaker, has been on a tear lately, as is evidenced by his latest mailing-list update, shown here.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Strange Horizons: Hugo-nominated sf webzine
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DATE: 09/24/2004 12:48:38 AM
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Jed sez,
Strange Horizons is a Hugo-nominated online speculative fiction magazine that pays pro rates for fiction. We've published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry every week for the past four years, and other material (including art) a couple of times a month. Almost everything we've ever published is still available for free in our archives, including the wildly popular April Fools article about Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, as well as our Author Focus week on Cory.
We're funded entirely by donations; most of our budget goes to paying for the material we publish, 'cause all 30 of our staff members are volunteers. We're currently in the middle of our twice-annual fund drive -- the model is a lot like public radio, except that we don't interrupt our content to ask for money. We're a 501(c)(3) literary nonprofit, so if you pay taxes in the US, your donation is tax-deductible. We'll take donations in any amount; I'd love to see the magazine funded entirely by hundreds of $5-$10 donations. A donation of any size gets you a chance to win one of our fund drive prizes. Larger donations get you a spiffy membership card and other premiums.
So if you'd like to stop by and help us out, we'd appreciate it. But even if you don't want to donate, come take a look at the magazine. Enjoy!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Prelinger Archive gems
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DATE: 09/24/2004 12:52:35 AM
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Rick Prelinger, who curates the Prelinger Archive (the largest video archive in the world, comprising thousands and thousands of "ephemeral films" like VD shorts, industrial training footage, and other great mix-and-match material -- all licensed under Creative Commmons licenses), sends us three fantastic links to material in the Archive:
PANORAMA EPHEMERA (2004, 89:35 min., color and black and white) is a collage of sequences drawn from a wide variety of ephemeral (industrial, advertising, educational and amateur) films, touring the conflicted landscapes of twentieth-century America. The films' often-skewed visions construct an American history filled with horror and hope, unreeling in familiar and unexpected ways.
PANORAMA EPHEMERA focuses on familiar and mythical activities and images in America (1626-1978). Many creatures and substances that we hardly notice because we feel so used to them take center stage, including pigs, corn, water, telephones, fire, and rice. At first resembling a compilation, it soon reveals itself as a journey through the American landscape over time, and the story begins to emerge between the sequences.
Link,
Torrent Download Link
And:
This site contains theatrical trailers for feature films. What, another movie trailer site? Well, this is a special one -- SabuCat Productions specializes in collecting, preserving and distributing high-quality 35mm materials, and the trailers in this collection are unlike anything you're likely to see online. Top titles: "5000 Fingers of Dr. T," "Amazing Transparent Man," "Conquest of Space," and of course "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman."
Link
And:
Growing collection of educational films originally targeting so-called "GenXers." Like Prelinger Archives films on the same site, but made for younger audiences in the Open Classroom era. Memorable titles: "Last Prom," "Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast," and "If Mirrors Could Speak: Self-Image Film."
Link
(Thanks, Rick!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Art/culture of computer viruses
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DATE: 09/24/2004 01:46:38 AM
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BB friend Alessandro Ludovico of Neural.it magazine points us to "I love you (rev.eng): The Aesthetics of Computer Viruses," an exhibit he's involved with that premiered in Germany and is now on view at Brown University in the US:
"I love you [rev.eng]" is divided into four investigative areas - political, cultural, technical and historical - and focuses on the controversial positions of security experts and hackers, of net artists and programmers, of literature experts and code poets...
What can visitors to the "I love you [rev.eng]" exhibition expect?
- Force computers to crash with "Sasser" or "Suicide"
- Experience a global virus outbreak in real time via a 3D world
- View security concepts and methods for preventing global network attacks
- Witness computer viruses as works of art like "biennale.py" and "The Lovers"
- See films by hackers on their subculture
- Learn about programming languages as the material for contemporary poetry
- Juxtapose experimental literature and code poetry
Link (to Brown exhibition details) Link (to Wired News article)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bugs photoshopped into everyday objects
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DATE: 09/24/2004 02:40:49 AM
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Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest: turn everyday objects into insects. Naked-Lunch-tastic!
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cancer-sniffing dogs
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DATE: 09/24/2004 02:41:17 AM
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Scientists report that dogs can smell disease in the urine of bladder cancer patients. In the study, published in this week's British Medical Journal, the canines successfully identified a cancer patient's urine sample placed among six control samples 41 percent of the time, far better than the 14 percent expected by chance. From an Associated Press article on the research:
"Perhaps the most intriguing finding, though, was in a comparison patient whose urine was used during the training phase. All the dogs unequivocally identified that urine as a cancer case, even though screening tests before the experiment had shown no cancer. Doctors conducted more detailed tests on the patient and found a life-threatening tumor in the right kidney."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HHGG text-game on the Web
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DATE: 09/24/2004 02:42:55 AM
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The old Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy text-based Infocom adventure game has been tarted up with some new graphics and re-released as a little Flash app by the BBC.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lucas put malicious Xbox trojan on Star Wars DVD
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DATE: 09/24/2004 02:45:57 AM
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The new Star Wars bonus DVD erases elements of your Xbox's firmware without informing you or giving you a chance to decline. This is apparently deliberate, as part of an "anti-piracy" effort aimed at punishing people who play the Star Wars DVD bonus disk in a modded Xbox.
The 'StarWars Trilogy DVD' (video/movie DVD) has an 'Extra Special Features Disc'. If you try to launch this on your Xbox it will automaticly update your dashboard ... NO confirmation will be asked. The bonus disc has extra features including a documentary on the star wars saga, footage from the making of all three films and a preview demo of the new 'StarWars Battlefront' Xbox game (that's why there's a default.xbe, dashupdate.xbe and update.xbe on the disc).
This information can be important for some people with older bioses (booting xboxdash.xbe), people using exploits or simply those who don't want their dash upgraded.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Presidential fright-mask sales as election-predictors
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A manufacturer of rubber presidential fright masks says that their sales figures during election-year Hallowe'ens successfully predict the winner of the upcoming presidential election. Unfortunately, at the moment more people are signing up to buy Shrub funnymasks than Kerry, but it's still early times.
In 2000, due to the popularity of political masks, BuyCostumes.com began publishing statistics on each Presidential Candidate's mask sales. It was soon apparent that the mask sales were as good a resource as the polls being published by major national media groups. Seeing the similarities, BuyCostumes.com then looked into some data on political mask sales in election years. Not only did they ask five different mask manufacturers, they also spoke with 12 national stores about their sales history all the way back to 1980. Their findings were astounding and right every time....
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TV channel subs videogame-hockey for the real thing
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DATE: 09/24/2004 04:01:35 AM
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With the hockey labor dispute leaving an on-air void where televised hockey used to sit, G4TechTV is broadcasting virtual hockey games played using video-game engines:
All 1,230 regular season games originally slated for the 2004-2005 NHL season will be played, with results of each video game match-up available to fans who tune-in daily to "Sweat." Up-to-the-minute scores, stats, teams and player profiles will be online at www.g4techtv.com.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Universities offering classes inside of MMOs
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DATE: 09/24/2004 04:04:46 AM
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Second Life, the Massively Multiplayer Online world where end users can design and trade their own game-artifacts, is offering free accounts to university profs to disburse to their students for the purpose of conducting in-game classes.
In order to help teachers bring their classes to Second Life, Linden Lab donates accounts for each student, as well as an acre of land in the metaverse for the teacher and students to work and build on. Afterward, anyone wishing to stay a member can do so at half price.
To date, in addition to Delwiche and Beamish, professors from San Francisco State University, the Rochester Institute of Technology and Vassar College have used Second Life in their courses.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's Sunburst acceptance speech
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DATE: 09/24/2004 04:31:06 AM
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Nalo Hopkinson sent me this photo of my pal and collaborator Karl Schroeder accepting the Sunburst Award (presented by Michelle Sagara) for my short story collection, A Place So Foriegn and Eight More on my behalf at last night's ceremony at Toronto's Merril Collection sf library. Here's the speech he read for me:
It is a cliche to note that receiving an award conveys an honour upon its recipient, but this is a stupendous honour and I would be remiss if I failed to tell you all how mightily chuffed I am. I am deeply sorry that I am not able to be there tonight: I am with you in spirit.
The list of people who deserve to be thanked for this is long indeed: the friends and colleagues; the fans and readers; the editors and critics; the collaborators and the writers who inspired me -- and the jury, them too! My most sincere thanks to all of you.
No writer is an island, no idea is original, no effort is a solo effort. We stand upon the shoulders of giants, we collaborate with our colleagues and with the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors. Literature -- indeed, all human endeavor -- is dignified and uplifted through collaboration and cooperation. We sit atop a great erected infrastructure of human invention and effort, all of it embodied in the bricks and boards that surround us, and, most importantly, in the traditional knowledge that allows each generation to improve upon the bricks and boards of the last one.
The writer is engaged in dialog with the world and with posterity. Our words go on to form a layer of the substrate of human creation. Those who tell us that our words, our art and our posterity are best served with strong locks and high fences are *not on our side*. No writer could pen a single word but for the rich humus of public domain effort with which we garden our notions and conceits.
So thank you all, and thanks most of all to our ancestors, the bringers of fire and the inventors of the wheel, the Judith Merrils and the Phyllis Gotleibs, the Gilgameshes and the golems, the Turings and the Teslas. Thanks to the brave pirates who continue to preserve our posterity in the face of outrageous insult to creation. Thanks to the readers and to you all.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sims in Sims 2 can play Sims 1
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DATE: 09/24/2004 04:38:56 AM
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The new version of The Sims, called "The Sims 2" allows your sim-people to play "The Sims" in-game. Recursion-licious!
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Video mashup of Half Life 2 + Oakenfold
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DATE: 09/24/2004 06:59:26 AM
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BoingBoing reader Mike says, "I just posted a new screenshot / electronica mash-up video: "30 Scenes in 30 Seconds." Link to blog post (video is DivX).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Video mashup of Russ Meyer + Hoodoo Gurus / Persian Rugs
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DATE: 09/24/2004 07:38:19 AM
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Following up to this week's sad news that sexploitation auteur Russ Meyers has passed away (Link), BoingBoing reader Richard Crepeau says, "Thought I'd spread the word about a Hoodoo Gurus side project called the Persian Rugs. One of their videos uses Russ Meyer clips from Mondo Topless. A nice hybrid between garage rock and camp."
On their website, the band says:
"Music and sex go very well together. For proof, just take a look at the video for the Persian Rugs' new single 'Be A Woman'. The band and director Todd Sheldrick have created the perfect setting for the band's 60's Punk-inspired Primal Rock: strippers and cavemen collide in a 21st Century psychedelic garden of eden. (...) The Rugs got in touch with famed 60's director Russ Meyer, the maker of such films as 'Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!'and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls' (the latter a direct influence on the Austin Powers movies) and asked for permission to incorporate footage from one of his cult classics, 'Mondo Topless', into their new filmclip. Russ asked to hear the song first, [and] loved it (...)
Link to "Be a Woman" *.asx video in low and hi-res, contains megadoses of kitsch nudity (and shots of vintage '60s electronic equipment). How did those ladies make their humongous breasts do that stuff on rhythm? Weighed down by all that eyeliner, no less?
Update: Reader Rob says, "If you have a fink installation on your mac, you can install asfrecorder from fink unstable packages and record the Russ Meyer/Hoodoo Gurus--Persian Rugs thing."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Dating Zen
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DATE: 09/24/2004 07:48:45 AM
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brutally honest personals
the week in craig
pick up lines
cuddle party
smittens
things my girlfriend...
break up form
rejection line
paper napkin
break up news
Image: "smittens." So cute they make me yearn to hurl. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Insane Phil Remix
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DATE: 09/24/2004 09:14:49 AM
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Eric read this post about a answering machine message left by an angry gentleman named Phil and decided to do a Garageband remix based on it. Very funny. (Full of swear words) Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: SkyEar
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DATE: 09/24/2004 09:50:01 AM
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Several months ago, I wrote an article for TheFeature about artists using wireless telecom in their work. One of the artists, Usman Haque, was planning to launch a network of instrumented helium balloons in the air. Equipped with mobile phones, LEDs, and sensors that measure electromagnetic radiation into the air, the cloud of balloons would act as a SkyEar.
"As police radios, television signals, distant storms, and other radio transmissions alter what Haque calls the "local hertzian culture," the cloud flickers in response... Of course, calling a particular phone alters the "hertzian topography" in that region of the balloon cloud, affecting its glow. "You can enter into something like a conversation with the cloud," Haque says."
Ten days ago in London, SkyEar had its second flight.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SPIT: New Internet acronym!
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DATE: 09/24/2004 10:55:14 AM
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Spam over Internet Telephony -- SPIT -- is the pending-Internet-disaster du jour. Nice acronym!
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lazyweb request - I need a hiss filter for audio recordings
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DATE: 09/24/2004 06:21:52 PM
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I'm looking for a cheap (under $50) Mac OS X program that will filter the hiss out of an interview I recorded on a cassette tape. If you have a recommendation, please email me!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MP3 goggles
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DATE: 09/25/2004 12:23:00 AM
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Oakley's new MP3 goggles come with built-in storage, headphones and a USB cable on the arms. Not cheap, though: $400 for 256MB! I think I'll wait for the cheap knockoffs...
Link
(Thanks, Doug!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bic as picklock, continued
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DATE: 09/25/2004 09:09:20 AM
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A couple of weeks ago, Mark posted about a guy who picked his Kryptonite bike lock with a ball point pen. Apparently, the story worried another man who recognized that the design of the bike lock was similar to the one on his Stack-On Products gun cabinet. He called Stack-On and was assured that his arsenal was safe from a pen pick. He proved them wrong.
"...the man went to a Staples store to buy a box of the Bic pens that were specifically cited as the break-in tool. He pulled the ink cartridge out of a pen and widened one end of the barrel slightly by scraping it with his pocket knife, just like a Web site instructed.
“I had run home for lunch and was in a hurry,” he said. “Within 30 seconds, I was into the safe with that pen.”
Link (via Fark)
Update: BB reader Seanessy Sommerfeld points us to news of a class action lawsuit brewing in British Columbia over the Kryptonite vulnerability. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of Zero-G zeitgeist
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DATE: 09/25/2004 09:54:12 AM
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An off-color web cartoon about Zero-G pleasure flights that suggests exactly what you'd expect from an off-color web cartoon about Zero-G pleasure flights. Link to cartoon, and Link to related BoingBoing posts on Zero-G Corporation's parabolic joyrides. (Thanks, Rob O)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Two new security op-eds from Bruce Schneier
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DATE: 09/25/2004 10:19:22 AM
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A pair of thought-provoking op-ed pieces from Bruce Schneier, who says,
This New Haven Register piece looks at the security and privacy issues surrounding a police "gun" that automatically scans licence plates. It's an example of "wholesale surveillance" -- something only possible with modern computer technology -- and as such requires new thinking about privacy protection. Link
This San Jose Mercury News essay discusses how the tighter U.S. immigration policies affect foreign students and professors at U.S. universities, and how that in turn affects security. The more we isolate U.S. academia from the rest of the world, the more technological progress suffers. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spanish-speaking bloggers who blog in English
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DATE: 09/25/2004 10:24:10 AM
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Jose Luis Orihuela says, "This list of Spanish-speaking bloggers blogging in English will be the base for an aggregator." The idea here (explained in mode depth at the link below, in Spanish) is to extend the reach of hispanohablante voices throughout the largely English-centered blogosphere. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Twinkies goes tits up, part two
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DATE: 09/25/2004 10:29:01 AM
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BoingBoing reader Mike says, "Your Twinkies Goes Chapter 11 post reminded me of this classic site I haven't visited in years, The T*W*I*N*K*I*E*S Project." As the website explains, this acronym stands for "Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations."
Link
Shown here: A Twinkie radiation research subject (left) next to a control Twinkie (right) immediately after the conclusion of an experiment.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO Handshadows from 1859
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DATE: 09/26/2004 12:04:38 AM
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Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall, originally published in 1859, is a lovely little Gutenberg Project book, illustrated with these great woodcuts of what passed for fun in the era of gaslight and corsets.
Link
(Thanks, Asthmatic!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Andrei the dog boy
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DATE: 09/26/2004 02:27:23 AM
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Police in Siberia have allegedly found a seven-year-old boy they believe was raised by an elderly dog.
A spokesman said: "He was running about on all fours and growling. They thought he was playing at first but the house is miles from anywhere and is little more than a ruin, and he was really dirty and naked, so they realised something was wrong.
"When they approached he growled and snarled and tried to bite them when they tried to pull him away from the old dog."
Link (via Fark)
UPDATE: BB pal Alberto Gaitan points us to the New Zealand News' much more detailed account of Andrei the dog boy's fantastic feral life. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Crude Dick
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DATE: 09/26/2004 09:03:41 PM
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Kevin Reynen says, "I've added a photomosaic of Dick Cheney to go along with War President, Porn Ashcroft, and Abu Rummy. Crude Dick is made up of SUVs and oil wells." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Big Honkin' Mushroom
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DATE: 09/26/2004 09:06:22 PM
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BoingBoing reader Michael says, "Looks like they found the world's largest mushroom in Switzerland, according to the BBC -- 'Found in the Malheur national forest in Oregon, that fungus covers 890 hectares (2,200 acres) - making it the largest living organism ever discovered.' Anybody else want a Mushroom Omlette?" Link
Correction BoingBoing reader Charles says, "I don't think swiss scientists discovered a huge mushroom in the US (Oregon) :) The story excerpt to which Michael points appears to have been a reference point for the largest mushroom in EUROPE, which the swiss discovered (86 acres). Still a honkin' piece of stir fry!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lawn Chair
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DATE: 09/26/2004 09:08:17 PM
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BoingBoing reader and furniture afficionado Fun Furde says, "The eco-friendly Terra is a lawn chair made out of your own lawn. You can grow your own for just $115, plus some dirt and grass seed." Link
Reader CJ Cramer says, "It looks like all that Nucleo is selling is the idea and the cardboard form for your dirt. Why not build your own form? ReadyMade Magazine had their take on this idea some time back." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIP, Nest interior design magazine
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DATE: 09/26/2004 09:12:34 PM
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BB reader Mister Jalopy says, "John Water's favorite - and perhaps the finest domestic design magazine of all time - has called it quits. At least for the print edition as they have some sketchy plans for a web version. It seemed too good to be true." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Filesharing-savvy CD promo strategy for Green Day
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DATE: 09/26/2004 09:17:10 PM
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BoingBoing Matthew Hawn says, "The band Green Day is selling pre-printed CDRs with the artwork of their last 5 major-label albums. You can buy the pack for $7.99. The band is coyly suggesting that these are for people who buy music digitally but file-sharing fans should rejoice that their CD don't have to look home-made. Nice gesture from the band to their fans... and a clever marketing ploy by their label, Warner Bros." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Works Progress Administration posters
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DATE: 09/27/2004 12:59:17 AM
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I love the design of this vintage anti-vandalism poster. (Click on it for a larger image.) According to this site, it was part of a series printed after WWII by the Works Progress Administration. Here's more on the WPA Posters from the Library of Congress's "By the People, For the People" exhibit:
"The By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943 collection consists of 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest. These striking silkscreen, lithograph, and woodcut posters were designed to publicize health and safety programs; cultural programs including art exhibitions, theatrical, and musical performances; travel and tourism; educational programs; and community activities in seventeen states and the District of Columbia. The posters were made possible by one of the first U.S. Government programs to support the arts and were added to the Library's holdings in the 1940s."
A reprint of this Result poster is on eBay right now, but of course I'd rather have an original. Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Feral Files
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DATE: 09/27/2004 04:50:34 AM
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Following previous posts on Sunjit the Chicken Man and Andrei the Dog Boy, several BB readers emailed me their favorite references to wild children raised by animals. For example, this site talks about France's Wild Boy of Averyon, "a remarkable creature (who) came out of the woods" in 1800. The text comes from a great book called The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, by Roger Shattuck. Here is one naturalist's observations of the Wild Boy:
"When he is sitting down, and even when he is eating, he makes a guttural sound, a low murmur; and he rocks his body from right to left or backwards and forwards, with his head and chin up, his mouth closed, and his eyes staring at nothing. In this position he sometimes has spasms, convulsive movements that may indicate that his nervous system has been affected.
There is nothing wrong with the boy’s five senses, but their order of importance seemed to be modified. He relies first on smell, then on taste; his sense of touch comes last. His sight is sharp; his hearing seems to shut out many sounds people around him pay close attention to. Nothing interests him but food and sleep."
BB reader Andy Scudder also points us to a transcript of a NOVA documentary called "Secret of the Wild Child." And then Alberto Gaitan sends us to FeralChildren.com a comprehensive clearinghouse of information on "isolated, confined, wolf and wild children." Perhaps it's time for a big screen remake of the 1977 TV series Lucan?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian-funded research should be available to Canadians
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DATE: 09/27/2004 05:02:22 AM
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Writing in the Toronto Star, Michael Geist argues that when Canada gives public money to scientific researchers, that it should require that the research be made available to the public through open-content publishing, rather than locked up in expensive journals that require Canadians to buy the research they've already paid for.
Late last month, a group of Nobel prize winners in the United States (which faces the same dilemma) issued a public letter calling on their government to link public research funding with public dissemination of the results. Canada should jump at the chance to adopt a similar model that would tie free, public dissemination to all publicly funded research. Such an approach would still leave room to commercialize the research results, while providing Canadians with an unprecedented innovation opportunity and a more immediate return on its research granting investment.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Money can't buy happiness
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DATE: 09/27/2004 05:20:14 AM
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A new scientific study reveals that (shocker!) a nation's economic fortitude is not as tied to the well-being of its citizens as previous believed. The results of the study--prepared by researchers at the University of Illinois and University of Pennsylvania--appeared in the latest issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
"It has been assumed that money increases well-being and, although money can be measured with exactitude, it is an inexact surrogate to the actual well-being of a nation. In a 1985 survey, respondents from the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and the Maasai of East Africa were almost equally satisfied and ranked relatively high in well-being. The Maasai are a traditional herding people who have no electricity or running water and live in huts made of dung. It follows, that economic development and personal income must not account for the happiness that they are so often linked to."
Instead, the authors propose that a population's "engagement, purpose and meaning, optimism and trust, and positive and negative emotions in specific areas such as work life and social relationships" should be considered when measuring the strength of a nation. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Prescription trips
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DATE: 09/27/2004 05:40:32 AM
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In Wired News, Kristen Philipkoski reports on FDA- and DEA-approved clinical trials of psychedelic drugs. For example, psylocibin is now being tested to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and cluster headaches. Meanwhile, a proposal for studying MDMA's effectiveness as an anti-anxiety treatment for terminal cancer patients is undergoing review at Harvard. Paging Dr. Leary! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Richard Branson's space tourism foray -- "Virgin Galactic"
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DATE: 09/27/2004 08:04:17 AM
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BoingBoing reader Jonathan Wrigley says, "Combine the chutzpah of Sir Richard Branson with the smarts of SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan (a bit of of Paul Allen's cash helps too), and you've got Virgin's latest venture - VirginGalactic. Suborbital space tourism for the rest of us!" Link
Shown here: Branson holds a model of the Virgin-licensed spacecraft. Five of these "spaceliners" will be built in the US by Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the team behind SpaceShipOne (which makes a go at the Ansari X-Prize this Wednesday morning -- I'll be there, with a crew from NPR). Provided that the venture meets regulatory approaval, flights will begin in 2007 at about $170-200K US per person, with plans to reduce price by half over time. What a news-packed month this has been for aerospace!
Virgin Galactic coverage: UK Telegraph (Link), and BBC News (Link) (Thanks also to Ari Kolbeinsson, Peter Flint, Daen de Leon, John Hoke, and other readers!)
Update: BoingBoing reader Stiv says, "Interestingly, Richard Branson did a promotional spot for the SciFi Channel's "I am Sci Fi" campaign which featured him piloting a Virgin-branded spacecraft (of course, the design differs from the one he's pictured holding on today's edition of Boing Boing). You can view the clip (in all it's craptacular Real Player glory) online." Link
And Ben Adair, formerly of NPR's show The Savvy Traveler, says: "I saw your post about Branson and thought about a disturbingly accurate Branson parody we did on the NPR show I used to run. Not that we scooped you, but it is pretty hilarious: Link. Scroll down to 'An interview with Richard Branson'."
Reader Kevin T. Keith says, "Regarding your BoingBoing post on Virgin's announcement of space tourist flights, recall that Pan Am famously announced - on a break-in live call in the middle of the Apollo 8 TV coverage! - that it would be starting tourist service to the moon, and offered membership in a "First Moon Flights Club" from 1968 to 1971. (Ronald Reagan held one.) TWA also followed suit. Obviously, nothing ever came of it. A brief review of the period (including an image of a Pan Am moon-flight "certified club member's card") can be found here: Link. I'll believe Virgin's claim when I see it happening (though it's obviously on a better technological footing than Pan Am's)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mobile India Barbie
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DATE: 09/27/2004 08:20:52 AM
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BoingBoing reader Russell Buckley says, "Toymaker Mattel has launched a Barbie doll in India, impeccably dressed as always, but also with her own must-have accessory - a mobile phone. But this is no toy - the mobile works. Barbie's owners can Instant Message Barbie and friends who have a Barbie too. Plus the look of the phone can be changed to match her clothes. It's priced at R 1199 (USD 26)." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jewelry-encased USB keychains
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DATE: 09/27/2004 09:07:55 AM
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eGem is selling hand-made "digital lockets" -- basically, USB flash-drives in enclosures made from precious metal. They're very pricey ($250-$500) and carry a disappointingly small amount of memory (why do people who make bespoke, high-priced electronics enclosures insist on using 64MB dollar-store boat-anchors as the technical core?).
As much as I admire the aesthetics of these things, I wouldn't buy one even if I had the money. It's something like a sin to buy a beautiful work of handmade art that is intended to cradle a bit of technology that will be obsolete in six months. Three months. It's like those gorgeous limited-edition Bang and Olufsen Bose (Thanks, Andrew!) 20th Anniversary Macs -- a work of art surrounding a piece of junk.
Now, OTOH, if someone were to mass-produce cheap, gigeresque enclosures for high-cap memory sticks, the kind of thing you don't mind showing off today and won't mind throwing out tomorrow -- *that* I'd buy in a second!
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Six grand for asking Bush "How many times have you been arrested?"
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DATE: 09/27/2004 09:13:19 AM
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John sez, "Remember the cash reward for asking a certain question of George W. Bush -- which now stands at over $2300? Now there's more. A lot more."
If you get the President to answer the question (before Nov. 1st, 2004), you'll get another $1000.00 from me (again, proof is needed). If you get him to answer in a news media covered forum, and his answer gets mentioned by ANY of the major news networks during primetime (for this, I consider major to be any of the big 4, ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox), you'll get an additional $4000.00. One more thing. We already know he's been arrested at least ONCE and fined $150 and temporary suspension driving privileges for driving under the influence of alcohol (Wikipedia). IF HE GIVES AN ANSWER OTHER THAN "ONLY ONCE" I'LL PITCH IN ANOTHER $1000.00!
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Victorian sex cry generator
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DATE: 09/27/2004 09:57:15 AM
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File under "old memes worth a revisit." Here you'll find such lines as, "You have carried me to a new-discover'd sphere of Venus, I am melted into a softness that can refuse you nothing!" and "I am inflamed beyond the power of modesty!"
Link (thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pez-dispenser USB
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DATE: 09/27/2004 10:43:48 AM
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This is a pretty cool idea: USB keychains built into Pez dispensers. Wish they were around now!
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Little Archie anthology due any day
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DATE: 09/27/2004 02:08:54 PM
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Little Archie was a comic book that started in the 1950s, featuring the characters from Archie comics as little kids. The earlier stories were written and drawn by Bob Bolling, and they're regarded by people who know and love comic books as some of the best stories in comic book history. Some people claim Bolling's work is better than Carl Bark's Uncle Scrooge or John Stanley's Little Lulu. Some people say he's the best comic book writer/artist that ever lived. The original comics are hard to find, but there's a new anthology coming out, The Adventures of Little Archie, that reprints Bolling's earlier stories. I bought my advance copy, and I can't wait to read them with my daughter. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tim Berners-Lee interview in Technology Review
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DATE: 09/27/2004 02:24:48 PM
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I wrote the cover story for October's MIT Technology Review magazine: an interview with World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee.
Technology Review: Is there an existing application that shows how the Semantic Web can form such connections?Tim Berners-Lee: If you want to play with the Semantic Web, you can make a friend-of-a-friend file. In a FOAF file [the data component of a personal home page, formatted in a standardized way], you can publish stuff about yourself, your organization, your publication, places, or photographs. You can have a pointer that says “this is a photograph about me” and other data about the photograph, such as who else is in it.
To create a FOAF file, you must fill out a form, such as the one at www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html. From this information, a Semantic Web–readable text file is generated that you can add to your personal website. There are semantic websites that will pull that data up and give you things like a list of photographs linking you to somebody else. I’m three photographs from Frank Sinatra because I’m photographed with Bill Clinton who’s been photographed with one of the Kennedys who’s been photographed with Frank Sinatra. That’s a silly application, but it really shows the power of the reuse of information.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: WTF is an interrobang‽
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DATE: 09/27/2004 03:49:12 PM
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Marc Laidlaw sez: I have a new favorite obscure puncutation mark:
In 1962, the interrobang (‽), was introduced by the New York publishing establishment as "a twentieth century punctuation mark". The interrobang combined the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. It received some attention at first, but never caught on, although for a brief period during the 1960s it was added to some typewriter keyboards.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Breast-enlarging ringtones
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DATE: 09/27/2004 09:20:52 PM
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Pete Rojas from Engadet says,
Anyone catch that story that was going around last week about a ringtone that's being sold in Japan that supposedly will enlarge your breasts just be listening to it? Well, we were dying of to hear what such a ringtone would sound like (purely for research purposes, of course), so we convinced Engadget's Tokyo correspondent to download the ringtone to his phone and record it for us as an MP3 so we could heard what it sounded like. I expected something at least vaguly ambient or new age or whatever, but it actually sounds like some dude playing a wicked solo on a guitar. Supposedly the ringtone is selling like crazy (not sure whether I believe that), but the company behind it also has plans for ringtones that'll cure baldness, make you more attractive to the opposite sex, and quit smoking.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: PornoPoliticalPolo-shirt Kerry fundraiser
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DATE: 09/27/2004 09:29:46 PM
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NYC-based fashion designer Rachel Comey created this polo shirt to raise funds for Downtown for Democracy, a group organized to mobilize support for Kerry within the creative communities. $40.00 via the perenially hip online mag Hint. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO make a legal P2P system
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DATE: 09/27/2004 11:25:37 PM
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If you're a P2P developer looking to understand the law, the best paper on the subject has been my cow-orker Fred von Lohmann's "IAAL*: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law." It's been out of date for a couple months, though, ever since Fred won the Grokster case, legalizing an entire class of P2P networks at a stroke. Now, Fred has revised the paper to reflect these new freedoms -- have at it!
n other words, a copyright owner has to show that you had knowledge of infringement when you could have done something about it. StreamCast and Grokster (like vendors of photocopiers and VCRs) never had knowledge of a specific infringement at a time when they could have prevented it. The critical factor was the decentralized architecture of the Grokster and Morpheus software. The software gave the defendants no ability block access to the network, or to control what end-users searched for, shared, or downloaded. Accordingly, by the time the defendants were notified of infringing activity, they were unable to do anything about it (just as Xerox is not able to stop infringing activities after a photocopier has been sold). In the words of the court: "even if the Software Distributors closed their doors and deactivated all computers within their control, users of their products could continue sharing files with little or no interruption."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Win2K-based air traffic control b0rks 800 planes in the air
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DATE: 09/27/2004 11:28:20 PM
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Southern California air-traffic systems were migrated from stable, Unix-based systems to commodity PCs running Microsoft Windows-based operating systems in the past three years. These systems required regular reboots -- and when a tech failed to perform the reboot correctly, the systems died and wouldn't come back up, stranding 800 planes in the skies over Lalaland.
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software failure, according to a report in The New York Times.
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(Thanks, Isara!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ian Clarke: UK govt should scoop up INDUCE Act refugees
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DATE: 09/27/2004 11:33:34 PM
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Ian Clarke, the creator of the P2P Freenet system (an anonymizing, attack-resistant system designed to let dissidents speak without fear of retaliation) has written a letter to the UK Home Secretary. Ian urges the British government to make arrangements to accomodate the flood of INDUCE Act refugees that will wash up on Britain's shores if the US enacts the terrible law, which would make it a crime to produce technology that "induces" copyright infringement (e.g., selling an iPod with the capacity to store more songs than most customers have in their libraries).
Clarke himself left the US in the wake of the PATRIOT Act (as did I), realizing that the US had created a system of law that routinely fingerprinted and photographed visa'ed immigrants, and subjected us to secret arrest without counsel or charge, said arrests possibly leading to indefinite detention.
My question is whether the UK government has made sufficient provision for displaced American innovators to migrate here given the hostile environment they may soon face in their own country. It is my belief that the United Kingdom can only benefit from the influx of talented software engineers from the United States, and should minimise any barriers to their migration here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photoshopped apocalypse cities
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DATE: 09/27/2004 11:35:27 PM
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Today's Worth1000 photoshopping challenge is to create the ruins of cities that are still standing. Some tasty post-apocalyptic visions here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Zuckerman: Wikipedia needs to cover non-nerdy subjects
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DATE: 09/27/2004 11:38:41 PM
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Ethan Zuckerman, who founded the GeekCorps org that works to help bring tech to Africa, has created a call-to-arms for the free, collaborative Wikipedia encyclopedia to address its systemic bias towards subjects of interest to white, Anglo-American nerd-boys, expanding its net to cover things like the Congo Civil War, nursing, and agriculture.
Wikipedia is biased toward over-inclusion of certain material pertaining to (for example) science fiction, contemporary youth culture, contemporary U.S. and UK culture in general, and anything already well covered in the English-langauge portion of the Internet. These excessive inclusions are relatively harmless: at worst, people look at some of these articles and say "this is silly, why is it in an encyclopedia?"
Of far greater (and more detrimental) consequence, these same biases lead to minimal or non-existent treatment of topics of great importance. One example is that, as of this writing, the Congo Civil War, possibly the largest war since World War II has claimed over 3 million lives, but one would be hard pressed to learn much about it from Wikipedia. In fact, there is more information on a fictional plant
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(via Many2Many)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show viewers smarter than O'Reilly Factor viewers
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DATE: 09/27/2004 11:41:14 PM
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Bill O'Reilly interviewed Jon Stewart of the Daily Show and called Daily Show watchers a bunch of "stoned slackers." It turns out that Stewart's audience is better-educated and better-informed that O'Reilly Factor viewers (surprise, surprise!).
Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch "The O'Reilly Factor," according to Nielsen Media Research...
Comedy Central also touted a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey, which said young viewers of "The Daily Show" were more likely to answer questions about politics correctly than those who don't.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Plush FM radios
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DATE: 09/27/2004 11:44:30 PM
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These plush boomboxes contain functional FM radios. Sorry, wholesale only.
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(via Red Ferret Review)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky Japanese toilet product ads featuring hygenic plushy creatures
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DATE: 09/28/2004 05:01:15 AM
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On this site, a number of Japanese TV commercials promoting bathroom accessories. Shown here, screenshot for some sort of disposable toilet seat thingy, which is replaced periodically by dancing penguins. Or, as Babelfish's auto-engrish explains, "You just exchange automatic washing!" At the bottom of the page, another ad in which a young woman gazes in wonder at an unusually-designed toilet. She's sitting in a rad Vitra Panton chair, not hawked by penguins. Other forest creatures make guest appearances. Link (via Warren)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online video interview with BBC Iraq blogger Stuart Hughes
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DATE: 09/28/2004 05:05:15 AM
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Chuck Olsen of Blogumentary has just published a 24MB Quicktime movie profile of BBC journalist, Iraq blogger, and amputee Stuart Hughes. "Stuart began blogging when he was dispatched to northern Iraq in early 2003," says Olsen, "His life, and his blog, spiraled through tragedy and transformation in the weeks and months that followed." (Link to related BoingBoing archive post)
Link to Blogumentary video interview
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Al Gore's new cable network hiring vloggers and untrained, would-be digital reporters
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DATE: 09/28/2004 05:10:43 AM
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INdTV, the media company founded by President former Vice President Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, is hiring talent. It looks like they're specifically trying to recruit "young adults" with or without any experience -- but with an affinity for low-budget digital production, and a desire to learn. Video-bloggers or would-be correspondents comfortable with the idea of indie soup-to-nuts newsmaking will write, shoot, and edit their own segments.
Last May we acquired an existing television network that is currently available in almost 20 million U.S. homes. In 2005, we will debut a new network, a network featuring programming created by and for young adults INdTV is seeking emerging creative, journalistic, and production talent to join the network as Digital Correspondents (DCs). DCs will think, write, shoot, edit and potentially appear on-air. They will work in a fast-paced, competitive environment, alone and in teams, out in the field and traveling the world. They will work with some of the best programmers, producers and editors in the business. And some of the content they produce will become a part of our network programming.
Conceptually, it's interesting stuff -- indie blog culture merging with big media. But as Dan Gillmor astutely points out, the network's plans to hire "young adults" with little or no pro journalism experience also "sounds like a great way to save on wages and health insurance." Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DARPA loves trash
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DATE: 09/28/2004 06:10:13 AM
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Noah Shachtman writes:
U.S. bases of the future are supposed to be self-sustaining. But, right now, they produce too much junk -- more than 7 pounds per day, per soldier. And a whole heap of "personnel, fuel, and critical transport equipment are needed to support the removal and disposal" of that waste, the Pentagon notes. So Darpa, the Defense Department's far-out research arm, has just given a Menlo Park, California "gene synthesis" company a grant to give the junk a second life, by turning the plastic waste into fuel.
"Plastic packaging waste has energy content that can approach that of diesel fuel, Darpa notes. "Diesel fuel has lower heating value of 43.9MJ/kg and hydrogen content of 12.5 weight percent. Plastic heating values can range from 26-43MJ/kg with a hydrogen content of 5-14 percent. If energy content of the waste is optimized for secondary use as a fuel source, at today's level of packaging being discarded, a military unit could achieve well over 100 percent self-sufficiency for their generator fuel needs."
Professor Richard Gross, at Polytechnic University, New York, thinks he has a polymer that can get the job done. It'll have "properties similar to polyethylene and will be prepared from renewable resources with a cost comparable to current commercially manufactured plastics," he claims. DNA 2.0, Inc., out of Menlo Park, will produce the enzymes needed to make the designer material for Darpa's MISER (Mobile Integrated Sustainable Energy Recovery) project.
Link to Defensetech blog
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites' Iraq blog: Behind Blast Walls
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DATE: 09/28/2004 07:05:28 AM
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Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is stationed in Iraq, and has added a pair of new posts to his blog today.
But behind these blast walls meant to protect us, our spirits wither. All of us who cover conflict on a regular basis got into this kind of journalism because we wanted to be immersed up to the eyeballs in our stories. Most of us have given up the communities, comforts and relationships that are the staples of more "natural" lives. To live and work like this is an anathema to our normal rhythms. So when our interpreter/producer Ashraf brought the video of his wedding to the bureau -- we all crowded around a tiny three-inch mini dv player -- like it was a crystal ball.
We watched us our colleague made the commitment of his lifetime to a stunning, young Iraqi woman -- dressed in a splendid royal blue gown, sprigs of white baby's breath in her hair. The camera moved around the room, allowing us to meet his family and friends -- some of them other Iraqi colleagues we knew -- but had never seen outside of work in this kind of setting, being themselves, full of smiles, the seriousness of newsgathering melted away for a few hours.
And then they danced. Mostly the women, moving like Bedouin princesses under the desert sky. A tiny glimpse of beauty in a place where it seems to become a bit more rare with each passing day.
Link to "Blog Smog," Link to "Behind Blast Walls."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iraq visual language survival guides for military personnel
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DATE: 09/28/2004 07:10:52 AM
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A friend who recently returned from Baghdad brought me an unusual souvenir: a "visual language survival guide" used by coalition soldiers. It's a sort of show-and-tell folding map intended for both soldiers and private contractors working in Iraq -- with lots of little pictures you can point to in front of an Iraqi person to say things like "is the improvised explosive device hidden under the dead goat?" and "was the bomb maker planning manual or remote detonation?"
A company named Kwikpoint makes them, and the military hands them out to personnel. The guides help English-speaking personnel communicate with prisoners, would-be-detainees, interrogatees, and so on. Don't speak Farsi or Iraqi Arabic? Need to tell a prisoner to drop trou and get horizontal beneath your boot, pronto? Point to the infographic.
Visually, they're unsettling. The images are functional icons, like highway signs or web UI buttons, so they reflect a simplified aesthetic -- like early childhood storybooks. The subject matter is violent, but the look is "see spot run" or "happy Lego people at play." The most surreal one is a two-part diagram in which a man is asked to remove his toupee so the interrogator can determine whether or not weapons are stashed beneath (shown in thumbnail here).
Civilians can buy the Iraq guide online for $11 each: Link. Scanned lo-res excerpts: part one, part two (jpegs, about 200K each). Remix possibilities boggle the mind.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: 3D printer art
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DATE: 09/28/2004 07:44:12 AM
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Computer scientist Gershon Elber of the Technion Israel Institute of Technology used 3D printers to create marvelous physical models of MC Escher's artwork. 3D printers, like those from Z Corporation, squirt out powdered plastic and binder layer-by-layer based on a CAD model. Link (via Reality Carnival)
UC Berkeley computer scientist Carlo Séquin also uses 3D printers to produce beautiful abstract sculptures. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Angry judge berates lawyers in opinion
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DATE: 09/28/2004 09:13:52 AM
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A Texas judge has handed down an high-larious, scathing opinion in which he lambastes the attorneys before him for squabbling like children:
The Court simply wants to scream to these lawyers, “Get a life” or “Do you have any other cases?” or “When is the last time you registered for anger management classes?”
Neither the world’s problems nor this case will be determined by an answer to a counterclaim which is four days late, even with the approval of the presiding judge.
If the lawyers in this case do not change, immediately, their manner of practice and start conducting themselves as competent to practice in the federal court, the court will contemplate and may enter an order requiring the parties to obtain new counsel. In the event it is not clear from the above discussion, the Motion for Reconsideration is DENIED. SIGNED this 21st day of July 2004.
Link,/a>
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worst jobs in history, via Baldric
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DATE: 09/28/2004 09:18:37 AM
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Tony Robinson, who played Baldric on Black Adder, is doing a new TV show called "The Worst Jobs in History" in which he undertakes to perform history's vilest tasks every week.
And there's no more powerful alkaline solution than two-week old human urine – and it's free!
I tell you, after two weeks it doesn't smell like wee, it smells like burying your nose in uncooked liver.
For the show I used our crew member's wee – and the job involves dancing around in it bare foot for two hours per length of cloth.
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Where to find malware on a Windows box
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DATE: 09/28/2004 09:20:01 AM
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Here's a good guide to all the places in a Windows installation that a worm or virus can hide itself.
2. REGISTRY. Windows executes all instructions in the "Run" section of the Windows Registry. Items in the "Run" section (and in other parts of the Registry listed below) can be programs or files that programs open (documents), as explained in No. 1 above.
3. REGISTRY. Windows executes all instructions in the "RunServices" section of the Registry.
4. REGISTRY. Windows executes all instructions in the "RunOnce" part of the Registry.
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(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Free Software, circa 1889
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DATE: 09/28/2004 09:21:07 AM
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Former BB guestblogger Johannes Grenzfurthner of Austrian art collective Monochrom says:
"Leo Findeisen, a member of Monochrom, wrote an interesting text and we published it on our server. He compares the 'old codes' of natural languages to the 'new codes' of today, which are programming languages. To help us understand the mechanisms through which new codes originate, grow and thrive (or do not), he examines the history of two natural languages that developed through an open source mechanism: Volapük and Esperanto."
Called "Some Code to Die For," the dense-but-engaging essay is available in English, German, and, of course, Esperanto.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: E-Voting activist meeting: San Fran, Oct 12
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DATE: 09/28/2004 09:21:35 AM
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BayFF -- a Bay Area discussion group for civil liberties issues -- is having an important meeting on Tuesday, Oct 12 at 7PM in the 111 Minna Gallery to discuss E-Voting:
Democracy is government by the people, and the right to vote is critical to determining what each of us wants of our government. Nearly one quarter of American voters - more than 35 million people - will exercise that right using electronic voting (e-voting) terminals in this election. Unfortunately, due to equipment that has been hastily developed and poorly tested, your right to vote is in greater jeopardy than ever before. There are widespread reports of voting terminal failures, and growing concern about the (in)security of these machines is fueling fierce debate over how to ensure the integrity of our elections. EFF is working to ensure that votes are verifiable and to train poll workers about what to do when the machines fail. Come listen to our team leaders talk about the latest developments, and share your thoughts on how we can make sure that every vote is counted.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland history travelling exhibit
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DATE: 09/28/2004 09:26:59 AM
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There's an upcoming touring exhibit on the creation of Disneyland -- I really hope I get to see this!
The Henry Ford in Dearborn,
Michigan, will research and develop a traveling exhibit celebrating the 50th
anniversary of Disneyland. The exhibit will be created by The Henry Ford in
association with Walt Disney Imagineering and The Walt Disney Company.
In an unprecedented agreement, Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative
design organization behind Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, will loan The Henry
Ford up to 500 pieces of original artwork, models, construction drawings, ride
vehicles and media materials relating to the architecture and design of
Disneyland.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: South Park's Puppet Regime
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DATE: 09/28/2004 09:47:00 AM
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In this month's issue of Wired Magazine: an item I wrote about the forthcoming film Team America, due in theaters next month.
While the rest of Hollywood obsesses over the next CG blockbuster, the creators of South Park are playing with puppets. For their latest film, Team America: World Police, Matt Stone and Trey Parker eschew computer graphics for wooden dummies and WYSIWYG garage geekery. "I hate what CG has done to movies," says Stone. "Filmmakers too often substitute technology for a good story. There's something so much more exhilarating about watching stuff that's real."
Real 22-inch-tall marionettes are what you get in this $20 million send-up of bloated action epics. Due in theaters October 15, Team America tracks a special task force that must save the world from terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. The film stars 90 puppets, including knock-offs of John Kerry, Michael Moore, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong II.
Puppeteers manhandle wires and rods to move the characters using the same supermarionation technique employed in the '60s cult TV series Thunderbirds. But Stone calls his method "supercrappynation" because the wires remain visible and sophisticated articulation is replaced by jerky verité.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ShmooCon: new hackercon in DC this Feb
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DATE: 09/28/2004 02:28:02 PM
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ShmooCon is the first conference put on by the high-larious hacker clade The Shmoo Group, who brought you such fun projects as the HackerBot and the WiFi sniper rifle. Coming next February 4-6 to DC's Wardman Park Marriott Hotel.
"Break It!" - a track dedicated to the demonstration of techniques, software, and devices devised with only one purpose in mind--technology exploitation. You will bear witness to some of the most devious minds, source code, and gadgets on the planet that focus their energies on breaking the technology we mindless sheep keep on buying. Baaaaa.
"Build It!" - a track that showcases inventive software & hardware solutions--from distributed computing or stealth p2p networks to miniature form-factor community wireless network node hardware or robotics even. Let loose your inner geek, and feel free to gawk. With all the neat stuff, it's important to take notes--that way we all have evidence to shoot down some sleazeball patents 5 years from now.
"BoF It!" - a track that promotes the open discussion of critical information security issues in a "birds of a feather" format. From lightning open source code audits or wireless insecurity discussion panels to DRM rants or anonymity & privacy strategies--it's down and dirty, with plenty of controversy for folks who like hashing it out with fellow hackers. Feel free to throw your Shmooball here, but no fisticuffs, please. Settle your differences at Hack-or-Halo in the evening, instead.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vintage Disney hotel logos as vector art
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DATE: 09/28/2004 11:29:11 PM
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Michael found some retro Disney World hotel matchbooks with the crumbling original logos for the Polynesian Village and Contemporary Resort hotels in all their 1970s avacodo-and-harvest-gold glory. Inspired, he reproduced them in Illustrator as vector-art files, which are now online on his site for you to download and render out at arbitrarily high resolutions -- I'm thinking of a wall-sized mural of the Poly logo.
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(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Uncovered: War in Iraq torrents under CC license
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DATE: 09/28/2004 11:32:08 PM
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Gary sez, "In a follow-up to the release of interviews from Outfoxed under a Creative Commons License, Robert Greenwald has also agreed to release the interviews from Uncovered: The War on Iraq." Get your torrents here:
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(Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple owns up to 15" Pbk display bug
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DATE: 09/28/2004 11:35:25 PM
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I blew through three screens on Apple's original 15" Aluminum G4 Powerbooks, which were prone to a design flaw that caused huge, distracting white blobs to appear on the screen. Apple insisted that there was no such design flaw and offered no official replacement beyond their warranty service (which replaced bad displays with new bad displays with the same flaws!).
Finally, Apple has admitted to shipping a lemon, and has extended the warranty period for people who want to get their bum displays replaced:
Users have been complaining about the issue since last fall, launching online petitions and other efforts designed to get the Mac maker to address the problem.
In October, Apple said people with the problem should contact its AppleCare service, but the company had been handling problems case by case under its standard warranty. In December the company posted more information to its support Web site, an Apple representative said.
"Last year we advised customers whose 15-inch PowerBook G4 displays exhibited faint white spots to contact AppleCare," Apple said in a statement. "To ensure that our customers are well taken care of, we are extending the repair period on these systems to two years from the original date of purchase."
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(Thanks, Riana!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Yes Men pranksters documentary trailer
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DATE: 09/28/2004 11:38:15 PM
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The Onion's AV Club has the trailer for a new documentary on legenday political pranksters The Yes Men, who pull stunts like impersonating officials with the WTO and show up at international trade conferences and propose a "market for human rights abuses" and "auctioning votes to the highest bidder." The doc looks fantastic -- can't wait for it to open here in London!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Catalogue of the Kleptones' samples
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DATE: 09/28/2004 11:41:23 PM
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Waxy has undertaken a collaborative project to identify and catalogue all the samples in the Kleptones' brilliant new illegal mashup album, A Night at the Hip-Hopera. He's done such a good job that he's managed to source samples that the Kleptones themselves had lost track of the origins of, according to this email interview Boogah undertook with Eric Kleptone ("They even pin-pointed samples that we couldn't remember where they'd come from. My hat comes off to those guys.")
15 - Break.mp3
- Queen, "I Want to Break Free"
- Aaliyah w/Timbaland, "Try Again" (intro sample)
- Beastie Boys, "Shake Your Rump"
- Beastie Boys, "Body Movin'"
- Beastie Boys, "Alive"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IPAC: a PAC for IP issues
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DATE: 09/29/2004 12:58:35 AM
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My pal Ren is starting a political action committee to pressure lawmakers into doing the right thing on copyright, trademark and patent issues:
Most of today's legislators think very little about intellectual property. When they do, it is often at the behest of an entertainment industry lobbyist. As a result, America's intellectual property policy has become a one-way ratchet of expanding entitlements for rights holders. The public's rights to use and benefit from intellectual property have steadily declined in the last century, and the forces behind that decline grow more powerful every day.
Yet in recent years, the public's awareness of these changes has sharply increased. Much of that increase can be attributed to the work of people like you. This awareness is vital, and IPac hopes to provide an outlet for it in the electoral system. IPac is dedicated to supporting candidates who will fight for balanced intellectual property policy. Specifically, we intend to:
* Fund the campaigns of elected officials who support IPac's principles
* Publish voter guides to help citizens make informed choices about their elected officials based on their handling of IP and technology issues
* Fund issue-based advertising
* Encourage legislation that aligns with IPac's principles
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best French sf you never read
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DATE: 09/29/2004 02:36:45 AM
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Kirk McElhearn has translated and posted two chapters from Pierre Bordage's novel The Warriors of Silence. Bordage is one of the best-selling non-English-language sf writers in the world, with 20 novels to his credit, widely translated into languages other than English. McElhearn hopes that in posting these chapters, he'll stir interest in the US and UK for Bordage's work:
On the planet Two-Seasons, a rumor kept returning, as often as the rain, suggesting that the wet season was coming to its end.
Slumped in a chair so old and dusty that the light of its tubes merged with the half-light of the agency, Tixu Oty, originally from the planet Orange, watched the heavy drops fall with the look of a divine cow contemplating an antique rocket train.
During the five, maybe six standard years that he had been on Two-Seasons, Tixu Oty had slowly changed into a shaggy, lifeless mass, soaked through with alcohol and boredom. A sickening stench oozed from his crumpled uniform, which had once been light green, and its pungency was reminiscent of the giant river lizards of the rainy season.
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(Thanks, Kirk!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free iPod for Air France business class passengers
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DATE: 09/29/2004 03:07:29 AM
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Fly first business from the US to Europe, get a free iPod Mini.
Air France is offering customers of its "l'Espace Affaires" business class service an opportunity to get a free iPod mini; all they have to do is purchase a ticket from now to Nov. 15, 2004. Tickets must originate from any Air France U.S. gateway for travel to any European destination, and travel must be completed by Jan. 15, 2005. Additional restrictions apply. Once travel is completed, passengers mail their information to an Air France address, and the airline then sends them an iPod mini within six to ten weeks.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lore on new Star Wars game
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DATE: 09/29/2004 03:22:24 AM
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Lore "Brunching Shuttlecocks" Sjöberg reviews Star Wars: Battlefront, a new shooter-game, in today's Wired News. Nutshell: it's more cool than it is fun, with lots of opportunities for Star Wars truefen to blow away Jar Jar and get down with their lucas-envy, but not a lot of gameplay.
You can look up at towering AT-ATs or look down from them as you blast the rebels to smithereens, evil cackle optional. You can zoom through the trees of Endor's moon on a speeder bike, see your buddies get pulled into a Sarlacc pit, and dogfight above Bespin. More cynical fans will welcome the ability to give Ewoks and Gungans a good spanking, blaster-style. Not only are the arenas exciting enough to pull you in, they even manage to make the prequels look good.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Anti-Bush shirts for kids
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DATE: 09/29/2004 09:27:40 AM
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Lowercase Tee sells funny anti-Bush T-shirts for kids. Perfect for watching the upcoming fake debates. (According to this story in the LA Times, President Bush's handlers wanted the auditorium temperature to be 70, in order to make John Kerry break out in a sweat.) Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in French
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DATE: 09/29/2004 01:48:37 PM
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"Botoxsmile" has done a "quick and dirty" translation of my Microsoft DRM talk into French.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ACLU and EFF strike down part of PATRIOT Act
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DATE: 09/29/2004 01:54:09 PM
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EFF has helped the ACLU overturn one of the worst elements of the USA PATRIOT Act, the "National Security Letters," which were secret warrants that the Justice Department could write for itself without judicial oversight and then bind the recipients to indefinite silence. That's right: secret, no-oversight warrants with perpetual gag-orders. The ACLU brought suit against the DoJ on this one, and we filed briefs on their side, and today, a federal court struck down this part of PATRIOT as unconstitutional. BooYAH.
"Today's ruling is an important victory for the Bill of
Rights, and a critical step toward reigning in the
unconstitutional reach of the Patriot Act," said Kurt
Opsahl, EFF staff attorney. "The Court recognized that
judicial oversight and the freedom to discuss our
government's activities both online and offline are
fundamental safeguards to civil liberties, and should not
be thrown aside."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WiFi walled-gardens suck
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DATE: 09/29/2004 02:16:03 PM
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Mike sez,
This overview from Techdirt covers the disturbing practice taken by some providers of free WiFi hotspots: restrictive content filtering. In my book, Wi-Fi Toys, I discussed how network operators can build a free Wi-Fi hotspot and share their Internet connection with a wildly useful free program called Nocat.
Unfortnuately, hotspot gateways like Nocat can also give owners the ability to block sites and restrict surfing to a "€œwalled garden" of accepted destinations. The walled garden idea was meant to give site owners the ability to create a sort of free preview of the Internet where you can perhaps check the weather, read the iHop menu, the local paper, or other casual internet destinations without having to register or sign on to the network.
I suggest people log off and take their business elsewhere.
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(Thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geniuses of the year
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DATE: 09/29/2004 02:31:06 PM
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The MacArthur Foundation has announced this year's winners of the "Genius" grant for $250k $500k for outstanding achievment in the field of outstandingness. Pretty amazing cross-section of artists, scientists and thinkers here:
Marine Roboticist building multiple, miniature, autonomous underwater vehicles that mimic the behavior of schooling fish...
High School Debating Coach changing the landscape of opportunities within urban schools...
Inventor cobbling sophisticated, life-enhancing devices from inexpensive materials for people in areas with little access to technology and even fewer resources to obtain it.
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(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet bubble's blessings
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DATE: 09/29/2004 02:32:50 PM
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An interesting rumination on what the Internet stock-bubble got right:
The aspect of the Internet Bubble that the press seemed most taken with was the youth of some of the startup founders. This too is a trend that will last. There is a huge standard deviation among 26 year olds. Some are fit only for entry level jobs, but others are ready to rule the world if they can find someone to handle the paperwork for them.
A 26 year old may not be very good at managing people or dealing with the SEC. Those require experience. But those are also commodities, which can be handed off to some lieutenant. The most important quality in a CEO is his vision for the company's future. What will they build next? And in that department, there are 26 year olds who can compete with anyone.
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(via EvHead)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Can suing customers save the record companies?
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DATE: 09/29/2004 02:35:16 PM
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Fred von Lohmann's law.com op-ed asks the music question: "Is Suing Your Customers a Good Idea?"
Unfortunately, the evidence thus far suggests that the RIAA litigation campaign has had little, if any, effect on P2P file-sharing. Companies like Big Champagne and BayTSP that track the online P2P population have found that the number of U.S. file-sharers continues to grow. The global file-sharing population, moreover, is skyrocketing. A survey of Internet users undertaken by the Pew Internet and American Life Project did show a marked decline in file-sharing in the months following the highly-publicized first rounds of RIAA lawsuits, but Pew's follow-up reports have documented a rebound in the months since.
In the face of evidence suggesting that the lawsuits have been ineffective at curbing P2P music-swapping, the RIAA responded that "lawsuits are an important part of the larger strategy to educate file-sharers about the law." Well, the "education by lawsuit" of American music fans is also off to a rocky start. Awareness of copyright law is certainly up. For example, an April 2004 survey revealed that 88 percent of children between 8 and 18 years of age understood that P2P music-downloading is illegal. Unfortunately, the survey also discovered that 56 percent of the children surveyed continue to download music anyway. So while many music fans are aware of the "stick" of lawsuits, they seem relatively unintimidated by it.
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(Thanks, Fred!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scans of GOP "Bible to be banned" scare-literature
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DATE: 09/29/2004 02:38:46 PM
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Kyle sez, "I called the Arkansas Kerry headquarters and managed
to get some scans of the GOP flier that's making the rounds,
declaring that the Bible will be BANNED if the liberals win.
Same-sex marriage, of course, will be ALLOWED. Thought folks
might like to actually see the pics that everyone's talking about
-- I haven't seen 'em anywhere else yet."
Link
(Thanks, Kyle!)
Update: Luke sez, Washington Blogger/journalist Steve Clemons had a better scan of the 'Liberals Will Ban the Bible' GOP scare-flyer last week. Clemons's scan is bigger and has the front and back of the flyer (which includes another BANNED Bible)."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Asimov's magazine on ebooks
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DATE: 09/29/2004 03:03:09 PM
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My pal and teacher James Patrick Kelly is a Hugo-award-winning sf writer who does a column about the Internet for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine -- this month's, about ebooks, is very good indeed (especially given the generally dismal approach of the sf field to electronic text).
should say here that I have long been one of those saurians who disliked reading for pleasure from a computer screen. But a couple of months ago, for reasons too boring to mention, I popped for a personal digital assistant (PDA) , mostly to keep track of appointments and addresses when I was away from my desk. As it happened, shortly after I made the buy, I went to Florida to attend the International Conference on the Fantastic and to soak up some rays. On a whim, I loaded some ebooks into my new gadget. By the time I got off the plane in Fort Lauderdale I’d fallen in love with my PDA as a reading device. Yes, the screen is smallish but I can change the font at will. Maybe it isn’t exactly ideal for the beach because direct light washes out the backlit screen, but my days of sunbathing are over and this thing is made in the shade. Often as not it’s my book of choice for bedtime reading. And if my wife wants to turn in, we can douse all the lights and I can read from that cheerily lit screen.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Penn Jillette's "Sock" references collected
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DATE: 09/29/2004 03:07:08 PM
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Penn Jillette, half of the magnificent magic/comedy duo Penn and Teller, has recently published a first novel called Sock, told from the PoV of a sock-monkey. The book is chock-a-block with pop culture references, especially song lyrics, and David has undertaken to catalogue them on this site.
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(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: CBS News: Bush's top ten flip flops
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DATE: 09/29/2004 05:08:52 PM
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Personally, I think flip-flopping is a sign of intelligence and shows a willingness to learn. But since the Republicans think flip-flopping is worse than torturing people or invading countries that don't pose a threat, here are President Bush's top ten flip flops.
President Bush: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories."(May 29, 2003)
President Bush: "I recognize we didn't find the stockpiles [of weapons] we all thought were there." (Sept. 9, 2004)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gallery of drug paraphernalia from 1970s men's magazine
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DATE: 09/29/2004 05:29:22 PM
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Here are some scans of neat-looking drug paraphernalia from a 1970s issue of Oui magazine. Link (via PCL Linkdump)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Nigerian spam used as Quicktime soliloquy
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DATE: 09/29/2004 06:18:23 PM
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Dylan
sez: "A movie clip of someone doing a Nigerian email scam monologue - complete with mispellings and bad grammar. It's a hoot." Link (via Good Experience)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne / Xprize snapshots, part 1
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DATE: 09/29/2004 07:43:14 PM
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Just got back to LA from the Mojave Airport -- er, spaceport -- where Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne completed the first of two flights that may result in its developers winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
Today's successful flight included a dramatic series of unplanned rolls during ascent. Developer Burt Rutan attributed them to known engineering problems that caused excessive dihedral effect (the way an aircraft reacts when wind hits it from the side). That corkscrew-spiral flight pattern on the way up looked terrifying from where I stood-- as if SS-1 were about to suddenly spin out of control to disaster at any moment. Judging from the gasps I heard in the media corral, others agreed.
Regardless of how risky that portion of the flight may have appeared, or indeed was, pilot Mike Melvill later said the rolls "felt cool" from where he was seated some 337,500 feet above the earth. He said he could see stars above, once he departed Earth's atmosphere. There was enough of a pause at the top for him to take a break from piloting, peek out the windows, and take some snapshots with a little camera he'd stowed on board.
I've been up since 230am today, and there's still work to do on tomorrow morning's NPR "Day to Day" report about today's flight. So for now, just a series of quick snapshots I took at the event. Here, SpaceShipOne at dawn: Link. Here, SpaceShipOne taxis out pre-flight, attached to White Knight: Link. Here, White Knight takes off: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne / Xprize snapshots, part 2
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DATE: 09/29/2004 08:08:36 PM
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The whole thing felt a little like Burning Man with more money and fewer naked hippies. Squint through the dust (which at times almost blew as hard as it does on the playa), and those big sponsor signs could almost pass for theme camp tents. Instead of bad trance music blaring in all directions, we heard bombastic symphonic overtures on the PA system every time SS-1 was about to do something important, like lift off or move from climb mode to glide mode.
The craft is fueled by nitrous oxide and rubber. I suppose this proves what many Hollywood clubbers have known for years -- that with a little latex and laughing gas, you can get to heaven.
Here, Scaled Composites' Burt Rutan and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen sit in the back of a pickup truck towing SpaceShipOne along the runway, after pilot Mike Melvill's successful flight. Mr. Melvill is still inside the craft. This sight made me laugh. I mean -- come on. A pickup truck towing a spaceship. Garage geekery, grand goals. Link to full-size image. Link to a snapshot moments later, in which Melvill addresses the crowd on the ground, while Rutan and Allen grin widely.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne / Xprize snapshots, part 3
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DATE: 09/29/2004 10:08:54 PM
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SpaceShipOne pilot Mike Melvill gives the universal sign for a successful flight after today's touchdown. Link to full-size. Link to another snapshot of Mr. Melvill standing on top of the craft, speaking to reporters.
The X-Prize webcast of today's flight includes some incredibly beautiful footage from an on-ship camera -- this must be what Melvill saw, gazing out of that little round window. A giant blue dome below, and a black sky with bright stars above. I'd sure like to see the snapshots he said he took up there. Anyway, go ahead and skip through the hoo-ha and just stream the good stuff -- but there is definitely some good stuff: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ASCII movies of the Bush SotU addresses
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DATE: 09/30/2004 12:50:02 AM
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ASCII Bush has ASCII-mation videos of both Bush I and Bush II's State of the Union addresses as Quicktime files. Filthyape sez, "The basic goal of this project is to make art from the debris of our culture by recycling these dreadful and painfully long presidential oration. The speeches are not edited--just digitally filtered. And like I said, they are very lengthy. ASCII BUSH is definitely boring enough to be interesting!!!"
Link
(Thanks, filthyape!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Google Answers: Is Google on fire?
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DATE: 09/30/2004 12:54:09 AM
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Danny's wife, Quinn, drove past Google HQ yesterday and noted smoke rising from the building. She rang Danny, who leapt into motion, going to Google Answers and posing this question:
Is Google HQ on fire right now? My wife drove your campus and saw
smoke. Are you guys okay? I can probably get a ladder if you need it.
The question remains unanswered. Silly Danny -- Google Answers staffers work offsite!
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Voter Information Guide by Kottke and co
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DATE: 09/30/2004 12:55:42 AM
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Kottke and his blog-readers have been assembling a Voter Information Guide, which they've been turning into one-page handouts and outher interesting and useful forms that explain how to register and vote in the upcoming election.
- 1-page PDF version by Trevor Filter
- HTML version suitable for printing by Ryan Brill
- text-only version by Chuck Welch
- an audio version by Ben Yates
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Industrial nations to WIPO: less IP, more global well-being
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DATE: 09/30/2004 01:18:40 AM
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Thiru Balasubramaniam from the Consumer Project on Technology is taking notes at the General Assembly of the UN's World Intellectual Property Organisation. Yesterday was the opening, and it kicked off with a bang, with a group of nations (comprising the 15 original European Community states, Japan, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and some others) excoriating the Organisation for pursuing IP Rights over the other goals of WIPO such as fostering creativity and transfering technology to the world's poorest nations.
...believe WIPO's work should help support the
multilateral development of intellectual property, not as an end in
itself, but as a means to help achieve the economic, social and cultural
well-being of individuals and societies across the planet. In that
light, we are pleased to see paragraph 6 of the Secretariat's
Performance Report emphasize that "WIPO's strategic goals should also be
viewed in the larger context of the UN Millenium Declaration adopted by
the UN General Assembly in September 2000, placing the eight Millenium
Development Goals at the heard of the global agenda."
Link
(Thanks, Thiru!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Half the men on small island charged with rape
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DATE: 09/30/2004 01:46:43 AM
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Pitcairn Island is a tiny, remote island off the coast of New Zealand (thanks to everyone who pointed out that Pitcairn isn't close to NZ at all) with only 46 people living on it. Seven of the men there -- more than half the adult male population, including the mayor -- have been charged with over about 100 counts of sexual assault, including the rape of a five year old. The charges arose after a British policewoman visited the island and met some of the girls, who told her what had been going on. This blog entry has links to articles from various news-sites on the trial.
The residents of the island are descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty and the local Polynesian population in 1790.
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(Thanks, Cyrus!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P2P usage stats you can rely on
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DATE: 09/30/2004 05:47:14 AM
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Cachelogic has posted a very good, in-depth study of network traffic using data gathered from a variety of large ISPs. They conclude that P2P use has not dwindled; that P2P systems are the main use of bandwidth today ("the killer app for broadband")l that P2P is used to move lots of kinds of files, including ones that are noninfringing (strong market-demand for symmetrical connectivity); and that P2P's impact on ISP bandwidth charges are largely the result of anti-detection design choices that make it hard for P2P systems to efficiently use bandwidth. So much for the salutory effect of extreme copyright laws, lawsuits and "eduction" campaigns.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: WSJ reporter confirms authenticity of her letter to friends about horrific conditions in Iraq
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DATE: 09/30/2004 09:41:38 AM
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Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Iraq, confirmed that a widely-redistributed letter she emailed to friends about the nightmarish situation in Iraq was indeed written by her. Too bad the WSJ doesn't allow this reporter to write these kinds of stories for the paper.
Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity," Fassihi wrote (among much else) in the letter. "Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler." And: "Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
...Making clear what can only, at best, appear between lines in her published dispatches, Fassihi concluded, "One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle."
Link
(Note: there's an advertisement for the University of Phoenix on the right column of the page featuring a scary looking unshaven man with a blinking problem who starts TALKING VERY LOUDLY after the Flash file loads, so you might want to mute your computer's speaker before clicking on the link)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: report from SpaceShipOne launch at Mojave
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DATE: 09/30/2004 11:53:39 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day" , I report from the Mojave airport spaceport on yesterday's launch of SpaceShipOne. The craft was funded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and designed by Burt Rutan's team at Scaled Composites.
"SS-1" is the top contender in the race for the Ansari X-prize, a global competition to build the first viable commercial spaceship. The winning team will receive a $10 million award. For SpaceShipOne, that amounts to only half of the $20 million or so Allen invested -- clearly, the competition is about more than a cash prize.
Jason DeFillippo joined me and Day to Day producer Nihar Patel for the trip to Mojave -- Jason took some absolutely terrific photos of the launch, flight, landing, and the surreal scene around the airstrip. Link. In this photo, I'm one of a number of silly-looking reporters all squinting intently at the sky and holding their hands against the sun. We were trying to catch a glimpse of a distant SpaceShipOne during its ascent. Vetern tech and space journalist John Schwartz from the New York Times is there in the blue shirt (here's his story: Link). Right about then, Nihar yells out, "HELIOS, THOU ART MY LORD" really loud, which made everyone crack up because we really did look goofy. Like we were participating in an ancient sun-cult ritual, or at least a Planet of The Apes episode.
Link to archived radio segment: NPR Day to Day "First X-Prize Flight a Success for SpaceShipOne", with some of Jason's photos. Link to previous BoingBoing post on yesterday's event, and Link to more of Jason's awesome images.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Music of the sphere
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DATE: 09/30/2004 11:54:11 AM
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A mysterious low-frequency hum emanating from the Earth is likely caused by ocean storms. First discovered by Japanese seismologists in 1998, the vibrations have a frequency between two and seven millihertz, inaudible to humans.
UC Berkeley scientists propose in the journal Nature that the hum is produced by interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, and seafloor. From a BBC News report:
The daily release of energy required to generate the hum is equivalent to a magnitude 5.75 to six earthquake, say Junkee Rhie and Barbara Romanowicz of the University of California, Berkeley.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Solar gear jacket
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DATE: 09/30/2004 12:33:12 PM
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SCOTTeVEST announced a solar-powered version of their sporty mobile gear jacket. Global Solar's thin-film photovoltaic cells on the back of the jacket charge a small battery pack that provides juice to MP3 players, phones, cameras, and other devices stashed in more than 30 hidden pockets. The coat is outfitted with a "Personal Area Network" of wires running through the lining.
Link (Thanks, Mark Riedy!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cosplayer photo gallery
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DATE: 09/30/2004 12:49:12 PM
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Mainichi Shimbun has a collection of 260 cosplay photos from this year's Tokyo Game Show. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Scientists review films
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DATE: 09/30/2004 12:54:21 PM
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This summer, the American Chemical Society's Chemical & Engineering News magazine started running movie reviews. From their critique of The Day After Tomorrow:
"To a scientist, the film is interesting because it compresses everything that could happen under an abrupt climate change scenario (and much that could not happen) into a few days, rather than the more realistic decades. A collapse of the thermohaline circulation is a low-probability, but high-impact event. If it did occur in the early 21st century, it would have a huge impact on weather.
Some data suggest the thermohaline circulation has already begun to slow. Certain parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet are shrinking 10 times faster than they were a few years ago, losing an average of 10 meters of elevation annually, in contrast to the previous 1 meter, and reducing the salinity of the North Atlantic."
Today's New York Times has a feature about C&EN's new "Reel Science" section. Link (registration required)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: ABC news reports on "debate" that hasn't happened yet
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DATE: 09/30/2004 01:11:24 PM
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The rules for tonight's poor-substitute-for-a-debate are so restrictive, and the sound-bites that will come out of the mouths of both men are so easy to guess, that ABC news was able to file a story about the results of the "debate" several hours before it takes place. Link Story removed by ABC, but you can find copies here. (Thanks, Certron!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Stop buying food -- become a "freegan"
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DATE: 09/30/2004 02:05:23 PM
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Chris sez: "There's an interesting article over on newsday.com regarding the 'Freegan' Movement. The idea is basically this: Instead of paying for food, a group of individuals have decided to get their nourishment from that which would have otherwise become waste. These urban scavengers troll the garbage bins of health food stores and other eating establishments in urban areas in an effort to not only reduce the amount of society's wasted usable resourses, but to also benefit from that which you throw away. One Freegan, Luna Tic, even took the concept a step further and converted his car to run on cooking oil discarded by restaurants (he says he gets 12 miles to the gallon). Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ResFest in San Francisco this week
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DATE: 09/30/2004 02:20:18 PM
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The amazing RESFEST Digital Film Festival comes to the Bay Area starting tonight with an opening program of shorts and a reception featuring a performance by the group Midnight Movies. (Click the image for a better view.)
"RESFEST 2004 kicks off with a survey of state-of-the-art storytelling that mixes animation, live action and graphics-oriented work, giving viewers a taste of the festival's unique blend of filmmaking techniques. See the retelling of the tragic fate of Oedipus in luxurious cinematic splendor redolent of '50s era epics--with a case of vegetables. See what happens when the inexorable thrust of time slows, then stops, allowing three characters to transcend their destinies in Daniel Askill's visually stunning philosophical mindbender WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE."
...and so much more eye/braincandy tonight and over the next few days. Of course, if you're not in the Bay Area, RESFEST 2004 is hitting more than a dozen other cities around the globe before the year's end. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: George Soros' speech about President Bush's disastrous Iraq adventure
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DATE: 09/30/2004 02:58:15 PM
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The neocons paleocons have worked hard to portray George Soros as a fiendish international drug dealer*, which means they're afraid of him. And they should be. He's stupendously wealthy and he spends his money on promoting democracy in the world, instead of earning the hatred of the world by pretending to promote democracy as a cover for nefarious plots. Soros just published this lucid, easy-to-understand speech about the President's reckless invasion of Iraq, and why it is so important to vote him out in November.
We went to war on false pretences. The real reasons for going into Iraq have not been revealed to this day. The weapons of mass destruction could not be found, and the connection with al Qaeda could not be established. President Bush then claimed that we went to war to liberate the people of Iraq. All my experience in fostering democracy and open society has taught me that democracy cannot be imposed by military means. And, Iraq would be the last place I would chose for an experiment in introducing democracy - as the current chaos demonstrates.
Of course, Saddam was a tyrant, and of course Iraqis - and the rest of the world - can rejoice to be rid of him. But Iraqis now hate the American occupation. We stood idly by while Baghdad was ransacked. As the occupying power, we had an obligation to maintain law and order, but we failed to live up to it. If we had cared about the people of Iraq we should have had more troops available for the occupation than we needed for the invasion. We should have provided protection not only for the oil ministry but also the other ministries, museums and hospitals. Baghdad and the country's other cities were destroyed after we occupied them. When we encountered resistance, we employed methods that alienated and humiliated the population. The way we invaded homes, and the way we treated prisoners generated resentment and rage. Public opinion condemns us worldwide.
(*If Soros really was making money off the sale of illegal drugs, why is he pushing to decriminalize them? That would destroy his profit margin. Did bootleggers try to overthrow prohibition?)
Link (Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Reuters hires psychic to write about debate hours before it starts
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DATE: 09/30/2004 04:05:48 PM
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The person who wrote this photo caption can see into the future! "U.S. President George W. Bush shakes hands with Senator John Kerry (D-Mas) at the start of their first presidential debate, at the University of Miami, September 30, 2004." Link to screen capture
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SpaceShipOne's second Xprize flight set for Monday, Oct. 4
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DATE: 09/30/2004 07:16:46 PM
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The Ansari XPrize foundation just announced that the scheduled time for SpaceShipOne's second launch is now confirmed for on October 4th, 2004, at 7:00am. If this attempt goes as well as yesterday's, Burt Rutan and Paul Allen's team will win the $10 million global competition. Link to announcement. Image: on-ship footage from yesterday's launch -- webcast link. Previous BoingBoing posts: Xeni's NPR report, and snapshots.
Spaceblogger, infojunkie, and BoingBoing reader Brad Neuberg was part of the X-Prize volunteer team. I met him at the launch, and he's been doing a terrific job of blogging live from the event site. Keep your eyes on his blog Monday, I'm sure he'll do more. Link
. And here's another live XPrize blog maintained by an event volunteer: Link to Mike Taht's blog. BoingBoing reader Susan Kitchens also attended, and posted some cool photos and details about the festive "X-stock" scene around the airfield, here: Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Review of Typeit4me
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DATE: 09/30/2004 08:32:19 PM
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Mark Hurst of Good Experience reviews a very useful-sounding OS X application called Typeit4me. Basically, it lets you create shorthand for any text phrase. When you type in the shorthand (such as "bb" for "Boing Boing") and hit the trigger key (such as the space bar), the shorthand will be replaced by the full text. The important thing is that it works in any application.
Types in HTML phrases: I've defined "ahr" to yield "". Whether I'm in BBEdit, or in a TypePad form within a Web browser, I can get these key HTML strings out quickly and error-free.
Types short phrases: This is great in e-mail. I've set it up so that "tf" becomes "thanks for"; "tfy" becomes "thanks for your"; "tvmfy" becomes "thanks very much for your"... and so on. You can be as polite as you want, and optimally efficient, at the same time.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian Creative Commons licenses launched
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DATE: 09/30/2004 09:17:34 PM
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Congrats to the Canadian Creative Commons project on launching its license today! Now Canadians have an easy way to license their works so that others can re-use them, share them, and improve on them.
The only fly in the ointment for me is this: I really wish they'd set up the licenses so that they constituted a blanket waiver of Moral Rights, but I can't fault them for making it optional.
Still, if you're Canadian and you're CC-licensing your work, please consider the moral-rights waiver; otherwise, people who use your work run the risk that if you take it into your head that they've offended you, you could force them to destroy the new art they've made with your stuff.
By the same token, I will never, ever incorporate a work with a "moral rights asserted" clause into any of my works -- it's not worth the risk to me.
A lot of the world's copyright systems have the concept of author's moral rights -- I really hope that waivers of these rights become the norm in international CC licenses.
Link
(via Michael Geist)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sony ditches DRM CDs
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DATE: 09/30/2004 09:20:05 PM
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Sony -- which recently added MP3 support to its walkman devices -- has abandoned publishing music on DRM-laden CDs. They say that it's because of an "increase in awareness by music consumers," which Engadget interprets to mean "they’ve succeeded in educating everyone that copying CDs is a bad thing."
But I took it differently: I think they mean that their customers have grown aware of what abad deal these DRM discs are and don't want them anymore. IOW, we complained loud and hard and Sony blinked.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF kicks Diebold's ass
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DATE: 09/30/2004 09:29:58 PM
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Diebold, the slimeballs whose faulty voting machines threaten the basis of US democracy, tried to silence its critics, a group of activists who were publishing leaked memos detailing the company's malfeasance, by falsely claiming that they were violating Diebold's copyright.
Now a court has ruled that Diebold knowingly abused copyright and the DMCA when it sent nastygrams to the activists' ISPs, and has awarded the activists damages and court costs.
EFF represented the activists' side here. Man, we're winning some important cases these days. I love my job.
In his decision, Judge Jeremy Fogel wrote, "No reasonable copyright holder could have believed that the portions of the email archive discussing possible technical problems with Diebold's voting machines were proteced by copyright . . . the Court concludes as a matter of law that Diebold knowingly materially misrepresented that Plaintiffs infringed Diebold's copyright interest."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neiman-Marcus's 2004 gifts for squillionaires
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DATE: 09/30/2004 09:50:15 PM
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The 2004 Neiman-Marcus Christmas Catalog is out, and with it comes this year's crop of insane multi-million-dollar gifts (say, a $10MM, 230'-long zeppelin, or a $1.5MM bowling alley -- real-estate not included). This stuff isn't even drool-over material; there's no world in which I would buy a bowling alley, even if I were richer than god. No, the attraction here is more about finding out what the retail cost of building a bowling alley from scratch is, or what the zeppelin manufacturers are charging these days. Like idly looking up the cost of a hundred-mile run of suboceanic fibre-optic or a Rosicrucian mummy (one of the mummies in the San Jose Rosicrucian Museum came out of an old Neiman-Marcus Christmas Book).
Link
(Thanks, Mia!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Court trashes fair use
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DATE: 09/30/2004 09:53:35 PM
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A court in St Louis today ruled against EFF in the "BNETD" case, in which we were fighting for the right to write and use your own game-servers that run with the games you buy. We're appealing, but this sucks: it's not much of a leap from this to deciding that tools used to tweak a game's performance for creating machinima (see below) is also a crime.
BnetD is an open source program that lets gamers play popular Blizzard titles like Warcraft with other gamers on servers that don't belong to Blizzard's Battle.net service. Blizzard argued that the programmers who wrote BnetD violated the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions and that the programmers also violated several parts of Blizzard's EULA, including a section on reverse engineering.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), co-counsel for the defendants, argued that programming and distributing BnetD was fair use. The programmers reverse-engineered Battle.net purely to make their free product work with it, not to violate copyright.
EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz said, "Consumers have a right to choose where and when they want to use the products they buy. This ruling gives Blizzard the ability to force you to use their servers whether you want to or not. Copyright law was meant to promote competition and creative alternatives, not suppress them."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Strangerhood: Sims 2 sitcom from Red vs Blue creators
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DATE: 09/30/2004 10:26:12 PM
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The Strangerhood is a new machinima sitcom from the creators of the brilliant Red vs. Blue (a series of comedy shorts made by adding synch audio to screen movies of characters in the Halo video-game running around onscreen, AKA "machinima"). Strangerhood is based on the Sims 2 engine, and the video clip of the credit-reel looks fantastic and witty as Red v Blue. Can't wait for this one to start.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT's FAT shakedown suspended by Patent Office
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DATE: 09/30/2004 11:23:19 PM
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Congrats to Public Patent, a patent-busting org that targetted Microsoft's bogus patent on the FAT file-system. Today, the Patent Office revoked disallowed claims in MSFT's patent, which means that Microsoft can no longer shake down technologists who want to make tools that use FAT (like digital cameras and USB card-readers).
Relying predominantly on evidence provided by PUBPAT when the reexamination was requested, the Patent Office made multiple rejections of the Redmond, WA based software giant's patent. Microsoft has the opportunity to respond to the Patent Office's rejection, but third party requests for reexamination, like the one filed by PUBPAT, are successful in having the subject patent either narrowed or completely revoked roughly 70% of the time.
"The Patent Office has simply confirmed what we already knew for some time now, Microsoft's FAT patent is bogus," said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT's Executive Director. "I hope those companies that chose to take a license from Microsoft for the patent negotiated refund clauses so that they can get their money back."
Link
(via Lawgeek)
Updated: Paul Hoffman sez, "Only the claims were rejected, and even that is probably temporary. Most patent applications have some or all of their claims rejected; the applicant then goes into a game of footsie with the examiner, coming out with either fewer claims or the same number of claims with a narrower focus. Sometimes the examiner simply says 'oh, you're right' and un-rejects; sometimes the examiner says 'no, you're actually hosed', but that is much less common than it should be.
"If Microsoft is left with a single claim out of the four, even if it is narrowed, they will still most likely be able to flog it against anyone using the FAT filesystem. Narrowing claims is only interesting in cases where someone makes something *like* the patent; then they hope that the claims are narrowed to less than what they are possibly infringing on. In the case of FAT, unless the claims are somehow narrowed down so far that you can implement FAT and not infringe on what Microsoft might end up with, PubPat's effort is not useful to the folks who want to implement FAT."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: French version of Cory's DRM, produced by collab among 3 people who never met
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DATE: 10/01/2004 06:50:28 AM
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Stephane Coillet-Matillion took notice of the "quick and dirty" translation of my DRM talk that I posted for "Botoxsmile" yesterday and decided that it could use some polish. Having done that clean-up, he merged it with Anil and Matt's beautiful html version and it's up today.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Building of Disaster Artwork
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DATE: 10/01/2004 08:27:18 AM
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BoingBoing reader Fun Furde says,
Souvenirs are important cultural objects which can store and communicate memories, emotions and desires. "Buildings of Disaster" are miniature replicas of famous structures where some tragic or terrible events happened to take place. The images of burning or exploded buildings make a different, populist history of architecture, one based on emotional involvement rather than scholarly appreciation. In a media-saturated time, world disasters stand as people's measure of history, and the sites of tragic events often become involuntary tourists destinations.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: installation+sculpture zen
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 10/01/2004 08:34:24 AM
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hehe projects
rafael lozano-hemmer
mars tokyo
jake & dinos chapman
kelly heaton
devorah sperber
yoko ono
jennifer angus
dia:beacon
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Federal program to monitor everyone on the road
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DATE: 10/01/2004 09:11:46 AM
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Interesting article about the Fed's plans to develop an all-knowing intelligent highway system.
Most people have probably never heard of the agency, called the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office. And they haven't heard of its plans to add another dimension to our national road system, one that uses tracking and sensor technology to erase the lines between cars, the road and the government transportation management centers from which every aspect of transportation will be observed and managed.
For 13 years, a powerful group of car manufacturers, technology companies and government interests has fought to bring this system to life. They envision a future in which massive databases will track the comings and goings of everyone who travels by car or mass transit. The only way for people to evade the national transportation tracking system they're creating will be to travel on foot. Drive your car, and your every movement could be recorded and archived. The federal government will know the exact route you drove to work, how many times you braked along the way, the precise moment you arrived -- and that every other Tuesday you opt to ride the bus.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fox News publishes made-up Kerry quotes, then pulls story without comment
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DATE: 10/01/2004 12:55:31 PM
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According to Talking Points Memo, Fox News ran a story with made-up quotes from Kerry, then yanked them without explanation.
Some of the quotes:
"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!" Kerry said Friday.
Women should like me! I do manicures"
About himself and the president: "I'm metrosexual — he's a cowboy."
Talking Points Memo has contacted Fox News for a comment. He's waiting to hear back from them. Link
UPDATE: Michael McDaniel sez: "Looks like FOX News has retracted their story, now that they've done as much damage as possible with it."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: India: Your IP is NG for us
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DATE: 10/01/2004 01:50:01 PM
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Thiru Balasubramaniam from the Consumer Project on Technology is at the general session of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, and he's just posted his transcript of a barn-burner of a speech on IP and international development.
All members of WIPO need recognize that higher and higher levels of IP protection, inherent in any harmonization exercise that takes no account of the circumstances of each country, are extremely detrimental to developing countries. Intellectual property rights have to be viewed not as a self contained and distinct domain, but rather as an effective policy instrument for wide ranging socio-economic and technological development. The primary objective of this instrument is to maximize public welfare. The national policy space of each country must be respected, especially when developing countries are asked to assume international obligations. Even the most advanced developed countries, with their complex laws, have to grapple with the anti-competitive practices linked to patents. The absence of any comparable legal regime in developing countries means that these countries are required to grant monopoly rights to IP holders, without any meaningful or credible instruments to regulate the exercise of these rights.
Given the huge disparities existing across the world it is open to question whether IP harmonization benefits developing countries. The developed countries to pay lip service to "development' in the context of Intellectual Property protection, but they do so rather self-servingly. The term 'development' as used by these countries, including in WIPO, means quite the opposite of what developing countries understand when they refer to the 'development dimension'. If you share the perspective of the developed countries, 'development' means increasing a developing country's capacity to provide protection to the overwhelmingly developed country owners of IP rights!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scalia: Sex orgies good for "eliminating social tensions"
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DATE: 10/01/2004 01:52:47 PM
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Is this article from The Guardian a joke?
Challenged about his views on sexual morality, Justice Scalia surprised his audience at Harvard University, telling them: "I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged."
Link (Thanks Steve!)
UPDATE: Benson sez: The original story is from the Harvard Crimson.
UPDATE: The Harvard Crimson has posted a correction to its story:
The Sept. 29 news story "Scalia Describes 'Dangerous' Trend" misquoted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as saying that "I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged." In fact, Scalia said, "I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged."
(Thanks, Matthew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion as a 3D model
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DATE: 10/01/2004 02:14:32 PM
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Any website that opens with the phrase "One day I decided I needed to create a 3D model of Disney's Orlando Haunted Mansion," is bound to be good. This site contains a step-by-step build-report from one man's efforts to reproduce the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion as a detailed, textured 3D model.
Since I had no detailed measurements, I had to build each element based on comparisons to the sizes of established elements. For instance...
a corner of the mansion may have thirteen cornerstones going up its spine, and the level of the front door is three cornerstones above ground level. So, to calculate the height of each of the seven steps leading to the front door, I had to divide the height of three cornerstones, by seven.
So let's just skip to the nearly completed Haunted Mansion model. I say, "nearly completed" because, to date, I've only completed the front facade of the mansion. I'm still building my own version of the rear of the house, and the grounds. I'll post the new models as soon as they're complete.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cold cure Zicam on the way out?
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DATE: 10/01/2004 03:47:00 PM
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Last year the news came out that some people think a nasal spray called Zicam permanently destroyed their sense of smell. A study at the University of Colorado supports these claims.
Dr. Miriam Linschoten is part of a team at the University of Colorado Taste and Smell clinic that has identified the problem and recently published its findings, after a review by other experts in the field, in the prestigious American Journal of Rhinology, which addresses issues involving the nose.
"We felt it was important to let other workers in the field know that zinc gluconate could have this effect on the sense of smell," said Linschoten.
Based on its research, the CU team believes consumers should be wary of using the intranasal spray.
"We believe that zinc ions, when you put them directly on the olfactory epithelium -- the part of the nose, the tissue in the nose that contains the receptor cells for smelling -- that you run the risk of destroying those cells," said Linschoten.
I love Zicam. I think it really does cure colds, and my sense of smell seems fine. I'm afraid this stuff is going to be pulled off the market. I wonder what the shelf life of Zicam is, because I'm thinking of buying a life time supply (4 colds a year x 40 more years to live = 160 treatments. Each box has about 3 treatments, so I'd need to buy about 55 boxes). Better yet, maybe someone will come up with a homebrew recipe so I can make my own. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sterling: Marry the UN and the Net
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DATE: 10/01/2004 04:20:32 PM
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Bruce Sterling is guestblogging on Worldchanging this week. His first provocative post is called "Marry the UN and the Net."
Logically, there ought to be some inventive way to cross-breed the grass-rootsy cheapness, energy and immediacy of the Net with the magisterial though cumbersome, crotchety, crooked and opaque United Nations. Then bride and groom would unite their virtues and overcome those gloomy vices gnawing at their vitals. The global worldchanging multitudes could beat back the darkness of the gathering New World Disorder while swiftly improving the cramped lives of the planet's majority in a beneficent orgy of networked interdependence! Wow!
Link
Update: Alex notes, "Bruce is just one of
the fine folks posting this week to celebrate our
first birthday. There'll be over 20 altogether,
includes folks like Rebecca Blood, Ethan Zuckerman,
Dina Mehta, Danny O'Brien, Anne Galloway, RĂ©gine
Debatty, David Weinberger, Meaghan O'Neill, Joi Ito
and Ross Mayfield.... "
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Did Fox News Photoshop a picture to make President Bush look taller?
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DATE: 10/01/2004 05:27:39 PM
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Compare the AP picture to the Fox picture. Did the President grow a couple of inches? Is he standing on his tip-toes? Did someone at Fox use Photoshop to make Bush appear taller than he actually is? Link (Thanks, Jeff!)
UPDATE: Ari sez: "Fox News did not 'doctor' a photo to make Bush look taller; they took it untouched from the AP. Bush just happens to look taller in that picture because it was taken at a slightly different time, from a slightly different angle. (Of course, you can still argue that they deliberately chose the photo where Bush didn't appear dwarfed by Kerry.).
The "tall" photo from the AP is here
The "short" photo from the AFP is here
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: More from the Feral Files
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DATE: 10/01/2004 05:31:29 PM
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John Ssabunnya spent three years of his life in the care of African Green monkeys. At two, he was abandoned in the Ugandan jungle and lived with his monkey family until a tribeswoman spotted him in 1991. Villagers brought him to an orphanage where he was taught to speak and apparently sing. A few years ago, John toured Britain as a member of the Pearl of Africa children's choir. From a BBC News report:
Dentist Hillary Cook, a 56-year-old mother of five from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, helped organise the singing tour. She met John after travelling to Uganda to offer dental treatment to some of the world's poorest people.
"He doesn't look any different to any of the other children in the choir, but his is a truly remarkable story. If it hadn't been for the monkey's intervention he would certainly be dead.
"He's a shy boy and still speaks slowly but when he sings he has the most wonderful voice."
I wonder how John is doing these days! Link (Thanks, Scott Compton!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Young Joe Sixpack takes a vacation
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DATE: 10/01/2004 05:52:54 PM
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Forget Burning Man. The photos in Spring Broke, a collection of images snapped by Nathaniel Welch during Florida spring breaks, are a gasp-a-page:
"Caligula would have understood the depraved decadence and desperate frenzy of spring break—American teens’ annual pilgrimage to shimmering shores, where sex on the beach is as much an afternoon activity as it is a fruity cocktail. A festival of sun and sin, of tanned flesh and binge drinking, spring break attracts thousands of high school and college students, who wash up on Florida’s shores like schools of breeding salmon, ready to indulge their insatiable appetites and hedonistic desires with total strangers.
... Whether it’s partying at a kegger on the beach or engaging in group sex in the shower, entering a wet T-shirt contest or passing out on the bathroom floor, these teens’ uninhibited impulses are as absurd as they are disturbing. Yet Welch accepts, and even embraces, these raunchy rituals of extreme adolescence, allowing a strange sense of sadness to pervade. The morning after, broken spirits are left to reflect on their senseless acts, pack their bags, and head home."
I glanced through the book and promise you that the teaser photos on this site don't even hint at the asinine behavior you'll see inside.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Presidential debate audio torrent
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DATE: 10/02/2004 04:27:59 AM
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Tony recorded the Presidential debate off NPR to an 93MB MP3, and Gary from Torrentocracy was good enough to seed it online as a torrent. Now you can join the mesh and get it in blazing-fast bittorrent-o-rama!
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(Thanks, Tony and Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on the debate torrent
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DATE: 10/02/2004 07:23:50 AM
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Just moments after the presidential debate closed, Jon Stewart took to the air with a brilliant, sharp-tongued edition of The Daily Show in which he laid the debate bare for a sham. Here's a torrent of the episode -- guaranteed to be at least two snarfs and a couple nauseated groans in there.
Torrent Link
(Thanks, matt72!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Soros blogs
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DATE: 10/02/2004 10:33:14 PM
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George Soros has started blogging! Billionaire currency-speculator Soros funds some of the most important copyfight work in the world through his Open Society Institute, and is a major financier of drug-reform efforts as well as an outspoken Bush opponent.
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(Thanks, dwcooper11!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Team America preview screening in Hollywood
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DATE: 10/02/2004 10:36:28 PM
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Don't flip out, no spoilers. Just got back from Paramount Studios' first media screening of Team America: World Police, the new film by "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. It's a nihilistic sendup of bloated, Bruckheimer-style action epics -- cast entirely with marionettes.
The titular flag-waving force battles terrorism so ham-fistedly, they often end up destroying more of the world than the bad guys they're out to neutralize. As the film opens, five freedom fighters on strings swoop down on Paris to foil an imminent terrorist strike. One blunder after another sets off a series of impossible chain reactions a la "Keystone Cops." The evildoers get bloody justice, but the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and a fair number of Parisians become collateral damage in the process.
Shortly after another fuckup leads to tragedy within the team itself, the film's heroes discover that Kim Jong-Il (eeeven more eeeevil than Saddam and Osama combined) is doling out weapons of mass destruction to a far-flung network of terrorists. Why? Part of a complicated plot for world domination, natch.
The Team persuades a rising Broadway star to lend his unstoppable acting technique to the cause. Their plan: penetrate the terrorists' network, uncover the WMDs, let freedom ring, drink celebratory beers. But blunders ensue again, and the global cops must now race against time to defend humanity.
In an item I filed for the current issue of Wired Magazine about the production's tech underpinnings (Link), filmmakers Stone and Parker describe Team America's aesthetic as "suppercrappynation." They borrow the "supermarionation" puppet animation method from Gerry Anderson's '60s TV series "Thunderbirds," but crap it up. The feel becomes messier; kitschily self-aware.
Marionettes playing AK47-toting homeland defenders don't have to do much to be funny. There's a specific kind of physical humor here only possible with puppets: suspended on visible strings, they amble as if they're drunk in zero-g. During a poignant exchange, one tries to point tenderly to another's heart, underscoring a dramatic line about "feelings." Her clumsy, string-guided hand misses the mark, to great comic effect. And like "Mister Bill," the characters are at their funniest when they're suffering -- tortured, murdered, or spontaneously impaled like sentient little olives on toothpicks.
There are many moments of blow-soda-through-your-nose comedic brilliance. North Korea's megalomaniac dictator sings a reflective, autobiographical ballad. Housecats posing as rabid panthers maul celebrity peaceniks. Matt Damon's puppet doppelganger cameos as a "Timmy"-esque halfwit whose vocabulary consists entirely of his own name. A computer intelligence network touted as the world's most sophisticated -- and appropriately named I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E -- speaks in a stoned surfer drawl. If Oscars were awarded for moments of cinematic vomit excellence, The Exorcist would have won 30 years ago; one scene in Team America would make it a shoo-in today. And a marionette sex scene manages to cram in such a dizzying array of positions -- from reverse cowgirl to rimming -- you'll need a copy of the Puppet Sutra just to keep up.
Willfull crappiness aside, the film isn't without flaws. The poo/genital/fellatio humor drags as the story approaches its climax. But everything that works really works, and the film seems destined to appeal to broader audiences than Stone and Parker's previous feature-length efforts. In short: it may be the single best crappy movie you'll see all year.
Before tonight's preview began, co-director Stone explained that the cut we were about to see was far from final, and that this was the first screening beyond a small circle of friends and crew. Shooting only finished two weeks ago; scoring, mixing, and post-production were all continuing this weekend, with a completed version due Wednesday. Stone added that in an unexpected dose of real-world irony, the score for Team America -- which parodies every CGI behemoth that famed composer Hans Zimmer ever scored -- was in fact being mixed this very moment at Mr. Zimmer's studio facility in Santa Monica. The finished product is due for a one-day-only release in 800 US theaters on October 9, followed by wide release on October 15.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons licenses en Espanol
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DATE: 10/02/2004 10:47:37 PM
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Creative Commons has shipping Spanish-legal-system CC licenses in Spanish and Catalan!
Link
(Thanks, Mario!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WMD expose from NYT
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DATE: 10/03/2004 08:19:37 AM
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Ilya sez, "It's a *fifteen* page long article on Bush, Lies, and WMDs. And it's fifteen pages long. Everyone should go read this right this instant. Because in journalism, brevity is not necessarily a good thing.
Last week, when asked about the tubes, administration officials said they relied on repeated assurances by George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, that the tubes were in fact for centrifuges. They also noted that the intelligence community, including the Energy Department, largely agreed that Mr. Hussein had revived his nuclear program.
"These judgments sometimes require members of the intelligence community to make tough assessments about competing interpretations of facts," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the president.
Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, he said he "made it clear" to the White House "that the case for a possible nuclear program in Iraq was weaker than that for chemical and biological weapons." Regarding the tubes, Mr. Tenet said "alternative views were shared" with the administration after the intelligence community drafted a new National Intelligence Estimate in late September 2002.
Reg Req'd Link, see here for fake logins
(Thanks, Ilya!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Parole for Mark David Chapman?
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DATE: 10/03/2004 08:20:54 AM
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Mark David Chapman, the loony who shot John Lennon in 1980, is up for parole.
An online petition calling for Chapman to remain in prison for the rest of his natural life has been signed by nearly 2,000 fans - and includes angry threats to Chapman's life should he be freed.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Massive victory at WIPO!
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DATE: 10/04/2004 07:26:39 AM
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For years now, progressive elements and copyfighters have been trying to get the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization to start thinking about ways of promoting creativity and development instead of just IP -- to get the organization to see that its raison d'etre is a better world, and that stronger IP laws is just one way of accomplishing that -- and that IP only works sometimes.
We've been foiled at every turn by the maximalists, the movies studios and the trademark offices, the patent-cops and the recording industry lobbyists and the IP lawyers' associations.
Which is why this is such good news: at the general session of the WIPO in Geneva this weekend, the Assembly as adoped a decision to put development and the promotion of creativity front-and-center in its goals. That means that from now on, WIPO isn't an organization that blindly supports more IP no matter what, but rather one that seeeks to improve the world by whatever tool is best suited to the job.
Jamie Love and the Consumer Project on Technology gets the credit for this: they were the ones who started this fight, and they've been the ones who led it all along.
This is the day the tide turns.
Bearing in mind the internationally agreed development goals, including
those in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, the Programme of
Action for the Least Developed Countries for the Decade 2001-2010, the
Monterey Consensus, the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable
Development, the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action of the
first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society and the Sao
Paulo Consensus adopted at UNCTAD XI;
(1) The General Assembly welcomes the initiative for a development
agenda and notes the proposals contained in document WO/GA/31/11.
(2) The General Assembly decides to convene inter-sessional
intergovernmental meetings to examine the proposals contained in
document WO/GA/31/11, as well as additional proposals of Members
States. To the extent possible, the meetings will be convened in
conjunction with the 2005 session of the Permanent Committee on
Cooperation for Development Related to Intellectual Property. The
meetings, open to all Member States, will prepare a report by July 30,
2005, for the consideration of the next General Assembly.
WIPO-accredited IGOs and NGOs are invited to participate as observers in
the meetings.
(3) The International Bureau shall undertake immediate arrangements
in order to organize with other relevant multilateral organizations
including UNCTAD, WHO, UNIDO and WTO, a joint international seminar on
Intellectual Property and Development, open to the participation of all
stakeholders, including NGOs, civil society and academia.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ballmer: iPod users are thieves
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DATE: 10/04/2004 07:45:43 AM
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Steve Ballmer believes that Apple shouldn't ship a music player like the iPod that can play non-DRM music. He says that in so doing, Apple has deployed a player whose dominant form is "stolen" material. Even though he's got MSFT customers living under his own roof who don't want to buy DRM products ("My 12-year-old at home doesn’t want to hear that he can’t put all the music that he wants in all of the places that he would like it," he joked.), he's committing Microsoft to continue its headlong rush to jump the shark by building DRM into more and more of its products.
Billing Microsoft as the good guys and Apple the villains of the piece - at least as far as corporate America, rather than users, is concerned, Ballmer said: "We’ve had DRM in Windows for years. The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."
"Part of the reason people steal music is money, but some of it is that the DRM stuff out there has not been that easy to use. We are going to continue to improve our DRM, to make it harder to crack, and easier, easier, easier, easier, to use," he said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Happy Meal anime
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DATE: 10/04/2004 07:49:53 AM
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Adnan sez, "I was browsing through a catalog of Gundam toys (y'know that famous bot anime) and i came across this - The McGundam - a group of mecha bots disguised as a happy meal."
Link
(Thanks, Adnan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unlimited lifetime first-class American Airlines pass
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DATE: 10/04/2004 07:52:38 AM
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While I'm pretty skeptical about the majority of items in the Neiman-Marcus catalog, I admit that I'd be sorely tempted to drop $3 million on the AAirpass, a lifetime unlimited first-class pass to every American Airlines flight in the sky.
Link
(via A Whole Lotta Nothing)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing has a linking policy
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DATE: 10/04/2004 08:12:25 AM
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After years of making fun of "linking policies" that set out the terms under which a website can be linked to, Boing Boing has decided to create a linking policy of our own. Here it is -- now, abide by it!
Boing Boing doesn't believe in linking policies. They're dangerous, have no basis in law, and they break the norms that make the Web possible. They're a wicked, stupid idea.
That said, if you believe in linking policies --
that is, if you believe that people who make websites should be able
to control who links to those sites and how -- then have we got a policy for
you:
No site with a linking policy (other than a policy such as
this one, created to deride and undermine the idea of linking
policies) may link to Boing Boing. Ever.
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TITLE: Public opinion informed by TV drama
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New scientific studies by political scientists at Ohio State University reveal that people who regularly watch crime dramas like NYPD Blue are more likely to deem crime as the top problem in this country. These concerns then inform the viewers' opinions of President Bush. Meanwhile, hospital shows like ER seem to impact viewers' opinions about health care. (Paging Dr. Welby!)
(Researcher R. Andrew) Holbrook noted that some observers have been especially concerned about programs like The Daily Show, which has elements of news and entertainment. Some believe that such shows might be confusing to viewers.
“That’s not the real issue,” Holbrook said. “Our results suggest that people don’t have neat dividing lines in their brains between entertainment and political news.
“People go back and forth between the two rather easily. That doesn’t mean they don’t know the difference between entertainment and reality. But they find they can use examples from television programs to illustrate points in real life.”
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: World's largest wind turbine
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REpower is completing assembly in Brunsbuettel, Germany of the world's largest wind turbine. The REpower 5M's rotor is 126 meters in diameter with a rated output of 5 megawatts. Once it's operational by the end of the year, it will feed the grid with enough juice to power 4,500 households. Link (to REpower's site) Link (to Reuters article)
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TITLE: The plushy dead
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Julie Black, a young artist in Lawrence, Kansas, is exhibiting a collection of deceased and eviscerated dogs, cats, rabbits, fish, and birds constructed out of felt and sequins. (Photo at left by Thad Allender.) From an article about her gallery show, "Dead Pets for Sale":
"I try to work with material accessible to kids," she said. "All the guts are filled with what would be inside Beanie Babies."
Combining a childlike stuffed animal with the gore of intestines bursting out appealed to the artist....
According to Black's artist statement, "Dead Pets for Sale" was the embodiment of her upbringing -- she said she grew up in a violent atmosphere -- and a viable truth she learned that can pertain to all subjects: that the grotesque can be beautiful and vice versa.
Link (via Fortean Times)
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TITLE: Antimatter bomb program at US Air force
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The US Air Force is looking into making bombs out of anti-matter. I want a key ring with a speck of it!
One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards' March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Link (Thanks, John!)
UPDATE:Tom sez: Anti-matter is easier to come by than one might think. 22Sodium isotope naturally emits positrons and this property is used in many nuclear metrology applications (PET scans, positron annihilation spectroscopy, etc.). So a bit of isotope table salt might fit nicely in Mark's ring. Link to PDF file
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Make News #2
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Here's the second issue of the Make newsletter.
Make News No. 2
October 4, 2004
==============
Welcome to the second issue of the Make magazine newsletter. A couple of
weeks ago, I asked you to suggest a name for this newsletter. Dozens of
people replied -- thanks!
Here are some of the suggestions that came in:
Makefile
Modifications
make /usr/share/hack
Create It
Done Deal
DoItNow
Make it Mine
Makers
Make-up-date
The Make a Cake NL
MAKE: The News
Re:Make
We had a lot of good submissions to choose from, but our favorite was
"Make News." Matthew Morrisson was the first to submit it, so he wins the
prize -- a title of his choice from O'Reilly's Hacks Series.
Congratulations, Matthew!
***
In the first issue of Make News, I also asked you to send in your ideas
for Make. A bunch of you wrote back asking for writers' guidelines. Here
they are:
Make Submission Guidelines
Make is a do-it-yourself technology magazine written by makers. When you
write something for Make, use your voice. Tell us the story behind your
project.
There are four types of content in Make: Projects, Features, Reviews, and
Everything Else. (If you have an idea for something that doesn't fit in
one of the first three areas but is still related to do-it-yourself
technology, we'd like to hear about it, too -- hence the Everything Else
category.)
We pay $100 for a review. Payment for other types of content will be
negotiated.
To pitch an idea, email it to Mark Frauenfelder (markf@oreilly.com).
1. Projects
If you've made something cool (or have come up with a cool hack or tweak
for something) and want to show other people how to make one, we'd like to
publish it in our projects section. (Note: We're interested in hearing
about things you've already made, not things you are just thinking about
making.)
Remember this when you are writing for Make: you're the readers' coach.
Think of your reader as a smart person who doesn't necessarily know what
you know. Imagine the questions he or she might have about your project.
Explain everything they need to know to recreate the thing you're writing
about.
We have two kinds of projects. One is called "DIY." This section is for
shorter projects (like swapping a battery out of an iPod, or installing
open source software on your TiVo.) DIY pieces run between 200 and 750
words. When writing a DIY, keep it conversational. These are very much
like explaining to a friend how you did something. Describe difficulties
you encountered, and suggest workarounds. Take digital photos of each step
along the way. Photos should be at least 2 Megapixels.
The second kind of project is a "Major Project." These are more complex
projects that would require a reader at least several hours, if not days,
to complete. If we accept your proposal for a Major Project, you will need
to submit the article in a format that fits our template. We'll provide
you with further instructions.
2. Features
We have several sections with articles about interesting things made by
people or groups of people. "Made on Earth" is a section with large photos
of projects and their makers, along with 200-word stories about them.
"Maker" is a longer profile of a dedicated maker-of-cool-things. And we
also have 600- to 1,000-word articles about groups, companies, clubs, and
technologies relating to DIY projects.
3. Reviews
Is there some gadget, tool, web site, newsletter, instructional video,
book, magazine, CD-ROM, or instrument you already own and love? Then send
your review to "Toolbox," Make's recommendation section.
Reviews should be approximately 300 words, and be written in the first
person. Think more "recommendation" and "experience" when you write these
than "review." We want to hear about your involvement with it.
The old Wired guidelines for reviews went like this: "Write your review.
Then write us a letter explaining why we should devote space to your item.
Throw away your review and send us the letter." That's the way to do it.
4. Everything Else
Do you have an idea involving DIY technology, but doesn't fit in any of
the above categories? Is it interesting? Let us know about it. Tell us
about the time your dad made a homebrew computer based on the Apple II
schematic. Tell us the funny story about the motorized surfboard you made.
What's the strangest experience you've had making something? If it's
surprising or funny, we'll run it.
***
Remember, the first issue of Make is coming in January, so start clearing
off your workbench!
Best regards,
Mark Frauenfelder
Editor in Chief
Make
markf@oreilly.com
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: SpaceShipOne wins XPrize, earlier space history at Mojave
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The age of commercial space flight officially began this morning: SpaceShipOne successfully completed the second of two flights into space within 5 days, securing its win of the $10 million Ansari XPrize. On today's edition of NPR's "Day to Day" I speak with host Alex Chadwick about today's historic news -- as well as some of the lesser-known space history surrounding Mojave airport, now America's first licensed spaceport. Link to today's segment.
Before SS1 took off this morning, its designer Burt Rutan said he hoped it would top the 354,200 foot altitude reached 40 years ago by X-15 pilot Joe Walker, also out of Mojave. The X-15 program was a joint NASA/Air Force effort preceding the space shuttle program (NASA photos, videos). And SpaceShipOne did indeed beat that record, climbing to an unprecedented 377,591 feet, then returning to earth in a smooth arc.
At last week's Mojave SS1 launch, I met Richard Russell and USAF Major Greg Frazier, aerospace historians who run an organization called West Mojave Aviation Archaeology. They work to preserve crash sites like the one where a later X-15 pilot, Maj. Michael J. Adams (bio link) lost his life in 1967 during an X-15 research flight. He was the first American astronaut to die on a space mission. Adams' fatal mission was the 191st flight in the X-15 program, and his first suborbital mission. His aircraft crashed after re-entering earth's atmosphere. The X-15 program was canceled the following year.
Frazier led an effort to create a monument to Adams at the X-15 crash site, unveiled in May, 2004 (Link). They're now working to get some of the ship debris into the Smithsonian Air and Space museum, and trying to raise awareness about these sites to protect them from vandalism.
"Florida got all the recogniation for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, and the Antelope Valley here is more known for aircraft achievements -- but X-15 was a spacecraft, so there is some space flight history here," Frazier told me, "Now, with the advent of Space Ship One, there's a whole lot of new history out here."
Link to today's "Day to Day" show on XPrize and X15 history, Link to last week's NPR segment: "First X-Prize Flight a Success for SpaceShipOne", with some of Jason DeFillippo's photos.
See also John Schwartz's fine Xprize/SpaceShipOne coverage in today's New York Times (Link), Dan Brekke's items in today's Wired News (Link), and on-ship footage from the webcast (Link). Also: The New Yorker has a great piece on Rutan this week, but it's not online.
And finally: BoingBoing reader Kevin T. Keith says, "Check out Google today - their logo includes a caricature of SpaceShip One in orbit (being greeted by little green men)."
Image: shot by BoingBoing pal Wayne Correia (background link, email link), who says, "It was so beautiful to watch it shooting straight up from 47,000 to 370,000 ft. when the pilot ignited the rocket. When the craft landed, Paul Allen, Burt Rutan and Sir Richard Branson went out in a pickup truck to the tarmac so they could greet the pilot and tow it back to their hangar... the three of them were just hanging off the back of the tailgate with the craft in tow, the pilot standing on the roof of the aircraft holding an American flag which he'd just taken into space." Link to Wayne's full-size photo.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cheburashka - adorable Russian animation character
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My friend Steve Mockus emailed me: "Hey are you familiar with a cute little Russian animation character
named Cheburashka? I've become obsessed with him. It was an animated children's TV show, kind of like Rankin and Bass, but very Soviet, struggling through adversity. The cartoons are fantastic. Link
UPDATE:Art sez: "Here's a picture I found on Flickr's feed. It's all about the Russian Olympic team, with Cheburashka as the mascot, all torn up and thrown away in a field."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chinese Communist Youth host Disney promo tour
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Disney is touring China's Communist Youth League centres to promote Disneyland Hong Kong and a potential Shanghai Disneyland.
Such is Disney's faith that China's communist youth will embrace the likes of Mickey Mouse and Sleeping Beauty, the company is doing little to dampen speculation that another theme park will eventually be built in Shanghai.
"There's very little doubt in my mind that there will be a market further north in China for a second Disneyland," said Mr Rasulo.
Link
(Thanks, Mia!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canada IP "protection" protects nothing
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DATE: 10/04/2004 05:53:24 PM
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Laura J Murray has written an excellent piece for the Internet journal First Monday on Canada's cultual practices and copyright.
This article analyses the rhetoric of "protection" ubiquitous in Canadian discussions of copyright policy, and identifies among the various uses of the term both a problematic assumption that protection is or should be the primary function of copyright, and overblown claims about copyright’s power to protect Canadian culture and creators. These "common sense" ideas, fostered by rights–holder lobbies, emerge out of a peculiar Canadian history of cultural nationalism(s), but they may not promote the interests of Canadians. Ironically, while professing fear for their cultural sovereignty, and following the paths of their own internal political, bureaucratic, and rhetorical culture, Canadians appear to be constructing a copyright policy in complete harmony with the needs of American and international capital. I explore a proposal to license educational Internet use, endorsed by parliamentary committee, as one example of the relationship between protection rhetoric and policy development. By casting the Internet as more of a threat than an opportunity, copyright policy developers in Canada are gravely misunderstanding and threatening Canadians’ use of this medium. The participation of Canadians in national and global interaction is crucial to the Canadian public interest, and must not be forgotten in the rush to protection.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC News proxy makes the service more Web-like
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Stef Magdalinski -- the Brit who led the amazing They Work For You project, among others -- has unveiled his latest project: a proxy for the BBC News service that identifies proper nouns in BBC stories and auto-links them to their Wikipedia entries.
This was spurred by a longstanding BBC News aversion to linking to external news sources, something out of keeping with the character of the Web.
News Online doesn't engage with its users, it doesn't provide tools that allow me, the licence payer, to slice and dice their stories, and by refusing to link from its body text, it fails to understand how hypertext works.
Also, with its conservative link policy (I can't show you an example of the news stories where the tech described above is working, because the links get removed after 2 days, because they might break), that only connects the BBC to established brands, it snubs the wider web, the great teeming mass of creativity. Patrician is not authoritative. Aloof is not respected. Conservative and fearful is not engaging. The gap between the BBC's utterly laudable self image and ambitions and delivery could not be any clearer than at News Online.
Finally, by not really allowing user interaction or commenting, News Online forces that debate and activity away from its site, and out onto the wild wild web...
* retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out "Capitalised Phrases" and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it's turned into a hyperlink
* uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story. Now you can see who's talking about the story from the story itself
* as a bonus, my code breaks that bloody awful ticker. I'm not fixing it.
* because that's how links should be, my links are underlined.
* reduces page bloat by about 10% by stripping acres of whitespace.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogger co-founder Evan Williams resigns
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On his blog, Blogger's co-founder says:
It's been almost six years now since I started working on what became the company I sold to the company we started talking to two years ago because of the product we launched five years ago. Six years is a long time. Or a little. Depending. For me, it's a little under 20% of this life on Earth. And it's the time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What should I do next?
Big ups to you, Ev, and best wishes in whatever it is you decide to do next.
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TITLE: Video Rocketry: Fin Flutter Footage
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BoingBoing reader Stefan Jones says,
In this clip (wmv), a wonderful bit of video from a camera in Peter Clay's two-staged Quantum Leap rocket. A few seconds into the flight, the fins appear to warp and distort. There's a raging debate over whether this was an optical illusion or an actual spasm in the fiberglass as the model plows through the "sound barrier."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Burro-packin' Colombian coffee farmer to kick Starbucks' ass
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Eric says,
Juan Valdez has his name and likeness on a bunch of new Cafes, one of which just opened in NY. I went down there today and took some pictures and did a write up on my impression. I braved the front lines in the war on Starbucks to bring you this special report. Enjoy!
That's right -- we're gonna stick it to the corporate man, by supporting another corporate man! Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Laptop bags made of materials from old space missions
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This company makes laptop bags that feature bits of landing parachute fabric from the 1990 Soyuz TM-8 Space mission, or the latest International Space Station Soyuz mission in April 2004. I am dying to own one immediately! These are so badass! Around $195.00 US or €165.00. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bruce Schneier has a blog
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DATE: 10/05/2004 08:43:47 AM
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I try to read everything Internet security consultant Bruce Schneier writes. The good news is, he now has a blog where he'll probably make links to his essays.
He has two recent essays available from his blog, which he describes thusly:
The first talks about terror threat warnings -- both the color-coded kind and the more specific ones -- and how they're both an ineffective security countermeasure and a political tool. It appeared in a magazine called "The Rake."
The second (published today in the "International Herald Tribune") discusses RFID chips in future passports, and how that endangers the security of people who carry them. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing them for both American citizens and foreigners, and the only possible reason I can think of is that they want surreptitious access to identity information.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sun endorses software patents, then loses 50% of profits to one
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An anonymous reader sez, "Ian Clarke points out a delicious piece of Schadenfreude - Just days after Sun's President Jonathan Schwartz said 'I continue to believe in the protection of ideas conveyed by patents [...] As does every company that expects to build a durable asset on behalf of its investors ...', Kodak wins their software patent case against Sun which could cost Sun up to half their operating profit between 1998 and 2001!"
Hey Jonathan, why did Sun need to steal Kodak's precious intellectual property - and if you didn't, perhaps, having experienced the wrong end of US patent law, you can reconsider your position on software patents?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Earthlink releases free net-phone
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Chris sez, "EarthLink just released their free SIP-based phone service for members: EarthLink Online Calling. I really like the fact that they'll send voicemails to the account's email address. This should open the door to interesting integrations between their voice and other services. Meanwhile, I guess I now do have a good reason to hand out those 7 online accounts to remote friends and family so we can all chat."
Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Laos's bike-powered WiFi: a mixed success
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Danny O'Brien's guestblog on Worldchanging describes the mixed success of the Jhai project, which promised to bring ruggedized, bicycle-powered WiFi to remote villages in Laos.
The Jhai PC, meanwhile, appears to have exposed an odd little niche. There appears to be quite a few places on the earth which are tantalizingly close to Net connections and telephony, but have no electricity, no cellphone coverage, and no landlines. Think of it as the developing world's equivalent of the last-mile problem.
Parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, although unlikely to get electricity or telephony, are within ten miles of the IP network built out for the DRC's university system. Again, the villagers there want to stay in contact with the extensive ex-pat network that war-torn countries inevitably create, as well as improve their finances. A Jhai PC network seems like it may be the most affordable way to do this. There's a project, led by a Congolese graduate working out of South Carolina, using funding raised by from the Congolese themselves, to build this network.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Outlaunching Estes
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DATE: 10/05/2004 09:31:33 AM
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Japanese aerospace sci/tech incubator HASTIC is marketing a $19,000 hobbyist rocket that can hit an altitude of one kilometer. The Camui-50P, developed by researchers at Hokkaido University, is 1.6 meters long and uses liquid oxygen as its fuel.
"(The rocket's) commercialization will have the effect of familiarizing people with space research," said HASTIC, which is selling the product.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lyndon LaRouche founded Wikipedia?
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From The Lantern, a student publication at Ohio State University, via Joi's blog:
LaRouche, an outspoken political activist, set the record for consecutive attempts at the presidency by running eight times. He started Wikipedia.com, a Web site functioning as both a free encyclopedia and a wiki community, which allows users to add information to posted articles. He is known to be a promoter of conspiracy theories and has frequently been accused of being a fascist and an anti-Semite - claims he has denied. In 1988 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations but served only five.
Link. In contrast, the wikipedia site says:
Wikipedia was started on January 15, 2001 by founders Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, and a few enthusiastic English-language collaborators.
This is certainly news to me if it's true. I always thought wikipedia was created by googly-eyed, multitentacled alien overlords, instead. As always, I invite responses from Wikipedia... or Mr. LaRouche... or the alien overlords.
BoingBoing reader Nick Brogna, who joins me in saluting our alien overlords adds, "It's rather amusing that, aside from the part about him, er, founding Wikipedia, the other lines have been copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article on him."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired: The Long Tail
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Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has a doozy of a piece in the current issue, now online. "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts," it begins, "The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." Mr. Anderson tells BoingBoing:
Short form: The rise of online distribution and its unlimited shelf space is leading to a dramatic shift in the entertainment business from hit-driven economics to niche-driven economics. Content that was once relegated to the fringe, beneath the threshold of commercial viability, is now increasingly able to find a market in distributed audiences. The interesting work is now in finding way to push demand down the Long Tail.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bushisms DVD trailer
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DATE: 10/05/2004 12:09:42 PM
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There's a trailer for the Bushisms DVD that Xeni wrote about, and it is hilarious. Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MPAA freaks out over puppet sex scene in "Team America" movie
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DATE: 10/05/2004 12:41:27 PM
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Updated below
The Motion Picture Association of America is demanding an NC-17 rating for South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker's new film : Team America: World Police, in part over a puppet sex scene mentioned here on BoingBoing over the weekend. Link to previous BoingBoing posts: Team America preview, tech backstory in Wired.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. I've seen the movie, and the scene, and the puppets don't even have any genitals. The scene doesn't read horny or icky, just really goddamn funny. Were someone to leak a clip online, it wouldn't be one-handed material -- unless you were a particularly desperate puppetophiliac. In which case there are far more explicit destinations for your type, anyway.
This is particularly tough for Stone and Parker, because the filmmakers are contractually obligated to deliver an R film to the studio. In related news, Paramount announces that the film will be sneak-previewed for a one-day-only release in 800 US theaters on October 9, followed by its previously scheduled wide release on October 15.
Quoth the film's producer, Scott Rudin, in the LA Times:
"There's nothing we're asking for that hasn't appeared in other R-rated movies, and our characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets did to each other what we show them doing, all they'd get is splinters," Rudin said.
Link to Guardian story, Link to LA Times (reg reqd).
(Thanks, Ernest Miller)
Update: Reuters reports that film has been granted an "R" rating by the MPAA, pending scene modifications. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Will Kerry get equal time to respond to President Bush's last-minute speech
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DATE: 10/05/2004 01:30:12 PM
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In an effort to halt his deteriorating ratings, President Bush has announced that'll he'll be giving a major speech on Wednesday. "The president is said to be eager to rebut Kerry's attacks on [the] issues." I'm imagine he is, since Kerry won't be able to respond. Will Kerry be given equal time on the networks? Link (Thanks, Kevin Slavin!)
UPDATE: Brian Carnell sez that Bush's speech will not be shown on television. If that's the case, then I take back my comments about equal time for Kerry: "Okay, now you're just getting plain out there with the knee-jerk anti-Bush stuff. 'Will Kerry be given euqal time on the networks?' Um, Mark, the broadcast networks don't run campaign speeches like this live -- why would Kerry need equal time?"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Munster's record album from 1964
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DATE: 10/05/2004 01:43:09 PM
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Todd Lappin sez: "Did you catch this? A lot of it is dreck, but the first track is fantastic." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Great new Lowbrow art book: Pop Surrealism
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DATE: 10/05/2004 02:48:29 PM
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I just got a copy of Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art, a wonderful new book about Lowbrow art, which my friend Kirsten Anderson edited. Kirsten is the owner of the Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle, which features the kind of underground art in this book. Many of my favorite artists are included here, such as Tim Biskup, Mark Ryden, Shag, Robert Williams, Isabel Samaris, Charles Krafft, Glenn Barr, and Todd Schorr, plus several artists I've never heard of, but am happy to have discovered. The book's design is excellent. There are also essays by Robert Williams, Carlo McCormick, and Larry Reid. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: No more weird white spaces in Boing Boing
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DATE: 10/05/2004 04:21:35 PM
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Many thanks to Gavin Stokes for helping me to get rid of the "white space" in Boing Boing, in which big hunks of text were invisible!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Roger Wood's latest clock
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DATE: 10/05/2004 04:35:05 PM
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My pal and old neighbour Roger Wood is a mad sculptor/clockmaker in Toronto who builds fantastical clocks out of garbage and thrifted bits and bobs. His mailing list features the latest of his creations, and every now and again, one comes along that's so pretty, I have to share it. Today is one of those days: isn't this wonderful?
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Does Bush have a little speaker in his ear that tells him what to say?
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DATE: 10/05/2004 04:37:19 PM
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Is Bush Wired? is a site that speculates on whether the President has a teeny earphone that prompts him during speeches and conferences.
"Television viewers have sometimes heard another voice speaking Bush's words before he says them. When Bush spoke at D-Day ceremonies in France last June, for example, viewers watching on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, including mediachannel.org's Danny Schechter, were startled to hear another voice speaking Bush's words as if to prompt him. Some said this continued into a q & a. And on the night of 9/11, when Bush appeared on television to address the nation, viewers of one television station in Quincy, Massachusetts heard another voice speaking, slowly and carefully, a few words at a time -- words which were then recited by the president. The voice was nondescript, male, definitely not the president's voice, says Quincy resident Robyn Miller. This went on for at least four sentences, she says, and then the "extra" feed was cut off."
Link (Thanks, Pointer!)
UPDATE: I was tricked! Matt Katz sez: "RTMARK is a way to provide funding for activists in a way that mirrors the stock markets. Looks like mark frauenschadenfreude's piece means that this particular fund is going to pay out! Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ISO message-board lawsuit threat stories
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DATE: 10/05/2004 04:44:37 PM
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My cow-orker Lee Tien, one of the country's great free speech and privacy lawyers, is working on a case for EFF in which the California Supreme Court is threatening to revise the immunity for libel liability borne by people who host message-boards. Today, if you or Yahoo host a message board where one of your users libels someone, you're off the hook: it's not your problem. The court is considering changing this, on the grounds that Yahoo has enough lawyers that if it got spurious takedown notices over material that wasn't libellous, it would be able to tell the difference between a valid and a stupid claim.
The problem is that bloggers and other individual and small-time message-board hosters don't have plenty of lawyers on tap to tell them whether they'll be safe in ignoring a takedown notice. The fear is that if liability shifts to message-board hosts, then the little guy will have to become overly cautious, treating every libel claim as valid, censoring his message boards willy-nilly.
In order to change the court's mind, EFF is looking for stories about small-time message-board hosters who've been threatened with legal action because of allegedly libellous remarks on their boards (we had one such incident, back in the old days).
Have you been threatened? Email Lee and help keep the net free!
Mailto Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Teach Yourself Banjo book under CC license
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DATE: 10/05/2004 04:48:31 PM
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Patrick Costello's "The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo" -- a lyrical, engaging teach-yourself-the-banjo book -- is now available for free online under a Creative Commons license.
"What have you got, kid?" The old man asked me around his cigar.
A banjo!" I replied.
"I know that you little dipstick." He said rolling his eyes "You think somebody as old as I am hasn't seen a banjo before? What have you got? Play something."
I thought about trying to say something to get out of this. As I stood there fidgeting the old man shook his head, picked up his guitar and started to walk away.
Oh man, I thought to myself, I'm really blowing something here. It was an August day. The festival was being held on this big open field and the sun was just hammering down on us. I knew a total of three and a half songs. I didn't want to make a fool out of myself but I also had the feeling that if I chickened out here I was going to miss out on something. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath, moved my banjo strap a little bit on my shoulder and started to pound my way through a tune called "The White House Blues".
The old man cocked his head and nodded a little before he turned around. He stood there holding a beat up guitar while cigar smoke billowed around his head. He seemed to enjoy listening to me ruin a perfectly good song.
Link
(Thanks, Patrick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nosferatu score CD
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DATE: 10/05/2004 04:50:21 PM
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CDBaby has done a limited-edition pressing of a CD of the orchestration from FW Mirnau's original film, Nosferatu.
Described by the SF Weekly as "exquisite, lush, and positively poetic," the noirish compositions by Jill Tracy and The Malcontent Orchestra have developed a fervid following of devotees, critical acclaim, and multiple Bay Area Music Awards nominations. Their original score to F.W. Murnau's silent vampire classic "Nosferatu" has only enhanced the band's reputation of sophistication and musical virtuosity. The San Francisco Examiner described the score as "remarkable....lyrical and lovely." The Marin Independent called it "unforgettable." The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Nosferatu "deliciously macabre."
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(Thanks, Armand!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF suing the FCC over the Broadcast Flag!
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DATE: 10/05/2004 04:56:10 PM
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EFF and some the orgs we work with are suing the FCC's ass over the Broadcast Flag, arguing that they've exceeded their authority with the ruling.
When the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) broadcast flag mandate goes into effect next year, it will be unlawful to sell devices that can tune in digital television without imposing copy protection on the signal. Many groups have argued that the mandate will hobble people's ability to make fair use of their media. And late yesterday, nine public interest organizations -- including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge (PK), and the American Library Association (ALA) -- told the US Appeals Court, DC Circuit, that the FCC exceeded its authority by imposing the broadcast flag regime.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Snap: "transparent" search engine with cool features
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DATE: 10/05/2004 05:07:21 PM
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Snap is a new search engine (just unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference, which I'm attending this week in San Francisco) that combines JavaScript-based query refining, click-stream mining, and lots of other foofaraw (including a "transparency" system that shows their revenue, number of clicks, clickthroughs, und zo weiter). It's cool-enough looking and fun enough to play with that I'm actually gonna try using it for a day or two (switching search engines is painful!).
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Vanishing cards
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DATE: 10/05/2004 06:37:39 PM
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Mark and I got a kick out of this cool bit of sleight-of-hand. Link (to video clip)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Not THAT kind of cock
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DATE: 10/05/2004 06:43:03 PM
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Apparently, Constantin Mocanu, a 67-year-old Romanian gent, accidentally cut off his own penis. He thought it belonged to a noisy chicken that woke him up. From Reuters:
"I confused it with the chicken's neck," Mocanu, who was admitted to the emergency hospital in Galati, was quoted as saying. "I cut it ... and the dog rushed and ate it."
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Psychedelic Jew's Harp
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DATE: 10/05/2004 06:52:56 PM
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JM Nasim reinvents the Jew's Harp as an hallucinogenic aural drug worthy of any ambient chillout room or temporary temple:
"I create this music live. No multi-tracking, no playback of pre-recorded material, no sampling. The raw signal of voice and Jew’s Harp feeds into a portable bank of automated processors. Here, various programmatic, architectonic sound spaces frame rhythmic zones within which certain acoustic potentialities reside. These sonic holograms manifest my musical explorations as shape-shifted sound. Seminal acoustics are gestated into new aural forms to birth multi- dimensional soundscapes of interpenetrating pulses and harmonics."
Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: GOP asks supporters to spin the debate's winner online -- before debate happens
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DATE: 10/05/2004 09:42:33 PM
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The NYT reports:
Determined to win the post-debate spin war on Tuesday night, the Bush campaign called on its supporters to flood the news media with quick declarations that Vice President Dick Cheney had come out ahead. Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, delivered the request in an e-mail message to supporters early Tuesday morning.
"Immediately after the debate, visit online polls, chat rooms and discussion boards and make your voice heard," he said in the note, sent to the six million supporters on the campaign's e-mail list. "People's perceptions are shaped as much by their conversations around the water cooler as by the debates themselves."
The note - which is a mirror image of one sent out by the Democrats just before the first presidential debate last week - also exhorted supporters to follow up by writing letters to their local newspapers and by calling in to radio talk shows.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Upcoming Nanotech conference
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DATE: 10/06/2004 05:55:21 AM
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Our friends at the Foresight Institute are offering BB readers a nice 30 percent discount off registration to attend the 2004 Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology, October 22-24 in Washington DC. Researchers, investors, policymakers, and "interested citizens" will gather to hash out the future of molecular nanotech on all fronts, from medicine and the environment to economics and privacy. The list of nanoworld celebrity speakers include K. Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, Ray Kurzweil, and Christine Peterson. We're especially excited that our favorite nanoblogger, Howard Lovy of the NanoBot, was invited to discuss Nanotech Goals and Conflicts. UPDATE: The BB discount code for registration is BOING30-JC
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Implantable sensor networks
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DATE: 10/06/2004 06:03:22 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about the future of wireless sensors that can be implanted into your body, enabling your cell phone to act as a doctor in your pocket.
The human body is like a car. Take care of it, and it might even last a lifetime. If it has problems you may have to bring it to the mechanic, your doctor. Once you're there, though, the knocks and pings always seem to disappear, leaving you with a lot of explaining to do. Ideally, for treatment's sake anyway, your physician would follow you around and do an instant examination at the moment a symptom rears its ugly head. That's the idea behind UbiMon, a wireless sensor network of medical-monitoring devices that will eventually be implanted right into the body.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cheney lies during veep debate (shocker)
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DATE: 10/06/2004 07:45:09 AM
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BoingBoing reader Mark Kraft says,
Last night, Dick Cheney said, "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight."
Turns out that this isn't true. Soon after the debate, the media was given a photograph of one such meeting: Link. Well, after doing a bit of searching, I found another such meeting! In fact, I found video, took screenshots, and so on...
Link. Daily Kos has more: Link, as does the Kerry campaign blog: Link (Thanks, Jeff Winkler)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Unintended consequences of Cheney's dot-com v dot-org debate goof
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DATE: 10/06/2004 07:49:16 AM
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During last night's vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney advised viewers interested in his version of the facts about Halliburton to visit factcheck.com. Evidently, he meant to direct them to factcheck dot ORG, a site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, but mis-spoke.
Factcheck dot COM redirects you to GeorgeSoros.com which contains arguments on "why we must not re-elect President George Bush." Whups.
For their part, the factcheck dot ORG folks say:
Cheney got our domain name wrong -- calling us "FactCheck.com" -- and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton. In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.
Link to factcheck dot COM. BoingBoing reader Clay says Soros and Co. have no idea who directed the vicepresidential linklove their way. "My friend designed the Soros blog and says [redirecting factcheck.com to the Soros site] was a happy and unrequested favor. Whois turns up not enough of a clue..."
Update: BoingBoing reader Dave Hayden points us to an AP story which says:
Cheney cited FactCheck.com, a for-profit advertising site based in the Cayman Islands. The company decided to redirect traffic to the Soros site after it became inundated with hits -- ” about 100 a second after the debate, John Berryhill, a Philadelphia lawyer for FactCheck.com, said Wednesday.
"This was to relieve stress on the service and to express a political point of view," said Berryhill, who spoke with the site's administrators shortly after the debate ended.
They picked Soros not only for his political views, Berryhill said, but because the billionaire could afford the costly deluge of hits the site would receive in the wake of the debate. Plus, the site administrators didn't want to point surfers to a candidate's site that was asking for money.
Link to story.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kahle: Universal access to all human knowledge is possible
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DATE: 10/06/2004 09:29:04 AM
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Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive and one of the great heroes of the copyfight) just delivered an amazing presentation at the Web 2.0 conference, called Universal Access to All Human Knowledge. It lays out Brewster's plan to see to it that all the information ever created in the world is stored and made available forever. Here are my running notes:
Universal access to all knowledge is possible, and it's not a
non-profit goal. Index the whole damn thing -- it's a business
for AMZN (let's sell all the books, let's sell everything),
Altavista, (let's index all the web), etc.
26MM books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of
copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized
ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about
$60K and takes up one bookshelf.
Google announced that it will digitize in-print material and
out-of-copyright works (like AMZN's thing).
It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in
the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too.
A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the
cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive --
to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all
the books.
Link
Update: The Weblogs, Inc Web 2.0 blog has got Brewster's talk in MP3 as well as plenty o' pix.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fun stop motion videos
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DATE: 10/06/2004 10:30:59 AM
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French university students have some fun with inexpensive stop motion.
Link (Thanks, Kevin Kelly!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Zoomquilt is a fantastic zoomable painting
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DATE: 10/06/2004 11:07:01 AM
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This is the best thing I've seen on the Web in quite a while. It's a painting of a weird world and you can zoom in and out of it with the up- and down-arrow keys. Link (Thanks, Marc Laidlaw!)
UPDATE: Ian sez: This is FEEDBACK in response to Mark Frauenfelder's kudos of
Re: Zoomquilt is a fantastic zoomable painting
It is also quite impossible [in Firefox OSX] to break out of, ie. stop the endless rendering, once you get it going. Nothing short of force quotting the app, thus forcibly closing all the
windows with their accumulated content, will do. I thought it may have been embedded in the Shockwave Director file, but on closer inspection of the calling page, this malfunction appears to have been DELIBERATELY disabled in display parameters block... Either way, this is clearly not a good thing.
value="swSaveEnabled='false'
swVolume='false'
swRestart='false'
swPausePlay='false'
swFastForward='false'
swContextMenu='false' ">
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How the NSA broke crypto, and created civilian crypto industry
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DATE: 10/06/2004 11:25:49 AM
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Bruce Schneier's blogged a great essay about the history of DES, the Data Encryption Standard, which was, for a time, the only public, standard cipher lawful for use by the American public. Most interesting is this part, in which he details how the National Security Agency deliberately weakened DES to make it less secure.
When IBM submitted DES as a standard, no one outside the National Security Agency had any expertise to analyze it. The NSA made two changes to DES: It tweaked the algorithm, and it cut the key size by more than half.
The strength of an algorithm is based on two things: how good the mathematics is, and how long the key is. A sure way of breaking an algorithm is to try every possible key. Modern algorithms have a key so long that this is impossible; even if you built a computer out of all the silicon atoms on the planet and ran it for millions of years, you couldn't do it. So cryptographers look for shortcuts. If the mathematics are weak, maybe there's a way to find the key faster: "breaking" the algorithm.
The NSA's changes caused outcry among the few who paid attention, both regarding the "invisible hand" of the NSA--the tweaks were not made public, and no rationale was given for the final design--and the short key length.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: William Shatner Album: Has Been
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DATE: 10/06/2004 11:39:58 AM
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Marc Laidlaw sez: "I can't believe this came to pass. An excellent Shatner album." The first track that plays on the site, "Common People," is great. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Art event in Philadelphia
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DATE: 10/06/2004 11:47:17 AM
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HYPER-RUNT is an exhibition of works by an excellent group of experimental tech artists, including Ken Goldberg and Shawn Brixey, and Mark Napier (left). The show is co-curated by my old friend Ebon Fisher, an influential digital artist himself who staged pioneering "Media Rituals" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn during the cyberdelic early 1990s. From the HYPER-RUNT curators' statement:
"HYPER-RUNTs raise uneasy questions pertaining to the nature of art in the realm of artificial life forms, media viruses, robot psychology, and inter-species cultures. They flirt with the possibility of a "post-human" future in which the paradigm of art and civilization gives way to a hyper-biology of emergent processes. A HYPER-RUNT might be seen as an ornery cultural lifeform, an élan vital, unexpectedly rearing its head in the turmoil brewing between artist, audience, technology, and ecosystem."
The exhibit runs from October 8 to 14 at the National Products Building with an opening reception this Friday. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Reboot games journalism!
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DATE: 10/06/2004 11:55:35 AM
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Kieron Gillen, a UK games journo, has penned a stirring manifesto for games writers calling on them to reinvent the form the way that rock-and-roll writers reinvented moribund music writing with a new gonzo style a few decades back.
However, once I thought the initial burst of energy was well spent and
a fair chunk of the better writers absorbed into the gaming press in
one form or another, State produced something that managed to embody
everything I'd want the New Games Journalism to be. It's by a gentleman
who works under the name of Always Black, and is entitled "Bow, Nigger".
It's a memorable piece of writing in at least a dozen ways, but is
firstly notable for reading like games journalism without being
anything like a piece of any games writing you've ever read. It's going
to lead to a lot of copyist features, the huge majority will vary
between average and utterly rubbish. Which is fine. Innovation tends to
do that. How many uninspired Hunter S. Thompson riffs have we had to
sit and shudder through? What, hopefully, we'll also get are the pieces
that Hunter's verve and vision inspired without being simple plagiarism.
"Bow, Nigger"
lies outside the main thrust of "serious" games journalism: that is,
the analytic tradition. A bad games journalist would write in imprecise
generalities, talking about something's "gameplay" and urging you to
"try before you buy" or similar page-filling rubbish. A good one would
look at the game, take it apart, try and understand how it works and
inform the reader of their findings.
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: China erects monuments to monkeys who died from Sars
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Casey Sorrow sez: I am a regular devotee of Boing Boing and noticed you have the occasional monkey headline (as does my website). You may be interested in this article in which China has dedicated a monument for monkeys that have died in SARS research. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bird Flu risk extremely low
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DATE: 10/06/2004 01:09:53 PM
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My friend Randy works for a large computer equipment company in Colorado. The employees fly to Asia a lot, and some were concerned about catching SARS or Bird Flu. One of Randy's friends put together an Excel spreadsheet to analyze the risk. Click on images for enlargement.
I know people are concerned about the possibility of a "bird flu pandemic". The news media is not helping to calm these fears. The truth is, from the last news clippings I have, that there have been 22 human fatalities in Vietnam and Thailand. The incidence of this cause of death is twice as high as the probability of dying in an airline accident -- but to keep this in perspective, you are 20 times more likely to be killed by lightning in Colorado than a Vietnam citizen is likely to die of bird flu!! All human incidents of the disease have been in people who handled sick birds. There is no known mutation of the virus to a state that would allow transmission between people. There have been no instances of humans becoming sick from eating properly cooked poultry. 80 million chickens & ducks have been exterminated in the Asian countries whose poultry has been infected. My sense is that there is less and less concern as time goes on, and the efforts of the governments to control the outbreak in the bird populations is resulting in a reduction of the problem.
...the probability of dying from SARS in Taiwan was roughly the same as the probability of being hit by lightning in Colorado.
UPDATE: Aalia sez:
I enjoyed your post earlier on the low risk of catching bird flu. However I
hate to nitpick but I'd just been reading a few articles on the subject and
couldn't resist pointing out that there is a probable human to human case of
transmission in Thailand, under investigation by WHO.
This was reported in ProMed Digest today:
"Thailand went on high alert last week [final week of Sep 2004], after it
reported that an earlier avian influenza victim died after probably
contracting the virus from her daughter. She was the 1st person in this
outbreak believed to have contracted the disease from another human, rather
than from poultry." Source cited in ProMEDmail
The Promedmail's moderator notes :
"[A preliminary account of this case was included in ProMED-mail post "Avian
influenza - Eastern Asia (120): Thailand 20041003.2731. If confirmed by the
World Health Organization, this case will raise the total number of cases
recorded in Thailand to 16 (with 10 deaths). Taken together with the 27
cases in Viet Nam, the total number of avian influenza A (H5N1) virus cases
in East Asia becomes 43 (with 30 deaths). - Mod.CP]"
So there may be one case...
As there's already clear evidence that the virus can cross species to cats,
dogs and humans, its not really that shocking that it there will be the
occasional likely instance of human to human infection occurring. I
calculate the raw probability of infection at approximately 1 in 4 million
on the current reported infection rates reported in Thailand. Pretty remote
chances indeed.
http://www.promedmail.org - best place I know of to keep track of this
stuff. If you need to follow it up just put bird flu and Thailand in their
search engine and you'll get more info on the Thai cases than you probably
ever wanted.
UPDATE: Quinn sez: "i've put up a long post about what makes the bird flu more dangerous than
it seems at ambiguous, inspired by your post. fundamentally, i agree with
the point that there's no reason to *not* take business trips to asia, but
i wanted to highlight why the bird flu matters, despite how little direct
danger it presents at the moment, especially in light of the recent flu
vaccine news."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: X Prize founders launch new tech innovation competitions
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DATE: 10/06/2004 02:12:03 PM
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The organizers of the Ansari X Prize, including Peter Diamandis, are launching what they describe as "Holy Grail Competitions" in a variety of tech arenas, to be known as The WTN X Prizes.
Competition objectives include seeking to meet the greatest challenges and opportunities facing humanity in the 21st century. The X Prize Foundation (XPF) and the World Technology Network (WTN) will be announcing the launch of a public outreach period to help select and sponsor a series of new technology prizes, the WTN X PRIZES, developed on the heels of the successful ANSARI X PRIZE competition. Intended to spur innovation in a variety of critical scientific and technological arenas and in response to great technological, social, and environmental challenges, areas of focus might cover goals in fields such as energy, medicine, information and communications technology, and nanotechnology. These "holy grail" goals might include cures for major diseases, teleportation,
molecular assemblers, cold fusion and a wide variety of others with truly major societal implications. Announcement of the public challenge suggestion process and other competition details and entry criteria will occur at the WTN's 2004 World Technology Summit And Awards.
Link, and link to previous BB post on this week's X Prize win.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anthopologists on Creative Commons, free software
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DATE: 10/06/2004 02:48:38 PM
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Biella sez, "This is a collection of anthropological articles on intellectual property, free software, and the Creative Commons. It is, as far as I know, the first time an Anthropology journal has published accounts on free software and the first time they are using a CC license. All the papers are ready to download as a PDF under a CC license."
Link
(Thanks, Biella!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: President Bush's speech rebutting Kerry shown live on TV for 50 minutes
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DATE: 10/06/2004 03:26:12 PM
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Jamie McCarthy sez: "Bush's speech was shown on CNN and MSNBC, so Brian Carnell was
wrong. If you're looking for good coverage of the coverage,
I like this writeup." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Feds want back-door in all broadband
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DATE: 10/06/2004 05:20:14 PM
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Donna sez, "People are really upset about the FBI's proposal to extend a phone-tapping law called CALEA to the Internet by requiring that broadband Internet and VoIP providers build in a 'backdoor' for government surveillance. But they'd be even more upset if they understood what this means. EFF's Annalee Newitz explains what will happen if this proposal is adopted:"
If the FCC adopts the proposal, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and nearly all VoIP companies will have to design their systems to be tappable. This isn't nearly as tidy as it sounds. The law distinguishes between two kinds of information that can be gleaned via telephone surveillance: "call identifying information" or CII (numbers dialed and when), and "content" (actual conversations taking place). Telephone network technology allows a law enforcement agent to gather these two kinds of information separately, in isolation from one another. There is no danger that an agent seeking CII will accidentally get to listen to the content of his target's conversations. Or that he will accidentally hear the conversations of everybody on the same block as his target.
Link
(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Updated: Snap's unforgivably stupid and evil linking policy
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DATE: 10/06/2004 05:22:42 PM
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Yesterday, I blogged about Snap, a reasonably interesting new search engine that unveiled at the Web 2.0 conference. Today, an alert reader pointed out Snap's unbelievably bullshit linking policy -- the idea that any company that is this clueless could end up a critical piece of the Web's infrastructure is so revolting it makes me want to take a bath.
Unless a User has a written agreement in effect with us which states otherwise, User may only provide a hyperlink to the Site on another Web site, if you comply with all of the following: (a) the link must be a text-only link clearly marked "snap.com" or "www.snap.com"; (b) the link must "point" to the URL "http://www.snap.com" and not to other pages within the Site; (c) the link, when activated by a User, must display the Site full-screen and not within a "frame" on the linking Web site; and (d) the appearance, position and other aspects of the link must not be such as to damage or dilute the goodwill associated with our name and trademarks or create the false appearance we are associated with or sponsor the linking Web site. Perfect Market reserves the right to revoke its consent to any link at any time in its sole discretion.
I mean, imagine if the only way you could link to Google was to use nothing but the word "Google" as the linktext and if you could only link to the Google frontpage (and not any of the search-result pages), and you couldn't scrape, frame or otherwise munge Google results -- kee-rist, it'd be a frigging apocalype.
Search engines demand our trust and our goodwill, and they cry out to be an authorative namespace for locations relevant to query terms. For Snap to assert that it can own how you can link to them -- despite the fact that this is nonsensical in both law and practice -- displays such an imponderable depth of contempt and ignorance for the Web's norms that it is truly unforgivable. I've just removed playing with Snap from my list of things to do for the next hundred years or so. Maybe you should, too.
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
Update: Snap founder Bill Gross sez, "Cory, thanks for catching that and posting. We're changing the policy, so thanks!"
No word on the rest of the copyright policy, which includes a ban on "creating derivative works" with Snap results.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The dark side of MMORPG romance
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DATE: 10/07/2004 06:07:25 AM
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Pete Rojas says: "'Miss B.' wrote a special column for Joystiq about love, romance, and the world of Massive Multi Online Role Playing Games. My fave part:"
With all the joy that an MMORPG romance can bring there is also a dark side to all this: jealousy, betrayal, and the inevitable breakup. In Star Wars Galaxies players can get married in the game by exchanging rings (which are either player created or looted). One toon has both rings in his/her inventory – targets the other player and selects “propose union” from a radial menu. If the other person accepts the second ring is transferred into his/her inventory and also placed on a finger. Now here’s the fun part, to remove the ring you have to select “divorce” from the radial menu. D-I-V-O-R-C-E rears its ugly head even in the fantasy that is Star Wars. To make the situation even more dramatic the ring, upon closer inspection, shows sign of wear and decay.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Induce act goes to markup today, copy of EFF's protest ad
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DATE: 10/07/2004 06:20:21 AM
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Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy's roundly criticized INDUCE Act, which would criminalize technologies seen as encouraging copyright infringement, goes to markup today in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. From here, it will be put in final form for vote. A wide array of consumer and tech advocacy groups sent letters to the committee yesterday to urge them not to move forward. The EFF placed this protest ad in Capitol Hill news publication The Hill: Link. Here's a link to Katie Dean's coverage in Wired News: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robot Fighting League event this weekend in SF
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David Calkins says,
The Robot Fighting League's 2004 National Championships are this Saturday and Sunday, October 9-10th, 2004! See the metallic stars of TV gather to fight it out to decide who's the champion - in robot weight classes up to 340 pounds. Thrill to the spectacle as robots fight only a few feet away from the bleachers!
Famous robots from TV competitions and regional matches across the country - including this spring's ROBOlympics - will fight it out in grand style in the place where it all started: Fort Mason. Robots will bash it out in our specially-built bulletproof robot fighting arena - so you can watch the carnage up close and personal that will lead to Number One! We're firing up the barbecue and chilling the kegs in preparation for the families that filled the bleachers during ROBOlympics.
Link to event details
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reverse Cowgirl rides again
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DATE: 10/07/2004 06:22:52 AM
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Susannah Breslin, who once ran a popular blog called Reverse Cowgirl, disappeared with nary a trace from the blogosphere some time ago. She has returned with a new site that reflects a broader range of work with regard to both media and subject matter. Susannah's new site includes an excerpt from her forthcoming novel Porn Happy, and some really fine photographic work, like the shot here.
Link to Susannah's new thing. Welcome back! Chris Bishop did some nice work with illos and UI here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Of Sims and Sex
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DATE: 10/07/2004 06:26:33 AM
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Fleshbot has a clusterfuck of a post here, with all sorts of news related to sex and Sims. Nude patches, naked knockoff Sims, fan porn, and the like. Snip:
Now that there's a widely available nude patch for "The Sims 2" that removes the pixelated blur when your wee animated minions take a shower or jump in the hot tub—not to mention hundreds of add-on objects ranging from latex catsuits to high-tech sex chairs—we expect to start seeing a lot more hot and heavy foreplay scenes and WooHoo! sequences that don't leaving us feeling limp.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Starbucks vs. Its Addicts
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Interesting Slate piece about the hyperefficient drug delivery mechanism known as a venti cappucino, and the forthcoming price hike from Starbucks. Link (thanks, Paul Boutin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Newsweek on Creative Commons/Wired Mag Music CD
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DATE: 10/07/2004 06:33:05 AM
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Newsweek's Brian Braiker has a story out on the Creative Commons/Wired Magazine music CD project that debuted at the recent benefit concert in NYC:
The Beastie Boys, David Byrne and Brazilian pop legend Gilberto Gil will appear on a new CD along with 13 other artists next month--not exactly earth-shattering news. But what's unique about the disc is that diehard fans are not only likely to end up copying, remixing and swapping it online; they're actively encouraged to do so. The compilation, due out at month's end, is both a legal experiment and the opening salvo in a war against the music industry's zero-tolerance policy on file sharing. And if the folks behind it have it their way, both the artists and their fans will come out winners.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Shopping Cart Modded with pulse jet engine
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Boo-yah! A 50mph shopping cart modded with a jet engine. "Its metal glows red hot at temperatures up to 600 degrees C, so [Andy Tyler] has to sit with his back to a heat shield. The microlight instructor, 35, built the gas and liquid fuel pulse jet from instructions off the internet." The nerds, they are my people. Link (Thanks, Kent)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Best VP debate parody image EVAR
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DATE: 10/07/2004 07:32:10 AM
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Link (Thanks, Wayne!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: David Beckham's alleged lover masturbates a pig on UK TV show
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Western civilization jumps the shark:
Rebecca Loos, Beckham's former personal assistant, who gained notoriety earlier this year when she alleged she had conducted an affair with the England captain, carried out the procedure on Five's reality show, The Farm. Viewers were shown explicit footage of Loos, who donned rubber gloves to arouse the animal before collecting around a third of a litre of semen in a flask. Having completed her task, Loos told her fellow contestants: "My arms are aching! It lasts for about 10 minutes and he starts thrusting really hard and then I grip!" Fellow farm hand Debbie McGee told her: "You must do it really well." Andrew Butler, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said... "It doesn't help to see Vanilla Ice jumping on the back of a pig and riding it around..."
Link (via Warren)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Transparent map over satellite photos of London
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DATE: 10/07/2004 08:26:15 AM
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Mark Hurst sez:
This overlays a streetmap on an aerial photo of the Tower of London (and, presumably, with other cities as well). Move the mouse around to see the overlay move. Very cool hack. Link (via life with alacrity.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: GOP fear-phrase video
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Somebody put together an amazing video that plays all the fear-invoking phrases uttered by the speakers at the RNC. It's hypnotizing. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More Bird Flu analysis
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Tim Bishop sez: "I was very surprised to read the bit on the Bird Flu on Boingboing today. I ran www.SARSWatch.org during the 2003 SARS outbreak, and I saw some pretty wild predictions.
"Epidemiologists have been studying this stuff for a little while, and have some pretty good models that might be worth explaining briefly.
"I started to write a response to the Boing Boing piece, but it got so long it turned into a blog piece." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: NanoKabbalah
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From time to time, Howard Lovy has posted brief items on his NanoBot blog about the relationship he sees between nanotechnology and Kabbalah. Now he's gone deep into the mystic for "Nanotech Angels," a Salon essay about how nano and Kabbalah are both "testament to the incomprehensible infinite."
"The mantra in the nanotech industry is to learn from the mistakes made in biotechnology and the public rejection of genetically modified organisms. Partly to blame was a "top-down" attitude taken by a scientific establishment that was much too self-important to bother with public attitudes and perceptions. So, consideration of "societal and ethical implications" is No. 1 on the nanotech industry's list. However, part of that process involves paying attention to the separate philosophical and religious societies in the world. Not the abstract "society" of a scientist's dream -- one that will listen to scientific explanations and reach "correct" conclusions based on the strength and logic of their arguments -- but the real society that's out there, the one that laughs at, or adores, Madonna and wears red strings, the one that crowds around old barns in rundown villages to gaze at a stain that they swear is the image of the original Madonna, the one that drops to its knees and faces Mecca five times a day, or faces toward Jerusalem every Friday night to welcome the bride of Shabbat."
Link (ad viewing required for free day pass)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Thumbs-down review of Kevin Mitnick movie just released on DVD
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DATE: 10/07/2004 09:28:17 AM
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"Track Down" is a 2000 movie about hacker Kevin Mitnick that was never released theatrically. Christopher Null reviews it in filmcritic.com.
The facts aside (and it's impossible to dispute the facts in Track Down, because there's no attempt to be accurate at all), Track Down is simply not a very good movie. Director Joe Chappelle has the unenviable task of helming this mess, having formerly directed a scant few films -- including Halloween 6 and Hellraiser 4 -- that couldn't have presented much of a challenge at all. With Track Down he must have found himself in a huge mess, stuck with a highly technical and convoluted plot and rising stars to coddle. You can almost hear him saying, "Ah, fuck it, let's just put a car chase in here."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: $100 shotgun fits in shirt pocket
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DATE: 10/07/2004 09:33:26 AM
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A couple of guys have mad a tiny shotgun that goes on sale tomorrow.
The credit card-sized shotgun is a muzzleloader, meaning it doesn't use shotgun shells. The user has to measure out some gunpowder, pour it in each barrel, drop seven BBs in each barrel, and tamp in a small wad of paper. A knob on one end serves as a safety, and two buttons set into a hole in the body are the electrical triggers. Each barrel fires with a loud pop.
"This is no more deadly than a .22," Teel said. "But the difference is you have multiple wounds, which means you'll try to get away quicker, and it will cause more pain. ... There will be more blood, which the cops will be able to see."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Eruption good for Sasquatch studies
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DATE: 10/07/2004 09:53:48 AM
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Jeffrey Meldrum, an Idaho State University associate professor of anatomy and primatology who moonlights as a Bigfoot researcher, believes that the eruption of Mount St. Helens could result in some excellent Sasquatch footprint findings. From NCBuy Weird News:
"He says most of the ground in the area isn't soft enough to take a footprint, but a blanket of ash could provide a good medium.
Meldrum owns more than 150 casts of mysterious ground tracks that fall somewhere between human feet and primate feet and says his study of them has convinced him that Sasquatch are real."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DJ Danger Mouse and others on future of music
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DATE: 10/07/2004 11:39:41 AM
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DJ Danger Mouse, ex-Napster CEO Hank Berry, Morpehus CEO Michael Weiss and a guy from iTunes and another form a label did a great panel yesterday at Web 2.0 on the future of the music industry and the Internet. It was the first time I'd seen Danger Mouse in person, and it was an honor, especially given how much his Grey Album mashup of the Beatles and Jay-Z changed my life. Weblogs, Inc has the audio of the discussion online as an MP3.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: South Afrtican perspective on Creative Commons
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DATE: 10/07/2004 11:44:54 AM
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Here's a great animation produced by South Africans, telling the true story of a South African journalist who adopted a Creative Commons license and found herself collaborating with people all over the world, making money and changing society.
1.7MB Flash Link
(Thanks, Redjade!)
Update: Alex sez, "I was really stoked to read this, even more excited after watching the film, and ready to tell the world about Thandi Mathobane, Journalist of the Future! The only problem is, she doesn't exist... Though you'd never know it, film is fictional. Here's the deal. That said, everything she does in this film is certainly possible now. Copyleft is definitely worldchanging for the developing world. But it does seem important to keep track of the difference between what we know and what we imagine....
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's Web 2.0 talk as MP3
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DATE: 10/07/2004 11:47:02 AM
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I gave a talk this morning at Web 2.0 on copyright, called "Web 2.0 = AOL 1.0? How the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to criminalize the Internet and you're not invited." It's online now as an MP3, thanks to Weblogs, Inc.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Get off the Internet and vote!
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Drew sez, "My sister natalie (nataliedee.com) and myself have put together a site called "Get off the internet and vote", where we give away free merchandise to people who send in proof that they voted on november 2nd. I am pretty excited about a chance to use the internet for actual social change rather than entertainment. Not that it hasn't been done before, but it's the first time I have. enjoy!"
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(Thanks, Drew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart's America: Democacy Inaction
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DATE: 10/07/2004 12:09:08 PM
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Last week I picked up the audiobook for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction to listen to during a long drive. I laughed so hard I nearly wrecked the car. When I got to my next stop, I rushed out and picked up the physical book, which is really a hell of an object: colorful, witty, and incredibly subversive in that it appropriates the iconography of USA Today (by way of Mad Magazine) to deliver nuanced, thoughtful, biting satire about the state of American democracy.
America (The Book) is the kind of thing I wish I'd had when I was about 20 years old -- a cross between Schoolhouse Rock and the political editorials in the NYT and Washington Post and the gonzo poltiical journalism of books like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
Amazon has posted a (slightly lame) video intro to the book by Jon Stewart and a (very good!) interview between Stewart and an Amazon section editor -- it's a shame about the weird Windows DRM stream format, but they're worth checking out on your way to ordering the book.
WMV Video Stream Link, WMA Audio Interview Stream
(Thanks, Arlo!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indymedia reports FBI ordered their UK ISP to hand over hosting hardware
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BoingBoing reader Micah at indymedia says:
A few minutes ago our host (Rackspace) in London received a federal order to turn over the hardware that hosts several Indymedia websites to the FBI.
Rackspace complied and handed the server over to the FBI, but they must have felt bad because they are building us a new server that will be online as soon as possible, oh and they apologized for the abruptness because they think that they are "required to comply with all federal orders of this nature". The servers hosted numerous local IMCs including Belgium and African imcs, Palestine, UK, Germany, and Brasil, Italy, Uruguay, Poland, Belgrade, Portugal, and more. We are unaware as to the reasons for this at this time. We suspect it has to do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters. Rackspace is a US company, but have colocation in the UK where these servers are (err, were) located. So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on a server in England, taken away by American federal police... can I be the first to say WTF?!
Also on the IMC servers stolen by the FBI were a lot of icecast radio stations, the Indymedia PGP public keyring and BLAG (an Anti-corporate GNU/Linux distribution with a suite of media tools designed to be used to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and free software... put out by the Brixton Linux Action Group). Rackspace has been asked by the EFF for a copy of the order, but Rackspace claims they dont know if they can give it up.
I have been in contact with [Rackspace's] regional director responsible for the federal order. He has stated that [he] can not provide any information regarding the order. I am going to follow up with our law enforcement liason to verify this.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Agitprop animation
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"What Barry Says" is a beautiful Constructivist-esque animation critiquing US foreign policy and the "Project for the New American Century." It's a collaboration between young British designer Simon Robson and friend Barry McNamara, who provided the rant for Robson to visually riff on. Link to 25 MB Quicktime video (Thanks, Nick Philip!)
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TITLE: Open source, no-plugin, rich GUIs for the Web
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DATE: 10/07/2004 12:43:42 PM
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Yesterday, I caught a demo of Laszlo, a really bad-ass application development environment for the Web. Lazlo does was Java was supposed to do -- let you run desktop-app-like applications within a browser window. But Laszlo doesn't require any plugin on its own, or flaky, slow Java. Instead, the Laszlo compiler turns Lazlo code (which is written in very fast, flexible, human-readable XML) into Flash apps. Pretty much everyone has Flash installed, so users can run your apps without installing new software (but since the Lazlo code is compiled down to Flash, it could also be compiled down to something else -- IOW, if Macromedia gets to rank with you, you could compile your apps to Java, to C++, Mono or whatever).
But the big news is that Laszlo is now Free Software -- free as in beer and free as in speech, licensed under an open source license from compiler to server. To recap: I came for the eye candy, I stayed for the liberty. This is nice stuff.
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(Thanks, Tobias!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: TV station reports that Bush has been elected President
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DATE: 10/07/2004 01:10:21 PM
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WBAY TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin is running an AP article reporting that Bush has won the election, weeks before the election is to take place. (Click image for enlargement."
At this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting.
Link (Thanks, Ian Meyer!)
UPDATE:
Satirista sez "AP is now saying the article was a "test article" (WTF?) that was "inadvertently" picked up by WBAY. Now, I've been a freelance writer/journalist for quite awhile, as have
you, but I've never heard of writing "test articles" in advance, other
than advance obituaries for celebrities. Have you? Furthermore, I
Googled '"test article" journalism' and came up with nada."
And, now, if you go to the Link, the site says only "
You have reached a page that is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please use your browser's BACK button to return to the previous page." I hope they keep changing the page. It's funny!
UPDATE: From: michael@slavitch.com
Subject: Site Suggestion - for boingboing
Date: October 8, 2004 7:05:52 AM PDT
To: doctorow@craphound.com, xeni@xeni.net, mark@well.com
email_name:
Michael Slavitch sez: "Remember that TV station that posted the AP article about electing Bush one month early? I sent them a snarky letter, and got a rather elegant and thoughtful response.
"Go figger!"
Dear WBay Staff;
You've made your station a laughing stock, so I suggest explanation far more detailed than "our apologies", unless you want to be classified with Fox News as a propogandist joke.
------
From: Miller, Ted
Subject: Electing Bush
Hi, Michael. As soon as we learned about the article, we had it removed. Unfortunately, we're not able to post another story in its place, so we posted a correction on our Home and News page that has a higher prominence (on our site at least) than the original article which was on the web site for 35 minutes.
We use an automated system for Associated Press national news, politics, science, entertainment, etc. If you see how much news we have on the site, you'll understand why we use automation (I am a department of one). If we did not have this system, there would simply be too many gaps in how often the entire site is updated.
The Associated Press tests about 4 times a week for a month prior to an election to help TV stations and newspapers make sure their publishing systems are working properly (yes, I see the irony). The AP's numbers are completely random with every test; if this error happened yesterday or tomorrow it just as easily could have declared Senator John Kerry or even Ralph Nader the winner.
We are sorry for the mistake, but it was unintentional on everyone's part and we responded quickly to remove it.
Ted Miller
WBAY Web Manager
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Applerotica
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DATE: 10/07/2004 01:31:17 PM
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Some Mac enthusiasts with waaaaaay too much time, libido, and Photoshop on their hands have created an extensive (47+ pages) gallery of Apple-inspired softcore. Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Old British kids' show was incredibly suggestive
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Michael sez: "[Here's a] clip from a British children's television show (apparently) that has more sexual innuendo than anything I've ever seen in my life."
Rod (to Jane): "Do you want to blow on my pipe while I'm twanging away?"
Jane: "Oh no Rod, I was blowing a lot with Roger last night. But would you
like to play with my maracas?"
Zippy: "No, let's just pluck away with our twangers."
Bungle: "Yes, it doesn't matter what size your twanger is."
Zippy: "I've got a big red one."
George: "I've only got a tiny twanger. But it works well and I like to play with it."
Geoffrey (to viewers): "Well, have you got your twangers out? And remember,
you can bounce your balls at the same time. If you haven't got any balls,
ask a friend if you can play with his.
Link
UPDATE: Michael sez: From imdb: 'There are currently rumours doing the rounds that Rainbow was nearly axed due to an 'obscene' edition being made that contained a lot of sexual innuendo about balls, twangers, plucking and so forth, a clip of which was shown on a late-night Channel Four comedy show. In fact, this edition of Rainbow was never meant to be broadcast 'properly', it was an in-joke performed by the cast and crew for a Christmas party at the production studios. It has long been a tradition within the British television industry for the videotape editing department to produce 'Christmas shows' consisting of bloopers, X-rated moments and suchlike fare to be shown at the seasonal gatherings, and the 'adult' Rainbow was produced with that in mind.'
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bill Gurley on MMOs
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DATE: 10/07/2004 02:20:36 PM
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Legendary VC Bill Gurley gave a fantastic, biz-nerd-oriented talk about Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games today at the Web 2.0 conference -- a talk in which he laid out mindblowing stats about MMO use that have him slavering as a financier for the opportunity to throw money at these things. Weblogs, Inc. has his talk up as an MP3.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: INDUCE Act killed for now! BOO-YAH!
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Orrin Hatch's crazy, iPod-criminalizing INDUCE Act has been shelved -- for now. The combined efforts of tech companies, nerds, and grassroots organizers have stalled it, and Hatch has cancelled plans to introduce the bill today. The quote from the RIAA positively seethes with frustrated malevolence.
Hatch canceled plans Thursday to present the bill to the Judiciary Committee, and participants in the talks said there would likely be no movement on the proposal in the immediate future. Hatch has previously said he intended to pursue the legislation next session if a bill wasn't approved. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is expected to take over as Judiciary chairman early next year.
The chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America, Mitch Bainwol, acknowledged Thursday that negotiations need more time.
"So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community," Bainwol said.
I have only one thing to say to Mr Bainwol: Neener. Neener. Neener.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Robert Crumb explains why old music is the best
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I agree with everything R. Crumb says in this audio file about old ethnic music and how much better it is than contemporary music. Link (Thanks, Ezra Friedman!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: CNN's "Presidential Showdown Game"
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DATE: 10/07/2004 05:00:13 PM
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Is it just me, or does this CNN banner ad seem incredibly bizarre, and CNN's online game to "Pick the winner of the popular vote in each state" to be in profoundly bad taste? The winner gets a gigantic HDTV. It feels weird. I mean, since when are these things "Presidential Showdowns?" My people call 'em "Elections."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig's kick-ass Web 2.0 presentation audio
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DATE: 10/07/2004 05:07:03 PM
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Larry Lessig's Web 2.0 presentation on Free Culture just got a long, heartfelt standing ovation here. Here's Weblogs, Inc's MP3 of the talk.
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Barbequed iPod still works
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DATE: 10/07/2004 05:27:21 PM
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This iPod was accidentally dropped into a bonfire -- the kicker is, it still works! And there's video to prove it.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Alan Radecki's photos of X Prize event and Mojave airport
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DATE: 10/07/2004 08:22:45 PM
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Alan Radecki is an aviation historian, a photographer, and probably one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet with regard to the life and lore and Mojave airport -- now America's first spaceport. When I was out at Mojave covering the SpaceShipOne launch for NPR, he generously served as a guide for me, my "Day to Day" producer Nihar Patel, and fellow shooter Jason DeFillippo. Alan drove us down desert dirt roads to some amazing airplane graveyards, and introduced us to incredible characters who live and work out there. More on that soon, on the radio show.
Alan took some great photos out there earlier this week, and has just published them online. He maintains a blog about the Mojave airport, and has a new book coming out -- Mojave Scrapbook -- about the site's rich aerospace and aviation history.
Link to Alan's latest batch of photos. This one's pretty magical. (Thanks, Wayne, and thanks Todd Lappin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Social software can't afford to shaft the Mac
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DATE: 10/08/2004 06:29:43 AM
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Danah's experimenting with some "social software" that crashes popular MacOS browsers. She points out that if you're trying to get traction with a social app, you really can't afford to shaft the Mac.
You can build enterprise software that doesn't work on a Mac but you CANNOT build social technologies that don't work on the Mac. Who are key driving forces behind sociable technology? Freaks, (independent) geeks, academics and other marginalized populations. What do marginalized groups use when it comes to technology? Surprise - they use subversive tools. Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.
It doesn't. But it does matter, particularly if you're building sociable technologies and you want the attention of the geeks, freaks and academics. This includes the bloggers, who are often bleeding edge geeky freaky academically-minded folks.
Sociable technologies are not enterprise technologies nor are they low-end consumer technologies. They require connecting clusters of people. And to do that, you start with the "mavens" to get to the hubs. Mavens are not mainstream users; they don't play by mainstream rules. They value their position as outsider, alternative. They love new gadgets that have cultural value. This is the type that Apple has done a fantastic job at attracting and maintaining.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO break Google Print DRM
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Seth has been exploring the DRM used by Google to disable your browser's key functions while you're browsing the new Google Print service -- while you're at those pages, your print, cut, copy, and save functions are disabled, even in Mozilla and even with Javascript switched off.
Seth's notes suggest some avenues toward breaking this DRM (beyond screenshotting, of course, which still works just fine!). This is a good avenue of research, possibly even worthy of a Mozilla variant optimized to circumvent the Google DRM.
If you wanted to write a proxy that would make Google Print pages capable of being saved to disk, you would presumably want to match
background-image:url("http://print.google.com/\([^"]+\)")
(although you'd need to be careful to match only the one in the definition of ".theimg", because it looks like there may at least one other background-image:url) and then replace
<div class="theimg"
with
<div class="x"
and somewhere nearby (I'm not sure how many tags up you'd need to go) insert a plain old
<img src="http://print.google.com/$1">
I haven't tried this because it felt like too much work relative to the previous two methods.
Contrary to what I expected, Google Print does not seem to check referer, so it seems to be possible merely to extract the URL from the definition of .theimg, and then to load it directly. Perhaps that will change in the future.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Indie label rejects DRM
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David sez, "A European indie music label [!K7] is taking an unusual approach to the issue of CD copy protection - it is branding all its releases with a sticker proclaiming the absence of any such control measure.... 'Copy protection kills customer relationships,' the label says on its website. 'That's why, from now on, !K7 releases will carry a new logo: 'NO copy protection - respect the music.'... The company believes it's all a matter of trust. 'Only those to whom respect is given show respect themselves,' it notes. In other words, treat your customers as potential pirates and they'll soon tell you to f**k off and not buy your product.'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Patent squatters shake down WiFi hotspots
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Acacia (the patent-squatters that EFF is fighting over a bogus patent that purports to cover all streaming media) has come up wiht another bogus claim of ownership to a basic, obvious and important part of the Internet: captive portals that redirect people who use WiFi hotspots to a login screen. They've announced a $1000 "license" shakedown, and companies that won't bend over will find themselves staring down the barrel of a lawsuit.
The licensing pact demands hotspot operators pay Acacia $1,000 a year for up to 3,500 redirected connections. After which, operators would have to pay 5 to 15 cents for each redirected connection.
"Anybody who operates a hotspot with redirection can assume they'll hear from us," Acacia's executive vice president of business development and general counsel Rob Berman told Wi-Fi Networking News.
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More here
(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: interview with Matt Stone and Trey Parker on "Team America"
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For today's edition of the NPR radio program "Day to Day" I interview South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Hollywood about their new movie, Team America: World Police (previous BB posts: Team America preview, and MPAA freaks over puppet sex). The film -- "acted" entirely by live-action marionettes -- will open in selected theaters this weekend.
Stone and Parker talk about some of the many creative challenges they encountered while producing a comedy action flick with puppets. Here's one snip from the interview that didn't make it in -- the film lampoons world leaders, and pokes bitter fun at the so-called "war on terrorism." I asked Trey Parker whether or not they timed the release in relation to the upcoming presidential elections. He replied, "(laughs) -- People assume we're trying to affect the election. But if you're going to change your vote based on what you see in a puppet movie, honestly -- you really should not be voting in the first place."
Link to today's "Day to Day" show, with archived audio. Includes streaming video clips of Kim Jong Il singing a reflective ballad, then feeding weapons inspector Hans Blix to live sharks.
Image: Trey Parker and "Kim Jong Il" -- the marionette, not the actual North Korean dictator -- on the set of Team America: World Police (Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount).
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TITLE: Cross-dressing day at high school
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As part of Spirit Week, students at Hastings High School in Westchester County, New York, held Cross-Dressing Day. The school administration was not thrilled, asking students to change the theme to "New York Pride Day." From The Journal News:
Cross-dressing students said their freedom of expression was violated and that the prohibition sent the wrong message to transgender students who may want to cross-dress regularly...
Josh McConchie, 16, who wore a pink skirt and high tops, said that "certain students in the school feel it's derogatory towards gays or cross-dressers because they feel we're making fun of them, but actually we're trying to make them fit in."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Carved skull
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This stunning carved skull is on eBay right now with a starting bid of $7,960. It would make a wonderful addition to my cabinet of curiosities.
"This antique real human skull from private collections is estimated at least 500 years old. It is HEAVILY carved with mysterious buddhism objects, symbols and Tibetan letters.... Sold for the purpose of educational and medical purposes only."
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: G.W. and Crew Flip Flop Catalog, Fall 2004 Collection
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DATE: 10/08/2004 01:35:23 PM
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Presidentiary flip flop parody. Snark couture. Super funny. Click this Link (Thanks, Sean!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Robots attack Japan
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New Scientist has a nice survey of the 2004 Intelligent Robotics and Systems conference in Sendai, Japan this week. Accompanying the text are video clips of humanoid robots unleashed by Fujitsu and Sony. In one clip, HOAP-2 from Fujitsu practices some very surreal looking sumo wrestling moves.
Max Lungarella, of the University of Tokyo, believes one of the more noticeable themes at this year's conference is the way robotics is feeding into areas of research relating to intelligence.
As roboticists succeed in making ever-more intelligent machines, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and even behavioural psychologists are becoming interested in studying their creations, he says.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Class photo fun
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DATE: 10/08/2004 02:07:06 PM
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Teenage Zen. Click image for a better view. (Thanks witz and my friends who pointed us to this!)
UPDATE: Brandon Lee directs us to the captivating story behind this amazing image, taken last year at a junior college in Singapore. It's a tale of two pranksters, a grouchy principal, the school's Photographic Society, and an online auction. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jim Flora book is here!
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DATE: 10/08/2004 04:30:26 PM
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I got my copy of The Mischievious Art of Jim Flora, by Irwin Chusid (Fantagraphics 2004), a couple of days ago, and have been admiring it greatly.
The press release about the book describes his work better than I can:
In the 1940s and ’50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins fingering cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives.
Up until this book, my exposure to Flora's work has been limited to several smallish reproductions in a book about album cover art, a record cover I bought at a garage sale, and Irwin Chusid's web site about Jim Flora.
I already thought Flora was one of the greatest illustrators ever, but I wasn't prepared to have my mind blown all over again. This 11" x 10" book has hundreds of large, clear, bright reproductions of Flora's work, and Chusid has done an amazing job of compiling a bunch of great stuff about Flora, including interviews with him, and remembrances from other artists who loved his work.
I can relate to what Tim Biskup said when he first saw Flora's work: "'This is going to change the way that I draw,' I said out loud in a record store. I was holding a copy of Shorty Courts the Count on LP." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites dispatch from Iraq: Cat on a hot tin roof
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DATE: 10/09/2004 09:26:02 AM
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NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Iraq, and files a new dispatch to his blog today:
Once you start to slide in Iraq, it's hard to right yourself. There's enough to piss you off on a daily basis that if you let it compound there's bound to be trouble. For Iraqis--car bombs, roadside bombs, city-sieges, instability, uncertainty, and loss of hope--this is their daily diet. I asked one of our drivers, Wesam, how he was doing the other day. It was just a typical faux question in passing. He stopped me in my tracks with a heartfelt answer.
"We are so unhappy, Kevin."
"Who's unhappy? You? Everyone?"
"Everyone--its such a very bad situation. We don't know what to do."
Neither does anyone else here-- so it seems. We are bound together in this bloody conflict where the body counts have to break double digits to really get our attention anymore. It's a spiritual malaise as easily caught as a common cold. Big Daddy spelled it out best with one word in Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," – mendacity.
Mine comes and goes depending on how much time I've spent quarantined in the hotel as opposed to out in the field. This week I've got it bad
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Both Presidential candidates arrested while serving papers on CPD
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DATE: 10/09/2004 09:41:01 AM
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Two Presidential candidates -- for the Green and Libertarian parties -- attempted to serve papers on the Commission on Presidential Debates, demanding the right to participate. As they attempted to approach the CPD officials, they were arrested:
The first report from St. Louis is in - and presidential candidates Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and David Cobb (Green Party) were just arrested. Badnarik was carrying an Order to Show Cause, which he intended to serve the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Earlier today, Libertarians attempted to serve these same papers at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the CPD - but were stopped from approaching the CPD office by security guards.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: London homeless's bag-contents
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DATE: 10/09/2004 09:44:04 AM
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This is an amazing photo-essay documenting the contents of homeless peoples' bags in London -- in some cases, the entire worldly goods of the subjects.
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(Thanks, James!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: To Evil: tech's most evil villains
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DATE: 10/09/2004 09:48:16 AM
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Danny O'Brien's continuing his brilliant series, "To Evil," a monthly column in which he picks out a few genuinely evil people in the tech industry and describes their sins for our edification and amusement (and Danny is very, very amusing: "Ziff-Davidians" indeed!).
We start, as any trawl through the inferno should, up to our thighs in spam.
This month, Redmond's lawyers sprayed a unique license from its hind-most intellectual property glands - all over the IETF's proposal for an anti-spam mail authentication standard, Sender ID.
As ever, open source kill-joys had a few problems with Microsoft's license. First, the patent license they offered wasn't transferable. So everyone who got the source had to sign a deal with Microsoft to use their super-special patented technology.
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(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Katamari for PS2: roll over stuff and get big
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DATE: 10/09/2004 10:26:23 AM
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I just downloaded the trailer for the PS2 game Katamari Damacy and now I want to buy a PS2, just to play it. Damn, this is demented: in Katamari, you're a rolling ball of detritus, careening through a Japanese town. As you roll over things (cars, picnic tables, people), they adhere to you, making you bigger, more ungainly, and capable of picking up bigger things. Eventually, you're meant to snowball your way up to truly stupendous articles -- all rendered in retro-cool pixel-art. Man, that's good squishee.
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(Thanks, Niels!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pratchett's "Going Postal": Graft, hackers, and a semaphore Internet
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DATE: 10/09/2004 10:37:30 AM
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I've just finished Terry Pratchett's latest (and finest!) Discworld book, "Going Postal," which concerns itself with the re-opening of the Ankh-Morpork post office as a competitive check against the sempahore tower monopoly. Pratchett's hilarious Discworld novels are parables about issues of modern day, and work on multiple levels: as comedic novels, as stories and as political commentary, and Going Postal is no exception.
There are three elements of Going Postal that I completely loved:
- (Nearly) all-new characters. The Discworld books have the signal virtue of being comprehensible no matter what order they're read in, but that said, there are a number of recurring characters, some of whom are getting a little shopworn. For Going Postal, Pratchett invents a suite of new and extremely likable characters, including an obsessive collector, a wonderfully cynical activist woman, and a pair of con-men (see below).
- The Big Con. I'm a sucker for stories about cons and graft (see my review of the canonical text in the field), and Going Postal revolves around a fantastic and daring series of cons that are by turns nail-bitingly tense and gut-wrenchingly funny.
- Tech savvy. Going Postal's mcguffin is the "clacks," a system of mechanical semaphore towers that have been strung across the continent in a kind of primitive telegraph/Internet. Pratchett completely nails the pioneering spirit, hacks, grift, and ingenuity present at the birth of every network, and his accounts of the technical workings of the clacks are nearly as gripping as classic real-world accounts of hacking derring-do.
Pratchett's name is a household word in the UK, but he's still relatively obscure in the US. There are dozens of Discworld novels out there, and this one is as good an entry as any -- I was totally hooked from page one.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO censor the net with a Hotmail account
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DATE: 10/09/2004 10:43:29 AM
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Alex sez, "Members of the Bits of Freedom group conducted a test to see how much it would take for a service provider to take down a website hosting public domain material. They signed up with 10 providers and put online a work by Duthc author Multatuli, who died over 100 years ago. They stated that the work was in the public domain, and that it was written in 1871. They then set up a fake society to claim to be the copyright holders of the work. From a Hotmail address, they sent out complaints to all 10 of the providers. 7 out of 10 complied and removed the site, one within just 3 hours. Only one ISP actually pointed out that the copyright on the work expired many years ago.
The conclusion of the investigation is worth reading, it starts 'It only takes a Hotmail account to bring a website down, and freedom of speech
stands no chance in front of the Texan-style private ISP justice.'"
244K PDF Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: NYC peace demonstration doc under CC license
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DATE: 10/09/2004 10:56:44 AM
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Michael sez,
"Sixty Cameras Against the War," a multichannel documentary of the NYC peace demonstration on February 15th, 2003 is available for download from Archive.org under a Creative Commons license.
"60 CATW" took footage from 60 different videographers at the demonstration, and displays it in multiple screens at a time (up to 60) to give a range of activists' experiences in Manhattan as the NYPD used barricades, horse charges, and pepper spray to cleave the march in two.
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(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Ilustration Zen
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DATE: 10/09/2004 11:13:57 AM
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justin degarmo
yoko ikeno
jules arthur
tom wilson
tara mcpherson
attaboy
luke chueh
ray caesar
Image: "Insignificant Other" (detail), Justin DeGarmo.
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank). And while we're at it: a special sponsor shout-out to the illomonsters at Mondolithic.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Now! Buy some wood on the Internets! Cheap!
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DATE: 10/09/2004 11:17:51 AM
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Some eBay jokesters claim to be auctioning off a piece of wood used by George Bush as a prop during last night's presidentiary debate. I had a really bad flu bug this week, and must have been conked out cold by the time this moment happened. But, um, wow. I'm not sure which is weirder, the notion of a 2 x 4 being used as a debate prop (literally or figuratively), or the eBay listing purportedly hawking said prop. I did, however, catch the moment when Bush said "I hear there is a rumor on the Internets" about a pending military draft. Wake me up when it's all over, will you? All hail Photoshop. Link (Thanks, Maggie, image via somethingawful)
Party pooper and BoingBoing reader Hudson points us to the *actual* story behind the "wood" reference in last night's debate. Link to unphotoshopped image. Here's the debate snip:
Kerry: The president got $84 from a timber company that owns, and he's counted as a small business. Dick Cheney's counted as a small business. That's how they do things. That's just not right.
Bush: I own a timber company? That's news to me. Want to buy some wood?
Factcheck.org says Bush lied: "In fact, according to his 2003 financial disclosure form, Bush does own part interest in 'LSTF, LLC', a limited-liability company organized 'for the purpose of the production of trees for commercial sales.'" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gillmor talks "We the Media" on the WELL
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DATE: 10/09/2004 11:41:00 AM
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Dan Gillmor is being publicly interviewed on the WELL about his fantasic "Journalism 3.0" manifesto, We the Media. All comers welcome.
OhmyNews is one of the most important new-media experiments anywhere
in the world. It was the right publication at the right time.
I do discuss some work outside the U.S., though the book is based more
on what's happening here than elsewhere. It turns out that I have a
longish section about OhmyNews, as I visited them about 18 months ago
while researching the book. I was dazzled by what I saw.
OhmyNews was launched in a place that was already well-wired for the
Net. The news environment was ideal, in a sense, for a genuine
opposition publication -- because three big newspapers had about 80
percent of the market share. Korea was at the cusp of political
changes, and the reform-oriented candidate was a great vehicle for
OhmyNews, which clearly helped elect him.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: When he's 64
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DATE: 10/09/2004 12:11:48 PM
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Happy Birthday. We miss you.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mac SE/30 media server mod
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DATE: 10/09/2004 12:45:42 PM
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Iain Sharp transformed his c.1989 Mac SE/30 into a Windows 2000 media server. From Leander Kahney's Wired News article on the heavy-duty hack:
The Mac-ITX is connected to Sharp's TV and stereo, and functions as his DVD player. It runs Windows 2000, and uses Windows Media Player, WinDVD, iTunes and Real Player. Sharp's concoction also features a 40-GB hard drive, slot-loading DVD/CD burner/player, video out (S-video and composite) and USB 2.0 and Firewire ports. It all works by remote control.
"With it all crammed together it works like a dream," he reports.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Presidential debate audio torrent
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DATE: 10/10/2004 01:10:29 AM
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Torrentocracy has the second Presidential debate audio up as a .torrent on the Internets -- join the mesh, feel the love.
Link
(Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Play-Doh Tiki
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DATE: 10/10/2004 01:15:07 AM
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Check out Doh-Doh Island, the Play-Doh Tiki set!
Link
(Thanks, Morgan!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Chris Ware
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DATE: 10/10/2004 09:56:19 AM
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Yale University Press just published a monograph of amazing cartoonist Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The new book was written by Daniel Raeburn, publisher of the comix crit zine The Imp.
"Daniel Raeburn looks closely at Ware’s career, work methods, and graphic innovations, which include pullout, flip-up, and three-dimensional insertions, along with cut-out-and-assemble-paper projects that require construction by readers. Based on many hours of interviews with the artist, Raeburn offers fascinating insights into the connections between Jimmy Corrigan’s biography and that of his creator. In addition, the book encompasses Ware’s many other works and examines his place in the world of literature, graphic art, and popular culture."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory speaking tomorrow night in Edinburgh
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DATE: 10/11/2004 03:40:27 AM
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Cory's giving a talk at the University of Edinburgh Law Faculty tomorrow (Tuesday) night, called "Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rooms to Make the Web Illegal, and You're Not Invited." Here's the details, hope to see you there!
What: Public lecture on copyright, "Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rooms to Make the Web Illegal, and You're Not Invited."
Where: University of Edinburgh Old College, Law Faculty, Lecture Theatre 175. It's #10 on this map. There's a reception afterwards in the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre, which is right next door.
When: Tuesday, 12 October, 2004, 6PM.
Hope to see you there!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Independent Games Festival
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DATE: 10/11/2004 08:21:07 AM
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BoingBoing reader Radek Koncewicz says,
"The 2005 Independent Games Festival is here, and the full list of entries includes some pretty well designed and innovative titles. My favourite so far is Gish, a physics-based 2D side-scroller from the guys who brought you Bridge It and Pontifex. Link to the awesome Gish trailer.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Biomimetic Bots
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DATE: 10/11/2004 08:30:05 AM
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The IEEE Computer Society's magazine, Computer, has a nice overview of robots that take design or engineering cues from nature.
Mark Cutkosky, a professor in Stanford University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, is part of a team working on a family of legged robots based on cockroach locomotion. He says their team defines biomimetics as "extracting principles from biology and applying them to man-made devices—particularly robots."
Cutkosky says two forces are driving the "new wave" of robotics. First, biological research has exposed a huge amount of biological process data that roboticists can apply to their work. Second, advances in low-cost, power-efficient computing systems allow researchers to create robots that work outside laboratories. Cutkosky says that roboticists can "really put some of the lessons we're learning from biology to practice. Ten years ago, even if I had understood exactly what materials and mechanical principles underlie the cockroach's robust dynamic locomotion, I would have been unable to build a robot that embodied them."
Link (via Slashdot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Newsweek's interactive voter guide
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DATE: 10/11/2004 08:35:53 AM
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Brian Braiker and the folks at Newsweek have created a fantastic online feature -- kind of like an "electoral college for dummies" app.
NEWSWEEK has compiled a state-by-state guide of what to watch for in the coming weeks. Click on your state to see how it voted in 2000 and what the key factors are in the remaining days before Nov. 2. And remember: Just because any given state may appear guaranteed to vote for one candidate over the other, that’s no excuse not to go out and pull the lever (or touch the screen) on election day—especially when you consider the many close races for the Senate, where the Republicans currently hold a precarious one-seat majority. If 2000 taught the electorate anything, it’s that every vote counts.
Link. Dig that UI.
BoingBoing reader John adds, "While electoral-vote.com doesn't describe the environment of each state as well, the site updates the probable outcome of the election daily based on polls. It provides all sorts or graphs and spreadsheets as well. It's got a nice, non-flash, interface to boot. Link. "
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: World's largest stinky flower in QTVR panorama
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DATE: 10/11/2004 08:53:03 AM
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A Quicktime panorama of the world's largest flower, known as the "corpse flower" because of the righteously rank stench it emits. Photographer, blogger, and QTVR enthusiast Peter says, There were queues of hundreds to see yesterday when I took this pano in the in Sydney Botanic Gardens." Link , and more about the flower with some time-lapse videos here: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites Iraq Blog: Interview with Ayad Allawi
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DATE: 10/11/2004 09:09:32 AM
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On his weblog today, NBC News combat correspondent Kevin Sites interviews Iraq Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.
Like him or not--Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's determination is as indisputable as his temper.
Prior to our interview he shakes with his left hand--his right injured from banging it against a mahogany desk. But at the moment he is calm and focused.
And like the different sides of his personality-- in two separate speeches recently he painted very different pictures of Iraq.
To the U.S. Congress in Washington he said his government was winning the war against the insurgents, but to his own interim assembly here, he said the nation faces some very grave challenges. I sat down with Dr.Allawi, in a one-on-one interview to discuss, among other things, which is the real Iraq?
Link, and link to related discussion forum.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: America's largest broadcast group to air anti-Kerry primetime smear
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DATE: 10/11/2004 09:25:52 AM
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Your airwaves at work: Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the largest chain of television stations in the USA, plans to broadcast a documentary accusing John Kerry of having betrayed American POWs in Vietnam.
According to WashingtonPost.com, Hunt Valley, Md.-based Sinclair has ordered its 62 stations, some of which are in the swing states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin, to show "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal" during prime-time hours next week. The Sinclair station group extends to 24 percent of U.S. television households.
Link, and more on why this is such a total douchebag stunt so unusual on Romanesko: Link (Thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mark Cuban drops 100 $Gs on the EFF
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DATE: 10/11/2004 10:26:43 AM
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Tech advocate and infamously loudmouthed Dallas Mavs owner Mark Cuban donates a heap of bling to the EFF:
Cuban, who has been fined more than $1 million by the NBA since buying the team in January 2001, already has matched the fine by donating $100,000 to the eff.org foundation which, he said is putting money toward fighting the Induce Act, which, Cuban said, could cost a million-plus jobs in the technology industry
Link (Thanks, Jason)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Star Wars Kid cameo in Tony Hawk game
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DATE: 10/11/2004 10:28:06 AM
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There's an Easter Egg in Tony Hawk Underground 2 that causes the Star Wars Kid to appear, twirling and sparring with his imaginary light-saber-staff. Follow the link for video and details
"On the Boston level if you ollie through the glass windows on one of the buildings (it's one or two to the left of the one where Ben Franklin is hiding) you land in a living room with a flat panel tv on the wall. If you stand in front of the TV Ghyslain gets up and shouts something about watching Star Wars (which you're now preventing). Hitting O (on the PS2) will result in him showing off his moves."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Fighting Perverts
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DATE: 10/11/2004 10:31:07 AM
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Fleshbot says:
Speaking of geeks and skin, our twitching, bloodshot-eye'd colleague at Screenhead found a whole English-language site devoted to the Japanese Power Ranger Porn DVD we spotted a clip from last year and have been dying to see more of ever since: "'The Fighting Perverts' is a hilarious Japanese adult movie chronicling a team of heroes who fight to rid the world of evil naked women who wear ski masks ... Clearly, this is the stuff of legends." The DVD is now out of print and difficult to find, but don't despair: the site has a discussion board and information on tracking down a copy if you're as anxious to see the rest of it as we are.
Link to "The Fighting Perverts": Japanese Power Ranger Porn, Link to more details on Fleshbot.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of couture zen
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DATE: 10/11/2004 10:31:10 AM
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Future shock is in my shoes. Designer Alexander McQueen's 2005 pret-a-porter collection for women (and, presumably, female androids).
Link -- don't miss the detail shots. (Thanks, Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pulling the wings off your Sims
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DATE: 10/11/2004 10:31:39 AM
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Great account of a The Sims player who put her little people in a little box, removed the doors and windows, and tortured them into incontinence, then death.
I start out by creating a random couple. I build them a little
room, seen below, with a door. One they've both walked in to check their "home" out, I get rid of the door. As you can see, the room contains the following:
* A ghetto chair
* A fireplace
* A clown painting
Because there's only one chair, directly opposite the clown
painting, which Mr. Victim immediately takes, Mrs. Victim quickly becomes annoyed. They have no light, no bathroom, and no food source.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lemony Snicket #11
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DATE: 10/11/2004 10:52:20 AM
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II just finished reading The Grim Grotto, the eleventh volume in Lemony Snicket's
Series of Unfortunate Events series. I remember being intrigued by these when they first appeared; the kids' book buyer at the bookstore I used to work at was all aglow over their dry wit and dark whimsy; even so, it was some years before I finally got round to reading hte first eight or nine books in the series, and I was quite excited when book ten came out last year, as I thought it would end things. It didn't -- the series has been drawn out through book 11 and book 12, and who knows how many more.
That was a bit of a disappointment. Somewhere around book seven, the series started to flag for me. The themes were a little tired, the character development had stalled, and the I just wanted the mystery to be resolved.
But with the Grim Grotto, the series revives admirably. The basic plot of the Unfortunate Events books is that the Baudelaire children (Sunny, a baby with a sharp tooth; Violet, a virtuoso inventor; and Klaus, a shrewd researcher) are orphaned when their house burns down. They are put into the custody of Count Olaf, a sinister villain who is plotting to steal their inheritance. After making their escape from Olaf, they endure a series of negligent and dangerous custodianships, chases, servitude and escapes, as they investigate the murder of their parents and the nature of the organization their parents belonged to, the V.F.D..
The books are full of adventure and intrigue that will doubtless engross little readers and with sophisticated humor and wordplay that will sail over their heads and into the astonished gobs of their grownups.
Grim Grotto features a really marvellous little morality play about villainy, in which one of the series's enigmatic villains is humanized, and in which moral ambiguity is put front-and-center; a real rarity in kids' lit.
These little, beautifully made hardcovers are only $10 or $11 each, and they can each be devoured in a couple hours flat. This is the kind of book I loved when I was, oh, 10-15; and it's the kind of book I love reading today, too.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in Portuguese
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DATE: 10/11/2004 11:02:13 AM
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Rui Soares (mailto) has translated my DRM talk into European Portuguese; a nice counterpoint to the Brazilian Portuguese version that Börje Karlsson did.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Joi Ito nominated to join ICANN board
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DATE: 10/11/2004 11:06:51 AM
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Joi Ito says:
I've just been nominated to the board of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) and will be officially joining already seated members at the conclusion of the ICANN Meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, December 1 - 5.
This is the end of a two or so year process of people telling me I should get involved and others warning me against it. Some of my wisest advisors urged me not to join saying things like, "you will make 3 mistakes in your life... this is one of them..." or "friends don't let friends do ICANN."
ICANN has its share of problems and a negative image associated with it in many circles. I've even taken my fare share of cheap shots at ICANN.
I am joining ICANN for two reasons. ICANN is changing and it's critical that ICANN is successful.
Link to ICANN announcement, Link to more on Joi's blog.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Undersea telesurgery
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DATE: 10/11/2004 11:07:28 AM
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Tomorrow, NASA will run an undersea telesurgery experiment at the Aquarius laboratory 19 meters down in Key Largo, Florida. The robot surgeon, operating on a dummy patient, will be controlled remotely by a physician in Canada. The aim is to explore how astronauts aboard the International Space Station could go under the knife in case of emergency. From a New Scientist report:
“The Aquarius is a very good analogue for the space station,” says (surgeon Tim) Broderick. Just as in space, he says, it can take time to get a patient back to solid ground when they need emergency surgery underwater. “They have to decompress for a day before they can come up,” he says.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sears Kit Houses
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DATE: 10/11/2004 01:53:20 PM
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Michael H. sez: "I was talking to a friend the other day who's in construction and he mentioned a Sears & Roebuck kit home from the 1920's that's being remodeled. So I ventured out to see it before the remodel and this is what I found: An Osborne. And much, much more." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: CNN - Bush Aides Deny Internet Rumors He Was Wired
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DATE: 10/11/2004 01:56:47 PM
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Robn sez: "As you previously blogged about Bush being wired (and the probable hoax that caused it) I thought you might like to see that apparently not only will it pay out, but now a mainstream media outlet has picked it up as well!" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Don Simpson on R. Crumb art opening
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DATE: 10/11/2004 02:02:29 PM
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Don Simpson of Fiasco Comics sent out a satirical account of a Robert Crumb art opening.
Crumb Eludes Art Lovers, True Fans In Pittsburgh
Subject of a retrospective at the 54th Carnegie International, R. Crumb
and his entourage blew into Pittsburgh long enough only to put in some
face time at a $500-per-plate Friday night gala. There, perplexed
white-haired dowager-patronesses gawked and pointed, as professional art
buyers advised them on adding a priceless Crumb to their collections.
After nibbling at the rack of lamb and downing several glasses of costly
champagne in succession, the aging cartoonist abruptly took his leave,
pausing only long enough to examine the gigantic display of his licensed
products that had pushed aside the Picasso postcards in the museum gift
shop. Lawyers stood by, taking notes as the underground cartoonists
apparently nitpicked the presentation for several minutes, before
rushing out the door. Autograph seekers who had waited outside in the
rain for hours were shunted aside by thuggish bodyguards as Mr. Crumb
was whisked into a stretch limo. There, his escorts -- three young call
girls decked out in Milanese haute couture -- obediently awaited,
another bottle of champagne chilling on ice. Then, off to Crumb's
private jet, which was revved up and waiting on the tarmac. Gala
attenders reported the 61-year old appeared "spry."
Members of the unofficial United Cartoon Workers Local No. 17 of Western
Pennsylvania still maintained hope as the evening wore on that their
hero would drop by the South Side pizza party they had thrown in his
honor. But by midnight, word had spread that Crumb was already "wheels
up" and flying over the Atlantic. Many sat dejectedly under the drooping
banner that read "Pittsburgh Cartoonists and Flood Victims Welcome R.
Crumb." Others sketched mindlessly on the placemats amid pizza crusts
and cold pierogies, in emulation of their cartooning hero, hoping
against hope that he still might show. "Crumb is the reason I became a
cartoonist," confessed one now-middle aged man, fighting back tears. "We
thought it would be nice to show him our love, you know, give a little
something back. I mean, we can only afford paper plates on our budget,
but I really thought he might appreciate the gesture. But he never
responded to our invite. And apparently he switched hotels on us. Some
kind of security measure."
Others in the crowd of fans and well-wishers were more hostile. "Man of
the People, my ass! Crumb's best work is twenty years behind him," said
a young heavily-pierced and tattooed cartoonist from Munhall. "I'm going
home and burning every freaking Crumb comic I own!" Another local
freelance illustrator wearing a tomato-sauce stained "Devil Girl"
T-shirt said, "Boy, I've known people who got a bit of success and
pulled up the ladder, but I never expected it from the guy who drew
'Motor City Comics'! I guess people change." Still others were more
philosophical. "I've waited my whole life to meet R. Crumb, and this was
probably as close as I'll come. I blame it on his handlers. He's just
got layers and layers of people now, and they have their agenda. But I
prefer to remember the struggling cartoonist with his sketchbook walking
alone on the streets of Cleveland--not the remote, branded commodity who
lives in France and flies around the world on the New Yorker expense
account."
"Didn't he draw the Freak Brothers?" another fan wondered aloud.
The Crumb retrospective features 124 pieces of original art and will be
on display until March 20, 2005.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Vinyl Junkies book review
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DATE: 10/11/2004 02:03:57 PM
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Paste Magazine reviews Brett Milano's Vinyl Junkies, which profiles obsessive record album collectors.
"Every guy with a record collection and a girlfriend should read Brett
Milano's Vinyl Junkies with her as relationship therapy. The book follows
die-hard collectors from different walks of life-from R. Crumb's country and
blues 78s to several vinyl addicts in Milano's native Boston, where he
writes for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald. The book presents an
engaging look at a diverse subculture-from the rabid nerd completists to the
musicians and industry types you would expect to have a serious relationship
with their records (including R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Sonic Youth's Thurston
Moore). But Milano also writes about "normal" people with jobs and
relationships and whose fashion choices range outside jeans and obscure punk
T-shirts."
Link (Via The Mondo Bongos Homepage)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why Paypal rules
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DATE: 10/11/2004 02:04:47 PM
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Matt Haughey has a good rant on why, from a buyer's standpoint, Paypal is a great way to buy things online.
I'm lazy. If I want to buy one of your custom shirts off your site using paypal, it's about three clicks and a quick login that my browser already knows. It goes like this: 1) I want it! 2) hit checkout 3) login and 4) paid! It doesn't matter if I have money in paypal or if it just gets pulled from my credit card on file, it's still just a few clicks and I'll have a shirt in tomorrow's mail.
When I hit a full-on shopping cart payment system, I see forms and forms mean tedious work, and I know I have to dump my credit card into yet another database that I blindly trust won't get compromised anytime soon, but mostly it's the work involved that diminishes my impulse buy.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Man on the Land: a UPA industrial movie from 1951
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DATE: 10/11/2004 02:07:47 PM
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Cartoon Brew has a post about a UPA cartoon from 1951, called "Man on the Land," made for the American Petroleum Institute. UPA is the studio responsible for Gerald McBoingBoing and Mr. Magoo. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I Goatse'd Ron Jeremy
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DATE: 10/11/2004 08:31:25 PM
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The Internets at their best! Porn legend Ron Jeremy gets his first glimpse of Goatse at a porn convention, thanks to a fellow named Laszlo with a deeply geeky sense of humor -- and a Sidekick handheld. The 240x160 color screen may not be capable of rendering Goatse "in his full splendor," says Laszlo, but it's damn sure "more than enough to realize what you're looking at." Snip:
[Ron Jeremy] picked up the sidekick upside-down, then turned it right-side up and took a few seconds to realize what he was looking at. He didn't express any serious shock or alarm but it did seem to be a genuine first-goatse viewing of the previously unfamiliar. "That's just some guy holding his asshole open, right?" He laughed a little and I think he was mugging a little for the camera when he saw me taking pictures (especially in the 7th image below). Then he laughed and showed the guy behind him and the other girls at the booth."
link to tell-all blog post. Qu'est-ce que c'est que le goatse? Link to worksafe Wikipedia explanation.
(thanks, Ken! thanks for the Internets, Bill! Thanks Cyrus!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cryptome gallery of Bush Bulge pics
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DATE: 10/12/2004 07:58:38 AM
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Cryptome has a gallery of images that relate to the question of whether or not the President has a cochlear implant with Karl Rove on the other end telling him what to do. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Boy-Girl / Boy-Boy / Girl-Girl duvets
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DATE: 10/12/2004 08:06:20 AM
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Fitzsu sells duvet covers and pillow shams with bathroom-door style silhouettes of boys and girls on them. Match your duvet to suit your lifestyle (boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl) or your single status (solo boy, solo girl). Polyamorous home decorators will note that not every lifestyle is included -- unfortunately, there's no boy-girl-girl-girl edition. Link (via funfurde)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To Philly, From Alaska, with love
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DATE: 10/12/2004 08:16:34 AM
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BoingBoing reader David Miller is a schoolteacher who recently made an unusual decision. He left his job of four years teaching at an inner-city school in Philadelphia to move to the most isolated place in the US. David now teaches grade school kids in an indigenous community in Tuntutuliak, Alaska. He's launched a blog where he chronicles daily life in this very different place. David says,
This entry is about what struck me in the first week- stuff like toilets draining into a pond next to my house, the toilet the burns my poop, that there are no roads in town, stuff like that -- Link.
And this entry is about the first comercial venture in the village and the trash that comes with it. (I may expand on it with pictures soon): Link.
Image: Today I took my class outside to search for bugs for a science project. Another difference between here and Philly: you can take your class out of the building without worrying about permission slips, and more importantly, without worrying about anyone getting lost (or going AWOL). Link
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blimp networks guard US troops
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DATE: 10/12/2004 08:22:39 AM
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Army officials are using unmanned blimps geared up with networked sensors to monitor and protect troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The towers and unmanned blimps, called aerostats, worked so well at detecting and identifying enemy forces and objects that Defense Department officials want to buy more of them. "We wouldn't have gotten the funding if it wasn't successful," said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, director of Army systems management in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology. Sorsenson spoke Oct. 7 at a Pentagon media briefing.
Army officials obtained $38 million in fiscal 2004 for 22 towers and aerostats for surveillance use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 84-foot-towers and 15-meter aerostats use the Rapid Aerostat Initial Deployment (RAID) system to monitor the perimeter of the service's bases there, said Col. Kurt Heine, project manager of the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor, whose program oversees the force protection effort.
The RAID system consists of towers, aerostats, sensors and an operations center. The towers and aerostats carry an electro-optical and infrared sensor that detects enemy forces and objects at day or night. The sensors obtain the images then transmit them via a radio frequency to an operations center, which sends them via a network to warfighters and analysts for review and action, Heine said.
Link to Federal Computer Week story.
And BoingBoing reader Allan Janus says,
We had an Army airship flying around the Washington DC area, testing RAID, a couple of weeks ago - I even got into trouble taking pictures of it while on the US Capitol grounds. By the way, an aerostat is a tethered balloon - they may be blimp-shaped so they're stable in the wind, though.
Richard Thompson, a cartoonist for the Washington Post, had a wonderful cartoon on the blimp - I have it on my website, since the Post doesn't put his drawings online: Link. I also posted some of my photos of the blimp, and the sorry story of my encounter with the Feds - it's at 29 September: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of Autoasphyxiation Space Couture Zen
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DATE: 10/12/2004 08:27:50 AM
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Out of the fetish websites and into the streets. Spring 2005 Ready-to-Wear collection from fashion designers
Viktor & Rolf. Link, and don't miss the detail shots. (Thanks, Susannah "Invisible Cowgirl" Breslin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites Iraq Blog: Layla
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DATE: 10/12/2004 08:41:35 AM
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From Iraq, NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites writes on his blog:
Friends Michael and Cynthia Perry from Los Angeles gave me this Hawaiian dashboard diva (pictured here on my Baghdad balcony) as an early birthday present when they learned I'd be returning to Iraq for a long tour of duty. I've dubbed the bobbling-hipped, ceramic babe Layla Ukulele--and promised them I'd take a picture of her swaying on the dashboard of a humvee in Iraq.
It also got me thinking, that like the globetrotting Gallic gnomes in the French film "Amelie," Layla would probably like to tour as much possible. After all, being an inanimate object, what's she got to lose? I guess we'll see after she's traveled with me for the next four months, meeting new friends and maybe… even some not-so-friendlies.
Drop me a line and let me know where in Iraq or with whom--you'd like to see Layla swivel for next. As usual, I promise nothing--but perhaps Layla could visit one of your deployed loved ones here in the birthplace of civilization.
Link, and post your Layla snapshot requests here: Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wireless purple pill
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The aptly-named "Jonah" pill contains a wireless temperature sensor to remotely monitor your vital signs. The pill is part of the VitalSense physiological monitoring system designed by the Mini Mitter Company in collaboration with the US Army.
"VitalSense proved to be a real lifesaver in a recent study of wildland firefighters in Montana. The study was designed to evaluate heat stress in high intensity work environments. Canadian coaches used VitalSense to evaluate the physiological status of Canadian triathletes training for all three legs (swimming, biking and running) of their event in the 2004 summer Olympics. In another athletic related study, Nike® is using VitalSense to test heat dissipation in clothing."
Link (via Wireless-Doc)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: VeinCam
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DATE: 10/12/2004 09:15:09 AM
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A new system that projects an image of a patient's veins onto their skin will soon be tested in a US hospital. Finding veins for injections and IVs can be a hassle, but the system captures a real-time near-infrared image of the patient's veins and displays the enhanced picture on the patient's body. From New Scientist:
The tricky part is making sure the image of the veins is projected in exactly the right place. Get this wrong, and the system becomes worse than useless. The key is device called a “hot mirror”, which is transparent to visible light but reflects infrared (hot) wavelengths.
The video projector and camera are set at 90 degrees to each other facing the mirror, which is set at 45 degrees to both of them. After calibration, this ensures that a vein always appears within 0.06 millimetres of its correct position...
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cultured Couture
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DATE: 10/12/2004 09:33:18 AM
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This tiny jacket was grown in vitro from a combination of mouse and human cells. Wired News reports on the University of Western Australia's Tissue Culture & Art Project:
"One of the most common and somewhat surprising comments we heard was that people were disturbed by our ethics of using living cells to grow living fabric," said (Ionat) Zurr, "while the use of leather obtained from animals seems to be accepted without any concern for the well-being of the animals from which the skin has been removed."
The group is now collaborating with extreme body artists Orlan and Stelarc on semi-living clothing and prosthetics.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Paleoporno
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DATE: 10/12/2004 09:46:44 AM
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Online image gallery of primordial eroticism scrawled on cave walls and etched in boulders. Unlike porn sites, archeological sites tend to be free of pop-up ads.
Image: stone engraving, Africa. Link (Thanks, Bruce).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Leisurama home from 1959
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DATE: 10/12/2004 10:12:43 AM
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Here's a page about an upcoming documentary about the Raymond Loewy-designed Leisurama prototype home from the '50s.
Nikita [Khrushchev] pointed at the kitchen in an American display behind him, and
made it clear to Nixon that he was not going to be made a fool of;
"Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it
down? Many things you've shown us are interesting but they are not
needed in life... We have a saying, if you have bedbugs you have to
catch one and pour boiling water into the ear."
Nixon responded by saying, "What we want to do is make easier the life
of our housewives."
Link (Thanks Kyle!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Seedling found growing in man's navel
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DATE: 10/12/2004 10:29:40 AM
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This guy has taken pictures of a plant he discovered growing in his belly button. I don't know if I believe it, but the photos are nice.
Last September I went alone on a canoe trip. On the very first day my canoe turned over in a rapid and I lost some of my equipment in the water. Fortunately, I managed to save my camping gear and my food. But I lost all my spare clothes. So I knew I would have to wear the same outfit for the rest of the trip.
Six days later, I was finally back home. The first thing I wanted to do was to change clothes and take a shower. But when I took off my sweater, to my amazement, I could see something sticking out of my belly button! I couldn’t believe it: something was growing in there!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kim Thompson responds to R. Crumb article
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DATE: 10/12/2004 11:35:11 AM
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Kim Thompson, co-founder of my favorite publishing company in the world, Fantagraphics, responded to Don Simpson's article about Robert Crumb's art opening in Pittsburgh, posted here on Boing Boing.
The day Don Simpson contributes one tenth of one percent to the world of comics what Robert Crumb has done (and continues to do) is the day one might -- MIGHT -- be tempted to take seriously rants like the ones Don's been hammering away at here.
Crumb is a private, quiet man whose prominence in the field of comics and art brings on massive, continuous, unwanted attention. He is under no goddamn obligation whatsoever to sign anyone's comics or chat with anyone, and which of his personal friends he chooses to see when and for how long is, emphatically, no one's goddamn business but his own. (Good grief!)
In fact, I would say that Don's supersonically shrill, nearly psychotic sense of entitlement vis-à-vis Crumb (carefully couched in sympathy for Crumb's jilted fans, although it's clear Simpson has just as much contempt for them as for Crumb) could be used as Exhibit A justifying Crumb's reticence.
In other words: Robert Crumb probably acts the way he does in large part to avoid assholes like Donald Simpson.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jim Woodring profile on STRANGEco
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Here's a profile of the fantastically-talented cartoonist Jim Woodring.
In 1999, Jim was commissioned to draw a picture of a hodag, a character from American folklore whose pseudo-scientific description is Bovinus spiritualis— a clawed, grinning ox-like creature of fearsome appearance that frequented Wisconsin and eastern parts of the United States. According to Eugene Shephard, the forester who in 1893 got the first prolonged look and whiff of the creature, the hodag had the "head of a bull, the grinning face of a giant man, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with a spear at the end." The beast subsisted on a diet of swamp things, but was known to occasionally snack on wayward lumberjacks and other unfortunates. It was also said to possess "the transmigrated soul of one of Paul Bunyan's oxen," and more obviously, a very obnoxious odor. So obnoxious that it took residents of Oneida County seven years of forest burning to purge the stink.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Network Solutions totally bones Gawker Media
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DATE: 10/12/2004 11:43:25 AM
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Today, Nick Denton's mood-ometer probably does not read "color me peachy."
Networks Solutions is fucking up my livelihood. You may have noticed that some of the other Gawker sites are having problems -- weird name resolution, ad server going wonky, etc. Well it seems that Network Solutions (our internet name registrar) has decided to cancel and suspend our primary, life-giving domain Gawker.com because of a failed credit card transaction over a month ago. Not a missed payment, mind you -- we were registering a new name domain name and something went screwy (Choire probably left it on a dresser again), although their customer service never contacted us about it. In fact, we've registered two other names with them since, without issue.
So when I woke up this morning, I didn't expect to see that Gawker.com would be suspended, nor was I happy to learn that the renewal process, according to NetSol's Indian customer service rep Patricia 011, would take four days. We are now, as a company, bleeding money from our eyes because a single, unrelated credit card transaction failed. So keep that in mind if are using Network Solutions. They reserve the right to disable any of your domains if there is any random issue with your account, then drag their feet to remedy their fuck up. In the mean time, if you need to get to Gawker.com, the IP is http://67.18.39.132/. We'll get this resolved (oh ho ho) as soon as possible.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sumatran yeti search continues
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DATE: 10/12/2004 12:30:00 PM
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Scott sez: "This article is an interesting article on the Sumatran Yeti that these scientists are trying to find. They seem to be getting closer, and have discovered hair samples, which can not be identified with any known species. The ape-ish looking animal walks erect and looks very missing link-ish - or like my wife's previous boyfriend before she married me, whichever you prefer." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dear Prudence doles out MMORPG romance advice
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DATE: 10/12/2004 02:00:34 PM
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Slate's "Dear Prudence" personal advice column tackles an MMORPG relationship question this week. Perhaps the first time such geekly guidance has appeared in a major advice column? Link (Thanks, John)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Death in the dollhouse
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DATE: 10/12/2004 02:22:38 PM
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In the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee constructed incredibly-detailed and spooky crime scenes in dollhouses to teach forensics to a homicide investigation seminar. The founder of Harvard's Department of Legal Medicine, Lee was named an honorary captain of the New Hampshire state police. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is a book collecting Corrine May Botz's fantastic photographs of Lee's macabre miniatures.
Link to an online gallery of Botz's photos
Link to last week's NYT article about Lee
Link to the book on Amazon
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Law enforcement memo of "imminent" terror attack?
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DATE: 10/12/2004 03:57:30 PM
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Sean Bonner blogs, "I have a friend with a job that makes certain Police Department memos things he needs to take note of. This is the one he got this morning. I've known this person for a very long time and I'm vouching for it's authenticity:"
Subject: FW: Terrorist Attack on US Soil is Imminent Importance: High
LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE
At the meeting of the Southern District of the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council (ATAC) that was held yesterday in Houston, US Attorney Michael Shelby informed the group that a terrorist attack of 09/11/01 proportions was going to be carried out on US soil within the next 6 weeks.
Mr. Shelby stated that on 09/13/04, US Attorney General John Ashcroft had a conference call with all 93 US Attorneys, an event which is extremely rare. The US Attorneys were informed that without a doubt an attack was going to be perpetrated in the US within the next 6 weeks, prior to the elections. Mr. Shelby urgently requested that all law enforcement be aware of any situation that may be out of the ordinary and report the activity immediately. Mr. Shelby also requested that we get the word out to patrol officers and detectives to talk to their informants and report anything odd or remotely suspicious. Mr. Shelby ended this warning by saying that unless we get a bit of "luck" and the attack can be detected and prevented, that another attack of 9/11 scale will be carried out.
Please disseminate to all of your law enforcement contacts ASAP.
New Mexico Investigative Support Center
Direct Line: 505-541-7000
Fax: 505-541-7006
John E. Vinson, Director
Link to Sean's blog post.
Mike Outmesguine says, "I called the number at the bottom of the email and told them I'd seen this notice, and wanted to find out more about the source of the warning. A representative from the New Mexico ISC told me that they forwarded the notice along after having recieved it from the Southern District Anti-Terror Advisory Council in Houston. They gave me a contact at that organization, whom I phoned, but I only got voicemail. I've also contacted the public affairs department of my local FBI office. My question is if it is a regional notice for TX and NM, or if it's something much bigger and LA and other areas will be advised to go on notice."
And in related news, CNN reports:
A Democratic senator said he will close his Capitol Hill office until after the November 2 election, fearing a possible terrorist attack that could harm his staff or visitors.
Sen. Mark Dayton of Minnesota issued a statement Tuesday, citing a "top-secret intelligence report on our national security" provided to congressional members by Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee "Based upon that information," Dayton wrote, "I have decided to close my office in the Russell Senate Office Building until after the upcoming election.
Link
See also this earlier Cryptome post on a September memo warning of terror attacks, with links to earlier news coverage: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ashcroft declares "most aggressive assault" on piracy in US history
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DATE: 10/12/2004 04:35:12 PM
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At a press conference in Los Angeles today, Atttorney General John Ashcroft announced an expansion of Department of Justice powers to combat intellectual property theft. Some say the approach appears to be modeled after the war on drugs.
The U.S. Justice Department recommended a sweeping transformation of the nation's intellectual property laws, saying peer-to-peer piracy is a "widespread" problem that can be addressed only through more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors.
In an extensive report released Tuesday, senior department officials endorsed a pair of controversial copyright bills strongly favored by the entertainment industry that would criminalize "passive sharing" on file-swapping networks and permit lawsuits against companies that sell products that "induce" copyright infringement.
Link to Declan's News.com story, Link to DoJ press release, Link to the lengthy report issued today by the DoJ's Task Force on Intellectual Property (PDF). More coverage at the LA Times: Link 1, Link 2
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Entertainment companies bent on wholesale slaughter of Betamax, puppies
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DATE: 10/13/2004 04:29:16 AM
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My colleague Fred von Lohmann is the brilliant IP attorney who kicked the RIAA/MPAA's ass in the Grokster case, legalizing P2P networks. The entertainment companies have asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling, effectively seeking to overturn "Betamax," the doctrine that says that it's legal to make general-purpose tools, even if some of your customers do naughty things with them. Fred's written a blistering op-ed about this on the EFF site:
First, the entertainment industry is plainly mounting a frontal attack on the Betamax doctrine, seeking a radical rewrite of secondary liability principles.
Often described as the Magna Carta of the technology industry, the Betamax doctrine makes it clear that innovators need not fear ruinous litigation from the entertainment industry so long as their inventions are "merely capable of substantial noninfringing uses." In today's petition, the entertainment industry urges the Court to reverse that established rule and impose on innovators a "legal duty either to have designed their services differently to prevent infringing uses, or to take reasonable steps going forward to do so." Of course, on that view, Sony's Betamax VCR would never have seen the light of day, since Sony could have designed it differently (in fact, the movie studios suggested back in 1978 that Sony implement a "broadcast flag" system!) or modified it after Disney complained.
Second, the entertainment industry appears to think that it can treat the Supreme Court and Congress interchangeably in pushing for its preferred re-write of copyright law.
Having just been rebuffed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Induce Act, the entertainment oligopolists now demand that the Supreme Court rewrite the Copyright Act for them. The entertainment industry lawyers think this case is about how "principles of secondary liability apply to the unprecedented phenomenon of Internet services."
Link
(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Settling grammar disputes with spam
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DATE: 10/13/2004 04:29:25 AM
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A group of English teachers in Hong Kong have a dispute with a standard grammar text. To settle it, they've sent out spam to millions of Internet users asking for opinions on correct English usage. Seth has written a long, thoughtful answer to their question:
I've gotten a couple of spam messages in the past month from some English teachers in Hong Kong. They're asking for people in the West to help back them up on a point about English grammar. Apparently, English grammar books available in Hong Kong misrepresent the rule about when you should use the present perfect and when you should use the simple past. The teachers sending the spam know the rule, but their students seem to consider the textbooks better authority than the teachers -- and won't listen when the teachers try to teach the correct rule. So the teachers decided to send out a spam appeal for native English speakers to try to get the correct rule into a publication so it would be persuasive to Hong Kong students learning English as a second language.
In my view, the present perfect is forbidden when the verb is qualified by an adverbial referring to a time period, except if the time period includes the present.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Eastern Standard Tribe coming true?
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DATE: 10/13/2004 04:30:03 AM
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Part of my novel Eastern Standard Tribe was reprinted today in Vodaphone's Receiver magazine. The timing is great, because it comes just as a group of "radio pirates" in the US are making part of it come true:
Lynch, 31, is one of a handful of iPod owners using the device to transmit FM radio stations from their car. He uses a bumper sticker on the back of his fender that reads "iPod @ 89.1 FM" to let passers-by know how to tune in...
"I put on some profanity. Comedy, R-rated comedy, Chris Rock's early stuff. Then I called [his friend] up on his cell phone and he was two cars behind me. I said, 'You're not going to believe this, but somebody up here is broadcasting swear words! Tune to 89.1FM.' He turns to the station and he's like, 'I can't believe I'm hearing this!' It was a big joke for a few minutes."
Once a friend suggested using a bumper sticker to advertise the frequency on which he was transmitting, Lynch was off and running. He became his own mini-pirate radio station.
"For four car-lengths around me was this little bubble of — me! Whatever I wanted to listen to! So I could be listening to Chris Rock talking about dating and meeting women in a club and then the next song go straight to Neil Sadaka."
Link
(Thanks, Ken!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Theory of Fun: Understanding Comics for games
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DATE: 10/13/2004 04:30:25 AM
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Raph Koster was creative lead and lead designer on Ultima Online and Ultima Online: The Second Age, and the creative director on Star Wars Galaxies -- today, he's the Chief Creative Officer for Sony Entertainment (the division that does the video games). His new book is called Theory of Fun for Game Design, and I was lucky enough to read a review copy last month.
Raph's intention here is to write a Understanding Comics for computer games: an accessible, lay-oriented text that explains, finally, what this medium means. Why are grownups playing games? What makes a game fun? What do games do to the way twe perceive the world? What do games do to the way we change the world?
Charlie Stross and I have been tossing around an idea for a novel set in a Massive Multiplayer Online game, revolving around the virtual-property-rights debate; Theory of Fun made me rethink big chunks of that book.
Theory of Fun is available for pre-order on Amazon now, with the pub-date listed as November. If you're a gamer, this should be your Xmas prezzie to your non-gamer friends; if you're not a gamer, this is the book for the gamer in your life.
In recent years, much study has been centered on gender differences in particular. One researcher in the UK, Simon Baron-Cohen, has concluded that there are “systematizing brains” and “empathizing brains.” He identifies extreme systematizing brains as being autistic, and ones just slightly less so as being those diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome. The distribution curve of systematizing brains versus empathizing brains, according to Baron-Cohen, is apparently influenced by gender. Men are more likely to have systematizing brains, and women more likely to have empathizing brains.
Gender differences have finally become acceptable to discuss without accusations of sexism. It’s important to realize that in all cases, we’re speaking in generalities, of averages. On average, females tend to have greater trouble with certain types of spatial perception—for example, visualizing the cross section of an arbitrary shape that has been rotated to a different facing. Conversely, males tend to have greater trouble with language skills—doctors have long known that it takes longer for boys to become verbally proficient.
It speaks of the power of videogames that they can actually change this. After all, the equation is both nature and nurture. There has been research showing that if women who have trouble with spatial rotation tests are given a videogame that encourages them to practice rotating objects and matching particular configurations in 3-d, that not only will they master the spatial perception necessary, but the results will be permanent.
According to Baron-Cohen’s theory, there are people who have high abilities in both systematizing and empathizing. One would surmise that these people tend to go into the arts, which are both heavily systematic and also require a high degree of empathy. Baron-Cohen postulates that having high abilities in both is a contraindicated survival trait, since it means that they are almost certainly not as good at either as the “specialists.” This may explain all those consumptive poets dying in garrets.
Link
(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Antique scientific and medical instruments for sale
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DATE: 10/13/2004 04:46:10 AM
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"Radio Guy" is an antiques dealer specializing in beautiful old medical and scientific instruments, with a good line in vintage and antique toys. His wares are expensive, his site is very hard to get around (it's all giant imagemaps and every click spawns a new window, argh), but gosh, these are some pretty artifacts.
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(Thanks, Skye!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gay accent
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DATE: 10/13/2004 04:59:08 AM
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Years ago, I blogged about the Fannish accent -- the pronunciation commonalities among sicence fiction fans, which seemingly predate their involvement in fandom (IOW, people are fans because they have the accent, not accented because they're fans). Now there's some research indicating the existence of a gay/lesbian/bisexual accent, too.
Vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and heterosexual speakers was examined. Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /[open aye]/ than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men. However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex. These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women. They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex.
Link
(via Plastic Bag)
Update: Dana sez: "Bailey is the author of a book titled _The Man Who Would Be Queen_,
about transsexuals. Aside from the fact that he was sleeping with
some of his research subjects (usually considered a bit of a conflict
of interest), the guy has some rather... prejudiced ideas about gender
and sexuality. He seems to be associated with a group called the
Human Biodiversity Institute -- which sounds reasonable enough, until
you find out it's a group of right-wing Eugenicists who argue for
things like a 'gay germ' and support the guy who wrote _The Bell
Curve_, which 'proved' that blacks are dumber than whites.
"There's an enormous clearinghouse of info about Bailey, the problems
with his general theories, and the formal research misconduct (sex for
SRS recommendation letters, frex) and ethics violation charges
(practicing clinical psychology without a license) which are being
investigated as I type."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of environmental apocalypse zen: airplane exhaust scars
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DATE: 10/13/2004 06:25:25 AM
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Doug says,
"Some time back, one of the Boingers posted an article about the environmental effects of airplane traffic. To further support this article that may or may not exist, I submit today's Astonomy Picture of the Day that shows plane contrails like scars on the land. Link.
And a "contrail count for kids" program over the next two days: Link."
From an April, 2004 NASA press release about the environmental effects of plane exhaust:
NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of increasing average surface temperatures enough to account for a warming trend in the United States that occurred between 1975 and 1994.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Novelty dynamite clock
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DATE: 10/13/2004 08:03:34 AM
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This novelty "dynamite" clock is one of the coolest, most subversive uses for a generic digital clock that I've ever seen. However, at $125 per, I'm tempted just to make my own.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: E-Voting roundtable
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DATE: 10/13/2004 08:21:59 AM
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SiliconValley.com is running an online roundtable this week about the security and trustworthiness (or neither) of E-voting. Panelists include Dan Gillmor, David Dill, Mischelle Townsend, and a host of other tech journalists, engineers, and voting activists. Readers can also submit questions.
"Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems declined to participate in this discussion."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iiRobotics, Edinburgh's toy robot store
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DATE: 10/13/2004 08:25:46 AM
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I'm on my way out of Edinburgh today, having given my talk yesterday, but before I split, I made a point of dropping by iiRobotics, the collectable robot store just off the Royal Mile. iiRobotics has an amazing selection of vintage and new toy robots, from craquelure-crazed 1950s tin jobs to modern Robosapiens, and is staffed by a pair of friendly, knowledgeable robots enthusiasts whose personal ardency for robots was really delightful. They've got most (all?) of their inventory online and for sale. I did about a third of my Xmas shopping today...
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(Thanks, Alice!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: eBay-resistant games economies
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DATE: 10/13/2004 08:27:42 AM
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Randy Farmer has just posted his upcoming State of Play 2 conference paper, called "KidTrade: A Design for an eBay-resistant Virtual Economy." Dan Hunter at Terra Nova sums it up nicely.
He suggests that there are virtual economy models that are resistant to eBaying, and which (talking to game devs) "may be suited better to your property, especially if externalizing virtual object markets will be harmful to the health and/or profitability of your product." He outlines one instantiation of such a model for an "eBay-resistant economy, designed for children to trade scarce virtual objects without fear of being cheated by smarter, craftier (adult) traders who are generating a lifestyle-supporting income from eBay-ing the kids’ poor trades."
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(via Terra Nova)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Monsanto stole patented wheat from Indian farmers
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DATE: 10/13/2004 08:27:52 AM
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Monsanto had taken out a patent for a "genetically modified" strain of wheat. Today, they lost that patent in Europe, after Greenpeace proved that the wheat in question had in fact been selectively bred by Indian farmers and had not emerged from Monsanto's labs.
The European Patent office in Munich had granted a patent to Monsanto on May 21, 2003. The patent covered wheat exhibiting a special baking quality that Monsanto claimed to be its invention.
However, Greenpeace proved in its opposition that the wheat variety was bred by Indian farmers for improving its baking quality and it was not a genetically-engineered invention as claimed by Monsanto.
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(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Square bacteria
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DATE: 10/13/2004 08:43:40 AM
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Researchers have managed to grow this square bacterium in the laboratory for the first time. The square bacteria was first discovered twenty-five years ago in a salty pond near the ultra-salty Red Sea. To grow it in the lab, the scientists used a culture with the salt concentration of soy sauce. From an article in Nature:
The microbe is also extremely tolerant of magnesium chloride. According to (University of Groningen scientist Henk) Bolhuis, this makes it a model organism for studying what life might be like in extraterrestrial corners of the solar system, such as the magnesium-rich brines on Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Push Pin
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DATE: 10/13/2004 10:06:58 AM
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In 1954, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Ed Sorel founded Push Pin Studios and transformed graphic design forever. Unapologetically drawing from the entire history of visual culture, from German woodcuts to Art Nouveau to 1930s comic art, Push Pin created a fresh, witty, surrealist, and thought-provoking style that (re)united illustration with typography and design. Many of today's edgiest graphic designers owe it all to Push Pin, whether they realize it or not.
BB co-conspirator and Chronicle Books editor Alan Rapp is helping bring the joy of Push Pin to a wider audience with The Push Pin Graphic, a collection of the studio's signature periodical produced from the 1950s to the 1980s.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Elfriede Jelinek's home page
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DATE: 10/13/2004 10:16:48 AM
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Former BB guest blogger Jenn Shreve points us to the Compuserve-hosted, Bambi-enriched Web site of Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature.
Jenn says: "Based on what I've read about her books, the film version of the Piano Teacher, and clips on the BBC showing scenes from her plays that involved almost-naked fat old men spanking one another among other things, she's a rather fearless, political, experimental writer. A bold choice for the Nobel committee."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Silver dollars minted from Twin Towers metal are bogus
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DATE: 10/13/2004 02:29:01 PM
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Remember the company that was selling commemorative silver dollars minted from money retrieved from a safe at ground zero? Turns out they weren't made from 9/11 silver. In addition, they aren't made of silver and they aren't dollars. A NY court has halted the sales of them.
[Judge] [New York Attorney General] Spitzer said the sale of the silver dollars — emblazoned with the World Trade Center towers on one side and the planned Freedom Tower on the other — is a fraud. He's investigating whether the silver actually came from the ruins of the twin towers.
Spitzer said the National Collector's Mint, based in Port Chester, N.Y., falsely claims that the coins engraved with "In God We Trust" are legally authorized silver dollars.
Spitzer said the coins, produced by a Wyoming company called SoftSky Inc., are advertised as nearly pure silver when they're only silver-plated.
Link (Thanks, Jason!)UPDATE Here's an excellent Wikipedia article about the coin.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wireless tech glossary
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DATE: 10/13/2004 06:50:55 PM
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Wireless tech expert and "WiFi Toys" author Mike Outmesguine has posted a handy overview of wireless tech terms on TheWirelessWeblog. From Bluetooth to ZigBee, from WEP to WPA to UWB, it's all here. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fox News producer sues Bill "Shut Up" O'Reilly for sex harassment
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DATE: 10/13/2004 07:00:20 PM
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Smoking Gun says:
Hours after Bill O'Reilly accused her of a multimillion dollar shakedown attempt, a female Fox News producer fired back at the TV star today, filing a lawsuit claiming that he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. Below you'll find a copy of Andrea Mackris's complaint, an incredible page-turner that quotes O'Reilly, 55, on all sorts of lewd matters.
Based on the extensive quotations cited in the complaint, it appears a safe bet that Mackris, 33, recorded some of O'Reilly's more steamy soliloquies. For example, we direct you to his Caribbean shower fantasies [Ed. note: said tropical fantasies include use of falafel as a marital aid -- last graf on this page: "... I would take your other hand with the falafel thing and put it on your pussy." Step aside, Atkins Porn! ] .
While we suggest reading the entire document, TSG will point you to interesting sections on a Thailand sex show, Al Franken, and the climax of one August 2004 phone conversation. (22 pages)
Link (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: AZ high school students build hydrogen powered car
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DATE: 10/13/2004 07:08:53 PM
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BoingBoing reader Simone says, "This car runs off hydrogen that the vehicle itself produces using water and solar power. No big whoop, right? Car manufacturers have allegedly been exploring this technology for years. However, THIS particular car was built by high school students. Unreal!"
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Snap, crackle, moan: Rice Krispies vibrator
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DATE: 10/13/2004 07:13:16 PM
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BoingBoing reader Gerald says,
"A friend of mine noticed that the giveaway electric toothbrushes in boxes of Kellogg's Rice Krispies breakfast cereal can double as vibrators. Dunno if they're being given away in the States, but in Canada you can't escape them. She took pictures; they're blurry, but the point is clear [particularly when the toothbrushy half of the two-part device is removed].
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wacky art car desktop wallpaper jpegs
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DATE: 10/13/2004 07:36:46 PM
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Gigantic desktop images of an obsessively complicated 1986 Ford WOW Bus art-car. 25,000 pieces. Good heavens. Link (Thanks, Nico Boll!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BMW miffed over results in "Ask Jolene" adult search engine
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DATE: 10/13/2004 07:49:17 PM
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If you hunt for the term "BMW" with porn search engine AskJolene.com, results may include pornographic photos with images of BMW cars. German car manufacturer BMW AG is not pleased, and has accused AskJolene.com of trademark violation. Link, and Fleshbot has more.
(thanks t3knomanser)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in LA: RESFEST, now through Sunday
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DATE: 10/13/2004 07:56:37 PM
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The Los Angeles edition of this planet's coolest digital film fest began today and continues through Sunday. Details on the coming five geektastic days and nights of pixelated culture are here: Link to schedule, film listings, and ticket purchase info.
If the graphics throughout the website (and on-site at the RESfest event) look familiar, that's because they're the work of often-BoingBoinged artists Kozyndan. Remember that amazing panoramic poster they did for the SARS Art Project? Link to The Yum-cha Militia (My Mother thought she had SARS, but it turned out to be PMS) (buy a print online for $25! I have one on my office wall.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Warren Ellis launches Telepathine
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DATE: 10/13/2004 08:48:44 PM
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A fresh source of free radio and fresh digital culture from Warren Ellis:
The telepathine playlist is donated music and performance by invited artists. It uses the radio.blog system to stream the audio as compressed Flash files. Most if not all of the telepathine artists have their featured works available as micropay or free downloads, accessed through their biography pages below. Mperia is telepathine's preferred stage for mp3 preview and purchase.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Drug-smugglers' coolest secrets
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DATE: 10/14/2004 02:50:13 AM
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Microgram Bulletin is the DEA's publication for tracking the ingenuity of drug smugglers -- from hollow, heroin-filled lollipops to heroin formed into machine parts to coke-filled Evian bottles to marijuana-based peanut butter to my personal favorite, this hollowed out biography of Princess Di filled with cocaine. Man, I've never seen a more thorough glamorization of drug smuggling! It seems the narcotraficante set has an entire army of James Bond Qs laboring in underground labs pumping out Viagra-lookalike Ecstasy and secret-agent hashish chocolate bars.
Link
(via CoolGov)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Three debates' audio in torrents
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DATE: 10/14/2004 02:52:34 AM
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You asked for it, you got it: the complete audio of all three presidential debates in MP3, packed into a single three torrent files on the Internets. Courtesy of the good folks at Torrentocracy.
Link to third debate
Link to second debate
Link to first debate
(Thanks, Gary and Guido!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Indymedia's servers returned
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DATE: 10/14/2004 02:56:34 AM
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Micah from Indymedia sez,
Indymedia harddrives have been returned to Rackspace. Yesterday we received an email from a yahoo address that we could not confirm, but now we know for sure they are being returned. We are requesting that they do not boot them, and they are being treated as hacked/infected, we will dd the drives and then perform analysis on them. We still have no idea what the deal is:
We received the drives for these servers back this morning, they are currently in the servers.
Jeff:
I know that you have gone through more than I can possibly understand. I was just told that the court order is being complied with and your servers in
London will be online at 5pm GMT.
I will pass along anymore information that becomes available and that I am allowed to.
Again, I do not have the words to understand nor express the feelings and emotions you have endured since this began.
Regards,
Jason Carter
Business Development Consultant
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wil Wheaton reads from Just a Geek
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DATE: 10/14/2004 03:04:29 AM
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Wil Wheaton, the former Wesley Crusher of Star Trek: TNG, is one of the most interesting geeks I know. Geeks, as a species, come from fantastic and variegated backgrounds -- doctors, lawyers, ditch-diggers and shop-clerks; it's a salutory effect of the absence of any real professional practice of geekdom. All that's required to be a geek is to geek out -- to pick up a computer and find something there that speaks to you, loudly and compellingly.
Wil has written a very good memoir of his journey to the present day, called Just a Geek (my blurb: "Here's the gimmick: Wil isn't *just* a geek. He's a geek who's come to nerdvana -- the Paramount lot where they dropped the first Trekbomb and forever changed the world -- to tell us that it's not all it's cracked up to be. He's also a geek who can *write*. Finally, he's a geek who's unafraid to sit at the keyboard and open a vein: there's a lot of scorching honesty mixed in with these convulsively funny memoirs."), published by O'Reilly.
Wil recently appeared at the Gnomedex convention and read an hour-long excerpt from Just a Geek, and the ITConversations people have put it online.
Link
(Thanks, Wil!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: William Gibson reblogging
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DATE: 10/14/2004 09:20:06 AM
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William Gibson is blogging again:
Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.
And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."
Link
(Thanks, Dan!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Kids' anatomical illustrations
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DATE: 10/14/2004 11:33:44 AM
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This gallery of second graders' anatomical drawings is really wonderful. The work reminds me of Outsider Art.
"You will notice how exceptional the drawings are - giving evidence to the premise that children learn so much more when the topic is of interest to them."
Link (via Reality Carnival)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Dub Reggae Ice-Cream Truck
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DATE: 10/14/2004 11:34:49 AM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I ride with Aurelito and Shakespeare, two Los Angeles-based DJs who have converted a '69 Dodge ice-cream truck into a mobile reggae sound system. They drive the truck all over they city -- to the beachfront, to the financial district, everywhere -- spreading sweet sonic scoops of double-dip dub for all to hear.
Link to archived radio program. This NPR.org website feature includes three streamable songs from the duo, as well as some photos I took while we were cruising around in the ice cream truck.
Here is a more complete gallery of the images I shot during that most unusual of LA street adventures: Link.
Shown here: Shakespeare looks out the back of the multi-colored dub reggae bus (Link to full-size).
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Brain implants
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DATE: 10/14/2004 11:50:47 AM
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A 24-year-old quadriplegic is now able to control a computer with his thoughts. This summer, the man was implanted with the Cyberkinetics BrainGate chip. The tiny device, containing 100 electrodes, was installed in the patient's motor cortex. Apparently, the connection is good enough that he can even play videogames and check email. From a Nature.com article:
The BrainGate allowed the patient to control a computer or television using his mind, even when doing other things at the same time. Researchers report for example that he could control his television while talking and moving his head.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Vintage Christian sex instruction LPs
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DATE: 10/14/2004 12:00:14 PM
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Postfun reviews old Christian sex-ed records.
Dad lights up his pipe and starts talking about nocturnal emissions.
DAD: One of these nights before too long you may find some of it (semen) passes off in your sleep . . .
BOB: (worriedly) But Dad, that's wrong, isn't it?
DAD: No, son, it's not wrong . . . No, it's true that to waste the seed deliberately - to do anything knowingly to make it come is a very grave sin. Because God designed that secretion in a man for one purpose. That is to be, well, like one of his raw materials in the creation of a new life . . . Wet dreams are different. Sometimes the supply of semen becomes too great before a man is married and these dreams are sort of a safety valve . . .
BOB: But Dad, why do fellas get these feelings before they get married?
Dad responds with a metaphor popular in the softcore films of Zalmon King. That is to say that God made sex as necessary as food for survival. Dad adds that sometimes this procreative desire inconveniently appears before the wedding vows are taken and the bloodtests are registered with the county seat.
Link (Via Sound Scavengers)UPDATE David sez: " Here are four mp3's from the Sex Instruction LP that you recently wrote about.
How Babies are Born
Girls and MenstruationThe Problem with Growing Boys (which you quoted)
The Marriage Union
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Printer forensics
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DATE: 10/14/2004 12:39:39 PM
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Remember the Brady Bunch episode where the family traces a letter from Jan's "secret admirer" to Alice's typewriter? Of course you remember it. Now, researchers at Purdue University have developed a similar technique for laser printers. Law enforcement would use the approach to bust counterfeiters and forgers.
The technique uses specialized software to detect slight variations, or "intrinsic signatures," of printed characters, revealing subtle differences from one printer to another. Even printers that are the same model have slight flaws and variations in their mechanical systems. These variations result in subtly different characters.
"We have observed variability from printer to printer within a single model, " (researcher Jan) Allebach said. "That’s because for a company to make printers all behave exactly the same way would require tightening the manufacturing tolerances to the point where each printer would be too expensive for consumers.
Link (via Slashdot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bill O'Reilly's alleged falafel fetish now has a name
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DATE: 10/14/2004 02:01:32 PM
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Link to http://www.falaphilia.com.
fa·la·phil·i·a (n.)
1. Obsessive fascination with ground spiced chickpeas shaped into balls and fried.
2. Erotic attraction to or sexual contact with garbanzo beans, coriander, and cumin.
3. An abnormal fondness for being in the presence of middle eastern foods. Also called taboulehmania, hummulingus.
4. Sexual contact with or erotic desire for a falafel.
Background on the sexual harassment suit filed by a former subordinate of the famed Fox News anchor here: Link. BoingBoing reader Anna wonders if the whole debacle might be more accurately described as a case of Batata Harrahssment. I don't know, but get ready for lots of bad puns on good food.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Neuromarketing soda
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DATE: 10/14/2004 02:12:50 PM
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Princeton psychology researcher Samuel McClure and his colleagues conducted brain scans on people to understand why some prefer Coke and others have a taste for Pepsi.
In their study, the researchers first determined the Coke versus Pepsi preference of 67 volunteer subjects, both by asking them and by subjecting them to blind taste tests. They then gave the subjects sips of one drink or the other as they scanned the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this widely used imaging technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio signals are used to measure blood flow in regions of the brain, with such flow indicating brain activity levels. In the experiments, the sips were preceded by either "anonymous" cues of flashes of light or pictures of a Coke or Pepsi can.
It turns out that the choice is based to some degree on "visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans that consume the drinks." I bet next year's NeuroMarketing conference won't be cancelled due to low registration.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Vintage Peanuts pins
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DATE: 10/14/2004 04:39:41 PM
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Matt Hinrichs received a complete set of Peanuts pins from the 1950s as a gift. Time to get jealous. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The tyranny of email
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DATE: 10/14/2004 04:47:20 PM
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Interesting article on how to deal with email more effectively.
I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows. It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into "right brain mode", and really focus on a problem.
Unlike face-to-face conversation and 'phone calls, people can communicate via email without both paying attention at the same time. You pick the moments at which you pay attention to email. But many people leave their email client running continuously. This is the biggest baddest reason why email hurts your productivity. If you leave your email client running, it means anyone anytime can interrupt what you're doing. Essentially they pick the moments at which you pay attention. (Even some random spammer who is sending you a crappy ad for a get-rich scheme.) This is bad.
Link (Via A Whole Lotta Nothing)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: First ever "gay IPO"
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DATE: 10/14/2004 07:01:41 PM
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Today, San Francisco-based online media company PlanetOut became the first gay-directed business to trade publicly on a major exchange. The ticker symbol: LGBT, an acronym for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender." How's the stock doing? Super, thanks for asking! Link (Thanks, Wayne)
Update: BoingBoing reader Darryl says, "No to quibble, but the Satellite was a 'Gay' media and property development group that floated on the Australian Stock Exchange on September 23 1999. They went into administration (rather like bankruptcy in the US) in November 2000 and the court cases continue to this day.
Here's an overview: Link. Business press comments "back in the day": Link. And the court case continues: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites Iraq dispatch: Rivers Run Through It
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DATE: 10/14/2004 09:45:40 PM
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NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites posted this dispatch to his blog before departing Baghdad for Fallujah this week,
When I see them in the river -- the 40-foot, olive-green boats -- all I can think of is Apocalypse Now. When, I wondered, would Captain Willard climb aboard and motor up the Mekong Delta on his way to terminate Colonel Kurtz's command with "extreme prejudice."
The surroundings even smacked of the cinematic version of Vietnam, muddy river banks broken up with patches of stiff, thin reeds, fisherman in small wooden boats plumbing the opaque green waters for tonight's meal.
But this is obviously a long way from that war zone. Twenty-nine years and a few thousand miles. We are on the banks of the Euphrates River in Iskandaria, Iraq. In moments we will be pushing off into a steady current and an uncommonly serene Iraqi dusk.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: In-game motivational posters
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DATE: 10/15/2004 12:28:27 AM
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One of the maps for the first-person shooter Counter Strike is called "cs_office," and contains everything you'd expect in an office, including these screamingly funny motivational posters with gamer themes (CAMPING: Doing unto others before they do unto you; HEADSHOT: Those who can, do -- those who can't complain; etc).
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Schoolhouse Rock that tells it like it is
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DATE: 10/15/2004 12:51:46 AM
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Pirates and Emporers is a pitch-perfect send-up of the "Schoolhouse Rock" musical civics cartoons of the 1970s -- easily the most-compelling educational materials aired on US TV -- in which the dark history of US international policy (funding terrorists, arming atrocity-mongers) is set to jaunty music and simple animation.
Link
(Thanks, Cassidy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: T-shirts from Real Genius
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DATE: 10/15/2004 12:54:39 AM
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Adam sez, "After a recent viewing of Real Genius I was compelled to own an “I Love Toxic Waste" t-shirt. However, my search for the perfect shirt was extremely frustrating. Unable to find a decent replica of the shirt, I decided to make my own. During the course of the project, my appreciation for Val’s (Chris Kinght's) other t-shirts grew as well. I realized that if I was going to recreate one shirt I might as well make them all (or at least those worth remaking). Every aspect of the original shirts has been studied and recreated with great fidelity."
Link
(Thanks, Adam!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Be the 1,000th ghost at Haunted Mansion Disneyland
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DATE: 10/15/2004 09:03:23 AM
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Holy crap, I think my brains just exploded. This is the best thing ever. I mean, EVER.
In an effort to raise funds for The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, DisneyAuctions.com is holding a "spirited" event that will allow the winning bidder to receive a personalized "tombstone" in the finale graveyard scene of the attraction with a humorous epitaph (inspired by the lucky bidder's interests and hobbies) written by the team at Walt Disney Imagineering.
But wait. There's more. The winning bidder will also receive a one-of-a-kind miniature replica of the tombstone and a certificate officially recognizing him/her as an Honorary resident of the Haunted Mansion; and the successful bidder and a guest will be spirited away from his or her hometown to Disneyland in time for a midnight "burial" ceremony on Thursday, October 28, officially placing the tombstone in the graveyard of the Haunted Mansion.
Link
(Thanks, Jeff!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
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DATE: 10/15/2004 10:17:14 AM
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I've just finished reading the sixth Adrian Mole book, Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction. Adrian Mole, the titular diarist of the series, is basically the same age as I am; I practically memorized the first two volumes while I was in high-school, especially the incredible, awful poetry that puts Vogons to shame ("Pandora/I adore ya/I implore ye/Don't forget me" or the immortal:
Norway! Land of difficult spelling.
Hiding your beauty behind strange vowels.
Land of long nights, short days, and dots over 'O's.
Ruminating majestic reindeers
Tread warily on ice floes
Ever aware of what happened to the
Titanic.
One day I will sojourn to your shores
I live in the middle of England
But!
Norway! My soul resides in your watery fiords fyords fiiords
Inlets.
)
As the years went by and Adrian aged, I found myself more and more engrossed in his life. Townsend, his author, walks us along a tightrope balanced over torture comedy (a la Fawlty Towers) and genuine pathos through the first five books:
- The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters
- The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole
- True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Susan Lilian Townsend
- Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years
- Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years
The story really picked up in book five, with Adrian's television career as the host of Offaly Good, a British cookery show devoted to entrails, at the height of the Mad Cow scare.
Book six is much, much better, though. Townsend is appalled by Blair's leadership and the invasion of Iraq, but rather than turning this into an anti-war manifesto, Townsend creates a convulsively funny running gag around it: Adrian has cancelled a holiday in Cyprus due to Blair's warnings that Saddam's WMDs could target the island, but his travel agent won't refund his £57.10 deposit until evidence of the WMDs is put forward.
I don't think I've enjoyed an Adrian Mole book so much since the original two. There's a lot of real pain and hardship in this story, not played for yuks at all, but whenever the tale gets too heavy, Townsend busts out one of Adrian's characteristic, tight-assed priggish observations about the world around him and just floors me.
A new Adrian Mole book is like a welcome letter from an old, beloved, frustrating friend.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Feebs want names of everyone who read ObL bio
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DATE: 10/15/2004 10:19:10 AM
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Zed sez, "A library in Washington is fighting the FBI's subpoena of the names and addresses of everyone who's checked out _Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America_. Why is the FBI so interested? Because someone wrote a Bin Laden quote, 'Let history be witness I am a criminal' in the margin."
Because of privacy policies, the library does not give out circulation records without a court order. When the FBI got a grand jury subpoena, the library filed a motion to quash it -- citing the rights of all people who use the library.
"Like the right to read and to read the material of one's choice without fear that someone will come around with questions about why you chose that book," said Garrett.
The FBI withdrew the subpoena, reserving the right to file it again.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office says they are not permitted to discuss anything that involves the grand jury.
If the feds had demanded the records under the Patriot Act, the library would have had to hand them over without question and without help from the courts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Documentary film on BBSes debuts from ex-BoingBoing guestblogger
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DATE: 10/15/2004 10:33:07 AM
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Former BoingBoing guestblogger Jason Scott says,
I'm happy to announce that the BBS Documentary I talked about so much is now in pre-order on the page. If people order before the 10th of November, they can send me a paragraph that will be included in the 3-DVD set. Also, I'm having a "beta premiere" where I show it to folks before going in for the final round of editing. That's happening November 6th AND 7th (after all, there's 7 episodes) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's been a long three years!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Photo gallery of Bush bulges
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DATE: 10/15/2004 10:35:59 AM
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President Bush either needs a new tailor or he has something strapped to his back. Here's a gallery of photos. In some of them, the bulge is evident. In other photos I see either normal fabric pooching or nothing. Link (Thanks, Gary!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to get off the fed "do-not-fly-list"
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DATE: 10/15/2004 10:45:49 AM
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This article on MSNBC indicates that getting off the controversial "do-not-fly-list" is as simple as modifying your name. Add a middle initial or a suffix, and you'll b0rk the data management system. The system seems to be so poorly designed that it cannot prevent false positives -- but may also allow an actual terrorist to slip past by just inserting a middle initial. Link (via Declan's politech list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Mixed Media Zen
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DATE: 10/15/2004 10:55:38 AM
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mark mothersbaugh
gum blondes
eddie breen
martha bruin degen
c.m. botz/f. glessner lee
biggles odd objects
david c. roy
roger stevens
neo kaiju
jason salavon
kiki smith
Image: detail from one of ex-DEVO-er Mark Mothersbaugh's works at mutato.com: "Two Teddies for a Happy Rabbit; Stow, Ohio".
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on sale now for $11.95
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DATE: 10/15/2004 01:52:44 PM
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Some guy on Amazon is selling Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) for $11.95, and says he'll ship it in 1-2 business days. Too bad Apple isn't releasing Tiger until mid-2005.
Here's a screen grab of the page, since it's sure to be pulled soon. Click for enlargement.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sleepwalking sex
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DATE: 10/15/2004 02:14:02 PM
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The BBC and New Scientist report on new scientific findings around the phenomenon of "sleepwalking sex."
Mr Buchanan told the Australasian Sleep Association how a patient of his, who was a respectable middle-aged woman with a steady partner, would leave the house while sleepwalking and have sex with strangers. The woman was totally unaware of her double life until her partner became suspicious and found her engaged in the act. "He was aware of some sleepwalking and there was circumstantial evidence, including the unexplained presence of condoms around the house," Mr Buchanan told the conference.
But enough with the (marginal) news. Fleshbot seizes the occasion as an excuse for a pile-on of "sleep fetish" sites. Who knew? Link.
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TITLE: Downhill Battle launches "Slashdot for politics"
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DATE: 10/15/2004 02:30:28 PM
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The folks behind Downhill Battle have launched a new news-site called The Regular, an hourly politics blog from some sharp copyfighters.
We were wondering why there wasn't slashdot for politics. Could it because there are already really good political blogs? Well, we think it's about time to use Slashdot's really good format where the efforts of a whole community go to make really good news stories. Thanks, Slashdot, for blazing this trail.
We have good reason to think that filesharing is participatory culture in the making. And that's what Downhill Battle is really about. Our next step is to hit the politics industry and we hope we can hit it big. We're working on getting something out the door that's participatory culture for politics; the same way that the current music industry isn't what music is about, participatory politics is not just about electoral politics. Our bread and butter will be housed at ParticipatoryPolitics.org in the future.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Natural Thing" film at Illegal Art
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DATE: 10/15/2004 04:10:03 PM
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Matt Conroy sez:
"I saw your inclusion of the Christopher's sex ed mp3's
at Boing Boing, and thought you might be interested in
a video piece "Natural Thing" that my wife and I made as
part of the video group Paul Harvey Oswald using
that very record.
"It's available at Illegal Art. Scroll down to the Paul Harvey Oswald entry." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance on bittorrent
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DATE: 10/15/2004 05:24:35 PM
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One of the most powerful televised exchanges in recent history. Stewart hits it out of the park. BoingBoing reader bryan says, "Jon Stewart blasted the hosts on CNN's Crossfire for hurting the democratic process instead of helping. He also calls Tucker Carlson a dick. Bittorrent: Link, and transcript here.
BoingBoing reader Hal points us to Salon's coverage (Link), and describes the interview/buttkicking alternately: "Tucker Carlson gets his ass handed to him on a platter -- without falafel to sweeten the taste."
In Salon, Charles Taylor says:
I've heard people talk about "The Daily Show" as an oasis of sanity, a public service. I couldn't agree more. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was another public service. He went on and acted as if the show's purpose really was to confront tough issues, instead of being the political equivalent of pro wrestling. Given a chance to say absolutely what he thought, Stewart took it. He accomplished what almost never happens on television anymore: He made the dots come alive.
Here's an alternate BitTorrent link: Link. (Thanks, yatta)
Also, Ifilm has a stream here: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywood election satire cartoon
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DATE: 10/15/2004 05:43:46 PM
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"Who wants some dishoom?" is a Flash spoof cartoon about the US presidential elections. Cast includes John Kerry, George W. Bush, Ahnold, and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Like many Bollywood movies, on whole it's not that great -- but the dance numbers are hotter than vindaloo. Link (thanks, Hob Gadling)
OK, but what does it all mean? BoingBoing reader Sameer says, "Dhishoom is like saying 'Biff,' 'bang,' 'wham,' or 'pow' -- Also the most common soundtrack dub during Bollywood fistfight scenes. Ususally used as "Dhishoom-Dhisoom.'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Be a character in Shetterly's next novel
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DATE: 10/16/2004 02:14:18 AM
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Will Shetterly, the brilliant author of the incredible novel Dogland (a magic-realist novel set in 1950s Florida, told from the PoV of a boy who's father has opened a dog theme-park -- a heartbreaking and magical novel about race politics, theme parks, and the Foundtain of Youth) is auctioning off the right to appear as characters in his next novel. And in order to make sure that those who can't afford the bidding aren't shut out, he's also giving away the chance to be a character in his next book as a piece of postcardware:
'm very grateful to the people who are bidding on eBay for two chances to be a character in the book, and three chances to be its patron. But I realize a lot of people can't afford to bid. So I'm offering a drawing: You or a character of your choice, a person or a pet, now have the chance to appear for free in a cameo in the novel.
Link,/a>
(Thanks, Will!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney's own copyright law bites it on the ass
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DATE: 10/16/2004 02:21:59 AM
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Disney's being sued by a kids' hospital that has the rights to the Peter Pan novels. The hospital says that the 1998 Sonny Bono term-extension (a law that Disney bought in order to ensure that its earliest cartoons didn't enter the public domain) covers the Peter Pan stories and so Disney owes it royalties on a sequel that a publishing subsidiary put out. Disney says that the law doesn't cover the Pan books -- and that it should know, since it paid for that law! -- and now they're going to court.
As Lessig notes, Disney is right -- the Pan books are public domain. But as Jason Schultz demonstrates, the temptation to wax neener-neener here is nigh-insurmountable ("When will Disney stop stealing from the public domain? I mean really, it's just like taking a CD from a record store without paying for it... except that the record store owner is dead... and well, the store is really the compendium of human knowledge.. and the CD is part of our collective cultural history. Whatever. Theft is Theft, right?")
This weekend sees the UK premiere of a film about Barrie's life, "Finding Neverland" -- starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet and Dustin Hoffman. The hospital will receive royalties from book excerpts portrayed in the film.
But the hospital charity says is getting nothing from "Peter and the Starcatchers" -- which has been on the New York Times best seller lists, has had an extensive author tour and has its own Web site. They say the book has been published without its permission.
A spokesman for the hospital told CNN that Great Ormond Street held the copyright to Peter Pan in the United States until 2023 -- although it runs out in EU countries in 2007 -- and said: "We are considering our options."
Disney, meanwhile, has insisted that Peter Pan is out of copyright in the United States.
"The copyright to the J.M. Barrie stories expired in the U.S. prior to 1998, the effective date of the U.S. Copyright Extension Act, and thus were ineligible for any extension of their term," Disney said in a statement to the Daily Telegraph.
Link
(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sony bullies Retropod off the net
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DATE: 10/16/2004 08:37:28 AM
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Sony sent a bullying shut-down notice to Retropod, a website selling hand-made iPod cases made out of recycled Sport Walkman housings. From defending consumer rights in the Supreme Court in the 1984 Betamax case to this in 20 years: what a pack of sellout assholes. Hey, fuck you too, Sony.
Sony recently learned that you are selling a case for carrying an iPod personal stereo that is made from a WALKMAN tape player. The product is being offered at your website at www.retropod.com.
Your use of casings for such a purpose is a clear infringement of the SONY and WALKMAN marks because it is deceptive. Consumers likely will be misled and deceived into believing that Sony is somehow connected with the iPod personal stereo when in fact it is not. (and now the important part) Moreover, they will be misled into thinking that Sony is backward in its design of products and is going away from miniaturization, as the size of the tape player housing is quite large by today's standards.
Link
(Thanks, 555Rgne!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Muslim convert's veil sparks couture controversy in Italy
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DATE: 10/16/2004 11:15:21 AM
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As Bruce Sterling recently asked on his blog -- "Milan or Tehran?" Well -- neither. Drezzo, Italy, where an Italian mother of four who converted to Islam has been fined $100 for wearing a veil that hides her face. Sabrina Varroni's case has inspired a dispute between politicians, civil liberties advocates, and fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Link to NYT article (Thanks, Jose Marquez)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Plane full of crash-test-dummies crashing, blowing up:video
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DATE: 10/17/2004 02:59:26 AM
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CoolGov has a great post on Federal regulators' experimental, deliberate crashing of airplanes full of crash-dummies into remote airstrips in order to determine the "crashworthiness" of airplanes. The silent video from inside the cabin is eerie and incredible -- way cooler than any special effect I've ever seen.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Court: War on Terror is no excuse to trample liberties
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DATE: 10/17/2004 05:17:41 AM
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Light sez, "This is an exceptionally cool - the Federal Circuit Court unanimously threw out the Georgia government's attempts to force protesters through metal detectors because the terror threat is elevated."
"We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War of Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over," Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the three-member court. "September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."
Link
(Thanks, Light!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UPDATED: TiVo jumps the shark with dumbass DRM system
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DATE: 10/17/2004 11:41:10 PM
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Matt Haughey, editor of the PVRBlog, writes, "This is an appalling example of TiVo baking DRM into their brand-new uber-expensive DVD burning TiVos. If you have a non-DVD tivo and you buy this new DVD-R model, you may transfer shows to the new TiVo, but you *can't* record those shows to DVD. It's totally insane and a sign that maybe TiVo is starting to drink the DRM kool aid, by going so far as to keep die-hard TiVo owners from recording shows within their own house, unless they recorded it on a single unit."
Link
(Thanks, Matt!)
Update: Kevin sez, "I called Pioneer and TiVo to see if there was a way around this, but
they said they weren't trying to prevent us from doing this... it was
a codec/compression issue. OK, fine. I can see that having the
additional DVDR hardware in one box would give you options the
standard Series2 wouldn't have for encoding, but TiVo needs to make
potential customers aware of this limitation."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: P2P Politics: make political clips and send 'em on
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DATE: 10/18/2004 12:07:01 AM
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P2P Politics is a new, nonpartisan site put up by Aaron Swartz, J Christopher Garcia and Larry Lessig that enables users to pick from short video campaign ads from supporters of the Dems, GOP, and Naderites and send them to friends with a single click. So far, only Kerry supporters have answered the call for clips, but Republicans and Naderites should get up, make some video, and send it in. All you need to do is shoot a video, slap a Creative Commons license on it, and the Internet Archive will host it while P2P Politics distributes it.
Link
(Thanks, Larry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ads too risque for the clients
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DATE: 10/18/2004 12:10:03 AM
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Zeldman has compiled an Ad Graveyard of rique print and Web advertisements that were rejected by clients of ad agencies. Some are quite funny, some are shockingly tasteless ("The said it would take three more bullets: The Beatles Reunion"), all are worth a look.
Link
(Thanks, Matthew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CAPPS II's brother: you can stop it
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DATE: 10/18/2004 12:11:11 AM
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Bill Scannell sez, "CAPPS II may be dead, but its evil step brother 'Secure Flight' will live if we don't complain loudly enough. If something isn't done soon, the passenger records of over 54 million Americans will be handed-over to the TSA by the airlines. The time to file your comments is now. We've built an interface that links directly into the 'Secure Flight' comments database. Deadline: 25 October."
To the Department of Homeland Security, you are no longer an American, you are a potential terrorist. Unless immediate action is taken by you, anyone who flew on any airline in the United States during the month of June 2004 will have a government dossier opened-up on them.
In order to test a new Orwellian airline security program called 'Secure Flight', the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration will force the airlines to turn over all their their passenger's travel records -- which include everything from credit card numbers to whether a kosher meal was requested -- from June of 2004.
If this test isn't stopped, there will be little left to stop the TSA from running checks on everyone who flies. 'Secure Flight' will make our country less like the America we grew up in and more like Communist East Germany circa 1974. All patriotic Americans must work to make sure this invasive, unconstitutional program never comes to fruition. Homeland Security needs to stop treating ordinary American citizens like criminals.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cartoony smoothie-maker
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DATE: 10/18/2004 01:21:16 AM
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Disney has introduced a new, cartoon-styled "smoothie-maker" -- looks awesome. Wish my kettle, stove, and laptop all had this kind of Max Fleischer coolth.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wired: tiny cars, objectifying cool and anti-Darwin
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DATE: 10/18/2004 01:34:32 AM
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Finished the new Wired yesterday -- in addition ot the already-mentioned-here Long Tail article, there were three other very noteworthy features that had me engrossed from the first graf:
- The Smart Car: a $10,000 plastic car with an integrated steel roll-cage that you can buy out of a vending machine. They park two to a parking space and get 50% better mileage than a Prius. These things are all over the road in Europe, but to make them work for the US market, they're rolling out an SUV -- a tiny, cute, fuel-efficient SUV.
- fMRIs to measure cool: a hipster scientest is putting peoples' heads in a functional MRI box and showing them pictures of cool and uncool objects to see how dorks' and beautiful peoples' brains differ; charmingly told by a dorky scientist ("Fifth grade was also the year that I discovered, to my shame, that the seventh grader I had privately idolized was actually the class dork, a turtleneck-and-glasses-wearing nerd incarnate"), the kicker is the junk science behind the interpretation of the results and the triumph of nerdliness over flash.
- Anti-Darwinists: Religious fundies (and, strangely, George Gilder) have gussied up Creationism with a cloak of information-theory science rhetoric and have successfully lobbied various school districts into getting "Intelligent Design" (dishonest new buzzword meaning "God|Aliens are responsible for humanity") onto the curriculum alongside of Darwin. Infuriating piece, and a textbook example of dirty poltiicking; the author does a fine job of deconstructing the arguments of the Creationists.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hong Kong Disneyland Feng Shuied
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DATE: 10/18/2004 01:47:23 AM
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Disney's Hong Kong Disneyland plans have been modified by a Feng Shui specialist brought in to consult on the job.
Esther Wong, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong Disneyland, said that the company had rotated the orientation of the entire park by several degrees in the early design phase after consulting a master of feng shui, a Chinese practice of seeking harmony with spiritual forces.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Magic-realism as Weapon of Mass Destruction
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DATE: 10/18/2004 03:33:05 AM
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Chris Nakashima-Brown is a Texas science fiction writer, popcult savant, and IP attorney. He writes like a cross between William Gibson and Mark "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist" Leyner -- these magical, hyperdense sentences that are each of them nearly haiku of amusant culture-jammer archness. The plot of his latest story is the use of Borgesian magic-realism as covert weapons of mass destruction, and its online gratis at Strange Horizons. Here's a taste:
I had my 9 a.m. acting class (Shatner method) to teach to our platoon of body doubles. Ali was the star out of the three unemployed Saddams we had recruited. He was dating J. Lo #2, Esmeralda Nuñez, and we needed to get them ready for their first op—a masterful bit of paparazzi placement I'd engineered for the next slow news week...
Womack set up his 12-inch Presidential Aviator George W. Bush in an on-deck leadership pose between the ketchup and the salt shaker. Fully outfitted with flight suit, pressure gear, and sidearm, the Prez usually stayed on the dash of Womack's Lincoln Continental, but turned into a worry ball when the boss was preoccupied. A worry ball that also served as a vehicle for Womack to practice the masterful voice-throwing he had honed in two decades as a practitioner of dirty tricks and kids' party ventriloquist.
"We're working hard to put food on your family," said the mini-Prez. "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory interview on All About Symbian
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DATE: 10/18/2004 03:50:01 AM
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Last week in Edinburgh, I did an interview with Ewan Spence, the co-editor of All About Symbian, on science fiction, civil liberties, Creative Commons, and mobile technology -- part one just came out today.
Link
(Thanks, Ewan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyright v Creativity tomorrow night at University of Reading
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DATE: 10/18/2004 04:06:24 AM
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Tomorrow night, I'm chairing the University of Reading's "Copyright vs Creativity" night, wherein Dr Andrew Adams, School of Systems Engineering will run down the UK and international perspective on copyright, creativity and the net. Open to the public, completely free, be there or be square:
What: University of Reading's Copyright vs. Creativity night
When: Tuesday October 19, 8pm
Where: University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus, Palmer Lecture Theatre (Map)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chinese company claims "Happy Birthday" as trademark
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DATE: 10/18/2004 06:29:30 AM
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Jason Schultz asks, "Will they sue kids who give competitors' toys at birthday parties where they sing the song?"
The words “Happy Birthday” can no longer be legally used if they are pinned to any other product, as a private Chinese company has claimed to have registered them as its trademark in 25 countries, including the US, Japan and European Union members this month.
The Fufeng toy plant in East China’s Anhui province said it has more than 70 products with the “Happy Birthday” brand, including industries like toys, dresses, shoes and hats. With increasingly fierce competition in the world toy market, the company realised the importance of branding.
Link
BoingBoing reader Neil Turner says,"The song, Happy Birthday To You, is actually copyrighted, according to Snopes, and the copyright doesn't expire until 2030. This means that any time the song is used in films, TV shows etc. royalties have to be paid.
Link."
On the derivative works tip, BoingBoing reader Neil says, "Ever notice how when you go to a restaurant like Red Robin or Applebees, they'll sing birthday wishes for you using their own 'special' songs? It's so they don't have to pay royalties for singing Happy Birthday! I wonder if that'll all change in 2030."
BoingBoing reader Eric A. Farris says, "The copyright of the song Happy Birthday to You was used as a story element in the first season of the most excellent and now defunct Aaron Sorkin sitcom Sports Night, episode four, Intellectual Property. A 'script' of that episode is here: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US voters: today is voter registration deadline in some states
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DATE: 10/18/2004 06:33:25 AM
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BoingBoing pal Bart Cheever says [to mostly California-resident pals],
Today, Monday October 18, is the deadline to register to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. To be able to vote your registration form needs to be postmarked by midnight tonight.
You can download registration forms and info from DeclareYourself.com. Physical forms are available at the post office, library or at your local registrar of voters (you can find the location of the registrar nearest you at
vote-smart.org)
So -- if you haven't registered, take a couple of minutes to download the form, print it out and drop it in the mail. Don't wait until later, do it now!
BoingBoing reader Dan writes,
True, today is the last day to register to vote for those in California, Kansas, and South Dakota, but the deadlines are later for other states (see the linked page on the FEC website). In fact, in my home state of Maine, you can actually register to vote in person up to and including election day!
Link to list of State Voter Registration Deadlines.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Barlow: Exit Strategy
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DATE: 10/18/2004 06:37:08 AM
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John Perry Barlow blogs about a mid-air encounter with a security industry CEO who was on his way to Baghdad.
We didn't find it difficult to get along despite the obvious political differences we'd had during the decades when he has been literally engaged in war-mongery and I have been a hippie peacenik. The interesting thing was that we didn't disagree on much now. We both believed that the invasion of Iraq and its subsequent occupation was a tragic catastrophe that could only get worse.
"I'll tell you," he said, "before we get out of Iraq, it's going to make Viet Nam look like a good idea." And this from someone who thought that our clandestine overthrow of the Sandinistas, in which he had taken part, "was" a good idea. But now he's mostly in it for the money. Besides, armed conflict is what he knows.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bush's faith-based reality: "Without a Doubt"
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DATE: 10/18/2004 06:45:08 AM
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Author and former WSJ national affairs reporter Ron Suskind has a riveting piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine.
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
Link (via William Gibson's blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Zeitgeist watch: Bushkilledsuperman.com
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DATE: 10/18/2004 06:45:29 AM
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Stem cell politics, comic mythology, and the death of Christopher Reeve all collide here. Link to Bushkilledsuperman.com. (The art shown here appears on an unrelated blog. All the same meme, though).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: FiASCO
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Former Nerve columnist Grant Stoddard now has an ironic electro-porno-kitsch-clash band called F i A S C O, which must be typed with extra spaces and caps to emphasize its overthetoppedness.
Often-BoingBoinged photographer Clayton Cubitt shot the stills for their website, and the video for their first single is nonworksafe genius.
Link to website. High-bandwidth Quicktime video link, Low-bandwidth link (video contains ironic nudity).
Fleshbot has more on "the making of" -- the video's comprised entirely of borrowed clips from a classic '80s TV show:
Anyone who's watched Manhattan cable television over the past 27 years needs no introduction to Robin Byrd, the pornstar-turned-Oprah of the smut set whose late night talk show has featured practically every adult entertainer ever to grace the marquees of the strip clubs of Times Square (back when Times Square actually had strip clubs, that is.) New York City band Fiasco pays homage to Robyn and her many guests over the years—not to mention their hairstyles, lycra unitards, and box-bangin' dance moves -- in a cleverly edited new video for their song "Those Feelings" ... lie back, get comfortable, and enjoy.
Link to Fleshbot post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bruce Sterling becomes a design professor
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DATE: 10/18/2004 07:15:31 AM
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On his Viridian Design mailing list (which just turned 6 years old), author / genius / ecological oracle Bruce Sterling says:
I have been asked to take a year-long guest residency, teaching design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
This school is in the Los Angeles basin, the epicenter of Southern Californian car culture, the etymological origin of the term "smog," and a metroplex that arm-wrestles Houston every year for the crown of the most polluted city in the USA. If there's a heart to the Greenhouse beast, well, it can't be far from Pasadena.
I'm taking the job. It's time to become the change we want to see. For the year 2005, the Viridian Pope-Emperor is becoming a design professor. I have a number of ambitious developments in mind for Viridian list, because, starting January, design will become my career. I'm leaving Texan and I'm becoming Californian. For a while, anyhow.
The full text of this mailing list post isn't yet available online -- but when it is, it will be right here: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Muppet Fan Halloween Parade 2004
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BoingBoing reader Caines says, "ToughPigs.com has published the first installment of its annual Muppet Fan Halloween Parade. This year's parade starts off with more than a dozen fan-made Beaker costumes." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: EDGE: The Astonishing Francis Crick
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DATE: 10/18/2004 08:09:08 AM
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V.S. Ramachandran writes in John Brockman's EDGE zine:
Everyone knows that [Francis] Crick (along with his colleague James Watson) unraveled the double helical structure of the DNA molecule but not everyone appreciates the even greater contributions he made soon afterwards. He went on to decipher the genetic code (three nucleotides coding for an amino acid; the mechanism of DNA replication, the transcription of the code by mRNA and its subsequent translation into amino acid sequences mediated by transfer RNA) With these achievements in place Crick soon came to be regarded as the founder of the new science of molecular biology and occupied the same place in twentieth century Science as Darwin did in the 19th century.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites Iraq blog: Layla, part 2
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DATE: 10/18/2004 08:21:30 AM
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NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Falluja this week. He adds two new dispatches to his blog, including this snapshot of traveling hula girl Layla (background) with some new friends. Link to Layla, part two, Link to Flying Dutchman. (and happy birthday, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Synesthete psychics
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DATE: 10/18/2004 08:39:19 AM
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Researchers from the University College London propose that people who see auras may actually have a rare form of synaesthesia, a cross-wiring of the senses. Psychologist Jamie Ward studied a woman identified as GW who saw certain colors projected around people she knew and in response to hearing their names. Ward says:
"The ability of some people to see the coloured auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mysticism throughout the ages. Although many people claiming to have such powers could be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synaesthesia. GW does not believe she has mystical powers and has no interest in the occult, but it is not hard to imagine how, in a different age or culture, such an interpretation could arise."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Asexual pride
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DATE: 10/18/2004 09:18:23 AM
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New Scientist has a long feature on asexuality and how online communities of asexuals are declaring their non-desire to be "as valid an orientation as being straight or gay."
The amazing degree of variation in the experiences of asexual people suggests that the underlying causes of their lack of sexual attraction are very different. Some asexuals might simply have extremely low sex drives in spite of an innate orientation towards males or females. Other asexuals might form a fourth category of sexual orientation in addition to the hetero-, homo- and bi-sexual ones, namely people who are attracted to neither gender, even if they have normal sex drives.
There is no official definition for asexuality yet, but it probably needs to take all these variations into account, says Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist and human-sexuality expert studying asexuality at Brock University in St. Catherines, Canada. “The place where we draw the line is the desire to interact sexually with other people,” says Brian (name changed), a navy veteran from Virginia. When it comes to having children, some asexuals say they would like to have a baby, but most would use IVF to avoid having to have sex.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ramachandran lectures
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DATE: 10/18/2004 09:29:44 AM
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Following on Xeni's post below about neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, here's a link to Real Audio recordings of his excellent Reith Lectures from last year on the subject of the Emerging Mind. Lecture #4, Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese, is a wonderful introduction to synesthesia.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark interviews Love and Rockets' co-creator Jaime Hernandez
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DATE: 10/18/2004 12:46:13 PM
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In the October edition of Graphic Novel Review, I interviewed Love & Rockets' co-creator Jaime Hernandez, who has been creating comics about the same cast of characters for nearly a quarter of a century. Fantagraphics has just released a 700+ page book, Locas, which anthologizes most of Jaime's work from the comic book.
Now that you are in your 40s and your characters have aged along with you, have the things that have happened to you as you've grown older played a large part in the way you look at the world?
I do really pay attention [to] how life is in the mid-40s and how it affects them. Even if we try not to live life by this timeline, we do. You're at a certain age where you say, "Where do I go from here? Do I want a family? By the time I'm this old, do I want a house?" Things like that. When you're younger, you don't think about that stuff, and some people are forced to think about it. It doesn't work out that well for some people. And so, so that's what I think about a lot. I think about which of my characters are going to slide into old age gracefully and which ones are going to go in kicking and screaming. That's an important point in my work right now. That's one of the things I think about a lot. "Ok, I'm doing a character here, where are they going? They're this age, they should be at this point, or maybe not, why aren't they? Why aren't they married and have kids?"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sushi USB drives
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DATE: 10/18/2004 01:16:20 PM
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These are easily the coolest USB gizmos: light-up chunks of plastic sushi with USB memory inline.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Torrented Stewart-on-Crossfire audience outstrips cable audience
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DATE: 10/18/2004 01:19:21 PM
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Best guess is that the Bittorrent downloads of Jon Stewart on Crossfire have outstripped the size of the audience for the cablecast of Crossfire.
The iFilm version currently has 99,228 views. Sites don't make Blogdex without 250,000 views. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe 350,000 is more viewers than the original Crossfire interview probably had. (I can only find that CNN averages 757,000 viewers during prime time).
Update: From the time I posted this until the time I finished an email with similar content, 40,000 people viewed the iFilm version of the Crossfire interview. Everytime I've checked BitTorrent, there have been more than 100 people sharing the file.
Another Update (10/16/04 7:56 PM): Leonard Lin is saying there are 4,000 BitTorrent seeds and his Apache server is now "handling 100+ simultaneous connections and avg'ing 7.0MB/s right now, 25GB/hr"
Yet Another Update (10/17/04 7:47PM): The Stewart/Crossfire torrents are now number 5 on Blogdex and has 291,863 on iFilm. The BitTorrent page lists 54,206 download, but I can't imaging how they're coming up with this number.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fleshbot -- the film company-- releases lost porno flick of Ed Wood
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DATE: 10/18/2004 01:55:04 PM
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Holy media meld, Batman! Resurrecting a 1971 hardcore feature from legendary kitsch auteur Ed Wood, Fleshbot becomes a film distribution company. Fleshbot says:
In 1971, Ed Wood's "Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love" -- one of the last of over two dozen porn flicks made in the 1960s and early 70s by the cinematic genius responsible for such classics as "Glen or Glenda?" and "Plan 9 From Outer Space" -- opened at the Hudson Theater in Times Square for an extremely limited run ... and the full hardcore version of the film hasn't been seen in its entirety since. Until this month, that is, when it becomes the first DVD released under the Fleshbot Films imprint. Yes, we're very proud. Wherever he is, we hope Ed is too.
Link, and I am so buying the DVD immediately (not worksafe)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Weinberger: Photo-organizing infocalypse looms
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DATE: 10/18/2004 03:02:45 PM
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This morning's roundup of this month's Wired missed this fantastic article by David Weinberger on the coming infocalyptic disaster when we all have a squillion photos with no metadata.
Thus, the metadata most of us attach to our photos is pretty pathetic. We can name them when we transfer them to a computer, but most people don't bother and end up with a hard disk full of photos with names like DSC00012.jpg and DSC00234.jpg. As the years go on, DSC00234.jpg will become an archaeological artifact that might as well be labeled Don't_Know_Don't_Care.jpg. If we're to have any hope of preserving our memories, we'll need to be more clever than that. Much more clever.
What do you do if you're too lazy - or overburdened or preoccupied - to tag your photos? Let a machine do it. Digital cameras already capture critical data points at the moment the shutter clicks. Most models record - in the image file itself - not only the date and time a photo was taken but also the focal length, the aperture setting, and whether the flash fired. These tidbits can provide clues about whether the photo was taken indoors or out, during the day or at night, focusing on something close up or far away. Scanty metadata, but potentially helpful.
But why limit the possibilities to what today's cameras can do? The image file format most cameras use includes fields for longitude and latitude, in anticipation of the day when global positioning systems are built in. That day could be soon. Cell phones already gather some positioning information, and by the end of 2005 all new cell phones in the US will be locatable to within 500 feet or so. Establish a Bluetooth wireless connection between phone and camera and the camera will know where it is. Web sites already exist that use GPS data to let you upload photos pegged to spots on maps, and a Stanford research project compares photos with shots of known locations, automatically annotating snaps with information about where they were taken.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dreaming of the single-chip mobile phone
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DATE: 10/18/2004 03:30:06 PM
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I wrote an article for TheFeature about two recent University of Michigan announcements that could lead the way to a mobile phone on a chip.
[T]oday's mobile phones -- not including ones that have non-traditional form factors -- have become about as tiny as human anatomy allows. Does that mean miniaturization is coming to an end? For the phones themselves, the answer is probably yes. For the components inside the phone, the answer is definitely no.
The advantages to shrinking and integrating the internal components of mobile phones are obvious. Component miniaturization means that manufacturers can pack more functions into phones, and integration ultimately leads to lower manufacturing costs.
At the Wireless Integrated Microsystems Engineering Research Center (WIMS ERC) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, two different research projects -- one involving antennas and the other involving frequency resonators -- could help achieve a long sought-after goal -- a true single-chip wireless transceiver.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pop Surrealiam book signing in LA at la Luz de Jesus Gallery
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My friend Kirsten Anderson is going to sign her new Pop Surrealism lowbrow art book at la Luz de Jesus Gallery from 7-11pm on October 23rd. Many of the featured artists will also be there: Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, Todd Schorr, Lisa Petrucci, Anthony Ausgang, and The Pizz will be there to sign copies. (Here's Bruce Sterling's take on the gallery)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: California cooking the paper-ballot option
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DATE: 10/19/2004 03:34:37 AM
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California may have a law requiring its electoral overseers to offer paper ballots to voters this election, but the people who run the elections want to fix it so that you never find out about it.
Pollworkers in Santa Clara County are being trained not to offer voters a chance to use paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has learned. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley mandated in May that all polling places offer a paper ballot option, which would allow people concerned about e-voting machine reliability a chance to vote on paper ballots at the polls. But pollworkers in Santa Clara County are being instructed not to tell voters that this option is available. Instead, they will make paper ballots available only if voters specifically request them.
Ed Cherlin, a pollworker being trained in Santa Clara County, said he was very disturbed to learn that he was not supposed to mention the paper option. "I object to the government telling me that I can't tell people about their rights," he said.
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(Thanks, Tracy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Live-action women's Dungeons and Dragons show
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DATE: 10/19/2004 04:09:21 AM
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Dungeon Majesty is a cable-access TV show in which four young women play Dungeons and Dragons -- the show is intercut with Z-grade green-screen masks of them staging D&D fights in front of fakey caves or deep in spooky woods, and illustrated with flip-book animations fo D&D monsters drawn in pen on lined paper. This is really fantastic stuff -- it's got nerd pride to burn, and production values that make MST3K look slick. Wish they'd put up .torrents of the shows, but the video teaser is pretty entertaining in and of itself.
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(Thanks, Star!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's Edinburgh talk video .torrent
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DATE: 10/19/2004 05:54:16 AM
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Video from my talk at Edinburgh University, "Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rooms to Make the Web Illegal, and You're Not Invited" is now online as a .torrent, thanks to Torrentocracy.
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(Thanks, Joe!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coming soon: babies with three biological parents
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DATE: 10/19/2004 06:41:23 AM
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In the Observer (UK), a story about proposed scientific experiments that would result in children being born with three biological parents.
UK medical authorities say they will almost certainly approve the application in the next few weeks. The aim of the technique is to prevent mothers passing on degenerative genetic diseases to their children. But campaigners say it could lead to significant increases in elderly women having children. They also claim it represents an unacceptable step towards the creation of designer babies.
'By creating a child with three genetic parents, these scientists are taking the first step towards genetic engineering of human beings. That is not a direction in which we should be going,' said Dr David King, director of Human Genetics Alert.
Link.
BoingBoing reader Chris says, "Actually, this is not completely new: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fun with scissors
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DATE: 10/19/2004 06:41:23 AM
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BoingBoing reader Kenny says, "We were having a debate about the term 'Pair of scissors,' and decided to do a Google 'Feeling Lucky' search on 'Why a pair of scissors' (without the quotes). Try it! Then be sure to read through the FAQ section." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mark Cuban: Give it away give it away now
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DATE: 10/19/2004 07:36:58 AM
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Broadcast.com billionaire, Dallas Mavericks owner, and "Benefactor" star Mark Cuban is giving away a bunch of ideas for new businesses on his blog. They're potentially patentable, he says, but he's not inclined to file.
Cuban's ideas--like others that have materialized on his Web log--center around the emerging industry for personal video recorders (PVRs), such as TiVo, and video on demand (VOD). VOD is not as widely available as PVRs are, but the idea has shown some recent signs of life with a movies-on-demand deal between TiVo and Netflix, and with the VOD service--offering mostly obscure programming--of Akimbo.
Link to CNET's story.
Cuban says, "If I were a patent terrorist like some, I could probably even patent these ideas. Isn’t it a shame that in this country today, you can have nothing more than an idea, do nothing with it, but still have a chance to make money?" Link to Cuban's blog entry with details on the proposed ideas.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Google Desktop + Hello + orkut = bad news?
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DATE: 10/19/2004 07:57:11 AM
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BoingBoing reader Adam says,
There's some idle suspicion that Google intends to expand their functionality to include sharing of desktop files. This seems pretty likely given their acquisition of Picasa, which included something called "Hello" - an IM-like application for chatting and sharing pictures. Moreover, if they decide to merge this with orkut, to allow file sharing just with your friends network, then that's a pretty compelling offering.
HOWEVER... The orkut terms of service are still extremely unfavorable to the end user. This is not too bad when it just applies to your profile and to chats on their message boards. It is REALLY bad when it applies to other forms of personal content that may be shared using the system.
I blogged this earlier: Link. As I said, this is just idle speculation, but it seems like something we all ought to watch out for.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Review of "The Last Starfighter: The Musical"
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DATE: 10/19/2004 08:06:51 AM
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Doesn't get much nerdier than this, folks. From filmmaker and former BoingBoing guestblogger Jason Scott:
1982. Atari Games, to celebrate the creation of their Atari 2600 Pac-Man Game (which, I might add, was one of the most pathetic, slapdash, slipshod piece of programming ever to churn out of a development studio) held a massive "Pac Man Day" in Citicorp Center in New York City. Being a confessed "Pac Maniac", I couldn't resist. To complete the picture, you have to know that I had that great uncontrolled 11-year-old hair of unequal length, and an old army fatigue jacket with a "PAC MAN" t-shirt transfer on the back. Now, it was me and literately THOUSANDS of kids jammed into the inadequately-planned celebration area at the Center, with all of us vying for places to stand and have fun. They had the contest, which only had maybe a dozen of us actually show enough nerve to go up on stage, and due to a REALLY LOUD chomping sound, I placed somewhere around third. Of course, this is up to dispute, because the place essentially turned into a riot (I can still recall my father up on a balcony, screaming at me to stand against a wall so I wouldn't be stepped on) and they generally just THREW stuff into the crowd, but I was third.
This is a memory I will hold dear until all of time. It was not a depth. It was a pinnacle. It was a heady, breathless moment in time in which my own fannish interest in something led me to a situation, a unique situation, that could barely be explained to others without sounding truly off-the-wall, absolutely beyond saving. And like many such unique events, you hold a fear in your heart, beyond the memory, a fear that as time goes on you will not feel such things again.So, as I sit here typing these words to you, I know I have achieved something of equal, deep geekdom. I have attended an off-broadway musical based on The Last Starfighter.
Link to Jason's blog entry, Link to The Last Starfighter show details.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: This guy uses ultrastrong magnetic field to shrink coins
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DATE: 10/19/2004 09:27:19 AM
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This guy uses ultrastrong magnetic field to shrink coins. Link (Mirror site link) (Thanks, Kim!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ben Folds on Shatner
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DATE: 10/19/2004 09:34:10 AM
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William Shatner's surprisingly good "Has Been" album was produced by alt.pop pianist Ben Folds. BB pal John Alderman just conducted a really insightful interview with Folds for MP3.com.
(Shatner) had so many ideas, and they're ideas coming from a 73-year-old actor. And that's a great perspective. It's moving. We hear kids all the time. Rock and roll is--and should be--a kid's place, and they're coming of age--18 years old--and they're going, "There's something out there. I want to get it. There's something." And those things that they're saying... They've been said over and over, which is OK, because this is their first time living. But what Shatner's saying in the record so much is that he still feels that at 73 years old. It's like you don't just age to 25, 30, 40 years old--and all of a sudden you know everything. It's that perspective that bridges any kind of generation gap you could have in rock-and-roll music.
As I'm saying it, I think it's kind of monumental. I don't know that anyone's ever done that before--actually said, "I'm 73 years old, and I cannot get my s*** together." That's cool!
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny remote shuts off almost any TV in a public place
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DATE: 10/19/2004 09:37:17 AM
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Great Wired News article about TV B-Gone, a keychain fob that you can use to turn off bothersome TVs in bars, airports, etc.
The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ScienceMatters@Berkeley
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DATE: 10/19/2004 09:39:54 AM
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In this month's issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley:
* Supernovas illuminate dark energy
* Neurobiology's lighter side
* A twist on Cancer DNA
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TITLE: Blogs as tool for direct citizen/lawmaker dialogue
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DATE: 10/19/2004 09:43:36 AM
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In this blogging.la comment thread, LA City Councilmember Eric Garcetti engages in dialogue with some of his constituents. Pretty cool example of the potential of blogs to facilitate government accountability and public discourse. Link (thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: TV sends S-O-S
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DATE: 10/19/2004 10:58:03 AM
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An Oregon man's Toshiba TV transmitted an international distress signal at 121.5 MHz that was detected by satellite. Civil Air Patrol responded and demanded that the man turn off his tube or pay $10,000 per day in fines for crying wolf. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Drum machine
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DATE: 10/19/2004 11:08:52 AM
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The Pneumatic and Electronic Actuated RoboT (PEART, after the drummer for Rush) is a machine that pounds the skins based on MIDI signals. The rig was built by students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. (Notice the impressive pile of junk hardware visible in the "practice space," most likely a utility closet in their lab.) Link (via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: That personal touch
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DATE: 10/19/2004 11:18:57 AM
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Carlo says: "A woman gets a picture of a sack from a customer service representative, then the customer service representative gets the sack." Apparently, a telephone help agent from Orange in the UK tested a client's new cameraphone by sending her photos of his dick. "Of course the real problem," Carlo points out, "is that nobody looks big on a 2-inch phone screen." Link (via TheFeature)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rudy Rucker starts a blog
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DATE: 10/19/2004 12:08:12 PM
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Novelist, computer science professor, and former BoingBoing guestblogger Rudy Rucker launched a blog today at rudyrucker.com. He says the project was "driven by a desire to post a great topical cover of the old protest song 'Eve of Destruction' by Al Buzzo of Geneseo, New York." Link. (scroll down for blog).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's DRM talk in Hebrew
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DATE: 10/19/2004 12:26:13 PM
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Ran Yaniv Hartstein has translated my DRM talk into Hebrew.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: U2 set to release iPods loaded with new album
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DATE: 10/19/2004 12:56:21 PM
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Reuters is reporting that:
U2 and Apple Computer Inc. are expected to announce next week that they have signed a deal to sell custom iPods. According to a source, the Irish rock band's upcoming album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," due Nov. 23 via Interscope Records, will come preloaded on iPods that will be available the week of street date.
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TITLE: Firefox raising $ for NYT launch-ad
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DATE: 10/19/2004 01:11:34 PM
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Firefox -- the slick and thin version of Mozilla intended for civilian use -- is going 1.0 soon, and the Mozilla Foundation is plnning on taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times trumpeting the occasion. They're taking donations and they've raised something like $30k so far.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bling Bling Medallion: world's most branded thing
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DATE: 10/19/2004 01:11:41 PM
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The Bling Bling medallion (composed of "layers upon layers of gold plated logos") is the world's "most branded thing."
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gramophone DIY kit
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DATE: 10/19/2004 01:11:48 PM
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This £16.95 kit was developed at Middlesex University -- it's a collection of materials and DIY instructions for building a mechanical gramaphone. It even comes bundled with a pair of old 78 RPM discs to test it with.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Belarus busts American for providing VoIP, being an entrepreneur without permission
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DATE: 10/19/2004 01:11:56 PM
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Authorities in Belarus -- the land of my forefathers -- have arrested a man for using and providing voice-over-IP services. Check out the way they characterized his activity, "damage to the country's communications providers," whew!
US citizen Ilya Mafter has been detained in Belarus because he was believed to have caused about 100,000 US dollars in damage to the country's communications providers, the Interfax news agency cited sources in the State Security Committee as reporting on Tuesday.
"A preliminary report suggests that damage of about 100,000 US dollars was caused to Belarussian communications providers, including the Beltelecom company, as a result of illegal communications services using IP telephony that were organized by Mafter," the source said.
The US citizen, who was detained on Oct. 16, is also suspected of "working as an entrepreneur without registration or permission," said the source.
Link
(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Video: What's happened to George W. Bush's brain after 10 years?
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DATE: 10/19/2004 01:44:51 PM
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luminifer sez: "This site has clips of a GW debate from 10 years ago, and clips from recent speeches/debates. The difference between the eloquent GW 10 years ago and what we have now is astounding, and maybe doesn't bode well for the future."
For [James Fallow's] article, rather than talking to campaign spinners for each side and reporting what they said, he dove into the archival record of each man's debates, and made an astonishing discovery: 10 years ago, George W. Bush was an articulate, forceful debater. Tough to belive, but when Fallows reviewed the tapes of Bush's 1994 debate with Anne Richards, he found that not only did Bush win the debate, but he spoke well.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Free teeth flossing gadget
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DATE: 10/19/2004 02:11:25 PM
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Kevin Kelly notes that you can get a free sample of the Reach Access Flosser he reviewed in Cool Tools by filling out this form here. Get your sample today and help us realize our goal to make Boing Boing readers the cleanest mouthed people on earth. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: CIA 9/11 report suppressed by the President
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npr sez: "This is a secret report by the CIA that names names in terms of 9/11 responsibility but is being supressed by Bush. People who aren't registered at LA Times can read the full text of the article here.
"The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election," the official continued. "No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress." None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush's much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss. The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain. And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath, or on the record. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. All in all, strange behavior for a man who seeks reelection to the top office in the land based on his handling of the so-called war on terror.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Video of President joking about non-existent weapons of mass destruction
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Remember when the President delivered a rip-roaringly funny monologue about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction? Here's a video clip of the event, interspersed with the not-as-funny consequences of the President's mistaken insistence that there were WMDs in Iraq.
Link (Thanks, Gregory!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart on his Crossfire appearance
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DATE: 10/19/2004 04:54:57 PM
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UPDATED: Here's a clip from Jon Stewart's Daily Show monologue following on his now-legendary Crossfire appearance in which he post-mortems his performance. Very good stuff.
Link New Link, Crossfire's response
(via Waxy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toilet seats with LEDs
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DATE: 10/19/2004 11:17:19 PM
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These LED-illuminated, battery-powered, motion triggered toilet seats are bad-ass, but not $250 worth of bad-ass!
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons's new website
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DATE: 10/20/2004 12:39:19 AM
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The Creative Commons website relaunched today with a really clean new interface -- great work, guys!
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(Thanks, Mario!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Archive talk in London next week
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DATE: 10/20/2004 02:11:54 AM
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Next week, the LWT in London hosts a talk called "BBC Creative Archive: Fuel for a Creative Nation," with Paula LeDieu, the visionary director of the BBC's Creative Archive project, through which the contents of the BBC's amazing vaults will be placed online under a Creative Commons license for reuse and redistribution by the Britons who paid for it all in the first place.
When: 28 October 2004, 18:45 for a 19:00 start
Where: Venue - LWT South Bank, Upper Ground, SE1, London. (Nearest stations are Waterloo and Southwark: map)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dubya's bulge is an iPod
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DATE: 10/20/2004 08:01:58 AM
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UPDATED: Joi Ito found this great iPod-ad send-up.
Link, Link to original
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sea monster
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DATE: 10/20/2004 08:38:38 AM
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This monstrous sunfish washed up on a beach in Puponga, New Zealand. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neal Stephenson's Slashdot interview
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Neal Stephenson's Slashdot interview is live -- he doesn't do a lot of press, but boy he's sharp.
The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.
The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mindball
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DATE: 10/20/2004 10:04:18 AM
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Ealier this year at the Wired NextFest, I played a prototype of Mindball, a game developed at the Interactive Institute where two players sit at a table and control a small steel ball with their EEG activity. (Actually, your brainwaves control a magnet under the table that moves the ball, but it *seems* as if you're controlling the ball directly.) By relaxing your mind, you can make the ball roll over to the opponent's goal. So to win, you have to "out chill" the other person. I was skeptical, until I actually sat down to play against my friend Nick Philip, an ambient DJ/artist who is in the business of chilling. He beat me every time.
Now, Interactive Productline is selling Mindball tables for US$20,000. It would make a great addition to any man or woman-of-leisure's rec room.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Stephen King finishes the Gunslinger books
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DATE: 10/20/2004 10:10:01 AM
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For more than a decade now, I've been reading Stephen King's Gunslinger books; the series he started writing as a teenager and has finally finished with the seventh volume, called The Dark Tower.
The series is loosely based on Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and it's a magic-realist, metafictional, cowboy, horror, fantasy, science fiction saga epic that runs nearly a thousand pages to the volume, and took the man a lifetime to write.
The seventh volume highlights all that is good and all that is poor in this series. It is, of course, self-indulgent. This series contains (lots) more verbiage than the Bible and Kapital combined, and says much, much less than either. Of course. It goes without saying. King is indulging his imaginaton, and we have to indulge his indulgence if we're going to enjoy this.
And it is marvellously enjoyable. From the first page of the first book, I've been quietly engrossed in the outcome of King's questing heroes. And at the end of this seventh book, I found out how it all came out, and I wasn't disappointed. This was a tale worth traversing.
If you ask me, these are King's best books. The basic premise -- a cadre of mystic, gunslinging knights traversing the worlds and all time to reach the mcguffin that holds the universe together -- is the perfect, relentless drummer, pounding out the tempo of the story, dragging them through hardship beyond hardship. The science fiction elements are cool; the fantasy elements are heroic; the horror elements are creepy as hell. The plot doesn't slacken, and the characters are deeply and thoroughly drawn.
i'm glad it's over, though. After thousands and thousands of pages, I just wanted it to end. And I'm grateful it ended so well.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mad Cowboy Disease
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DATE: 10/20/2004 12:52:52 PM
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Clever tees benefiting "Downtown For Democracy," a political advocacy group comprised largely of hipsters. Link (via Hint)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photoshop contest: Bill O'Reilly's next book cover
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DATE: 10/20/2004 01:00:14 PM
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Falaphilia, schadenfreude, and loofah sponges ahoy. Fark invites all to photoshop the cover of recently scandalized Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly's next book. Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sex and mobile tech zeitgeist watch
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DATE: 10/20/2004 01:23:52 PM
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File under "strangest patents of all time." Sounds like the cellular equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
Mobilehookup's patent pending 'Talk Now' combines text messaging's fun and convenience with speed-dating's functionality. A key industry innovation, 'Talk Now,' allows Mobilehookup members to further pursue a budding connection by talking live - for five minutes - on the telephone while protecting user privacy and anonymity. (...) One of the fastest growing communities of its kind in Canada, Mobilehookup offers 'Talk Now' users the unique opportunity to get to know a person better without having to exchange key personal information - like phone numbers or addresses. Not only does this mean members retain control of the dating situation but similar to speed-dating, they are better equipped to quickly decide whether or not to continue with a relationship.
Easy to use, 'Talk Now' is activated by sending a message to the Mobilehookup server. After getting approval from the other party, the Mobilehookup server connects the two members by bridging a telephone call, ensuring that total anonymity is maintained. Whether they're simply having fun or connecting with a potential life partner, the members receive five minutes from VoCoMo to talk to each other.
Link to ultra-bizarro press release (thanks, Jason)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Q-Burns Abstract Message online listening party
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DATE: 10/20/2004 01:36:11 PM
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Michael Donaldson, aka Q-Burns Abstract Message, may be the hardest working man in funktronica. When he's not gigging in big cities or remote locales -- Siberia and Iceland were two recent tour stops -- he's cutting, pasting and tweaking his inimitable brand of soulful grooves.
A new CD remix collection of his work was released this week. Future Past Tense documents selected tracks from 1998 to present, and you can listen to the entire album online by way of a spiffy flash player here: Link. Admission to the listening party is free, but strictly BYOB: bring your own broadband.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: t-shirts: I heart Internets, I hear rumors, I heart Jon.
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DATE: 10/20/2004 03:43:57 PM
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Show your love for the internets, and your faith in our presidentiary, with official "I HEART THE INTERNETS" merch. Link (Thanks, Chuck)
BoingBoing reader optimus says, "Oh, snap! The 'I Heart' tshirt model totally got the drop on us. Ours, though, has a totally 31337 IBM PC for optimal internets use." Link
BoingBoing reader thom says, "In a similar vein, there are some t-shirts with the 'Stop... Hurting... America' quote of Jon Stewart." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Godzilla v. Hollywood
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DATE: 10/20/2004 04:17:55 PM
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Soon, a scaly lizard demon will trudge down Hollywood Boulevard. Mactresses shriek, clutching their knockoff Prada handbags. Trannies, junkies, and star map sellers scatter in all directions. Squinting through heady smog, the monster flails two little arms impotently in the air. He belches smoke, and groans a terrifying groan. Then -- splat! One clawed hand smacks down into a grey puddle of moist cement.
No, I'm not talking about Jack Valenti. On November 29, Godzilla finally gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Link to blogging.la post, Link to Japan Today story, and Link to Godzilla, Final Wars -- the 28th Godzilla film, due out on 12/4/2004, and purportedly last in the series.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Glenn's seven point sleep program for new parents
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DATE: 10/20/2004 05:12:26 PM
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New dad Glenn Fleishman has learned seven ways to help his baby boy sleep through the night.
5. Small noises should be ignored at night. We were pretty ready to jump up and feed or comfort Ben when he made any sound at night. And that was fine in his early weeks when he wasn't a good sleeper and his melatonin hadn't kicked in to start helping him tell night from day. But more recently, we were still doing it. Our post-partum doula/sleep consultant said more or less, he'll tell you when he needs something; his peeps and snorts can be safely ignored because he'll rise out of heavy sleep into light and back into it many times a night. She was right. The minute we started waiting for real action--not minutes of screaming, but a real "wah wah"--we started getting real sleep. It's tough. But it's the way to go and doesn't damage the kid. When you leap up every time he or she peeps, you're disturbing his or her sleep, the sleep folks say.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kidnapped Aussie uses Google to verify identity and secure release
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DATE: 10/20/2004 11:52:33 PM
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An abducted Aussie journalist convinced his captors that he wasn't a spook by directing them to a search-engine.
[H]is captors agreed to release him after they were convinced he was not working for the CIA or a US contractor...
"They Googled him and then went onto a web site - either his own or his book publisher's web site, I don't know which one - and saw that he was who he was, and that was instrumental in letting him go, I think, or swinging their decision," he told AP news agency.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Whales can't sue
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DATE: 10/20/2004 11:53:45 PM
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Denise sez, "Ninth Circuit Judge Willy Fletcher, no doubt with some degree of wistfulness, concluded in a decision published today that the world's Cetacean Communty lacks standing to sue George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld over the Navy's use of low frequency active sonar."
We are asked to decide whether the world's cetaceans have standing to bring suit in their own name under the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. We hold that cetaceans do not have standing under these statutes.
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(Thanks, Denise!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Creative Commons in 20 words or less
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DATE: 10/20/2004 11:56:09 PM
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Jason Fried from 37 Signals has launched a challenge to clearly describe Creative Commons's value-proposition in 20 words or less. Go help!
"Legally share your work without losing copyright protection..."
Free legal service for intellectual property creators looking to share.
Share your cake and keep it too
"Legally share your work without losing copyright protection."
Alternative to traditional copyrights that allows authors and artists to share their work and still protect the specific rights important to them.
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CC-licensed sf novel
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DATE: 10/21/2004 12:03:09 AM
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Chris Carlsson has just released his first novel, "After the Deluge," as a Creative Commons-licensed download.
A teenage arsonist threatens a partially submerged mid-22nd century San Francisco. As a Public Investigator "€œtryout"€ seeks evidence across the utopian city full of canals and veloways, political and social conflicts erupt. When there is no such thing as property, what is crime, and how does a utopian society protect itself from bad behavior? Should scientists be as free as artists to create? What is a "free market"€ for work without and money and commodities?
Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Delta flight attendant suspended for blogging
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DATE: 10/21/2004 05:37:32 AM
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An anonymous BoingBoing reader says, "Queen of Sky is a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines. Three weeks ago she was suspended without pay for the sole reason of posting pictures in uniform on her blog. She was given no warning or chance to remove the pictures before that time. Queen of Sky has since removed the pictures from her blog, but one of them can be found here: Link."
More on Cathy Seipp's blog, Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: $600K for GOP PDAs?
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DATE: 10/21/2004 05:42:59 AM
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BoingBoing reader Ron Hovingh says,
My dad, dear misguided soul that he is, gave some money to the RNC but listed one of my e-mail addresses because he didn't have one at the time. So I've been getting urgent GOP "Give money now!" e-mail since last spring.
The latest RNC newsletter urges a contribution of $200, which it said "will pay for a PDA to help our canvassers contact Republican voters quickly accurately" and notes that "the RNC is shipping 3,000 out to volunteer captains."
I suppose $600,000 is a drop in the bucket if you're still coasting on Enron donations, but I have to wonder: 1.) What PDAs still cost $200? 2.) Do they get to keep the PDAs, and isn't this bigger partisan payola than Michael Moore giving away clean underwear?
But not so fast. BoingBoing reader Mark Pike urges us to refrain from playa-hatin' on partisan PDAs.
I'm working on the campaign right now trying to increase Dem. voter turnout in FL. With regard to the PDA stuff, canvassing operations have been using them to enter data at houses about voters. They use them to store maps of neighborhoods. This helps them control their databases and collect information more efficiently. There's no way canvassers get to keep the PDAs.
Also, when contacted voters reveal their preferences and begin discussing what issues are important to them, some of the canvassers use the PDAs to show commercials and videos that specifically target the things voters are discussing.
Look into it a little more. It's pretty fascinating how much technology is being harnessed by campaigners this year.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hollyw00t
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DATE: 10/21/2004 05:51:07 AM
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Moment of phonecam zen at an Austin, Texas movie theater marquee, courtesy of Wil Wheaton.
BoingBoing reader Stiv says, "That movie theater building currently houses Warthog: Texas (a computer game company, Link). Located on South Congress [street], the building used to be an adult theatre named Cinema West that got converted during the tech bubble. I fondly remember the porn titles they'd run on the marquee (my favorite was Passage through Pamela)."
Link to original. (thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Forest creatures frolic with Grandaddy
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DATE: 10/21/2004 07:12:45 AM
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This video from the band Grandaddy reveals (choose one):
(1) what you'll see at the dentist's office when the gas kicks in
(2) a Furry Fetish website come to life, minus the creepy sex stuff
(3) where lonely old sports mascots crawl off to die.
Link to quicktime video for "Nature Anthem." Not new but still worth a stream. (thanks, David)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Samsung releases 5 megapixel camera phone
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DATE: 10/21/2004 08:20:30 AM
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Available in South Korea later this year -- 5 luscious megapixels of pure phonecamming pleasure from Samsung. Link to /.'s roundup of news coverage.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update on confiscated Indymedia web server controversy
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DATE: 10/21/2004 08:30:28 AM
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Micah from Indymedia says,
Richard Allen, Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield UK and Jeremy Corbyn (MP for Islington North) posed official Parlimentary questions to the Home Office about what happened with the Indymedia servers. Their response indicates that no UK law enforcement agencies were involved, see here for the full response:
Caroline Flint [holding answer 18 October 2004]: I can confirm that no UK law enforcement agencies were involved in the matter referred to in the question posed by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam.
Link to previous BoingBoing coverage: one, two.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hallowe'en mix-disc of all time
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DATE: 10/21/2004 08:30:48 AM
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UPDATED AGAIN: Check out these two amazing downloadable mix-discs of Hallowe'en rarities and oddities -- Boris Karloff, the Groovie Goolies and the theme to Casper the Friendly Ghost! Man, this is what the Internet is for. (BTW, if you wanna post this as a .torrent, the Oddio Overplay people are cool with it -- just email Otis and me so we can post links to it) (Update: there's now a torrent of disc one online) (Update disc two is up as a torrent too now)
Disc One:
01 Tarantula Ghoul and The Gravediggers - Graveyard Rock
02 Don Hinson and The Rigamorticians -
Riboflavin-Flavored, Non-Carbonated, Polyunsatured Blood
03 Movie Trailer - Vampire Playgirls
04 Bobby Bare - Vampira
05 The Crewnecks - Rockin' Zombie
06 Griz Green - Jam At The Mortuary
07 Movie Trailer - Monsters Crash the Pajama Party
08 The MSR Singers - Monster Man
09 The Abominable Surfmen - Monster Surfer
10 Bobby 'Boris' Jones - Surfer Smash
11 Jupiter Jones - The Spook Spoke
12 Bob Mcfadden and Dor - I Dig You Baby
13 Movie Trailer - The Mind of Mr. Soanes
14 Albert DeSalvo - Strangler In The Night
15 Kenny and The Fiends - House on haunted hill
16 Winchell's Donut House Halloween Record -
Hear The Monsters (Spooky Sounds and A Spooky Tale)
17 Buddy Morrow and His Orchestra - The Raven
18 The Modernaires - The Rockin' Ghost
19 Bob Rosengarden and Phil Kraus - Satan Takes a Holiday
20 Boris Karloff and Friends - Ha Ha Ha/The Bride Of Frankenstein
21 Movie Trailer - Brain Eaters
22 Groovie Goolies - Goolie Garden
23 Hap Palmer - Haunted House
24 Bruce Haack and Norman Bridwel - The Witch's Vacation
25 Sounds of Terror! - Burned at the Stake
26 Louise Heubner - Intro Orgies, A Tool Of Witchcraft
27 Marty Manning and His Orchestra - Night On Bald Mountain
28 Criswell - Someone Walked Over My Grave
Link, Link to .torrent of disc 1, Link to .torrent of disc 2
(Thanks, Otis!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Amy Jenkins banned work premieres tonight in Boston
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DATE: 10/21/2004 08:54:23 AM
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The Audrey Samsara, a video work by Amy Jenkins that was commissioned by the Salvatore Ferragamo company and subsequently deemed too "distasteful" to display in their 5th Avenue store, will finally be publicly shown for the first time tonight, October 21, in Boston. (Background here and here.)
"Samson Projects, Boston’s newest contemporary art gallery, and Newbury Street’s 9 Months, announce a new arrival: a provocative one-night exhibition and fashion show on Thursday, October 21. A video installation by Brooklyn-based artist, Amy Jenkins, will be shown on a 60 inch plasma screen. The same evening, the latest belly-baring, runway maternity looks will be modeled by local, pregnant celebrities."
For those unable to attend this special one-night screening, the work will also be part of Jenkins's upcoming solo show opening in February at the Kustera/Tilton Gallery in New York City. Tonight's event is from 6:30-8:30pm.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wireless Music's Social Sound
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DATE: 10/21/2004 09:03:06 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about the future of mobile music technology:
Seventy-five years ago, a group of eager engineers convinced entrepreneur Paul Galvin that young people would do well with some mood music when they went parking on Lovers Lane. The following year, Galvin Manufacturing Corporation launched its first car radio, named by fusing the words "motor" and the suffix "ola," borrowed from the popular Victrola phonographs. In 1930, the state-of-the-art Motorola car radio defined music in motion. The next revolution in mobile music wouldn't happen until 1979. Indeed, this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sony Walkman, wearable technology that provided young people with a private soundtrack for the movie of their lives. Since then though, the song has remained the same... Listen carefully though, and you'll hear the opening strains of new mobile listening experiences in development at research laboratories around the world.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jay and Silent Bob coming to Degrassi
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DATE: 10/21/2004 09:09:57 AM
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Jay and Silent Bob are coming to the Canadian cult TV show Degrassi: The Next Generation!
"It's like When Worlds Collide, y'know? I'm a big fan of things like when Spider-Man and Daredevil meet. I go ape-(bleep) and bust a nut," said director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy), who is finally getting his chance to take part in the cult series he idolizes by starring in a three-episode arc on Degrassi: The Next Generation.
In a hilarious and profane press conference here yesterday with past and present Degrassi cast, creator Linda Schuyler and her creative team, Smith confirmed that he and pal Jason Mewes (aka "Jay" from Clerks and Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back) will start filming their parts next week through mid-November.
The episodes, which will air early next year, have Kevin Smith playing himself directing the next Jay and Silent Bob movie, "Jay And Silent Bob Go Canadian, Eh?" In the fictional film, the slacker duo come to Toronto because they need to get a high school diploma and no school in America will take them.
Link
(Thanks, Amanda!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Science and fiction
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DATE: 10/21/2004 09:11:15 AM
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The cover story of this week's Science News is about how TV and movies--from A Trip To The Moon to CSI-- can be good points-of-entry to educate the public about real science:
During his physics classes, (high school teacher Tom) Rogers also presents accurate cinematic depictions of science. "It's harder to find good stuff," he notes.
For example, he shows excerpts from 2001: A Space Odyssey to teach the concept of artificial gravity. In the film, it's generated along the rim of the rotating space station by centrifugal force. Students use visual clues to estimate the size of the space station and its rate of rotation. They then plug those numbers into the appropriate formula. If they do this correctly, they determine that the gravity at the outer rim of the station is about 90 percent of that on Earth.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Disturbing (but worksafe) photograph
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DATE: 10/21/2004 10:05:43 AM
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From Warren Ellis:
The guy in the middle is the famous and pioneering American private investigator Jay J Armes, who lost both his hands in an explosives accident as a kid. He learned to use those hooks they gave him and became immensely successful and wealthy. He's the guy who rescued Marlon Brando's son from kidnappers. I mean, this guy once had his own action figure (my little brother owned it).
Link
BoingBoing reader Lloyd Vancil says, "The action figure is still out there. Isn't the net wonderful? Link." (Ed. note: OMG check out the "bio-kinetic hand" action!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wired News on Make
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DATE: 10/21/2004 10:26:24 AM
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Wired News ran an article today about Make, the new DIY tech magazine that O'Reilly Media is launching early next year with BB's own Mark Frauenfelder at the helm!
The can-do attitude of old hobbyist magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics inspired the spirit of the new magazine, (O'Reilly VP Dale) Dougherty said.
"That was kind of lost in the '70s and '80s when people started becoming more consumers," said Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make. "People didn't need to make things anymore. It was cheaper to buy them."
While that still may be true today, "there is a satisfaction in making something rather than buying it," he said.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2004
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DATE: 10/21/2004 02:36:06 PM
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Nobody says it like Hunter S. Thompson.
Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners.
Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion tombstone auction closes at $37,400
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DATE: 10/21/2004 03:18:33 PM
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Disney's charity auction for the right to have your name on a tombstone at the Disneyland Haunted Mansion has closed, with a top bid of $37,400.00.
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Soviet heroes awards
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DATE: 10/21/2004 10:17:26 PM
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Things Magazine reports on a site about old Soviet Military awards.
The Order of Maternal Glory, 1st class, was awarded to mothers of nine children. If you had one more, you got the Order of Mother Heroine. Awards came with serious benefits. If you became a Hero of the Soviet Union, you also got "first priority on the housing list, 50 per cent rent reduction, reduced taxation rates (in 1985 this was changed to tax exempt status), up to an additional 15 square meters in living space, free yearly round-trip first class ticket, free personal bus transportation, free yearly visit to sanitarium or rest home, as well as entertainment and medical benefits."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: History of betel chewing
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DATE: 10/21/2004 10:19:20 PM
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When Carla and I traveled around Malaysia and Singapore in the mid-80s, we were excited to try betel nut. It's a seed that you mix with a little lime powder (calcium carbonate) and wrap in a leaf. Then you stuff the quid between your lip and gum. I didn't detect any psychoactive effects from the stuff, but it did turn my saliva a pretty red color. As a former Cophagen snuff addict (I haven't used it in 20 years), betel was an interesting substitute. Link (via growabrain) UPDATE: Suresh Venkat sez "should be careful with the betel leaf ;). it is the preferred
after-dinner digestive in India, where it is called 'paan', and is
sold on streets often right outside a restaurant.But there they often
mix tobacco in it for that extra kick. Needless to say, mouth cancer
follows shortly thereafter...
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Infringing Economist ads and the right of attribution
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DATE: 10/22/2004 02:23:34 AM
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I've been having a recurring argument lately about the morality of "attribution" and how bad it is to make money off of someone else's creation. But take this (terrific) Economist ad (the ads in London are about 1000x more clever than their American counterparts, and about 10x more clever than their Canadian cousins). It is clearly making money off of Scrabble, so should it give them a cut? How about attribution? "The Scrabble tile and Scrabble are Registered Trademarks of Hasbro, Inc."? The whole point of the ad is that there's no text EXCEPT the text on the tiles; it would, IMO, substantially weaken this piece to add an attribution line. Should they have to, anyway? This is what Lessig means when he talks about If Value, Then Right thinking. If there's some value in something, then someone must have a right to it. But would giving Hasbro a piece of the action encourage Hasbro to make better games? Will not giving them a cut discourage them from making more games in the future?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Windows error on giant Toronto animated billboard
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DATE: 10/22/2004 03:09:47 AM
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Windows errors on giant public billlboards are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with "Toronto."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copy files between thumb-drives without a laptop
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DATE: 10/22/2004 03:16:28 AM
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The FlashpontX is a $99, 512MB USB thumb-drive, with a twist. It has a female USB jack, and if you plug any other USB drive into it, any files in your "share" directory on the thumb-drive will be automatically copied over to the other key. So you can copy all your files even if you don't have a laptop handy. I've got my current 256MB thumb-drive strung on the wrist-strap of my phone, so it's always with me -- it'd be great to be able to just load up a share-point wiht a ton of stuff like the Wired CD, my latest novel, and so on, and hand it out to friends when we get togehter for coffee for fast drive-to-drive copying.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RSS feed of the comments on Flickr photos you've commented upon
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DATE: 10/22/2004 03:20:26 AM
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One of the big problems with commenting on others' blogs, Flickr photos and so forth is that you have to remember to go back to the entry to see if anyone's replied. Now, Flickr has solved part of the problem by letting you see the comments on all the photos you've commented upon as an RSS feed. This is a life-saver -- now I want one for TypePad, Slashdot, and all the other places I post.
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Update: Turns out you can get responses to your Slashdot posts by email! (Thanks, Jamie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dutch public-service images entering the public domain!
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DATE: 10/22/2004 03:24:48 AM
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This is so freaking cool: the Dutch Parliament has unanimously some Dutch Parliamentarians declared that most images owned by Dutch public broadcasters should be posted to the Internet and dedicated to the public domain. This is astonishingly great forward-thinking from what has always been one of the best Parliaments in Europe.
He described the problems he encounters in his work: "Technically, there are increasing distribution possibilities. However, [distribution] rules are the obstacles. Even a broadcaster's own production rights forbid online distribution. Programmes made with public funds belong in the public domain."
"Based on my experience in education, you just about have to fall on your knees and beg for images. This is ridiculous," said Ms Broekers-Knol, member of the Upper Chamber, supported by her fellow parliamentary colleagues.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HP sends Sun's President a nastygram for blogging
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DATE: 10/22/2004 03:29:45 AM
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Back in August, the President of Sun Microsystems posted a little dig at HP on his blog, saying:
To me, HP's problems spawn from the death of... their operating system, HP/UX. Like IBM, they've elected to ask their customers and ISV's to move to Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows on x86 systems. And if you're an ISV, how does that differentiate HP? - they're a box vendor. If you're a customer, where does that leave you with your HP/UX investments? Facing untimely change - with a vendor no longer in charge of their OS.
Pretty innocuous, right?
Well, HP didn't think so. They had their jackass lawyers send a nastygram to Sun, demanding that they take down the blog entry. Riiiiight.
Give it to Sun -- they didn't waver. Instead, they sent their own nastygram right back, and promptly delivered both letters to the ChillingEffects clearing-house for public humilation.
Once again, in certain of the places this is a statement of opinion by Jonathan Schwartz. His opinion is based on his good faith assessment of the current climate of HP. Alternatively, however, Sun will also stand behind this as a statement of fact that is true and accurate based on the above substantiation. As detailed by the above facts, we have seen signs that HP is abandoning HP/UX.
Jonathan Schwartz's opinions and even his vigorous debate on this subject as well as Sun's product comparisons and dialog on these commercial matters are inherent in Sun's competition with HP and are part of the free market system in which our companies operate. For our statements of fact, Sun has valid, objective and verifiable evidence. Accordingly, and based on the above, Sun affirmatively stands by its claims regarding HP/UX and will not agree to cease making such truthful and/or subjective claims.
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Errol Morris "Switcher" ads with former Bush supporters who will vote for Kerry
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DATE: 10/22/2004 08:55:46 AM
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Academy Award documentarian Errol Morris (who directed Apple's switcher ads) has created about 50 "switcher" ads for Kerry that are now on his website. A couple ran on MoveOn but most of them never appeared on the Web or TV. Now you can see them all on Morris' site. They're amazing. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Living brain in a jar
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DATE: 10/22/2004 10:09:47 AM
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A scientist at the University of Florida has cultured 25,000 living rat neurons into an in vitro brain capable of controlling flight simulator software.
“It’s essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom,” (bioengineer Thomas) DeMarse said. “Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network – a brain.”
The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Israeli Air Force's official bird watcher
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DATE: 10/22/2004 10:33:39 AM
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Ornithologist Yossi Leshem saves lives and millions for the Israeli Air Force by tracking bird migration and predicting their flight patterns. From an interview with Leshem in New Scientist:
"Israel has a higher density of fighter aircraft in its airspace than anywhere else in the world. So there is a huge conflict between flying machines and flying birds. Collisions are a big danger, for the birds of course, but also for our aircraft. Many more Israeli aircraft have been downed by birds than by enemy air battles in the last three decades... When a white pelican weighing 10 kilograms hits a plane going at 800 kilometres an hour, at the point of impact there will be a force exerted on the plane equivalent to about 100 tonnes. It's devastating"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nobel laureate Francis Crick's last filmed interview
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DATE: 10/22/2004 11:00:21 AM
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Filmmaker and BoingBoing reader Chris Thorpe says,
We've been filming the great and the good of science and film for a while. The aim is to provide coverage of as many areas as we can, [with subjects] telling their life stories in their own words. Sadly, Francis Crick died last month, but we were lucky enough to gain permission to place online his last ever filmed interview which has never been seen publicly before today. The site is subscription only (it's video on demand and we have to find a way of paying for it somehow!) but some clips are available free in the trailers area. The press release can be found here: Link.
Crick on "The Scientific Mind" -- Link. Crick on "The Beauty of the Double Helix Model" -- Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Prosthetic memory hardware
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DATE: 10/22/2004 11:59:06 AM
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Wired News has an interesting article about the quest to create an artificial brain prosthesis. University of Southern California professor Theodore W. Berger, whose work we've previously blogged, is making headway on an implantable chip that functions like the hippocampus. That's the part of the brain that creates memories for storage.
"The team expects it will take two to three years to develop the mathematical models for the hippocampus of a live, active rat and translate them onto a microchip, and seven or eight years for a monkey. They hope to apply this approach to clinical applications within 10 years. If everything goes well, they anticipate seeing an artificial human hippocampus, potentially usable for a variety of clinical disorders, in 15 years."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Poll shows that Bush supporters lie to themselves to feel better
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DATE: 10/22/2004 12:07:29 PM
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The Sept. 11 Commission found that there were no substantial ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, and Charles Duelfer's report states that Iraq had no significant WMD program. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of supporters of the President take comfort in pretending that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and pretending that there were significant ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
In addition, the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes' survey also found that a majoroty of supporters of President Bush mistakenly believe that the President supports the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the treaty banning land mines, when he in fact opposes them.
A majority of Bush supporters also think that most of the people on the world hope the President is re-elected. This is not the case.
Steven Kull, program director, said that Bush supporters' "resistance to information" on several fronts reflected a powerful bond with the president formed after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the perception - shared by Kerry supporters - that Bush still asserts that Iraq had WMD.
...
"To support the president and to accept that he took the United States to war based on mistaken assumptions is difficult to bear, especially in light of the continuing costs in terms of lives and money," Kull said.
"Apparently, to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Bush supporters suppress awareness of unsettling information."
A spokesman for the Bush campaign, Reed Dickens, said the perceptions on weapons were understandable "given that it's only in the last few weeks we've had this definitive finding" of the Duelfer report.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do this Sunday: Remix Radio
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DATE: 10/22/2004 04:15:54 PM
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On the Creative Commons blog, Glenn Otis Brown writes:
At 2pm this Sunday on the Bay Area's KALW (91.7), Benjamen Walker's "The Creative Remix" will debut on the airwaves. The main point of the show: "If remixing is an art form why are the lawyers running the conversation?" Follow Ben, whose insight and sense of humor have drawn him a cult radio following, as he speaks with artists about traditional kinds of collage -- like DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album -- but also art you might not have considered "remixing" -- historical fiction, for example, or an ancient poetic form called the Cento. Read more about the show. And Bay Area people, mark your calendar: 2pm, this Sunday, KALW (91.7).
Link to live stream.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do Sunday part 2: Jon "I'm not your Monkey" Stewart on 60 Minutes
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DATE: 10/22/2004 04:25:04 PM
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Before his now-legendary CNN "Crossfire" appearance, Jon Stewart sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes Correspondent Steve Kroft to discuss his gripes with cable news in America. Kroft's profile of the Comedy Central "Daily Show" host airs this Sunday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Composer Philip Glass sues "Celsius" filmmakers
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DATE: 10/22/2004 04:28:30 PM
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BoingBoing reader Greg says,
Philip Glass is suing the producers of Celsius 41.11, a vehemently anti-Michael Moore and anti-Kerry movie, for unauthorized use of parts of his musical score for "Powaqaatsi." They've used it already in commercials, and "if the music was heard in the movie, which is being released today in 40 cities nationwide, [Glass] would consider seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the film from being shown."
reg-free Link to NYT story
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Rapper's Delight" babelfished into Italian, then back into English
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DATE: 10/22/2004 05:17:52 PM
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Someone out there on the internets claims to have plugged the old-school hiphop classic "Rappers Delight" by Sugar Hill Gang into the online translation service Babelfish. First, they translated it into Italian, then used the same automated service to zap it back to English.
It can be in a position to flying entire with the night, but can oscillate a party ' to work to the light in advance payment?
It cannot satisfy it with its screw without fine small, but I can break off it outside with my excellent sperm!"
I go I make it, I go I make it, I I go make it, make it, make it.
' they are ' I here I am here, I I am great hank of prohibition, I I am everywhere
The shooting just your hands in on the air and left hardy as in you it is not taken care hardly
We make it, is not arrested, the y' all, a tock of the heartbeat, the y' all, you is not arrested!
Goes the hotel, the motel, whatcha that it goes to make today? (opinion that what)
I am going to obtain a girl of Moscow, andante to obtain the somunchank, eliminate in def a OJ,
Everyone goes, " hotel, motel, inn of festivity"
It reads like spam! Just add a couple of mortgage and v14gra lines. Link (thanks siege)
While we're on the subject, have you noticed how spam these days is the best conceivable source for band names? I mean, while I was publishing this post you're reading now, the following arrives in my in-box:
cannabis camille. chard the itsappian
tribesman blimp marksman torr checkup. drawn we cottrell,
expurgate we harelip Yexpand crayon?
I flack slim pursuant passer drank me albanian louisville dump,
answer is pertain fritz anneal clank chaperon
I mean -- Cannabis Camille? No amount of cheap beer and bong hits in college could possibly result in such brilliance. It begs to belong to an unlistenable all-girl stoner band. They'd play, like, String Cheese Incident covers or something. With extra-long guitar space jam interludes, as if the original ones weren't long enough. And Chard The Itsappian sounds like such a great name for a vegan deathmetal outfit. Or the illicit (and biologically impossible) love child of DEL: tha funkee homosapien and Dan the Automator.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Howard Lovy wins Foresight Prize
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DATE: 10/22/2004 07:22:56 PM
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Congratulations to BB pal and NanoBot blogger Howard Lovy who won this year's Foresight Institute Prize in Communication, recognizing "outstanding journalistic or other communication endeavors that lead to a better public understanding of molecular nanotechnology or other key emerging technologies of high social or environmental impact. Here's a bit from Howard's excellent acceptance speech:
Thank you very much for honoring me with what my 13-year-old daughter calls the "Dork of the Year" award.
"She, and everybody else, tells me I'm obsessed with nanotechnology. Guilty. But I look at it much differently than most of you in the room. I'm not obsessed with it as a technology, as a science, as a means of saving or destroying the world, or making a quick buck, or gathering government grants, plotting world domination. That's not what I do. Nanotechnology to me is, pure and simple, a … great … story. It's a story that contains, within it, many chapters large and small. My God, it's a story of grinches and greed, it's a story of men and women with vision, it's a story about humankind's relationship with the world around..."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark interviewed on MacRadio
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DATE: 10/22/2004 08:15:02 PM
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I was interviewed by Louis, the host of MacKaos, on Tuesday. I talked about Make magazine and the origins of bOING bOING. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How Nintendo censored US games
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DATE: 10/22/2004 11:51:45 PM
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Great piece detailing Nintendo America's censorship rules that were used to tone down Japanese games for the US audience, removing skin, violence and fun.
This strict "no blood" policy came to an embarrassing climax following the SNES release of Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat had been one of the most violent games for the Sega Genesis, with wall-to-wall blood and guts. The graphic violence was one of its chief sources of appeal. When the game was released on the SNES however, in coordination with Nintendo's content guidelines all the blood had to be removed. Instead, when the characters smacked each other gray"sweat" flew out of their bodies, certainly a painfully awkward compromise. As well, the gory "fatality" moves, in which characters could formally execute their opponents by decapitating them or ripping out their heart were all removed. The game was a huge commercial failure for Nintendo compared to the success of the Genesis version, and the experience is credited with promoting a significant shift in Nintendo's attitudes towards video game violence.
Link
(via Waxy)
Update: Tim sez, " "Friendships" are present in all major versions of Mortal Kombat II, including, most importantly the original arcade version. They were not (at all!) introduced by Nintendo in the SNES version to tone down the violence, as this fellow asserts."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Silent, eerie plane-crash footage set to music
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DATE: 10/22/2004 11:54:06 PM
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Last week, we blogged some killer NASA test-footage of an airplane full of crash-test dummies silently crashing into an experimental airstrip and bursting into flame while the dummies jerked violently back and forth. Coudal Partners sponsored a juried contest to set this footage to music, with fantastic results.
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(Thanks, Edgewood!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: L Ron Hubbard bio-play acted by kids
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DATE: 10/23/2004 01:49:10 AM
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A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant is a play starring children, telling the story of the life of L Ron Hubbard. It's just opened in LA after a successful run in NYC.
The play is pretty much what the title implies: an unauthorised pageant performed by - but not necessarily for - children that tells the story of the life of Church of Scientology founder and main man L Ron Hubbard. And before you ask, the L, we learn, stands for Lafayette...
As soon as the Church got wind of an LA Times piece on the production, several editors on the paper received calls from the guardians of L Ron's flame urging them to pull the article. Nothing unusual about that, as any entertainment PR will tell you. But things took a more sinister turn when the phone calls started.
"The parents of one of the kids in the cast were called by members of the entertainment industry that were Scientologists," says Timbers. "They were told that if they were to continue with the show that it might be bad for their future career."
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYC subway turns 100 -- how did that tech boost shape city?
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DATE: 10/23/2004 07:58:10 AM
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Newsweek's Brian Braiker on how the NYC subway system -- mobile technology from an earlier era-- made the city what it is today.
When the Dutch East India Company set out to build New Amsterdam in the 17th century, it was not as a religious settlement but as a business center. Then Alexander Hamilton decided that New York City was not going to be the agrarian society envisioned by the founding gentleman farmers of Virginia, but an economic engine driving the nation’s commerce and mercantilism. Gov. DeWitt Clinton, who served two nonconsecutive terms (1817-22, 1825-28), followed his lead -- and built the Erie Canal. The canal was the very key to making New York’s port the country’s greatest, eclipsing Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia and Norfolk, and turning the city into a center for national commerce, as well as a gateway to the West. New York thus arguably owes its commercial success to one source: the ability to move goods and people from one place to another efficiently and en masse.
Enter the subway, which turns 100 this month. If anything truly revolutionized the way New Yorkers live, work and play, it’s the subway. On any given weekday, 4.5 million people travel on the 6,400 cars that run along 722 miles of track beneath the city’s five teeming boroughs. For all their complaints about it -- the dirt! the crowding! the noise -- the subway remains nothing short of the miracle it was when the subway opened in 1904.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eminem's anti-Bush anthem leaked online
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DATE: 10/23/2004 08:05:20 AM
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Updated: An audio excerpt from Eminem's new anti-Bush song "Mosh" can be downloaded here, from The Regular. Quoth the caucasian rap superstar in a Rolling Stone interview, "Bush is definitely not my homie." Link
An anonymous reader points us to two links for listening to Eminem's "Mosh" in its entirety. Real Audio Link, ASX link.
BoingBoing reader David Stein sends a transcript of the song's lyrics: Link
Reader dapulli says, "On wednesday Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 in the UK gave out the link to the download of this track on national radio. You can listen to him doing so here on thursday about 90 minutes into the show -- Link"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Q for the anti-globalist set
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DATE: 10/23/2004 09:07:56 AM
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My friend Natalie Jermijenko, a mad engineering prof who has invented such kickass nift as feral robot dogs is interviewed today on WorldChanging. Here's her talking about her role as "Q" for the anti-globalist set, designing mediagenic gizmos to take to demonstrations.
There are Italian and Spanish direct action groups, very well trained in direct action. They’re doing marvelous actions using blow up pool toys, big happy smiley faces on the strike zones [parts of the body would be likely to be hit by police] so they can protect themselves. Putting pockets into these bright clownish costumes they wear, both mediagenic and highly visual, but also with room for putting in an empty two-liter soda container, with their tops on. These make good protection in the strike zone.
Nonviolent defense is a long tradition. Profoundly misplaced, but necessary. I wish our energies could be better spent. Nonetheless, their threat has to be answered. And systematically, we have to answer every threat of this abuse power, of criminalizing political process, the political right to gather with a nonviolent method.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Smart swatches
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DATE: 10/24/2004 09:51:42 AM
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MIT researchers are developing fabric swatches outfitted with sensors, microprocessors, and conductive velcro. The "electronic patches" can be quickly slapped together to provide different functionality in various form factors. From New Scientist:
To make a bag that prevents people forgetting things, (the inventors) have equipped a module with a radio antenna and receiver. The unit is programmed to listen for signals from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on objects like cellphones, keys and wallets.
A sensor module in the bag’s handle detects when the bag has been picked up, indicating that the owner might be leaving. This triggers the reader to check through the objects the computer module has been programmed to look for. If it does not detect a required item, it uses a voice synthesiser module in another patch to warn: “Cellphone, yes! Wallet, yes! Keys, no!”
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Awesome figurative art from drinking straws
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:38:39 AM
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I don't know much about the source of these images, reposted on a Portuguese language blog, but they depict a man creating amazing sculptural scenes from ordinary drinking straws. Throw forty million and some rotoscope at it, and who knows? You may end up with something that could kick Shark Tale's ass. Link (Thanks, Jose Luis Orihuela)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cat-tossing in Zero-G -- Seekrit Air Force Movie
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:50:31 AM
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UPDATED. Moments such as this make the thankless, burdensome toil of bloggerhood worthwhile. BoingBoing reader Vann says, "I wish I'd stumbled across this clip before your zero-G flight." I couldn't agree more.
Link to quicktime movie of some people throwing a live cat around in zero gravity on a "vomit comet."
The file is linked from an Air Force website for an online education class called " COCKPIT PHYSICS: Physics Instruction for the Twenty-First Century." The website doesn't appear to be a joke, nor does the cat-tossing QuickTime clip, presumably intended to illustrate the science that governs cruelty to fluffy, innocent housepets in reduced gravity environments.
While you're visiting the Air Force website, don't miss this equally invaluable physics lesson (Link):
#1 If you are outside in a lightning storm, you may notice that your hair starts to stand on end. Why do you think this happens?
Some good advice is to stay indoors during a lightning storm. If your hair is standing up, then you are in extreme danger.
Words to live by.
UPDATE: The Air Force website where this was first spotted has removed the cat-toss video. New download location details in this update post: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MMO based on Disneyland
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DATE: 10/24/2004 10:21:55 PM
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UPDATED: Disney is working on a massively multiplayer game based on Disneyland. Oh please oh please oh please let this rock like the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and not blow diseased animals like the Haunted Mansion movie!
Disney also is working on something called Virtual Magic Kingdom, an online version of California's Disneyland built on the same technology as multiplayer online games.
Rasulo didn't say when the cyberpark would open, but he promised it would be "almost as magical as visiting one of our parks in person."
Link
(via Ambiguous)
Update: A Disney insider writes, "Virtual Kingdom is a proposed MMORPG that Disney might launch. I've seen
the storyboards and heard the pitch. Think Kingdom Hearts as an MMORPG, not
Disneyland, visiting the various 'worlds' of Disney. Possible innovations
include visiting physical locations (theme parks) and watching TV or
listening to radio for special codes that unlock perks inside the game.
Yes, they know Persistent World games are hard. Yes, they know grief
players and powergamers will have to be controlled. No, it's nowhere close
to being released or even in alpha code."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Updated: Nielsen: User-education won't fix security
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DATE: 10/24/2004 10:56:40 PM
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Jakob Nielsen's AlertBox is a good source of cranky, well-structured rants about what's wrong with the interaction design online. This week's is about security, and why user-education is not the answer. Our tools conspire against us to make us less secure, and if we're to be made more secure, our tools will have to be enlisted to work on our behalf. I'm particularily enamoured of recommendation number one: I think that "Encrypt Everything" should be the watchword of the security movement.
So many systems -- from Yahoo's login screen to most ISP-provided POP mail to iChat/AIM to all those reg-required news-sites -- default to you sending your password in the clear or even require you to do it, it's a crine shame.
Especially given how many passwords we need to generate these days and the concomittant inevitability of recycling passwords, which means that your throwaway NYT-LAT-WashPo password, which you send in the clear every time you login to one of those sites, may suddenly become associated with your credit-card number when you buy access to an article out of the NYT archive. Now you're sending a password that unlocks limited spending authority on your credit-card in the clear, potentially several times a day. Gee, thanks, NYT.
# Encrypt all information at all times, except when it's displayed on the screen. In particular, never send plaintext email or other information across the Internet: anything that leaves your machine should be encrypted.
# Digitally sign all information to prevent tampering and develop a simple way to inform users whether something is from a trusted source. This might, say, replace current stupid security warnings that people don't understand because they expose the guts of the technology. ("The security certificate has expired or is not yet valid." Aha. And what does that mean to a normal person?)
# Turn on all security settings by default since most people don't mess with defaults. Then, make it easy to modify settings so that users can get trusted things done without having to open a wide hole for everybody.
# Automate all updates. Most virus software downloads new virus definitions in the background, which is a good first step. The automated patching introduced with Windows XP's SP2 is also an improvement.
# Polish security features' usability to a level far beyond anything we've seen so far. Security is inherently complicated, and it's something users don't care about (until it's too late). The user interface requires the ultimate in simplicity. Heavy user testing and detailed field research are a must.
Link
Update: In fact, if you look at the source code for login.yahoo.com (for the
"standard" security) you'll see that the form uses:<form method=post
action="https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?cm3nqsgq0mv6j"
autocomplete=off name=login_form onsubmit="return
hash(this,'http://login.yahoo.com/config/login')"> What that does is if you have javascript enabled, it creates an MD5
hash of your password (plus an included challenge) and sends that along
with your userid. If you don't have javascript, it defaults to sending
everything via https. Effectively your password is never broadcast in
the clear, only your userid, which is public information anyway.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Funny jokes from Defective Yeti
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:07:43 PM
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Defective Yeti did a "funny jokes I heard recently" post and invited more from readers. As with any list of jokes, there's a certain proportion of unfunny, offensive or dumb jokes, but there are at least a dozen that made me laugh aloud.
Person 1: Knock knock.
Person 2: Who's there?
Person 1: Control freak.
Person 1: Now you say "control freak who?"
Q: Why can't engineers tell jokes timing?
How many kids with ADD does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
LET'S RIDE BIKES!
A duck goes into a bar and asks the bartender, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "No. This is a bar and we don't sell grapes." The duck leaves.
The next day, the duck goes back to the bar and asks, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "I told you yeaterday. This is a bar and we don't sell grapes."
The following day, the duck returns and asks,"Got any grapes?" The bartender loses it. He grabs the duck by the neck, and yells, "I already told you twice! This is a bar! I don't have any grapes! If you ask me again, I'll nail your beak to the floor!"
The next day, the duck goes in the bar and asks, "Got any nails?" The bartender sighs and says, "No, we don't have any nails." The duck says, "Good. Got any grapes?"
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Knitting patterns under Creative Commons licennse
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:15:39 PM
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Knitting geek and BoingBoing reader Rose says,
Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine that normally comes out quarterly. They've done a special issue for breast cancer awareness that's just come out, and they've published it under a Creative Commons license. (see the last page of the special issue for details). This is the very first time I've seen knitting patterns published under a CC license, and I think it's splendid!
Link (PDF)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why market-forces can't correct DRM
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:18:00 PM
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Advocates of DRM talk about the ability of the market to find a balance between features and restrictions, because people whose freedom has been unduly restricted will make future purchase decisions that will put the overly draconian DRM systems out of business. But check out this cautionary tale of a guy who bought a home-media centre, started recording his favorite shows to DVD, and then:
Turns out that a couple of days ago, HBO started encrypting all of its programs with CGMS-A. They allow you to "copy" a program that you record from their signal once. The trouble is that they consider that one-time copy to be recording the program onto your hard drive, not taking it from the hard drive to a DVD. THAT SUCKS OUT LOUD and I am extremely angry, as you can imagine. The files are HUGE and, even though I have a 200 gb hard drive, I can't keep them there forever. MediaCenter records tv shows with a dvr.ms extension.
When he bought the media centre, it did the thing he wanted it to do with the shows he wanted to do it to: it's like buying a VCR to record the World Series, taking it home and satisfying yourself that it works. It worked.
Then, months later, it stopped working. He could no longer record his favorite shows. Why? Well, because the cablecaster decided to remove a right from him. And because Gateway, the company who sold him the equipment, decided to collaborate with the cablecaster in screwing him out of that right.
When this guy goes back to the store, what should he do to protect his next investment? Say he buys an HP device next, having concluded that Gateway won't look out for his interests. He takes it home and finds that it works fine for his purposes (maybe HP has a "better" deal with HBO that will let him burn more-restricted DVDs from his HP media-centre), then, a couple months later, the cablecaster switches on another flag and suddenly his video won't work.
Where's the market-force here? Should he stop being an HBO customer? A cable customer? A customer for only those PCs that he builds himself and installs a copy of GNU/Linux on?
What purchase-decision can he make or avoid in order to signal to the market that this kind of restrictiveness is unduly harsh and he won't pay for it any longer?
Link
(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kids online turn into creators
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:20:32 PM
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Foe Romeo reports on fascinating research suggesting that the Internet turns kids into creators, not consumers, of media.
Even more interestingly, the study found that 17% of young people have sent pictures or stories to a website and "online creativity can be encouraged through the very experience of using the internet." That is, the more time kids spend online, the more likely they are to produce their own content. And interaction breeds interaction. Does that mean we can safely assume that as internet usage increases its media timeshare, more and more people will become creative producers as well as consumers?
And does online game play in particular have any connection to this increased propensity to create? Nathan Combs recently suggested in his Socially Charged Software post that multiplayer games have a "MODder dimension", where "content is more than just accumulated and integrated, it is the product of collaboration and a shared value system of production: from inspiration through validation." (See Habbo Hotel's fan sites, for example.)
Link
(via Plastic Bag)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Identity Theft: What it is, How to Prevent it, and What to Do if it Happens to You
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:45:17 PM
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I finished Rob Hamadi's Identity Theft: What it is, How to Prevent it, and What to Do if it Happens to You yesterday, and am feeling vaguely freaked out today.
Hamadi assembles dozens of identity-theft cases in short narrative form, like little cautionary tales, and then strings them together with some interconnecting material to show you who commits identity theft, who falls victim to it, how identity thieves work, and what steps are most likely to mitigate the threats. Also, and importantly, he describes which steps won't make an appreciable difference in identity theft -- like biometric ID systems -- and how companies' imperiousness (demanding you identify yourself at every turn and taking copies of your ID) negligence (throwing those copies out unshredded) and foolishness (demanding easily forged documents like gas bills as proof of ID) make us all more vulnerable.
My take-away from this is that there are some steps that we can individually take to improve our security against identity theft -- buy a good shredder for your credit-card receipts, don't recite your account numbers aloud into your mobile phone on a crowded bus, make up something other than your mother's maiden name to use when asked to give it as a security password -- that the main identity theft risk needs to be addressed by calling companies and agencies that compromise our identities to account. When the hotel you've checked into takes a photocopy of your driver's license, you can storm out in a huff, but that's not a sustainable way of behaving, especially when they all start doing it.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn trompe l'oeil
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DATE: 10/24/2004 11:45:37 PM
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It's not what you think. WARNING: THIS SITE CONTAINS IMAGES. Link (Thanks, Bruce).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Accidental PC-to-garage-opener mod
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DATE: 10/25/2004 06:02:09 AM
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An upgraded PC has turned itself into an unintentional emitter that works a nearby garage-door opener when a certain video game is played on it.
I recently purchased a Sapphire 9800XT 256MB AGP 3D card off Ebay, modded with a Zaltec VGA heatpiper cooler. So, the graphics card is awesome; I get to finally play Deus Ex 2 (pretty fun). The problem, however, is now my GARAGE DOOR OPENER won't work whenever I'm playing the game! I've tried this out several times, and it seems as though there is interference whenever I'm playing a computer game.
Link
(Thanks, Alice!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's All About Symbian interview, part two
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DATE: 10/25/2004 06:08:31 AM
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A week ago, I blogged part one of an interview I did with All About Symbian when I was in Edinburgh, about science fiction, civil liberties, Creative Commons, and mobile technology -- now part two is online.
"It's a great phone, but I'm scared to do anything with it." For a man toting the fastest PowerBook ever made, and completely in touch with the electronic world, this surprises me. "I'm largely scared of doing any of the advanced things on my phone mainly due to the cost. And by the cost I mean the ridiculous per megabyte data pricing everyone in Europe seems to have. In the States I had a simple data phone, nothing fancy. But with it I had a $50 a month unlimited data plan. A true unlimited plan, not an unlimited plan until you reach 10mb of Wap Data. Because it was flat rate, it meant that I could take risks and chances with services. I would play with the phone and see just what is possible, because I knew I would never get stuck with on of those bills where you go 'Shit! How did I spend ÂŁ100 looking up the football scores?!?' So that's scared me off."
Link
(Thanks, Ewan!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Creative Commons-licensed jazz sheet music, Wired CD out
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DATE: 10/25/2004 07:28:10 AM
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Following up on this post about knitting patterns, BoingBoing reader Oren says
Thought I'd let you know that my jazz trio, Whispering Johnson, recently released some new recordings of original tunes (the Birthday Numbers) and we've made not only the audio but also the sheet music available under CC Sampling Plus licensing.
As far as I know it's the first time sheet music has been released with this kind of license. We think they're really good compositions, and we hope others will take them, play 'em, write lyrics for 'em, reharmonize 'em....whatever. It's the old jazz tradition, formalized for our times (which unfortunately seem increasingly hostile to the kinds of informal sharing and extension that have always fostered creativity).
Link
And while we're at it -- the Wired Magazine CD with CC-licensed tracks is out on newsstands now. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Aesthetic Apparatus "Dubya Says" poster
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DATE: 10/25/2004 07:36:57 AM
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Political satire poster from Minneapolis-based undercover design team Aestheric Apparatus. This model is available with a variety of purported Presidential quotes, including:
# "I figure since I can't use it at camp x-ray anymore"
# "Hey, let's snort coke off this donkey's balls."
# "And then you just simply put the voter in what I call the "freedom machine.'"
Link to details for this image, link to more Aesthetic Apparatus posters, link to group's home page. (thanks, Siege, and Matt Jacobs!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart on CSPAN
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DATE: 10/25/2004 07:37:39 AM
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Brian sez, "If you like Jon Stewart, you MUST watch this "American Perspectives" interview with him that is now available at the CSPAN site. It was recorded within 24 hours of the recent Crossfile incident. MUST-see television."
Link, Alternate Link
(Thanks, Brian and Qburns!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to Lose Treo 650 Customers, by Sprint -- UPDATED
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DATE: 10/25/2004 07:47:51 AM
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UPDATED BELOW
The much-anticipated new Treo 650 was unveiled by PalmOne today, and BoingBoing reader Marc Hedlund says,
[It has] a bunch of new features, including Bluetooth. Unfortunately the rocket scientists at Sprint decided to turn off Bluetooth for dialup from your laptop (though other networks allow it). Why? Well, they want you to buy *another* $250 product from them (their "connection card") so they can charge you as though you own two cell phones. The phone looks great -- too bad Sprint decided its customers are idiots.
I'm a Sprint user, and I'm a prime example of a likely upgrade candidate for the Treo 650. I don't use a PDA phone right now, and have been thinking the 650 or something like it might make blogging and communicating on-the-road a whole lot easier. But dumb-ass pricing moves like this one are making me seriously consider a carrier switch. Link
UPDATE: Sprint has since announced that it will not levy the $250 fee. Details here. Cool!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Frogs levitated by ultra-powerful magnets
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DATE: 10/25/2004 08:01:20 AM
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Following up on yesterday's post about cat-tossing in zero gravity, we now direct your otherwise productive time to these spectacular Quicktime movies of helpless little frogs being levitated by really huge magnets. Strawberries, grasshoppers, and globs of water also get the "weightless" treatment. Link (Thanks, Eric!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Satan's army
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DATE: 10/25/2004 10:27:58 AM
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The British Armed Forces has officially recognized a naval technician as a satanist, meaning that he can conduct satanic rituals on board the HMS Cumberland. This is a first for the Royal Navy.
“I didn’t want to feel I couldn’t get out my Satanic Bible and relax in bed. I didn’t want to bite my tongue any more when dealing with idiots,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Leafy Sea Dragon gallery
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DATE: 10/25/2004 10:44:32 AM
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Photos and short videos of an exquisitely bizarre looking fish called the Leafy Sea Dragon. As good as discovering complex life forms on another planet. This makes me want to get an aquarium. Link (Thanks, exomorph!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: This is not my beautiful house
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DATE: 10/25/2004 12:06:43 PM
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When a Douglasville, Georgia woman returned home from a 2 1/2 week holiday to Greece, she found that a total stranger had moved into her house, ripped up the carpet, changed the photos on the walls, and was wearing clothes from her closet. The squatter also switched the utilities over to her own name and installed a washer and dryer.
Link (via Fortean Times)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Broadband over power line
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DATE: 10/25/2004 12:15:41 PM
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On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Noah Adams about a form of broadband connectivity called BPL, or broadband over powerline.
Earlier this month, the FCC opened the door for more consumer trials and wider deployment of the technology, which delivers internet connectivity through the electrical system in your home or office. What you may already know is that BPL could soon rival other consumer options like DSL and cable internet, delivering speeds of 2-3 Mbps through ordinary power jacks. More choices means more competition, and that likely means lower prices.
What you may not know is that beyond cheaper, ubiquitous internet -- BPL could potentially revolutionize the way electrical power is priced, managed, and delivered.
Link to archived audio for today's program, Link to NPR Day to Day home. Link to recent FCC newsletter edition which contains details on the October 14 announcement. Here's a link to some of the ARRL's concerns about the fact that BPL can cause interference with amateur ("ham") radio frequencies under certain circumstances. The FCC acknowledged this issue as it gave BPL the go-ahead on October 14.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Zombie-movie remix contest
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DATE: 10/25/2004 01:22:24 PM
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Just in time for Hallowe'en: a zombie-movie-remix context from the Free Culture people!
1: Raise the Dead. Get out your video editing tools and download a slice of George A. Romero's classic 1968 horror flick Night of the Living Dead. Romero's original, idiosyncratic, super-low-budget vision of a broken world filled with animated, cannibalistic corpses has filled the imaginations of moviegoers for decades. Indeed, it's the film that gave birth to an entire genre: the apocalyptic zombie horror movie. [More]
And because it's in the public domain, anyone can borrow pieces of it to make a music video, comic short, or other art. Which is what we want you to do. To really get your creative juices flowing, hook yourself up with another piece of re-mixable art: the 2003 student film "Amid the Dead." [More]
It's available for download here for the first time, under a Creative Commons license that gives you permission to play mad scientist.
Step 2: Go Mad – Invent! Take a piece of Romero, mix it up with some Amid the Dead, and add your own special twist. Use your imagination to build your own new piece of art.
Step 3: Give it a ReBirth Certificate. Tag your new creation with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. It not only lets people feel safe to use your work without having to phone you and a team of lawyers, but it prevents someone else getting their own team of lawyers and turning your work into a big commercial franchise that everyone else has to pay to use.
Link
(via Creative Commons)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Air Force zero-G cat-tossing video flies again
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DATE: 10/25/2004 03:17:46 PM
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UPDATE: Earlier today, the uber-bizarre "Cat Tossing in Zero G" video we blogged over the weekend was taken off the Air Force website where we first spotted it. BoingBoing reader Leonard has since mirrorred the video. Zero G cat flies again! Link to new download site (2MB QuickTime .mov), and link to previous BoingBoing post.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Amateur art at Arizona State Fair
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DATE: 10/25/2004 05:34:18 PM
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Cardhouse goes to the Arizona state fair, takes pictures of the amateur art competition, and makes funny comments about it.
Originally I didn't notice that in this piece (by Schuyler Graham) the name of the glue is "Love All." There is nothing that can bring the earth together more than a liberal application of seventeen kascrillion tons of glue. It's hard to lift up a gun, or anything really. Don't dilute! Ok!
Link (Via Scrubbles)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ashlee "OMG how does this lipsynch stuff work?" Simpson videogate
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DATE: 10/25/2004 05:35:43 PM
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Regarding recently disgraced acid reflux poptart Ashlee Simpson, BoingBoing reader Kevin says, "She's asking for advice on her own message board."
Subject: How do I get rid of all those videos.
10/24/2004 8:35:08 PM - by Ashlee Simpson
Ok you people know the internet, I'm going to get rid of all these videos posted on other websites, how do i delete them?
Link to message board post, and link to schadenfreudealicious news roundup courtesy of Gawker.
Now, in all fairness -- we have not verified that this post was in fact penned by the real Miss Simpson. Honorary factchecker and wet blanket Jeff "Koganuts" Koga says,
Per a Stereogum comment (Link), The "Ashlee Simpson" who posted the comment you quoted from (notice no photo) (Link) differs from the real Ashlee Simpson (photo, link at the top of the forums pages) (Link). Still, both Ashlee's stats and date of registration are the same, so who knows why she's registered twice? Maybe she forgot her password? :-)
Update: Will the real poptart please stand up? BoingBoing reader and nerdetective Chris Gsell says html source proves the post-er in question is definitely not Ashlee verité:
Hey, just thought I would give you a heads up and let you know that the posts from the author whose profile page does NOT have the picture is not the real Simpson. I say this because if you examine the source of this page, you will see this HTML code:
<td align="right" valign="top" class="txtLabel">Status: </td> <td align="left" valign="top" class="txtBox">Host</td>
On the "fake" profile page you will find this code:
<tr>
<td align="right" valign="top" class="txtLabel">Status: </td> <td align="left" valign="top" class="txtBox">Registered User</td> </tr>
...with some javascript below it to spoof the Status field.
Thanks, Chris!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wired/Creative Commons concert audio .torrent
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DATE: 10/25/2004 10:44:53 PM
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A reader writes, "LegalTorrents has posted a 320kbps MP3 version of November 2004's freely distributable Wired Magazine cover CD - includes Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Dan The Automator, Gilberto Gil, Cornelius, and many more Creative Commons-licensed tracks - unmissable."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pez dispenser USB drive mod
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DATE: 10/25/2004 10:52:30 PM
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This is an awesome Pez dispenser mod that turns your favorite Pez-head into a USB thumb-drive (and turns the Pez container into a case for the drive).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fantastic political Flash against Cal Prop 69
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DATE: 10/25/2004 10:56:30 PM
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California's Proposition 69 makes it legal for the cops to collect DNA from innocent people and store it indefinitely, and makes it nearly impossible for you to get your DNA back from the criminal database. So this anti-69 Flash is worth watching for the message, but I'm blogging it because it is, second-by-second, one of the most effective political pieces I've ever seen. Excellent, compact, on-message copywriting and great layout/design/pace.
Link
(Thanks, Cindy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Biggest threat from DRM
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:06:04 PM
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Mitch Wagner's written a good piece for Security Pipeline about the danger to the labels if DRM works the way they want it to:
DRM is invisible only when users only want to use data in ways foreseen by the publishers.
DRM makes it harder for consumers to invent their own ways of using technology. A user wishing to listen to digital content on a new type of device needs to go to the media companies first, and ask, "Mommy, may I?"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pitcairn rapists convicted but not jailed
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:12:00 PM
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Pitcairn Island, population 47, is one of the most remote place in the world, inhabited by descendants of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty who washed up there in the 18th century. More than half the men on the island were accused of systematically raping the young girls on the island, in charges going back more than 40 years (they claim that this "tradition" merely follows the Bounty mutineers' example set with their Tahitian brides). Now six of the seven accused have been convicted, though formalities are keeping them out of jail for the moment.
Pitcairn, with an area of just five square kilometres, has no safe harbour and is too rocky for an airstrip. It has no paved roads, no sewage treatment system and no landline telephones.
Visitors must fly to an outlying French Polynesian island and then travel by boat for 36 hours to get there, ending their journey in a longboat, riding the surf that crashes on to the island.
Islanders fear that the Pitcairn community, with a population of only 47, will not survive if the six are jailed.
Many of the men operate the island's only boats, which are lifelines to the outside world, ferrying in essential supplies.
Link
(Thanks, Cyrus)
Update: Zach sez, After following the Pitcairn Island link I noticed that smh.com.au now requries users to register. For those wishing to view the article and future articles from this site they can use the following details:
username: boingboing
password: boingboing
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Make sure California's votes get counted
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:18:29 PM
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If you're a Californian and you want to make sure your vote counts, check out Paper or Plastic?, EFF's latest Flash campaign, created by the talented Ren Bucholz and friends. Non-Californians: pass this on to your Californian friends!
Electronic voting machines will be used in 10 California counties during the next election. However, every California voter has the right to request a paper ballot, which can be used in a recount and verified for accuracy by each voter. Some election officials are trying to keep this choice a secret, so we want to make sure that you know about the availability of paper ballots. If you live in Alameda, Merced, Napa, Orange, Plumas, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Shasta, Tehama, please pass this to your friends and neighbors.
Link
(Thanks, Cindy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Build a $100 GNU/Linux machine
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:37:53 PM
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Fantastic Slashdot thread, in response to MSFT's Steve Ballmer calling for a $100 PC: build a $100 GNU/Linux PC out of new, readily available parts that already have Free Software drivers.
$18 - Celeron 700MHz 66MHz 128K FCPGA CPU OEM (socket 370)
$25 - ASUS MEW-AM Mainboard Socket 370 supporting Intel Celeron 300~533+ Onboard sound/video
$40 - 1 512mb Stick of PC100 Ram $58 if 2 256mb sticks are required.
$3 - Encore - 10/100 VIA Chipset NIC
$24 - COMP-USA ATX Case w 250W Power Supply.
$2 - Generic heatsink
Total = $112
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US dollar tanks so hard, Cuba abandons it
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:41:34 PM
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As someone who earns his living in US dollars but lives in the UK, I'm keenly aware of the plummeting value of the post-fiscal-responsibility greenback. Turns out I'm not the only one worrying about his wealth vanishing down the US deficit: Fidel Castro has ordered Cubans to stop trading in dollars and switch to Swiss Francs, Euros and Pounds Sterling.
Cubans and others on the island can still hold dollars in unlimited quantities and can change them into pesos before the new policy takes effect. But they will have to pay a 10 percent charge to exchange dollars afterward. There will be no such charge on changing other foreign currencies, such as Euros, into convertible pesos.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wikipedia for news
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:45:11 PM
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Wikinews is to news what Wikipedia is to encylopedic-style reference material: a publicly editable site for comprehensive coverage of current affairs. It has posted a mission-statement and requirements and is calling for votes from the public on whether it should actually launch.
We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.
Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.
While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.
Link
(via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: File-sharing grows despite lawsuits: neener neener neener
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:51:32 PM
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Yet another study has confirmed that the RIAA's plan to stop file-sharing by suing thousands of fans has failed. Maybe they just haven't sued enough of us. There are about 70MM file-sharers in the US -- maybe once the studios have bankrupted, say, 35 million of us we'll get the message.
"We wanted to examine the truthfulness of reports claiming declining P2P traffic and help the community make reliable assumptions concerning P2P traffic estimates and trends," wrote Thomas Karagiannis, a doctoral candidate in computer science at UC-Riverside, in an e-mail. "The assertion of declining P2P traffic was in direct contrast to the constant increase of P2P activity over the last year and counterintuitive to the fact that P2P applications are still the top most downloaded applications (on) the internet."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Putting all the car's bits in the wheels
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DATE: 10/25/2004 11:59:18 PM
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Michelin's shown off a concept car whose "active" wheels contain all the elements you'd expect to find in the car itself: "Why not ... use the space within the tire to put as many components as possible, including all the suspension, and make it active, and put in an electric motor, and even eliminate the need for a mechanical transmission?"
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(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RNC fear-phrases video
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DATE: 10/26/2004 12:04:18 AM
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This video pieces together all the instances of speakers at the RNC saying things like "terrorism," "September 11th," and other fearmongering buzz-phrases. It's actually startling to get a sense of how much reptition of the talking points went on at the convention: could they really be this blatant?
5.2MB Quicktime Link
(via Lawgeek)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Coolest Ethernet cable ever, EVER
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DATE: 10/26/2004 06:04:39 AM
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Back in 2001, I thought that this was the coolest Ethernet cord, ever, but I was wrong. Its successor, the new Roadwired CORDZ Multi-Connection Survival Tool is a generation more cool and more versatile. Cased in rugged safety yellow plastic, this retracting 7' RJ-45 cable comes with a set of snap-on ends to convert it to a phone cable, a cross-over or an extension cable. This one went straight into my shoulder bag, and I don't think I'll ever leave home without it.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Justin Hall's crazy Tokyo cosplay video report
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DATE: 10/26/2004 06:07:54 AM
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Mark Hurst says, "[Check out this] bizarre short movie on cosplay, filmed at the Tokyo Game Show, by justin "links from the underground" hall." Link to "Robin in Wonderland," Link to more of Justin Hall's recent Tokyo observations -- Mini-Documentary on Tokyo Game Show 2004: Link, and an item in TheFeature.com about mobile phone games that use PhoneCams. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites Iraq dispatch: Layla, part 3
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DATE: 10/26/2004 06:09:04 AM
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NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites posts a dispatch to his blog before from Falluja.
Link, and link to previous post in series.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni at 35th Anniversary of the Internet event in LA
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DATE: 10/26/2004 07:02:43 AM
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If you're in Los Angeles this week, I hope you'll consider joining me at the 35th Anniversary of the Internet event taking place at UCLA, on Friday October 29. I'll be speaking about blogs and media. There's an amazing list of speakers I'm *really* looking forward to -- They include John Perry Barlow (EFF), Gordon Bell (Microsoft), Bran Ferren (Applied Minds), Dan Gillmor (San Jose Mercury News), Alan Kay (UCLA), John Markoff (NYT), Clay Shirky (NYU), Eric Schmidt (Google), and Ethan Zuckerman (Harvard), and others. Looks like it's going to be great. Link to event details.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIP, John Peel
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DATE: 10/26/2004 07:09:12 AM
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Reader Mark Middleton says, "[Legendary BBC deejay] John Peel ruled in the 70's/80's bringing alternative and punk to UK listeners. An immense loss." About the man who launched bands from David Bowie to Joy Division, Warren Ellis says, "Peel broke every major musical movement of the last forty years in Britain." Link to obituary on BBC, and link to listener tributes.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Kerry's haunted retreat
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DATE: 10/26/2004 08:37:21 AM
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The Times Online has dug up the spooky secret history of John Kerry's Rocky Mountain retreat, a barn that Teresa Heinz Kerry's former husband imported from Suffolk, Great Britain. The building's former address, Rookery Farm in the village of Elmsett, is known to be haunted by the ghosts of a father and son who hung themselves in the barn in the 19th century after going insane.
The owner of Rookery Farm in Suffolk told The Times that she had detected an unexplained presence in the farmhouse on several occasions since moving there in 1992. Julie Hunn, 47, a legal secretary, who lives at the farmhouse with her husband, Andrew, said: “Sometimes you’ll just get a feeling that there’s somebody there or you’ll see a shadow. It’s happened two or three times since we moved here.”
Maybe it's Karl Rove.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bad restaurant art HOTORNOT
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DATE: 10/26/2004 08:53:17 AM
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Last year, I found myself in a restaurant with Johannes from Monochrom, a cool techno-art collective in Vienna. Johannes, espying a vile painting on the wall, began to photograph it and discuss it learnedly as it fit within the pantheon of bad restuarant art -- he was, it turned out, a connaisseur.
No you can share his passion. The Monochromniks have put up a hot-or-not style site for posting your photos of dreadful digestive aids. The next time you find yourself looking at an eatery painting that looks like it came free with the cheap chrome frame, snap a shot, upload it it and share.
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(Thanks, Johannes!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jungle Cruise skippers get their guns back
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DATE: 10/26/2004 08:59:04 AM
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Disneyland's Jungle Cruise skippers have long been the bull-goose studs of the park: Walt's favorites, these castmembers got to fire actual blanks from a real pistol at a (fake) hippo and tell bad jokes about it. Sure, from time to time one would drop his gun in the drink and they'd have to get the frogmen to dredge the firearm back up before they could restart the ride, but damn, it was worth it just to have a real pistol in the hands of a 17-year-old with a bad sense of humor. Then they took the guns away -- shooting at hippos was deemed inappropriate. Now, Disney's embarked on a quest to get back to its roots now, and they're giving the Jungle Boat skippers their guns back.
Giving the Jungle Cruise skippers their guns back is what seems to have delighted visitors the most, however.
"At least once a week somebody would get off the boat and say, `Hey, what happened to the guns?'" said Ribble's daughter, Sherri, one of the ride's operators.
Now, she says, people burst into applause when she opens fire.
Link
(via Waxy!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Glucoboy
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DATE: 10/26/2004 09:01:56 AM
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Designed for children with diabetes, Glucoboy is a blood glucose meter cartridge for the Nintendo GameBoy. From an interview with inventor Paul Wessel, founder of Guidance Interactive Healthcare:
"My son Luke was diagnosed at age three with Type 1 (diabetes). At about age six Luke began losing his glucose meter way too often. But he knew exactly where his GAMEBOY was, even if it was under the sofa. So I thought - Why not combine the two devices into one."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Printer cartridges aren't copyrighted works
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DATE: 10/26/2004 09:05:13 AM
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to break software locks. Under that theory, Lexmark sued a competitor, Static Controls, for making compatible printer cartridges because refilling the cartridges necessitated resetting the cartridge software, and doing that meant breaking the lock that intended to keep you from refilling your cartridge. Get that: they claimed, basically, that the printer cartridge was a copyrighted work, and that by refilling it, you were pirating it.
Anyway, this is so much bullshit, it makes your head spin. And as of today, the appeals court agrees: Lexmark can't use the DMCA to prop up its business-model of charging you a 1000 percent markup on its inkjet carts. Neener, neener, neener.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing endorses John Kerry for President
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DATE: 10/26/2004 09:38:30 AM
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You may have noticed that the BoingBoing masthead looks a little different today. We've added a link to Apple "Switch" ad director Errol Morris' videos depicting former Bush supporters who will vote for Kerry in 2004. We've also added a banner for moveon.org.
When Mark first launched the BoingBoing weblog, it began as a sort of publicly-viewable personal scrapbook of "wonderful things." More than four years later, with four more participants added to the mix, that is what this project remains.
It may seem odd for a scrapbook to endorse a presidential candidate. But Mark, Cory, Pesco, John and I -- the people who keep this scrapbook alive -- share the conviction that John Kerry is the candidate best suited to lead America for the next four years. And we want you to know why.
In recent days, a growing number of news organizations have posted eloquent endorsements for Kerry. Some of them are particularly suprising, because they come from such unlikely sources. We encourage you to read them, and consider their content.
For us, the choice for Kerry involves simple things. Justice, liberty, privacy, transparency. Freedom of speech, thought, and technological expression. A woman's right to choose. Equal access to health care, education, and economic opportunity for all. The rule of law, at home and abroad. Peace. The enduring value of the American Constitution.
These are wonderful things. The Bush administration has proven both inability and unwillingness to protect them. In 2004, Kerry is the one.
We urge all eligible BoingBoing readers to exercise their right to vote in this election. Democracy is a wonderful thing. It won't survive without your participation.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: JG Ballard quotation book
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DATE: 10/26/2004 11:02:49 AM
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I'm eagerly awaiting the release next month of JG Ballard Quotes: Does The Future Have A Future?--a pocket-sized book of profound and mind-bending JG Ballard-isms. My all-time favorite fiction writer, Ballard is the prophetic British novelist behind such dark, twisted, noir masterpieces as Crash, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights. The new book of quotations, published by our counterculture chronicling friends at RE/Search, is illustrated with photographs by Ana Barrado, Charles Gateweood, and others.
"The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology." --JG Ballard
Your best bet is to order the book directly from RE/Search! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The American Conservative chooses Kerry over Bush
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DATE: 10/26/2004 11:55:44 AM
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Chris sez: The American Conservative magazine, headed up by Pat Buchanon, has come out in favor of Kerry by coming out against Bush:
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal -- Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it -- and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.
Link
UPDATE: Anonymous sez: If you look closely, you'll notice that their editorial staff was split and so they each did a seperate endorsement. Among the staff, they pretty much endorsed everyone from Bush to Badnarik to (shockingly enough) Nader. To say they endorsed Kerry is accurate, but also very misleading. One editor endorsed Kerry, the rest endorsed others.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: new poster from Eboy: Superbroncobattle
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DATE: 10/26/2004 12:14:40 PM
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Eboy, a group of isometric pixel wizards, has created a new poster titled "Superbroncobattle." The detail shown here is just a sample of the entire image, which will kick your eyeballs and leave bruises. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Battelle 1000th post on Searchblog
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DATE: 10/26/2004 12:21:11 PM
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John Battelle 1000th post (congratulations!) on his Searchblog is a great summary on Mary Meeker's "Update on the Digital World."
Meeker: ...And if there are hundreds or thousands of thought leaders and motivated, interested parties on the Internet with the ability to publish news or insights into any number of local or global issues, then it is safe to say that these blogs often become both the first source of news, a vital proving ground for authors and a source of potential community for other interested parties. For example, you’re probably going to get far more Boston Red Sox specific-content from a blog about the Red Sox made by a die-hard fan than you will from a random sports page, especially if you’re after opinions and community.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: iPod photo
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DATE: 10/26/2004 12:31:02 PM
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Gizmodo's got the details on the new color iPod Photo. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Howard Stern v. Michael Powell on radio show call-in line
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DATE: 10/26/2004 01:06:37 PM
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BoingBoing reader douglips says,
This morning, Ronn Owens interviewed Michael Powell on KGO radio in the bay area. About 15 minutes after starting the interview, Howard Stern called in. Fur flew.
ASX Link, Real Audio link, and MP3 Link (thanks Erik) Howard kicks in at 32:20 or so into the streams. Update: BB reader cowicide says, "I noticed your new mp3 download is pretty huge for most people. This might help people out who aren't on broadband: Small (680KB) file, edited to just air Howard's part of the show. Link." Thanks, cowicide!
Update 2: Link to CNN story, and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine blog says, Here's a transcript of the Howard Stern v. Michael Powell confrontation: Link."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mysterious hums heard round the world
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DATE: 10/26/2004 05:03:35 PM
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The always fascinating Things Magazine has a terrific entry about strange hums that have confounded authorities and hapless citizens for years.
More on hums, which some have dubbed the Taos Hum, 'a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide.'
So what is the Taos Hum? Spurred on by complaints that the 'Bristol Hum' (which has driven at least one person to suicide) was caused by faulty gas pipeline equipment, British Gas undertook an investigation, canvassing 33 hum sufferers. Of these, 80% were found to have hearing problems, but 20% were genuinely hearing something. Further investigation found that the noise was actually originating from a number of distant sources, including distant machinery, and were 'being amplified by the geometry of particular rooms' in the sufferers' houses.
Related, the concrete sound mirrors on the South Coast, designed to listen in for fleets of approaching enemy bombers in the days before radar.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Modesty hacks for fashion-conscious Mormon youth
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DATE: 10/26/2004 08:02:02 PM
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Jen magazine offers tips for fashion-conscious young Mormons who want the latest styles, but don't want to show off their midriffs.
Fashion Fixes
Jeans too low?
Shirt Too Short, Sheer or Low Cut? Pants Too Low?
Skirt too short? Pants too low or tight?
Can't Find Jeans That Cover Your Stomach?
Answers to these perplexing problems can be found here.
Link (via Growabrain)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fahrenheit 9/11 free to download
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:08:51 AM
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Marc Perkel sez, "I'm distributing Fahrenheit 9-11 on my web site. I spent $2000 to buy 100mb line for 2 weeks before the election. If you haven't seen it - take a look and pass the link around."
Link
(Thanks, Marc!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tube-amps in chrome and beauty, hand-built and gorgeous
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:12:09 AM
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Electron Luv's hand-built tube-amps are works of art. Fantastic stuff.
Link
(Thanks, Rich!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Caseless casemod
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:14:19 AM
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Now this is a casemod: the components are suspended on old Cat-5 cable and coat-hangers, floating free in the air; it's like hydroponics for PCs. A caseless mod!
Link
(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rolex's dumbass lawyers threatening lists receiving fake-Rolex spam
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:17:50 AM
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Fantastic TidBITS article about Rolex's moron lawyers sending a cease-and-desist letter to John Gimore for hosting the archive of a mailing list that includes a spam for fake Rolexes.
Since the FreeS/WAN list is archived on the Web, Rolex Watch U.S.A., Inc. (remember Rolex? It's an article about Rolex) found the post in searches for the counterfeiters of Rolex watches. It's obvious to anyone over the age of 13 (and probably lots of people under that age) that the spam appearing in the FreeS/WAN archive is something that happened to the FreeS/WAN list, not something that the FreeS/WAN list intentionally propagated. It was an accident, and an unfortunate one at that. But obvious though this is, a group of highly paid attorneys hired by Rolex couldn't figure this out and sent a cease-and-desist letter (undoubtedly accompanied by twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one) to John Gilmore telling him that, as the person who registered the freeswan.org domain, he could be liable for damages up to $1,000,000 for posting content that violated the Rolex trademark, promoted counterfeiting, and diluted Rolex's intellectual property rights. Now that's adding injury to insult! First spam makes it through to a list you run, and then you're threatened by lawyers because of it.
Link
(Thanks, Henry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kids who support Kerry threatened with expulsion -- UPDATED
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:52:37 AM
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Kids at Richland Center High School in Richland Center, WI got a chance to meet George W Bush during an official visit. However, any student who turned up wearing a pro-Kerry pin, hat or shirt was threatened with expulsion.
Here's the contact information for the school officials, who have betrayed the trust we put in them as educators to teach democratic fundamentals, like open debate, dissent, and freedom of expression.
Richland Center High School
23200 Hornet High Rd
Richland Center, WI 53581
Phone: (608) 647-6131
Here’s the principal:
John Cler
608-647-6131 x1590
Here’s the local superintendant of schools:
Rachel Schultz
608-647-6106
Here’s the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
1-800-441-4563
Here’s the state superintendent:
Elizabeth Burmaster
state.superintendent@dpi.state.wi.us
Link
Update: Many of you wrote to say that you communicated with the the principal listed above that that he says:
- The Bush people rented the gymnasium, and the school was just enforcing their requirement that students not wear Kerry-supporting materials
- The principal didn't threaten expulsion
I don't buy it: signing up to do #1, enforcing a ban on political expression, at a political event, in a political season, is a betrayal of an educator's duty. And anything a school administrator bans carries with it the implicit threat of discipline. One student reports being threatened with expulsion, the principal denies it. It may be that the principal didn't make the threat of expulsion, but telling students that it is forbidden to do foo implies that students who undertake foo will be punished somehow.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Super Mario Brothers on Ice video
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DATE: 10/27/2004 06:10:22 AM
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Gerry sez, "This is easily the most surreal thing I've seen this morning so far. It's an old Super Mario Brothers...on Ice special from apparently ABC from I'd guess about 1988. Hosted by Jason Bateman and Alyssa Milano. You have to watch this."
14.9MB Quicktime Link
(Thanks, Gerry!)
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TITLE: Mario-playing robot
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DATE: 10/27/2004 06:13:28 AM
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Check out this awesome Mario-Bros-playing Lego robot -- it's a set of articulated Lego arms that press the buttons on a NES controller in a preprogrammed sequence that completes the first level of Super Mario Brothers.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Danger to Mac users: "Eat shit and die"
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DATE: 10/27/2004 06:48:52 AM
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Joel sez, "Check this out: A group of developers built an OSX iSync client for the Sidekick II, then didn't get approved by Danger/T-Mobile, meaning Mac users are effectively cockblocked from syncing because of the locked-down nature of the platform."
I publicly apologized last year for recommending the Sidekick to people. Danger lied to the press and its customers about the platform, then went on record saying that it intended to sell its customers out to media companies.
Now it's screwing over Mac users who want to have a means of migrating their own data off their devices. If you do business with Danger after all this, you need your head examined.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy 10th birthday, internet banner ads -- and HOTWIRED
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DATE: 10/27/2004 07:19:16 AM
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BoingBoing reader Oivvio Polite says, "AdLand celebrates the banner ads tenth birthday, showing the first banner ad ever and AT&T 'you will' banner, and the commercials from 1994 that go with it. The banners turned ten years old October 25 2004." Link
And Wired News Editor Kourosh Karimkhany says, "BTW, the first site to run that ad (actually, to inspire AT&T to create those ads) was Hotwired. As it happens, today the ol' timers are getting together for the 10th anniversary of Hotwired."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sprint Says Treo 650 WILL Support Bluetooth Dialup
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DATE: 10/27/2004 08:07:19 AM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, Mark Hedlund says,
Earlier this week BoingBoing linked to my blog post about Bluetooth being disabled on the new Treo 650 for laptop dialup. I got a note this morning from Sprint PR saying that they do plan to support laptop dialup over Bluetooth on the Treo 650. The phone will ship without it, but they will release a software patch to enable support -- no firm release date given.
Link. And here is my response: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hipster "VOTE" e-cards
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DATE: 10/27/2004 08:10:18 AM
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BoingBoing pal Lynda Keeler says:
"Hipstercards features dozens of designs contributed by digital artists and graphic designers. The cards are free, easy to send and wildly creative in how they incorporate the 'Vote' message. The beauty of these eCards is that they can quickly travel from person to person -- so they can cycle beyond your initial circle of friends and reach people who may not be as committed to voting and are in critical states."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Wedding in Star Wars Galaxies
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DATE: 10/27/2004 08:20:05 AM
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There have been many weddings in gamespace before, but this service in Star Wars Galazies -- documented in loving high-resolution on this page -- takes the cake. A beautiful service, a honeymoon suite with black satin sheets, and Vaseline on the lens as the couple moves to virtually seal their vows.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in NYC tonight: Art-hacked Voting Booths
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DATE: 10/27/2004 09:25:34 AM
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BoingBoing pal Cameron Sinclair says:
"50 artists were given Votomatic voting booths from the 2000 Florida election. Naturally they fucked with them. Tonight they will be auctioned off in New York City.
"Participating designers and artists include David Byrne, Christo, Frank Gehry, Milton Glaser, Hugh Hardy, Maira Kalman, Richard Meier, David Rockwell, Stefan Sagmeister, Ed Schlossberg, Robert A.M. Stern, Brian Tolle, Yeohlee Teng, and Diane von Furstenberg."
Link to details on Benefit Reception and Silent Auction - Wed, Oct 27.
Shown here: SIT ON THIS, designed by Tucker Viemeister, Kai Williams, Philip Refior, and Silas Warren of Springtime USA. Materials: Pink corduroy, foam rubber, and iron-on patches. “The abstract form of the Florida voting booth reminded us of a chair. We shortened the legs, made a corduroy slipcover, and BINGO! It’s almost a proverbial La-Z-Boy. To wake up the complacent citizen, we wrote on the seat: Do Not Rest Until Your Vote Is Counted.”
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: President Bush's website now blocks non-US visitors
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DATE: 10/27/2004 09:38:16 AM
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UPDATED.
BoingBoing reader Stef was among many to alert us to news that as of Monday morning, "George W. Bush's website now blocks all non-US traffic. Wonder how the US citizens living/working overseas feel about this?" Link to BBC report (which references BoingBoing as a source). The server reply is "Access Denied. You don't have permission to access 'http://www.georgewbush.com/' on this server."
Reader Daen de Leon points to the Netcraft report here: Link
Reader Supi in Finland says, "Guess Bush really hates us foreigners. Finnish news article here. In brief: GWB's publicist turned media to ask questions from Bush's internet campaign manager Michael Turk, who never bothered to reply. You can of course access the site via a proxy, but that's little bit too complicated for most of the people. Well, at least we are left with this "mirror" of Bushs site -- georgewbush.org (brought to you by whitehouse.org -staff). And johnkerry.com works just fine from Europe."
Reader Marco Montemagno in Italy says, "On this page I uploaded a screenshot [of what happens when I try to access the Bush website."] Link
Reader Michael Maas asks, "Can US soldiers in Iraq access GeorgeWBush.com?" [Ed note: I'd assume so, if they use military networks rather than regionally-managed ones -- but I'd welcome an authoritative answer.] See update below.
Canadian reader Anne Galloway says, "Just to let you know there is no problem accessing Bush's site from Canada." And Tarik in Barbados says, "You know can access Bush's site from Barbados no problem, including that awful Kerry flash game." Reader Tom Biro adds, "I work for a company based in Germany, but I am working (and have lived - forever) in New Jersey - since our whole network proxies out of Germany, I'm unable to visit this website. I imagine I'm not the only person actually here in the States having this problem. The number of expats this affects is probably pretty huge. "
Swiss reader Guido says, "The ISP behind georgewbush.com seems utterly incompetent. The following two links work just fine from Switzerland: https://georgewbush.com/, and http://65.172.163.222/. The 'normal' homepage, however, doesn't work." Thanks, Guido. It must be hard work, keeping up with all those internets!
Dave Cross says, "To counter the barring of georgewbush.com someone has set up a http://georgewbush.co.uk -- which is just a redirect to michaelmoore.com."
UPDATE: Can US servicemen and women, reporters, and contractors in Iraq access georgewbush.com? Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Iraq, and he tells BoingBoing: "I just tried. Access denied." Some US readers with enlisted friends and relatives stationed overseas echo that. Reader John J. says, "My sister's stationed in Germany; she tried it and got that 'access denied' response." But an enlisted reader requesting anonymity says, "I am a Lt Col serving in Northern Iraq - all of us serving here are on .mil domains - we have no problem getting to the site."
Reader Jim in Germany says, "It is probably done by this tool: Akamai EdgeScape. This is how it works -- Link. And this link shows you the way how visit it anyway ;) -- Link. My article in my blog (in German, sorry) Link." And Jason in the UK says, "This is the link to the origin server that Akamai uses to pull in content to the network. This link is still accessible to me in the UK."
Joi Ito has more: Link. No official word on why from the Bush camp, but internet monitoring firm Netcraft said "the pattern of traffic to the website suggests that the block was not due to an attack by vandals or hackers."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nintendo to sue SuicideGirls?
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DATE: 10/27/2004 11:32:46 AM
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UPDATE BELOW
No, this ain't The Onion. But it is ridiculous. Suicidegirls founder Sean says:
I got this email this morning from the law firm that represent Nintendo. They are claiming that the member RuneLateralus listing Zelda and Metorid as his favortie video games in his profile is an infringement on Nintendo's intellectual property. I enjoy an ice cold coca cola on a hot day. Do you think Coca Cola is going to sue me for posting that?
Remember, kids, lawyers are evil and all they want to do is figure a way to bill you more of their time. Nintendo is actually paying these people to threaten me over RuneLateralus favorite video games listing on his profile. What a bunch of morons.
Link to SG blog post with full text of Nintendo nastygram. (Ed. note: SuicideGirls is a sponsor of BoingBoing)
UPDATE: Link to update post
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: God Hates Rags
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DATE: 10/27/2004 01:46:32 PM
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It's all a url pun on the infamous "godhatesfags.com." BoingBoing reader Alex K. says, "The site came about as a part of the short film hosted on the site, 'Felt: Tearing the Fabric of America.' The short film is a damn funny mockumentary replacing the focus of ire and derision from homosexuals to puppets. Down with the Felt Agenda! Adam and Eve, not Adam and Sleeve! Jim Henson has been in HELL for 14 years, 5 months and 11 days ! "
Link to godhatesrags.com, and link to movie. Actually, God Hates Rather a Lot of Things: Link. Here's a particularly promising url: Link (Thanks, Wayne Correia!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny Human Ancestor Found in Asia
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DATE: 10/27/2004 01:56:52 PM
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Yow! This is the best thing I've read all year. National Geographic reports that "Scientists have found fossil skeletons of a hobbit-like species of human that grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child. The tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits, lived with pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons on a remote island in Indonesia as recently as 13,000 years ago." Link (Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Doom 3 casemod
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:28:56 PM
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This Doom-3-inspired casemod is completely excellent, from the glowing red windows to the realistic fake rubble around the base.
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Appropriation-friendly library opens in San Francisco
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:34:42 PM
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Rick sez,
We've built an appropriation-friendly library in San Francisco and are now welcoming visitors.
The Prelinger Library is an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, print ephemera and government documents, located in downown San Francisco, California, USA.
Though libraries live on (and are among the least-corrupted democratic institutions), the freedom to browse serendipitously is becoming rarer. Now that many libraries have economized on space and converted print collections to microfilm and digital formats, it's become harder to wander and let the shelves themselves suggest new directions and ideas. Key research libraries are often closed to unaffiliated users, and many libraries keep the bulk of their collections in closed stacks, inhibiting the rewarding pleasures of browsing. Despite its virtues, query-based online cataloging often prevents unanticipated yet productive results from turning up on the user's screen. And finally, much of the material in our collection is difficult to find in most libraries readily accessible to the general public.
Most important of all, people wishing to copy library holdings for research and transformative use often face difficulties in making legitimate copies. Since the act of quoting and recontextualizing existing words and images is indistinguishable from making new ones, we think it's important for libraries to build appropriation-friendly access into their charters, and we're trying to take a big first step in this direction.
Link
(Thanks, Rick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Portrait-murals made from dominoes
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:38:42 PM
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Domino Artwork has downloadable PDFs explaining how to make large portraits of Abe Lincoln and MLK out of 12 sets of double-nine dominoes.
Link
(Thanks, Bob!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian TV transgressivist TV show
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DATE: 10/27/2004 02:58:18 PM
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Nerve is a new Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show featuring short clips on outre and transgressive subjects, like scrotum--waxing, grafitti writing, and wearing a burkha.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Conservative Sinclair Media Group tied to Porn?
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DATE: 10/27/2004 03:13:49 PM
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Sinclair Media Group, the broadcasting conglomerate which famously aired an anti-Kerry smear program last Friday, reportedly has links to the adult biz.
Sinclair is ran by David Smith, who in the mid-1970s was a partner in a company called Cine Processors, according the Los Angeles Times, which cites public records and a former partner in the company as sources. David E. Williams, Smith’s partner in the business, told the Times that Cine Processors’ sole business was the development of 8mm pornographic films.
Link to AVN article, which refers to an LA Times story: Link, site reg. required. (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nintendo lawyergram to Suicide Girls -- UPDATE
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DATE: 10/27/2004 06:16:48 PM
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Following up on earlier news today about a hilariously clueless cease-and-desist from Nintendo's attorneys to softcore website Suicide Girls -- the implications of which are as stupid as they are far-reaching -- BoingBoing reader Josh says,
Hi Xeni, I called the S.F. and the Seattle offices of the law firm representing Nintendo here, Perkins Coie. They not only seem to not know about this, they can't even look at it because their firewalls won't allow them to get to porn sites. (Ed note: BWAAHAHAHAHAH!)
I've emailed someone in their offices the posts so I expect this'll get cleared up inside a day or two.
Link to previous BoingBoing post with full text of the laughably logic-lacking lawyerletter. I've known some of the partners at Perkins Coie in the past -- sharp, tech-savvy, forthright folk. I can't imagine this silliness will go too far.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bush's one-finger salute
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DATE: 10/27/2004 07:24:37 PM
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Here's a clip of GW Bush in classic form as he prepares to be videotaped.
Link (Thanks, Nick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Five years' blog-posts in a single textfile
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DATE: 10/27/2004 11:35:16 PM
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Tom Coates has hit his fifth bloggaversary, "five full years of random plasticbag.org posts - 4175 of them in fact, plus 1517 links in the linklog (before I moved over to using delicious to manage them in the last couple of weeks). In terms of the non-linklog posts alone that works out at over two posts a day, each and every day of each and every week, of each and every month, of each and every year since November 1999...I've written in excess of 1.1 million words over the last five years. To put that in perspective, English versions of the Bible have only around 750,000 words in them. I've written a bible and a full third of a sequel."
Here's the provocative notion: "there must be any number of ways to visualise that data or explore it or rip it apart or whatever. So here's the dump: Every full post made to plasticbag.org over the last five years."
Boing Boing's fifth is coming up in January -- we'll have about 17,000 posts by then. Maybe we'll do this too!
7.4MB Textfile Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: For sale: action against bloggers
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DATE: 10/27/2004 11:36:33 PM
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A PR company is selling services "to take action against bloggers!"
"(PR client) is a market intelligence and media analysis services firm. (PR client) is working with F1000 companies who are using our services to Manage and Monitor Digital Influencers (such as blogs, message boards, user groups, complaint sites, etc.) as an intelligence and threat awareness tool. (Person's name), CEO could talk to you about 'What F1000 Companies are doing to take action against bloggers' and 'How companies are taking steps to protect their corporate reputations from bloggers/digital influencers.'"
Wow, I guess PR really is the opposite of blogging.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Votergates: Documentaries on electronic voting's failings
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Brewster Kahle points us to two excellent, full-length, Creative Commons licensed documentaries on the perils of electronic voting. Confusingly, they are both called "VoterGate."
Votergate 1: "This is an action documentary, following a young team on their nationwide investigation of the current problems with our voting systems and elections procedures. Fast-paced and engaging, this documentary reveals the shocking story of how touchscreen voting systems are highly susceptible to hacking and how these systems are being implemented across the country without the proper checks and balances to insure accuracy and accountability"
Votergate 2: "This film is an investigative documentary uncovering the truth about new computer voting systems, which allow a few powerful corporations to record our votes in secret. But the film is not just a warning. It strongly concludes that elections are harder to defraud when voters turn out in
big numbers. This documentary is designed specifically to help viewers navigate past the fear and spin already being thrown at this critical issue."
Link to the first movie, Link to the second movie
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's interview with GMU's English Dept paper
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DATE: 10/27/2004 11:48:07 PM
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My interview with Carnegie-Mellon's George Mason University's English department newspaper, English Matters, is online!
On the one hand it was that, as a science fiction writer, we're supposed to be looking towards the future, and it's pretty clear to me that the future involves electronic text. It's very hard to imagine that we'll read fewer electronic words or more paper words as the years tick by and so I wanted to be involved in that practice; I wanted to be one of the people who was a pioneer in that practice, because I'm a science fiction writer and it's what I should be doing.
By the same token, I was pretty sure whatever the future of electronic text looked like it wouldn't be distorted in a way that was intended to maximize the degree to which it resembles traditional, non-electronic text – which is what DRM technology does. The objective of DRM technology is to make bits act like atoms. To embrace that as the future of electronic text is to say that the Luther Bible will finally give us a proper Protestant Reformation once they can make the Gutenberg press run on fetal calfskin instead of paper, because everyone knows that a real Bible is on fetal calfskin. Once they can be sure that the Luther Bibles are only printed in Latin and read by priests, then we'll have a proper Protestant Reformation underway, and not until then.
Link
(Thanks, Aaron!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MMO anthropologists rumbled by MMO players
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DATE: 10/27/2004 11:50:25 PM
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BuhBuhCuh sez,
Students at the University of Pittsburgh are taking a class on "writing and reading practices in digital environments." This week, they are looking at a MMO called Second Life, and started a discussion on the ethics of researching players - do you tell them you are researching, or does that compromise the research. (A good terra-nova thread).
The 'net works in funny ways, and sure enough, a student told a SL user about the blog. Now the users of Second Life are in an uproar about the ethics of the students researching them without asking first. (Not to mention that the fairly intellectual Second Life community wasn't happy about the insinuations that they are all crazed stalkers.)
There is a long thread in the Second Life forums but registration is required.
Link
(Thanks, BuhBuhCuh!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Halloween handcrafted pipes
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DATE: 10/27/2004 11:56:48 PM
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A reader writes, "Trever Talbert hand crafts pipes. Every year, he makes one or two one-offs for Halloween and auctions them off. Past years' are here.
Link
Don't like a dry shave? Nobody does. Buy yourself some generic sex lube. It's only a couple of bucks at Walmart or Target or, really, any drugstore. A little dab and a disposable razor and you can get a nice shave. Rub a thimbleful of water over your face and wipe off to finish. It may sound funny, and of course your razor is ruined unless you rinse it out right away, but this works very well. It's one of my favorite tricks.
A dab of sex gel will help you comb out your hair in the morning, too, and it disappears completely into the hair, as if it were never there.
For washing up, make my homemade, adult version of baby wipes in a bottle. First, find some hand and body lotion that has a scent you'd like to wear, buy some baby oil, and get some relatively scent free shower gel or shampoo. Pour a couple of teaspoons of each into a small water bottle, say half a liter. Maybe skimp a little on the baby oil and be a little generous with the shampoo. Fill the bottle halfway with warm water, cap it and shake to mix. Now take a napkin from your favorite fast food place, saturate it with the mixture, and give yourself a good wipe down. It takes the smell off, trust me. Add a bit of witch hazel to the mix if you like an astringent quality.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gimli costume extraordinaire
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DATE: 10/28/2004 12:01:41 AM
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This cosplayer's amazing Gimli-the-dwarf costume is documented here in a build-log that details everything from the construction of the armor to the facial prosthetic.
Link
(via Ftrain)
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TITLE: Dremel tool designed for pumpkins
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DATE: 10/28/2004 12:03:57 AM
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Dremel, maker of the famed rotary tool that is the favorite of casemodders and hardware hackers, have released a special Hallowe'en rotary tool that is specifically designed for elaborate pumpkin carving.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Collective lunar eclipse photos
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DATE: 10/28/2004 12:15:56 AM
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Flickr users are using the "eclipse" tag to collect photos of the lunar eclipse from all over the world. Some are breathtaking.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Update on "Kids who support Kerry threatened with expulsion"
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DATE: 10/28/2004 04:37:12 AM
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Yesterday, we blogged about a school principal who allegedly threatened students who attended an on-campus Bush speech in Kerry tee-shirts with expulsion. Many of you wrote to say that you communicated with the principal above and that he says:
- The Bush people rented the gymnasium, and the school was just enforcing their requirement that students not wear Kerry-supporting materials
- The principal didn't threaten expulsion
I don't buy it: signing up to do #1, enforcing a ban on political expression, at a political event, in a political season, is a betrayal of an educator's duty. And anything a school administrator bans carries with it the implicit threat of discipline. One student reports being threatened with expulsion, the principal denies it. It may be that the principal didn't make the threat of expulsion, but telling students that it is forbidden to do foo implies that students who undertake foo will be punished somehow.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Video Vote Vigil
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DATE: 10/28/2004 07:58:53 AM
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BB pal Jon Lebkowsky says:
"Working with Texans for Truth and Mercury Campaigns, we're putting together a web site to gather videos and images of any disturbances and irregularities that might occur at polling places on election day. We launched yesterday with a QuickTime video of George Bush shooting the finger (though some just linked to the video). We aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented... We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Retinal display on display
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DATE: 10/28/2004 08:03:25 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about University of Washington University Thomas Furness's Virtual Retinal Display, a system that paints a video image onto your eyeball with a laser beam.
"The small screens and narrow fields of view of mobile devices don't work well with the human vision system," Furness says. "When we first started talking about VRD, the idea was to create a system that requires very little power but can be connected to a PDA or cell phone to deliver a wide field of view with high brightness. For mobile computing applications where you want to overlay digital information on top of what you see, you need the luminance to compete with the outside world."
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: How not to save your marriage
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DATE: 10/28/2004 08:39:09 AM
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A Wisconsin man tossed a live electrical wire into the tub while his wife was bathing, "hoping a near-death experience would save their marriage." From an Associated Press report:
William Dahlby said in court he was only trying to scare his wife the evening of May 9. He told jurors the wire was hooked to a "ground fault interrupter" designed to cut the electricity when the cord encountered water. His wife was not hurt.
Dahlby was convicted yesterday of attempted first-degree murder.
Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Flickr client from Ecto creator
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DATE: 10/28/2004 08:41:38 AM
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Adriaan Tijsseling, maker of the brilliant Ecto blog editor -- used by all of us who work on BB -- has just shipped a MacOS X app called 1001, which provides a slick desktop interface to Flickr, including your friends' photos, photo-strems matching your favorite tags, and an easy uploader.
Link
(via Joi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Economist endorses Kerry
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DATE: 10/28/2004 10:27:25 AM
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A Kerry endorsement from one of the most unlikely sources imaginable. The Economist endorsed Bush last time around, and before that Dole. Link. (Thanks, Glenn)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Calling for volunteers to videotape voter intimidation
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DATE: 10/28/2004 10:39:48 AM
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Video Vote Vigil wants people with video cameras to record instances of voter intimidation.
On November 2nd please join the army of volunteers who will keep an eye on our democracy. Volunteer here to submit video of disturbances outside polling locations. Enter your contact info and we will send you an email with more information.
PLEASE NOTE: We are not asking people to videotape INSIDE polling locations. We want volunteers to monitor the intimidation where it happens -- on the streets outside the polling locations.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Stranger's scariest Halloween costumes
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DATE: 10/28/2004 10:58:39 AM
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Very scary Halloween costumes for kids based on current political themes.
The Littlest Prisoner at Abu Ghraib: So easy, so quick, and so terrifying!
Lyndie England (Candy cigarette optional.)
Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid: Add a burnt-cork beard and an electric match from the tobacconist, and your little terror is ready to fly!
Link (Thanks, Stephen!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Explosives at Al Qaqaa were stolen after US occupation: photos
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DATE: 10/28/2004 11:09:53 AM
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After two days of silence on the hundreds of tons of missing plastic explosives in Iraq, the President defended himself by stating that the explosives might have been removed before the US invasion. These photos seem to suggest otherwise. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Grand Theftendo - Homebrew port of GTA III to the 8-Bit NES
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DATE: 10/28/2004 11:13:39 AM
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Derek sez: "Grand Theftendo is a port of Grand Theft Auto III for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is Grand Theft Auto III running on an 8 bit, 256 x 240 resolution, 2 bit colour x 2 bit palette, 1.79 Mhz system, written entirely in 6502 Assembly Language! It includes the entire Portland city!" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More on the tiny humans who lived in Idonesia
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DATE: 10/28/2004 12:49:29 PM
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Here are a few notes about my favorite story of the year - the discovery of a race of tiny, tool-making people with heads the size of grapefruits.
Many kind readers emailed me to tell me that these wee folk are not our "ancestors," as much as I wish that they were. Here's one email I received, from a gentleman named Dustin
I saw your Boing Boing post earlier on the tiny Indonesian hominids, and
have a small
quibble: the headline says "human ancestor" but these creatures, though
apparently related to us, are not ancestors. If they existed 13,000 years
ago, they'd have co-existed with modern Homo sapiens for at least 15-20,000
years, and with archaic H. sapiens for the 60-190,000 years before that. If
anything, they're more like second cousins or something.
My friend Jenn Shreve forwarded an email from Marc Herman, who is writing a book on Indonesia:
I just read your friend Mark's posting on boing boing about the skeleton of the tiny people of indonesia. As it happens, I met one of the anthropologists in on this discovery several months ago at an airport in Indonesia. She was *bursting* to tell someone about it, so after I promised not to report anything, she went on and on about the discovery. It was an excellent way to kill a layover. But the really cool part, which you really should tell Mark, is that these tiny people were recent enough that they likely coexisted with humans who could tell stories; there are, to this day, myths among people in that part of Indonesia of distant human ancestors who had tiny, somewhat stupid tiny friends who lived in caves. There are also many remnants of tiny elephants on Flores island. It appears increasingly likely that this particular island, which is east of Bali, was isolated from predators, so over thousands of years everything that didn't need to defend itself became smaller and smaller, until it became the land of the tiny things. Normal sized people lived amongst all the tinyness. This is real. This actually happened.
There's a lot of good stuff about the tiny people at Nature.com. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Woodring-esque Salamander from old German kids' books
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DATE: 10/28/2004 01:53:41 PM
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The only thing I know about these scans of pages from a German kids' books about a Salamander is that they are really beautiful and that they remind me of the work of cartoonist Jim Woodring. Link (via The Cartoonist)
UPDATE: Mark Lakata sez: "I saw your post on boing-boing. Those salamander cartoons were free leaflets given out with "Salamander" brand shoes. My mom used to buy them for me when I was young at the local German shoe store (in LA). You would get the cartoons for free. This was in the 70s. Note that there seems to be a big emphasis on the shoes....
Salamander is still in business. I bought a pair of dress shoes last year in Europe.
http://daddytypes.com/archive/2004/10/27/lurchi_needs_a_new_pair_of_shoes.html
http://www.salamander.de/index.cgi?action=frontpage::load_plain§ion1=lurchi&template=index
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny Humans update #3
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DATE: 10/28/2004 01:56:39 PM
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Michael sez "There may be new impetus to visit Kerinci Seblat National Park in Indonesia. The Orang Pendek may be a living fossil - the same species as Homo Floresiensis, but be very much alive. There are still sightings of such "little people" even today, and none other than Fauna & Flora International, the worldâ€'s oldest conservation charity, is searching for the creature.
They have set up camera-traps in likely areas of forest or in areas where local people have reported sightings. So far the picture that will make world news has proved elusive and as reported sightings get rarer, the naturalists fear that if orange pendek does indeed exist it may be very close to extinction. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Homeland Security saves America by busting a toy store owner for legally selling a Rubik's Cube knockoff
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DATE: 10/28/2004 02:06:20 PM
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Reinvigorated after spending $500,000 on a self-congratulatory awards dinner in which it handed out "lifetime achievement" awards, the two-year old Dept. of Homeland Security went after an extremely dangerous toy store owner who was selling a knockoff of a Rubik's Cube. We can all sleep a little more soundly tonight.
The next day, two men arrived at the store and showed Cox their badges. The lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube. She said yes. The Magic Cube, he said, was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.
The whole thing took about 10 minutes.
After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that the Homeland Security agents had it wrong. The Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on rival toy's trademark.
Link (Thanks, Ben!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Vintage scary Halloween sounds on MP3
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DATE: 10/28/2004 02:34:27 PM
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Terrifying (ly cheesy) sound effects from an old LP. Great stuff.
Link (via PCL Linkdump)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: What do George Lakoff and Jenna Jameson have in common?
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DATE: 10/28/2004 03:12:50 PM
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Bonnie Powell points us to this incredibly odd story from the folks at Chelsea Green, the publisher of cognitive linguist George Lakoff's latest book Don't Think of an Elephant! (Previous BB posts about Lakoff here and here.)
Following reports that George Lakoff's political work Don't Think of an Elephant! had made the Booksense and San Francisco Chronicle paperback bestseller lists, Chelsea Green received word that the book had made #30 on the NY Times paperback list. We were ecstatic, but troubled to see that the book was listed with the wrong author (Howard Dean) and wrong publisher (Ballantine). When president and publisher Margo Baldwin called the Times to correct the information, she was told that the book was no longer on the list at all, as it had been reclassified as a How-To/Self-Help book.
The email exchange between Baldwin and the New York Times is funny, and sad.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nintendo apologizes to Suicide Girls!
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DATE: 10/28/2004 03:19:37 PM
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Nintendo sent the email below to the good people at Suicide Girls. Background here and here.
Hello,
We would like to apologize to you and to those who frequent the
suicidegirls.com website for inadvertently contacting you about a fan
posting on the website.
We know that many of our fans are old enough to make their own choice about what they want to view on the Internet. We value the support of our fans and we respect their decisions. The letter was sent as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children. We are proud of our efforts in this area. Unfortunately, the site posting identified in our letter was targeted by mistake.
As a gesture of goodwill, we would like to offer you (and RuneLateralus) a free Nintendo video game system and game of your choice. (...)
In addition, we would appreciate it if you could provide us with contact information for RuneLateralus, or have him contact us directly, so that we may apologize to him. We would be glad to send him a game and system of his choice through you as well, since we do not have his contact information.
Sincerely,
Christie Hamilton
Nintendo of America Inc.
Consumer Service Department
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Work on Brit Library's Free Software archival crawler!
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DATE: 10/28/2004 03:54:27 PM
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Mark sez, "I run the web archiving programme at the British Library and I've just posted a tender for the development of a smart archiving crawler. The smart crawler is to be free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The project may be of interest to BB readers in the search, document classification and ranking, digital library, or archiving space."
The British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are embarking on a programme to archive resources on the World Wide Web in their respective national domains. To achieve this programme, the British Library as lead partner wishes to tender for a contract to multiple suppliers to provide development services and/or software technology for a Smart Archiving Crawler. This will comprise of a framework controlling and interacting with Heritrix, the Internet Archive's open source archiving web crawler, and modules which provide prioritisation capabilities using document thematic analysis and link weighting.
113k Word Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK Creative Commons article
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DATE: 10/28/2004 03:56:18 PM
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Becky Hogge has written an excellent piece in today's Guardian about the Creative Commons in honour of the upcoming Creative Commons UK launch.
On November 1, a group of new copyright licences will be released in the UK, arriving from the US under the umbrella of Creative Commons (CC). The project is the brainchild of Stanford University's law professor Lawrence Lessig, and the licences allow artists to move away from traditional copyright's "all rights reserved" towards a more digital age-friendly "some rights reserved".
The different types of licence allow artists to choose which rights they wish to maintain. They could keep the right to exploit works for commercial gain, to veto derivative works or ask to be credited each time their work is reproduced. In turn, those encountering CC licensed works on the internet know immediately how the original artist feels about the use of that work without having to ring lawyers.
Link
(Thanks, Becky!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on Australian national radio about 35th anniversary of 'Net
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DATE: 10/28/2004 10:52:58 PM
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Earlier today I was a guest on the breakfast show of Australia's ABC Radio National, along with professors Leonard Kleinrock and Alex Halavais. The occasion: an event in LA tomorrow commemorating the 35th anniversary of the internet. (Event link). Here's the list of participants.
Kleinrock is from the Computing Sciences Department at the UCLA, and is credited with having sent the first email-type message in 1969. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around how badass that is. I am planning to ask him to autograph my laptop tomorrow. Mr. Halavais is assistant professor at the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo. He studies really interesting stuff! Here's a snip from the show summary:
It's the internet's thirty-fifth birthday today. Like any baby, when it was born in 1969, the Internet looked nothing like the grown-up version of today which networks millions of computers. Back then, it linked just a handful of computers. It was the brainchild of researchers from the University of California who wanted to send data from one computer to several others at the same time.
On this day in 1969, a message we might now call an email was sent from UCLA to nearby Stanford University. The moment the 'send' button was hit, a new era of global communications began.
Link to archived radio show, with streaming sound online (in RealAudio only, sorry).
For those of you in Los Angeles tomorrow who plan to stopy by the event -- here's a tip, if you're hoping to blog-while-confabbing. Bring batteries! They'll have wifi in the house, but no electrical outlets in the room where the conference is taking place. Only 50 or 60 IPs available, too, so connectivity could be tough to access if a lot of bloggers show up. See you there!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Internet Vets for Truth launch election-week download blowout
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DATE: 10/28/2004 11:19:02 PM
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An anonymous tipster points us to the launch of an election-related download project organized by a group called "Internet Veterans for Truth." If you're familiar with P2P-politics, you get the basic idea -- though the projects are not related, and don't follow the same content-gathering process.
The site features excerpts (and some full-length downloads) from features including Going Upriver, Farenheit 9/11, Uncovered, a bunch of Jon Stewart and Daily Show clips, and Eminem's Mosh video.
Snip from the internetvetsfortruth.org site:
Subject: The Rumors On the Internets Are True!
The INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH have launched a new pre-election campaign, "Never Forget," at internetvetsfortruth.org in an effort to educate the voting public prior to the November 2nd election.
The website features documentary content highlighting the records of both
George W. Bush and John Kerry. The Internets Veterans for truth invite you to view this documentary evidence
as well as to enjoy the social and political commentary of Jon Stewart,
Eminem, and others.
We know the rumors on the Internets are true. We invite you to visit and decide for yourself. And please, pass this on to our fellow Americans. Let's blogroll.
Link. Everything's free, natch.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Instant death and a $200 fine
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DATE: 10/29/2004 12:40:38 AM
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Steve Jurvetson snapped this great sign and posted it to Flickr -- how the hell do they collect?
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Voter fraud against Democrats
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DATE: 10/29/2004 12:43:08 AM
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This fraudulent letter was sent to a largely Democratic area in Ohio.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nerd folksongs
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DATE: 10/29/2004 02:14:53 AM
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Jonathan Coulton is a nerd folksinger who writes and performs anthemic, heartfelt songs about laptops, IKEA, fractals, and other geeky subjects.
Link
(Thanks, Rose!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steven Johnson's next: "Everything Bad Is Good For You"
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DATE: 10/29/2004 07:40:15 AM
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Steven Johnson, author of the wonderful books Emergence and Mind Wide Open, has just blogged soem info about his next book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You."
It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.
I call this long-term trend the Sleeper Effect, after that famous Woody Allen joke from his mock sci-fi film where a team of scientists from 2029 are astounded that 20th-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. (In conversation, I sometimes describe this book as the Atkins diet for pop culture.) Over the course of the book, I look at everything from Grand Theft Auto to "24," from Finding Nemo to "Dallas," from "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos," from "Oprah" to "The Apprentice." There's some material about the internet, too, though less than you might suspect.
Link
(Thanks, Steven!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Iraq update on Bush website blocking non-US vistors
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DATE: 10/29/2004 08:12:07 AM
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BoingBoing readers from Austria to China to Zimbabwe wrote in to follow up on our post (Link) about President George W. Bush's website blocking non-US visitors with an "access denied" response. One American reader said, "Yeah, well come November 2 I'm planning to give HIM an 'access denied' response with my vote." One BoingBoing reader who requests anonymity updates us the Iraq factor:
I'm the Chief Technical Officer for a satellite internet and network services provider with offices in Baghdad and Arbil, Iraq. We have over 500 installed sites in Iraq, all of them since the end of the war - I came over 15 months ago. Many of those sites are military, and I may be able to provide some new information for you. Yes, my customers are also blocked from accessing Dubya's site. I can't say I really care - I'm a flaming liberal and he lost my vote when his father was still president. But the act itself is particularly odious.
We resell satellite bandwidth on several different satellite providers, among them Hughes Network Systems, Europe, and Tachyon Networks, Europe. All of those customers are shut out. Most military users here have these choices for internet:
1. NIPRNET, the non-classified network the military uses for communications, including AKO (the military mail system).
2. Filtered, proxied systems provided by Segovia or KBR. Locked down by Websence and filtered against most "offensive" content.
3. No internet.
4. Paying personal money for a private connection.
In general, support units such as the US Army Corps of Engineers have access to military internet options. The USACE builds NIPRNET, after all. But the common infantry units have little or no access except what they can scrounge up from personal funds. We sell a lot of cheap end-user satellite systems to these units. These systems aren't cheap by US / terrestrial standards - a 512x128 kbit shared-bandwidth satellite connection is $275 per month, and it goes up - way up - from there.
Those with access to #1 or #2 probably have access to Dubya's site and anything else that attempts to segregate network access by geography.
The rest of us will not.
Link to previous BB post on "Bush website blocks non-US visitors"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Idiocy of the Do Not Fly List
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DATE: 10/29/2004 09:13:35 AM
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From Ubiquity Magazine
Deirdre McNamer (how
appropriate) wrote a story in The New Yorker magazine in October 2002 about
a 28-year-old pinko-gray-skinned, blue-eyed, red-blond-haired criminal
called Christian Michael Longo who used the alias 'John Thomas Christopher.'
His alias was placed on the DNFL used by the Transportation Security
Administration. He was arrested in January 2002 but his alias was not
removed from the DNFL. On March 23, 2002, 70-year-old brown-skinned,
dark-eyed, gray-haired grandmother Johnnie Thomas was informed that she was
on the master terrorist list and would have special security measures
applied every time she flew. Indeed, the poor lady found that she was
repeatedly delayed by a scurry of activity when she presented her tickets at
an airline counter, extra X-rays of her checked baggage, supplementary
examination of her hand-baggage and extra wanding at the entrance gates. On
one occasion she was told that she had graduated to the exalted status
labeled, 'Not allowed to fly.' She discovered that there was no method
available for having 'her' name removed from the DNFL; indeed, one person
from her local FBI office dismissively told her to hire a lawyer (although
ironically, he refused to identify himself). An employee of the TSA informed
her that 'four other law-abiding John Thomases had called to complain.'
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: AOL attempts to shame customer from unsubscribing
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DATE: 10/29/2004 09:22:24 AM
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Jim Hanas sez: "Thought you and your readers might get a kick out of this post, in which an AOL cust service rep -- as I was trying to cancel my account -- asked me what I used the internet for, and when I said I didn't want to answer any questions, he asked if I was 'ashamed' of what I used the internet for.
"John Ashcroft, is that you?" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Anti magnetic ribbon site
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DATE: 10/29/2004 12:12:29 PM
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This guy is irritated by those little magnetic stickers that look like ribbons. So he is selling anti-ribbons.
Why are you doing this?
We believe that there is strong possibility that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan might be a little far away or maybe even a little too busy to be checking out the pseudopatriotic magnet on the back of a 1986 Geo Metro as it drives down I-95 or sits in an Olive Garden parking lot.
Why do you hate America?
We don't hate America, we hate that people think slapping a stupid magnet on the back of their car has meaning. Mostly everyone in this country supports the troops and hopes they will return safely. Maybe you should be telling them directly in person, on the phone or in a letter and not driving around with a big magnetic banner you probably got at Wal*Mart that simply attempts to prove to everybody but the troops that you support the troops more than everybody else.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Eye Spirits
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DATE: 10/29/2004 12:30:15 PM
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Paul Devereux wrote an interesting article for Fortean Times about macular degeneration, a common cause of vision loss for elderly people. Why is an eye disease interesting to forteans who study unusual phenomenon? Some sufferers experience amazingly strange hallucinations as the brain "fills in" what the eyes are missing.
"The research reveals that the hallucinations can last from a few seconds to several hours and can be of many things, both familiar and unfamiliar to the person viewing them. Hallucinatory content can include inanimate objects, people, animals, plants and bunches of flowers, trees, and complete scenes. Some people see strange things such as monsters, shining angels, or transparent figures floating in a ghostly manner through rooms and hallways."
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Camera flash nanowelding
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DATE: 10/29/2004 12:54:01 PM
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UCLA chemists have welded together nanofibers using an ordinary camera flash.
"I was very surprised," (professor Richard) Kaner said. "My graduate student, Jiaxing Huang, decided to take some pictures of his polyaniline nanofibers one evening when he heard a distinct popping sound and smelled burning plastic. Jiaxing recalled a paper that we had discussed during a group meeting reporting that carbon nanotubes burned up in response to a camera flash. By adjusting the distance of the camera flash to his material, he was able to produce smooth films with no burning, making this new discovery potentially useful."
The technique could also enable polyaniline nanofibers to be used as a solder of sorts, so that other polymers (plastics) can be welded together. Such an approach would be useful in the construction of myriad nanoscale devices such as chemical sensors and membranes.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: NASA image expert says Bush was wearing a device during debates
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DATE: 10/29/2004 01:17:57 PM
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Dr. Robert M. Nelson is a NASA senior research scientist for NASA and according to Salon, an "international authority on image analysis. Currently he's engrossed in analyzing digital photos of Saturn's moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or canyons." He used Photoshop filters to outline the bugle on President Bush's back seen during the first debate, and concludes that it is some kind of "device."
However, our President sheepishly admitted it was "a poorly-tailored shirt." Poor guy. We should send him some money for a shirt that doesn't have big rectangular pooch and a rope hanging from it. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Eyedropper contact lenses
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DATE: 10/29/2004 01:26:49 PM
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Scientists at Singapore's Institute of Bioengieering and Nanotechnology have developed contact lenses that deliver eye medication to treat diseases like glaucoma. From New Scientist:
"If the drug is water-soluble, it will be trapped within a network of tiny inter-connected, water-filled channels in the material. If it’s water-insoluble, it will be trapped within nano-spaces in the polymer matrix, and slowly leach out into the channels. In contact with fluid on the eyeball, these channels open up and release the drug."
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tiny Humans update #4
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DATE: 10/29/2004 01:41:14 PM
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Scientific American interviews Peter Brown, who led the startling discovery of Boing Boing's new mascot, the meter-tall human species Homo floresiensis that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 13,000 years ago.
"Looking at the distribution of small-bodied animals around the world today, they tend to occur in rainforests... And certainly that's where small-bodied humans tend to be found. We don't know much about the paleoenvironment on Flores yet, but everything's consistent with it being heavily rainforested back in the Pleistocene and probably heavily rainforested until agricultural humans arrived and started clearing the rainforest. The fauna is consistent with that sort of environment as well. Maybe there just wasn't a lot to eat. The island is only about 14,000 square kilometers, there's not a lot of it there. So I think the most likely scenario is that as part of their adaptation to [having fewer] calories living in a rainforest--and maybe thermoregulation as well--there was this long-term selection for smaller body size."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny Humans update #5 -- hobbit hair found in cave?
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DATE: 10/29/2004 01:41:49 PM
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The Age: "The discovery of hair in the Indonesian cave in which a new species of hobbit-sized humans was found has raised Australian scientists' hopes of obtaining their DNA.
"If it's hobbit hair, we will be screaming with delight," said Bert Roberts, a member of the Australian-Indonesian team that surprised the world on Wednesday with its discovery that the previously unknown human cousins barely a metre tall had survived until at least 13,000 years ago on the island of Flores." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Transcript of Google CEO's remarks at 35th Internet Anniversary
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DATE: 10/29/2004 01:44:52 PM
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I'm at the "35th Anniversary of the Internet" event in Los Angeles, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt is speaking with UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock. Here is a partial, rough transcript of Mr. Schmidt's remarks.
We allocate about 70% of our resources to our core business and 30% to "other" because we never know what that other will become. We also ask our employees to spend 20% of their time on exploration, and those tend to be complementary to our core.
Our agenda tends to be driven by a bottoms-up process not so much traditional strategic planning. Google is trying to solve the next problem not the last problem.
[ Question: Was it serendipity that made google what it became? ] I think the word is luck. The principles from which Google was built do exist in other indstries. Ours is a reproducable model, and others may end up reproducing it and solving other problems. We're just seeing the beginning of this.
Good management is not that complicated, it's about leadership. Some managers need to micromanage everything, but that doesn't produce creativity. If you can figure out a way to tell a story, that's how people learn. they have a beginning middle and an end. if you have the right kind of people and the right kind of values, that can work. The great thing about high tech is that labor is very mobile, and if you want to deal with other people, you are forced to deal with them as peers and equals.
There are many uses of the net that are not touched by Google. Peer to peer, and the majority of email traffic. It's very important that people work on internet monitoring, internet scaling, all of the next generation projects -- I don't think any single one is of dominant importance.
We're in a real time world where people who need to collaborate can do so instantly. That has a downside because evil people can collaborate quickly, as well as the good guys, but the overwhelming effect is very positive.
Software businesses, intellectual property businesses have good cashflow if they're run right. A friend who went to business school once told me the only rule you need to know is DNROOC. Do not run out of cash. For us the decision to go public was viewed as a neccesary thing but not something we needed for our operations. People were surprised about the fact that the decision to go public was such a last minute thing, which it was -- we made the decision hours before we filed. We then went through the whole process which was of course widely covered and entertaining in lots of ways. At the end of it, we flew back to our offices and went back to work. Following Monday we had a one hour biefing about what we felt we did right or wrong. We had one of the executives announce the "end of the IPO," and we haven't talked about it since.
The company is about end users changing the world, the good and bad things they're doing out there. It's not about the IPO.
Information on the internet has a very long tail (Ed. Note: referring to Chris Anderson's recent article in Wired.)There are very few things that the entire world is interested in at the same time. The vast majority of people out there are very much engaged in their own daily lives, in a local context very different than yours or mine.
The other thing to remember is that the average person does not want to debug their computer. We prefer instead the idea of a person typing something in and Google -- or someone else -- figuring things out for you. But very few things are organized around that principle of simplicity; we love and appreciate the complexity in technology but people using the internet really don't want that. When you see an ease of use breakthrough, it's such a wonderful thing.
Link to "35th Anniversary of the Internet" event site.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Air Force report on Teleportation Physics
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DATE: 10/29/2004 02:19:01 PM
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Chris sez: "I subscribe to Steven Aftergood's Federation of American Scientist's Project on Government Secrecy 'Secrecy News' mailing list (that was a mouthful). It's an outstanding (and usually very dry) source of semi-classified material. Steven's been featured on The Daily Show and NPR's On the Media, among a lot of other media outlets. The following was the last entry on today's e-mail, dealing with Air Force research on psychokenisis and recommends further government experimentation to develop the USA's psychokenisis capabilities. It's a true story that I doubt Vonnegut could improve upon..."
The Air Force Research Laboratory has paid for and published a new
study on "teleportation physics," referring to the disembodied
transport of objects across space.
The author strives to distinguish his subject from the fictional
Star Trek "transporter" concept, and notes that "we are still very
far away from being able to ... teleport human beings (and even
simpler biological entities such as cells, etc.) and bulk
inanimate objects...."
But after fifty pages of opaque physics, he concludes with an
endorsement of remote viewing, psychokinesis and spoon bending by
psychic Uri Geller.
"During a talk that he gave at the U.S. Capitol building, Uri
caused a spoon to curve upward with no force applied, and then the
spoon continued to bend after he put it back down and continued
with his talk," he reports.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Saddam statue leg up for auction
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DATE: 10/29/2004 02:28:49 PM
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Jens Thiel sez: "A small German auction platform presumably has the left leg of the
famous giant bronze statue of Saddam in Baghdad on sale, the CNN-one. Reverse auction price dropping, currently at 82 k euro. The auction is in English and German, there's loads of pics.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese rock band cosplayers
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DATE: 10/29/2004 03:42:11 PM
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Scott sez, "Elaborate, post apocalyptic fan-cosplay photos from outside a Tokyo (I think) concert of Dir En Grey. Costumes are mostly too unusual to describe, but gothic nurses, japanese nazis, pregnant schoolgirls come close for some of the pics."
Link
(Thanks Scott!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sean Bonner's dispatches from 35th anniversary of Internet event
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DATE: 10/29/2004 04:18:02 PM
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I'm sitting inside a UCLA auditorium, next to my friend Sean Bonner. He's been posting blog dispatches from the event all day. Since word got out ahead of time that there would be WiFi here but few electrical outlets, Sean even brought a long extension cord and a power strip to share juice with people. That's how cool he is. Here's a list of Sean's 35th Anniversary of The Internet Conference posts:
* Morning (Link): Bright Side: "Gorillas of the Internet," John Markoff, Gordon Bell, Henry Samueli, Patrick P. Gelsinger, Robert J. Aiken
* Session #2 (Link): Tim O'Reilly, John Perry Barlow, Dan Gillmor, Dave Patterson, Larry Press
* Lunch: (Link) Eric Schmidt and Leonard Kleinrock
* Session #3 (Link) -- The Young Side: The Indigenous Digital Generation. Alan Kay, Clay Shirky, danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, Xeni Jardin.
* Session #4 (Link): The Future Side: Pioneers and Visionaries. Bran Ferren, Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence G. Roberts
Link to event home.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nintendo v. Suicide Girls flap immortalized in online comic strip
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DATE: 10/29/2004 04:29:35 PM
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Penny Arcade features a funny comic about the happily-resolved Nintendo v. Suicide Girls flap. News of that now infamous lawyer-gaffe was first posted here on BoingBoing. Link to Penny Arcade comic, and links (one, two, and three) to previous BoingBoing posts on the topic.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Printable Star Wars masks
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DATE: 10/30/2004 12:14:46 AM
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Check out these downloadable, printable Star Wars Gen 1 masks reproduced from the 1983 classic, "The Star Wars Book of Masks."
Link
(Thanks, Bonnie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Build your own Batphone
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DATE: 10/30/2004 12:25:31 AM
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Step-by-step instructions for making your own light-up, buzzing, working Batphone with its own cake-dome -- killer!
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(Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Group woman-gamer blog -- UPDATED
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DATE: 10/30/2004 12:33:13 AM
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Fragdolls is a group-blog run by woman gamers. The entries alternate between tales of heroic gaming deeds and gripes about boys who borrow media and fail to return it -- gripping stuff!
Link
(Thanks, Nate!)
Update: James Everett sez, "you'll notice that Fragdolls is sponsored by UbiSoft, one of the
largest publisher/developers around. While mentioning games they play
they certainly don't do anything obvious like talk about strictly
UbiSoft titles, and their favorite games lists include Nintendo titles
like Zelda and Pikmin. But closer inspection reveals that they've
tried SOCOM II and blogged about not liking it for one reason or
another (mostly valid criticisms it looks like) while simultaneously
talking about how much they can't wait for Ghost Recon 2, Ubi's
competing military shooter title."
Update #2: Simon sez, "Thought you might be interested to know that I did some more digging into that Fragdolls link that someone sent in to you, and someone else pointed out was actually some pretty insidious stealth marketing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney sued by "inventor" of FastPass system
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DATE: 10/30/2004 12:37:11 AM
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A man in Tennessee claims he came up with the idea for Disney's FastPass system, whereby one gets a ticket to come back to a ride later without queueing, and sent it as a suggestion to Disney. Disney wrote him a letter back telling him it was a dumb idea, and then -- he alleges -- they implemented and patented it. Now he's suing.
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion tombstone winner "burial" photos
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DATE: 10/30/2004 05:37:01 AM
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Cary Sharp is the lucky soul who won the $37,500 charity auction for the right to have your own tombstone installed at the Disneyland Haunted Mansion graveyard. This weekend marked his "burial" -- and LaughingPlace has the story with pix.
At the stroke of midnight, Sharp was delivered to the gates of the "Haunted Mansion" in a black horse-drawn carriage, and was greeted by the Mansion's familiar trio of hitchhiking ghosts. He also received a one-of-a-kind miniature replica of the tombstone and a "Death" certificate of authenticity officially recognizing the addition to the attraction. His gravestone is located in front of a quintet of ghostly musicians who eternally perform in the attraction's memorable graveyard scene.
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple to iPod owners: "Eat shit and die" -- UPDATED
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DATE: 10/30/2004 10:39:17 AM
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If you're an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive laywer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it. Of course, there's more dough where that came from -- they'll just pass the cost on to you in your next iPod.
As it turns out, you're shit-outta-luck even if you managed to snag a copy. That's because Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the "improvement" of breaking iPod Download. That's right -- Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.
Every time I post something like this, I get a deluge of mail that makes the same tired points, so before you bother, here's some pre-rebuttal:
- Apple didn't have any choice. If they don't play nice with the suicidally stupid record industry, the industry will stop supplying music for the iPod.
So freaking what? Who's the customer here, me or Sony/BMG? And honestly, there may be some powerful bozon emitters in the halls of the RIAA companies, but does anyone really believe that the record industry will just take its ball and go home at this point? "Sorry, we're no longer making music available for the iPod anymore because Apple has refused to break your personal stereo to our specifications." Riiiight.
- Just don't run the update.
Yeah, that works. Until they roll the iTunes update into an OS update, like they did the last time they broke iTunes and called it an upgrade.
What's the lesson here? Well, Apple's not on your side, even if you're an Apple customer. If you buy into a proprietary platform where the music industry gets a veto, you're scr0d. Every time you buy an iPod, you are financing legal and technical countermeasures aimed at taking away legitimate features that enable you to do more with your lawfully acquired music and hardware.
Link
Update #1: Why it's irrelevant that there are other tools for synching your iPod
Update #2: How to un-cripple your copy of iTunes 4.7
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fragdolls update -- group blog or astroturf campaign? -- UPDATE
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DATE: 10/30/2004 11:17:06 AM
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Simon sez, "Thought you might be interested to know that I did some more digging into that Fragdolls link that someone sent in to you, and someone else pointed out was actually some pretty insidious stealth marketing."
Link
Update: Emily Jane sez, "Another thing about the Fragdolls: They're BOOTH BABES. In addition to being sponsored by UBISoft, at the Penny Arcade Expo a few months ago, they were UBISoft's entire booth.
"While they try to adopt 'Just a bunch of girls that like video games' as their image, walking around and hearing 'PLAY VIDEO GAMES AGAINST HOT CHICKS!!!' all day definitly reduced the fun of this girl that likes video games.
"And while I realize that a bunch of chicks playing video games is going to be an event just because they're in the minority, the willingness of these girls to be the circus and make girls playing video games seem even LESS normal, totally contradicts what they claim they are all about."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Google desktop for OSX misreported by Reuters and others?
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DATE: 10/30/2004 12:43:50 PM
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Following up on Google CEO Eric Schmidt's remarks at the Internet Anniversary event yesterday in LA, Sean Bonner says:
While I didn't take super detailed notes (...) notice how I didn't say "Google is releasing a desktop search for OSX!!!!" That's because he didn't say that. Well he sort of did, but not really, so you can understand my surprise this morning when Mac Rumors, MacDailyNews and Reuters are reporting otherwise. They are quoting him as saying "We intend to do it." What a spin!! That is so out of context it's not even funny.
First of all lets keep in mind here that it's 2004, almost 2005 and pretty much ANYTHING that is released for a PC will be released for a Mac, it's just a matter of time. We all know that, and it's not news.
The remark in quesestion was in response to someone asking about privacy issues of Google Desktop and a footnote to their question was if Google was planning an OS X version. The answer was "yes, and no" He went on to explain that because the way Operating Systems work so differently and how built in the Google Desktop is there's no way to just port it over to a different OS so it has to be redone from scratch so while they do intended to do it, it's not something that they are working on, or something anyone should expect soon.
That's how I recall Mr. Schmidt's response, too. Not at all the way it's being reported by Reuters -- and others, who weren't there, re-reporting the Reuters item (ok now my head's spinning). Schmidt also ended that reply by pointing out that as a matter of policy, Google does not "pre-announce" products.
Tim O'Reilly was the "questioner," and in a discussion forum on ArsTechnica he posts this response.
This is Tim O'Reilly. I'm the one who asked Eric the question at his talk about whether we'd expect a Mac version of Google desktop, and I have to say I didn't read his response at all the way the Reuters reporter did! He was fairly equivocal, saying that it was a hard problem, requiring a whole separate project, not just a port, because of the differences in the operating systems. He made no announcement of actual plans to deliver the product, or even that Google was actively working on it
Link to Tim's discussion forum post.
Link to Xeni's partial transcript of Schmidt's remarks.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Rogue Taxidermists exhibit
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DATE: 10/30/2004 03:05:13 PM
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The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists is holding their first exhibition at the Creative Electric Studios in Minneapolis.
"The organization's mandate is to advocate the showmanship of oddities; espouse the belief in natural adaptation and mutation; and encourage the desire to create displays of curiosity."
And here's a letter from the National Taxidermists Association in response to a request for feedback on the exhibit:
If you are looking for approval for this so called"art", I am afraid you have come to the wrong place.
Displays of wounded,bleeding or mangled animals is not in any form,"art" The members of the NTA
are truly professional taxidermists and as such can be called artists,and most, if not all, abhor your
desplays[sic].
You can surely be called a Rogue taxidermist.
Bill Haynes
NTA Board of Directors
Ethics Chairman
Vice President
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: William Gibson on ObL tape
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DATE: 10/30/2004 11:29:05 PM
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William Gibson's posted a blistering analysis of Osama bin Laden's latest video.
OBL today is probably a very satisfied, very optimistic man, and if he can skew the last-minute dynamic of the election in Bush's favor, he'll have cause to be all the more satisfied.
And that's the danger, that some crucial percentage of our dimmer, more reactive voters will flash back to 9-11 and the Bush of the bullhorn, the Bush buffeted with the heartbroken grit of Ground Zero, and vote for that -- childishly imagining that such a vote runs counter to the wishes and the needs of OBL, the bearded stickman, the cave-dwelling spider, our new Old Man of the Mountains. Player of the long game.
Link
(Thanks, Jamie!)
Update: CJ point out that Gibson's had some second thoughts about this post
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show clips galore
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DATE: 10/31/2004 12:10:22 AM
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Lisa Rein has just posted 13 clips from the Daily Show over the past couple weeks, including:
The Colbert Report
Ed Helm's DSpan
Flu Vaccine Shortage
Red Sox Winning The World Series
Walmart violating ancient graveyards in Hawaii
Ad for "America, The Book"
Opening bit of 10/20/04
Coverage of the the mudslinging and overexaggerating statements by Bush and Kerry during the last Presidential Debate
P-diddy etc. (Christina Aguilara - sp?) and their "Vote or Die" campaign.
"Stand and Choose" voting ads starring video game characters
Lewis Black on how the Shrub Administration continually wastes our tax dollars on extravagant purchases in the name of Homeland Security and $500,000 parties for the TSA.
The opening bit from 10-19-04
Messopotamia
Iraqi tourism board
Soldiers who refused to go on "suicide mission"
Bush saying that we will "not have an all volunteer army" and then being corrected by someone in the crowd.
Jon Stewart's comments on his Crossfire appearance.
Coverage of second presidential debate.
Drew Barrymore On The Daily Show
Richard Clarke On The Daily Show
Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CodeCon call for proposals
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DATE: 10/31/2004 12:18:14 AM
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CodeCon is the wicked-nerdy technology conference held each year in San Francisco, at which all presentations must include running code, preferably code that is available for download by the con-goers. They've just posted their call for proposals.
All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally accompanied
by source code. Presenters must be done by one of the active developers of
the code in question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working*
code...
Program Committee:
* Jeremy Bornstein, AtomShockwave Corp., USA
* Bram Cohen, BitTorrent, USA
* Jered Floyd, Permabit, USA
* Ian Goldberg, Zero-Knowledge Systems, CA
* Dan Kaminsky, Avaya, USA
* Klaus Kursawe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, BE
* Ben Laurie, A.L. Digital Ltd., UK
* David Molnar, University of California, Berkeley, USA
* Jonathan Moore, Mosuki, USA
* Len Sassaman, Nomen Abditum Services, USA
Link
(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steampunk mecha-wars
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DATE: 10/31/2004 12:25:35 AM
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Steam Wars is an elaborate concept for a movie about steam-punk mecha-wars, an alternate history in which th 19th century is dominated by wars between giant, steam-powered killer robots.
Link
(Thanks, Andy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Squid biomass exceeds human biomass
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DATE: 10/31/2004 12:34:38 AM
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Squids thrive in a global-warming world, and the biomass of squid has now exceeded the biomass of humans.
Link
(via Plastic Bag)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hypo-allergenic GM cats available for pre-order
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DATE: 10/31/2004 12:40:25 AM
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Allerca is taking pre-orders on genetically modified, hypoallergenic cats that do not excrete the allergenic protein in their skin and spit.
ALLERCA will produce the world's first hypoallergenic cats, and we expect the birth of these first special kittens in early 2007.
The cat allergen is a potent protein secreted by the cat’s skin and salivary glands. Removal of the allergen will not harm the cats in any way. The resulting hypoallergenic cats will improve the health and quality of life for millions of cat-allergy sufferers.
While some breeds of cats have been promoted as having less allergen than others, scientists that have tested this hypothesis have shown that all cats, regardless of breed, produce allergen. Allerca will produce the first cats that will not affect human allergies.
The first breed of hypoallergenic cat produced will be the British Shorthair, known to be friendly, playful and affectionate. Other popular breeds will follow soon.
Link
(via Futurismic)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart will destroy television!
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DATE: 10/31/2004 01:01:06 AM
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Brian Dear evaluates Jon Stewart-and-co's latest appearance on C-SPAN and predicts that Stewart will destroy television!
The panelists took turns reading from their book, America: The Book. It's amazing how much coverage this book gets on C-SPAN. But these guys are not normal book authors, and they're not there to push the book. They're there to destroy TV as we know it.
I believe that Stewart and company are trying to revolutionize television by tearing down its conventional standards and practices. First, dress inappropriately, like a slacker. Stewart's starting to dress like Bill Murray in the early scenes of Stripes. Second, resort to language that's simply not said on television, certainly not C-SPAN. Speak as many four-letter words as possible, so the television audience members marvel in the fact that there are no bleeps like there are on The Daily Show, only occasional and entirely useless on-screen warnings that this program contains bad language. Duh!
Prediction: Stewart and company are going to get C-SPAN in big trouble, and somebody's going to try to fine or indict C-SPAN for breaking FCC rules. You watch: some congressman is going to take this one for a ride, and sick the FCC on them but good.
Link
(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Let's Get Ready to Snitch On Our Neighbors!
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DATE: 10/31/2004 02:09:49 AM
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The Let's Get Ready to Rumble guy is paying cash bounties to people who snitch on their neighbors' "infringing" use of phrases like "Let's Get Ready to Gamble" and "Are You Ready to Rumble?"
Buffer Enterprises, Inc. now offers a cash bonus to those who report a corroborated unauthorized use [resulting in an actual recovery] of the "Let's Get Ready to Rumble,"(R) "Get Ready To Rumble"(R) or "Ready to Rumble"(R) servicemarked phrases ,any paraphrasing of these marks (including "Get Ready To Crumble,"(R) "Are Your Ready To Rumble?"(TM) "Let's Get Ready To Gamble"(TM)), or use of Michael Buffer's famous rendition of his copyrighted "Let's Get Ready To Rumble" recording. This bonus system applies to viable reports [resulting in an actual recovery] of unauthorized use of our servicemarks, copyrights or related rights in or upon TV, radio, the internet, print or in connection with unlicensed products or services such as T-shirts, toys, posters, or other merchandise.
Link
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: False hype and hope about hypo-alergenic GM cats?
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DATE: 10/31/2004 09:58:27 AM
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As Cory posted below, Allerca is taking deposits for $3,500 cats genetically engineered to be hypo-allergenic. Caveat emptor though. New Scientist reports that geneticists and allergists doubt Allerca's claims.
It is probably possible to create cats that do not produce the most common protein allergen, says Thomas Platts-Mills, director of the Asthma and Allergic Disease Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, US. But he adds that cats produce many more allergens, and that blocking production of the protein could damage the cat's health.
Moreover, Allerca's claims that a technique called RNA-induced gene silencing can work in cats are "unfounded", says Greg Hannon at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, and author of the book RNAi: A Guide to Gene Silencing. So far the technique has been used only in mice.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New group blog on e-voting
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DATE: 10/31/2004 05:51:07 PM
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Ed Felten says:
[We've launched] a new group blog on e-voting, from a group of leading experts on e-voting technology. Members thus far include David Dill, Ed Felten, Joe Hall, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach. The site's goal is to provide one-stop shopping for e-voting news and analysis, to the public and the press, on election day and thereafter.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To Some Fool, Thanks for Everything! Love, Nigerian Spammer.
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DATE: 10/31/2004 06:00:47 PM
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BB reader jon rahoi writes,
"Nigerian scammers now appear to be using webdate.com to troll for victims to save 'damsels' in distress. I've posted one damsel's emails leading to the pitch." Excerpt:
# "Hi dear i have added you to my chat friend right now i left an offline for you, hope to catch you on later lol benny and one more thing your physic i like it kool keep it up, lol."
# "Hi its nice to hear from you. Well i into sales of aretifacts and it carried me far and wide but this is my first visit to africa. I am currently in nigeria and its a lovely place. Well i have not visited china before would love to some day and dont worry when i come back i will tell you all about africa when we go out for dinner. Well is nice to hear from you. Lol."
# "Thanks for writing back. I am glad you did. Well i dont know where to start. Well i sold my paintings to a client and he has refused to pay up i have not seen him since the last 3 days i contacted the local police here and they cant seem to find him. I dont have enough money to pay for my hotel bills and settle my agent. Please i want your assistance. I need 450 dollars to add to the money i have so i can payup clear my name and come back home this week, thanks for your kind assistance. Lol benny."
[Jon continues:] "So the whole profile on webdate is just more Nigerian scammers trolling for desperate horny foreigners willing to save a damsel in distress.
"Is it just me, or does Nigeria sound like the bar in House of Games? Does David Mamet live there? Is it near Mos Eisley Spaceport?"
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Star Wars-inspired "Fallen" wins fan film contest
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DATE: 10/31/2004 06:06:28 PM
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Hollywood Liberation Army tells BoingBoing, "
Fallen is a machinima music video created in Star Wars Galaxies about a tragic romance between a female Imperial officer and a male Rebel fighter using the song "Fallen" by Delirium. It has just won the Star Wars Galaxies Fan Film Fest 2004.
Link to movie download site, and link to more info on the project.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of snapshot zen: stingray smile
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DATE: 10/31/2004 06:22:38 PM
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Lovely snapshot of a serene stingray from the Coney Island Aquarium [via flickr]. Link to larger, uncropped image. (Thanks, Ivy )
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spoken Word Bananaphone
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DATE: 10/31/2004 06:39:52 PM
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First a fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a spoken-word interpretation of Raffi's childrens' song "Bananaphone", inna deadpan William-Shatner-styleee. Then, he posts this masterpiece online. Now, you can download it, and spew Red Bull through your nose laughing. Next, who knows -- some enterprising soul might just transform this file into spoken-word-Bananaphone ringtones. Or better yet, an extended hard trance remix.
Link to site with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor)
UPDATE: Ferlinghettified beatnik remix here -- Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Still the One" songwriter demands Bush campaign stop using his tune
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DATE: 10/31/2004 06:52:27 PM
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The Bush re-election campaign has been using the 1970s hit "Still the One" without copyright clearance. The songwriter behind the tune wants that to stop.
"I was watching TV, and there all of a sudden was my song, my guitar playing, my voice coming out of the speakers," said the 56-year-old [John] Hall, still a working musician. Hall wrote "Still the One" with his then-wife, Johanna D. Hall. The two as well as surviving members of the band are supporters of Democratic Sen. John Kerry and don't want their work used to promote Bush's re-election, Hall said.
"I'm not just some guy that's stoned out and happened to write a song, and even if I were, it would still be a problem, because you should always ask permission to use the work," Hall said.
Link (Thanks, Rico, and Steve)
Update: BoingBoing reader Brian Carnell points us to a news article which says the Bush campaign claims to have acquired permission from a third-party licensing company.
"Out of deference to Mr. Hall's views, the song will no longer be played," Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said. She said the song had been included in a catalog of music that the campaign's licensing company used to provide music for events."
Link to Detroit News story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Stealth Lessig-ing
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DATE: 10/31/2004 07:10:31 PM
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First, there was Stealth Disco. Then, a dark variant emerged after Abu Ghraib -- the Stealth Lynndie. Now, the Stealth Lessig.
BoingBoing reader Kmr. Tupko in Poland says,
"Lawrence Lessig is present on the web in limited number of images that we've all become familar with -- there's Lessig by the columns, and several of Lessig behind a computer. They've become visual icons. But when I recently googled for Lessig photos, I found these: an entire image directory of this guy posing in these -- cult by now, apparently -- Lessig-like poses. It's like one of those contests, where they say, 'show the contents of your bag/purse,' except here one person just took it upon himself to 'strike a Lessig.' Very creative commons, remix spirit."
Link to a directory of photos showing some guy in Japan "Striking a Lessig." And lo, a meme is born.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bhutan: World's biggest book
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:00:18 PM
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Kottke's posted a great item about a presentation he caught at PopTech on the "world's largest book," called "Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom," which retails for $10,000 at Amazon. Says Kottke, "Turning the pages involved a short walk."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sim e-voting machine almost as buggy as real thing
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:06:22 PM
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If you're a Sims player you can download this "Dumboold" electronic voting machine, which has almost as many flaws as the real thing from our malfeasant friends at Diebold!
The Diebold Voting Machine is programmed with cheats, bugs and easter eggs, which you can discover and read about by playing around with it. It demonstrates and simulates some alarming problems with real world electronic voting machines, with many surprising effects and subtle interactions:
Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log.
When you put the voting machine into debug mode and clear the votes, you will see a dialog with the hillarious picture and story of Baxter the Chimpanzee. In your web browser, you can watch the funny monkey movie showing Baxter erasing the voting log! Now your Sims can monkey around with the electronic Dumbold Voting Machines, go bananas hacking the system, fling poo and corrupt the election results just like the pros!
Link
(Thanks, Robert!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Photos of decaying Toronto
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:09:30 PM
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Kendall Anderson shoots galleries of decaying and abandoned buildings, asylums, factories and warehouses in Toronto and environs. Love this one, from his series shot in an old Toronto Transit Commission "Barn."
Link
(Thanks, knotpunkt!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Working iPod costume
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:12:24 PM
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This guy modded his Tablet PC and a rewired USB mouse and built a "working iPod costume."
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart C-SPAN torrent -- UPDATE
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:23:26 PM
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Here's a .torrent for ASF video of the wonderfully subversive Jon Stewart and company appearance on C-SPAN. The video's apparently a little low-quality, be warned.
Torrent Link
(Thanks, RobW!)
Update: Here's a higher quality video in .torrent form, courtesy of Mike Graham. Thanks, Mike!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion dollhouse
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:33:20 PM
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Bigfigs ("big figures") are the new breed of Disney Park collectables -- they're 18-24" detailed models of ride-buildings and facades. The new Haunted Mansion one is out, and while I can't say I'm very impressed with it -- looks too much like a doll's house and the construction materials are too plasticky if you ask me -- the Haunted Mansion fan boards are all a-twitter. Order 'em from Disneyland DelivEARS at 800-362-4533.
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US-Iraq bioweapons report by independent UK academic
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:38:18 PM
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David sez, "Geoff Holland of the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex (UK), has recently submitted a report to all Members of the UK Parliament with the aim that the US supply of biological materials to Iraq will at last be properly investigated. The report can be read or downloaded from this site. It sets out further evidence of misleading Government statements in relation to the Iraq conflict, considering specifically the Government’s response to the previously overlooked finding of the US Senate ‘Riegle Report’— that in the 1980s the United States supplied Iraq with materials for its biological weapons programme in breach of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention"
428K MSFT Word Link
(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More on Apple's breaking of the iPod -- UPDATED
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DATE: 10/31/2004 11:49:16 PM
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A number of you have written in regarding yesterday's post about Apple's campaign to remove features from your iPod and presenting it to you as an "update." There are innumberable utilities available to help you move your music from your iPod to your Mac, of course, but that's not the point.
The point is that Apple is devoting time, money, and lawyer- and engineer-hours to breaking your iPod and selling it to you as a "fix."
Imagine if your mobile phone manufacturer enlisted your car maker into ensuring that you didn't use a third-party charger with your cigarette lighter, but instead bought the official, expensive licensed charger. Every time you take your car in for warranty-mandated service, the manufacturer's representative rips out your lighter and puts a new one in that locks out your charger. And when the agent is done, he smiles and tells you he's "updated" your car.
Does the fact that you can go out and find a new third-party charger that works with the new lighter mitigate in the car-maker's favor? Wouldn't you be pissed off that your car-maker was selling you out to the phone company, treating you as a mark to be sucked dry by whatever vendor it decided to do a deal with?
That's what Apple's done here. The music industry has concluded that it can maximize its profits by restricting what you do with your music, and it's signed Apple up to see to it that even if you figure out how to do more that Apple will do its best to take that feature away from you.
In any event, there are many tools to help get your music off your iPod. Here's a link to Open Pod, the one that I've decided on. It's a GPL-licensed tool and looks like it works well.
Link
(Thanks, Jeff!)
Update: How to un-cripple your copy of iTunes 4.7
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show video ahoy!
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DATE: 11/01/2004 12:02:33 AM
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Lisa Rein's posted still more Daily Show clips, including "Coverage of The Shrub and Kerry on morning talk shows," "A little movie on the tax burden of winning one of Oprah's free cars," and "A 2 part interview with Madeline Albright."<
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lawyer/engineer lecture on copyright versus creativity audio
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DATE: 11/01/2004 01:11:07 AM
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A couple weeks ago, I chaired Dr Andrew A Adams's wonderful "Copyright versus Creativity" lecture at the University of Reading. Adams is an engineering prof who's pursuing a Master's in law -- it gives him a good, interdisciplinary approach to the subject that made for a very insightful and informative evening.
Now Andrew's slides and the audio of his talk are online under a Creative Commons license -- have a listen.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cobra Commander for President
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DATE: 11/01/2004 09:45:16 AM
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A paid political advertisement from the "Cobra Commander For President" campaign, by way of somethingawful.com. Says BoingBoing reader Jason, "He's the only one who can stop TEH TERRAR!" Link to Flash cartoon.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Face off (and on)
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DATE: 11/01/2004 10:13:20 AM
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The Cleveland Clinic has received a bioethics board's approval to conduct a human facial transplant. (Background on face transplants here.) From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
Doctors say that the psychological makeup of the patient - expectations, self-image and the ability to cope with a drastically changed appearance - is critical to the success of transplants.
Conflict about these and other issues has always been part of the transplant frontier. But the face, because it is so tied to identity, generates a particularly emotional reaction.
"It's jolting in a certain sense because it's such a personal thing," Dr. Stuart Youngner, chairman of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, said in an interview. "It's you more than your kidneys are you. The face and eyes are windows into the soul, the person."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Friendster Pachinko
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DATE: 11/01/2004 10:40:25 AM
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A virtual gambling game where networking profiles become a sort of currency. Link (via waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Seven-legged calf
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:06:47 AM
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Last month, a calf with seven legs was born in Central Trinidad. According to the Trinidad Express, a woman who lives near the amazing creature said that its birth is divine.
"We are living in the dark age which is called (Kalyug), and during this time miracles would happen all over the world, so no one should be surprised," she said.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Dilbert does nano
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:11:50 AM
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Howard Lovy's NanoBot points to a Dilbert comic lampooning today's hottest R&D buzzwords.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wefunkradio.com
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:35:49 AM
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I stumbled on this streaming radio channel last week for the first time, and have not been able to turn it off since. Holy crap, this stream is so sweet. Deep funk, hip-hop, underground soul, rare grooves. Totally fucking delicious. Individual programs are also offered for download, and the site provides detailed playlist information. In 7 days, I think I've purchased 3 or 4 CDs of material from artists I heard on their shows -- listening to the stream on iTunes, then browsing the show playlist archives, then ordering the song or album in question via the iTunes store or Amazon or whatever. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bananaphone spoken-word Ferlinghettified beatnik remix
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:55:42 AM
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Following up on a previous BoingBoing post about a spoken-word interpretation of child music star Raffi's "Bananaphone" song, reader Jack Pate says:
Here's a one-minute mashup with "Peacocks Walked," a track from the Cartwright/Oppenheim album "A Mumbai of the Mind," which is itself a jazz interpretation of some Ferlinghetti poems.
Link to MP3 file. Like, groovy, man.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Hollywood, government team up for new "war on piracy"
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DATE: 11/01/2004 12:50:16 PM
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During his recent visit to Hollywood, Attorney General John Ashcroft unveiled federal plans for what he called the "strongest, most aggressive legal assault against intellectual property crime in our nation's history."
He also made a frightening association -- because intellectual property theft can be so lucrative, he said, it "risks becoming a potential source of financing for terrorists." He did not cite specific examples of a link between the two.
Technologists and copyright reform advocates like Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig say that's cause for concern.
On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day", I speak with Lessig -- and government officials like LA Mayor James Hahn and California congressman Xavier Becerra --about the new "war on piracy" being waged by federal, state, and local agencies in partnership with entertainment industry groups such as the RIAA and MPAA.
Link to archived audio for today's program, Link to NPR Day to Day home. Noah Shachtman suggests an alternate headline: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yet another cool iPod costume
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DATE: 11/01/2004 01:57:42 PM
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BoingBoing reader Gabe wore this crafty get-up on Manhattan streets last night. Nifty! Link, and link to Cory's earlier BB post about another iPod Halloween costume. And here are still more, with hot silhouette chicks galore: Link (Thanks Tim)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Audio/transcript from BBC Creative Archive talk
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DATE: 11/01/2004 02:46:24 PM
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DigitalLifestyles has audio of the Q&A from the talk that Paula LeDieu, the co-director of the BBC Creative Archive, gave last week. There's also a partial transcript of the talk, courtesy of RedMonk.
14 MB MP3 Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod charger in an Altoids tin gets 10 hours of play
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DATE: 11/01/2004 03:01:23 PM
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JMG sez, "Instructions on how to make an external iPod battery pack from two 9 volt batteries and two AAs, housed in a playing card box. Claims to get 10 hours of play from it, and looks pretty easy to build. Here is a version in an Altoids tin, with links to US stores for the parts."
Link
(Thanks, JMG!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Shit! Goddamn! Get off your ass and jam (while you vote)!
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DATE: 11/01/2004 03:15:16 PM
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BoingBoing reader doktorp sez, "My friend geoff performed this set last night at share and blew everyone's mind. Check out some of the gems inside, a great mix to throw on the iPod and get pissed off enough to get up early and vote tomorrow! Hope people enjoy it as much as we did." Link to two-hour live DJ mix of politically-themed reggae, dub, dancehall, hip-hop, jungle, and breakcore.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Great Pumpkin meets Great Old Ones
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DATE: 11/01/2004 03:27:01 PM
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On Strange Horizons: What if Charlie Brown's pumpkin patch were designed by HP Lovecraft:
As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock—the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin. For him, I cultivated an annual pumpkin patch—mostly Autumn Gold and Big Max, as I thought he would find the Atlantic Giants tacky. I also evangelized him in the community, relating the tale of how, every year on Hallowmas Eve, the day when the spiritual most strongly encroaches on the substantial, this mightiest of gourds would rise to revel across the world with the most sincere of his adorers. My neighbors were understandably skeptical; after all, not once had this superbeing ever chosen to grace my pumpkin patch or any other place in our town. I vowed that I would coax him into my backyard, and I set out in the manner of a learned man to discover how I might do this.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jon Stewart clips galore
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DATE: 11/01/2004 03:44:45 PM
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Lisa Rein's on a Daily Show clips tear! Here are four more clips from Oct 26: "Interview with Bob Kerrey of the 911 Commission," "The first of several 'Fiasco Previews' of the Upcoming Election," "Another Messopotamia episode" and "A bit featuring The Shrub and Kerry have pandering to the minority vote."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Obscure sex fetish du jour: Inflatable Reindeer
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DATE: 11/01/2004 04:18:09 PM
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The web is like a big fat dominatrix who greets you with outstretched, sausage-shaped arms. She's always there, ready to embrace even the most infinitely obscure of human sexual proclivities. In the welcoming folds of her porky bosom, there is room for everyone. Everything. Even Inflatable Reindeer Fetish. And just in time for Christmas. Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bananaphone ringtone
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DATE: 11/01/2004 05:01:37 PM
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Following up on this utterly pointless series of BoingBoing posts (Link 1, Link 2), Ryan Kaldari says, "You asked for it... the Bananaphone ringtone. Only for Sprint phones, BTW." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: RIP Bill Liebowitz 1941-2004
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DATE: 11/01/2004 06:38:32 PM
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I was shocked and saddened to learn that my friend, Bill Liebowitz died on Friday. Bill was the owner of Golden Apple Comics on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. He was a huge supporter of bOING bOING (the print zine) when Carla and I moved to LA in 1991. He hosted several bOING bOING events at his store and always had time to talk and share his valuable publishing advice. He was one of the nicest people I've ever known, and I know a lot of other people feel the same way. (He got a huge obit in the LA Times.) Good-bye, Bill, I'm going to miss you. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mobile voters lean Kerry in Zogby SMS poll
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DATE: 11/01/2004 08:59:46 PM
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Polling firm Zogby International teamed up with Rock The Vote to conduct a text-message poll of voters whose primary phone is a mobile:
[The poll] found Massachusetts Senator John Kerry leading President Bush 55% to 40% among 18-29 year-old likely voters in their first joint Rock the Vote Mobile political poll, conducted exclusively on mobile phones October 27 through 30, 2004. Independent Ralph Nader received 1.6%, while 4% remain undecided in the survey of 6,039 likely voters. The poll is centered on subscribers to the Rock the Vote Mobile (RTVMO) platform, a joint initiative of Rock the Vote and Motorola Inc.
Link (Thanks, Cameron)
BB reader Robert Stratton says, "I find it unfathomable that the Rock The Vote Mobile portal asked about people voting for Messrs.Bush, Kerry, or Nader, but didn't include Michael Badnarik the Libertarian candidate. For the record, Mr. Badnarik happens to be on the ballot in more states than Mr. Nader. Just a caution lest we draw too much from sloppily constructed SMS polls."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Juan Cole: What's at stake
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DATE: 11/01/2004 09:09:25 PM
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A series of observations on what tomorrow's election will decide, from University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole.
Bush is not winning the war on terror because he does not understand it. He has used the rise of al-Qaeda as a pretext for settling Washington's scores with old enemies like Saddam. This projection of main American force so far has paid no dividends whatsoever, in increased US security or stability in the world. It has not even made money for US companies, with the possible exception of Halliburton (and even it claims it has been hurt by bad Iraq publicity).
The most frightening thing of all is that the Project for a New American Century group, which has made an internal coup in the Bush administration, ultimately has its sights on China. They want to surround, besiege and break up Communist China, as they imagine the US did to the Soviet Union. In many ways, the Bush administration uses North Korea as a proxy for China, saying things about Pyongyang they really would like to say about Beijing. In fact, China is currently increasingly tied to the US-led world economic order and has every impetus to cooperate with the US on most issues. The Chinese take in $80 billion a year more from the US than we make from them. Picking a fight with Beijing, which is a very attractive option for the American Right, would be disastrous.
The Bush administration is full of revolutionaries. They are shaking up the world by military force. They are playing a role familiar in modern history, pioneered by Napoleon Bonaparte, of using overwhelming military superiority to establish new forms of hegemony by appealing to desires for change among neighboring publics. Bonaparte promised the Italians liberty on the French model, but in fact reduced the Italians to a series of French puppet regimes and then he looted the country. So far Bush's Iraq looks increasingly like Bonaparte's Italy in these regards.
Link (via William Gibson's blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Citicorp ads remixed as political protest posters
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DATE: 11/01/2004 09:18:40 PM
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Link to Sean Bonner's blog post, and Link to artist website: Copper Greene.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Californivoteification
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DATE: 11/01/2004 09:55:26 PM
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Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers reminds all eligible BoingBoing readers in the USA to vote tomorrow (apologies to our ineligible felon/space alien demographic). Image: Kiedis shot in LA by photographer and BoingBoing buddy Kiino Villand of RES.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Record a solo album in "NaNoWriMo for musicians"
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:11:34 PM
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The fifth NaNoWriMo -- the national novel writing month that challenges individuals to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days -- has just kicked off, and good luck to the NaNovelists!
But what of the musically creative? They need not suffer in silence any longer: Lacunae has just floated "NaSoAlMo" -- the national solo album month, for "brave souls who are up for it will write and record an entire solo album in the course of its 30 days."
Q. So, for the purposes of NaSoAlMo, what exactly is a solo album?
A. An album of music you have written, played and recorded entirely by yourself*. The shortest inarguably awesome album I can think of offhand that a lot of people have heard is the first Ramones album, which is 29:09 long, so your solo album must be at least that long. Beyond that, its form and content are up to you.
*Since Ramones includes a cover of "Let's Dance," your NaSoAlMo album may, if you wish, include one cover of somebody else's song.
Link
(Thanks, Lalitree!)
Update: album in a single day. It's really not that hard! There's over a 150 of them already."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod Download can work again if you fix what Apple broke
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:25:11 PM
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Further to the previous posts on Apple's deliberate breaking of compatibility with iPod Download, a legal and legitimate plugin that Apple's customers freely chose to install on their computers, which Apple disguised in a disingenously named "update":
It turns out that Apple's system for disabling the plugin uses a blacklist of disallowed iTunes additions in the iTunes binary. If you open the binary in a hexadecimal editor, like HexEdit, you can find the area where Apple has inserted the string "iPod Download" in its blacklist and simply replace the text with something else (in fact, I think you could probably just change one character) and your iTunes's original functionality will be restored.
Link
(Thanks, Laurent, Rob, and Brent!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show clips, we got Daily Show clips!
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:31:04 PM
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Lisa Rein continues her one-woman quest to post all the funny, political pieces from the Daily Show in QuickTime form. Here are eight more from Oct 27 and 28.
-Arafat's fall
-A Red Sox Moment For Rob
-An Interview with poll taker John Zogby (with some good news :-)
-AN EXCELLENT PIECE where Stewart skillfully uses the Shrub's own words against him (shrubisms.mov)
-A film documenting attitudes toward the election in a small town
-Stephen Colbert's "This Week In God"
-Lewis Black on "the undecideds" (a.k.a. "the idiots")
-Another voting fiasco preview highlighting the Repubs strategy on voter fraud
(The Mary Poppins' etc. I mentioned in an earlier post.)
-An interview with Jesse Jackson
Oct 27 Clips Link, Oct 28 Clips Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lore Sjöberg on Paper Mario
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:33:50 PM
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Lore Sjöberg (whose comedy website The Brunching Shuttlecocks remains the most consistently and uproariously funny site on the Web) is fast becoming my favorite games-reviewer. Today in Wired News, he reviews Paper Mario:
If Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door isn't the most adorable game available for the Nintendo GameCube, it's at least the most adorable game involving blood sport and demonology. If you have a low tolerance for cuteness, you're going to need a Hazmat suit and a complete collection of Cure albums to get you through it...
The mix dusts off the conventions of both RPGs and platformers and makes them feel shiny and fresh. The battles, for example, are turn-based, but pressing a button at the right time can allow your team to do extra damage. Pressing it again with perfect timing adds a flourish to your attacks, impressing the audience and giving you more power for special moves. These touches keep even cakewalk battles from being a dull exercise in menu selection.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Visualisations from five years' worth of blog-posts
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:40:21 PM
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A couple days ago, we blogged about Tom Coates's celebration of five years of blogging: he put all 1.1 million years worth of posts from his blog, Plasticbag.org, online as a giant text file and asked his readers to do cool crap with it.
Cool crap they hath wrought: Tom rounds up the tasty visualisations of his posting frequency, verbal tics, and the way that switching from Blogger to Movable Type changed his posting style in a long post today. How cool.
Our first batch of analysis comes from Cal Henderson who has basically used the data at his disposal to take the piss out of me. A few weeks ago I got a bit moody with Matt Jones after he complained that I was starting every post I was writing with the word "So..." (here's the grump in question). So what has Cal done? He's established the horrible truth of the situation - here's a graph of how many posts I've started with the word "So" over time... As you can see - a startling indictment and as Cal said to me on AIM, "evidence that you're getting worse".
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Who should own your wedding pix?
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:43:01 PM
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Michael Geist's new Toronto Star column deals with a proposed Canadian law that will give photocgraphers copyright in their works, not the people who commission their photos. Sounds like a good idea, but boy, is this a badly written law. Check it out:
As anyone who has used a wedding photographer or taken their children for portraits can attest, consumers hire photographers to capture their precious life moments with the expectation that the resulting photographs belong to them. While photographers may seek permission from consumers to use a particularly good picture to hang in their storefront window or place in their portfolio, the current law requires photographers to first obtain the commissioning party's authorization...
[U]nbounded by any limitations in the law, photographers might sell such photos as stock photography.
Moreover, a change in the law would literally force consumers to track down their photographer (or the photographer's heirs) in order to obtain permission to use their own archived pictures.
Reg Req'd Link -- use jimbo@mailinator.com/password to login
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tracking e-voting dangers: I VOTED?
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DATE: 11/01/2004 11:48:23 PM
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EFF's DeepLinks blog has been given over to warnings and advice about electronic voting systems while the election runs, in a special segment called, "I VOTED?" Here are three from last night:
- Election observers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) reported today that the problem, which some voting officials initially attributed to fluke "voter error," is evidently widespread and may even be relatively common with touch-screen machines. Incorrectly recorded votes make up roughly 20 percent of the e-voting problems reported through the Election Incident Reporting System...
- According to the Local 6 news station in Florida, about 13,000 ballots were put in jeopardy today because of a bad memory card in an optical-scan voting machine. When the error was discovered, representatives from both parties were notified and the ballots were removed from the site and placed in a vault. Now, it's up to the canvassing board to decide how to recount the ballots.
- Tips for voting, "Make sure you've cast your ballot! The last step is to touch a box on the touch-screen to cast your vote. Some voters have forgotten to do this. Depending on local
procedures and how well they are followed, poll workers may
finish casting your vote for you, or they may cancel your vote.
If you make sure to finish the voting process, you can make sure
your vote will be stored and counted."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show from yesterday -- six more clips
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DATE: 11/02/2004 04:34:31 AM
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Lisa Rein appears to have caught up with the Daily Show -- she's posted six more clips from yesterday's show:
Jon Stewart Telling Us To Get out there and VOTE!
A two part interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace
(where he explains that Fox has a four person panel now that has to decide unanimously before a winner can be declared.)
Kerry and Bush respond to Bin Laden's new tape
Cheney, Chelsea, Bruce and Arnold On The Campaign Trail
A voting report from Ed Helms and Stephen Colbert
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gmail security flaw, and fix info
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DATE: 11/02/2004 05:42:07 AM
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Adam Fields says:
There's a Gmail exploit that allows an attacker to steal your Gmail cookie, which thereafter identifies them as you to the system, even if you change your password. This seems like a huge problem for Google, above and beyond the actual security breach. Remember that Gmail uses the same unlimited lifetime Google cookie. The data in that cookie is, presumably, extremely valuable for their tracking efforts, and I'd guess that this will be difficult for them to fix in a way that maintains that.
Link (via politech)
Luminifer writes:
The site's been updated with links to info about the exploit already being fixed - and also, the fact that the gmail cookie and the google cookie are two different cookies (doesn't the gmail cookie expire after 2 weeks, and then only if you check the 2 week box? I may be wrong on this one.).
link to the fix info
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Seven years in the making: why Brit tax year stars April 5
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DATE: 11/02/2004 05:44:26 AM
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A review of the archives of the UK's Inland Revenue service reveals that when a schoolboy wrote in 1965 asking why the British tax-year starts on April 5, the tax authority devoted seven years to answering the question:
The archives show that Aubrey Meadcroft's simple query to the Inland Revenue's librarian sparked years of research, including a close study of the personal files of William Pitt the younger, the late 18th and early 19th century prime minister who introduced income tax...
It was long and complicated and dated back to the first division of the fiscal year in medieval times, which meant sheriffs who collected the king's income carried less money at one time, making their journeys safer.
The year was later split into quarters, with the end of one accounting period fixed as the Christian feast day of Annunciation, March 25.
When the calendar was reformed to take out mistakes inherent in the previous Roman system, 11 days were "wiped", putting Annunciation on April 5.
Around 80 years later, in 1832, this was named as the end of the entire tax year as it was the closest quarterly date to the Government's Budget, its annual statement of income and spending.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Police punches, harasses photographer documenting FL elections
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DATE: 11/02/2004 05:44:44 AM
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In the Palm Beach Post:
A widely published investigative journalist was tackled, punched and arrested Sunday afternoon by a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy who tried to confiscate his camera outside the elections supervisor's headquarters. About 600 people were standing in line waiting to vote early when James S. Henry was charged with disorderly conduct for taking photos of waiting voters about 3:30 p.m. outside the main elections office on Military Trail near West Palm Beach.
Link (via politech)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites Iraq photoblog: Things They Carry
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DATE: 11/02/2004 05:55:00 AM
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Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Iraq, traveling with the 214 Marines Reserves, from Dallas Texas, currently based at Camp Abu Graib near Falluja. He asks the soldiers, "What do you carry for comfort or luck in the war zone?," and photoblogs each reply. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Diebold voting machines hacked -- unplug the modems NOW
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DATE: 11/02/2004 07:07:09 AM
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David Weinberger sez, "From BlackBoxVoting, evidence that machines were hacked in an election 6 weeks and a recommendation from Bev Harris that voting officials unplug the modems NOW."
New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes tomorrow. All county elections officials who use modems to transfer votes from polling places to the central vote-counting server should disconnect the modems now.
There is no down side to removing the modems. Simply drive the vote cartridges from each polling place in to the central vote-counting location by car, instead of transmitting by modem. "Turning off" the modems may not be sufficient. Disconnect the central vote counting server from all modems, INCLUDING PHONE LINES, not just Internet.
Link
(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Small World photo winner
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DATE: 11/02/2004 08:03:28 AM
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MIT electrical engineering grad student Seth Coe-Sullivan won Nikon's 2005 Small World Photomicrography Competition with this shot. The image depicts quantum dot nanocrystals that Coe-Sullivan was studying for possible use in light bulbs and cell phone. Each "coffee bean" shape is approximately the diameter of a human hair. From MIT's press release:
"The natural world is what created the art, much more than I did. I was just there to observe it," said Coe-Sullivan.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1,000,000 copies of Eminem's Mosh served by archive.org
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DATE: 11/02/2004 08:11:29 AM
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Eminem's poltical song "Mosh" has a get-out-the-vote video that's licensed for free Internet distribution, and is being distributed by Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive as well as many other places. Brewster sez, "he Eminem Mosh video is using up 400Mb/sec of our bandwidth in the US and about 200Mb/sec in EU. This means we have distributed about 1 million copies of that video. this is a record for us, and since it is available from several other places, this is probably a record for the net."
Link
(Thanks, Brewster!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Genetically-enhanced jocks
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DATE: 11/02/2004 08:19:56 AM
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Science News has an interesting feature about gene doping, a form of gene therapy that could improve an athlete's strength. Apparently, as gene therapy technology continues to improve, gene doping could become a problem by the 2008 summer Olympics.
"Gene doping could someday provide extra copies of genes that offer a competitive advantage, such as those that increase muscle mass, blood production, or endurance. The products of gene doping would be proteins similar, if not identical, to the body's versions and would therefore be less detectable in an athlete than are performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids and insulin. Consequently, rules against gene doping might be difficult to enforce."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 11/02/2004 08:28:29 AM
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In my latest issue of Lab Notes, the UC Berkeley College of Engineering's monthly research digest:
* Animating slime, mud, and blood
* Nanopores detect disease
* Computationally comparing rats, flies, and people
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Voting with paper in Santa Clara is hard and uncertain - UPDATED
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DATE: 11/02/2004 09:11:36 AM
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Kent Brewster writes,
If you intend to cast a paper ballot today, please be ready for an adventure. This morning in Santa Clara, Vickie and I signed in the way we always do and requested paper ballots. Hilarity ensued: attempting to vote on paper caused a flurry of activity: oh-no-you're-not, you-have-to-vote-with-the-machine, what's-your-major-malfunction-mister, and other clucking noises.
There was no "votamatic" machine for paper ballots any longer; we had to enter a plain brown cardboard voting station that looked exactly like a refrigerator carton and mark our ballots with a pen. (Pen not supplied; bring your own.) I was first in line; after marking my ballot I approached the desk and asked the Nice Lady on the end if I should put it into the box. She nodded and smiled at me, so in it went.
Then I turned to look at Vickie and the rest of the line and noticed they all had big pink envelopes to put their ballots into when they were done. A tiny peanut-sized bulb flickered to life inside my brain. I went to the stack and checked, and sure enough: the big pink envelope said PROVISIONAL BALLOT on it. It had several choices to check: you had no ID, you had moved after the registration deadline, or were Otherwise Unclean. The Other Nice Lady--the one who had her act together--was making everybody who voted on paper seal it inside the provisional ballot envelope, even though there was no "I HAVE BEEN REGISTERED VOTER IN THIS PRECINCT SINCE 1987 AND I AM CHOOSING TO VOTE ON PAPER DAMMIT" box to check.
Further hilarity ensued: Vickie is a lawyer with a long history of political activism, so there was much back-and-forth between her and the Other Nice Lady, who then got on the phone with Headquarters and came back with the following ruling: we were all to mark our paper ballots, seal them in pink envelopes, and don't worry about filling out our names and addresses on the envelopes. Somehow--the nebulous theory goes--the election workers will be able to magically detect the paper ballots filled out by properly identified voters and pull them out to be counted tonight.
We left the station feeling VERY unsure that our votes would be counted.
If I was a busy election worker tonight, I'd just grab all those pink envelopes and heave them into the Provisional stack. And if I was the guy at the Provisional Counting Station, I'd have to seriously consider trashing all those envelopes without names and addresses filled in on the form on the outside. That's the point of a provisional ballot envelope, after all: to make it possible for them to verify your right to vote.
Link
(Thanks, Kent!)
Update: Wirehead sez, "I'm in Santa Clara for this election and I got up early to vote, by paper if possible. The EFF isn't blowing smoke -- They aren't asking you if you want paper ballots. There's a single, dunce-cap of a voting area for those who ask for paper and clearly not enough paper ballots. To top it off, there's two stickers -- one for if you voted using an eat-my-vote machine, the other for if you voted with paper."
Update #2: Ben Delong sez, "I'm assuming you're having people with voting issues either call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (Kent probably should have while at the precinct), or make an online report at http://voteproblem.org, Must spread the word!! ;)"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vote Save Error #9 photo
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DATE: 11/02/2004 09:27:37 AM
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Boy, things are busy in Santa Clara this morning. BB reader Brian Nicks tells BoingBoing about his early e-voting experience on Monday:
Want to know what this image is? It's a picture I took with my cellphone-camera of an electronic voting machine screen. I took it today when I went down to vote for the next President of the Unites States in Santa Clara California. The screen says "Vote Save Error #9. Use the Backup Voting Procedure." A news crew was on hand to film Californians using the voting machines. I pointed to this particular screen and said "There's your story - right there. I just took a picture of the screen and plan to share it with 6.4 billion of my closest friends on the Internet tonight. I suggest you do the same." To my astonishment, the cameraman did shoot some footage of the screen, though I don't know what was shown later on television.
Now that I've told you the story behind the picture, I need not mention the maelstrom of thoughts that go through my head whenever I look at it - the picture is testament enough. The next revolution will not be televised. The next revolution will be blogged.
Link to full-size snapshot of voting machine error message. Blogger and BB reader Megan Powell says, "Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this is the implication that there are (at least) eight other errors."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO get music off your iPod
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DATE: 11/02/2004 10:36:41 AM
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Phillip Torrone sez, "Never did we think weÂ’d need to do a How-To on something which should be part of the basic functionality of a portable music player, but once you put your tunes on an iPod unfortunately itÂ’s a one-way sync unless you know the tricks for getting them off. Here's how to get your stuff off for free on a Mac or PC and how to re-enable a useful tool with a Hex editor." (ed: this is the best, most comprehensive guide to getting music off your iPod that I've ever seen)
Link
(Thanks, pt!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Heartwarning paper vote story
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DATE: 11/02/2004 10:43:20 AM
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Jeremy sez,
With all the bad stuff getting reported, I just wanted to let you all know about my good experience today voting in my second presidential election. I live in Astoria, New York, so I guess no one's trying to mess with the election here.
I work nights and get off around 3 AM. By the time I bike home, it's about 3:30 AM, so I figured I'd just stay up, get to my polling place early and vote when the polls opened. I left the house around 5:25 AM. I was pretty tired.
I got to the polling place and was disappointed to find about 10 people out front. I wanted to be first. So I waited about ten minutes until the school janitor came and opened the doors. We all walked into the gym and I watched as the voting machines were rolled into place and various set-up activities happened.
I stood with a group of people in the front of the gym, where a lady was checking some cards. They didn't look like my card and I was worried. I waited near the end of the line and the lady got to me. I realized that these were all poll workers and said I wasn't one. So I went and waited in the lobby.
Ten more minutes passed and at 6 AM the lady let those of us waiting (about 30 now) come in to vote. I walked up to my election district machine, showed my card, had some banter with the workers and a girl behind me, they filled out my card, put it in and I was the first person to vote.
I went in and, let me tell you, I don't know what kind of setup your state has, but New York doesn't have pansy-ass touch screens, punch cards or check boxes. We've got a Big Red Lever! You pull this monster to the right. Then you flip black switches next to your choice. Then, and this is fun because you get to touch the Big Red Lever again, you flip the Big Red Lever back to the left to finish voting.
That Big Red Lever made me feel secure. My vote was entered, I said thank you to the poll workers and headed back to my home at 6:15 AM with a spring in my step and a Big Red Lever in my heart. I'm pretty tired now, but I'm going to stay up tonight and watch the returns and dream tonight of a Big Red Lever.
Link
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Low-tech voting snafu: whups, the Kerry lever broke
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DATE: 11/02/2004 11:01:00 AM
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BB reader Megan sez:
A low-tech election snafu in Pennsylvania, reported by my husband (currently in line waiting to use the backup voting machine):
The Kerry lever broke off. I hope this bodes well. Unfortunately, the voter who experienced the problem pulled the lever to cast his vote before asking for assistance, and did not vote in any other races.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bomb threats reported at AZ polling sites
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DATE: 11/02/2004 11:32:24 AM
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BoingBoing reader Cowicide says,
It's on Phoenix, Arizona TV news right now... haven't found any links yet. They are moving polling stations around. School is being canceled (children in buses are being diverted) because the threats are directed at schools with voting. Police say the voices were of two adult males.
Link
Update: Links to news stories: Tucson Citizen, and KOLD (Thanks, Mike Gillis)
In other news: It's a miracle! The first-ever immaculate election. CBN, a Christian TV network run by Satan the 700 Club just called it for Bush. Quoth Pat Robertson, on preliminary exit poll data: "Safe to say Bush is the winner." Those of us in the reality-based community will have to wait a while for results. (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny Humans update #6 - religious implications
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DATE: 11/02/2004 01:31:23 PM
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Great essay on what might happen if we were to find out that the tiny humans were alive today.
In theory, the existence of Mini-Man should destroy religion, but I can already hear the fanatics claiming that he has been put on earth by the Devil.
Link
(Thanks, Aggressively Shy Stick Insect Hunter!)
And Stefan Jones sez: "Bounced the news about the Wee Folk off of David Brin. Apparently, he'd already been discussing it with some fans, some of whom were creationists. His comment, which I quite like:"
"I find it truly stunning how many people can shrug off stuff like this, preferring instead a tiny, cramped cosmos just 6,000 years old, scheduled to end any-time-now in a scripted stage show.
An ancient and immense and ongoing cosmos is so vastly more dramatic and worthy of a majestic Creator. Our brains, capable of exploring His universe, picking up His tools and doing His work, seem destined for much more than cowering in a corner, praying that some of our neighbors will go to hell..."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: First-person voting stories
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DATE: 11/02/2004 01:51:08 PM
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Kottke's collecting first-hand accounts of the voting process -- over 200 messages so far and growing fast!
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: RU Sirius interview about his new book, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
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DATE: 11/02/2004 01:55:39 PM
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Here's an interview with RU Sirius about his new book, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
RU has a blog about the book, too.
Cool book. It offers a fresh historical perspective that covers a lot of ground, but at the same time it’s a pretty easy read.
RU: Yeah, I think it does the job of establishing that there is this stream; a spirit really, that runs through history. Several spirits perhaps. This non-authoritarian, non-conformist, antic, changeable character, or community of characters, keeps coming up throughout human history. Sometimes they show up as artists or anti-artists, sometimes as religions or spiritual path; sometimes as a political revolution or change, sometimes as a scientific movement, sometimes as nihilism. Some seem to contradict others; representing opposite political sides. Or they represent opposite attitudes towards civilization and technological development – that comes up quite a bit. And yet, I think the book shows various memetic lines of transmission that sometimes seem to run in parallel and sometimes seem to criss-cross.
I hope it’s an easy read. It’s my (you’ll pardon the word) most serious book, but I tried to have some fun with it. People are telling me they laughed quite a bit. History books aren’t usually funny, although Jacques Barzun has a pretty good sense of humor. Barzun hugely influenced me in the writing of this book. He’s kind of a conservative guy, a historian, who thinks we’ve gone to far in the pursuit of “emancipation.” But he’s pretty permissive with himself as a writer. He writes with a sort of puckish style that belies his conservatism. I took that as permission to do a bit of what comes natural to me anyway.
How did you come up with the idea?
RU: It was a gift. Really, this came from my coauthor Dan Joy in concert with Timothy Leary. They provided the entire map, Dan particularly. I had to fill most of it in. This was a great process of discovery for me personally.
So it’s got kind of a Learyesque spin on the notion of counterculture. I actually tried to mitigate that somewhat, because I wanted to be sure that it was very inclusive. (It should include people who would never dream of freezing their heads!) But that basic dna – Think For Yourself and Question Åuthority (Leary’s slogan through the ‘80s and ‘90s) – is already pretty inclusive, so it wasn’t difficult.
I think constantly about how it could have been approached differently, and I can think of lots of approaches that would also be valid. I’m sure the most shit that Dan and I will take will be from counterculture types who feel we missed some major point, or didn’t include their pet epoch, or didn’t mention or say enough about this counter-subculture or that one. But I *want* that kind of shit, if it’s intelligent. I expect some passionate objections particularly to my coverage of the late 20th Century. I will be disappointed if there isn’t passionate objection. No authentic counterculture person should be completely satisfied with my take – no ditto-heads. But all ought to be flexible enough to find value in the book, I think, once they get over the fact that I didn’t mention the Radical Faeries or the Zippies or DJ Scrotum or whatever. There was just no way to do justice to every interesting mutant breed in that densely populated century. Maybe we’ll follow up with something more encycleopedic. I’m up for doing that at some point.
You’re pretty critical also of some countercultures. You don’t hold back.
RU: Well, I held back a little, but I didn’t want to just do a cheerleading book. That would have been boring for me. In turn, it would have been boring for the reader. So yeah, I was pretty rough on a few movements -- the ultraleft of the late 1960s for instance. I was part of it. You always hurt the ones you love. But I was honestly appalled when I went back and read the rhetoric of “The Revolution” circa ’69 or ’70. The problem wasn’t with their radicalness but their absurd level of self-importance. This sort-of “We came together as righteous dope-smoking motherfuckers stomping the plastic pig nation under the heels of our wild acid-drenched beatle boots ready to smash Amerikkka with our guns and bombs and rock and roll.” That sort of thing. Well, we were the boomers, you know. Self-impressed.
The book does strike a somewhat more conciliatory, careful, considered tone than most of your other work.
RU: Yeah. I suppose it’s true that some of my stuff doesn’t read too differently from the righteous acid-drenched beatle-booted fascist insect stompers. “Considered” is a good word for it. I was really aware that my assignment wasn’t to rant, but to see deeper into these things, and think a little bit harder about these things, and write a legitimate history… even if it does get whimsical in spots.
I think this is a really great book for straight people. (Not in the gay sense, but in the people who aren’t hip sense.) I want to emphasize this. I feel that I addressed this book to an educated, moderate, middle-class American; “Here’s something that’s worth thinking about Soccer mom”… at least the one’s that like to read and think a bit. At the risk of sounding like too much of a salesman, buy this book for your parents or kids who don’t get it. I just really happen to think that’s true. I can’t wait for my own relatives to insert it into their brains.
I’m frightened that it’s not going to ever reach that audience. I just hope it penetrates somehow.
Earlier you said that you think about different potential approaches. Like what?
RU: I could have harkened back to matrilineal societies much discussed by anthropologists and various feminists, neo-pagans, modern primitives, etcetera. These presumed pre-authoritarian origins as opposed to non-or-anti-authoritarianism within the context of what we call history. Our take is sort of Western, sort of post-enlightenment, although it also slices and dices and scrambles a lot of that basic software. Right now I’m reading a transgender history by Leslie Feinberg that casts back to matriarchy and shamanism and various other “primitive” cultures. I would call that a history of counterculture, of a particular sort. I admire it.
In defense of our approach, I would say only that ours can include the modern primitives, and also include Zen, Sufism, The Troubadours, western anarchism, cyberpunk, punk rock, cubism, Voltaire, ad infinitum. Whereas a modern primitive approach would be just that. And I think it’s been written in different ways by Terence McKenna, by Riane Eisler, and by Feinberg. It’s all good. Let a thousand histories of counterculture bloom!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Chow magazine debuts
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DATE: 11/02/2004 02:04:55 PM
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My friend (and former Industry Standard editor) Jane Goldman has launched her new magazine, CHOW. It's a food magazine, and I've been waiting a long time to see it. I got a sneak peek at David Albertson's office (he's also the creative director for MAKE), and I can't wait to subscribe.
And now, here is CHOW. We consider it the tolling bell of a food revolution. You’ll see that our stories are more entertaining, our photos more realistic (and messier), our reporting deeper, our instructions clearer, and maybe most important, our subjects a lot more far-flung than what food magazine readers are used to seeing.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of LA election day phonecam zen
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DATE: 11/02/2004 03:28:19 PM
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I voted in person today using ink and paper, inside this church. No eat-your-vote machines in sight -- though thousands of voters did use them in early voting procedures here in LA county. None of those had paper trails, but local election supervisors claim they were built with "systemic triple redundancy" to prevent errors (right).
My short-term memory sucks, so I spent some time over the weekend reading up on obscure ballot measures and scribbling notes on a cheat sheet so I could just walk in, fill in the dots, then leave.
When I showed up at the voting site mid-day, there were no lines -- just bored volunteer pollsters gnawing on pizza crusts, and a few betruckerhatted hipsters brooding over ballots in booths. I filled mine out in a few minutes, then handed it in to an elderly black lady seated behind a card table covered with jolly ranchers and sweet tarts (either voting incentives or Halloween leftovers, or both).
"That was fast!" she said. I told her I'd spent time at home thinking about my choices, and already knew what I'd vote for when I arrived. "That's right, honey," she said. "If people don't know what they want by now, just when do they plan to know?" Link to full-size phonecam snapshot of my polling site in LA's Silverlake neighborhood.
Over on Dan Gillmor's blog, there are dispatches from a less tranquil precinct: Columbus, Ohio. Dan says, "Chris Kelly, a Bay Area lawyer, is one of the Democrats who's traveled to Ohio this week to keep an eye on the Republican ballot-challengers." Link. Dan also shares his first-person account of Bay Area e-voting misinfo and long lines here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DIY Election lawsuit HOWTO
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DATE: 11/02/2004 04:44:22 PM
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Were you denied the ability to vote? Here's how to sue, via Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.com. Link (parody)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: First-person voter accounts on Metroblogging
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DATE: 11/02/2004 05:34:33 PM
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Dispatches from metroblogging.com contributors around the country. Among them, BoingBoing's single, oblique, obligatory iPod reference of the day:
Overheard in line at my polling place this morning.... "I think all the ones with the white headphones are voting for Kerry."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dueling e-voting press-conferences
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The electronic voting people threw a bizarre press-conference yesterday, explaining how this election proves that electronic voting really works (despite all evidence to the contrary). EFF and the Verified Voter Foundation responded with a press-confernece of its own, in which the dangers of electronic voting are carefully and thoroughly spelled out. Click the link below to get at the audio for both conferences.
1.) problems including "touchy" touch-screen machines -- e.g., machines that "light up" for the wrong candidate in the summary screen; machines failing and polling officials running out out paper ballots, as they did in New Orleans; and Sequoia machines showing a "default" choice that voters must correct;
2.) which states appear to have had the most trouble and how to analyze the reports from the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS);
3.) how to understand the elections data gathered on Election Day in the context of past elections; and
4.) why a paper audit trail may be the best solution for some of the problems that are coming up, especially as we head into vote tallying later this evening.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Water-proof pool-lamps
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DATE: 11/02/2004 11:26:26 PM
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These water-proof floating battery-powered lamps are fantastic -- makes me wish I had a pool!
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: In-game free speech
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DATE: 11/02/2004 11:28:02 PM
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The State of Play II conference on social issues in online gaming is underway, and Wired News has a report on a fascinating debate regarding free speech in gamespace:
Recently, in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game A Tale in the Desert, an uproar erupted after an in-game trader declared that he would not sell to women and then inquired whether one female character was for sale...
Often though, such in-world tension is the result of member behavior many see as antisocial, and player communities frequently get into highly charged discussions -- both on official game forums and on unofficial blogs -- about what to do. In some cases, players threaten legal action against other players or even against the developers.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best WiFi hotels
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DATE: 11/03/2004 03:29:19 AM
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HotelChatter has done an excellent roundup of the best WiFi hotels in the biz, including Kimpton's (who will position a Linksys Wireless Bridge near your room if your signal strength is teh suck), and my favorite, the Holiday Inn Express:
Sure you are going to get a basic room, but usually at a low price, and if you throw in free wireless then most people can be happy, at least for a night. Most, not all (check before you go) Holiday Inn's have free wireless in the lobby and some sort of free broadband in the guest rooms. Depending on the Holiday Inn you may run into port blocking, and in general, a good rule of thumb is expect most of these free Internet services to come with some sort of limitations.
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian rip-off clone of MoblogUK
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DATE: 11/03/2004 07:48:18 AM
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A reader writes, "MoblogUK is a free-to-use, Creative-Commons-licensed moblogging site that has been running for about 1 year. Sadly, it seems that a Canadian company are trying to cash in on MoblogUK's sucess by launching freemoblogUK. Please note the similarity in logos. freemoblogUK's domain name was registered in September of this year, so it's obvious which site came first. I thought this story might be of interest to you, especially because moblogUK in a non-commercial Creative Commons project, whereas freemoblogUK is an commercial entity."
Link
Update: Rob notes a telling difference between freemoblogUK and moblogUK's terms of service:
"freemoblogUK may use, sell and/or share with its affiliates any information provided by you on this website, including your name, e-mail address, usage patterns, and uploaded images and text."
versus moblogUK:
"The last thing we want to do is to take ownership of your images - they're yours to do with as you wish, and if we want to use them, we'll ask you first. However, some people will just take your photos and use them to get rich - it's for this reason that we recommend you protect your images with a license: http://creativecommons.org
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Semantic Web on mobile devices
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I wrote a piece for TheFeature about a cool Semantic Web project using PDAs at Carnegie Mellon, called MyCampus.
MyCampus was specifically set up to develop context-aware mobile services for the university's community. The system runs on PDAs and across 700 WLAN access points located around the university, and it is used daily by 3,000 people to help them study, socialize, plan meals, attend events, shop, and engage in extracurricular activities.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Source: MPAA to file 200 lawsuits against filesharers tomorrow?
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A source who asks to remain anonymous (but generally knows what he's talking about) tells BoingBoing that the MPAA is expected to file a number of lawsuits against movie fileswappers -- possibly as early as tomorrow, Thursday November 4. The number of lawsuits is expected to be in the range of 200, +/-. "They talked about this once before, but held off," he says, "and they've put out word that they're doing a big announcement related to piracy at a Billboard conference tomorrow."
UPDATE: The Associated Press now has a story out. Announcement from MPAA head planned for Thursday. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blackboxvoting.org files "largest FOIA action in history"
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Snip from announcement on website:
Black Box Voting (.ORG) is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.
America: We have permission to say No to unaudited voting. It is our right. Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips.
An earlier FOIA is more sensitive, and has not been disclosed here. We will notify you as soon as we can go public with it. Such a request filed in King County, Washington on Sept. 15, following the primary election six weeks ago, uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; “trouble slips” revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists.
Link (via /.)
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TITLE: Watchdogs Spot E-Vote Glitches
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Kim Zetter of Wired News files this story about reported e-voting irregularities. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kerry concedes.
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DATE: 11/03/2004 12:25:22 PM
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Updated here: Link.
Click on thumbnail for full image (Igor Knezevic)
8:15am: Four more years of a nation led by criminals. I was making coffee with one eye on CNN when the news broke, and I called my dad, a man who's spent many years fighting for good things, sometimes at great personal cost.
"Get over it," he said, "The way you feel now is exactly how I felt when Nixon won a second term -- crushed. I just couldn't believe America was that stupid. But remember what happened to Nixon that term."
"Change comes from discontent," he said. "And right now, there's a lot of discontent."
I finish pouring my coffee, and agree when my dad says what we're faced with right now is considerably more frightening than Nixon. BB pal Jim Graham IMs a few minutes later: "Yeah, and Karl Rove makes Lee Atwater look like a choir boy."
Dan Gillmor sums up what the continuation of Bush's presidency means for America.
The Republicans have an even stronger congressional majority. They have shown how gladly ruthless they can be in using their power. Bush and his allies have never believed in compromise. They have even less incentive to govern from the middle now, even though the nation remains bitterly divided.
There's no secret about what's coming. We don't have that excuse this time.
Here comes more fiscal recklessness -- as we widen the chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else, cementing a plutocracy into our national fiber, we'll pay our national bills on the Treasury Bill credit card for the next few years. Many economists expect a Brazil-like financial crisis to hit the U.S. before the end of the decade. If we muddle our way though the near term, we'll still have left our kids with the bill.
Here comes an expansion of the American empire abroad, a fueling of fear and loathing elsewhere on the globe. This is also unsustainable in the end. Empire breeds disrespect.
Our civil liberties will shrink drastically. This president and his top allies in Congress fully support just one amendment in the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. Say goodbye to abortion rights in most states. Roe v. Wade will fall after this president pushes three or four Scalia and Thomas legal clones onto the Supreme Court. Say hello, meanwhile, to a much more intrusive blending of church and state.
The environment? We'll be nostalgic for Ronald Reagan's time in office.
This is not sour grapes. This is reality.
I hope, but doubt, that the Democrats re-discover enough of their collective spine to block the most extreme moves. If they do it'll be a change for a party that stands for so little these days.
People say there are two Americas. I think there are at least three.
One is Bush's America: an amalgam of the extreme Christian "conservatives," corporate interests and the builders of the burgeoning national-security state.
Another is the Democratic "left": wedded to the old, discredited politics in a time that demands creative thinking.
I suspect there's a third America: members of an increasingly radical middle that will become more obvious in the next few years, tolerant of those who are different and aware that the big problems of our times are being ignored -- or made worse -- by those in power today.
That third America needs a candidate. Or, maybe, a new party.
If you follow South Park, maybe this is all about being forced to choose between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
BoingBoing readers are a good-humored lot, though. Some have suggested sending fecalgrams to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as an exercise of free speech. Reader Pete Setchell says, "There is still one chance to get him out of the White House - send him a pack of pretzels to celebrate his victory. I've just sent some via Amazon."
Reader Dave in the UK writes,
"As a British citizen, I just can't understand why. Does the British media unfairly portray Bush, or are more than half of American voters just fucking stupid? I write this as an appeal to BoingBoing - please, please help me understand how this could have happened, and why, why on God's earth would so many Americans support Bush?"
Presuming the elections were fairly conducted and accurately counted -- which remains a matter of some considerable debate -- I'm going with the latter.
Mateusz Pozar in Sweden (the place that has no army) echoes the emails of BoingBoing readers around the globe today: "I must say that i’m surprised (and most of the world with me actually) that Bush got a second term. Seriously, would he have to rape kittens to get kicked out of office?"
Iranian expat blogger Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan says -- welcome to the Christian Republic of America.
"You know what? I really think Iranians should export their revolution to America. They badly need it. Unbelievable, half of Americans go to Church once week at least? Even Iranians don't go once a week to Mosque, thanks to the Islamic revolution. So I guess America really needs a Christian revolution, maybe people would see what religion really is."
BB reader Billy Hayes says,
"I am from Texas (born and raised). I am a white male. I did not vote for Bush. I guess we all have our reasons. I voted for Kerry. I find comfort in what you posted about what your father said about Nixon. Bush likes to use old Texas sayings a lot. I have one for him. In Texas there is a saying that goes, 'Give em enough rope and they will hang themselves.' Well, I guess the Republicans have all the rope they need."
Reader Hal Eckhart in Minneapolis says,
"Thanks for the consolation, however small. We can only hope and keep on trying.
"I, too, remember being aghast when Nixon won re-election, and the sense that everybody was blithely oblivious to his evil. My high-school civics teacher had a "four more years" sticker on his podium, and once bragged to us that he laughed out loud when he heard JFK had been shot.
"This country and this world are full of idiots. This country's idiots are just a little more cock-sure that they deserve what they've got. A lesson in humility is certainly on the way, and we can only pray that it will be no more painful than it needs to be."
Johannes says, "Greetings from cold and windy Vienna! Your former guest blogger just wants to wish you good luck with your new/old president. Link, and Link two."
John Shirley, another ex-BB-guestblogger, says
The newspaper today says that millions of young people who said they were anti-Bush and who were registered to vote Democratic *didn't show up at the polls.* They were too busy playing Grand Theft Auto or renting Jerry Bruckheimer movies or smoking weed or babbling in chatrooms. It's their fault we're heading into a theocracy. But they're not alone in their culpability."
BoingBoing pal Q-Burns Abstract Message IMs,
Bill Hicks once told a story about an American friend of his who complained about the USA. When told, "well, if you don't like it then move somewhere else" the friend's reply would be, "What? And become a victim of our foreign policy?"
Image at the top of this post: Vote/Vomit, created by BoingBoing reader and American immigrant Igor Knezevic, who says, "Attached is my small comment on my first voting experience in this great country. Being a graphic artist - that's the least I can do for whatever it is worth."
Geek and new dad Glenn Fleishman tells BoingBoing,
I've been Jewish, not very observant, my whole life. I'm one of the first generations of Jews to not fear assault as they went to school or lived their lives in secular or religious ways. To not worry about slaughter. I have only met a handful of concentration camp survivors, including a teacher in college. I don't know what it is to be oppressed or insulted for my ethnic and religious heritage.
Today is the first day I am afraid in America because I am Jewish.
Today is the first day I fear for my new son, who is not, but has a Jewish father.
I'm lucky to live in Washington State, and specifically in Seattle. A haven of secular and broad-spectrum religious views in a sea of red. We went strongly, even among Republicans, to Kerry, and maybe I just won't leave this state much for the next four years.
Some talk of moving to Canada. Some in Canada say this, others put it this way. (Thanks, Brent)
Me, I just keep thinking about this kid's face. And promises of endless war. Link to portrait of LC David Murphy, shot at Camp Abu Graib near Falluja by Kevin Sites.
From Kerry's concession speech:
Audience member: We still got your back!
Thank you, man. And I assure you -- you watch -- I'll still have yours.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hawking getting a free software chair
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The next rev of the firmware for Stephen Hawking's speech synth and wheelchair will be released under a free software license.
Communication through the use of this software is made possible by the pressing of a single computer button attached to Professor Hawking's wheel chair, this button being his ticket to interact, move around, write and speak.
As his disorder intensifies, he is looking to upgrade the software to combat the disease...
"I am developing this as an open source software so that scientists all over the world can work on this platform and modify it according to specific requirements," he added.
Link
(Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod Download is back!
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iPod Download is an iTunes plugin for moving music off your iPod onto your Mac that Apple had removed from the Internet by means of a series of lawyer letters. Then Apple shipped a disingenous "update" to iTunes that contained a blacklist of disallowed plugins, including iPod Download, because apparently Apple knows better than you which software you should use with your iPod after you've bought it and paid for it.
iPod Download has been updated to version 1.1, and it works with iTunes again. Get it before Apple uses the law to take away your rights again.
1.4MB DMG Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?
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DATE: 11/03/2004 01:53:55 PM
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Eric Lawrence sez: "My friend Rich Malley, creator of Thot4ThDay (a daily humor email, over 8 years and running), sends these dead-on thoughts:"
"WWADRD?
Dear Friends:
If the shoe was on the other foot, What Would a
Dumbass Republican Do?
Get depressed?
Get down?
Feel defeated?
Go away?
Refrain from being an obnoxious pain in the ass, 24/7?
Temper his sense of righteous entitlement?
Mute his howls of indignation?
Question his convictions?
Hell, no!
Here's what a Dumbass Republican would do:
Act like a winner in a world full of deluded losers.
Refuse to let the "facts on the ground" deter his
belief in what he's got coming.
Drown out polite civil discourse by braying his unshaken beliefs like a stuck pig.
Refuse to shut the fuck up.
Refuse to go away.
Wrap himself in the flag and impugn the patriotism of any who would question his moral superiority.
Wear a big shit-eating grin that gives the other side
just a moment of pause as they lay their heads on
their pillows at night.
Have a glint in his eye that says, "I may have a shit-eating grin on my face, but I'm just waiting for
an opportunity to slip this knife in."
See this not as a defeat, but as an inconvenient mistake.
Friends, join me.
Do not accept.
Do not waver.
Do not shut up.
Do not give comfort with your distress.
Be an unrelenting irritant.
Be a dumbass.
Right now, attitude is everything.
Together, we can help each other bear the present
while shortening the time - and it will come - when we prevail."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: A headline to remember
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DATE: 11/03/2004 05:03:45 PM
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Never imagined I'd be reading this Reuters headline, from yesterday. Link (via Nick Denton)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Forget Canada. I'm packing my bags for the blogosphere.
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DATE: 11/03/2004 05:19:54 PM
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Snip from "Electing to Leave: A reader’s guide to expatriating on November 3" from Bryant Urstadt in Harper's Magazine.
So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options. (...) Perhaps the most elegant solution is to join a country that exists only in one’s own -- or someone else's -- imagination.
Could someone who renounced their US citizenship declare themselves a citizen of the Internet? ;-) Link (via Joi, MeFi, etc.)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A deathly fear
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DATE: 11/03/2004 06:26:03 PM
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An elderly French man has built a coffin instrumented with an alarm that detects motion. If he moves once the box is six feet under, the alarm goes off to summon help. In case nobody hears the call right away, the casket is stocked with food, water, and a mini bar. The gentleman suffers from taphephobia, a fear of being buried alive.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Quote of the Day: Diebold CEO promises Ohio to Bush
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DATE: 11/03/2004 07:27:53 PM
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In a fall 2003 fundraising letter sent to Republicans, from Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell:
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
E-voting machine maker Diebold is based in North Canton, Ohio. Via earlier news items published mid-2004 by CNN, CBS, Mother Jones, and others.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dan Clowes Apple Switch TV commercial
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DATE: 11/03/2004 07:41:17 PM
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When I was filmed by Errol Morris for the Apple Switch TV commercial, cartoonist Dan Clowes (of Eightball) was there, too. It was the second time I'd met him. He's really funny. I like his commercial, which never ran on TV. Link
Also, this from the Fantagraphics newsletter:
Clowes will write the film Backyard Resistance for producer Scott Rudin and Paramount Pictures. The film will center on a trio of youngsters who made a shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark called Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Earlier this year, Rudin secured the life rights to the Mississippi trio behind the film -- Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb -- after Vanity Fair published an article about them.
The three began the project while on summer vacation in 1982, finishing it seven years later, shooting on a VHS camcorder and using backwoods Mississippi locales.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Spammers react to election
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DATE: 11/03/2004 08:06:54 PM
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Funny spam.
From: "Mia Wang"
Date: November 3, 2004 9:28:10 AM EST
To: Taylor
Subject: Bush Gets Re-elected
Reply-To: "Mia Wang"
With 4 more years of Bush coming you need some prozac. Get it here.
Trust me, it'll make you feel better.
ST0P
Don't those singers dislike playing carelessly?
Did Roy love working on the top of the mountain?
I didn't dislike cooking at home.
tomorrow i will wash my hair and go to the salon
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Guy who is afraid of stonefish peppers me with questions
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DATE: 11/03/2004 08:17:28 PM
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Some guy came across my account of moving to Rarotonga, and he sent me this email:
From: XXXXXX
Subject: rarotonga
Date: November 3, 2004 2:13:45 AM PST
To: mark@well.com
Hello.
I am looking at the possibility of moving to rarotonga and I have a few
questions about stonefish I wonder if you can give me some information...
1. how many stonefish are there in rarotonga?
2. how many people have you seen get hurt from this fish?
3. of these, how many people died?
4. I've read conflicting reports on the internet about the lethality of this
type of fish, some sites say you die in 15 minutes and have zero chances of
survival, some say there are only 3 ambiguous reported cases, what is your
experience about this?
5. I've read that there is no antidote in rarotonga, perhaps the information
is outdated; do you have the antivenom now and if so do all hotels have it
or is there only one place to get it?
6. Isn't there a project to exterminate all stonefish on the island?
7. What technique do you use to keep these fish away from the shore?
8. what percentage of stone fish actually hide under the sand waiting for
someone to step on it?
9. what kind of necrosis have you seen deriving from stonefish puncture? was
there ever a need for extensive removal of tissue?
thanks for your time!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MPAA filesharer lawsuits expected: UPDATE
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DATE: 11/03/2004 08:34:26 PM
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Following up an this earlier BoingBoing post: The Associated Press and Variety (sub required) report more details on an announcement expected from the MPAA tomorrow regarding lawsuits against hundreds of movie fileswappers. The anticipated move would be significant because movie studios -- unlike the recording industry -- have not yet taken large-scale legal action against individuals.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Purple Haze
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DATE: 11/03/2004 09:11:37 PM
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Reader Jeff Culver in Seattle says:
"I was thinking today about how the 'red v. blue' states graphic is really misleading considering the slim margins that the candidates won some of those states by, so I sat down and created the map that's attached. In the dozens of hours I've been watching the news I haven't seen one like it, but thought that you and the BoingBoing readers might find it interesting. I think it definitely portrays our fellow states far differently than the extreme way we've been seeing to date."
Link to full-size image. Nod also to Siege, who also thought of this months ago and posted a similar graphic on his blog at Nerve (subscription-only access, and I can't find the link to his post, sorry).
BoingBoing reader Bill says,
"In contrast to your purple map, USA Today has published a country map broken down by county that shows where each party won. It's an even more depressing sea of red than the full US map, but clearly shows how the city folk liked the Dems and the rural folk liked the Reps this time around. Population difference is slight, land area difference is huge."
Link
Also: see this county-by-county "purple map", which extends the idea in greater detail: Link (thanks to Eric Lechner and Michael Leuchtenburg, also spotted today on kottke)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Michael Moore "protect the vote video team" member's Ohio account
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DATE: 11/03/2004 10:20:09 PM
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BoingBoing reader Dave Pentecost was a member of filmmaker Michael Moore's "video the vote" witness team in Cleveland, Ohio. Multiple teams working with Moore covered various US cities, shooting documentary footage of conditions at polling sites and keeping an eye/lens out for voting irregularities or harrasment incidents. Dave had planned to send some short video clips to BoingBoing for us to host and stream as they were shot on election day (with bandwidth help from other friends of BoingBoing). That didn't happen in real time as we'd hoped -- but here's Dave's first-person testimony of what he shot, heard, and saw in Ohio:
Slowness in getting tapes back from the field prevented my getting any video posted on Election day. It was also just chaotic enough that the video crews didn't know the importance of what they had witnessed and recorded. The general impression was that we were seeing more confusion and incompetence at the polls than actual manipulation or intimidation. But just around the time the polls were about to close, there was a report of Republican challengers and police at one site. A video team and our lead producer headed over to see.
The first report said that there were five challengers at a polling station where they were only allowed two. Our team had to stay outside and record statements from voters and the Democratic challenger, who told a peculiar story. Remember, these were all black neighborhoods.
Sometime around noon, eight white people showed up, claiming to be GOP operatives but refusing to show any ID. They said they were there to see the Republican challenger, but no one knew who they were referring to. Several of them came into the polling station and set up shop looking at people's documents and making notes in clipboards. When a couple of them came outside and someone asked them what they were doing, they said they were just delivering sandwiches, and that they had to go. But the same dark blue PT Cruiser had been seen driving around several different polling stations.
Our crew taped two of the people beginning to cross the street to the polling place, then noticing the crew and quickly turn around and go back to their car. They also drove up next to them in the parking lot and when they got out to try to talk to them, they sped off.
I had a glimpse of some of this footage last night when the crews came back, exhausted, wet and cold. Everyone was ready to go to a small party at the house of a local Democratic judge to watch the returns. I left the reel digitizing into my laptop and went off for the evening. At that point I had only seen a few other clips of voters who had been told they weren't on the list , were sent to another polling site, and often not offered a provisional ballot.
Today on the bus ride back to New York, what we had recorded began to come into focus. The filmmakers logged their tapes and found the most interesting material There were interviews with voters who were amazingly calm after the ordeal of trying to vote and getting sent back and forth when their names were not found on the lists. Young couples where only one would be on the list, when they had registered at the same time. Elderly people who were sent from place to place and then not offered provisional ballots. People who had normal ballots put into the provisional ballot box and vice versa. Voters who had received confusing or misleading information by mail or phone. People who had not been offered the required 2 more chances if they messed up the first ballot, and were instead given a provisional ballot. Some who were told that the provisional ballot would not be counted (who knows yet whether that will come to pass).
And one crew had been at the "PT Cruiser Gang" location earlier in the day and had gone into the voting room. They didn't know who the white guys with clipboards were, but they didn't like their looks and shot about ten minutes of footage of them. These were not blue-suited Republicans. They were twenty-somethings with short haircuts wearing black crewneck or turtle neck sweaters. One stood at a table examining voter documents with a severe look, while holding his pen in a "stabbing" grip and clicking the button repeatedly in a strange menacing way. His two male friends carried clipboards and wandered around, looking over people's shoulders. They talked to each other or to people outside with cell phones, and a short haired blonde woman came in to confer. When our team went outside they got a great shot of the PT Cruiser - a pullout from the license plate.
What to make of all this? Well, the expected army of challengers didn't show up, at least where we were - polling places that had been determined to be at risk, and had many Election Protection voluteers in addition to our teams. We have the distinct impression that a campaign of purging the rolls and discouraging the voters had been in place. As far as provisional ballots go, the people manning the polling stations were at best poorly instructed (a policy of passive negligence on its own) or could not be bothered. At worst they were part of a cleverly altered system that denied people the vote whether they were recently registered or had been voting in that same location for over 30 years.
The PT Cruiser Gang? Freelancers having some fun? Deniable operatives? Who knows. But the tape of these incidents that I put together on the bus is going to the Democratic National Committee as well as Michael Moore's group. In another era it would probably go to the Justice Department. We are also trying to see if some television outlet is interested (Nightline?) and we hope it will spark some action in voting reform and will get the Dems to tackle these issues and others before the next presidential election.
I wish I could convey the feeling on the bus today as we left Cuyahoga County while the bad news came flooding in. There was a nightmarish moment when we got calls from the Dems and Michael Moore's people (I assume - I was in a black funk, editing with my headphones on) asking if we had enough evidence for a lawsuit. Was it all on our shoulders whether Kerry conceded or not? Was there a lawyer among us to even begin to answer that question? Could I tell anything from the collection of impressions I was assembling on my laptop? This could not be happening. Fortunately for our sanity (and perhaps for the nation's), we soon heard that all the provisional ballots of Ohio would not make the difference. And what about all the votes that were lost when not offered the provisional ballot? When people gave up on running from place to place in the rain, looking for their name on a list? We'll never know.
A word about our Video the Vote team. You heard 1200? There were 20 of us in Cleveland. Yes, Michael Moore paid for our bus and hotel rooms.
But we are not acolytes. We are a diverse group of young and older filmmakers with our own interests and agendas, who volunteered our time, skills and equipment to try to make a difference. The tape we shot belongs to each filmmaker, with the agreement to make it available as this develops. We were astonished by the dedication of all the other Election Protection volunteers, and by the deep desire to vote shown by everyone we met. And we are impressed by the potential of a "Rapid Media Response Team" - maybe we'll get a chance to do it again some time, with better communications and closer access to bandwidth, so the editor (me) and feedpoint won't be clear across town.
And a word about the tapes. Once I've gotten some sleep I will post a short edit of the PT Cruiser Gang. We'll see what happens with the rest - moving testimonials by folks who just wanted to exercise their right to participate in the process. Now I can catch up on back posts in Boing Boing and get on with life in these times.
Dave, thank you.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chinese innovations not found in the west
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DATE: 11/03/2004 11:34:39 PM
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Great Globe and Mail tech report on "10 things the Chinese do far better than we do." Some are pretty namerican-centric (cellphones) and others don't take account of the fact that privacy is less of a concern in a totalitarian state (RFID-based transit cards), but overall this is a fascinating piece full of great ideas that someone should market in the west.
In Tianjin, a city of 13 million people, traffic lights display red or green signals in a rectangle that rhythmically shrinks down as the time remaining evaporates. In Beijing, some traffic lights offer a countdown clock for both green and red signals.
During a red light, you know whether you have time to check that map; on a green light, you know whether to start braking a block away -- or to stomp on the accelerator, as though you were a Toronto or Montreal driver. (That's probably why Montreal has a few lights with countdown seconds for pedestrians.)
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mario quilt: lovely nerd folk art
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DATE: 11/03/2004 11:38:43 PM
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This quilt was made out of 1.5" squares laid atop a pattern generated by laying a game screencap over a grid Paint Shop Pro 8. This kind of nerd folk-art is amazing: I wonder if Nintendo watches for this kind of thing in order to get ideas for future schwag? I would so buy one of these: hell, I'd buy FIVE and give 'em as Xmas gifts.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Balloon-based haunted house
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DATE: 11/03/2004 11:52:28 PM
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This charity haunted house was built by a cadre of leet ball00n hax0rs who built it entirely out of thousands and thousands of balloons. The site's a little hard to navigate and a little thin on background, but damn, there are some amazing pieces here -- well worth poking around.
Link
(Thanks, Gregg!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Worst WiFi hotels
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DATE: 11/04/2004 04:37:59 AM
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Following on yesterday's entry on the best WiFi-enabled hotels, HotelChatter today brings us an entry on the worst WiFi hotels... They've limited the field to Namerica, which really cuts back on the competition, if you ask me. Europe is full of hotels that offer wireless at between $30 and $50 a day, and require you to go to the front desk and buy a scratch-off card in order to get a login for the service, and are often sold out of the cards. Jesus, Euro-hotel-WiFi just sucks for the most part.
Marriott offers WiFi in their lobbies and common areas. Oh yeah, one catch, if you want access through Marriott's STSN WiFi deal you have to pay ~$3.95 for the first minute and anywhere from .25 cents to $1 for each additional minute (charges vary from Marriott to Marriott). In the immortal words of John McEnroe..."You can not be serious!". Honestly, this charge seems steep. We bet there are psychic hotlines that charge less per minute. Marriott is charging for a service that aches to be free, but it gets worse.
To add insult to injury, if you do scrap together the $4.95 for five minutes online you will not only have to race through your online activities in an attempt to beat the clock, but you will also have to contend with pop up navigation, and a terribly non intuitive interface. Oh yeah, and if you want to use the hardwired broadband line in your guest room, you will have to pony up more cash.
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pope endorses wanking, screwing
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DATE: 11/04/2004 07:50:38 AM
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The Vatican has published a pamphlet called "It's a Sin Not to Do It," in which the Church sanctions masturbation for married women, and urges Catholics to get laid more in general. In an unrelated story, Italy and many other Catholic nations are experiencing negative population growth.
Forty years ago, the Vatican published a notorious set of guidelines for courting Catholics that outlawed even French kissing before marriage.
The pages of It's A Sin Not To Do It, however, feature a frank interview with Cardinal Ersilio Tonini in which he emphasises that "the Church is not an enemy of the flesh". He argues that Vatican doctrine has always defended the "nobility of sexuality", which is regarded by the Church as a "treasure" of humanity.
Another chapter likely to raise eyebrows unearths theological justification for post-coital masturbation for women who fail to achieve orgasm during intercourse.
Link
(Thanks, Leigh!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Pocket projectors
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DATE: 11/04/2004 08:28:49 AM
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The New York Times has an interesting article about pocket-size digital projectors that could someday attach to cell phones or laptops. As with most mobile technology, the problem is power. Still, several prototypes have been developed.
Lasers rather than L.E.D.'s are the basis for a hand-held projector in development at Light Blue Optics, a company in Cambridge, England. "We want a device that you can download films to, press a button and see a huge screen projection," said Adrian Cable, director of the company.
The large projections are produced holographically. "These are not the three-dimensional holographic projections of Princess Leia in 'Star Wars,' " Dr. Cable said, but instead two-dimensional ones produced by an optical process different from standard projection.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Agalmatophilia
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DATE: 11/04/2004 08:37:02 AM
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There's now a fence surrounding a 19th century statue of journalist Victor Noir at his tomb in Paris's Pere Lachaise cemetery. From the BBC News:
It is said that a woman who kisses the lips of the prostrate statue and slips a flower into the upturned top hat will find a husband by the end of the year.
The new sign warns: "Any damage caused by graffiti or indecent rubbing will be prosecuted."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Douglas Rushkoff's Frontline documentary to air Nov 9
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DATE: 11/04/2004 08:41:55 AM
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Our friend Doug Rushkoff is the correspondent on a new Frontline program about the ways marketers influence people. Doug wrote an excellent book on the same subject, called Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say. The show airs on November 9; check your local listings for times.
FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar "persuasion industries" of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Through sophisticated market research methods to better understand consumers and by turning to the little-understood techniques of public relations to make sure their messages come from sources we trust, marketers are crafting messages that resonate with an increasingly cynical public. In this documentary essay, correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (correspondent for FRONTLINE's "The Merchants of Cool") also explores how the culture of marketing has come to shape the way Americans understand the world and themselves and how the techniques of the persuasion industries have migrated to politics, shaping the way our leaders formulate policy, influence public opinion, make decisions, and stay in power.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney flash memory
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A Japanese company is making 4,000-5,000-Yen Disney-branded USB thumb-drives.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MPAA chief: a kinder, gentler litigation
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DATE: 11/04/2004 10:13:15 AM
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UPDATED
As posted here on BoingBoing yesterday morning, the MPAA is expected to announce details today involving 200 or more lawsuits against individuals accused of sharing copyrighted movie files online. "Hundreds of lawsuits a month" are anticipated to come out of the extended campaign. Defamer has an update:
New MPAA Head Pirate Hunter in Charge Dan Glickman will announce the opening volley of lawsuits later today. Quick, everyone uninstall BitTorrent and throw your computers into the nearest body of water to avoid their wrath! At least Glickman seems to be paying lip-service to a somewhat less bloodthirsty approach than his predecessor, Jack Valenti. [snip from news story]
Glickman said "a holistic approach" was needed to combat piracy, including educational efforts, criminal prosecution and lawsuits against infringers. "You need the stick and you need the carrot both," he said. "You can't just have one without the other."
Glickman took a reflective pause before explaining, "See, the way it works is we dangle the carrot, then when a file-sharer reaches for the it, we wiggle the stick so they know what we're packing, We ask them, 'Are you sure you want to do that? Didn't you see the stick?' And if they insist on going for the carrot, we beat them to death with the stick, you know, just until we can see a little brain through the skull. That's why you need the stick and the carrot both. It's really hard to kill someone with a carrot."
Link. No confirmation yet on whether or not the "holistic approach" will involve (a) cramming acupuncture needles into suspected pirates' WLAN routers, (b) pouring homeopathic tinctures all over their keyboards, or (c) killing them softly with tofurkey.
The LA Times notes that Disney may not participate:
At least five of the seven big studios that belong to the MPAA have agreed to join the effort, which could generate hundreds of lawsuits a month. Among the potential holdouts is Walt Disney Co., according to one person familiar with the association's plans.
Link to LA Times article (reg required)
UPDATE: The other shoe drops. Link to MPAA's formal announcement of filesharer lawsuits, which took place earlier today at UCLA.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Palast: Kerry won, here's the facts.
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Harper's Magazine contributing editor Greg Palast argues that election management in Ohio was hopelessly b0rked, and that the state was unfairly and inaccurately declared a win for Bush. Snip from editor's intro to his latest feature, on Tompaine.com:
Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided -- known as “spoilage” in election jargon -- because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.
And snip from Palast's story:
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kerry concedes: Update.
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DATE: 11/04/2004 11:22:40 AM
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Tuesday was a tough night for those of us who hoped to wake up with a new American president instead of a one-way ticket to The Republic of Jesusistan. As state after state on TV network maps filled with red, despairing leftie friends IMd and SMSed to say they were hitting the cheap chardonnay -- and hard. They weren't alone in the disappointment, or the drink. Me, I've been sober for more than a decade, so I drowned my sorrows in -- well, tea.
True, boxed wine can be a comforting mistress. But if these aren't sobering times, I don't know what is. And I believe that now more than ever, the ability to form complete sentences is a powerful political statement.
Many BoingBoing readers put down their meds long enough in to share personal anecdotes from voting day, and the day after. Some dropped science on us. Others offered t-shirts, creative visualization, MP3 playlists and forward-thinking proposals.
Reader E. Whale says:
With all the new reports of lost or miscounted ballots, now is the time to make sure it doesn't happen again. The Open Voting Consortium is a combination of open source coding and election reform effort, and they're looking to get 111 members by 11/11. Contribute code, time, money, or whatever you can -- if we start now, maybe we'll really, truly fix things for next time. Link.
Reader aacool said,
I just thought I'd let you know I was tracking Internet Load on Election Day, Nov 2, 2004 and blogging on this topic. Since this election was so closely blogged and involved many more Internet-aware voters than ever before, I felt this issue was interesting. Link.
Molly wrote in to say,
As a Texan, I'd like to repeat the words of Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks and say that I'm embarrassed to that Bush is from Texas. And yes, the country really is stupid, and that's why an incompetent criminal has been re-elected. I got a very clear picture of his base constituency when having a discussion over lunch with some co-workers about our favorite children's shows. I was commenting on how much I liked Sesame Street, and one woman (a very vocal Christian conservative) said, "Oooh.. Sesame Street is too tolerant for me". To my horror, several other women nodded their heads in agreement. I guess I didn't even think there was such a thing as too tolerant.
Responding to this, reader Jim Moskowitz says:
I was startled at that email you quoted from "Molly" about a conversation where several people agreed that Sesame Street was 'too tolerant', and I went looking for evidence that that phrase is a propagating meme. Yep, it is. Here's a brief interview about it from earlier this year, on [evangelical Christian network CBN News]: Link to A Christian Author's Push for Radical Intolerance. Warning: contains unsettling ideas and the what-is-he-insinuating sentence "I don't want you to go and shoot people with both barrels of Christianity."
William Gibson blogs today:
My friend Steve Brown reports that the most popular new t-shirt at his local liberal arts college says "I'LL BET YOU VOTE *NEXT* TIME, HIPPY!" Second terms, historically, are not cakewalks. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power, this very moment, is patiently eroding the membranes containing the coming year's inevitable debacles and scandals. Unless you don't believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely, how can that be otherwise? Peace.
(Special thanks to everyone who wrote in, including those of you whose political opinions differ. Thanks for the links, Blamanj, Mikelite, Chris Brown, Jeff Warren, Jon West, Fingers, and Shea. )
Previous BoingBoing post: Kerry Concedes Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Voice-operated airplane
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DATE: 11/04/2004 11:26:59 AM
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MIT researchers have developed a voice-controlled aircraft guidance system that enables a pilot in one plane to control a nearby unmanned air vehicle by talking to it. From the press release:
"The system allows the pilot to interface with the UAV at a high level--not just 'turn right, turn left' but 'fly to this region and perform this task,'" said Mario Valenti, a flight controls engineer for Boeing who is on leave to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. "The pilot essentially treats the UAV as a wingman," said Valenti, comparing the UAV to a companion pilot in a fighter-plane squadron.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: My Modest Proposal: The U.S.A.R.
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DATE: 11/04/2004 03:26:57 PM
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My friend wrote this. It's very funny, mainly because it's true.
MY MODEST PROPOSAL: THE U.S.A.R.
By C. B. Shapiro
I feel bad for the Red States.
Yes, they won the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and most of the state houses. But they still can't have the country they really want because the last few Blue States won't roll over. So I am making a simple proposal:
Secession. Divorce. Splitsville.
Personally, I think we made a huge mistake not letting them go when we had the chance back in 1862. Well, no time like the present to correct an old mistake.
Then, they would finally be free to have the kind of society they've always wanted; church and state can be fused so they build the kind of theocracy they've dreamt of, with Jesus at the helm. Then the new USAR (United States of America Red) can ban books, repeal civil rights, persecute gays and have all the wars they like. They want prayer in schools? More power to them. They can ban abortion and post the Ten Commandments in every federal building in their country. Bring back slavery, if they want. We'll be free to live with our like-minded countrymen who believe in science, modernism, tolerance, religion as a personal choice, and truly want limited government intrusion in our personal lives. Why should each side be driven mad by the other any more, decade after decade?
Call the Culture War a tie and everyone go home.
Of course, we in the U.S.A.B. get the Gross Domestic Product, businesses and universities of California, New York, Massachussetts -- basically the whole Northeast and Northwest (plus Illinois and Michigan if they want to come along). They get Wal-Mart and Duke and most of the Nascar tracks. But they can feel free to import movies, TV shows, financial services, and defense technology. We'll import country music, bibles and Confederate flags.
The two countries will by necessity have open immigration policy: anyone who feels they are living in the wrong country can just move across the border, no questions asked.
Ultimately, why should I have to convince my fellow countrymen that Darwin may have had a point and that the word “liberal” is not equivalent to “godless communist?” And why should they be forced to live in a country with morally corrupt non-believers? I'll stay in the messy, free-thinking U.S.A.B. And to the U.S.A.R. I say…
God bless you all, and see you at the U.N
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on election results
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DATE: 11/04/2004 10:44:03 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted three clips "from the November 3 Daily Show: "Jon covers Kerry's concession, Bush's relishing in his glory, and Stephen Colbert's commentary on it all."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hello Kitty online multiplayer game
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DATE: 11/04/2004 10:46:31 PM
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Sanrio have launched a Hello Kitty massively multiplayer online game. The cuteness factor here is fantastic -- somewhere between genuinely and sickeningly fascinating:
Hello Kitty World will allow thousands of players to live and participate in Hello Kitty's magical and cute online world. You will be able to roam the streets of Kitty Kingdom, XO Federation, and Melody-land. Enjoy the beautiful landscape and architecture of Puroland or Badtzcity and participate in numerous puzzles, story lines, or adventures lead by the worldwide community of Hello Kitty World subscribers. You can even have a successful career, open different shops, earn and spend Sanrio Dollars in your bank, buy a house, and trade with other players around the vast game world.
Other than hundreds of choices for you to build your dream house and lovely player characters, Hello Kitty World players will also be able to raise pets and teach them special tricks and skills. Players will be able to cooperate and interact with other players to overcome a joint quest or challenge other friends to a friendly duel.
You will be able to make new friends through special in-game telepathy as well as interact with other gamers through a variety of community channels and forums. Share the exciting world of Hello Kitty World and spread the message of love with both your old friends and the new ones you have just met in the Hello Kitty World.
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(via Plasticcbag)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK National ID Card petition -- LAST-CHANCE! ACT NOW!
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DATE: 11/04/2004 10:54:31 PM
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Britain's national ID card is back from the grave, and the government here is ploughing ahead at speed to make this an expensive, privacy-compromising reality. If you've lived in the UK for the past six months (or more), and you don't want to be issued a Soviet-style "internal passport," get to this site now and spend ten seconds filling in the No2ID petition. This may be your last chance.
We, the undersigned residents of the United Kingdom, petition the Prime Minister and the government to immediately cease all further development of, and legislation for, national identity cards and the National Identity Register.
We believe the proposals constitute an attack on individual rights and freedoms. We believe they will lead to institutional discrimination and to unfair and unlawful denial of benefits and services. We believe the proposals will lead to an increase in state control and surveillance over the individual, and that they will create an unacceptable imposition on every citizen. We believe the proposals are unlawful under the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights that guarantee every person the fundamental right to privacy.
We believe the identity proposals will lead to an endemic loss of privacy and freedoms. We believe they will present dangers to marginalised, disenfranchised and disadvantaged people. We also believe that an identity scheme will imperil the relations between citizen and state.
Furthermore, we believe that even if these principled concerns had been fully addressed, that the government's proposals would still constitute an enormous waste of financial resources and would achieve little or no tangible benefits.
For these reasons we urge the government to fully abandon the proposals.
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(Thanks, Phil!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Secret doors disguised as bookcases
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DATE: 11/05/2004 02:42:54 AM
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Hidden Doors manufactures and installs custom secret doors disguised as swinging and revolving bookcases. Someday, I want to live in a house where every extrance is one of these.
Link (site doesn't work in Mozilla)
(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Whimsical clocks made from found objects
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DATE: 11/05/2004 02:43:14 AM
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Sestka is a Czech vendor of whimsical clocks made from found objects. There are some real beauties in this gallery, but my pick is this one, with kissing couple figurines and a miniature lamppost mounted at 8 o'clock.
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(Thanks, Jakub!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Corridor: a graphic novel of India
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DATE: 11/05/2004 03:08:37 AM
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The Hindu reviews Sarnath Banerjee's book Corridor, billed as "the first graphic novel of India." Look terrific.
Corridor meanders through the lives of a bunch of confused urban youngsters — Digital Dutta, the north Kolkata man torn between Karl Marx and H1-B Visa; Brighu, a compulsive collector and a contemporary version of Ibn Batuta; Shintu, newly married and searching for the ultimate aphrodisiac; and D.V.D. Murthy, a malodorous forensic expert with a penchant for Keats. They are all visitors to the second-hand bookstore of Jehangir Rangoonwalla in a corridor in Connaught Place. Rangoonwalla tells one of his phirang, vipasana-learning customers that he received enlightenment ("that it all comes down to chewing your food well") in an elevator in Nariman Point. Past all seekings, he has reached a state where he considers his bookshop the centre of the universe, from where he doles out not only books, but also tea and wisdom in generous doses.
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(Thanks, Avi!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Electrifying your scalp improves your language skills
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DATE: 11/05/2004 03:11:28 AM
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Low-powered electrical currents applied to the scalp immediately improve language skills.
A current of two thousandths of an ampere (a fraction of that needed to power a digital watch) applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant improvement, according to data presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego. And apart from an itchy sensation around the scalp electrode, subjects in the trials reported no side-effects...
Iyer says more work needs to be done to explain the effect, but she speculates that the current changes the electrical properties of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region through which it passes. She believes that the cells fire off signals more easily after the current has gone by. That would make the brain area, a region involved in word generation, generally more active, she suggests.
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(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK Public Service Publisher: a BBC for everything else?
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DATE: 11/05/2004 03:35:32 AM
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The UK's Office of Communications (Ofcom) is publicly toying with the idea of funding a "public service publisher" (PSP) to complement the BBC's role as a public service broadcaster. The idea of a PSP is to publicly fund an entity that publishes books, games, interactive material and other "published" items that are commissioned from British creators and that reflect and deliver British values. It's a brilliant idea, and one that's ripe for Creative Commons licenses -- the specs say that "Content distributed by the PSP must be widely available throughout the UK, with at least near-universal availability." Sounds like open content to me!
184K PDF Link to the call for bids, Link to the Ofcom web-page for the project
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech glitch at voting machine gives Bush 3,893 extra votes
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DATE: 11/05/2004 06:38:37 AM
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BoingBoing reader Joe says:
A computer glitch in a Columbus, Ohio precinct gives Bush an extra 3,893 votes. Makes you wonder what other mistakes the computer made that we haven't found.
I'm a computer programmer and quality assurance tester for a software company in Cleveland, so I know a thing or two about computer glitches. Where there's one glitch that's obvious, there are about 10 others that slip by unnoticed until it's too late.
Link to AP story, via Akron Beacon Journal
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Get paid to work on a successor to TheyWorkForYou and FaxYourMP
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DATE: 11/05/2004 09:06:02 AM
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mySociety is a charitable project that gets grants to build cool, Democracy-hacking software that will follow on the astonishing UK activist projects like FaxYourMP and TheyWorkForYou. They've just gotten a buttload of money and they want to hire a kick-ass PHP developer to build their next s33krit project (which I have been fortunate enough to see and am very very excited about!).
mySociety - is a new project from the community which built FaxYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com. It is overseen by registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy and builds web sites and services that deliver simple, tangible benefits to civil society at very low cost per person helped. It brings Britain's grassroots civic software community together with public and voluntary sectors to get useful sites built, and to teach through demonstration.
Since September 2003 a small core team has been working to clarify and codify the project's aims and to establish and structure an organization to support it. In parallel, an open public competition for project ideas was launched and this was used to pick our five launch projects.
Now, with an appropriate legal structure identified, our first projects under development, and initial funding secured, mySociety is looking to contract a PHP developer with exceptional user interface design skills.
Link
(Thanks, Tom!)
Update: Tom sez, "We're not building a successor to TheyWorkForYou - after all, it's barely finished yet! Yhe money is not for TWFY, at all - they are different legal entities with different people in charge. They're fully voluntary, wheras we're combinging core developers with volunteer labour to try and get the best of both worlds."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech glitch in NC e-voting machines results in 4,530 lost votes
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DATE: 11/05/2004 11:08:57 AM
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Over 4,500 votes vanished in one North Carolina county due to a data storage error. Whoops! Democracy buffer overrun.
Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state. Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board. Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.
Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, California-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said. "That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.
Link (Thanks, craig)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Campaign to Stop Grokster Cert Petition
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DATE: 11/05/2004 11:24:43 AM
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Ernest Miller says:
It was a major victory earlier this year when a Federal Appeals Court upheld the Grokster decision, basically clearing P2P filesharing software providers from liability for the copyright infringements of their users. The MPAA and RIAA want the Supreme Court to overturn the decision and have submitted a petition for a writ of certiorari. The State Attorneys General are considering supporting the petition for cert, but perhaps many of them can be dissuaded. You have to call your State AG today, before 5pm.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in LA: Xeni, others read shorts at Vermin on the Mount
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DATE: 11/05/2004 11:59:11 AM
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Join me and a bunch of other writers for a live reading this Sunday November 7, 2004 in LA! Participants include Scott O’Connor (Among Wolves), Sean Carswell (Barney's Crew), Rachel Resnick (Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick), and host Jim Ruland (McSweeney's, LazyMick, and a forthcoming novel which is going to kick ass) for a night of irreverent readings in the heart of Chinatown.
The Mountain is located at 475 Gin Ling Way (pedestrian walkway off Hill St.). Call 213-625-7500 for details. Fun starts at 7, readings at 8, effigy burning at midnight, bring extra garments to rend.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Supersizing of Americans results in extra jet fuel use
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DATE: 11/05/2004 12:47:20 PM
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Interesting article about the effect that the increased average weight of US citizens has had on jet fuel use.
"American's growing waistlines are hurting the bottom lines of airlines as extra pounds on passengers cause a drag on planes."
"Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
"The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 to carry the additional weight".
Link (Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More than 1,000 reports of e-voting problems nationwide
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DATE: 11/05/2004 01:22:33 PM
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In USA Today:
Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.
The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.
But there were also several dozen voters in six states — particularly Democrats in Florida — who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.
In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Males having babies
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DATE: 11/05/2004 03:15:58 PM
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Male fish, that is. National Geographic reports that male bass in the Potomac River are producing eggs. Seventy-nine percent of the male smallmouth bass examined by scientists show both testicular and ovarian tissue.
"The findings have perplexed the government scientists, who suspect a little-understood class of emerging contaminants. The contaminants include natural hormones excreted by humans and livestock as well as hormone-mimicking synthetic chemicals. The chemicals appear to confuse the endocrine systems of fish, essentially fooling males into producing female cells."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fastest supercomputer
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DATE: 11/05/2004 03:38:43 PM
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IBM's BlueGene/L has knocked NEC's Earth Simulator off its post as the fastest supercomputer in the world. The machine, under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, hit 70.72 teraflops, double that of the previous champ. BlueGeneL was designed for the United States' Stockpile Stewardship Program to help scientists understand the aging of nuclear weapons. From New Scientist:
"...BlueGene/L may come to dominate the Top500 list for some time. It has been designed to include an unprecedented number of different processing units - 65,536 in all - and is expected to reach a staggering 360 teraflops when completed."
The Top500 Supercomputer Sites rankings are based on the LINPACK Benchmark that tests "the performance of a dedicated system in solving a dense system of linear equations."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Reality check from Steve Silberman, a married gay man
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DATE: 11/05/2004 03:56:51 PM
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My friend, Steve Silberman, who has written probably 15 of my favorite 20 stories in Wired, wrote this fantastic essay about being an American gay married man. He sez: "With all the current speculation about gay marriage sinking the election for Kerry, it occurred to me that no one was hearing from gay people who have actually gotten married. The entire debate was turning on abstractions. So I wrote this as a reality check."
Our Traditional Non-Traditional Wedding
As I read through the post-mortems of the 2004 election speculating about whether the gay marriage issue cost John Kerry his presidency -- with many Democrats supporting this view -- I have the disoriented feeling of reading about my sweet, ordinary life with Keith distorted through funhouse mirrors. When writer Bill Bennett places gay marriage in opposition to "ethical values" and a "decent society," as he did in the National Review the day after the election, does he mean us? Apparently so. By now, the concept of marriages like ours has been twisted into such an abstract threat to so many otherwise fine and compassionate people -- and so divorced from the humble blessing of two souls caring deeply for one another -- it's time for a national reality check.
Keith and I are not political activists. His family has traditionally voted Republican, and his parents voted for Bush in the recent election. Until recently, Keith's father was the mayor of a small town in the Midwest; the first time I met him, he took me aside and said, "I know that you are very special to Keith, so that means you are very special to us." There was such simple, human, Midwestern forthrightness in that statement. No banner-waving, no Biblical injunctions, no soapboxing. Just a clear and compassionate message: We love our son and trust his ability to make the most personal decision of all.
Keith and I didn't get married to commit a pioneering act of civil disobedience, to "redefine marriage" as President Bush claimed during his campaign, or to outrage the religious right. We took our vows because getting hitched seemed like the sane next step of our commitment. We figured the best way to defend the sanctity of marriage was to have one and live up to the promises we made to one another.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Made-in-China toys installation
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DATE: 11/05/2004 04:24:35 PM
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Michael Wolf put on a photographic exhibit featuring Chinese toy-factory workers and installed it in a gallery whose walls were crawling with over 10,000 Made-in-China toys.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Death masks of the rich and famous - UPDATE
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DATE: 11/05/2004 04:36:39 PM
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This gallery of death-masks -- castings taken from the phizzes of famous corpses -- is completely captivating, if a little poorly presented (captions on the thumbnail pages would really help!). One of the coolest things I own is my casting from a death mask of Vincent Price, bought from legendary make-up artist Tom Savini. Pictured here, the death mask of Sir Isaac Newton, (one of the) inventor(s) of calculus.
Link
(via Making Light)
Update: Teresa notes "The absence of captions and a working
index was the reason I listed so many of them as separate links. If
you were to link to me at that post, rather than at the main Making Light URL, your readers could also make
use of my list.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Panther help! (Lazy Web request)
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DATE: 11/05/2004 10:26:58 PM
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UPDATED: The problem is fixed. Sort of. I wiped the drive, reinstalled 10.3, and the problem has vanished. Thank you to all of the kind readers who offered assistance, especially John Rochester who gave me a crash course in log files.
ORIGINAL POST: I've been experiencing a strange problem on my PowerBook G4/1.33 running OS X version 10.3.5. WindowServer spins up my hard drive constantly, every few seconds for a second or so at a time, even when idle. In fact, if I'm doing a task, it seems to stop. It's driving me crazy (er, crazier). Here's a sample of my WindowServer log:
Nov 05 19:30:45 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid
tracking area
Nov 05 19:30:45 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid
tracking area
Nov 05 19:31:04 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid
tracking area
Nov 05 19:31:04 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid
tracking area
At MacOSXHints, I found this thread and this other thread, but no real solution. I'm also at a disadvantage because my Unix knowledge is essentially non-existent. I'd be very grateful if someone could please help me. Please email me directly to david (at) pesco.net. Thanks!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brands aren't worth as much as we thought
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DATE: 11/06/2004 12:22:44 AM
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This month's Wired has a stunning article by James Surowiecki about the failing currency of brands as a form of intangible corporate asset. This is a timely piece because the rhetoric of branding has been used to make unprecedented incursions against privacy, competition and speech.
It used to be that trademarks were intended to protect "consumers" (that's us) from being tricked into buying goods under false pretenses. If it said "Coca-Cola" on the can, there had better be Coke inside, and not Pepsi or Crazy-Bob's-Discount-House-of-Soda brand. When a competitor of Coke's shipped a bottle of stuff that was misleadingly packaged or labelled, Coke's authority to sue its competition derived from its need to protect us, not its bottom line. It didn't get to sue because it owned Coca-Cola, but because it was acting as a proxy for its customers, who were being decieved by con-artists who mislabelled their goods.
That meant that Coke's trademarks couldn't be used to go after anyone except competitors and then only when they were deceiving the public. If I started the Coca-Cola Brake and Lube Shop and there was no likelihood that a customer of mine would spend his money at my premises because they thought the fine quality of Coca-Cola Beverages would be reflected in my workmanship, then I was OK.
It also meant that if I made a product like Coca-Cola (say, Pepsi Cola), I could use the word "cola" to signify that if you like Coke, you should try Pepsi. Trademark didn't protect Coke from Pepsi's proudly announcing that they had goods that were similar to Coke's. A court actually found that "cola" was a generic term ad that Coca-Cola couldn't stop other "cola" makers from using it.
But as time went by, trademarks stopped being about us and started being the embodiment of brands (which, as Surowiecki points out, are on the wane and were probably never as important as we thought to begin with).
This meant that trademarks weren't just things that helped the public know what they were buying -- they are a kind of pseudo-property. Pseudo-property that could be defended on the basis that it "belongs" to a company, who need to be protected from having the value of their marks "diluted" or "tarnished."
So now you have Visa going after eVisa.com -- a company that helps you get travel visas -- and Air Canada going after shareholders who used the Air Canada logo on communications about problems with Air Canada management. Disney's one of the worst, of course, going after daycares that paint Mickey on the walls -- even though there's not an instant's danger that anyone will mistake a nonprofit daycare center for a Disney operation and be misled into patronizing it. Most recently, of course, some of Nintendo's lawyers got a wild hair up their ass because someone mentioned some game titles on a profile-page on a porn/community site and freaked out because the association might damage their brand.
All these new and exciting uses of trademarks -- shutting up critics, blocking new entrants into the market, and controlling the speech of private individuals -- are justified by the importance of brands.
But if brands just aren't that valuable, maybe it's time to rethink this stuff. I'm all for trademark laws that punish people who defraud me by misrepresenting their goods -- but trademarks used to create and maintain a market position just mean that it's harder for the "consumer" (that's me) to find out about competitive offerings and failings in goods and services. That kind of "right" doesn't do me any good at all.
Undoubtedly, there are strong brands that can still command a premium. In one recent survey by Landor Associates, 99.5 percent of people said they'd be willing to pay more for a Sony. But the size of that premium is smaller than ever. Five years ago, Sony charged 44 percent more for its DVD players than the average manufacturer. Today, Sony DVD players cost just 16 percent more than the average. And yet, even though the price of Sony's most expensive DVD player fell 60 percent between 1999 and 2003, CyberHome, maker of absurdly cheap DVD players, has knocked off Sony to become the biggest DVD-machine seller in America. Similarly, in the fashion industry, a stronghold of brand identity and obsession, prices fell an average of 9 percent between 2001 and 2003. At least part of the reason is the uptick in private-label sales, which now account for almost half the market. The rise of retailers like Zara and H&M, which make their own cheap but nice designer knockoffs, and the emergence of a high-low aesthetic (in which top designers no longer dictate taste) have weakened the power of fashion brands and fragmented the industry into myriad small ones. Sure, superbrands like Louis Vuitton and Prada can still command a heft price premium. But they're increasingly the exception...
Look at Nokia. In 2002, it had the sixth-most-valuable brand in the world, valued by the consultancy Interbrand at $30 billion. But the very next year, Nokia made a simple mistake: It didn't produce the clamshell-design cell phones that customers wanted. Did consumers stick around because of their deep emotional investment in Nokia? Not a chance. They jumped ship, and the company's sales tumbled. As a result, Nokia lost $6 billion in equity. How about Krispy Kreme? In 2003, Fortune called the doughnut maker America's "hottest brand." Then came what might prove to be the hottest name of 2004: Atkins..
The truth is, we've always overestimated the power of branding while underestimating consumers' ability to recognize quality. When brands first became important in the US a century ago, it was because particular products - Pillsbury flour or Morton salt - offered far more reliability and quality than no-name goods.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Futurismic's best story yet
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DATE: 11/06/2004 12:39:12 AM
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Futurismic has published a new story by Michael Canfield called "Is You Is/Is You Ain't?" They've published some great fiction up until now, but this is truly a cut above. It's the story of a kind-of-hyper-Gary-Coleman, a baby-sized adult actor whose aging is retarded so that he can play the NinjaBaby, a popular infant action star. Satirical and hilarious, this is the best story in Futurismic's publishing history (I've just recommended it to the Science Fiction Writers of America for consideration in next year's Nebula award), and it grabs you right from the first paragraph:
I got my first break as stunt-double for the top goodie on Super Comix Babies. For the third season the producers cast me in a recurring role. Before the series ended its seven-year run, one or two scripts even revolved around my character. You always remember your first job fondly, I guess, but the public remembers me — if at all — for my own series: NinjaBaby. Two films spun-off from it — New York NinjaBaby and NinjaBaby II: Back to the Womb — made good money at the time. Back to the Womb is still considered important for the first use of an in-vitro actor, Tommy Baker, who played me in flashback sequences. Tommy came to a bad end; it’s a tough business. Good friends burned-out early: drugs, depression, suicide. I’m luckier than most. NinjaBaby fans tell me the movies sacrificed the grace notes that made the series a classic. I don’t know. I can tell you that when we produced the original series, we called it shit.
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(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: LCD^H^H^H TV styled to look like 50s classic TV -- UPDATED
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DATE: 11/06/2004 12:43:49 AM
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RCA has released its "Astro" TV, which is styled to look like a classic 1950s set, save that it is built around a flat-panel LCD modern CRT. Expect to see a lot more of this as LCDs get cheaper and more available: remember when FM-radio-on-a-chip costs fell to approximately zero and the market was flooded with FM radios built into pens, sunglasses, and novelty baseballs and pencil-sharpeners? Modestly-sized LCDs are certain to follow suit in the next year or two.
Link
(via Red Ferret Review)
Updated: Andrew point out that "Both the Red Ferret and Brookstone links to the Astro say it is a 13" CRT. Of course, CRTs are even cheaper (at the moment)..." D'oh. My apologies!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: All Your Base-style tribute to child's lost-pet flier
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DATE: 11/06/2004 12:57:50 AM
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I Lost My Frog starts with a found-object, a hand-drawn flier written by a small child who is trying to recover his frog, named "Hopkin Green Frog," with Art-Linkletter-perfect infantalisms like "PS: I'll find my frog/Who took my frog/Who found my frog."
Interweb hipsters used this as a jumping-off point and photoshopped a series of images depicting the search for the lost Hopkin Green Frog, and the results are incredibly funny and even a little touching. Like an "All Your Base" for a lost pet.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Break-up lines from various philosophical schools
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DATE: 11/06/2004 12:59:39 AM
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Wonderful, funny list of break-up lines grounded in different philosophical schools.
The Teleologist: We aren't meant for each other. (P.K.)
The Deontologist: We aren't right for each other. (P.K.)
The Consequentialist: We aren't optimal for each other. (P.K.)
The Solipsist: It's not you, it's me. (P.K.)
The Empiricist: I think we should see other people. (P.K.)
The Rationalist: I'm not a priority to you any more. (P.K.)
The Rationalist, v 2.0: I've been doing some thinking... (Paul Audi)
The Rationalist, v. 3.0: If you can't see your faults, there's nothing more I can say. (P.K.)
The Content Externalist: Ever since we moved, you've changed. (Paul Audi)
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(via Monochrom)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Alien v Predator script saved by Internet pirates
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DATE: 11/06/2004 01:01:40 AM
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Amazing anaecdote from Peter Briggs, the author of the screenplay for Alien Versus Predator.
I wrote "A vs P" originally - oh, God...did you hear that? I actually said "A vs P". I hate that thing...it's like "T2" or "LXG"! Anyway, I wrote it on an Amstrad computer, which was about one step above a Univac Room Filler. In '92 I swapped to an Apple Mac, which I've used ever since. And I ended up losing the Amstrad disk, which was some weird, unreadable proprietary brand anyway. It wasn't until whoever it was transcribed it and pirated it onto the web years later, that I was able to cut-and-paste it into Final Draft and have an electronic copy again. So, thank-you, Internet Leaker, wherever you were!
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(via Wired Magazine)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Save Canada's Internet from WIPO - UPDATED
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DATE: 11/06/2004 01:38:26 AM
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Canada is strongly considering ratifying the 1996 WIPO "Internet Treaties." These are the treaties that caused the USA to implement the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and they've wrought untold damage around the world. What will this mean for Canada? Well for starters, the Globe and Mail notes that a notice-and-takedown regime is inevitable:
In what is bound to be a controversial element, the committee recommended that Internet service providers (ISPs) must be held liable for copyrighted material that goes through their systems. To be exempt from that liability, the ISPs must show they are acting as true "intermediaries," without actual or constructive knowledge of the content.
ISPs should be required to comply with a "notice and takedown" system against subscribers who violate copyright laws.
Boing Boing's incomparable sysadmin, Ken Snider, a Canadian geek, wrote:
It is *extremely* important to me that our government not bow to CIRA. I have high hopes that the current minority gov't means they won't deal with this anytime soon, but I *want* to get the message out to every damned MP I can get my hands on. The problem is, I don't have any *specific* information on these provisions. I was hoping you would, or at least, could point me in the right direction (or even champion the cause with me! Woo!).
It's *critically* important to me that Canada doesn't follow the US in this process. I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to make the reasons *why* this is a shitty idea known, I just need some help making my points clear and concise, as well as containing the appropriate amount of "politik" that they'll make a difference.
So, Ken, here're some answers for you.
Copyright is a system for regulating technology -- it regulates technologies used to make and distribute copies. We have lots of technology regulation in the world: there are rules that govern the operation of automobiles and rules that govern the marketing of electrical appliances. This isn't per se wrong.
But when the 20 horsepower locomotive was invented, the blacksmiths weren't able to successfully lobby to have 80 horseshoes welded to each engine, despite the rule that said that every "horse" used for transport needed four shoes. When you invent a railroad, you need railroad-rules for it, not horse-and-buggy rules. The facts that the railroad doesn't need shoes, or oats, or curry-combs don't reflect bugs in railroading: they are the feautres of railroading.
The Internet has one overarching feature that makes it superior to the technologies that preceded it: it can copy arbitrary blobs of data from one place to another at virtually no cost, in virutally no time, with virtually no control. This is not a bug. This is what the Internet is supposed to do.
It was really foresighted in 1996 for WIPO to sit down to update copyright law to suit the Internet. They recognised that the Internet was a fundamentally different thing from the technologies that came before it, and of course, a new technology needs new rules and regulation.
But WIPO got it horribly wrong. The approach that WIPO took to regulating the net was to create a set of rules that tried to make the Internet act more like radio, or TV, or photocopiers -- like all the things that it had already made rules for. The WIPO approach treated the ease of copying on the net as a bug, and set out to fix it.
Notice-and-takedown is an area where WIPO got it drastically, terribly wrong.
If you own a restaurant, you're not responsible for policing your customers to ensure that none of them are carrying stolen bank-loot. If someone burst in and pointed at the guy at the back table and said, "He's wearing my hat!" no one would blame you if you didn't wrestle the hat away from him and give it back to the accuser.
But under notice-and-takedown, this is what we ask of our ISPs. If you allow users to host stuff, you're responsible for what they host. If they put an infringing file on your server, you're required to know what they've put online, and you'll share in their punishment if you fail to block them from posting infringing material.
Now what is and isn't a copyright infringement isn't anything like a clearcut issue. ISPs aren't equipped to evaluate what's infringing and what isn't -- hell, even Supreme Court judges have a hard time figuring it out. Operating a server doesn't qualify you to understand and evaluate copyright law.
So there's a get-out-of-jail in notice-and-takedown. If you respond to accusations of infringement by taking your customers' materials offline quickly, you won't share in their liability. Now, given the kinds of penalties available to rights-holders for online infringment (in the US, it's $150,000 per infringement!), it's not surprising that most ISPs avail themself of this "safe harbour," removing stuff whenever a complaint comes in.
But a complaint isn't proof -- someone who rings up your ISP and says, "That file infringes on my rights" is like the guy who busts into a restaurant and shouts, "That guy is wearing my hat!" There's no way for an ISP to evaluate whether he's genuinely aggreived, whether he's nursing a grudge, whether he's just a nut. In the US, nuts, grudge-nursers and flakes all use notice-and-takedown to censor the Internet and get material removed.
Usually rights-holders will counter that this can be addressed through something called "counter-notification," where an ISP that's removed something is given the right to contact its customer and say, "This guy says you infringed his copyright. If you disagree, let us know and we'll put your file back online and you two can sort it out in court."
But in practice, counter-notification is a rare beast. Most ISPs just do the math and decide that sending a single counter-notification letter will cost them more in lawyer-hours than the customer in question will ever make for them. They just invoke the termination clause in nearly every ISP contract and shut down the account.
This is why notice-and-takedown is a near-perfect tool for censorship. Don't like what your critics have to say? Just sent a takedown notice and poof, it's gone! The Scientologists love this tactic -- they even get Google to remove links to sites that are critical of their "church" by asserting copyright infringement. Have a look at the truly chilling annals of ChillingEffects, which gathers up takedown notices and other nastygrams. The takedown notice is the favourite tool of the crank, the censor, and the bully.
Even when applied to genuine copyrighted works, takedown is dangerous to the point of unusability: the Business Software Alliance, MPAA, and RIAA send out automatically generated takedowns by the thousands, using software that does half-assed pattern-matching on files available on the net and then sending off letters to universities, ISPs and other entites demanding the takedown of book reports about Harry Potter, Linux distributions with the same names as movies, and academic work by professors with the same name as musicians.
What's more, notice-and-takedown is almost always accompanied by systems for peircing Internet users' anonymity: if you want to find out your stalking victim's new address and number, you need only find the message-board where she's posting about her troubles and write to the ISP as an infringed-upon rightsholder, demanding her info.
If Canada wants to "solve" the problems of the Internet, it should be looking to find "Internet-native" solutions. Canada's Internet laws should treat copying as a feature, not a bug. It should empirically evaluate which sectors are negatively impacted by file-sharing (mounting evidence suggests that almost none of the entertainment industry's woes can be blamed on the net) and then solve those industries' problems with blanket licenses and other tools that don't seek to regulate copying, something that's impossible to do without breaking the Internet.
Solutions that approach the Internet as a problem are no solutions at all.
Write to your MP, write to the Ministers -- This Slashdot poster collects the contact info for numerous government officials who are involved with this. Keep Canada's Internet free.
Link
(Thanks, Ken and Ian!)
Update: This post drew a lot of attention from Canadian activists and would-be activists. If you want to save Canada from the WIPO Internet treaties, a good place to start is the always-excellent Digital-Copyright.ca. On top of that, Will Pate has set up a petition to Parliament on this.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Persian bloggers receive death threats
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DATE: 11/06/2004 09:27:17 AM
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Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan, an Iranian-born blogger who lives in Canada, says:
U.S. election aside, hot topic of the last couple of weeks in Persian blogosphere has been a blog called "Islamic Army" in which its anonymous author has threaten a big list of Iranian blogger for their "insults" to Allah, Prophet Mohammad and other Shia Imams.
The blog was first being hosted on Persianblog, but they shut it down after a while, probably due to complains.
Now they've moved to BlogSpot and have made another blog with the same name with a more precise content to backup their claims. They now have picked particular posts from my Persian blog, in which they think I've insulted the God, and other sacred concepts of Islam and therefore, quoting from a Quranic verse, I deserve to be killed.
On their links section there isa link to another persian blog called "Islamic resistance" in which the author, Amir, has written in detail about weapons used by Iraqi insurgence, Iranian airforce, and other things with a theme of military resistane. There is also a link to the official website of "Doctrinal Analysis Center for Securtiy without Borders" which is run by Hassan Abbasi, a controversial Revolutionary Guard (former, maybe) official who advises pre-emptive action by Iran to US and Israili interests, who happens to be Michael Ledeen's favorite Iranian strategist of terror.
I never took them seriously before, but this time I'm a bit concerned, because they seem to be a different group who have possibly liked the original blog and have tried to adopt their message and to prepare enough evidence for the original claims, at least about me. (Although I'm the first place in their the original list, there are many other names.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Election-day footage from Michael Moore "Video the Vote" team
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DATE: 11/06/2004 10:50:37 AM
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Dave Pentecost is one of a number of volunteer filmmakers who worked with Michael Moore to document election day conditions at polling sites throughout Ohio. Background on the project in a previous BoingBoing post: Link.
Dave sends BoingBoing this short movie comprised of excerpts from footage they captured on November 2, 2004. Much of it was apparently edited on laptops in the back of a bus. He says:
"Our thanks to People for the American Way and Election Protection. My apologies to the Jayhawks for not clearing the music first. (I'm still waiting to hear back, their rights person is in transit, I'll do it next week). The decision to go ahead was mine. This was shot by a dedicated group of 20 volunteer filmmakers, but any faults in the editing or focus of this video are my responsibility. The organizers of the trip will release a longer selection of statements by voters who had problems voting.
This is not leaked Michael Moore footage. As far as we know he has no plans to make a film with it. This was created by the Ohio volunteers on their own and the material belongs to them. Anyone wishing to use the original footage will be able to license it from the individuals who shot it. We are saddened by the voting problems we saw and hope that releasing this short video will add to the conversation on election reform.
"
One BoingBoing reader suggests the short be known as Fahrenheit 59MB. Video (in 3 MB, 20MB, and 59MB streams and downloads): Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.
(Hosting thanks: internetvetsfortruth.org and Sean Bonner + Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for the shrinkage, cowicide).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Special-purpose clubbing phone
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DATE: 11/06/2004 03:34:11 PM
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I kinda stopped caring about mobile phone design and features a year or so ago. Don't know why, but my interest just crashed. But Nokia's forthcoming 7280 has piqued it again -- it's virtually the first genuinely novel phone design ideas I've seen in a long time.
The 7280 is a tiny phone intended for use as a "club phone" -- when you get home from work, you take the SIM out of your bulky camera/calendar/smartphone and stick it in this tiny little keypad-less (voice-activated) twig of a phone with a small built-in camera and go out on the town. It's just the right size for a night out on the town, and has just the right features for a lightweight communications context like being out barhopping.
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(via Wired Magazine)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vintage glasses-frames at decent prices
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DATE: 11/07/2004 04:34:06 PM
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I used to have amazing vintage chunky black Buddy Holly glasses frames that I'd scored at a Hadassah Bazaar and had lenses cut for. Eventually, though, they started to wear out, and I bought a pair of lightweight, modern metal ones. They're nice, but some days I really miss the thick plastic numbers.
That's why I was so happy to stumble upon Klasik, a vendor of reasonably priced vintage frames. I did my shopping at the Spitalfields Market in London, but you can buy online, too (it's cheaper to buy your glasses in person, but the web-prices are still a bargoon compared to the cost of cool new frames). He'll even make up your perscription and have the lenses cut for £35, a steal.
The selection is flat-out amazing and the stock is in amazing shape -- lots of the frames appeared never to have been worn at all.
These are the frames I bought today. He told me that the lenses would be ready in a week -- can't wait!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny Humans update #6: Creationists tackle the "Hobbits"
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DATE: 11/07/2004 04:49:16 PM
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Stefan Jones sez: The slight tremor you feel beneath your feet are gravity waves generated by Stephen J. Gould and Carl Sagan spinning in their graves really, really fast.
Answers in Genesis founder Dr. Ken Ham says he is always amazed by the reactions of evolutionists whenever a new, so-called "humanoid" bone is found. Inevitably, he says, the evolution proponents say with the finding of a new fossil that creationists have lost their age-old argument with Darwinists.
But Ham says this is not so. "The interesting thing is that, really, from a creationist perspective, we have no trouble at all explaining variation within human kind like this," he explains. "I like to help people understand that by saying, 'Look -- eight people got off Noah's ark, and as they increased in number, and then you have the Tower of Babel, and you split up the human gene pool.'"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: TV show will feature decomposing corpse
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DATE: 11/07/2004 04:51:36 PM
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"The tentatively titled documentary "Dust to Dust" will tackle the taboo of rotting human flesh and bring those images into British homes.
"According to the Guardian newspaper, producers on the show are currently searching for a terminally ill patient whose family is willing to sign off on letting a national television audience watch him rot. After the patient's death, the body will be placed in a private area of London's Science Museum and a number of cameras and scientists will get to watch the body decompose."
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(Thanks, Howard!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO save Canada from WIPO's Internet treaties
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DATE: 11/07/2004 04:57:24 PM
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Yesterday's post about Canada's proposed new copyright laws drew a lot of attention from Canadian activists and would-be activists. If you want to save Canada from the WIPO Internet treaties, a good place to start is the always-excellent Digital-Copyright.ca. On top of that, Will Pate has set up a petition to Parliament on this.
(Thanks, Darren, Will, and Russell!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Take the Skinheads Bowling
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DATE: 11/08/2004 04:04:49 AM
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My pal Jim Ruland, host of last night's Chinatown reading in LA, has a terrific new story out about a punk rock bowling tournament in Vegas.
Friday night at Sam’s Town Casino, five miles south of the Las Vegas strip: The unsuspecting locals didn’t know what hit them. Dangerous-looking men with tattooed heads and hands were perched at the blackjack tables. Women wearing ripped-up fishnets and fuchsia-pink mohawks blew kisses on the dice at the craps table. Bleary-eyed boys and girls cavorted around the slot machines wearing hoodies and clutching bottles of screw-top wine. Down in the basement bowling alley, it was like a Mad Max cast reunion, an amateur porn convention and visiting day at the Las Vegas State Penitentiary all rolled into one. The Sixth Annual Punk Rock Bowling Tournament was officially underway.
Every year, on the second weekend in February, scores of punk rockers from all over the United States descend on Sin City for three days of drinking, bowling, music and more drinking. The centrepiece of the event is a bona fide tournament with cash prizes, trophies and swag (read: porno) doled out to the top teams.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Surprise! Bush website no longer blocks non-US visitors
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DATE: 11/08/2004 04:05:34 AM
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Boingboing reader Rob says, I'm in Ireland and was very puzzled when the president's site was blocked to all non-U.S. visitors, but thought I'd let you know it no longer seems to be blocked.
In related news, Norwegian police shut down a satirical web site calling for the assassination of George Bush. Link to news story (via politech).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: IMsmarter launches
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DATE: 11/08/2004 04:52:33 AM
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David Weekly, a geek whose work teaching tech in Ghana we blogged earlier this year, just launched the public release of a software project he's been developing for more than a year. IMSmarter is described as "a new kind of instant messaging enhancement that empowers all of the major messaging services with cool, new features -- without requiring a software download or even an email address."
IM Smarter gives users a single place to easily and securely search all their IM conversations from work, home, and elsewhere. It works with official clients like AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ. It is also compatible with third-party clients like Trillian and even OS/X and Linux clients like iChat and GAIM.
Users can receive reminders and notifications across multiple IM networks... or create new blogs and post to them as easily as sending an IM, and they are notified whenever a user on their buddy list updates their own blog. Blog feeds are available in RSS, RSS2, and Atom formats, and users with existing blogs can automatically republish their IM Smarter blog entries to LiveJournal, Blogger, and Xanga.
The service runs on a cryptographically secured, fault-tolerant cluster of over a dozen servers in two near-military-grade secure Internet facilities in San Diego and San Jose.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gadling launches
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Jason Calacanis and the Weblogs Inc. folks have launched a new travel-oriented blog called Gadling: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Political QTVRs: Arafat and US Elections
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DATE: 11/08/2004 04:56:34 AM
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A QTVR panorama of the scene at the French hospital where Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is reported to be near death: Link. And more fullscreen QTVRs -- from the Minnesota Election, democrats Link and and Republicans, with Governor Pawlenty in the center. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update: Election-day footage from Michael Moore's Video the Vote Team
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DATE: 11/08/2004 05:05:20 AM
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Updated: new download links follow.
Dave Pentecost is one of a number of volunteer filmmakers who worked with Michael Moore to document election day conditions at polling sites throughout Ohio. Background on the project in a previous BoingBoing post: Link.
Dave sends BoingBoing this short movie comprised of excerpts from footage they captured on November 2, 2004. Much of it was apparently edited on laptops in the back of a bus. He says:
"Our thanks to People for the American Way and Election Protection. My apologies to the Jayhawks for not clearing the music first. (I'm still waiting to hear back, their rights person is in transit, I'll do it next week). The decision to go ahead was mine. This was shot by a dedicated group of 20 volunteer filmmakers, but any faults in the editing or focus of this video are my responsibility. The organizers of the trip will release a longer selection of statements by voters who had problems voting.
This is not leaked Michael Moore footage. As far as we know he has no plans to make a film with it. This was created by the Ohio volunteers on their own and the material belongs to them. Anyone wishing to use the original footage will be able to license it from the individuals who shot it. We are saddened by the voting problems we saw and hope that releasing this short video will add to the conversation on election reform.
"
One BoingBoing reader suggests the short be known as Fahrenheit 59MB. Video (in 3 MB, 20MB, and 59MB streams and downloads): Link 1, Link 2, Link 3. WMV format downloads: Link.
(Hosting thanks: internetvetsfortruth.org and Sean Bonner + Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for the shrinkage, cowicide).
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: NASA and the Rain Man
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DATE: 11/08/2004 08:16:56 AM
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Researchers at NASA are taking CT and MRI scans of Kim Peek, the inspiration for Rain Man, to study how his brain is changing. From an Associated Press article:
Not only are Peek's brain and his abilities unique, noted Richard D. Boyle, director of the California center performing the scans, but he seems to be getting smarter in his specialty areas as he ages.
The 53-year-old Peek is called a "mega-savant" because he is a genius in about 15 different subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Milgram Reenactment
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DATE: 11/08/2004 08:49:44 AM
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BB pal Eric Paulos, a computer scientist who has conducted several research projects inspired by the work of Stanley Milgram, points to an art project where actors reenacted one of the maverick social psychologist's shocking "Obedience to Authority" experiments conducted at Yale University in the 1960s:
During the experiment subjects were asked to give seemingly real electric shocks to another individual. Ostensibly the experiment was to test the limit to which subjects were prepare to follow the orders of an experimenter. How severely would they be prepared to hurt a fellow human because they were ordered to do so.
The Re-enactment represented 8 subjects moving through the Obedience experiment in real time. Using transcripts from the original experiment each actor took the role of a specific subject. Each aspect of the experiment was repeated for each subject. Under the guise of a memory test, subjects were asked to give seemingly real electric shocks to another individual. Ostensibly the experiment was to test the limit to which subjects were prepared to follow the orders of an experimenter, and how severely would they be prepared to hurt a fellow human because they were ordered to do so.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tim Biskup ceramic totem pole
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DATE: 11/08/2004 08:57:12 AM
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Here's an eBay auction for a 2-foot-tall stack of stackable ceramic mugs designed by Tim Biskup. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Perfume watch
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DATE: 11/08/2004 09:27:19 AM
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The Parfume Watch from Venexx squirts out your favorite fragrance with the touch of a button. As Wrist Fashion points out, Batman's nemesis Poison Ivy would dig this. Especially if it was filled with "knock-out gas." Whatever the hell "knock-out gas" is. Link (via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Los Alamos hermit
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DATE: 11/08/2004 09:46:03 AM
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Roy Michael Moore has squatted for several years in a cave at the US nuclear weapons facility Los Alamos National Laboratory. His solar-powered home features a glass door, stove, and marijuana garden. After smoke from his stove alerted authorities, Moore was busted for possession, posted bail, and was released. His website micromike.com explains his scientific and philosophical theories about cosmology and astrophysics. From the Albuquerque Journal:
He headed for Los Alamos, he said, because it is one of the smartest towns in the country, with a dense population of physicists working at LANL.
Using marijuana to help him solve problems inherent to the mysteries of space and time, Moore said, constitutes his "pursuit of happiness."
"I just dedicated myself to staying here forever until I die to try to get this work done," he said.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Petition to stop Canada from signing WIPO's bad Internet treaties
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DATE: 11/08/2004 10:11:16 AM
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Regarding yesterday's post on Canada's disastrous intention to adopt WIPO's Internet Treaties, Ian sez, "Digital-Copyright Canada is doing a petition of the old fashion kind. Print out the pdf and sign it (get your friends and cow-orkers to sign) and mail it in to one of serveral collectors and they will physically present the hard copy to Parliament."
Link
(Thanks, Ian!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Creative Commons-licensed autobiography: Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory
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DATE: 11/08/2004 11:14:20 AM
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Bob Myers sez: "I've put my new book, Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory, up on the web under a Creative Commons License. It's 'historical autobiography,' a romp through the 1950s with me as a child and my atom-bomb-scientist dad. Please take a look!
"Just this morning I got another "reader review" which said, "I finished reading your book, enjoying it tremendously."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Middle Finger Man meets his match
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DATE: 11/08/2004 11:48:45 AM
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Apparently, there's a guy in Provo, Utah who sits on his porch and flips the bird at every person who goes by. He uses both hands and doesn't stop bird-flipping until the passer-by is out of site. He is known around town as "Middle Finger Man."
This blogger decided to video tape MFM and see how long it would take for him to lower his hands in defeat. The answer: only about two minutes. Here's videotape documentation.
Dave and I headed over there and pulled off to the side of the road. We waited til the traffic cleared and then made our approach. MFM saw me and my camera and assumed his position...middle fingers up. I made my challenge and he accepted it with his version of a thumbs up. We tried to talk to him a few times, but he was not interested in conversation. Well, long story not as long, it was a little over two minutes before he finally lowered his hands in defeat. He also broke with a smile because he knew he was beat.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Folk Art calendar
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DATE: 11/08/2004 01:24:08 PM
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Patrick Amiot creates surreal and cartoony folk art sculptures out of scrap metal. From an article several years ago in the San Francisco Chronicle:
"To make a piece -- give it to my wife or daughters, or put it on my front lawn -- is a rush," Amiot said. "The postman sees it and gives me a thumbs-up. Other artists have come out of the woodwork. It's a working-class-hero kind of thing. It's like being a regular Joe. It's like showing a kid a new toy."
The 2005 Folk Art For Schools calendar features photographs of Amiot's work, with profits benefiting K-8 schools in the artist's hometown of Sebastopol, California.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Streaming radio deccaversary
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DATE: 11/08/2004 03:24:16 PM
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Fred sez, "Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of WXYC Chapel Hill's ten years of streaming a live simulcast on the net. For the anniversary, we put together a free CD and panel discussion. We also threw a massive party here in Chapel Hill. Anyway, thought your readers might like to know about the tenth anniversary, and they can also download the CD for free. It's high-quality...comes with artwork and everything."
Link
(Thanks, Fred!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jabberwocky in many languages
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DATE: 11/08/2004 03:27:10 PM
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The first book I ever read was Alice in Wonderland, and the second was Through the Looking-Glass. I memorized most of the poems, and my favourite was Jabberwocky. So imagine how delighted I was to find this page of translations of Jabberwocky into Spanish, Esperanto, Yiddish, Afrikaans and many other tongues.
!Cuídate del Galimatazo, hijo mío!
!Guárdate de los dientes que trituran
y de las zarpas que desgarran!
!Cuídate del pájaro Jubo-Jubo y
que no te agarre el frumioso Zamarrajo!
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland high-rez aerial photo
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DATE: 11/08/2004 03:29:40 PM
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Zan has stitched together an amazing, high-rez aerial photo of Disneyland and environs from USGS 1 foot resolution color Urban Image data.
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fantastic photo gallery of sleeping salarymen
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DATE: 11/08/2004 04:10:33 PM
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I used to work for a Japanese company, and I know about the long hours that Japanese businessmen put in. This astounding gallery of photographs of unconscious salarymen (either asleep or dead drunk) documents a sad side effect of a culture that focuses too much on work. (The nice thing about Japan, on the other hand, is that these guys probably don't have to worry that some jerk is going to take their wallet.) Link
UPDATE:Chuck sez: Actually, they DO have to worry about this problem. Now that the end of the year is approaching, we
can expect a lot of increased warnings and vigilance with regards to pickpockets. Especially after
all the year end parties and heavy drinking going on. Pick pockets going after the sleepers on the
last train home is a big problem in Japan.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Aurora Borealis light show unusually far south in USA
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DATE: 11/08/2004 07:50:46 PM
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An extreme geomagnetic storm was taking place over our planet for the last 48 hours or so -- and that caused a rare wave of Northern Lights displays as far south as Oklahoma, Virginia, Maryland, Alabama and California in the USA. NASA's spaceweather.com site has tons of amazing user-submitted photos, and background info on what causes Aurora Borealis to occur. BoingBoing pal Q-Burns Abstract Message watched the otherworldy light display last night for several hours, while he was some 30K feet above earth on a redeye flight from PDX > ORD.
"This image is the closest to what I was seeing in the plane," he says, "But imagine it moving like a curtain in a light wind. They MOVE ... that's what you miss in the photos. Like curtains, and then colors shoot across the sky. It's like meteors, but they are color flashes instead of meteors. It helped that the sky was totally cloudless last night too." Here's another image presented as an animated gif to approximate the way they move.
How very mysterious and wonderful our world is! The lights are caused (at least in part) by charged particles interacting with earth's magnetic field. Those particles give off extra energy in the form of colorful light. That's a fancy way of saying that they are the visible remnants of secret and awesomely powerful space vibes. I wish I could have seen them here in Los Angeles, but we're too far south even for this unusually southern display. Plus our air's all shitty.
Link to photos of this week's display, Link to a Google news search that (for the time being) returns tons of local news reports of sightings throughout the USA. Link to a short MP3 report that comes from a phone alert service offered by spaceweather.com (bear in mind that the report was issued last week, hence the "next two days" reference).
BoingBoing reader Jesse Hamilton adds, "This very cool map will show you where they are visible: Link." And reader Guillaume Rischard in the UK says, "My university is running a nice, entirely free service (Link) that lets you subscribe to a mailing list to warn you when an aurora is likely to occur. I got one right before yesterday's for example -- 'VERY HIGH local activity, possible start of geomagnetic storm.' Oh, and the Canadian space agency has an image service of which we are quite jealous: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What, me torture?
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DATE: 11/08/2004 09:53:15 PM
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A thought-provoking piece in Boston Review on the twighlight hours of the 8th Amendment in America:
I recall the words of Marine Brigader General Michael R. Lehner at GuantĂ namo Bay in 2002: "There is no torture, no whips, no bright lights, no drugging... We are a nation of laws." But what kind of laws? Laws that permit indefinite solitary confinement in state-of-the-art, high-tech units, with cell doors, unit doors, and shower doors operated remotely from a control center. Physical contact is limited to being touched through a security door by a correctional officer while being placed in restraints or having restraints removed. Inmates have described life in the massive, windowless supermax as akin to "living in a tomb," "circling in space," or "being freeze-dried."
When does an emotional scar become visible? To make it visible is to stigmatize, yet only certain kinds of stigmatization are recognized: those that accord with the substandard of what prisoners are assumed to be. They are all bodies. Only some are granted minds. And who is to decide? The unspoken assumption remains: prisoners are not persons. Or, at best, they are a different kind of human: so dehumanized that the Eighth Amendment no longer applies. The naked pyramid of flesh in Abu Ghraib, the kneeling and shackled bodies, blindfolded by blacked-out goggles and hooded in Guantanamo, sanction degradation. Such inhuman treatment, however, is made lawful when our government refuses to recognize that "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment has a precise meaning, when our current courts continue to ignore obvious violations of human dignity and worth. In a penal system that has become instrumental in managing the dispossessed, the unfit, and the dishonored, such phrases as "minimal civilized measure of life's necessities" or the "basic necessities of human life" prompt us to reconsider the meaning of "human."
Link (via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Strongbad email omnibus DVD - UPDATED
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DATE: 11/08/2004 11:38:19 PM
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The Homestar Runner people have released the first 100 Strongbad Emails (these are blisteringly, convulsively funny short movies in which a grunting cartoon in a Mexican wrestler mask answers email, must be seen to be understood) on a single, region-free DVD. It's out next week. My only complaint: there's no "pre-order now" button!
Link
(via Waxy!)
Update: Jordan sez, "The Strong Bad Email DVD is actually a 3-disc boxed set, and is available for order right now. Also, for fans of Homestar Runner and Strong Bad, a great fan site is the Homestar Runner Wiki. (Disclosure: I'm one of the admins of the HRWiki.)"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Holiday snapshots from the sixties
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DATE: 11/08/2004 11:43:18 PM
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This is a gorgeous gallery of scanned snapshots from the 1960s, mostly parades, Disneyland visits, Batman-themed birthday parties, and grownups in funny hats.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show post-election clips
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DATE: 11/08/2004 11:44:54 PM
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Lisa Rein's posted two more Daily Show clips, Reactions to the Election (featuring "Tony Blair's latest press conference brown-nose, the Shrub reaching out to people who already share his goals, and the Shrub enforcing the one-question rule") and an
interview with Chuck Schumer (D) New York.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pratchett's "Only You Can Save Mankind": the musical - UPDATED
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DATE: 11/08/2004 11:49:19 PM
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Terry Pratchett's novel Only You Can Save Mankind is a charming and fine young adult novel about a kid who discovers that the Space Invaders he chases onscreen are a distant fleet who are being massacred by his hand. Like all Pratchett, it is funny as anything, and like all of Pratchett's YA novels, it's eminently suitable for grownups as well.
The book has been adapted for the stage and will run this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Pratchett says, "If I'd known it was going to be so good I'd have written a better book."
Link
(Thanks, Lynn!)
Update: Philip sez, "It's currently being broadcast as a 3-part radio play on BBC 7 and can be found beginning here until next Monday (15th Nov).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Firefox, an Internet Explorer killer, has gone 1.0
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DATE: 11/09/2004 03:46:51 AM
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Firefox, the finest, most secure Web browser ever created for average-user applications, went 1.0 today. You can download it below, toss out Internet Explorer, and be relatively assured that you computer won't be compromised due to Microsoft's bad design decisions and lax security maintenance.
Link, Direct link to FTP server
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Scopitones: music videos played on dismantled WWII airplanes
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DATE: 11/09/2004 04:00:06 AM
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Jacob sez, "'Scopitones' are music videos from the 1960s, designed to be played in a film jukebox that was built in France from surplus WWII airplane parts. Check out the archive of Scopitones --i t's full of such retro treasures as a Nancy Sinatra video for 'The Boots Are Made For Walking' and a Neil Sedaka video for 'Calendar Girl.' Dig those crazy outfits!"
Link
(Thanks, Jacob!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Embarrassing sweater gallery
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DATE: 11/09/2004 07:37:00 AM
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Heath sez, "Fashion archeology at its most embarrassing. One man unearths clothing that has gone long unworn and asks the timeless question: What was I thinking?"
Link
(Thanks, Heath!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Skin your iPod, TiVo remote, gameboy, phone and PDA
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DATE: 11/09/2004 07:37:18 AM
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SkinIt sells reasonably priced crazy-ass vinyl "skins" for your MP3 player, PDA, phone, handheld game, whatever (even your TiVo remote!). They've got a zillion patterns and they'll even pay you royalties on yours if you submit it and they sell it. Just ordered one for my iPod.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Technology's worst villains of the month
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DATE: 11/09/2004 07:43:18 AM
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Danny O'Brien has a new column in OSDir, called "To Evil," in which he rounds up the month's greatest technology villains. Here's his latest column, which skewers Diebold, CherryOS, and Ubuttnakedness.
In the US, black-box technologies mean no-one can peek at the proprietary code and procedures which drive vote-counting technology. That's upsetting to many open source advocates, especially when the machines chase them out of the voting booth rending electoral officials, limb from limb, roaring "I'LL GIVE YOU SPOILED VOTE, JELLY LIMBS!". Hey, it happens...
For instance, bemused election officials noted this election that after 32000 votes were tallied, their county's vote counts started going *down*.
The more experienced programmers among you will realise, with mounting amazement, that somebody, somewhere stored the *only* variable that matters in a voting machine to a signed short.
Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Flashy fish
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DATE: 11/09/2004 07:52:27 AM
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Science News has an interesting article about the otherworldly colors and skin patterns of reef fish.
People can theorize till the cowfish come home about what they see on a reef, but what matters is what fish see, and that's been hard to determine.
Improvements in cameras and in equipment for analyzing light and color are now inspiring new approaches to approximating a fish-eye view of the reefs. Looking at the abundant coloration from a fishy perspective, the new work demonstrates that people can be quite wrong about what's showy and what's subtle. The old questions are giving way to more-sophisticated new ones. Colors aren't just a matter of either hiding or flaunting. It may be possible to whisper and shout at the same time.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jabberwocky in machine-transcription - UPDATED
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DATE: 11/09/2004 08:05:40 AM
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Here's what happens if you recite Jabberwocky into IBM's ViaVoice dictation software.
'Was Berlin, and the slight the copes
Did jar in jumble in the Wade;
All Lindsay were the borrow groves,
And the mowed grass out grade.
"Be where the Jasper walk, my son!
The jaws that bike the clause that catch!
Be where the jejune bird, and shined
The from yes dander snatch!"
Link
(Thanks, Doug!)
Update: Simon sez, "the ViaVoice
production of Jabberwocky was created using version1.0.3 of the software
and IBM are currently at version 10. Probably wouldn't do as badly/well if
the current version were used."
Update #2: Cody sez, "I posted this blog entry a while back, featuring not one, not two, but three different versions of Jabberwocky as interpreted by voice recognition software. And then there was the version interpreted by handwriting recognition software...
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Nifty world clock design
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DATE: 11/09/2004 08:35:14 AM
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This clock is built a little like a 12-sided Dungeons and Dragons die so you can set the time to match different parts of the world by orienting the name of a particular city face up. Link (via Cool Hunting)
UPDATE: Christopher Null sez: "I had one of those clocks. Was mega cool until the battery died -- and I find there's no way to replace it, had to toss it out. Argh!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Winston Churchill's 104-year-old parrot is still alive and cursing
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DATE: 11/09/2004 08:42:50 AM
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The parrot Winston Churchill bought in 1937 is still alive, and her voice sounds like Churchill's.
Her favourite sayings were "F*** Hitler" and "F*** the Nazis". And even today, 39 years after the great man's death, she can still be coaxed into repeating them with that unmistakable Churchillian inflection.
Link (via Growabrain) UPDATE: Jason sez: This went round a while back, and turned out to be probably false.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Exit-poll data: you can't debate the election without it
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DATE: 11/09/2004 10:44:04 AM
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Lessig's posted a barn-burner of a blog entry on the fact that the wildly incongruous exit-poll data from the election hasn't been made public, which means that no one can really assess the allegations of wrongdoing at the polls.
I don't think there was a conspiracy to suppres the Bush vote, nor do I think Diebold stole the election for Bush -- but there are obvious puzzles that need to be resolved. First, there is Morris' point -- exit polls are just not that wrong. Second, there are the insanely inverted county votes in the many heavily Democratic counties in Florida that had their votes counted by optical scan (and tallied by Diebold machines among others). Why were the polls so bad? Why did Democrats in those counties overwhelmingly defect to the President while remaining "liberal" in their other votes?
These are questions of fact that can be answered, or at least understood, if the facts were known. The Exit Poll Consortium should enable that knowledge. It would be a relatively simple regression to map exit poll data against counties or precincts with suspect machines. More importantly, it would be relatively easy to isolate where, if anywhere, suspicion should be directed.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO buy a sari/salwar kameez on eBay
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DATE: 11/09/2004 12:12:12 PM
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Teresa Nielsen Hayden has discovered a whole crew of custom sari-manufacturers in India selling direct to the Western market -- hell, the global market -- with eBay. Because of eBay's rules, there's a weird polite fiction that they're selling you some cloth and throwing in the actual making of the garment as a kind of freebie, but this is a really cool maker-to-wearer business that's cutting out hundreds of intermediaries. Teresa's produced a guide to buying Indian garments these ways that's absolutely fascinating.
There are three signs to look for. First, if the listing says any size, it usually means they’re making clothing to order, but might mean they’re selling the same model in multiple sizes. Second, the accompanying photo shows, not finished garments, but two or three pieces of color-coordinated fabric wrapped around a dressmaker’s form. Not all bespoke-tailoring vendors do this, but all the vendors who do it are selling bespoke tailoring. The third and infallible sign is that they ask you for your measurements.
The base price for a made-to-order three-piece salwar kameez starts around $30 for something simple in a cotton or synthetic fabric, and goes up to the lower-middle three digits for wedding garments so dense with gold embroidery that they mess up flash photography. Shipping runs around $12-$25, so check before you bid.
Report on the experiment:
Using the proceeds of my CafePress t-shirt sales, I ordered three salwar kameez (kameezi? kameezes?) from three different vendors. Only one auction was contested. The average purchase price was $39.00.
All three purchases arrived within two weeks. All three fit. All three vendors misunderstood or ignored my request for elbow-length sleeves, but they all got the trousers right (nipped in at the ankle, with a small cuff).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Octopussy
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DATE: 11/09/2004 12:55:44 PM
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Manuel on Buffoonery posts this interesting series of pointers to tako pr0n.
Whybark got me going on Japanese octopus porn with this tip: famous ukiyo-e painter Hokusai's awabi fisher and octopus (c.1814). Fast-forward to 2001, when Masami Teraoka painted Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven. Toshio Saeki's Octo-girl takes the classic tentacle porn for a spin.
A B-movie was made about Hokusai's life called Edo Porn. Here are images from the bizarre octopus sex scene. Check out the eyes on that thing--just like the painting!
What's up with the Japanese obsession with octopus sex? I'm still looking into it. Check the comments for the definitive guide. I did find this one strange story on Dr. Kilmarnock's Obscure World of Victorian Erotica: Tentacles of Desire: The Man who Loved Cephalapods. Look at that old pervert! It's me in 40 years!
For scientific posterity, here's some information on actual octopus sex, including a line drawing of hot hectocotylus/mantle cavity action. And here's the original octopus porn link that started it all.
Most of the links are not worksafe, duh. Regarding that last link (to hardcore images), ultra-observant BoingBoing reader Brian says, "Wow. They have a condom on the thing... and it's tentacles are tied up above her legs so as to give the illusion of life and intent. The thing is dead. That's not just octoporn... thats necroctoporn!" Link (Thanks, Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Digital Accordion
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DATE: 11/09/2004 01:23:32 PM
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Roland has announced a digital accordion. Can a digital ukulele be far behind?
PBM (Physical Behavior Modeling) enables true sound reproduction and dynamic expression.
Realistic tone and expressive simulations of a wide range of traditional accordions.
22 onboard Orchestral sounds and 7 Orchestral Bass sounds that can be mixed together with traditional accordion sounds.
Portable, lightweight and expandable via MIDI.
Expand creative possibilities and explore new performance options not achievable using traditional instruments.
The FR-7 is a complete, all-in-one model with powered speakers.
Link (Via dottocomu)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Best Buy tries to separate "angel" customers from "devils"
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DATE: 11/09/2004 03:34:14 PM
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Fascinating Wall Street Journal article about Best Buy's campaign to get rid of the smartest 20% of it customers, and keep only the fools who are looser with their money.
Best Buy's angels are customers who boost profits at the consumer-electronics giant by snapping up high-definition televisions, portable electronics, and newly released DVDs without waiting for markdowns or rebates.
The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on "loss leaders," severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. "They can wreak enormous economic havoc," says Mr. Anderson.
Mr. Anderson's campaign against devil customers pits Best Buy against an underground of bargain-hungry shoppers intent on wringing every nickel of savings out of big retailers. At dozens of Web sites like FatWallet.com, SlickDeals.net and TechBargains.com, they trade electronic coupons and tips from former clerks and insiders, hoping to gain extra advantages against the stores.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: New York Underground
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DATE: 11/09/2004 04:02:14 PM
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Julia Solis is an urban archaeologist who explores the subterranean mysteries and ruins of New York City and other locales. For years, she's chronicled her adventures through photographic evidence and essays posted on her Dark Passage Web site. Now, Routledge has published New York Underground, a stunning monograph of Solis's journey into the underworld. 
"Did alligators ever really live in New York's sewers? What's it like to explore the old aqueducts beneath the city? How many levels are beneath Grand Central Station? And how exactly did the pneumatic tube system that New York's post offices used to employ work? In this richly illustrated historical tour of New York's vast underground systems, Julia Solis answers all these questions and much, much more. New York Underground is timed to release in the centennial year of the city's subway system. It takes readers through ingenious criminal escape routes, abandoned subway stations, and dark crypts beneath lower Manhattan to expose the city's basic anatomy. While the city is justly famous for what lies aboveground, its underground passages are equally legendary, and tell us just as much about how the city works. "
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Middle Finger Man update - enter Mark Cuban
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DATE: 11/09/2004 05:57:54 PM
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Middle Finger Man (see previous BB entry) is about to become famous, whether he wants to or not. Brian Stucki sez: "I am the writer of Brian's Blog and the creator of the Middle Finger Man Video. I have had thousands of visits linked from your site for the video and have recieved hundreds of e-mails asking for more. I recently received an e-mail from Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and HDNet. He encouraged me to get HD footage of MFM and get it into him and his people. I have blogged about this and called upon the help of my readers. I was hoping you could post the update as well so I might be able to make this video to find out more of the MFM."
Go get 'em, Brian! Link
UPDATE: Here's a better picture of MFM, aka "Lt. Dan." Looks like he might be a yoga practitioner, judging by the way he sits. He also seems to be a jolly fellow. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ex- CBS newsman: bloggers replacing journos like "parasite replacing dog"
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DATE: 11/09/2004 06:42:56 PM
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Eric Engberg, a former CBS News correspondent in Washington, said:
The public is now assaulted by news and pretend-news from many directions, thanks to the now infamous "information superhighway." But the ability to transmit words, we learned during the Citizens Band radio fad of the 70's, does not mean that any knowledge is being passed along. One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.
Link (via politech)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ashcroft resigns, claiming credit for "extraordinary era of justice"
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DATE: 11/09/2004 06:45:55 PM
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Attorney General John Ashcroft resigned today, claiming credit for "an extraordinary era of justice" in his resignation letter. Link to full text
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 21st century googie: a house built around a cylinder
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DATE: 11/09/2004 09:50:54 PM
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London is full of little houses called "two-up-and-two-downs" -- a kitchen and a sitting-room on the ground floor, and two bedrooms (and a bathroom) upstairs. Two rooms up, two rooms down. It's a kind of basic building-block of London housing.
This futuristic little six-metre-square house is a modern two-up-and-two-down, with four rooms contained in a revolving cylinder that maximises the efficiency of space. This is a wonderful twenty-frist century take on googie architecture, the kind of thing that has all the designy prettiness of an iMac and all the ephemeraility of a tailfin.
Link
(via Pirotcar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video of Cory's iBiblio talk
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DATE: 11/09/2004 09:53:08 PM
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Last February, I gave a talk on copyright at iBiblio/UNC Chapel Hill. They video'ed the proceedings and have now posted the footage for download.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gerald McBoing Boing coming to Cartoon Network
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DATE: 11/10/2004 08:35:01 AM
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BoingBoing reader Larry says, "Jerry Beck's exellent site has info and pics of the proposed new Gerald McBoing Boing show being developed for Cartoon Network. Being your namesake and all I thought you might dig / run in horror." Link (Ed. Note: For the record, Mark didn't name the blog you're reading after that character, but that doesn't make this news any less cool!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US druggists refuse to give out birth control because of "moral values"
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DATE: 11/10/2004 08:39:53 AM
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A number of states have enacted (or may soon pass) laws that allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control if their beliefs (read: fundamentalist Christian dogma) dictate otherwise.
"I was shocked," says [Juley] Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."
Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions. Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in procedures that go against their conscience. South Dakota and Arkansas already had laws that protect a pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense medicines. Ten other states considered similar bills this year
Just in time for next season's hotly anticipated coathanger abortion fad. Welcome to Jesusistan. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Geek Graffitists protest NYC's anti-sticker legislation
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DATE: 11/10/2004 08:43:38 AM
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BoingBoing reader Reevo says:
All City Council is a cool little project by Ni9e (the same guys who hijacked the USPS labels a while back) protesting the new anti-sticker graffiti legislation in New York City. The guys at Ni9e have taken the images of the New York City Council members are reproduced them onto US postal labels with ASCII art. From a distance they images just look like the faces of those involved in the legislation but on closer inspection the text actually reads out the legislation itself. They then plaster them around the area that each of the council offices are situated...cheeky! [via]
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DefenseTech blog moves to new digs, gets spiffy makeover
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DATE: 11/10/2004 08:50:09 AM
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My fellow Wired News contributor Noah Shachtman says:
After nearly two years of operating DefenseTech blog on my own, I've decided to team up with the fine folks at Military.com. I've been a daily visitor to Military.com for quite some time – no one rounds up defense-related news and views better. But I've always been jealous of the site's slick design, and its almost bottomless well of features. No longer. It feels good to join such a bad-ass crew.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Audible Zen
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DATE: 11/10/2004 09:02:04 AM
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let them sing it | nasa vlf receiver | aurachime | nitrada | whales | pitman | fish + wildlife | n.a.g. | looptracks | viragelic |
rand()% | infinite wheel |
Image: an "audible tweek" from NASA (Link). web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: MPAA plans to sue movie downloaders
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DATE: 11/10/2004 09:16:55 AM
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On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I speak with host Noah Adams about the MPAA's plans to begin suing individuals suspected of sharing copyrighted movies online. We speak with the MPAA's antipiracy director John Malcolm, and with Jason Schultz of the EFF about the planned lawsuits -- the first of which are expected to be filed next week. Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online and public art to save a disappearing lake in California
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DATE: 11/10/2004 09:19:42 AM
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BoingBoing reader Eli the Bearded says,
"The Lake Project is an art on billboards exhibition. A number of photos of Owens Lake, in southern California are put up on billboards in the San Francisco Bay Area. Owens Lake is an environmental disaster caused by overdrainage to quench the ceaseless thirst of Los Angeles. This site has images from the billboards in a flash animation and a number of links to information about Owens Lake."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How a ballot-receipt should look - UPDATED
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DATE: 11/10/2004 09:31:36 AM
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Wired Magazine's back-page each month features a photoshopped image that is meant to represent a telling found object from our future. They're often good, but this month's -- a receipt from a paper-trail-leaving voting machine -- is the best so far. Wow.
Link
Update: Various of you wrote in on this, but Jacob put it most succinctly, "While it's nice that there's a paper trail, the format of the
receipt implies that there is long-term tracking of how you've cast
votes in the past, and some votes could be determined by examining the
receipt (so much for the secret ballot). And the 'who's ahead data'
would be just as unhelpful as exit polling data is on election day.
Let's hope the vote tracking features of e-voting don't come to pass."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 3D Nudes of silent-film star Harold Lloyd
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DATE: 11/10/2004 11:18:46 AM
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Silent film star Harold Lloyd shot thousands of nude photos of Hollywood starlets, many of them in 3-D. His granddaughter has published a book of the photos, which comes with a Harold Lloyd-style pair of 3-D glasses to view these awesomely kitschy cheesecake shots. Link to OC Register story (try username ocusername, PW ocregister)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MPAA scare-ads removed by polite letter to mall
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DATE: 11/10/2004 11:20:03 AM
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Th0m sent a nice letter to the people who run his local mall in Dublin, Ohio, telling them that the big MPAA anti-piracy ads were offensive and got on his nerves, and they took 'em down!
The ads are tantamount to a legal threat to the general public about their property, and they do it opposite advertisements for children's movies. My response is that I do not want them to do that in my community, in the public space where I'm trying to live. I am an artist too, and just because they have a problem with free downloads, doesn't mean they can give the impression that people in *my* community can't download my copyrighted works for free.
It is not that I think that copyright infringement is justified. Rather, corporations are giving legitimate downloading and new internet-based media a bad name by claiming they are a victim of new technology.
Link
(Thanks, Th0m!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Story on Cobb County Creationism Case
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DATE: 11/10/2004 11:23:44 AM
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Gary Peare sez: "I have a modest proposal regarding the following story:"
A federal trial began today in Atlanta over evolution disclaimers in Cobb County schools. A group of parents backed by the ACLU argue that the disclaimers in science biology textbooks are a government endorsement of religion.
"The county put stickers with the following text into the books:"
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
"So here's my proposal. Let's allow the religious right to paste their stickers in all the biology texts they want so long as they affix the following text to each and every one of their Bibles:"
"This book contains material on Judeo-Christian theology. Judeo-Christian theology offers insight into the origin and meaning of life and is the basis for several of the world's great religions. But it does not encompass the full range of religious beliefs held sacred by members of our diverse American society. Moreover, this material is based on ancient texts, and significant errors may have been introduced through subsequent translations and omissions. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The creepy, creepy world of "reborn baby dolls"
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DATE: 11/10/2004 11:29:10 AM
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Apparently, some people are immune to the "uncanny valley" syndrome.
Laura sez: "My husband Dan pointed this out. A search for 'reborn' in the eBay dolls category yields painstakingly refinished dolls made to look sometimes eerily like real babies. A few descriptions:"
Krystal was given her first bath inside and out to remove all original coloring.. Then I color washed her on the inside with a creamy mixture of acrylic paints to give her skin the right shading. She was then given layers of the right mixtures of oil coloring on her baby skin to make her the beautiful baby you see here.Then she was blushed to perfection. Not a fold nor wrinkle was missed.
Andrea has the 'BABY FAT' pellets as one of her key weighting ingredients. These new silicone based pellets make her even more realistic and add a whole new dimension to the feel of her body. The 'squish' factor is AWESOME!!
Link UPDATE: Nick Madeira sez: "I thought the 'reborn' dolls were so disturbing, I had to check google, and found [this] link for an umbilical cord clip - they suggest you model an actual cord from clay."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Thumb drive made from plastic thumb
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DATE: 11/10/2004 01:10:25 PM
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Someone's fashioned a USB thumb drive out of a plastic thumb and is selling it on eBay.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Last of original Winamp/Nullsoft team departs
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DATE: 11/10/2004 01:37:47 PM
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A sad bit of geek history today: the last members of the original team behind Winamp have departed AOL. Nullsoft would appear to be no more. The once-ubiquitous digital audio player -- which did indeed whip the llama's ass -- now appears destined for decline.
Winamp's demise comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.
The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn't long until the two ideologies collided.
Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.
Link to Betanews item. (thanks waldo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Theo Van Gogh's "Submission" on IFILM
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DATE: 11/10/2004 02:13:43 PM
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David Benjamin from ifilm.com says, "We have a copy of Theo Van Gogh's short film, Submission on our site. This is the film that inspired a Muslim man to kill him." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Video: tanks at anti-war protest, LA federal building
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DATE: 11/10/2004 02:33:59 PM
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BB reader Adam Rakunas says,
"Indymedia has video of two tanks (well, LAV-25s, but who's gonna quibble with an armored cannon on Wilshire Boulevard?) at an anti-war protest outside the Federal Building in Westwood, CA. Whether the folks at the Army Reserve Center up the street at Federal got bored or the Police State is flexing its muscles, I dunno. Personally, I think these guys just knew that parking in Westwood is a bitch and borrowed the appropriate vehicle."
Link.
Update: BoingBoing reader Bob says, "I have photos of the armored personnel carriers in the streets of Westwood at the antiwar demo." Link
BB reader Rudy says, "I noticed a followup post on indymedia claiming to have run into the vehicles the next morning at a parade. The author goes to claim that the operators claimed to be at the protest and they arived there after getting lost." Whups.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US Army recruitment spam?
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DATE: 11/10/2004 04:49:00 PM
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BoingBoing reader Mark Miller says,
While not a site, I found it interesting while being a student at UT Austin, that the US Army recruiters have decided that spamming students is a viable means of recruitment. So desperate must they be to get people to fight in Iraq. I'm also disturbed by the apparently "Universities must turn over contact info to local army recruiting offices". I thought Selective Service covered people attempting to avoid the draft.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: White phosphorous among weapons used by Marines in Fallujah
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DATE: 11/10/2004 06:58:33 PM
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In the San Francisco Chronicle:
"Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, Md., the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns. Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Double shot of double-entendre beverage brands
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DATE: 11/10/2004 07:10:58 PM
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Thirsty? Depending on what floats your proverbial boat, perhaps a cockolada or a nice glass of Boo Bee Juice would hit the spot. The former is an adult-oriented beverage novelty resembling an anatomical part unique to male persons. The latter is an actual children's drink product with a snort-inducing name (no, it doesn't come in Tara Reid flavor). (thanks Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update on nabbed Indymedia servers -- "criminal terrorism investigation" say feds
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DATE: 11/10/2004 07:28:44 PM
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Salon has a new follow-up on the troubling tale of those Indymedia web servers reportedly confiscated by representatives of an as-yet-undisclosed government. Link .
In October, The EFF filed a motion to unseal the Seizure Order in a US District Court -- background Link. This update published on an indymedia site today includes the court's response to EFF's motion to unseal. Snip: "The U.S. government claims Indymedia hard drives were seized as part of an international 'criminal terrorism investigation,' and thus the U.S. District Court's gag order should be upheld." Link to full text of court's response.
Link to previous BB posts on the matter.
The Register has more: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New AG nominee: White House counsel who called Geneva Conventions "quaint"
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DATE: 11/10/2004 07:57:40 PM
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White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, who once described the Geneva Convention as outdated and "quaint," may soon fill the post left vacant by John Ashcroft this week. Link to SF Chronicle article on the new nominee.
Mr. Gonzales effectively endorsed torture in America's "war on terrorism," as detailed in this Newsweek article:
As a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers -- and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation -- methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."
Link. And the NY Times has this series of excerpts from Mr. Gonzales' legal writings: Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pee Wee Herman has two more movies coming
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DATE: 11/10/2004 10:32:32 PM
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Pee Wee Herman -- whose brilliant and seminal kids' TV show, Pee Wee's Playhouse, is out on DVD, hurrah! -- has announced that he's working on two more Pee Wee movies, one a sequel to Big Top Pee Wee, and the other a feature-length version of Pee Wee's Playhouse. As they say on the Intarwebs, "w00t!"
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jeopardy winner wagers $1337
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DATE: 11/10/2004 10:42:25 PM
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Amy's Robot sez, "Tonight was round 1 of the Jeopardy College Tournament. One of the contestants, Kermin from Carnegie Mellon University, had a commanding lead (well over $10K) going into Final Jeopardy. His final wager had Alex Trebek scratching his head, but Kermin was clearly sending a message to fellow computer nerds. His wager: $1337. For the uninitiated, in 'leetspeak' 1337 translates to 'leet' or 'elite.'"
Link
(Thanks, Amy's Robot!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free Tibet with a Creative Commons license
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DATE: 11/10/2004 10:45:46 PM
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Crazy Yak sez, "We've been inspired to start putting out 'Free Tibet' -related content with Creative Commons licenses.. First up is a sound/image/word account from a recent visit to Tibet by me. Sadly, Tibet still isn't 'free' (politically or in day-to-day life), but it *is* a great model for perseverence of non-violent struggle and compassoin in the face of great adversity."
Link
(Thanks, Crazy Yak!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Top of mind (control)
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DATE: 11/11/2004 05:41:01 AM
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Technology Review interviewed bioethicist Paul Wolpe about neurotechnologies that enable you to interact with computers via your thoughts. (I posted a bit about brain implants a few weeks ago.) A professor of psychiatry, medical ethics, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Wolpe is also the chief of bioethics for NASA.
"A key issue is the implications of these technologies for personal privacy. If there are eventually technologies that externalize internal states, who has a right to access that information? And what about cases where that information could be taken against people’s will, or without their knowledge? Are we going to start implanting electrodes in the brains of the suspected terrorists in Guantánamo Bay? Certainly not yet—there’s nothing we could get out of that. But research is being funded by the Departments of Homeland Security and of Defense for things like lie detection technologies using functional MRI or near-infrared light. These technologies can be used coercively in a way polygraphs, for example, can’t. If you’re not willing to cooperate with a polygraph, there’s really nothing they can do. But you aren’t necessarily going to need to cooperate for some of these technologies; they can, theoretically, be used covertly. They may be used on suspected criminals or enemies of the state, or on you and me when we’re going through airports. Near-infrared technology may someday employ an undetectable spot of light on your forehead. Research on ways to take what used to be private thoughts and make them accessible will challenge our laws and our thinking about what privacy means."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ingesting insects
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DATE: 11/11/2004 06:48:35 AM
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According to a new study from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), edible insects are an excellent source of nutrition for people in Central Africa where traditional proteins are at a premium.
For every 100 grams of dried caterpillars, there are about 53 grams of proteins, about 15 per cent of fat and about 17 per cent of carbohydrates, according to the study. The insects are also believed to have a higher proportion of protein and fat than beef and fish with a high energy value...
“Due to their high nutritional value in some regions, flour made from caterpillars is mixed to prepare pulp given to children to counter malnutrition,” said (FAO researcher Paul) Vantomme. “Contrary to what many may think, caterpillars are not considered an emergency food, but are an integral part of diet in many regions according to seasonal availability. They are consumed as a delicacy.”
Link (via Science Blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: TV series for cellphones coming from Fox
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DATE: 11/11/2004 06:59:36 AM
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Well, this sounds like a first. Twentieth Century Fox said yesterday it will create a unique series of one-minute dramatic shorts based on the TV show "24."The offering will be available exclusively to subscribers of a new high-speed wireless service offered by Vodafone (world's biggest mobile provider).
Vodafone will begin offering the one-minute epidosdes in January in the United Kingdom, coinciding with the start of the fourth season of the show on a satellite V service.
Link (via unwired, thanks richard)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: White phosphorous history
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DATE: 11/11/2004 07:28:18 AM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post about reports that white phosphorous (WP) is among the weapons being used by US Marines in Falluja, reader Marty Busse says:
It has a long history of use as a weapon by the US military, and the legal issues around it are rather contentious.
The book A Higher Form of Killing, by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, contains a very small ref to use of WP in WWII, when there was a dispute about its use between the British and the US: the US was not bound by the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (which the British felt use of WP was prohibited by) and the British yielded to the US opinion. (The US didn't ratify that protocol until 1975, but with some reservations on the use of riot control agents: Link.) And this article refers to the current Geneva Protocol on Incendiary Weapons, which the US is not a party to: Link.
I recommend taking a look at A Higher Form of Killing, which contains all sorts of interesting information and a few very neat photos, including one of the massive apparatus used to create anthrax bombs during WWII.
(It also contains a few rather gruesome photos.)
Link to book.
Image: White phosphorous rounds explode on enemy positions north of the Han River prior to U.N. offensive during March 1951. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More double-entendre beverage brands
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DATE: 11/11/2004 07:34:11 AM
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Apparently, people can't get enough of this sort of stuff. BoingBoing reader graham says, "saw this in an airport (spain i think)." Link to worksafe snapshot of "Lovejuice" drink stand. Link to previous BoingBoing post on this rapidly developing story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ronald McDonald goes pre-op
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DATE: 11/11/2004 07:45:04 AM
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File under "only in Japan." Attractive womanoid clown sans clownface, pimping a hot hot barely legal sandwich sold in Japanese McDonaldses, or whatever the plural form is. Maybe the new McGrand Tomato would taste good with some Boo Bee Juice.
Link to online version of TV commercial, in windows media only. (via)
Update: Sweet mother of special sauce! There's an ambiguously gendered dude version, too. Oh-so-emo. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Grower robot
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DATE: 11/11/2004 07:45:17 AM
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Translator II: Grower is a robot that draws green lines of "grass" on gallery walls at varying heights depending on the amount of carbon dioxide it senses in the room. From creator Sabrina Raaf's artist's statement:
"The metaphoric relation is that grass needs CO2 in nature to grow. Here, my simulated grass needs the breath of human visitors in order to thrive. The height of the 'grass' directly reflects on the human activity or traffic in the space. The more people that visit that space, the more amenable that space is to my machine’s ability to create. The relationship between Translator II: Grower, the space, and the public becomes a metabolic one - one of co-evolution. This piece makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them 'healthy' spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within."
Link (via Near Near Future)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canada wants an Internet levy -- fight back!
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DATE: 11/11/2004 08:50:14 AM
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Canada's efforts to update its copyright laws for the Internet continue apace -- you may remember three separate posts on this last week. Canada Heritage is now recommending an Internet "levy" that will go to a collecting society, on a grounds that everything on the Internet is copyrighted by someone, and the collecting society will gather money for them in exchange for your use of their material.
The problem here isn't really the levy -- blanket license fees, including levies, are actually not a bad way of solving some copyright problems -- but what you get in exchange for it. The levy here would cover all Internet users, including institutions that have the right to re-use work without permission or payment (like schools and libraries), and it won't confer any substantial rights upon you.
That means that even if you pay the levy for the use of copyrighted works on the Internet, you won't get the right to share music, or download movies, or use screenshots in your PowerPoint presentation. When a radio station pays a blanket license fee, it gets the right to play all the music ever recorded. When you pay your levy, you'll get virtually no rights at all -- except the right to get your ass sued off if someone decides that you're being naughty.
The standing committee on Canadian Heritage, which presented this recommendation along with several other potentially disastrous ideas, heard lots of learned, substantive testimony on why this is bad for Canada. It roundly ignored it all. The report that Heritage delivered is a one-sided smear against the Internet and a naked grab for a few giant copyright holders at the expense of new entrants to the market and the general public. The people responsible for this should be removed from their duties -- it's inexcusable.
If Canada is going to extract a levy from Canadians, then Canadians should get something in return: unlimited access to noncommercial, educational, and archival use of copyrighted works on the Internet. A levy without something in return is just an exercise in picking your pocket -- and you shouldn't stand for it. Sign the petition today.
The best answer to copyright reform has always been to maintain balance, the lawyers say. Society wants to maintain creative incentives, so laws are passed to protect creators; but society must also have access to those works to share in their knowledge.
"The danger of WIPO is that it threatens that balance," Mr. Geist said, "and replaces social rights with absolute rights."
There's also the potential for the recommendations to have a direct economic impact.
"The committee ignored solid evidence that the levy on blank CDs [meant to compensate artists for pirated content] would double as a result of the national treatment requirements of the WIPO treaties," Mr. Knopf said. "This could quickly cost Canadians more than $100-million annually.
"We could end up with the worst of all dystopian worlds," he added. "You could pay the levy on a CD and get sued anyway" over the disc's content.
Link
(Thanks, Ian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shaw is censoring Internet feeds and lying about it
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DATE: 11/11/2004 12:18:46 PM
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When customers of Canada's Shaw Cable high-speed Internet service noticed that their filesharing activity had slowed down dramatically, they didn't know what to make of it. Calling the ISP didn't help: Shaw's tech support people swore that they were delivering all the packets they received from their customers, just as you'd expect. After all, who'd want an ISP that picked and chose which of your communications got through -- imagine if the phone company or the post office just silently threw away some of your messages based on secret criteria!
So the Shaw customers went to DSL Reports, a community site for posting about DSL and other high-speed providers, and they found that they were not alone and not imagining things. Lots of Shaw customers were getting really crummy performance out of their Internet connections.
Then someone claiming to be a Shaw insider posted an explanation: Shaw had secretly installed a packet-filter on its network that was using hidden rules to silently discard some of its customers' packets. And they'd instructed their tech people to lie about it when customers called in and asked.
It might have been a fake, but not long after, DSL Reports got a letter from Shaw's lawyers telling them that this was confidential info from a Shaw employee and that they'd be sued if they didn't take it offline, so it looks like its true (says DSL Reports, "Needless to say, we've never bent over for an ISP upset at bad publicity, or forked over anyones identity, and we're not about to start.")
Here's the facts, then:
- Shaw is indiscriminately censoring its customers' Internet feeds. It's not blocking infringing files (hell, Shaw can't even know for certain what files are and aren't infringing for each customer), it's blocking protocols, applications used to transmit and receive tens, hundreds of millions of public-domain, copylefted and non-copyrightable works.
- Shaw is lying about censoring its customers' Internet feeds.
- Shaw is threatening to sue people who tell the world about its lies.
Are you a Shaw customer? Do you still want to be, in light of the above?
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Strange curve of freedom vs terrorism
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DATE: 11/11/2004 01:06:42 PM
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Kevin sez: No freedom and high freedom don't produce terrorists, but intermediate freedom does; more than poverty.
"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.
Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.
Like those with much political freedom, nations at the other extreme - with tightly controlled autocratic governments - also experienced low levels of terrorism.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Best sf site on the net spawns a novel
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DATE: 11/11/2004 01:21:15 PM
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Futurefeedforward is the best science fiction site on the Internet. It consists of fictituous, humourous (and I do mean *humourous* -- side-splitting, in fact) news articles from the future. It's been on hiatus for far too long, but it's back, and there's now a Futurefeedforward novel in the works, which is the best news I've heard in ages. The author's posted the first chapter, which starts with a long and totally excellent parody of a software click-through license:
YOU ARE HEREBY GRANTED THE FOLLOWING RIGHTS:
* The right to read once, in its entirety, the BOOK.
* The right to store in any biological storage device a derivative work in the form of a personal memory or recollection of the BOOK and its contents.
* The right to advise others to purchase for themselves their own licenses for use of the BOOK.
* The right to repeat aloud, without the aid of technical means of amplification—including but not limited to megaphones, public address systems, streaming audio, and cupped hands—passages from the BOOK not to exceed three (3) consecutive sentences, or a total of eight (8) sentences.
* The right to a living wage and to a secondary and post-secondary education of modest quality.
* The right to purchase products not produced or manufactured by the COMPANY, including any products necessary to personal hygiene or nutrition, but excluding Big Mac brand sandwiches and any item fairly characterized as a "fresh wipe."
* The right to walk here and there for purposes such as you determine.
And it just gets better from there, as the story rockets forward in a scene that combines the best of Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and The Onion:
I wore a gray suit to my first deposition, a shapeless, off-the-rack sort of a number festooned with cargo pockets and illogical darts. 100% Worsted wooline. Summer weight. Hand stitched. 38 Regular. $49.95 at the GAP I passed on my way in. I left my old pants in the dressing room. They recycle them. Rebuild and recertify. That sort of thing. Pre-owned pants. I think they have that.
It took me longer than I expected to find the place. All of the exits seemed to be for an enchanted wood. 318b: Deerlick; 318c: Blue Mountain; 318d: Beaver Meadows. I was looking for Brosnan Parkway. It dead-ends into Fishglass just short of the exit. No sign. Nothing.
The place was in a strip mall: Denny's, Donut Star, Ringo's Modified Produce, Fantastic Wok. It was a Deposition Lounge. I've heard that On The Record has better food (fried finger waffles, little ginger pies), but the Lounge generally has plusher seats and the private rooms are quite a bit more reRecord is out in the Valley.
100K PDF Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vending Machine Hamlet
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DATE: 11/11/2004 04:05:59 PM
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Hie thee to a gumball machine!
Shakespeare probably didn't have a toy in mind for the title role when he penned his vengeful tale. But that was before a frustrated, 20-something actor decided it was time someone performed classical theater with a cast that can fit in a suitcase. Tiny Ninja Theater - now an international touring company - is presenting its latest production at Performance Space 122 (PS122) in Manhattan this month. "Hamlet" is the third major Shakespeare work the plastic cast has taken on, having already conquered "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" since its debut in 2000. A simple principle guides the troupe: "There are no small parts, only small actors."
"They don't complain, they're very hard workers," deadpans Mr. Weinstein on opening night, Oct. 28, after shedding the dark shirt and overalls he wears over street clothes for the performance. "Sometimes you can push them too hard. But they'll leave you in the lurch, too.... If I forget a line, they're not going to cue me, you know?
"
Link to CSM story, Link to Tiny Ninja Theater website (thanks Susannah!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Futurephone-To-Podcast:
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DATE: 11/11/2004 04:10:07 PM
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Warren Ellis says:
If you've got a podcast grabber like iPodder, aim it at this link. And you should grab a .3gp video, shot with the Nokia 7610 cameraphone, that I shot in North Beach, San Francisco a couple of weeks ago while waiting for Laurenn McCubbin to pick me up in her little chariot. .3gp is viewable in a current version of Quicktime -- older versions will probably call out for the .3gp plugin. Obviously, this isn't going to be much use if you have the iPodder-iTunes-iPod direct filling set up. But it illustrates how easily you can shoot video, dump it into a file and broadcast it.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Rape of Nanking" author Iris Chang found dead
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DATE: 11/11/2004 07:40:54 PM
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BoingBoing reader Brent says:
Iris Chang, the acclaimed author of The Rape of Nanking was found dead today of an apparent self inflicted gun-wound in Northern California. The importance of her book cannot be overstated, and it's a true loss. Rumors, of course, are already flying that it may not have been suicide, but murder because of her next book which looked at American forces in Bataan. Rumors of course are rumors, and she was known for suffering from depression.
Snip from San Jose Mercury News coverage:
[Ignatius Ding, a retired engineer and personal friend] remembers her study, the room where she wrote, as "being like a shrine," its walls festooned with photos of Nanking atrocities, maps and documents."She would sit in there and just look at all those photographs,'' Ding said. "She was like a zombie.'' (...) Chang also wrote Thread of the Silkworm, a 1995 book about a Chinese scientist who was deported and later went on to create China's missile and space program.
Link (reg required, or try this)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Inexplicably weird NSFW website du jour
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DATE: 11/11/2004 08:20:29 PM
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This website belonging to a self-proclaimed "sexual scientist" in Boca Raton reads like a schizoid cross between a Dr. Bronner's soap label and Dear Penthouse.
# "Welcome to the Orgasm & BrainWash Engineering Center where BrainWash is defined as an alternation of gene and enzyme expression in your 3 brains - the head, gut and pelvic cavity."
# "We have a complete orgasm solution for the loving couples under the heaven and on the earth, maybe under the earth too if they are alive."
Link. Don't miss the tinfoil-beanie-cap prosaic brilliance of this item in Dr. Lin's fuck-FAQ: "Vibrator - the Weapon of Mass Destruction or Pleasure?" Link. The good doctor also weighs in on such topics as animal copulation and electron sex. (via MeFi).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Asimov's magazine on DRM, copyright and Creative Commons
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 11/12/2004 12:22:21 AM
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My pal and mentor James Patrick Kelly is a Hugo-award-winning science fiction writer and the Internet columnist for Asimov's science fiction magazine. Last spring, we did a long interview about DRM, ebooks, Creative Commons and the future of reading and copyright. Jim has turned that conversation into a pair of excellent columns aimed at explaining this stuff to his lay audience, and the second one just hit the net and the newstands.
Are DRM schemes hurting my career? I suppose the answer depends on how one defines a career. Is my career the business model though which I earn the princely sums (not!) that I am paid to commit prose in public? Is my career the collection of all the sentences I have ever typed that have gone on to be published, either in ink or in digits, even if they are now out of print? Is it the size of my readership, even if many of you have just stumbled across my stuff here in the pages of Asimov’s? Or is it my reputation among readers who remember my work and would look for more Kelly stories if they weren’t too hard to acquire?
The way I see it, readers and rep are what really matter to a writer. Dollars should follow from a satisfied readership, although exactly how this happens in these times of technological and economic innovation is not immediately apparent, alas. I do believe that the net has irretrievably compromised twentieth-century notions of intellectual property and that no amount of DRM shenanigans is going to turn back the copyright clock.
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video from Cory's talk in Norway
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DATE: 11/12/2004 02:07:52 AM
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I just gave a talk on European copyright threats to libraries, digital authors and academics at the Digital and Social conference in Bergen, Norway. Within minutes of my talk finishing, the video was online!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Back seat to the Hummer
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DATE: 11/12/2004 05:12:03 AM
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The International Truck and Engine Corporation and the US Army are showing off the oxymoronically-named Smart Truck 3, the replacement for the Humvee. The beast weighs 3,000 pounds more than the H2 and is three inches taller and four feet longer. Amazingly though, it apparently guzzles less gas. From the Independent:
"The army also wants the vehicles to be marketed to other customers such as government agencies or regular Joes who only feel right using a stepladder to get behind thewheel.
The commercial version would not have the electronics designed to detect anthrax, the Kevlar armouring on the underside, the night-vision cameras and the 25-inch LCD touch-screen computer monitors."
Link (Thanks, David Steinberg!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Staged in-game murder photos
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DATE: 11/12/2004 05:18:15 AM
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The White Room is a series of "photos" generated with the game Max Payne 2, documenting a staged in-game murder. Check it out: "By transforming the game environment into a ready-made urban studio space, the objects and interiors were altered using the in-game weapons with the gore from dead enemies being used to 'paint' the sets before being unceremoniously blasted out of view and the scene captured. The events implied never happened in the game, they are not representations of 'real-life' crimes nor are they illustrations of fictional crime stories. These are silent witnesses, containers demanding context, they are waiting places."
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(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Greetings, from prison!
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DATE: 11/12/2004 05:20:45 AM
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In the UK, the Dorset Police is sending postcards from prison to convicted criminals. From the BBC News:
The initiative is designed to cut the number of house burglaries in the county by warning criminals of their fate if they re-offend. The message on the reverse of the cards reads: "If you don't want to end up here... stop offending!"
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Benoit Mandelbrot
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DATE: 11/12/2004 05:37:26 AM
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New Scientists has an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who coined the term fractal and indirectly turned on the public to self-similarity and chaos theory in nature. He turns 80 next week.
What is it like seeing the Mandelbrot set emblazoned on T-shirts and posters?
I'm delighted. I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities - and not for the common mortal - was a very bad idea.
Even though most people view it as a beautiful image and ignore the underlying mathematics?
That's right. Yet there is nothing more to this than a simple iterative formula. It is so simple that most children can program their home computers to produce the Mandelbrot set.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites: photoblogging Falluja
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DATE: 11/12/2004 05:44:21 AM
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: A new tech eye on in-theater piracy
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DATE: 11/12/2004 07:30:21 AM
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Avast, ye plunderers! In the following story I filed for Wired News:
A Florida-based company called Trakstar came to Hollywood earlier this week to demo a new, two-part tech system they say is the solution to the illicit capture of movies in theaters. The system is comprised of two parts. First, a camcorder-spotting tool (which looks like Darth Vader's head) that automatically scans, detects, and photographs recording devices in the audience and warn security of their suspected presence. The second, an audio watermarking tool that creates an invisible sonic tag to lead law enforcement back to the original location, time, and date on which an ill-gotten movie file was obtained.
Because the system involves photographing audience members in the general vicinity of a suspected device -- and it can be triggered by "false positives" like camera-less cellphones -- the technology is likely to alarm privacy advocates. Critics point out that the system would need to be adopted by nearly all theater chains in order to have impact. And the system won't do anything to stop pre-release leaks that originate inside movie studios or post-production facilities themselves.
Some of the company's staff members have backgrounds in military and defense technology, and the PirateEye camcorder-detection system they built was derived from technology originally created for the Defense Department to detect sniper scopes and land mines in combat environments.
During the recent Hollywood demo, not all of the camcorders and pinhole devices planted by participants were spotted by PirateEye during the first demo attempt. Subsequent rounds appeared to locate all of the devices, but also caught more than one "false positive," including one participant's cell phone, which contained no camera, but a light-emitting display. Gladstone said future refinements to the system, which is still in development, would improve accuracy before commercial release.
But because the PirateEye system photographs the area near any object that triggers a positive response from the system -- and that area may include innocent audience members who simply happen to be seated next to the suspected device -- the technology will likely generate protest among privacy advocates.
Link to Wired News story
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Legal train wreck
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DATE: 11/12/2004 11:10:05 AM
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A Jeanette, Pennsylvania woman is suing Norfolk Southern railroad because a train hit her when she was walking along the tracks. Patricia M. Frankhouser suffered a broken finger, cuts, and pain. From Pittsburgh Live:
"Defendant's failure to warn plaintiff of the potential dangers negligently provided plaintiff with the belief she was safe in walking near the train tracks," the suit states.
The filing does not state why Frankhouser failed to hear the oncoming train and get out of the way.
(Thanks, Jessica Hemerly!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Malcolm Gladwell talks about why opinions are often useless
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DATE: 11/12/2004 01:26:27 PM
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New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell gave a talk at PopTech about a subject in his forthcoming book on human nature. This MP3 file has some great stuff in it about Herman-Miller's Aeron chair (which everyone hated when they first saw it but has gone on to become the best selling office chair and winner of lots of design awards) and Pepsi vs. Coke ("sip tests" are no good because people like sweeter drinks if they're having only a sip, but they prefer less sweet if they are drinking a whole can).
I thought the paradox of the triangle test Gladwell talks about is especially interesting. If you give a person two unmarked glasses, one containing Pepsi and the other containing Coke, they'll have an 80% change of being able to tell which is which. But if you introduce a third glass, containing either Coke or Pepsi, they odds that they'll be able to identify the odd drink is reduced to 33%, or chance.
Lots of excellent stuff in this half-hour talk. I can't wait for the book.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: High schoolers singing Dylan's "Masters of War" visited by Secret Service
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DATE: 11/12/2004 01:30:39 PM
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Snip from ABC News story:
Parents and students say they are outraged and offended by a proposed band name and song scheduled for a high school talent show in Boulder this evening, but members of the band, named Coalition of the Willing, said the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. The students told ABC News affiliate KMGH-TV in Denver they are performing Bob Dylan's song "Masters of War" during the Boulder High School Talent Expose because they are Dylan fans. They said they want to express their views and show off their musical abilities.
But some students and adults who heard the band rehearse called a radio talk show Thursday morning, saying the song the band sang ended with a call for President Bush to die. Threatening the president is a federal crime, so the Secret Service was called to the school to investigate. Students in the band said they're just singing the lyrics and not inciting anyone to do anything.
The 1963 song ends with the lyrics: "You might say that I'm young. You might say I'm unlearned, but there's one thing I know, though I'm younger than you, even Jesus would never forgive what you do … And I hope that you die and your death'll come soon. I will follow your casket in the pale afternoon. And I'll watch while you're lowered down to your deathbed. And I'll stand o'er your grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Robodump 1.0 - an excellent prank
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DATE: 11/12/2004 02:05:15 PM
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Kevin Kelm made a robot that looks like someone taking a dump. You can listen to the soundtrack at his site.
RoboDump is a robot. Sort of. And it poops. Sort of. Forever. A horrible, never-ending bowel movement complete with straining grunts, horrific gas, splashes, and pee sounds.
I snuck RoboDump into the men's room at the office. Unfortunately, today turned out to be the day of a board meeting. Whoops! It still went over well; the office was abuzz all morning with gossip about the guy in the bathroom. Several people theorized it was the CFO. The janitor commented to someone in the hallway that he wanted to clean the restroom but "this guy's been in there all morning."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dragon Optical Illusion
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DATE: 11/12/2004 02:40:25 PM
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This little paper dragon is folded in such a way that when you turn it, it appears as though it is turning its head to face you. I guess it's like those negative busts at the Haunted Mansion. The video for this is neat. Link (via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Eat less, breathe more, lose weight
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DATE: 11/13/2004 03:15:56 AM
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Professor Richard Muller, who teaches the famed "Physics for Presidents" course at UC Berkeley, wrote a column in this month's Technology Review about the physics of gluttony.
Let me address this issue by invoking another physics principle: conservation of mass. More specifically, let me talk about the conservation of carbon atoms. When you digest food, its carbon atoms enter your blood. Unless they are expelled from your body, they add to your weight. But here is the salient observation: the only effective way your body has to get rid of digested carbon is to combine it with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, and then expel it through your lungs. Unless you breathe out the carbon, you gain weight.
Here are some numbers, taken from books on exercise physiology. Fat, protein, and sugar all contain about 0.1 gram of carbon per food calorie consumed. So if you digest 2,000 calories of food (a typical daily diet for adults) then you take in about 200 grams of carbon. At rest, each breath exhales about 0.5 liter of air containing about 1 percent carbon, for about five milligrams per breath. After a day at 12 breaths per minute, you get rid of about 120 grams of carbon. That’s less than you ate, so you’ll gain weight.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: RE/Search Television
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DATE: 11/13/2004 03:32:14 AM
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Our friends at seminal underground publisher RE/Search are launching a television show on San Francisco public access! The premiere of "The Counter Culture Hour" with host V.Vale is tonight at 6:30pm (and every second Saturday of the month) on Access San Francisco, Channel 29.
"Now is your chance to see V. Vale interview Dirk Dirksen, Mabuhay Gardens impresario from 1974-1984--early punk rock! With rare photos and footage - mostly in the first ten minutes, so don't be late! Be ready to sit for an uninterrupted hour for this riveting show. Stay through the final segment: The Mutants on stage with Dirk at the Mabuhay circa 1978 starting their last public performance of 'Insect Lounge.'
Also includes a 'Counterculture Show-n-Tell' with Yoshi from Japan telling about his "incredibly strange book collection" --very 'amusing'""
Developed by Marian Wallace and Marian Wilde, the show is a work-in-progress that, with your help, could air all over the country. RE/Search says they "are looking into syndication to other areas and are interested in contact information for your town's public access station."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBC Micro emulator for the GBA
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DATE: 11/13/2004 05:59:11 AM
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PocketBeeb is an emulator for the old BBC Microcomputer (yes, the British Broadcasting Corporation used to have Acorn manufacture a "public-service" PC for them, which in one reason why the UK has so many ass-kicking games programmers today), that runs on the Game Boy Advance. I loved this from the release notes: "Basic, Acorn DFSi, OS 1.2 roms (c) 1981 Acorn Computers Ltd. Used without permission... but then who would you ask?"
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fighting spam shouldn't mean fighting free speech
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DATE: 11/13/2004 06:03:31 AM
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My cow-orkers at EFF, Annalee Newitz and Cindy Cohn, have co-authored a brilliant white-paper on how spam-fighting is endangering the ability of nonprofit mailing-list operators to send email to people who ask for it.
MoveOn.org is a politically progressive organization that engages in online activism. For the most part, its work consists of sending out action alerts to its members via email lists. Often, these alerts will ask subscribers to send letters to their representatives about time-sensitive issues, or provide details about upcoming political events. Although people on the MoveOn.org email lists have specifically requested to receive these alerts, many large ISPs regularly block them because they assume bulk email is spam. As a result, concerned citizens do not receive timely news about political issues that they want. Often, MoveOn.org's staff doesn't discover that the mail isn't getting through for days or weeks, and even when it does, ISPs respond slowly to "unblock" requests or refuse to explain why email has been confiscated. Although ISPs may have the best of intentions, what we see in this scenario—one that is all too common—is free speech being chilled in the service of blocking spam.
In their zeal to stop spam, many organizations and companies are blocking the delivery of wanted messages, especially those sent through email lists. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most blocking processes are not transparent to the email sender or recipient, and email users are generally given little or no control over which emails are blocked. Instead, system administrators, creators of spam-blocking tools, and ISPs all too often attempt to predict what mail a recipient does and does not want. As a result, email users rarely receive all legitimate messages sent to them.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World run by pirates photoshopping contest
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DATE: 11/13/2004 06:05:32 AM
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Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest is on a theme near to my heart: if pirates ran the world.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Aschroft: judges shouldn't uphold the Constitution
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DATE: 11/13/2004 06:09:18 AM
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John Ashcroft, the former Attorney General of the United States of America, has given a public, blistering critique of judges who strike down the Bush administration's policies as unconstitutional.
"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said...
"Courts are not equipped to execute the law. They are not accountable to the people," Ashcroft said.
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(via Lawgeek)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Save Tomorrowland!
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DATE: 11/13/2004 06:13:28 AM
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The editors of SaveDisney have written an open letter to Matt Ouimet (President of Disneyland Resort) and Jay Rasulo (President of Walt Disney Theme Parks), calling on them to save the submarine ride and bring back Tomorrowland. After years of a Tomorrowland renovation turning Disneyland into the happiest construction site on earth, Tomorrowland is still moribund, boring -- a place where two of the main attractions are a video arcade and a down-at-the-heels second-rate Comdex trade-show-floor.
What was once a gleaming futuristic utopia -- with an amazing kinetic energy from its various transportation vehicles above, on and below the Earth's surface -- has become a rundown has-been-land due to the inadequately budgeted Tomorrowland '98 project that essentially stripped-bare what had been one of Disneyland's most popular areas...
The infrastructure for these marvels remains largely intact. What a shame it would be to pass on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve Walt's 1959 wonders for future generations. Walt's fleet of submarines, once his pride and joy -- were built to last, and have survived to date. But the clock is ticking...
We at SaveDisney.com would like to support the restoration of Submarine Voyage -- whether its a retooling into a more-current Finding Nemo storyline, or a simple refreshing and rededication of the classic attraction.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show clips from last week
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DATE: 11/13/2004 06:17:59 AM
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Lisa Rein has posted four more clips from last week's Daily Show, a grab bag of Stewart and co's best bits:
Fallujah Assualt, 13.1MB Mov Link, The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, 13.9MB Mov Link, Salem Mass reforming its witch-burning reputation, 22.8MB Mov Link, Lewis Black on the election result, 6.5MB Mov Link
(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Notebooks made from cheesy hardcovers
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DATE: 11/13/2004 06:25:52 AM
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ExLibrisAnonymous is one of my favorite sources of cool junk from the Internet. They buy crappy library hardcover books of childrens' stories, teacher's manuals, and dull nonfiction titles, and spiral bind the front and back covers around a sheaf of blank white paper, throwing in some of the plates or pages from the original book in the middle. At $11 each with shipping, they're a great gift item. The store just posted a bunch of new "titles" today, and I bought six as Xmas gifts.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyfighter's book-fair in Montreal
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DATE: 11/13/2004 07:18:03 AM
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Montreal is hosting The Salon du Livre Libre, a copyfighter's answer to the mainstream "Salon du livre de Montreal," 18 - 22 November 2004 at Cafe Utopik (522, rue Ste-Catherine est)
The Salon du Livre Libre, an open book fair organized by Cogitateurs
Agitateurs will take place from the 18th to the 22nd of November at Cafe
Utopik, from noon to 10PM each day. Organized in response to the Salon
du livre de Montreal, the event will inform the public about media
concentration, copyright law, small-scale publishing and Open Content.
Visitors to the Salon will be able to read free and public domain books
and download them to CD-ROM. In addition, there will be conferences and
panel discussions on freedom of information in an age of media
concentration and commoditized culture. A collection of theoretical and
analytical works revolving around the issue of Intellectual Property
regimes will be published for the occasion, as well as a collection of
original artwork. Entrance and all activities are free of charge.
Link
(Thanks, Robin!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Girl found inside pinata
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DATE: 11/13/2004 07:31:47 AM
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Border officers inspection a car coming into the US from Mexico discovered a little girl stuffed into a Powerpuff Girls knockoff pinata.
"Officers began to take the piñatas out of the back seat, and one [of the several pinatas in the car] seemed to be much heavier than the others," said Vince Bond, a spokesman for U.S. Customs & Border Protection. "This one had a little girl of approximately 4 or 5 years of age inside it."
The girl's mother also was found, curled up inside the car's trunk, and the girl's brother, who is about 9 years old, was found underneath the collapsible back seat.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cloth speakers
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DATE: 11/13/2004 03:39:10 PM
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These bendable, foldable speakers from Mikasa Shoji Co. of Japan are made from cloth woven with copper wire, polyester fiber and magnets. When the cloth vibrates, sound is produced. Evidently, this isn't the first time someone's created cloth speakers -- but these sure look sweet. As if you could wear them around your neck, like a sonic choker. Link (thanks, Beverly)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: earworm zen
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DATE: 11/13/2004 03:48:26 PM
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* wordspy: earworm
* badgers
* peanut butter jelly time
* lalala
* taters
* chocolate
* bounce the pudding
* llama
* weeeeee
* bananaphone
* spoken word bananaphone
* a cautionary tale
* maim that tune
* wikipedia: earworm
Image: It's peanut butter jelly time. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: RIP, ODB
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DATE: 11/14/2004 01:20:43 AM
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Rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard, a founding member of Wu Tang clan, has died. Link (thanks Sean)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FCC thinks it has authority over PCs and everything that can play a show
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DATE: 11/14/2004 03:37:45 AM
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Public Knowledge, EFF and others are suing the FCC, arguing that it doesn't have the authority to impose the Broadcast Flag rule. The Broadcast Flag says that anyone who makes a device to receive digital television signals has to get all its recording and output technologies approved by the FCC, and the FCC will withhold approval from all technologies save those that encrypt the shows and keep you from doing what you want with them.
Susan Crawford has posted some very cogent analysis of the FCC's position in the case -- the Commission is arguing that it doesn't just have jurisdiction over things for receiving shows -- it can regulate anything that can play a show that originates on cable or the airwaves.
The thing is, this rule doesn't merely affect TV receiving equipment. It affects everything that RECEIVES digital files from TV receiving equipment as well -- every device inside any home network. It affects the open-platform PC. It's a sweeping rule. And now FCC's jurisdiction to enact this rule is being argued in sweeping terms.
Why should we care about all of this? We should care because if the FCC has the power to act on anything that has something to do with communication, we have only the FCC's self-restraint to rely on when it comes to all internet communications. We should care because we want open platforms and open communications to continue. We should care because the future of the internet is at stake -- the FCC will use its "ancillary jurisdiction" to impose "social policies" on any services that use the internet protocol, and will point to its broadcast flag action as support for its jurisdictional claims.
Link
(Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Badly behaved RSS readers gobble bandwidth
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DATE: 11/14/2004 03:43:18 AM
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Glenn Fleishman has posted some analysis of the impact of RSS aggregators on his blogs' bandwidth use. A well-behaved aggregator should always check to see if the file it's after has been updated before it gets a copy of it, but lots of badly designed aggregators mindlessly pull the same file a couple times an hour (or more), and once you've got ten or a hundred thousand of these pointing at your RSS, going 24/7, it can get awfully expensive. Boing Boing's RSS stats are pretty scary too -- check out the log analysis.
I did a quick look at which aggregators represent the most traffic, and a very small number of users employing lwp-trivial, a perl-based HTTP query system, appear to be using over 10 percent of my RSS bandwidth! Time to fix their wagons, to be sure. It makes sense that various Mozilla browsers that have RSS support are using about 15 percent. NetNewsWire makes a very strong showing of 10 percent of usage lately.
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(Thanks, Glenn!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Animation made from graffiti stencils all over town
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DATE: 11/14/2004 03:47:13 AM
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An artist created a small animation of a robot walking, then rendered each frame as a stencil. Then s/he went around town and sprayed the stencil on walls, lamp-posts, etc, and photographed each one. When all the photos are played back in sequence, it creates the animation, but with a wildly flickering background of cityscapes that is absolutely wonderful to behold.
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(via Plastic Bag)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RadioPod lets you auto-synch Internet radio with your iPod using RSS
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DATE: 11/14/2004 03:48:52 AM
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Ben Hammersley has just released an app called RadioPod, which lets you automatically grab RSS feeds listing streamed audio from the Internet, convert the streams to MP3, and synch them to your iPod.
I’ve cobbled together a server app, RadioPod, to record streaming radio stations, convert them to MP3s, and then provide an RSS 2.0 feed for a PodCasting application to download and then throw into iTunes ready for my iPod. I’m using it for The Today Programme off BBC Radio 4 every morning. It’s jolly nice to walk the dogs and listen to James Naughtie.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cigar review that made me laugh aloud
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DATE: 11/14/2004 03:51:57 AM
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Ben Hammersley's blog is sponsored by a cigar company, and in exchange for their sponsorship, he occasionally reviews one of their stogies. But his reviews aren't standard cigar-mag fare: Ben's reviews are hairy-chested, gonzo-hyperbolic laugh-riots that make me wish I still smoked (at least cigars!).
Basically: fuck me, this is a good smoke. But it’s strong enough to stun a rabid ox, with a punch and a nicotine high like you’ve had your guts pulled clean with a loofah. All in all, then, rather pleasant. I smoked mine on a basically empty belly, and almost passed out. Powerful stuff.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO: make a free TiVo-oid BitTorrent service
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DATE: 11/14/2004 03:54:44 AM
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On Pealco.net, a recipe for automatically grabbing your favorite TV shows by BitTorrent as soon as they are put online -- the author calls it "something like Tivo, but free."
I’m bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they’re on and when I do, they’re already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to Suprnova and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn’t it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would.
The are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what’s happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free.
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(via Waxy)
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TITLE: Bloody chainsaw Nintendo controller
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DATE: 11/14/2004 03:58:19 AM
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There's a chainsaw-shaped controller for the Nintendo GameCube, inteded for use with the new Resident Evil game. It's spattered with fake blood and emits chainsaw noises, but it also has all the buttons it needs to sub in for your regular GameCube controller.
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Unsecret Society
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DATE: 11/14/2004 11:39:00 AM
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The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn aims to make a century-old occult tradition of magick less, well, hidden:
"The revelation of the once-secret Hermetic symbols and philosophies that are the foundation of the Golden Dawn's system has long since occurred, yet we still see Lodges swearing their Aspirants to absolute secrecy with mighty oaths of death and destruction, if they dare to reveal to the uninitiated the "secret knowledge" which the uninitiated could buy cheaply at a used book store. We see no reason to follow this defunct and even harmful approach.
Instead, following the demonstrably advantageous practice of the Open Source Software movement, we build our Order on the sources of knowledge that are accessible to anyone. Our sources are already open; we simply affirm this obvious fact. We have no "secrets" to conceal, in particular those that have already been revealed. And in any case, the era of artificial secrecy is at an end. Ours is the Information Age, and we embrace it fully. Therefore we ordain and establish our order as the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn."
Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Dog Toy or Marital Aid?
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DATE: 11/14/2004 11:49:02 AM
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A fun quiz. Although I'd argue that some of these devices could be dual purpose.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show clips from Nov 9
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DATE: 11/14/2004 11:32:31 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted three clips from the November 9th episode of the Daily Show:
- Interview with Richard Branson
- Lewis Black on the New Republicans
- Ed Helms on martial law and impending elections in Iraq
39MB ZIP Link with Quicktime files
(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
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TITLE: Bounty-raising for encrypted, private P2P software
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DATE: 11/14/2004 11:40:17 PM
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Downhill Battle is one of the best, most effective group of copyfighters on the net, fast turning into a MoveOn for the P2P wars. They've just posted a fundraising campaign to raise a bounty for software authors who extend the "Gaim" encrypted instant messaging protocol -- which is Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License -- to add filesharing to it. Doing so would make it nearly impossible for the recording and movie industries to run file-sharers who used the system to ground, effectively cloaking users' activities from the industry and from network administrators and ISPs who've been co-opted into enforcing copyright for entertainment companies. I just put $100 into the fund. This is an important piece of software and it needs to exist.
We propose an extension to the Gaim chat client that lets users do gnutella-style search & download filesharing, where search requests propagate out to trusted buddies, buddies of buddies, etc. This approach has several advantages. First, people will be more altruistic sharing with friends and won't be as worried about RIAA/MPAA lawsuits. At the same time, because they can share with friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends, they'll often be searching a very huge library. This software will be just as simple as an IM client, and it will be easy for people to invite friends (so it spreads virally). No other piece of filesharing software is this well positioned to become hugely popular with the average, not-so-knowledgeable, Windows user. As a bonus, it will convert many users to using the open-source and ad-free client Gaim--a good thing in itself. The immediate goal is creating a working version that is extremely simple but very modular and easy to modify or expand upon.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's latest short story -- CC-licensed, on Salon, all about gaming
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DATE: 11/14/2004 11:51:32 PM
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It's been a long time since I've written any short stories. I've been concentrating on novels and on nonfiction, and the blog, and the dayjob. But short stories are my first and best love: writing them is amazing mental exercise and I'm always pleased with the result.
Salon has just published a brand-new short story of mine, called "Anda's Game," which is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two -- netting them about $0.02 an hour -- but this is a very different proposition indeed.
There are a lot of firsts in this story:
- It's the first story I've written since moving to the UK, and the story is told from the point of view of an English girl
- It's the first in a series of stories I'm writing that riff on the titles of famous SF novels and stories (this one is a play on Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" -- also coming are "I, Robot," "The Man Who Sold the Moon," "Jeffty is Five," and "True Names" -- this last with Ben Rosenbaum). This started as a response to Ray Bradbury's assertion that Michael Moore was a "thief" and a "horrible human being" for using the word "Fahrenheit" in the title of his last movie -- but now I'm just finding it fun to deconstruct the stories of the writers who came before me.
- It's the first story that Salon has ever published under a Creative Commons license -- which means that you can put it on a P2P network or email it to a friend without running afoul of the law.
I'm really proud of this one: I read it to an audience at the WorldCon last September and the response was really warm and enthusiastic. I hope you like it too:
"Get down," Lucy said in her headset. "I'm gonna use the BFG."
Every game had one -- the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-arse weapon in the world. Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small fortune in gold and Anda had laughed and called her paranoid, but now Anda helped Lucy set it up and thanked the gamegods for her foresight. It was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired five-metre bolts that exploded on impact. It was a beast to arm and a beast to aim, but they had a nice, dug-in position of their own at the bottom of the hill and it was there that they got the BFG set up, deployed, armed and ranged.
"Fire!" Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim towards the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her point-of-view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on.
"Nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark! Yee-haw!" Lucy called, and Anda laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically, dripping hyper-red blood and ichor.
In her bedroom, Anda caressed the controller-pad and her avatar punched the air and did a little rugby victory dance that the All-Blacks had released as a limited edition promo after they won the World Cup.
Link
Update: Aaman's posted a great review of the story to his blog!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Absinthe Chocolate
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DATE: 11/15/2004 05:13:38 AM
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Two great tastes... My wife just got me some Cioccolato all'assenzio, made by Pastiglie Leone. It's yummy dark chocolate flavored with absinthe. I also like the droopy, blissed-out illustration on the package. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jumbotron of your own
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DATE: 11/15/2004 05:26:50 AM
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The University of Iowa's scoreboard, including Jumbotron, is on the auction block right now with a starting bid of just $10,000.
Link (via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LA photo show with large phonecam blowups from Steve Diet Goedde
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DATE: 11/15/2004 10:30:11 AM
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Sean Bonner and Caryn Coleman, with whom I collaborated to produce the SENT phonecam art show, just launched a new show at their LA gallery sixspace this weekend. Most of the work in"Snapshot" was taken with conventional film and digital cameras -- but one of the participants, Steve Diet Goedde, contributed some beautiful work shot on a relatively low-quality consumer phonecam. What sets his work apart is that these phonecam shots were then blown up to very large-format prints. The end result is powerful and dream-like, and really brings to light the unusual way phonecams pixelate images.
Link to show home page, link to Sean's blog entry, and link to online preview of Steve Diet Goedde's contributions to the show.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fox Network's $1.2M FCC fine based on inaccurate compaint data
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DATE: 11/15/2004 10:34:06 AM
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BB reader Jim (jr) Roberts says,
Jeff Jarvis used the Freedom of Information Act to discover that the $1.2 million fine against the Fox Network for the long cancelled Married With Childred series Married By America was based on a grand total of 90 complaints, 88 of which were identical!
Link (and thanks, Wayne)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Is that an RFID in your Viagra, or are you just happy to see me?
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DATE: 11/15/2004 10:38:33 AM
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BB reader Zach Lipton says,
The New York Times reports that the FDA and drug makers are going to begin using RFID tags on drugs, especially often-counterfitted drugs such as Viagra. Currently, the plan is to only tag the large bottles that pharmacists count out pills from, but the system could be expanded to cover individual retail containers of drugs once prices drop. At that point, you can have the wonderful experience of having your Viagra shout "Hi! I have Viagra in my bag!" every time you walk into a store. After 2007, the FDA may require mandatory RFID tagging of drugs in addition to the voluntary tagging scheme.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mobile music confab in Miami this week
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DATE: 11/15/2004 10:44:53 AM
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Hal Bringman reminds us that the annual Miami Mobile Music Conference starts on November 18, with "more than 400 music, carrier, handset and technology executives" discussing "music-based mobile entertainment and services." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How 'Dungeons' changed the world
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DATE: 11/15/2004 10:58:49 AM
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Peter Bebergal has a wonderful op-ed in today's Boston Globe about the imagination-boosting power of Dungeons and Dragons.
To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a kid's best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden toys and things "they had to make themselves" has now become my own. Looking around at my toddler's room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I want to cry out, "I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!"
Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Interview with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy: "Music is not a loaf of bread."
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DATE: 11/15/2004 11:05:03 AM
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In today's Wired News, I interview Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco about why he feels the record industry's attempts to stamp out filesharing are wrong. The band has a new CD out,
A Ghost is Born, and a new book -- The Wilco Book -- with photos, art, essays and previously unreleased tracks on an accompanying CD (cover image shown here).
WN: What if the efforts to stop unauthorized music file sharing are successful? How would that change culture?
Tweedy: If they succeed, it will damage the culture and industry they say they're trying to save. What if there was a movement to shut down libraries because book publishers and authors were up in arms over the idea that people are reading books for free? It would send a message that books are only for the elite who can afford them.
Stop trying to treat music like it's a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can't be cheap, either.
WN: How do you feel about efforts to control how music flows through the online world with digital rights management technologies?
Tweedy: A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work. Treating your audience like thieves is absurd.
Link to Xeni's Wired News interview with Wilco.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Graphic Novel Review on Seth's "Clyde Fans"
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DATE: 11/15/2004 11:44:10 AM
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Joey Manley of Graphic Novel Review wrote a lengthy and very interesting review of cartoonist Seth's Clyde Fans.
In comics, as in any form of visual narrative, the "talking head" can be deadly when extended beyond a beat or two. Seth solves this problem by refusing to avoid it, by flaunting it, even, and taking it to the extreme: the first half of Clyde Fans: Book 1 consists of one older, heavyset gentleman, name of Abe Matchcard, a retired business owner and traveling salesman, talking to the reader — or not talking at all, just puttering around the house, brushing his teeth, then putting them in his mouth, lighting a cigar, etc., etc. — for about seventy pages.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Two-headed turtle
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DATE: 11/15/2004 01:28:14 PM
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This beautiful two-headed tortoise was born two months ago in a British collector's incuabtor. From a BBC report:
(Owen John) Jones, 66, from Dorchester, said he had named the tortoise Solomon and Sheba as he was not sure what sex it was...
"Both heads eat and sometimes they start on the same piece of food and meet in the middle."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: John Balance, RIP
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DATE: 11/15/2004 01:49:41 PM
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Composer John Balance, co-founder of Coil and member of seminal industrial music groups Psychic TV, 23 Skidoo, and Current 93 died on Saturday. Under the influence of alcohol at home, Balance fell from his first floor landing. He was rushed to the hospital and passed away soon after. He will be missed.
"I don't believe in destroying good mysteries or adding to bad reputations." --John Balance (1962-2004)
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Potlatch: Bay Area literary sf con of great warmth and gusto
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DATE: 11/15/2004 02:25:09 PM
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Potlatch is a West Coast science fiction convention that's one of the friendliest, most interesting cons I've ever attended. It's back in San Francisco this year, March 4-6, 2005 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel International. If I were in still living in the Bay Area, I'd be there for sure.
Potlatch is an all-volunteer, non-profit, literary convention for the readers and writers of speculative fiction. Proceeds benefit Clarion West, an intensive six-week workshop for writers preparing for professional careers in science fiction and fantasy.
At Potlatch, people talk to each other and participate in panel discussions about writing and reading speculative fiction. You'll find conversations at programming events, in Clarion-style writers workshops, in the consuite, in the halls, and in elevators. Never been to a Potlatch before? Get the feel of a Potlatch Panel by reading some of the transcripts of previous Potlatch panels.
Link
(Thanks, Matt!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of zen: how to pack a fresh brain
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DATE: 11/15/2004 03:50:47 PM
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Surreal site of the day: procedures for packing a fresh brain (yours?) for shipment to a brain bank. Re-posting this item, because I forgot to include the Link. Feel free to send fresh brains, I could use one. (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogger Kevin Sites reports on marine shooting unarmed Iraqi prisoner
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DATE: 11/15/2004 03:59:56 PM
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On NBC News this evening, combat correpondent and blogger Kevin Sites reported on an incident in which a U.S. Marine shot dead an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in a mosque in Falluja.
The Iraqi was one of five wounded prisoners left in the mosque after Marines had fought their way in on Friday and Saturday. There was no immediate comment from the Pentagon on Monday's report... The pool report by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites said the mosque had been used by insurgents to attack U.S. forces, who stormed it and an adjacent building, killing 10 militants and wounding the five. Sites said the wounded had been left in the mosque for others to pick up and move to the rear for treatment. No reason was given why that had not happened.
A second group of Marines entered the mosque on Saturday after reports it had been reoccupied. Footage from the embedded television crew showed the five still in the mosque, although several appeared to be already close to death, Sites said. He said one Marine noticed one of the prisoners was still breathing.
A Marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: "He's fucking faking he's dead. He faking he's fucking dead." "The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man's head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast," Sites said. No images of the shooting were shown in the footage provided to Reuters.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Screencap of blogger Kevin Sites' report of Falluja prisoner shooting
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DATE: 11/15/2004 06:23:09 PM
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A video grab of footage referenced in Kevin Sites' report for NBC News shows "a U.S. Marine pointing his assault rifle at a wounded insurgent inside a mosque just before gunfire was heard in Falluja, November 13, 2004... a U.S. Marine shot dead an unarmed and wounded Iraqi prisoner in the mosque." Link to image, Link to archived video and transcript of Kevin's report for NBC News, link to previous BoingBoing post, link to Kevin's blog.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Thanks to idiots with credit cards, spam kingpins rake in $100,000's a month
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DATE: 11/15/2004 10:17:41 PM
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From Tampa Bay Online's coverage of the spammer trial:
As one of the world's most prolific spammers, Jeremy Jaynes pumped out at least 10 million e-mails a day with the help of 16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 1,000-employee company would need. [..] In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out. But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said. "When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview.
Link (Via LinkMachineGo)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Stoplight turns red for speeders
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DATE: 11/15/2004 10:30:42 PM
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The city of Pleasanton, California has come up with a funny way to punish speeders:
[The] city's traffic engineers have created a traffic signal with attitude. It senses when a speeder is approaching and metes out swift punishment. It doesn't write a ticket. It immediately turns from green to yellow to red.
Link (Via Paul Boutin)
UPDATE: Benjamin Leng sez: "In the small german town i grew up, we had one of those for years. A friend of mine found out that when you entered the town with a speed in excess of 160km/h (metric and proud of it), you could pass the light before it coud turn red. So the really bad speeders rushed through this town in a even more insane speed. Human irresponsibility beats well-meaning technology once again."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fast forward
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DATE: 11/16/2004 05:38:52 AM
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Entrants in the Recorderrace in Munich, Germany hack portable tape recorders into mobile vehicles powered by the tape transport motor. Pictured are last year's winners. The second international race takes place on December 12. From the rules:
• The technical principle of the tape recorder has to be preserved. Not allowed are additional drives of whatever source, but only the original devices. No additional energy storage is permitted.
• Only one recorder per vehicle may be used. The bundling of various recorders into one vehicle is not permitted.
• The removal of e.g. the cassette cap is permitted as long as main parts of the body are conserved.
• The vehicle has to be roadworthy for more than one race.
• Bodyworks, design, accessory or advertising is permitted with the exeption of: vivid pets are not allowed as drivers!
• Remote control is not permitted. The vehicle has to be able to drive (roughly) straight on a distance of 15 meters.
• The vehicle has to arrive as started i.e. no components may be left on track.
Link (via Near Near Future)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Phone fetish
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DATE: 11/16/2004 07:20:28 AM
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SmashMyPhone.com sells images and videos of models crushing cell phones with their feet. Beats crushing small animals, anyway.
This site is about trampling, crushing, and smashing telephones. Our models have no mercy and take proper care of the most hated piece of modern technology. We focus on telephones but will also smash other objects, including balloons and other items.
Link (via Fleshbot, and thanks to David Steinberg)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Smoking fights depression?
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DATE: 11/16/2004 07:34:55 AM
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Not really, but Yale psychiatrist Marina Picciotto reports that targeting the brain receptors for nicotine could cut down the time it takes antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft to begin working.
"In this study in mice, she and her colleagues tested the action of antidepressants with and without mecamylamine, a noncompetitive antagonist (blocker) in nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). In a separate study using knockout mice that lack these receptors, they found that the function of the nicotine receptor in the brain was an essential component of the therapeutic action of antidepressants."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Virgin Mary sandwich
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DATE: 11/16/2004 08:15:00 AM
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Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. Starting bid on eBay: $3000
"I made this sandwich 10 years ago, when I took a bite out of it, I saw a face looking up at me, It was Virgin Mary starring back at me, I was in total shock, I would like to point out there is no mold or disingration, The item has not been preserved or anything, It has been keep in a plastic case, not a special one that seals out air or potiental mold or bacteria, it is like a miracle, It has just preserved itself which in itself I consider a miracle, people ask me if I have had blessings since she has been in my home, I do feel I have, I have won $70,000 (total) on different occasions at the casino near by my house, I can show the recipts to the high bidder if they are interested..."
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
UPDATE: Here's an Associated Press article about eBay canceling the first auction of the sandwich because they thought the seller was joking. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Theory of Fun PDF - UPDATED
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DATE: 11/16/2004 08:34:07 AM
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I reivewed Raph Koster's brilliant Theory of Fun book (think of it as an Understanding Comics for games) here before, and now I'm delighted to see that Raph's posted a tremendous, graphic-rich picture-book in PDF format detailing the notions from the game.
4.7MB PDF Link Better 4.7MB PDF Link
(via Wonderland)
Update: We killed a server with this one, there's a mirror of the file here
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: kidssmellbullsh*t.com
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DATE: 11/16/2004 08:40:24 AM
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Tech advocacy group Downhill Battle launched two websites today
The first site -- www.kidssmellbullshit.com features a contest for kids to write a letter or submit a photo about the issue, which will then be sent to [The Business Software Alliance] and [The Motion Picture Association of America]. The winner will receive an iPod Mini. The second site - www.copyrightcurriculum.com - is a collaborative effort to write a public-interest curriculum for teachers that want to address these issues in their classrooms.
The move was to counter private sector and lobbying groups' partisan educational tools that are being forced into public schools. Teachers across the country who use the Weekly Reader in their classroom have been receiving installments of the BSA curriculum in the magazine since September 1st. In addition, the MPAA has hired Junior Achievement to teach a filesharing curriculum that drastically distorts the legal realities of the history of copyright and peer-to-peer filesharing. Kidssmellbullshit.com hosts a letter-writing and mash-up photo contest for school-aged children with the goal of sending a youth-based message to BSA and MPAA about the their thoughts on these new technologies. Other users are allowed to collaboratively edit, filter and mash-up the curriculum materials using the collaborative wiki system.
The second is a slightly more serious page called the Collaborative Copyright and Technology Law Curriculum . This one's for the grownups in the house who want to do some serious ass-whooping.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ceiling ponds made from plastic duck-butts
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DATE: 11/16/2004 08:47:54 AM
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With these duck-undersides from TAP Plastics, you can create a "ceiling pond." It's apparently popular in dentist's offices.
Link
(Thanks, Ron!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Adventure game responses to cursing
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DATE: 11/16/2004 09:26:42 AM
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Something about text adventure games brings out the potty-mouth in me: LOOK UP. GO NORTH. GO WEST. SHIT. Here's a gallery of screengrabs of responses to cursing in classic text adventure games.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Snoop Dog's new track debuts in-game
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DATE: 11/16/2004 09:27:56 AM
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Snoop Dog's new single will debut in a game.
Snoop Dog, always on the cutting edge of music, games and porn, has set a new precedent for the ever-evil music business. His new single, Riders on the Storm, has debuted in Need For Speed Underground 2. The track, produced with the surviving members of The Doors, can only be heard if you buy the game (for now, at least). The article goes on to make the case for future collaborations between the two mediums. It’s a no-lose deal for the music industry, which is a big, old, fat loser. While gaming is a sexy redhead. Our emerging presence in the mainstream just keeps mounting. And, no, I don’t say that with naive glee — more like, worried awe. Hopefully the music biz culture won’t rub off.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Ceramic cup looks like paper coffee cup
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DATE: 11/16/2004 11:15:29 AM
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This looks like a typical deli paper cup for coffee, but it's actually made of ceramic. $12 and it's yours. Link (Via Coolhunting) UPDATE: Mia sez: "Another taste of New York- one-part good design and one part Marie Antoinette milking a cow." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Long Now Foundation seminars on MP3 (and ogg)
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DATE: 11/16/2004 11:57:26 AM
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Here are a bunch of audio files of talks given at the Long Now Foundation. Speakers include Bruce Sterling, Brian Eno, and George Dyson. The suggested donation of $10 per talk is pretty darn steep. I'd say $10 for all the talks would be fair, but pay whatever you think. Link (Thanks, KK!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scenes from Errol Morris' aborted project, The Movie Movie
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DATE: 11/16/2004 12:25:14 PM
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Errol Morris's website is loaded with great stuff. On the front page right now is a clip featuring Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane. (He seems not to know the alleged source of "rosebud," but no matter, he really does have some interesting things to say about the movie.)
The Movie Movie, an aborted project, is based on the idea of taking Donald Trump, Mikhail Gorbachev and others and putting them in the movies they most admire. Isn't it possible that in an alternative universe Donald Trump actually starred in Citizen Kane?
He's also got a bunch of never-before-seen Apple Switch TV commercials, including this one of me I watched for the first time just now.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Viewing all 68,647 New Yorker cartoons on your iPod
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DATE: 11/16/2004 12:53:11 PM
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Kirk McElhearn sez: "What a great idea for the iPod photo (not the lowercase on the word 'photo', as per Apple's change today)! Using it to view cartoons! And not just any cartoons, but the 68,647 cartoons from the New Yorker, available on two CD-Roms with the new Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker book."
Why not use the iPod photo to view cartoons, especially those from the New Yorker? I recently wrote about The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, which is a wonderful book containing some 2,000 cartoons from the New Yorker, but also with more than 68,000 cartoons - every one ever published in the magazine - on two CD-Roms.
So, Perceval's idea is this: why not view the New Yorker cartoons on the iPod photo? Great idea, if you ask me; much better than vacation pictures. The question is, however, can it be done? Are the graphics of the cartoons good enough to view on such a small screen? Are the captions readable?
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bizarre black Lois Lane comic from the 70s
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DATE: 11/16/2004 01:05:09 PM
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boogah sez: "Millionaire Playboy has unearthed a wonderfully absurd bit of comic book history: A comic book where [Superman's girlfriend] Lois Lane goes undercover as a black woman to get information for a story she's trying to do."
The story begins with Lois assigned to do a story on Metropolis's urban area that Lois refers to Little Africa. It seems that all black people refuse to submit to an interview done by Miss Whitey. Young children, old blind ladies, and even people on the street hate white people. With Superman's help Lois is placed inside the Plastimold and the Transformoflux Pack invented by Dahr-Nel, Kryptonian Surgeon. Apparently this machine is meant to change white people to black people. You have to wonder if Superman uses this machine often?
Link Here's a almost-but-not-quite nonsensical interview with the Japanese creator of the Girlfriend's Lap Pillow. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Rubberstamped money
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DATE: 11/16/2004 01:35:48 PM
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Interesting gallery of money that has been rubberstamped with polictical messages.
The Latin motto DEO VINDICE means "God will vindicate us," or something to that effect. This was the motto of the by the Confederate States of America. You will, of course, have noticed the Confederate flag. It seems that someone still carries a grudge about the outcome of the Civil War, given that the stamp was situated to obscure President Lincoln's portrait. Specimen collected in Kerrville, Texas. Image courtesy of Susan W. and Allen M.
Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: To do in LA tonight: RES digital film screening
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DATE: 11/16/2004 02:21:38 PM
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If you're in LA this evening, the RES monthly screening series is back at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood with videos for The Streets, UNKLE, The Faint, Gift of Gab, Swayzak... and new work by Spike Jonze for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Stylewar for Blues Explosion. Some directors will be in attendance. Post-screening afterparty populated by beautiful hipsters wearing important haircuts with whom you'll want to rub elbows (or other parts). Link to ticket purchase site.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MPAA fileswapper lawsuits begin
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DATE: 11/16/2004 02:47:15 PM
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BoingBoing reader Aaman says,
The Motion Picture Association of America has filed the first wave of lawsuits against fileswappers and released a program to detect file sharing. The MPAA also announced it would make available a computer program that sniffs out movie and music files on a user's computer as well as any installed file sharing programs. The organization said the information detected by the free program would not be shared with it or any other body, but could be used to remove any "infringing movies or music files" and remove file sharing programs.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: David Lee Roth, paramedic
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DATE: 11/16/2004 03:04:10 PM
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Former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth, he of the high-flyin' karate kicks, is training to be an emergency care provider in NYC.
Roth, 50, has been riding for several weeks with a New York ambulance crew in training to become a paramedic, The New York Post reported Tuesday. "I have been on over 200 individual rides now," said Roth. "Not once has anyone recognized me, which is perfect for me."
Link (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moral values coming to a freeway sign near you (not)
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DATE: 11/16/2004 03:19:48 PM
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Apparently, some people are taking this hoax/parody seriously:
John Hostettler, the Congressman representing the 8th district of Indiana, has been convinced by local religious groups to introduce legislation in the House that would change the name of an Interstate 69 extension to a more moral sounding number. There are plans to extend the interstate from Indianapolis through southwestern Indiana all the way through Texas into Mexico in the coming years. While most believe this highway will be good for the state’s economy, religious conservatives believe “I-69” sounds too risqué and want to change the interstate’s number.
Link to full text of parody. Twitterpated locals are flooding the poor congressman's office with calls, emails, faxes and the like. Link to non-parody news story. (Thanks, Brian)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: new tech eye watches for in-theater camcorders
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DATE: 11/16/2004 03:33:58 PM
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On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I report on new technology that movie industry officials hope will decrease the number of people using camcorders to make illegal copies of feature films. The "PirateEye" system flashes short pulses of light at the audience, then takes a digital snapshot of the area surrounding any object that appears to be a camcorder or pinhole camera. That area could include innocent audience members, as well as non-camera devices that set off a "false positive" -- and that could spark protest among privacy advocates.
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The emperor has no verbs
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DATE: 11/16/2004 05:27:08 PM
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BoingBoing buddy Mike Outmesguine says,
This Reuters story doesn't "misunderestimate" the growing trend of Dilbert-esque corp-speak at the highest offices in the land. George Bush and Tony Blair are taken to task by author John Humphrys for their consistent use of verbless speech to avoid accountability and debate in political discourse and for pounding the meaning out of words like "freedom" and "democracy" through rampant repetition.
Linkify
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chess set made of wireless tech pieces-parts
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DATE: 11/16/2004 05:34:54 PM
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I mean, as if chess weren't already geeky enough:
"Ingredients: 50 ohm BNC, SMA, and N terminators with various BNC, SMA, N, APC7, F, UHF connectors and inter-series adapters; or any other RF connectors you can find around the house. White gets nickel or stainless steel and black gets gold top pieces. p.s. Dad lost the first game."
Link, and don't miss the awesome living room tournament snapshot. Guaranteed to make any grown-up nerdchild feel homesick. (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tele-hunting
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DATE: 11/16/2004 11:40:17 PM
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A ranch owner in Texas is setting up a Web site enabling hunters to telerobotically aim and fire a .22 rifle at animals on his ranch. From a Reuters report:
The idea came last year while viewing another Web site on which cameras posted in the wild are used to snap photos of animals.
"We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head," he said. Link
Of course, this system is not without precedence. In 1997, I joined Survival Research Laboratories' Mark Pauline and Eric Paulos at a Tokyo art gallery when they demonstrated a Web-based telepresence system to aim and fire their deadly Air Launcher machine at targets in San Francisco. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Roboxotica 2004 in Vienna
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DATE: 11/17/2004 12:44:45 AM
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Former BB guest blogger Johannes Grenzfurthner and his co-conspirators at the monochrom art/tech collective and Shifz are hosting their annual Roboxotica cocktail robotics festival starting this weekend. This year's theme is Beautiful Failure:
"Until recently, no attempts were made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebensraum, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital...
Scientists, researchers, computer geeks and artists from all over the world participate to build cocktail robots and discuss about technological innovation, futurology and science fiction."
Roboxotica has been kind enough to host former BB guestblogger Karen Marcelo of Survival Research Laboratories/DorkbotSF and Dorkbot founder Douglas Repetto for the mechanical festivities.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Smuggling via squid
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DATE: 11/17/2004 01:46:05 AM
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Peruvian police seized 700 kilograms of cocaine that smugglers stuffed inside frozen giant squid for the journey to Mexico and the US. From BBC News:
"The drugs - worth about $17.5m - were sealed in several layers of plastic and other wrapping material and covered in pepper to divert sniffer dogs....
Interior Minister Javier Reategui said that police operations had uncovered a drug-trafficking organisation using a fish-exporting company."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Japanese govt threats silence security researcher
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DATE: 11/17/2004 03:16:45 AM
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A security expert who audited the Japanese National ID Card system and found it to be terribly designed and implemented was prevented from presenting his findings at a technology conference after the Japanese government intervened and threatened the conference organizers.
The Japanese government gave me two options.
1) Do not talk
2) Drastically change your slides to say what they want me to.
When I offered to not use slides at all and give my own opinion they told me that I would not be permitted to speak AT ALL. It is obvious to me that they did not have an issue with my slides or presentation. They were afraid that I would draw attention to problems in JUKI net. Soumushou thinks that they can hide from the issues. They think that if they keep people from speaking about the issues, it will go away. I thought I would be immune from such Japanese government pressures however I underestimated Soumushou's ability to manipulate those around me.
Link
(Thanks, Gohsuke!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grey Video: Beatles/Jay-Zee VIDEO mashup will delight you
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DATE: 11/17/2004 03:17:11 AM
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DJ Danger Mouse came to fame when he remixed the Beatles' "White Album" with Jay-Zee's "Black Album" and called the result the "Grey Album." EMI, who hold the Beatles' copyright, went nuts and threatened to sue anyone who hosted the MP3s. This led to Downhill Battle's Grey Tuesday protest.
The album is stone brilliant. It's at the top of my iTunes playlists and it's what I put on whenever I need a boost. It's made me dig out the White Album again and listen to it with fresh ears. I think it's the most important album of the 21st Century (to date, at least).
Now someone has made a video for one of the Grey Album tracks, "Encore," in which black and white Beatles footage (I'm guessing "A Hard Day's Night") and desaturated footage from a Jay-Zee performance are artfully combined with new footage and CGI (Ringo scratching! John breakdancing!) to make one of the funniest, coolest, and most illegal music videos I've ever seen. Go download it now before the lawsuits start.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Legal threats for linking to mashup
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 11/17/2004 03:26:51 AM
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Waxy has been threatened with a alwsuit by Walt Disney (which holds the rights to Queen's music and trademarks) for linking to a site where you can download the stunningly good Night and the Hip-Hopera, a staggering mashup of Queen's music with basically everything. These are the links that got Waxy threatened:
01 - Precession.mp3
02 - See.mp3
03 - Live.mp3
04 - Bite.mp3
05 - Jazz.mp3
06 - Rock.mp3
07 - Love.mp3
08 - Fight.mp3
09 - Fuck.mp3
10 - Play.mp3
11 - Ride.mp3
12 - Sniff.mp3
13 - Ridicule.mp3
14 - Plan.mp3
15 - Break.mp3
16 - Listen.mp3
17 - Work.mp3
18 - Come.mp3
19 - Expose.mp3
20 - Jerk.mp3
21 - Save.mp3
22 - Stop.mp3
23 - Question.mp3
Here's what Waxy has to say about it:
The irony is that I'm not even hosting the files anymore... The links on my site are all redirected to someone else's server, and have been for weeks. At any rate, I'll be forced to remove the direct links by November 23.
As far as I know, I was the first person to put the DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album on the Web. Now, I see the suppression of artistic freedom again with the Kleptones album, which has always been freely-distributable and never made a dime. It's depressing to think that our horribly broken copyright law means that nobody can legally hear this album or create others like it.
The cease-and-desist is below. The album itself can still be downloaded from the mirrors on the official Kleptones site, but I'm not sure for how long. If anyone has any ideas for creative protest, now's the time.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TiVo sells your fast-forward button to advertisers
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DATE: 11/17/2004 03:30:39 AM
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TiVo has jumped another shark, adding a "feature" to its PVRs that few TiVo customers would have agreed to if they'd been given the choice. When you fast-forward with your TiVo, it will show you banner ads. That's right -- it shows you ads while you're skipping ads. As Matt Haughey puts it, they've "sold your fast-forward button to advertisers." Time to build a MythTV, before they are criminalized.
People get TiVos for different reasons, mostly it's for the time shifting nature, but the close second most loved feature has to be the ability to fast forward through ads. The advertising TiVo has added so far has been minimal impact. The commercial showcases that show up on your main menu aren't that bad and often have good ad shorts and information, but pushing that into the main TV watching interface seems like a spectacularly bad move. No longer are the ads an optional thing you can dig for more, they're soon going to be pushed in front of you when you use a key feature of the product.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: JM Barrie theme-park in a game
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DATE: 11/17/2004 03:36:05 AM
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Players in the online world Second Life have built an astounding JM Barrie theme-park in-game. Wagner James Au writes,
From the Second Life residents who brought us 'Oz' comes 'Neverland', a 48 acre theme park devoted to the world and work of J.M. Barrie, on the 100th anniversary of his classic 'Peter Pan'. Featuring a painstakingly-realistic recreation of fin de siecle London (including a Jack the Ripper-haunted graveyard and a pub with a working dart board), Captain Hook's pirate armada (featuring self-firing cannons), and the Lost Boys' winding roller coaster. Last Friday's entry discussed the genesis of the project, and today's entry goes into the art, craft, and technology of the project-- along with asking the very pointed question, 'Why would a couple dozen talented people freely devote hundreds of hours working on a project that indirectly benefits a for-profit company?'
Link
(Thanks, James!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: I like you
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DATE: 11/17/2004 07:58:46 AM
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I like you. I like you. I almost love you. Link to Flash animation. (Thanks JP)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: iPod with swapped guts on eBay
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DATE: 11/17/2004 09:00:20 AM
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BB reader TeffDogg sez:
Somebody is eBaying an iPod whose guts have been swapped with the innards of what looks like a $2 miniature toy electric guitar. The auction pictures suggest that the iPod was working fine up until its transformation. Bidding is currently at five dollars. I wonder if this will get the Apple fans as angry as the guy who put an Athlon motherboard in a Mac G5 case?
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: GTC Telecom long distance is a rotten company
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DATE: 11/17/2004 09:42:47 AM
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What happened to GTC? It used to be a great cut-rate long distance company. Now they are about as good as monkeys in a dentist's office.
When I first signed up for GTC Telecom a couple of years ago, I was happy with the service. How can you complain about 2.9¢ long-distance with no monthly fees? And it was very easy to contact customer service by phone -- I never had to wait more than 30 seconds for a representative to get on the line.
But a few months ago, I started having problems with GTC. I got a call from a guy claiming to be from GTC who wanted me to give him my credit card number right there on the phone to pay a supposedly outstanding bill. It sounded suspicious, especially because I had signed up to pay my bill automatically through my bank account. So I told him I'd call GTC myself. When I called GTC, they told me that my bill was paid in full. Very strange. I got another call a week or so later, and then another. Each time, I called GTC back and learned that my account balance was zero.
Then suddenly, my long distance service stopped working. Whenever I tried to make a long distance call, I'd get a message saying "The number you dialed is no longer in service." Of course, that was untrue because the numbers I was trying to call were in service, and I could reach them with my mobile phone.
So I called GTC (1-800-486-4030) to see what was going on. I was put on hold, and listened to really bad on-hold music. Every five minutes a recording would come on, claiming, "the next available agent will be with you shortly." But no one ever helped me. After a half hour I gave up and hung up. I tried again several times that day and throughout the week. Same result -- nobody picked up the phone. Maybe everybody quit their jobs and went home. That would also explain why I couldn't make long distance calls.
In frustration, I sent an email to GTC Telecom informing them of the problem. No response. (Not even to this day). I finally switched to another cut rate carrier, ECG Long Distance, which has high ratings for customer service. They've been great.
Last week, ECG called me to let me know that I'd been slammed. Someone, without my consent, switched me from ECG to another carrier. I asked them who, and they told me that only my local carrier would know. So I called my local carrier and they told me it was Sprint. I called Sprint and they looked into it, and they told me that it wasn't actually Sprint that did the slamming, it was a company that rented Sprint's lines. Guess who? GTC.
I've been on hold with GTC since 8:45, listening to their awful new age music. It's now 9:42 and I'm about to hang up the phone and write a letter of complaint to the California Public Utility Commission and the FCC about these idiots. They have wasted a lot of my time and I hope they go out of business soon so nobody else will get suckered by them.
UPDATE: 1-700-555-4141 is a toll-free number you can dial to find out who your long distance carrier is. You'll get a recorded message telling you the name of your long distance company. It's a good idea to check it occasionally, to make sure you haven't been slammed.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Ze Frank's Communication Course #1
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DATE: 11/17/2004 01:20:44 PM
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Mark Hurst sez: The world's only Ze Frank teaches us how to rethink e-mail communications. Genius. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mashup tools needed for civil disobedience
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DATE: 11/17/2004 02:45:10 PM
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Phillip Torrone's issued a call-to-arms for citizen engineers to share their tips and techniques for creating mashups, so as to enable widespread civil disobedience. Click through for his contact details.
the solution to end this madness?
more mash ups. millions of them.
this is where you come in, i'm going start a how-to series on making your own mash ups, so if you make these, please drop a note on how you do it, what software you use and all that.
let's unleash a flood of millions of mash ups. with podcasting really taking off, p2p networks, mp3 players everywhere and the nature of music always wanting to be sample, mixed and heard it'll be hard to stop everyone turning on, tuning in and mashing up.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ASCII war online short
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DATE: 11/17/2004 10:59:10 PM
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War-themed ASCII / Flash hybrid animation. This has nothing to do with red and blue states, or Iraq. It has everything to do with WTFclouds, TTYLnukes, LMAOplanes, and German gothrock ennui kthxbi. clicky ROFL. (via MeFi)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 30 million public domain newspapers online
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DATE: 11/17/2004 11:16:43 PM
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The National Endowment for the Arts Humanities is working to put 30 million newspapers online in digital format.
The first of what's expected to be 30 million digitized pages from papers published from 1836 through 1922 will be available in 2006.
"Anyone who's interested - teachers, students, historians, lawyers, politicians, even newspaper reporters - will be able to go to their computer at home or at work and at a click of a mouse get immediate, unfiltered access to the greatest source of our history," said Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He announced the project in a speech at the National Press Club...
The National Endowment for the Humanities is working on the project with the Library of Congress, which has embarked on a broader project to preserve records of American newspapers dating from the late 1600s...
The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, and copyright restrictions are in force on papers published after 1923.
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(via Whole Lotta Nothing)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mark Cuban fined by NBA for blogging
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DATE: 11/17/2004 11:19:11 PM
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Mark Cuban -- maverick television and sports executive and generous supporter of EFF -- has been fined by the NBA for blogging his criticism of the league's decision to hold its opening game on election night, the one night of the year when no one gave a rat's about basketball.
The NBA held its opening night on election night last Tuesday, a dumb move because Cuban thought (correctly, I might add) that the kickoff games would get zero TV coverage the day after the election. So Cuban decided to inform his readers of his opinion on his weblog, and the NBA fined him for this. That's right everyone, the NBA fined Mark Cuban because of a weblog entry he wrote.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A neat, neat, neat Christmas
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DATE: 11/18/2004 12:30:23 AM
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Church leaders in Cambridge, England are madder than hell because David Vanian and Captain Sensible of seminal punk/goth band The Damned were invited to switch on the city's Christmas lights. From a BBC News report:
Reverend Dr Peter Graves, of Wesley Methodist Church in Cambridge, said: "We should not give a major function over to a group that goes out of its way to deny what Christmas is about. "
Er, presents? Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Psychology of Interrogation
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DATE: 11/18/2004 12:59:04 AM
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New Scientist has a really intriguing and intense interview with Michael Koubi, the former chief interrogator for Israel's Shin Bet.
How do people behave when they are interrogated for the first time?
Every detainee behaves differently. It depends whether he's from the city or the village, or a Bedouin from the desert. It depends whether he's educated or not. Prison is unimaginably different to normal life. People behave in unexpected ways. People who talk tough in public often submit in interrogation.
I once interrogated a Bedouin who said nothing at all for a few days. He was a very tough man. During one session I was playing with a stick, and this idea came to me: I said to him, do you realise there's a snake hidden in the stick? And suddenly he became very afraid. He said he'd tell me anything. This man was used to dealing with snakes in the open, but in a cell it was a different matter.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Rolling (Electronic) Paper
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DATE: 11/18/2004 01:14:45 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about the development of incredibly flexible displays for mobile devices:
"Flexible displays are a staple of science fiction. Imagine unrolling an electronic newspaper that’s automatically updated via the wireless Web. Or unfurling a screen stored in your location-enhanced mobile device so you can consult a digital map without squinting. These kinds of applications -- promised for more than a decade -- have almost become clichés of futurist hype. Indeed, as one reader of TheFeature points out in response to a flexible screen announcement by Philips, “Every industrial design student has some (mock-up) PDA with a roll-out display in their portfolio.” So why the hell can’t you buy one?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fair use enemas? Turd text in trademark tussle
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DATE: 11/18/2004 06:01:35 AM
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You had me at "Use of our client's trademark to identify enema equipment in erotic fiction is likely to cause confusion." Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Physicist, "activist scientist" Melba Phillips dies
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DATE: 11/18/2004 06:06:37 AM
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BoingBoing reader Dano says, "She was a physicist in a time when women just didn't do that, and [her passing should be of interest to BoingBoing readers because of] what she did for the world community with regard to the Federation of American Scientists and anti-secrecy."
Physicist Melba Phillips, among the last of a vanishing generation of activist scientists who founded the Federation of American Scientists and fought the political battles of the early cold war, died last week. A 1947 policy statement on "military secrecy and security" that she co-authored for the FAS leadership complained that the personnel security practices of the Atomic Energy Commission were "extra-legal, arbitrary, and often subversive of every right of the individual in a democracy" ... FAS in its early years was sharply divided between liberal anticommunists, who eventually became dominant, and popular front liberals. Dr. Phillips was among the latter.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: GPS and speech recognition help blind people using public transport
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DATE: 11/18/2004 10:18:49 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about Noppa, a neat project in Finland to help blind people navigate through cities with the aid of GPS-enabled mobile phones.
The basic user components of Noppa are a mobile phone that's loaded with speech-recognition software and a Bluetooth GPS unit. The Bluetooth connection is used to get real-time bus and train data (the kind that appears on bus stop signs and train platforms to users know when their vehicle is about to arrive). The GPRS connection accesses a custom information server that manages route planning, guidance and speech recognition. The information server also accesses maps, weather information and municipal databases from the Internet. The speech-recognition software allows the user to make verbal requests, and the system uses speech synthesis to tell the user how to get to the correct bus stop or train station and tells him or her which vehicle to board.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hack your way out of writer’s block
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DATE: 11/18/2004 11:08:15 AM
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Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has a great list of ways to break through writer's block.
Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something.
Unplug the router - Metafilter and Boing Boing aren’t helping you right now. Turn off the Interweb and close every application you don’t need. Consider creating a new user account on your computer with none of your familiar apps or configurations.
Write the middle - Stop whining over a perfect lead, and write the next part or the part after that. Write your favorite part. Write the cover letter or email you’ll send when it’s done.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cockroach-controlled mobile robot system in LA on Friday
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DATE: 11/18/2004 11:57:48 AM
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On November 19th, 2004 8-10pm at Machine Project in Los Angeles, "Garnet Hertz will be showing his most recent prototype: a cockroach-controlled mobile robot system. The system uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball to control a three-wheeled robot. Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to create a semi-intelligent system, with the cockroach as the CPU. This work will be framed within the contexts of intelligence, embodiment, artificial life, the history robotics, and Michael Jackson." Link (Thanks, Dan!)
UPDATE: Jenifer Tidwell sez: This is a scene right out of a 1993 SIGGRAPH animation piece called "Grinning Evil Death," about a giant robotic cockroach going down in defeat to a kid empowered by a cereal-box prize. In the climactic scene, the intrepid kid pulls the lid off the robot to find it powered by... a cockroach. Link 1, Link 2
UPDATE: Bill sez: "A friend of mine wrote to Garnet concerning the treatment of the cockroaches he uses in his robot. I was impressed with how well he treats the little guys and thought you might like to know. Here is his reply:"
I appreciate your comments, although I take some comfort in knowing that the cockroaches I use aren't in pain or even annoyed: they're a Madagascan Hissing species that hiss loudly when irritated.
The insects are only in the device for a few minutes at a time, and lead very normal lives otherwise. I feed them organic lettuce and top-grade Purina dog food.
You should compare this to the way that insects are cut apart and routinely chopped to bits by standard scientific research (let alone the Orkin man).
All the best - and I actually appreciate your feedback.
Garnet
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: R2-DJ tees
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DATE: 11/18/2004 01:58:51 PM
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Damn, these "R2-DJ" tee-shirts are bad ass. Limited edition of 150, too!
Link
(Thanks, Derek!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet Archive pages are admissable into evidence
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DATE: 11/18/2004 02:01:51 PM
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The Internet Archive contains billions of snapshots of web-pages on different days since 1996. Using its "Wayback Machine," you can get the archive to show you what any page looked like on a day when it was copied by the archive's crawler.
So it was only a matter of time before the a page from the Archive would be used in a court proceeding to prove something about some date in history. It's happened, and the court has admitted the Archive's pages into evidence.
Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska's assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska's objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.
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(Thanks, Sean!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canada's DMCA: why is it a bad idea? -- UPDATED
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DATE: 11/18/2004 02:04:16 PM
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On DigitalCopyright.ca, a good, sharp, short analysis of the pending Canadian version of the USA's rotten, hated, disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):
1. Education – Canadian schools currently spend millions of dollars each year on copyright licenses to provide students with access to educational materials. The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that teachers, students and schools do not have to pay for certain uses of these materials (including research, private study, and certain classroom instruction). Contrary to the Court’s ruling and despite the millions of dollars schools already pay for copyright materials, the committee would require schools to divert millions of dollars more from education budgets – from students, schools and taxpayers - to pay for publicly available material on the Internet.
Link, En Francais
(Thanks, Ian!)
Update: Ian sez, "they also have posted a open letter to the members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, in reply to quotes seen in a Globe and Mail article."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyright treaty laid bare: watch your governments make sausage!
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DATE: 11/18/2004 02:15:43 PM
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This week is my bi-annual pilgrimage to Geneva, Switzerland, where I'm representing EFF at the negotiations over the "Broadcast Treaty" which lets people who send out shows claim a 50 year owenership over them, even if the shows are publi domain, copylefted, or of a non-copyrightable nature (like a C-SPAN broadcast). It requires signatories to protect DRM with laws that make it illegal to tell someone how to do more with his television. And there's even a proposed element ("the webcasting provision") that would bring this to the Web. This stuff is way bad news.
But we're part of the largest coalition of "public interest" groups in WIPO history. We're getting major face-time with the delegates and making a difference.
Here are some posts I've just made to EFF's Deep Links blog detailing what's going on:
Day one notes: One of the things were doing here is taking exhaustive notes on who says what, when, and what it means. We're providing the first-ever in-depth peek into how the treaties that will rule your life are getting made. On Day One, we saw the introduction of a brilliant proposal by Chile to set a minimum group of public rights under copyright -- like the right of the blind to turn books into Braille without permission or payment -- that would apply in every country, so that people cooperating on international education/research, archiving and disabled access projects could know that the stuff they sent to their collaborators was just as legal abroad as at home.
Statement on limitations and exceptions: I'm giving this statement tomorrow on the limitations and exceptions proposal: "It is in the nature of archiving, education and the provision of services to the disabled to be cooperative. Unlike commercial, competitive enterprises where labor may be replicated -- and charged for -- many times over; nonprofit public interest work to distribute a joint effort as widely as possible."
Day two notes: Day two was all about the Broadcast Treaty, and saw really tough debate on the Webcasting provision and the DRM stuff (WIPO calls DRM "TPMs" -- technological protection measures. Kinky!). Most notable, though, was that a saboteur took all of the literature set out by the public-interest groups and hid it/trashed it/threw it in the toilets.
Letter on stolen documents: Here's the letter we sent to the WIPO Secretariat (the administrative overseers) on our stolen literature.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sirius names Mel Karmazin CEO
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DATE: 11/18/2004 04:43:53 PM
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Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Backups made simple with Super Duper
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DATE: 11/18/2004 08:41:54 PM
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I've been burned by data loss before, so I know how important it is to back up my hard drive. The thing is, every back-up software I've tried has been a big hassle. They're all slow and complicated. As a result, I was lucky if I'd do a backup once a month, because I dreaded firing up the program and trying to figure out what to do. "Which checkboxes should I click?" "Which options should I select?"
On a lark, I searched Version Tracker for backup software and found a new program called Super Duper. It was getting excellent reviews there, so I decided to give it a try. And I love it! It's extremely simple to use, but very powerful. It's one of those great programs that seems to know exactly what you need, when you need it, without requiring you to do anything.
After the first back-up (I use a 200G Maxtor One-Touch drive), subsequent "smart backups" take just a few minutes. The backups are bootable - in fact, they're clones of the original.
Super Duper has made backing up painless. So painless that it's almost fun. I back up my eMac and my iBook daily now. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hooters sues boobs-n-beer rival over copyright
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DATE: 11/18/2004 09:16:45 PM
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Jason Schultz points us to the following surreal slice of news and says, "Boy, I'd love to hear the expert witness testimony in this trial!"
Hooters of America and a rival restaurant chain began arguing in federal court over who has rights to the concept of using scantily clad women to sell food and beer. Atlanta-based Hooters of America accuses Ker's WingHouse of Kissimmee of poaching the idea coined when it opened its first sports bar in Clearwater in 1983, Hooters lawyer Steve Hill said in opening statements Wednesday in Orlando.
"The evidence will show WingHouse has copied the Hooter girl almost from head to toe," Hill said. "For want of a better expression, the Hooter girl is our Ronald McDonald."
But Crawford Ker said he based his chain on Knockers, a failing restaurant with an all-female staff in Largo that he took over after retiring from the NFL, according to pretrial deposition.
Link. You can get a "taste" of the allegations made by Ker's WingHouse here: Link. Couldn't we just settle this with a round of topless onion dip wrestling and some free draft pitchers?
Update: IANAL, but a knowledgeable BB reader who is quite familiar with the law (and requests anonymity) says: "The title for this entry is a tad incorrect. At issue is not copyright, but rather - I am not making this up - 'trade dress.' See the not dissimilar discussion (sans décolletage) here."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pirates eavesdropping on satellite calls
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DATE: 11/18/2004 10:05:13 PM
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I was looking at international long distance rates on Vonage, which are quite good (like 10 cents a minute to China), but was shocked to see that Inmarsat satellite calls are over $12 a minute! For fun, I did a search on Inmarsat and found this article about Inmarsat eavesdropping. Apparently, real pirates like to do this.
Pirates are the heroes of age-old adventure stories, but most of us forget that whole regions still depend on modern pirates. The coast around Malacca in Malaysia is such a spot, together with the Bay of Thailand and the Southern Chinese Sea. In South America the coast of Northern Brazil is another centre of pirate activity. On average every other day sees an attack, and whenever pirates strike they leave good manners at home. Typically all people on board of a ship are killed, unless they manage to escape with a rescue boat. Most pirates know in advance if the ship and its cargo is worth an attack, because they use state of the art equipment to monitor Inmarsat communications and even fax transmissions listing every single cargo item. Quite a substantial portion of Inmarsat reception units that are being sold in Germany or the United States are channelled to those regions where they are of invaluable service to modern age pirates. French journalist Eric Paquier managed to interview one pirate recently and when asked what pirates do with their victims he got the following response: 'We hang them upside down on one of the masts, then burn them alive and later eat their ears for dessert."
When is there going to be a movie about modern-day pirates? Link
UPDATE: Wes Phillips sez:
"When there is, here's a really good novel they can use for a starting point."
UPDATE: Bill Berry sez: "That's a good idea: a movie about modern-day pirates. I'd see it.
I don't know if you remember the old 60s Hanna-Barbera show The Banana Splits, but they had a segment on the show that featured modern-day (er, 60s) pirates. If I remember correctly, they had modern boats and guns.
Danger Island. The show's main ongoing one live action serial. Directed by future Hollywood director Richard (Lethal Weapon) Donner, it centred on five people stranded on a remote jungle island: Doctor Hayden and his young daughter Lesley, Link (played by child actor Jan Micheal Vincent, later to play the character of Link in '80s TV series Airwolf), Morgan (who proved the muscles), and the silent native, Chongo. Together they faced deadly natives, pirates, landslides and earthquakes.
As Bingo says: "Oh-oh...Danger Island next!" Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Record player needed for getting public domain discs online
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DATE: 11/19/2004 12:50:35 AM
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Donate a record player and help digitize 30,000 records!
Hello, my friend has recently come into approximately 30,000 records(!) many of which are old enough as to be public domain, i.e. their copyrights are expired. He has offered to let me digitize them so that they may be distributed, to undermine the record companies and their patterns of rereleasing albums periodically in a "remastered" cd so that the copyrights never expire. I have the computer and software necessary to digitize these records (which include crazy rare ethnic and folk music, as well as odd "mood" atmospheric music), but need a record player with component outputs, ie a linelevel output, so that i can hook it up to my soundcard. I can afford a needle, I just need a decent record player. Help the world, give me the old record player in your garage. Recordings will be distributed on an ftp site and on peer to peer programs (people actually do use these for legitimate purposes!).
Link
(Thanks, Paul!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Grey Video mirrors
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DATE: 11/19/2004 01:07:37 AM
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I blogged the unbelievably awesome Grey Video the other day -- it's an amazing video mashup to accompany one of the tracks from DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album. The site's gone down, but Waxy's got mirrors and torents and bears, oh my.
The official site
is down, likely a result of popularity or legality, and I don't know if
it's coming back. Until then, I'm going to mirror the high-quality
Quicktime version.
Download: grey_video.mov (Quicktime, 22 MB)
BitTorrent: grey.torrent (thanks, Kyle!)
Also, Matt Haughey is mirroring it.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Prosthetic fin
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Fuji, a 34-year-old dolphin at an aquarium at Okinawa, lost most of her tail fin to a disease that forced doctors to amputate. Tiremaker Bridgestone fabricated a $100k prosthetic fin for her. From the AFP:
The company has yet to receive any request for an artificial fin or leg for other animals but spokesman (Shinichi) Kobori said Bridgestone is open to such requests.
"We make tires; we specialize in foots of sort. If we see offers, we will consider them," he said.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bionic back
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DATE: 11/19/2004 02:07:58 AM
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Disc error? Popular Science reports on the Charité Artificial Disc, a plastic replacement for one of two discs in the lower back. The Artificial Disc is expected to receive United States FDA approval by the end of the year.
“This is the first major breakthrough in back surgery since the 1940s,” says orthopedic surgeon Richard Guyer of the Texas Back Institute in Plano.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Neuroscience of music
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DATE: 11/19/2004 02:27:16 AM
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In the new issue of Scientific American, UC Irvine neurobiologist Norman Weinberger looks at how the brain processes music. Surveying the research in his and others' labs, Weinberger examines how our brain "retunes" itself to various kinds of musical input and how we've evolved our response to music.
"An imaging experiment in 2001 by Anne Blood and Zatorre of McGill sought to better specify the brain regions involved in emotional reactions to music. This study used mild emotional stimuli, those associated with people's reactions to musical consonance versus dissonance. Consonant musical intervals are generally those for which a simple ratio of frequencies exists between two tones. An example is middle C (about 260 hertz, or Hz) and middle G (about 390 Hz). Their ratio is 2:3, forming a pleasant-sounding "perfect fifth" interval when they are played simultaneously. In contrast, middle C and C sharp (about 277 Hz) have a "complex" ratio of about 8:9 and are considered unpleasant, having a "rough" sound.
What are the underlying brain mechanisms of that experience? PET (positron emission tomography) imaging conducted while subjects listened to consonant or dissonant chords showed that different localized brain regions were involved in the emotional reactions. Consonant chords activated the orbitofrontal area (part of the reward system) of the right hemisphere and also part of an area below the corpus callosum. In contrast, dissonant chords activated the right parahippocampal gyrus. Thus, at least two systems, each dealing with a different type of emotion, are at work when the brain processes emotions related to music. How the different patterns of activity in the auditory system might be specifically linked to these differentially reactive regions of the hemispheres remains to be discovered.
In the same year, Blood and Zatorre added a further clue to how music evokes pleasure. When they scanned the brains of musicians who had chills of euphoria when listening to music, they found that music activated some of the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Congresscritters told "internet porn = heroin"
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DATE: 11/19/2004 07:42:36 AM
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Conservative porn-prohibitionists addressing Congress yesterday compared online porn to heroin -- and urged lawmakers to fund studies about "porn addiction" and create a propaganda public health campaign warning of the dangers. Perhaps a surgeon general's warning for vibrators and videos is in order. All joking aside, how you feel about porn isn't as important here as how you feel about, in their words, "curbing" the internet and other forms of communication. It always starts in the name of the children, doesn't it?
Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, said pornography's effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine. She told of one patient, a business executive, who arrived at his office at 9 a.m. each day, logged onto Internet porn sites, and didn't log off until 5 p.m. Layden called for billboards and bus ads warning people to avoid pornography, strip clubs and prostitutes.
The panel discussion ranged from hardcore, violent pornography to audience complaints about a sexually suggestive promo that aired prior to this week's "Monday Night Football" game. Brownback, an outspoken Christian conservative who has championed efforts to curb indecency on television and the Internet, said the public is beginning to realize "they don't just have to take it." But he acknowledged the First Amendment right to free speech has limited congressional efforts.
Link. Just in case they're right, I urge you -- whatever you do -- to please, please not click on the Suicide Girls ad that appears to the right of this blog post. Like pot, it leads to (ahem) harder things. (thanks, JP)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EU won't use patented standards - CORRECTED
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DATE: 11/19/2004 07:55:51 AM
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The EU has announced that it's not going to use patented software standards unless it gets an irrevocable royalty-free license to all the patents in the standard -- guess that means Windows is out!
European Commission's IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) Unit announced their definition of Open Standards, which require the "intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard to be made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis". It also calls for "no constraints on the re-use of the standard" to be imposed. The definition is part of the European Interoperability Framework just published at http://europa.eu.int/ida/servlets/Doc?id=18063
Among other speakers, Christian Hardy from the French ministry of finance presented the large migration of over 100 000 desktops to OpenOffice, the free software alternative to Microsoft Office, across the national French Administration. Rolf Theodor Schuster, CIO at the German Foreign Ministry presented a live demonstration of the fully open source desktop and server system that secures the global German embassy network.
Link
(Thanks, Rishab!)
Update: Rishab sez, "note that the interoperability framework is not mandatory! but the volume of protests from e.g. COMPTIA indicates that it will be influential."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese cosplay photographs
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DATE: 11/19/2004 12:44:54 PM
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Another excellent gallery from MasaMania of Japanese kids at play. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tech companies tell WIPO: we don't want your "protection"
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DATE: 11/19/2004 02:37:10 PM
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I've been in Geneva all week, fighting the Broadcast Treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organization. One of the least-supported provisions in the treaty is the "Webcaster's provision" which would allow people who transmit information on the Internet to control how anyone who receives it uses it -- even if it's Creative Commons licensed, or in the public domain, or not copyrightable. Microsoft and Yahoo's representatives have backed the US's call for this (America is the only country that wants this), essentially saying that they represent the whole tech industry on this.
This week we presented a letter from 20 technology companies and organizations that opposed the inclusion of Webcasting in the treaty -- among the signers were Mark Cuban (who founded Broadcast.com, and owns $500,000,000 in content), O'Reilly and Associates, and Salon.com. I made 300 copies of the letter and set out copies at one-hour intervals (setting out all my copies would have been a mistake, since someone was stealing all of the public-interest groups' papers and throwing them away in the bathroom garbage-cans).
It made a huge difference. After the letter got into the delegates' hands, the tenor of the debate really changed. Click the link to read the letter:
Briefly, we reject the Webcasting Provision for the following reasons:
1.
The Internet depends on permission-free access. This is reflected in the exemptions in many countries' copyright laws for online and internet service providers. When authors or rights-holders' permission has been required for fixation, copying, retransmission or decoding in other situations, the negotiation of licenses from creators and copyright rights-holders have provided ample protection for all parties. Adding a new layer of intermediaries, over and above copyright holders, for the re-use of information on the Internet benefits no one -- save those intermediaries. If an Internet company has the rights to a work, or need not secure the rights to a work due to a limitation in copyright, or because the work is in the public domain, there is no rational reason to require that the company also seek the permission of a further intermediary whose sole creative contribution to the work is in making it available.
2.
There is no demonstrable problem. Internet businesses are famously, legendarily well-capitalized from angels, venture capitalists, public markets, private investors, governments and every other source of capital imaginable. Proponents of webcasting rights have offered no credible evidence that the lack of legal protection for webcasting rights has precluded the establishment of any new Internet businesses. Indeed, the businesses most volubly calling for Webcasting protection are among the best-capitalized in the history of the world. There is no certainty of benefit here, but it *is* certain that the creation of a new psuedo-copyright will slow down adoption and innovation in Internet markets by requiring all content-related businesses to negotiate yet another layer of license agreements before they can offer new products or services to the public. The most likely result of introducing these new rights will be to skew the market; in practice it will provide financial assistance to incumbents who will be able to assure investors of their right to exclude their competitors and new entrants from the market. At the same time, it is likely to constrain, not increase, the creation of more information products for the public.
We do not desire the "protection" you offer us, nor do we believe it will benefit us.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WIPO notes from day three: democracy == ignoring dissent
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DATE: 11/19/2004 02:47:34 PM
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Today at WIPO saw a flat-out disgraceful cooking of the deliberative process. The administrators of the meeting -- the chair and secretariat -- are pushing hard to make this treaty pass, even if no one wants it to. The solution to the deadlock is "regional meetings" in which countries that oppose the treaty can be isolated and arm-twisted into coming into line, and where few or no public-interest NGOs will be present. Some of the most populous countries in the world -- India and Brazil -- along with many others called for a better approach: any region that wants a meeting can have one, but the real action would be at an "inter-sessional meeting" held in Geneva, with all countries represented. Even though these countries presented a solution that would have given regional meetings to those who wanted them, the chair steadfastly refused to hear from them -- eventually, he used a straw poll to discard their proposal altogether, and then called it "democracy." (Oh, and even more of the public-interest group papers were stolen and trashed today)
India: Before the lunch break I pushed you more for the floor more than
I normally would. The reason was that I had a dental appointment. I
realize my ideas may not have been clearly conveyed because my speech
may not have been clear. I hope my speech is a little clearer now. What
I was suggesting was that Brazil's suggestions for open consultations
inter-sessionally were an eminently sensible idea. I would have thought
that given the open ended consultations are wider in scope and the fact
that the differences that emerged in this meeting were essentially
differences across regions, it would be more beneficial to have an
inter-sessional meeting which is precisely what we are now engaged in.
Some meeting like this that brings regions together in inter-sessional
consultations. But I see that none of that has been reflected. And since
we believe our conclusions are those of the committee rather than the
conclusions of the chair, we would request you to show some indication
that our contribution has not been entirely dismissed out of hand. Thank
you.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Everything Must Go.
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DATE: 11/19/2004 11:58:24 PM
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"I could not help but notice all these robots fucking in the mini-mall..." From Hint Magazine, an animated homage to fashion designers Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Hermès, Cosmic Wonder and others. Images by illustrators Thomas Zeitlberger and Manu Burghart, with flash design by Midim, music by TV on the Radio. Link to Everything Must Go.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Report: air inside Dutch churches is toxic
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DATE: 11/20/2004 12:07:02 AM
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Snip from BBC News story:
Church air was found to be considerably higher in carcinogenic polycyclic hydrocarbons than air beside roads travelled by 45,000 vehicles daily. It also had levels of tiny solid pollutants (PM10s) up to 20 times the European limits.
Link (thanks, swirlingpuss, via, and thanks Armin).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Target.com selling "anal massage"
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DATE: 11/20/2004 12:24:45 AM
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WTF? Link to a Target ad which, as one BB reader says, is "offering Anal Massage, at 10% off, and free delivery. 4-8 week delivery lead time. This will probably disappear pretty quick."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pepsi Spice Me
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DATE: 11/20/2004 12:30:24 AM
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BB reader Caines says, "This guy is drinking noting but Pepsi Holiday Spice for 45 days (similar to the movie Super-Size Me, in which a man ate nothing but McDonald's food with frightening effects). He's keeping a blog to document the impact it is having on his body. Snip: 'I instantly started sneezing, which made me shit my pants and on top of the horror I got another bloody nose. Luckily no one was home when this happened."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hermit crabs get artificial shells from helping humans
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DATE: 11/20/2004 12:38:42 AM
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BoingBoing reader Jayson Franklin says:
"This article describes an attempt to make artificial (plastic) 'shells' to be left on the beach for wild hermit crabs. 30% of hermit crabs have shells that are too small for them, and must often resort to using refuse for housing."
Link to The Hand Up Project: Attempting to Meet the New Needs of Natural Life-Forms
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: educational zen
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DATE: 11/20/2004 12:48:49 AM
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technical docs weirdness |
wacky warning labels |
warning signs |
public info films |
howtoons |
cut away illustrations |
hand shadows |
throw cards |
tricks of the trade |
more tricks |
what is that stuff |
unwise microwave oven experiments |
periodic table of funk |
make friends on the telephone |
what to do if the net is down |
communication course #1 |
how stuff works
Image: Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness/Aerial Smackage. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Machine gun table
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DATE: 11/20/2004 04:34:02 AM
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This curious c.1965 coffee table, weighing in at 200 pounds, is up for auction on eBay:
"The "box" is welded and riveted together to form a frame around a GIANT hand sculpted and hand welded machine gun. The look of the piece is very industrial. It is a stunning sculpture in person and will make an interesting addition to any style home or place of business from machine age to mid century modern."
It would go well, at least thematically, with the child's gun lamp I scored a couple of months ago.
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "educational zen" double take
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DATE: 11/20/2004 10:49:53 AM
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Wasting valuable hours of her life that she will never get back, BoingBoing reader Brenda Vonahsen dove into our last edition of Web Zen ("educational zen") and found herself zenned out by one item in particular.
She says, "The 'Dragon Ballz toy' section of the Hall Of Technical Documantation Weirdness contains this prose:
WARNING: With appertain rotor of screw setting pre ceiling on the understanding that serew no weild. May wield two-faced, pressboard securing. weild pre to begin with wiping ceiling of bilge dasto.
# Prythee no sport with stingy or play asperity game. Winding finger have got bloodstream not walk. Throagh peril.
# Tad disport of time grown man tatelage.
# Till the cowcomes home.Weild toys damage,burn-in prythee wind to a close wield.
# Give attention to open/close toys,therefore take place peril.for instance slipup batteries wield result in the emission of heat rupture liquid.vent itseld prythee pay attention."
Brenda says, "I think that at some point whomever wrote this just gave up. The use of 'prythee' I find sort of cute and endearing."
Link. Plus, I love how instead of calling them "instructions," the document calls them "Ways and Means." Sounds like a House subcommittee.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: War-auteurs
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DATE: 11/20/2004 12:34:12 PM
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Snip from Michael Ignatieff's piece in this week's NYT Magazine :
"We now have the terrorist as film director. One man taken hostage recently in Iraq described, once released, how carefully his own appearance on video was staged, with the terrorists animatedly framing the shot: where the guns would point, what the backdrop should be, where he should kneel, what he should be scripted to say."
Link (Thanks, Slavin)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: educational zen coda: compulsion things
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DATE: 11/20/2004 01:05:39 PM
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Following up on this week's edition of Web Zen -- education zen -- (Link, and related post), geek, dad, and technopundit Glenn Fleishman says, "You missed my recent scan of a badly translated manual. This sign means your duty as compulsion things." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Microsoft hearts Firefox?
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DATE: 11/20/2004 01:23:23 PM
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BoingBoing reader Tom Christie says, "The Windows Marketplace site is advertising Firefox as making 'browsing more efficient than ever before.'" Link
But total killjoy and BB reader Oscar Bartos writes, "I know, disappointing. It's all on the disclaimer page:"
Disclaimer: Merchandise pictures and descriptions are provided by the manufacturers of the merchandise. Windows Marketplace is provided for informational purposes only, and Microsoft makes no representations or warranties, either expressed, implied or statutory, regarding the merchandise, manufacturers or compatibility of the merchandise available within. Information within Windows Marketplace is subject to change without notice. Actual end user compatibility may vary. The inclusion of a merchandise or manufacturer does not imply endorsement by Microsoft of the merchandise or manufacturer.
Link.
And BB reader TeleKawaru says, "It's also interesting to note that the screenshot for FireFox is displaying GMail and not Hotmail. =)"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Here come the chimeras
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DATE: 11/20/2004 01:26:46 PM
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BoingBoing reader Cyrus Farivar says, "Life imitates art. We're making real chimeras now. Front page of the Washington Post."
In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. These are not outcasts from "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the 1896 novel by H.G. Wells in which a rogue doctor develops creatures that are part animal and part human. They are real creations of real scientists, stretching the boundaries of stem cell research.
Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses. Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact -- not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures. Some are already revealing deep secrets of human biology and pointing the way toward new medical treatments.
But with no federal guidelines in place, an awkward question hovers above the work: How human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Patent app: personal stereo cellphone
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 11/20/2004 02:34:46 PM
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Snip from a patent application developed for NEC:
In a cellular phone, stereophonic sound reproduction of music etc. is realized by using a microphone and a speaker of the cellular phone as stereophonic speakers. By the stereophonic sound reproduction function, radio broadcasting from FM stations, streaming sound from the Internet, etc. are reproduced by the cellular phone.
Link to " Cellular phone with high-quality sound reproduction capability " (via pho list)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Melodeo
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DATE: 11/20/2004 02:40:08 PM
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A Seattle-based tech company is developing a music service for cellphones. Company execs hope the offering will one day trump Apple's iPod and iTunes in popularity.
Melodeo said yesterday that it has raised $9.5 million in venture capital to help develop and market the music player. Investors in the second round include GF Capital, Ignition Partners, Intel Capital and Voyager Capital. The company has raised $11.7 million to date.
The attraction of Melodeo is that it allows a user to search, buy and listen to music from a cellphone, rather than having to download the music on a computer and transfer it to another device. It does this quickly by loading a list of available tracks and artists on the user's cellphone. The user can then browse and connect to the wireless carrier's server only when a track is purchased.
Link (via unwired)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Propeller sellers
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DATE: 11/20/2004 02:52:49 PM
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BoingBoing friend Mara says,
"The band Guided by Voices put out an album in 1992 called Propeller, and each one had an original cover hand-created by the band and/or their friends. There were only 500 copies made, and one just sold for $6200. Here's a link to an article about the sale: Link."
And here's a guy who's trying to collect images of all 500 covers: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Target.com sells Anal Massage part deux
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DATE: 11/20/2004 02:55:22 PM
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From time to time, I lean back in my tattered Aeron chair once rescued from a Bangalore call center's fetid dumpster, inhale deeply from a knockoff Cohiba, and mutter into a lukewarm can of Red Bull, "What a sophisticated, leet lot these BoingBoing readers are."
This is not one of those times.
Following up on a previous BoingBoing post about Target.com selling an item called "Anal Massage," dozens of you gleefully emailed to say you'd spent all night conducting googlevestigation, like so many anal-obsessed Philo Vances packing overheated routers in place of warm pistols. Here's some of the dirt you scraped from the undersides of your gumshoes. Perverts.
BB reader ADM says,
"Mystery solved: A little poking around in the item information for Target's"Anal Massage item reveals an ASIN. This is because Amazon and Target are business partners and ASINs are the unique identifiers used by Amazon. So if you go to Amazon and search for this item's ASIN (B0002KPIBO) you learn that (unfortunately) the item in question is not an actual anal massage, but rather an instructional DVD called "Anal Massage."
Says one reviewer: "It is appropriate for housewives, lovers, massage therapists and everyone interested in deepening the experience of relaxation and pleasure for themselves or for others. The DVD presents an easy to follow hands-on format that is comfortable for all types of viewers." Hands-on and comfortable!
Link.
Reader John Todd Larason says,
Target.com is run by Amazon.com, and shares large amounts of code & backend database info. If you take the target.com URL for that item and replace 'target' with 'amazon', (or just take the asin argument and use it directly, ie the url in this link), you get to Amazon's page for the item -- a DVD, "Anal Massage for Relaxation and Pleasure" by the New School of Erotic Touch.
jhartnett says, "More anal massage goodness! If you go to target.com home page and type "anal massage" in the search window you get these results. Seems to be a booming business. Link."
Reader Bob Jones (not THAT Bob Jones -- uh, I think) says, "Praise the Lord! It appears to be an "Adult Health" title, here's a review: Link." (NSFW warning: cover art depicts giant ass-crack with strategically-poised thumb).
Reader Neil Turner says, "Amazon even offers some 'used' Anal Massage you can buy. Link."
And finally, Music to Anal Massage By? Jeremy K. says, "Just thought I'd let you know, that in addition to the item on Target.com for the Anal Massage, they have a Uranus-Self Anal Massage for M music cd. Crazy stuff going on over there at Target! Link"
Nice work, sleuths. Now -- do me a favor. Don't let congress get wind of this, okay?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Plate-mod
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DATE: 11/20/2004 03:04:05 PM
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Designer Sara Cihat creates really cool looking "rehabilitated dishware" out of finds from second-hand stores which are then cleaned up, re-screened, and glazed to new heights of hipster glory. She makes skulls, strippers, and guns look like the foundation for a great breakfast.
Link (via designsponge, thanks Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Congress nixes funds for new nukes
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DATE: 11/20/2004 05:46:31 PM
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The Nuclear Calendar site reports:
Congress deleted all funds for new nuclear weapons in the omnibus appropriations bill, which passed the House of Representatives this afternoon. It is expected to pass the Senate shortly. This includes funds for the Robust Nuclear Earth penetrator, or nuclear bunker buster, and for the Advanced Concepts Initiative for new nuclear designs.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tech-support generation spends Thanksgiving patching for parents
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DATE: 11/20/2004 11:12:42 PM
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Great Newsweek editorial defines the young adults of today as the "tech-support generation" who go home at Thanksgiving and patch their parents' operating systems and de-install their spyware. The related Slashdot thread catalogs the must-install apps, plugins and patches that you should bring home to the old folks to get them online.
Forget the generational tags you’ve already heard, like Gen X and Gen Y. We are the Tech-Support Generation. Our job is to troubleshoot the complex but imperfect technology that befuddle mom and dad, veterans of the rotary phone, the record player and the black-and-white cabinet television set. Next week, on our annual pilgrimage home, we’ll turn our Web-trained minds and joystick-conditioned fingers to the task of rescuing our parents from bleeding-edge technology on the blink.
Link
(via Slashdot)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Neal Stephenson's System of the World concludes the Baroque Trilogy
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DATE: 11/21/2004 12:58:29 AM
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I've just finished the last page out of 2,700 in total in Neal Stephenson's amazing, astounding, frustrating, hysterically funny Baroque Trilogy. Finishing books that are this ambitious conveys a real sense of accomplishment on the reader, and not just because my shoulder will ache less for no longer being weighted down by several pounds of Stephenson in my bag.
The Baroque Cycle began with Quicksilver, which set up the story: Daniel Waterhouse, a distant ancestor of the lead character in Cryptonomicon, is the son of a revolutionary puritan in 17th Century England who escapes revolution, plague and fire in the company of Sir Isaac Newton and the founding fathers of Natural Philosophy, the rationalists who dissect dogs and swill mercury and invent science. His adventures in and out of London are set in motion by Enoch Root -- not an ancestor of Cryptonomicon's Enoch Root, it seems, but the actual Enoch Root, hundreds of years before Cryptonomicon's action. (Another major element here is the simultaneous invention of calculus by Leibniz and Newton)
The story picks up in The Confusion, where we get to spend a lot of time in the company of Bob and Jack Shaftoe (ancestors of Cryptonomicon's Bobby Shaftoe), who are engaged in swashbuckling, globe-spanning adventures that contain, among other things, the best swordfighting scenes I've read since The Princess Bride. At the center of all of this is the Duchess Eliza of Arcachon-Qwghlm, a distant ancestor of the Qwghlmers from Cryptonomicon.
Finally, the story concludes in volume three, The System of the World, which brings together all of these characters in London as they hurtle towards the fusion of the old system -- alchemy, superstition and regency -- fuses with the new -- money, rationalism, mercantilism.
The historicity of these books is borderline alarming. Stephenson has researched so many goddamned interesting factoids about pirates, the birth off the monetary system, natural philosophy, alchemy, the court of the Sun King, the functioning of London's ancient prisons, the nature of sewage disposal in early metropolises, and many other diverse subjects that you can practically open the books to any page and find five cool trivia questions to baffle your friends with on e.g. long plane trips.
The storylines are convoluted in the extreme: they twist and turn on themselves, surprising and delighting.
The characters are Stephenson's best: funny, likable, roguish, brilliant, and insightful, and they serve to illuminate his research, and almost never seem like an artifice for this purpose.
The books' strengths, however, are also their failings. They are slow in many places, bogged down in detail (especially the intrigues among the many royals), as though Stephenson was bent on conveying the sheer tedium of life in the 16th and 17th centuries. The convolutions in the plotlines veer back and forth between intriguing and confusing.
For all that, these books are like a good curry. They're mild and interesting when you first taste them, but after you've swallowed, they grow on you, spreading a warm fire throughout your digestive system, making beads of sweat appear on your forehead. Since finishing the first two books, I've been practically haunted by them. Ever time I spend money, or walk through London, or see a ship, or think about math and science, some snippet of those books springs to mind, a lens through which to reexamine my thinking and assumptions.
The System of the World is no less moving: even as I drew toward the conclusion, it was already working at me, making me think hard about the world around me. Though reading these books was, at times, a chore, it was a chore that paid off handsomely.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Let them eat cake!
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DATE: 11/21/2004 03:04:22 AM
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Two seventh graders in Marietta, Georgia were arrested after serving yummy cornbread cake to their classmates. The cake was spiced with an expired prescription drug, bleach, clay, and tabasco sauce. From an Associated Press report:
"They took it into the cafeteria at lunch time and began passing it out to students, just whoever would take a piece," said Jay Dillon, spokesman for the Cobb County School District in suburban Atlanta.
Some of the students started vomiting after eating the cake Tuesday, officials said. Eleven students, mostly seventh graders, were treated at a hospital and released, Dillon said.
Link (via Fortean Times)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Girlmod
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DATE: 11/21/2004 08:03:11 AM
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BoingBoing reader Brenda Vonahsen says,
"This company (Link) makes concept models, and in their spare time (I'm guessing) they makes large models like this one (Link) and (Link).
"If you look carefully in one of those links, you can see a power cord coming in to the model, and a monitor line coming out. Yes, it's a casemod. The monitor is external (on the left). Here's the making-of documentation (Link). Pretty imrpressive, however, they are not alone (Link)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Clueless Pennsylvania senate says no to muni WiFi, but others say yes
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DATE: 11/21/2004 08:06:41 AM
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Esme Vos of the exxxxcellentttt muniwireless.com newsletter, about community wireless and broadband projects, says:
The Pennsylvania Senate has just passed a bill that would limit the ability of municipalities to build alternative broadband networks and challenge the incumbent's (Verizon's) dominance of broadband in the state. The bill is on the governor's desk and he is balking at signing it because of the restriction. People can contact him and urge him to veto it.
More information on the bill, and contact information for Pennsylvania's governor, are here: Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More on modern pirates
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DATE: 11/21/2004 12:35:28 PM
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After posting my entry about modern pirates who eavesdrop on satellite-based mobile phone calls, a couple of people have send in some amazing stuff about pirates.
Xeni sez: "Check out these photos Eric Pasquier took of the pirates. Link (Sample shown here)
"Also, see this related story which uses some of Pasquier's amazing pirate
photos." Link
Chris O'Connor sez: "This is a lovely listing of all sorts of modern piratatical
activity reporting for shipping companies and includes
semi-detailed descriptions of pirate attacks." Link
Anonymous sez: "Fun story on piracy, but not entirely accurate. According to Dr. Peter Chalk, a piracy expert at the RAND Corporation, piracy in the Straits of the Moluccas does not usually end up in killing of the crew *unless* the crew resists. (Of course the situation may be different off Brazil or Africa.) Usually they're just put off the ship on a lifeboat and the ship and cargo are stolen. The ships sometimes get reused, and sometimes are simply set adrift after their cargoes are offloaded and resold. This piracy is far more common than we the public hear about. Dr. Chalk estimates that about 10% (or less) of ship hijackings are reported. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: G-Cans: massive underground water system in Japan
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DATE: 11/21/2004 01:15:29 PM
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Che sez:
Tokyo is an impressive city above ground, but one of the most incredible things about this city is it's mind-bogglingly complex underground. The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city (A serious problem for Tokyo during rainy-season and typhoon season). The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos which are connected by 64 kilometers of tunnel sitting 50 meters beneath the surface.
The whole system is powered by 14000 horsepower turbines which can pump 200 tons of water a second into the large outlying edogawa river. I'm in the middle of playing Halflife2 right now and something like this looks like its straight out of the game or some sci-fi movie. This unbelievable gallery of photos however, is not CG, it is the real deal.
The site is all in Japanese, but if you click around the menus a bit, there are animations and diagrams of how the system works, and other interesting photos of the high-tech control center and turbine facilities. Supposedly the G-Cans project is also meant to be a tourist attraction, and can be visited for free. very cool. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: René Cigler art show
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DATE: 11/21/2004 01:25:22 PM
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Boing Boing pal (and bOING bOING cover artist) René Cigler has some new work in a group show at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica California. The pieces are sculpted characters with handmade everything. For a sneak peek check them out on her site. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites responds on Falluja shooting video via his blog
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DATE: 11/21/2004 02:06:50 PM
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Blogger and war correspondent Kevin Sites has issued his first detailed public statement on the Falluja shooting incident and its aftermath -- by way of his blog.
In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing. I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.
But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.
Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.
We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.
For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all -- especially if they seem to be aberrations, and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole. The answer is not an easy one.
In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both -- though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as the darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with the larger perspective - will allow the truth of that situation, in all of its complexities, to begin to emerge. That doesn't make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle -- the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Internet "Hopkin" meme unravelled
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DATE: 11/21/2004 11:00:09 PM
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Hopkin Green Frog is a complicated story. It begins with fliers posted around Seattle, seemingly drawn by a small child, asking for a lost pet frog called "Hopkin Green Frog" to be returned. The flier was plaintive, funny, and charming, and it began to circulate among photoshopping internet hipsters, who remixed its elements into various scenes from mundane and exotic world: the Hopkin Flier on a military briefing screen, surrounded by alert marines; angry demonstrators carrying WHO TOOK MY FROG? placards; the frog on a milk carton, etc -- if you're familiar with the All Your Base phenonmenon, you'll recognize this as an allied circumstance (we blogged this part already).
Mike from WhyBark lives in Seattle, and decided that this would be a cute piece for the local newspaper. He'd read on MeFi that Hopkin was actually a McDonald's toy, and he tracked down a new one for $5 on eBay. He called the number on the flier and repeatedly tried to make contact with Hopkin's owner's father. After many attempts, he got through, and got to the bottom of the Hokin Green Frog mystery.
Hopkin's bereaved owner is a 16-year-old autistic boy, who was very upset about the loss of his toy. According to his father, he's gotten over the loss of Hopkin and giving him a replacement Hokpin would be a bad idea, as it would re-open old wounds.
The person who drew the flier is a sixteen-year-old boy who suffers from autism. His father was unaware that his son may have made more than one batch of fliers (it appears that new fliers were hung in May of 2004). He did know about the loss of the frog and I believe that he knew about the first batch of fliers.
He also did not want me to give the frog to his son. He’s forgotten it, he told me. Bringing it up again will probably only bring up a bunch of bad memories.
He was quite unaware of the interest in the frog and the flier on the internet. He reiterated that he did not think it would be a good idea to show the sites to his son.
Link
(Thanks, Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Indie label adopts Creative Commons licenses
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DATE: 11/21/2004 11:03:05 PM
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Positron! Records, an independent label, has adopted Creative Commons for its releases!
Positron! Records is pleased to announce that our artists now have the option of releasing their works under Creative Commons licenses.
Unlike those who suffer from what we like to call "major label retardation," we here at Positron! have never believed it was bad thing for our supporters to share our music with their friends. The Creative Commons licenses we use legally allow you to share songs from these records on peer-to-peer networks. In addition, you can sample portions of these songs for use in your own compositions, whether they are mash-ups for your friends, or a commercial release. The only caveat is that the resulting work must be released under the same license. It is our way of both thumbing our nose at the ridiculous state of copyright law in this country, and letting you, our customer and supporter, know that you are not a criminal, but a trusted ally in the war against corporate stupidity.
Link
(Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US peso circles the drain, may suck global economy down with it
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DATE: 11/21/2004 11:09:36 PM
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With the US dollar circling the drain in the wake of unchecked defecit spending by the irresponsible Bush administration, the world economy is being disrupted. In China, people wiht hard currency assets are converting them from dollars to Yuan, with enormous bank-queues of those who are selling US currency as fast as they can (Cuba's gotten in on the act, trading its dollar assets for Yen and Euros).
So far, the dollar's slide to nine-year lows doesn't reflect panic. But some analysts say a run on the dollar is possible. And even an orderly drop could affect everything from mortgages to prices at Wal-Mart.
The good news for Americans: It's getting easier for manufacturers to sell products overseas, and more likely that tourists from Germany will flock to US National Parks.
But the downside could be significant. America, the world's leading importer of goods, is now buying them at higher prices. And if the dollar's dive makes foreign investors wary, US interest rates may have to rise to attract buyers of federal debt.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lone gunmen?
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DATE: 11/22/2004 02:21:16 AM
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On the 41st anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Glasgow video game company Traffic has released JFK Reloaded. A reconstruction of the scene and events around the Texas School Book Depository that tragic day, the game puts Oswald's rifle in the hands of players.
From a Boston Herald article and Traffic's press release:
"We've created the game with the belief that Oswald was the only person that fired the shots on that day, although this recreation proves how immensely difficult his task was,'' (Traffic's Kirk) Ewing said.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Superman is bad role model
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DATE: 11/22/2004 02:52:57 AM
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Researchers at New York University and MIT have discovered that people with Superman on their mind are less likely than others to help people in need. The reason, the psychologists propose, is that the average person quickly realizes that there's no way they can compare to the Man of Steel. Priming the subjects in the study with thoughts of other, well, lesser superheroes did not have the same effect. For the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, students were asked to volunteer for a fake community service program after being cued to think about Superman or other superheroes. From a New Scientist article:
"Students who thought of Superman volunteered much less of their time than those who thought about other superheroes. Furthermore, Superman-primed subjects were significantly less likely to show up at a meeting for volunteers held three months after they were initially asked to participate."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Barbara Rushkoff's new book
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DATE: 11/22/2004 03:36:57 AM
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My friend Barbara Rushkoff's brilliant 'zine Plotz, was a nerdy, hysterical, smart, honest, irreverent, and sometimes touching take on being Jewish in the modern world. Now, Barbara brings her Plotz perspective to Judaism's seemingly impenetrable holiday tradition in a new book. From imagined pages of TV Guide at Christmas "if Jews really did own the media," to the temporary shelters of Sukkot as advertised in a bizzaro world Sears catalog, "Jewish Holiday Fun...For You!" is a pop cultural tour-de-force of an historically unpopular culture. A perfect gift for under the Hanukkah Bush. From the introduction:
"We get to light menorah candles. Which means we get to play with fire. Sure, throwing tinsel on a tree is fun, but it's just not FIRE."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Full-back HTML tattoo
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DATE: 11/22/2004 05:30:08 AM
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Brad sez, "BMEZine.com's 'Geek Tattoo' section continues to amaze--here's an HTML-inspired backpiece."
Link
(Thanks, Brad!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Self-cleaning suit
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DATE: 11/22/2004 06:24:55 AM
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Clemson University researchers are making headway toward the long-hyped notion of nanotech-outfitted, self-cleaning clothing. They've created a polymer film peppered with silver nanoparticles that enable water to pick up dirt as it rolls off the fabric. From a press release issued by the American Chemical Society:
“The coating doesn’t actually clean itself, but it does resist dirt much better than other fabric treatments,” explains research team member Phil Brown, Ph.D., a textile chemist with Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. “The concept is based on the lotus plant, whose leaves are well-known for their ability to ‘self-clean’ by repelling water and dirt. Likewise, when water is exposed to the treated fabric, the dirt will be carried away more easily. You will still need some water to rinse away dirt and stains, but cleaning will be quicker and less frequent.”
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Pirates book reads like a mix of Monty Python and Hardy Boys
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DATE: 11/22/2004 06:33:40 AM
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I've just finished Gideon Defoe's book "The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists," which is billed as "a Blackadder for the high seas." It's a very funny little hardcover -- about an hour's read, that tells a pirate adventure story in mock-kid's-book style that reads like a cross between Monty Python and the Hardy Boys. Great stocking stuffer!
'Listen, why don't I sing you a song?' said the Elephant Man, obviously desperate to try to change the subject. He even got up and did an ungainly jig as he sang,
I look like some ex-pe-ri-ment!
But please believe me I'm a proper gent!
I seem like a monster, but whatcha don't know is,
I got a scorching case of neurofibromatosis19
Jennifer and the pirate with a scarf gave up on getting a straight answer, and went off to search for any clues that might be evident at the other exhibits. But they had no more luck with the Man Who Could Eat A Bicycle, or the Lady Who Had Had Hiccups For Forty Years, or even with the Girl From Chesterfield Who Would Repeatedly Go Out With Idiots When She Could DO A Great Deal Better For Herself. The pea-soup fog was starting to make their eyes sting, so Jennifer and the pirate ducked inside a tent that was simply marked 'A Special Exhibit For The Ladies'. It didn't seem very special, it was just an empty and badly lit tent as far as the pirate with a scarf could make out.
19 Or possibly Proteus Syndrome. There is still some debate in medical circles. Contrary to popular belief, Michael Jackson never did purchase the Elephant Man's skeleton from the Royal Hospital. This is a good example of how you shouldn't believe everything that people tell you.
Link
Update: Ben sez, "The book's Pirate Captain hero has his own blog on Livejournal. According to the user info, the blog is 'a presentation of a ship's log discovered at a car boot sale in Botley, Oxfordshire in 1997' and is 'intended primarily for maritime historians and business leaders with an interest in inspirational management techniques'".
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ed Felten's lecture: "Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue" -- UPDATED
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DATE: 11/22/2004 06:40:42 AM
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Ed Felten, the legendary engineer who led the team that broke the music industry's watermarking scheme and whom the music industry threatened with legal action if he presented his findings at a technical conference, has given an amazing lecture on copyright and technology as part of the Princeton President's Lecture series, called "Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media." It's a fantastic primer for geeks, lawyers and civilians on the copyfight.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
Update: Ed Felten sez, "The lecture is now available under a Creative Commons (non-commercial, share-alike) license. There's a page with license info and links to the lecture. At the moment it has the streams only, but I hope to add other formats as soon as I can. If anybody translates it into a different format, I would like to know so I can add a link to my page and/or redistribute the translation myself. [Note: Email Ed with your new formats, NOT Cory]
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT on Falluja shooting video response via blog
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DATE: 11/22/2004 07:12:11 AM
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Following up yesterday's BB post about Kevin Sites' blog post on the Falluja shooting video: The New York Times covers Mr. Sites' response-via-blog today; it was the first time he'd issued a detailed statement about the events surrounding what was captured on tape, and the decisions that followed.
I am told that this is the first time the paper has based an entire story around a blog entry. Link. See also this North County Times op-ed. Link. Kevin Sites' "Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1" -- Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: DIY gramophone build-notes and video
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DATE: 11/22/2004 07:43:50 AM
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Back in the summer, Mark blogged this completely bad-ass Japanese build-your-own gramophone kit that could record and play back audio by etching it with a needle in a medium like a CD or a plastic disc. Adam got ahold of one and built it, posting his build-ntoes and video of the gramophone in action. Damn, it's cool.
Link
(Thanks, Adam!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Werewolf and furry Bible-bashing
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DATE: 11/22/2004 08:09:18 AM
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This website is dedicated to preaching the gospel to the "werewolf and furry community" so that they can have their souls saved even if they enjoy dressing up like giant animals or, possibly, believe themselves to be nonhuman.
Q: How can you be a dragon and a Christian at the same time?
A: Many shifters worry that they are so strange that they can never be accepted into the Body of Christ. That's not true and its not being fair to Christians. We Christians accept people from all walks of life. I'm proof of that.
I have been told that my shifter feelings are a lie from satan and that God has a plan for me in this human body. Well I don't know what that plan is, and as far as I can see, that divine plan will never see fruition because I feel too much like a loser to implement it.
So I need to be a dragon, a beautiful and powerful dragon that's fears not what men can say or do and attracts many followers. If I was a dragon, I could do so much good for this world because my self-confidence would return to me. I pray constantly to God to change me, and He tells me to wait.
If I can handle being a Christian, you can too, because I'm more f***** up than you are.
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Color laser printers add hidden ID number to print-outs
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DATE: 11/22/2004 02:00:13 PM
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Zach J sez: Colour laser printer manufacturers encode each printout with the printer's serial number so they can trace it back to you if you are counterfitting bills. They can trace it back to you for anything else as well. Oh, and you could of course hack this to give yourself a nice alibi. "Clearly it wasn't MY printer, look at the code!" How long have they been doing this? Why isn't it common knowledge? What other ways to track our lives have been implemented without a big announcement? Link
UPDATE: Anonymous sez: "The answer to the question of how long color laser copiers have been encoding their serial numbers onto their prints is: at least since 1995 or so.
"The Canon CLC 700 was introduced then and didn't come with the any discernible anti-counterfeiting features. The previous generations of the Canon CLC lines detected that they were being used to copy currency and put a blackish green cast over the output. The problem with the old system was that the detection was too sensitive and would trip on non-currency items and not detect the planned new currency designs.
"After a bit of looking (and some pointed questioning on behalf of our security-conscious customers) we found about the yellow-dot encoding, and sure enough, it's been on every color machine since.
"The reason you probably haven't heard much about it is because it (AFAIK) is only used by the Secret Service to trace counterfeit documents back to their source machines, and the Secret Service doesn't like to talk too much about means and methods."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Copyrights are awarded without economic rationale
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DATE: 11/22/2004 02:16:26 PM
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James Boyle, an amazing academic copyfighter, has written a positively brilliant column for the Financial Times on the crazy way that IP policy gets made -- without any evidence, without any followup. In particular, Boyle writes about database copyright, which Americans don't have and which Europeans do have -- and how the European database industry is atrophying under this punishing regime that allows companies to own collections of facts.
Are database rights necessary for a thriving database industry? The answer is a clear “no.” In the United States, the database industry has grown more than 25-fold since 1979 and - contrary to those who paint the Feist case as a revolution - for that entire period, in most of the United States, it was clear that unoriginal databases were not covered by copyright. The figures are even more interesting in the legal database market. The two major proponents of database protection in the United States are Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis, and Thomson Publishing, the owner of Westlaw. Fascinatingly, both companies made their key acquisitions in the US legal database market after the Feist decision, at which point no one could have thought unoriginal databases were copyrightable. This seems to be some evidence that they believe they could make money even without a database right. How? In the old-fashioned way: competing on features, accuracy, tied services, making users pay for entry to the database and so on.
If those companies believed there were profits to be made, they were right. Jason Gelman, one of our students, points out in a recent paper that Thomson’s Legal Regulatory division had a profit margin of over 26% for the first quarter of 2004. Reed Elsevier’s 2003 profit margin for LexisNexis was 22.8%. Both profit margins were significantly higher than the company average and both are earned primarily in the $6 billion US legal database market, a market which is thriving without strong intellectual property protection over databases. (First rule of thumb for regulators: when someone with a profit margin over 20% asks you for additional monopoly protection, pause before agreeing.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disney turns movie screenings into search-and-harass ordeals
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DATE: 11/22/2004 10:44:31 PM
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Disney's started confiscating movie viewers' cellphones and cameras, and subjecting them to roving patrols of ushers, and marring the prints with red identification dots at fifteen minute intervals.
After the screening I went to the table to collect my cell phone and handed them my ticket. The table had over 100 phones on it in the plastic bags. The geniuses they have working security couldn't find my phone after five minutes of searching so I looked myself and managed to find the ticket number in about 30 seconds. While I was waiting though I was able to enjoy this conversation between security and a well dressed agent type:
"Do you have your ticket sir?"
"You never gave me a ticket."
"Yes we did sir."
"I have another ID."
"I need your ticket sir."
"You never gave me a ticket"
"You'll have to wait till we are done here and then we'll try to find your phone."
In despair the agent person said "Why am I being punished for your mistakes?"
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Great moments in sports
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DATE: 11/23/2004 01:49:01 AM
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Accompanying a Sports Illustrated article about the brawl at the recent Pacers-Pistons basketball game is this great chronology of "some fan confrontations with athletes and officials at pro sports events in the United States." Here's are a few of them:
April 19, 2003: An Oakland Athletics fan threw a cell phone at Texas Rangers outfielder Carl Everett....
Sept. 19, 2002: A father and son burst onto the field at Chicago's Comiskey Park and slammed Kansas City Royals first-base coach Tom Gamboa to the ground, punching and kicking him....
Nov. 24, 1999: Oakland Raiders were pelted with snowballs, some spiked with batteries, at Denver's Mile High Stadium. Charles Woodson allegedly threw a snowball that struck a female fan in the face, and Lincoln Kennedy went after a fan who hit him in the face with a snowball....
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fake Lego burned to heat Finnish homes
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DATE: 11/23/2004 01:57:30 AM
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A multi-ton shipment of Chinese fake Lego that was seized in Finland is being incinerated at a heating plant.
About ten tons of counterfeit Lego blocks were destroyed at the Kymeenlaakso waste processing plant in Anjalankoski on Thursday. The plastic will be mixed with other waste and burned at a district heating plant in Lahti...
Johannes Qvist, regional manager of Lego in Finland said that in addition to commercial considerations, the destruction was also a safety issue, as the pirated Legos do not comply with toy safety standards.
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(Thanks, Matt!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Space shots
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DATE: 11/23/2004 02:16:27 AM
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I just saw an exhibition in Paris of spectacular space images taken by photographic scientist-astronomer David Malin using the telescopes at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The photographs were remarkable, but it was particularly strange and cool to see a collection of scientific work in a gallery setting just down the hall from an exhibit of Louise Bourgeois prints. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jaws vs. The Dolphins
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DATE: 11/23/2004 02:21:13 AM
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Reuters reports that a pod of dolphins protected swimmers from an attacking great white shark off the coast of New Zealand's North island:
"They started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us," (Rob) Howes told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA).
Howes tried to drift away from the group, but two of the bigger dolphins herded him back just as he spotted a three-meter (nine feet) great white shark swimming towards the group.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory offline until Dec 12
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:56:39 AM
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I'm off for my first multi-week, fully offline holiday since 2001, and it's about time. I won't be answering any mail between now and December 12th. Here's some alternate contact info for while I'm away:
- If you've got a Boing Boing suggestion, you can (and should!) use the form. (My lovely and talented co-editors will be blogging as normal!)
- If you've got a business-related Boing Boing question, you can direct it to our business manager, John Battelle.
- If you've got a professional inquiry about my writing, you can contact Russ Galen, my literary agent.
- If you've got a question related to my work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, please direct it to my colleague Gwen Hinze.
Now, I've got a plane to catch! See you December 12th or so!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dan Rather to resign from CBS
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DATE: 11/23/2004 10:01:22 AM
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From an AP report:
Dan Rather, embattled anchor of the "CBS Evening News," announced today that he will step down in March, on the 24th anniversary of taking over the job from Walter Cronkite. The veteran anchor has been under fire in recent months for his role in a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story that questioned President Bush's service in the National Guard, which turned out to based on allegedly forged documents.
Rather, 73, said he will continue to work for CBS, as a correspondent for both editions of "60 Minutes." He made no mention of the National Guard story in announcing the change, saying he had agreed with CBS executives last summer that after the Nov. 2 election would be the right time to leave.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Krappy gifts
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DATE: 11/23/2004 10:41:41 AM
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Webstore krappy.com is the "home of unpopular culture," offering kitsch/weird items such as the bubble wrap terrorist (shown here), Eye Spark Robot figurine, and the unforgettable Vietnamese Ear Cleaner (doubles as a torture instrument). The product blurbs are as entertaining as the goods themselves. Link (thanks, Mark Hurst)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tinfoil beanie hatted protestors out-Larouche Larouche
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DATE: 11/23/2004 10:52:50 AM
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Some say the art of theater is dead. Some say the art of protest is dead. But theatrical unprotest art is alive and well. College student and BB reader John Duffell sez:
So yesterday I was out walking to class at the University of Washington when I came across a group of bizzaro Bizarros donning tinfoil hats and making outrageous statements. One was waving a sign that said "Build an escalator to mars"; another sign bore the sentence, "Dick Cheney is a salamander."
My first thought was that they were the often-seen-around-campus avid followers of Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr., perennial presidential candidate, perennial nutcase. "Holy living fuck," I thought, "These people are seriously getting out of control" -- and then I realized that they were MAKING FUN of the Larouche people. It was amazing. I was dumbstruck by the genius. The whole thing was practically a religious experience.
When class got out, I returned to the scene, and all that remained were a couple of leftover crazies standing at a Larouche table promising $100 to whomever could construct a cube twice the volume of another cube but with the same surface area. Honest to God, I'm still not sure if those were the false LaRouchites or the real mccoy.
Link to PDF of yesterday's edition of the U. of Washington's paper, and Link to The Daily Washington's home page.
And before you guffaw too loudly at those signs, remember -- some folks take the "escalator to Mars" thing very seriously. Link. And at least one lefty website purports to have evidence of a Cheney-reptile connection. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Economic "armageddon" coming to a world near you
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DATE: 11/23/2004 11:16:41 AM
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The chief economist at Morgan Stanley is 90% certain that the US economy is headed for disaster.
To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day.
That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings.
Sustainable? Hardly.
Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels.
Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy.
Today the figure is 85 percent.
Nearly half of new mortgage borrowing is at flexible interest rates, leaving borrowers much more vulnerable to rate hikes.
Americans are already spending a record share of disposable income paying their interest bills. And interest rates haven't even risen much yet.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 50,000 comic book covers
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DATE: 11/23/2004 12:11:03 PM
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Wow - a searchable database of 50,000 comic book covers. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tinfoil beanie faux-Larouche protest -- more photos
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DATE: 11/23/2004 01:24:59 PM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, BoingBoing reader joshua c. bis sez, "Looks like there are a bunch of photos of the event: Link, and another Link. Here's a livejournal post from one of the participants -- Link. All by way of this "warning post" from the uw livejournal community, Link."
Signs like It's the PSYCHIC Economy, stupid!!! = nothing less than brilliance. Some *actual* LaRouche demonstrators -- who clearly had no warning the event was taking place -- were present, and utterly befuddled.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Praise the lord and pass the ammunition
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DATE: 11/23/2004 03:02:06 PM
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Once an eBook and now a website, A Christian's Guide to Small Arms is described by author Gospel Plow as " a primer for the Christian who is beginning to reject the false theology that requires him to be a pacifistic patsy in the face of heathen hordes." Snip:
The most probable scenario that the Christian American, called to fight for God, family, and country, will be presented with is that of the guerrilla resistance. He will be facing an enemy occupational force that will have great superiority in materiel and organization. Outside sources of supply and instruction will not be likely. The wisest course in this situation is to choose weapons and tactics that minimize supply, training, and maintenance problems.
Link. Legal curiosity: the "copyright" page has a a few things (structurally) in common with a Creative Commons license. But Mr. Plow has elected to limit free distribution permissions to "Christian person[s], educational organization[s], fellowship[s], church[es], or militia[s]." (Thanks, Wayne Correia)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Exploding cellphones
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DATE: 11/23/2004 03:44:31 PM
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According to this news article, there have been 83 incidents of spontaneously-exploding cellphones in the past two years. "If you're cramming more and more power in a small space, what you're making is a small bomb." Link (Thanks, Nick Douglas)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Video of TV-B-Gone in action
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DATE: 11/23/2004 05:11:31 PM
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Phillip Torrone sez: TV-B-Gone is a device that reports to turn off virtually all TVs, and so far in our tests, it's knocked out anything we've pointed at it. Of course that wasn't good enough, we're recording the IR signals and putting it on iPod with a sound to IR converter, that way we can play "tv off" all the time and turn off TVs wherever we go, always. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "What're You Lookin' At?!" anthology
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DATE: 11/23/2004 05:51:24 PM
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Fantagraphics has published the What're You Lookin' At?! anthology, by Johnny Ryan. Featuring the collected stories from Angry Youth Comix, this 150-page black and white comic stars Loady McGee, a pimply faced troublemaker who behaves like Donald Duck might after drinking several bottles of fortified wine, and Sinus O'Gynus, the softheaded and sensitive "Patrick" to Loady's "Spongebob." The art and stories are like the very best comics a bored highschooler might draw during study hall. They're gross, immature, unkind, and crude. Fortunately, they're also hilarious, which makes them well worth reading. Last time Pesco was at my house he couldn't stop laughing at these stories. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: America's new anti-piracy czar
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:28:06 PM
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From The Hollywood Reporter:
Buried inside the massive $388 billion spending bill Congress approved during the weekend is a program that creates a federal copyright enforcement czar. Under the program, the president can appoint a copyright law enforcement officer whose job is to coordinate law enforcement efforts aimed at stopping international copyright infringement and to oversee a federal umbrella agency responsible for administering intellectual property law.
Intellectual property law enforcement is divided among a range of agencies including the Library of Congress, the Justice and State departments and the U.S. Trade Representative. It is hoped that designating a single overseer to coordinate copyright law enforcement will put some cohesion into the federal effort, said one Senate Appropriations Committee aide.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Turbospoke
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:30:58 PM
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Caution: this bicycle accessory may instantly tranform your 6-year-old child into a pint-sized Hell's Angel. Turbospoke is an attachment for the rear chain stay. Rember the old "playing card in your spokes" trick for making basdass noise on your badass bike? This is like that, only badasser. Link (thanks Marc)
Update: BB reader Matt Dowling says, "On an episode of the TV show Braniac in the UK, a kid wanted to know if he was faster or slower with the turbospoke attached to his bike. So they set up a little circuit for him to pedal around with the thing on/off. Realisticly it should slow him down, but the result was that he went faster with the thing on, and what they figured is that it was psychological in speeding him up (with the "vrooom" and all)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Target Sells Anal Massage: coda
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:34:58 PM
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Following up on an interminable string of blather about the fact that Target.com sells an item called "anal massage," I would like to alert all shoppers to this book title -- also available on Target.com.
Hiroyuki Nishigaki:
How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?
Aye, there's the rub. Link (Thanks, Nik Willmore)
Reader Chris Slatt adds, "The best part about that anus constriction book isn't that it is sold at Target.com -- it's the customer reviews at Amazon. The 2nd page in particular is quite amusing." Here's a pinch:
A wonderful treatise on depression and a valuable resource for anyone, I can personaly attest to Mr. Nishigaki's methods. By following his instructions implicitly, I have banished the dark clouds under which I suffered for years, and have integrated his practices completely into my life. Even as I sit and type this review I am busy constricting my anus and counting, 80,81,82,83....... ooops!
Link
Siege adds, "The legendary Goatse himself reviewed it." Link
BB reader Magnus confesses,
I actually purchased a copy of How to Goodbye Depression from Amazon a couple of years ago. The first part of the book is a collection of Usenet postings in which the author baffles a procession of posters with his anus-constricting theories. The second part constains more, erm, practical information.
The book manages to hover delicately on the knife-edge between wind-up and misguided sincerity; with everything given added semiotic slip by the Engrish in which it's written. The reader genuinely has no idea whether they're being laughed at, whether they're in on the joke, or whether there's even a joke at all.
I think it should be retitled Finnegan's Arse.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Psst! Electronic Art
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:42:39 PM
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Slate has a story about how the value of digital art is measured -- and the role of intellectual property law in that calculation:
[Eli] Sudbrack vaulted to art stardom with his contribution to last spring's Whitney Biennial -- a surreal full-room installation with a Brazilian-disco vibe that included images of drag queens, soft-core porn, and serial substance abuse. Traditionally, such installations are unique pieces. Those created by artists firmly inscribed in the artistic canon -- such as Joseph Kosuth, Richard Long, or Mona Hatoum -- might sell for $150,000 to $300,000. But Peres Projects broke the Whitney piece down into multiple units (somewhat like the suit, shirt, and shoes of an autumn ensemble in a Barneys window) and sold each individually. To reproduce the whole installation, a collector would have to buy one of each element, at a total cost of $150,000. The defining elements -- the installation's floor, walls, and ceilings -- were in an edition of three. But the five sculptures, priced at $5,000-$15,000, were in an edition of five while the $2,500 decals and $5,000 video were in an edition of 10. Thus, the total list price of products available from the Whitney show was $600,000, minimum. Such sums only matter, of course, if someone will pay them. But by the time Frieze opened barely seven months later, Peres Projects had sold every last item from the Whitney show.
Is this madness? That's debatable. But the sales model definitely reflects a fundamental change in how art can be produced and sold. Purely digital art -- sold as software or access to online environments -- has been creeping into the art market over the last decade, but it still remains very much marginalized.
Link (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pop art nouveau robot romance manga
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:55:21 PM
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Writing text for blog entries is hard work and I'm sleepy. What needs to be said about Yumiko Kayukawa's delicious pop manga art, beyond what you see here? Shown: Cat Robbot [sic] (Nekogata Robotto). Awesome. Link (Thanks, Mark Hurst).
Update: BoingBoing reader Shane adds, "We recently interviewed Yumiko on our site Crown Dozen, and she's super-sweet." Link to interview.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gay worm reams Italian Senate
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:57:20 PM
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The Italian senate's computer system was shut down today after an attack by a computer worm containing gay porn images. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:57:50 PM
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Following up on this previous post, reader Ori Neidich says your slack-assed faithful BoingBoing editors "should point out to readers that gun fetishism isn't limited to just Christian Evangelicals." Uhh, puh-lease. As if we didn't know all about gun fetishism already. Anyway, he continues:
"I was reading your post about a Christian Guide to Small Arms [Ed. note: not that kind of small arms] and it reminded me of a site that my friends and I would visit for a hearty guffaw now and then. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.
What made it particularly hilarious were the regular columnists such as "Ask the Rabbi" where readers could submit various questions on firearms and religious law answered in one convenient place. Unfortunately, the site has recently become much more propagandistic and has less of the community feeling it did before Bush took office (I guess they are feeling defensive). But if you search through the articles you can still find some of the oldies-but-goodies including reviews of weapons they've taken out to test at the range and PDFs of targets that they make available as free downloads. Like this one (Ed. Note: Godwin's law alert).
Also, they have a coloring book for children that is absolutely hilarous -- Link (PDF). It features
Brasco(TM) The Liberty Bear... 'great for introducing children to guns, freedom, and responsibility."
Link. And yes, dear reader, that image would be none other than Brasco the Jewish, gun-toting bear. In closing, I would like to point out that he is not wearing any pants. Thank you.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sexual Tension
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DATE: 11/23/2004 09:58:01 PM
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An online gallery of work from photographer Elyse Butler, documenting backstage life in Porn Valley. Some really incredible shots in here. So much "backstage on porn sets" photography approaches the industry with one of two unstated goals: glamorizing or maudlinizing. This work does neither, and it is all the more powerful as a result.
Image: "Porn Actress Nikki Hunter stretches in the dressing room before going out to do a re-enactment of a rape scene on a pool table. Hunter has been doing pornography for about two years and was a stripper previously for eight years. 'It's good money,' she says, 'Much better than just stripping... I'll make about a thousand just tonight.'"
Link, images are not porn but they're not worksafe either. (thanks, S, via jmcolberg)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update: "Jews for Preservation of Firearms" greeting cards!
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DATE: 11/24/2004 07:11:28 AM
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Following up on our previous post about Brasco (tm) the gun-toting, bespectacled Jewish Liberty bear -- don't miss these nifty greeting cards. Nothing says "I love you" like FIREARMS CAN BE FUN, or THE JAPANESE WANT YOUR GUNS. If you're stuck on what to send a young child in your family during the upcoming hols, this oughta do the trick! Link to Brasco(tm) Greeting Cards $11.95 per set of twelve cards.
Reader Paul Mitchum says,
"Sure, the JPFO have Brasco, but will they sell you a mascot costume so that Brasco himself can appear at educational events? No? :-)
Well, check out the NRA's Eddie Eagle. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, so there are rules about how Eddie can be portrayed by whoever's inside the costume. Note that the NRA is saying that Eddie Eagle should not carry a gun (even a toy or prop), under penalty of civil lawsuit.
Brasco, meanwhile, is clearly ready to take out some punks, once he puts on his glasses."
But WWRD (what would a rabbi do)? BB reader Mike Schleif says,
According to Jewish law, hunting (for fun or sport) is actually not considered appropriate, so the jews for guns site seems odd. Here is a rabbinical explaination of Jewish views on gun use and hunting.
Link. Thanks, Mike, but I think Brasco makes it pretty clear he has bigger concerns.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Turkey has a Posse
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DATE: 11/24/2004 07:17:02 AM
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BoingBoing reader Ethan says, "I received an email FWD from a friend this morning, asking everyone to choose vegetarian this Thanksgiving. My favorite line was, 'The turkey does not want its throat slit this year.'
Something about its dead-pan delivery (no pun intended) made me think 'The Turkey Has a Posse.'
So here's an image (to put on your own server) I made for the holidays if you want it.Happy Thanksgiving."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Little shrimp tail leads to man's eventual death
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DATE: 11/24/2004 10:16:10 AM
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Zach J sez: In what could only be called an advertisement for the upcoming film version of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Yahoo News has a story of a Benihana chef who tossed a shrimp tail at a man, which caused the man to reflexively jerk his head away from the incoming projectile, resulting in a neck injury. The subsequent surgery for said neck injury failed, requiring a second surgery that ultimately lead to a fatal infection. So, in this litigious modern era, the man's family is naturally suing the Benihana chef for the untimely death. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Bioweapons (or bad sushi) damage politician's face
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DATE: 11/24/2004 11:13:38 AM
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Anonymous sez: "Check out the pictures -- before & after -- of Viktor Yushchenko's face. He came down with a mysterious illness' (reportedly toxins from biological weapons, his detractors say he ate bad sushi) a couple of months ago. Doctors in Austria who treated him are under police protection. Meanwhile Yugoslavians Ukrainians are out protesting in the streets against his political opponents, who are accused of winning the election fraudulently. Truth is stranger than -- a fictional cold war spy novel." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Blog Torrent
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DATE: 11/24/2004 12:55:37 PM
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Dave sez: Downhill Battle has released Blog Torrent to the masses! Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol on your PHP-enabled web site.
Why does Blog Torrent matter?
Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings. It lets people create vast networks of truly peer-to-peer video content-- video that was made by individuals and shared with individuals, no bandwidth budget or distribution deal needed. Does this mean that we can do for television what blogs have done for news? Let's find out...
Why use Blog Torrent on your blog or website?
1. It lets you post video or other large files as easily as you post text.
2. Installing Blog Torrent is as easy as uploading a photo to your website or blog.
3. Blog Torrent is the one bittorrent tracker that won't confuse your users.
4. It publishes an RSS feed of all your torrents.
Link (via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Flash gurus -- Creative Commons needs you
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DATE: 11/24/2004 06:40:30 PM
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The Creative Commons folks are ISO a Flash/AfterEffects/Video design person. Says CC's Executive Director Glenn Otis Brown, "We'd like to produce a short, new animated/motion graphics film, and we need a great designer and/or animator to help us do so on a fairly tight deadline." Link to details.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: WP's gossip columnist almost led Iraq's army
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DATE: 11/24/2004 06:47:44 PM
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Richard Leiby writes the "Reliable Source" column for the Washington Post. On Salon.com, he says: "Right after the fall of Baghdad, hundreds of desperate disbanded troops asked me -- a middle-aged journalist -- to give them jobs. That's when I knew everything was going terribly wrong... My very strange story ... never fails to amuse, bewilder and ultimately dishearten anyone who has ever wondered why combat that was supposed to end on May 1, 2003 -- you know, "Mission Accomplished" -- still rages with no end in sight." Link (via romanesko)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Boobs on CSPAN
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DATE: 11/24/2004 06:52:25 PM
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And when I say "boobs," I am not making a perjorative reference to clue-impaired congresscritters. "Uncensored, unpixelated clips from the M-rated The Guy Game and Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude were shown to a bored looking audience (including Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl) as part of a National Institure for Media and the Family briefing on its annual MediaWise Video Game Report Card." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online archive of Japanese TV ads
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DATE: 11/24/2004 06:57:34 PM
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BoingBoing reader Lawrence sez:
I like to capture Japanese commercials, and these include a ton of tech and gadget commercials. My most recent crop includes ads for the PSP + DS, Olympus M:Robe media player, Canon printers and cameras, NTT cameraphones, computers and even a moving company that will offer a quote based on pictures you take with and email from your phone.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: How to Good-bye Depression buttclench therapy: update
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DATE: 11/24/2004 06:58:01 PM
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Following up on our earlier BoingBoing post about Hiroyuki Nishigaki's book How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?, reader Jeff says,
"Mr. Nishigaki has a jumbled AOL Members site for his book. Link.
Also, his old usenet postings are here: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pacers, Pistons b-ball brawl reimagined as Picasso's Guernica
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DATE: 11/24/2004 07:02:59 PM
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On this odd fan tribute page for the Washington Wizards: a brilliant basketball-riot-themed Photoshop adaptation of Picasso's Guernica. Link (Thanks, Tony, and Doug)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: USB mince pies for Christmas
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DATE: 11/24/2004 07:09:48 PM
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100% Christmas-compatible. "According to Christmas lore, eating a Mince Pie every day in the run up to Christmas will make for a happy year ahead...The USB Mince Pie combines the ease-of-use of USB technology with a super-accurate, faithful reproduction of a genuinely tasty Mince Pie." Link (Thanks, Alex)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bikini-Clad Breakfast Fun
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DATE: 11/24/2004 07:17:08 PM
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It's kind of like Naked Lunch, only it's -- well, Scantily-clad Brunch. BoingBoing reader Will Oram says, "You may remember your entry on bikini babes throwing meat products at each other (Link to previous BoingBoing post). They're back...but with hot breakfast action!"
And there's nothing like a hot breakfast to get your day off to the right start. Link to low-res version, other higher rezes are here. If this floats your boat, may I also recommend Fleshbot's disturbingly huge archive of "Atkins Porn"and other culinary kink. Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jews For Preservation of Firearms: bonus round
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DATE: 11/24/2004 08:27:27 PM
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I thought of labeling this post "how to milk one website for every blog-inch it's worth," then thought better. But the Jews For The Preservation of Firearms Ownership website is a veritable html honeypot. Within, one finds ample abundance for not one, not two, but three BoingBoing posts (and counting).
Responding to the suggestion that Brasco the heavily-armed, pants-free, bespectacled Jewish Liberty Bear (tm) might be packin' his Hebrew hardware just for sport, BoingBoing reader Morgan Foust says:
"It's a pretty common misconception that most rabid gun owners own guns for hunting. They often don't (and I would know, I come from a family of gun-totin' survivalists). They own guns for self-defense at the very least, although more of them then you suspect honestly believe that the Democrats and the UN are plotting to take over the US with a 1984-style conspiracy and freedom's only hope are going to be gun-lovin' Americans fighting back, just like 1776 all over again. There's actually a Jewish explanation for this. Some Jews who own guns like to point to the Biblical/Tanakh Book of Esther, in which the Jewish population in Persia circa 450 or so BC arm themselves and repel an army led by a genocidal vizier. There are several verses describing the Jews kicking ass: 'And the Jews smote all their enemies with slaughter and destruction,' or 'the Jews slew five hundred men'."
And reader Cameron spotted another ammolicious goodie in the JFPO store: "They sell a one-of-a-kind pistol with the Bill of Rights on it... for the Jewish Dirty Harry types, I guess. What takes the cake: the $4,000 semiautomatic being sold to support the JPFO documentary film." Link.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wireless Research's Biggest Hurdle and Largest Opportunity
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DATE: 11/25/2004 03:04:25 AM
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For my latest article at TheFeature, I interviewed Ramesh Rao, a director of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, who believes that he future potential of mobile technology won't truly be realized until the wireless spectrum's Tower of Babel is toppled.
"No system is designed around the assumption that there will be others in the neighborhood...The wireless world has largely been built around specific technologies that have industry consortiums and standards bodies behind them. So largely, every developer or provider takes the point of view that the world may have a choice, but in the end their system will be the one that's adopted. So we ask, what are the architectures, capabilities and services that can emerge if you set out to exploit the fact that you will have multiple systems surround you?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Build your own ACE Satellite
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DATE: 11/25/2004 08:25:09 AM
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Ivy says,
"This Advanced Composition Explorer [ACE] model was designed with the intermediate to advanced builder in mind.
What ACE does in layman's terms:
The Earth sits in a stream of accelerated particles coming in from the Sun, interstellar material, and galactic sources. The study of these energetic particles will broaden our understanding of the formation and evolution of the solar system, as well as the astrophysical processes involved. The Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft, carrying six high-resolution sensors and three monitoring instruments, will sample low-energy particles of solar origin and high-energy galactic particles, with a collecting power 10 to 1000 times greater than past or planned experiments."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bananaguard
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DATE: 11/25/2004 08:30:47 AM
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"Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? This unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere." Link (Thanks, Toby and Daniel)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Space Quilt
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DATE: 11/25/2004 08:36:42 AM
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Todays Astronomy Picture of The Day from NASA is a quilt designed by a fan of Hubble Space Telescope photography. The 41 inch by 38 inch quilt was sewn by a woman named Judy Ross (wonder if there's any relation to the other Ross famous for sewing something that included stars?) The explanation on the APOD site includes links to the original images: Red Rectangle Nebula (Link), Eskimo Nebula (Link), Sleeping Beauty Galaxy (Link), V838 Monocerotis (Link), and Supernova remnant N49 (Link)
Link
(Thanks, Scott Matthews)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scent of a Cellphone
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DATE: 11/25/2004 08:38:35 AM
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BB reader Russell Buckley says,
One type [of cell phone decoration] gives off a smell when the phone rings - choose from lemon, peach or even ramen noodles and curry. Mmmm, mine's a vindaloo. Yours for merely $10. Others consist of little figurines, bursting to go to the loo. And if you pull it (where??) it doesn't wait any more!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hula Hoop-ers crossing
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DATE: 11/25/2004 08:53:08 AM
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BoingBoing reader Scott Doenges says, "I took this picture earlier this month in Utah's Arches National Park (Link to full-size). Upon close inspection it was clearly a transparent sticker somebody slapped onto the sign. A little Googling told me that these modified pedestrian crossing signs have been spotted all across the country. Here is another one from the D.C. area (Link).
Update D'oh! We've been had! By hula-hippies! Super Mike Lewis says, "When I saw the picture of the Hula-Hoop-ing street sign I thought you were linking to the band The String Cheese Incident. SCI is a bluegrass/rock/jazz jam band out of Colorado. There is real good chance it was a fan of their who stuck the sticker on that street sign." Link. BoingBoing reader Ariel says the band tosses 'em out to fans during shows. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coma cure: Doctor saves girl from rabies by "stopping" brain
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DATE: 11/25/2004 09:16:32 AM
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BoingBoing reader Xopl says,
Driving home for Thanksgivings, I listed to an interview on Minnesota Public Radio with a Milwaukee, WI doctor who saved the life of a girl who had contracted rabies from a bat. The disease is known as having a 100% fatality rate if you do not receive a vaccine before symptoms show, but the girl's doctor didn't accept that and developed an entirely new way to treat the disease. Apparently, rabies causes the brain to attack the body, and that is what causes death. By putting the girl into a coma he managed to stop the brain from being able to do any damage while the girl's immune system defeated the virus. This is a reminder that sometimes the impossible is possible if you don't listen to those who tell you otherwise. The Associated Press is also covering the story, which can be read in any number of places.
Link
Reader Kim Brennan says,
Rabies is not 100% fatal (to humans) if you have shown symptoms, but all previous survival cases DID receive the vaccine after symptoms had shown. This was the first case of survival without the vaccine.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pink Pistols
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DATE: 11/25/2004 09:53:54 AM
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BoingBoing reader Shane says,
After seeing your posts (Links: 1, 2, 3) on JPFO and the Christian Guide To Small Arms (Link), I can't believe you left out the Pink Pistols, a web site which caters to the gay gun-owners' community.
The site features sections on gun safety, organizing chapters, and lobbying to other liberals about gun rights. I'm not a member of this organization, but I support them fully in their endeavor.
Also, I am a gun-toting, Texas dwelling libertarian, and I love boingboing.net--Even if I do disagree with a lot of the opinions here.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indian epic Ramayana as comic
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 11/25/2004 09:55:42 AM
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Avi Solomon says, "Ramayana, the classic indian epic is online in 'graphic novel' form! (Link). This is part of the 'Amar Chitra Katha' series concieved by Anant Pai who was the pioneer in using comics to reintroduce India's mythological and historical treasures to it's alienated youth. More on Anant Pai (Link), and 'Amar Chitra Katha' website (Link)
BoingBoing reader Suresh Venkat says, "Many Indians of a certain age (myself included) grew up devouring Amar Chitra Katha (I had huge piles of them in my house, and in all probability still do at my parent's place in India). I didn't realize that they count as "graphic novels." I guess I was on the cutting edge even then. :) "
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fark photoshop contest: Cult of Mac
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DATE: 11/25/2004 08:57:09 PM
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What if the Mac really were a cult? A photoshop contest at Fark illustrates the many possible answers. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Electronic Concubine
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DATE: 11/25/2004 09:21:10 PM
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What's headless, limbless, vaguely turkey-shaped, has two breasts, three speeds, one vagina, and runs on a pair of double A batteries? The worst fucking laudanum-induced nightmare EVER, or the Concubine Masturbator sex gadget. Snip from website: "This multi-speed toy has it all! Made from a soft, realistic material, the concubine masturbator has perky breasts, hard nipples, and a ready and willing vagina." Visualize a decapitated (but stacked) quadruple amputee after multiple rounds of kitten bonsai, and you get what this looks like. Or, click here. Link Warning: NSFW and may induce goatse-like retina scarring. (Thanks Jonno)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jesus H Defy
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DATE: 11/26/2004 02:36:19 AM
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In May, I posted news that Bletchley Park codebreakers had been called to an historic monument in Central England. Their mission was to crack an 18th century puzzle--the carved letters "D OUOSVAVV M"--that some believe contains a clue to the location of the Holy Grail. On Thursday, the codebreakers announced their preliminary findings. Right this way, please. Dan Brown will be signing autographs at the exit... Link (Thanks, Kev!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on ABC World News Tonight Friday: Firefox
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DATE: 11/26/2004 05:38:55 AM
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Friday evening's edition of ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings includes a feature about Firefox and the open source movement, in which I'm a participant. Details and local air times: Link. Note: If you're on the east coast, the show may be pre-empted by football. And football has nothing to do with browsers.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fluctuat's Excuse My French
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DATE: 11/26/2004 12:09:44 PM
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Boing Boing's Paris liaison Alexandre Boucherot and his co-conspirators at Fluctuat.net have launched an English counterpart to their excellent AEIOU arts and culture blog. I for one am most grateful. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny Humans update #7: battling palaeontologists
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DATE: 11/26/2004 02:26:14 PM
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An Indonesian paleontologist is keeping the remains of the tiny humans away from other paleontologists. Let the paleontologist war begin!
They may be tiny, but the hobbits -- the extinct one-metre-high human species whose discovery rocked the palaeontology world last month - are provoking a giant barney among Australian and Indonesian scientists.
One of Indonesia's leading palaeontologists, Professor Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University in Jakarta, has grabbed the hobbit remains and locked them away in his safe, refusing to let other scientists study them.
In addition, he rejected the widespread view that the hobbits are a separate human species, claiming they are a pygmy form of modern humans who suffered microcephaly, a disorder that produces a small brain.
The Australian scientists who dug up the bones of the hobbits, officially dubbed Homo floresiensis, have pleaded with Professor Jacob to return the bones as they may contain vital DNA clues as to their exact ancestry. The seven skeletons were found last year in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores by an Australian and Indonesian team.
Link (Previous tiny humans updates here.)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Automatons in the NY Times
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DATE: 11/27/2004 05:16:45 AM
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Today's New York Times has an article about the Murtogh D. Guinness Collection, four-hundred years of music boxes, proto-robots, and mechanical musical instruments recently acquired by the Morris Museum in New Jersey.
"Our sense of wonder is tweaked when we see, for example, a two-and-a-half-foot-high early-20th-century automaton with a little boy reaching for a jar of marmalade for his biscuit. As he reaches up, a door opens and the jar revolves, revealing the animated face of his scolding grandmother. A fly buzzes in the cabinet while a tiny mouse emerges from an apple.
In addition to the craft of it, this object, like virtually everything in the collection, is a piece of theater, an authentic historical performance: a time machine, if you will, visiting from the past."
Link (free site reg. required)
UPDATE: As BB reader Rob Iracane so kindly points out, the Morris Museum Web site has nice multimedia clips of the various machines in action. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tree of Death
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DATE: 11/27/2004 05:31:14 AM
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Cerbera odollam, a plant that grows in India and southeast Asia, is also known as the "suicide tree" because people munch it to kill themselves. Apparently, it's also used to rub out young wives who aren't well-liked by their in-laws. From New Scientist:
Although the kernels of the tree have a bitter taste, this can be disguised if they are crushed and mixed with spicy food. They contain a potent heart toxin called cerberin, similar in structure to digoxin, found in the foxglove.
Digoxin kills by blocking calcium ion channels in heart muscles, which disrupts the heartbeat. But while foxglove poisoning is well known to western toxicologists, (researcher Yvan) Gaillard says pathologists would not be able to identify Cerbera poisoning unless there is evidence the victim had eaten the plant. “It is the perfect murder,” he says.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Funny old anti-Commie comic book
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DATE: 11/27/2004 09:50:43 AM
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Olli sez:
"Just found this link to some really interesting anti-communist propaganda from the 1960's. It's a comic book that looks at what *COULD* happen to *YOU* if those evil commies get their hands on the USA. Endorsed by none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself!" Link (When I read it, I mentally swapped every instance of "communists" with "red-state republicans" and it was even more enjoyable -- Mark)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Funny old anti-Commie comic book update #1
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DATE: 11/28/2004 07:45:15 AM
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Jose sez: Regarding the comic book entry: Awesome find. Was doing the same thing, substituting things in my head, and I had to remix some panels. With fairly obvious references, as well as to a story Xeni posted earlier. (click on thumbnails for enlargment.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: "Destination Earth" (commie Martian cartoon at archive.org)
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DATE: 11/28/2004 08:01:12 PM
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Joel sez: "The recent 'Funny old anti-Commie comic book' BB post reminded me of this. The Prelinger Archives at archive.org have quite a few anti-communist/pro-capitalist propaganda films. The most entertaining of these are the surprisingly large number of animated shorts, done in classic 1950s stylized animation. The one with the most amusing premise is 'Destination Earth' (This one is by the great Tom Oreb -- Mark) in which Mars is ruled by an evil communist dictator named Ogg (no relation to the Ogg Vorbis audio format). As if it weren't bad enough, they have another hideous problem -- not knowing anything about the essential technology of ... oil (out of sheer coincidence this film was sponsored by the petroleum industry). However, after sending a space scout to Earth they learn all about the benefits of oil and capitalism (though the economic treatise 'Competition: More for All') and immediately put an end to Ogg's tyranny by running off to the Martian countryside to drill oil wells in the spirit of free enterprise. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pink Floyd's student choir sues
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DATE: 11/28/2004 09:11:03 PM
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In one of the oddest music-related lawsuits in recent memory:
A group of former pupils at a London comprehensive school are poised to win thousands of pounds in unpaid royalties for singing on Pink Floyd's classic Another Brick In The Wall 25 years ago. The pupils from the 1979 fourthform music class at Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals after their teacher was approached by the band's management.
Now the 23 ex-pupils are suing for overdue session musician royalties, taking advantage of the Copyright Act 1997 to claim a percentage of the money from broadcasts. Music teacher Alun Renshaw took the 13- to 14-year-old pupils out of lessons by to the nearby Britannia Recording Studios in Islington to record - without the head's permission.
Link (Thanks, Josh, and thanks Glenn)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Target.com sells "marijuana" -- for $25
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DATE: 11/28/2004 09:37:07 PM
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Following up on an interminable string of previous BoingBoing posts about the fact that Target.com offered an item called "anal massage" for sale -- now, this breaking news flash. Target.com is selling "Marijuana," for $25.25, with free shipping available on orders of $30 or more. Link. In the event that cooler heads at Target prevail, sensibleerection.com saved this screencap: Link (Thanks to many readers who submitted this item, the first of whom was mikel)
BoingBoing reader Tim Windsor says,
On the Target Marijuana page, you can get the ISBN under "More Information." Plugging that into Amazon leads to this product page, where the kids are havin' some fun in the comments section.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Funky food safety tunes
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DATE: 11/28/2004 10:02:30 PM
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BoingBoing reader Vidiot says,
Dr. Carl Winter of the UC-Davis Department of Food Science and Technology has been called the "Sinatra of salmonella" and the "Elvis of E. coli". He makes song parodies about food-safety issues. His website includes RA streams, PowerPoint presentations, and lyrics for such songs as "Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters", "I Sprayed It On The Grapevine", "Don't Get Sicky Wit It", and "Beware Of La Vaca Loca."
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ScienceMatters
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DATE: 11/29/2004 06:23:52 AM
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Inside my latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley:
* DNA devices for crime scenes... and Mars
* Chilling News About Glaciers
* The Toughest Shrimp Around
I hope you enjoy it!
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Handstanding Pandas
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DATE: 11/29/2004 06:33:18 AM
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Some Pandas do handstands to mark their territory. The aim is to piss as high up a tree as possible. The higher the scent, the "more dominant" the signal. A new BBC Wildlife Magazine documentary captures this and other interesting bearhavior using camouflaged cameras and motion sensors.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Smart Cruise Control
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DATE: 11/29/2004 06:42:59 AM
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A physicist at the University of Michigan has built a computer simulation to model how "adaptive cruise-control" technology in cars may affect traffic flow. The system would use radar to keep vehicles from getting too close to each other. From Science News:
Its advantage is that it can respond much more quickly and precisely than human drivers can to any change in speed. A vehicle using adaptive cruise control typically brakes sooner and more smoothly than one without the system....
Intriguingly, at an average speed of 67 miles per hour, if only one in five vehicles used adaptive cruise control, no traffic jams would form and traffic would generally flow freely. At lower concentrations, however, intermittent episodes of traffic congestion would still be an issue.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Songs of Sickness
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DATE: 11/29/2004 06:56:47 AM
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Reader Dougal Campbell says,
The BoingBoing post about food safety tunes reminded of of something I heard on NPR a while back. Doctor Helen Davies at the University of Pennsylvania creates songs to help her students remember facts about microbiology. One of my favorite bits (song to the tune of the Beatles' "Yesterday"):
"Leprosy,
Bits and pieces falling off of me,
But it isn't the toxicity,
It's just neglect of injury.
Link to AMA News story, and there's another article here: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Free music via French blog
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DATE: 11/29/2004 07:44:10 AM
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Chryde says,
I founded a collective french music weblog with a mp3blog page. We made a compilation of musics we discovered on the web, by ourselves or via other mp3blogs. It's called Point D'ecoute (French for Listening post, a reference to a Mark Hansen Installation: Link.
All the tracks are taken from the bands' sites so it's 100% legal, like a mini Wired CD. 23 tracks, a lot from the US, but also Netherlands, France, Belgium, Austria, Sweden... You can download it here: Link
We made it free to download, with a cover and all. At an event in Paris celebrating musical webzines, we burned it on demand: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: India's first professional DJ academy
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DATE: 11/29/2004 07:46:59 AM
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Reader Avi Solomon says,
"Indian DJ Nasha made a splash with his 'Nasha - Flute Fantasy' and continued to create many more great bollywood remixes. He has now opened the first professional DJ academy in India- keep them coming, man!"
Link to news story. Listen to a complete DJ Nasha session here(realplayer): Link. Nasha's set starts around 4:49 into that BBC ram link, after some banter with the show's host. It's a fine, fine session! Interview: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 1960s sex HOWTO manual from Japan
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DATE: 11/29/2004 07:56:47 AM
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Scans from "Young People's Sex Manual: From Petting to XX," a mid-1960s era howto doc from Japan. Progresses from the fine art of handholding to paper cutout foreplay demos to an extravaganza of sex positions between a real woman and an artist's male wooden model. Link, also spotted on Fleshbot. (Thanks, Dave)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Alaskan blogger accused of mother's murder
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DATE: 11/29/2004 08:10:04 AM
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A teen blogger in Alaska has been arrested for her mother's murder.
Rachelle Waterman had posted to an online journal dating back to February. In the journals, which she titled "My crappy life, the inside look of an insane person." She says she lives in Hell, Alaska, details conflicts with her mother and writes about a desire to commit violent acts against herself and others...
Link to copy of one of her final entries, posted Nov. 14 -- hours after law enforcement learned of the mom's reported death. In the entry, Waterman writes about a trip to Anchorage, and buying a new pair of boots. Link to Waterman's blog. Link to related post on glassdog. Link to news coverage. (Thanks, pollenatrix)
Here's Google's cache of contributions to a fantasy art site from the accused teen (now unavailable in original form). Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR of Macy's Parade
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DATE: 11/29/2004 08:27:46 AM
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A QTVR panorama of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last week in New York City. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Proto-pron for sale at Sotheby's
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DATE: 11/29/2004 08:56:19 AM
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(Updated)
What may be the world's oldest existing piece of printed porn will be auctioned off next month, and is expected to sell for up to 65 thousand dollars.
"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line." (...) The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.
Link to news item (Thanks, Sandy)
Here are the auction item details, including this amazing image, on Sothebys.com: Link. The work is both porn and protest:
Although in every sense, and in almost every line, pornographic (even though its humour sometimes recalls that in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), the play has two primary purposes: one literary, the other political. One aim is the production of a hilarious burlesque of the then fashionable â€heroic’ plays... Its other main aim, however, is to satirise uncompromisingly the court of Charles II – not only the notoriously lecherous Charles himself, with all his mistresses (“Thus, in the zenith of my lust I reign”), but also the venality of his courtiers, who are depicted as slavishly imitating him and indulging in the common state of moral and sexual anarchy.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: CIA funding chat room spy tech research
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DATE: 11/29/2004 09:06:24 AM
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Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh writes:
The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly released documents reveal.In April 2003, the CIA agreed to fund a series of research projects that the documents indicate were intended to create "new capabilities to combat terrorism through advanced technology." One of those projects is research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., devoted to automated monitoring and profiling of the behavior of chat-room users.
Link to story. One of the FOIA'd documents, via EPIC.org (PDF): Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sleaze SF paperback covers of yesteryear
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DATE: 11/29/2004 09:34:28 AM
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Link (via Warren)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Smiling not allowed in US passport photos
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DATE: 11/29/2004 12:01:18 PM
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The unhappiest passports on earth:
[When taking a [photo of a person applying for a passport] "The subject's expression should be neutral (non-smiling) with both eyes open, and mouth closed. A smile with a closed jaw is allowed but is not preferred," according to the guidelines.
... Smiling "distorts other facial features, for example your eyes, so you're supposed to have a neutral expression. ... The most neutral face is the most desirable standard for any type of identification," said Angela Aggeler, spokeswoman for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, which handles travel-document guidelines.
Link (Thanks, Maines!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: gadgets, gadgets, gadgets!
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DATE: 11/29/2004 12:38:44 PM
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On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I hit the streets with Alex Chadwick to try out a few new gadgets, including:
* A hand-held traffic reporting device called TrafficGauge ($80, thanks to Mike Outmesguine for turning me on to this one!)
* A multimedia gizmo called the DVXPod (shown here) that plays music, movies and television shows ($599)
* laptop bags made from spaceship parachutes (which have actually been up in space, $95-195).
* some awesome headphones from Sennheiser -- good noise-canceling headphones are a must for the DVXPod or other handheld media centers. Here's my favorite model, the HD 212Pro (about $90-120).
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Target.com sells crack and MDMA
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DATE: 11/29/2004 12:56:39 PM
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First came the news that Target.com was selling "anal massage," then came their offer of "marijuana" for $25 -- now, they're rolling out the hard stuff. Here, the online retailer beckons you to come hither and buy Crack and MDMA. No wonder Target's spokesdog has those big red circles around his eyes! (thanks Gordon Bird, and Toddville Robins)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Spongebob Swipedpants
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DATE: 11/29/2004 02:35:19 PM
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Burger King locations around the United States are reporting thefts of inflatable Spongebob Squarepants rooftop icons. The gigantic blow-up-Bobs commemorate the fast food chain's promo effort with a new animated film.
Similar SpongeBobs have disappeared from Burger Kings in at least two other states, including Minnesota, where a "kidnapper" asked for ransom - 10 Crabby Patties, fries and milkshakes. The note was signed by SpongeBob's cartoon nemesis, Plankton.
Link to one news story, and Link to another. (thanks, Stefan Jones)
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TITLE: Did we mention that Target.com sells blowjobs, too?
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DATE: 11/29/2004 05:13:19 PM
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Listed under "Entertainment" (as if we don't already know), but with no additional product details whatsoever: "blowjob." A steal at $9.99, but they take 4-8 weeks to come -- er, arrive. Link to item, Link to screenshot, and link to previous post about Target.com silliness. (Thanks, Jeff)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Big head people in Tokyo stores
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DATE: 11/29/2004 05:41:48 PM
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Giant headed people in Tokyo stores are a sign that Christmas is coming. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Genetically engineered plants detect land mines by changing color
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DATE: 11/29/2004 05:45:57 PM
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When the roots of these GMO flowers hit nitrogen dioxide (which leaches into the soil from buried land mines), the plant changes color. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: McRorie the one-man bandstravaganza
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DATE: 11/29/2004 06:01:08 PM
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McRorie Tait is a one-man, kilt-wearing, awesomely mulletted, electronic music phenom from Canada. His website describes him thusly:
"McRorie wears eight custom designed sensors on his shoes, four sensors on his chest, two midi keyboards on his hips, and sings lead vocals, harmonies, and solo instruments with his voice. McRorie coordinates the multiple parts of a musical composition: drums, bass, rhythm, vocals, and lead instruments -- TOTALLY LIVE."
Out of control cool. Plus his chest lights up like a robot and I think he also eats fire on stage while playing killer '80s cover songs with his feet. This is so cool it almost feels like a hoax. But I think it is real. Link to website with video clips, song downloads, and CD purchase details. (Thanks, Q-Burns).
UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Alexis says, "McRorie is legit - most of the footage in that clip IS from the 80's, that's why he's covering 80's songs. He appears in the clip on the now defunct Canadian talk show Dini Petty Show, several pieces are from Toronto news show City TV and part of the way through the clip he's seen with a very young Celine Dion before she hit mega-stardom."
Reader Matt McParland says, "I saw McRorie, the one man band, play live 4 or 5 years ago when his Canadian tour rolled through my hometown. His Canadian tour consisted of the man himself, two racks of MIDI-controlled effects and a few old Macs running wireframe screensavers for the light show. He played for about 20 people that night in a hole in the wall bar and we've been talking about it since!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DIY dodecahedron calendar, a la D-n-D dice
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DATE: 11/29/2004 06:57:36 PM
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This 12-sided pentagon print-em-yourself calendar is a nifty gift idea for thrifty geeks. Dodeca-bitchin'! Link (Thanks, ritilan).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Busty hentai mousepads
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DATE: 11/29/2004 07:02:38 PM
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About $25 per ergonomic hentai mousepad, boobies included. Link (via Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Etienne-Jules Marrey
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:03:26 AM
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The Musée d'Orsay has an exhibition of the mind-blowing photographs by physician and physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, whose research in the 19th century led directly to the invention of the movie camera. The image at left is a 1901 shot of a smoke machine.
"Marey became interested in movement at an early stage of his career: the movement of blood as it circulated, the movements which controlled the beating of the heart, then those of the muscles and nerves. To improve his studies, he developed more and more precise recording instruments. Once had explained the internal movements of the body, Marey extended his investigations to the motion of the body as a whole: a walking human being, a flying dragonfly, a swimming ray, a falling cat..."
For those outside of Paris, "Movement In Light" is a stunning online exhibit of Marey's work from which the text above was taken. Link (via AEIOU: Excuse my French!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Victorian Fax
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:20:08 AM
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This fax-by-telegraph machine was in operation at the New York Herald in 1900. From a Pearson's Magazine article published at the time:
"The equipment consists of two machines, almost identical in construction, the first being called the " transmitter," the second the " receiver." Each is provided with an eight-inch cylinder, which may be made to revolve by a delicate system of clockwork so finely regulated that both instruments work together to a nicety.
Above each cylinder rests a fine platinum needle, or stylus, not unlike the point in a telegraph key. A sheet of tin-foil, six inches by eight inches, ready to wrap round the transmitter's cylinder, and a sheet of ordinary carbon manifold-copying paper of the same dimensions, which, when placed between two sheets of blank paper, is to be wrapped round the receiver's cylinder--these complete the chief requirements."
Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bestial reality
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:41:18 AM
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Stay with me here: The British Office of Communications cleared Channel Five of any wrongdoing for airing an episode of reality TV show TheFarm in which David Beckham's ex-girlfriend gave a handjob to a pig.
From ABC News Online:
"The task performed by Rebecca Loos is one that occurs regularly on UK farms. It was properly supervised by a qualified veterinary surgeon and was carried out for a genuine purpose, to artificially inseminate the pigs on the 'celebrity farm'," the ruling said.
"We don't believe that the scene was degrading or harmful to the boar."
Link
UPDATE: BB reader Jamal Cole points out: "It should be noted that Beth Littleford masturbated a pig on the Daily Show way back when Craig Kilborn was hosting (~1998). She showed it pictures of Miss Piggy, and asked, 'Do you find this attractive?' I had always found her attractive until then..."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tis the season to STICK IT TO THE MAN
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DATE: 11/30/2004 07:00:40 AM
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BoingBoing reader Garth Johnson says,
"This is a lovely pamphlet that artist Packard Jennings distributed at his local mall. Packard is the human who brought us the 'fallen rapper' pez dispensers."
Link to art-pamphlet, and Link to other past work from Jennings.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Karate Kid, The Musical
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DATE: 11/30/2004 07:10:33 AM
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A musical for stage, based on the 80's cheeseball film classic The Karate Kid. Now playing at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center in NYC. Somewhere, Ralph Macchio is crying. Link (Thanks, mediamelt)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Darrin Perry: in memoriam
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DATE: 11/30/2004 07:28:09 AM
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Kenn Brown says,
My friend and mentor Darrin Perry, former Creative Director of Wired Magazine , passed away over the holiday weekend. He was only 39 years old. I am devastated... it was three awesome years we spent collaborating first as professionals, and then as friends... and now its over. I will miss him. I will miss working with him. He had a significant impact on publications from Sports Illustrated to Wired.
Here is the obituary. There is a guest book for those who wish to leave their condolences. Link
Tim Jarrett says, "Perry led the 2002 redesign of Wired Magazine, which freshened the look and feel of the aging geek bible while making it more legible."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: World Health Organization's bird flu warning: 100 million deaths
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DATE: 11/30/2004 08:47:00 AM
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Matt Vine sez: Since yesterday, the rest of the world has been buzzing with news of the World Health Organization's warnings of a impending flu pandemic that could kill up to 100 million. These warnings are suspiciously missing from American news sites - we get things like "Godzilla honored with 'Walk of Fame' star" from CNN's front page." Link UPDATE:
Alex Rosen sez: "Well, the Times is carrying it, and has a much different spin than the
submitter's. It sounds like off-the-cuff guestimates by one guy, not a
prediction by WHO itself.
While the agency has previously said that the death toll would be from 2
million to 7 million people, Dr. Omi said the toll "may be more - 20 million
or 50 million, or in the worst case, 100" million.
W.H.O. officials in Geneva said later that they had not received an advance
copy of Dr. Omi's remarks and did not know the basis for his estimates and
why he believed a pandemic was so likely.
"No one knows how many are likely to die in the next human influenza
pandemic," or even when it will occur, said Dr. Klaus Stöhr, the agency's
top influenza expert. "The numbers are all over the place."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Casino cheater's blog
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DATE: 11/30/2004 09:18:44 AM
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Interesting weblog run buy a retired casino cheater -- that is, a former casino dealer who cheated the casinos. He gets interesting email from fans of his book, American Roulette:
Read your book and took action. It was the most satisfying money I’ve ever received from a casino. It was a post-bet placement of a $5 dollar chip on number 33. I placed the chip between the 32 & 33. Like your book says it was to the dealers far left and I could see the ball falling into the 33 slot on the wheel. It’s not much fun working on your own but it was greatly satisfying.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Exploding lava lamp kills man
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DATE: 11/30/2004 09:47:41 AM
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BB reader Poppy says, "A 24 year old man left a lava lamp on his stove, and it exploded. A shard of glass pieced his heart, killing him instantly. Link to story. This just a week after all the warnings over exploding cell phones. Link."
Reader Jeremy says, "I thought the story might be complete bull, but went right to the Kent Police Department site and found this press release. It has a little more information that the AP report." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Interesting traffic citation scam
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DATE: 11/30/2004 12:41:39 PM
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Stefan Jones sez: Rob Cockerham takes a break from pranks, hijinks, tomfoolery, and bizarre eBay auctions to describe a new type of mail fraud: An authentic-looking letter claiming that the recipient's car was spotted exceeding the speed limit and demanding payment (by money order or cashier's check) of a fine. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: GuitarBot Strums Classics at Juilliard
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DATE: 11/30/2004 04:36:21 PM
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BoingBoing reader Mia says,
Tonight at the high-falutin' Julliard School: the RoboRecitcal, an all-automata concert performance by a player piano (old school) and GuitarBot (new school). GuitarBot, "a stringed instrument that is designed to extend -- not simply duplicate -- the capabilities of a human musician," was created in 2000 by LEMUR (the League if Electronic Musical Urban Robots... no joke) and looks like it was designed by Dan Flavin. It will play a program featuring Bach, Mozart, and compositions by J. Brendan Anderson, the Julliard undergrad who coordinated the recital.
The Julliard link includes a discussion of the centuries-old history of musical composition for automata, based on the ideal of direct transmission of music from composer to listener, unsullied by those accident-prone humans.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Netscape = Firefox / IE shotgun wedding?
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:03:07 PM
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BoingBoing reader boogah says,
Apparently Netscape isn't totally dead - AOL outsourced development of a new browser based on Firefox to Canadian firm Mercurial Communications. Normally I'd applaud something like this. Getting Firefox into the hands of the many is a good thing... But the fact that they're going to allow the user to switch their rendering engine from Mozilla developed Gecko to Internet Explorer's rendering engine seems a bit sinister.
BTW: Ugly screenshots are available here.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Haptics: Can You Feel the Buzz?
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:06:42 PM
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My latest article for TheFeatures is about haptic interfaces, which send information to your skin.
At Nokia Research, Jukka Linjama and Topi Kaaresoja added a small acceleration sensor to a phone to create a Pong-like game that a user controls by tapping the phone either horizontally or vertically. The user gets feedback from different vibration patterns. In a paper presented at the NordiCHI human-computer interaction conference, they wrote that the synchronized combination of graphics and vibrations "creates a kind of a kinesthetic illusion of a soft ball being tapped and bouncing inside the device. In informal evaluations most users rated this illusion very natural, impressive, and enjoyable."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Versace Barbie
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:07:39 PM
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I didn't know there was such a thing. Does she come with a (perfect) nose full of (plastic) coke? Link (Thanks CityRag)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony Adds MP3 Support
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:08:48 PM
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BB reader Morgan opines:
To paraphrase Cory, Sony has realized that their customers want to do more, not less, with their hardware. They're now offering firmware upgrades (at $20 per unit) for their portable digital music players that will allow them to play back non-DRM'ed MP3s. Previously, Sony customers were locked into using Sony's DRMeriffic ATRAC format. Their next generation of music players will have natively support MP3 playback.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anti-porno iPod feature?
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:15:26 PM
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BoingBoing reader Brandon says,
There is a "bug" in the iPod Photo that randomly flashes photos from other albums into slideshows. [on Leander Kahney's Wired blog, "Cult of Mac,"] Keith Finch has suggested this might not be a bug, but rather an intentional measure to dissuade users from keeping "double secret 'Hot Butts'" albums on their iPods. The hypothetical situation he presents to support his case is good for a chuckle or two.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: US Army spamming students by phone, too
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:24:56 PM
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Following up on a previous BoingBoing post about the US Army sending e-mail recruitment spam to college students, Mark Miller sez:
I had previously mentioned the US Army spamming students at UT Austin. While they have done so again, even after being told that I wished no further e-mails, what has become even more bizarre is a call from +1 702-671-0040, by a pre-recorded Army Recruitment message. It gave the number for the local Army Recruitment Center here in Austin. When I called back, it noted that you could leave no messages, but to call the number stated in the message you received. Several other friends of mine have received such calls this evening.
The NPA-NXX lookup says this is a Las Vegas number.
What's even more disturbing is that my number is on the FCC's Do Not Call List.
If any reader on BoingBoing could shed some light on the new recruiting practices of the US Army, and perhaps the call center that they are calling out from, I would be appreciative.
Link. You're welcome to send replies to that question via the BoingBoing submission web-form.
Reader Douglas Barnes says,
I, too got automated phone spam from the Army today; when I called to complain in, er, rather strong language, instead of apologizing or promising not to do it again, the sergeant in charge threatened to "find [me] and beat the shit out of [me]." Not a great day for Army PR.
I'm assuming they got my info from UT. A recent Third Circuit case allows universities to kick military recruiters off campus (and, one assumes, to refuse to provide databases of student information). No sign that UT would even want to do this, much less go to court for the privilege.
Link to blog entry with details.
Responding to the same thread, reader Bryan Shepherd -- also a UT-Austin student -- writes, "You posted a week or so back about the army recruiting practices here at UT-Austin, so I thought you might find this interesting as well. It's an email I just received via my UT account."
From:Hood, Charles R SGT USAREC [CHARLES.HOOD@usarec.army.mil]
Subject:Special Forces Opportunities
To whom it may concern,
I am offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity to become part of America's elite. If you are always challenging yourself, highly adept at problem solving, and relentless in pursuing your goals, then a spot in the Special Forces is for you. The Special Forces soldier also known as the Green Beret is highly skilled in such arts as SCUBA diving, Parachuting, and Foreign Languages. This training along with the best equipment is what makes them the best of the best. For a limited time, the Army will offer you the opportunity to attend Infantry Basic Training, Jump School, and Special Forces Assessment and Selection. This opportunity is normally reserved for soldiers who have served for a period of 2 to 3 years, but at this time, it is available you with out any special prerequisites. I highly encourage you to take the chance and become one of America's Elite. For more Information, contact SGT Hood @ (877) 524-0211.
SGT Hood, Charles R.
U.S. Army Recruiter
(877) 524-0211 Cell
(512) 472-7616
Reader Sarah Looney writes, "I blogged on this a while back. The spam emailed to students clearly states that they are recruiting for 'a non-deployable position.' Finding this strange, I followed up with the recruiter..." Link to more on Sarah's blog.
See also this Mother Jones article: "No Child Unrecruited". The Army now has access to public school records, thanks to the No Child Left Behind act. (thanks, karen)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Update -- Darrin Perry: in memoriam
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DATE: 11/30/2004 05:38:15 PM
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Earlier today, we posted word of the untimely passing of Darrin Perry, the former creative director whose career included work at both Wired Magazine and Sports Illustrated. Wired managing editor Blaise Zerega shares the following update for BoingBoing readers who may have known Mr. Perry:
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the North Carolina School of the Arts, a place that allowed Darrin to first cultivate his passion and love of the arts. Or donate to the human rights campaign @ HRC.org an organization that was a voice for his beliefs. For the North Carolina school of the Arts please Note: "In Memory of Floyd Darrin Perry." Please make checks payable to: N.C.S.A. Foundation Inc., Mailing Address: N.C.S.A. Foundation Inc.. Attn: Sarah Turner, 1533 South Main Street, Winston Salem, NC 27127-2188, Tel: 336.770.1371, Email: turnes [at] ncarts.edu.
Link to a SF Chronicle story about Perry's redesign of Wired Magazine in 2002.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blinged-out baby umbilical cord gift atrocity
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DATE: 11/30/2004 06:33:14 PM
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A company in South Korea will gold-plate your child's umbilical cord and frame it for display. Link (second image down on the page.) (Thanks, Isaac)
Reader Andrew says, "Koreans have been keeping umbilical cords for centuries (Link)
and recently they have used umbilical cord to help a paralysed woman walk again (Link). There are other medical uses for the umbilical cords (Link). My Korean girlfriend says her mum still has her umbilical cord, and she's 23!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Math of Christmas Carols
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DATE: 11/30/2004 06:36:21 PM
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BoingBoing reader Ben Dalton says,
"Brian Whitman, maker of eigenradio (which "plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy") has released a happy holiday album automatically derived from the principal components of 'all christmas music'. Description, from his site: 'This season, as a present to friends worldwide, our system listened to as much Christmas music as it could handle. When it was done it synthesized these sixteen new timeless classics.' Great stuff."
Link, and Link to all of them compressed into a regularly updated .m3u audio stream (thanks Stevyile)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Karate chimp mpeg short
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DATE: 11/30/2004 06:48:53 PM
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This movie's already made the rounds plenty of times. But in light of the Karate Kid moment we've been having here on BoingBoing, seems worth a mention. Link to mpeg short of a chimpanzee throwing karate kicks with a human partner. Link (Thanks Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Desktop wallpapers of cellular transmission towers
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DATE: 11/30/2004 07:02:21 PM
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A collection of wireless transmission tower-themed desktop wallpapers: Link. See also this collection of wireless tower site snapshots, and this handy online search tool for locating a cell tower near you. (via SOCALWUG wireless tech listserv)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Animation: My Neighbor's Wife
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DATE: 11/30/2004 07:06:21 PM
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Link to Flash animated short (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Correction: RFID-chipped Mexican cop numbers overstated
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DATE: 11/30/2004 07:42:17 PM
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Following up on this BoingBoing post from August, 2004:
News reports earlier this year indicated that 160 employees in the Mexican Attorney General's Office had been implanted with Verichip RFID devices. New information indicates that only 18 individuals received the device, said Katherine Albrecht, Founder and Director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering).
"Our concern is that dozens of news outlets have repeated the inflated number, which has reached the level of an urban legend," Albrecht observed. "I myself have repeated the erroneous figure in several media interviews, and I want to set the record straight."
Link to Allbrecht's statement and futher details.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Erotokitsch master: Boris Vallejo
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DATE: 11/30/2004 07:49:59 PM
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Reflecting on the intergalactic love-art of Boris Vallejo, BoingBoing pal Siege opines:
"I recently stumbled across this online gallery of Boris Vallejo's paintings. A few days ago my mom had informed me that she had just scored an awesome calendar of his work, and snagged it for me, remembering that when I was a little kid I used to teach myself drawing with his paintings."
"Boris was the Botticelli of the trailer park. My dream (not yet dead) was to have a jacked-up molester van, regally decorated with massive Boris paintings airbrushed on the sides, accenting the tinted portholes and the silver tail-fin. I would blast Hot For Teacher as I cruised the parking lots, luring the Daisy Dukes into my mobile velvet-lined bachelor pad... I used to draw Boris art (along with the occasional Playboy centerfold) and sell them to the rich kids for $5-20 dollars each, priced according to the amount of nudity."
Link to the official Boris Vallejo website. Link to a ginormous gallery of work spanning multiple decades. And link to one of Siege's all-time fave Boris creations, which depicts a man-goat-loverdude ascending with his betrothed on an invisible hairway to Steven. This one is my favorite (alternate link). If you squint a little, it looks like the pattern on a Pucci dress.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Blog defined
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DATE: 12/01/2004 03:20:48 AM
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Meriam-Webster declared yesterday that based on lookups in their online dictionary, the "#1 Word of the Year for 2004" is (drumroll and eyeroll)... "blog."
Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.
Also-rans include "incumbent,""insurgent,""hurricane," and "peloton," defined as the "main body of riders in a bicycle race."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A class with Howard Rheingold!
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DATE: 12/01/2004 03:38:05 AM
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Cybersociology author Howard Rheingold and Andrea Saveri, a director at the Institute for the Future, have teamed up to host a course at Stanford University that will undoubtedly be incredibly engaging. The course, Toward A Literacy of Cooperation, is open to public enrollment and kicks off January 5. Howard and Andrea have lined up a dynamite list of guest speakers including Paul Hartzog, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Ross Mayfield of SocialText. From the course description:
"Darwin had a blind spot. It wasn't that he didn't see the role of cooperation in evolution. He just didn't see how important it is. So for two centuries -- a time during which the world passed from an agrarian landscape into a global post-industrial culture of unprecedented scale and complexity --science, society, public policy and commerce have attended almost exclusively to the role of competition. The stories people tell themselves about what is possible, the mythical narratives that organizations and societies depend upon, have been variations of "survival of the fittest." The role of cooperation has been largely unmapped.
Now is the time to finally build this map, not because we're feeling altruistic, but because scientists are beginning to see how cooperation actually works in biology, sociology, mathematics, psychology, economics, computer science and political science. And in the last two decades, we've seen a variety of new challenges to business models that stress competition over customers, resources, and ideas. Companies in emerging high-tech industries learned that working with competitors could build markets and help avoid costly standards wars. The open source movement showed that world-class software could be built without corporate oversight or market incentives. Google and Amazon built fortunes by drawing on, even improving, the Internet by facilitating and building on the collective actions of millions of web publishers and reviewers. Thousands of volunteers have created over one million pages of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia – in over 100 languages. Collective knowledge-gathering, sharing economies, social software, prediction markets – numerous experiments in technology-assisted cooperation are taking place.
In this lecture series we want to begin to put these pieces of the puzzle together to build a practical map of cooperative strategy, starting with the basic social dilemma that has forever defined the tension between self-interest and social institutions. Social dilemmas arise when you or I act rationally... in our own self-interest...but our individual rational acts add up to a situation in which everyone is worse off. That is, our choices add up to less, not more."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: The plight of the Bo Ke (blogger) in China
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DATE: 12/01/2004 04:24:11 AM
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New Scientist has an interesting story about the struggles of bloggers in China and the "Great Firewall" of government censorship there.
The potential of blogs to act as news sources is relished by some Chinese bloggers. One site, Chinanewsman.net, founded by journalist and programmer Li Zhaohui, is a haven for news that is banned from the official media. Within its first five months of operation, Chinanewsman was closed repeatedly, forcing Li to switch internet service provider six times.
But it survived, and now hosts around 5000 blogs kept by journalists. Some of the information is available only to registered users who join by invitation. This mechanism has protected the site, probably because the censors are, in general, more tolerant of these semi-private spaces.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Victorian-era paper blog
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DATE: 12/01/2004 08:32:15 AM
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A handwritten journal attributed to a woman who lived in Boston in 1878 is for sale on eBay. It's filled with talk of star quilts, boiling sheets, chamber pots, bed tick, collar boxes, ginger cakes, feather pillows, corsets, stabbings and head wounds. Our ancestors called these things "DIE-ah-rees." Link (Thanks, Robert)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Handgun-shaped bbq pit in Texas
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DATE: 12/01/2004 08:36:27 AM
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If only it were the result of a Fark photoshop contest. Link (Thanks, dave davies)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "White-label" illicit iPod: U2 vs. Negativland
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DATE: 12/01/2004 08:42:41 AM
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Reader Francis Hwang says,
I've just opened an eBay auction for an unauthorized iPod "U2 vs. Negativland" Special Edition. Commemorating the infamous early-90s case in which U2's record label crushed indie noisemakers Negativland, this iPod is a U2 iPod that comes pre-loaded with lots of Negativland tunes, and some fancy box modifications, too. Also, profits go to Downhill Battle, so we can start fighting back!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lifetime of SF fanzines for sale on eBay
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DATE: 12/01/2004 08:46:25 AM
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Mike Horvat, an Oregon resident who really, really, really digs science fiction -- has placed his lifetime collection of fanzines up for auction on eBay. The list of 250,000 individual issues range from 1964 to 1978, and include complete runs of Trumpet, Psychotic, Algol and Locus, according to his description.
"After forty years of amassing my collection of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fanzines I have to get rid of it. I don't have much to say about it, because if you don't all ready know what I am talking about, you won't want to buy it."
Link to auction (via trufen)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ukrainian protest rap
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DATE: 12/01/2004 08:52:32 AM
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Soundtrack to the Chestnut Revolution: a song called Razom Nas Bahato. "Together we are many / We cannot be defeated." Link to blog entry with lyric translation, and Link to MP3 file. (Thanks, JP)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Philly prepares to offer free WiFi citywide
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DATE: 12/01/2004 09:01:43 AM
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Big news in Pennsylvania today, after reports of many bureaucratic challenges -- Philadelphia has reached an agreement with Verizon that will allow the city to offer free WiFi as a sort of public utility. Free like liberty, free like beer?
Philadelphia's plans are the most ambitious of any major U.S. city to provide free or cheap high-speed wireless to all residents. Lawyers for the city and Verizon, the city's local telephone company, found common ground Tuesday in discussions with the governor's office, said Luz Cardenas, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia Mayor John F.
Street.
Link.
But don't start cheering too soon, counters BoingBoing reader Mike:
While Philly's WiFi plan looks like it will go ahead as planned, that's only because PA Gov. Ed Rendell negotiated with Verizon to get their permission. The bill that Rendell just signed into law is just as bad as ever -- it was written by corporate lobbyists and gives telco monopolies the right to veto municipal plans to provide broadband services. Philadelphians will get their WiFi only because we raised a ruckus about it, but other cities in Pennsylvania are out of luck. This is a bad deal and a bad precedent.
Link to the full text of Mike's critique.
And BB reader Chris Holland says:
Philly citizens are about to unwittingly foot the bill for higher-priced broadband while jeopardizing their Municipal WiFi project, courtesy of telco-lobby-sponsored Pennsylvania House Bill 30. Om Malik is rounding-up analysis from Esme Vos and Harold Feld. The WSJ also offers a similar perspective. Slashdot also picked-up this story from Macworld.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Court squashes 'net copyright reform attempt
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DATE: 12/01/2004 09:14:39 AM
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Bad news for the internet, bad news for culture, bad news for the liberty of ideas. In an era of shrinking funds for schools and bricks-and-mortar libraries, a federal judge rules against efforts to open access to knowledge on the 'net.
The case, Kahle v. Ashcroft, pitted two archive groups -- the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, and the Prelinger Archives, which preserves films -- against the U.S. Justice Department. The archivists argued that four copyright laws are collectively keeping people from gaining access to "orphan"
works: out-of-print books, old films, and academic articles that have little or no commercial value.
The laws that the archivists fault are the Copyright Act of 1976, the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. A central part of the archivists' argument is that laws granting copyright protection to all works, even those for which the creators have not sought protection, have radically altered the "traditional contours of copyright."
Link to SF Chron story. And snip from John Borland's coverage on CNET:
Kahle said Wednesday that the decision would be appealed, and that they had always planned to fight the primary battle in the appellate courts. The court had not directly addressed what he said was the primary thrust of the case--a change in laws to automatically renew copyrights, instead of requiring copyright holders to reregister, he said.
"The key component of the district court ruling is that the judge did not consider the main aspect of this case, which is the changing of the contour of copyright law from opt in to opt out," Kahle said. "That has dramatically changed what's under copyright, and even more ominously, changes the nature of what can be put on the Internet."
Link to CNET story. Link to court's decision in PDF format. Link to a related /. thread.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: World AIDS day: "Milk" protest art
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DATE: 12/01/2004 11:10:10 AM
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Fleshbot says:
Shu Lea Cheang's online art project mixes random porn images grabbed from the web while displaying the number of Africans who died of AIDS since you started connecting. Porn is all about fantasy -- but if there was ever a time to remember that certain realities still affect all of us (especially the adult industry), it's today. Get educated, get involved, and do what you can to make observing World AIDS Day every December 1 a thing of the past.
Link (NSFW)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Video of ABC News on Firefox (including Xeni)
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DATE: 12/01/2004 11:19:14 AM
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Video of last Friday's ABC World News Tonight segment about Firefox (in which I was a participant) is now online.
Link to WMV (~15MB), and Link to Real (~9MB). If anyone's moved to torrentify or convert to other formats, well, be my geek guest.
(Thanks much to JP and Mike O. for TiVoing, and big thanks to Leonard for hosting.)
Update: Brian provides two torrents. Link to WMV torrent, Link to Real torrent. Thanks, Brian!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Haptic Arm Wrestling
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DATE: 12/01/2004 11:47:28 AM
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Matt Browning sez: "This is a followup for the Haptic entry by Mark yesterday. I wanted to point out a Haptic Arm Wrestling League that just launched in 6 science museums, including the New York Hall of Science in Queens, the Tech Museum in San Jose, and the Imaginarium in Alaska. I developed the software and co-developed the electronics for this, and after 4 months, i still get a big smile watching the kids (and adults) use it for the first time.
Features include:
* live video and audio feeds of your opponent
* left handed person can wrestle a right handed person
* safety (for the kids) balenced with realistic (for the adults) arm movements
* a statistics League - showing the locations with the top winning percentages
* RFID bracelet activation (only for the Tech Museum) that allows museum visitors to go home after the museum visit and enter their ID into the website, providing screenshots of them and their opponent while they were playing." Link
UPDATE: Joe sez: "It's always good to see real life catching up with sci-fi. I can't have been the only person who saw this post and immediately thought of Alan Moore's 80's epic "The Ballad of Halo Jones." Her cabinmate on the spaceship Clara Pandy, where they were working as stewardesses, the 7 foot tall Toy Molto, was forever playing an armwrestling machine and wrecking it. Here is a picture of Toy having just returned from the stores with a new stronger arm for the poor machine. It would be nice to see this groundbreaking graphic novel brought to the attention of modern readers, as it is easily as good as anything produced since (IMHO)."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Corgi Toys art gallery
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DATE: 12/01/2004 01:21:32 PM
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Nifty Corgi Toys art gallery. Link (Thanks, Todd!!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: China's animated film biz set to boom
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DATE: 12/01/2004 02:21:01 PM
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In today's NYT, an interesting feature about China's animation industry -- which, like virtually everything else there, appears to be growing fast. Talent that has until now served mostly as outsourced labor for American TV and film projects won't remain nameless for long, as a string of new features are readied for release.
Seen from outside, there is nary a hint of the Magic Kingdom about this ambitious young animation studio nestled amid magnolias and palms on the campus of Shenzhen University. A glimpse inside one specially secured building, accessible only with a smart ID card that one swipes through a reader to gain entry and move about inside, soon gives up the game. The first clues are the Hollywood posters that hang from nearly every wall: "Star Wars," "Godzilla," "The Lost World," "The Matrix," "End of Days." Down one hallway, heavily air-conditioned computer rooms hum with the kind of processing power one might find in a high-tech laboratory. The giveaway is the army of artist-students slouched over their flat-screen monitors in one dimly lighted production room after another, drawing thousands of pictures for feature-length films. Early next year, Global Digital Creations Holdings, a fledgling animation studio that has mostly labored in anonymity, is aiming for the big time with the worldwide release of its first 3-D feature film, "Thru the Moebius Strip," a science-fiction adventure about a determined boy's time travel to another galaxy to rescue his stranded father.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Live blog coverage of Kazaa-gate in Australia
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DATE: 12/01/2004 02:44:11 PM
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A correspondent from Australian Personal Computer Magazine is live-blogging the Sharman networks trial in Sydney. He describes it as "the world’s-biggest-copyright-case for the Internet’s most-downloaded-program-in-history." Link to Day 2, Link to Day 1. (via pho)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: When was the last time you had an HIV test?
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DATE: 12/01/2004 03:26:41 PM
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If you can't remember, maybe it's time for an update. World AIDS Day -- today -- is as good a day as any to get an HIV test, and the web provides a number of search tools for finding free, anonymous testing near you (as well as AIDS education and safer-sex support). More options than ever are out there.
For instance, where I live here in LA, one organization offers free, quick oral testing (no blood! no needles!) in trailers that drive up to areas near nightclubs and shopping districts. The test strips taste sorta gross (in a pepto-bismol-meets-spackle kind of way), but you're sent off in a few minutes packing free candy, condoms, and the empowerment that knowledge brings. Wherever you are, periodic testing and a commitment to practicing responsible sex are a good thing. Link to HIV testing resource website maintained by the US CDC, Link to resources at stopaids.org, Link to test facility search resources at AIDSHealth.org.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Brazil to break AIDS drug patents
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DATE: 12/01/2004 05:21:01 PM
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BB reader Jake sez: "It's interesting to note this vindication of Cory's prediction that intellectual property right law makes certain things too costly for poorer countries to use. The head of Brazil's AIDS program told the BBC today that the only way his group can continue its fight is by breaking the hold on anti-AIDS patents." Link to news story.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Not a pisser
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DATE: 12/02/2004 04:59:50 AM
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Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 artworld big shots in Great Britain.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Disease cards
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DATE: 12/02/2004 05:06:02 AM
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The Center for Disease Control offers two free sets of disease trading cards to download in PDF form. Each card has photos and information about diseases that the CDC studies, from Anthrax to the West Nile Virus. Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes
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DATE: 12/02/2004 05:35:07 AM
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In my latest issue of Lab Notes, research from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* Listening for extraterrestrials
* A class on Lego Mindstorms robots
* Composites for satellite engineering
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Not just for breakfast
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DATE: 12/02/2004 05:42:09 AM
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Cereality is a sit-down restaurant that serves up custom blends of brand-name breakfast cereals and toppings. The second Cereality location just opened on the University of Pennsylvania campus. From an Associated Press report:
Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load."> Between bites of hot oatmeal with cranberries and almonds, Penn junior Alpha Mengistu, 20, said Cereality offered more than a quick carb- and sugar-load.
"I think this would be a good place for a date," she said. "You could learn a lot about a person by what cereal they choose."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Eavesdropping on CRTs
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DATE: 12/02/2004 05:55:58 AM
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This scientific paper was published two years ago, but I missed it. It may be an oldie, but it's a goodie. Computer scientist Markus Kuhn demonstrated a way to read CRT computer monitors at a distance using a photosensor, even if you're not facing the screen.
An image is created on the CRT surface by varying the electron beam intensity for each pixel. The room in which the CRT is located is partially illuminated by the pixels. As a result, the light in the room becomes a measure for the electron beam current. In particular, there is a little invisible ultrafast flash each time the electron beam refreshes a bright pixel that is surrounded by dark pixels on its left and right.
So if you measure the brightness of a wall in this room with a very fast photosensor, and feed the result in another monitor that receives the exact same synchronization signals for steering its electron beam, you get to see an image like this (after using a mathematical signal processing technique--ed.)
Link (Thanks, Ken!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Umbilical cord keepsakes, part deux
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DATE: 12/02/2004 09:46:54 AM
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BoingBoing reader Lee Kin Mun says, "Hi, I was amused to read about the umbilical cord story you posted, and just want to point out that while gross to most Western audiences, it is a very common practice in Asian communities. We Chinese do it too (yes, even in metropolitan Singapore), like my blog friend Huileng. My wife has the umbilical cord stump of my secondborn son (but not our firstborn daughter, we forgot) too. Personally, I think keeping the umbilical cord stump is way less gross than the eating of placentas (which I am told, tastes like liver).
Link to a post on Huileng's blog about umbilical cord cultural norms.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Milk and Honey, Vaseline and Prayer
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DATE: 12/02/2004 09:52:04 AM
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BoingBoing reader Darren writes,
I saw your post on Worlds AIDS Day. Coincidentally, I just posted on a great CBC radio documentary about the church's role in HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It's called 'Milk and Honey, Vaseline and Prayer'. Collectively, the Christian churchs' approach to managing HIV/AIDS is shameful. The Anglicans are the only church to offer condoms to parishioners, and even they seemed to do it reticently. The documentary's title refers to the most common approach to the disease.
Link to documentary and Link to Darren's blog post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Military recruitment spam: new ruling, legal questions
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DATE: 12/02/2004 09:59:24 AM
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Following up on earlier BoingBoing posts (one, two) about controversial military recruitment tactics: a 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling this week will allow colleges and universities to ban military recruiters from their campuses.
The government has been using a ten year old federal law called the Solomon Amendment which "requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives.
Link to military.com story, Link to Washington Post coverage. Link to PDF of decision, including the 30 page dissenting opinion. (Thanks, PJ)
BoingBoing reader Mark Miller says,
"For anyone who has actually received such a pre-recorded call from the US Army, and is not on the Do Not Call List, such action is already illegal in it of itself, I discovered. Here's a link to the federal code that prohibits this activity. Personally, I plan to take civil action against the US Army. I encourage anyone else who has received such a call to do the same.
Link
BoingBoing reader Brian Hagner, a student at University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, responds:
Mr. Miller claims the section of the US Code that is linked prohibits the automated phone calls by the US Army to be illegal. I believe if he had thoroughly read the exemptions listed under section (2) (B) of the linked section of the code, he would see that the Commission holds broad discretionary powers to exclude such automated calls from being held illegal under the code. It is well with in reason for the Commission to find a) that the US Army calls are not specifically of a commercial nature, or b) if they are deemed to be commercial calls, they do not infringe on the privacy rights of the recipients, and do not include unsolicited advertisement. While it seems obvious that these calls are advertisements, its entirely likely that they are ruled not to be advertisements, but rather fall into another category due to the nature of the US Army and the inherent necessity of recruiting people to our nation’s defense.
I enjoy reading the postings on BoingBoing, but just thought it unwise to encourage people to file suit against the US Army based on an incomplete reading of the US Code.
I enjoy reading the postings on BoingBoing, but just thought it unwise to encourage people to file suit against the US Army based on an incomplete reading of the US Code.
Reader Douglas Barnes (also a law student, but at the University of Texas School of Law) counters:
At the risk of turning BoingBoing into a legal debating club, I have to point out that Brian Hagner has misread the statute. He also neglected to check the implementing regulations to determine whether the hypothetical exemptions he suggests were implemented (for the reasons below, they weren't, but it's always good to check anyhow).
The ban on automated calls to cell phones is in 47 U.S.C. 227(b)(1)(A). At 227(b)(2)(B), it allows regulatory exemptions to 227(b)(1)(B). You'll notice they put a helpful forward pointer in 227(b)(1)(B) "or is exempted by rule or order by the Commission under paragraph (2)(B)."
There is another exemption, 227(b)(2)(C), which allows a regulatory exemption for calls "calls to a telephone number assigned to a cellular telephone service that are not charged to the called party . . ." More interestingly, there are sovereign immunity and related issues to work through, which I will spare the readers of BoingBoing.
And Mr. Hagner replies:
Douglas Barnes is absolutely correct in that the calls to cell phones are prohibited. I did not realize that the discussion was about calls to cell phones because the previous posts did not specify. After looking further, I realize that Mr. Barnes’s blog mentioned cell phones, but that was not specified any where else. I assumed we were talking about automated calls to phones in general.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Frank Rich in NYT: Anchorman, Get Your Gun
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DATE: 12/02/2004 10:11:55 AM
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This one really nails it. Frank Rich on the new red-state-panderin' mood washing over mainstream media at the moment. Some interesting thoughts on the role of blogs.
[N]etwork news still counts. The idea, largely but not exclusively fomented by the right, that TV news might somehow soon be supplanted by blogging as a mass medium may remain a populist fantasy until Americans are able to receive blogs by iPod. (At which point they become talk radio.) The dense text in the best blogs often requires as much of a reader's time and concentration as high-end print journalism, itself facing declining circulation. Since blogging doesn't generate big (if any) profits, there's no budget for its "citizen reporters" to reliably blanket catastrophic and far-flung breaking news. (There are no bloggers among the 36 journalists thus far killed in the Iraq war.) Bloggers can fact-check documents (as in the Rather case), opine, organize, talk back, leak early exit polls and publish multimedia outings of the seemingly endless supply of closeted gay Republican officials. But if bloggers are actually doing front-line reporting rather than commenting upon the news in a danger zone like Falluja, chances are that they are underwritten by a day job on the payroll of a major news organization.
Kevin Sites, the freelance TV cameraman who caught a marine shooting an apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a mosque, is one such blogger. Mr. Sites is an embedded journalist currently in the employ of NBC News. To NBC's credit, it ran Mr. Sites's mid-November report, on a newscast in which Mr. Williams was then subbing for Mr. Brokaw, and handled it in exemplary fashion. Mr. Sites avoided any snap judgment pending the Marines' own investigation of the shooting, cautioning that a war zone is "rife with uncertainty and confusion." But loud voices in red America, especially on blogs, wanted him silenced anyway. On right-wing sites like freerepublic.com Mr. Sites was branded an "anti-war activist" (which he is not), a traitor and an "enemy combatant." Mr. Sites's own blog, touted by Mr. Williams on the air, was full of messages from the relatives of marines profusely thanking the cameraman for bringing them news of their sons in Iraq. That communal message board has since been shut down because of the death threats by other Americans against Mr. Sites.
Link (Thank you, J. Muller)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gifts to Sate Your Technolust
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DATE: 12/02/2004 10:15:08 AM
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In today's Wired News, a gadget shopping guide I pulled together, in which everything was selected for mobility. Battery-powered holiday travel delay coping mechanisms.
For geeks, the most telling signs of seasonal reality have nothing to do with a crisp chill in the smog, the scent of tofurkey roasting in the microwave or that scraping sound a super-sized fir makes when you're cramming it through the front door of your nano-apartment.No. The sure sign it's time to move out of holiday denial and into holiday acceptance is the sight of all those fresh gadgets jamming shelves at the mall.
Electronic healing starts when you admit you are powerless over your problem -- deciding which gizmos to buy, either for your loved ones or yourself. To kick-start your journey of techno-recovery, consider these goodies, all of which can fit handily into a single carry-on bag (we've even picked that out for you).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Le moleskine blog
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DATE: 12/02/2004 10:31:34 AM
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On this wonderful little blog, a young man in Bordeaux, France sketches his way through life in a series of moleskine journals. He scans the results, and posts them online for all to see. Simple things like this bring me endless delight in the power of the web. It's a microscope. It's a telescope. Its lens captures a field of infinitely varying depth. Link to Beleg's moleskine online, Link to his main blaugue, and link to the Wandering Moleskine Project.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MSN Spaces = soylent green
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DATE: 12/02/2004 10:44:21 AM
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Updated. Today, Microsoft launches their free hosted blogging platform, spaces.msn.com. What effect the service will have on Blogger, TypePad, Userland, and the like is, predictably, a subject of great debate. The service is free, and seems aimed squarely at home users. BoingBoing reader alfie checks the W3 validator site and says, "MSN Spaces seems to be completely ignoring markup standards. Well done chaps." Link. Reader Christopher Carfi hosts a discussion about the launch on his blog, here.
Reader Paul Pellerito says,
"MSN Spaces User asciident notes that at the bottom of every MSN Space is (c)2004 Microsoft Corporation. And according to their terms of use:
For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission."
"Makes me wanna yell STOP! Soylent green is people!"
Wired News story, Forbes coverage, and here is the Microsoft press release.
Peter Orosz says:
MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging service, censors stuff! We're all gonna die! This is a screencap taken by a friend of mine who apparently tried to register at MSN Spaces. His blog's description reads "A Corporate Whore", which the service promptly bounced. Yikes!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sony v. Kottke over KenJen vid
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DATE: 12/02/2004 11:23:14 AM
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BoingBoing reader Tom Biro writes:
If you're not familiar with what went down in the last week with regard to Jason Kottke's blog, then here's a quick refresher. Kottke had pointed out details he was given about Ken Jennings' eventual demise on the television game show "Jeopardy," and much speculation took place on blogs and in the public eye that he would lose sometime this year. Then, a few days ago, Kottke posted audio and a description of what happened in the "final" show for Jennings. A few days later, he was contacted by Sony and asked to first remove the audio and then the printed description. Various print outlets, including the Washington Post were apparently not told to do the same. (Or are at least not saying/doing so)
Thursday morning, Kottke wrote this post, where he stated that "Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world....I can't say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org."
The concern here is that a blogger could, even if s/he were *correctly/legally* doing something, be sued and lose the case, purely for financial reasons. Is this right?
No. It most certainly isn't. Link to Kottke's post. IFILM has a copy of the video here, and here's a torrent Link (thanks alfie). For the KenJen-obsessed, here's more fodder. Jeff Jarvis proposes a "Bloggers Legal Defense Society" -- Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More on haptic arm wrestling
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DATE: 12/02/2004 01:14:47 PM
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Tim sez: "I saw your post today about the haptic arm wrestling stations. I work at The Tech in San Jose and thought I'd send along a couple photos of our stations, including one showing the videoconferencing and progress meters. We just opened our NetPl@net gallery and this is one of the
most popular exhibits in the gallery. We've had to make several repairs since the opening since kids absolutely love beating the hell out of it, so we're looking into ways to better reinforce its mechanical parts."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Paper bird peace bombs
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DATE: 12/02/2004 01:42:22 PM
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This reminds me of one of my favorite books in childhood.
Having failed to quell months of escalating unrest in three southern provinces by force, Thailand's unorthodox prime minister is hoping plane loads of origami peace bombs will defuse the tension.
Thaksin Shinawatra has urged all 63 million Thais to make at least one paper bird in the next fortnight so they can be dropped on the three restive provinces on December 5 as a sign of goodwill to mark King Bhumibol Adulyadej's birthday...
Link (thanks Alex Rosen)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pornospammers = eternal innovators
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DATE: 12/02/2004 01:43:38 PM
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BoingBoing reader and accidental sex-spam-sleuth Alias observes:
"Because GMail (and other popular email clients these days) blocks images by default, porn spammers have now begun to use 1980s style ASCII art in order to get their message across.
This textfile contains one simple example, with the words HOT GIRLS in big letters - it cunningly gets past spam filters by not containing any actual words in the body text. As its content is only apparent to humans, it will be tricky to catch by any filters - as long as the whitespace remains intact, the actual text can just be any random garbage. In theory, every spam email could be totally unique.
I confidently expect to see a renaissance in erotic ASCII art in the coming months, until someone figures out how to filter out this type of spam..."
Reader Xopl replies,
"Well, ASCII text spam messages are actually pretty easy to filter. You just render the text, and then use technology similar to an OCR to see if it spells anything. Now, if they start doing actual ascii-porn images... that's difficult. But frankly, I'm not sure I'd mind."
Link to spam-specimen (*.txt)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Funny Cingular brochure
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DATE: 12/02/2004 02:27:56 PM
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I received this Cingular brochure in the mail today. The girl on the cover seems to be amused that a tiny hand is growing out of her shoulder. (click image for enlargement.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The postcards of the Keown-Boyd Family 1898-1922
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DATE: 12/02/2004 04:10:24 PM
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Richard sez: "I noticed that recently you've blogged several vintage-things sites -- the commie cartoon, the sci-fi book covers, that old diary, etc. All very cool, and I think you should add one more site to the list --€“ "emails" from the last century!
"Someone found a huge box of old postcards (1898-1922) in an antique shop. Not all that unusual, but what made them interesting was that they were all sent between members of the same (huge) family. Their finder is now scanning them in, transcribing them, and sticking them online.
"It's the best of all possible things: you get to pry into the personal lives of strangers, see cool, old pictures (like a wall covered in skulls and London before the tourists arrived), as well as getting a rare glimpse into the past. As far as I can tell, these people used their postcards like we used email -– the post was so good the cards (and their reply) could arrive the same day." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs
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DATE: 12/02/2004 04:50:08 PM
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Earlier today, I posted comments from a BoingBoing reader about the fact that MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging tool, censors certain words you might try to include in a blog title or url. If you can't speak freely on a blog, what's the point of having one? This demanded a full investigation.
Using my existing MSN Passport account, I attempted to create a number of blogs, one after the other. The results of which titles passed and which were banned may surprise you -- or at least generate a few Beavis-and-Butthead snorkles. Each of the linked test-titles in this BoingBoing post points to to an actual, unmodified screenshot of the corresponding test blog I created (or was denied the ability to create) using MSN Search.
(1) BoingBoing's readers said the title "Corporate Whore" was censored. My attempt at
"Corporate Whore Chronicles" met the same result, but "Corporate Prostitute Chronicles" worked fine. Hooray for synonyms with more syllables!
(2) I figured anything in the original list of seven dirty words banned by the FCC would be off-limits: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Most of that proved to be true, as did other potent cusswords which would likely cause license problems for a television or radio station. But a test blog titled "Tits for Tats" passed without incident. Off to a good start, with no unneccesarily broad language policing. Chalk one up for MSN Spaces!
(3) More good news. "World of Poop" is just fine. And the rather racy "Butt Sex is Awesome" made it through, as did the overtly naughty "Dick, Balls, Boobies, Goddammit." The test blog titled "My Craptacular Life" was free to do its bloggy thing, unhindered by prudish vocabulary cops. Even "Internet Explorer is Crappy" was welcomed with open arms. Now that's free speech!
(4) Uh-oh. My attempt to create an MSN Spaces blog called "Pornography and The Law" is met with rude red text advising me to can the profanity. So, if I were a law student who wanted to start a blog about the history of obscenity law in the United States, I'd be shit out of luck.
(5) Very bad news for fans of Russian literature. The blog title "Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov" is deemed inappropriate, as are any titles I try to create with the 1955 book's name.
(6) You may recall our previously-approved blog title, "Butt Sex is Awesome." That name was fine, but MSN Spaces puts the kibosh on "Anal Health for People who Think Buttsex is Awesome" ("anal" was the problem word here; "buttsex," "butt-sex," and "butt sex" all passed MS-muster.)
(7) "Smoking Crack: A How-To Guide For Teens." This wholesome little morsel, suggested by my NPR "Day to Day" producer Steve Proffitt, also made the grade.
The conclusion? A mixed bag of results that manages to do what most attempts to automate censorship do -- make fools of the censors.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Visualizing the nano future
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DATE: 12/03/2004 07:04:33 AM
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Howard Lovy of the NanoBot has written a great article for Tech Central Station about a new animation project to educate the public about molecular nanotechnology. The project was spearheaded by molecular nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute.
John Burch, who runs Lizard Fire Studios in Austin, Texas, says he fully expects his animation to be ridiculed by those who believe that he's merely producing a fanciful cartoon. That's OK, he says. Throw potshots at it. But while the argument rages over what is not possible, somebody had to "put this stake in the ground" and make the first move toward creating "a clear image of what we think is possible.....
"I want to make this thing happen," Burch says. "Everybody I know has medical problems that could be fixed or improved through technology based on this machine. There's too much pain in this world to just sit here and watch it."
Where would he like to see it shown? "I think most anyplace where it's not ridiculed will be a good place."
Link
UPDATE: And yes, we're aware that Tech Central Station is a, well, problematic publication. But it's still a good article.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Squid as sculpture
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DATE: 12/03/2004 07:21:16 AM
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Maverick German anatomist Gunther von Hagens is the inventor of "plastination," a process by which the body and fat in a corpse is replaced with a polymer. His surreal work is currently on display in Los Angeles. Now, von Hagens is preparing to plastinate a giant squid in his Heidelberg laboratory. From a New Scientist article:
To research the project, von Hagens visited (Auckland, New Zealand squid expert Steve) O’Shea in October to study some much smaller species such as arrow squid. “We dissected a number of ‘sacrificial’ squid,” says O’Shea. This week, O’Shea sent a mature female giant squid, measuring about 10 metres including tentacles, and a mature male, just under 7 metres, to Heidelberg.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Snowglobular
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DATE: 12/03/2004 08:21:04 AM
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Camille Utterback's Shaken artwork is a tiny video screen embedded inside a snow globe. From the artist's statement:
"In the Shaken object, the physical gesture of shaking the device initiates the objects response of being 'shaken'. This object consists of a snow globe with an embedded LCD screen and tilt sensor. The more the user shakes the object, the more momentum is added to a video of a woman shaking out of control. Future versions of this piece will incorporate video clips which evoke a first person depiction of being shaken or disorientated."
Link (via Near, Near Future)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jackson vs. Blackwell
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DATE: 12/03/2004 09:12:02 AM
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Lisa Rein has transcribed the the complete Countdown With Keith Olbermann interviews last week with Jesse Jackson and Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell about the controversy surrounding the vote count. Video available too.
Link (to Blackwell) Link (to Jackson)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Holiday Stress Relief: Virtual bubble-wrap
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DATE: 12/03/2004 10:58:51 AM
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Pop your way to a state of bliss with Virtual Bubble Wrap. Link (Thanks, Stefan!) UPDATE: Here's a Palm OS version.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Giant pouched rats sniff out landmines
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DATE: 12/03/2004 11:11:51 AM
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Tom sez: "Who needs an electronic nose to sniff out buried landmines? The Belgians prefer African giant pouched rats. And no, the rats do not get blown to bits."
The idea of using rats for the detection of landmines came up through a search for a cheap and efficient mine detector tool, which would be able to detect both metal and plastic landmines.
"Added bonus: the rats can detect tuberculosis from sputum samples!!" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Robot-ized amplifier and speakers
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DATE: 12/03/2004 11:28:55 AM
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This robot stereo and loudspeaker system is beautiful. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Todd Lappin's Japan vacation photos
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DATE: 12/03/2004 11:47:29 AM
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My friend Todd Lappin recently returned from a trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, and he has uploaded his excellent photographs on Flickr. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Target.com: No blowjobs for you!
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DATE: 12/03/2004 12:10:45 PM
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Guess we'll have to find something new to blog about:
[T]he Internet [Ed. note -- Read: BoingBoing] has been abuzz about an alleged hack into Target's Web operations, where its online store site appeared to offer items for sale that one wouldn't normally expect to find at the mainstream retailer. When customers typed "marijuana" into the search feature of Target's Web site, books and CDs about marijuana appeared that Target wouldn't want to sell. Worse--at least for Target--books, CDs and DVDs related to sex and drugs appeared when other words were entered.
"When a guest logs on to Target.com and searches for a particular word, that search includes Amazon.com's millions of books, music and (movie) titles," Target said in its statement. "Target.com is currently working with Amazon.com to suppress certain titles from the Amazon.com catalog from appearing on the Target.com web site."
Link to News.com story, and link to related BoingBoing posts about Target selling anal massage, more anal massage, blowjobs, crack, MDMA, and marijuana. That was quite some inventory! (thanks Steve)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Old computer equipment comes with cigarette lighter and ashtray
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DATE: 12/03/2004 12:40:52 PM
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Warren Baelen sez: "I was [at the Computer History Museum] the other night for a memorial to Ken Iverson who recently passed away. He was the designer/inventor of several languages including APL and J. Ken was a great mathematician and computer pioneer and they had a nice tribute to him. But before the memorial I got to take the walking tour.
What I thought BB readers may want to know about is this "viewable storage" tour. It features some computers that you would expect to see at a computer history museum, including an Apple I signed by Wozniak, a piece of the Eniac, but it also has some other really cool things such as a complete Johniac, an IBM 7030 "Strech", a few Cray machines. One computer that stood out in my mind was an IBM radar analysis computer -- features included: *light pen/gun, *circular radar console, *built-in phone (rotary of course), *cigarette lighter and ashtray.
Yes, a cigarette lighter and ashtray -- because watching radar of Russian bombers must have been really boring. I enclosed a picture of the computer with ashtray (which appears on the left hand side -- rotary phone on right). Apparently this machine was obsolete when it was deployed because the USSR switched to using ICBMs and this machine was built for tracking bombers in the Artic circle -- however it wasn't declassified until the 1980s because the Russians didn't know what its capabilities were. As my father put it, 'sometimes a blinking light is just a blinking light.'"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing traffic stats
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DATE: 12/03/2004 05:47:22 PM
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Note that we have made our traffic stats available in the left column. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Google reveals Iraqi prison abuse photos on photosharing site
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DATE: 12/03/2004 06:39:14 PM
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The Associated Press found what appear to be new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse by US military personnel -- by Googling for them, then paying 29 cents a copy for reprints through on-line photo sharing service smugmug.com. The images appear to date from May 2003, which may make them the earliest evidence of such alleged abuse. Snip:
[The AP] reporter found more than 40 of the pictures among hundreds in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing Web site by a woman who said her husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty. It is unclear who took the pictures, which the Navy said it was investigating after the AP furnished copies to get comment for this story.
These and other photos found by the AP appear to show the immediate aftermath of raids on civilian homes. One man is lying on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat. In many photos, faces have been blacked out. What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo and others show debris and upturned furniture.
(...)
The images were found through the online search engine Google. The same search today leads to the Smugmug.com Web page, which now prompts the user for a password. Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page. "I think it's fair to assume that it would be very hard for most consumers to know all the ways the search engines can discover Web pages," said Smugmug spokesman Chris MacAskill. Before the site was password protected, the AP purchased reprints for 29 cents each.
Link to AP news story, and link to the smugmug.com photosharing site (the images referenced are no longer publicly accessible through that photo-sharing website). The AP report says:
Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived version of the page.
Any 1337 BoingBoing readers who sleuth the url for Google's cache of the smugmug gallery in question are invited to let us know.
Update: More images said to be from the smugmug gallery in question are published here: Link (Thanks, pemdasi) And the Spanish newspaper El Mundo has also published a selection of those photos. Link (Thanks, nv1962)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Balloon man
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DATE: 12/04/2004 01:02:08 AM
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Cluster balloonist John Ninomiya has a Web site archiving his high-flying adventures:
"Five years ago, I decided to fulfill a childhood dream by learning to fly with a cluster of large helium balloons. I have made twenty-three helium cluster balloon flights since that time. All of them have been among my most magical flying experiences... With half a dozen pilots worldwide, cluster ballooning remains something between an extreme sport and a personal eccentricity..."
Link (via Slashdot)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Danger, high voltage
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DATE: 12/04/2004 07:11:01 AM
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It's common for people living in Europe to buy computer hardware in the US where prices are lower and the Euro is strong. Just don't try it with the new iMacs. An article in today's International Herald Tribune points out that the G5 iMacs sold in the US are strictly 100-110 volt, unlike every other Apple machine on the market with the exception of the eMac. Plug a new iMac into a standard 220-240 European outlet without a transformer and your motherboard will fry. From the IHT article:
It was a sudden, unexpected and little publicized change for Apple...
I asked Apple why and have not received an answer. Postings on Internet discussion boards are thick with speculation. The most likely reason is that limiting the reach of U.S. and Japanese computers is meant to help preserve European sales, where PC sales are relatively strong but the economy is weak. A company also gains if its revenue is in a more valuable currency than the one its costs are in.
Link (Thanks, DMD!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Fallujah in Pictures
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DATE: 12/04/2004 09:25:40 AM
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Lots of photographs documenting the liberation of Fallujah. (graphic) Link (Thanks, Emeka!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Spezialeinheit
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DATE: 12/04/2004 11:28:40 AM
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Former BB guest blogger Johannes Grenzfurthner says:
"One of the non-robotic projects of Roboexotica is online now. It's called
'special forces'. We co-operated with Loka Daun (she was part of the artist-in-residence programme) and set up some short stories about a very special bio-squad and their deadly business."
It's sickeningly sweet and deliciously frightening. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Glenn Fleishman saves a bundle on his phone bill
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DATE: 12/04/2004 03:59:54 PM
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By using various data, mobile, and VoIP services, Glenn Fleishman is going to save about $130 a month in data/telecom charges.
One reason we could make this switch is that I moved my $25 per month unlimited Vonage service home. We'll move Lynn's business line--about $60 per month--using number portability to ring on the Vonage line, so that won't increase costs there and will save us about $55 per month. We'll shift the $20 to $25 in long-distance calls we were making on our landline to Vonage, saving that much per month.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Nice gallery of kids' book illustration
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DATE: 12/04/2004 04:21:45 PM
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These images are from a Huckleberry Hound book. The backgrounds are great! Link (Via PCL LinkDump)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cost of war in Iraq JavaScript counter
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DATE: 12/04/2004 07:08:32 PM
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Here's a neat little JavaScript counter:
Cost of the War in Iraq
(JavaScript Error)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Doctor answers cancer questions online
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DATE: 12/04/2004 07:45:46 PM
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This looks pretty cool -- Leonardo Faoro, a medical resident at Mayo Clinic, has set up a message board to answer questions that people with cancer have.Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jesus long in the tooth
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DATE: 12/05/2004 02:51:55 AM
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Jesus was spotted inside the mouth of a devout Christian in Phoenix, Arizona. Magically, Jesus's presence was only revealed by a dental x-ray. Perhaps the man has been eating too many grilled cheese sandwiches.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sirhan Sirhan's attorney speaks out
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DATE: 12/05/2004 03:00:11 AM
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The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, site of Robert Kennedy's murder, is slated for demolition so a school can be built on the site. Assassin Sirhan Sirhan's lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, is suing to keep the hotel standing, claiming there's evidence there proving his client wasn't a lone gunman. From a Reuters report:
The suit said that bullet holes in the walls and ceiling where Kennedy was killed on June 5, 1968, prove that more than one gun was used to shoot the New York senator.
Teeter wants the hotel to remain standing so that an acoustical reenactment of the crime can take place. He argues that modern technology can prove how many shots were fired.
"Mr Teeter is looking for us to allow him to go into the hotel and reenact the shooting so that new acoustical tests can be made to determine if more than one gun was fired. But this would be 35 years after the event and years after his client admitted his guilt in court," (the School Board's attorney Kevin) Reed said.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Blade Runner DVD blocked by Univision head?
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DATE: 12/05/2004 08:41:01 PM
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BoingBoing reader Mike Harris says,
Jerry Perenchio, now-CEO of Univision, was one of two bond-completion guarantors for the film when it was first shot. Because it went over budget when first filmed in 1982, the guarantors assumed ownership of the film by contract, and Perenchio refuses to authorize Warner Brothers to release what they and Ridley Scott want to release: a three-disc box set with "a new and polished director's cut with previously unseen footage and scads of bonus features."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Strawberry Bukkake Forever
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DATE: 12/05/2004 08:50:01 PM
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BoingBoing reader pmk says,
"I was walking in Harajuku when I spotted this poster, which is such a clear freaking bukkake reference it's frightening. It's the album cover for a the most recent album by J-Pop star Ai Otsuka.
The funniest thing is you only get the picture with her tongue hanging out if you buy the (more expensive) CD+DVD set. If you only shell out $30 for the CD (typical price in Japan -- owwweee!), you get the more prim version, with her mouth closed."
Link. Joel Johnson at Gizmodo adds, "There was a huge tower version in Shibuya when I was there a couple of weeks ago." Link to Joel's flickr snapshot. Here's a link to Ai's website, with Flash and album covers galore.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phoneless phonebooths for cellphoners
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DATE: 12/05/2004 08:50:01 PM
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Celebrigeek Wil Wheaton tells BoingBoing,
Restaurant owners everywhere, tired of hearing people blather on their cellphones from their tables, have started building phoneless phonebooths for them to use.
So far, designs include plush, velvet-lined booths, and an English-style phonebooth.
Link (via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Origami Doves Don't Quell Violence in Thailand
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DATE: 12/05/2004 08:55:01 PM
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Following up on last week's post about an intiative to drop "paper bird peace bombs" in Thailand as a symbolic peace gesture:
Fresh violence flared in mainly Muslim southern Thailand on Monday, only hours after the Air Force dropped an estimated 100 million origami "peace birds" to quell unrest which has claimed nearly 500 lives. (...) The origami initiative, carried out to mark the birthday of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, had its critics among some Muslim leaders who said it did not gel with local culture and should not be a substitute for more traditional peace efforts.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cartoon character skeletons
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DATE: 12/06/2004 06:46:36 AM
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Artist Michael Paulus's series of cartoon characters' skeletal systems is pure brilliance exquisitely rendered. From his artist's statement:
"Animation was the format of choice for children's television in the 1960s, a decade in which children's programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.
I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass."
Link (via Waxy)
UPDATE: It seems that a traffic spike or some other anomaly is causing problems with image loading on this site.
UPDATE #2: Waxy has a temporary mirror here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Siyathemba design project finalists
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DATE: 12/06/2004 06:47:13 AM
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Earlier this year in Wired News, I wrote about a design competition to build a a football field and healthcare facility for youth in Somkhele, South Africa. The non-profit group behind the competition, Architecture for Humanity, just announced nine finalists and sixteen honorable mentions. "Siyathemba" is the Zulu word for hope, and the facility will serve as an AIDS education and care site, an an impoverished area which has been extremely hard-hit by the pandemic. Link to AFH home with finalists list, and Link to earlier Wired News story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 250,000 scifi zines find a home at Univ. of Oregon
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DATE: 12/06/2004 06:51:36 AM
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Following up on this earlier post about a guy who wanted to sell a lifetime collection of science fiction zines on eBay, former BB guestblogger Jason Scott says:
Hello, Jason Scott here (historian guy). I saw that the 250,000 fanzines up for sale on ebay were taken down. I took the step of looking up and contacting Mike, the guy who put them up, and spoke for a while.
Apparently he had gone to the ebay sale as a last resort after contacting a number of universities to donate his collection. And, as luck would have it, his auction was spotted by a worker at the University of Oregon, who have contacted him and offered to take the collection whole.
So, the collection has found a home, and a sale to the highest bidder (not always the greatest way to divest decades of collecting and collating) is no longer necessary. Great news.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Collaboration Zen
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DATE: 12/06/2004 06:57:40 AM
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fray
halfbakery
unfinished jokes
poem
leave your message
box doodle
tapestry
yellow arrow
Image: work by hmathis, from the Box Doodle Project. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka MP3s for the masses
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:01:41 AM
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For those about to porn, we salute you. A virtual gangbang of downloadable MP3s which capture that sound.
Even if you have never seen a porn movie in your lifetime, almost everyone in the world knows what the 'Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka' represents... Each person, upon hearing it, mentally interprets the 'Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka' in their own way, fueling a range of emotions from lust to disgust. This CD represents 17 individual artists' interpretations of the 'Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka'; each providing their own unique cultural and geographic spin on the vibe that is "Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka'. From celebrations of the beauty of intimacy to a cautionary tale of excess, this collection of sound sculptures of the 'Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka' mystique from around the world will guide you into the heart of all that is 'Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka'. So turn the lights down low, light a few candles, put this CD on the stereo and let the magic of the 'Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka' take you wherever you want to go.
Link (Thanks, former guestblogger and eternal cool guy Todd Lappin!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Undead Art winners
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:05:50 AM
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BoingBoing reader Alex says,
The winners of the Undead Art competition run by Free Culture.org (the group inspired by Lawrence Lessig, and who operated Barbie in a Blender day) have been announced. I'm really fond of the winning entry - How to Survive a Zombie Epidemic by Gabriel Koenig. I think it illustrates the reasons why Creative Commons and the public domain are important - it allows people to create new and original mashups, using old material in a way that had not been predicted by its creators.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Voting opens for Wizbang's 2004 Weblog awards
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:12:44 AM
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Vote, if you're into that sort of thing. Though after November 2, frankly, I'm all voted out. BoingBoing's up for "Best Overall Blog," FWIW. Some have suggested that honor, valor, and inbound links might better be fought out among female blogtestants through mudwrestling. I heartily concur. Watch your back, Wonkette -- see you in the slime. Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kentucky creationist museum online
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:18:33 AM
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Members of the reality-based community, please sit down before you click this link. BoingBoing reader Jim Hanas says,
Folks are building a Creation Museaum near my hometown in Kentucky as "a wonderful alternative to the evolutionary natural history museums that are turning countless minds against the gospel of Christ and the authority of the Scripture." I encourage you to take the virtual tour of this $25 million attraction. You will think George Saunders made it up.
Link to Creation Museum virtual tour. Note the inexplicably illogical illustration of dinosaurs entering Noah's ark, thumbnail above (Link to original image).
BB reader Josh adds, "I found this on the website of the creationist museum you guys linked to today. In there wonderful question and answers section they offer this gem of an explanation of the Columbine killings. Along with a great cartoon they explain that the killers really did what they did because of...teaching natural selection! Wow." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Neo-Kaiju Project
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:26:58 AM
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The Neo-Kaiju collection is a herd of ten wacky, Japan-inspired monster figurines Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Seonna Hong, Todd Schorr, Kathy Staico-Schorr, and other artists. Dig 'em. You can buy them online. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A random science
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:27:01 AM
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Science News has a great, deep article about the myriad uses of random numbers--from e-commerce to protein folding--and why computers have such a hard time generating true randomness.
Now, physicists and computer scientists are figuring out ways to pull true randomness out of the physical world. One Web site, for instance, generates random numbers from the noise of a radio tuned between stations. And a commercial device put on the market last March harnesses nature's ultimate source of randomness: quantum physics, which Albert Einstein famously described as God playing dice....
Although computers are expert at spewing out numbers, a computer program can't by itself produce random ones. Computers are engineered to behave deterministically, obeying the will of their users. "If a computer does something unpredictable, then we call it broken," says Landon Noll, a cryptographer at the computer security firm SystemExperts in Sudbury, Mass.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Darrin Perry: illo in memoriam
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:30:33 AM
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BoingBoing reader and illustrator Kenn Brown of Mondolithic (who publish an "image of the week" online every week) says, "I want to start off this weeks image with a memoriam to our friend and mentor, Floyd Darrin Perry - former Creative Director for Wired Magazine. Darrin passed away last weekend at his home in San Francisco. It has been a terrible week coming to grips with this loss. He was a wonderful, giving person and a great human being, who touched our lives in ways I cannot begin to express - he will be missed terribly. This weeks illustration was our last assignment for Darrin." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chinese editions of MSN Spaces censor political terms
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:37:42 AM
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Following up on last week's BoingBoing posts (one, two) about the curious censorship and intellectual property details of Microsoft's new blogging tool MSN Spaces, BoingBoing reader Weizhong Yang in Taipei, Taiwan says:
I would like to tell you that some Chinese readers of BoingBoing (such as me) recently tried to know if the Traditional Chinese and the Simplified Chinese MSN Spaces censored some words, after reading your post â€MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs’. Well, they indeed did that. We found that the Traditional Chinese MSN Spaces censored words such as oral sex, anal sex and so on, by the way, they censored two important and common used words which make us feel unbelievable.
One is a word pronounced as cao which means fucking sometimes, however, it also means operating, handling, exercising or practicing, and there was a famous king/hero/tyrant in about the second century called Cao Cao. Therefore you cannot set certain derivations of that word, (for instance Cao Cao and Yang Xiu, which is a famous traditional Chinese drama play) as the title of your MSN Space. Another common word is censored too, which means fucking sometime but also means doing something or the main body of something.
The situation of the Simplified Chinese MSN Spaces is even worse. Names of many contemporary political figures are censored such as Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Teng-hui and so on. “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics” is censored, too.
Here are some related URLs (in Chinese, with the censored Chinese characters shown): Link one, Link two.
Link to Weizhong's blog post (in Chinese), which also shows the banned Chinese characters.
Following up on Mr. Yang's email, I contacted Xiao Qiang, Director of the Berkeley China Internet Project Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley (also a student of BoingBoing's "band manager", John Battelle). He adds this background:
As for the subject of how Chinese government keywords filtering, the full list of the keywords are covered on my China Digital New Blog. (John is also part of the project, helped to found the weblog last year.) Here is my essay with a list of the words you never see in Chinese cyberspace: Link. Some of the Chinese keywords are translated and analyzed here: Link. And my recent article about blogging in China is here: Link.
It will be very revealing if we can dig out what Microsoft has build into their new blogging software. The emails you got from those Taiwan users are clear evidence of it, even it is far from the full list of these words.
My guess is the list Miscrosoft use will be largely identical to what I have posted on China Digital News site, since it is the list universally used by almost all Chinese web hosting services, with some modification for each specific service. They got this list of banned words, and it is being updated constantly, from the net police, I suspect Miscrosoft will get it from the same source.
It would be very interesting for Taiwanese or other Chinese-speaking people to test MSN Spaces by using the list of words I published, just to see whether they are coming from the same source or not.
Link to Mr. Qiang's China Digital News project.
BoingBoing reader Tom McGrenery adds,
Ironically, a lot of the Chinese character censorship is related to the self-censorship of the Chinese language for some time now.
For example, the whole thing about Cao Cao. Now "cao", the verb "to fuck" used to be a character showing the verb "to enter" over the character for "meat". I think we can all figure out why it may have been considered ever so slightly crude. However, instead of dealing with the idea that people wanted to write "fuck" every so often, the Chinese ended up with substitute characters. A popular alternative was just writing "X" instead of a naughty character, but of course, if context wasn't enough, you had to spell out which character it was meant to be. I mean, did X mean "fuck" or, perhaps, "shit"? So, things moved onto using alternate characters -e.g. characters also pronounced "cao" that didn't originally mean "fuck".
The upshot? Well, according to censorship software, they now all mean "fuck". Welcome to China.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Recursive animation (recursive animation)
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DATE: 12/06/2004 07:47:24 AM
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Here is a neat recursive flash animation. Part of what makes this so weird and funny is the look of the guy.
Link (via Reality Carnival)
And here are someone else's directions on how to make your own. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Unagi implant
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DATE: 12/06/2004 08:14:37 AM
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Scientists are reverse engineering a lamprey's nervous system as part of an effort to design a neuroprosthetic implant that could help patients with spinal cord injuries walk. The researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland hope that understanding the eel's spinal cord could reveal ways in which they might tap into the injured spinal cords of humans.
A properly designed implant, they believe, could act in place of the brain and direct these dormant control centers to send the same kind of locomotion signals they did before the spinal cord was injured. "We want to take advantage of circuits that already exist in the body," Etienne-Cummings said. "Instead of stimulating the leg muscles directly, we want to go to the spinal cord and stimulate the nerves that control the muscles in the legs."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Trailer tramps in 70s travel trailer brochure
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DATE: 12/06/2004 02:24:10 PM
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Retrocrush scanned the pages of a '70s travel trailer brochure with lots of pics of buxom chicks, and added the obligatory funny comments.
"Enough of that shameless hussy. Listen, let's talk this over some wine, empty cereal bowls, and oval candle holders. I love the shape of those candle holders. I know this might sound weird, but they actually taste pretty good. If you just flick your tongue against the top inside part, with the sides against your lips, it's...ohhh, incredible. I'd sure like to watch you do that, while I grab your ears, if you know what I mean!"
Link (Via PCL LinkDump)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Returning Fallujans get retina scans and forced labor
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DATE: 12/06/2004 02:49:00 PM
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From Sunday's Boston Globe:
The US military is drawing up plans to keep insurgents from regaining control of this battle-scarred city, but returning residents may find that the measures make Fallujah look more like a police state than the democracy they have been promised. Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times.
(...) One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.
"You have to say, 'Here are the rules,' and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability," said Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, the Marine regiment that took the western half of Fallujah during the US assault and expects to be based downtown for some time. Bellon asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, " 'What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?' All this Oprah [stuff]," he said. "They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, 'I'm with you.' We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe..."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Supremes reject eBay porno cop's case
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DATE: 12/06/2004 02:56:20 PM
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Take a deep breath, try to stay with me here. The US Supreme Court has ruled that masturbating on a police uniform in an adult video sold on eBay is not First Amendment-protected speech if you are an off-duty cop whose AOL alias is codestud3. And who says the law is boring? Link to PDF decision. Link to news story, Link to another. (Thanks to multiple smutlaw scouts including Darren Bedwell)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ninjas killed my family
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DATE: 12/06/2004 03:01:42 PM
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Link to found image.
BoingBoing reader Joshua Bis updates us: "Any idea how begging sign memes spread? Some kids in Seattle were using this sign earlier this year -- see the photo accompanying this article (Link, also
mentioned on the seattle metroblog). There was also a rash of 'hit a street kid in the face with a pie' franchises around town earlier in the year. I wonder if that network expanded, too?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coppola copyright dispute blocks silent film "Napoleon"
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DATE: 12/06/2004 03:28:28 PM
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Reader Londonfilter says:
In the 1980s, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola helped film expert Kevin Brownlow restore Abel Gance's lost silent masterpiece Napoleon. Recently, though, Coppola tried to shut down the British Film Institute's screening of Brownlow's latest 5-hour-long print of the film, over a dispute over -- you guessed it -- copyright. Director Abel Gance gave Brownlow UK rights to the film but Coppola claims that Gance didn't have the legal rights to do so. The screening went ahead anyway, with Brownlow joking beforehand that he half expected process servers to swoop in by helicopter with Ride of the Valkyries blaring in the background. Gance was a brilliant, iconoclastic director of huge, ambitious films. He was, in short, a spiritual forefather of Francis Ford Coppola, and it's disappointing that Coppola is trying to surpress his work.
Link to Times UK story, and link to IMDB listing for Abel Gance's Napoleon.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ritz phone gang can keep ÂŁ1.3MM roulette winnings
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DATE: 12/06/2004 03:33:28 PM
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BoingBoing reader Frank says, "Three Eastern European gamblers tricked the Ritz out of ÂŁ1.3 million British pounds by using a scanner embedded within a mobile phone and hooked up to a probability calculator to up their chances at the roulette table." Link to today's news that "Scotland Yard has decided that there is no ground to prosecute the gamblers and refunded them the 'significant' quantity of cash which officers seized after their arrest."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Creepy baby Jesus head soul-saving website
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DATE: 12/06/2004 03:43:32 PM
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Never mind the Lord, have you accepted the Flash plug-in yet? On this very strange web page, a disembodied baby Jesus head floating in html space cries or laughs when you click on His head. The website says, "The Baby Jesus can save you from the pain and suffering of the world and all He asks of you is that you return His love Also visit our shop for Baby Jesus gifts." Do they mean the baby Jesus, or this animated doppelganger? And when they say Baby Jesus gifts, do they mean gifts for Jesus, in keeping with the season, or Jesus-branded schwag? Just asking. Link to "The Interactive Baby Jesus Head" (Thanks ACM)
Update: Hmmm, is this a hoax? Well, duh! Don't the words "anti-fornication thong" mean anything to you people?
BoingBoing reader Bryan says, "I was intrigued (and disturbed) by the Baby Jesus. Wondering what type of strange religious group created this, I WHOISed the site. Interestingly, it is registered to a company called "IdeaFlood, Inc.," which is based, apparently, in Nevada. So, I went to the Nevada Department of State website, and found out that one "Brian Shuster" is the registered agent for the corporation. A quick google search of his name, and voila!, pr0n and the Creepy Baby Jesus have quite a bit in common. Worse, the guy has a patent on pop-up ads!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Porn Happy: new blog, new novel from Susannah Breslin
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Former BoingBoing guestblogger Susannah Breslin (aka The Reverse Cowgirl) launched a new project today: Porn Happy is a blog about a novel that follows the misadventures of a man named Xerxes Xavier in the adult film industry. Snip:
When I first met the adult movie industry, it was changing. Faced with rising competition from the unbridled, uncensored, and uncharted world of Internet pornography, born captive but raised in recent years to run free without chastisement under the blind eye of a series of liberal political regimes, Porn Valley was becoming far, far more extreme. Starring stunt sex acts and unprecedented multiple penetrations, pushing the parameters of sado-masochism and redefining the meaning of degradation, seeking to uncover how far humans could really go, Porn Valley was the new Wild, Wild West, a land beyond sex where anything was going. Like Narcissus, I fell into my reflection in it. When I was dead, dead to feeling, it was in Porn Valley that I found nothing but feelings and no feelings at all.
Link to Susannah's new blog, and link to the first of a number of forthcoming excerpts from the novel she plans to post there. Watch for the next one on Wednesday.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Three new clips from Michael Moore "Video the Vote Ohio"
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DATE: 12/06/2004 04:01:53 PM
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BoingBoing reader Dave Pentecost is one of a number of volunteer filmmakers who worked with Michael Moore to document election day conditions at polling sites throughout Ohio in November. Background on the project in these previous BoingBoing posts (one, two). Today, Dave tells BoingBoing:
Here are three clips of longer selections from the Video the Vote Ohio project. The longest clip, of voter statements about problems they had at the polls, is being reviewed by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. Link to videos at archive.org.
Here are a couple of Ohio papers on the recount: cleveland.com news story (Link), ohio.com news story (Link), and here's the lead from an AP story (Salon, Sunday Dec 5 -- Link):
"Two major challenges are expected to unfold Monday when Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell certifies the state's final presidential election results, declaring President Bush the winner by about 119,000 votes. Lawyers representing voters upset about problems at the polls plan to contest the results with the Ohio Supreme Court, citing documented cases of long lines, a shortage of machines and a pattern of problems in predominantly black neighborhoods."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Battelle on recent Google activity
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DATE: 12/06/2004 05:16:03 PM
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John Battelle provides good, brief analysis of what Google is up to.
With the news that Google has locked down googlereviews.com, incorporated reviews (of sorts) into Froogle, re-launched Google Groups in a bid to get competitive with Yahoo, started to update Blogger, has released desktop search (with its obvious developer platform implications), and is quickly scaling Local with mobile and the like, it's a pretty obvious conclusion to draw: Google is joining the architecture of participation party in a big way.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Let Louis Rossetto's mom have her damn bedroom!
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DATE: 12/06/2004 05:27:24 PM
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Friend and Wired founding editor Louis Rosetto emailed me yesterday: "This is one of those good versus evil, little guy -- actually little grandmother -- versus City Hall kind of stories. As you will read below, my mother has been ensnarled for two years trying to get approval to build a modest addition on her house -- a ground floor bedroom because, at 87, she is becoming literally terrified of climbing the stairs to her current bedroom.
"Two couples across the street have been fighting her as if she was the Irvine Corporation about to slam a 500 home subdivision into the neighborhood -- perhaps for no other reason than, in Berkeley, they can. When they had exhausted all statutory remedies, they decided to go nuclear and are now trying to landmark my mother's house. Regulatory abuse turns into real abuse. There's a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing in Berkeley Monday 7:30pm at 1901 Hearst. If you're in the neighborhood, please drop by for the fireworks." (click image of newspaper advertisement for enlargement).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Odd Rods: monster car sticker gallery
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DATE: 12/06/2004 05:38:58 PM
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Pure 1960s fun: big-headed monsters driving itty-bitty cars. Link (Via Eye of the Goof)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Uncool Tool: Liquid Lens
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DATE: 12/06/2004 06:56:52 PM
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I'm pretty hard on my eyeglasses. I never keep them in their case, I drop them on the ground, and my kids get their little fingers, oozing with glass-etching sebaceous secretions, all over them. As a result, the lenses are full of tiny scratches. The center of the lenses have a cloudy spot. It's distracting (and made even worse by the fact that I've had a big gray floater in my right eye since 1998).
I was at Target this weekend picking up some Christmas decorations and came across this $10 product, called Liquid Lense: Easy 2 Step Lense Treatment Kit. It's supposed to fill and seal surface scratches with some kind of liquid polymer.
I bought it. At home, I followed the instructions, cleaning the glasses and then painting the clear polymer onto the lenses using the included mascara-type brush. After letting it cure for 8 hours, I put on my glasses. The scratches were still there. Worse the layer of clear polymer was uneven, giving everything a blurry funhouse mirror look. I washed the stuff off using the remover solution and tried again. The problem was just as bad, if not worse. I tried it on glasses and even on my cell phone display. Everything ended up worse, not better than before. Don't buy this stuff.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Unagi implant
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DATE: 12/07/2004 02:20:04 AM
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Scientists are reverse engineering a lamprey's nervous system as part of an effort to design a neuroprosthetic implant that could help patients with spinal cord injuries walk. The researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland hope that understanding the eel's spinal cord could reveal ways in which they might tap into the injured spinal cords of humans.
A properly designed implant, they believe, could act in place of the brain and direct these dormant control centers to send the same kind of locomotion signals they did before the spinal cord was injured. "We want to take advantage of circuits that already exist in the body," Etienne-Cummings said. "Instead of stimulating the leg muscles directly, we want to go to the spinal cord and stimulate the nerves that control the muscles in the legs."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: History of Contraception
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DATE: 12/07/2004 06:51:55 AM
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The Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western University in Cleveland has a new History of Contraception Museum. The Center recently received 650 artifacts in the Percy Skuy Collection, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Skuy is the past president of Ortho Pharmaceutical in Canada. On display at the new museum are such vintage intrauterine devices as the Russian Cross, Supercoil, and 10 Armed Device.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Aya Kato
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DATE: 12/07/2004 07:08:24 AM
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Japanese artist Aya Kato's illustrations are amazing. As Bibi says, the style is a dark fusion of Manga and Art Nouveau. Really stunning. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indian film to debut by cellphone
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DATE: 12/07/2004 10:00:15 AM
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Rok Sako To Rok Lo, an Indian "campus caper" movie, will become the first full-length feature film to premiere on a wireless cellular network. On December 9, subscribers to India's Airtel service can sneak-preview a streaming version on their Edge-enabled phones. Theatrical release begins the following day. Link (via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tech guide for POGs
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DATE: 12/07/2004 10:00:27 AM
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POGs: Parents of geeks. Mark Hurst says,
Here's a free tech-buying guide I wrote not for Boing Boing readers, but for their *parents*. Hand this PDF (look how nice it prints out) to any of your non-geek friends, and they'll know exactly what technology to buy - for themselves, or for gifts this holiday season. P.S. There's also an Almanac section where I put all the rants I've stored up over the past year. I make absolutely no money on this guide and do it only to help spread some basic tech knowledge.
Link to PDF
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "U2 vs. Negativland iPod" satire shut down by Apple
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DATE: 12/07/2004 10:40:39 AM
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Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post, reader Francis Hwang says,
On Tuesday, November 30, I offered the "Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition" for sale on eBay. On Monday, December 6, only one day before the auction was scheduled to close, I was notified by eBay that my auction listing was being shut down at Apple's request. Apple had told eBay that my work was in violation of their intellectual property rights. I have emailed Apple asking for an explanation, and am waiting for a response.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: HaXXXor
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DATE: 12/07/2004 10:46:01 AM
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A new edition of geek-themed porn from the smutmongers at HaXXXor. Fleshbot says, "We especially like Binary Babe's tutorial on decimal, hexadecimal, and binary counting systems: we'll never forget that two nipples (er, nibbles) or eight bits makes a byte again!" My favorite clip title: "Defcon Jacuzzi." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Knit a fuzzy, huggable uterus
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DATE: 12/07/2004 10:48:16 AM
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Grab your yarn and needles, folks -- time to knit your very own "Cute, Cuddly Uterus Doll." Snip from website:
It's not completely anatomically accurate. I've taken a few liberties with the general shape and scale, as well as leaving out the ligaments connected to the ovaries.
And, of course, the human uterus is not normally bubblegum pink.
May I also add that most of them do not play piano. Link (thanks, major bloodnok)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Does your car contain a black box data device?
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By some estimates, "black box" data recoring devices are in as many as 30 million of the 200 million cars and trucks on America's roads. Is your ride one of them? Car makers aren't required to notify you, unless you buy the car in California. This PDF document contains a partial list of vehicles with built-in black boxes. Link (Ed. note: it's pretty US-centric -- anyone have similar data for other countries?) The devices typically record for a few seconds after an airbag deployment, collecting speed, braking and other operating data. Some privacy advocates are concerned that the data could be used against you in court unfairly.
(Thanks, David Radulski
-- data via St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Update: Jim Harris of Harris Technical Services, the "Traffic Accident Reconstructionists" who produced the black box list, says:
The list on the Harris Technical Services website, listing the vehicles with "black boxes", is complete and current as far as being able to retrieve crash data from them with commercially available equipment. Other manufacturers, Toyota in particular, have stated they have a data recorder of some type on board but have not released the required software or hardware required to extract the data. They have not published exactly what data is recorded. Pretty much the same for Volvo. Daimler-Chrysler has not commented at all. (...) There is one legal case, still pending final resolution, where the judge would not admit [black box data] evidence as the police did not obtain a search warrant before downloading the data. This case is in Tennessee.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired Mag 2004 Tools roundup
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DATE: 12/07/2004 11:55:01 AM
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This year's edition of Wired Magazine's annual "tools" special is out. The special includes 129 of the world's coolest gizmos, from video to audio to games to screens -- even "30 under $30." I wrote the "cars" section -- bitchin' gadgets to geek out your ride, and a feature on the energy-conserving "Tango" two-seater (shown here). Link to Wired Tools 2004, and Link to Xeni's section on Auto tech.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Whose sign is it anyway?
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DATE: 12/07/2004 12:10:21 PM
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This AP photograph of some soldiers in front of a sign in Kabul, Afghanistan looks normal enough, until you notice that the sign they're standing in front of (presumably aimed at the local poplation) is written in English. Link to more background, and link to original images (one, two)
Update: BoingBoing reader Sepoy says,
"It is a widespread practice all across South Asia for businesses to take out public ads (full page in newspapers) and put up posters congratulating the elected or despotic leaders -- all the way from National Assembly to PM. [Ed note: Hmmm, sounds suspiciously like those movie studio "for your consideration" ads come Oscars time. Who knew Hollywood and Kabul were sister fiefdoms!] The ad in question is by Afghan Wireless -- their logo is visible -- which is an international company selling, well, telecommunications. Nothing sinister. And not designed for consumption in CNN or FOX."
Reader Pinski says, "Saw your post on the Kabul sign and it reminded me of this one in Florida." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Court tosses Hooters lawsuit against rival boobs-n-booze chain
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DATE: 12/07/2004 12:10:56 PM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post: a federal judge has ruled that a Florida chain restaurant featuring scantily-clad, buxom waitresses -- and hot wings -- did not infringe on the trade dress of the Hooters restaurant chain. Snip from IP Law Bulletin article (paid sub required)
"I have been falsely accused of cheating by an aging restaurant chain that is slipping," said Crawford Ker, WingHouse founder and owner. "Yesterday the judge has cleared me of any wrong doing. It has been proven that Hooters does not have a monopoly on wings and attractive women."
Link to Bloomberg's report. (Thanks Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: MSN Spaces
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On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I hit the blogosphere with host Alex Chadwick to test-drive Microsoft's new blogging service, MSN Spaces. We kick the tech tires, and explore some of the territory also covered in these two previous BoingBoing posts: (MSN Spaces: Seven Dirty Blogs, and MSN Spaces = soylent green).
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.
In related news, BoingBoing reader Joshua Wattles -- who also happens to be an entertainment law attorney in Los Angeles -- offers a different opinion on the ToS for MSN Spaces:
I noticed your concern about the Microsoft copyright language. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The operative, and curative, clause in the legal dribble is this “each in connection with the MSN Web Sites” as part of the whole in line recitation of “For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission."
It means, all those rights relate only to the uses Microsoft (or a sublicensee) makes in connection with its MSN Web Sites application and service - - and that’s just logical since the material is being deposited on MSN web sites and it needs to know it can have it reside there. Amongst us lawyers and our affiliated judges, this language would not fairly be interpreted to mean in context to permit Microsoft to appropriate the material for a use of its own such as putting together a SLATE made up of MSN blog mash-ups, for example.
And BoingBoing reader L. Mosier points to a website that put the new blogging service through a "racial epithet test."
The website Illegal Voices, which names the MSN Spaces post on BoingBoing as inspiration, tested MSN Spaces for whether racial epithets were allowed. MSN has a reputation for booting hate sites and chats from its domains, but, as the author notes, "I was surpsried to find how easy it was to create a blog with a slur in its title." The author concedes that, though free speech is a major issue online, most major sites are united in banning hate speech and take strong steps against it. Interesting survery; MSN seems to prohibit the "n-word" but allows other derogatory terms.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Bibleman Cometh
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DATE: 12/07/2004 12:22:14 PM
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(Updated). Yesterday's Baby Jesus Interactive Head was a spoof. The Kentucky Creationist Museum was admittedly staid. For BoingBoing readers who want a little more action in their evangelical internet kitsch, this next round should suffice.
Christian Kaiju! Bibleman attempts to convert young souls by way of hot God-on-sinner conflict. A meatspace world tour is under way, video e-mails are available on demand, and the sin-smiting superhero stars in a buttload of DVDs. The vibe? GWAR meets Xena the Warrior Princess meets Vacation Bible Wrestling. Snip: "Bibleman’s spectacular battles against the flamboyant villains of Darkness are an exciting way to introduce your children to the Bible and the power of God’s Word." Flamboyant villains, huh? Get a load of Bibleman's own shiny man-cleavage. With all that spandex going on, he looks a little light in the loafers himself, if you know what I'm saying. Link
Update: Bonus Round. City of Revelation is sort of like Disneyland, only low-budget and born again. (thanks, Hyperspaz)
BoingBoing reader Yams says, "You might find it interesting to note that the man who wrote, directed and starred in Bible Man was frequent Scott Baio co-star, Willie Aames, who starred opposite Chachi in both "Zapped!" and "Charles in Charge". Link to Willie Aames IMDB listing.
And reader Ryan says,
Another bonus round: Holy Land is a bigger budget theme park here in Orlando, Florida. While not on par with Universal, Sea World or Disney World, it's got it's own kitsch. Make sure to check out the menu from the "Oasis Palm's Cafe", complete with "Goliath" burger. Another note, my deeply religious Catholic grandmother was bored out of her mind at Holy Land.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Digital girl
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DATE: 12/07/2004 12:47:31 PM
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Kaya is a super realistic digital girl created in 2002 using the 3D modeling program MAYA. Her video clip "screen test" is spooky. She is at the nadir of the uncanny valley. Link (Via growabrain)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Having fun with the FCC Whine-o-Matic
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DATE: 12/07/2004 12:56:16 PM
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Kevin Kelleher shares some fun he had with the Parents Television Council's complaint form:
"I went to the above URL and emailed the following complaint, signing it as Bill O'Reilly of Fox News. Lo and behold, it was instantly sent to all five FCC commissioners. Maybe other BB readers can enjoy it too. Oh, and don't forget to stop by the PTC gift shop!"
Here's what he submitted:
"I woke up this morning and it suddenly dawned on me that, gee willikers, my show stinks! I have no idea what I'm talking about and I am a menace to the broadcast industry. Shut me up before I open my big yap again!
"By the way, I am writing this from the Parents Television Council's web site. They make it so easy for people like me to send an email complaining to the FCC about anything we want.
"According to Mediaweek, 99.8 percent of the complaints going to the FCC about indecency are coming from this very web site. Only who knows how many of them are legitimate and representative of the will of the great American public? -- Bill O'Reilly, Fox News"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to BroadSnatch
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DATE: 12/07/2004 01:41:49 PM
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phillip torrone sez: "The How-To I wrote for this week on Engadget shows how to use the BlogDigger RSS media feed, iPodder and WindowsMedia to deliver weird, random and cool videos from around the web to you Portable Video player. Here's a Video (WinMedia) of what you can expect. Is this the future of IP-TV? One thing is for sure, the videos I get are completely bizarre."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using your Brain in the World
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DATE: 12/07/2004 03:39:07 PM
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O'Reilly has just released its latest book in the Hacks series: Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using your Brain in the World. I haven't see it yet, but there are several cool sample hacks at the OR website, including: Hack 11: Why People Don't Work Like Elevator Buttons, Map Your Blind Spot, Glimpse the Gaps in Your Vision, Create Illusionary Depth with Sunglasses, Neural Noise Isn't a Bug; It's a Feature, Improve Visual Attention Through Video Games, Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?, and Make the Caffeine Habit Taste Good. Link
UPDATE: Anne Galloway sez: "Saw your post on Mind Hacks and thought I'd point to the accompanying weblog - in case you hadn't seen it." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bandwidth-gobbling RSS aggregators: foiled!
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DATE: 12/07/2004 09:49:11 PM
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Last month, Cory posted an item about Glenn Fleishman's analysis of the impact of RSS aggregators on his blogs' bandwidth use. (Link to previous BoingBoing post). Now, Glenn updates us with this news:
I've run the latest statistics on RSS usage after adding a simple throttling program that uses a database to track the last access by an RSS aggregator (or anyone trying to retrieve a syndication file). One retrieval per file update is now the limit. I've seen my bandwidth use on RSS drop almost in half with no commensurate drop in actual users, and only a single note describing a problem in retrieving my feed (from a very old aggregator).
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Imaginary friends
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DATE: 12/08/2004 12:03:52 AM
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Sixty-five percent of children say that by age seven, they've played with an imaginary companion. Children interviewed for a study by psychologists at the University of Washington and University of Oregon were considered to have an imaginary companion if they were able to discuss its psychological traits, "such as 'She is nice to me.'"
The study also showed that:
• While preschool girls were more likely to have an imaginary companion, by age 7 boys were just as likely as girls to have one.
• 27 percent of the children described an imaginary friend that their parents did not know about.
• 57 percent of the imaginary companions of school-age youngsters were humans and 41 percent were animals. One companion was a human capable of transforming herself into any animal the child wanted.
• Not all imaginary companions are friendly. A number were quite uncontrollable and some were a nuisance.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Whistleblower interface
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DATE: 12/08/2004 12:26:03 AM
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The Universal Whistling Machine (U.W.M.) is a human-computer interface based on whistling. Developed by artists Marc Böhlen and JT Rinker, the system extracts the sound of a human whistle, conducts a time-frequency analysis, and then answers with its own call.
Whistling is much closer to the phoneme-less signal primitives compatible with digital machinery than the messy domain of spoken language. As opposed to pushing machines into engaging humans in spoken language, U.W.M. suggests we meet on a middle ground. Whistling occurs across all languages and cultures. All people have the capacity to whistle, though many do not whistle well. Lacking phonemes, whistling is a pre-language language, a candidate for a limited Esperanto of human-machine communication.
Link (via Near, Near Future)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Medical curiosity clip-art
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DATE: 12/08/2004 02:53:38 AM
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For Hanukkah last night, my wife gave me an excellent book/CD-ROM package called Images of the Human Body. It's a clip-art collection of hundreds of vintage medical illustrations, from detailed renderings of brains and skeletons to, er, "cut-away" depictions of internal organs and musculature. They've even thrown in a couple drawings of such wonderful medical procedures as trepanation and tooth-pulling. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sneakerfreaker.com
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:08:24 AM
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Hint Magazine is one of my favorite sources for news about Expensive Shit. This week's edition features a blurb about another fashion publication -- one devoted exclusively to the sneaker freak.
That athletic shoe enthusiasts are no weekend hobbyists is evidenced by Sneakerfreaker.com, the online presence of the eponymous Melbourne-based print magazine devoted to the growing cult of cool kicks. Geared mostly to the skater/urban set, the website features blog-style previews of soles about to hit the market, mainly classic models re-released in limited editions by major and minor brands (as expected, Nike's Dunk gets a lot of attention, but plenty of less iconic laces are duly worshipped), along with short articles on sneaker culture, interviews with collectors, store reviews and city guides for sneaker-hunting. There's even a section devoted to sneaker-inspired street art, as well as a user forum and a shop where you can buy the magazine and T-shirts. If Pumas and Ponies, rather than Manolos and Jimmy Choos, are your weakness, Sneakerfreaker.com is a must.
Link to Sneakerfreaker, link to Hint.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Are white synthesizers cooler than black ones?
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:16:50 AM
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Glad you asked. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Missing person finder tech
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:35:11 AM
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BoingBoing reader Pierre Nel in South Africa says,
A news story is airing on South African television & radio about a locally designed system that enables people to track down missing kids using a dna sample (like a single strand of hair etc) - according to various parents that appeared on the news the system actually works, but the company that invented the device don't want to release any details on exactly how the device works, because it's still in a "testing phase". We were treated to some satellite images on the news story though. Weird.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sleep more, lose weight?
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:38:28 AM
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An interesting study points to a link between obesity and (in)adequate sleep.
The recent rise in obesity may be partly due to the reduced amount of time we spend asleep, according to new research from the University of Bristol, UK. Dr Shahrad Taheri from Bristol University, and colleagues in the United States, examined the role of two key hormones that are involved in regulating appetite -- ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin increases feelings of hunger while leptin acts to suppress appetite. People who habitually slept for 5 hours were found to have 15% more ghrelin than those who slept for 8 hours. They were also found to have 15% less leptin. These hormonal changes may cause increased feelings of hunger, leading to a foraging in the fridge for food.
Link (Thanks, Jobo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bukkake Christmas cellphone ad
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:48:49 AM
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Shamelessly porn-themed ads: they're not just for J-Pop stars anymore. Wrap it all up in holiday tableau, and voilá: a sure sign of western civilization's imminent decline (as if we needed any more of 'em). Link to the Register's writeup of a Vodfone Live! ad that appeared in UK papers last month. (Thanks, miker)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cool Tools book, TEST from Wired mag
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:49:00 AM
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Two items of interest to BoingBoing readers from the current issue of Kevin Kelly's ezine, Cool Tools.
First: a few hundred copies of the second edition of his Cool Tools book remain available on Amazon. "Some of the items are a bit dated by now, some are simply outdated or obsolete, but much of the book is evergreen," says Kevin, "The best cool tools won't be easily superceded." Link to Amazon listing.
Second: Wired Magazine just launched a trial publication called TEST, sort of a Consumer Reports-style testing guide about electronic gear. Snip from Kevin's review:
TEST comparatively evaluates a surprisingly thorough range of gear, and their judgements seem to be reasonable, rather than just fashionable. The best surprise of all is that TEST does the one key thing so many magazines dare not do -- that is, they actually say: we tried all of these and this one is the best. Why is that so hard to do? Because it steps on advertiser's toes. So, may the force be with TEST. Out of all the many year-end holiday lists of gadgets I've seen online and in magazines, this is the only one I think has any merit as a trustworthy guide. Great job.
BTW, this special issue should not be confused with the annual roundup of gadgets and gifts in Wired's December issue, although it will be. And I had absolutely nothing to do with TEST's creation and no foreknowledge about its appearance. I'm just a happy reader. This first issue of TEST was printed in limited quantities, but Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has made a PDF of its content available online exclusively for Cool Tool readers in case you can't find it on your local newsstand, where it should be until the end of the year.
Link to Wired TEST download (PDF).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: QTVR: memory of John Lennon's passing in 1980
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:54:28 AM
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Twenty-four years ago today, John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City. A "strawberry fields" memorial stands in his honor in Central Park. Here's a QTVR panorama shot by Daniel Maurer. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bose iPod sound dock
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DATE: 12/08/2004 09:01:46 AM
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We've been testing out a demo unit of the new Bose SoundDock here for about a month, and the short version is that I'm digging it. The $300 device has received fair criticism from various sources for not packing more features that cheaper competitors do (for instance: the ability to sync your iPod, or play music coming from your laptop or PC). The sound quality is better than other iPod speakers, though, and it's become a convenient way to avoid sonic warfare among officemates. I share a modest-sized space with other colleagues who also happen to pack 'Pods, and an odd sort of DJ honor-sharing system has evolved among us. My mini sits in the SoundDock one day, someone else's (any size) might rock the cradle tomorrow. It's a relatively small-footprint, low-cost way to meet the jam needs of our shared work space.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Babs (RIP)
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DATE: 12/08/2004 09:13:43 AM
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When Babs the gorilla died yesterday at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, the zookeepers invited the other gorillas to hold a wake of sorts. Apparently, gorillas sometimes "pay respects to their dead" in the wild. The dominant female of her group, Babs, 30, suffered from incurable kidney disease and was put down. From an Associated Press report:
One by one Tuesday, the gorillas filed into the Tropic World building where Babs' body lay, arms outstretched. Curator Melinda Pruett Jones called it a "gorilla wake."
Babs' 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the first to approach the body, followed by Babs' mother, Alpha, 43. Bana sat down, held Babs' hand and stroked her mother's stomach. Then she sat down and laid her head on Babs' arm.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Anti-drug movies from Singapore
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DATE: 12/08/2004 09:20:17 AM
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BoingBoing reader Alfie says,
How rare, I was googling for a subtitle resource (Ed. note: suuuuuure) and i came across this page at the Singapore narcotics bureau, hosting oodles of high quality anti drug campaign movies!
Example: "The Awakening: A 3D animated film using only powerful sound effects and English subtitles. The film recounts the memories of a teenager's painful and tragic past." 60mb!
Link to list of online anti-drug movies created by the Central Narcotics Bureau of Singapore.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rear-View Mirror
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DATE: 12/08/2004 09:26:21 AM
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I helped the editors of Nerve.com gather up a "best of" collection from erotic photographer and Nerve-blogger Siege. The images, along with a little intro I wrote, are here. You'll need a paid subscription to see them; content is sexually explicit and intended for adults who are not at work. The image cropped here, btw, is a beautiful nude clutching a pig heart. Link to Rear-View Mirror
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reporter blames "spam-rage" for angry call to conservative website
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DATE: 12/08/2004 12:00:14 PM
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Philadelphia-based public radio journalist Rachel Buchman resigned from WHYY after "making a phone call that would change [her] life." She says she left the now-infamously nasty voicemail for the people at Laptoplobbyist.com because she was posessed by a spam-induced rage.
"I was incensed that I wasn't going to finally get to ask a real person to remove me from the list... The answering machine asked the caller to leave a name and number, and without thinking, that's what I did."
I hear you, Rachel. Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Feds raid DC gaming stores for modded Xbox consoles
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DATE: 12/08/2004 12:08:14 PM
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BoingBoing reader Aaman says,
The Feds have raided three Washington DC video game stores and arrested two people for the crime of 'modding' XBox video game consoles - the details are in this Reuters story. The store/company, Pandora's Cube, sold $500 "Super Xbox" consoles.
Link
Reader Mike Harris says,
It's not often I defend the Feds, but let's not forget this particularly relevant point from the article, eh? "The modified consoles, some holding 15 or more games already copied to the hard drive, were on open display in the stores.. 'They were burning games onto the hard drive and equipping the hard drive with copying software so that the average consumer could just go ahead and copy the software themselves.'" It doesn't sound as if it's the fact they were modded that drew the Feds' ire as much as the fact they had 15 pirated games on them.
Reader Bill Reals says,
As a Modded Xbox owner, I can say that if the allegations are true, then these employees are IDIOTS and are screwing the rest of us by doing this. I modded my Xbox to make it into a Media center, I've converted all most all of my legally purchased music collection into MP3s and need a jukebox. An Xbox with a chip and larger hard drive is the only way to go and while it does give you the abilty to back up games to the HD, it shouldn't be used for piracy. However, what this is going to do is equate modchip with piracy.
And BoingBoing reader Karl Reinsch says,
Yes, the allegations about the stores seem to be true. Actually, it's probably a little worse than that.
I stopped in one of the locations just about two weeks ago looking into PS2/XBox mod chips and was stunned to see them selling modded systems with games already copied onto the hard-drive. (They were defintely doing it with XBox systems and may have been doing it with PS2 systems as well.)
They even printed up stickers with the list of included games and attached them to the packaging for each system. You could pick your XBox based on the size of the hard-drive and the list of included games. "Oh look, this one has 'Halo 2' on it!"
They were also preloading the XBox systems with tons of emulators (arcade and console) and as many ROMs as they could find. I watched a customer walk in and ask about a specific original GameBoy game - the employee immediately fired up a GameBoy emulator with the appropriate ROM right there on the demo XBox and handed the customer the controller to play with. I was shocked.
They appeared to be to be doing pretty brisk business. I left the place seriously disturbed by what I had seen and wondering whether to report them. Guess somebody already had. They definitely crossed the line. And it is sad to see that happen with one of the few reliable local suppliers of mod chips.
I know for a fact that this store keeps computer records of their customers/purchases. I doubt that individuals will be legally pursued, but if the company records are turned over then the Feds will know exactly who purchased what system with which illegal games...
Here's a related /. thread: Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Update on Louis Rossetto's mother's house
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DATE: 12/08/2004 02:10:08 PM
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A couple of days ago, I wrote about the problems Louis Rossetto's mother was having trying to get permission from the city to add a small addition to her house in Berkeley (Link). On Monday, Berkeley's Landmarks Preservation Commission held a meeting to decide whether to grant landmark status to the house. In short, his mother got permission to build the addition. Congratulations!
Here's Louis' report from the meeting:
A report from the front: the battle was lost - but the war won!
Last night was my mother's Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing. Her 900 square foot two bedroom addition took three hours of discussion. In the end, the LPC voted 5 to 4 to designate her house a landmark. They then turned around and voted 9 to 0 to accept one of the two designs for the addition that my mother had submitted - proving that my mother wasn't threatening her "historic" Wurster in the first place.
I am both exhilarated and depressed by the experienced. Exhilarated because we beat those motherfucking neighbors and my mother can build her bedroom. And saddened to have witnessed first hand a truly arbitrary, philistine process that must be repeated ad nauseum across America, and that causes neighborhood wars, promotes mediocrity (if not worse), and can leave people emotionally and financially ruined without even protecting the alleged purposes of the landmark ordinances.
As my mother wrote in her ad, this wasn't about preservation, this was about the local Soviet trying to assert its control over the block. After the vote to designate, one of the neighbors behind the landmark petition came over to my mother and magnanimously "welcomed" her to the neighborhood. The problem with that is my mother has been living in her house for four years already, and that their "welcome" amounted to the taking of her property. When they then lost the war when the Commission - shamed by the role they had just played in the obvious injustice visited on my mother - voted 9 to 0 to accept her design, I wanted to go over to this now ashen-faced neighbor and "welcome" him to reality.
People write above about the "benefits" of this kind of kangaroo court to civic and even property values, but from my mother's experience, these kinds of processes protect neither. It was unclear whether a majority of the commission had even visited my mother's house - only one took up her invitation to see it. The Berkeley standard for designation is that the property is the "first, last, or only" example of its kind, but the Commission had done no research into the number of Wurster houses that had been built, whether this one was better or worse than any of the others, or even whether Wurster was really anything more than a local hero. Commissioners pontificated at length on the house and Wurster, but they literally did not know what they were talking about. In fact, if you do a google on Wurster, you get about 700 links (a lot of them having to do with my mother's case). Do one on another local Berkeley architect, Bernard Maybeck, and you get an order of magnitude more - 8K. Do one on another local, Julia Morgan, and you get 30K. That should tell you something about Wurster's relative stature.
The very scariest thing about the proceedings last night was that there were at least two members of the LPC who believed that their job was not just to consider buildings that had been brought to them for landmarking, but they should actively be increasing the number of buildings in the City's "inventory." As one of them put it, "There are 40,000 buildings in Berekley, and we have landmarked only 300." This, in a city that's barely 100 years old, and which already has more landmarked buildings, as I have noted, than San Francisco which is half a century older and has seven times the population.
And their criteria for landmarking? Berkeley has landmarked parking lots, has landmarked empty lots, has landmarked rocks, has landmarked factories where "whites and blacks worked together for the first time." Listening to these commissioners, you can easily imagine them finding something in every building in the city that would justify landmarking, and if not in the building itself, perhaps in its relationship to its neighborhood, to the trees on the site, to the "streetscape," to the feeling of the street, . . .
Anyway, my mother can build her bedroom. And I intend to make a contribution to the Institute for Justice. Once again, we are shown that tyranny isn't just a national threat; it starts, and is perhaps most pernicious, on your own block.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Survey of creative people's work methods
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DATE: 12/08/2004 02:45:36 PM
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Rob sez: "Rod McLaren has a fantastic series of blog entries running (indexed in the link above) called 'How we work'. It has insights into the work methods used by the worlds most creative/productive/innovative people.
"So far the range includes Chatwin, Autechre, Giotto and Calatrava to name just a few."
James Ellroy, author, on what to write: "Don’t follow that bullshit of 'Write what you know.' Write what you like to read. Write what you want to read but no one else is writing."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Andrew Brandou and Tim Biskup "Ultra-Murder Death Squad" show at Tin Man Alley
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DATE: 12/08/2004 03:06:54 PM
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Looks like a good exhibit with new art by Tim Biskup and Andrew Brandou is happening at Tin Man Alley in Philadelphia.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: DoJ tutorials on Muslim, Sikh head coverings remixed
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DATE: 12/08/2004 05:30:07 PM
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BoingBoing reader Apul Patel says,
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently released a pair of posters aimed at assisting authorities with properly identifying and searching Muslims (PDF, 1.5 MB) and Sikhs (PDF, 1 MB).
We were so impressed by the posters that we created one for the DOJ to offer South Asian shopkeepers in rural areas.
Link to Common Redneck Head Coverings (PDF, 255 KB)
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: O'Reilly's next "Hacks" book (spoof)
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DATE: 12/08/2004 05:30:07 PM
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Reader Gary Peare says,
"Bananaslug creator Steve Nelson was inspired by Mark's recent Mind Hacks post to create Parent Hacks by Lizzie Borden -- a book in the O'Reilly Hacks series that he'd like to see."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Laptops fry sperm
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DATE: 12/08/2004 08:19:53 PM
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As if it weren't bad enough that porn websites cause seizures and blindness -- more proof that the internets are dangerous places:
Laptops, which reach high internal operating temperatures, can heat up the scrotum which could affect the quality and quantity of men's sperm. (...) "It is very difficult to predict how long the computer can be used safely," [ Dr Yefim Sheynkin, an associate professor of urology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook] told Reuters. "It may not be at all, if the testicular temperature goes up high within a very short period of time." Adolescents and young men who use laptops several times a day over many years face the greatest risk. Sheynkin fears that if laptop use is not curtailed, in 15-20 years when they want to start a family the men could face problems.
Link to Reuters story. What the hell is that lady doing in the photo that accompanies the article? Link to the medical journal where the detailed findings will appear: Human Reproduction. Here's the researcher's home page: Link. (Thanks, Steve Rubel)
Reader Jont points us to an inadvertent bit of targeted advertising: "Here's a screen capture from the news story about laptops and infertillity. The look on the guys face speaks volumes." Link
Reader Scotto says, "Hey, if laptops fry sperm, use a 'condom'! This was on my Christmas list before I read about the sperm fear factor, though." Link to the Lapinator.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: More images of innards
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DATE: 12/09/2004 07:44:55 AM
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Cued by my post yesterday about antique medical illustration clip-art, reader Jim Bacus pointed me to this wonderful online exhibit by the National Library of Medicine about the history of anatomical imagery:
"The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ADSL problems? Blame XMAS.
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DATE: 12/09/2004 08:20:48 AM
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British Telecom is advising resellers that some broadband service problems reported by end users during the holiday season may be due to radio frequency interference caused by poorly-engineered blinking Christmas lights.
"We are asking Service Providers to talk with their End Users where loss of synchronisation is reported over the Christmas period to determine whether they or their immediate neighbours have a set of these lights, and if so to ask them to set them to steady state which should overcome the loss of service."
-- BTWholesale briefing
Link to UK broadband user group post. (thanks, Cristiano)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Nmap Revisited
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DATE: 12/09/2004 08:34:48 AM
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Following up on this previous Boingboing post, reader Avi Solomon says, "Looks like the entire Nmap episode from the geek-themed porn DVD "HaXXXor 1" is available for download. Happy Compiling :)" For those readers who do not spend twelve or more hours a day behind a computer, here's some background from the site hosting the clips:
Nmap was demonstrated in the Matrix Reloaded. Nmap trivia buffs may also know that Nmap source code was displayed in the 2000 movie Battle Royale (
[Screen1]
[Screen2] [Trivia]). Lesser known is that it was featured in a 3rd movie after these two appearances. Nmap made the leap from Science Fiction to "hacker pr0n" with the release of HaXXXor Volume 1: No Longer Floppy. In a seven-minute chapter, the lovely E-Lita walks us through downloading, compiling, and executing Nmap while keeping our attention by methodically removing her clothing :). You can buy the DVD (cover image) for $10 at conferences such as Defcon or from the HaXXXor Girls web site. It contains other chapters such as "Naked Dumpster Diving" and "Young Love (Of Government Encryption)".
Link, and more background on nmap here: Link.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Not the same old whale song
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DATE: 12/09/2004 08:36:31 AM
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For twelve years, marine biologists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have tracked a lone whale whose song is at a completely different frequency from any other whale. This particular baleen whale calls at 52 hertz while whales usually sing at frequencies in the 15-20 hertz range. The whale doesn't follow normal migration patterns either. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cubase plugin makes music sound like it's played by cellphone
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DATE: 12/09/2004 08:40:32 AM
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Mobile phone makers Nokia created some free plugins for Cubase that allow musicians to simulate the sound of their music being played on (or through) any one of Nokia's cellphones.
"Is this interesting? Probably not, but I just like the idea of being able to make my recordings sound exactly like they are coming out of a mobile phone." To test the thing out, I used a MIDI file of Radiohead's 'Paranoid Android'. Click to hear a N-Gage take on the intro, a Nokia 3200 doing the first choral bit, a Nokia 6650 doing the exciting bit in the middle and a Nokia 6100 rather mangling the spazz-out bit at the end.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Some Chinese bloggers reject name "Bo Ke"
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DATE: 12/09/2004 08:43:58 AM
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Yan Feng says,
Possibly triggered by the New Scientist article The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China, suggesting that blogger is called as Bo Ke in China, and a post on Boing Boing, which referenced the article, there is a big tide of voice saying I am not Bo Ke. (See bookmarks at del.icio.us and a collection of ImnotBoKe icons at flickr).
Link. Hey, how about just calling them "Bloggers in China?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Homemade film camera kicks gigapixel ass
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DATE: 12/09/2004 09:28:04 AM
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Interesting piece in the NYT about inventor Clifford Ross, and an analog camera he developed which is capable of capturing astounding detail from great distances.
[The camera was] unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.
Yesterday and today, Mr. Ross is talking gigapixels, art and the essence of visual comprehension with a dozen scientists, at a meeting at New York University. This summit, closed to the public, was organized by Mr. Ross and his new scientific pals at the government's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which specializes in matters pertaining to nuclear weapons and threats to national security.
"We're good at making big computers," said Carl Diegert, lead computational and imaging scientist at Sandia. But, Mr. Diegert said, when scientists look at pictures of the space shuttle, for example, they may not see things as clearly as they might. "We're trying to find how the human emotional part comes into play in finding a crack in the space shuttle. Clifford has figured out how to catch all this information at a moment in time."
Link to story. Image: A photo of Mount Sopris in Colorado, taken by Clifford Ross with his camera invention. (thanks, Susannah)
BoingBoing reader Ted says,
The mountain pic, while impressive, is not unalerted - it has been photoshopped. From a 5/2004 AP story, "Because the camera uses film meant for aerial shots, its negatives must be chemically treated to reduce their unusually high degree of contrast. That leaves sharp details but muddy colors. So after digitally scanning the negative, Ross and his assistants must manipulate the image using Adobe Systems Inc.'s Photoshop software to return the mountain's colors to their initial vibrancy."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: VoIP videophone from Vonage announced
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DATE: 12/09/2004 10:09:53 AM
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Make way for VoIP videophones, or a whole lotta hype over nothing? Time will tell. Vonage today announced a partnership with video communication technologies maker Viseon to create just a VoIP video chat device for release in 2005. A beta is scheduled for debut at CES in January. Image: Viseon's current videophone, which retails for about $500. The Vonage-ified version is expected to look similar. Link to Vonage press release, and link to Forbes story.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Road rage cards
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DATE: 12/09/2004 10:20:07 AM
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Short, to-the-point messages for use on the freeway as needed. Link (Thanks, Sean. Also spotted at Autoblog, LA Voice).
See also these STFU cards you can hand to strangers who are talking too loudly in their cellphones about stuff you don't want to hear. Link to SHHHH! Society for Handheld Hushing printable cards (PDF)(thanks, Russell)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The great China gadget road-test
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DATE: 12/09/2004 10:22:06 AM
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BoingBoing reader Dan Washburn is a journalist based in Shanghai, China. He hauled a bunch of gadgets on a four-month, solo trip through China. "Well, the trip is finally finished," says Dan, "And now I have reviewed all of the gadgets." Link to "The Trip: Gadgets get graded," and Link to the main page for Dan's trip journal.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Team America puppet sex scenes revealed
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DATE: 12/09/2004 10:45:27 AM
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It was only a matter of time (and pixels) before the more explicit version of that marionette sex scene from Team America made it online. As you may recall from earlier BoingBoing posts, the simulated, stringy, smutty bits were severed so that the film could receive an "R" rating from the MPAA. I saw the, ahem, uncut fullscreen original at a Paramount press preview earlier this year, and can vouch for the salad-tossing authenticity of this wmv clip. Too bad there's no sound. I believe another still-more-hardcore edition was created with a puppet golden shower sequence... AFAIK that hasn't leaked (heh) online yet. Link, and previous BB posts: Team America preview, and TA tech backstory in Wired Magazine.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eyeballing airport traffic at SFO, JFK, LAX
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DATE: 12/09/2004 10:58:00 AM
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These websites could sure come in handy during the holiday travel season. This java-based web app (Link) allows you to observe the movement of flights and air traffic patterns in the Bay Area, surrounding SFO airport. Watch animated simulations of flight tracks taken from actual radar data, with about a 10 minute lag time. The site also includes links to other airports such as LAX and JFK. Here are sites for more airports: Link. (Thanks, Markus, and Matt)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese, Meet Choco-Cthulu
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DATE: 12/09/2004 11:16:44 AM
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BoingBoing reader Nick Mamatas says, "I've been getting a little sick of all the dumb religious pareidolia being put up on eBay (e.g., that cheese sandwich, the "ghost" in the cane etc.) , so I started an auction of my own...a piece of Advent candy that looks like a tiny chocolate Cthulhu."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Feedspeaker speaks your RSS feeds
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DATE: 12/09/2004 01:48:37 PM
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Using his special robot-voice, BoingBoing reader Michael Buckbee says:
The latest Phillip Torrone Engadget Podcast mentions a freeware app I wrote: FeedSpeaker. It will save any RSS feed off to a MP3 file. He describes it like a robot, I describe it like Stephen Hawking, so it probably sounds like a Stephen Hawking robot. After testing it on the BoingBoing RSS feed, I've determined that if robots ever take over the earth, they'll eventually be defeated in an attempt to pronounce 'Xeni'.
Link to BoingBoing MP3 (3MB)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: History of safecracking
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DATE: 12/09/2004 05:16:29 PM
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I enjoyed reading about the lost art of safecracking in this illustrated lecture by Tim Hunkin.
The nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, became very interested in combination locks while working on the atomic bomb in Los Alomos during the second world war. Los Alamos was in the middle of the desert, so there wasn’t much to do when he wasn’t working, and safe cracking became a sort of hobby. As the project was all top secret, every office had combination locks on its filing cabinets. Feynman first discovered, playing with the locks on his own filing cabinet, that the numbers did not have to be that precise, each one could be up to two digits either side of the true number and the lock would still open. This enormously reduced the number of possible combinations (from 1,000,000 down to 8,000). With practice he found he could try 400 different combinations in half an hour, so trying every single combination it would take on average 4 hours to open the lock. A modern version of this, advertised on the internet, is a motorised German device that turns the dial, trying every combination in turn, for use by locksmiths trying to get into a safe whoes combination has been lost.
Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Audio Recorder for OS X
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DATE: 12/09/2004 06:00:15 PM
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I hate tape recorders and tape recorders hate me. On at least a half-dozen occasions, I've tried to tape an interview for a story I was working on only to discover the recorder didn't capture the conversation. Half the time it's been my fault (not hooking up the cables between the phone and the recorder properly) and half the time the recorder just didn't do its job, as far as I can tell. It's embarrassing when that happens!
A few weeks ago, I discovered Audio Recorder, a freeware program for OS X that records audio input as MP3 files. The interface couldn't be simpler. I've used it three times so far and the results have been flawless. I use it with the $25 RadioShack Wireless Phone Recording Controller, which is also great. I play back the interviews in iTunes and transcribe them in BBEdit. Man, I'm set. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nanotube bones
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DATE: 12/10/2004 03:35:09 AM
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Purdue University researchers are devising a way to fabricate better artificial bones using carbon nanotubes to mimic the natural fiber-like structure of real bone. From Technology Review:
"The researchers' petri-dish experiments show that orienting artificial joint material nanotubes in the same direction made bone cells attach better to the material. It also stimulated the growth of more new bone tissue, which is important for anchoring implanted artificial joints. Finding better artificial joint material is motivated in part by the 15-year lifespan of today's artificial joints."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Psychic desk
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DATE: 12/10/2004 03:42:19 AM
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![An Invisible Force[1]](http://www.boingboing.net/images/an_invisible_force%5B1%5D.jpg)
Artist Crispin Jones's "An Invisible Force" is a beautiful antique desk that answers your Magic 8 Ball-esque questions:
"The surface of the desk is laser-cut into a grid. The user selects a question they want answered from the special packs of question cards. The user then inserts the card in the slot on the table, they press the card down and hold it down until the end of the answer. The answer to the question is gradually spelt out on the surface of the desk, the surface of the desk becomes a sort of physical dot-matrix display. A metal plate under the user's hand heats up, so the user if forced to endure a level of pain in order to see the final answer."
Link (via Near, Near Future)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Drug-addicted software
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DATE: 12/10/2004 04:16:54 AM
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A neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota reports has developed a computational model of drug addiction. The aim is to test hypotheses about how the brain "learns" addictive behaviors. From the University's announcement about the project, described in this week's issue of the scientific journal Science:
"Natural increases in dopamine occur after unexpected natural rewards; however, with learning these increases shift from the time of reward delivery to cueing stimuli. In TDRL (temporal-difference reinforcement learning), once the value function predicts the reward, learning stops. Cocaine and other addictive drugs, however, produce a momentary increase in dopamine through neuropharmacological mechanisms, thereby continuing to drive learning, forcing the brain to over-select choices which lead to getting drugs."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Che's daughter, MD
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DATE: 12/10/2004 04:27:28 AM
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New Scientist interviews Aleida Guevera. Che's oldest daughter by his second wife is a pediatrician in Cuba.
Should science have a higher profile with people who say another world is possible?
We who are of the left are fighting so that there will be more people in the world who will have all of the possibilities. I think that for us science is crucial, starting from the way we use our resources to the way we will be able to use whatever comes to us. For example, in the early 1960s my dad said that he would like to study nuclear science because at the time it was something from the future.
He also wanted to bring it into perspective, bearing in mind the realities of the planet - to develop science without killing the world. That is something we must bring back in our time. The challenge is to make use of the very interesting scientific developments that are being carried out without destroying the environment. There has to be a balance.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Lit Zen
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DATE: 12/10/2004 07:30:14 AM
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wrapped up in books
textfiles
pop references in sock
lightwedge
technical books
challenged books
paperback covers
classics re-written by maxim
(how) to kill a mockingbird
yiddish with dick and jane
alice in wonderland
826NYC
word pirates
worst sentence
punctuation game
Image: LightWedge. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New penis-mod surgery for the differently-hung
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DATE: 12/10/2004 07:42:58 AM
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BoingBoing reader Laura says, "Apparently 1 in 200 men have a penis shorter than 7 cm when erect, because of birth defects or side effects from childhood cancer treatment. A new surgical procedure brings hope to the lives of the differently-hung, as it not only adds length needed for activities like sex and standing urination, but also retains much of the organ's erogenous sensation capabilities." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Arnold Schwarzenneger Tribute Band
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DATE: 12/10/2004 07:51:37 AM
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Arnocorps is an Arnold Schwarzenegger tribute band. Song lyrics are comprised of scripts from the Calilfornia governor's movies. The lead singer sings in a schwarzeneggeuro accent. This is wrong for so many reasons. Almost as wrong as the fact that last night, when I was browsing magazines in a Burbank newsstand with a friend, my governor's ripped, cut physique blared out at me from the cover of several bodybuilding magazines, all oiled up and steroidy looking. Then, when I was driving home, there was a big billboard off the 101 for the Terminator DVD set, and again, my governor's uber-mänly face. How can this be? I do not understand. This, I suppose, is future shock. Link (Thanks, Madvoodo)
Update: Arnocorps says all of Schwarzenegger's blockbuster films are ripoffs of ancient Austrian legends, and they're launching a class action lawsuit for damages.
"The Austrian community," says attorney Paul Marquiwitz, "is deeply saddened and dismayed by the fact that the Hollywood motion picture studios have chosen to exploit the rich cultural heritage of Austria to both expand their global profit and further their lies regarding conceptual originality."
Action-adventure band ArnoCorps is spearheading a class action lawsuit against several major motion picture studios in the US. The lawsuit charges these studios with stealing the lore and mythology of Austria for plot material and dialogue in big-budget, not to mention very profitable, films. The band's motivation stems from the common misperception that ArnoCorps performs music based on these films, rather than ancient lore. This erroneous view has plagued the band since their reformation in California in 2000. Holzfeuer, lead vocalist of ArnoCorps, adds, "These picture studios should admit, for once and all, that they have been stealing. It wasn't until ArnoCorps began to rock about these ancient tales, that the publics began to question, 'Hold a minute. Which came first, the chicken with the egg?' Exactly. That's right."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: CBC introduces RSS feeds with shitty EULA
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DATE: 12/10/2004 07:56:09 AM
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Reader Ben says,
It would appear that the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) is finally exporting RSS feeds. Prior to this they had a headline service, but it was not wildly used -- though widly critized. Unfortunately they have included a required User Agreement that boggles the mind in some places. My favorite bits so far: Guarantees. You represent and warrant that:
*snip*
e) you will not remove, conceal or obliterate any copyright or other proprietary notice or any credit-line or date-line or other mark or source identifier included on the CBC Feed and Feed Content, including without limitation, the size, color, location or style of CBC/Radio-Canada'™s trade-mark [AGAIN WILL THERE BE ANY?]
Ok boys and girls. Leaving [ COMMENTS IN YOUR AGREEMENTS IS PRETTY DUMB ]. [ GO DEVELOPERS ] Another fun bit:
Promotion. You shall not make any promotion or advertisement of the CBC Feed or Feed Content, without the written authorization of CBC/Radio-Canada.
So by firing this off to the BB crew, I'm in violation?
Mounties, arrest that BoingBoing reader! Link
Reader Brandon Ellis says,
So stupid.. not to mention that the page listing the rss feeds is unprotected AND listed in the source page with the EULA agreement. Think I'll build a web service that illegally accesses their feeds and runs teh results through the Shizzolator.. then I'll sell it. :-)
Reader Chris Beck says,
I think the most egregious portion of the RSS EULA is: "Website Exclusivity. You guarantee that the CBC Feed or Feed Content shall be the exclusive content on your website from a general news and information provider."
Reader Boris says,
The CBC feed "agreement" has already been fixed! Quick! Personally, I feel the best part of the agreement is certainly: "g) for the duration of the Agreement, you shall not behave in any way or participate in any activity deemed by the Canadian public to be morally reprehensible." So canadian!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of couture zen
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DATE: 12/10/2004 08:00:56 AM
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A model wearing the work of French designer Sonia Rikyel on a Bucharest runway. Link (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More wacky Army recruit spam hijinks in Texas
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DATE: 12/10/2004 08:04:54 AM
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Following up on a series of previous BoingBoing posts (one, two) about what would appear to be rather unorthodox recruiting tactics from the US Army in Austin, Texas, BoingBoing reader Mark Miller writes,
After going into the Dobie Mall (a private dorm here at UT Austin), where the Army Recruitment Office is, and politely giving my name an e-mail, and requesting that they never contact me again, I just received *another* call from the US Army, the same pre-recorded message.
But this time I had a pencil and a pen handy, and caught the number that was stated in the message, +1 (512) 326-2828. After a quick Google, I discovered the Austin Army Recruiting Company. Their address being 2101 I-35, South Suite 414, Austin, TX 78741. Apparently, there exist the San Antonio U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion, with the mission statement of, "The San Antonio U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion's mission is to recruit qualified men and women from south and central Texas, in order to provide the strength needed to uphold and defend Freedom and Democracy."
The US Army Recruitment Office in Dobie is located at 2025 Guadalupe, Suite 258, Dobie Mall-UT Campus, Austin, TX 78705.
This leads me to believe that the Dobie Mall recruitment office is responsible for sending the spams, while the San Antonio U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion is responsible for the phone calls, by contracting out someone in Las Vegas to send automated pre-recorded messages to college students. (The message specifically states if you're 18 to 22, and enrolled in college) [+1 702-671-0040 is the number they're calling from]
I've been advised after noting the TCPA legislation making illegal such an act (pre-recorded messages to any service where the recipient pays for the phone call [id est, my cell phone]), the Army may claim sovereign immunity (An interesting legal concept where, if the US Government does not specifically have in legislation when you can sue them, you can't.) Instead, I will proceed with filing a FOIA to garner more info about who is ultimately responsible in the Chain of Command for these proceedings. If any other readers of BoingBoing wish to help with this, (having the recording still on voice mail, the number they called you at in order to specifically request how that number got on the list, et cetera), contact me at mirell@gmail.com.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: War of the Worlds trailer now online
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DATE: 12/10/2004 08:12:33 AM
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Trailer's out for the forthcoming Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise, War of the Worlds. The movie is based loosely on H.G. Wells' classic novel (and the 1953 film) in which giant Martian spaceships menace earth. trailer sites: IFILM, Apple (Thanks, David B.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Slavery and other simple pleasures
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DATE: 12/10/2004 08:17:18 AM
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More good news from Talibama North Carolinastan:
Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures." Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a booklet that attempts to provide a biblical justification for slavery and asserts that slaves weren't treated as badly as people think.
Link (Thanks, Ethan)
Reader ttrentham says, "The Cary Christian School home page now redirects you to the News and Events section (Link) which includes a press release stating that, because of the article in the Observer, they've dropped the book from their curriculum."
Well, praise the Lord.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Burton "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" trailer online
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DATE: 12/10/2004 08:29:37 AM
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Oh my, this does looks promising. Link to trailer, and link to movie website. (Thanks, Tony)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New roadsign font not in public domain
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DATE: 12/10/2004 08:46:27 AM
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BoingBoing reader Paul Vallee says,
I was reading this interesting story about a new font being developed for use on roadsigns and with likely broad applications in general legibility. It turns out, disappointingly, that this font is not going to appear in the public domain and is thus not available for download. The reason is that the project is not pubclically administered, rather it is a joint venture between the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and several University and private entities. Looks like the copyright for the font remains in private hands, namely Meeker & Associates Inc. and Terminal Design Inc. You can buy the fontface online but it doesn't come cheap!
Link. Also see: Clearview website with abundant type-geekery: Link, and a spirited discussion here: Link. (Thanks, Oscar Bartos)
Pho list cofounder Jim Griffin says,
Fonts are not copyrightable. Fonts receive no protection under U.S. Copyright law, no matter what font purveyors tell you. It pisses them off, but it's true: Typefaces are not properly the subject of copyright.
Reader Spencer Cross says,
Mr. Griffin's claims about typeface copyrightability are an extreme oversimplification of a very contentious issue. On the same site he's referencing (typeright.org via about.com), you'll find another article about a US District Court judge affirming the copyrightability of font outlines. As with any copyright issue, it's not as cut and dried as we wish it were.
Likewise, I wanted to mention that I think it's interesting that we seem to be assuming that the typeface should be in the public domain because it's being used for highway signage. I'll withold judgement on that idea, but I think it's worth thinking about whether it's the conclusion to which we should leap without deeper thinking.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Architectural obit: the demise of SSAWS
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DATE: 12/10/2004 08:50:44 AM
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BoingBoing reader Juergen says,
In 1993 the Ski Dome SSAWS (located in Chiba, Tokyo, Japan), which stands for Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter Snow, opened its doors. In 2004 it was gone. SSAWS, also known as Tokyo Ski Dome was the worlds first and largest indoor ski area ever built. Even in the hottest Summer you could enjoy skiing on a 500 meter snow covered slope with a 80 meter vertical drop.
Unfortunately it was not as successful as planned and closed its doors in 2001. After a lengthy planning period the demolishing of SSAWS started in Autumn 2003 leaving the whole area covered in fine white dust for months. This documentations shows impressions of the demolishing until the end in Spring 2004 and gives you an idea how huge this building was.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rhapsody in Nintendo
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DATE: 12/10/2004 09:11:55 AM
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An ensemble of ten people playing an orchestrated musical number on Nintendo Dual Screen units. Link to *.asx video. I believe it has something to do with Daigasso! Band Brothers, aka Jam With The Band! but perhaps someone (a) more game-literate or (b) Japanese-speaking can (c) clue me in. (Thanks, Marcus)
Reader Brent says,
"The video is just a demonstration for the game. The Japanese test describes some features of the game, such as 8 people can play off a single cartridge (might want to double-check how true that one is) and that there is a two-button beginner mode."
Reader Ian Hammond says,
I don’t know enough about the DS to tell you whether they were indeed playing Diagasso! Band Brothers. However, it warmed my heart to see a bunch of Japanese adults geeking out to an anime intro theme song. If you’re interested, the song is from the recent series “Fullmetal Alchemist,” and I believe the track is titled “MELISSA” (a clip is apparently available on the site I linked). Thanks for making my Friday that much happier!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Recursive Japanese Schoolgirl Watch moment
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DATE: 12/10/2004 09:15:06 AM
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BoingBoing pal Brian Lam, who is an editor at Wired Magazine, just returned from a trip to Japan. During his adventures abroad, he helped a friend teach English. Brian brought in some copies of Wired for the students to read, and ended up capturing this mindbogglingly recursive snapshot of Japanese School Girls reading Japanese School Girl Watch. Ouch, my brain! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Excellent transcribing app: Listen&Type
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DATE: 12/10/2004 09:59:06 AM
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Yesterday, I wrote about a super simple recorder for OS X, called Audio Recorder. I've been using iTunes to play back the files, but last night Boing Boing reader Mason told me about a $20 transcribing program called Listen&Type. I gave it a whirl, and I'm sold on it. Here's why: (1) You don't have to switch back and forth between iTunes and a text editor to stop and start the recording. Listen&Type lets you set up keyboard commands so you can stop and start the audio without leaving your text editor. (2) You can skip back 5 seconds by entering a keyboard command. There are some other functions, too, such as marking, but features 1 and 2 have made me an instant fan. Now, I'm really set! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Where is Daniel Clune?
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DATE: 12/10/2004 10:06:28 AM
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Myles Weissleder, VP of communications for Meetup.com asks for your help: "Soon after Meetup.com launched, members of bookcrossing.com, a fledgling web community where book lovers 'set books free', starting having Meetups in their towns to trade books and chat. And since, a wonderful community has flourished on- and off-line. (Over 4,500 Bookcrossing Meetups to date!)
"It was a real shocker to learn a few weeks ago that Daniel Clune, the head programmer at bookcrossing.com, disappeared on November 6th in Sandpoint, Idaho.
"Please consider this plea from a bookcrosser:"
His family is devastated and the community dumbfounded. A young, healthy man, Daniel, 29, is known for his reliability... a stand up guy. Not the sort to take off on a flight of fancy. No one believes that his disappearance is voluntary. Something happened to Daniel Clune, and his family and friends need to know just what that something is. Please consider featuring the story of Daniel's disappearance. The key to finding him is out there somewhere, but has not yet been found. Exposure is badly needed.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: PopSci article on immortality theorist Aubrey de Grey
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DATE: 12/10/2004 10:14:22 AM
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Cambridge computer scientist Aubrey De Grey is profiled in the latest Popular Science about his controversial views on anti-aging. He also has a cool beard.
De Grey contends that we know enough to intelligently map out a program of anti-aging intervention research such that sometime in the next 100 years, and quite possibly much sooner, the average human life span may be 5,000 years, a figure brought short of outright immortality by the small number of people who will die from non-age-related diseases and everybody else who, given the boggling amount of time available to them on the planet, will eventually do something unlucky or stupid like walk in front of a moving rocket car.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Supreme Court to hear Grokster case
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DATE: 12/10/2004 10:30:07 AM
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Here we go.
The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider whether two Internet file-sharing services may be held responsible for their customers' online swapping of copyrighted songs and movies.
Link (thanks Jason)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The Fertile Valleys
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DATE: 12/10/2004 10:45:42 AM
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I've been spending some time in Las Vegas recently. In Spanish, "the fertile valleys," because once the valleys there really were green from artesian springs. The springs are gone, but not the green.
New gambling/restaurant/theme park/shoppingmall/tittybar monstrosities pop up daily, each more expensive and spectacularly gauche than the last. The place is blowing up. Five thousand people move there every month. To LIVE there. Not just sink cash and drink.
Las Vegas is full of math. Each piece of its land has a brand and a url. Each address on the strip is a self-contained kingdom, a discrete casinosphere. The shopping malls have floor shows. The mannequins all have eternal nipple hard-ons, and who can blame them? It's an exciting place.
It's not puro lowbrow. One hotel near the Disney casino has a Picasso in the lobby. There's a mini-Guggenheim inside the Venetian. But the fact they're there feels wrong. Like an MP3 Xtina Aguilera/Pavarotti/Pantera mashup. Wrong wrong wrong.
It's sucking all the glam out of Los Angeles. All of LA's best restaurateurs are opening newer, better venues out there. Spago LA, bleah. Spago LV, yeah. A number of the larger couture lines are opening virgin boutiques there, before breaking ground in LA. The Chanel shop in Vegas gets the 2005 Spring collection before the Beverly Hills store does. Some of the best plastic surgeons are there now, and hence, so are some of the world's best breasts. Trump's new condo tower is under construction, just down the street from Steve Wynn's new joint, which is already sold out for two full years even though it only opens next April. Dominance superseded. Allure 0wned.
One of the finest voices of this place, I think, is a writer named Lloyd Fonvielle. Here is his IMDB listing, and here is his blog. He is also responsible for these cool t-shirts.
I'm not sure why it's so compelling right now, but it is. Sometimes, a thing swells to a scale so tasteless, so grotesque, it crosses a magical threshhold and becomes beautiful. Like matter to antimatter. Beauty from antibeauty.
How did a place so full of decay become an emblem of growth? The future is here. But I'm not sure what that future is. Trying to call that is like trying to call a dice roll before the dice stop rolling. Las Vegas is perpetual motion. Los Angeles is not truly a 24 hour city. Neither is New York. That title now belongs to this place.
Image: a phonecam snapshot I took of Dale Chihuly's glass bloboforms hanging en masse from the ceiling at the Bellagio. Las Vegas itself is a great cluster of colorful orbs. Although, if you squint, both kinda look like a bunch of vomit. Link to full-size image.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists
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DATE: 12/10/2004 11:41:08 AM
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Aneequs sez: "Aubrey de Grey seems not to belong to the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, but I think someone should nominate him. (This club is run by the same people who do the IgNobel Awards.) Check out the site for lots of pictures of scientists with luxuriant flowing hair." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: John Perry Barlow vs The Man
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DATE: 12/10/2004 12:11:34 PM
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In September, friend and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow was arrested at the San Francisco Airport and charged with the misdemeanor possession of controlled substances that had allegedly been discovered during a search of his checked baggage. He was requested to get off the plane (which was about to take off) by an attendant, who escorted him to the baggage claim area.
He led me to an office in the baggage claim area that was thicker with cops than some banana republics. They greeted me with same distaste they'd likely have shown an actual terrorist and treated me accordingly for the remainder of that very long day. On the counter lay small quantities of marijuana (for which I have a physician's recommendation), mushrooms, and ketamine that had allegedly been encountered in my suitcase. That the total volume of this prize was significantly more compact than the amount of high explosive necessary to endanger an aircraft, and indeed, insufficient to merit a felony charge on any count, didn't matter to them. They clearly regarded me as a threat to public safety. When I pointed out to the officials that they only had authority to search for threats to the aircraft, one of them, a bug-eyed, crew-cutted troglodyte, declared that, if I had taken any of these substances, then I would have endangered Flight 310. That such an obviously ungifted person was capable of so imaginative a conceptual leap remains a marvel to me.
After spending the day locked up in the Redwood City jail, Barlow was bailed out by another EFF co-founder, John Gilmore, who put up the $25,000 in cash to spring Barlow. It's a good thing that Barlow has Gilmore on his side, because Gilmore is a wealthy civil libertarian who has been fighting his own battle against creepy secret airport security laws.
Writes Barlow:
We then set about to mount what appears to be the first serious contest of TSA's routinely over-broad searches of checked bags. Apparently, everyone else who has been arrested as a consequences of these inspections, and there have been many, has pled guilty rather than face the cost and trouble of mounting a constitutional defense.
I might have done so myself had it not been for Gilmore's willingness to support the handsome cost of my defense. That, and the recognition that unconstitutional behavior by the authorities is constrained only by the peoples' willingness to contest them. Liberty is preserved not only on the battlefield. More often, it is preserved on the streets, by people who know their rights and refuse to forfeit them at the time of arrest. Failing that, as I did, it is preserved in court. Fortunately, precedent appears to be on my side. The controlling Ninth Circuit case in such matters is US v. Davis (482 F.2d 893) which authorizes warrantless airport searches only for the purpose of detecting weapons and explosives.
The full story on Barlow's blog is worth reading. Good luck John and John!
Link
(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tiny Humans update #8: live capture?
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DATE: 12/10/2004 12:23:24 PM
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Angus sez: Yet another development in the Flores Hobbits story. Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa claims to have captured one last month...
Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa has a strange tale to tell. Sitting in his bamboo and wooden home at the foot of an active volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, he recalls how people from his village were able to capture a tiny woman with long, pendulous breasts three weeks ago. "They said she was very little and very pretty," he says, holding his hand at waist height. "Some people saw her very close up."
Link (Previous tiny humans updates here.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A Painting a Day weblog
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DATE: 12/10/2004 12:33:13 PM
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Duane Keiser creates one oil painting every day, and posts it to his blog. He's been doing it since December 3rd. I hope he keeps it up -- he's great!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coop iPod skins
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DATE: 12/10/2004 01:08:16 PM
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These hard-shell iPod covers designed by underground art legend Coop will be available at the end of next week for $50 each. Limited edition of 100, available for many models and sizes. So. Cool. Must. Have. Now. Link to MacSkinz store where the'll be sold.
Doug from MacSkinz says, "Our artist series includes work from Glenn Barr, Andrew Bawidamann, Joe Chiodo, Brian Ewing, Jon Foster, Marc Gabanna, Dave Johnson, Frank Kozik, NeckCNS, Plankton Art, Ragnar, Jeff Soto, Miles Thompson and others."
Link to images 1, 2, 3, 4. See also this previous BoingBoing post: Coop's "Parts With Appeal" show opens at sixspace: Link (Thanks Sean!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Great inexpensive kids' toys from Whimsyload
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DATE: 12/10/2004 02:06:21 PM
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My friend Scott recommended Whimsyload.com as a place to buy toys for my 1.5-year-old. He recommended three items:
Wooden Man, Crazy Box (shown here), Bird Clock.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dan Gillmor to leave SJ Merc News
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DATE: 12/10/2004 03:04:38 PM
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One of the journalists I respect most in this world, Dan Gillmor, is leaving his post at the San Jose Mercury News to "work on a citizen journalism project." I know I'm not alone in expecting continued greatness from this man. Good luck, Dan. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Salad bar hacking
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DATE: 12/10/2004 04:36:47 PM
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This is the best thing I've seen in a long while. Robyn Miller sez: "This is a photo from a Chinese PDF manual. The manual explains, via text and a lot of fun photos, how to cram as much food as possible on one of those tiny Pizza Hut bowls at the salad bar. They're only allowed one trip. My cousin lives in Beijing. When he goes to Pizza Hut, he says this is what most people are busy building." (Click image for enlargement)
UPDATE: Kurt Groetsch sez: "Two more photos of salad bowl extensions here and here. They made the rounds of the office when I was working in Beijing."
Gregory Lam sez: I have a friend of mine who currently lives and works in China, described the same phenomenon here. "I quote: 'For one price (I think it's approximately 20 RMB), you get a single trip to the salad bar. You get a medium-sized soup bowl to put your salad in. Of course, this is a challenge any structural engineer would love to take upon: putting the most salad you can in this small bowl. I saw people at the salad bar for 5-7 minutes just trying to force more and more salad into their bowl. The highest salad I saw must have rose 9 inches off the top of the bowl.'
"The reason is, Western food is quite expensive in China. Pizza Hut is actually considered to be upscale dining!"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Complete ukulele kit for $22
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DATE: 12/11/2004 10:11:38 AM
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Make a uke from this $22 kit. I might get one of these and give it a custom paint job. Link (Thanks, David!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Yushchenko poisoned
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DATE: 12/11/2004 10:20:05 AM
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A few weeks ago, Mark posted a freaky then/now image of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko. Doctors now believe that Yuschenko suffered from Dioxin poisoning. Dioxin is one of the substances found in Agent Orange. There is speculation that a "third party" put the poison in his soup. From CNN:
One of the doctors at Saturday's news conference said the changes in Yushchenko's face will remain for a long time. More treatment will be needed to determine whether his face can be restored to the way it had been.
Yushchenko had long been known for his good looks.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Piracy vs. Stealing: Teacher Fails "A" Student for Topic Choice
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DATE: 12/11/2004 10:24:20 AM
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Adam Brault sez: "Sixteen year-old Steve Geluso was failed by his English teacher for choosing to distinguish piracy from stealing in an essay.
"Geluso, an 'A' student, recently completed an in-class exit exam for his Language Arts class. The goal of the exit exam was to write a comparative essay on a topic of the student's choice. Being a student who enjoys a challenge, he wrote an essay contrasting piracy with stealing.
"His teacher failed him, saying there was no difference between the two and that he was "splitting hairs". Other teachers who read his essay said that he did well from an organizational and technical standpoint, but because his teacher felt that there was no difference between piracy and stealing, she gave him an 'F' because she disapproved of the content of his essay.
"Check out his several comments regarding this event on his low-fi weblog at http://steve.mathcaddy.com Steve's scanned-in paper is available Here (Note the "Continue to Page 2" link at the bottom of the page.)"
UPDATE: Mike Harris has an HTML version of the essay. He sez: "I transcribed it with errors and cross-outs, along with his teachers' commentary. Useful for those who don't want to go through nine large scanned images to read his essay." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Knitted Radiator
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DATE: 12/12/2004 04:35:18 AM
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At this year's Royal College of Art graduation show, Kelly Jenkins showed Overloooked, aka The Kintted Radiator. The radiator is designed to be heated with water or hot wire and the temperature of each row can be individually controlled. Jenkins's degree is in Constructed Textiles. From The Guardian:
'It's an interactive radiator,' she says. 'Industrial knitting and everyday objects are both overlooked and taken for granted, and I wanted to focus attention on them.
It works like a normal piece of knitting. Each row is independent from the other, so you can unlink rows, or fold it up and put it away. It can also be customised. You can have just one row of seven stitches, or it can be made to any shape or scale.'
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: i-Tablet mod
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DATE: 12/12/2004 04:44:51 AM
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Joesph DeRuvo Jr. took a dead iBook and hacked it into a tablet Mac with a touch screen usually used for interactive kiosks. Link (via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Quint's revenge?
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DATE: 12/12/2004 05:51:27 AM
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This 1,082 pound Mako shark was caught in August during the Yarmouth, Nova Scotia Shark Scramble. From an LA Times article (free reg. required):
The shark battled for 40 minutes before angler Jamie Doucette, 28, of Wedgeport, Nova Scotia, saw its enormousness. "She felt pretty big," he recalls, "but it wasn't until she started pulling the boat off course that I started to worry..."
...Doucette reeled it in and other anglers wrapped it in ropes as the shark chewed through the knots. One loop circled its torso, the other the tail; one man leaned over the boat and slit its throat as Jaws thrashed for something to bite. It died 20 minutes later.
Kind of sad, really. More info toward the middle of the Mako page from Captain Tom's Guide to New England Sharks. Link (Thanks, Justin Ried!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Starbucks barristas as living software processes
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DATE: 12/12/2004 06:01:33 AM
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Really cool paper examines the underlying software design principles that are rendered in the meatspace protocols for Starbucks barristas.
Starbucks, like most other businesses is primarily interested in maximizing throughput of orders. More orders equals more revenue. As a result they use asynchronous processing. When you place your order the cashier marks a coffee cup with your order and places it into the queue. The queue is quite literally a queue of coffee cups lined up on top of the espresso machine. This queue decouples cashier and barista and allows the cashier to keep taking orders even if the barista is backed up for a moment. It allows them to deploy multiple baristas in a Competing Consumer scenario if the store gets busy.
By taking advantage of an asynchronous approach Starbucks also has to deal with the same challenges that asynchrony inherently brings. Take for example, correlation. Drink orders are not necessarily completed in the order they were placed. This can happen for two reasons. First, multiple baristas may be processing orders using different equipment. Blended drinks may take longer than a drip coffee. Second, baristas may make multiple drinks in one batch to optimize processing time. As a result, Starbucks has a correlation problem. Drinks are delivered out of sequence and need to be matched up to the correct customer. Starbucks solves the problem with the same "pattern" we use in messaging architectures -- they use a Correlation Identifier. In the US, most Starbucks use an explicit correlation identifier by writing your name on the cup and calling it out when the drink is complete. In other countries, you have to correlate by the type of drink.
Exception handling in asynchronous messaging scenarios can be difficult. If the real world writes the best stories maybe we can learn something by watching how Starbucks deals with exceptions. What do they do if you can't pay? They will toss the drink if it has already been made or otherwise pull your cup from the "queue". If they deliver you a drink that is incorrect or nonsatisfactory they will remake it. If the machine breaks down and they cannot make your drink they will refund your money. Each of these scenarios describes a different, but common error handling strategy:
Link
(via Salad With Steve)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Canadian academics: get active in copyright reform!
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DATE: 12/12/2004 06:09:45 AM
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Michael Geist has written a column targetted at Canadian academics, calling on them to get involved in the copyfight before it's too late.
First, these institutions should call on the federal government to reject the proposal and instead adopt a balanced copyright approach that encourages the use of the Internet in Canadian schools. One possibility would be the establishment of a limited educational user right to publicly available work on the Internet. In keeping with longstanding and widely accepted practices on the Internet, publicly available work would include materials that are not protected by passwords, encryption or other means, i.e., information the author would appear to want to make widely available.
Second, the education community should stop wasting millions of dollars each year by paying unnecessary copy licenses to copyright collectives such as Access Copyright. While copyright collectives claim that education institutions need licenses to compensate for faculty and student copying, many copying activities are permitted under Canadian copyright law without the need for payment. The Copyright Act contains an explicit user right for copying for research or private study purposes (surely the most common uses of works on university campuses). The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that this user right must be interpreted in a liberal fashion such that copying full articles may be lawful in certain circumstances.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Novelty tongues for dogs
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DATE: 12/12/2004 06:18:34 AM
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The Humunga Tongue is a doggy fetch-ball with an enormous, hilarious rubber tongue attached to it, so that while your hairy pal is masticating it, it looks like he's got a huge, Gene Simmons-esque tongue. High-larious!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Unlock your car by knocking a secret code on the window
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DATE: 12/12/2004 06:28:55 AM
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The Knock-In Lock is a car add-on that unlocks your doors if you knock the correct combination of a five-to-twelve-digit knock code. It's intended for use in the event that you lock yourself out of your car.
# Estimated that nearly 1 million lockouts happen every year in Australia alone
# Highly secure, user defined, five to twelve digit AUDIBLE KNOCK code
# Shuts down for an hour with three wrong attempts
# Easily installed onto your existing central locking by auto electricians or car alarm installer with no drilling required
# No waiting around for hours for road rescue
# Avoid damage to your vehicle whilst breaking in to retreive keys
# 2 Year Manuacturers defects Warranty
# Extremely convenient to have even if you never get locked out
# Buy it NOW! Before You Desperately Need a Knock-In-Key!......
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steal This File Sharing Book -- A-Z HOWTO for file-sharing
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DATE: 12/12/2004 06:35:54 AM
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One of the books I took on holidays with me was Wallace Wang's "Steal This File Sharing Book," just published by No Starch Press. It's a great, thorough, easy-to-read guide to all the different ways to acquire files over the Internet, from sharing by email and IRC to getting the most out of multiprotocol P2P tools to seeking out and using ratio-based leet warez boards.
This is unquestionably the best book on the subject that I've read. It strikes the perfect balance between factual -- "Here is what is available, here is the law, here is the means by which you can download, here is how to minimize your legal risk" -- and philosophical -- "Here is a breakdown of music industry sales, here is Harlan Ellison's opinion on bookwarez, here's what crackers have to say about zero-day warez trading, here's the dumbass laws that have been proposed to allow rights-holders to remotely shut down your computer via secret kill-switches, isn't that crazy?"
Wang is an accomplished tech writer and a stand-up comic, so Steal This File Sharing Book is both funny and lucid. It assumes almost no technical knowledge and it walks the reader through everything from file-compression protocols to anonymizing proxies to the notorious cross-stitch-pattern-trading underground.
If you want to figure out how to file-share safely, avoid spyware, not get busted, and learn about the morality and ethics as presented by all sides of the file-sharing debate, this is the book for you.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Laptop bag made from cedar
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DATE: 12/12/2004 06:48:12 AM
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These Japanese briefcases will fit a 17-inch laptop. They're hand-made from cedar and lined with linen, and cost about $240. Wow.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Prisonbreaker used bow-and-arrow to fire cellphone into slam
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DATE: 12/12/2004 06:51:01 AM
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Someone tried to break a prisoner out of a slam in Sweden by firing a cellphone over the wall attached to an arrow.
The suspect, whose name was not released, taped two cell phones and a battery charger to three arrows, and fired them over the 12-foot wall into Mariefred prison outside Stockholm on Friday night, police spokeswoman Susanne Abrahamsson said.
The man was not spotted by guards when he fired the arrows, but was arrested after police found his car parked about 650 feet from the prison walls, with a bow hidden underneath it, she said. After the man returned to his car, police dogs traced his scent back to the prison wall, and guards were able to find the arrows in the prison yard, where inmates go for exercise.
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(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cable companies will expire your Six Feet Under recordings after 2-4 weeks
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DATE: 12/12/2004 09:33:52 AM
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Time-Warner is arm-twisting cable companies into agreeing to a scheme to automagically erase your saved episodes of Six Feet Under from your cable-company-provided PVR after a month or so. This is the danger of sucking up to the studios in the first place: they say, "Suuuure, we'll 'let' you build a PVR that will tape the shows you cablecast to your customers, but that permission is contingent on our ongoing goodwill. So if in the future we decide, for example, that your PVR can't record certain shows, or can't skip certain commercials, or can't store certain recordings for more than a few days, you'd better implement it. Or else. So what if your customers can't figure out why their PVRs don't work properly? That's your problem, pal."
Why do cable operators think they have to get a studio's permission to build a PVR? Since when do studios get to have a veto over the design of TV-recording technologies? In a way, I can sorta feel sorry for the cable operators, whose utter lack of spine has put them in a position where they have to face the wrath of angry, $70/month cable customers whose PVRs have stopped working because some Time-Warner exec's astrologer has told him that four weeks is the longest anyone can hold onto a copy of Six Feet Under without driving their business into the ground.
But I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the cable operators. It's hard to work up a big mouthful of warm feeling for a company that makes you feel like you were just traded to another inmate for 2 packs of menthol cigarettes. After all, if they hadn't sold us all out in the first place, they wouldn't be in this position.
A middle-level executive at Time Warner has approached several cable companies and broached the idea of restricting the ability of customers who use those company's Digital Video Recorders to record several popular Time Warner TV programs...
Viewers would be able to record an episode with their DVR, but there would be a time limit on how long it would be available for viewing. The executive was pushing for an expiration date that coincided with the premiere of the next episode. The consensus of the cable executived was that it needed to be between 2-4 weeks.
Of course, you can just get around this problem by following the advice of Microsoft's senior DRM engineers and downloading your Six Feet Unders from a P2P network like Kazaa. They won't expire, you can watch 'em on any device, and you don't even need to sign up for a $70/month cable service.
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(via Copyfight)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bodies proportional to motor and sensory brain regions
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DATE: 12/12/2004 09:44:34 AM
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Two images of notional "homunculi" -- the first, a Sensory Homunculus, shows "what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception" (on the left). The other, the Motor Homunculus, "shows what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its movement."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kids' forensic facial reconstruction kit
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DATE: 12/12/2004 09:55:31 AM
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The Discovery Channel has released a CSI-branded "facial reconstruction kit" toy so that kids can play forensic scientist, reconstructing notional corpse faces. Man, I wish I'd had one of these as a kid.
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(via Wired Magazine)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: iPod-sized video player without DRM
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DATE: 12/12/2004 10:01:53 AM
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The Ama DivX-Pod is a pocket-sized media player that can grab video (MPEG-4, DivX, WMV, Quicktime) off your hard-drive or digitize your videos and DVDs. Its got a 20GB hard drive and a little screen, and it's intended to allow you watch you movies, free from DRM, wherever you are.
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(via Wired Magazine)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cuba's biotech boom
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DATE: 12/12/2004 10:07:16 AM
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Cuba's biotech program is a big-stakes gamble by the Castro regime on developing-world-appropriate pharmaceuticals. They're using sales of generic versions of patented drugs to fund research into Cuban drugs, which they're patenting and selling to America. Wow.
Faced with economic calamity, Castro did something remarkable: He poured hundreds of millions of dollars into pharmaceuticals. No one knows how - Cuba's economy, with its secrecy and centralized structure, defies market analysis. One beneficiary was Concepcion Campa Huergo, president and director general of the Finlay Institute, a vaccine lab in Havana. She developed the world's first meningitis B vaccine, testing it by injecting herself and her children before giving it to volunteers. "I remember one day telling Fidel that we needed a new ultracentrifuge, which costs about $70,000," Campa says. "After five minutes of listening he said, 'No. You'll need 10.'"...
It's like Castro said: They don't really like patents. They like medicine. Cuba's drug pipeline is most interesting for what it lacks: grand-slam moneymakers, cures for baldness or impotence or wrinkles. It's all cancer therapies, AIDS medications, and vaccines against tropical diseases.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SF short story that you should seek out RIGHT NOW - UPDATED
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DATE: 12/12/2004 10:18:35 AM
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Three years ago, I had the privilege of workshopping John McDaid's brilliant story "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals" (see the all-too-short excerpt here). I have never read a story that was its like, before or since. Just thinking of it today can render me stuporous. Finally, years later, the story has been published in the January issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on stands now. It's a little hard to find, but the publisher's website can give you some pointers. Stories like this are the reason that it's worth subscribing to the sf mags. Just getting to read a story like this once in a year, or in a decade, can make you a better person.
Aria
I'm an unreliable narrator. Everything I know about classical piano could be stored handily, uncompressed, in the lobotomized set-top box of an antique cathode television. Still, it falls to me to transcribe the events surrounding the Van Meegeren Piano Competition of 2023 and the alleged visitation by the late Stefan Janacek.
#
Variation 1
Stassy intro, nep?
Yar, yar, copied; 'swhatcha get when I type not talk. Gomenasai. Not a storyspeaker -- ich bin eine musicalische opster. I clip, I doop, I rap, I dub and shunt, pull leitmotifs from the noosphere 'n' singledoubletriple layer, pack and run the tuples, skiffy ins-n-outs wrapped moebial around sparse, selective, show-don't-tell syllables relevated from the subway and limousine earth. A hardwired hook sniffer: What edge will cut through the commodified wash of minute-15 Will-Have-Beens? Hafta lay down a tuff rhythm groove and scan for a tasty solo line; grimly practical, paratactical composition.
But a keyboard is needed to massage this medium. Got to force myself to sit down, sluice, educe the force that through these carpal tunnels drives the florid. Grep the keystroked sense of this, in at least a first approximation, before it evanesces.
Because I don't believe in ghosts. I never have. I never will. And yet, tonight...
And yet tonight, I saw one.
With my own eternally doubting fingers.
Link
Update: Richard sez, "Thought I'd write and mention that 'Keyboard Practice' is available for download in unencrypted ebook formats for $3.99 as part of the aforementioned Fantasy & Sci Fi Jan 2005 on Fictionwise (no affiliation other than being a customer!)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kooky words the Oxford English Dictionary might add
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DATE: 12/12/2004 08:32:31 PM
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The latest edition of the OED newsletter is online, and includes an "Appeals" section:
The Words or phrases which appear on the Appeals List are those currently being drafted or revised for the OED for which the documentary evidence is incomplete. Often these are slang or colloquial items which cannot be researched in specialist texts and are most likely to be found by a general reader in non-specialized or popular literature.
(...) Please note: it is generally safe to assume that examples found by searching the Web, using search engines such as Google, will have already been considered by OED editors.
Words on this list include:
hoodie (n.: a hooded jacket, sweatshirt, or other garment) antedate 1990
posedown (n.: the final stage in a bodybuilding competition) antedate 1978
scrunchie (n.) antedate 1989
tikka masala (n.) antedate 1975
Link (via Elegant Variation, thanks Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Wave Noodle theme park to open in Japan
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DATE: 12/12/2004 08:35:05 PM
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Former BoingBoing guestblogger and Business 2.0 editor Todd Lappin says,
"Upon returning home from my recent trip to Japan, where much yummy ramen was consumed, I immediately re-rented Tampopo, the classic Japanese film about the sublime pleasures of noodle soup. (That opening scene with the Japanese master teaching his young apprentice proper ramen-eating technique is still hilarious.) Anyhow, now comes this exciting news flash."
Today, [game company and Katamari Damacy publisher] Namco announced plans to open a ramen noodle theme park in the southern Japanese city of Nagoya. The "Nagoya Noodle Shop Alley," due to open for business on February 25, is meant to introduce visitors to the history of ramen noodles and the different types of ramen available around Japan. [ ...]
The visual theme of the park is intended to reflect Japan in the pre-war 1930s, but the ramen on offer are to represent the "new wave" of noodle development around the nation.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New blog popularity tracker "LinkRank" launches
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DATE: 12/12/2004 08:51:40 PM
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PubSub is launching a new tool called LinkRank that tracks the popularity of blogs based on the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in those blogs. Steve Rubel from PubSub says:
Here's how this works. Here's the chart for BoingBoing (link), which right now is the leading blog among all of the sites that PubSub tracks. You can view the Top 100 list here (link). If you look at the BoingBoing chart, you will notice that over the last 30 days you ranged from as low as the 21st most linked to site to 17th most link to site. The lower the number the better since the actual figure is a site's ranking. Two examples of comparison searches you could run with the tool might be Gizmodo vs. Engadget, or Apple vs. Microsoft. This tool will be particularly valuable for people to size up which blogs are consistently influential and which are just flashes in the pan.
Link to a more comprehensive explanation of PubSub LinkRanks works (includes intimidating mathematical equations that look like they came out of the geometry class I failed in high school).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Walmart sued over Thoughtless "fuck'
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DATE: 12/12/2004 09:18:35 PM
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BoingBoing pal John Parres points us to this news story and says, "Fuckin' lawyers. Fuckin' lawsuits. Fuckin' stickers. Fuckin' censors. Fuckin' V-chips. Fuckin' Free Speech!"
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which promotes itself as a seller of clean music, deceived customers by stocking compact discs by the rock group Evanescence that contain the f-word, a lawsuit claims. The hit group's latest CD and DVD, "Anywhere But Home," don't carry parental advisory labels alerting potential buyers to the obscenity. If they did, Wal-Mart wouldn't carry them, according to the retailer's policy.
But the lawsuit claims Wal-Mart knew about the explicit lyrics in the song, "Thoughtless," because it censored the word in a free sample available on its Web site and in its stores. The complaint, filed Thursday in Washington County Circuit Court, seeks an order requiring Wal-Mart to either censor or remove the music from its Maryland stores. It also seeks damages of up to $74,500 for each of the thousands of people who bought the music at Wal-Marts in Maryland.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Oracle CEO Ellison: China censorship not his problem
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DATE: 12/12/2004 09:24:17 PM
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From Declan McCullagh at CNET:
When it comes to touting his company's software, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is never one to mince words. But when it's the principle of free speech versus the almighty dollar, the bad boy of Silicon Valley is a veritable shrinking violet. Earlier this month, the Chinese government decided to block access to Google's English-language news service, a decision that riled free-speech advocates. But Ellison wants nothing to do with this controversy.
"The Chinese government has the right to do it," Ellison said as he answered audience questions following his keynote speech at OracleWorld Wednesday afternoon. "It's a sovereign country... Oracle's job is not to encourage governments to change their policies," he said, adding that Oracle "was just a technology provider."
Link. Related post on Declan's politech list: Oracle's Larry Ellison lobbies hard for National ID card (Link)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BSOD t-shirts
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DATE: 12/12/2004 09:28:55 PM
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A sad, sad screen; and yet it looks so fine in silkscreen. Sizes for both d00ds and chyxx0rs. Link (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Electronic kitsch music set to Prellinger archive movie clips
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DATE: 12/12/2004 10:03:13 PM
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Malcolm sez: I found some great footage on the Prellinger archives page and put some of my home grown music to it. It's an electronic kitsch retro groove with just the right images... at least i hope." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Have a coprophilic Catalan Christmas
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DATE: 12/12/2004 10:35:08 PM
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Dave Thau, an old friend from the Wired days, sent me an email I thought was worth sharing:
I'm writing to report to you about a couple of Catalan Christmas artifacts you may not know about.
First I will describe the caganer - a wholesome and fun Catalan addition to the typical Christmas creche figurine family. The traditional caganer is an old Catalan man with a red hat and canvas shoes squatting and taking a dump in the manger. Over time, the theme has expanded to include sumo wrestlers, Santa, the Devil, the Pope, Dali, and soccer fans, just to name a few. There's a good site describing them, and selling about 60 different varieties: www.caganer.com. Here's a link to their shop.
In Barcelona there's a temporary market of stalls in the Placa Nova which sell the caganers and a host of other Christmas paraphernalia, including the next member of the Catalan Christmas family: caga tio. I've attached a picture of ours (click image for enlargement).
Caga tio comes in many sizes, but generally looks just like our new friend, sans the pipe. Customs surrounding caga tio differ, but all agree, caga tio means "shit log." Here I relay to you what I think is the full blown caga tio ritual.
Fifteen days before Christmas, caga tio makes his appearance in the dining room, where he must be fed at least once every day. He likes oranges, crackers and sweet wine. In some families, caga tio starts small, but grows as the days progress toward Christmas.
At some point, caga tio is moved out of the dining room, into the living room, and covered with a blanket to keep him warm. On Christmas Eve, before the traditional Christmas dinner, the kids are sent to their rooms to say three Our Fathers, which gives the elders enough time to stash presents under caga tio's blanket. After their prayers are done, the kids return to the living room and start beating the hell out of poor caga tio with big sticks. And they sing a song. One version goes "Shit, log, shit! If you don't shit well, we will whack you again!" Another goes "Log, log, shit candy! If you don't shit for Christmas, we will whack you once more!"
After the children have gotten their fill of flogging the log, the blanket is removed to determine caga tio's state of digestion. Typically, a miracle has occurred, and the log has pooped wrapped gifts, which are called "the shits." Often one of the shits will be something weird, like an egg, to let everyone know that it was the last one deposited by caga tio.
This is my understanding of caga tio, but I feel like there are probably many nuances I'm missing. If you know of any catalans, please let me know so I can ask them some questions.
Ah, another exemplar of Catalan Christmas coprophilia is candy shaped like poo. We got some of this stuff, but ate it all before we could take a picture of it. If you're interested, we'll hunt more down tomorrow. Acutally... it was GOOD - we're getting more tomorrow no matter what!
We're documenting all this, and other Barcelona extravagances in our blog.
UPDATE: 
Here are some more caga tio pictures from Dave Thau (click image for enlargement)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Speed-reader app adapted by non-coder as language-teaching tool
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DATE: 12/13/2004 12:37:32 AM
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Trevor (who made a "speed reader" app out of my novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, said app being an amazing brain hack that makes your ear wax go all runny) sez,
After running across the speed reader showing Eastern Standard Tribe, a French/English language instructor (and blink-tag era web enthusiast) downloaded the applet and proceeded to hack together a series of irregular verb lessons, complete with his own grass roots markdown syntax!
This guy knows nothing about Java and thinks it's cool to use midi on his pages, but he remixed my tool for remixing in what can only be described as a gorgeous cludge.
Who doesn't love a thriving creative commons?
Link
(Thanks, Trevor!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Forever War with better sex, Starship Troopers without the lectures: Old Man's War
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DATE: 12/13/2004 12:51:34 AM
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John Scalzi is an hilarious writer and journaller, whose Bathroom Readers
and National Lampoon pieces are practically required reading. A couple years ago, he wrote a science fiction novel called "Old Man's War," which he serialized on his blog. My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, read the book and decided to buy it for Tor books, and now it's available in hardcopy, with a starred Publisher's Weekly review, no less.
Old Man's War is a cross between Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Haldeman's Forever War -- a raunchy, action-packed, thought-provoking book about galactic-scale warfare where lightspeed lag and distant, unimaginable alien technology are central to the story.
In Old Man's War, senior citizens can enlist in the space army, and when they do, they are taken away and rejuvenated, using secret technology, given a turn in battle, and the survivors are retired to a distant world, never to see the Earth again. For a certain kind of person, this is infinitely preferable to certain senescence and death, and that's the sort of person that fills the pages of Old Man's War.
Scalzi's modern twists on SF classics are genuinely surprising -- I read this book in practically one sitting, but I keep going back to it now, thinking about the great ideas and writing. As a last minute Xmas gift, you can't go wrong. Here's the blurb I wrote for the cover:
Scalzi's written a dynamite, gripping and surpassingly original military novel here. It's Starship Troopers without the lectures. It's Forever War with better sex. It's funny, it's sad, and it's true.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Marvel's anti-fan lawsuit explained by EFF lawyer
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DATE: 12/13/2004 12:54:56 AM
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My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann has written a great, scathing attack on Marvel Comics' evil decision to sue City of Heroes, an online game, because some of City of Heroes customers have designed characters that look like Marvel superheroes.
Yes, you read that right -- Marvel's claim is based on the idea that private individuals who pretend to be Wolverine for fun in a video game are breaking the law. Since when is it illegal to pretend to be your favorite superhero? Should parents be policing their kids, lest they be caught "pretending without a license"? Were all those drawings of the X-Men on grammar school notebooks evidence of infringement? And what about all those homemade superhero Halloween costumes?
Of course, Marvel may well be wrong about the law. From a trademark point of view, it is difficult to see how these kinds of noncommercial activities could satisfy the "use in commerce" threshold imposed by federal trademark law. Copyright lawyers will reason that these activities, even if technically infringing, are almost certainly sheltered by defenses like fair use or de minimis non curat lex. Marvel, for its part, will doubtless say that its legal beef is with the operators of "City of Heroes," not the players (pay no attention to that pesky complaint, that's just legal mumbo jumbo).
But all of these lawyerly answers miss a more fundamental point: Why are everyday expressive activities in the real world -- such as joining some neighborhood kids in the backyard for a bit of superhero role playing -- suddenly exposed to the depredations of copyright and trademark lawyers when they move online?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dotbomb patents considered harmful
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DATE: 12/13/2004 07:04:30 AM
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My cow-orker Jason Schultz -- who leads EFF's fight against stupid software patents -- has written a great editorial for today's Salon on the perils of dotcom patents:
The idea behind patents is that inventors and manufacturers of new products should have some protection against free riders in the marketplace that would otherwise copy their innovations. If competitors are able to simply copy the innovations of those first to market, few will have incentives to release their products to the public. In this instance, however, we see the opposite result.
Here, the patents at issue were less valuable to companies that actually produce Web services products than they were to firms that produce nothing but lawsuits and licensing threats. In other words, patents like these have become worth more as weapons than as protections for companies competing in the marketplace.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: The tumor that almost ate Cincinnati
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DATE: 12/13/2004 08:32:22 AM
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Carlo Longino, my friend and fellow escapee from Cincinnati, Ohio, points us to this article from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Surgeons at University Hospital have removed a 66-pound tumor from the abdomen of a woman from Peebles, Ohio.
"I can't believe that thing was in me," said Grace Radtke, who went home today after the massive but non-cancerous ovarian tumor was removed on Dec. 3.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: Supreme Court takes up Grokster filesharing case
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DATE: 12/13/2004 10:37:57 AM
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On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I join NPR's Alex Chadwick to discuss the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to hear MGM-Grokster -- a case involving P2P which may be the most important intellectual property decision in decades.
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 80s Berkeley punk compilation
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DATE: 12/13/2004 10:47:26 AM
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Krucoff sez: "I have just launched an MP3 re-issue music label. I've started with a classic compilation tape of the 80's Berkeley punk scene originally put out by Aaron Cometbus which I think might be of interest to your readers. Here's the "release" permalink.
And here's the background on why I started this effort to digitally preserve old music. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bionic limbs
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DATE: 12/13/2004 11:17:18 AM
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Researchers from MIT, Brown University, and the Providence Veterans Affair Medical Center are launching a $7.2 million, five-year effort to develop bionic limbs:
"At the end of the project, the scientists hope to have created "biohybrid" limbs that will use regenerated tissue, lengthened bone, titanium prosthetics and implantable sensors that allow an amputee to use nerves and brain signals to move the arm or leg."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: LBJ & the Helium Filled Astronaut
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DATE: 12/13/2004 12:50:02 PM
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Enjoy this 1964 audio clip of President Lyndon Johnson speaking on the phone with SeaLab Commander Scott Carpenter, whose lungs are filled with a helium-oxygen mixture, making him squeak like an excited rodent. Link (Thanks, Ethan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese band uses old 8-bit Nintendo to make music
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DATE: 12/13/2004 01:01:33 PM
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justin007 sez: "Found this link to an 8-bit band out of Tokyo that uses a Famicom (8-Bit Nintendo) to create some very cool tunes. The next evolution of Shibuya-Kei. Click on the links to listen to their MP3's." Link UPDATE: Karl sez: "Enjoyed your boinboing blurb, 8bitpeoples is among the many sites offering similar fare, with a wealth of offerings. What I think is noteworthy, or at least timely, is the fifth selection from the top, a holiday compilation called 'The 8bits of Christmas.' My favorite is "Let it Snow," by bit shifter. It's so wonderfully ... exuberant, I can't help laughing every time I listen."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Online transcription services
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DATE: 12/13/2004 02:46:18 PM
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Freelance writer Mike Whybark has been reading my blog entries about transcribing interviews, and he let me know about a couple of web-based human transcription services. He wrote about it in a blog entry.
On opening the file, I was overjoyed. While the iDictate files were quick-and-dirty, costing (I thought) a penny a word, and yielding about 5,000 words per half hour, the escriptionist file was meticulous, beautifully formatted, and scrupulously accurate. It was also 7000 words long, rendering the per word cost considerably less than 1 penny.
I tried iDicate last night on a 2,700 word MP3 interview and was very happy with the results. They turned it around in a matter of hours and the copy was very clean. A penny a word is a great deal. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Joey Manley on Gish
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DATE: 12/13/2004 03:25:54 PM
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Joey Manley is gushing over the PC game, Gish.
Gish is to Halo 2 as Jeepers is to Wolverine – a lower-budget, supercute, delightful alternative. The free demo alone provides more pleasure than the average videogame. It only took me about five minutes of playing the demo to realize that I had to buy the full version. Yes, this game has caused me to put down Halo 2.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kim Stanley Robinson's new book, Forty Signs of Rain
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DATE: 12/13/2004 03:43:41 PM
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I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain. Robinson wrote Pacific Edge, the most inspiring utopian novel I've ever read (and one which never fails to reduce me to happy tears in the last chapter) and the Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars trilogy -- the most breathtakingly ambitious science fiction books I've ever read.
Forty Signs of Rain is a fast, even breezy read, which I tore through in just a couple sittings. Its best feature is its characters, who are Science Heroes: scientists who are really into science, in the way that one of Neal Stephenson's hacker characters is into hacking. They see everything they do -- fixing broken sea-walls, climbing cliffs, navigating traffic, pushing for global warming remdiation, chairing meetings, even nursing babies -- in terms of scientific theory, experiment and action.
The thing that all of Robinson's Science Heroes have in common is their concern with global warming, which has reached an all-too-believable tipping point in Forty Signs of Rain. As the world reaches and then passes the brink of catastrophic flooding, Robinson's characters argue, act and think about how to bring us back from the brink. They are not only charming as they do so -- they're inspiring. Faced with a world that may soon be broken forever, they swuare their shoulders and apply themselves. They despair, but they master their despair. Pacific Edge is a book I return to again and again when I am down. This will surely be another.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New MPAA lawsuits against BitTorrent, eDonkey expected
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DATE: 12/13/2004 03:45:45 PM
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The Motion Picture Association of America is expected to announce new legal actions this week against operators of tracker sites for two major peer-to-peer filesharing networks. In the US, action is expected to be filed against operators of BitTorrent tracker sites; in Europe, against parties responsible for the hosting of eDonkey trackers. The MPAA has not confirmed or denied that these actions are forthcoming, but have announced that a press conference will be held Tuesday to launch a "significant expansion of the global fight against movie piracy."
Participants in Tuesday's conference will include MPAA CEO Dan Glickman and Anti-Piracy chief John Malcolm; Mark Ishikawa, CEO of file tracking tech provider company BayTSP, and Redswoosh's Travis Kalanick (previously co-founder of the now-defunct P2P service Scour.net).
Update: Variety's Ben Fritz now has a story online.
[W]hile P2P networks themselves are still legal despite industry efforts to shut them down, indexing servers that help users locate and download pirated content are not.
The fact that the defunct Napster ran such servers, while Grokster and Streamcast Networks, defendants in the Supreme Court case, do not, was cited by lower courts as a key reason why Napster was ruled illegal but the newer networks weren't. Developers of BitTorrent and eDonkey don't run their own indexing servers. However, many individuals and groups involved in online piracy do, and they're expected to be the targets of the new legal crackdowns .
"If it can be demonstrated they lent substantial assistance to copyright infringement and had knowledge of what they were doing, it's a strong case that fits in line with Napster," explained Michael S. Elkin, head of the entertainment and media group at law firm Thelen, Reid & Priest. Several sources close to the MPAA confirmed the planned actions, although reps for the group weren't talking before today's press conference in Washington, DC.
Link (paid sub required)
Update: Xeni's reports for NPR and Wired News, and new updates on the MPAA actions, are here: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Car boot sales to be closed if any vendor sells a pirate DVD?
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DATE: 12/13/2004 03:48:13 PM
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The UK government has been asked to grant copyright cops the power to shut down entire car boot sales (flea markets) if any bootleg DVDs are found on sale there:
The Anti-Piracy Taskforce wants more powers be given to Trading Standards Officers to close down car boot sales where pirate DVDs are sold.
Link
(Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO make your PC more secure, by Bruce Schneier
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DATE: 12/13/2004 03:59:32 PM
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For my money, Bruce Schneier is the best computer security person in the field right now. He's just published a list of security recommendations for individuals who want to make their PCs safer:
Operating systems: If possible, don't use Microsoft Windows. Buy a Macintosh or use Linux. If you must use Windows, set up Automatic Update so that you automatically receive security patches. And delete the files "command.com" and "cmd.exe."
Applications: Limit the number of applications on your machine. If you don't need it, don't install it. If you no longer need it, uninstall it. Look into one of the free office suites as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Regularly check for updates to the applications you use and install them. Keeping your applications patched is important, but don't lose sleep over it.
Browsing: Don't use Microsoft Internet Explorer, period. Limit use of cookies and applets to those few sites that provide services you need. Set your browser to regularly delete cookies. Don't assume a Web site is what it claims to be, unless you've typed in the URL yourself. Make sure the address bar shows the exact address, not a near-miss.
Web sites: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption does not provide any assurance that the vendor is trustworthy or that its database of customer information is secure.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ben Rosenbaum story under CC license
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DATE: 12/13/2004 04:04:28 PM
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Ben Rosenbaum, the great new sf writer whose story, "The Ant King" is one of the finest pieces ever published by the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (and with whom I'm currently collaborating on a story called "True Names"), has just released his story, Embracing the New, which Asimov's Magazine published this year, under a Creative Commons license.
The Bereft worked in the new mines, carving the green stone from the cliff face. Their fur had been shaved, because of the heat. Many of them had bloody claws, torn by the stone. Vru tried to look away. He had rarely seen so many Bereft. Their bodies were muscular, powerful... and naked of Ghennungs. It was horrible, yet there was something about those empty expanses of skin that called to him, like a field of untrodden snow.
The green stone glittered, embedded in the gray rock. Khancriterquee had been yelling at the foreman all day. Why use the idiot Bereft? They understood enough to be useful in the older mines, with the older gray stone. But this wonderful new green stone, in which so much detail would be possible -- the perfect stone for gods, won from the Godless -- was difficult to extract, and they were incapable of learning to do it. They had ruined every large piece so far.
"They are useless! Useless!" Khancriterquee screamed at the foreman. "Why could you not get real people?"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Battelle's scoop on Google's University library project
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DATE: 12/13/2004 05:41:02 PM
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John Battelle has the scoop on Google's "Project Ocean." From an email he received:
"Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could
harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and
the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find
materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate
with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of
the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system.
Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in
the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects
with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public
Library."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Chris Null: The RIAA is a loser, literally
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DATE: 12/13/2004 05:45:45 PM
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Great piece by Chris Null from Mobile PC mag on why the RIAA isn't as fearsome as it would like people to believe.
Lots of stories get written when the Recording Industry Association of America sues people, but not much gets written about the aftermath of those suits.
There should be: In the last 12 months, the RIAA lost a landmark suit against Grokster (essentially legalizing peer-to-peer software), lost a suit to Verizon (holding that it did not have to provide names of its subscribers who the RIAA wanted to sue), and has yet to actually win against any of the thousands of individuals it has sued in court (some of the cases have been settled out of court, most are still pending). Suddenly, the RIAA isn’t looking so much as devastating as it does merely pathetic.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: S'mores Nativity kit
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DATE: 12/13/2004 07:15:33 PM
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Over at Brooke's Bitter Shack of Resentment, there's news about a kit you can buy to make a Nativity creche out of s'mores.
Says Lee's cousin Luke: "Doesn't baby Jesus look adorable? And tasty?"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Frog eats mouse
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DATE: 12/13/2004 07:39:09 PM
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Photo sequence of a frog eating a young mouse. Link (Thanks, Jenn!)
UPDATE: Emily sez: "That sequence with the toad and the pinkie is actually from an amazing book [Food Chain] by Catherine Chalmers. The book is full of these sequences, with frogs, pinkies, mantids, tarantulas, snakes, and more. She also did some great work with cockroaches. Look her up--she's fantastic!"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to make miniature modelling clay oranges
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DATE: 12/13/2004 07:43:46 PM
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Anon sez "Step-by-step photos showing how to make miniature (about 5mm diam) model oranges from modelling clay. (Oranges are symbolic of gold and wealth for the Chinese, hence they're all over at the Lunar New Year.) The detail is impressive." Link
UPDATE: J Bryan sez: "This is the site that the miniature orange tutorial originated on. Polymer clay is a special subject to me and the artists hold a special place in my heart and it is important to me that their work is credited when possible. [Angie Scarr] is a fantastic artist and it is good to see her work showing up in other languages, but she is the one who originated this realistic method."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jungle Boat Cruise movie coming
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DATE: 12/14/2004 12:24:49 AM
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Hot on the heels of depressing failures like the Country Bear movie and (eugh) the Haunted Mansion movie, as well as the triumph that was Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney is turning yet another park-ride into a movie: this time, it's the Jungle Boat Cruise.
Mandeville's David Hoberman describes Jungle Cruise as "an adventure film with comedic elements, but its core is almost a family version of Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,' about a group that travels upriver, in search of a significant cure." Josh Goldstein and John Norville (Tin Cup) will write the script.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tiny atomic clocks
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:09:15 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature.com is about the development of an atomic clock that's the size of a grain of rice:
Most clocks that we check throughout the day are wrong. For example, your wristwatch -- whether it's a Swatch or a Rolex -- probably drifts at least a few seconds each week. Of course, that's probably imperceptible even if you're so overbooked that every second counts. However, wireless technologies are even more tightly scheduled than you are. Indeed, outfitting mobile devices with clocks that are accurate to the quadrillionths of a second could ratchet up cell phone reliability and GPS accuracy while packing more signals into the dwindling radio spectrum.
That's why scientists are developing tiny clocks that are stable to one part in 10 billion, meaning they lose or gain a maximum of just one second every 300 years.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: David Remfry illustrations
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:18:48 AM
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My fashion illustrator friend Anne Sanger turned me on to the work of David Remfry, an amazing watercolor artist who recently collaborated with fashion designer Stella McCartney:
Stella McCartney said of the collaboration, ‘The thing about the project with David is, it’s not a fashion illustration, it’s not fashion advertising. It’s so considered, each line. It’s not a modern-day graphics illustration; it’s an old-school drawing. The guy sat here with a pencil and drew a woman.’
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: SFX supply house
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:31:33 AM
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Planning a New Year's Eve soiree? In the market for fake fog, simulated snow, confetti cannons, or, my favorite, large sheets of nitrocellulose (flash paper)? Video artist Dr. Maz points us to online shop Theatre Effects, delivering SFX needs right to your door since 1976. The "Fun FAQs & Helpful Hints" section is loaded with great tips on manifesting all kinds of theatrical magic. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Exercise in a pill
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:44:34 AM
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A protein called PPAR-delta in the body that regulates other genes involved in the process of breaking down fat could someday be the basis for an "excercise pill." Ronald Evans of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies genetically engineered mice to produce extra PPAR-delta to see if it would affect the rodents' weight. From Scientific American:
When put on a high-fat, high-calorie diet for 13 weeks, the transgenic mice gained only a third of the weight that their unmodified brethren did. What is more, mice on this diet remained resistant to obesity even when they were kept inactive....
Although Evans recognizes the potential for abuse by athletes, he believes that his work has more practical implications in treating metabolic ailments, including obesity and heart disease. Patients with such conditions often cannot exercise because of their weight or other complicating problems. "This work could lead to an exercise pill that gives many of the benefits of training without the need to sweat," Evans predicts.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Retro game store in Osaka
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DATE: 12/14/2004 08:39:05 AM
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Todd Lappin points us to this wonderful story about a retro game store in Osaka, Japan.
Japan's hidden secret is that when it comes to retro games, Akihabara is not the epicenter of goodness. The true heart of the retro gaming revival in Japan is actually in Osaka's Den Den Town.
Located approximately 10 minutes walk from Namba Station in Osaka's Minami district, Nipponbashi (aka Den Den Town) is home to the Original Super Potato store, as well as its hipper cousin, Retro TV Game Revival. These two stores, located a scant 150 feet apart, represent the absolute pinnacle of Japanese retro game collector shops. It is not uncommon to see extremely rare gaming systems sitting next to a $2000 Gold Cart Shonen Jump Limited Edition Dragon Ball Z 2 and across from 1980s video game soundtracks on vinyl.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Idle hands
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 12/14/2004 08:57:59 AM
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Mark Slouka wrote an amazing essay for the November issue of Harper's Magazine called "Quitting The Paint Factory: On the Virtues of Idleness." It's about the beauty of doing nothing, and the fight against those who would deny us one of life's greatest pleasures:
Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy."
Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business."
Link (Thanks, Terre and the Birdman!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moblog.co.uk crash: it's only a flesh wound!
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DATE: 12/14/2004 09:10:27 AM
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The servers behind popular mobile blogging community moblog.co.uk experienced a catastrophic failure yesterday that caused loss of user images posted from the 22nd of September through December 13. Sources close to the matter say both hosts and users are seriously bummed out. When the service is back online, new tech measures will be put in place to prevent a repeat. Meanwhile, some members are photoshopping their way out of despair (Image link).
After a night of great angst, Alfie from moblog.co.uk tells BoingBoing,
"I'm going to eat the hugest pizza in the universe when this is over.
The site will be back up in the hour.
"It has however prompted us to develop new technical features. Among them -- we've now built in super redundancy so this will be impossible! to occur again. "We've received so may emails saying not to worry and I reckon most people will busily carry on, but as I said, I just feel so damn guilty."
Unlike other popular phonecam blogging services, much of moblog.co.uk's content is offered under Creative Commons license.
The giant plushie monster with laser-emitting eyes believed to be responsible for the server crash could not be reached for comment.
Update, 3pm PT: Alfie says, "We have been up and running for a couple of hours now, and have written an image app for people to be able to add lost images back into their original positions on their moblogs. It's really ace, as it seems most people have kept backups of their images, and are busily putting them back in place. Mat Brown is the code genius who got this done." Looks like the moblog code crew got their victory pizza, too: Link.
Reader Kris Ardent points us to "more info on that mysterious giant plushy monster who caused the Great moblogUK crash of ought-4. Link. Great closeup shots of Domo Kun in action (hiking with his television, hypnotizing you, surfing the creek, yelling at a gopher) here: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MPAA's new legal assault on BitTorrent, eDonkey, DirectConnect
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 12/14/2004 10:40:44 AM
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Following up on yesterday's BoingBoing scoop:
On today's edition of NPR's "Day to Day", I speak with host Alex Chadwick about today's announcements by the MPAA of new legal actions against P2P networks including BitTorrent, eDonkey, and DirectConnect.
Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.
I also filed a report on the MPAA's new legal assault for today's Wired News:
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of American film studios, filed civil lawsuits today against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent tracker servers which point to locations where downloadable files can be found. The MPAA also targeted operators of servers for the eDonkey and DirectConnect networks. The group's actions include criminal complaints and cease and desist orders issued to ISPs on 4 continents. Acting in cooperation with the MPAA, French law enforcement authorities took related action yesterday, and actions by authorities in Finland and the Netherlands followed today.
BitTorrent, eDonkey, and DirectConnect allow millions of internet users to share copies of movies, music, software and games. Because of its particular efficiency in helping users handle very large files -- such as digital copies of feature-length films -- BitTorrent has attracted the enmity of Hollywood. (....)[MPAA antipiracy chief John] Malcolm described the operators of the targeted servers as "Traffic cops connecting those who wish to steal a movie with those who have a copy of it."
"These people are parasites leeching off the creativity of others," said Malcolm. "They generate ad revenues by way of popup ads, banner ads... and they solicit online donations."
Previously, the MPAA has filed hundreds of suits against individual downloaders. The new actions against server operators come just days after the Supreme Court agreed to take up the landmark MGM v. Grokster filesharing case. MPAA representatives denied that the timing of today's news was related.
Link to Wired News story. During the press conference, Mr. Malcolm also referred to BitTorrent tracker server operators as "cogs in the piracy machine."
Update: Petri Lyytinen says,
2039 is reporting about recent bust of finnish BitTorrent network, Finreactor, for distributing copyrighted material worth millions of euros. Allegedly they gathered evidence for court using special backdoor software written by finnish company Hitback Oy, that was lured to 26 illegal products which were downloadable from the network.
Link to Finnish news stories and police reports.
Link to yesterday's BoingBoing post -- New MPAA lawsuits against BitTorrent, eDonkey expected: Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Beatles Xmas albums from the 60s downloads - UPDATED
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DATE: 12/14/2004 11:32:49 AM
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At long last, the Beatles' rare Xmas albums as downloads. Moblog Kid sez, "If you were fortunate enough to have been a member of the official Beatles fan club between 1963 and 1969, then you likely have heard one or more of these records. The Beatles recorded them and sent them out to their adoring fans every year, finally collecting them all on one album for the 1970 edition. Now rare and quite pricey to obtain, these seldom heard recordings offer a rare glimpse of the fabs at their funniest."
Link
(Thanks, Moblog Kid!)
Update: David sez, "It sounds like someone ripped the Beatles Xmas records from vinyl. Their effort is appreciated, but the records have actually been bootlegged from the original tapes, and you can get a bit torrent of them in lossless format. It includes an outtake from 1964. There is also another outtake that's come out more recently that's circulating among hard-core collectors. Happy Christmas!"
Update #2:Ella sez, "This site requires registration and is *not* accepting any new registrations, so if anyone, like me, clicked the link and didn't already have an account from before, they're SOL and had better just go for the crappy recordings."
Update #3: Stuart sez, "Try bugmenot for user name/password. I did. Got in."
Update #4: Torrent Link 1 (Thanks, Ermordung!); Torrent Link 2 (Thanks, Demonoid!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Long's Drugs uses a no-longer-secret code to indicate wholesale price on tags - UPDATED
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DATE: 12/14/2004 11:53:34 AM
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Long's Drugs uses a simple letter/number code to indicate on its price tags the wholesale cost for each item on sale. The code has been cracked and now you can find out exactly how much Long's makes on your purchases!
So, for example, if a candy bar has a retail price of 0.44, it might have a cost code of HL, indicating that Longs Drugs pays 0.25 for it.
The Longs Drugs Price code appears in the middle of many of their on-shelf pricetags. It is two, three or four letters.
Here, the ANT stands for 308, meaning that the Longs Store paid $3.08 for the M&Ms, and will make 91 on the retail sale.
Link
(via Waxy)
Update: Jack sez, "It might also be interesting to note that Walgreens uses a similar system, except with the word BRUSHCLEAN
B1
R2
U3
S4
H5
C6
L7
E8
A9
N0"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dry, deadly quicksand
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:20:42 PM
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Mark Hurst sez: "The NYTimes reported today on Dutch researchers whose research suggests that quicksand may indeed exist *without* water. This 'dry quicksand' is so lethal that dropping a weighted ping pong ball on the surface is enough to make the ball disappear almost instantly. See the video material on this site."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Blockbuster competes with Netflix by dropping late fees -UPDATED
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:42:06 PM
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Isaac sez,
In an effort to fight upstart content distributors like Netflix, Blockbuster Inc. is planning to eliminate late fees on games and movies as of January 1.
Blockbuster apparently makes as much as $300 million annually on late fees; they think they'll make up for this lost income with increased volume.
Don't know what this will mean to the future of Blockbuster, but I do know that it's just another sign that we're catching up to the future every day, and the way we think about media, content, and ownership is changing rapidly.
Link
(Thanks, Isaac!)
Update: Mike sez, "you rent a movie, you have a certain grace period within which you have to return the movie (or game). if you step over that grace period they charge you full price for the thing (minus the original rental fee). you can contest the charge, and if they take it back they'll charge you a $1.25 'restocking fee.' Restocking fees are usually put in place by electronic retailers to deter returns on big ticket items that are not defective. If you buy something and then return it, the company has to deal with more costs to handle the return. But Blockbuster's entire business is based on returns! It doesn't sell movies, it rents them to you with the expectation of getting it back. Their business model hasn't changed any. it's just a way to extort more money out of us consumers."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hooray For Santy Claus! MP3
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:50:13 PM
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Senor Tonto from Italy has created a great Christmas Gift for your downloading pleasure: "a downloadable x-mas single with a cover of 'Hooray For Santy Claus!,' the theme song from the 1964 silly sci-fi movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, played with a bunch of old analog synth keyboards, a banjo, a kazoo, a glockenspiel and even a Texas Instruments Speak & Spell.
"There's also a downloadable cover for the single with art (an homage to Jack Cole's pin-up art) by italian cartoonist Davide Toffolo."
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Registration for Emerging Tech is open!
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DATE: 12/14/2004 03:58:42 PM
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Registration is open for the next O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, March 14-17 in San Diego. I'm doing a new talk called, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites, about sanity in the spam-wars, but that's just for starters. Check out the partial program grid (which I'm very proud to have had a hand in, as a conference committee member):
- Raffi "Tivo Hacks" Krikorian and NYU's Tom Igoe doing a double-header tutorial on hardware hacking called Net Objects
- Damian Stolarz explaining how to Hack Sci-Fi Features Into Your Car in a half-day session covering "the basic workings of the automotive electric, audio, and diagnostic systems" and "radio head-ends, touch screen input devices, remote controls, and in car x86-based hardware and software all in the context of a working automobile"
- My cow-orkers Wendy "Chilling Effect" Seltzer and Jason "Patent Busting" Schulz on Endangered Devices and How We Can Save Them -- a tour of all the cool crap you can buy today, which might be illegal tomorrow
- My pervy cow-orker Annalee "Techsploitation" Newitz's talk on How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change which covers "how sex laws have enlarged the demand for technologies that provide anonymous, instant, mobile gratification while also stoking content-providers' desires for soft/hardware that can control access and quickly identify users by age and geographical location."
- The wildest researchers at BBC Radio: Tom "Plasticbag" Coates, Matt "Brain Hacks" Webb, Matt "No Nickname" Biddulph and Paul "Also No Nickname" Hammond talking on Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software in which they explain some deeply cool, deeply weird shit they're doing with the BBC's radio service
- Matt "Metafilter" Haughey on Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild in which the Creative Commons's secret search sauce will be unveiled and dissected
- Tom "The British Don't Really Have Nicknames" Loosemore explains TheyWorkForYou.com, the best political advocacy site I've ever seen, in Forgiveness, Not Permission: Retro-fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy
- Natalie "Feral Robots" Jermijenko -- my choice for real-world cyberpunk heroine -- takes us beyond her genius feral robot dogs with Social Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots: "Feral robots are roving packs of adapted open source robots that are released to investigate contaminated urban sites. Feral robots begin as domestic commercially available robotic dog toys."
- Danny "NTK" O'Brien and Merlin "5ives" Mann will jointly present their Life Hacks Live work -- a book-length version of Danny's amazing hacker life-skills Life Hacks project, with "a whistle-stop tour through an amazing year in this exploding field: tracking apps that merge the geek's command-line power with GUI ease-of-use; the expansion of RSS and wiki techniques into frontline organizing apps; the spread of search and script automation onto the desktop; how plain text files are the new rock and roll."
- Finally, Lee "Jhai" Felsenstein, who pretty much invented the PC, will present on Tech That Helps the World, talking on the bicycle-charged ruggedized meshing WiFi networks he's sending to Laos. I mean, seriously: LAOS.
Save up to $300 if you reg before Jan 31!
Link
(Thanks, Rael!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Homeless man evicted from makeshift hut on working drawbridge
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DATE: 12/14/2004 05:30:18 PM
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Reader Rob D says,
This is a blog entry describing how a homeless man built a shelter on the underside of a working (bascule) drawbridge here in Chicago - complete with electricity & a playstation. The entry has links to other local news sites and their coverage of the incident. As an architect, I am in awe.
Link, and story is also covered in Chicagoist, Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Pierce-nez eyeglasses
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DATE: 12/14/2004 06:19:37 PM
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email_name:
Shannon sez: I just did an interview with gaming miniatures designer James Sooy about a design project he's just completed, a pair of frameless eyeglasses held in place by a single bridge piercing (as in body piercing)." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Beer bong tragedy has entire city of Perth in shock
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DATE: 12/14/2004 07:07:28 PM
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A beer-thirsty Australian gentleman, inpatient with gravity, employed a mechanical contraption to rapidly deliver beer into his gullet using a pump powered by an electric drill. The device proved so effective that the high-pressure jet of beer shooting down his throat ripped a hole in his stomach. Authorities responded by warning people not to use high-pressure machines to drink beer this Christmas. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Carnival of Carbs
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DATE: 12/14/2004 09:00:44 PM
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Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post about plans for a "New Wave Ramen Museum" in Japan, our intrepid readers point us to two existing Japanese cultural institutions that celebrate the art of starch.
First: the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum's website offers a wealth of knowledge on the nomenclature of ramenculture. Link. Looks like it would be yummy fun in person. (Thanks, Lloyd Vancil, and michael yee)
And BoingBoing reader Steven C. Brown in Hawaii says, "Regarding the Namco Ramen theme park you posted earlier, Namco already has Namjatown, an indoor amusement park that features gyoza! Link. You can find additional pictures on my site. Link. Aloha!"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Awesome Chinese gadget spam
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DATE: 12/14/2004 09:30:18 PM
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From time to time, a sublimely surreal piece of unwanted email from grammatically-impaired strangers lands in my in-box. For instance:
Glad to know your company on internet, I would like to introduce our novel products the TPS series Taxi's Safeguard System and the CQ-1 series Super Safety Suitcase to you.
1. TPS series Taxi's Safeguard System: Anti-Theft, Anti-Robbery and Anti-Violence with 50 KV Electric Shocking. The TPS series Taxi's Safeguard System is a novel Security Alarm System with electric shock function that can safeguard owner while gangster is robbing. At any time it can warn to the owner any conditions to caution him to raise vigilance. At emergency the owner can remote the system to electrically shock the gangsters. This system has Anti-Theft, Anti-Robbery, Electric Shock, Remote control central door and Intelligent indication functions.
2. CQ-1 series Super Safety Suitcase
With whole surface suitcase 30KV Electric-shock. This product can be used for caring and storing cash, confidential documents and valuables. It has the function of remote radio control. Switch on and off, set up and random switch of the functions can be realized through remote radio control. At various complex and urgent situations, the customer can choose the most effective and safe defensive function. It has the functions of "Anti-lossing", "Anti-stealing" and "Anti-robbing." Alarm sound level>85dB. Material of case body: high-grade genuine leatheroid.
We can supply your wants! Any problems,please feel free to contact me.
Best Regards
Mr.Zhaoboo
Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson subscribes to an RSS feed for my in-box, which explains this: Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swarmstreaming: like Bittorrent for streams
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DATE: 12/15/2004 12:09:00 AM
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Justin Chapweske is the creator of Swarmcast, the first-ever "swarming" download technology -- the grandaddy of technologies like Bittorrent. He's just released "Swarmstreaming" -- a technology to make streaming go better if more people use it at once:
I'm proud to finally unveil swarmstreaming our third generation of swarming algorithms that are designed for the fastest downloads of web content and multimedia without any special server software or silly .swarm files. This is probably our most exciting advancement since the original invention of swarming.
The technology improves swarming by ensuring that the bytes that the user wants next are scheduled to be received next. So if they're playing back a video file, the bytes from the front of the file will be received first. If the user (or application) skips forward to the middle of the file, the bytes at the middle of the file will be prioritized. Thus, unlike first generation swarming systems like Swarmcast or Bittorrent, you don't have to wait for the entire file to download to do something useful with it!.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Regular Sucking Schedule
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DATE: 12/15/2004 05:30:18 AM
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Glenn Fleishman says,
There's been a lot of intelligent discussion about RSS bandwidth since I started my reports and throttling attempts, and I decided to start Regular Sucking Schedule as a clearinghouse of advice, free software, and discussion.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New iPod firmware shuts out Real
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DATE: 12/15/2004 05:30:18 AM
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ArsTechnica reports that last month's iPod firmware update makes music encoded in RealNetwork's Harmony unplayable on certin iPod models.
The Harmony software mimics the FairPlay DRM used by Apple's iTunes Music Store for all of the tracks it sells. RealNetworks introduced the software with great fanfare last July, announcing that they had broken the stranglehold Apple held over the iPod and enabling customers of its RealRhapsody music service to purchase tracks that could be played on iPods. Apple was not pleased with RealNetworks' efforts, accusing them of adopting "the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod."
Link
Reader Stefan Pause says,
Just thought this might be of interest to a few readers -- credit where credit's due and all that -- it wasn't Real who did the hard work of reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay DRM, it was "dvd Jon" Lech Johansen (of DeCSS fame). The Register did a good write-up of the whole thing back in January: Link, and there's more general commentary over at Jon's blog's Apple section: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mmmmm, Cup-o'-Chrysalis!
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DATE: 12/15/2004 06:00:44 AM
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Yummy, yummy, yummy I got bugs in my tummy! Canned chrysalis -- caterpillars in soy sauce -- are a somewhat popular food in Korea. On this blog, their culinary properties are examined by two Austrian dudes in Vienna. Link (Thanks, Martin)
BoingBoing reader Wayne Choi says,
I immigrated to the US [from Korea] when I was three and didn't go back to visit until I was 10. When I went back I recalled eating something when I was three and I had fond memories of it. It was chrysalis...more of the barbequed variety as opposed to canned. I ended up trying it and got sick. I completely forgot about this until I saw your post. Thanks...I guess.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: World's smallest P2P app
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DATE: 12/15/2004 06:07:12 AM
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Ed Felten and Alex Halderman have created the world's smallest functional P2P filesharing program, written in fifteen lines of code.
TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 1000 photogs vs. 20 models
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DATE: 12/15/2004 06:27:10 AM
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Photographer and BoingBoing reader Juergen says,
"I attended a organized photo shooting with 1000 photographers and 20 models...you do the math: 50 photographers for 1 model! Where? In Japan of course."
Link to a gallery of 160 photos Juergen shot at the event.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Neo NeoFiles
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DATE: 12/15/2004 06:34:17 AM
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The latest issue of RU Sirius's NeoFiles is now online. In this edition, RU interviews Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Heard, about his psychedelic adventures, and EFFer Annalee Newitz on whether Transhumanism sucks. As a special bonus, NeoFiles publisher Will Block interviews RU about his excellent new book Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House.
In this edition of Neofiles, we drift far afield to explore some views that some neophiliacs may find either too far beyond the pale or too close to the bone. This is all part of our effort to make a varied discourse, much of it circling around the concept of transhumanity or radical mutations in the human condition.... What we do and think at the edges in this generation will likely be central concerns to generations a few decades or centuries into the future. Let’s get all the possibilities and impossibilities on the table now. You never know what vision or critique may prove useful in whole or in part some time in that future.<
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Death rock
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DATE: 12/15/2004 06:41:46 AM
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Fabricated in 2000, the Skeletar was carved from a single piece of rock maple, bleached white. The bones of the arm are inlaid in ebony with blood stones as the position markers. From luthier Peter McGilton's description of this masterpiece:
"My electric guitars were once described as encompassing 3 major themes of rock and roll: love, sex, and death.... The (Skeletar) image was conceived on a tour of the Hapsburg Palace in Vienna. In the basement are the family crypts and funeral vehicles, all elaborate Rococo sculptures glorifying death: Skeletons with Angel's wings larger than life in black cast iron."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Prisoners' Inventions
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DATE: 12/15/2004 08:08:24 AM
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Art group Temporary Services worked with an artist named Angelo who is incarcerated in California to create a book containing Angelo's illustrations of inventions made by prisoners, from chess pieces fashioned from toilet paper and sugar water to a battery-operated tattoo gun (shown here) to a "muff bag" (sex doll). Temporary Services also recreated many of the inventions for exhibition based on Angelo's drawings. From Angelo's introduction to the book:
"Writing this book was a revelation. To be able to present these examples of human inventiveness to you, I had first to discover this technology all over again. If some of what’s presented here seems unimpressive, keep in mind that deprivation is a way of life in prison. Even the simplest of innovations presents unusual challenges, not just to make an object but in some instances to create the tools to make it and find the materials to make it from. The prison environment is designed and administered for the purpose of suppressing such inventiveness. Officially, the devices described here are considered contraband, subject to confiscation in routine cell searches. But inmates are resilient if nothing else—what’s taken today will be remade by tomorrow, and the cycle goes on and on."
Link (via Near, Near Future)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lego logic
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DATE: 12/15/2004 08:44:03 AM
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This person assembled mechanical logic gates from Lego. Digital logic gates are the building blocks of computer processors.
"I have now designed working NOT, OR, NOR, AND, and NAND gates. Using two NAND gates I have produced a NAND gate latch or Flip-FLop. The natural follow on from these is clocked logic, full-adders and ultimately a genuine "computer" device. At the moment all these gates essentially just demonstrators. They work, but because of the limitations that arise through gear slippage, the real practicable use is probably not that great."
Link (via Slashdot)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Greg Costikyan interview
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DATE: 12/15/2004 03:08:41 PM
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I interviewed game developer and novelist Greg Costikyan for TheFeature about the challenge ahead for mobile gaming.
"Nokia recently shipped an N-Gage title called Pathway to Glory, which is the first mobile game I've seen that uses voice over IP for in-game voice communication. This is one of the things I think is vital to making multiplayer mobile gameplay work. In every online game, even the simplest, like Hearts, or Backgammon, there is a chat facility. And being able to talk with people while you're playing is one of the major appeals of online gaming, because multiplayer games in particular are inherently social in nature."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SXSW 2005 reg open, too!
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DATE: 12/15/2004 04:12:08 PM
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Jon sez:
The 12th annual SXSW
Interactive Festival is Scheduled March 11-15 in Austin, TX. SXSW
Interactive brings together the web's most creative innovators for
five days of panels, parties networking, and fun. Highlights include
the following:
* Opening remarks by web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman on Saturday
afternoon, March 12.
* Keynote speech by "Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell on Sunday
afternoon, March 13.
* Keynote interview with Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox on Monday
afternoon, March 14.
* Keynote conversation featuring Alex Steffen and
Bruce Sterling on
Tuesday afternoon, March 15.
* SXSW Web Awards ceremony hosted by Laura Swisher, co-host of the
late great "Unscrewed with Martin Short" on G4techTV.
* Blogging-related panels such as "Building Your Brand With Blogs"
with DL
Byron, Jim Coudal, Jason Fried and Robert Scoble.
* Business / entrepreneur-related panels such as "The New New New
Economy: Is 2005 the Next 1997?"
* Design-related panels such as "How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi
Design With CSS" with Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Molly Holzschlag, Christopher Schmitt and Dave Shea.
* Activist Technology track with panels such as "How to Think About
Democracy and Technology."
* Joint panels with SXSW Film Conference covering topics such as
"Future of DVD Distribution" and "Future of High Definition."
Cost to register for the SXSW Interactive Festival is only $225
through January 14; walkup price is $275. For more information
(including complete list of speakers), see http://www.sxsw.com/interactive
.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Haunted Mansion's cobwebbing-and-griming regimen
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DATE: 12/15/2004 04:33:12 PM
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GREAT article on how Disney keeps the Haunted Mansion's interior nice and spooky-grimy:
"It's something that we take very seriously at Imagineering," he says. "In the case of the Mansion, it's kind of fun because there are all those anecdotes about how everything else in the park is kept so pristine, and inside the Mansion the challenge is to keep it as rundown and dusty and musty as possible." The goal with all the attractions at Disney parks, says Jason, is to keep them looking and sounding just as good as they did on opening day. "This is the 35th year for the Haunted Mansion, and when you walk in there every single thing about it is just as it was intended to be back in 1969 when it opened!"
Link
(Thanks, Amanda!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Short copyright movies from Duke U
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DATE: 12/15/2004 04:34:21 PM
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Duke Law held a contest to make a two-minute mini-documentary about copyright. The finalists are online now for your votes -- they're all tremendous.
We are happy to announce the finalists in our Arts Project Moving Image Contest. The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film. Many thanks to everyone who entered and everyone who helped spread the word about the contest. The judges are selecting three winners from among these finalists, and the winners will be announced on January 15, 2005.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Hundreds of free 1930s Sherlock Holmes radio drama MP3s
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DATE: 12/15/2004 04:36:46 PM
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The Sherlock Holmes Society of London has hundreds of free MP3s of Sherlock Holmes radio plays from the 1930s -- amazing!
Link
(via Ben Hammersley)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Half-Life 2 cookies project -- with tin snips, oven and welder
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DATE: 12/15/2004 04:40:11 PM
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Check out this bad-ass home-made Half-Life 2 cookie-stamp and tin, fresh off the tin-snips and out of the oven.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Paper digital clock uses heat to change display on thermal paper
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DATE: 12/15/2004 04:42:47 PM
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This clock is made out of heat-sensitive paper whose "pixels" are changed to reflect the current time by warming it from behind with computer-controlled LEDs.
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fifty years of Disneyland souvenirs
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DATE: 12/15/2004 04:45:30 PM
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Fifty Years of Disneyland Souvenirs features pictures and commentary on Disneyland souvenirs from 1955 to the current day, grouped by year.
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MP3 of US Army phone spam
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DATE: 12/15/2004 08:16:02 PM
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Following up on a series of BoingBoing posts related to allegations of spammy recruitment tactics by the US Army (posts: one, two, three), reader Mark Miller says,
After the response from the previous BoingBoing post, I now have a recording of the call I received from the Army. I think it sums up the feeling by listening to it than any words can convey...
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Keith Weesner hot rod art
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DATE: 12/15/2004 11:58:17 PM
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Keith Weesner is a background animation illustrator and a painter. I like the simplicity and mood of his work. Link (via The Cartoonist)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Advertising techniques that Web-users hate
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DATE: 12/16/2004 12:04:06 AM
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This month, usability guru Jakob Neilsen's AlertBox column addresses the Web's most hated advertising techniques. The finding I'm most satisfied by there is that audio in an ad is viewed as being offensive on par with popups. I totally loathe any auto-playing audio on websites (sez one of Neilsen's subjects, "IF ANYTHING COULD BE WORSE THAN POP-UPS, THIS IS IT. I HATE THIS AD. HATE HATE HATE.")
Link
(via Pirotcar)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bruce Sterling's design talk in streaming video
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DATE: 12/16/2004 12:06:36 AM
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Here's an amazing streaming video of science fiction writer and design professor Bruce Sterling presenting his views on the future of design and technology, revolving around RFIDs, rapid prototyping, and cradle-to-grave design for zero-emission disposal, from his talk at Germany's "Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen"
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Imadeit: kids' furniture kits
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DATE: 12/16/2004 12:09:56 AM
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imadeit sells furniture kits for kids to make. Link (via Core77)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sitarsploitation records
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DATE: 12/16/2004 12:26:47 AM
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Here's a gallery of old pop music LPs featuring sitar music. Unfortunately, the MP3s are just sound clips, not the whole songs. What gives? Link (via PCL LinkDump)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ever been in a turkish prison?
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DATE: 12/16/2004 03:42:27 AM
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Oliver Stone has apparently apologized to Turkey for possibly exaggerating the nightmare of Turkish prison life as depicted in Midnight Express. From The Guardian:
"It's true I over-dramatised the script," Stone told reporters in Istanbul before holding talks with Turkey's culture and tourism minister, Erkan Mumcu. "But the reality of Turkish prisons at the time was also referred to ... by various human rights associations"....
Echoing the view of diplomats who said that, if anything, foreigners were often treated better than locals in Turkish jails, Stone said that the country had improved greatly since 1974, when a brief visit to Istanbul had given him the impression of being in a "very Ottoman" place.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Killer weed
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DATE: 12/16/2004 03:46:10 AM
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Cops in Oklahoma busted two truck drivers after discovering 610 pounds of marijuana stuffed into coffins they were hauling. From Reuters:
An attorney for one of the men said his client was unaware there was marijuana in the caskets and was only delivering them.
"He didn't check inside the caskets for drugs -- would you?" attorney Donn Baker said.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Curious hobbyists of Russia
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DATE: 12/16/2004 04:13:33 AM
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Russian magazine Moskovsky Komsomolets is running a contest called Amaze The Country to honor the region's most interesting hobbyists. From The Moscow Times:
...The votes for this week's three semifinalists were being led -- perhaps rather fishily -- by an entrant who "studies the secrets of hermetic science" and makes amber pendants that cure headaches and heart problems. Coming from behind was a man from the Siberian town of Chernogorsk who has crafted an 18-meter crocodile and a life-sized Mercedes in topiary. One of those through to the semifinals is Vladimir Aniskin, a specialist in microminiatures, who has crafted a caravan of camels in the eye of a needle and written "Peace to the World" on a human hair...
Some of the most colorful entries come from the Russian Club of Records, or "Levsha," a Moscow organization that publishes a book of national records and submits information on local feats to Guinness World Records. Among the 50 or so members featured are an Altai schoolteacher who can play Ludwig van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata while lying with his head under the keyboard and a man who has collected all his nail clippings for the last 35 years.
Link (via Reality Carnival)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lend me an ear
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DATE: 12/16/2004 04:54:33 AM
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The Tissue Culture & Art Project used human cells to grow this quarter-scale replica of performance artist Stelarc's ear. In October, I posted about a tiny skin jacket they produced in vitro.
"The ear is cultured in a rotating micro-gravity bioreactor which allows the cells to grow in three dimensions. Stelarc's recent projects and performances are concerned with the prosthetic. The prosthesis is seen not as a sign of lack, but as a symptom of excess. Rather than replacing a missing or malfunctioning part of the body, these artifacts are alternate additions to the body's form and function.
Extra Ear 1/4 Scale is about two collaborative concerns. The project represents a recognisable human part. However, it is being presented as partial life and brings into question the notions of the wholeness of the body. It is also confronts broader cultural perceptions of 'life' given our increasing ability to manipulate living systems. TC&A are dealing with the ethical and perceptual issues stemming from the realization that living tissue can be sustained, grown, and is able to function outside the body. Stelarc, ultimately, is concerned with the attachment of the ear to the body as a soft prosthesis. Extra Ear 1/4 Scale is partial life form – partly constructed and partly grown – waiting to become a soft prosthesis."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Meat-scented air fresheners for your car
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DATE: 12/16/2004 07:07:02 AM
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Link (Thanks, Jonno)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vintage science fiction radio play MP3s
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DATE: 12/16/2004 08:31:40 AM
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R Bryan Rumble sez, "this site has a great selection of some older radio shows and it includes the classic 'X minus 1' series that ran from 1955 to 1957 on NBC radio. All are considered public domain and are free to listen to. 'X minus 1' was a forerunner of the 'Twilight Zone' and 'Outer Limits' TV series, and featured radio adaptations of stories by Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, etc."
Link
(Thanks, RBR!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Post office is sneaking pix of you
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DATE: 12/16/2004 08:35:38 AM
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The Electronic Privacy Information Center have ucovered the fact that everyone who uses a post office kiosk gets her or his picture snapped and retained for 30 days. If the picture can't be taken (because the camera is covered, say), the transaction fails.
EPIC FOIA Request Shows Postal Machines Take, Store Photos. Documents (pdf 1.9 MB) obtained by EPIC under the Freedom of Information Act show that new Postal Service self-service postage machines take portrait-style photographs of customers and retain them for 30 days on a Windows XP platform. One document reads, "Camera required by FAA. Privacy Office is requiring a notice for customers, advising that photograph may be taken during the transaction." For more information, see the EPIC Postal Service Privacy Page. (Dec. 9)
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Firefox ad in today's NYT
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DATE: 12/16/2004 08:38:19 AM
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Back in October, we ran a post on the effort to raise funds for an ad in the New York Times promoting the superb Firefox browser, a spin-off of Mozilla that has now been downloaded over 11,000,000 times. Today, the ad -- a two page facing spread -- ran in the Times. w00t!
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US will shut down GPS to "fight terrorists"
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DATE: 12/16/2004 08:40:50 AM
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If your rely on GPS to get you to work, out of the bush, back to shore, or anywhere else, it's time to stop. The Bush administration is paving the way to shutting down GPS in the event of an "emergency" so that "terrorists won't be able to navigate." Nice one, George: why not shut down the fire-departments, too, so that "terrorists won't be able to survive fires started by careless smoking?"
The president also instructed the Defense Department to develop plans to disable, in certain areas, an enemy's access to the U.S. navigational satellites and to similar systems operated by others. The European Union is developing a $4.8 billion program, called Galileo.
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(via /.)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Other Music
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DATE: 12/16/2004 09:07:13 AM
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Whenever I'm in NYC, I blow a ton of cash at Other Music in the East Village. A visit to this CD/record boutique is like a transgenre tour of the finest music you've probably never heard. From glitch hop, Krautrock, and global pop to afro-beat, folktronica, and vintage psychedelia, OM only sells the choicest cuts. They also have an excellent Web site and weekly email update with RealAudio samples of the records they review. OM's Year End Recap--a "best of" culled from the weekly updates--is a great port-of-entry into the staff's exquisite taste. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Must TiVo TV: Weird U.S.
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DATE: 12/16/2004 11:23:27 AM
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The History Channel has a series called Weird U.S. I haven't seen it yet, but MrBaliHai's review has prompted me to create a season pass for it on my TiVo.
I happened to catch Weird U.S. on the History Channel last night, and I must say that it looks very promising. Yesterday's episode dealt with the bizarre case of the Wallet Man, french immigrant Antoine LeBlanc, who was executed in 1833 for murder, and subsequently skinned; his tanned hide was used to make wallets, purses, lampshades and book jackets!
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Several comic book related stories
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DATE: 12/16/2004 12:18:48 PM
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Eric Reynold's of Fantagraphics sent an email today with a list of good comic-book related things to read:
Jaime Hernandez is cover-featured in this week's issue of L.A. CITY BEAT newspaper. The feature includes a handsome new cover by Jaime, so those of you in So. Cal. might want to grab a hard copy.
Jaime's new book, LOCAS, is the lead review on Salon.com today and includes a lengthy interview with the man himself. The "ultramercial" you have to sit through to read the full article is brief today, so check it out.
Also, for the Chris Ware fans among us, Chris has new strips in both the current issue of ESQUIRE and the new issue of THE NEW YORKER. That's six all-new Ware pages, not to be missed.
Finally, today's PEANUTS strip made me laugh out loud.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Psychology of stock market suckers
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DATE: 12/16/2004 12:49:42 PM
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Good Slate piece that briefly goes over several aspects of human nature that lead to bad investment decisions, including "Self-attribution Bias," "The Gambler's Fallacy," "Prospect Theory," "Conservatism Bias," "Confirmatory Bias," "Overoptimism," "Outcome Bias," "Buffett's Rearview Mirror," and "Hindsight Bias."
Outcome Bias: We tend to evaluate decisions based on outcomes instead of probabilities. Thus, we congratulate ourselves for stupid choices that happen to turn out well and vow to never again make smart choices that happen to turn out badly. Our errors get reinforced, and our wise decisions rejected.
Link (Via Paul Boutin)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kiddie record bonanza in 2005 on Basic Hip
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DATE: 12/16/2004 12:57:59 PM
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Maybe you should ask for a new hard drive for Christmas:
In 2005, Basic Hip Digital Oddio will feature an entire year of albums from the golden age of kiddie records, lovingly transferred from the original 78s and encoded to 192kbps MP3 format. That's one a week for 52 weeks!
We believe people from around the world and of all ages will be delighted to hear these records. Not many folks these days play 78s or share this type of recording online. Chances are you've never heard them and if you have, it's been a long, long time. They are nostalgic, entertaining and just plain fun. The colorful covers are beautiful works of art.Â
Link (Via Oddio Overplay)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Amazon's new "user-added" image feature
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DATE: 12/16/2004 06:30:28 PM
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This may not be news to those of you who are frequent Amazon shoppers, but I just noticed this new feature -- customer-added-images for listings at the online shopping site. Link to example. Seems like there's a huge potential for abuse or inaccuracy, but, interesting move nonetheless. (thanks SusannahBadMammaJamma)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yahoo video search, o how I love thee.
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DATE: 12/16/2004 06:40:43 PM
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Let me count the NSFW ways. Fleshbot opines:
"[T]he real reason why it's already generating a lot of interest [is] to save you from having to enter all those search terms over and over again (or until Yahoo! gets around to posting that "Jenna Jameson" button, as suggested in the Slashdot thread)."
Yahoo! Video Search: "Anal" · "Ass" · "Blowjob" · "Boobies" · "Bukkake" · "Cock" · "Fuck" · "Gay Porn" · "MILF" · "Orgy" · "Porn" · "Pussy" · "Suck" · "Threeway" · "Tits"
Getting to the "adult" stuff may require sign-in to a Yahoo! user account, and turning off "safe filtering." Image -- still shot from you-know-what.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Yarn Porn
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DATE: 12/16/2004 07:12:58 PM
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Sexually explicit DIY projects for pervy knitting fanatics. For every body part, there is a woolen warmer. Shown here, "crochet crotch." Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free-to-implement designs for solar-powered PCs
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DATE: 12/17/2004 12:58:14 AM
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Avi sez, "SolarPC manufactures (and licenses) low cost, energy efficient (12 volt DC) PCs that have no moving parts except the electrons! These will be a pleasure to have around when the next oil shocks hit!"
SolarPC manufactures high quality Mini-ITX computers for home, business, educational, mobile and industrial applications. All SolarPC Systems utilize efficient 12 volt DC power and small aluminum cases that run quiet and cool...
A no cost license to manufacture SolarPC designs is available for educational and charitable groups participating in the Global Education Link project. Please contact SolarPC for additional information.
Link
(Thanks, Avi!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Science fiction society HQ is tax-exempt
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DATE: 12/17/2004 01:03:14 AM
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A reader writes, "News site relating a ruling Wednesday that the science fiction society's headquarters qualifies for a property tax exemption, and that its activities and programs have legitimate educational value."
The issue revolved around the definition of "educational purpose." To be eligible for property tax exemption, nonprofit organizations have to show that their properties are "used exclusively for a charitable or educational purpose to promote the general welfare of the people of the state," according to the tax code.
The Court of Appeals took account of the society's annual young writer's competition. In addition, the society holds writing workshops, has a library for its members and runs an annual convention where science fiction novelists and scientists discuss their work. Judge Alan Wilner, writing for the majority, wrote that those initiatives serve an educational purpose, making the society eligible for the tax exemption.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Chaotic crochet
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DATE: 12/17/2004 01:38:52 AM
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Bristol University mathematicians Hinke Osinga and Bernd Krauskopf have crocheted a representation of the Lorenz equations, nonlinear differential equations that are used in chaos theory. Their crochet pattern appears in the latest issue of the journal Mathematics Intelligencer. From a BBC News report:
The idea for the "Lorenz manifold" model came about during the Christmas break two years ago.
Dr Osinga, who learnt to crochet when she was seven, was relaxing by crocheting some hexagonal lace motifs.
Prof Krauskopf asked her: "Why don't you crochet something useful?"
Eighty-five hours of work and some supporting steel wire later, they had something almost a metre across which looks not unlike a big Christmas decoration - which is what they are using it as.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Olympus camera laid bare and annotated
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:02:53 AM
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Steve Jurveston has just posted this astounding photo of a caseless Olympus camera to Flickr. Already, Flickr users have begun to use the photo-annotation tool to mark up the pic with technical details on the exposed components.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Chow Yun Fat in next two Pirates of the Caribbean movies
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:04:32 AM
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Chow Yun Fat will star in the next two sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean, playing "the famous 19th century Chinese pirate Cheung Po Tsai."
Chan said both the movie's producer and director contacted Chow's management company in the U.S. two months ago and director Gore Verbinski flew to Hong Kong last week to discuss the screenplay with Chow. "The director was very sincere about it and specially flew to Hong Kong and discuss the script with Fat Gor (Chow's nickname) ... but we cannot talk about the details until we sign the contract," Chan was quoted as saying.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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TITLE: WiFi detector shows name, WEP and strength of discovered networks
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:16:05 AM
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The Canary Wireless Hotspotter is a $50 WiFi detector with an LCD readout that shows the name, WEP status and signal strength of the 802.11g and 802.11b networks it finds. This is what's been missing from traditional WiFi detectors (which only light up to indicate the presence of 2.4GHz radio emissions, which can also come from microwave ovens, cordless phones and walkie talkies). I'm not sure how sensitive the antenna is in this thing -- antenna sensitivity is key: you don't want an overly sensitive device that shows you networks that are not in range of your laptop's WiFi, but neither do you want an weak antenna that misses networks your WiFi card could use.
Link
(via Red Ferret Journal)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1959: When random numbers were cool
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:19:04 AM
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This paper from 1959 describes a method for constructing an electronic random-number generator.
2.1MB PDF Link
(via Schneier on Security)
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TITLE: Richard Stallman will record an answering machine message for you
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:22:00 AM
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If you sign up three people to donate to and join the Free Software Foundation, geek hero/Free Software inventor Richard Stallman or FSF copyfight lawyer superstar Eben Moglen will record an answering machine message for you to use:
After we agree on the text for the message, Stallman or Moglen will record it in a free digital format that you can play as a whole on your preferred media, be it your voice mail, web site, blog, VOIP system, answering machine---you'll have the file, so you can move it around as you please. We can personalize them for whomever you like, so you can make them gifts for friends and family.
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Barlow's trial blogged
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:31:59 AM
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My cow-orker Seth attended John Perry Barlow's trial this week -- Barlow was arrested for possession of drugs after they were allegedly discovered during an airport security search; Barlow argues that security screeners don't have any remit to be searching passengers for drugs, which are not a security risk to airplanes. Seth's commentary on the proceedings are a must-read, a really eloquent and learned dissection of the absurdity in the courtroom.
The Federal government lawyer sat right behind the People's lawyer and objected every single time that the defense asked anything about screeners' training or procedures, or about statistics, history, trends, equipment, techniques, or anything substantive about the roles of different law enforcement agencies. And the judge essentially always granted the objections on "relevance" even when they were made on "privilege". For example, the defense asked things like whether x-ray machines beep and whether they have two-dimensional displays, and the United States objected. The United States does not want you to know whether x-ray machines beep, or whether they have two-dimensional displays.
Intermittently, I found this hilarious, because much of the alleged "SSI" could be discovered immediately by a passenger or a journalist. (I am still working on a piece that will describe vulnerabilities in vastly more detail than almost all of the information the United States objected to at the People v. Barlow hearing. I intend to describe not only the security procedures used by specific airports and airlines, but a good deal of detail about how they can be circumvented, in the hope of showing that many of these measures cause privacy harm for no benefit. All of those descriptions derive solely from my experiences as a passenger on a single recent commercial aviation trip. That does not prove that the government is legally wrong to say that people within the system are forbidden to talk about equivalent things, but it suggests that there's not much true security benefit at stake in forbidding them.) The security culture is reflexive, or, one might say, knee-jerk -- the Feds are totally dedicated to idea that it is never appropriate to permit anyone within the system to disclose SSI to the public. It would be bad for national security, the theory goes, if screeners could tell people whether x-ray machines beep. Never mind that Federal law enforcement agencies themselves publish detailed information about how to conceal weapons to carry them aboard aircraft, what various kinds of concealed weapons look like under x-ray, which ones appear more suspicious than others, and where you can buy them!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Madness and genius
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DATE: 12/17/2004 07:12:34 AM
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New Scientist interviews John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and subject of the film A Beautiful Mind. Nash discusses his research, the film, insanity, and his son's schizophrenia.
Do you still hear voices?
I was a long way into mental illness before I heard any voices. Ultimately I realised I am generating these voices in my own mind: this is dreaming, this is not communication. This is coming from an internal source, not from the cosmos. And simply to understand that is to escape from the thing in principle. After understanding that, the voices died out. My son hears voices, but I haven't heard any for a long time.
So was there an element of rational decision-making involved in dealing with your symptoms?
There's a lot of choice in this, I think. I know this is not the standard point of view. The standard doctrine is that we are supposed to be non-stigmatic in terms of these people: they are constitutionally, necessarily, schizophrenic. But I think there is an element of choice. A person doesn't pass into insanity when their situations are good. If their personal life is successful, people don't become insane. When they're not so happy, when things aren't so good, then they may become clinically depressed, and then maybe schizophrenic. Wealthy people are less likely to become schizophrenic than people who are not wealthy.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Kids like to listen more than look
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DATE: 12/17/2004 07:23:22 AM
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Cognitive scientists at Ohio State University report that infants and young kids, unlike adults, are attracted more to sound than visuals in their environment:
(Vladimir) Sloutsky, who is also associate dean of research for the university’s College of Human Ecology, said children probably pay more attention to sounds because of their temporary nature.
“If you don’t pay attention to sounds, they disappear,” he said. “On the other hand, many visual stimuli are stable and stationary. This preference for sounds makes sense in the case of learning language. If infants and young children didn’t favor sounds, it is difficult to explain how they could pick up language.”
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Trunk Show
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DATE: 12/17/2004 08:42:46 AM
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Make love to the camera, my ten-ton baby. A fashion shoot comprised of pouting, prancing, pachyderm models photographed by Bruce Weber for Style.com. Complete spread appears in the January 2005 issue of W magazine. Link (thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 65MB of vintage random numbers from 1965
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DATE: 12/17/2004 08:47:10 AM
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Dano sez, "In 1955 the RAND Corporation published a book of computer generated random numbers that is again in print and available as a downloadable PDF. (Beware, it's over 65MB.) They needed it for their research when using Monte Carlo simulations, and like most all of their research it is freely available to the public."
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(Thanks, Dano!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Donate to EFF, send a lump of coal to MPAA and RIAA
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DATE: 12/17/2004 08:48:18 AM
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A reader writes, "Downhill Battle made this page to encourage people to donate to copyfighters over the holidays. They're going to one lump of coal to the RIAA and MPAA for every $100 donated to EFF, Public Knowledge, and IPac."
For every $100 given to these groups in the month of December, Downhill Battle will send one lump of coal to the RIAA and MPAA. This is not a joke-- we are literally going to look up their addresses and send them coal.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Vibrateroid women's razor products from Gillette
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DATE: 12/17/2004 08:51:20 AM
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Gillette announced yesterday the launch of two new products in its "Venus" line, including "The Venus Vibrance," a (cough, cough) round, pink, battery-powered women's shaver.
The company will roll out a battery-powered Venus Vibrance shaver, similar to its men's M3Power, that sends little vibrations to the skin to raise the hair for a closer shave. It also will add Venus disposables. In a product category where women's products generally are priced higher than men's -- on the assumption women will pay more for personal care -- the suggested retail prices for the Venus Vibrance will be $9.99 to $11.99, equal to the new lower price the M3Power gets next month
Just like women's clothing, personal care consumables like shampoo, and -- heck, car repair services often cost more than the equivalent for men, because there's a (correct) assumption that women will bear a higher price burden than men for each. Hey, feel fucked in more ways than one! Link (via pell thanks Jbat!)
Reader Adam Fields says
Two things:
1) You missed that the story indicates that the women's line won't be priced higher because Gillette is giving up on the "women will pay more for nothing" attitude. Commendable!
2) You also missed (or at least didn't mention) the unfortunate turn
of phrase 'Our testing indicated that there is an upside potential
to penetrate more razors at a slightly reduced price.' Ya gotta
love that.
Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why false security is bad
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DATE: 12/17/2004 08:54:43 AM
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A frequent defense proffered for feel-good, nonsensical, expensive "security theater" (like taking away air travellers' nail clippers) is that it can help us all to "feel secure." Bruce Schneier just blogged these thoughts on "feeling secure" from Bill Mason, a jewel thief.
Nothing works more in a thief's favor than people feeling secure. That's why places that are heavily alarmed and guarded can sometimes be the easiest targets. The single most important factor in security -- more than locks, alarms, sensors, or armed guards -- is attitude. A building protected by nothing more than a cheap combination lock but inhabited by people who are alert and risk-aware is much safer than one with the world's most sophisticated alarm system whose tenants assume they're living in an impregnable fortress.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Revolving condos
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DATE: 12/17/2004 09:23:49 AM
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Mr Jalopy sez, "The revolving restaurant is the pinnacle of civic achievement. I am a sucker for overpriced drinks, terrible appetizers and the line of stationary/rotating demarkation as long as I get a full 360 degrees with never a decent view. But a rotating apartment? Kick ass."
Link
(Thanks, Mr Jalopy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Journey Thru Innerspace CGI recreation DVD
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:28:06 AM
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Ernie Miller sez, "As mentioned a year ago (Recreating Gone Disney, the Atom Mobiles fan site has been recreating a 3D version of the famous "Adventures Through Inner Space" ride that used to grace Tomorrowland. Well, they've finished it and it is now available for purchase on DVD (though they can't guarantee Christmas shipping). Kevin Yee of Miceage says, " words are too cold to fully capture the magic on this DVD. The ride-through was a transcendent experience for me. I found myself exclaiming 'Ohmygosh! I forgot all about that!' constantly while watching the video. I cannot possibly imagine a single theme park collectible, video, or book ever encapsulating the Disneyland experience as much as this one DVD." If anyone wants to send me one as a belated Christmas present ..."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: IE + Moz/Firefox use tied among BoingBoing readers
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:28:17 AM
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BoingBoing's sysadmin extraordinare Ken Snider says, "IE has only a 1.6% lead on Moz/Firefox for BB readers now on BoingBoing.net. Check out the stats: Link.
Add up Moz and Firefox. And if you include the 1.6% from netscape, which also uses the Gecko rendering engine (so is the same as Moz/FF really), they're exactly tied."
November: IE 38%, FF 30.6%, Moz 5%, Netscape 1.8%
October: IE 38.2%, FF 28.6%, Moz 5.6%, Netscape, 1.9%
Going back 6 months (June): IE: 41%, FF 12.7%, Moz: 7.4%, Netscape: 2.2%
Reader Frank Hecker says,
Two points re your post regarding Mozilla/Firefox use by BoingBoing readers. First, "Netscape" in your statistics may include Netscape Navigator 4.x (or earlier). If so, then it's not strictly speaking correct to count all of the 1.6% Netscape share toward the total percentage share for Gecko-based browser; you should count only the Netscape 6 and 7 share.
Second, note that Camino is also a Gecko-based browser, so its 0.2% share should be added to the figures for Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape 6/7.
With these corrections, the Gecko-based browser share based on the current statistics (Link) is something between 35.9% and 37.5% depending on the relative breakdown of Netscape Navigator 4.x or earlier vs. Netscape 6 and 7. (31.1% Firefox + 4.6% Mozilla + 0.2% Camino + 0-1.6% Netscape.) Given that MSIE is at 36.9% I think it's fair to call this a virtual tie.
BB Sysadmin Ken sez: "This page shows the full breakdown, by browser version: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cuba places torture billboards in front of US diplomatic HQ
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:28:42 AM
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Rough translation from the Spanish language original:
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba unfolded two gigantic billboards on Friday in front of the United States diplomatic headquarters in the island, with photographs of the tortures in the Abu Ghraib prison of Iraq and the word "Fascistas" together with a Nazi swastika.
The images were put up after Cuba demanded that the United States Interests Section in Cuba take down a Christmas billboard with a shining ornament that says "75," in allusion to the dissidents imprisoned by the Cuban government in 2003. The billboards unfolded by Cuba show Iraqi prisoners bleeding and hooded during torture by soldiers in Abu Ghraib with a caption that says "Made in Usa" in the middle of the high-traffic MalecĂłn of Havana.
Three days ago, James Cason, chief of the US Interests Section in Havana, declared that president Fidel Castro was threatening the diplomatic office with reprisals by saying that "there would be consequences" if they did not take down the billboard referring to the imprisoned dissidents. Reuters observed on Friday morning the work of unfolding the billboards in front of the North American Special Interests section
Link (Thanks, Ned Sublette)
Update: More info in English: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Holiday Zen
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:29:20 AM
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a wonderful life in 30 seconds |
xmas weebl |
xmas beatles |
holiday saw music |
santa mosh |
hooray for santy claus |
christmas remixed |
holiday 2004 sampler |
beckham nativity |
smores nativity |
advert calendar |
10 least successful holiday specials |
holiplay |
polar rescue |
snowball fight nyc |
unsilent night |
alek's christmas lights |
harbin snow and ice festival |
12 leaves of festivus |
how to dispel the myths of hanukkah | and from the archives:
holiday zen 2003 |
holiday leftover zen 2003 |
winter zen 2002
Image: still from "It's a Wonderful Life in 30 Seconds re-enacted by bunnies." web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mailing list goes away
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:29:27 AM
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The Boing Boing mailblog has always been a humongous pain to manage and run, and we spend an awful lot of time tinkering with it. As a result, we're gonna kill it (for now, anyway -- maybe in the future we'll have the bandwidth to take it up again). Thanks -- and sorry -- to all the subscribers who hung in there while we tried to make it work!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Desk and chair from one sheet of plywood
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:29:31 AM
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Ingenious plan for making a computer desk and chair from a single sheet of plywood -- geometry rules!
Link
(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wired News hiring a new Ed-in-Chief
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:29:51 AM
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The fine folks at Wired News have an immediate opening for Editor in Chief in San Francisco. Wired News, not Wired Magazine as some misunderstood upon first glance. Details here: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Geeking out over Gehry Organ at LA's Disney Hall
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DATE: 12/17/2004 10:36:46 AM
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Last night, I crawled out from behind my laptop to go hear Handel's Messiah at the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, with a few friends. The performance was beautiful, the architecture of the space was beautiful, but the coolest part of the evening by far? Geeking out over the awesome, gigantomongous, french-fry-esque pipe organ at the back of the hall. It's comprised of more than 6,000 pipes, only a portion of which are visible. Some are conical and made of metal, others are shaped like long, slender boxes and are made of wood. The pipes range in size from ballpoint pens to palm trees.
The organ wasn't played last night, but I'm told that when it debuted privately to a group of pipe organ professionals earlier this year -- they all removed their shoes so they could feel the deep bass vibrations in the floor. A couple friends mentioned that when the LA Phil played Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (opening theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey) a while back, this thing emitted gut-liquefying bass notes that remind you why that piece of music was selected to open a sci-fi film in the first place. That uber-low opening note doesn't kick you in the innards on a recording the way it does from a huge pipe organ in an acoustically rich venue.
Oh, also, it even smells cool! Many different fine woods were used to construct the pipes, so it emits a magical, cedary sort of fragrance that reminded me of incense in a Catholic mass.
Image: a phonecam snapshot I took of the organ, while standing beneath its tall, sonic stalagmites: Link to full-size.
Here are some wonderful photos, Link, and an Organ FAQ, from the LA Phil's website: Link. NPR did a cool segment about the organ's construction and sound, here: Link. And Link to a San Diego Union-Trib article. Here are upcoming organ performances at the WDCH: Link (thanks tons, Shawn Sites, and Michael and Cynthia Perry!)
Update:
BoingBoing reader Bill B. says,
"I live in the Kansas City area, and have been to a concert at the huge Latter Day Saints Church in Independence, Missouri. The organ is unbelievable there as well but not designed like the one you reported on. I have been an afficiondo ever since seminary when I was a radio host for the 'Organ Hour'. One note: with organs like the one you described, you don't just feel it in your feet but all through your body. The harmonics will literally vibrate your insides when the proper notes are played. Now I must make plans to come and hear the one out in LA."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Nerdy-craftsy Xmas projects
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DATE: 12/17/2004 11:55:15 AM
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This blog-post rounds up some amazing, craftsy-nerdy Xmas decor and sweet novelties, like this gingerbread motherboard.
Also on offer, this gingerbread laptop,
and this
tree decorated with motherboards.
Link
(via Engadget)
Update: Juan sez, "The PCBs depicted are NOT motherboards as cory states, but are in fact memory modules, and a CPU as star."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Year in Cryptozoology
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DATE: 12/17/2004 12:34:15 PM
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Noted cryptozoologist Loren Coleman provides his list of 2004's top stories in the field of mysterious or "hidden animals." His top pick is no stranger to regular Boing Boing readers.
The Discovery of Homo floresiensis
The story is as remarkable as the finding of the first coelacanth, the 65 million year extinct "living fossil" found off Africa in 1938. The biggest story in anthropology for 2004 may become the event of the decade within cryptozoology. The editor of Nature, Henry Gee, in an editorial entitled "Flores, God and Cryptozoology," wrote: "The discovery that Homo floresiensis survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures such as Yetis are founded on grains of truth....Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dunk mug
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DATE: 12/17/2004 12:40:50 PM
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Handy hot drink mug with a shelf beneath for storing snackables. Link (via Gizmodo)
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:12:15 PM
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: ELLEJAE is naughty car parker
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DATE: 12/17/2004 02:25:04 PM
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My friend and editor Chris Null snapped this photograph of a car occupying two handicapped spaces. Why should its owner care if someone dinged it? It's one of the ugliest cars I've ever seen. A scratch or ding would only improve its appearance.
I hope Santa doesn't bring you any presents, ELLEJAE. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More parking hijinks
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DATE: 12/17/2004 03:55:53 PM
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The folks at LAist purposely parked a car in ways that inconvenienced others, just to find out what kind of angry notes people would slip under the windshield wiper.
At Virgin Megastore (Sunset Boulevard), parked in two spaces because said car was so precious, we couldn't risk being near any car at all: "Take your head out of your ass and realize there are other people who need to park -- asshole! If I had time to wait for you I would then I'd kick your ass for being so greedy!!!!
Bedford drive, in Beverly Hills neighborhood: "Don't ever park in front of my driveway again or I will call the police. The police will be notified. The police will tow your car. Don't ever do this again!!
Link (Thanks, cathy!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sony forced to rethink Librié concept
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DATE: 12/17/2004 04:27:54 PM
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Andreas Bovens sez: On July 2, 2004, Boing Boing reported about the Sony Librie e-book reader, which sports an awesome e-ink display, but is full of restrictive DRM bloat. In a desperate (?) attempt to boost sales of the Librié, Sony recently started offering downloads for converting your own documents to the Librié's BBeB format, meaning that you now can read Project Gutenberg or Aozora Bunko books on your Librie!
(As far as I know, reports so far are only in Japanese, hence a link to my own blog entry about it.)"
Now all it needs is a backlight and the capability to sync with a Mac, and I'll buy one no matter how much it costs. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jewschool Hit With Nastygram for Jesus Tee
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DATE: 12/17/2004 05:06:51 PM
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Mobuis sez: "I run a popular Jewish blog called Jewschool to which Douglas Rushkoff is an infrequent contributor.
"I've recently found myself enmeshed in an IP controversy surrounding a parody I was hawking on Cafepress of the uber-trendy "Jesus Is My Homeboy" t-shirt, and am currently debating the issue with the original shirt manufacturer's lawyer. Check out the link for the legal hijinks." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: When good word algorithms go bad
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DATE: 12/18/2004 05:02:17 AM
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BoingBoing reader Kevin Kelleher says,
Why Is eBay Selling the Apocalypse? I was using Google to spell-check "disastrous" (I know) and came across some interesting results on the sponsored links. eBay and Amazon wanted to sell me a disastrous, whatever that might be. Intrigued, I typed in "apocalypse" and found the following:
Apocalypse
Low Prices on Apocalypse
EBay is Fun, Quick & Easy! -aff
www.EBay.com
Dear overworked folk in eBay marketing: Take another look at those sponsored-word algorithms. I was tempted to click on one of these links, but I remembered a time when I was using eBay to find a CD of Christmas music and I accidentally clicked on the "Buy It Now" button for a Hanson Brothers Christmas album, and what would happen if I accidentally "Bought It Now" with the apocalypse? (Come to think of it, it couldn't be much worse than the Hanson Christmas CD). I got similar results with all kinds of grim language:
Find Devastation
We have what you're looking for.
Devastation & much more!
www.eWoss.com
Searching for Misfortune?
Find it on eBay! Free registration.
Misfortune & much more (aff)
eBay.com
Pestilence at Amazon.com
Amazon.com/music
Sexy Cataclysm Singles
www.infobert.com
and on and on. My personal favorite:
Find Apocalypse at Snap
Don't search for Apocalypse,
find it at Snap!
www.snap.com
Funny, I thought snap.com had found its own apocalypse about 4 years ago.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MP3 of Ukrainian pro-democracy zeitgeist
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DATE: 12/18/2004 05:48:37 AM
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BoingBoing reader Kristiyan in Varna, Bulgaria says:
You can really feel the people of Ukraine, they want democracy! This is an mp3 file, amateour journalism recording of audio experience. The situation is the city of Lutsk - an Ukrainian city. The recording shows a walk of a fellow there, people screaming, "Yushchenko!" The music of the gathering party, the crowds, the street traffic. The students, the people of Ukraine demanding their democracy. A non-CNN, non-CBS, non-BBC, citizen report.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art if I want
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DATE: 12/18/2004 05:59:27 AM
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De L'art Si Je Veux is the latest work by Nicolas Clauss from the digital arts group Flying Puppet. It is comprised of statements about art from young people whom the world might not expect to be experts on art.
The paths of contemporary art are so numerous and sometimes so radical that it is amazing, if not useful, to wonder how a naive audience views it; this instance, adolescents from a working-class area. Beyond any cultural references, all genuine interpretations teach us a great deal.
For several months, the young participants were surrounded by significant works of the 20th century. They then gave expression to their impressions through film, interviews, surfing the Net, creating their own images, reflecting a world that might appear inaccessible. The gamble was to create a work of art from this happy undertaking of demystification, this dream factory.
Using photos, videos and sound, these young people share with us, through interactive creations, their impressions and their own relationship with Art and the artists they chose.
Link to De L'art Si Je Veux ("Art if I want"), requires Shockwave plug-in.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mower-mod
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DATE: 12/18/2004 06:00:29 AM
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BoingBoing reader Chris Ruzin says,
"I wrote about my uncle's heavily modded Husqvarna lawnmower and threw in some pictures. I'm not sure how many people spend as much time and money on their mowers as my uncle, but it can't be too many people."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jack Chick creationist comic "Big Daddy"
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DATE: 12/18/2004 06:02:11 AM
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BoingBoing reader Tommy York says,
Recently, at a school rally of mine here in San Francisco, I came across the booth of the Christian club at school, AGAPE. I decided to pick up a few little comics of theirs, and I came across this one - one the denounces evolution, procedes to denounce the whole theory of the "atom" too, and by disproving evolution, of course, shows that the only logical alternative is that Jesus is the creator. Propaganda like this in public schools seems a bit off to me.
Link to page-by-page photos of "Big Daddy" creationist comic book. I can't help but wonder what the whole thing would sound like read in the voice of Mr. Slave from South Park. I mean, "Big Daddy"? The unshaven monkey with the banana on the cover looks vaguely Tom of Finland. Oh jesusth christth, Jack Chick!
Update: Reader Lance Simmons says, "There's a much better copy of Big Daddy at the publisher's site." Link. See also these previous BoingBoing posts on Jack Chick's Christian comix: Link, and Link 2.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Greek geeks: The Antikythera Mechanism
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DATE: 12/18/2004 06:02:11 AM
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BoingBoing reader Rafael says,
This is a link to an article written for the American Mathematical Society's website back in April 2000 on the function of the Antikythera Mechanism (the world's oldest example of a mechanism with gears dating from 87 B.C.). The discovery of the mechanism surprised scholars because it was not believed that ancient Greeks possessed such technology. The article goes into a lot of detail and has working Java applets!
Link to part one, Link to part two.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Saving the World with Hostess Twinkies
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DATE: 12/18/2004 06:29:54 AM
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BoingBoing reader Isaac says,
"I was going through some old comics from the 1970s, and I stumbled upon a series of ads that I had forgotten about - Marvel and DC both had full-page ads in which their superheroes shilled for Hostess Fruit Pies, Twinkies and more! (Holy Flaky Filling, Batman!) There are links to ten different ads I've scanned and posted."
Link. See also the extensive Seanbaby archive of kitschy Hostess goodness: Link (thanks, Chris and tgr!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Warhol's Interview box set
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DATE: 12/18/2004 09:31:02 AM
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7L is fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's imprint at art book publishing house Steidl. I was just at the 7L bookshop in Paris and one of the many objects of desire I encountered was Andy Warhol's Interview: 35 Years of Pop, a seven-volume boxed "best of" collection of the magazine's first (and arguably best) decade. Each book has a different theme: The Covers, The Pictures, The Interviews, The Andy Warhol Interviews, The Fashion, The Directors, and The Back of the Book. There's also a facsimile of the entire first issue from 1969 and the 35th anniversary issue published in October. The whole shebang weighs 88 pounds, but fortunately Lagerfeld brilliantly outfitted the box with wheels and a handlle. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fortean photography
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DATE: 12/18/2004 11:34:51 AM
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I love Fortean Times's online gallery of strange photos and illustrations. Along with antique spirit snapshots, stigmata statues, Bigfoot, and dervishes, they have a nice selection of "simulacra photos." In Fortean terms, simulacra photos depict "spontaneous or natural figures or images. These can occur in nature as well as in the chance conjunction of artefacts." For example, the seed capsules of snapdragons in this photo. Readers are invited to send in their own shots to the print magazine's Simulacra Corner. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Custom creatures
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DATE: 12/19/2004 03:46:42 AM
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A couple months ago, I posted about the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. One of the members, Sarina Brewer, is a taxidermy artist with a wonderful sense of the curious and surreal. Her exquisitely executed "gaffs" (fakes) range from various siamese siblings to winged cats to enchanting renderings of the classic Feejee Mermaid. And her prices are quite reasonable.
From Sarina's bio:
Her lifelong obsession with biology often focused on genetic mutations. Study of these deviations of nature eventually led to the the discovery of circus sideshows and "freaks." This influence, as well as a slightly warped sense of humor, manifest themselves in her strange cryptozoological creations and each peculiar artifact she creates. Now incorporating her past formal art education with her passion for biology and the bizarre, you are invited to peruse the culmination of nearly three decades of the study of art and the natural sciences in her eccentric works.
"I call it art, you can call it whatever you want."
Link (Thanks, Moblog Kid!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Video store agreement claims your soul
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DATE: 12/19/2004 06:39:24 AM
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Douglas sez, "Although I've spent a fair bit of law school debating various aspects of what people can (or should be able to) bind themselves to with clickwrap and shrinkwrap licenses, the one fact that everyone acknowledges is that nobody ever reads the fine print. Here's some truly classic fine print on the receipt from my local video store, circa last Halloween."
Link
(Thanks, Douglas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Print 3D models to cut-and-glue paper models
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DATE: 12/19/2004 06:56:01 AM
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Jason sez, "Knowing how crazy Boing Boing readers are for origami and paper models, I thought you might be interested in Pepakura Designer, which lets you print out plans for paper models from objects designed in common 3D modelers... The demo has the save featured disabled, but you can still print your objects. It works with objects from 3D Studio, Lightwave, AutoCAD and a few others."
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Forensic video-cameras included in next-gen stun-guns
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DATE: 12/19/2004 07:08:24 AM
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Two stun-gun manufacturers will add video-recorders to the next generation of their guns, for forensic purposes.
The video cameras will essentially record whenever a person is hit with one of the guns, which immobilize a victim by shooting massive amounts of electricity through them. The electricity does not kill or permanently damage a person hit, according to the companies, but being hit hurts quite a bit.
Link
(via Engadget)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How nuts is Gollum?
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DATE: 12/19/2004 07:10:53 AM
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This medical journal article treats Gollum as a subject in a scholarly analysis of his disorders:
There is no disorder of the form of thought. He uses neologisms such as "triksy" and "hobbitses." Gollum has nihilistic thoughts, believing that he is a murderer, liar, and thief; although there is some basis in fact for this and he shows little guilt or remorse. He is preoccupied with, and deeply desires, the ring. He has obsessive thoughts but no compulsions, though he would do anything for the ring. He is hostile towards Frodo, the current owner of the ring. He has paranoid ideation about Sauron ("the eye is always watching") and about Samwise Gamgee ("the fat hobbit... he knows"). Gollum has difficulty controlling his thoughts and actions, exacerbated by prolonged contact with the ring. As Gandalf and Frodo have similar symptoms in the presence of the ring, we can attribute this somatic passivity to the ring. There are features of dissociation. Smeagol has separated his personality and is now Gollum as well.
Link
(via Oblomovka)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lego Thriller
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DATE: 12/20/2004 04:24:04 AM
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This shot-by-shot recreation of Michael Jackson's Thriller video using Legos is magnificent.
Due to our strong personal convictions, we wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.
Michael Jackson
Philipp Lents
Miriam Lents
Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Exorcism seminar
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DATE: 12/20/2004 05:13:24 AM
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A Vatican university will teach a seminar for Roman Catholic priests on satanism and exorcism. The Regina Apostolorum, an esteemed pontifical school, is holding the course entitled "Exorcism and prayers of liberation."
The courses, starting in February, will deal with demonology, the presence of the notion of the devil in sacred texts, and the pathology and medical treatment of people suffering from possession.
"The seminar will conclude with the testimony of two exorcists who will explain how to distinguish between someone who is ill and requiring medical care, and one is 'possessed by demons,'" (university teacher Carlo) Climati explained.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Giant map of Reagan's inauguration parade route
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:22:56 AM
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A photograph of the gigantic, room-sized map used to plan President Bush's inauguration parade through DC. (The General standing on the map was the man at Mrs. Reagan's side during the state funeral for her husband.) Link. Related WaPo article: Link (Thanks, Alex Rosen)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photographs on Grass
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:29:43 AM
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BoingBoing reader Bhoarl says, "Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey exploit how the chlorophyll amounts in grass respond to light variation to produce monochrome images. Hack the planet? Link to gallery, and here are two other sites that deal with work from this duo: Link one, and Link two." (and thanks, Terry Towery)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dunk mug not all that hot, says teatime guru
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:30:43 AM
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BoingBoing reader Alistair says, "Saw your post on the dunking cup on boing boing. I sent the link to Nicey from nicecupofteaandasitdown.com (the web's primary site for tea and biscuit culture). His response, which I can't take to be anything other than Gospel Truth was a bit dissapointing.
"They are a bit crap really, not enough tea capacity and the biscuit compartment is too limiting. I used them for pouring old bacon fat into. "
"Shame, really." Link to previous BoingBoing post on Dunk Mug (via Gizmodo), and link to previous post on nicecupofteaandasitdown.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Squeeze Box Hot Tub
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:32:43 AM
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Jackola says, "Brad Fitzpatrick, LiveJournal's founder, installed a Squeezebox in the gazeebo of his hot tub. Imagine playing the music stored on your computer through WiFi to your hot tub!" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: La Mala Educacion / Bad Education
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:45:27 AM
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Run to the theater and see this film. I find it impossible to write anything about Pedro AlmodĂłvar's movies, particularly this one, without resorting to hyperbole, ALL CAPS, and liberal use of the expression "OMGOMGOMG." That is because he is the greatest living director, and save your emails, this is not a point I care to debate. All I want to tell you is that this is a spectacularly beautiful, nuanced, and mature work. It's technicolor film noir. It is so good, you walk out of the theater glad to be alive because film exists, and it is possible for someone to make one so fine that it really does capture a little chunk of human soul. Also, Gael GarcĂa Bernal plays a trannie.
La Mala EducaciĂłn / Bad Education: Link to website, Link to trailer, Link to IMDB listing, Link to reviews and US showtimes. OMGOMGOMG.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Poodle-robics
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DATE: 12/20/2004 08:34:16 AM
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And speaking of fine films: Link (via Adam, thanks Kelly Sue)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nintendo surgeons
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DATE: 12/20/2004 09:15:51 AM
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"Traditional academic surgeons look at what I do and thumb their noses," said James Rosser Jr., director of the Advanced Medical Technologies Institute at Manhattan's Beth Israel Medical Center. Rosser was speaking at the first ever Video Game/Entertainment Industry Technology and Medicine Conference, a symposium he helped organize to discuss interfaces between medicine and entertainment technology. The conference was sponsored by the US Department of Defense's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center. From a Reuters report:
Surgeons who play video games three hours a week have 37 percent fewer errors and accomplish tasks 27 percent faster, (Rosser) says, basing his observation on results of tests using the video game "Super Monkey Ball."...
More than 5,000 people, from schoolchildren to surgeons, have done training exercises on a system Rosser calls "Top Gun," designed to train laparoscopic surgeons, doctors who use minimally-invasive techniques to repair injuries.
Link (via Near, Near Future)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Da Vinci (Legal) Code
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DATE: 12/20/2004 11:04:07 AM
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I randomly happened to read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code right when it came out. When I told my pal Vann Hall about the novel, he said the basis of the plot sounded like a non-fiction book from the early 1980s called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. A few months after Da Vinci Code hit it big, I noticed that Holy Blood, Holy Grail had also made it to the bestseller lists, more than twenty years after it was first published. Now it seems that the Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors are suing Dan Brown for ripping off their research.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing audio interview with Mind Hacks editor Matt Webb
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DATE: 12/20/2004 03:31:29 PM
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I'm starting to get interested in podcasting, so I interviewed Matt Webb, the co-editor of the new book, Mind Hacks, just published by O'Reilly. It's 25 minutes long, and I even created a cheesy Garageband theme song for what I hope is the first of many interviews.
Note: Matt wrote me with the following info -- "This is the McGurk video I was talking about. Just proving that I'm nothing without my notes, I incorrectly remembered the
McGurk sounds! It's a visual 'ga' and an aural 'ba' that combine to the
perception of 'da.' No 'va' at all (that's a variation on the experiment)."
The Mind Hack's weblog is here.
Link to BitTorrent file of my interview with Matt Webb.
Link to BitTorrent stats. (Thanks, Chuck!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nifty online PDF conversion tools
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DATE: 12/20/2004 06:50:24 PM
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BoingBoing reader Peter Orosz says,
Adobe has this service where you send your PDF to pdf2txt@adobe.com and they reply with an ASCII copy of your PDF attached. Very cool, as all PDF viewers I'm aware of lack this feature. The catch: Adobe "may occasionally access the content you submit" so this is probably only safe for stuff like ebooks.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Drive-Thru Supergrocery
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DATE: 12/20/2004 06:54:55 PM
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Coming in late 2005: the world's first drive-in mega grocery store. Think Sam's Club/Costco meets McDonald's. One less reason for America to get up off of its increasingly fat ass!
Among the more than 17 classifications of products and services that AutoCart said it will offer at the proposed supercenters are grocery, pharmacy, banking, movie and game rental, bakery, office supplies, florists, photography development, dry cleaning, liquor, and lottery sales.
Link (Thanks, Marc Nathan)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: IP address leads to pregnant woman's killer
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:09:00 PM
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BoingBoing reader Steve Portigal says,
It's probably not the first time that an IP address had led police to capture a criminal but this is certainly a high profile mention of such a technique - and it seems like they moved awfully fast given that it was a regular non-cyber crime.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Coke Machine Hacks
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:11:57 PM
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HOWTO doc on hacking Coke vending machines by way of the drink selection buttons on the front display. Link (Thanks, Jason Sutton). Mirror one, Mirror two, and Google cache (Thanks, Dan, Jackson Baker and Scott M.)
Update:: Reader Chris Vincent says,
Just thought I'd point out that most of the content on those sites (including the Coke machine article) is verbatim from the Anarchist's Cookbook, a legendary collaborative document that can be found all over the internet. Everything from social engineering to fun explosives to (obviously) Coke machine hacks can be found there.
Another interesting bit of information, this time about Pepsi machines (not from the cookbook, just something I found out about last week):
New Pepsi machines have a "code", a special sequence in which you can push the buttons on the face of the machine, which causes the LED screen to report the number of cans sold and the total cash value. I'm not sure what that code is, and it may be configurable on a per-machine basis. I'm sure somebody out there can shed more light on it than me.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ToS for Universal's free movie screenings
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:16:42 PM
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BoingBoing reader Steve Portigal says, "I received a free pass for a preview screening of the new film In Good Company and thought the warning info at the bottom might be of interest. Sure, we've heard of this happening, but I don't know if anyone has offered the actual text of the "agreement":
This pass is the property of Universal Pictures which reserves the right to admit, revoke admission or refuse access to the theatre at the discretion of an authorized representative. Please arrive early! Seats are not guaranteed, are limited to theatre capacity and are first-come, first-served. EXCEPT FOR MEMBERS OF THE REVIEWING PRESS. CHILDREN ARE STRONGLY DISCOURAGED. NO ADMITTANCE ONCE SCREENING HAS BEGUN. This theatre is not responsible for seating over capacity. This Ticket Is Not For Resale.
NO RECORDING
This screening will be monitored for unauthorized recording. By attending, you agree not to bring any recording device into the theatre and you consent to physical search of your belongings and person for recording devices. If you attempt to enter with a recording device, you will be denied admission. If you attempt to use a recording device, you consent to your immediate removal from the theatre and forfeiture of the device. Unauthorized recording will be reported to law enforcement and may subject you to criminal and civil liability.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Samsung debut's world's biggest plasma screen
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DATE: 12/20/2004 07:22:08 PM
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Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung unveiled a gigantolicious plasma screen display today -- it measures 102 inches diagonally, making it the largest such display in the world according to Samsung. Out mid-2005. Link (Thanks, Isaac)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tokyo's Nakagin capsule tower
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DATE: 12/20/2004 08:00:05 PM
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BoingBoing reader Juergen says,
In Japan we don't only have capsule hotels. No -- we also have capsule buildings. At the outskirts of the posh Ginza district stands the now almost forgotten Nakagin Capsule Tower, the world's first capsule architecture built for actual use.
Built from 1970 and opened in 1972 the Nakagin Capsule Tower was a innovative masterpiece by architect Kisho Kurokawa. Kurokawa developed the technology to install the 2.3m x 3.8m x 2.1m sized capsule units into a concrete core with only 4 high-tension bolts, making the units detachable and replaceable. The capsules were designed to accommodate the individual as either an apartment or studio space, and by connecting units they could also accommodate a family. Complete with appliances and furniture, from audio system to telephone, the capsule interior was pre-assembled in a factory off-site and then hoisted by crane and fastened to the concrete core shaft. Today the Nakagin Capsule Tower is in rather bad condition and most capsules are rented out as mini-offices for a monthly fee of about 70,000yen each.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bespoke M&Ms
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DATE: 12/20/2004 08:04:28 PM
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The M&Ms website includes an online service for ordering your very own personalised M&Ms. The printing dos and don'ts are a fun read, though -- don't even think about mentioning landmarks, or other terms that might raise copyright issues for the candy maker. Certain dirty words are prohibited -- some variants of BUTT SEX IS AWESOME in the "Classic Wedding Blend" color palette returned null results. Other offensive terms were just fine. Damn you, chocolate censors! But high carb free speech prevailed when I chose the message shown here in the "Especially for Her Blend" color scheme. Link (Alex)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Give blogs for Christmahannukwanzafestivus
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DATE: 12/20/2004 08:22:10 PM
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Blogs for Christmas is a cool new service for giving the gift of -- well, blogs. Send "specially-wrapped" blog packs or a mix of categorized rss feeds to friends and loved ones for the holidays. Get whuffie-enhanced "virtual eggnog" in return. Made by the same good folks behind Participatory Politics Foundation and Rolling Resistance (formerly Internets Vets for Truth). It's free. And Chappy Chanukah. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Snapshot of postal kiosks with built-in camera
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DATE: 12/20/2004 08:55:58 PM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine says, "A while ago on BoingBoing, I read something about Postal shipping kiosks taking your picture. There's one of those at my post office so I got some pics of its beady little eye for you guys if you want. PS: I hope I don't get jacked up or sued under RICO or DMCA for taking pictures of publicly accessible computer equipment." Link to photos: one, two, three, four.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sexy Dead Singles and 11-year-olds want to meet you
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DATE: 12/20/2004 09:15:42 PM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing item about "Good word algorithms gone bad," one reader suggested that I type the word "dead" into Google. I did, and received this interesting AdWords recommendation (Link to 70k GIF screenshot, sweartagod it's not altered):
Sexy Dead Singles
Free photos, personals and hot
profiles of local singles.
www.infobert.com
Emboldened by this success, I searched for the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and sure enough, eBay had 'em! Why didn't those pesky world leaders look here? Link to screenshot of the text ad suggested for a Google search on "WMD.".
Wmd
Brand new and used. No bidding.
Buy Wmd at eBay! (aff)
www.eBay.com
Reader Matt Baume says,
I enjoyed your post about the apocalypse and devasation on ebay. Thought you might like to know, i've stumbled across two other unsettling algorithmic hiccups: searching for "11-year-olds" gets you ebay ads for children, and searching for "ringworm" results in "sexy ringworm singles." i've got screenshots of each on my blog: one, two.
I attempted to repeat Matt's results, and got even worse returns on "11-year-olds" from Google. Not only did AdWords suggest "Great deals on new and used 11 year olds now!" from eBay, but "7 Year Olds at Amazon.com" were also indecently proposed in the same breath as "Sexy Adult Personals" and "Photos of Hot Local Women Who Want to Find Sex Partners." Link to screenshot. Well then.
Reader Larry Swanson says,
Couldn't resist playing along. These are all actual AdWords results from today:
Famine
Find Everything You Want at Ebay
It's Fun, Quick & Easy to Buy! -aff
www.eBay.com
Find Drought
We have what you're looking for.
Drought & much more!
www.eWoss.com
Vomit
600+ Popular Stores - One Website &
One Simple Checkout - Shop Now!
SHOP.COM
Lint
Lint for sale. aff
Check out the deals now!
www.eBay.com
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Subway robot paints to Rush tunes
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DATE: 12/20/2004 09:20:40 PM
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Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson shares this snapshot with BoingBoing -- he says it depicts:
"A guy with his hand-made robot playing songs for change at the Bedford L (subway) stop (in New York City). It was so understated. The robot was an art project from the guy, who said he wasn't really into robotics. Sort of like, Yeah, that's my goddam robot.
Like the robot was trouble or something, or he had inherited it -- even though he'd made it himself."
Link
Update: reader Joshua Dickens says, "In reference to the robot from Bedford Ave post, I actually encoded a video for the robot-creator in question and am hosting it on my web site: Link. The robot paints to [the music of the 30-year-old hair band] Rush.
Oh, and maybe someone can torrent the video in case my site gets slammed!"
I am bleeding through my eyeballs I'm laughing so hard right now. Email Josh if you want to help with the torrent: Link
And reader Ben Seigel says, "A correction: Rush is not a '30-year-old hair band,' but rather, a 30 year old progressive rock band. Please don't lump them together with Ratt and Poison." Ben, I thank you, and mea maxima prog-rock culpa.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Engineered spider web
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DATE: 12/21/2004 04:24:08 AM
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Scientists at Jerusalem's Hebrew University used synthetic biology to crank out spider web fibers in the lab. They introduced certain genes from garden spiders into a virus that was used to infect caterpillar cells. Spider fibers then formed in the cultured cells.
"The research enabled us to determine the close connection that exists between the sequence, structure and functions of the proteins," said (researcher Uri) Gat. "From a practical viewpoint, mass production of fibers, whose diameter is one-thousandth of a millimeter, is likely to be useful in the future for manufacture of bulletproof vests, surgical thread, micro-conductors, optical fibers and fishing rods; even new types of clothing may be envisioned."
Link (to original press release) Link (to CNN article)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Treasure hunter
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DATE: 12/21/2004 04:34:52 AM
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In the December issue of my favorite print magazine Smithsonian, my old friend/Wired editor Michael Behar has a great article about Robert Graf, a treasure hunter seeking a centuries-old pirate's booty. The multimillion-dollar treasure might be hidden in a stone vault now underwater in the Seychelles. Then again, it might not be.
When I arrive on Mahé, it's easy to spot Graf in the crowd at the airport. He's the only guy wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the classic pirate ensign—a skull and crossbones. Tanned and fit, the treasure hunter seems relaxed—hardly what you'd expect from someone who has spent a third of his life obsessed with a long-dead pirate. Yet Graf is no laid-back islander. He's in-your-face intense right from the start. I'd barely heaved my suitcase into the trunk of his rusty compact car when he launched into a breathless retelling of how he'd voyaged some 10,000 miles from his Colorado home, married a Seychellois hotel reservations manager and spent more than $450,000 of his own money looking for a treasure that others have failed to find here for nearly a century.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Science News of the Year
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DATE: 12/21/2004 04:55:15 AM
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Science News have selected what they consider to be the most important science stories of the year. To read the full texts of their articles about the topics, you need a subscription. Also of interest though is the list of the most popular articles that are freely available online as determined by the number of visitors to the Web pages.
The most widely viewed news article described bias in a heads-or-tail toss of a coin. The most popular feature looked into the physics underlying a new generation of yo-yos. Other top articles reported on:
* DNA differences among various breeds of purebred dogs.
* Stone Age human relatives that were surprisingly small.
* Psychology investigations of how, and how well, people recognize lies.
* A Martian chemical that hints there was once life on the Red Planet.
* A gene mutation that resulted in a superstrong toddler.
* Technologies developed to mimic ocean animals.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Meet the Beastles
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DATE: 12/21/2004 07:11:05 AM
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A mash-up that was bound to happen sooner or later. Link (Thanks, Vincent!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scared of Santa
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DATE: 12/21/2004 08:10:40 AM
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A photo gallery of terrified children. Link (Thanks, Yi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Scanlon's heavy industry photography
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DATE: 12/21/2004 08:27:52 AM
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Photographer Kevin Scanlon has spent the last thirty years chronicling the elegance of railroads, steel mills, and heavy industry throughout the country. He shoots steel mills -- active and silent -- West Virginia coalfields, and the dwindling railway systems in America. As the gallery intro says, "His images capture an important historical era that spans the end of the twentieth century into the new millennium." He loves this world, and chronicles it with a sense of belonging.
He's also my uncle, and he is the person who first taught me to love photography -- and appreciate the grace of machines. I've enjoyed his work since before I could walk, and I'm overjoyed to see it online now, where the rest of the world can find it more easily. I'm a biased critic, but I really love my uncle's work. He says:
"I am still a child. I have always been fascinated with big things, especially big machines. My photography has tended toward industrial subjects. In the 1970s I started photographing steel mills as a documentary project. Over the years I found that I was reacting to the mills, especially the blast furnaces, more from an emotional than a documentary viewpoint. Something about their tremendous size is both scary and attractive, and ultimately magnificent."
"Standing near an operating blast furnace is like becoming that child again watching a robot monster movie on Saturday afternoon. The mill looms above. The men working around the bottom move cautiously and wear protective clothing. There is a constant roar from the blast stoves, the unique smell of hot metal-and there is the light. Molten iron emits a glowing light that is mesmerizing. You want to reach down and scoop up a handful of this flowing strand of light."
Image: Sunrise, Edgar Thomson Works. Link to gallery home, Link to steel mill photos (these are my favorite!), link to Pennsylvania railroad photos, Link to Appalachian railroad photos.
Merry Christmas, Uncle Kev, and thank you for capturing the soul of endangered machines.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: M$ sells Slate to WaPo
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DATE: 12/21/2004 09:51:26 AM
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Microsoft will sell the online publication Slate to the Washington Post. No editorial changes anticipated. Link (Thanks Steve Portigal)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Long Tail" from Chris Anderson to become book, blog
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DATE: 12/21/2004 10:03:46 AM
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Wired Magazine's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson says:
I've signed a deal to do The Long Tail book with Hyperion (in the US--Random House will be publishing it in the UK and others TBA elsewhere). I should be turning in the manuscript next fall for a spring 2006 release. Following John Battelle's great example, I'm starting The Long Tail blog to help me preview my book thinking and research in public and to tap the wisdom of crowds on this rich subject.
Link to thelongtail.com, also available in tasty, lean RSS. Link to online copy of original Long Tail essay which appeared in Wired Magazine.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kids' space books through the decades
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DATE: 12/21/2004 10:09:47 AM
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Great directory of kids' books about space and space exploration from 1950s to 1970s. (Image shown here from The Big Book of Space). Link (Thanks Armand!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Better quality audio for Mind Hacks interview
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DATE: 12/21/2004 11:27:57 AM
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Here's a BitTorrent file for a much better-sounding version of my interview with Matt Webb of Mind Hacks. (Here's the original entry). Link (Thanks, Torrentocracy!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: India freaks out over amateur teen sex phonecam video
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DATE: 12/21/2004 01:18:49 PM
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Snip:
The [oral] sex clip was recorded weeks ago and passed on by the bragging schoolboy to three of his friends and eventually made its way to video disc sellers in New Delhi. It did not draw much attention until an engineering student at a prestigious Indian college listed it for sale on [eBay's Indian subsidiary] Baazee.com... it's the talk of urban India, an obsession of newspapers and talk shows. (...)
Of greater concern to many in the business community is [Baazee.com exec Avnish] Bajaj's arrest under the Information Technology Act of 2000. The law makes a criminal offense of "publishing, transmitting, or causing to publish any information in electronic form, which is obscene." But it also says an Internet provider or Web site manager can't be held responsible if he acted diligently to remedy an electronic offense after learning of it. Baazee.com maintains it yanked the sex video listing as soon as customer service managers noticed it, and Bajaj had traveled to New Delhi to cooperate with authorities.
Pawan Duggal, a cyberlaw expert, said Bajaj's arrest has serious implications, especially when Internet usage in the country is rapidly growing and foreign investors are increasingly looking to India for e-commerce opportunities. "Ultimately we have to see bigger picture. We want to increase Internet penetration. All this will only happen if you allow service providers the freedom," he said.
Hehehe. He said "increase penetration." Link (via unwired, thanks John Parres, and Prion)
Update: Fleshbot picked up an interesting/creepy angle on the story as reported by Agence France-Presse: the incident is
reportedly being followed at the "highest levels" of US government as well. Fleshbot's editor asks, "Yes, the manager of Baazee.com is an Indian-born US citizen, but still. Is this the sort of case the US State Department usually gets involved in? We'd have thought they were busy with other things, like ... oh, war and stuff." Link
And reader John McCarthy says, "According to today’s Salon, Condi’s on the trail of the India phone sex scandal."
[Condoleezza] Rice is understood to have telephoned the U.S. ambassador in India, David Mulford, about the case. The Bush administration's national security advisor and future secretary of state has let it be known that she is furious about Bajaj's humiliating treatment. He is, after all, a U.S. citizen.
Link. "Appropriately enough," says John, "I had to watch a premercial for a Verizon videophone to read the full text."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Phonecams = kiss of death to Bollywood stars' privacy?
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DATE: 12/21/2004 02:06:32 PM
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BoingBoing reader Kevin Slavin says,
I just got back from Mumbai yesterday, and it's true about the scale of the Baazee uproar -- it's front page full-width headlines, first the scandal, then the arrest, then the arrest scandal, etc.
Worth noting is the echo to it, also front pages over there -- a phonecam snap of some Bollywood celebs kissing in public. It provoked a series of suprisingly fierce newspaper debates over Public Displays of Affection in India overall.
There's a funny logic behind that, considering that almost no one saw the event itself, and that the real Public is the viewers of the news networks which broadcasted the image. The distributed image was considered the documentation of public-ness, rather than a further expression of it.
Link to "Why the phone camera may be kiss of death to secret lives for Bollywood stars: A snatched image breaks a taboo and horrifies India's screen giants" in the Times Online (UK)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sandbag shelter wins architecture prize
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DATE: 12/21/2004 02:14:34 PM
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Karim sez: "We often don't think of temp shelters getting prestigious architecture awards - but this project out of California won a prize from the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Cool design and sustainable and easy to make." Link
UPDATE: Derek sez "Just saw the Sandbag Shelter link you dropped on the Boingx2 site. If you click over to the indicated page, check out the 4th pic on the top of the
page (listed as photo 6 at the bottom). Its the one with the completed huts.
Look in the background about 2/3 to the right. You'll see (what appears to
be) an airplane about half a second from a ground smashing explosion. The
smoke trail looks to start in the upper left then you see it headed straight
down and the plane is just above the mountain horizon when the pic was
snapped. Bizarre timing, eh?"
UPDATE:Hayes sez: "It's a piece of string or rope hanging from the line that you can see in the left side of the picture."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tijuana Christmas MP3s from hell
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DATE: 12/21/2004 03:41:11 PM
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El amigo de BoingBoing moblog kid dice:
"Tijuana Xmas! Aaaaaaahahaha! the cheesiest christmas songs, straight outta Tijuana! these are going straight onto a christmas cd to terrorize my family."
Link to Christmas MP3s from "The Border Brass." Link to image of front cover, Link to back.
Link to the label behind the album, part of a series of xmas releases. (Thanks, Shawn)
Reader Bill the Splut says,
"As the owner of scores of freakishly anti-Christmas albums that have been used to abuse my friends at this time of year, I was excited to buy "Tijuana Christmas" for a dollar. But I never used it. The reason isn't that LP isn't cheezy enough, but because the joke is too subtle. As an actual, admitted lifetime fan of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Tijuana Christmas is brilliant. They aren't just Xmas tunes--every one is a parody of a TJB hit. For instance, note how track 3 mimics A Taste of Honey. The rest of the tracks have similar musical jokes.
"And people would've caught those jokes. Remember, the TJB was a huge success before the Beatles came over. Anyone who was an American kid in the 60s had parents with most of Herb's LPs. Why else do you think that you find so many copies of Whipped Cream and Other Delights in every stack of used vinyl?"
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Planned Parenthood's "Pledge-a-Picket" program
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 12/21/2004 05:05:40 PM
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This is a funny idea. The more protesters who picket in front of a Planned Parenthood office, the more money Planned Parenthood gets.
Once a week, PPCT puts a sign outside its clinic that says, "Even Our Protesters Support Planned Parenthood." To date, the Pledge-a-Picket program has raised $18,000 for PPCT. While not a significant chunk of its overall revenues, Pledge-a-Picket contributes greatly to PPCT's patient assistance fund, which helps clients who don't have resources get the care they need.
Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: It's the torrent, stupid
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DATE: 12/21/2004 08:34:23 PM
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Mark Pesce rants about the recent shutdowns of BitTorrent supersites Suprnova.org and TorrentBits.com.
Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers?
Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly
serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution
of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving
birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be
able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious:
you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could
have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well
underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording
industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.
It's said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger
and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a
crash. This baby is now fully out of control.
Link (via waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Motherlode of free Bollywood MP3s
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DATE: 12/21/2004 08:48:25 PM
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Sweeter than a mouthful of jalebi. David Boyk says:
"While I was supposed to be studying for finals, I made a mix CD to introduce dubious Westerners to Bollywood. That didn't waste enough time, so I also made a big web site that has all the tracks from the CD, plus some more, and a lot of other information to explain Bollywood movies and music, and also to help a bit with language."
Far from a waste of time, David's terrific site includes a "bollywood for dummies" primer, and a very helpful list of common Hindi words you'll encounter. As for the MP3s, man -- there are some serious gems in here, in particular the rockin' 1960s numbers. This may not be the largest Hindi MP3 collection online, but it's a terrific place to start.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywood Torrents
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DATE: 12/22/2004 12:35:37 AM
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This site offers a similar service to the recently-killed Suprnova.org and Torrentbits -- except this one's 100% Bollywood. Movies, music, stage dramas, TV shows. Link. And if you dig that, you may also like desitorrents.com: Link. (Thanks, Anil Kandangath)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: ScienceMatters@Berkeley
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DATE: 12/22/2004 04:17:24 AM
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In my new issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley:
* Synthetic biology that could cure blindness
* A flare-up in solar physics
* The fly guy and the genetics of Drosophila
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Twin helps twin escape jail
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DATE: 12/22/2004 04:29:39 AM
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I like it when prankster twins conduct fun social experiments. This is a great one. Twins in Sweden swapped clothing so that one could just walk out of the jail where he was incarcerated. The problem is that the twin who agreed to be locked up quickly decided the plan wasn't fair. From the Associated Press:
Faced with the prospect of spending the night in jail, his brother admitted the ruse to prison guards.
"We knew there was a certain risk of a mix up, so we took some measures," said Lars-Aake Pettersson, the warden for the jail. "But this was apparently not enough. They managed to dupe us."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hyperreal beach resort
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DATE: 12/22/2004 04:36:40 AM
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While Japan demolishes one of its famed indoor "outdoor" simulacradomes, a Zeppelin hangar in Brandenburg, Germany is transformed into a massive indoor beach resort. From The Guardian:
"On the night of Tropical Islands' gala launch, the transformation from airship hangar to island paradise is nearly complete: there are still a few coiled up hoses about, and the rainforest plants look a bit dusty, but most things are in place. The sand along the lip of the Balinese lagoon is a pristine white. Round the other side of the rainforest, the island in the centre of the tropical sea - a body of water about the size of four Olympic swimming pools - is set for the premiere of what will be a nightly stage show. The scale of the operation puts one in mind of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, or a Martian colony, or other things that don't exist in real life. They have trucked in 30,000m cubed of soil and 500 plant species for their rainforest. The speakers which broadcast insect noises are shaped like rocks. And the building itself, it goes without saying, is extraordinary, the biggest inside of anything you will ever see. It makes your head spin. This place doesn't just have a climate. It has weather. As the place fills up, the extra moisture in the air condenses on the roof. It starts to rain a little bit."
Link (via Near, Near Future)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Taste-tests of crazy Asian drinks
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DATE: 12/22/2004 08:32:30 AM
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Comrade Todd Lappin says, "A friend just sent me this link to a site that offers hilarious taste tests of unusual Asian canned drinks. Take, for example, this review of basil seed drink (which, BTW, I happen to enjoy, despite the fact that it is indeed sort of like drinking sweetened tadpole larvae)."
"Basil Seed Drink with Honey may just be the epitome of non-thirst-quenching drinks. Mmmm... very sweet, with nary a bit o' liquid. Instead, the tongue is met with an onslaught of slick gelatin capsules that, through a nefarious mixture of slipperiness, honey, and yes, sheer numbers, forcefully override the throat's core instinct not to swallow tadpoles, or chilled vomit. And yet, I can't say it wasn't fun. Yes, yes I can."
"Though I don't always agree with their evaluations," Todd says, "I am personally grateful to the intrepid souls who compiled this resource, if only for their candid review of Grass Jelly Drink, which even I have not yet mustered the courage to sample."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Beyond torrents
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DATE: 12/22/2004 08:36:57 AM
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BoingBoing reader Adam Fields says, "I wrote a piece somewhat in response to Mark Pesce's bit about trackerless torrents (Link to previous BoingBoing post). I think P2P is the content industry's worse nightmare... to date. But there's other stuff coming. What happens when the entire music library of the human race fits on a card that's cheap and small enough to hand out with a cup of coffee?" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Cheese Steak Ninjas
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DATE: 12/22/2004 08:40:59 AM
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BoingBoing reader sputnik says:
Tony Luke's is an infamous steak & hoagie joint in South Philly, patronized by Judge and Mobster alike. I was looking at their site today, and came across the TONY LUKE'S flash VIDEO GAME.
It's SERIOUSLY cheesy, and completely South Philly, starring the owner, Tony Luke Jr.
You shoot blonde haired ninjas running amok at a South Philly wedding hall, trying to thwart the plans of the EVIL DR. MONELLA, who has stolen the Tony Luke's recipe disk! Man. It doesn't get better than this.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: World's largest solar power site goes live
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DATE: 12/22/2004 08:49:39 AM
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The 30-acre installation was installed in Germany recently by Powerlight, a company based in Berkeley, CA.
PowerLight's three Bavarian solar parks, consisting of 57,600 silicon-and- aluminum panels, will generate 10 megawatts of electricity -- enough to power 9,000 German homes. The amount of electricity produced is much less than power plants fueled by coal or natural gas, but with very low operating costs, the solar project is expected quickly to turn a profit while emitting zero pollution. Schroeder's left-of-center Social Democrat-Green coalition has turned Germany into the world leader in renewable energy since it took office in 1998. Billions of dollars have been spent on wind and solar projects, and Schroeder, in a politically risky move, has sharply increased taxes on petroleum products in an attempt to reduce consumption of conventional fuels.
Link (Thanks, Wayne)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Custom-painted Bollywood posters
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DATE: 12/22/2004 09:04:14 AM
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BoingBoing reader Alex says,
In case you didn'ts know this type of service, a french studio offers a nice service : "Limona Studio offers you the opportunity to commission your own hand-painted movie poster on canvas. From your pictures, the best artists of Bollywood selected by Limona Studio, will create a very unique and colorful painting in Bollywood style." Watcha !
Link, and Link to post on Alex's blog.
Update: Shahrukh sez:
I'm a regular Boing Boing reader from India. Guess that makes me know a little more about Bollywood than the westerners. Love ur coverage on the stuff, but the pic shown in this post isn't exactly Bollywood. "Bollywood" refers to the HINDI film industry rather than the entire Indian film industry.
That's because they're made in Bombay (now Mumbai) hence B-ollywood. Get it? There's also Tollywood. The Bengali film industry which is located in Tollygunge, which is Calcutta (now Kolkata), in India. See they're all still part of the Indian film industry but not "Bollywood. That pic is from the "South Indian" film industry and isn't "Bollywood".
Thanks, Shahrukh!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Battelle looks back on 2004 predictions
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DATE: 12/22/2004 02:22:56 PM
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John Battelle -- who, among other things, is BoingBoing's Ruben Kincaid -- looks back on a bunch of predictions he made for 2004 on this blog post. Compare what panned out with what fizzled out, and read the results of John's tech prophecies on search, software, IPOs, RSS, and more. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wardriving Maui
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DATE: 12/22/2004 02:31:48 PM
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You can take the geek out of the hotspot, but you can't take the hotspot out of the geek. Author, wireless tech guru, and all-around super nice guy Mike Outmesguine recently took a vacation in Hawaii, and spent much of it wardriving for wireless networks. If that ain't nerd cred, I don't know what is. Snip from the blog account of his journey, and his technical findings:
The night was humid. With the air conditioner on high, I drove North towards Kahului. The laptop sitting
on the center console continuously pinging at the networks being discovered. “Man, there’s a lot of wireless
around here,” I said.
Which shouldn’t have surprised me. The island of Maui in the state
of Hawaii is a popular tourist destination with hundreds of hotels and time-share condominiums supporting over 2
million tourists a year.
Haleakala, the dormant volcano reaching to 10,023 feet, is home to
”Science City”, a research facility and observatory. Maui
fosters a strong technology community boasting state tax incentives, a modern
research & technology park for industry. And Hawaii is the hub of the
Southern Cross
Network, a submarine fiber optic network capable of providing 1.2 terabits of bandwidth from Hawaii to mainland US,
and 480 gigabits of capacity to Fiji, Australia and New Zealand.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Non-Asians eat crazy gross snack foods, too
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DATE: 12/22/2004 02:41:17 PM
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Following up on today's earlier post about Wacky Asian Soft Drinks, and an earlier BB item about Korean BBQ chrysalis, we now direct your attention to "Steve Don't Eat it," a blog that chronicles grossout food experiments conducted by a dude named Steve.
I'm pretty sure that Urkel-O's and pickled pork rinds trump those cans of basil seed drink by a food fear factor of fifty. Japan and Korea do not have a monopoly on icky snacks and soft drinks. Link (Thanks, Dogzilla)
Also, an update on that chrysalis snack story (gag). Reader Kyungjoon Lee says, "You said they were caterpillars, but I think that's a little misleading. They're silkworms. The only chrysalis we eat in Korea are from silkworms. The chrysalis is what the silkworm becomes when it finishes spinning its cocoon. We boil the cocoon, unravel the silk, and eat what's inside. It's not *that* popular, but you can see chrysalis vendors at national parks or hiking trails."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Merry Capitalism! God bless us, every cent!
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DATE: 12/22/2004 02:47:31 PM
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"E-Z bake bankruptcy," or "How Chase Bank One stole Christmas." Snip from WaPo story:
Somewhere in China, frantic factory workers cannot make enough toy automatic teller machines for clamoring American children.
"I wish every kid in America could have an ATM," says Michael Searl, the onetime stockbroker who created the Youniverse ATM Machine, a highly evolved piggy bank that receives and dispenses real cold cash, not that fake play stuff. "Why wouldn't I want every kid to have one?"
Tweens and beyond can insert the supplied ATM card into the silver machine, punch in their PIN, be greeted by name on the electronic display, peer into the pretend security camera and wait for that seminal capitalistic moment -- when crisp bills miraculously appear, ripe for the plucking. Unlike in a real ATM, a cash drawer opens in the toy ATM, allowing an avaricious child to grab every last cent and run. What do you want for $24.95?
Link (Thanks, John Parres!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mark Dery's Wunderkammer
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DATE: 12/22/2004 02:50:19 PM
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Author and culture critic Mark Dery has launched a blog called The Gilded Hack.
Mark says he'll "be writing occasional, desultory screeds about unpopular culture, unnatural history, weird sex, fringe science, media pathologies, Xtreme theory, bottom-feeder subcultures, and whatever else catches my fancy." Mark's writings have always engaged me, frequently informed me, sometimes confused me, never bored me, and almost always made my head spin with delight. Full disclosure: In his opening post, Mark paid Boing Boing what I consider to be the ultimate compliment. He likened our site (and others) to a postmodern cabinet of curiosities, my own personal meta-obsession.
Some of my favorite blogs reclaim the radical promise inherent in the notion of an online journal, letting casual passersby eavesdrop on a stranger’s innermost thoughts, see the world through another mind’s eye. Call it the Being John Malkovich effect. The cultural critic Julian Dibbell had it just about right when he theorized the weblog as postmodern wunderkammer—an idiosyncratic jumble of found objects (in this case, ideas and images, facts and fictions scavenged from the global mediastream) that “reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the ‘discovery’ of the networked world.” Some of the most consistently enlightening and entertaining blogs are the inscrutable products of borderline obsessive-compulsives. Like the baroque “wonder closets” invoked by Dibbell, blogs such as bOING bOING, The Obscure Store, Kottke.org, and Die, Puny Humans are omnium gatherums, overstuffed with anything that catches the fancy of their eccentric curators.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mayor of Bogota uses mimes for public behavior control
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DATE: 12/22/2004 04:35:08 PM
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This is brilliant. A March article from the March 2004 Harvard University Gazette has a great profile of mayor of Bogota, Colombia. He's a former academic and has been using mimes to encourage people not to jaywalk or behave irresponsibly in public.
Another innovative idea was to use mimes to improve both traffic and citizens' behavior. Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians who didn't follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. The program was so popular that another 400 people were trained as mimes.
Link (Thanks, Sid!)
UPDATE:
Octavio Isaac Rojas Orduña sez: "Antanas Mockus was Bogota's mayor for the 2001-2003 period. Luis Eduardo Garzón is in his place now. So, this news originally took place during 2003."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Hello Kitty Xmas tree in Hong Kong
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DATE: 12/22/2004 07:05:42 PM
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Snapshot of a Hong Kong Christmas tree trimmed head to toe in Hello Kitty. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Disney porn for sale on eBay
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DATE: 12/22/2004 07:12:52 PM
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Fleshbot's got the downlow on a vintage, X-rated, Disney-inspired comic for sale:
Here's your chance to own a piece of art/porn history: the original printing plate for legendary illustrator and comic artist Wally Wood's "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" went up for sale on eBay this week. Wood, an EC Comics artist and one of the original illustators for Mad Magazine, produced the work in 1967 for The Realist, Paul Krassner's seminal counterculture journal; Disney chose not to sue Wood for his depiction of dozens of its signature characters in naughty (though not explicit) positions, but a subsequent bootleg poster edition of the image prompted Disney to file a lawsuit, which was later settled out of court.
Link to auction, and Link to Fleshbot item which contains pointers to other locations where you can buy copies of the print -- as well as auctions for vintage copies of The Realist.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: CD cover art for Bollywood MP3 roundup
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DATE: 12/22/2004 07:20:36 PM
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Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post (Link) about an exxxcellent website offering MP3s of Bollywood film songs (and a helpful primer on Bollywood appreciation for newbies), reader Rick Elizaga says:
"Inspired by David Boyk's excellent Bollywood mp3 compilation Bollywood for the Skeptical, I slapped together some printable album art to accompany it. Available in PDF format on my site, for free, of course.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photos of Mass Tomb near Prague
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DATE: 12/22/2004 07:36:26 PM
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BoingBoing reader Alex says,
Sedlec is a small suburb of Kutna Hora, which you can get to in about an hour on the train from Prague. Just off the main road into Kutna Hora, there's a small chapel, set in a very green graveyard. There is a statue of a Saint outside, with a halo of stars made from gold metal. There's a low-key, local restaurant opposite. The church-yard is quiet. The church itself has spires, and at the top are skull and crossbone motifs.
Sedlec is not actually a church - it's an Ossuary: a tomb. Inside, it contains the remains of about 40,000 people. They have been used to decorate the building: their skulls cover the walls, their limbs hang from the ceiling as a massive chandelier and their bones form a huge coat of arms on one wall. I spent an afternoon in the place and have loads of creepy photos up on my site.
Link
Update: Reader Lucas Emery says, "I was excited to see your post about the Kostnice bone ossuary. I first heard of it in a Smithsonian magazine article when I was in, like, the eighth grade and over the spring I was lucky enough to finally get to see it up close and personal! I've got a few cc licensed pictures up on flickr for the curious. My next dream travel destination is the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo. Spooky!" Link.
Reader Darren Barefoot says,
"Here are two photos I took when visiting that creepy place last winter: Link, and Link 2. The latter one won me a free point-and-shoot camera from Backpacker magazine.
Another interesting note about the ossuary is that if you want to take photos, you have to pay an additional fee. This is presumably to mitigate the postcard and poster revenue lost from their tiny giftshop. The fee, in my recollection, was nominal. I figured it was a reasonable compromise approach to the thorny issue of photography in tourist attractions. If you should find yourself in Kutna Hora (a small town near Sedlec), don't miss Church of St. Barbara. It's my favourite European catheral."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogging death
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DATE: 12/22/2004 07:59:43 PM
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My friend Jen Collins runs a blog under the pen-name Kitty Bukkake -- an online diary, in the purest sense of the word. A first-person documentary. Her mom recently passed away from cancer, and Jen blogged about this, too, with that same raw voice. Link to the post she wrote the day after. (Thanks, Susannah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Clunky vintage accessories for mobile phones
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DATE: 12/22/2004 08:08:54 PM
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Technokitschy vintage accessories for your cellphone from "Mockia."
The BRICKIA, DESKIA and POKIA all plug into your mobile and work as a headset (although hardly hands free) The BRICKIA is a genuine vintage 80s mobile phone converted into a plug in headset. (...) The DESKIA is perfect for any office environment. Take calls from your mobile on the big chunky 60's 70's and 80's phones. There is nothing like holding a traditional earpiece close to your head to maximize your telecom pleasure. The POKIA is a vintage telephone handset in a selection of fine colours and styles...
Link (Thanks, Mason)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: PlayStation knockoffs made by Chinese prisoners
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DATE: 12/22/2004 08:11:43 PM
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Sony recently cracked a network of manufacturers, subcontractors, and factories in China that collectively produced over 50,000 black market PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles and controllers per day. Most of the labor was produced by prison inmates, according to Engadget's item: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scary bathroom interfaces of India
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DATE: 12/23/2004 12:07:07 AM
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Reader Anil Kandangath says, "Here is a glorious journey through bathrooms in India. I found this hilarious since I've actually seen bathrooms like these." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Overheard in Hollywood during the holidays
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DATE: 12/23/2004 12:09:13 AM
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"You go to war with the parents you have... not the parents you might want or wish to have." 10:32pm, woman speaking into cellphone.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Photomicroscopic Winter beauty from Clayton James Cubitt
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DATE: 12/23/2004 12:13:16 AM
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A Winter Beauty story shot by Clayton James Cubitt for the December 2004 issue of Metropop Magazine. Link to gallery of photographs. Photomicroscopy snowflake images based on the photos of Kenneth Libbrecht, snowcrystals.com.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Backyard mecha
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DATE: 12/23/2004 02:37:01 AM
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Carlos Owens, a 26-year-old steelworker who lives near Anchorage, Alaska is building a "mobile suit gundam," a robotic exoskeleton, in his backyard. From a CNET report:
"This is a concept that's been around for a long time," Owens said in a telephone interview. "But I'm not going to wait for the other guy to come out and make it when I've got the capability to do it myself."
When completed, the idea is for the pilot to be able to strap himself into a central, padded compartment, and then control the mecha with the motions of his own body. When the pilot walks, the mecha walks. Raise an arm and open a hand, and the mecha does the same, with 46 possible movements planned.
Owens said he can't afford top-of-the line equipment, like infrared sensors and electronics that would govern the motion. Instead he's using a hydraulic system to transfer the motion of his limbs to the larger structure, and a gas engine mounted on the back to generate the power needed. In all, the system can exert about 3,500 pounds per square inch, or more than enough to set his ton and a half creation in motion, he said.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Building Better Batteries
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DATE: 12/23/2004 02:37:38 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is about new battery designs for mobile devices, from an onboard nuclear trickle charger that harnesses radioactive energy to a microbattery made with the same techniques used to fabricate computer chips.
"In late 18th century, Italian physicist Luigi Galvani shocked the public by demonstrating that an amputated frog's leg twitched when touched with certain metals. Galvani was convinced that energy stored in the frog's leg caused the jerk. He called the accumulated juice "animal electricity." Galvani's friend Alessandro Volta called it nonsense. To prove that the energy came from the metal, not the flesh, Volta eventually made a sandwich of silver, moist cardboard, and zinc. His device also spurred frogs' legs to spasm. In the end, Volta won the intellectual battle and also invented the battery. Two hundred years later, the technology hasn't changed much."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Meat-scented air fresheners for your car
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DATE: 12/23/2004 07:07:02 AM
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Link (Thanks, Jonno)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Why blood banks shouldn't use SSNs for ID
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Snip:
100,000 California donors receive identity theft warning after a single laptop is stolen from a mobile blood bank. It was being used to register donors. "The blood bank will no longer require Social Security numbers from its donors, and has revised procedures for handling computer hardware and other sensitive equipment."
Link (via Declan McCullagh's politech)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: World's smallest baby
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DATE: 12/23/2004 07:44:58 AM
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When Rumaisa Rahman was born 15 weeks before her due date at a Chicago hospital, she weighed just 8.6 ounces, less than a can of soda. Three months later, she now weighs 2 pounds 10 ounces. Rumaisa's twin sister Hiba is slightly larger and may leave the hospital this month. Doctors expect Rumaisa to stay for a few additional weeks, but fortunately the prognosis is very good. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Death Church in Poland
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DATE: 12/23/2004 08:02:36 AM
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BoingBoing reader Kamil Antosiewicz says,
"Reading the BoingBoing post about mass tomb in Kutna Hora near Prague, I realized that here in Poland we've got a similar sacral place. It's located in a village called Czeremna, near a famous spa center called Kudowa Zdroj in lower Silesia. About 24 thousand human skulls are gathered there (3000 in a main hall, the rest in a cellar). A priest named Waclaw Tomaszek dig them out in during the XVIII century, and the chapel itself was built in the 1780s. The human remains mostly date from the 30-year war (1618-1648) and epidemic disease which killed thousands of people in that period. You can check out some pictures here: Link (the text is in polish but the pics are clickable), as well as here: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The 8 bits of Christmas
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DATE: 12/23/2004 08:08:00 AM
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Holiday-themed chiptunes from 8bitpeoples: 8 classic carols performed on 8 different videogame consoles and home computers. Link (Thanks, Marc)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Call of Cthulhu silent film nearly done
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DATE: 12/23/2004 08:11:35 AM
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BoingBoing reader Malcolm says,
The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society have nearly finished making a 1920s/30s style black and white silent film of "The Call of Cthulhu", and they've put a quicktime trailer on their site.
It looks really bizarre: they seem to have done quite a good job of mimicking the visual style of films of the period, particularly the horrifying rituals of the cultists.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: J-Pop Van-Mod
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DATE: 12/23/2004 08:17:15 AM
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Spotted in Japan: Vans tricked out with flares, ground effects, and crazy paint jobs that serve as mobile shrines to J-Pop megastar Ayumi Hamasaki. Link (Thanks, Fungus Mungus).
Update: BoingBoing reader Jim Appleton says, "The incomparable Masamania has at least two whole galleries of these vans. Masa's [warning: Engrish] indifference to Ayumi herself is typical Masa: 'Sorry but I am not fan of her, because breast problem.'" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Battelle's tech predictions for 2005
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DATE: 12/23/2004 08:20:23 AM
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John Battelle gazes knowingly into a crystal ball, and reports "things that I believe have a reasonable chance of occurring in 2005 with regard to the intersection of media, technology, and search." Really good stuff here, consider it required reading. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of pirated Chinese DVD zen
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DATE: 12/23/2004 08:32:08 AM
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Image: the cover of a pirated "Kill Bill" DVD in China with the headline "HERE COMES THE BRINE." BoingBoing reader Jon Rahoi says:
I'm living in mainland China for a couple of months. The dearth of English TV and the terrible quality of Chinese shows made me set out, on my very first day, to a local DVD store.
They're on every street. These people must listen to and watch a fair number of movies and CDs. But since the average wage here is, very roughly, US$150 a month, and the average DVD costs about US$15 back home, how can they afford it? Do they get a continental discount?
I walked in and got right to the discount rack. Dozens of American and foreign movies were on sale for 6RMB, about 75¢! The full-price ones ranged from 12-18RMB ($1.50 - $2.25.) Obviously, these are copies, fakes, pirate booty. But how good are they? For the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I bought 35 of them.
(...) The DVD cases are works of pirate art. They are all made in the same style from hard glossy cardboard. Cheaply made, but professionally graphically designed. They're so uniform, you can tell they almost all come from one maker. What makes them art, though, are the mistakes: made by a genius dyslexican who flunked the TOEFL. English literacy here is almost zero. A Chinese person picking up a movie to buy would not read the title, the quotes, the description, or the credits if they were in English. But any American movie case has to have English, right?
Here's a report on Jon's blog, Link, and here's another entry on the in-theater experience -- "To The Chinaplex": Link
BoingBoing reader Charles Lin adds,
I lived in China for a short while, and the pirated DVD's tend to have OCR errors. How they got "brine" from "bride" is a horrid mistake, but especially when it comes to recognizing movie blurbs and the blocks of credits on the back, most of the errors don't appear to be typing transcription errors, but OCR errors from a scanner. Much of the box art doesn't look like the American version because it's scanned in from foreign posters for the movies, which often are of a slightly different design.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 1965 Ski Mask HOWTO
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DATE: 12/23/2004 09:30:21 AM
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If your grannie knits you one of these, run like hell, then call the cops. Excerpts from a "roll your own ski mask" article from a mid-'60s issue of McCall's Magazine. You know, they have fetish websites for this sort of thing nowadays. Link. The horror. The HORROR. (thanks, Cameron)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Eco-bus runs on taco grease
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DATE: 12/23/2004 09:39:57 AM
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In Mexico City, a group of ecologists are wandering from taqueria to taqueria in search of waste cooking oil to fuel an old school bus for an environmental awareness tour from California to Costa Rica.
The bus, which ran on avocado oil during a week-long drive down from the U.S. border, is being used to prove that vehicles can run on recycled fuels that pollute less than gasoline as it chugs around oil refineries, factories and eateries collecting vegetable oil.
"We're running low, we have to score some oil today," said environmentalist Zak Zaidman as crew members called around the greasiest-sounding eateries in the city's phone directory.
Link to Reuters story, Link to Tucson Citizen article. (Thanks, Isaac)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pulp Xmas
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DATE: 12/23/2004 09:56:07 AM
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Video mashup of Pulp Fiction with vintage Rankin-Bass holiday animation. Link (Thanks, Perry E. Metzger, also spotted on Adam Fields)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Babes in space
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DATE: 12/23/2004 09:59:13 AM
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Fun gallery of old science fiction pulp covers featuring babes organized by category: Babes with Blasters, Babes in Bondage, Babes of Myth, Alien Babes, Babes with a Grip, Robobabes, Babes in Charge, Experimental Babes, Babes under Glass. Link (Thanks, Avi!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Starbucks email prank
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DATE: 12/23/2004 12:12:26 PM
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Read what happens when a new Starbucks corporate office employee gets into a bizarre email exchange with a prankster pretending to be the CEO / president.
I know this may seem petty, but Ms. Crisholm should have told you how we feel about goatees or facial hair in our corporate offices. While I realize they may be considered stylish and acceptable in our Starbucks outlets, we ask that men refrain from wearing them in our corporate offices as we are trying to uphold a certain image. That includes earrings and other piercings on men, which I do not tolerate at all. Unfortunately, there's little we can do about the appearance of our counter people no matter how much we try. I certainly wish this weren't the case, because most of them have absolutely no loyalty to our brand, and they have done nothing but tarnish our image. I hope you understand our position. Please have it removed by Monday.
Link (Thanks, Scott!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ocular mod
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DATE: 12/24/2004 02:45:27 AM
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Developed by the Netherlands Institute for Innovative Ocular Surgery, the 3.5mm Cosmetic Extraocular Implant (brand name: JewelEye) is available in various shapes and apparently can be self-installed.
"Earrings, make-up and more recently tattoos and piercings are accepted forms of body cosmetics. Surprisingly, no jewelry is available for the organ that is most important in social interactions, the eye."
Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Iranian graphics
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DATE: 12/24/2004 03:28:17 AM
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Last week, my wife stumbled upon a small monograph of the work of Iranian graphic designer Reza Abedini. Arabic Farsi Arabic (!) script is naturally beautiful, and I think Abedini's compositions, with text often a central graphic element, are incredibly fresh and emotional. Today, my friend Anne Sanger sent me a link to a great "Who's Who in Iranian Posters" page with links to even more information about the country's happening graphic design scene. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Public Record
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DATE: 12/24/2004 06:15:11 AM
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BB pal Terre Thaemlitz, who created my personal directory page Web site, just designed the new "Public Record" archive for audio activist ensemble Ultra-red. It's faxtastic.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Insight into ocular mod
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DATE: 12/24/2004 06:46:35 AM
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Following up on my earlier post today about JewelEye, Shannon Larratt of the excellent Body Modification Ezine points to his wife Rachel's personal account of Cosmetic Extraocular Implantation. Shannon says Rachel was the first American to have the procedure done. And I was very wrong in my original post: self-installation is clearly not an option. Rachel writes:
"The procedure itself involved injecting a liquid to elevate and separate the layers of the eyeball, which helps the surgeon with the placement of the implant under the conjunctiva (in old age, many people build up calcium deposits in this area, so our eye is actually designed to handle material stuck there). A small flap is cut, and the implant is inserted. After it was in place, they began suctioning out the liquid that was used to elevate the layers. After a few weeks, the liquid will dissipate and the implant will become even more visible."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New bluetooth phone virus
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:07:19 AM
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BB reader moblog kid says, "A new mobile virus disguises itself as the game metal gear solid, disables all antivral software, and sends the cabir/sexxxy.sis virus to anyone in bluetooth distance. What i dont get is why there is no payload!" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing stats under construction
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:14:49 AM
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A quick housekeeping note: We're taking our web stats offline for a bit, while we dig into some technical considerations to ensure maximum clarity. We'll make them public again when that's complete.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Taco grease eco-bus update
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:23:00 AM
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BB reader Chris from Bay Area Vegetarians says, "It was cool to see the earlier post on boingboing about the bio diesel busy. A friend of mine is actually on board and part of the team. They have a blog documenting the trip. It's full of cool photos!"
Link
And reader Eric Case says, "Over at the BiodieselBlog, I posted about something similar back in April: Link. They're using the oil left over from fish processing as biodiesel: Link."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Space Station sightings
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:27:10 AM
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BoingBoing reader Uncle Horn Head says, "I heard on NPR this afternoon that in the coming days it will be possible to see the International Space Station with the naked eye. NASA has posted a massive list of world cities with optimal viewing times."
That spot was a chat between Ira Flatow and Alex Chadwick on the NPR program "Day to Day," to which I'm a contributing tech correspondent. Here's the audio for that segment: Link
Reader Philip Downey adds, "The site heavens-above.com tells you when ANY satellite is going over anywhere in the world. One neat feature is going back a day in time to figure out what you saw last night."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: EPIC's New Year Privacy Resolutions
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:29:33 AM
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Chris Hoofnagle from EPIC says, "Marc Rotenberg and I came up with this list of ten privacy resolutions for 2005. Don't just try to lose weight next year, try to lose the data brokers too." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Gingerbread Kama Sutra
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:32:43 AM
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These desperate amateur cookies will do anything to stay warm. Site includes recipes. Link (Thanks, Rose).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dutch eDonkey site owners released
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:50:08 AM
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Snip from the Register:
Seven people arrested last week by Dutch law enforcement officials for offering links to allegedly copyright-infringing content have been released. The group shared thousands of movies, games and music files through eDonkey and BitTorrent files.
Dutch lobby organisation BREIN remains likely to start criminal procedures against the site owners. BREIN believes that warez group DVD Europe Team, which shares illegal copies of movies as soon as they are released in cinemas, is part of the group that hosted the files.
Link (Via DMCA-Discuss)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bad Type
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DATE: 12/24/2004 08:54:59 AM
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Cool work from a graphic designer who loves typography. Link (thanks, Siege)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Chewie the Rookie Wookie
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DATE: 12/24/2004 09:00:49 AM
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BB reader Isaac says, "Remember the days before George Lucas so tightly controlled the Star Wars franchise? The days when there could be a Star Wars Christmas Special on TV? Cleaning out my garage, I found an old 45 RPM record from 1977: The Rebel Force Band, performing "Chewie the Rookie Wookie" (sort of Motown) and "May the Force Be With You" (imagine a lounge singer doing a version of "Sunrise, Sunset" - that's what it sounds like). Of course, nowadays something like this would never get off the ground; it's just not as sophisticated as Ewoks, Jar Jar Binks, or that Jake kid."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: MP3s of Yugoslavia's Fake '50s Mexican Songsters
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DATE: 12/24/2004 09:15:34 AM
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Amazing site with MP3s, artist info, and background on Mexican-themed entertainment from Yugoslavia in the 1950s.
BB reader Dan Berkes says, "Meet the Slavic Mexicans! How a Cold War lover's quarrel resulted in one Eastern European nation's adoption of Mexican music and movies. Does this make Tito the father of the mashup?"
In 1948, the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (May 7, 1892 - May 4, 1980) broke up with the Soviet leader Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Dec. 21, 1879 - March 5, 1953) and Yugoslavia was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union. There were tanks on both sides of the border and Tito's regime imprisoned many Soviet sympathizers (real or just suspected). Russian films were suddenly not so popular anymore.
Yugoslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment. They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?
Link. I'm a big fan of Mexican popular music from that same period, but this is pretty mindblowing. Behind the iron sombrero.
Update:
BoingBoing reader meeroh says, "Naturally, the Yu-Mex mashup was parodied, with the parodies often far better than the originals. One of my favorite parodies songs is here (MP3), and the somewhat poorly transcribed lyrics are here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Merry Geeksmas
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DATE: 12/24/2004 09:37:56 AM
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Image: Holiday nude shot by tech law journalist Declan McCullagh, founder of the awesome tech news list politech.
Link to full-size.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: East LA Xmas tamale pilgrimage
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DATE: 12/24/2004 01:06:08 PM
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Phonecam snapshots from a family pilgrimage to the best tamale shop in Los Angeles, Tamales Lilianas, on First street near Cesar Chavez. We passed some beautiful makeshift Christmas altares in the street, big murals of la virgen de guadalupe all decked out with tinsel and fake pine wreaths and Hello Kitty and blinkie Snoopy lights. And guys on the street were selling pirated CDs of of Mexican holiday pop music. Cheesy carols from Los Bukis and stuff, bootlegged, on blankets. I love the street in East LA this time of year.
Tamales are an essential holiday tradition in Mexico and in every place where Mexico is felt. Christmas without them is like going tree-less. There's always a long line at Lilianas if you wait until Christmas Eve to go pick them up, but the longest of lines is a small penitencia to pay for that fragrant corn vapor that fills the car on the drive home. If there is a perfect scent, this is it. I sat in the back seat, with the bag pulled up around my face like I was huffing glue. Maybe Liliana sneaks a little crack into the masa or something. Me intoxican. De dulce, de rajas con carne, de pollo con chile verde, y sencillo, de elote. Irresistibles.
Larger phone-snap images: Steaming hot bag of fresh tamales, La Virgen on Cesar Chavez, and long line outside Lilianas.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy holidays from BoingBoing.
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DATE: 12/25/2004 08:22:37 AM
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Image: Xeni's family tree.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More kitschy Star Wars holiday vinyl
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DATE: 12/26/2004 09:38:50 AM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, reader Sewer Urchin says,
The Rebel Force Band isn't the only rare Star Wars music out there. As scary as it may sound, there was a Star Wars Christmas album, and as you will hear, it's probably the worst holiday music ever recorded.
With songs like "What Can You Get A Wookiee For Christmas (When He Already Owns A Comb?)" and "R2-D2 We Wish You A Merry Christmas" performed by a pre-fame Bon Jovi, your ears will be begging for mercy. The force was definitely not with the creators of this album.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Art from old weapons in Cambodia
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:24:38 PM
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Organizers of Peace Art Project Cambodia describe their venture's three main goals:
"Introducing Young Cambodian Artists to new artistic methodology and materials and training them in metalwork skills, producing, exhibiting and selling sculpture made from de-commissioned weapons & promoting a Weapon-Free Society and Young Cambodian Artists in Cambodia and internationally... These sculptures are political art at its most powerful - relics of a violent past transformed into expressions of hope for a more peaceful future."
Link (Thanks, Reevo)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Lessig announces Code v2
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:26:59 PM
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BoingBoing reader Alex says,
On his blog, Lawrence Lessig has announced a new experiment for his first book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace. He's going to post version 1 (that's the original published version) to a wiki under a Creative Commons license. Updates and corrections will then be supervised by "chapter captains", and around June time Lessig will take the contents of the wiki, and mould it into Code v2. All royalties from the book will be donoated to Creative Commons, and the wiki will live on 'for ever'. He has an email address up if you have expertise and are interested in volunteering to be a "chapter captain".
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Can you copyright a typeface? BB readers debate.
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:27:40 PM
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[NSFNLG warning: Not Safe For Non-LawGeeks.] A recent post on BoingBoing sparked debate among some readers about whether or not U.S. copyright law makes it possible to protect typefaces. Digital music guru Jim Griffin maintains that the answer is no. He points to Volume 37 of the Code of Federal Regulations (Link) as one of several portions of US law that back his assertion. Snip from the text of the law, with his comments:
"The following are examples of works not subject to copyright and applications for registration of such works cannot be entertained: (...) typeface as typeface" 37 CFR 202.1(e).
House of Representatives report accompanied the new copyright law when passed in 1976:
"The Committee has considered, but chosen to defer, the possibility of protecting the design of typefaces. A 'typeface' can be defined as a set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system and are intended to be embodied in articles whose intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other cognizable combinations of characters. The Committee does not regard the design of typeface, as thus defined, to be a copyrightable 'pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work' within the meaning of this bill and the application of the dividing line in section 101." H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, 94th Congress, 2d Session at 55 (1976), reprinted in1978 U.S. Cong. and Admin. News 5659, 5668.
It's also in accordance with a court case that has considered the matter: Eltra Corp. V. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294, 208 USPQ 1 (1978, C.A. 4, Va.).
The U.S. Copyright Office holds that a bitmapped font is nothing more than a computerized representation of a typeface, and as such is not copyrightable:
"The [September 29, 1988] Policy Decision [published at 53 FR 38110] based on the [October 10,] 1986 Notice of Inquiry [published at 51 FR 36410] reiterated a number of previous registration decisions made by the [Copyright] Office. First, under existing law, typeface as such is not registerable. The Policy Decision then went on to state the Office's position that 'data that merely represents an electronic depiction of a particular typeface or individual letterform' [that is, a bitmapped font] is also not registerable." 57 FR 6201.
BoingBoing reader John Todd, formerly of Emigre Inc., says:
In the late 90's I worked for Emigre Fonts in Sacramento. Emigre is the developer and publisher of some of the worlds best known typefaces. While I was there we became very agressive in protecting Emigre's type, on the internet and elsewhere. I refer you to this link, where you can see that in 1999, Emigre and Adobe sucessfully sued a software publisher, preventing him from selling fonts based on Emigre and Adobe Designs. The press release reads:
"Defendants Paul King and Southern Software agreed to have judgment entered against them in each case for copyright infringement and intermediate copyright infringement of more than 1,100 Adobe font software programs and 35 Emigre font software programs, and agreed to have permanent injunctions entered against them barring them from distributing the font programs they created by copying Emigre's and Adobe's font software programs. The permanent injunctions also bar defendants from creating or distributing any font software which copies or extracts the points in an Emigre or Adobe font software program."
And BoingBoing reader Rob Myers adds,
My understanding is that you cannot copyright the design of the font, but you CAN copyright the PostScript program or TrueType data that draws it. Copyright a font design: no. Copyright program, data or other "writing": yes, even if it draws a font. So you can make your own fonts that look the same as another font without infringing copyright, but you can't copy another program or dataset that draws the font. IANAL, but I've worked in design and repro.
Link to previous BB post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: William Gibson short: Cyber-Claus
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:30:13 PM
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On William Gibson's blog, a holiday-themed short which was originally published as "Cyber-Claus", in The Washington Post Book World in 1991. Snip:
In the night of 12/24/07, though sensors woven through the very fabric of the house had thus far registered a complete absence of sentient bio-activity, I found myself abruptly summoned from a rare, genuine and expensively induced examples of that most priceless of states, sleep.
Even as I hurriedly dressed, I knew that dozens of telepresent armed-response drones would already be sweeping in from the District, skimming mere inches above the chill surface of the Potomac. Vicious tri-lobed aeroforms that they were, they resembled nothing more than the Martian war machines of George Pal’s 1953 epic, “The War of the Worlds”.
And while, from somewhere far above, now, came that sound, that persistent clatter, as though gunships disgorged whole platoons of iron-shod mercenaries, I could only wonder: who? Was it my estranged wife, Lady Betty-Jayne Motel-6 Hyatt, Chief Eco-Trustee of the Free Duchy of Wyoming? Or was it Cleatus “Mainframe” Sinyard himself, President of the United States and Perpetual Chairman of the Concerned Smart People’s Northern Hemisphere CoProsperity Sphere?
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More fake Mexican songsters -- from Poland
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:33:33 PM
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Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post about 1950s Yu-Mex mashups from behind the iron sombrero, reader Mzimu says,
Slavic Mexicans were not limited only to former Yugoslavia - they were also playing in communist Poland during 60s. Nearly everyone here was subjected to torture of listening their biggest hit "Pamelo, Aegnaj" ("Farewell, Pamela"). Some of them are playing to this day - check out Tercet Egzotyczny (or, translated, "The Exotic Trio"). MP3s (unfortunately, only from their recent and not-so-great period - well, they are elderly people now!) and tour dates are available here. If you want to check them out they are playing in US and Canada soon. And yes, they are *very* cheesy.
Link.
Borzoj says, "The '60s fake mexican music in Poland is neither only from the 1960s nor only Mexican. Mitch and Mitch, who released their first album around a year ago, are first genuine polish country & eastern band. Very *cheesy*!" Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: What if Osama released albums, not videos?
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:39:17 PM
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This Fark Photoshop contest offers a multitude of possible answers. Link (Thanks, Scott)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Holiday Leftovers
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:50:25 PM
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tijuana christmas
santa's lil' gimp
hp holiday cards
typeflake
carnation x-mass jukebox
champion of cheer
carol maker
penguin diving
Image: typeflake. Links: web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ACLU solicits feedback on airport "pat-down" searches
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DATE: 12/26/2004 01:55:22 PM
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Snipped from Declan's politech list -- ACLU Technology and Liberty Project Director Barry Steinhardt says,
A September 2004 TSA directive granting airport security screeners broad leeway to conduct "pat-down" searches has led to numerous reports of sexual harassment and abuse.
Victims -- particularly women-- are reporting that they are not being offered private searches or searches by screeners of the same sex, and that "private" searches are being conducted behind screens that provide no privacy. Passengers are reporting rough, rude, and humiliating manhandling and groping of their breasts and crotch areas, demeaning sexual comments, and being forced to remove business jackets in full view of crowds, despite the fact that it is a widespread convention in our society for women to wear only bras or other undergarments underneath such jackets.
The ACLU is assessing possible responses to this policy. In doing so, it is extremely helpful for us to gain a sense of the kinds of abuses that are taking place. If list members have experienced a problem with pat-down searches at airport security, they can help us end this problem by reporting their story here. For more information on the abuses, Politiech readers might want to look here, where we have collected many of the news stories.
Link to ACLU website.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Death Churches of the world, part 3
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DATE: 12/26/2004 02:00:14 PM
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Many readers wrote in to follow up on recent BoingBoing posts on churches and tombs built from human remains (one, two). Here are some of your suggestions.
Reader Brennen says, "I stayed in Prague for a few days this summer, and blogged about a day-trip to Kutna Hora. The cathedral is spectacular; the ossuary is just weird. One skull might be shocking - several thousand used as decorative elements are bizarrely mundane. Incidentally, I'm told that a portion of the recent Dungeons & Dragons flick was filmed at Kutna Hora." Link
RLD says, "Here are more photos of the Sedlec Ossuary. Very interesting." Link.
JPA in Portugal writes, "After reading your entries about the churches in Poland and near Prague, I should mention that in Portugal we also have a couple of those. The most famous is called Capela dos Ossos, or Bone Chapel. It is smaller than the ones you mention, but no less interesting." Link
Joe Goldberg says, "Saw your post on the Kostnice bone ossuary, and I have a few images of it as well, that capture the scale of what 40,000 dead dudes look like. See: Link, Link, And a coat of arms made of at least one of every bone in the human body: Link."
BoingBoing pal Quinn says, "Even I have a set of pics from the ossuary outside of Prague, with a couple of shots up on flickr: Link."
Mark Gallagher says, "I used to live near a cathedral in Germany that was situated on the narrowest point of the Rhine river. This area was a pretty popular spot for armed conflict throughout the ages even as recently as WWII, when Patton made a fuss about pissing in the river there when crossing on the way to Berlin. Anyway, the story goes that the local cathedral always had kind of a shortage of hallowed ground for burying people due to all the medieval bloodshed, and at one point just resorted to warehousing a lot of the fallen soldiers to make way for more traditional burials for VIPs. I can't seem to find my own photography, but here's a link to a good one. I'm going to say that it looks a lot more impressive in person, but here it is: Der Beinhaus in Oppenheim."
And reader Zizkov in the Czech Republic writes, "Read about the ossuary on BoingBoing. I visited it last year and found it macabre and grotesque, though perhaps not quite as grotesque as the gambolling snaphappy backpackers (mainly American) who were there at the same time. I'm not exactly an ancestor worshipper but I found the general visitor behaviour, uh, distasteful. As I recall, entrance was 35 Kc and a photo pass the same, that is, around $2.50 all in. Many individual opinions available at virtualtourist.com (search keyword: ossuary). For those interested in ossuarys, here is another in Rome: Link. 4,000 Capuchin friars (I passed this one by when in Rome). Merry Christmas -- or whichever festivity you may be celebrating."
Thanks to all.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Crocheted Lorenz attractor
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DATE: 12/26/2004 03:54:39 PM
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"Dr Hinke Osinga and Professor Bernd Krauskopf, of Bristol University's engineering mathematics department, used 25,511 crochet stitches to represent the Lorenz equations." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ToS for Universal's free movie screenings -- Update
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DATE: 12/27/2004 12:00:20 AM
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A bit of nerd ephemera. Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post, reader Jeff "Koganuts" Koga says, "Here's a ToS for Universal's free movie screenings. I was finally able to scan in the invite I received for the first advance screening of Serenity (which won't be out in theatres until next September)." Link to scanned invite: side one, side two.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Data alert network could have helped in Asia tsunami
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DATE: 12/27/2004 12:09:42 AM
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India and Sri Lanka, the two nations with highest death tolls from yesterday's devastating tidal waves, are not among the group of 26 countries that comprise the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System. Had they been part of the alert system, say scientists -- lives could have been saved. Snip from NYT story:
Although waves swamped parts of the Sumatran coast and nearby islands within minutes, there would have been time to alert more distant communities if the Indian Ocean had a warning network like that in the Pacific, said Dr. Tad Murty, an expert on the region's tsunamis who is affiliated with the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, in fact, scientists running the existing tsunami warning system for the Pacific, where such waves are far more common, sent an alert from their Honolulu hub to 26 participating countries, including Thailand and Indonesia, that destructive waves might be generated by the Sumatra tremors.
But there was no way to convey that information speedily to countries or communities an ocean away, said Dr. Laura S. L. Kong, a Commerce Department seismologist and director of the International Tsunami Information Center, an office run under the auspices of the United Nations.
Link to NYT story, and Link to USGS data on the "great earthquake" at magnitude 9.0 which occurred off the west coast of Northern Sumatra Sunday.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Fun on Flores
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:25:40 AM
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National Geographic Traveler has an article about how the Indonesian island of Flores may become a hot travel destination based on the discovery of our fossilized friends Homo floresiensis, the one-meter-tall humans.
Flores has generated headlines before, but not the kind that attract tourists: famines in the 1960s and natural disasters in the '70s and '90s. Economic crisis hit in the late '90s, followed by political problems in East Timor and Bali. By 2000 tourism had plummeted from 35,000 visitors a year to just 10,000.
This year, however, the Flores Tourist Authority reports that travel to the island has already rebounded by 21 percent, probably due to fossil-related media coverage.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Deanne Cheuk's Mushroom Girls
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DATE: 12/27/2004 03:15:27 AM
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Deanne Cheuk is a NYC-based fashion designer and illustrator, art director for Tokion magazine, and publisher of her own tiny 'zine called Neomu ("No words, no advertising, just inspirational images, photographs, and graphics"). Cheuk's own paintings and drawings from her Mushroom Girls Virus series are spectacular. I can't wait for her forthcoming monograph!
Link (Thanks, Anne Sanger!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Spherical paintings
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DATE: 12/27/2004 03:33:12 AM
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Artist Dick Termes paints amazing scenes onto spheres that magically seem to draw you into entire enclosed universes. In Science News, Ivars Peterson profiles Termes and explains the optical illusion behind the art:
"Termes takes a unique perspective in his art. In effect, he imagines crawling inside a transparent ball, then looking out with one eye in all directions from a center point. He then transfers what he sees onto the outside of a sphere.
Suppose, for example, that the ball he's inside is in a starkly geometric, cubical room. The room is defined by three sets of parallel lines. From his perspective inside the ball, these lines lead to six vanishing points. And the lines are curved. This six-point perspective, with the six vertices of an octahedron serving as the vanishing points, becomes the basis of his spherical paintings.
In essence, Termes geometrically translates the view from inside a sphere to the outside of one."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Detecting proximity over the Internet and other dumb DRM notions
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DATE: 12/27/2004 06:46:18 AM
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One of the recurring themes in the DRM negotiations I sit in on is figuring out how far away two different computers are from one another, so that an entertainment company can enforce crazy, paranoid "business models" like, "Buy a movie for viewing on as many PCs as you'd like provided that they're all within 10 feet of one another."
My cow-orker, EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen, has posted a little blog entry about the inherent failings in all the DRM vendors' systems for determining "proximity" of two devices over the Internet.
...DRM vendors are falling back on other tricks. One you hear a lot about is "IP TTL" (a part of the Internet Protocol specification where routers are supposed to subtract 1 from a header field, to prevent a misaddressed packet from floating around the Internet forever). That doesn't provide evidence either, though, because (1) IP headers like TTL are under the minute control of end-users wielding firewall software, and (2) "bridging" software doesn't subtract 1 from TTL in the first place because conceptually it is not acting as a router.
So the last resort of people trying to use TCP/IP and get evidence about locality or proximity has been to measure latency -- how long it takes for one device to communicate with another. Latency is harder to tamper with because there are physical limitations like the speed of light. For example, you can never get any message from New York to Paris in under 19.5 milliseconds because that is how long it takes light to go from one to the other. If you're using a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, there is a magic number around 250 milliseconds (depending on your latitude) because geosynchronous orbits can only occur at one particular altitude and it takes light about 250 milliseconds to cross that entire path. (Geosynchronous orbit is far away!) So some systems have been adopting rules about not sending some programming to devices that take more than a certain number of milliseconds to answer you when you say hello and ask them for acknowledgment, on the theory that devices that answer really quickly plausibly are on the same local network, whereas device that answer more slowly probably are not.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Destruction-testing NES games through overclocking
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DATE: 12/27/2004 06:50:40 AM
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These guys are overclocking their tired old Nintendo Entertainment Systems, cranking them up so that the games go all non-linear:
Super Mario Bros.
This game ran fine up to about 4.0 MHz when the graphics went insane. It maintained stability no matter what. I couldn't get it to crash except going past that.
Super Mario Bros. 3
This also ran nicely, but the graphics went nuts around 3.6 MHz. It maxed out around 4.2 MHz, but wouldn't crash unless pushed further.
Kirby's Adventure
This game lags like mad all the time, so the gameplay is actually noticably slower at the stock speed. Using the abilities like Fire and Spark, especially around enemies using them as well, can grind the game to a halt. At 3.0 MHz or so the lag was pretty much entirely removed, and gameplay smoothed out tremendously. Around 3.4 MHz however, the graphical corruption became very, very bad. The status bar at the bottom of the screen started to rise up onto the game area. The higher the clock, the higher it went, blocking out my view of the game. Then the topmost sprite layer started to go insane around 4.0 MHz. The game kept running stably in the background though. ;)
Chip'n'Dale's Rescue Rangers
It's very hard to find lag in this game, but there are a few distinct points. These were smoothed out at 2.3-2.6 MHz, but the game ran stable up to 4.4 MHz. Past 4.0 MHz however, the sprite layer went nuts like the other games, with random tiles flashing everywhere. No crashes however!
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Disneyland ride scheduler uses historical wait-time data to cut queuing
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DATE: 12/27/2004 06:53:17 AM
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This Win-only app uses historical wait times and a "scheduling algorithm" to help you plan your day at Disneyland to minimize your wait-times and maximize your rides.
RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized.
Using historical wait time statistics for each attraction as a foundation, RideMax analyzes millions of different ride sequences in order to create a minimum-wait-time itinerary. This schedule is tailored to the expected crowd patterns on the day of your visit, for the attractions you want to ride!
Link
(Thanks, Alex)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Boing Boing makes Now Magazines' 2004 top ten
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DATE: 12/27/2004 06:55:08 AM
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Now Magazine, my hometown free entertainment weekly in Toronto, has picked Boing Boing as one of its top-ten blogs for 2004!
Link
(Thanks, Rannie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Kids superhero Xmas LPs as MP3s
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DATE: 12/27/2004 06:56:54 AM
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Check out these MP3s made from old kids' superhero Xmas records!
01 - Superman Christmas Story - Light Up The Tree, Mr. President
02 - Batman Christmas Story - Christmas Carol Caper - Part 1
03 - Batman Christmas Story - Christmas Carol Caper - Part 2
04 - Wonder Woman Christmas Story - The Prisoner of Christmas Island
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Double-Screen cartridge ripped
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DATE: 12/27/2004 06:58:29 AM
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Someone has ripped a game-rom from a Gameboy Double-Screen cartridge -- next step, double-screen ROM images for MAME!
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Legal uses for P2P catalogued on Slashdot
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:01:08 AM
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The Supreme Court have agreed to hear the appeal on Grokster v MGM, the court case that EFF won, legalizing P2P networks. To help save the Internet's bacon, Slashdot users have clubbed together to catalog noninfringing uses for P2P networks.
Durring the beginning of the Iraq war, I used P2P to get video and pictures that were censored from the US. The instant I hear about pictures, recordings, etc. on another network they can't show in the US, I go find them on P2P. Along with that search, I also found pictures that solders had taken along the way. Then I found gunship video (de-classified and classified because it had altitude/other readings) showing people walking into a building. The order came, and they leveled the building. Then started firing on anyone leaving the scene. You could actually see the men get thrown around after getting hit with munitions. On, and this video just happened to show one man running into a mosque so he was let go. (sure it wasn't leaked on purpose)
Link
(via Waxy)
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TITLE: Lemmings' suicide myths started by Disney nature photogs
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:03:37 AM
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Lemmings are widely considered to be suicidal beasts, throwing themselves en masse off cliffs. It turns out that this isn't true, but rather a legend begun through some unethical trick photography executed by Disney nature photos in the fifties.
The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river. It's easy to understand why the filmmakers did this - wild animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings' self-implemented population-density management plan.
So lemmings do not commit mass suicide. Indeed, animals live to thrive and survive. Consider a company like Disney, where one rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty. It's rather odd to think that Disney could be so unkind to another rodent, the lemming..
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Themepark maps from history
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:07:25 AM
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ThemeParkBrochures collects historical brochures from theme-parks, decades of park maps from such thrill-lands as India's EsselWorld, Busch Gardens, and a 1977 Six Flags map.
Link
(via The Disney Blog)
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TITLE: Fan-magazine picks a different average person for every ish
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:11:40 AM
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Each issue of Re-Magazine pocks a random, average person and uses her or him as the basis for an entire magazine's worth of articles and photo-spreads -- pictured here is Marcel,a 44-year-old sales rep from Wavrin, France.
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(via Salad With Steve)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bill of Rights free MP3 audiobook
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:12:43 AM
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For free on TellTale Weekly, a website that produces high-quality audiobooks from public domain texts: an MP3 reading of the Bill of Rights.
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TITLE: Use SFX to make your own Dr Who theme mix
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:16:02 AM
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The BBC has posted a mixer that lets you make your own version of the Dr Who theme, adding from a long list of SFX with names like "Scottish Hamster" and "Party Popper."
Link
(Thanks, Gene!)
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TITLE: London Underground sources obsolete spare parts on eBay
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:18:19 AM
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Parts of the London Underground are so old that they can only be serviced with parts acquired on eBay from speciality collectors.
Tube Lines has bought computer cards, old chips and other equipment which are now out of stock.
Company bosses said they had to use the internet because some of the signalling systems on the Tube were so old.
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(Thanks, Nick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Vienna's best holy water
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:25:14 AM
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The awesome Viennese net weirdo artists at Monochrom have identified the best sources of holy water in Vienna and are offering them for sale at reasonable rates:
monochrom.at has, therefore, obtained samples of Holy Water from ten selected Viennese churches. These samples have been mixed in correct proportions, purified from pathogens through distillation and osmosis, and then bottled in handy portions. monochrom.at therefore feels confident that they are offering not only the best Holy Water of all Vienna (city average) but the most aseptic Holy Water in the entire world.
monchrom is offering 20 vials (signed, dated) for sale, each containing 0.125 liters of purified Holy Water (city average) for E 44.95 per vial.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF helping produce anonymizing software
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:29:15 AM
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I have the coolest job: my employer, EFF, is now officially doing development on Tor, an anonymizing network tool that lets people use the Internet without being snooped upon:
Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to figure out who and where you are. Tor's technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against "traffic analysis," a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.
Traffic analysis is used every day by companies, governments, and individuals that want to keep track of where people and organizations go and what they do on the Internet. Instead of looking at the content of your communications, traffic analysis tracks where your data goes and when, as well as how big it is. For example, online advertising company Doubleclick uses traffic analysis to record what web pages you've visited, and can build a profile of your interests from that. A pharmaceutical company could use traffic analysis to monitor when the research wing of a competitor visits its website, and track what pages or products that interest the competitor. IBM hosts a searchable patent index, and it could keep a list of every query your company makes. A stalker could use traffic analysis to learn whether you're in a certain Internet cafe.
Donations to EFF are tax-deductible -- you've got a week left to knock some bucks off your tax bill and do some good for the whole Internet!
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TITLE: US customs wants a loyalty oath from DVD importers
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:32:26 AM
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MBF imported a video from Italy and discovered this disclaimer in the packaging -- apparently, you can get a parcel through customs with more ease if you recite a hollow loyalty oath and promise that you're not sending in any footage that advocates treason.
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Zoom through an hypnotic series of paintings
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:35:22 AM
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This Flash app allows you to soom through a long series of illustrations, looping one after the next. The effect is hypnotic and genuinely beautiful, like disappearing into a series of paintings.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Track UPS via RSS
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DATE: 12/27/2004 07:38:46 AM
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Jason sez, "You had a link some time ago to a post that converted Fedex tracking information into RSS format. I have created the same thing for UPS, and I directly linked to the post where I explain it."
Link
(Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bloggers in SE Asia cover quake and tsunami disaster
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DATE: 12/27/2004 08:06:53 AM
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Image: Screencap of TV coverage in Bangkok -- Buddhist monks chanting for the souls of those who died in the disaster. At present, the international death toll stands at nearly 24,000. Ron Morris in Thailand says, "Since the first tremor from the Sumatran quake was felt in Bangkok over 36 hours ago, we have been blogging the latest news about the disaster. Includes screen grabs from Thai TV and links to locals who took photos of the wreckage after the tidal waves." Link
Cameron Sinclair of the nonprofit group Architecture For Humanity tells BoingBoing, "Two members of the WorldChanging.org crew live close by the Tsumani disaster and are reporting on whats going on: Link. As for reconstruction issues, a page is being set up at Architecture for Humanity to cover this: Link."
Here is a photoblog maintained by a man named Fred in Sri Lanka, with snapshots of the destruction in Jaffna, where he lives and works: Link. Here's another Sri Lankan blog maintained by "Zeus": Link. See also this livejournal maintained by a man named Ernest who was in Phuket when the catastrophe hit. Link. Here's a personal blog maintained by a person in Malaysia, with posts related to the event: Link. Blogger Rezwan in Bangladesh posts about a near-miss here.
BoingBoing reader Dav asks how he and other displaced Western tourists can help.
"Just since I know you guys are at the nexus of a lot of information: I'm here in Thailand on holiday, been staying on the island of Koh Samui on the east side of Thailand. We had been planning to go to Krabi (one of the places hit hard in southern thailand) in a couple of days for a psy-trance party. Now we're thinking of keeping the flight tp Krabi and trying to volunteer to help however we can. Any ideas on how to find out if any organization would want volunteers and where/what? I tried a few sites like Red Cross, etc but didn't notice any info on emergency volunteering and the net connection is so slow it is difficult looking around."
Pointers to other blog coverage welcome, submit sites here.
Update: Alex Steffen of worldchanging.com says,
"Some South Asian bloggers, including a couple of my colleagues from Worldchanging, have set up a blog tracking relief efforts and how folks can contribute: tsunamihelp.blogspot.com. We're also going to be posting more throughout the day on Worldchanging. This is not "just" one of the worst disasters of the decade, one where every bit of help will be needed to save lives and rebuild, it's also a call to change the way access to basic science is shared on our planet. Most of the tens of thousands of people who died yesterday might have been saved with better scientific, communications and warning systems."
And here are more eyewitness blog accounts from bloggers in Phuket, Thailand:
pleloup, Andrew Sutton: Link 1, Link 2, and the French Photojournalism Association: Link. (Thanks, Jim Basman)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Updates on Tsunami from bloggers in India and Sri Lanka
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DATE: 12/27/2004 09:02:46 AM
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Rohit Gupta writes:
The picture here is taken from the southernmost tip of India, where until today there were hundreds of tourists trapped at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, off the coast of Kanyakumari district. In an amazing display of humanitarian collaboration and bravery, the local fishermen saved roughly 500 of the 600 trapped people, while the role of relief agencies was severely limited by the breakdown of communications and bad weather. Even as I write this, most local media can only offer conflicting figures. Link.
A majority of the deceased from the mainland were local fishermen who had gone out in the sea, to net their nightly catch. Throughout the day and night, and the following day, small boats and catamarans, perhaps too small to brave the violent sea, were plying up and down the strait that divides the island from the Indian mainland. While the Indian Air Force kept dropping food and medical supplies, it is the fishermen who've kept the Kanyakumari death toll (524) as low as it is. Most of the saved were not locals, but tourists, including a Supreme Court judge. There were no riots or cases of civic indiscipline reported in that district, nor in any other part of India, during the rescue efforts. Thankfully, the Indian media has taken due note of the effort. Also, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, has offered extensive aid to Sri Lanka, and at least four Indian Navy ships have already carried medicines, food and water to Galle, one of the most affected areas in Sri Lanka.
Rohit Gupta says, "One of my media friends is a TV show host in Sri Lanka, and is writing live accounts of the frenzy on our community blog while rushing around in search of loved ones. Morquendi writes..."
A part of me wants to say fuck you to being a journalist and go out there and get involved in the aid work. Carry bags of food to the people who need it. But another part keeps saying my work is here. Making calls and making sure people stay informed. Seen things today I never thought I'd see. Seen things I don't ever want to see. How do you ask a question from a father who saw his 4 year old child being dragged off into the sea and be sensitive about it? Do you say sorry? Does that cut it? 2 friends dead. They were on a romantic beach holiday. I like to believe they died holding each other's hands. 2 more missing. Presumed dead. Find a vehicle in about an hour and head off down South to look for them, or identify their bodies. If anyone had told me the day was going to be like this maybe I'd have stayed in bed.
Alex Steffen points us to another first hand report on the worldchanging.com blog: Link. In Mumbai, blogger Dina Mehta is also covering the disaster: Link. Dina is also participating in the collaborative tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, which is shaping up to be something of a central clearinghouse for blog updates on the aftermath and relief efforts.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toilet night-light motion-sensor glows red if the seat is up
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DATE: 12/27/2004 10:21:01 AM
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The Arkon LavNav is a nightlight that clips onto your toilet seat. It senses your approach in the night and glows gently (no blinding 100w bulb at 2AM) -- green if the seat is down and red if the seat is up.
Link
(via Wired Test)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Arthur C. Clarke on tsunami
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DATE: 12/27/2004 10:39:33 AM
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On his website, author and inventor Sir Arthur C. Clarke -- who lives in Sri Lanka -- says:
Thank you for your concern about my safety in the wake of Sunday’s devastating tidal wave. I am enormously relieved that my family and household have escaped the ravages of the sea that suddenly invaded most parts of coastal Sri Lanka, leaving a trail of destruction.
But many others were not so fortunate. For hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans and an unknown number of foreign tourists, the day after Christmas turned out to be a living nightmare reminiscent of The Day After Tomorrow.
Link to complete text of message (thanks, Brian), and link to Wikipedia entry on Sir Arthur Clarke.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Surfing a Tsunami
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DATE: 12/27/2004 10:58:19 AM
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Rogier sez: "Most people would do anything to get out of the way of a tsunami. But daredevils with a death wish would like to RIDE one, and they're keeping their surf boards ready. Officials in Hawaii are still a bit freaked out by the memory of 400-plus surf enthusiasts showing up on the beaches of Oahu ten years ago, trying to catch a killer wave. To prevent a repeat, a public-safety DVD has been distributed through Hawaiian surf shops this fall.
"The message is sure to get lost on this guy, who was caught on film riding a monster wave that would give mere mortals heart attacks (though from the looks of it, it isn't nearly on the magnitude of the walls of waters that wiped out tens of thousands of people in South East Asia yesterday). Link
UPDATE: Peter Orosz sez: "Professional big wave surfers can ride waves that are taller than normal tsunami waves (the biggest wave ever ridden was in Hawaii on January 28, 1998, when Ken Bradshaw rode a wave with an 85-foot face on the North Shore of Oahu at Outside Log Cabins). Natural big wave spots like Waimea Bay in Hawaii, Teahupoo in Tahiti or Mavericks in California can produce waves 50-80 feet high, while yesterday's tsunamis were no higher than 30 feet (as far as I recall from CNN's report). The destructive power of tsunamis result from the immense amount of water in motion: the earthquake sets the entire ocean moving. In many places, a tsunami is not an actual wave but a rapidly rising tide that surges inland.
"Apparently, it's quite difficult to measure waves and there are several methods. According to Surfline, Bradshaw's 1998 wave was "a 45-foot wave with an 85-foot face", whatever that means. Billabong has a contest called XXL with a cash award going to the person who rides the biggest wave of the season, and according to their site, the world record holder is Pete Cabrinha with a 70-foot wave ridden at Peahi/Jaws on Maui this April. This page gives a guide to estimating wave height and describes the different methods used."
Nick sez: "I think (though I'm not 100%) that this is referring to the fact that
waves have both crests and troughs. The "height" of a wave should be
defined as how high the crest reaches above the standard ocean level,
while the "face" of a wave should be what one sees when one looks directly
at it, namely the entire distance from trough to crest. If ocean waves
were shaped like perfect sine waves then one would expect the trough to be
as deep as the crest is high, so a 45-foot wave would have a 90-foot face.
Of course they're not but a 45-foot wave with 85-foot face would seem to
make sense."
Christian Anthony (Video Editor, Surfline) sez: "The link you have under the 'Surfing a Tsunami' story to the big wave video is misleading.
"It's labeled as 'Surfing Hurricane Ivan Waves' but Hurricane Ivan was on the East Coast and did not produce waves of that height, nor are there spots on the East Coast that break like that. That video on the site has been ripped off from the Billabong Odyssey movie and is from Hawaii, specifically a break called Peahi (or Jaws).
"Last week there was a really big swell that hit Peahi and all the professional big wave riders were on it. You can see the video here."
Alberto sez: "You know about Laird Hamilton, cross-board virtuoso? He's invented the foilboard, which he uses to surf the huge swells that cross the oceans for miles. Although at the reported 450 mph of the Sumatra 2004 tsunami, I'm not too sure even he'd be able to catch-up. (He also surfs monster waves once they break on shore, but with a more-conventional surfboard.) He has a bare-bones website that offers a couple of DVDs of his jaw-dropping exploits (Flash interface alert, with and unkillable soundtrack of wave sounds)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Animations of tsunami's path
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DATE: 12/27/2004 11:24:06 AM
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BB pal Mike Outmesguine says, "This animation shows the wave of the tsunami moving outward from the island chain north of Sumatra. Remarkably, it travelled the 750 miles to Sri Lanka and Eastern India in only 100 minutes. Spotted on the USGS page mentioned earlier on BB: Link."
Also, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers a 3D quicktime animation of the Indonesian tsunami here: Link (3.5 MB) (thanks, Rob)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: AFH and Worldchanging launch India, Sumatra, Sri Lanka aid funds
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DATE: 12/27/2004 11:26:43 AM
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Cameron Sinclair from Architecture for Humanity says, "We've set up a reconstruction fund specifically to deal with rebuilding issues. As with all our disaster relief operations we are commited to zero overhead/admin. costs. All services are being donated pro-bono and we are partnering with locally based NGO's that will use locals in the rebuilding process." Link
Previous BB posts related to blog coverage of the Asian quake and tsunami: Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6.
Update: World Changing and AFH have just announced a new, joint fundraising appeal. The goal: raise $10,000 for reconstruction projects in the Sumatra, Sri Lanka and Indian regions affected. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Audiobook of Cory's DRM talk
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DATE: 12/27/2004 11:42:06 AM
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Telltale Weekly has recorded a 53 minute audiobook of my Microsoft DRM Talk, which they're selling for a dollar, with 20 percent going to EFF. You can get it as an Ogg, MP3 or AAC!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Prayer shawl for gay orthodoxim
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:16:49 PM
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The Rainbow Tallis is a prayer shawl for the gay Orthodox in your life.
Link
(via Heeb)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Kevin Kelly's True Films book
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:17:16 PM
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Kevin Kelly has self-published a book of his documentary recommendations and is selling about 75 copies on Amazon.
This thin book (50 pages) is overpriced at $15, but if you'd like to purchase one, order it fast because I won't be reprinting this version. Once they are gone, they are gone. (You can always get all the reviews online).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MMO character run by nine profoundly disabled players
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:33:36 PM
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Wagner James Au sez, "Second Life resident lilone Sandgrain, who IRL manages a large group of severely disabled people in a care center, recently convinced her bosses to give her nine clients an SL account of their own, to share. Since then, she's been slowly introducing them to the world. (And vice versa.) Avatar customization, online flirtation, and object creation take on new meanings, when they're conducted by a group of nine disabled people with wildly varying backgrounds from their wheelchairs."
"How did we decide on what we would look like, and our gender? We formed the man avatar first, because that day, we had more men in the group. We always wanted a female one, but we haven't taken the time to create her yet. Mary and Johanna would like that very much. We decided on how wilde would look first by starting with skin colors. We have both black and white in our real life group, and didn't want to have those because neither is better than the other. So we picked orange...
"Micah and Charlene could use the mouse," lilone replies, when I ask her if it's possible for each member of wilde to enter Second Life directly, perhaps with their own individual accounts. "John and Nichole could, but wouldn't alone. Micah can't read. Charlene has one hand, but can read." She shrugs. "None of them, really."
Their solution, for now at least, is lilone effectively acting as their interface: she sits at the keyboard, with the wilde group gathered in a semi-circle in a cramped care center room, peering over her shoulder and into the monitor, at the world inside...
Link
(Thanks, James!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Christian ACLU lawyers sought to prove coherence of Jesus and liberty
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:36:02 PM
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John Scalzi says, "Someone I know and love said to me today that she believes that there are no lawyers at the ACLU who are Christians -- because her received (and incorrect) knowledge of that organization is that it hates Christ and all those who seek salvation through him. Naturally, because this is someone I care about, I can't let this perception stand. So I'm asking lawyers who are Christian and who work/have worked for the ACLU to come forward to refute my correspondent's assertion, by leaving a message in the comment thread at my site. To encourage participation, I hereby pledge $1 (up to $200) to the ACLU for every one who does. And if they want to explain how working for the ACLU relates to their relationship with Jesus, so much the better."
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Next Harry Potter on July 16
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:38:21 PM
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Graham sez, "The Leaky Cauldron has info on J. K. Rowling's announcement that the sixth Harry Potter book has been completed. Publication date to be announced within 24 hours. Very exciting for some of us."
So now you know! Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be available from July 16th 2005 (and I do hope you consider it a decent birthday present, Delleve-who-posts-at-the-Leaky-Cauldron... not that I was watching the fansites on Monday night or anything...)
Link
(Thanks, Graham!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Utne Reader story on Whuffie and reputation economies
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:40:27 PM
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I was interviewed for an article on reputation economies in the current issue of the Utne Reader -- the piece is online now!
In the 2003 science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, author Cory Doctorow imagines a society where all of life's necessities are free, and market laws such as supply and demand cease to exist for everything else. Instead of trading in a hard currency, citizens living in this "post-scarcity economy" measure their wealth with an ephemeral, reputation-based currency called "Whuffie." Doing something that benefits the community, like baking a cake or writing beautiful poetry, increases a person's Whuffie, while causing a traffic accident or publishing clumsy prose can temporarily put you in a virtual poorhouse. Everyone is wired into the Internet via brain implants and can routinely view and modify others' standing instantly (and free of charge), ultimately making one's status the subject of majority opinion.
Link
(Thanks, Brendan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MoblogUK adds full Creative Commons licensing wizard
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DATE: 12/27/2004 01:45:58 PM
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Alfie sez, "We have always urged users to use Creative Commons licenses at moblogUK, but we now have all combination CC licenses available to be embedded in users moblogs, using our CC licensing wizard."
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami blog coverage: updates
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DATE: 12/27/2004 02:12:20 PM
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Rohit Gupta, Jon Lebkowsky, and Dina Mehta at the Worldchanging.com blog have just published a roundup of first-person accounts, aid site urls, and news reports related to the tsunami disaster in Asia. They say this post will be updated regularly, so you can bookmark and return for fresh info as it comes.
Link. Joe Gandelman posts another comprehensive roundup here, on his "Moderate Voice" blog: Link.
Wikipedia is also maintaining coverage in a richly linked, well-organized web page with ongoing updates. Link. And Wikipedia Commons offers related media (photos, data animations, and the like): Link (Thanks, Nick Douglas)
Loic Le Meur tells BoingBoing, "On Philsland, a French blogger writes of having been alerted by e-mail three hours before the tsunamis hit the coasts. An earthquake alert was issued by the USGS center three hours before it hit -- we could have saved thousands of people's lives if information had moved faster. This blogger was informed by the alert (Link, in French), and I also talk about it here (Link, in English)."
Image: snapshot from Phuket. Link. Another gallery of "citizen photojournalist" images here: Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Garbage disposal installation made simple
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DATE: 12/27/2004 05:51:03 PM
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My parents are staying with us for the holidays, and today my father and I installed a garbage disposal in the guesthouse kitchen sink. My father did 90% of the work, since he's a lot better at this kind of stuff than I am, but I had to pitch in for certain parts, because one of his hands is out of commission. He has a rare condition called Dupuytren's contracture -- thickening of skin tissue in the hands that makes it impossible to open them. It's a genetic condition that seems to affect people with Viking ancestry. He had a "palmar fasciotomy," a surgical procedure to cut the bands of thickened tissue. So his right hand is all bandaged up. (Click thumbnails for enlargement).
We saved a few hours installing the garbage disposal by using this great wireless switch purchased at Home Depot. It cost $18 and has a range of 100 feet (we mounted it just a few feet from the disposal, of course). I'm wondering what else I use these things for. What a terrific idea!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: SMSes from Sri Lanka, and a call for help with live blog
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DATE: 12/27/2004 09:17:22 PM
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Earlier today, we posted a first-person account from tsunami eyewitness Sanjay (aka "Morquendi"). He's a blogger and TV producer who lives and works in Sri Lanka, one of the areas hardest hit by the disaster. Throughout last night -- as he participated in emergency rescue and relief efforts -- Sanjay text-messaged live observations to his co-editors at the collaborative blog ChiensSansFronteres. Snip:
# I'm standing on the Galle road in Aluthgama and looking at 5 ton trawlers tossed onto the road. Scary shit.
# Found 5 of my friends, 2 dead. Of the 5, 4 are back in Colombo. The last one is stranded because of a broken bridge. Broken his leg. But he's alive. Made...
# ..contact. He got swept away but swam ashore. Said he's been burying people all day. Just dragging them off the beach and digging holes with his hands. Go..
#..ing with gear to get him tommorrow morning. He sounded disturbed. Guess grave digging does that to you.
Link (Thank you, Rohit Gupta)
UPDATE: Mumbai-based blogger Rohit Gupta from ChiensSansFronteres tells BoingBoing,
"We now have two bloggers on the ground in Sri Lanka. Morquendi/Sanjay is recruiting more bloggers for us. Sri Lanka is mobbing. India is not. No reports from Anadaman and the south so far, but that's probably because traditional media already has access. Here's the latest SMS post from Sanjay in Sri Lanka:
There's 1600 bodies found by the LTTE in Mullaitivu, in the Eastern Province, so far. They are not allowing any journalists in till rescue operations are done.
I'm going absolutely insane with the mail that's pouring in. I need more hands and ears and eyes, preferably attached to a human being. BlogVolunteers invited to help us.
Rohit's blog-mate Peter Griffin says:
For anyone volunteering to blog at tsunamihelp.blogspot.com (help the group post information), contact Rohit Gupta (fadereu@gmail.com), Dina Mehta
(explore@vsnl.com) or me (zigzackly@gmail.com). And on ChiensSansFrontiers (http://desimediabitch.blogspot.com/), we've got first person accounts going from Sri Lanka at the moment. Anyone else who'd like to provide first person accounts from anywhere in the region is welcome. Mail Rohit or me.
Among the eyewitness reports on this group blog, "Lastnode" in the southern city of Matara in Sri Lanka writes:
Just thought I would present some snapshots for the rest of the world to see the real situation in the south. The State run media (if you can even call them media anymore) is presenting a rosy picture of a Government coping well with the issue. Here are snippets from my notebook.
27th November 2004 10:30 AM, Matara Fort / Town: Two men carry a body in from the now calm sea. Hundreds of locals swarm around, trying to identify the boy. Wearing dark blue shorts and a faded red t-shirt, he can't be more than four or five years old. His eyes glazed, he stares at the onlookers. His left skull is fractured, but there is no blood running. The crevice stares ominously at me, a reminder of the untamed power of the sea.
In the Fort, the courts complex is in pieces. Cops stop us as we try to enter the Lawyer's quarters. They're scared as well. Confused. Just orders to sit and guard the place from looters. Former Minister and UNP MP Mahinda Wijesekara's room is gutted, tangled sea weed hanging on his name board. A sign perhaps of the inactiveness of all Politicians. Sure, they're doing something. But, IT'S NOT ENOUGH.
(...) At the mass graves, we watched as bodies were lifted out of vans. No records of death. Only one Policeman on duty. No law. No order. Just people burying the dead. Body after body. Shovel after shovel. All along the Galle Road the destruction just made me numb. The media footage delivered by our FREE media brothers and sisters out there tell the truth. But they don't do the real carnage justice. No, not at all. You have to see with your own eyes bodies by the road. Unknown bodies. Stinking so much you feel the need to wretch. You have to see with your own eyes vans stuck on trees. Trawlers on the main road. Broken bridges. You have to see the power of your sea. And you have to be humbled.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Thank Poland for saving Europe from software patents
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DATE: 12/28/2004 12:43:19 AM
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For years now, the forces of good in Europe have been fighting against reforms to EU patent laws that would allow software patents to be filed in Europe. Software patents have existed in the US for some time now, with disastrous results -- rather than encouraging innovation, these patents have been used by companies who produce nothing except lawsuits to shut down whole classes of technologies or to extort money from them.
There's no reasonable explanation for bringing software patents to Europe. The American experiment has been such a complete and utter failure, it's crystal-clear that software patents in Europe would be just as bad.
And the Euro-activists have won again and again, every battle, and the greedy jerks who support patents have strong-armed and cajoled the European Parliament into breaking its own rules to overturn the victories of the activists.
But at the very final moment, the Polish Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Science and Information Technology stepped in and blocked the Patent Directive, taking it off the EU agenda (for now, anyway). It was an incredibly brave and important moment, one that will keep the European technology industry and the citizens who rely on it free and safe.
ThankPoland is a site that is collecting thank-yous for the Polish Undersecretary of State, particularily from the EU, but also from around the world. We owe him a debt of gratitude and it's an honor to thank him today.
Link
(Thanks, Crosbie!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Replacing Peace-Keepers with System Administrators
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DATE: 12/28/2004 01:03:14 AM
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Jamais sez, "WorldChanging interviews Naval War College professor Thomas Barnett. It's a lengthy, wide-ranging discussion of the differences between the 'Core' nations and the 'Gap' nations, the role of globalization in causing and fixing failed states, the need for a 'sysadmin force,' and the role of environmental collapse as a driver of conflict. You may not agree with all of his conclusions, but he makes a strong, insightful argument." This was a really thought-provoking peace; there's a seductive logic in the idea of replacing international Peace-Keepers with international System Administrators.
Well, it would be what I call the System Administrator Force. It would be a people-intensive, UN-peacekeeping-plus approach that could defend itself -- could do counter-insurgency, could fight and not be some ineffective, pussy UN force where you shoot at them and half of them run away. It would be a tough force. You shoot at these guys, or start committing atrocities in their presence, and they would stop you, and if necessary, kill you. It could not only keep the peace, but enforce it.
It would also have a highly-trained civilian component. You'd have international, inter-agency teams. It'd look like the Casbah bar scene in Star Wars -- you'd want to see loads of uniforms from all sorts of countries, and you'd want to see civilians from all sorts of NGOs and aid agencies: you'd want the whole package, acting in a Great Depression, FDR sort of mode, where the first order of business (after enforcing the peace) would be to get everybody busy. The government that would be there would be some sort of transitional organization, an international reconstruction fund, with the goal of getting things stabilized, an economy working and laws written.
Link
(Thanks, Jamais!)
Update: Angus sez, "there's a tremendously compelling (albeit in .rm) presentation by Barnett at the CSPAN site that I watched a couple days ago. He's tremendously insightful, not just on military issues, but the nature of globalization the networked world."
Update 2: Jesse sez, "Here is an MP3 of Barnett's talk at poptech."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: China Mieville's Socialist Review Christmas story
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DATE: 12/28/2004 01:08:09 AM
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Award-winning science fiction author China Mieville has written a wonderful Christmas story for the Socialist Review. It concerns itself not with the commercialization of Christmas, but with the privatization of it, with an era in which observing Christmas requires extensive license payments and agreements with the entities that hold the copyrights and trademarks in holiday traditions.
Don't get me wrong. I haven't got shares in YuleCo, and I can't afford a one-day end-user licence, so I couldn't have a legal party. I'd briefly considered buying from one of the budget competitors like XmasTym, or a spinoff from a non-specialist like Coca-Crissmas, but the idea of doing it on the cheap was just depressing. I wouldn't have been able to use much of the traditional stuff, and if you can't have all of it, why have any? (XmasTym had the rights to Egg Nog. But Egg Nog's disgusting.) Those other firms keep trying to create their own alternatives to proprietary classics like reindeer and snowmen, but they never take off. I'll never forget Annie's underwhelmed response to the JingleMas Holiday Gecko.
No, like most people, I was going to have a little MidWinter Event, just Annie and me. So long as I was careful to steer clear of licenced products we'd be fine.
Ivy decorations you can still get away with; holly's a no-no but I'd hoarded a load of cherry tomatoes, which I was planning to perch on cactuses. I wouldn't risk tinsel but had a couple of brightly-coloured belts I was going to drape over my aspidistra. You know the sort of thing. The inspectors aren't too bad: they'll sometimes turn a blind eye to a bauble or two (which is just as well, because the fines for unlicensed Christmas™ celebrations are astronomical).
Link
(Thanks, Gavin and all the others who suggested this!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Dangerous Things on your desk
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DATE: 12/28/2004 01:17:08 AM
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Kaden Harris builds exquisitely-crafted "Dangerous Things" for your desktop, such as miniature working guillotines, catapults, and the Hypnodisk (pictured here), a staple of evil mythical masterminds. Sensory Impact interviewed Harris about his "antiques from a parallel universe":
"I did a prototype of a ‘pitching machine’ sort of thingie powered by 2 sewing machine motors that was supposed to fire anything from pencils to Sharpies, but it turned out to be insanely over-powered…workplace murders would have gone through the roof if I’d brought it to market. I have a newfound respect for 2H pencils these days."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: RFID Chip Chips
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DATE: 12/28/2004 01:25:48 AM
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Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology could soon be embedded in casino chips and tables. Casino supply company Shuffle Master recently shelled out $12.5 million for two patents on gaming-related RFID systems. Shuffle Master president Paul Meyer presents this scenario in Gambling Magazine:
"Say I sit down at a black jack table and I have a player's card. I place it and a $100 bill on the table. My card is swiped which places me at that table," explained Mr. Meyer. (A player's card is another way for casinos to track frequent gamblers. They earn points on the card for free meals, or other rewards.)
Without RFID, "as I play over time, the only way the casino can estimate the kind of player I am, is by using pit boss estimates. That's a pretty rough estimate. That's where table tracking comes in. Every chip is associated with me and is tracked using a reader. Exactly what I'm betting and losing or winning is tracked automatically. Without tracking, they (casino) don't know what I'm betting." In other words, the reasoning behind RFID utilization is that the casino will know what every player is doing at every table.
"Say you move away from one table with $500 in chips. You now go to cash in those chips. Those RFID chips can be read at the cage and associated with you. In your moment of generosity, you give a cocktail waitress a $25 chip. When she cashes it in, we know how generous a tipper you are."
Link (via The Wireless Weblog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How to Be Creative -- the book
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DATE: 12/28/2004 01:57:22 AM
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Back in August, I blogged about Hugh Macleod's "How to Be Creative" project. Hugh draws cartoons on the backs of business cards and works in advertising; his How to Be Creative is a meditation on creativity, individualism and commercialism, and it's full of pithy, clear, no-nonsense advice.\
Now Hugh has expanded the piece into a short book, which is online in its entirety. He's found an agent and the agent is shopping the book -- I'd certainly buy a copy!
Chaos can be a positive thing. Chaos is inherently part of the creative act. To embrace creativity means you must also embrace chaos. Things don't happen when everything is neat and "just so". Creativity is all about distruption. The people who tell you that creativity is pain-free are liars. The people who tell you they've got a plan are liars. There is no plan. There's just you, God and the need to invent. And this uncertain world is what most of us now find ourselves entering, willingly or otherwise.
Creativity equals chaos. Chaos equals creativity. Embrace it or die. I've already done so. I know all about it. It almost cost me my liver but like I said, education is expensive.
The Creative Age is upon us. The Chaotic Age is upon us. We are scared. Damn right, we should be scared. But out of the terror comes the amazing opportunities for us to expand both on the material and spiritual level. The fewer safety nets there are to save us, the less choice we have to be anything other than ourselves, the less choice we have besides doing what is meaningful to us. And finding ourselves, doing what matters, becoming the person we were born to be, this is what God put on this earth to do.
We live in amazing and interesting times. If we're lucky, while on this earth we can do a damn good job proving i
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Smartass kids slamming classic video games
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DATE: 12/28/2004 02:25:04 AM
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Child's Play is EGM's recurring feature in which kids who play video games are sat down in front of game classics like Tetris and Adventure and Donkey Kong, then encouraged to deliver scathing hilarious commentary on the general suck of yesteryear's treasured games as compared to today's offerings.
Bobby: I've played this on my cell phone.
EGM: [Pointing to the humans on the ground] What do they look like?
Parker: They look like those little characters in the game Life, the little people you have to stick in your car.
EGM: Before this came out in compilations, we used to put quarters in arcade machines.
Parker: You wasted quarters on this?
EGM: Yeah.
Parker: That's so sad.
Link
(via Foe Romeo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: FDA: Give dying cancer victims Ecstasy
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DATE: 12/28/2004 03:20:17 AM
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The FDA has approved research into whether Ecstasy should be used in palliative care of terminal cancer patients to ease their final days.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved a pilot study looking at whether the recreational hallucinogen can help terminally-ill patients lessen their fears, quell thoughts of suicide and make it easier for them to deal with loved ones.
"End of life issues are very important and are getting more and more attention, and yet there are very few options for patients who are facing death," Dr John Halpern, the Harvard research psychiatrist in charge of the study, said.
The small four-month study is expected to begin early next spring. It will test the drug's effects on 12 cancer patients from the Lahey Clinic Medical Centre in the Boston area. The research is being sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a non-profit group that plans to raise 250,000 (-184,816) to fund it.
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(via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Inflatable bounce-house pub
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DATE: 12/28/2004 03:53:36 AM
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From the people who brought you the inflatable church, an inflatable pub with inflatable fireplace and even a dart-board.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Chillits DJ sets online
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DATE: 12/28/2004 08:31:07 AM
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Chillits is an ambient music outdoor festival that takes place every fall in Northern California. It's sort of a scaled-down version of the UK's Big Chill. All of the DJ sets from Chillits 2004 are now online for our, er, blistening pleasure. The mixes by my musical mentors, San Francisco's Nick Philip and DF Tram, are just stunning. And yes, the Brian Behlendorf who also spun a really beautiful set is in fact the co-inventor of Apache. I have Brian to thank for turning me on to post-Eno ambient when we both interned at Wired in 1993. What DF Tram says about his own set pretty much applies across the Chillits board: this music is "best enjoyed horizontally." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: The legend of lost Disney porn
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DATE: 12/28/2004 09:24:43 AM
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Following up on last week's BoingBoing post about a vintage, X-rated, Disney-inspired comic for auction on eBay (Link to post), BoingBoing reader Mercutio writes:
An entry on LJ prompted me to look at Boing Boing entry concerning the sale of Disney parody/porn on Ebay. Thought you'd appreciate knowing that Disney animators actually made an orgy scene using characters from Snow White.
I once worked at Facets Multimedia, an art movie house in Chicago. During the mid 1980s, I attended a lecture by famous animator Seamus Culhane. Mr. Culhane had worked for Fleischer, Disney and Warner Brothers at different times. And he was an animator on Snow White. (Mr. Culhane was fired by Walt Disney for trying to organize an independent union - but that's another
story.)
During his talk, Mr. Culhane was asked if there had ever been any porn created that was like the famous picture from The Realist [Ed. Note: the "Disney porn" image auctioned last week on eBay]. He answered that, yes, the work was so long that the animators got bored and created very explicit orgy scene sketches and cells. He further said that when Walt Disney heard what was going on, he personally hunted down and burned all of the objectionable material.
Thought you'd like to hear this story. I don't know if Mr. Culhane or any other animators were ever quoted in a new source about this episode in Disney history.
As any regular reader of this site knows, my blog-colleage Cory Doctorow is BoingBoing's resident guru on all things Disney. Browse the results of this Google search string for some of his previous posts on ephemera from the mouse-o-sphere.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Brotherton's Star Dragon sf novel under CC license
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DATE: 12/28/2004 11:19:06 AM
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JeremyT sez, "Mike Brotherton has released a free downloadable version of his first science fiction novel, _Star Dragon_ on his website. Mike's first novel, published by Tor last year, is a great read. Star Dragon is a hard science fiction novel detailing a scientific expedition to investigate strange life forms living inside a star's accretion disk." This is great news -- Tor is my publisher, too and it's wonderful to see them experimenting with CC licenses for their other authors.
Unlike most first-time visitors entering the world headquarters of Biolathe, Inc., Dr. Samuel Fisher didn't pause at the moist cloying air that moved across the building’s threshold like breath. If anything, his pace increased; he threw his shoulders forward and his streaker-clad feet rushed as if to prevent a fall, sinking into the plush rose ruglings with each step. Unlike the sunlit diamond and gold, seemingly mandatory in corporate buildings, this lobby throbbed pink and organic. The entire building was alive. Despite the omnipresence of biotechnology, walking inside it rather than sitting on it still made most hesitate.
Not Fisher -- he was in the middle of five major projects. He didn't believe his life would be as transformed by the upcoming presentation as the Biolathe agent had hinted. He charged ahead, glancing about the nearly empty lobby for signs to guide him. What was this? He’d been here six seconds already! There was never enough time to waste any of it. He decided there was one thing he would hesitate over in the future: being talked into a physical meeting.
In the middle of the cavernous chamber Fisher stopped abruptly, brought up short by a bipedal mobile with wrinkled gray skin attached to the wall by a pulsing umbilical.
Link
(Thanks, JeremyT!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Craigslist takes $50 million from newspapers' classified ads
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DATE: 12/28/2004 02:55:10 PM
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Classified Intelligence, a consulting firm has released a report that says craigslist.com has seriously hurt newspapers' classified ad revenue.
Craigslist - now partly owned by eBay - beat out the papers by being more customer friendly and by being quicker to act than its rivals. Other papers around the US should take notice of Craigslist' Bay area success, as the site continues its march into new cities.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Before and after hi-res satellite images of tsunami zone
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DATE: 12/28/2004 03:07:00 PM
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Amazing, amazing images of beachfront in Sri Lanka before and after the tsunami hit. Also, hi-res satellite images of the tsunami itself. Snip:
"This is a natural color, 60-centimeter (2-foot) high-resolution QuickBird satellite image featuring the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka. Imagery was collected at 10:20 a.m. local time, slightly less than four hours after the 6:28 a.m. (local Sri Lanka time) earthquake and shortly after the moment of tsunami impact."
Link (Thanks, WW!).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Web based Apple 2 emulator
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DATE: 12/28/2004 03:12:28 PM
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Virtual Apple is a library of old Apple 2 applications that you can run from the emulator on website. Unfortunately, you need Windows(!) and IE to run it. I checked -- they have Wizardry available -- the game that convinced me to buy my first Apple 2e in 1985. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How people destroy technology
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DATE: 12/28/2004 04:29:47 PM
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Technology Review covers Kent Norman, "a cognitive psychologist who studies how people destroy their technology -- sometimes on purpose, but oftentimes out of frustration."
"Struck mid-size tower with car going 25mph, propelling it 15-20 feet forward. This causes damage to car but troublesome DVD drive finally ejected jammed disc upon contact with pavement. Still worked but HDD reported errors, and case wasn't attractive. Sold on eBay (with new case and HDD). Beware of this computer if you find it on eBay."
"Slammed keyboard with fists hard enough to pop most of the keys off. Lost the 'A' key and the top row of characters stopped working. Threw keyboard into the swimming pool. Kinda nice watching it sink."
"Smashing boards and plastic bits with a hammer is satisfying. Stomping on things that make a nice "CRUNCH" noise is even more satisfying. "
"I once shot a computer with a .50 cal BMG sniper rifle."
Link
(Thanks, Brad!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rare Rucker 1st edn auction to benefit tsunami victims
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DATE: 12/28/2004 04:30:57 PM
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Bill sez, "I have a treasured first printing of Rudy's (out of print) short story collection that's been with me since college. It's a book full of mind-expanding (and funny) stories. I'm auctioning it off on eBay, and the proceeds will be given in the winner's name, to Oxfam America's relief efforts in area devastated by the 26 December earthquake and tsunami."
Link
(Thanks, Bill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Harry Potter parody choose-your-adventure game for iPod
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DATE: 12/28/2004 04:38:26 PM
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The Brunching Shuttlecocks once featured an hilarious choose-your-own-adventure game based on Harry Potter, by David Neilsen.
It turns out that iPods have a "museum" mode where text notes and audio clips can be combined so that museums and other venues can hand out iPods to patrons, who trigger narration by clicking the iPod's button based on signs at each exhibit. This is also well-suited to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games.
So here's a choose-your-own-adventure Harry Potter parody game for the iPod -- wow!
Link (scroll down page to 3/25/04 entry)
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TITLE: Mutant snowflakes on Jimwich
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DATE: 12/28/2004 05:31:03 PM
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Good news: Jim Leftwich has started blogging again! And to re-kick it off, he's assembled a gallery of non-six-sided snowflakes he's found in advertisements. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Virgin Mary toast on demand
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DATE: 12/28/2004 05:37:04 PM
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Matthew is auctioning a grilled cheese maker that toasts the Virgin Mary's likeness onto a slice of bread. He sez: "I'm working on a super cheap wifi telecommunications project for the Pacific island of Bougainville. The sandwich maker is art experimant and half a hair-brain fund raising
effort for the project." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Duck and Cover: The Citizen Kane of civil defense films
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DATE: 12/28/2004 06:50:30 PM
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Boing Boing friend Ken Sitz sez: "My CONELRAD
project just received a holiday gift from the Library
of Congress in today's announcement that DUCK AND
COVER is being inducted into the National Film
Registry, thus guaranteeing its perservation. We
launched a campaign last March to rally our readers
and interested parties to support our official
nomination and we just published the first production
history of the film." Link
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TITLE: Photographs from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937
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DATE: 12/28/2004 08:09:44 PM
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In 1975, documentary artist Bruce Jackson found a bunch of old prison photos in a drawer in the Arkansas penitentiary.
The people being photographed have no interest in the photographs being made; the people making the photographs have no interest in the photographs they have made.
Link (Via Sensible Erection)
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TITLE: EW picks Grey Album for best of 2004
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DATE: 12/28/2004 11:23:03 PM
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Entertainment Weekly's Album of the Year is DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, an album made by mashing up Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' White Album. The resulting disc is very good, and also illegal, at least in the eyes of EMI, the Beatles' publisher, who pursued legal action against Danger Mouse for making the disc.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BitTorrent write-up in Wired
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DATE: 12/28/2004 11:41:01 PM
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This month's Wired Magazine features a long article on Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, written by BB pal Clive Thompson. It's a very good piece, and Bram gets some great licks in; the only place I took issue with it is where Clive talks about Microsoft DRM being useful to "keep content out of pirate hands" -- there is not a single piece of content in the history of the universe that has been "kept out of pirate hands" (i.e. kept off the Internet, or prevented from being stamped out in pirate CD factories abroad) by DRM. It's a weird kind of Big Lie strategy by the DRM people to talk about how DRM can prevent "piracy" when there has never, ever been an example of this happening.
Wired seems to be a little soft on DRM these days; the recent Wired spin-off, Wired Test, featured page on page of reviews of music players, media PCs, and PVRs with hardly a mention of the fact that all of these devices were fundamentally crippleware, and all controlled by entertainment companies who can and do arbitrarily remove functionality from them after they have entered the marketplace, so that the device that you've bought does less today than it did when you opened the box. If you're publishing a consumer-advice magazine, it seems like this is the kind of thing you should be noting for your readers: "If you buy this, your investment will be contingent on the ongoing goodwill of some paranoid Warners exec whose astrologer has told him that your pause button will put him out of business and must be disabled."
There's a strong tie here for the use-case for BitTorrent. I bought a Sopranos Season Three DVD set for a friend's Christmas this year. When the friend opened the gift on her Christmas holiday in France, the discs wouldn't play in her hotel's French DVD player; nor would they play in the on-site English PowerBook -- because the discs had DRM. At that point, the rational thing to do would have been to sell the discs on Amazon and just download Season Three using BitTorrent -- the studios have rigged the game so that you get a superior product (e.g., something you can actually watch) when you download bootlegs from BitTorrent, and they actively punish customers who buy their products instead of downloading them.
Which brings me back to Clive's casual note that Microsoft DRM can keep media "out of pirate hands." It's a statement that's so categorically untrue, it seems to come from a parallel universe with different laws of physics and economics. BitTorrent proves the futility of DRM as surely as DRM turns honest customers into studio-hating downloaders.
Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with "content people" from the record and movie industries, he realized that "the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate." Cohen said as much at the conference's panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen's audacity.
Cohen seems curiously unmoved by the storm raging around him. "With BitTorrent, the cat's out of the bag," he shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about piracy and the future of media, and at first I think he's avoiding the subject because it's so legally sensitive. But after a while, I realize it simply doesn't interest him much.
He'd rather just work on his code. He'd rather buckle down and figure out new ways to make BitTorrent more efficient. He'd rather focus on something that demands crazy, hair-pulling logic.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Myanmar's govt suppressing tsunami news?
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DATE: 12/28/2004 11:43:48 PM
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GeekCorps founder Ethan Zuckerman has astutely noticed that there is almost no news about the effect of the tsunami on Myanmar (formerly Burma), which was surely in the disaster's path. It appears that news of the tsunami's effect has been supressed by Myanmar's military dictators.
There's two possible explanations for this story. One is that Myanmar, with 1930 kilometers of coastline, numerous fishing villages and huts on stilts along the coast, and a common border with Thailand - where over 1500 are reported dead - miraculously escaped the effect of the tsunami.
The other explanation is that Myanmar's famously secretive military government hasn't wanted to reveal the extent of the tsunami damage to the outside world... and especially to their own citizens. (As in many represive regimes, it's easier to to get news from outside the country than news from within it.)
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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TITLE: Cory's PopSci column: How Hollywood broke DVD
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DATE: 12/29/2004 12:05:31 AM
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I've begun writing a regular column for Popular Science magazine, about technology and policy. The first one's just hit the stands, called "Go Ask Hollywood: Why can't you back up your DVDs? Because entertainment execs don't want you to."
They set up a cartel in 1995, now called the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA), to dole out these licenses. Anyone making players without one is breaking the law. A Fox Studios executive told me, "It's a polite marketplace." Sure, if polite means stagnant.
Think of all the things you can do with a track from a CD now that you couldn't do 10 years ago: rip it to your laptop, turn it into a ring tone, send it to your friends, burn a mix. Many of these capabilities are illegal, and the recording industry has tried to stop them all, but they're out there, challenging the old rules and feeling their place in the market. Innovators have tried to enable the same flexibility for the DVD. Last year 321 Studios released software that let you back up prerecorded DVDs, but the MPAA sued it into bankruptcy before a court could rule on whether or not the product was legal.
Just last month, this magazine gave a Best of What's New award to a $27,000 movie jukebox from Kaleidescape, praising the maker's efforts to appease Hollywood by locking down content on the device so it can't be shared. Kaleidescape thinks the product is within the boundaries of its DVD-CCA license, but my Deep Throat on the cartel says the group disagrees and is currently deciding how the company will be punished. Penalties range from a stern warning to fines to lawsuits. (When I called the DVD-CCA for an official line, I got this reply: "I've been asked to tell you we have no comment." "Who asked you to tell me that?" "I can't tell you.")
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Space Invader shoe
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DATE: 12/29/2004 01:39:31 AM
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Anonymous French guerilla artist Invader surreptitiously installs tile mosaics of classic video game characters in high-traffic spots all over Paris and other cities around the globe. In fact, I can see one from the window of my apartment! Now he's released a limited-edition sneaker with a space invader character raised in the tread, enabling the shoe to be used like a stamp. Each step in sand, mud, water, paint, wet tar, etc., leaves an imprint, scoring you points in the ongoing invasion. Link (via Cool Hunting)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dicing with Dragons: BBC Radio doc on D&D
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DATE: 12/29/2004 04:41:09 AM
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Gavin sez, "On Wednesday, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary called 'Dicing with Dragons', which explored the origins of Dungeons and Dragons, including its introduction to the UK by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, authors of the Fighting Fantasy books and the founders of the current Colossus of non-electronic gaming, Games Workshop. The documentary also explores the literary inspirations for DnD material, including Tolkien, Robert E Howard and Michael Moorcock, and also the writers who've been inspired by it, like China Mieville. You can listen to the documentary in Real Audio format on the BBC's website. Great listening."
Real Stream Link
(Thanks, Gavin!)
Update: Daniel sez, "You might want to amend your article to say that the Steve Jackson
interviewed is not the Steve Jackson of the famous RPG company Steve
Jackson Games, makers of G.U.R.P.S., Toon, Ogre, Car Wars and other
RPG classics along with the popular trading card game, Illuminati: New
World Order."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Asimo in motion
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DATE: 12/29/2004 05:57:36 AM
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I love this video of Honda's new-and-improved Asimo robot running. He moves like a cute old man chasing a bus. From the press release:
"The combination of newly developed high-response hardware and the new Posture Control technology enables ASIMO to proactively bend or twist its torso to maintain its balance and prevent the problems of foot slippage and spinning in the air, which accompany movement at higher speeds. ASIMO is now capable of running at a speed of 3km/hour. In addition, walking speed has been increased from the previous 1.6 km/hour to 2.5 km/hour."
Link (Thanks, Matt!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Obesity and oral contraceptives
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DATE: 12/29/2004 06:12:48 AM
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A new study from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center reports that women on birth control pills who are categorized by their body-mass index as overweight or obese are 60 to 70 percent more likely to get pregnant than "normal" weight women who also take the pill.
One possible explanation is increased metabolism. "The more a person weighs, the higher their basal metabolic rate, which can shorten the duration of a medication's effectiveness," she said. Another possibility is that the heavier a person is, the more liver enzymes they have to clear medications from the body, causing a drop in circulating blood levels of the drug. A third theory is based on the fact that the active ingredients in oral contraceptives – the hormones estrogen and progesterone – are stored in body fat. "The more fat a person has, the more likely the drug is sequestered, or trapped, in the fat instead of circulating in the bloodstream," (epidemiologist Victoria) Holt said.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tsunami charities rated
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DATE: 12/29/2004 06:33:50 AM
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Benjamin sez, "I did a little digging into a few of the major charities mentioned on Google's page and on the tsunami blog, and have posted ratings and links from Charity Navigator, the Better Business Bureau, and the American Institute of Philanthropy for the top few."
Link
(Thanks, Benjamin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Incredible Beatles mashup mixes 40+ different tracks
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DATE: 12/29/2004 07:32:37 AM
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Hank sez, "Where ordinary mash-up mixes mix two or perhaps three songs, this mix is made up by appx 40 Beatles songs, with sometimes five different songs playing at the same time. A must hear!" I concur; this is mind-blowingly amazing. Man, all these Beatles mash-ups this year are really making me yearn for my old Beatles vinyl. I especially love the juxtaposition in this track of the old skiffle-Beatles with the later psychedelia. Soo-poib.
5MB MP3 Link
(Thanks, Hank!)
PS: I am reasonably certain that this server will be shortly overwhelmed. If you've got a mirror, email me and I'll post a link to it. However, I have no such mirror, so if you find yourself unable to get a copy, don't look at me!
Update 1: Ian Clarke, the co-author of the awesome P2P tool Freenet, has graciously offered to distribute this file through Dijjer, his new (still pre-beta) P2P content distribution tool; here's the Dijjer Link
Update 2: Brian Arnold offers this more conventional mirror
Update 3: David Chin was good enough to make and seed this Torrent for the file (though I have my doubts about BitTorrent's efficacy with a file of a paltry five megabytes)
Update 4: Guillaume Champeau sends in these links you can use to get the file over P2P nets: eDonkey/eMule Link, Gnutella (Limewire, Bearshare, Shareaza...) Link
Update 5: Phil Nelson provides this old-fashioned Web mirror
Update 6: Jeroen Sangers also has a traditional Web mirror
Update 7: Andre Nantel invites us to consume her/his "20,000 megs of unused bandwidth for this month," via this link
Update 8: Doppeljr has this mirror on offer
Update 9: Matt Lyon has an archive for your downloading pleasure
Update 10: If a dijjer link isn't obscure enough, how about a Red Swoosh link, courtesy of Travis Kalanick?
Update 11: Scott Lawrence's mirror promises unlimited bandwidth!
Update 12: Everett Guerny provides another .edu mirror.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More CC-licensed banjo manuals
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DATE: 12/29/2004 07:58:11 AM
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Patrick sez, "'A Book Of Five Strings' is another Creative Commons banjo book- you guys posted a link to my first CC project, 'The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo' back in September. 'Five Strings' was released a few weeks ago and it's already selling pretty well. Going CC actually boosted sales for my first book so I figured I might as well do it again."
Link
(Thanks, Patrick!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rudy Rucker explains how to get high on cellular automata
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DATE: 12/29/2004 09:04:54 AM
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Rudy Rucker sez, "Here's an interesting blog entry about conotoxins, cellular automata, and the new drug Prialt."
So I’m going on about cellular automata all the time and you’re thinking, “Yes, but can CAs get me high?” I’ll say! Stephen Wolfram’s mascot is the textile coneshell, famous for having a one-dimensional CA wrapped around its shell.
Link
(Thanks, Rudy!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Earth is spinning faster as a result of quake
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DATE: 12/29/2004 11:02:52 AM
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The massive undersea earthquake that caused the tsunami gave a boost to our planet's spin. As a result, days will be a fraction of a second shorter from now on.
Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Post-Tsunami Reconnect project
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DATE: 12/29/2004 11:04:04 AM
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Author and wireless geek Mike Outmesguine announces a disaster relief project aimed at bringing connectivity to tsunami victims cut off from communications services by the disaster.
I am working to organize a disaster relief effort to help those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. I'd like to send wireless equipment and expertise to damaged areas to help reconnect the people. I'm still working out the details and will update you as more develops. It will be organized with folks from the Southern California Wireless Users Group, SOCALWUG and other wireless groups that wish to participate. I started calling it the Post-Tsunami Reconnect.
Xeni Jardin mentioned the effort today on Fox News Channel during an interview about bloggers and the tsunami. I will have a video excerpt available soon. Here is a statement I sent to the Center for International Disaster Information about the effort:
"We are a Southern California based user community of experts and advocates of wireless data communications. Wireless community members supplied technical expertise and wireless equipment for the Florida hurricane relief efforts and to military personnel stationed in Iraq. We would like to organize, collect, and deliver wireless data equipment to disaster relief workers and others in the affected region to help maintain a high level of communication and internet access ability. We would also be able to send engineers into the area to help bring connections online."
For more information or to discuss a donation of funds, equipment, or your expertise, contact Mike Outmesguine by email "mo at wifi-toys.com" or voice:
+1-818-889-9445 ext. 102
Link
Previous BoingBoing posts: Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dori Smith debunks Dvorak's anti-Mac column
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DATE: 12/29/2004 11:12:01 AM
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Backup Brain's Dori Smith obviously had fun eviscerating John Dvorak's latest anti-Macintosh diatribe. She points out glaring problems with Dvoraks first two sentences, which is all you need to know to realize that Dvorak's column is a joke.
Dvorak: "The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. That becomes obvious when you look at the declining market share numbers -- not from research firms, but from the W3C, which monitors online activity."
Smith: "[Those statistics] show that the number of Mac users online (or at least visiting the W3 Schools site) has gone from 1.8% in March 2003 to 2.3% in December 2003 to 2.7% in December 2004. But noting that the number is increasing would completely destroy Dvorak's premise, so he doesn't mention it."
Link (Via Scoble)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami blogs launched for help services, missing persons inquiries
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DATE: 12/29/2004 11:15:09 AM
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The group responsible for tsunamihelp.blogspot.com have launched two new collaborative blogs: tsunami enquiry, with numbers for emergency help services in affected areas, and tsunami missing persons, which aims to assist people in connecting with loved ones.
Previous BoingBoing posts: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: In Sri Lanka, animals seem to have survived
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DATE: 12/29/2004 11:17:54 AM
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Strangely, amid massive loss of human life, there seems to be little or no dead wild animals in Sri Lanka. Snip:
Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned -- the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast, but they can't find any dead animals.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Backyard disaster bunker
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DATE: 12/29/2004 11:29:54 AM
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Jim Leftwich writes about US Bunkers, which manufactures a nice little pod to cozy up in when the peak oil crisis-induced food, water, and energy riots commence. Load it up with plenty of guns, ammos, water, food, and antibiotics and ride out the catastrophe. Don't open the door until the population drops by 90 percent. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM
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DATE: 12/29/2004 01:40:35 PM
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Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, has responded to my blog-post in which I take issue with Wired's latest product-review magazine, which breathes hardly a mention of DRM even as it reviews devices that are all crapped up with studio-paranoia-generated restriction technology.
Chris takes a "middle ground" position that I've heard described as "radical centrism" -- his position is that the EFF's opposition to DRM is "idealistic" and that there is therefore a practical "reality" that is better suited to the world. I think it's a false dichotomy, and I'd like to have a little go at Chris's post here and see if I can show why:
Consumers want more content, easier-to-use technology, and cheaper prices. If some form of DRM encourages publishers, consumer electronics makers and retailers to release more, better and cheaper digital media and devices, that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.
This is the crux of the argument. It starts out by saying that DRM is protection. And protection makes Hollywood comfortable. And a comfortable Hollywood will release more material. And the more material there is, the cheaper it will get.
But all of those propositions are materially untrue. Start with "DRM is protection." DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. DRM has never once in the history of the field kept a file from appearing online, or from being booted by organized crime pirates. Despite its rhetoric on this, Hollywood is perfectly aware of how bogus the DRM-is-protection claim is; any entertainment exec you put on this spot on this will retreat to a badly-thought-out mantra to the effect that "DRM is a speedbump, it's not meant to keep files off the Internet, it's meant to 'keep honest users honest.'" As Ed Felten has pointed out, keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM may keep a naive user from buying a cheap DVD abroad and bringing it home, and it may make it possible to charge you for things that you used to get for free, like format-shifting, but it won't ever keep an honest user honest.
DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that "much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots," then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.
This is a profoundly ahistorical proposition. Never in the history of media from the dawn of the printing press right up to the invention of the DVD have we afforded this kind of privilege to incumbent rightsholders. Quite the contrary: at every turn, brave entrepreneurs have engaged in "piracy" of copyrighted works (through devices like the record player, radio, cable television and VCR) and kept at it until the law caught up with the technology.
It's different with the DVD. With the DVD, the electronics companies completely wimped out. They traded their customers to the studios for two packs of cigarettes, and the result has been a decade of stagnation in DVD players. There's no indication that movies are being released sooner or more cheaply on DVD than they were on VHS; and in fact, the release of movies on VHS was preceded by incredible, absurd hyperbole about the video-cassette's inevitable destruction of the film industry and the complete impossibility of a movie ever being released by a studio for viewing on your VCR.
If you believe that "content owners still call most of the shots" then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous. DRM hasn't convinced the studios to put new material online -- the offerings that the studios have put online are a pathetic shadow of the material one can download from the P2P networks. The studios have all the DRM in the universe at their disposal, but they're not using it to bring new material to market.
Nope, they're using it to sell you the same crap for more money. Chris loves his Microsoft Media Center PC, "essentially a DVR on steroids" -- at least, he loves it so far. That's because he hasn't been bitten on the ass by it yet, like this guy, who bought a Media Center PC so that he could catch the Sopranos and burn them to DVD. When he bought the PC, it was capable of doing that. Halfway through the season, the studios reached into his living room and broke his PC, disabling the feature that allowed him to burn his Sopranos episodes to DVD. And if you got suckered into letting your cable company give you a "free" PVR, you've got a nasty shock coming this season: your episodes of Six Feet Under will delete themselves from your hard drive after two weeks, whether you've gotten around to watching them or not.
If you want to watch all the Sopranos or Six Feet Unders in a row at the end of the season, you'll have to do it on Pay Per View. You'll have to buy what you used to get for free: the right to record a show and watch it for as long as you'd like. You get less, you pay more. And the studios can change the rules of the game after you've bought the box and brought it home: the only way you can protect your investment is if you can somehow ensure that no studio executive decides to revoke one of the features you paid for back when the box was on the show-room floor. Remember, these are the same studio execs who are duking it out for the right to limit how long a pause button can work for.
Chris likes the iTunes Music Store, calling it a success, but it's got the same problems as the Media Center and all the other DRM devices. The record labels can demand that Apple selectively break your music player, removing features based on secret negotiations, long after you've made your purchases. Apple will even force "updates" on you that remove features that you've chosen to add to your device, shutting you out of listening to your own music on the player you shelled out good money for.
The problem is that once your device vendor sells you out to the studios, they're 0wned. The studios' protection racket lets them demand practically anything from a device vendor -- check out "selectable output control" for some truly heinous world-domination horseshit.
So, Chris, that's why I disagree with your "realistic" notion:
- There's no reason to believe that DRM makes more content available
- There's no reason to let the studios "call the shots" -- we haven't before this
- There's no reason to believe that DRM makes media cheaper, quite the contrary
- The features that make your "reasonable" DRM palatable to the market today can and are rescinded tomorrow
If I were in Chris's seat, I would be sure that every single review of a DRM device carried the following notice: WARNING: THIS DEVICE'S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD'S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE -- BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY'RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT'LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT, Fox News, others on blogs and tsunami disaster
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DATE: 12/29/2004 03:43:45 PM
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John Schwartz wrote an insightful piece for the New York Times this week about the role blogs play in covering and responding to the tsunami disaster. I was interviewed for the piece, but the people who really have something interesting and valuable to say are the ones over there, on the ground -- and the folks rolling up their geek sleeves to assist.
From relaying first-person accounts (like Sanjay/Morquendi's SMS reports in Sri Lanka), to kick-starting relief efforts (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com, and the Post-Tsunami Reconnect project), to questioning media coverage (Ethan Zuckerman's post about Myanmar), there's a lot going on here The amateur-shot image shown here ran in the NYT story. Snip:
"At sumankumar.com, Nanda Kishore, a contributor, offered photos and commentary from Chennai, India: 'Some drenched till their hips, some till their chest, some all over and some of them were so drenched that they had already stopped breathing. Men and women, old and young, all were running for lives. It was a horrible site to see. The relief workers could not attend to all the dead and all the alive. The dead were dropped and the half alive were carried to safety.' His postings included a photo of a body on a sidewalk with a buffalo walking by. 'It now seems prophetic," he wrote, "for according to the Hindu mythology, Lord Yama (the god of death) rides on a buffalo.'"
Link to story.
Fox News did a segment on this subject yesterday. I spoke with anchor Jon Scott about some of the blogosphere reports we've been pointing to from BoingBoing in recent days. Here are video clips of the Fox News segment: Real, Windows (Many thanks, Mike Outmesguine, for TiVoing and kindly hosting.)
There have been a number of related stories out in the past 24 hours in the Wall Street Journal (Link, sub required), Libération (France) (Link), the Inquirer (UK) (Link), and AP (Link). (Thanks to BB readers including Jean-Luc for pointers).
Previous BoingBoing posts: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Kevin Sites blogging from Thailand
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DATE: 12/29/2004 04:54:58 PM
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Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites was in Southeast Asia on a break from reporting duties when the tsunami disaster took place. He's now in Thailand, reporting -- and back on the blog again, dispatching photos and first-person accounts. Snip:
One-hundred and fifty-nine pine coffins have been stacked in the garage -- many of them big enough to hold refrigerators -- built to accommodate the now bloated and rapidly decomposing bodies inside. Thai soldiers, wearing surgical masks, race against time to arrest the process -- before the bodies become impossible to identify.
In a well-choreographed drill -- they use hammers to smash square blocks of dry ice, carrying the shards on sheets of plastic and dumping them inside the coffins with the remains. They work at a very high tempo -- almost as if they were trying to rescue the living -- rather than preserve the dead.
On the sides of the coffins are photographs of the deceased as they were found, special attention paid to jewelry or tattoos, anything that can help in identifying who they once were.
The pictures are grisly -- bruised, blackened, bodies misshapen from the ferocious force of an angry ocean and all that travels with it. Old, young, small, large, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, English, Thais –- all victims of the earth's unrest on a day when she seemed to have precious little mercy.
Link.(Photo: Coffins bearing digital photographs of the deceased. image: Kevin Sites.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Amateur video footage of tsunami on blogs, torrents
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DATE: 12/29/2004 05:12:15 PM
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Waxy.org has been collecting amateur video footage, here's a roundup post: Link. Punditguy has more: Link
Chris Holland says,
I've used prodigem to create torrents for the South Asia tsunami videos. The more people use this torrent, the faster everyone else will be able to download the videos. See also this page to make it easy for people to put an amazon donation badge on their sites.
Link
Previous BoingBoing posts: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indian numeric systems for dummies
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DATE: 12/29/2004 05:59:40 PM
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Alex Steffen says,
Hey -- If, like me, you are a non-Indian, find reading Indian new sources valuable (especially during this disaster), but don't really know your lakh from your crore, and find the placement of commas in Indian numbers utterly baffling, this guide to the Indian numbering system will prove helpful:
Term / Figure / No. of zeros / In words
lakh (lac) / 1,00,000/ 5 / Hundred Thousand
crore / 1,00,00,000/ 7 / Ten million
arab / 1,00,00,00,000/ 9 / 1 billion
kharab / 1,00,00,00,00,000 / 11 / 100 billion
Link to Wikipedia tutorial
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More on bloggers and tsunami aid efforts
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DATE: 12/29/2004 06:11:54 PM
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The total number of dead is now believed to be more than 80,000, and rising. In some places, one in every four citizens have lost their lives. Many of the areas hit were extremely poor to begin with, and some 1/3 of the dead are children. Following up on previous BoingBoing posts about fundraising and relief efforts kick-started in the blogosphere:
Scott Hanselman proposes that Google allow bloggers that use AdSense to donate ad proceeds to tsunami relief. Link (Thanks, Peter Provost).
Andy Carvin at Digital Divide Network says, "In response to this week's devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Digital Divide Network has created an online community workspace on disaster relief and emergency preparedness: Link. The virtual community can be used for posting online resources, documents, news, and articles about tsunami relief efforts. Users also may take advantage of the site's Web bulletin board and post their own blog entries."
BoingBoing reader Andrew Falconer proposes that folks who've received holiday gift cards convert them into donations to a tsunami relief charity. "I've emailed Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Swapagift.com regarding gift card donations directly to tsunami relief charities. Amazon.com has already implemented the ability to donate via their One-Click system."
Reader J. Hahn says, "I am particularly impressed with Amazon.com's Red Cross donation counter that proves Americans are not 'stingy.' Also, as a Mac user, I was proud to go to the apple.com site and see not one product ad on their front page - just links to aid and donation sites, and Microsoft had not one mention of the disaster."
Previous BoingBoing posts: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Indigenous tribes at risk of extinction after tsunami
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DATE: 12/29/2004 06:21:08 PM
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Some of the indigenous ethnic communities on Andaman and Nicobar islands could be on the verge of extinction after the tsunami disaster.
The remote cluster of more than 550 islands, of which only about three dozen are inhabited, is home to six tribes of Mongoloid and African origin who have lived there for thousands of years. Many of these tribal people are semi-nomadic and subsist on hunting with spears, bows and arrows, and by fishing and gathering fruit and roots. They still cover themselves with tree bark or leaves.
"They are a vital link to our prehistoric past. If they are lost, India and the world lose a bit of their glorious heterogeneity," said Ajoy Bagchi, executive director of the People's Commission on Environment and Development, India, which has worked with tribal groups in the region for years.
"Even a small loss in any of these groups, barring the more numerous Nicobarese, could seriously endanger their survival. We need to immediately do a count on how many of them are alive."
Link. Previous BoingBoing posts: Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jim Flora in the New York Times
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DATE: 12/29/2004 07:19:56 PM
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I've written about my favorite illustrator, the late Jim Flora, several times on Boing Boing. I'm happy to see that the New York Times has an article him, and his influence on today's artists.
"I came across his work in 1993," said Michael Bartalos, a San Francisco-based illustrator who was among the first to locate Flora. "Our styles were very similar - strangely similar, actually - but after I met him I was even more influenced."
Among the other prominent artists and illustrators today who are strongly influenced by Flora's art are Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, J. D. King and Melinda Beck, who all wrote appreciations for Mr. Chusid's book, each praising his effortlessly jazzy spirit. Gene Deitch, a contemporary of Flora's, admits that through the 40's and 50's he was "brazenly imitating his style."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami Help Wiki
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DATE: 12/29/2004 07:38:54 PM
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Wikinews just launched a Tsunami Help page to collect links to relief effort resources including aid agencies, missing and found people, confirmed deaths, news updates, and helpline numbers. The emergency database was created by contributors to the SEA-EAT (Tsunami Help) blog. (Thanks, Rohit). Link to related BoingBoing posts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Video -- Xeni on ABC World News: Google Guys
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CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 12/29/2004 07:50:33 PM
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In case you or your TiVo find yourself in front of the TV tonight (Wednesday, December 29), I'll be appearing on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings in a segment about Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, whom ABC count among the "people of the year" from the tech world. Link. Local air times: Link
Update: Here's an archived video file of tonight's ABC News segment on Google, in WMV. Offers to convert or torrent welcomed with thanks. Link to 3.4 MB file (Many thanks, Mike Outmesguine!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Barlow: Amelia takes a fall
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DATE: 12/29/2004 10:31:37 PM
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On his blog, John Perry Barlow writes about a serious accident that his daughter Amelia just survived -- and the sense of hope that, paradoxically, experiences like this can bring. Hope that transcends the personal, encompassing the global. Our best wishes for Amelia's safe and speedy recovery, Barlow. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Crafty crackhead Powerbook made from garbage bags
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DATE: 12/29/2004 11:24:01 PM
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There's a big-city hustle that goes like this: a hustler comes up to offering to fence you some stolen big-ticket electronics item, still sealed in its box -- say, a video camera. You can heft that box all you like, but no opening the shrink-wrap, as that would lower the resale value. Once you give the crackhead $20 for this boss $1000 camera and tear off the shrinkwrap, you discover that you've just bought a brick in a camcorder box. Basically, it's what happens when you combine crackheads, a supply of fresh consumer electronics boxes, and a shrinkwrapping machine.
Here's a modern twist on an old favorite: buy a Powerbook for a double-sawbuck. What's in the black, sleek Powerbook box?
"A fake laptop made of gray garbage bag and cardboard, spray-painted platinum silver and finished with A HAND-PAINTED APPLE LOGO DONE IN WITE-OUT."
Oh, man, that's some Martha Stewartoid crackhead creativity.
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(via Making Light)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Go-faster tweak for Firefox
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Here's a great go-faster tip for Firefox, the free, rock-solid, secure browser from the Mozilla Foundation:
1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!
Link
(Thanks, daede!)
Update: Ole sez, "Enabling pipelining in Firefox can speed up complex page retrievals, as you note, but it can also break Flash. This is a Macromedia thing not a Firefox thing but that’s why the app defaults to pipelining disabled."
Update 2: Gav sez, "There are reasons why Firefox isn't configured like that out of the box. Asa at Mozilla.org explains why.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Defense fund for Bit Torrent indexer
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LokiTorrent is a BitTorrent indexing site -- like the lamented Suprnova -- that has been threatened with legal action by the MPAA for telling people where to download torrent files that allow them to download video and other large data-objects. Unlike some of the other Torrent indexers that shut down last week, LokiTorrent is mounting a legal defense. They're trying to raise a legal defense fund of $30,000, and they've made $11,500 in the first 12 hours.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Geek lessons learned from suit-productivity book
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Merlin Mann's 43 Folders weblog is a site where he's been chronicling his efforts to adapt the lessons of the stupendous productivity book Getting Things Done (I've bought and given away 10 copies since reading it earlier this year) to a technological workflow: in other words, he's porting suit productivity to geek lifestyles.
He's just posted part one of a roundup of his lessons learned from a year of pursuing the lessons of Getting Things Done (more to come tomorrow). It's really good stuff, and it's helped me make sense of my last decade's work.
In a previous life as a producer and project manager for some good-sized web projects, I once approached my work with a completely baseless optimism and sense of possibility that I had absolutely no business feeling--let alone foisting off on others as way to guide big projects. Especially given how extravagantly long-range I now realize most of those projects' aspirations really were. Yikes. Simpler times.
The reality is that projects change, and projects break; that's what they do. It's their job. The smaller your project is, and the shorter the distance there is between "here" and "there," the less likely you are to have to chuck it and start over for reasons you couldn't possibly have foreseen when you were knitting up them fancy GANTT charts for Q3/2007.
You know how it works with The Big Plan. Projects kick off, a series of heavy documents with 4-color covers is produced and distributed, everyone gets pumped for a week or two, and then somewhere, somehow, along the way, changes start to rain down, and the pretty, pretty plans for the next 3/6/9/12 months go completely to hell, often taking team morale and productivity right along with them. Say what you will about the volatility of go-go dotcoms and the nature of venture IT projects, but two bald facts won't wipe away: things always change, and Big Project Plans make great door stops.
Since picking up GTD, I've gotten more comfortable with employing informal, "back of the envelope" planning to derive very short-term goals and actions. Clients in particular seem to really like this. It helps them keep a handle on the tab, plus they all enjoy seeing one piece of the work rolling out every month or so. All without the need for endless commitments, rosaries, or finger crossing.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO Make high-quality recordings from an iPod
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Phillip Torrone's article on Hack-a-Day explains how to trick out your iPod to get it to record audio really well, bypassing the crippling restrictions imposed by Apple:
apple cripples recording on an ipod so belkin and griffin then have to sell us add-on devices for over $50 that can only record at 8khz, which is all pretty shitty. apparently (the rumor is) apple does this so people don’t use their ipods to record stuff they think we shouldn’t, like concerts, whatever.
but don’t worry, there’s a way around it and you can record at high quality, all for free.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Genetic music
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Genemusik is a project that "takes fragments of conventional Western melody and sequences them as DNA that is subsequently ‘bred’ and ‘mixed’ within bacterial cultures." The system is being developed by Nigel Helyer at the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Western Australia. I have no idea what this will sound like, but it "sounds" interesting. From the project description:
DNA extracted from these cultures may then be re-sequenced, translated to musical notation and interpreted as new musical forms.It is anticipated that the first public manifestation of GeneMusiK will be a series of elegant body adornments that contain ‘musicalised’ synthetic DNA sequences. Each item will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and an audio CD of the musical sequence. Subsequent editions are envisioned that will contain DNA sequences hybridised within bacterial cultures, together with installations of living ‘musical low-life’.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wallet Essentials
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Touch of Ginger sells an interesting line of gimmicky "Wallet Essentials," credit card-sized "necessities" like emergency cufflinks, ice scrapers, bottle openers, guitar picks, and shirt accessories (pictured here) that you punch out or fold up into functionality. It would be fun, albeit expensive, to get these printed as business cards.
Link (via Sensory Impact)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cryptozoological commemorative stamps
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This site of stamps commemorating cryptozoological creatures is fantastic. I want to collect them all! Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: University of Pseudoscience
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DATE: 12/30/2004 06:32:07 AM
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One of the Florida State University professors protesting against a proposed chiropractic school at the college created this spoof campus map. Apparently, seven professors have threatened to quit if the chiropractic school happens.
From the St. Petersburg Times:
The threatened resignations...reflect a belief among many in the medical establishment that chiropractic is a "pseudo-science" that leads to unnecessary and sometimes harmful treatments...
The list of critics include FSU's two Nobel laureates - Robert Schreiffer, a physicist, and Harold Walter Kroto, a chemist - and Robert Holton, the chemistry professor who developed the cancer-fighting drug Taxol, which has brought FSU tens of millions of dollars in royalties. In recent weeks, more than 500 faculty members have signed petitions against the chiropractic school, including about 70 in the medical college, said Dr. Raymond Bellamy, an assistant professor who is leading the charge against the proposal.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Jet pilots complains about laser
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DATE: 12/30/2004 08:47:06 AM
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A commercial airline pilot said that a laser beam entered the cockpit of his plane for several seconds on Monday, while it was 8,500 feet in the air. Air traffic controllers determined that the source of the laser came from a neighborhood in Warrensville Heights, near Cleveland. The FBI is investigating. And in September, a Delta pilot's eye was injured from a laser beam while he was landing a plane in Salt Lake City. Here's the LA Times article about this.
I'm wondering if the idiots who are doing this are using lasers like the ones sold at Lasershoppe.com. Wow: I just went to lasershoppe to read more about the $600 lasers the site sells (which can burn holes through plastic cups, and I learned that they are no longer selling lasers because they don't want to have anything to do with people who would use their lasers maliciously. They link to a CNN article that says six commercial jets have had their cockpits illuminated by laser beams in the last four days. (Photo by Phillip Torrone)
UPDATE: Patricio Lopez sez: A while ago the Ask the Pilot colum at Salon dealt with the whole lase threat issue. Excerpt:
For the record, even a well-aimed laser would be highly unlikely to cause a crash. Hitting both pilots cleanly in the face, through a refractive wraparound windshield, would require a great deal of luck, and even a temporarily blinded crew would still have the means to avoid disaster. Do not equate the results of a laser strike with, for example, having to drive sightless through a busy intersection. Maintaining a jet's stability would be challenging under the circumstances, but not impossible.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scientists love $89 toy microscope
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DATE: 12/30/2004 09:55:43 AM
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Digital Blue's RX5 computer microscope for kids is a big hit with scientists, according to this Wall Street Journal article.
Andrew Westphal, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley, says he was recently able to examine some microscopic dust from outer space with the help of the RX5's plastic lens. That is because a conventional microscope's glass lens would have suffered from the hydrofluoric acid used to separate the particles from other elements. "Had it not been for the toy, we would have been at a loss," he says.
Meanwhile, patients suffering from Morgellons, a rare type of skin disease, have been getting medical information by using the microscope in sending images of their lesions to Morgellons Research Foundation in McMurray, Pa.
Link (Thanks, Mister Jalopy!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cryptozoology and the Tsunami?
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DATE: 12/30/2004 11:04:33 AM
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Leading cryptozoologist Loren Coleman tells BB:
"Everyone wants to talk about the tsunamis, and so yesterday a reporter contacted me to ask about what impact all this would have on cryptozoology. Questions about cryptozoology in the midst of a global disaster? I frankly was shocked. But then I saw this as an opportunity to emphasize humanitarian efforts, first and foremost, and stressed zoological awareness would be an objective far down the priority list."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ohio election grok-helper
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DATE: 12/30/2004 11:20:17 AM
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Lisa Rein just posted a helpful article that attempts to simplify the Ohio election/voting fraud situation: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: McDonalds China website 0wned over politics
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DATE: 12/30/2004 11:48:49 AM
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McDonalds' official China website was hacked by someone identifying themself as "Chinese Hacker," evidently a mainland nationalist upset with the fact that the website identified Taiwan as a separate nation. Link to news story (thanks Yi)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of sex tech patent zen
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DATE: 12/30/2004 11:49:54 AM
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US Patent Office - US 6,751,348 B2 - Automated detection of pornographic images. Or is it, "automatic detection of erogenous zones"? Link (spotted also on Fleshbot)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami update: Microsoft responds, bloggers organize, video torrents
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DATE: 12/30/2004 12:25:37 PM
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A quick roundup of items related to the tsunami disaster. Image: mannequin in pile of wreckage in Thailand, shot by blogger and NBC correspondent Kevin Sites who is on assignment in Asia covering the story. (Link)
*Following up on a previous BoingBoing post, an anonymous Microsoft employee says:
Responding to this: "Reader J. Hahn says, "I am particularly impressed with Amazon.com's Red Cross donation counter that proves Americans are not 'stingy.' Also, as a Mac user, I was proud to go to the apple.com site and see not one product ad on their front page - just links to aid and donation sites, and Microsoft had not one mention of the disaster."
Most of Microsoft's efforts regarding Tsunami relief is focused internally. MS offers a dollar for dollar charitable donation match to all FTE, and is doing everything it can to expidite the process of trying to get the money to where it will do the most good.
* Tsunami Outreach: Bloggers Without Borders' first international project launched last night. Link (Thanks, Sean)
* BoingBoing reader Nicholas Bentley says,
"Hello Xeni, We thought you might be interested in passing on the news of one person's great efforts for tsunami relief. We wanted to donate to a tsunami relief effort with our funds in a PayPal account but had difficulty finding an agency that took PayPal. Eventually we found Kevin McDonald's site where he is doing a fantastic job of collecting PayPal contributions and passing them on to AmeriCares (AmeriCares disaster relief has a 4-star rating from Charity
Navigator.) Kevin has even persuaded AmeriCare's webmaster to see about accepting PayPal transfers direct in the near future."
*BoingBoing reader Chris Cummer says,
Family members of a close personal friend of mine are still missing in Thailand. Her father and brother have flown there to try and find them, as this Globe and Mail article details, but the help of the blog community would also be greatly appreciated. I've posted a request for help on my blog at Missing in Khao Lak, Thailand. Hopefully someone might have some information for a Canadian family that's been living on the edge of grief for five days now.
Related: see this "missing persons" wiki page (Link), and a blog devoted to linking missing persons with their loved ones: Link. And the Red Cross has launched a "Family Links" web page where family members can search for missing relatives’ names: Link. "The information is not verified or tracked by either the ICRC or the American Red Cross but is offered by the ICRC as a stand-alone internet tool for inquirers to use on their own."
* Reader Roberto says, "Every year at this time, I empty my jar full of loose change. But this year I discovered I could donate to the Red Cross (among other charities including UNICEF) from a Coinstar machine at my drugstore. And big kid that I am, I had fun playing with the machine." Link.
* Reader Chris Holland says,
I stumbled upon Austin's Blog who's done a fine job of gathering more videos. So earthlink homepage servers don't get creamed, I've created this torrent gathering 5 of the videos from his blog that weren't already covered in the previous torrent which is still available here. Remember, the more people click those torrent links, the easier and faster it is for everybody else to download them too. And try to keep the torrent opened for as long as possible even after you're done downloading. Big Kudos to prodigem's very easy-to-use torrent service. Link
* Andy Carvin says,
I've just set up a tsunami news digest using the news aggregator Kinja.com. The page contains latest news feeds and first-person blogs related to the tsunami disaster from around the globe. I'd like to see others add their own tsunami-related feeds to the site. If you have a news feed or blog that's focusing on the tsunami, or are reading one that you'd like to add to the digest, please visit the website and log on with the following info: login: tsunami-info / password: southasia. Once you've logged in, you can add a news source to the digest by pasting it into the "Add a Favorite" form field in the right column. Or, you can follow this shortcut.
* Among the many first-person accounts appearing on blogs: Sanjiva is an IBM employee from Sri Lanka, who is trying to build information systems to aid in locating missing persons, and help with medical resource logistics. Link.
* Stuart Ian Burns tells BoingBoing:
This del.icio.us tag is offering good links to information about the Tsunami. There is also a tag at flickr: Link. And The SEA-EAT blog have begun a profile to collect photos of the missing: Link.
Link to related BoingBoing posts.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami account from Burning Man gate manager
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DATE: 12/30/2004 12:26:39 PM
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More than 115,000 are dead. Pearl, a gate manager for Burning Man, was in Thailand when the tsunami hit -- he survived.
This is Pearl. I am currently in Bangkok waiting for a flight I have cajoled my way onto. I am one of the survivors. With only scratches, briuses and infections I am fine. Everything I own (almost - a small plastic jesus doll made it through!) is gone. My house was wiped out, as were 3000 hotel rooms, around 600 other resident/vacation homes and almost all the business' in the area.
Our house was 150 feet from the beach, that is THE hardest hit beach in Thailand. As water rushed into our house and then ripped open the second story wall, I leapt off our second story roof and swam and swam and swam, riding the wave deep into the jungle, as it destroyed building after building, ripping up trees and spinning diesel trucks into the air. All this with me in the center of it clinging to anything that floats and swimming to avoid the standing buildings or trees that crushed and impaled many others. The wave deposited me, a small swedish girl and a 60 foot poilice cruiser (medium sized steel patrol boat - around 20 tons) 1 kilometer from the beach - in the jungle.
For the next 5 hours i set up a triage center and cared for dead and dying foreigners. Finally we got helicopters in, and I made my way back towards the main town. I found Karin (my girlfriend) and collapsed. We had both assumed each other dead as the destruction was so massive. She had climbed a coconut tree, wrapped her arms and legs and held on. The water kept pullng the tree and her under, but it and she survived. That day I saw around 100 bodies. The next day, another 200, and the day we left there were cattle trucks full of rotting corpses being taken to Phuket.
After days of no news, dwindling food and water - a group of divers virtually kidnapped a driver to take us away. Every few hours someone had created a rumor that another wave was coming, or there was a gas explosion, or the Muslim rebels were attacking. None were true, but it caused massive panic and killed many more people. We were already under massive psychological strain, and this just made it insane. We ran.
My town is gone. There are probably 2% of the original buildings in a recognizable form. I am very lucky to even be making my way home. The U.S. goverment offered me a phone call, a toothbrush, a paperback book and a temporary passport. No hotel, no food, no flight home. I was told that I could take out a loan if I could list three people who would vouch for me at home. The process would only take a few days. I was alone, injured (superficially - but I sure did look bad), no possesions, no money and my government offered my a book.
I don't know who or what to acknowledge for my presence. That will take a lot of soul-searching. I am certainly among the luckiest people in Thailand right now. According to local news it looks like my town had a SURVIVAL rate of 60%. Please think of what you value. Look around, have you given a hug to someone recently? Anyone? If everything you had were taken away, who would you turn too? In the end it is each other, not the things, that make the world spin. I won't ever forget that.
(via Wayne Correia)
Update: Una traducciĂłn en español del recuento personal de Pearl está aquĂ. (gracias, edmz)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Win DRM hides malicious trojans, RIAA deploys infected music on P2P?
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DATE: 12/30/2004 01:30:46 PM
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According to PCWorld and TechDirt, Windows DRM contains a flaw that allows for attakcers to create music files that contain trojans that attack your computer when you play them, and moreover, the music industry has hired a company called Overpeer which is flooding the P2P networks with infected fake music files.
Overpeer is the same company that the recording industry has hired in the past to dump fake versions of songs on file sharing networks. What the article doesn't answer is whether or not the industry hired Overpeer to dump spyware on the network as well, but it's likely they're pleased either way. Overpeer defends their actions by saying that anyone obviously deserves what they get because, obviously, they were looking for unauthorized files. It's not clear that everyone would agree. Sneaking malicious files onto someone's computer because "they deserved it!" doesn't seem like a very good justification. What may be even more important to this story, however, is the revelation of just how easy it is, thanks to a huge loophole in Microsoft's copy protection technology, to include a malicious file with an audio or video file. Basically, because Windows DRM needs to look for a license, all anyone needs to do is point that license to a website that loads malicious content and off you go. Thank you Microsoft, for creating a huge loophole that will probably make sure millions of new computers are loaded with spamming, DDOSing trojans shortly.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Amazing card-stacking photos
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DATE: 12/30/2004 01:34:05 PM
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Kevin sez, "Bryan Berg is famous for stacking playing cards. He is the Guiness record holder and tours the world stacking cards. The web site for him is sweet and simple and lets outstanding photography tell the story."
Link
(Thanks, Kevin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Documentary filmmakers get screwed by copyright clearance
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DATE: 12/30/2004 01:37:51 PM
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Thomas sez, "Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers: A pair of researchers documented increasing barriers to documentary film production caused by the high cost of obtaining rights clearances from IP holders."
The study explores the implications of the current terms of rights acquisition on the creative process of documentary filmmaking in today's marketplace, and from them makes recommendations to lower costs and promote creativity. It focuses on the lived experience of independent documentary filmmakers who work primarily within a broadcast environment (sometimes with a theatrical "window"), in coping with the creative challenges created by acquiring and granting rights. Click here to read Untold Stories.
Independent documentary filmmakers were selected because their work regularly requires them to interact with a wide variety of rights holders, from archives for photographs and stock footage to musical performers to other filmmakers. This is especially clear when it is a historical documentary or one that comments on commercial popular culture, but it is an issue for most documentary filmmakers, no matter what the subject matter. When a trademark appears on a baseball cap, or a subject happens to be watching television, or a radio in the background plays a popular song, or a subject sings "Happy Birthday," rights clearance becomes a professional and creative challenge.
Link
(Thanks, Thomas!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More on porting suit-productivity to nerds
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DATE: 12/30/2004 01:50:39 PM
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Merlin Mann has posted part two of his year-end roundup of his project to port Getting Things Done, a productivity book aimed at suits, to nerdy types whose life is organized around technology.
I have had the worst time setting up a single, integrated workflow that works for me. I've flitted endlessly between text files, Entourage, Mail.app, vim, online RSS-based calendars, all-in-one apps, paper planners, Moleskines, index cards, and more in search of the right combination. Each tool and habit has its benefits, to be sure, but I never seem to land on a really satisfying set of apps and practices that feels like it has exactly the right "flow" to it. Most corrosively, I often (really often) blow tons of time ramping up to some new bauble only to ultimately discover it lacks some critical piece (export, reminders, etc. etc.). Bad habits for someone who ostensibly wants his work life to be more productive and waste-free.
Of course, I can write some of the time and effort down to "research" and the fact that part of my work involves learning about new productivity widgets, but I can't avoid the fact that I still don't have a method of handling all my information (and actual work) in a way that I find satisfying and intuitive. Plus I have to admit to some terrible habits surrounding my ongoing search for "The Perfect System(TM)."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Winner: Most shockingly tasteless tsunami-related headline award
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DATE: 12/30/2004 04:20:50 PM
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"Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays," CNN. Link (Thanks, Realish). Gawker has others: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Surnova resurrected, eXeem launched
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DATE: 12/30/2004 04:24:46 PM
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Popular torrent-helper site Suprnova has re-launched, sans torrents. And BoingBoing reader Derek says,
After a few days of having a teaser on their site, Suprnova's Sloncek did an interview with NovaStream.org about a new P2P app and network called eXeem that will be released for download in a couple of weeks. It's being developed by a new, unnamed company, which asked Sloncek to be a representative for them.
It will be Windows only, with no Mac or Linux versions planned at this time. It will be ad supported, and not just banner ads either. It will be full of adware, most of which you can opt out of, according to Sloncek. Some of the less intrusive ones will be required for the application to function though.
Apparently eXeem is based off of BitTorrent, but is different enough that it can't be called a BitTorrent client, and I assume it won't be compatible with BitTorrents either. The application will be downloadable from eXeem.com in a couple of weeks.
Link to details, and here's a link to a .zip of eXeem Beta 0.16. Pseudonym sez: "It won't actually work because of a lack of a working beta code but if ye are curious to have a look at the program then by all means do..."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Amazing microscopic photography
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DATE: 12/30/2004 04:29:55 PM
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Nifty gallery of microscopic nature photographs. Shown here: cross section of a lavender leaf. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on ABC World News: People of the Year -- Bloggers.
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CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 12/30/2004 04:35:57 PM
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ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings has been doing some terrific tech-related work in their 2004 year-in-review coverage. While I can't disclose details, tonight's WNT episode features a technology-related "person of the year" segment in which I am a participant. I'm not a "person of the year" -- just another loudmouthed blogger who always has something to say about whoever is. Details and local air times: Link.
Update: The "People of the Year" ABC featured here -- bloggers. Link to segment transcript. The ABC News piece closed with a screenshot of this Photoshopped "fantasy" cover of what some thought a more deserving candidate for Time's "Person of the Year" issue. The image pays homage to Dan Gillmor's essential book, We The Media.
Update 2: Link to video: WMV (4.19 MB) (Thanks tons, Mike O!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 5ives: funny lists of five things
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DATE: 12/30/2004 11:47:16 PM
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Merlin Mann is an amazingly funny guy. I've mentioned his "5ives" site here before -- it's where he keeps very, very funny lists of five things. I found myself needing a chuckle this morning so I revisited 5ives and by the time I got to this entry, I was actually laughing aloud:
Five things I'll be doing while you're at Burning Man
1. carefully stewarding my pallor
2. repeatedly watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on the TiVo
3. defecating indoors--copiously, often, and without queueing
4. not tongue-kissing a sweaty Java programmer in clown makeup named "Shanti"
5. wearing clothes--lots and lots of square, capitalist, heinous-body-covering clothes
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Gaming Hacks, comprehensive, fascinating and eclectic
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DATE: 12/31/2004 05:01:54 AM
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I just finished reading Simon Carless's Gaming Hacks, one of the latest O'Reilly Hacks books, and I can't remember when I've had more engrossing fun with a technical book.
Like all the hacks books, Gaming Hacks is arranged around 100 "hacks" -- tricks you can use to get more from gaming. They proceed from the simple to the hellishly complex, so there's something here for everyone.
That's even more true than is usual in the Hacks series, though, because of Carless's incredible, comprehensive, eclectic view of the kinds of hacks that might interest a gamer. Here are some of my favorites:
- How to hack an old Atari 2600 controller: rehabilitate your old paddles without WD40, then splice them into a modern PC (also: how to download, play and write "homebrew" games for the 2600 and other boat-anchor platforms that are produced by console aficionados who enjoy the challenge of programming for 8-bit, minimal-RAM game environments)
- Roll your own "machinima" -- movies made by recording the action taking place in a game environment, then dubbing in studio-recorded voices
- Learn to read enough Japanese to play grey-market games imported from Japan
- Create your own scripts for automating repetitive "grinding" tasks in massively multiplayer games
- Etiquette for joining adventuring parties in MMOs
- Detect and foil cheaters in networked first-person shooter games
- Build a killer home theatre audio setup to maximize your game platform's 3D sound
- Build a portable device out of an old console, like the NES
- Overclock your console
This gives you a flavor for the book's subject-matter, but it doesn't convey wonderful prose style: Carless writes like a great, fetishistic geek, like the Car Talk guys or the folks on The Screensavers, like someone who's really, really enthusiastic about his subject matter and wants to wise you up to all the truly awesome wonders awaiting you.
Combine that with a stupendous introduction by sf-writer-turned-game-writer Marc Laidlaw, who wrote the Half-Life series for Valve, and a slew of highly knowledgeable co-authors who contributed various tips, and you've got the perfect mix of informative, enjoyable and fascinating. This book is staying on my shelf.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Animals escaped tsunami
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DATE: 12/31/2004 05:16:36 AM
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While tens of thousands of people along the Sri Lankan coast were killed by the tsunami, wildlife officials say that they haven't found any dead animals. The waves swept inland to the island's largest wildlife reserve but none of the elephants, tigers, jackals, crocodiles, or other animals drowned. From the BBC:
Debbie Marter, who works on a wild tiger conservation programme on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, one of the worst-hit areas in Sunday's disaster, said she was not surprised to hear there were no dead animals.
"Wild animals in particular are extremely sensitive," she said. "They've got extremely good hearing and they will probably have heard this flood coming in the distance. There would have been vibration and there may also have been changes in the air pressure which will have alerted animals and made them move to wherever they felt safer."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Bar code bust
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DATE: 12/31/2004 05:42:27 AM
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Two couples in Nashville were busted this week for printing out their own UPC bar codes and slapping them on products in Wal-Mart and other stores to lower prices. Allegedly, they were part of a larger ring in 19 states that over the last decade would buy the, er, "discounted" items and later sell the goods or return them in exchange for gift cards that they'd also peddle. Authorities say that the scheme defrauded Wal-Mart alone of $1.5 million. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Suit-productivity tips for nerds roundup concluded
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DATE: 12/31/2004 08:58:58 AM
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Merlin Mann has concluded his end-of-year roundup of his attempt to port the excellent-but-suit-oriented productivity book Getting Things Done to a system that suits geeks who rely heavily on computers and related devices to organize their lives.
I doubt that I'm the only GTD nerd who now has faster and more ubiquitous access to the internet than back in 2001, when Getting Things Done was first published. Just as one data point, I work primarily on internet-related projects from home on a 1.5Mb DSL line and house-wide wifi: "@online" is virtually all of the time for me. So, the GTD contexts associated with my work demand more subtlety to be useful (or even worth the bother of maintaining them).
Take me and multiply it by an order of magnitude for students with Hiptops, full-time AIM access, and a completely wifi campus with unlimited, lightning-fast bandwidth. I suspect that this desk-free, under-25 crowd are a group worth Davidco devoting some avid attention to.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: William Gibson interviewed by Moira Gunn
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DATE: 12/31/2004 09:15:42 AM
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IT Conversations has an 18 minute audio interview with William Gibson, from Moira Gunn's Tech Nation program.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Scientific data on Earthquake and Tsunami
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DATE: 12/31/2004 11:35:31 AM
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Comprehensive collection of materials related to the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, including animations, charts, links, and seismograph recordings, and helful explanations on how to read them. Link (thanks, Ben)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami media bubble: a trickle or a flood?
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DATE: 12/31/2004 11:53:56 AM
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Choire Sicha deconstructs wildly contradictory headlines related to the Asian disaster. "I'm all for opinionated reporting and interpretation, but this I find this actually quite disturbing and very sad, particularly when one gets a whiff of agenda in the headlines." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami Reconnect Project: Update
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DATE: 12/31/2004 11:58:40 AM
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BoingBoing pal Mike Outmesguine gives us an update on the blog-driven project to provide free wireless communication services to areas cut off by the disaster:
Here's a rough update. Smartbridges located in Singapore has pledged 5 access points to begin with and more as specific needs arise. They can be used to connect remote locales over a distance or to create coverage in a local area.
Individuals have pledged spare antennas and radio bridges. Several people have volunteered their time and expertise, including volunteers from the US and Europe prepared to travel to the area to help set up the equipment.
I have been asked specifically to help rebuild communications from people in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and an island near the epicenter without any telecom connection to nearby Sumatra.
We are now working in coordination with the efforts of the Wireless Comm Association International, and I will be attending the Jan. 13th disaster relief meeting in san jose. Other wireless activists and group leaders have contacted me about working together, which I am thrilled to do. I am in touch with companies that want to help, but are working with us to determine what specific models we could put in use.
Bloggers without Borders has pledged 10% of current donations will go to socalwug for this effort.
Donations can be made to socalwug via paypal (through my account at
mo@transstellar.com) or credit card. Equipment can be sent to me to redistribute or may ship directly from the manufacturer to the site if practical (as in SmartBridges case from Singapore.)
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ABC World News Tonight "Bloggers" segment video online
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DATE: 12/31/2004 12:01:07 PM
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Archived video of last night's ABC World News Tonight segment about bloggers as "people of the year" is now online: Link WMV, 4MB. (thanks Mike!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: High altitude kites for beating the peak oil problem
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DATE: 12/31/2004 12:55:24 PM
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Well, probably not. But this is an interesting idea: using a kite "laddermill" (as opposed to a rigid, ground-based windmill) to harness the high-speed wind blowing at 30,000 feet and convert it to electricity. Link (Via Mirabilis)
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TITLE: $6 stapler doesn't use staples
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DATE: 12/31/2004 01:00:19 PM
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Treehugger reports on a cute-as-a-button stapler that doesn't use staples.
Instead of using the tiny pieces of metal that add up to lots waste, this ingenious little device joins your papers by punching a small, neat hole in your documents and folding the remaining flaps together for a secure binding.
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TITLE: Fun with home made bomb
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DATE: 12/31/2004 01:13:37 PM
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Windows media video of some guys in the Netherlands blowing up a bomb beneath a freeway overpass or a subway tunnel. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sleek looking old car mod
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DATE: 12/31/2004 01:27:10 PM
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Henry Covington made eight of these jetsonian cars (custom bodies on Renault frames) in 1958. He called it El Tiburon (The Shark). A guy in Riverbank, CA bought the last remaining Tiburon body from Covinton's widow for $800 and put in on a Porsche frame. This Modesto Bee article has more photographs.
(Check out the cover of the 1960s Mechanix Illustrated near the bottom of the page, too. The articles sound great: "ICE CUBES MADE WITH FLASHLIGHT BATTERIES," "NEW ARMY COMBAT VEHICLE 'WALKS' LIKE A MAN", and "WEEGEE TELLS HOW TO MAKE THOSE WEIRD PHOTOS." I'd buy that magazine for 25 cents.) Link
(Via Mookie)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Home made tank tears through old shed
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DATE: 12/31/2004 01:46:19 PM
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This home made tank reminds me of the wireframe tank in Battlezone. Watch this video of it as it tears through a field and knocks over an old shed. I could without the lame music in the background. They should have used "Teddy Bears' Picnic" if they really wanted to enhance the mood. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYE drug of choice for Burners
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DATE: 12/31/2004 02:12:13 PM
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This New Year's Eve, Burning Man devotees homesick for Black Rock City are drowning their yearnings in the finest intoxicant earth has to offer: lines of playa dust. Twice as sweet as sugar, twice as bitter as salt. And if you get hooked, baby, it's nobody else's fault. Link to (snort) full-size image. (Thanks, Rusty!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ix-nay on the b-word
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DATE: 12/31/2004 02:28:11 PM
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Not long ago, NY Daily News gossipist Lloyd Grove decreed his column a Paris Hilton-free zone, announcing that only if "she discovers a cure for cancer, wins the Nobel Peace Prize, launches herself into outer space - or even gets her high-school diploma" would the shark-jumping heiress appear again by name. Well, I've been guilty of a similar sin in 2004, and I hereby pledge to go cold turkey on the word "blog" for, oh, at least the next 72 hours. Today, there's news that dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster named "blog" the "Word of the Year," and that just feels like the last fucking straw. It's time for at least a temporary autokibosh. There. Hear that? The sound of the b, l, o, and g keys on my key**ard hittin* the **tt*m *f the trash can here in my *ffice. F*r a few days, anyway. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More on Exeem
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DATE: 12/31/2004 02:41:09 PM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, reader Pseudonym says, in a rather hushed voice:
Whois shows the crowd behind Exeem are in fact a company by the name Swarm Systems Inc. that are in fact located in Saint Kitts and Nevis, so would presumably be free from prosecution and lawsuits like Sharman Networks.
And another anonymous reader (my, you're a sneaky lot) says,
Just wanted to let you guys know that exeem IS compatable with torrent files, you can load them up just like any other client. The ads sloncek was talking about are just ads not adware. The reason there isnt a mac or linux version is cause the program is still in beta and chances are that eventually there will be mac and linux versions. Here are some screenshots of it. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Keep in mind that these are shots of the private beta so the public beta will probably be different since it has changed a lot sinse version 0.1.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Concrete TV
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DATE: 12/31/2004 02:53:32 PM
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Ripped from the headlines over at Fleshbot:
Concrete Ron describes himself as "perhaps the greatest video editor of all time", and anyone who's ever caught Concrete TV on Manhattan public access television over the last decade or so probably wouldn't argue: a typical episode incorporates vintage porn movies, 80s aerobics videos, car crash footage, Hong Kong shoot-em-ups, old commercials, beefcake reels, pro wrestling smackdowns, cheesy B-movie moments, sex education films, random explosions, wet t-shirt contests, and plenty of "raw emotion, euphoria, physical collision, glee, fantasy, despair, and discomfort" in one noisy, violent, sexy, and brilliantly edited pop culture/infoporn mashup. If we ever had to show visitors from another planet what's going on in our collective brains at any given moment, we'd make them tune in here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Justice memo redefines torture
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The US Justice Department has released a new memo that revises and broadens the definition of torture, replacing a 2002 memo that justified its use to protect national security.
The 17-page document states flatly that torture violates U.S. and international law and omits two of the most controversial assertions made in now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases.
"Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture," said the memo from Daniel Levin, acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
Critics in Congress and many legal experts say the original documents set up a legal framework that led to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After the Iraqi prison abuses came to light, the Justice Department in June disavowed its previous legal reasoning and set to work on the replacement document to be released Friday. The Justice Department memo, dated Thursday, was released less than a week before the Senate Judiciary Committee is to consider President Bush's nomination of his chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general.
Link to CBS News story (thanks, Scott Hille), Link to NPR (audio) coverage, WaPo, Guardian.
Here is the actual memo document, via the BBC story: Link to PDF(Thanks abi). Choice words in the final graf:
"There is no exception under the statute permitting torture to be used for a "good reason." Thus, a defendant's motive (to protect national security, for example) is not relevant to the question whether he has acted with the requisite specific intent under the statute."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Happy New Year
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DATE: 12/31/2004 03:21:26 PM
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I thought I'd make my last entry of the year a picture of the miniature donkey we would have bought if it hadn't bitten me on the leg.
Best wishes to everyone in 2005!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Year's Eve QTVR panos from around the world
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DATE: 12/31/2004 10:53:19 PM
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QTVR panoramas from celebrations in Dubai, Zermatt, Lisbon, and other cities. At the time of this post, photographer Jook Leung's annual shot of Times Square in NYC isn't yet posted -- but will likely be up by the time you put down your champagne long enough to click here: Link. Feliz año nuevo, y'all!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Preshrunk: a blog for cool t-shirts
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DATE: 01/01/2005 12:25:40 AM
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My pal Boogah has created a great new blog for the New Year: Preshrunk, a blog about cool t-shirts that you can buy online. I own about 300% more tees than I can make good use of, but I'm still obsessed with great, funny tees. Boogah's got great taste in shirts, too.
Dear Vintage Gamer Geek,
Atari logo shirts are played out. I'm pretty sure most of you know that, but it bears repeating. They're been played out since the nerd character in Road Trip wore one and danced like a jackass to Run DMC. I hate to break it to you but Nintendo shirts are almost over too. Mark my words: Commodore shirts are going to be "the next big thing".
But why Commodore? Because when all else fails, it's best to go as retro as you possibly can. Since I couldn't find any Timex Sinclair shirts, Commodore had to be it. So pull out your VIC-20, C64 or C128 and let's party.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT: SMS as warning system for future disasters
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DATE: 01/01/2005 08:21:21 AM
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Another really solid piece from New York Times reporter John Schwartz about technology's role in the tsunami disaster. Here, questions about a text-message emergency warning system, and an interview with "Sanjaya," aka "Morquendi," whose SMSes from Sri Lanka were linked and excerpted here on BoingBoing earlier this week (Link):
When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, Sanjaya Senanayake found he could not make calls on his cellphone or regular land line at first - but he could send and receive text messages from his cellphone. Mr. Senanayake, a 23-year-old television producer, has spent the last few days reporting on the disaster, frantically searching for friends and posting his experiences to the networked world through a [redacted] (desimediabitch.blogspot.com) - often via text messages relayed by a friend in Mumbai, India, formerly known as Bombay. "It's a very easy, instant way to get the message across," he said in a cellphone interview.
Experts say that thousands of deaths might have been avoided if warning systems had been in place to alert the people around the rim of the Indian Ocean of the tsunami. No such system exists there now, although the United States has such a system in place for countries of the Pacific basin. Those who design and use the wireless technology known as Short Message Service, currently used for chatter and advertisements, say it could be used to jumpstart governments' warning networks.
"This tragedy is going to put this more to the forefront," said Greg Wilfahrt, cofounder of SMS.ac, a company that sells text message services in more than 170 countries. The technology, though used most avidly in the United States by teenagers, is wildly popular worldwide and has accompanied the international boom in cellphone use. Even in parts of the developing world, cellphones are everywhere: almost half of the Malaysian population uses them, according to a survey released this month.
"The way they use the cellphones over there, it makes us look like amateurs," said Steve O'Rourke, a director of the Asia Pacific Research Group, which has studied cellphone use. Cellphone use has not spread quite as widely in many of those nations as it has in the developed world, of course. But getting cellphones to people living in remote, impoverished areas has been a major focus of economic development efforts. Even a few phones might do the trick in the face of an impending disaster, Mr. Senanayake said. The message need only reach "one person in every locality who has a phone," he said, and that person can spread the word.
Link to NYT story.
BoingBoing reader Jacob Rome writes,
I read the post this morning about using SMS to help warn people of disasters. While this is a good idea, no one has talked about a much better technology for warning masses of people-- radio & TV broadcasting. The US has a system set up to do this, as I'm sure we're all aware from the tests of the Emergency Broadcast System. The geologists in US & Japan who recognized the threat of a tsunami could have called international broadcast media such as CNN & the BBC. In turn, by broadcasting news of the possible tsunami in the Indian Ocean, they would alert national authorities, local media & even some residents about the pending disaster. This was a tremendous missed oppurtunity, no formal system was needed to warn people and a little creativity could have send tens of thousands of lives.
One week after the disaster, we're seeing a number of reports and op-eds examining the failures that accompanied this event, and questions about how information could be shared more quickly in the future. It would seem that one lesson learned here is that multiple, overlapping alert systems offer the best reach. How tragic that in this era of abundant and unprecedented global connectivity, such critical information did not reach those who needed it most. We can do better.
Update: BoingBoing reader Gene Cowan says,
Arlington County, Virginia -- home of the Pentagon -- has been using an SMS alert system for a couple of years now. It was very helpful a week ago when a gas tanker overturned on the highway near my house -- just beside the Pentagon. Most of us woke up thinking it was another terrorist attack, but within minutes the SMS system send a message to my phone with the news of the truck crash, then a second message telling us to stay indoors because of possible fuel spills. Very helpful and reassuring.
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Curry cures Alzheimer's?
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DATE: 01/01/2005 09:03:16 AM
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The pigment that makes curry yellow, curcumin, does a better job at treating Alzheimer's than the majority of drugs being tested. (Interestingly, India has one of the lowest Alzheimer rates in the world.)
The new UCLA-Veterans Affairs study involving genetically altered mice suggests that curcumin, the yellow pigment in curry spice, inhibits the accumulation of destructive beta amyloids in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and also breaks up existing plaques.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Dan Gillmor launches new life
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Pioneering journalist and fearless tech explorer Dan Gillmor has a new home on the web -- and new plans. He writes:
For the first time in two decades I'm not on the payroll of a large media corporation. As of today I'm on the payroll of a one-person company, comprised of me, but media is still on my agenda.
As many of you know I'm going to work hard on a project to inspire, enable and create what many have been calling a new kind of journalism. In the new world that I and many others believe is coming, the grassroots will have a fundamental and crucial role in the process -- a change that I tried to outline in my book, We the Media, which appeared in the second half of 2004.
For me, this departure is challenging and exciting. I've left what surely is one of the best jobs in mainstream journalism, and will miss my former colleagues immensely (not to mention the pay, benefits and freedom to say what I believed).
I'm also jazzed. Yes, this is a chance to truly walk my talk. But the opportunity to be in on what I consider a pivotal shift, and to be involved just as it begins to happen, made my decision easy.
Read the rest here: Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sf writers' birthday calendar
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DATE: 01/01/2005 12:27:05 PM
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Capt Xerox sez, "What do James Tiptree Jr. and Orson Scott Card have in common? It's certainly not their writing styles, but they do share the same birthday. After the success of last year's free science fiction calendar, the Website at the End of the Universe is offering a new one for 2005. Each page has a list of famous science fiction authors' and artists' birthdays for that month. This year's artwork features covers from the ever-popular line of Ace Doubles. Each month highlights a cover of a book's author who was born in that month."
Link
(Thanks, Capt Xerox!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: First of 52 weekly old kiddie records
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DATE: 01/01/2005 08:08:50 PM
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Here's the first of 52 records that will me made available this year by Basic Hip: "Walt Disney's Story of Robin Hood." It comes as a single zip file with 192kbps and the album cover art (17.2 MB). Yippee! Link UPDATE: Here's a link to the torrent. (Thanks, Brian!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory sets DRM strawmen ablaze
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DATE: 01/02/2005 02:35:50 AM
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On the heels of the long post I made the other day in response to Wired's Editor-in-Chief own blog-post on DRM, lots of people have commented on the debate. Generally the comments are very good, but there's this pack of straw-man arguments that keeps popping up: "The companies are just trying to do what's best for their shareholders by making as much money as possible. If the DRM isn't too restrictive, then the market will accept it. Just wait and see how successful a DRM is in the market, that will tell you how good it is."
They're straw-men, and I decided after reading them re-stated in this post, that it was worth setting them ablaze. Here goes:
For starters, any market-correction for DRM will surely involve informed customers making good purchase decisions about the DRM in their devices. That's what this debate is all about. The implicit, "Stop complaining and let the market sort it out" in these comments ignores the fact that complaints about DRM are vital to the market sorting it out.
"I noticed last month that Chris A (as befits an ex-Economist writer) is keen to encourage commercial companies to sueeze every last penny of value out of their intellectual property"
This is a straw-man. Neither Chris nor I question Disney, Fox, et al's desire to suck the consumer electronics companies' customers dry with DRM. The argument we're having is over whether it's in the CE companies' best interests to be accomplices to this.
To have a functional market, you need companies and individuals who act in their own best interests. Traditionally, the entertainment companies have wanted fewer devices of less capability in the market -- which is why they strongly opposed the phonogram, radio, jukebox, cable TV, VCR and Internet.
Traditionally, the CE companies have perceived a market opportunity to give their customers more devices and more capable devices, because customers want to get more for less.
This has resulted in a tension that yielded a balance to everyone's benefit. The CE companies built devices that were capable, customers got more freedom, and entertainment companies discovered new opportunities to expand their revenue.
Today, the CE companies are agreeing to participate in secret consortia where a maximum threshold for functionality is being set out by the studios. The CE companies are promised that if they play within the cartel's rules -- i.e., if they don't ship the products their customers want -- then the cartel will sue into oblivion any competitor who enters the market with a more-capable device.
This has nothing to do with "bits-want-to-be-free," an even bigger strawman than the idea that this is about whether companies should be trying to make as much money as possible.
Bits may or may not want to be free. The point is that customers of the CE companies certainly want to know how free their bits will be before making a purchase: if we are to have a functional market for devices with educated purchase decisions, then reviews should make note of the salient fact that these devices, unlike every device that a reader has ever owned up until this point, has features that can be revoked at the whim of the studios.
If you are thinking about buying a stereo with a key feature and the choice is between two models, wouldn't it be useful to know that in one model, the feature is guaranteed to last forever, while in the other, the feature can be revoked at any time due to factors that are beyond your control and shrouded in secrecy?
Take the example of the Media Center PC. There is one show -- the Sopranos -- that is currently being cablecast with a flag switched on that prevents you from burning a DVD of the shows you record.
If you're not a Sopranos fan, that's not a big deal -- maybe you're a classic movie buff building a collection of Cagney films off of TNT. $2,000 for a Media Center PC seems like a good buy for you right now.
But how are you to know whether TNT will switch on that same flag? Are you a party to those negotiations? Is there anyone who considers your interests who's in the room where that's being decided? Is there even anyone in that that room who can tell you how it's going, so that before you buy the box, you can read up on the current negotiations and make an informed decision?
Do you even know which flags exist? Now that HBO has switched on the no-DVD flag on The Sopranos, people who are paying attention know that they have no reason to believe that they will be able to burn anything to DVD -- if the DVD burner works today, don't count on it tomorrow!
But what if you've bought the box in order to fast-forward past commercials? Is there a "no-fast-forward" flag lurking in XrML, the "rights expression language" used by the media center? (There is). Under what circumstances can it be activated? Can it be used to stop you fast-forwarding through an objectionable scene in a movie while your kids are in the room? The Directors Guild of America is suing a company that makes it easy to do this with DVDs; will they ever convince the studios to turn it on in your Media Center PC?
The final straw-man here is about whether DRM is "too restrictive" -- whether it impinges on "reasonable expectations." But that's not what anyone in this fight actually is arguing about. It's about the ability of the studios to change the rules of the game: whether the factors that influence your purchase today are subject to change later. Not whether the device is too restrictive today, but how restrictive it might someday become. What are the anti-features of the device, the technologies that can be used to remove features you enjoy today?
That is the question, not "how restrictive is the DRM today?" If you believe in markets, in making money, in providing shareholder value, in all the cant of capitalism, then this is the question you should want to see uppermost in the minds of "consumers" when they make a purchase decision, because that is the only way that the market can "correct" DRM that overreaches.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Get my stuff done
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CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 01/02/2005 02:53:12 AM
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This animation just nails the procrastinator's mindset and is incredibly infectious. You'll see. Link to Quicktime (Thanks, Imaginary Foundation!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dan Gillmor's last Merc column
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DATE: 01/02/2005 10:12:00 AM
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Dan Gillmor's final column in the San Jose Mercury News runs today, marking the end of a ten-year career in reporting on tech journalism -- Dan's leaving to start a company that will enable "grassroots journalism," capitalizing on a trend that he's very parrionate about. The final column is a lovely bittersweet end to an amazing run.
And, as always, the people and institutions currently holding the clout don't cede it willingly. Governments are clamping down on us in all kinds of ways. Incumbent business powerhouses are trying to hold back the tide as well, not just to keep their positions but also to thwart new innovation that might threaten them.
These reactionary encroachments and retrenchments are not surprising. They always occur in times of swift change and challenge. In the end, they are almost always unsuccessful, because progress ultimately finds a way around barriers, and because people challenge the reactionaries.
But we need to keep the pressure up, as citizens and people who want the freedom to use these new tools and live in liberty. The stakes are high, and liberty takes work.
Link
(via Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RIP Frank Kelly Freas
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DATE: 01/02/2005 02:26:24 PM
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No official URL for this yet, but the word is going around on several sf mailing lists. Frank Kelly Freas, the legendary science fiction artist, also a frequent contirbutor to MAD Magazine, has died.
Link
Update: A couple of you have written in to point out that there's now of Freas's passing on his site. (Thanks, Chuck and David!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USB Hanko
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DATE: 01/02/2005 02:33:33 PM
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From AkibaLive: "IO Data Japan will release a hanko (Japanese name stamp) and USB flash drive combo device during the later part of January 2005. For those who aren't familiar with the term hanko, it's a name stamp that the Japanese use every day to sign official documents. The 32MB USB flash drive that's located on the other end contains special name/stamp software."
Link
(Thanks, Diane!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 60 Minutes: Google, Battelle, and Bollywood
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DATE: 01/02/2005 07:19:15 PM
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Well -- not all together in the same story, though that might have been even more interesting.
The CBS television program 60 Minutes featured a lengthy segment on Google this evening which included astute comment from John Battelle, who moonlights as BoingBoing's Reuben Kincaid when he's not writing books, building empires, and tracking search tech trends here. Snip from the transcript:
"If anybody got a Porsche or a Ferrari right now at Google, they’d probably be drummed out of the company," observes John Battelle, an author and entrepreneur who has been following Silicon Valley companies for 20 years. He says, "Google has a brand image to maintain. And their image is they’re all about innovation and they’re all about the Internet, and they’re all about trust. They’re not about selling out. They’re not about getting rich quick. So you’ve got a culture like that; I think if anyone were to buy, you know, a new Mercedes convertible and drive around with the stereo blaring, and miss work a couple days because they’re rich now, that would not be acceptable behavior at Google.
"But trust me," he adds. "There’s a Mercedes convertible in every one of their heads. There is. And it will…come out. Over time, it will come out."
The show also included a killer piece on Indian film star and hyperbolic superbeauty Aishwarya Rai. Snip:
The reason Bollywood films have such universal appeal is because they’re squeaky-clean. There are no sex scenes, not even kissing. Every time you think someone’s going to do it, they'll burst into song instead. "I'd assume that's really a reflection of our society," Rai says, when asked to explain the films' modesty. "Of course people kiss and of course people have a very healthy love life. This is the land of the Kama Sutra. But nevertheless, in our society you don't really see people around the street corner kissing or being extremely, overtly, physically demonstrative publicly. They do it privately but not publicly."
Link to Google piece with BoingBoing's own John Battelle, and Link to seg on Aishwarya Rai.
Update: BoingBoing reader Manish Vij has this video clip of the first 2:45 of the Aishwarya Rai interview. Link. Anyone got a pointer to video of the Google segment?
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: She used up all my darned bandwidth!
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CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 01/02/2005 10:31:31 PM
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Those being the words of Michael Verdi -- father of "Youngest Videoblogger In the World" Dylan Verdi, who was featured in last week's ABC News segment about bloggers as "People of The Year." Mr. Verdi has just posted this short "the making of" movie which explains how his 11-year-old daughter became an accidental pheblogenomenon in the span of 24 hours last week. Hey, the kid's gotta be alright -- she's listening to the same record I was at eleven, and on vinyl too.
Link to Michael Verdi's QuickTime movie, and Link to video of last week's ABC News segment. (Thanks, Wonbo!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HauntCon: a convention for spook-housers and amateur haunters
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DATE: 01/03/2005 01:23:00 AM
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HauntCon is the national haunter's convention, a gathering of the tribes for people who build elaborate Hallowe'en dioramae and/or operate spook houses across the land. The next HauntCon, which will take place April 22-24 in Dallas, has just opened for reg. Features include modded-hearse races, a "haunted garage sale" for swapping your bits and pieces, a trade floor, and learned presentations on haunting techniques. I've always wanted to attend one of these, but every year events conspire to keep me away (this year is no exception; I'll be the Guest of Honor at Penguicon, the Linux/sf convention in Detroit that weekend -- my cup runneth over!). 2006, then -- for sure!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bollywoodsploitation: Coke's Mulit homage
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DATE: 01/03/2005 06:57:56 AM
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BoingBoing reader Manish Vij says,
Coca-Cola just released a great Bollywood-inspired ad in Spain, Portugal and Italy (thanks, GG). The ad retraces The Party, The Guru and Russell Peters’ wisecrack that the only thing a desi accent is good for is cutting tension.
In the ad, a desi waiter livens up a dreary Spanish party by bursting into a Bollywood song. Here’s the really cool part: it pays homage to Absolut Vodka’s unforgettable Mulit parody — pink shirt, shiny belt buckle and all. Watch the clip.
Link to related BoingBoing posts on the earlier "Mulit" ad by Absolut, and Link to BB post about other Bollywood spoof TV ads.
BB reader Fabio Fichera says, "The ad in question isn't that new, a somewhat shorter version has been around for months here in Italy." And reader JJ Merelo writes,
Just a few points about this newsitem. First, it was released last summer and become an instant sensation: the theme has been even featured in the new year's eve TV shows, replayed over and over as a ringtone, and so forth. The party does not really look like a Spanish party, it rather looks like a british party. Believe me, I've been in Spanish parties. And a bit of trivia: it's actually a girl who sings it, it's a kind of 'bollywood aserejé', since it's not really in hindi (or telugu, for that matter), but in mock-indian language, and it was originally done in Argentina. There's also a pointer to the spanish Coca Cola site: Link, and a story by a popular hispano-argentinian blogger: Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Faux fan-sites fisked by Choire
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DATE: 01/03/2005 07:10:43 AM
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Mr. Sicha writes in the NYT:
Fan Web sites, from Adam-Brody.com to Absolutely Zooey Deschanel, share certain traits: gushy tributes, copyright-infringing use of paparazzi shots, a whiff of stalker enthusiasm. A new site, cremasterfanatic.com, is unusual for the subject it obsesses over - the Conceptual Art star Matthew Barney - but otherwise it hews to the norm. It borrows pictures of Mr. Barney with his wife, the pop singer Bjork. It summarizes each of his five "Cremaster" films. It even posts tribute poetry:
Pearl filled baths
The pigeons flap
His cremaster relaxes
But Cremaster Fanatic is a fake. Or to put it more kindly, it's a parallel work of art. "I'm pretending to be a fan," said its creator, the New York artist Eric Doeringer, who wrote that haiku himself (as "David Kramer," one of many pseudonyms deployed on the site).
Link (Thanks, Susannnah)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Charles Darwin on Tsunamis (1835)
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DATE: 01/03/2005 07:11:07 AM
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During his crew's historic voyage on the Beagle in 1835, Charles Darwin experienced an earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Snip from Darwin's description:
Shortly after the shock, a great wave was seen from the distance of three or four miles, approaching in the middle of the bay with a smooth outline; but along the shore it tore up cottages and trees, as it swept onwards with irresistible force. At the head of the bay it broke in a fearful line of white breakers, which rushed up to a height of 23 vertical feet above the highest spring-tides. Their force must have been prodigious; for at the Fort a cannon with its carriage, estimated at four tons in weight, was moved 15 feet inwards.
A schooner was left in the midst of the ruins, 200 yards from the beach. The first wave was followed by two others, which in their retreat carried away a vast wreck of floating objects. In one part of the bay, a ship was pitched high and dry on shore, was carried off, again driven on shore, and again carried off. In another part two large vessels anchored near together were whirled about, and their cables were thrice wound round each other: though anchored at a depth of 36 feet, they were for some minutes aground.
The great wave must have travelled slowly, for the inhabitants of Talcahuano had time to run up the hills behind the town; and some sailors pulled out seaward, trusting successfully to their boat riding securely over the swell, if they could reach it before it broke. One old woman with a little boy, four or five years old, ran into a boat, but there was nobody to row it out: the boat was consequently dashed against an anchor and cut in twain; the old woman was drowned, but the child was picked up some hours afterwards clinging to the wreck. Pools of salt-water were still standing amidst the ruins of the houses, and children, making boats with old tables and chairs, appeared as happy as their parents were miserable.
Link (Thanks, Avi Solomon)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tsunami satellite images from U. of Singapore
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DATE: 01/03/2005 07:11:07 AM
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Another collection of satellite photos of affected areas, including Aceh and Nicobar. Link (Thanks, Catherine Giayvia)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jordanian net-radio station gets state OK for FM broadcast
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DATE: 01/03/2005 07:11:07 AM
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Five years ago, Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab launched an internet-only radio station in Jordan called Ammannet. The group has finally received approval from the state to request an FM license. With that move, Jordan enters the age of independent radio broadcasting.
The license for AmmanNet doesn't include news reporting, but the stations founder and owner feels that it has enough municipal issues, cultural, social, and economical and sports programming to satisfy the culturally hungry Jordanian public. "Since the new Audio Visual Law was enacted, all the stations that have been licensed have broadcast only music. We are sure that the public is interested in a more holistic approach to broadcasting in the form of a community radio rather than just entertainment radio."
Kuttab expects the new FM station to be operating by the spring. Established in October 2000 under the auspices of UNESCO and the Greater Amman Municipality, AmmanNet has since grown to become a leading liberal voice, exercising a wider degree of freedom than most Jordanian media operations. Among its programs on the Net is a unique monitoring program of the Parliament and the Municipality, eye on the media, school radio, sportsnet, IT in Arabic, book reviews, legal awareness programs
(HAQI) and various cultural and artistic programs.
Link to Ammannet home page, and Link to background on the project via UNESCO. Congratulations, Daoud.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fortune on blogs and biz
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DATE: 01/03/2005 07:19:07 AM
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The impact of blogs on business is the subject of Fortune magazine's current cover story. BoingBoing is one of many "freewheeling blogs" mentioned, but the real reason to read it is this gem of a quote. Snip:
"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting with very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions."
Words to live by. Must. Respect. Karmic. Weenie. Snarks aside, David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth produced a really solid, thoughtful piece here, and it's well worth a read. Link to full text of article, for which (as Joi and others have pointed out) Fortune let go of their "paid registration only" policy.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: P2P tsunami alerts: ARC relays SMSes for emergencies
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DATE: 01/03/2005 07:22:48 AM
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Following up on this previous BoingBoing post:
Problem -- No effective system of mass, international alert existed in South Asia to quickly warn those in harm's way of the tsunami's approach.
One approach to a solution, created in the span of about 24 hours by an impromtu volunteer geek corps -- A tech system called Alert Retrieval Cache (ARC) which collects, sorts, and routes SMS messages for the puposes of alerts and relay communication. An early warning system based on SMS, short message service.
Rohit Gupta in Mumbai (one of the folks behind DesiMediaBitch, excellent tsunami coverage in recent days) says,
When you need a genius, invent one. We are a genius. Last 24 hours we spent in creating a system of sending and receiving SMS messages through a network of relief people. Here is the page in progress -- Link. These messages you see are SMSes, sent directly from Sri Lanka onto a webpage. ARC was created by Neha Vishwanathan, Rohit Gupta, Taran Rampersad, and Dan Lane.
Link to more on DesiMediaBitch.
Here's a snip from the ARC project workspace:
How can a single SMS can save people's lives? If all the people relevant to that message can receive it, instantaneously. In the following system, the SMS message also contains a way of deciding which recipients are relevant to the message.
Why do we need ARC? The failure of state-owned and hierarchical warning systems to alert us about the South Asia earthquake & tsunami, despite prior information has put into focus issues of forums for information exchange. What we need is to get credible, real time information from the grassroots to save lives.
How does this ARC work? Here's a scenario - Morquendi is a relief worker in Middle Earth, and he runs short of medical supplies, specifically antibiotics. The supplies are needed immediately. He needs to inform someone from his location. He sends out an SMS to ARC ... The Sorter program looks for similar keywords in the cache, as in Morquendi's message. After the program is done sorting, it links this message to all those numbers that are attached to similar attributes as in Morquendi's original message. Then it flashes this message to all these numbers. Real-time, instantaneous. People in the vicinity, and anyone across the world who is awake, or knows Morquendi, receives this message.
Link. Jon Lebkowsky has a related post here: Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wunderkammer keepers
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DATE: 01/03/2005 08:47:58 AM
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I've posted previously about the amazing work of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists and member Sarina Brewer. I'm delighted that the mainstream media has finally gotten wind of these curiosity-creators. From a long profile of the group in today's New York Times:
Though they admire the tradition of modern wildlife taxidermy, the Rogue Taxidermists are particularly drawn to the early history. "Prior to zoos, prior to museums, prior to galleries, we had these cabinets of wonder, these collections of art, trinkets, oddities," (member Robert) Marbury said. Then, with the rise of natural history museums, "they all sort of broke apart."
Now, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists is hoping to honor that early tradition and celebrate the "showmanship of oddities," as the group's Web site puts it.
Link (free reg. required)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Wi-Fi Networking News podcasts
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DATE: 01/03/2005 11:41:52 AM
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Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News is now producing a podcast. Find out more about on his site. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Stolen: remote control for brain implant
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DATE: 01/03/2005 12:45:42 PM
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A medical device which allows a woman to sleep by switching off an implant in her brain has been stolen.
Rita Carlisle, 53, from Knaphill, Surrey, suffers from a condition called essential tremor.
The stolen remote control gadget sends out pulses to calm the condition and can be switched off so she can rest.
She said: "I'm extremely tired, I'm getting three to four hours' sleep a night, I can't turn the machine off."
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nullsoft founder Frankel turns to Jesus, Cockos, Assniffers
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DATE: 01/03/2005 02:20:33 PM
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Nullsoft/Winamp founding father and code guru Justin Frankel dishes the dirt on what he's up to post-AOL in an interview with Nate at BetaNews. The short version: new company called Cockos, and some really interesting new projects -- "Jesusonic, "a fully programmable effects processor for guitar, bass, vocal and general use;" a program called Assniffer (an HTTP sniffing app that logs transferred files), and another known as PathSync (interactively synchronizes directories on various hard drives). Link to BetaNews interview. (Thanks Numair, who reminds us to wire funds to OGAMBO NATIONAL HERITAGE BANK TRUST).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Presidential Inaugural Balls: $40 million of fun
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DATE: 01/03/2005 08:22:38 PM
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Reason's Hit and Run excerpts a hilarious New York Times interview with Jeanne L. Phillips, chair of the Presidential Inaugural Committee:
Q: I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.
A: Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them.
Q: As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?
A: I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now -- not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the -- well, it's called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.
Q: How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?
A: I'm not sure that they do benefit from them.
Q: Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?
A: Honoring service is what our theme is about.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Japanese Subways Are Packed
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CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 01/03/2005 08:32:47 PM
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Short video clip of Japanese commuters getting squeezed into a subway car by three uniformed officials.
Link (Via Ektopia)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sf short story about upselling in neural implants
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DATE: 01/03/2005 10:46:56 PM
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Jeremy sez, "I've posted January's story to Futurismic, called 'Consensus Building.' This is another entry from Tom Doyle (author of September's 'Art's Appreciation'. It's a mean-spirited story about naked ambition, greed and the fungibility of computer-assisted memory. We've also re-opened Futurismic for fiction submissions. We've increased our permissible word limit to 15,000 and we're going to stay open until we get a year's worth of stories. Our guidelines are here and our web form for submitting is here."
Futurismic's publishing some amazing science fiction and this story doesn't disappoint. It's a great 10 minute read, perfect for the Web.
As always, she examined herself in the mirror, searching for vulnerability. She was rewarded by the usual view: an attractively fit, Slavic cheek-boned thirty-something who could still pass for twenty-something.
"I could lose some weight," she thought. But no, she hadn't really thought that. It was a chip idea. She consciously interfaced with the AI to avoid further confusion. "What the fuck are you talking about? I look great."
"You could lose a few pounds." The voice was a more clinical version of her own. "And your skin could do with some work, too. I can assist."
"No, thank you. Resume normal." She concentrated on getting ready for work, but the ritual had been tainted. Despite herself, she felt larger, flabbier, distinctly less attractive. To compensate, she deliberately dressed sexier than her usual businesslike attire, with shorter skirt and flashier blouse, and forced her hair to have a good day. She refused to submit to moods as a matter of policy.
Another thought tugged at her mind. "You could really use a new outfit." The tone was that of an enthused continental fashion designer.
Link
(Thanks, Jeremy!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shirky: Wikipedia's "anti-elitism" is a feature, not a bug
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DATE: 01/03/2005 10:50:13 PM
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Kuro5hin published an article by a Wikipedia co-founder, in which he slams Wikipedia for its "anti-elitism" and calls on the organization to mend its ways in order to earn the confidence of academics, librarians and other learned types. I read it when it was first published and it seemed wrong to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
Now Clay Shirky -- himself an academic -- has written a wonderful and comprehensive rebuttal of the piece, explaining why complaints of "anti-elitism" are misplaced.
Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don't like the Wikipedia. It works without privelege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.
This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the Wikipedia's driving force. You can see the reactionary core of the academy playing out in the horror around Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library of Congress -- the NY Times published a number of letters by people insisting that real scholarship would still only be possible when done in real libraries. The physical book, the hushed tones, the monastic dedication, and (unspoken) the barriers to use, these are all essential characteristics of the academy today.
It's not that it doesn't matter what academics think of the Wikipedia -- it would obviously be better to have as many smart people using it as possible. The problem is that the only thing that would make the academics happy would be to shoehorn it into the kind of filter, then publish model that is broken, and would make the Wikipedia broken as well.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 250 covers of "House of the Rising Sun"
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DATE: 01/03/2005 10:55:04 PM
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This Russian-hosted website contains links to 250 covers of "House of the Rising Sun," from the 101 Strings Orchestra to Bob Dylan to Toto. I once put together a compilation of 60 covers of "Stormy Weather" for my dad, but this has me beat hands down. Bravo!
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sinclair Spectrum retro shirt
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DATE: 01/03/2005 11:00:38 PM
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There's a lot of room in this world for obscure nerdy t-shirts that advertise beloved, defunct computer companies -- but could there be anything finer than a Sinclair Spectrum hoodie?
Link
(via Preshrunk)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Five percent ETECH discount for Boing Boing readers
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DATE: 01/03/2005 11:03:14 PM
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O'Reilly and Associates have just come through with a great offer for Boing Boing readers planning to attend the amazing Emerging Technologies conference in San Diego this March 14-17: quote "et05bb" when you sign up on the web-site and get a five percent discount over the already-discounted earlybird rate.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Public Bruce Sterling interview on the WELL
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DATE: 01/03/2005 11:22:49 PM
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Bruce Sterling is conducting his annual "state of the world" interview on the WELL's public "Inkwell" conference -- you can read along and send questions to Jon Lebkowsky, the moderator, for Bruce to answer.
Well, for two years I've been trying to write a science fiction novel
about "ubiquitous computation." However, I'm now so close to
my material that, when I went to lecture about it, I got asked
to join the faculty of a design school.
It's not like I get tenure, mind you. I'm merely guest-artist
for a year, or, as they like to put it at my new alma mater,
Art Center College of Design, I'm "Provocateur-in-Residence."
But I get a salary, and, more to the point, I get to play
in the prototype lab.
I could have said, "No, I've got to finish sci-fi novel
number umpteen here," but, gee whiz, if they're asking,
why not go? ACCD is one of the world's most-famed
design schools, and justly so. I was flattered.
I was in residence for a couple of weeks at Cranbrook
School of Design back in the early 90s, and I wrote
the outline and proposal for my novel HOLY FIRE there.
That turned out to be one of my better books.
So, y'know, I'll do it. What the hey.
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: ClearChannel stations gave away boob-jobs for Xmas
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ClearChannel radio-stations in four US cities held a contest last month called "Breast Christmas Ever," in which the "winners" were awarded breast-enlargement surgery.
Link
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TITLE: Indian state getting $2.50 2Mbit broadband
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Andhra Pradesh is a state in India where the government has just awarded a contract to a consortium of companies to roll out 2Mb/s broadband to every village, at a monthly cost of about US$2.50.
A consortium led by Gurgaon-based Aksh Broadband Limited has been selected to implement the Rs 400-crore Andhra Pradesh broadband project, which aims at extending broadband services to each and every village of the state in the next two years.
Link
(via /.)
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TITLE: Rational calendar with 364 days, extra week celebrating Isaac Newton
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An American physicist has developed a "rational" calendar of 364 days, in which each date falls on the same day of the week every year, thus saving profs the bother of drawing up new homework schedules every September.
His constraints meant eight months would have different lengths than they do now. March, June, September, and December would each contain 31 days, while the other months would each get 30. To keep the calendar in synchronisation with the seasons, Henry inserted an extra week - which is not part of any month - every five or six years. He named the addition "Newton Week" in honour of his favourite physicist, Isaac Newton.
"If I had my way, everyone would get Newton Week off as a paid vacation and could spend the time doing physics, or other activities of their choice," he says.
Despite this incentive, Henry says he has encountered resistance to his plan - mainly because people would be "stuck" with a birthday that always falls on a Wednesday, for example. Henry, who is among that group, is not moved by the argument. "You have my permission to celebrate your birthday the preceding or following Saturday," he says.
Link
(via Wired News)
Update: Rick sez, "Here's Dick Henry's own page on calendar reform, and here is the proposed Newton Calendar itself."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Russian Jimi Hendrix covers
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Emef sez, "Hendrix.ru has been collecting covers of Jimi Hendrix songs from people like Foxy & Biven from Moscow or Aleksandr Antipov from Minsk... They've been running a contest for covers of 'Little Wing' in the years 2001-2002, 'Manic Depression' in 2002-2003 and 'Hey Joe' in 2004."
(Thanks, Emef!)
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TITLE: Cory and Charlie Stross on the cover of Locus
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DATE: 01/04/2005 07:04:06 AM
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The January issue of Locus Magazine, the science fiction trade magazine, has a cover story on me and Charlie Stross, my friend and collaborator. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it.
Link
(Thanks, Amanda!)
Update: Locus has posted an excerpt from their interview with me.
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TITLE: Feds say filesharing war = drug war
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Russell Page sez: This is a bit of an interesting story at CNN about filesharing:
"There are a lot of similarities with the drug war," said David Israelite,
chairman of the U.S. Justice Department's Intellectual Property Task Force.
"You never really are going to eliminate the problem, but what you hope to
do is stop its growth."
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Will Eisner, RIP (1917-2005)
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Chris Arrant sez: "Artist, cartoonist and storyteller Will Eisner (www.willeisner.com) has passed away at the age of 87, from complications from heart surgery." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Make News No. 3
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Here's the latest edition of Make News, the newsletter for Make magazine (I'm the editor in chief). I'm looking for "Challenge" ideas (see below) and I'm also looking for article and review ideas for the second issue. If you want contributor guidelines, email me at markf@oreilly.com.
Make News No. 3 -- MAKE subscriptions now available!
https://www.pubservice.com/MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA
December 22, 2004
=================
Welcome to the third issue of MAKE News, the email newsletter for MAKE, a how-to technology project magazine published by O'Reilly Media.
(Note: If you entered the Build the Perfect PC Sweepstakes, you are receiving this newsletter once because you requested information about MAKE. To continue to receive this newsletter, sign up at make.oreilly.com under the newsletter sign up link.)
Happy Holidays and Subscription Announcement
============================================
I like the holidays for many reasons. One of them is because it gives me a great excuse to buy new gear. My new digital video camera--which I ordered last week so I can record my kids opening their toys on Christmas--is due any day. I'm also looking around for a photograph printer--I'm weighing the advantages and disadvantages of dye sublimation vs. inkjet (dye sub is winning so far). If my money doesn't run out, I'm going to finally upgrade my beloved Sony Cybershot-U digital camera for another camera with a zoom lens. With these three things in my arsenal of digital tools, I'll be all set to capture the upcoming festivities.
When someone asks me what they should get their technology- loving relatives and friends as a gift for the holidays, I'm not shy about telling them to give a subscription to MAKE. To launch our subscription effort, we have a special offer for readers of this newsletter. Subscribe using this link and you'll get the first volume of MAKE for free.
https://www.pubservice.com//MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA
Here's how it works. The annual subscription price for four volumes is $34.95. When you subscribe with this link, you'll get the first issue plus four more quarterly volumes for $34.95. So subscribe for yourself or friends with our very best offer for charter subscribers: five volumes for the cost of four. Be sure you get the premiere volume of MAKE. Subscribe at:
https://www.pubservice.com/MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA
The MAKE Meta-Challenge
=======================
I'm looking forward to the ideas for cool projects that readers are going to submit in the coming months. One thing we're working on is a way for people to share their projects with other people on the MAKE website. We'll have some great image- importing and annotation tools. Look for it in late January.
The other thing we're featuring is a "MAKE Challenge" that will appear in every issue of magazine. We'll present readers with a problem (for example, "My neighbor's dog won't stop barking. How can I get it to shut up in a humane, yet effective way?") and ask for solutions to the problem.
To get the "MAKE Challenge" started, I'd like you to email me a technology-related problem you'd like solved. Here's an example of a real-world problem looking for a solution, sent to me by Marc Goodner:
"I have had discussions recently with a number of other camphone enthusiasts who all love them for the poor quality--the artifacts in the images, the unexpected results. The problem is, the images are just too small. An idea came out of these discussions that what would be really cool: a repurposed digicam that has a larger chip but modified to work as a pinhole camera by removing the lens. Is such a thing possible? I don't know. I don't have the skills and neither do any of the guys I know who are interested in this since most of us are software guys. Seems like a good project for MAKE magazine."
Do you have a problem that needs solving? Email me at markf@oreilly.com. If I like it, it might get used as a "MAKE Challenge."
Happy Holidays!
Mark Frauenfelder Editor in Chief Make markf@oreilly.com
MAKE subscriptions now available! Get the first volume free when you become a charter subscriber at:
https://www.pubservice.com/MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New Cool Tools newsletter
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Good stuff in the latest Cool Tools newsletter, including affordable satellite phone service, a neat newspaper article clipper, and a miracle product for your windshield called Rain-X.
Sheeting water on a glass surface, like a windshield, causes significant distortion in the light/images passing through the glass because it isn't perfectly smooth. Rain-X causes the water to bead up so that spaces between the beads give you clear vision of what's ahead. While this is clearly evident during rainstorms, it is UNBELIEVEABLY DIFFERENT during rainstorms at night. You can actually SEE!
Link
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TITLE: Home Hacking Projects for Geeks
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O'Reilly Media has just published Home Hacking Projects for Geeks, featuring 13 fun home automation projects for your house. I drew the illustrations for the book, and enjoyed reading about the projects the authors came up with.
The thirteen projects in "Home Hacking Projects for Geeks" are divided
into three categories: Home Automation, Home Entertainment Systems, and
Security. The book includes projects such as:
-Remotely Monitor Your Pet
-Make Your House Talk
-Remotely Control Your Computer's MP3 player
-Create Time-Shifted FM Radio
-Watch Your House Across the Network
-Build a Home Security System
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Glenn Fleishman on digital radio
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Glenn Fleishman sez: "I wrote my own take on a Wired News story about the RIAA's lobbying of the FCC to get broadcast flags embedded in digital radio content. Digital radio is now offered by about 150 AM/FM stations in the U.S. even though only about 10,000 to 35,000 (estimated) high-definition or HD radios that can receive the digital content were sold in 2004. Terrestrial digital AM/FM will grow to at least 2,000 stations by 2007, and millions of receivers by 2008, according to analysts. With HD, AM stations sound like FM (and don't disappear in underpasses) and FM stations sound like CD quality. Reportedly! I haven't heard it yet." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: How to weave a wallet out of paper money
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Beautifully-made site shows you how to make a wallet out of 12 20 one-dollar bills. Link (Thanks, Tony!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Ken Courtney t-shirt
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Brooklyn anticouturista Ken Courtney made some new shirts. Say it with diamonds: Link. On a related note, someone IMed me a joke yesterday.
Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb.
A: What, you mean you don't KNOW??????
Link to Ken's latest, and link to background.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Creepy NSA marker
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Found in National Vigilance Park, Ft. Meade, MD, next to NSA Headquarters: creepy NSA marker, with biblical reference for extra-specialness. Link, and link to website for the park.
(Thanks, Romanpoet).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Ancient animation from Iran
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CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 01/04/2005 03:13:14 PM
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The world's first animation? An earthen goblet created 5000 years ago and recently unearthed in southeastern Iran depicts a goat jumping toward a tree and munching on its leaves. Link (includes a short animated AVI)
(Thanks, Isaac).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Famous moments recreated with Half Life
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This Half Life 2 player is recreating famous moments in history using in-game characters and scenery.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NYT: Blogs fact-check their own asses in tsunami debate
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Another insightful piece from John Schwartz at the New York Times about unsubstantiated rumors that spread online after the tsunami (example: Halliburton must have been behind it all). Story examines how bloggers reacted quickly to debunk falsehoods as they emerged, a sort of inherently self-healing trait evident in many online communities. I was among those interviewed for the piece, but as usual, others had far more interesting things to say.
[James Surowiecki, the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds"] pointed out that there is nothing new about ill-informed rumor-mongering or other forms of oddness. "There were always cranks," he said. "Rumors have always been fundamental about the way people talk, or think, about politics or complicated issues." Instead of a corner bar or a Barcalounger, however, the location for today's speech is an online medium with a potential audience of millions.
But there is another, more important difference, Mr. Surowiecki and others say. Internet discourse can be self-correcting, with near-instant feedback from readers. What was lost in the sniping over the Democratic Underground posting was the fact that the follow-up comments were a sober discussion of what actually causes earthquakes. The first response to the posting asked, "Earthquakes have been happening since the beginning of time ... How would you explain them?"
Further comments explained the movement of tectonic plates and provided links to sites explaining earthquakes and tsunamis from the United States Geological Survey and other authoritative sources.
"Not to make fun, as I'm sure it's not a unique misconception ... but the reality is simple plate tectonics," one participant wrote. "The entire Pacific Ocean is slowly but surely closing in on itself. What happened is that the floor of the Indian Ocean slid over part of the Pacific Ocean, releasing massive tension in the Earth's crust.
"That's it. No mystic injury to the Gaia spirit or anything."
I know some folks have their digital knickers in a twist over the story's headline (Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate), but I don't see anti-blog bias here. On the contrary, strikes me as a reasoned piece that traces how bloggers collectively sought to correct the record within their sphere of discourse. I would, however, like to point out that Mr. Schwartz totally missed the fact that an alarming number of blogs are in fact penned from corner bars and barcaloungers, thanks to the wonders of WiFi. Blowhards, unite! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Graphic Novel review
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The latest Graphic Novel Review is out, and it has an interview with Harvey Pekar, as well as a cover by the late Will Eisner and Gary Chaloner. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The future of webcomics
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Joey Manley sez: "The Webcomics Examiner has posted a great panel session on 'The Future of Webcomics.' The highlight is Shaenon Garrity's story about the young Cartoon Art Museum volunteer who diagnosed himself as "Surface Six" (a reference to a section of "Understanding Comics" where McCloud describes the slow growth of a true cartoon artist -- "Surface: Six" is one of the steps along the way). Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: New Creative Commons remix website
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BB pal Matt Haughey sez,
We're having a party in San Francisco on Thursday night (Link), and we recently launched a remix community site that tracks samples across songs uploaded (here's a good example track: Link). We're doing a contest with Wired Magazine to launch it, where the winner of the best Fine Arts Militia/Chuck D remix gets on their next CD!
Link to CCMixter, and Link to contest details.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Online video of 60 Minutes Google seg (with John Battelle)
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Here's last Sunday's 60 Minutes segment about Google, including comment from BoingBoing's John Battelle. Link to video (divx), and Link to previous BB post with details. (thanks, matthowie!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Googling unsecured webcams
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Cleverly-aliased BoingBoing reader numlok whispers:
This is both very cool and very scary. Use this search string below with Google, and you will find dozens (hundreds?) of unsecured webcam feeds (most seem to be security cams).
inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="
Link. More background here.
BoingBoing reader Nick adds, "This is a Google search that gives 2000 cams instead of just 800. Pointed out on MeFi."
Update to this post with more webcam Google-hacks: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Happy Birthday, Mars Rovers
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One year ago this month, Mars welcomed two new visitors: The Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Link to JPL website with a look back. Do androids dream of electric cakes? (Thanks David!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: ESPN website free to call Evel Knievel "a pimp," court says
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A US appeals court ruled today that motorcycle stunt deity Evel Knievel cannot sue ESPN for publishing his photo online with two women above the caption "You're never too old to be a pimp."
The term "pimp" was probably intended as a compliment, the court said. But Knievel said, "What good is law in the United States of America if five or six goddamn bimbos are going to rule against it?"
Link. And, ROFLcopter! (Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: BoingBoing traffic stats are back
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DATE: 01/04/2005 05:36:26 PM
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Here's a note from John Battelle, affectionately known as Boing Boing's "band manager."
Earlier in the month we took Boing Boing's live stats page down (link). As we noted in our post, we wanted to grok what the program was reporting, and make sure that whatever we posted was clear and understandable.
Well, the stats are back up (link), and you may notice that we've not done much to them. There's a good reason for this - we prefer to post our stats pretty much as reported by AWStats, the log file analysis program we use. We considered filtering those numbers in any number of ways, but always ended up at the same place - statistics are subject to interpretation and judgment, whereas data is data. We prefer to give you the data, and let you do with it what you want.
We did learn a few interesting things about how AWstats works, and we did make one minor tweak to the reporting process. First, of the columns you see, only the first one - "Unique Visitors," and the last two "Hits" and "Bandwidth" can be taken at face value. "Unique Visitors" counts unique IP addresses that are hitting the site, so it's a fairly accurate count of actual humans reading Boing Boing. (If anything, its count is a bit low, as it does not account for sites like AOL which may have one IP address for thousands of unique users.) The "Hits" and "Bandwidth" columns count just about anything that moves on the site, so they are fine measurements of how "busy" the site is. But the other two columns - "Pages" and "Number of Visits" - are more difficult to understand. They are AWStats' best guess as to how many total visits a site gets, as well as how many pages are actually viewed by those visitors. These columns have always disregarded image and video files, but because a lot of our traffic comes from RSS readers, they are certainly inflated by some amount.
But how much? It's anyone's guess. We're working with Feedburner (link), among others, to figure that out, but until we know, we prefer not to hazard one of our own. What we do know is that those middle columns had been inflated by php files recently added to the site by advertisements, so we filtered those out.
We hope that posting these stats will be one small step toward the blogosphere working out the moving target of "standards" for measuring traffic to blogs - Mark Fletcher of Bloglines has done some good preliminary work (link) along those lines. As we learn more, we'll keep you posted.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on NPR: blogs and the tsunami disaster
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On the NPR program "Day to Day" this week, I join NPR's Alex Chadwick to discuss the role of blogs in responding to the tsunami disaster. From first-person accounts, to amateur videoblogging, to tech aid, to fundraising coordination, to "citizen journalism" (nod to Dan Gillmor) that sometimes pokes holes in official government-isssue accounts -- we explore online voices around the world.
Link to archived audio for this program, expanded coverage on the NPR website includes pointers to video files and torrents. Link to NPR Day to Day home. This week, listeners in Boston are hearing the show on their local affiliate WBUR for the first time -- so, consider this a shout-out to Boston.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: 2005 EDGE Question
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DATE: 01/04/2005 06:13:02 PM
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"What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Each year, literary agent and online provocateur John Brockman poses a single question to a wide array of scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers. Responses to this year's question are now online at Edge.org. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sixapart buying LiveJournal?
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DATE: 01/04/2005 06:30:13 PM
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There are rumors on the internets that Six Apart will soon buy LiveJournal. Details as they come.
Update: Om Malik has more:
Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad, and Moveable Type is about to acquire Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount. The deal is a mix of stock and cash, and could be announced sometime later this month, according to those close to the two companies. If the deal goes through, then Six Apart will become one of the largest weblog companies in the world, with nearly 6.5 million users. It also gives the company a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF helps beat RIAA in privacy for accused infringers case
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DATE: 01/04/2005 11:47:05 PM
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EFF's helped win another victory this week! We filed a brief in RIAA vs Charter, a case where the music industry was asserting the legal right to require your ISP to turn over your information if you'd been accused of copyright infringement -- rather than waiting until they'd proven their case. The court ruled in Charter's favor yesterday, saying that just because you've been accused of infringement, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have the due process right to privacy until you've been proven guilty.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with 21 other groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Charter case, urging the Eighth Circuit to determine that the same strong protections applied to anonymous speech in other contexts also apply when copyright infringement is claimed but has not yet been proven. In a victory for privacy and anonymity, the Eighth Circuit determined that DMCA subpoenas could not be used to get this information.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ghost ship tee for your inner haunted pirate
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DATE: 01/04/2005 11:51:29 PM
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This Ghost Ship tee sports a lovely line-drawing of a drifting, tattered pirate ship and a maritime tattoo-like anchor on the sleeve -- Yarrr!
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(via Preshrunk)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Technorati adds Keyword Watchlists
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DATE: 01/04/2005 11:54:11 PM
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Technorati, a service that indexes blogs in real-time and provides search, indexing, and link-analysis, has added "keyword tracking."
For example, say you're interested in keeping track of the recent rumor that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. You would start by going to Technorati and typing in a set of search terms like:
("six apart" OR sixapart) AND (livejournal OR "live journal")
This will give you an instantly updated stream of posts from blogs around the world that are talking about both SixApart and LiveJournal, in a post, using a variety of spellings.
Note the results page, however - Underneath the title of the search, you'll notice a link that says, "Make this a Watchlist". Click on that link, go through the login process (or create an account if it is the first time at Technorati), and you'll get a link to that saved search to put into your favorite RSS reader.
Linkvia Sifry's Alerts)
(Disclaimer: I'm an advisor to Technorati -Cory)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bloggie Award nominations are open
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DATE: 01/05/2005 12:08:53 AM
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The 2005 Bloggie Awards are open for nominations! Last year, thanks to your generous votes, Boing Boing won four Bloggies, including Best Weblog. It was a stupendous honor to accept these awards on behalf of my co-editors, and I've got one of the certificates hanging beside my desk now; it gives me a good feeling every time I look at it. I've just done my nominating -- I hope you'll think of Boing Boing when you do yours.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RPG publisher needs $50K in orders to stay afloat
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DATE: 01/05/2005 12:14:37 AM
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Guardians of Order is an excellent Canadian role-playing game publisher (they do the killer cyberpunk game Ex Machina) that has fallen on hard times because the US dollar has cratered (they do most of their business in the US). The're trying to book US$50,000 in orders for their wares in order to keep the business afloat:
* The special signed and numbered editions (by George R.R. Martin) of the limited edition A Game of Thrones RPG are still available for pre-order. The order page will be updated soon with a new art preview, as well as a sneak-peak at the Noble d20 character class.
* We are downsizing and consolidating our warehouses. In doing so, we found a few copies of out-of-print products, and have placed them for sale in our Rare Products Store. Supply is extremely limited in some cases, and we will sell items on a first-come-first-serve basis.
* In the Rare Products Store, we also have a few gems never offered before, including the German translation of the Sailor Moon RPG and sealed decks and displays of the Origins-Award winning Sailor Moon CCG, as well as imperfect printings (at great discounts) of BESM d20 and Silver Age Sentinels.
* Also in the Rare Products Store, we are offering 7 lucky individuals the chance to own an exclusive part of the company: one of our personalised convention Team GoO hockey jerseys. Each one must be custom made, so you can choose your own jersey name and number.
* In our In-Print Store, we are offering substantial discounts on product bundles. It's the perfect way to jump in and try that game you've been wondering about. Bundles are avaible for Big Eyes, Small Mouth, BESM d20, Silver Age Sentinels Tri-Stat, and Silver Age Sentinels d20.
* For the first time ever, we are selling the ULTIMATE GoO Bundle: one copy of every in-print product we have in our catalogue - plus a few surprises - for an amazing 60% off!
* Finally, a special thank you to our more aggressive customers: if your order comes to more than $200, we will include your name in all of our 2005 books under a dedicated "Contributing Supporter" credit.
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(Thanks, Jesse!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: US tsunami relief = 42.27 hours' worth of Iraq-war spend
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DATE: 01/05/2005 12:15:44 AM
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Frank sez, "Curious as to how much $350 million in promised US aid for tsunami victims equals in expenditures on the war in Iraq? I did the math so you don't have to. $350 million equals 42.27 hours of the cost of the war in Iraq. (And yes, the decimal point is in the right place.)"
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(Thanks, Frank!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory's book on preliminary Nebula ballot!
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DATE: 01/05/2005 12:18:27 AM
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The preliminary ballot for the Nebula Award came out yesterday, and my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is one of six novels that made the first cut. Between now and Feb 15, my colleagues in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) will vote on a final ballot. It's exhilarating to have just gotten this far, but it will be truly amazing if my first novel makes the final ballot. If you're a SFWA member, I hope you'll remember the book when your preliminary ballot arrives in the mail!
Paladin of Souls -- Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos, Oct03)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- Cory Doctorow (Tor, Feb03)
Omega -- Jack McDevitt (Ace, Nov03)
Perfect Circle -- Sean Stewart (Small Beer Press, Jun04)
Conquistador -- S.M. Stirling (Roc, Feb04)
The Knight -- Gene Wolfe (Tor, Jan04)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Paging Dan Brown and Nicholas Cage
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DATE: 01/05/2005 01:54:11 AM
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Last year, the deeply secretive Knights Templar demanded an apology from the Vatican for persecuting the group in the 14th century. Apparently, the Vatican wasn't entirely against the idea. That surprising communication from the shadowy sect also revealed the hometown of its current grand master. The Guardian went on a quest to Hertfordshire, England to track down the Templars:
If there is something implausible in the idea that huge stretches of world history have been secretly coordinated from a market town just north of the M25 - well, maybe that's what they want you to think. The local newspaper, the Hertfordshire Mercury, certainly seems convinced: over the past few months it has published several intriguing stories quoting local Templars, who told its reporter of a secret network of tunnels under the town that was still in use by the order. "It reaches beyond well known central Hertford locations," one Templar said, "including the tourist office, the castle, Monsoon, Threshers, the post office, Bayley Hall, and the council offices." Treasures of "immense importance" were hidden there, it was claimed. Was the quest for the Holy Grail finally about to come to an end? More surprisingly still, was it about to come to an end underneath Monsoon on Market Place?
The man who has persuaded the Vatican to consider apologising, Tim Acheson, meets the Guardian in icy morning fog in Hertford, wearing smart pinstriped trousers and a thick winter overcoat. His midnight-blue sports car is parked nearby. "As you might expect," he says, setting the tone for the day, "there are going to be some things that I'm not able to discuss."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Found, one weird buoy
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DATE: 01/05/2005 02:18:22 AM
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This giant buoy washed ashore in Cocoa Beach, Florida and nobody has any clue where it came from or who it belongs to. From Florida Today:
"There's no identifying marks on it, so I don't know where it came from," said Jeff Galliher, petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard at Port Canaveral. "It's just a buoy base with a tower coming out of it."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Einstein flip
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DATE: 01/05/2005 02:51:57 AM
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Cambridge physicist Helen Czerski and BMX pro Ben Wallace have collaboratively designed a new bike trick in honor of the centenary celebration of Einstein's most influential scientific publications.
In the stunt, 18-year-old Wallace, a competitor in extreme sports events around the world, launched off a six-feet high ramp and spun backwards through 360 degrees while simultaneously folding his bike underneath him in a move known to BMX devotees as a ‘tabletop’. At one point, onlookers saw Wallace upside down, travelling at 15mph, with his head 12-feet off the floor.
Czerski, a keen sportswoman and diver herself, said: “I spent a lot of time looking at the physics behind various stunts, trying to understand the limits of what is physically possible to determine how far we could push the parameters with our new creation. I then tested our ideas using a computer simulation to plot a new stunt.”
The stunt draws upon a variety of physics theories including the conservation of angular momentum and Newton's laws of motion.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tallest bridge
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DATE: 01/05/2005 03:04:55 AM
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This is a photo from orbit of the brand new 1.5 mile Millau viaduct in southern France. It's the world's tallest road bridge, standing 900 feet at its highest point above the Tarn River.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Howard Rheingold's "Mobile and Open" manifesto
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DATE: 01/05/2005 08:57:07 AM
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Howard Rheingold wrote a great manifesto for TheFeature outlining what he thinks it is going to take to create a healthy and diverse mobile mediasphere. He invites your comments at the site.
The devices that most people on earth will carry or wear in coming decades could become platforms for technical and entrepreneurial innovation, foundations for industries that don't exist yet, enablers of social and political change. However, it is far from certain that mobile media will go the route of the PC, where teenage dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and millions of others actively shaped the technology, or the Internet, where search engines were invented in dorm rooms and innovators like Tim Berners-Lee gave away the World Wide Web for free without asking permission or changing any wiring.
Powerful interests recognize the dangers such a world poses for business models that depend on controlling and metering access to content, conduit, or services for a mass market, and they are acting to protect their interests. That's what digital rights management, extension of copyright laws into what formerly had been the public domain, the broadcast flag, spectrum regulation policies that favor archaic technologies and incumbent licensees, trusted computing systems that bake all these rules into monopoly silicon are about.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Lawyers attempt to flush Urinal.net again
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DATE: 01/05/2005 09:01:44 AM
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Mike of Techdirt sez: A year ago, you linked to the story we had about the Greater Toronto Airport Authority telling the site Urinal.net that it was against the law to mention their name (and put a picture of one of their urinals) on their site.
Well, now it appears that someone else is reacting badly to that same site. Not only did the company (the Marco Beach Ocean Resort) say that Urinal.net couldn't mention their name, they also claimed that their cease & desist letter could not be forwarded or shown to anyone...
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Stunning little $100 automatons
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DATE: 01/05/2005 09:32:28 AM
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These Japanese language website sells some incredible-looking science projects. The only English words on the site are "Sophisticated Science Kit Series for Adults." The Karakuri puppets they sell are scale reproductions of actual historical Japanese automatons, and the videos are stunning.
Greg sez: "Following the link to Gakken's toy site mentioned in your recent post regarding the phonograph kit, I was excited to see a working model of the bow-shooting boy (hiki douji kara kuri ningyou). Be sure to check out the video.
During a recent trip to Japan, I saw a television show about about these--no, not the toys, the original automatons. (The real one is much larger than this model.) I was amazed at the complexity of that machine. I am even more amazed that they have replicated the function in a tiny model that costs only $100! Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A MusicPlasma for blogs
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DATE: 01/05/2005 09:52:25 AM
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John Battelle is proposing a MusicPlasma for blogs, that is, a graphical way to map out the blogosphere by grouping related blogs. He's already got people interested in the idea.
Then I thought of MusicPlasma. The thing I like about it is how intuitive it is - put in the name of a band you like, and you find more that you might like but had never heard of.
Hey, I thought, what if we did that with blogs, and instead of Amazon data, we used Technorati cosmos data, or Feedster data, or Findory, or Bloglines, or some combination of all of that plus more?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Agony Column on Cory's next novel
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DATE: 01/05/2005 10:04:02 AM
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Rick Kleffel's "Agony Column" has a fun piece on my next book, and the thing I'm working on these days:
Now however, Doctorow has taken a very different track. His forthcoming novel, 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town' (Tor Books / Tom Doherty Associates ; May 1, 2005 ; $24.95) is in the first place coming to town a bit later in the year. The early draft I first read of this novel was nearly three times as long as 'Eastern Standard Tribe'. But the big ch-ch-ch-changes come as Doctorow turns to face the strangeness not of a science fictional future, but instead a fantastically rendered present. Alan, the protagonist of 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town', is a middle-aged man who moves into a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. He only barely fits in with the college-roomie types next door, and that's even before the gal who lives there reveals to him that she has wings that grow back even if she cuts 'em off.
Alan is a sensitive guy, and he understands, because, we're told, his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. This is clearly the type of reproduction that will not be taught in your hygiene classes. So, you know, when one of his brothers, a set of nested Russian nesting dolls, shows up on his doorstep starving because the innermost doll has disappeared, you can imagine that the whole family relationship issue is a bit more complex than usual. Especially since brother Davey, whom Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.
What's a guy like Alan to do but hook up with a cybergeek who plans to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet access? I've got to admit that under the circumstances set out by Doctorow, that seems like a more than reasonable reaction. Now as to how readers will react to the novel, well, that's a different matter entirely. I'm totally engrossed by this slight shift for Doctorow from the purely technological to the absurd and fantastic. That's because Doctorow writes with the kind of hardheaded humor and logic that makes one suspect this book will be a mind-boggling delight. And perhaps a bit of a revelation for Doctorow's audience, which could really grow to include a swathe of readers who enjoy literary fantasy.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing's redesign
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DATE: 01/05/2005 10:15:51 AM
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You might have noticed that we've tweaked Boing Boing's design, and have added a new ad banner along the top. We have removed the network text link advertising because we wanted to experiment with other kinds of ads.
We're always interested in hearing your suggestions for other design changes to improve legibility and usability. Feel free to email them to us, and put "BB design" in the subject field.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Super Mario mosiac made from post-its
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DATE: 01/05/2005 10:16:42 AM
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A Super Mario mosaic made out of post-it notes -- brilliant!
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Old magazine art
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DATE: 01/05/2005 10:42:51 AM
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Great website devoted to beautiful old magazine art. I guess all of the best artists today are involved in movies and TV. Back in the old days, they worked for magazines. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More Googleable unsecured webcams
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DATE: 01/05/2005 11:10:38 AM
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Following up on yesterday's post about how to sniff out publicly-viewable webcams (whose operators may not be fully aware that said webcams are publicly viewable), Boing Boing reader George Hotelling says:
Did you know there's a whole site dedicated to finding interesting stuff via Google? Link, and check out or the "ihackstuff.com" site.
And reader Victor Gregorio says:
Here is a search that finds Axis webcams..
inurl:"view/index.shtml"
Link.
Reader Jonathan offers yet another string for Axis cams, Link, and says "They're particularly fun since they tend to have multiple frames per second, so you get something almost full motion." I just tried this and found a cool barnyard in Japan where goats and baby cows were frolicking in the dirt with ducks.
Update: More here.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tweaking the design
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DATE: 01/05/2005 11:35:37 AM
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Thanks for all the great comments about BB's redesign. I think it is great that so many people really care about this. Most people seemed to hate the orange background, so I turned it back to white for now. How do you like it now? The next thing I'm going to do is make the text column variable-width again. Please email your comments to me!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Thai boxer photos to benefit tsunami victims
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DATE: 01/05/2005 12:24:05 PM
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Photographer Clayton Cubitt, whose work I've posted about here many times, says:
I've created an edition of prints to benefit the Tsunami disaster relief efforts. This edition was printed exclusively for this benefit auction, and I won't be making any more prints in this size of these images. Ever.
The edition consists of two 13x19-inch prints, portraits I made of Thai kickboxers exactly one year ago at Lumpinee Stadium, Bangkok. These are beautiful pigment prints (if I do say so myself), personally printed by me on Hahnemuhle heavy-weight art paper, hand-signed and numbered (1/1).
100% of the proceeds will be donated through eBay's "Giving Works" system to Unicef's Tsunami Relief Fund.
Link to auction page (alternate url Link). Details of the images, Link one and Link two.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Homeland security warns of Casio watches as bomb triggers
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DATE: 01/05/2005 12:37:44 PM
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Off in the distance, I can hear the wailing of the hipsters and the rending of their ironic garments. Boing Boing reader Christian Cantrell says,
The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a warning to the Transportation Security Administration recently stating that al-Qaida may attempt to use watches with cigarette lighters or Casio watches with built-in altimeters to detonate bombs on board US airliners. Apparently, the altimeters built into some Casio watches can be modified to detonate bombs at certain altitudes. They are apparently favored by cost-conscious terrorists since Casio watches are affordable and easily obtained.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Japanese fan-made game: Ie, Tatemasu!
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DATE: 01/05/2005 12:52:53 PM
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On the terrific, offbeat videogame website "Insert Credit," we find this cultural exegesis of a Japanese gay porn video game. Screenshots included, and they're relatively worksafe because the... um... protuberances... are blocked with pics of cute anime girls. Cute anime girls with third eyes, that is. Snip:
The game I am about to pick as my "Game of the Year 2004" is called Ie, Tatemasu! ("let’s build your house!", as they say on the guide book); it’s a fan-made erotic game. And the most basic type, too: a simulation game. For those of you not familiar with the genre, you basically see the character you’re supposed to be talking to, read the dialogue, and sometimes make a choice (between, for example: "go to the pachinko" or "pay a visit to this character"). Sometimes, when, hum, something visual happens that words would be unfit to describe properly, you are shown a still illustration of the scene while the text still runs down the CG. Basically, these games are very, very slow slideshows of pornographic drawings with a lot of text, and very few interactive elements.
Link (Thanks, Chris Baker!).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF reviews freedom-loving MacOS high-def TV toy
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DATE: 01/05/2005 02:41:34 PM
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With only half a year left until the FCC criminalizes watching television without DRM (thanks to the loathsome Broadcast Flag), it's time to start stocking up on open hardware that can tune, record and manipulate digital TV signals without Hollywood's irrational, paranoid shackles.
If you've got a Mac, that means scoring one of El Gato's new EyeTV 500s, a device that can move digital TV shows form your rabbit ears or your cable wire to your Mac in glorious high-def, as plan-jane MPEGs that you can manipulate, share, rip, mix and burn till the cows come home.
My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann, EFF's Senior Intellectual Property Lawyer, is also a certified hi-fi nut, gearhead, and gadget freak. He scored a review-unit of the EyeTV 500 and wrote up a review of its freedom-enhancing capabilities.
As a demo of those capabilities, EFF is hosting a five minute high-def clip from Fellowship of the Rings (Torrent Link), which occupies a thunderous 500MB of hard-drive (!). The studios argued that the Broadcast Flag was necessary to keep viewers from sharing high-def movies over the Internet -- at 500MB per five minutes, that seems a little far-fetched.
The tiny silver lining here is that if you can get an open, freedom-loving digital television tuner between now and the summer, you'll be able to go on doing practically anything you like with the digital television you receive over the air and with your unencrypted cable signal. If you choose to do this by plugging a DTV tuner into your computer, you'll be able to archive your shows on your hard-drive, manipulate them with your favorite editing software, and email clips to your friends.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shirky: Wikipedia is better than Brittanica on net-centric axes
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DATE: 01/05/2005 02:52:00 PM
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Clay Shirky's posted more about Wikipedia on Many2Many, responding to danah boyd's post about how Wikipedia won't be an encylopedia. The thing Clay really nails this time in the idea that "new media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at."
And of course, sometimes Wikipedia is better, since, as with the Indian Ocean tsunami example, Britannica simply has no offering. So, at the margin, a casual user who wants free access to a Web site that offers a communally-compiled and non-authoritative overview of a recent event will prefer the Wikipedia to nothing, which is what Britannica offers. In this case, Wikipedia comes out on top, and walking along several of those axes like cost, availability, topicality, and breadth of coverage, Wikipedia has the advantage, and in many cases, that advantage is increasing with time
Now Britannica doesn't want this to be true (god, do they not want this to be true) and so they try to create litmus tests around authoritativeness -- "WARNING: Do not read anything that does not come from an institutional source!" But this is as silly as audiophiles dismissing the MP3 format because it wasn't an improvement in audio quality, missing entirely that the package of "moderate quality+improved cost and distribution" was what made the format great. Considering MP3 as nothing more than a lossy compression scheme missed the bundle of services that it enabled.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Weird color problem
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DATE: 01/05/2005 04:47:40 PM
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(Click thumbnail for enlargement.) Anyone know why the body copy shows in gold in IE on OS X? It seems fine on Safari and Firefox. Please email me if you know the answer. (Also, thanks to everyone for your great design suggestions. As you can see, I've incorporated quite a few of them.)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: A Kafka day at the Los Angeles traffic ticket office
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DATE: 01/05/2005 05:00:18 PM
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In November, my wife, Carla Frauenfelder, was driving home when a Los Angeles Police officer pulled her over. He ticketed her for making an illegal left turn.
The next day, with her ticket in hand, I entered the url for the website listed on the ticket (lasuperiorcourt.com). I wanted to pay the fine and sign her up for driving school so our car insurance rates wouldn't increase. The website couldn't find the ticket. I tried searching for it both by entering the ticket number and by entering my wife's driver license number. No luck. So I called the phone number on the ticket. The woman who answered said there was no record of the ticket. She said my wife would have to drive to the ticket office on Penfield St, in Chatsworth to take care of it.
So, my wife drove there on January 5th and showed the woman at the counter the ticket. The woman entered the ticket number and nothing came up. She scratched her head for a minute, and then noticed that the police officer forgot to write a date on the ticket. Apparently, that screws everything up.
The woman told my wife what the fine is (about $135), but told her that she could not accept payment for the fine, because the ticket is not in the database. My wife is not allowed to attend driving school, either, because the ticket isn't in the database.
The woman instructed my wife to call the court every day week, to find out if the ticket had been entered into the computer yet. Once it shows up, she is supposed to drive to the ticket office the very next day to take care of it. And once the ticket has been entered, she is going to be hit with a penalty and possibly a warrrant for her arrest, because once the information goes into the computer it'll see that she hasn't paid the fine yet, and it will be flagged as delinquent. My wife will then have to explain the situation to another helpful city employee.
My wife asked the woman how it long will take for the ticket to be entered into the computer system. The woman said she had no idea. My wife asked her if she is going to have to call every day week for the next several years. She shrugged and said "Well, it might take a week, it might take six months, I don't know."
My wife asked again if she could just pay the fine and have it apply to the ticket when it finally does show up. Woman: "Nope."
I'm at a loss for what to do here. If you have a good idea please email me and let me know if you do!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: CNN "Crossfire" host Carlson to stop hurting America
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DATE: 01/05/2005 05:25:00 PM
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More Jon Stewart/Crossfire fallout? CNN has announced that it will not renew Tucker Carlson's contract, and the days of "Crossfire" may be numbered. Said CNN chief Jonathan Klein: "I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp." Link (Thanks, Doug Hammond)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Reader-annotated edition of Neal Stephenson's "Command Line"
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DATE: 01/05/2005 05:30:30 PM
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Boing Boing reader Alex says,
With Neal Stephenson's permission, this guy has annotated In the Beginning was the Command line and posted it online for everyone to see. I think this is a great example of how works can evolve and be improved upon. Unfortunately, In the Command Line has not been 'set free', but it's great that the author was able and willing to give permission for this development.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: "Lonely Island"-er Andy Samberg on Comedy Central
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DATE: 01/05/2005 05:38:36 PM
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Andy Samberg (whom you may recall from such previously-Boinged hits as TheLonelyIsland.com and Channel101) will be doing stand-up on Comedy Central's Premium Blend this Friday at 10pm. For those whose blog-term memory returns no results on a query for Mr. Samberg's work -- The 'BU, Just 2 Guyz, Nintendo, and The Heist are excellent places to start. (Thanks, Macki)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: HOWTO: Knit dim-sum-shaped toys for your cat
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DATE: 01/05/2005 06:00:50 PM
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Catnip-filled kitty toys shaped like won tons and eggrolls are the subject of this online HOWTO, with step-by-step instructions and photos. I'm not really the knitty type of chick -- I mean, the needles I'm around generally have something to do with tattoos, piercings, travel vaccines, or the kind you drop on vinyl. But knitty.com is such a great site, I'm almost tempted to try. OK, almost.
Link to feature. (Thanks, Mara!).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: NPPA photojournalism contest open to photobloggers
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DATE: 01/05/2005 06:19:36 PM
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The NPPA holds annual awards for excellence in photojournalism -- this year's contest is accepting entries now, and winners will be judged and posted in March. There's also a web division which is open to independent photo sites; rules are here. Photobloggers, heed the call! You're welcome to enter, and it costs nothing.
Winners from last year's competition are online, and include this stunning series of images by Mark Zaleski about people who work with the dead for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department in California. Snip from description for this image: "Pathologists and technicians examine the remains for a woman during an autopsy in the autopsy suite. Each body brought into the Riverside County Sheriff Coroner Bureau is tagged with the individuals identification information."
Link to Zaleski's photos (warning: some are gruesome), Link to another particularly striking series by NPPA winner David Hoegsholt -- portraits of a drug-addicted prostitute in Copenhagen. (Thanks, Susannah, and thanks also to Keith W. Jenkins, Photography Editor for The Washington Post Magazine and Best of Photojournalism on the Web Contest Coordinator.).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: XM CEO in the hotseat over Stern, Dr. Laura at CES
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CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 01/05/2005 06:35:40 PM
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Shown here, a snapshot of XM's CEO Hugh Panero at the CES show in Vegas today. If he looks like he has a terrible headache, that's because Jason Calacanis just gave him one. Jason says:
We just got back from the XM press conference at CES and we got to ask him two questions -- we made them zingers of course: Question one: “What impact do you think Howard Stern going to Sirius is going to have on your business, and how close did you come to signing him?” As you can see from his expression he was really excited about answering this one).
Question two: “Dr. Laura over the past couple of years said that gay people are biological errors. You talked before about decisive programming (i.e. Stern), I wonder what XM’s position is on hate speech was and if you condone it. And why would you associate yourself with her after you said you wouldn’t associate with Howard Stern because of controversy issues. Are you going to lose subscribers, and do you feel gay people are biological errors?”
Link to post, Link to video for the Stern/Sirius question (WMV) and link to the Dr. Laura question (WMV).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Report: Six Apart announcing Livejournal buyout Thursday
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DATE: 01/05/2005 07:17:30 PM
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Following up on yesterday's BoingBoing post (based on tips from two sources who requested anonymity), and this entry spotted subsequently on Om Malik's blog -- eWeek reports that the rumors have been "confirmed," and Six Apart is indeed planning to announce the acquisition of LiveJournal tomorrow. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies
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DATE: 01/05/2005 08:30:32 PM
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I imagine my blog-mate Cory might have a few things to say about this when he's online again. :-) In an interview on news.com, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described free culture advocates as a "modern-day sort of communists." Well now.
Q: "In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
A: "No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.
And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned--including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future."
Link (Thanks, Rick Prelinger, and Nathan Slaughter).
BB reader Matt Bradley said, "Obviously, what we need is a large red flag with a gold copyleft in the upper left, replacing the hammer and sickle."
That sounded like a fine idea, so I whipped up the icon you see here. Enjoy, comrades!
Update: More Creative Commies propaganda here. Link one, Link two.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: LiveJournal announces sale to Six Apart
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DATE: 01/05/2005 09:39:54 PM
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It's official. LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick says:
Why is Six Apart buying LiveJournal? Lots of reasons:
* Our companies are more alike than different.
* We both use Perl.
* Together we form super robot that's stronger than the sum of its parts.
* Super robots can fight super companies.
* They respect us, we respect them.
* We have a number of features they don't.
* We have experience with making "inward-facing" community sites, whereas their sites/products tend to be "outward-facing". They want some of that inward-facing action.
* Because we're awesome.
What does this mean for LiveJournal? Nothing earth-shattering. LiveJournal development and support will continue, and will probably even accelerate, as we grow the team. We'll continue to work on speed, reliability, and new features. LiveJournal won't become paid-user-only or anything crazy like that. We're not going to raise prices. We're not going to cancel permanent accounts, etc, etc. And we're not going to spam or sell your information. You own your journals, not us. Really you shouldn't see any negative changes. The most immediate changes will be that we'll start to get prettier...
more styles, themes, etc. Six Apart is really good at that and we're not.
Link to announcement. (thanks marginalia and Perian)
Update: And Six Apart announces their side of the story here: Link.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: HOWTO turn a t-shirt into panties
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DATE: 01/05/2005 10:46:52 PM
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If you've experienced the heartbreak of wearing out a beloved t-shirt, despair no longer. Here is a recipe for turning an old t-shirt into a pair of knickers.
Find a clean (if you care) shirt that strikes your fancy. I have used shirts with printed pictures or words, anything I thought would look good on my butt. You might not want to use your prized material possession if it's your first time. Figure out if you have enough material for underwear (see item 1 above), and cut out the two main pattern pieces. You can cut the crotch piece out of the same material, or you can use a new fresh T-shirt or whatever. (I keep a few Hanes white undershirts on hand.)
Link
(via Preshrunk)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Distributed journalism as practiced by bloggers and the NYT
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DATE: 01/05/2005 11:29:07 PM
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Dan Gillmor describes "distributed journalism" as practiced at time by bloggers, and explains how this kind of activity has been practiced by professional news organizations for years.
I think of distributed journalism as somewhat analogous to any project or problem that can be broken up into little pieces, where lots of people can work in parallel on small parts of the bigger question and collectively -- and relatively quickly -- bring to bear lots of individual knowledge and/or energy to the matter. Some open-source software projects work this way. The important thing is the parallel activity by large numbers of people, in service of something that would be difficult if not impossible for any one or small group of them to do alone, at least in a timely way.
Distributed journalism isn't new. Professionals have been doing it for a long time. When I was the Vermont stringer for the New York Times, back in the early 1980s, the paper's National Desk would occasionally put the word out to stringers in all 50 states, asking them, for example, to call state government people about some topic or another and send a memo back to New York. The same kind of thing is done all the time by major publications with their own staffers on big stories. One person may write the piece, but a collection of many, many reporters does the legwork.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: WalMart tried to confiscate journo's camera
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DATE: 01/05/2005 11:32:14 PM
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A naked man streaked a Wal-Mart in Maryland, and a freelance news photographer snapped some pics. Wal-Mart sent out a goon who demanded that he turn over his camera and not take or publish photos of Wal-Mart without permission.
"He said if I didn't turn the camera over to him, he would have me arrested" and ban him from the store, Roy said.
Attorney Mary R. Craig, who represents The Herald-Mail, said Roy "certainly was well within his rights" to take pictures.
The store can set limits, such as on taking pictures inside, but the expectation of privacy probably is less outside, she said.
She said Roy probably didn't violate anyone's privacy, especially the naked man's.
Alice Neff Lucan, an attorney who represents the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, said Wal-Mart "emphatically" had no right to demand Roy's camera.
"He didn't violate any of Wal-Mart's rights and he didn't violate the streaker's rights," she said. "He just took a picture of what was in the public's view."
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(via Dan Gillmor)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Apple sued for iTunes monopoly practices
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An iTunes user is suing Apple under US anti-trust laws for locking non-iPod players out of playing back iTunes music.
"Apple has turned an open and interactive standard into an artifice that prevents consumers from using the portable hard drive digital music player of their choice," the lawsuit states...
"Apple has unlawfully bundled, tied, and/or leveraged its monopoly in the market for the sale of legal online digital music recordings to thwart competition in the separate market for portable hard drive digital music players, and vice-versa," the lawsuit said.
Mr Slattery called himself an iTunes customer who "was also forced to purchase an Apple iPod" if he wanted to take his music with him to listen to.
link
(Thanks, Tom!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Creative Commies
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DATE: 01/06/2005 06:38:56 AM
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Following up on yesterday's Boing Boing post about Bill Gates describing free culture advocates as a "modern-day sort of communists," reader Jaime whipped up this bit of Soviet Constructivist goodness. Further the cause, comrade! Link to full-size.
Update: More propaganda here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Starbucks' offerings demystified
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DATE: 01/06/2005 07:46:48 AM
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This website presents a key to translating Starbusian pidgin Latin (want a mochalattamericanafrappaspressachino?) into English for coffee civilians.
Single Made with just one shot of espresso. This is the normal amount for all Tall-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos.
Double Made with two shots. This is the normal amount for all Grande- and hot Venti-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for Tall-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos.
Triple Made with three shots. This is the normal amount for Grande- and Venti-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for most iced Venti-sized drinks.
Quad Made with four shots. Hope you weren't planning on sleeping anytime soon.
Ristretto This is so rarely requested that even many baristas don't recognize it. A normal shot of espresso takes about twenty seconds to pull; a ristretto shot is stopped at fifteen seconds, making a slightly smaller, less bold shot.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Look of fear
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DATE: 01/06/2005 08:29:55 AM
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Neuroscientists at CalTech are studying a woman (known as SM) who can look at a person and recognize when they're happy, sad, or angry. But she can't tell if someone looks frightened. The reasons they've uncovered could someday lead to new treatments for people with autism. From News@Nature:
The researchers were intrigued to find that SM totally avoided looking at people's eyes. She discerned her information simply from looking around the nose and mouth.
This was generally enough for her to identify emotions such as happiness or anger, where features such as a smile, or bared teeth, are important.
But wide eyes are a particularly important component of a fearful expression. Because SM was only looking at the nose and mouth, she did not notice the eyes and concluded that the person was feeling neutral.
"First you have to look at the eyes, and then the brain has to make use of that information to figure out it's fear," explains (researcher Ralph) Adolphs.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Need something? Just whistle
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DATE: 01/06/2005 08:43:00 AM
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A group of shepherds on La Gomera in the Canary Islands communicate with each other by whistling. Now, researchers at the University of Washington say that functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals that the shepherds' brains process the whistled language, called the Silbo Gomero, in the same way spoken languages are processed. From a Reuters report:
When the whistlers listened to Silbo sentences, regions in the left side of their brain were activated, including areas linked to language production and comprehension, along with a region in the right hemisphere thought to be associated with linguistic processing....
The Silbo, which is thought to have been brought to the island by Berbers from North Africa, condenses Spanish into two vowels and four consonants.
Whistled languages are also used in Greece, Turkey, China and Mexico, according to (researcher David) Corina.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Downloading comics: threat or menace?
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DATE: 01/06/2005 08:52:31 AM
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A comics fan who thinks downloading comics is immoral posted a long rant to a message board, urging readers to shun comics-trading sites. The debate that follows has several excellent posts -- but the most interesting ones come from fanatical comics-buyers who download books they already own in hardcopy because it's a "good way to be able to go back and reread a book without running the risk of damaging it" and so forth.
The comics industry has been creaking and threatening collapse for as long as I've been reading funnybooks. One thing that's always frustrated me is the incomprehensible lag between the monthly books and the bound collections: if you wander into a bookstore and discover issues 1-5 of Y: The Last Man or Issues 1-5 of Fables (both stone brilliant; run, don't walk) and fall in love, why you can go on to pick up the subsequent collections, three or four books each in all. Now, say you've read up to issue 20 of Fables and you don't want to wait for the next collection to come out: you want to take the plunge and become a regular, monthly comics reader. You go down to your local comics store and say, "Please sell me issues 21 through the current issue of Fables, and put the current ish aside for me every month: I'm hooked!"
What usually happens is the comics person will say, "Sorry, we've got issue 25, which is the current one, and number 24, but that's it -- the older ones are out of print." In other words, you got on the Fables boat too late and you're not going to be able to catch up with the book in comics form without buying issues from collectors or off of eBay.
So here's a gedankenexperiment for ya: what if the DC and Marvel put all their funnybooks on the Web two months after they were shipped to the stores? My guess is that the kind of comics reader who downloads issues so that he won't be "running the risk of damaging" the hard-copy will continue to buy as many comics as ever.
But if you believe the comics industry, it's going broke selling to just the people who put their comics in mylar bags and stack them in hermetic vaults. Funnybooks need to attract a civilian audience who will dip their toes in from time to time, buy the occassional collection, read one or two books a month: it needs a LOT of those people.
The bound collections are a great way to hook new readers. They're retailed in regular book-stores, so they're visible to the kind of person who never goes into a Graphic Novelle Emporium. All that's missing is a way to turn collection readers into monthly-plus-collection readers. The Web could be that way. Scott McCloud has written some brilliant stuff about what a comic that's designed for the Web should look like, but here's the whole other way to use the Web to advance the comics biz: give old issues away to bridge the gap between customer acquisition and customer retention.
Here's at least one comics dealer who sees free downloads of comics driving his business:
This is a message from Derithian who for some reason newsarama wont let him post it......maybe I just need to restart but I'm to busy right now RUNNING A COMIC SHOP!
I am going to come out and say it; I am a member of the z-cult. Not only that I'm a forum mod. To say anything different would put what I say in a different light. I found the Cult about a month after it started. I hadn't read a comic in more than 5 years and hated it all. Comic books were for kids and stupid. Then I downloaded because someone told me I had to read something. So I read it. A month later I opened my own shop.
Not only did I open my own shop, I sell comics to foreign members of z-cult from my shop who are interested in buying books but aren't in areas where you can buy them. Interesting isn't it. You can say all you want that downloading hurts the industry when I have personally because of the cult put tens of thousands of dollars back into the industry. Not to mention I started my own comic development studio to publish local writers online.
Link
(Thanks, Max!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Next-generation concrete
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DATE: 01/06/2005 09:02:39 AM
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Science News has an interesting feature about the future of concrete. For example, Ductal is five times as strong as regular concrete, but it also bends a bit under heavy loads and shows "warning" cracks instead of failing in an instant. Agilia packs itself, negating the noisy and time-consuming process of passing a vibrating machine over it. And LiTraCon is the cool translucent stuff pictured here that I posted about last year. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Update on my wife's Kafka-esque traffic ticket dilemma
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DATE: 01/06/2005 10:04:53 AM
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I've received lots of email about my wife's catch-22 traffic ticket problem (in short, she is trying to pay the ticket but the court won't accept payment because the ticket hasn't been entered into the computer system yet. And the reason it hasn't been entered into the computer system, apparently, is because the officer who issued the ticket didn't enter the date in the date field).
I'd like to thank everyone who wrote to me about this. We got rid of the messages boards on Boing Boing over a year ago, and I'd kind of forgotten how nice and generous 99.9% of Boing Boing's readers are! It's inspiring and uplifting to get email from so many exellent people.
I thought you'd be interested to read the advice I've received about this so far. There are lots of ideas, but the four most common ones are:
1. Get a lawyer.
2. Get a cashier's check and pay the fine with it (sending it by certified mail).
3. Contact the officer who issued the ticket and ask him what the status of the ticket is.
4. Contest the ticket, because it is invalid with a date on it.
Our next steps: we are going to call a lawyer friend who has dealt with ticket problems before, and we are calling AAA, which apparently has a department that helps people deal with traffic tickets.
Here's one thing that might help (click on thumbnail for enlargement). When my wife went down to the court to attempt pay the ticket yesterday, the clerk gave her this "Proof of Appearance" statement. Hopefully, it'll convince the judge that we tried to take care of the matter.
Here is the email I've received so far. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: More Gates "Creative Commies" propaganda
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DATE: 01/06/2005 10:37:47 AM
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My fellow travelers -- feast on this fine assortment of Copyleft Flag desktops for your commie computers!
Link to one collection (Thanks, Ian), and link to another (Thanks, Toby), and Link to a convenient banner for pledging of allegiance (Thanks William v3.0), and some little teeny internet buttons: Link (Thanks, Matthew Bradley). Previous Boing Boing posts on Redmond's Red Scare: one, two.
Update:
Boing Boing reader Ryan Schroeder says, "I had to have a Creative Commies shirt, so I threw that graphic up on Cafe Press. Figured others might want one as well. IMPORTANT: All prices are set to the base level, I'm not making a cent here. Cafepress is getting all of our money. If the people demand it I'll boost the prices by a buck or two and donate everything to the EFF." Link to Creative Commies t-shirts.
And reader Ken Mickles says, "Similar to Ryan Schroeder, I had to have a Creative Commons t-shirt for myself. But conveniently for me, I own a screen printing company. So if anyone else wants one, I put up a quick Paypal form and I'm selling them for $5 plus shipping. That's a fair bit cheaper than CafePress, and they should be way higher quality." Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 120-year-old tortoise adopts baby hippo
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DATE: 01/06/2005 10:43:14 AM
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Some people in Kenya rescued a dehydrated baby hippo that had been separated from its herd. The released it into an enclosure in a sanctuary, and it ran over to a giant tortoise, and is now "inseparable" say officials.
"'When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,' Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: WFMU podcasts
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DATE: 01/06/2005 10:51:37 AM
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Doron of WFMU sez: "WFMU, one of the nation's finest radio stations (and home to lots of boing-boing friendly music) has just launched podcast.wfmu.org. As you probably already know, some broadcast radio stations, BBC, NPR, WGBH have dabbled in podcasting, usually offering random clips or the odd talk show... WFMU is making seven of its shows available for podcast including three music shows.
"Two of the music shows (Antique Phonograph Music Program) and Thomas Edison's Attic consist of DJs hand-cranking old turntables to play cylinders and records dating from the 1880s to the 1920s and should hopefully fall under public domain while the third "Advanced D & D with Donna Summer" (aka Jason Forrest) plays breakcore and random CD-Rs from all over the place.
"The station would very much like to offer all of it's content for podcasting but like other people, we're a bit concerned about the legal ramifications. In any case, we're very excited to be offering our content in a way that allows listeners to hear our programs when and where they want to. hope you guys like it." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Mark Ryden's Wondertoonel catalog on sale
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DATE: 01/06/2005 11:04:38 AM
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"Wondertoonel - Paintings by Mark Ryden, is a forty page catalog containing each of the thirty paintings in the Wondertoonel exhibition and is printed on heavy paper stock, enhanced with gold metallic ink on the interior pages and features gold foil embossing on the cover. Also includes artist and curator statements. The catalog measures 8 1/2" wide by 9" high. Price: $20" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Messenger bag
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DATE: 01/06/2005 11:30:27 AM
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I drew this little guy and am selling a Cafe Press messenger bag with him on it for $25. Link 
(Click on the image for enlargement.)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Moment of Celebrity Headline Zen
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DATE: 01/06/2005 12:40:15 PM
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"Blake's Vomiting Didn't Seem Sincere to Witnesses" -- spotted twice: Link, and Linkerer.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Rats! Bugs! Boys! Attack!
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DATE: 01/06/2005 01:13:40 PM
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A 1994 Air Force proposal seems to suggest that the most powerful weapons against the enemies of freedom might be bugs, rats, and horny homosexual men. Link to Defensetech post, and see also "Military Lab Proposed Gay-Aphrodisiac Chemical Weapon" (Link) at Russ Kick's Memory Hole. And how does the chemical make you feel? Link.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: iMac fingernails
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DATE: 01/06/2005 02:35:07 PM
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Japanese salon offers acrylic fingernails that look like old school iMacs. Link (Thanks, Hugh!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sims 2 hacks blowing up
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DATE: 01/06/2005 02:43:28 PM
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Hacks for Sims 2 are spreading like wildfire:
Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need to empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope -- every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal.
All this mayhem is the work of a community of experimenters wielding hex editors, custom programs and reverse-engineering skills who began mastering their own Sims 2 worlds immediately after the game's release last September. The hackers share their weird science with one another through public websites and forums.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Letters from VALIS
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DATE: 01/06/2005 03:20:06 PM
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A woman named Claudia is auctioning off a collection of 60 letters (186 pages) that surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote to her over a span of nearly two decades. The starting bid of the eBay auction is $1,000.
"We corresponded between 1974 and 1981. For sale are all the letters he wrote me between 1974 and 1975, when I was writing a U.S. master's thesis about books he'd published a decade earlier, at a time when only the French accorded him critical respect and his first language editions had lapsed out of print: Originals of over 60 individual letters, 186 pages (all those he signed on the right side of the page).
The letters are about Valis and V.A.L.I.S. (because that's what he was writing then); they are also a linear chronology of his "long inner trip" in his own words (the drawing is what a dream instructed him to draw); they are also about Ubik and UBIK (because that's what I was writing about); they say what he wanted them to say."
Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Bram: BitTorrent use up, it's not all warez
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DATE: 01/07/2005 12:07:18 AM
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Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, notes, "I'd like to point out that although a number of very large BitTorrent-based web sites have been taken down recently, downloads of BitTorrent have only gone down slightly. There's a widespread belief that BitTorrent is used almost exclusively for warez, probably a perception of people who themselves use it almost exclusively for warez, but that impression is simply untrue."
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: T-shirt: HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC AND IT'S FUN
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DATE: 01/07/2005 12:12:01 AM
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Back in the 80s, the music industry came up with its dumbest campaign up to that point: the campaign to convince their customers that taping vinyl, making mix tapes, sharing taped albums with friends, all of that, was a form of theft and would destroy music itself.
They put these "home taping is killing music" graphics on everything from stickers to the sleeves of LPs you bought in the shops. Home taping didn't kill nothin' (turned out to be no more deadly than P2P!).
The media geniuses at Downhill Battle have produced a great tee that recycles the HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC slogan and gilds the lily with this tagline: AND IT'S FUN. I laughed till it hurt.
Link
(via Preshrunk)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Lessig speech on copyleft and communism
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DATE: 01/07/2005 05:17:14 AM
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LegalTorrent's Gary Lerhaupt sez, "It's video I captured from last nights Creative Commons 2nd anniversary party. The video runs 30 minutes highlighting the short but powerful lifetime of the Creative Commons, but the biggest highlight by far is Lessig closing it out. He takes on both BillBoard and BillGates for their recent FUD (if you can call it FUD). Hilarious."
Torrent Link
(Thanks, Gary!)
Update: Gary sez, "While I do only dabble in legal torrents and am a big fan of the LegalTorrents site, i'm not really affiliated with them. Maybe you could change it to 'Prodigem's Gary Lerhaupt'"
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How the Interstates got their numbers
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DATE: 01/07/2005 06:25:53 AM
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CoolGov uncovered this US Highway Administration document that explains the numbering scheme behind the US interstate highway system.
* Major interstates routes have a one or two digit number associated with them. North-south routes have odd numbers (I-5) while east-west roads have even numbers (I-10).
* Connecting interstate routes or beltway loops around urban areas have 3 digit numbers (the 101).
* To prevent duplication within a state, a progression of prefixes is used for the three-digit numbers. For example, if I-80 runs through three cities in a state, circumferential routes around these cities would be numbered as I-280, I-480, and I-680.
* There’s no set standard on exit numbering, but states generally use one of two systems:
1. Milepost numbering. The southern or western-most point on a given interstate begins the odometer at 0. If an exit is 6.5 miles from that point, it’s exit #6 and so forth.
2. Consecutive numbering. Again, starting at the western or southern-most point, each exit is given a number, starting with 1. When they have to shoehorn more exits in, they become #6A, #6B, etc…
Link
(via Cool Gov)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Transmaterial catalog: Biosteel, pervious concrete, Superblack, corrugated glass, rubber pavements/sidewalks, strawboard, conductive plastic, plasphalt, light-emitting glass, regenerative plastic...
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DATE: 01/07/2005 07:28:57 AM
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Phil sez, "Further to your 'Next-generation concrete' post, you might like this site... which includes an 11MB 187-page PDF of a brochure *packed* full of materials as just as intriguing: Biosteel, pervious concrete, Superblack, corrugated glass, rubber pavements/sidewalks, strawboard, conductive plastic, plasphalt, light-emitting glass, regenerative plastic..."
11MB PDF Link
(Thanks, Phil!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Lab Notes from UC Berkeley
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DATE: 01/07/2005 09:52:44 AM
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In my first issue this year of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:
* Engineering disasters
* Eyeing new ion beams
* Assembling nanomachines
* NASA's comet fly-by
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Retroactif art gallery
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DATE: 01/07/2005 10:01:32 AM
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Neat, short art gallery from French site, Retroactif. Some of the art is probably not safe for work, the accompanying soundtrack's first 10 seconds are certainly not safe for work. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Asimo's rival?
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DATE: 01/07/2005 10:02:00 AM
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Researchers from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology claim that they have developed the world's smartest humanoid robot. According to engineer You Bum-Jae, the robot has more intelligence than other androids because its brains are housed outside its body in a server that handles all data processing and storage. From Agence Presse France:
When showed a 10,000 won ($10) bank note, it said: “That’s a 10,000 bank note that people would like to have.”
When asked about its name, it said: “I am sorry. I don’t have a name yet. Please give me one.”
Then it waved its hands, saying: “I will see you again next time when I will have become wiser.”
Link (Thanks, Big Friend Alderman!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Videora
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DATE: 01/07/2005 10:13:09 AM
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From BB "band manager" John Battelle's Searchblog:
"Via PVR Blog, I see that Videora, a BitTorrent RSS reader, has launched. Om noted it here.
So why do we care? Well, I've long theorized that video over IP will come from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down, much as it has with blogs, and with music before that. This feels right along those lines."
Link (to Searchblog entry), Link (to Videora)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Phantom Limb Phenomena conference
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DATE: 01/07/2005 10:24:08 AM
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The Phantom Limb Phenomena conference will take place next weekend at Goldsmiths College in London. Apparently, the participants will make presentations on science, art, and culture as they relate to the phantom limb phenomena, a condition in which amputees experience the sensation of a limb that is no longer there. From the conference description:
Since its original description in 1866 by the Neurologist S. Mitchell, the phantom limb phenomena have attracted many scholars across a broad spectrum of fields. The phenomena describe the condition found in many amputees in which sensation of the removed limb persists. As such, it has served as a metaphor for many ideas in other fields beyond the scope of neurobiology and neuropsychology including philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, film and art. The purpose of this conference is three fold. First, it brings to the public’s attention this fascinating and significant medical problem. Second, it not only looks objectively at the way that these phenomena have stimulated interest across such a wide variety of fields but also shows how successful it is as a inter-disciplinary signifier; an issue important for both art and science initiatives.
Link (Thanks, Dr. Paulos!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Cyberduck FTP browser
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DATE: 01/07/2005 10:26:21 AM
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I've been using David Kocher's Cyberduck FTP client for several months now. It's freeware for OS X and it is fabulous. All the other FTP clients I've used have been hard to learn and are confusing, but I've never had to look at the help file for Cyberduck. I don't even know if it has a help file. The bookmarking feature is well-implemented and I like being able to click on the BB Edit icon to edit any file on the server (yes, I know BB Edit lets you open files on servers, but sometimes I like to open them from Cyberduck.) If you are looking for a simple, power FTP client, check this out. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Advice Goddess looking for Ithaca-based bloggers
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DATE: 01/07/2005 10:32:58 AM
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Syndicated columnist Amy Alkon (aka Advice Goddess) is looking for Ithica-based bloggers to petition a newspaper publisher there from dropping her column.
If you read my column in Ithaca, and are a fan, here's some bad news: The publisher wants to drop it after getting complaints about a line I wrote -- "Sex isn't special." Here it is in the context of the column (entire text of the column here):
Where you go wrong is thinking sex is special. It isn’t. Monkeys have it, and not because somebody gave them flowers and expensive jewelry. But consider this: while your girlfriend was the antithesis of selective about the men she slept with (apparently, not only sowing her wild oats, but a soybean crop equivalent to that of mainland China’s), she appears quite picky about the man she relationships with.
Now, I have no problem with people writing in to say I'm wrong or immoral. In fact, I welcome dissent. Papers should, too. Instead, daily newspapers tend to bend over the moment three old ladies (or some church group) complains. I work very hard to tell the truth and present data-based answers in my column instead of taking the easy way out: simply rubberstamping the status quo. Sadly, many papers would rather foster docile readers than spirited discussion.
If you live in Ithaca (ONLY if you live in Ithaca and read me -- this has to be an honest reflection of reader opinion), and if you like my column and want to continue to see it in the paper, please call the publisher:
Jim Fogler, President/Publisher (607) 274-9252 jfogler@ithaca.gannett.com
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Photo gallery of Japanese far right
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DATE: 01/07/2005 12:03:50 PM
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If you've ever been to Tokyo, you've probably seen and heard those strange vans with huge speakers driving around town, blasting some kind of recorded diatribe. They are propaganda vans operated by emperor-loving, Yakuza friendly right-wingers.
Juergen sez: "Every year on August 15th, Yakuza, Right Wing Groups and War Veterans gather at the controversal Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to commemorate the end of the war and to worship the war dead. The Yasukuni Shrine has a special significance, because Japanese believe that once a soldier has been enshrined at Yasukuni he becomes a kami, or national deity. The kami at Yasukuni are thought to look over the nation and protect it just as they did when they died fighting for it. During World War II, soldiers believed the highest honor they could receive was death followed by enshrinement at Yasukuni. Soldiers had a saying "see you at Yasukuni", which meant they knew they were going to die, but they would meet again in death. Yasukuni Shrine is currently the home to the souls of more than 2.5 million Japanese war dead including fourteen convicted Class A war criminals. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing banner contest - win a Suicide Girls skatedeck.
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DATE: 01/07/2005 12:32:59 PM
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We are having a contest! Design a banner that advertises Boing Boing. Indieclick will run several of our favorite submissions across the Indieclick network and will donate a SuicideGirls skatedeck (click thumbnail for enlargement) to the banner that does the best. Email your 468 x 60 gif file (with a one-time animation cycle) to me. You are free to use Boing Boing's logo in the banner, but the rest of the design has to be your own work. By the way, the deadline is Friday, January 14.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing! soda pop
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DATE: 01/07/2005 04:03:14 PM
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When Carla and I were publishing the long forgotten bOING bOING zine, we bought a bunch of these Mexican sodas called Boing! and brought them to a science fiction convention in Austin. I think it must have been 1991 or 1992. I don't know if I ever actually drank a bottle of the stuff.
Anyway, ADM of Thousand Robots has a page about tasting the soda. He wasn't a big fan.
I tried the Strawberry (Fresa) variety...at room temperature, which is inadvisable. It doesn't taste precisely like anything I've had before. The closest analogue I can come up with is Ruby Red grapefruit juice, but blander and less sour and simultaneouly -- at first -- less sweet. But then once the aftertaste wallops you with the sugar, you'll feel a bit like you've just strained a shot of thinly flavored water through a cup of sugar right into your mouth. Boing juice doesn't taste like strawberries. Or maybe it just tastes like old strawberries that have been sitting next to a pile of rotten bananas for a few weeks at a Mexican juice factory.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: World champeen Halo player revered as a god
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DATE: 01/07/2005 04:10:36 PM
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Zed sez, "this guy is a full-time professional Halo player who looms so large in that world that when he took a vacation, Halo message boards were full of speculation as to what it all meant."
Over Thanksgiving, on Day Five Without Zyos, the message boards of the online world were abuzz with rumors. Zyos has quit. Zyos is playing under a different name. Zyos is dead. Five pages of this, growing more fevered as it went, until one of Zyos' handlers, one of the people in the business of "building Zyos' brand," logged on.
"Guys," he said. "Zyos is fine. He's just on vacation."
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(Thanks, Zed!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Classic Atari D&D game is now a Quake 3 level
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DATE: 01/07/2005 04:15:09 PM
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The classic Atari 2600 game World of Adventure (a super-low-rez D&D-style game from the early gaming Cretaceous) has been turned into a level for Quake 3, with shining metallic polygons.
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(Thanks, Jhayne!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Shirky: Pro metadata will lose to folksonomy
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DATE: 01/07/2005 04:42:25 PM
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Clay Shirky continues to just totally nail the questions of metadata, authority, and user-created content. Today's installment: why crappy, cheap, user-generated, uncontrolled metadata will win out over expensive, controlled, useful, professionally generated metadata:
Furthermore, users pollute controlled vocabularies, either because they misapply the words, or stretch them to uses the designers never imagined, or because the designers say "Oh, let's throw in an 'Other' category, as a fail-safe" which then balloons so far out of control that most of what gets filed gets filed in the junk drawer. Usenet blew up in exactly this fashion, where the 7 top-level controlled categories were extended to include an 8th, the 'alt.' hierarchy, which exploded and came to dwarf the entire, sanctioned corpus of groups.
The cost of finding your way through 60K photos tagged 'summer', when you can use other latent characteristics like 'who posted it?' and 'when did they post it?', is nothing compared to the cost of trying to design a controlled vocabulary and then force users to apply it evenly and universally.
This is something the 'well-designed metadata' crowd has never understood -- just because it's better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Drunk prank photos
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DATE: 01/07/2005 04:52:04 PM
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Here's a page of amazing "drunk prank" photos -- pictures taken of passed out people who have been decorated by their supposed friends. Shown here, and incredible balancing act. (Some photos might not be safe for work.) Link (via cityrag)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sky and Telescope article on laser-pointer etiquette
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DATE: 01/07/2005 05:58:35 PM
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Marc Laidlaw points out this article from Sky and Telescope that has good information about the deadly laser pointers that terrorists have been using to knock aircraft filled with women and children right out of the sky. Oh, when will the horror end?
According to engineer Samuel M. Goldwasser, who maintains an extensive Web site about lasers called Sam's Laser FAQ, if you were to look directly into a laser-pointer beam from a mile away, it would appear as bright as a 100-watt bulb seen at a distance of less than 100 feet. Most people would find such a bright light very uncomfortable and would instinctively blink and/or turn away.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: MSFT anti-spyware violates spyware EULAs
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DATE: 01/08/2005 01:11:17 AM
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Running Microsoft's new anti-spyware product will violate the Clickthrough LIcense on the spyware itself.
The license agreement on DirectRevenue's website states that those who have been inflicted with it "agree that you will not initiate, permit, authorize or assist any third party or application to remove the Software from your computer, or disrupt its operation or the operation of any other user." DirectRevenue's EULA also claims the right to reinstall itself if any third party software removes it. (Among the myriad spyware-related lawsuits going on, by the way, DirectRevenue is being sued by fellow adware vendor Avenue Media over the DirectRevenue software's penchant for deleting other spyware from users' systems.)
So it seemed to me that this poses something of a quandary for Microsoft. After all, the software EULA as we know it today is basically a Microsoft invention, and no other company has been as big a supporter of UCITA and other legal efforts to make sneakwrap licenses completely binding. So Microsoft isn't going to want to go around violating any other company's EULA, not even those of companies of whom they might not completely approve
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(via Hack the Planet)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: SD Card with ingenious USB interface
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DATE: 01/08/2005 01:15:07 AM
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SanDisk is shipping an SD memory card with a tiny hinge; fold it back to reveal a USB interface. Take the chip out of your camera and plug it straight into your laptop to move your pix over; carry your USB thumbdrive in your camera, not on your keychain.
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(Thanks, elNorm!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 100 kids' radio shows under CC license
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DATE: 01/08/2005 03:14:59 AM
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Here are 100 MP3 episodes of a kids' radio show that starred some of the cast of Lord of the Rings, downloadable as a Creative Commons licensed .torrent.
A good few years back, I was involved in a radio drama series for children - a 'Cartoon for Radio' called Ashley's Worlds. I've made the whole thing available as a bittorrent file.
If you're not sure what a bittorrent is, you should read the Wikipedia entry on the topic.
So - what do you need to know about Ashley's Worlds? It was originally established to entertain my son, Jake. He was a fair bit younger then - but he still enjoys the series now.
All the characters are cats - and, well... it'll make itself clear as it goes along.
The real Ashley was my cat, who sadly passed away last year.
Cast:
Craig Parker - Ashley
Carl Bland - Bishop
David Weatherley - Tobias
Belinda Todd - Tabitha
Merv Smith - The Strange Old Cat
I've registered Ashley's Worlds under a Creative Commons Licence so that people can be encouraged to listen to it without fear that they'll be breaking copyright by listening.
Link
(Thanks, Andrew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sleep's social, technological and biological basis -- WOW
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DATE: 01/08/2005 05:33:56 AM
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Circadiana is a new blog written by "Coturnix," who appears to be an academic studying sleep. Yesterday, Couturnix posted a wonderful, informative, lucid essay on the biological and social nature of sleep and how it interacts with technology. Technology -- the light bulb, in particular -- is a drug that exerts a powerful physical force on our sleep habits, one that we haven't yet figured out how to metabolize safely. Coturnix's piece is the most fascinating thing I've read on the subject -- and I did a ton of research on the subject for my novel Eastern Standard Tribe, but I wish I'd had this paper then.
A classical sociobiological just-so story posits that this kind of individual variation on the lark/owl continuum had an adaptive function, namely to ensure that at every time of night at least one member of the tribe was awake. Thus some stood guard early in the night, others late in the night, listening to the sounds of the jungle (or savannah, or whatever) while the midnight break is thought to have been used for copulating with whomever also happens to be awake at the time - this was before the social invention of sexual monogamy...
Pretending that sleep-need does not exist is also institutionalized. I am not talking just about night-shifts and rotating shifts (those will kill you), night flights, being available for communication 24/7, stores open 24/7, etc - those are part of a modern society, will not go away, and we just need to learn how to adjust. I am talking about the building standards. With a huge proportion of the population working at night, why do windows have no blinds? Some old manors do, but new buildings do not. Never. Some have fake blinds, just for show, screwed into the outside walls on the sides of windows, yet cannot be closed. There are no built-in black curtains, or roll-down wooden blinds. It is difficult to find such curtains in stores if one wants to install one. What is going on? I have never seen, heard, read about, or experienced another country in the world in which sleep is not sacred, and blinds are not an essential part of a house.
I see some striking parallels between the way this society treats sleep and the way it treats sex. Both are sinful activities, associated with one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth and Lust). Both are associated with the most powerful biological needs. Both are supposed to be a taboo topic. Both are supposed to be done in private, at night, with a pretense that it is never actually happening. Education in sleep hygiene and sex hygiene are both slighted, one way or another (the former passively, the latter actively opposed). Both are thought to interfere with one's productivity - ah, the good old Protestant work ethic! Why are Avarice and Greed not treated the same way? Raking in money by selling mega-burgers is just fine, and a decent topic of conversation, even a point of pride. Why are we still allowing Puritan Calvinist way of thinking, coupled with capitalist creed, to still guide the way we live our lives, or even think about life. Sleeping, whether with someone or alone, is a basic human need, thus a basic human right. Neither really detracts from the workplace productivity - au contraire: well rested and well satisfied people are happy, energetic, enthusiastic and productive. It is sleep repressed people, along with the dour sex repressed people, who are the problem, making everyone nervous. How much longer are we going to hide under the covers?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: More Air Miles in circulation than dollars
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DATE: 01/08/2005 05:38:48 AM
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The pool of unredeemed frequent-flier miles is the most voluminous currency in the world, worth more than the cash supply of dollars and pounds combined.
According to a new analysis by The Economist magazine, the global stock is worth more than $700bn (£370bn), more than all the US dollar bills in circulation, and streets ahead of Britain's £42bn of notes and coins...
A close look at the rules can expose unbeatable deals. A civil engineer from California, David Phillips, became known as the "pudding guy" after calculating that an offer of frequent flyer miles with food at his local supermarket yielded a remarkable return. He spent $3,000 on 12,000 Healthy Choice chocolate desserts and earned $25,000 worth of free flights, enough to pay for travel for the rest of his life.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Book financing via blog: Porn Happy
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DATE: 01/08/2005 07:00:25 AM
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Author, photographer, and blogger Susannah Breslin (whose work I've posted about here often) is taking an unusual approach to the financing of her next book Porn Happy -- she's seeking patrons via blog.
Link. See also this newly-minted Susannah Breslin fansite: Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Stop sketching, little girl -- those paintings are copyrighted!
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DATE: 01/08/2005 07:29:46 AM
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Museum security guard told a child to stop sketching paintings in a museum -- because they're copyrighted.
It is standard operating procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh.
Over the weekend at the North Carolina Museum of Art there were works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Degas and some Illanas. Julia Illana is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook. "I love to draw in my notebook," Illana said.
Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into trouble with museum security. A museum guard told Julia's parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.
Link (Thanks, Cowicide)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bloggers blur definition of reporter's privilege
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DATE: 01/08/2005 07:35:35 AM
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Spotted on the politech list -- Declan says, "It's provocative and raises some of the hoary who's-a-journalist-and-can-get-creds issues that are becoming important again."
As two prominent Washington journalists struggle to avoid jail time over their refusal to disclose confidential sources, one of the biggest obstacles the reporters face is America's fastgrowing army of citizen Web loggers, or bloggers.
It’s not that the town criers of the online world are campaigning to send Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine to prison. Rather, it’s the bloggers' very existence that undercuts the journalists' legal defense.
On Wednesday, lawyers for Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are scheduled to appear before a federal appeals court in the capital to argue that reporters should have a legal privilege not to testify about their sources under most circumstances. A federal prosecutor investigating whether the White House leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, has asked the pair to appear before a grand jury to answer questions.They have refused.
The crux of the reporters' contention is that the public would be less well informed if journalists could not promise their sources confidentiality. However, the proliferation of blogs and bloggers could represent the Achilles' heel in this approach. If Ms. Miller and Mr.
Cooper are entitled to claim special treatment in the courts, so too could hundreds of thousands of Americans who use the Internet to post comments about their views on current events.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Winners in Technorati's Developer Contest
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DATE: 01/08/2005 07:41:58 AM
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Technorati's David Sifry says,
Technorati's developer contest winners have been announced! Winners included GovTrack, a site that tracks bills in congress and congresscritters, and what bloggers are saying about them, whitelabel.org, which transforms the BBC's news site to include links to wikipedia and bloggers links, PersonalDemocracy.com, which tracks what bloggers are saying about members of the US house and senate, and many more.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Bill Gates on blogging, RSS, MSN Spaces...
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DATE: 01/08/2005 07:49:26 AM
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Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson interviews Bill Gates at CES -- in part, about blogs and Microsoft's MSN Spaces.
Gizmodo: So would it be fair to say your idea with Spaces will be more hands-off? Since you're kind of giving the power of the individual to publish, you don't really care what they say?
Gates: No. There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that...
Gizmodo: So since it's sitting on your servers you want to be more careful of it.
Gates: No, there are rules about... if you get notified that it's stolen materials or pornography or things like that. Our policies are just related to what the laws are. The idea of the open empowerment—that's why we've always loved the PC. And there are many examples over the last several decades where the power of the PC to let people publish and communicate has made a huge difference in terms of people trying to control information flow. And that's why the PC is such a fantastic development.
Link (Thanks, Nathan, who comments here!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fugitive hides out in Circuit City store for months
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DATE: 01/08/2005 07:55:56 AM
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BB reader Steve Portigal says,
Like the combination of several Richard Pryor plots (rewritten by William Gibson?) this escapee hangs out in an abandoned Circuit City... during which time he played hoops with a mini-basketball net and watched Spider-Man 2 on a DVD player. He also routed water from an adjacent Toys "R" Us and even installed a smoke detector.
Link to Seattle Times story (no reg) Link to Charlotte Observer (reg required)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sneak peek at images from A Scanner Darkly
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DATE: 01/08/2005 08:26:35 AM
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BoingBoing buddy Wiley Wiggins says "First images of the Animated Philip K. Dick film A SCANNER DARKLY [directed by Rick Linklater]. I am not involved with this film (unfortunately), but I have seen about 20 minutes of it and it is the most incredible piece of animation I have ever seen."
Link to pics on AICN, link to Wiley's post.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Tsunami Roy, born December 26, 2004
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DATE: 01/08/2005 09:43:56 AM
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When the Tsunami hit India's Little Andaman island, Lakshmi Narain Roy whisked his family, including his pregnant wife, onto the family rickshaw and pedaled to higher ground. A few hours later, Namita Roy gave birth to a baby boy, three weeks premature. From a Reuters report:
"On Wednesday, we learned a Navy ship had come into the bay but the jetty was damaged and so with help from other locals I carried her and the baby on to a dinghy and took her out to the big ship at sea," (Roy said.)
Reaching Port Blair after a 7-hour journey Roy's wife was rushed to the local hospital where doctors immediately cleaned up her uterus and gave her some medicines.
"It was the doctors who suggested we name the boy Tsunami and we also liked the name and decided to call him that. After all it is a name everyone will instantly notice and remember."
Link (via Fortean Times)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Low-tech "Hipster PDA" (cards and a paperclip) hacks
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DATE: 01/08/2005 10:26:54 PM
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Merlin Mann's "43 Folders" blog is devoted to turning the advice in David Allen's amazing productivity book Getting Things Done into material that is suited to people who lead technological lifestyles (Getting Things Done barely mentions computers and doesn't have anything on stuff like hacking producivity with perl scripts).
But sometimes Merlin goes low-tech, as he did with his amazing post from last September on the "Hipster PDA" -- a bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. Now he's extending the Hipster PDA with tips and tricks he's derived since then. It's great stuff -- Craig of Craigslist carries around old business cards in his shirt-pocket with notes to himself in tiny writing on the back of them. Hipster PDA is like that on steroids.
The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let’s make one together.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Web cartoonist smacks down anti-Internet syndicated cartoonist
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DATE: 01/09/2005 02:50:28 PM
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The cartoonist behind the syndicated strip "Non Sequitur" has been using his strip to take shots at another cartoonist who ditched the syndicates in favor of a give-it-away model that is intended to drive traffic to his website. In repsonse to the Non Sequitur guy's bullying, one of the creators of the web-comic Penny Arcade has written this stirring manifesto:
This guy has been giving Scott Kurtz a lot of shit over Scott's syndication deal. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, any newspaper that wants to run PVP can do so for free. It's just free advertising for Scott. The more people he can drive back to his site, the more eyeballs on his ads and the more money he makes.
I sort of feel bad for Wiley, I mean it's not his fault he's old and doesn't understand technology. He's like a doddering old man sitting in his horse and buggy, shaking his liver spot covered fist at passing automobiles. He thinks that web publishing is for kids and lacks the integrity of good old fashioned paper. Let me tell you about web publishing Mr. Wiley.
Six years ago my friend and I started publishing our comic strips on the internet. Now Penny Arcade is translated into five different languages and read by 3.5 million fans in countries all over the world. When we have a convention to play video games and talk about Penny Arcade, over 3000 people show up. When we ask our fans to donate to charity they give $310,000 to the Children's Hospital. Newspapers like the New York Times write long articles about how fucking awesome we are. Huge companies pay us to create web comics based on popular license like Tom Clancy and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. All of this came from publishing our silly little comics on the internet.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, fuck you and fuck your stupid newspapers. We don't need you.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: UK Freedom of Information requests blog
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DATE: 01/09/2005 03:15:06 PM
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Alex sez, "This week's NTK links to an interesting new blog. It aims to track requests made under the UK's Freedom of Information Act (which came in to force at the beginning of this year)."
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Companies that have fired people for blogging
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DATE: 01/09/2005 03:26:05 PM
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This page contains a list of companies that are purported to have fired employees for blogging "fired, threatened, disciplined, fined or not hired people because of their blog."
1.) Delta Air Lines
2.) Wells Fargo
3.) Ragen MacKenzie
4.) Starbucks
5.) Microsoft (some say yay, some say nay)
6.) Friendster
7.) the Houston Chronicle
8.) the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
9.) Nunavut Tourism (Canada)
10.) the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University
11.) Maricopa County Superior Court of Arizona Self Help Center and Library
12.) Mike DeWine, US Senator (R-Ohio)
13.) the Durham Herald-Sun
14.) Kerr-McGee
15.) ESPN
16.) Apple (according to this blog entry AND this article)
17.) Statistical Assessment Service (DC nonprofit)
18.) Minnesota Public Radio
19.) The Hartford Courant
20.) the International Olympic Committee (barred athletes from blogging during the Olympics last summer)
21.) Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (?)
22.) the National Basketball Association (NBA)
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(via Apophenia)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Waterstone's fires 11-year-employee for blogging
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DATE: 01/09/2005 03:59:02 PM
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Waterstone's is a huge British bookstore chain. A employee of a Waterstone's in Scotland was recently fired from the store he'd worked in for eleven years for blogging satirical remarks about his workplace.
Anyone who has been a regular reader of the Gazette will know that I do occasionally mention my work life, although it accounts for a fraction of my written output. Like many folk I am not always happy at work (I have good days too, I don’t go in miserable all the time as I’m sure former colleagues would attest if they could) and me being me when I mention bad days or annoying occurrences I do so in my own satirical, sarcastic, comedic style. I often put many things into a basic narrative form, add characters etc. So I would coin terms such as â€Bastardstone’s’ and have a character called â€Evil Boss’ (my equivalent to Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss – in fact I compared head office directives to being in a Dilbert cartoon). I once referred to a chum and former colleague, Olly, when he found a full time IT job after his graduation as being a successful member of the Escape Committee at work. This was brought up at my hearing yesterday. My protest that this was (to me a bloody obvious) spoof on the Great Escape didn’t seem to cut any ice. This will give you an idea of what I faced.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CodeCon 2005 program online
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DATE: 01/09/2005 11:29:48 PM
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Luke sez, "The CodeCon 2005 program has been posted. CodeCon is the the l33t3st hax0r conf. around, founded by Len Sassaman and Bram Cohen of Bittorent fame."
OzymanDNS - Advanced exploration into the use of DNS as a general purpose communication medium. DNS is more hostile to this than any other protocol, so the solutions being built should be generalizable.
presenters Dan Kaminsky
history The first version of OzymanDNS was presented at Defcon, where I demonstrated SSH over DNS (and with that, general purpose VPN'ing using the dynamic forwarding discussed at Codecon in 2003) and live streaming radio over DNS. I also discussed in some depth the potential for bypassing firewalls using the proxying components of the protocol.
demo "DNS is a routing, caching, globally deployed overlay network on top of the Internet. Last year's Black Ops of DNS discussed rudimentary mechanisms for manipulating that network to achieve low bandwidth but insidiously firewall-penetrating connectivity anywhere and everywhere. This year, we expand this research to show how extensive, bandwidth amplifying routes can be deployed across the two million DNS servers out there -- and demonstrate an aggressively loss tolerant protocol that can extract high speed connectivity from what's usually considered to be the lowest capacity protocol on the Internet." In other words, I'm trying for Video over DNS. I'll also probably demonstrate in greater depth my DNS-based solution to RSS overload.
future plans Once the DNS infrastructure is ready for demo, backport it to general purpose UDP, document the spec, and turn it into a NAT2NAT framework. The lack of a really good solution for this has been a thorn in all of our sides, and the TCP stuntage from years back turned out not to actually be deployable like this would be.
Link
(Thanks, Look!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Rats trained to differentiate spoken Japanese and Dutch
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DATE: 01/09/2005 11:38:00 PM
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Rats can be trained to differentiate between Dutch and Japanese speech. If this is perfected and the black plague comes back, warring linguistic groups could use this to deploy targeted biowar vectors. I'm sure there are other applications as well, of course. But: Dutch-seeking plague-rats -- w00t!
The rats were trained to respond to either Dutch or Japanese using food as a reward.
Then they were separated into four groups -- one that heard each language spoken by a native, one that heard synthesized speech, one that heard sentences read in either language by different speakers and a fourth that heard the languages played backwards.
Rats rewarded for responding to Japanese did not respond to Dutch and rats trained to recognize Dutch did not respond the spoken Japanese.
The rats could not tell apart Japanese or Dutch played backwards.
Link
(Thanks, Paul!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: New US Attorney General versus a baked potato
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DATE: 01/10/2005 12:03:59 AM
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The ever-hilarious Fafblog today compares the US's new Attorney General, torture advocate Alberto Gonzales, to a baked potato. The results may surprise you!
Hello there an welcome to another edition of Alberto Gonzales Versus A Baked Potato! Today we'll rate the president's nominee for attorney general against a plump oven-hot starchy vegetable.
BACKSTORY
Alberto Gonzales: Risen from humble roots, member of oppressed minority
Baked potato: member of the Solanaceae family
Advantage: GONZALES
EVIL
Alberto Gonzales: No longer pro-torture! Still pro-omnipotent executive branch.
Baked potato: Product of the corrupt agribusiness industry
Advantage: POTATO
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Sony's Parisian Play Station
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DATE: 01/10/2005 01:37:23 AM
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My first article for Technology Review is now online. It's about Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, the company's only computer science research facility outside of Tokyo.
"Last year, a video circulated around the Internet depicting a delighted German Shepard sniffing at a fine cut of beef on the floor while a Sony AIBO robotic dog watched curiously.
It was a cute scene, until the AIBO became a bit too interested in the steak. Without warning, the real dog viciously attacked the AIBO, while off-screen human witnesses shrieked in fear.
Who pitted the canine against the computer? Sony researchers themselves, in collaboration with Hungarian animal behavior experts. And that's just one of the myriad experiments conducted by Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) Paris, a commercial laboratory where research and development don't always go hand in hand."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nano-propeller
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DATE: 01/10/2005 03:26:10 AM
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University of Toronto researchers have built "nano-propellers" that are 1/500th the width of a human hair. Hydrogen peroxide acts as the fuel, causing the gold and nickel "blades" to release gas bubbles that provide enough thrust for them to spin. From BBC News:
But researchers admit that if nano-machines are to have a future, ways must be found of getting different parts to interact as a functional whole.
"Rotational motion is at the heart of many conventional machines, such as rotary engines, screws and clocks," said Professor (Geoffrey) Ozin. "However, these machines clearly need more than just a rotor."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Biosphere 2 for sale
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DATE: 01/10/2005 04:08:44 AM
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The Texas investment company that owns Biosphere 2 north of Tucson, Arizona is selling the place. Billionaire Ed Bass dropped $200 million in the 1980s to build Biosphere 2 as a prototype "space colony." The experiment suffered major scientific and managerial problems and was eventually opened to the public as a tourist attraction. From the Arizona Daily Star:
"We're looking at everything from government entities, universities and private schools to church groups, resorts and spas as potential owners," (said Christopher T. Bannon, general manager of Decisions Investment Corp.) "We'd love to see the Biosphere 2 used as a research activity, but we know that may not be the end result."
Link
UPDATE: Jamie McCarthy says: "It's a bit unfair to refer only to Biosphere 2's 'scientific problems.' It's been doing good science since it dropped off the media's radar. Scientific American Frontiers devoted a segment to the Biosphere global-warming-related experiments. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Digitise every Canadian book
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DATE: 01/10/2005 07:44:01 AM
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Copyfightin' Canadian law prof Michael Geist has a modest proposal for Canada's digital strategy: digitise every Canadian book, ever:
While digitally scanning more than 10 million Canadian books and
documents is a daunting task, the Google project illustrates that it
is financially feasible. Reports suggest that it will cost Google
approximately $10 to scan each book.
Assuming similar costs for a Canadian project and a five-year
timeline, the $20 million annual price tag represents a fraction of
the total governmental commitment toward Canadian culture and
Internet development.
In fact, the most significant barriers to a national digital library
do not arise from fiscal challenges but rather from two potential
copyright reforms currently winding their way through the system.
Link to article mirror on Interesting People list; original is behind dumb-ass registration system
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his "version" of Enron
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DATE: 01/10/2005 08:41:45 AM
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Noted crooked scumbag Ken Lay, of Enron fame, is so desperate to get his "version" of the breathtaking scam he and his rich buddies pulled off into the public eye before his trial that he's paying search engines 5-12 cents/click to return a link to his bogus account of his wrongdoings when searchers enter "Ken Lay" into the search-box.
Put the search words "Enron scandal" or "Ken Lay," or even this Enron reporter's name, "Mary Flood," into any of the above search engines and one of the first things you will see is www.kenlayinfo.com. If you hit on Lay's Web site from there, then Lay pays between roughly 5 cents and 12 cents.
Link
(via Battelle)
Update: Clicking this link will bring you to Ken Lay's page while costing him one click's worth of traffic. Click early, click often! (Thanks corps_no_play_nice!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: New lowbrow art book: Weirdo Deluxe
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DATE: 01/10/2005 09:20:36 AM
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Coming on the heels my friend Kirsten Anderson's book Pop Surrealism, comes another lowbrow art book edited by my friend Alan Rapp: Weirdo Deluxe
The Wild World of Pop Surrealism & Lowbrow Art, by Matt Dukes Jordan. Many of the same artists are covered in both books -- Williams, Biskup, Shag, etc -- but I don't think there's any overlap in the works of art showcased in each book.
The presentation Weirdo Deluxe is excellent. Each artist is briefly interviewed about his/her obsessions, collections, influences, and thoughts on lowbrow (most don't seem to like the term -- I like pop surrealism better, too).
Both books are worth having if you're a fan of this genre.
Link
UPDATE: Mike Essl, the designer of Weirdo Deluxe, has a nice little write-up about the book. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Nike, remixed
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DATE: 01/10/2005 10:21:47 AM
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The website for hipster-couturier Dr. Romanelli, who hacks up old Nike jackets and restitches them back together with other garments to mashupolicious effect.
Link
(Thanks, John Keehler)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Le Freak
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DATE: 01/10/2005 10:25:56 AM
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A pissed-off principal has cancelled all of the student dances at Leemore Union High School in California because he was freaked out by kids freaking.
According to the Rap Dictionary, the meaning of "freak" is:
1. Dance in a provocative way.
2. Have sex.
3. Person who practices the above things; sexually aggressive female (never missing a beat).
4. To take out the filter paper from a Black & Mild pipe-tobacco cigar. "I'm going to freak this Mild"
The principal is particularly bothered by number 1, although I bet numbers 2 through 4 wouldn't thrill him either.
Link (to AP report)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Fur-lined coffee cozies (faux, that is).
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DATE: 01/10/2005 10:28:23 AM
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You know those little cardboard cup-condoms they slip around your cappucino in Starbucks? These are just like those -- only crafted from real fur. I'd totally buy 'em if they were fake. only crafted from fake fur.
Link to fur-cozy details (Thanks, Susannah).
Update: BB reader John Rambow of the Fodors blog says, "It seems to me that that fur Starbucks holder is a riff on one of the famous objects of surrealism, Meret Oppenheim's creepy-but-I'm-not-sure-why fur tea service, Breakfast in Fur." Link, and another link.
BB reader Christopher Hyson says, "Actually, there is a local firm in the Rochester NY area that has been making these, and the fur is synthetic!" Link
Reader Bryce says, "I was really excited to see the post about the furcozies on boing boing. they were designed by Shannyn Rivera, who graduated from my school (cranbrook academy of art, in michigan) last year. The grad book, published at the end of each school year, features one or two pieces to represent each artist, and the furcozie is hers! The Javawear thing that a reader referred you to looks like a knock-off."
Update 2: Shannyn Rivera tells Boing Boing:
The images on your blog was from our company website, XS Couture xscouture.com or furcozie.com, owned by myself and my design partner, Wil Ayers, who originally designed the Furcozie TM (or what you would call the furry coffee sleeve). It was designed in 2002 as a Cranbrook Academy of Art Graduate project and introduced at the Milan Design show in April of 2003. The Furcozie TM is made of synthetic faux fur and leather trim. There was an article in Dwell that told everyone that it was real fur- which lead everyone to believe it was real fur, but it has NEVER been real fur that we used. It's just really great looking high quality faux fur.
We are in the process of manufacturing a variety of Furcozies TM (in different faux fur colors, trims and and faux fur patterns) to sell this year. As for the JavaWear product, we have no relationship whatsoever to the company or to the design of their product. It seems that their product came out after ours.
As for the JavaWear product, we have no relationship whatsoever to the company or to the design of their product. It seems that their product came out after ours.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Album Zen
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DATE: 01/10/2005 10:40:05 AM
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outside the inbox |
big songs for short attention spans |
torture tape experiment |
vinyl orphanage |
vintage jazz |
oddio overplay |
comfort stand |
basic hip |
clubbo
Image: A bizarre southern rock oddity from Clubbo.com. (link). web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Orkut, Blogger blocked in Iran?
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DATE: 01/10/2005 10:42:41 AM
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Iranian expat blogger Hoder in Canada says,
Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling. They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personals and some other popular dating and social networking websites.
For ISPs this means a big loss, since much of their recent sales have been because of people writing and reading blogs and surfing Orkut. So the government is effectively eliminating small and private ISPs by bankrupting them, whiteout paying a political price for it.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Machine chops almost anything into micron-size pieces
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DATE: 01/10/2005 11:05:45 AM
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Robb Doody sez: "VDS is a small company that has created the Windhexe, a hugely powerful vortex machine with no internal moving parts, that uses nothing more than air to pulverize animal byproducts into a very fine(micron-sized particles) powder. It also happens to pulverize **everything** into micron-sized particles. An industry based on these could reduce landfills by 90% with zero emissions,has been used to create products for the cosmetic and health care fields, and could one day eliminate the need for you to put out the garbage."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Creative Commies: more art than you can shake a sickle at
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DATE: 01/10/2005 11:20:05 AM
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Following up on previous Boing Boing posts (1, 2 3, 4) about remarks by Bill Gates comparing free culture advocates to commies -- a number of readers picked up the meme and riffed on their own. Here are a few of the many "creative commonist" propaganda submissions received in recent days:
Robert Corr website buttons (thanks, Tama), Kill Sapo's printable graphics, Andrew Mike's Internationale lyrics remixed, a "creative commies blog, Eugéne Roux's desktop graphic shown here -- link to fullsize ("My modifications to the original XP background are, of course, Creative Commons licenced" he says).
Boing Boing reader Dylan Herbert says,
"This is an article posted on OSNews last August. It addresses concerns the author of the piece - David Adams, the man behind the launch of OSNews in 1997 - has with what he labels (and I paraphrase here) the internet-wide 'open-source = communist' meme. It is a brilliant, 9-page essay in which he explores 'why this idea is wrong and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.'
While Adams does not 'deny that some proponents of free software do, in fact, share some ideological common ground with Communist thinkers,' he clearly lays out the stark differences between them."
Link.
Wired News also covered the blogosphere brouhaha over Redmond's red scare. Snip:
Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons, wondered whom Gates was referring to when he made the remarks. Certainly not Creative Commons, which is a "voluntary, market-based approach to copyright," Brown wrote in an e-mail.
"I get sad when people cheapen words like 'communist' or 'fascist' by throwing them around recklessly, especially given what those words meant in the not-so-distant past," Brown wrote. "My father was a CIA Cold Warrior for 35 years of his life; he wasn't fighting against GPL'd software. Stalinist purges, the Berlin Wall, tanks in Budapest -- that's communism.
"And let's not forget just how many creative people's lives were ruined by irresponsible name-calling not too long ago. Remember the Hollywood blacklists?" he wrote.
Link
See also this item on Dan Gillmor's blog about Gates' remarks, and this subsequent post.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: First-ever Mingering Mike art exhibit
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DATE: 01/10/2005 11:22:31 AM
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Man, this warms my heart on a cold day. You may recall last year's BoingBoing posts (one, two) about a self-taught artist and soul-funk performer named "Mingering Mike," whose work was discovered by crate-diving youngsters at a flea market near DC. After Mike's work made the rounds on a vinyl junkie message board, and BoingBoing, and other blogs, a NYT article followed, and so did attention from art institutions. Now, he's got a website -- and a forthcoming musem debut for his hand-painted album covers. Kick ass!
Link to info on Mingering Mike's first art show (January 21st - April 3) at the Southeastern Center For Contemporary Arts (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Emergency alerts by email or phone
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DATE: 01/10/2005 11:51:22 AM
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I'm not sure quite what to make of this, but it's interesting. The service offers emergency email
notification of "natural disasters or other emergencies" in your area ... "provide[s] notification to citizens of local, regional, national and international emergencies utilizing the Internet and electronic mail (email) in a secure and expedient manner." Beware the website, which features a creepy animated talking head and annoying sound. Link (Thanks, Frank Keeney)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Everybody needs an animatronic chimp head
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DATE: 01/10/2005 11:53:18 AM
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PC Mag has an article about Wow Wee Toys new animatronic robot toys and tools. My favorite is the $129 chimp head. There's a video on the site.
On the more mind-blowing and unusual side, is the new Wow Wee Robotics Alive Series. These are life-like, animated, remote-controlled robot heads that include stereoscopic hearing so they can track your position and even your distance away. Wow Wee's first demonstration of this technology is a frighteningly real looking monkey head with a fully articulated face. The real stunner, though, is the expected price: $129. George York, Wow Wee's chief designer on the project said he's been working with the company's divisions in Hong Kong and China to have the robots ready for a 2006 release.
(Thanks, Casey!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blogging disaster relief in Phuket
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DATE: 01/10/2005 12:08:14 PM
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One of the bloggers on the Bangkok edition of metblogs.com is documenting disaster relief efforts in Phuket, day to day, with snapshots and a detailed first-person account.
Link (note: includes some very graphic images which some might find disturbing). (Thanks, Sean)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: EFF defends bloggers' rights to keep informants' identities secret
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DATE: 01/10/2005 12:24:52 PM
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Apple is making legal threats against of bunch of rumors sites, demanding that these journalists disclose the identities of their sources. Bad, bad Apple. EFF is taking up the sites' cause, defending their right to keep their sources' identities a secret. Good, good EFF!
On December 13, Apple filed suit against "Does 1-20" in a Santa Clara court. The company obtained a court order that allows it to issue subpoenas to AppleInsider and PowerPage for the names of the "Does" who allegedly leaked the information in question. EFF is defending the publishers against these subpoenas, arguing that the anonymity of bloggers' sources is protected by the same laws that protect sources providing information to journalists.
"Bloggers break the news, just like journalists do. They must be able to promise confidentiality in order to maintain the free flow of information," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "Without legal protection, informants will refuse to talk to reporters, diminishing the power of the open press that is the cornerstone of a free society."
"I am very disappointed by Apple's behavior and its new policy of issuing legal threats to its best customers," added Jason O'Grady, publisher of PowerPage. "Is corporate paranoia really more important than the First Amendment?"
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Still more random Googleable webcams
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DATE: 01/10/2005 12:41:00 PM
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Following up on last week's Boing Boing posts (1, 2) about tips for finding (and watching) unsecured webcams via Google, this news story offers the security biz take on the issue. Link (Thanks, Xopl).
Boing Boing reader rogueleader says, "More open network cameras -- these are Canon's network attached cameras that have pan, tilt and zoom controls. Java based applet." Link
Reader Flemming says,
I couldn't resist making a little thing that picked up a bunch of them from the google API, and then grabbed the first picture from each of them, and geocoded the IPs a bit to see where they were from. Makes it much easier to access, and it was pretty easy. So, see here, and my blog post about it here.
Reader Brian Smith says,
I put together a list of all the axis webcams google had in an easier browsing way if you're interested. I'm going to do the other types soon. See large compiled lists of cams here and here.
Jesse Andrews tells Boing Boing,
Hey, you might be interested in a hack for grabbing shots from those webcams. It creates a html page showing a snapshot and links back to the cam.
Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: North Korea wages war on long hair
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DATE: 01/10/2005 01:09:28 PM
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The government of North Korea has launched a series of television public service announcements called "Let Us Trim Our Hair In Accordance With Socialist Lifestyle!"
Snip from a BBC News story on the campaign: "It stressed the 'negative effects' of long hair on 'human intelligence development,' noting that long hair 'consumes a great deal of nutrition' and could thus rob the brain of energy."
This is really funny, for a number of reasons -- first, Pyongyang's logic flies in the face of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, an elite alliance of demonstrably smart dudes who all have very long hair.
Secondly, I met several young men in Richmond, Virginia this past weekend who identify themselves as Socialists. Each were in their 20's, none of them shave, and one -- Silver -- even ran for mayor on the seemingly contradictory "pro-labor, pro-marijuana" platform ("I came in fifth -- out of five candidates," he told me, "I'm demanding a recount... they said I only got two votes, and I know for a fact I got at least ten.") Long hair seemed to be totally de rigeur in this faction of the Party. Clearly, there's a disturbance in the force.
Link to BBC story on North Korean TV PSAs, via William Gibson's blog, which also features a snapshot of a NSFW snowman in Vancouver today.
Update: A dose of sociopolitical hair deconstruction from our pal Kourosh Karimkhany of Wired News.
Why doesn't anybody point out that Kim Jong-Il has the full-on bouffant action going? What, he doesn't want competition? Or are the REAL North Korean power-that-be tweaking their leader indirectly by outlawing his haircut? Where are the retired Kremlinologists when you need them?
Regarding the influence of politics on gentlemanly hair and beard stylin's, reader Andrew Gray says
In 1841, Charles Mackay published a wonderful book on "The Madness Of Crowds"; strange behaviour by societies, or groups, covering everything from the South Sea Bubble and the Tulip craze to fly-by-night London slang. One of the things he touched on was the various approaches to hair - the way long, flowing locks have shot from being a sign of Real Masculinity to Shocking Effeminacy and back over time. Here is an extract of that chapter.
Some of it is amusing - the Papal edict that wearers of long hair were to be excommunicated, or the Russian beard-taxes - and some simply strange, like his theory that the Haircut Issue caused the Hundred Years War. But it certainly seemed apt in respect of this; can we ever out-surreal history?
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mouse-controlled Etch-a-Sketch
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DATE: 01/10/2005 04:16:55 PM
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These folks have hacked a mouse into an Etch-a-Sketch and published their build notes with pictures so you can, too.
Link
(Thanks, Gregr!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Dan Gillmor and Paul Jones panel at North Carolina conference
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DATE: 01/10/2005 04:18:57 PM
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Justin sez, "Dan Gillmor, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, and Paul Jones, currently of ibiblio, will be on a panel entitled 'Using Blogs to Create Community; as part of the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Saturday, February 12."
Link
(Thanks, Justin!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Man Who Owned the Bible: wonderful absurdist copyright parody
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DATE: 01/10/2005 04:25:15 PM
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Talented sf and fantasy writer Will Shetterly (whose one-of-a-kind Dogland is the one of the finest novels I've ever read) has written a short-short story called "The People Who Owned the Bible" and blogged it under a Creative Commons license. It's a corker.
Then Jimmy Joe Jenkins's DNA proved he was the primary descendent of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible. At first, Jimmy was satisfied with ten percent of the price of every KJV sold and 10 percent of every collection plate passed by any church that used the KJV. But when some churches switched to newer translations, Jimmy sicced his lawyers on all translations based on the KJV. That got him a cut of every Bible and every Christian service in English. Some translators claimed their work was based on older versions and should therefore be exempt, but none of them could afford to fight Jimmy in court.
So the churches grumbled and paid Jimmy his tithe, except for the Mormons, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists, Quakers, and Unitarian Universalists. Jimmy said their teachings hurt the commercial value of his property and refused to let them use the Bible. All of those groups dissolved, except for the Unitarian Universalists, who didn't notice a change.
Link
(Thanks, Will!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Daily Show on Attorney General's confirmation hearings
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DATE: 01/10/2005 04:29:33 PM
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Lisa Rein has posted a video capture of The Daily Show's segment on the confirmation hearings for torture advocate Alberto Gonzales, the new Attorney General of the United States.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Clerks / Boing Boing screenplay parody
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DATE: 01/10/2005 05:01:04 PM
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BoingBoing readers Pam and Anthony asked themselves, "What if the screenplay of Clerks had been written by the editors of the e-zine BoingBoing?" Then they wrote this: ClerkClerk. All I have to say is -- someone better cough up the url for those genuine Tibetan goatskin-covered bongs before I have to bust out the ninja moves. (Thanks, Lee)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Shift diary from Florida call girl ring
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DATE: 01/10/2005 05:58:49 PM
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Kim Cooper sez: Unbelievable and fascinating. This is the circa 1998 internal message board used by the support staff of a Florida call girl ring, foolishly left unsecured so Google could crawl it.
Dip in to any part of the page and it's like lifting a rock off a hill of sleaze. The girls are unreliable. The johns are dumb. The male madame is driven to extremes of emotion over office messiness. A rival escort agency tries to steal the talent. Everyone is hustling, and not just in the obvious ways.
I found this site while researching the obscure bubblegum musical "Toomorrow," an uncommon mispelling which appears on this page. What a treat! Link
UPDATE: (Following links might not be safe for work) Anonymous sez: Fascinating stuff from the shift diary. The site mentions they have an 800 number. Googling for it, I found this old and broken site for "Riga Escorts."
Also this listing for "Anne Marie and friends" escort service:
And this listing for "Amy" (last one on the page)
A little further tracking, and I found the old site on IA."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: 25-foot rock falls on road
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DATE: 01/10/2005 08:11:50 PM
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The rain here in Los Angeles is really bad. Our lawn is flooded, and my neighbor just told me we live in a flood area. A couple of years ago he took his kayak out and paddled it down our street. I'm a little nervous. But things are even worse a few miles away from our house, in Topanga Canyon. Take a gander at this boulder that rolled onto the road. Link (Thanks, John!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Meet the Cubes
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DATE: 01/10/2005 08:58:44 PM
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A corporate drudgery playset for grown-ups.
Bob, Joe, Ted, and Ann spend eight hours a day, five days a week, at tiny desks in tiny cubicles in a giant room packed with countless similar cubicles in a giant building filled with countless similar rooms.
Each set has one 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate cube: four walls, desk, chair, file cabinet, in/out box, phone, and computer. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters.
Also includes a job title sticker sheet so you can create a convoluted and meaningless position for your employee.
Link to online store, link to manufacturer website.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Quote of the day: pyramid scheme
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DATE: 01/10/2005 10:28:39 PM
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"Don't cheerleaders all over America make pyramids every day? It's not torture." -- Defense lawyer Guy Womack speaking about alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, during the trial of accused military personnel. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Easy-to-use free crypto tool for cross-platform mail
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DATE: 01/11/2005 12:32:32 AM
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Ciphire Mail came out today, free for nonprofits, private users and the press. Oxblood sez,
t's a powerful and easy-to-use email encryption client that was designed for non-technical users. Most people don't realize that sending email across the Internet is like sending a postcard written in pencil in the real world. That's a pretty scary thought. And even if you've got nothing to hide, you've got plenty to protect, like personal photographs, medical and financial information, and maybe even love letters.
Ciphire Mail was three years in development and has been peer-reviewed by some of the world's leading cryptography and security experts. The whole purpose of the technology is to bring the highest level of security to all email users, regardless of computer skills. Once Ciphire Mail is installed it operates something like a virus scanner, just working quietly in the background.
Link
(Thanks, Oxblood!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: A minister's timely death
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DATE: 01/11/2005 03:10:16 AM
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The Reverend Jack Arnold, 69, dropped dead of cardiac arrest while giving a sermon Sunday at the Covenant Presbyterian Church near Orlando, Florida. His last words? "And when I go to heaven..."
Link (via Fortean Times)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Optical toy exhibit
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DATE: 01/11/2005 03:30:58 AM
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The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics hosts an informative online exhibit about several optical toys and "illusionary devices" from before the twentieth century. From the description of Magic Lanterns, like the one pictured here:
"A magic lantern consists of seven functional sections: the lamp, reflector, condensing lens, lens tube, body, base, and smokestack. The lamp is the sole source of illumination, which often came from burning oil or gas, a burning piece of calcium, or later, electricity. The reflector reflects the light from the lamp toward the condensing lens, which focuses the light onto the slide being projected. The lens tube serves to magnify the illuminated slide, so that projected images from 6 to 12 feet wide can be obtained. The body is often made completely of metal, and houses all of the previous components except the lens tube. The base lifts the magic lantern above the surface of a table. This is important because the body will become intensely hot from the illuminating lamp, and the base helps to prevent table burns. Finally, the smokestack serves to vent the smoke coming from the lamp, so that the smoke doesn't accumulate inside the lantern and put out the fire."
Link (via MetaFilter)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Cryptozoology art exhibit
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DATE: 01/11/2005 04:02:09 AM
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In October 2005, the First International Cryptozoology Art Symposium will be hosted by the Bates College Museum of Art, Maine College of Art, and the International Cryptozoology Museum. I think this is a great idea and I bet they'll be some really wonderful "outsider art" on display, like this amazing sketch of the Florida Skunk Ape. From the call for entries:
In the exhibition, as well as discussed in the symposium, will be the finest
examples of cryptozoological art, including native works, eyewitness
drawings, forensic sketches, paintings, models, and sculptures of the
representations of cryptids, thanks to artists and cryptozoologists from
around the world. Items used in the exhibition will include art on loan,
from artists' and personal collections, and tangible evidence of cryptids
from cryptozoologists.
The symposium will consist of invited speakers, and the exhibition shall
highlight invited and selected artists. This is a call for artists who may
wish to have their forthcoming or already existing art reviewed by the
selection committee, as evidenced via photographs, drawings, and related
illustrative material of their work, for inclusion in this exhibition.
If you're interested in participating, please email Loren Coleman, director of the International Cryptozoology Museum.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: IBM turning 500 patents over for free implementation
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DATE: 01/11/2005 07:23:18 AM
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IBM has announced that it will turn 500 of its software patents over to a "patent commons" that can be freely implemented by anyone. This is big news for free software authors, since it's often impossible for all-volunteer projects to defend themselves from patent infringement claims when there is a bogus software patent (like the thousands that IBM has accumulated) that overlaps with their work. Groklaw's got an excellent piece on this:
IBM has more patents than any of them. And if they have decided to carve out a protected zone for free and open source software, then it will happen. If the proprietary software world is enamored of patents and wishes to continue that system, at least for now, while making an exception for GNU/Linux software, I call that a positive move.
I know some would naturally argue that all software patents are bad. NoSoftwarePatents.org has taken that position and are critical of IBM's pledge.
I think software and patents need to get a divorce myself, but I also see that we are in a period of transition. Old business models are dying, and new ones are coming into being. And if there is a way to allow everyone to make money the way they want to, that may be, for now, as good as it gets. This is a creative response to the particular issue that GNU/Linux faces with patents, and I applaud it.
Link
(Thanks, Ken!)
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TITLE: Open seminar on Mieville's Iron Council
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DATE: 01/11/2005 07:27:49 AM
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My pal Henry Farrell, a poli-sci prof, is conducting an "open seminar" on sf/fantasy writer China Mieville's brilliant novel Iron Council. Mieville is a second-generation Marxist, and his works are extremely politicized; Farrell's seminar is bound to be very interesting. The whole thing is licensed under a CC license for you to distribute, teach, remix and play with.
China’s most recent novel, Iron Council was published in August. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post describes it as “a work of both passionate conviction and the highest artistry.” A few months ago, the Mieville Fraktion within CT decided that it might be fun to put together a mini-seminar around Iron Council, and to ask China to respond. He very decently said yes; you see the result before you. We’ve invited two non-CT regulars to participate in the mini-seminar. Matt Cheney blogs on literature and science fiction at The Mumpsimus; he also writes for Locus magazine and SFSite. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein blogs at The Little Professor, and teaches Victorian literature at SUNY Brockport. Miriam very kindly agreed to join the project in its later stages, revising a long comment/review that she had already written (and that China had independently cited to).
Link
(Thanks, Henry!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Free beer that's free as in speech
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DATE: 01/11/2005 07:30:38 AM
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Vores Ol ("Our Beer") is a Danish beer that's been released under a Creative Commons License that covers the recipe and the bottle-art.
The recipe and the whole brand of Our Beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that anyone can use our recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative of our recipe. You are free to earn money from Our Beer, but you have to publish the recipe under the same license (e.g. on your website or on our forum) and credit our work. You can use all our design and branding elements, and are free to change them at will provided you publish your changes under the same license ("Attribution & Share Alike").
Link
(Thanks, Pierre!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Torture Jet: is this the CIA's "ghost" plane?
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DATE: 01/11/2005 07:37:54 AM
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Rumors, snapshots, and speculations have been circulating on airplane geek sites and political message boards for some time now about "N379P." This and other registration numbers are believed to belong to a plane used by the CIA to transport detainees to interrogation sites -- in foreign countries known to subject prisoners to torture. A story in the Chicago Tribune has more, and begins with an attempt to track down the name under which the craft is registered. None of the known registration numbers are listed in the FAA database. Snip:
Like Leonard T. Bayard, the only named principal in Keeler and Tate, one Tyler Edward Tate, also appears not to exist in any public records accessible by the Tribune. Premier Executive's only listed executive is its president, Bryan P. Dyess. A person with that name does appear in commercial databases, but his only addresses are two post office boxes in Arlington, Va., not far from CIA headquarters. Premier Executive purchased or leased the new Gulfstream V in 1999, FAA records show. The plane's original registration number, N581GA, would later be changed by the FAA to N379P, and again to 8068V.
The first public mention of the Gulfstream appeared six weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when a Pakistani newspaper reported that Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a 27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, had been spirited aboard the plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security officers in the early hours of Oct. 23, 2001.
There is no information about where Mohammed was taken. But Pakistani officials said later that Mohammed, a Yemeni national, was believed by the U.S. to belong to Al Qaeda and to have information about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
Since Sept. 11, unnamed U.S. officials have been quoted in several publications discussing the U.S. practice of "rendition," which involves sending suspected terrorists or Al Qaeda supporters captured abroad for interrogation to countries where human rights are not traditionally respected.
Link to full-size image, Link to Chicago Trib story, Link to The Memory Hole's copy, Link to earlier WaPo story, Link to earlier Boston Globe piece, (Thanks, JG)
Update: BB reader Mike says,"Two more photos of the CIA gulfstream, one taken july 21, 2004 in Stuttgart, the other from May, 2002 in Portugal: Link.
If the query URLs don't persist, just go to the search page of airliners.net and enter the tail number. Link."
And reader Marcus in Stockholm says, "Swedish news corp TV4, who broke the gulfstream story back in may, has made translated transcripts of their reports available on their website: Link."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: School-bus fingerprinting deconstructed
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DATE: 01/11/2005 08:23:43 AM
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Bruce Schneier -- the best security person working the field IMO -- got wind of a small school district in Texas that's fingerprinting students when they get on and off school-buses "to prevent kidnapping." He's written a masterful deconstruction of this practice, showing why it's a stupendously dumb idea.
Let's imagine how this system might provide security in the event of a kidnapping. If a kidnapper -- assume it's someone the child knows -- goes onto the school bus and takes the child off at the wrong stop, the system would record that. Otherwise -- if the kidnapping took place either before the child got on the bus or after the child got off -- the system wouldn't record anything suspicious. Yes, it would tell investigators if the kidnapping happened before morning attendance and either before or after the school bus ride, but is that one piece of information worth this entire tracking system? I doubt it.
You could imagine a movie-plot scenario where this kind of tracking system could help the hero recover the kidnapped child, but it hardly seems useful in the general case.
Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: History of Sub Pop
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DATE: 01/11/2005 08:55:31 AM
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Someone is auctioning off their entire Sub Pop Singles Club collection (except for one record by Luna). The collections contain more than one-hundred 45s, including rarities from Nirvana, White Stripes, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, and, my personal favorites, the Afghan Whigs. This is really an audio encyclopedia of 1990s underground rock. Two days left in the eBay auction and it's already up to $4,500. From Sub Pop's description of the now-defunct Singles Club:
The Sub Pop Singles Club was a legendary mail delivery service that provided the subscriber with one 7" single per month by one of the most talented and physically attractive bands of the day.
The madness began in November 1988 with the now mythic Nirvana 'Love Buzz' single and continued through five years of unadulterated bliss, finally reaching its end with Lou Barlow's 'I Am Not Mocking You'. Beginning in April 1998, Sub Pop Records unhesitatingly re-launched the Singles Club and once again provided a reason to live for the countless morbidly lonesome shut-ins of this generation. Since then, we have, without pause, released one magically delicious single per month to divert, delight and enjoy.
For a good indication of the caliber of music you will be receiving just take a look at some of the bands that participated in the first incarnation: Smashing Pumpkins, Fugazi, The Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth, Rapeman, Unrest, Rocket From the Crypt, Jon Spencer, Ween, Soundgarden, Afghan Whigs, Poster Children, The Muffs, Reverend Horton Heat and lots more. Subscribers to the re-launched club in April 1998 have received singles from the likes of Luna, Modest Mouse, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Team Dresch/Longstocking, Creeper Lagoon, The Get Up Kids, Beachwood Sparks, Dot Allison, Bonny Prince Billy, Pedro The Lion, Crooked Fingers, Mudhoney, Dead C, Death Cab For Cutie, To Rococco Rot, The Yo-Yo's, The Creatures, Trumans Water & Zeke among others, with many more yet-to-be announced sonic delights.
If you're saying to yourself 'I haven't even heard of any of those bands', then perhaps you would do better to join our Ass-Kick of the Month Club, in which a large, burly man will come to your home each month and give you a severe boot to the rear until you come around and start listening to some good music for a change!
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Mac Mini coverage from Blogistan
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DATE: 01/11/2005 10:49:42 AM
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Apple's just announced the $500 Mac Mini, a computer that looks like half a Mac cube and requires you to supply your own monitor, keyboard, etc. Technorati has up-to-the-minute coverage from the blogosphere.
Link
(Thanks, David!)
(Thanks for the pic, Tysontune!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Jailed for a Song: Human-readable copyfight explanation
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DATE: 01/11/2005 11:25:57 AM
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Donna sez, "This is the debut public-awareness campaign from IPac -- the PAC for appropriate balance in intellectual property policy. It makes it abundantly clear that the people who support sensible copyright law aren't the extremists in this debate. Bonus: Its explanation of what's going happening is human-readable (even Grandmother-readable), so it's a great way to spread the word to family and friends."
Copyright infringement is a problem, but the radical political agenda of copyright holders is far beyond what normal Americans want. We need constructive proposals for how to pay artists, protect technical innovation, and end the record & movie companies' crazy litigation campaign. That's why we need your help.
Congress isn't listening to the public, and we need to be loud if we want to be heard over the Hollywood lobbyists and record label flunkies. Make a stand for sensible copyright law and sign up for IPac's free mailing list. We'll keep you up-to-date on ways that your time and money can impact Congress. And in 2006, we'll support candidates who agree with us - and fight candidates who have chosen Hollywood's special interests over yours.
Link
(Thanks, Donna!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More on anti-Alzheimer's curry ingredient
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DATE: 01/11/2005 12:42:19 PM
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Interesting reply to my earlier post about the Alzheimer's fighting effect of curcumin, a chemical found in turmeric:
David Soleimani-Meigooni sez: Curcumin also has many other clinical properties such as
anti-cancer/anti-tumor, anti-inflamatory, and anti-oxidant properties.
I have had the opportunity to research (and publish) on the
anti-cancerous properties of curcumin on prostate cancer cells, both
from the direct application of curcumin and use of curcumin as a
radiosensitizing agent, in-vitro. Curcumin was found to induce cell
death of prostate cancer cells, and a 2 microMolar concentration of
the curcumin coumpound combined with radiation enhanced the effect of
the radiation by a factor of 2.61 on the prostate cancer cells.
This
combined (radiosensitizing) effect theoretically means that the
application of 2 microMolar of curcumin would allow 2.61 times less
radiation to be utilized to achieve the same biological effect as a
radiation-alone treatment. Because radiosensitization utilizing
curcumin can allow smaller doses of radiation to be theoretically used
for treatment, there is a much lesser effect of radiation to the
surrounding normal tissues that receive radiation when treating a
cancerous target (ultimately there could be less complications to a
patient following radiation therapy).
I would just like to emphasize
once more that the research that I performed has only been performed
in-vitro on tissue cultures, and is far from being applied in a
clinical setting. A simple pubmed search of curcumin could give you a
greater idea of the all the academically researched, medical
applications of curcumin.
I also wanted to point out this epidemiological sudy of the Indian
population that shows that their extremely low rate of digestive tract
cancers can be attributable to "the presence of natural antioxidants
such as curcumin in Indian cooking": Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Wanted: reviews for Make
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I'm looking for reviews of stuff for the 2nd issue of MAKE, and I can think of no better group of people to write them than the readers of Boing Boing. Is there some gadget, tool, web site, newsletter, instructional video, book, magazine, CD-ROM, or instrument you already own and love? Then send your review to “Toolbox,” Make's recommendation section. If we use it, we'll pay you.
Reviews should be anywhere between 100 and 300 words, and should be written in the first person. Think more "recommendation" and "experience" when you write these than "review." We want to hear about your involvement with it.
The old Wired guidelines for reviews went like this: “Write your review. Then write us a letter explaining why we should devote space to your item. Throw away your review and send us the letter.” That's the way to do it.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tsunami castaway survives on coconuts and rainwater for 15 days
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DATE: 01/11/2005 02:55:09 PM
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Ari Afrizal was swept out to sea while working at a construction site. For the next two weeks, he clung to flotsam and husked coconuts with his teeth. Link (Thanks, Cyrus!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Scary cold war death machine: Project Pluto
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DATE: 01/11/2005 06:09:38 PM
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MrBaliHai reports on Project Pluto, a cold war weapon of mass destruction
[S]ometimes [it's] easy to forget that the era also produced truly horrifying Cold War schemes like Project Pluto: a low-altitude cruise missile, powered by an atomic ramjet that carried multiple hydrogen bombs and puked out chunks of radioactive debris, killing everyone along its flightpath.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Art of Miles Thompson
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DATE: 01/11/2005 06:47:34 PM
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Miles Thompson's paintings are excellent. His work reminds me of my favorite illustrator Jim Flora. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Art of Andrew Brandou
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DATE: 01/11/2005 06:49:55 PM
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Andrew Brandou's beautiful paintings of animals are on exhibition at La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: RAM-stick with an LED ticker
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DATE: 01/11/2005 08:12:35 PM
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Corsair has shipped a RAM stick with a mini-LED pixelboard built into it. It's intended to show the temperature of the RAM, but you can also customize it to display your own messages in a continuous scrolling ticker that splashes unread messages in red light on the inside of your case.
Better yet, you can use Corsair's Memory Dashboard to program the memory to display your own personalized greeting (or obnoxious salute). Type in a message, you can have three messages of up to 23 characters each, click a button, and your message gets sent to some spare bits on the memory. (Where exactly? According to Corsair "the default message is stored in a microcontroller on the DIMM; user programmable messages are stored on the hard drive and loaded in Startup.") And from then on, that message will scroll across the display like your very own tiny Times Square Zipper...except it won't be giving you the latest news headlines and sports scores.
Link
(via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Sheet-music for Super Mario
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DATE: 01/11/2005 08:16:02 PM
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This guy, who calls himself "The Blindfolded Pianist," has gone through all of Super Mario Bros and figured out the sheet music for it.
Link
(via Kottke)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: USGS photos, 1872-1991, in the public domain and online
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DATE: 01/11/2005 08:38:51 PM
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Liz sez, "Alan Storm, one of my former student set up this web site which provides access to four CD-ROMs worth of photos from the USGS taken between 1872 and 1991. Many are gorgeous, and all are in the public domain."
Link
(Thanks, Liz!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: BBEdit's little brother, a great Mac text-editor, for free
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DATE: 01/11/2005 09:13:25 PM
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BareBones Software are the publishers of BBEdit, hands-down the best text editor I've ever used (I write everything from my grocery lists to my novels with BBEdit; I am writing this blog-entry in BBEdit). They have a low-endtext-editor called TextWrangler that's quite good as well (it' slike BBEdit's little brother), and they've just released it for free.
We see the need for a strong, feature-rich text editor at a low price. In the past two years since TextWrangler's initial release, we have observed the crowding of the landscape with products which don't meet our standards for quality and thoughtfulness.
By making TextWrangler 2.0 available at no charge, we're answering the call of Mac users who need a powerful, professionally executed product, and raising the bar for Mac text editors.
Link
(Thanks, Macmini--thegatewaydrug!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Nature illustrations of Ernst Haeckel
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DATE: 01/11/2005 11:07:00 PM
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I had dinner with Bruce Stewart and Shawn Connally at their home tonight. Bruce is O'Reilly's editorial director and Shawn is Make's managing editor. I noticed a couple of amazing framed prints on the wall in their library, and Bruce told me he took them from a book by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), a German biologist who drew fantastic illustrations of animals, plants, and micro-organisms. Apparently, Haeckel sort of made up certain details in his illustrations to bolster his wacky theories about evolution (he pushed the idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," that is, as na unborn animal develops in the egg or womb, it goes through all the evolutionary stages that its ancestors went through). The book Bruce showed me is called Art Forms in Nature, first published in 1904. I was knocked out by the beautiful drawings of sea creatures and other weird animals, and the way Haeckel arranged several life forms on the page is wonderful. Here's a page with a bunch of Haeckel drawings (There's also a link on the page to a 261 MB PDF file, which I assume contains a bunch of his work.) Thanks for letting me know about this incredible artist, Bruce!
Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Counterfeit seizures
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DATE: 01/11/2005 11:18:22 PM
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Gieschen Consultancy tracks seizures of counterfeit goods: cigarettes, clothing, computer equipment, drugs, financial instruments, identification, etc. It's interesting to see the kinds of things people are knocking off.
Police today arrested a man from Transport Nagar area here for allegedly selling duplicate ball bearings under a known brand name.
French customs officials said Tuesday they had seized nearly 10,000 meters of fake Louis Vuitton monogrammed canvas, enough to make several thousand...
[C]ustoms authorities in Piraeus seized two containers containing some 800,000 packs of contraband cigarettes...
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Museum of Sound
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DATE: 01/12/2005 04:09:40 AM
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The Los Angeles Times ran an excellent article a couple of weeks ago about the Smithsonian Institution's sound archives where the noises of yesteryear are collected:
Inside a bombproof vault a few blocks from the White House, Dan Sheehy is surrounded by audio ghosts: the clickety-clack of typewriters, the tumble of glass bottles inside a soda machine, a 1960s-era telephone ring.
Here, sonic blasts from the past are entombed in a hodgepodge of vinyl records, compact discs and reel-to-reel tapes. “We are a museum of sound,” said Sheehy, whose job is to preserve America’s acoustic heritage for an obscure branch of the Smithsonian Institution.
Sounds are like smells, he says. They can transport the listener to another time and place. The buzz of an airplane propeller sends Sheehy’s mind back to hot afternoons in 1950s Bakersfield, Calif., playing in the yard while aircraft sputtered overhead. “The sound immediately triggers memories of time and temperature,” he said.
The article inspired BB's own Mark Frauenfelder to dream up the notion of Slamtones, a mobile phone service that would deliver the "sound of slamming a phone down on the hook when you angrily end a call."
Link to LA Times article, Link to Mark's "Slamtones" journal entry at TheFeature
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: December's evil-est tech companies and executives
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DATE: 01/12/2005 05:46:48 AM
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Steve sez, "In this month's mocking toast To Evil! Danny O'Brien laments the holiday habit of trying to hide one's evilness from Father Christmas, but finds those evil proprietary software people can't help being who they are. '...let's see whose been evil and not so evil down there in the chained world of proprietary software. That sorry place, where slipshod users cannot hide their sin, distracted as they are by demons only the unfree suffer: the draconian wiles of restrictively-licensed media companies, the constant hammer of pop-up ads and malware, and - most dread of all - closed-source software with hard-coded integer limits, running on AIX.'"
It's kind of intriguing, isn't it, when the MPAA and RIAA is to scaring us into believing that the world of unauthorized copying is filled of dodgy-dealers stuffing the files with all kinds of polluted malware and pop-ups, that they're also paying the people who do the stuffing?
I'm really hoping that in their next batch of cinema adverts, the MPAA addresses this, and shows a grumbling adware developer instead of a Hollywood set-painter. "The piracy issue, it affects us all: the construction guy, the lighting guy. And me, the guy who installed all that crap on your mum's computer. And also an awful lot of Los Angeles-based cocaine dealers. Why doesn't anyone think of them?"
Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: An "information wants to be free" record label
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DATE: 01/12/2005 06:44:16 AM
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Bob sez, "Artists House is a 501(c)(3) record label that actually gets it. Their albums bear the motto 'Information wants to be free,' and true to this, each CD comes with the MP3s on a data track which you are encouraged to email to your friends. On top of that, you also get a DVD with all sorts of goodies including high resolution mixes, sheet music, and music lessons."
Link
(Thanks, Bob!
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Handbag embossed with handgun
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DATE: 01/12/2005 07:25:39 AM
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The "Guardian Angel" bag is embossed with the outline of a handgun, so it looks like you're packing heat. The same designed has made a laptop bag with the outlines of groceries embossed into the sides, disguising the computer within as foodstuffs. The bags are sold to women in Rotterdam to assuage fears of muggings.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Sodium explosion videos
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DATE: 01/12/2005 09:55:37 AM
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When you drop a chunk of sodium in water, it will explode. This guy has posted videos of his "experiments" with large chunks of the unstable metal.
The first step was the procurement, through eBay, of three and half pounds of solid sodium metal for about a hundred dollars. This is a decent price for a small quantity like this. Small being a relative term: It's used by the ton in industry, but anything more than a few grams is a dangerous quantity if found in your home. Three and a half pounds is enough, for example, to blow your home to bits under the right conditions.
Link (Thanks, Chris!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Doctor Who seeks little people
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DATE: 01/12/2005 01:43:37 PM
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Shooting on the set of the new Doctor Who series apparently has been held up due to a shortage of little people to act as extraterrestrials in the show. From The Mirror:
Dr Who executive producer Russell T Davies said: "It's very difficult to employ persons of restricted growth when, as our producer Phil Collinson says, `Bloody Gringotts and the Chocolate Factory are filming at the same time'."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Shakespeare's drip
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DATE: 01/12/2005 01:54:59 PM
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An article in the new issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases suggests that Shakespeare may have suffered from VD. Inhaling mercury vapor, one of the treatments for syphilis of the time, could have caused the tremor revealed in Shakespeare's signature, his hermit-like behavior later in life, and possibly even the Bard's baldness. Then there are the references in his writings. From a press release about the article:
Mentions of the “pox,” the “malady of France,” the “infinite malady,” and the “hoar leprosy” in his writings seem to indicate that the Bard knew--perhaps from personal experience--how torturous venereal disease could be. “Shakespeare’s knowledge of syphilis is clinically precise,” said John Ross, MD, author of the study. A line in Sonnet 154, “Love’s fire heats water,” apparently refers to an STD causing burning urination.
Of course, Shakespeare could have just been writing about the concerns of the day, not his own. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Archive of public domain USGS photos in torrent form
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DATE: 01/13/2005 12:16:02 AM
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Peyton sez, "the USGS photo site you linked to last night only allows 300 downloads of full sized images per day. Oops! So I hooked up the owner of the site with blogtorrent and helped him troubleshoot his firewall/router issues."
Torrent Link
(Thanks, Peyton!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Impersonate a preppie, go to jail
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DATE: 01/13/2005 12:18:59 AM
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I took a pic of this sign at the security checkpoint in the airport in Lyon, France -- it says that you can get a three year prison sentence for trafficking in counterfeit trademarks.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Steal This File-Sharing Book author MP3 interview
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DATE: 01/13/2005 12:22:59 AM
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Denise sez, "Cory reviewed Wallace Wang's latest book, Steal This File-Sharing Book recently. I recorded an interview with Wallace this afternoon, and it's available as a podcast on my blog. Wallace and I discuss the future of P2P networks, nefarious knitters, macchiato moms, the Grokster decision, the economics of digital media, and — what podcast would be complete without a little porn?"
Link
(Thanks, Denise!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Hyperlinking the World
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DATE: 01/13/2005 01:02:24 AM
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My latest article for TheFeature is an interview with Hartmut Neven, a machine vision researcher who is leveraging the ubiquity of cameraphones to bring biometrics to the mobile masses and hyperlink the world through a system best described as "a visual Google.
TheFeature: What do you mean by "visual Google"?
Neven: You take a picture of something, send it to our servers, and we either provide you with more information or link you to the place that will. Let's say you're standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. You take a snapshot with your cameraphone and instantly receive an audio-visual narrative about the painting. Then you step out of the Louvre and see a cafe. Should you go in? Take a shot from the other side of the street and a restaurant guide will appear on your phone. You sit down inside, but perhaps your French is a little rusty. You take a picture of the menu and a dictionary comes up to translate. There is a huge variety of people in these kinds of situations, from stamp collectors, to people who want to check their skin melanoma, to police officers who need to identify the person in front of them.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Screw fly, don't bother me
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DATE: 01/13/2005 01:23:22 AM
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A male fly looking to mate often brings a female a gift such as a tasty bug. While the female eats, the male takes care of business. However, a new study by biologists at the University of Western Australia posits that some male flies trick their mates with fake gifts like seed tufts or leaves. From an Animal Planet article about the study:
(Researcher Natasha) LeBas explained that cheating with token goodies does not hurt the species overall, but instead reveals the battle between the sexes over how much males and females wish to invest in reproduction.
"Each sex wants to invest less and wants the other sex to invest more," LeBas told Animal Planet News. "This study is an example of a species in which males who invest a lot, by giving nutritious gifts, seem to have a successful way of investing less, by giving tokens, because females seem to take some time to give up trying to feed from the token."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Herr Harry
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DATE: 01/13/2005 05:57:36 AM
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Prince Harry was photographed at a formal costume party sporting a Nazi uniform. The Sun newspaper ran the picture on the front page, resulting in a quick mea culpa from the possible future King of England.
Link
UPDATE: BB reader Greg Phillips kindly pointed out that a "fancy dress party" is the equivalent of a "costume party."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ay caramba!
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DATE: 01/13/2005 07:32:56 AM
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The actors behind the Spanish language version of The Simpsons are involved in a labor dispute between Mexico's National Actors Association and a Mexican contractor who handles the dubbing of the show. If the matter isn't settled soon, new actors might be hired to replace the original Spanish cast. From the Associated Press:
(Nancy) Mackenzie, the voice of Marge, has been with the union for about 40 years, dubbing television shows that include "Dallas" and "The Dukes of Hazard."
Losing the part in "The Simpsons" would be hard to take, she said.
"You get to the point where you care deeply for your cartoon character," Mackenzie said. "You love them. You go to bed with them at night. It's a sad state, and not because of the money. It's for love."
Link (Thanks, C-lo!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Greg Dulli's cover band
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DATE: 01/13/2005 08:14:19 AM
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During the 1990s, my friend Greg Dulli was the singer for the Afghan Whigs. His current ensemble, the Twilight Singers, has released three exquisite albums including, most recently, an amazing all-covers record called She Loves You. Greg has always drawn inspiration from old soul and R&B and now he's put together a new band, Uptown Lights, just to play his favorite tunes.
"Formed primarily to throw house parties in their hometown while they work on their respective individual projects, Uptown Lights revisits the days of dressing uptown and throwing downtown.
Armed with a setlist featuring the songs of their heroes, like O.V. Wright, Joe Tex, the Temptations, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and many, many more, this show is not to be missed..."
The first gig is February 19 in Los Angeles. No tour is planned yet, but they promise to post occasional live MP3s. Black out the windows, it's party time.
Link (via Summer's Kiss)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Saturn's moon looks like hollow plastic toy
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DATE: 01/13/2005 10:32:02 AM
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Iapetus, one of Saturn's moons, has a "topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator," giving it the look of a cheap plastic toy with mold flash.
The ridge is conspicuous in the picture as an approximately 20-kilometer wide (12 miles) band that extends from the western (left) side of the disc almost to the day/night boundary on the right. On the left horizon, the peak of the ridge reaches at least 13 kilometers (8 miles) above the surrounding terrain. Along the roughly 1,300 kilometer (800 mile) length over which it can be traced in this picture, it remains almost exactly parallel to the equator within a couple of degrees."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: R.A. Wilson, Terrence McKenna, Mark Pesce audio archives
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DATE: 01/13/2005 10:41:48 AM
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Here are a bunch of MP3s with lectures and interviews with psychedelic neuronauts Robert Anton Wilson, Mark Pesce, and the late Terrence McKenna (who I just learned owned an original set of Ernst Haeckel books). Link (Thanks, Matt!) UPDATE: More McKenna lectures (not very good sound quality) here.
Even more trippy MP3s here! (Thanks, Robai!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Dollar bills used as canvases for art
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DATE: 01/13/2005 11:07:07 AM
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They're all but worthless in the internal currency market, but dollars bills have found a new purpose: as canvases for Kamiel Proost's whimsical paintings.
Link (Thanks, Rev.Dr. Spyder X!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Interesting Indian delicacy: paan
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DATE: 01/13/2005 11:11:37 AM
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David-Michel Davies recently went to India, and has chronicled his trip in his new blog. He discovered a treat there, called paan.
Specifically, Paan is made by taking a betel creeper leaf, adding some ingredients -- the masala-- and then folding it up into a triangle for chewing/consumption. The ingredients can be a wide range of things, but generally Paan falls into two main categories: Mitha (sweet) or Saadha (with Tobacco). The Mitha Paan (I didn't try the tobacco variety) usually has betel nut, lime paste, almond powder, grated coconut, pistachio powder, and sometime a very sweet cherry jam or chutney. The combination of all these ingredients makes for a very tasty and refreshing after dinner treat; the plant enzymes, lime paste, and mild stimulant from the betel nut acts as a digestion enhancer and breath freshener.
Link
UPDATE: Kevin Kelly took this photograph while traveling in Asia. It appears in his book, Asia Grace. He sez: "This is a cool ornate paan shop in southern india. That's it. That is the entire shop. A shelf about three feet deep and maybe 8 feet wide, with two guys sitting all day on the shelf (about waist high). In many ways it is the ultimate walk-up service set up. No bending, reaching, or waiting. Imagine it as an ATM for treats, or a gonzo vending machine, only with live human animation, mirrors, beveled glass. Maybe by now they could have LEDs at night."
UPDATE:Kurt sez: "Coincidently, last night I stumbled across Benjamin Feen's photo album from his current trip to India, where he has a step-by-step photo sequence of the creation of "sweet paan" on page 3. Link
UPDATE:Farhad Manjoo points out this old BBC article that warns of oral cancer in paan aficionados. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Tsunami simulator project
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DATE: 01/13/2005 12:20:07 PM
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This is really neat -- some guy built a little tsunami simulator in his basement (I'm assuming that the kid in the photo is the son of the creator, and not the creator, but I could be wrong. He might be a child prodigy for all I know). His explanation of why the tsunami was so devastating was really interesting. Link (Thanks, Jon!)
UPDATE: Robert sez: "Saw your post on BoingBoing, so I have to forward you a link to a "real" Tsunami Simulator here in my town. It's a pretty kick-ass facility, supposedly the only one of its kind in North America." Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Website landscape
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DATE: 01/13/2005 12:24:10 PM
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(Click thumbnail for enlargement) This is a little like the idea John Battelle proposed in his blog.
Folks who read this blog also read that one," for example. Or "Blogs who link to this blog also link to that one." If we put a sophisticated interface with some dials and levers, it could really be a neat tool for exploring relationships in the blogosphere. I could imagine some cool slices that might parse this wildly growing ecosystem in interesting ways.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Amazon.com founder buys ranch for his aerospace company
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DATE: 01/13/2005 02:13:40 PM
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"Bezos' Seattle-based Blue Origin suborbital space venture is starting the process to build an aerospace testing and operations center on a portion of the Corn Ranch, a 165,000-acre spread that the 41-year-old billionaire purchased north of Van Horn, Texas."
Blue Origin is hiring, by the way. On its jobs page, it lists its hiring criteria:
1. You must have a genuine passion for space. Without passion, you will find what we're trying to do too difficult. There are much easier jobs.
2. You must want to work in a small company.
3. We are building real hardware -- not PowerPoint presentations. This must excite you. You must be a builder.
(Neal Stephenson works there part time.) It probably gets about 10,000 resumes a day.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Sneak peek at Warren Ellis' new graphic novel
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DATE: 01/13/2005 03:07:34 PM
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Shown here, a sneak peek at the cover for Warren Ellis' forthcoming serial comic Desolation Jones. Art by J.H. Williams. Out in April, solicited for ordering in February.
Link to more info, and link to full-size image.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: More rotten customer service from GTC telecom
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DATE: 01/13/2005 04:20:24 PM
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GTC, the horrible long distance company that slammed me last year, is still bugging me. They wrote:
Dear GTC Telecom Customer,
A recent attempt to charge your credit card was unsuccessful. As a valued GTC Telecom customer, we are concerned about your current unpaid balance.
If you have a new credit card that you would like to use to pay your bill, or if your credit card on file with GTC Telecom needs to be updated (such as an expiration date), please log on today to our secure website, https://www.mygtc.com/ccupdate.asp, to update your credit card information.
If you have any questions about your GTC Telecom account, please feel free to email us at service@gtctelecom.com.
Thank you for choosing GTC Telecom.
Online Services
service@gtctelecom.com
Optimistic fool that I am, I called the phone number on the GTC site (1-800-486-4030), but like every other time I've called the number in the last six months, I am put on hold for an half hour and then the line goes dead.
So I tried sending email to service@gtctelecom. Every time I've sent email there it has been like throwing it down a mineshaft. But this time, something different happened. The email bounced.
I just sent email to the FCC and the California Public Utility Commission to complain about this lousy company.
I'm wondering if anyone has had a good experience with GTC telecom. I hate them.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Technorati Tags: three great services on one page
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DATE: 01/13/2005 10:27:12 PM
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Technorati has unveiled a new "tags" service that is one of the most exciting things I've seen all month. Technorati Tags are like Del.icio.us Tags and Flickr Tags -- they're keywords you assign to your stuff. If you tag a Del.icio.us link with "Toronto" and I tag a link with "Toronto," Del.icio.us will figure out that we're both talking about the same thing and feed both links to anyone who's searching for new links about Toronto. Likewise with Flickr: upload a photo and tag it "spider" and it will be returned along with all the other spider pix in the system when a searcher asks for the "spider" tag.
Technorati Tags are keywords that map to category names, keywords, and other cues in blog posts. When you bring up a Technorati Tag for "computers," you get all relevant blog posts that Technorati knows about, presented on a page with relevant Del.icio.us links and relevant Flickr images. Technorati Tags blend three different Internet services and three services' worth of tags to tease meaning out of the ether. Brilliant.
The photos come from our friends at Flickr. Flickr is a great photo sharing community. If you'd like your photos to appear on our tag pages, join Flickr and post your photos there. And remember to tag 'em!
The links come from the nice folks at Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarks manager. If you'd like to contribute links to Technorati Tag pages, you can join Del.icio.us, post and tag some links.
The rest of the Technorati Tag pages is made up of blog posts. And those come from you! Anyone with a blog can contribute to Technorati Tag pages. (Don't have a blog? Give TypePad a try!) There are two ways to contribute:
* If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), just use the included category system and make sure you're publishing RSS/Atom and we'll automatically include your posts! Your categories will be read as tags.
* If your blog software does not support those things, don't worry, you can still play. To add your post to a Technorati Tag page, all you have to do is "tag" your post by including a special link.
Link
(Disclaimer: I am an advisor to Technorati)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Baseball's ghosts
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DATE: 01/14/2005 05:06:00 AM
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Dan Gordon, co-author of Cape Encounters: Contemporary Cape Cod Ghost Stories, is researching a new book that will collect reports of ghostly encounters in ballparks. It sounds like a fun idea!
Their goal is not to authenticate or necessarily even endorse these
paranormal accounts. The ghost stories are merely a device through which
the book will examine the romance and mythology of baseball, its many
traditions, its history, the legacy of some of its more prominent and
colorful figures, and its ever-present connection to its past.
Dan Gordon would greatly appreciate hearing about any stories, leads, or
referrals you could share. Anything having to do with ghosts, curses, eerie
phenomena, and unexplained events in ballparks or associated with baseball
teams is welcome.
Link to email Dan Gordon (Thanks, Loren Coleman!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Human Clock
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DATE: 01/14/2005 05:23:08 AM
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The Human Clock displays the current in strange photos taken by people all over the world:
A lot of photos have the time written on a crummy cardboard sign, while other photos might have the current time in a more edible format, such as olives. There are photos below sea level and ones over two miles above sea level.
Many people viewing this website end up sending in their own clock pictures, be they in an airplane, installing brakes, or on a playground. There are clock pictures from all over the world ranging from Outback Australia to Canada to Pakistan to Antarctica to Italy to Brazil. Other people travel around the American Southwest and end up taking a clock photo on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.
Link (Thanks, Eric Paulos!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Larval therapy
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DATE: 01/14/2005 06:06:54 AM
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Last fall, I posted an item about the use of maggots to treat post-operative infections. Now, the University of York in England is gearing up a $1.5 million clinical trial on the effectiveness of maggots in treating leg ulcers. The larvae are known for selectively eating dead tissue without bothering the healthy tissue. From the BBC News:
Trial co-ordinator Dr Pauline Raynor said: "Patients will have the chance to take part in an exciting study which will find out whether maggots really do heal ulcers more quickly.
"We need a total of 600 patients to come forward to take part in this important research.
"Of the people who have volunteered so far, squeamishness does not appear to be an issue at all."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Something to sink your teeth into
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DATE: 01/14/2005 06:34:27 AM
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Mark Dery recently underwent dental surgery and extracted a thought-provoking rant from the experience about a possible subconscious fear of teeth:
"Certainly, the mouth, as the biggest breach in the body's integrity, holds its own terrors (What's this big hole in the middle of my face?! What if something falls out? What if something falls in?). Not for nothing has the face of mythic horror been a slavering maw (Alien), a toothy portal welcoming you to the afterworld (Jaws).
Teeth are scarier still. TV dramas such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and police-procedural fiction such as Patricia Cornwell's novels about the forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta have forged an ubreakable link, in the mass imagination, between teeth and death. In such narratives, teeth and dental records are often all that remain of the murdered; mute witnesses to their owner's last moments, they testify to the victim's identity and, ultimately, help finger the perp.
Teeth are by definition uncanny, the point at which the skull beneath the skin erupts through the body's surface. It's the Return of the Repressed (© Sigmund Freud; all rights reserved)—in this case, the death we do our best to forget while we're busy living. A bony reminder that mortality is the subtext lurking just beneath the human comedy, teeth are the skeleton's insistence that it, too, is ready for its close-up."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Darth Tater: Mr Vader Potatohead
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DATE: 01/14/2005 06:40:28 AM
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Hasbro's latest Star Wars toy is total genius: a Darth Vader version of Mr Potatohead called Darth Tater! BAHAHAAHAHAHAA.
Link
(via Wonderland)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Images of the UK's stopped clocks
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DATE: 01/14/2005 06:43:45 AM
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Alfie sez:
StoppedClocks is a site I set up to generate some interest in repairing clocks around the UK.
However, images of stopped clocks and their locations, is the right start point, so we began the stopped clocks moblog at moblogUK - It's open to the public, and we'd really really appreciate people sending their Stopped Clocks Finds in to build the library. If people have a stopped clock in their area they can send it to stopped at moblg dot net.
(one thing too, we will be building a desktop clock made up of all the times displayed on stopped clocks, when we have enough of course.)
Link
(Thanks, Alfie!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Wacko Jacko Simulacro
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DATE: 01/14/2005 06:53:22 AM
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I was shocked and amazed to hear that no cameras are allowed in the courtroom for Michael Jackson's upcoming trial, but fortunately E! Entertainment and Britain's BSkyB have something in store that will add yet another layer of surreality to the whole thing. They're teaming up to create a daily half hour program where actors will recreate the previous day's courtroom highlights directly from transcripts. Link (via Fark)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Locksmiths freak out over "Safecracking for the computer scientist"
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DATE: 01/14/2005 07:04:48 AM
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A crypto researcher named Matt Blaze wrote a paper called "Safecracking for the computer scientist" that detailed the common vulnerabilities in safes in use today (Bruce Schneier called the paper "excellent").
The result, though, has been a round of incredible ire, bile and moaning from locksmiths and safe-maker, who have filled Usenet with angry recriminations with Blaze, who has committed the cardinal sin of explaining that their products don't work as advertised.
The real problem is that people like Blaze are in positions of trust in
society. Then he abuse it by publishing trade secrets in the name
of research.
When they do things like this and get away with it it gives other
peoples like him the idea that this is OK. We have to nip it in the
bud or soon there will be no security left after these intellectuals
get through with us.
Link
(via Schneier)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CBS uses DRM to "secure" Rathergate documents
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DATE: 01/14/2005 07:19:54 AM
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Ed Felten's just blogged a good piece reflecting on the news that CBS has pulled its original "Rathergate" PDFs and replaced them with versions that have Adobe's DRM turned on so that you can't copy their text, presumably to make it harder for critics to stuck damning quotations in their works.
This is yet another use of DRM that has nothing to do with copyright infringement. Nobody who wanted to copy the report as a whole would do so by cutting and pasting -- the report is enormous and the whole thing is available for free online anyway. The only plausible use of cut-and-paste is to quote from the report in order to comment, which is almost certainly fair use.
This sort of thing should not be a public policy problem; but the DMCA makes it one. If the law were neutral about DRM, we could just let the technology take its course. Unfortunately, U.S. law favors the publishers of DRMed material over would-be users of that material. For example, circumventing the DRM on the CBS report, in order to engage in fair-use commentary, may well violate the DMCA. (The DMCA has no fair-use exception, and courts have ruled that a DMCA violation can occur even if there is no copyright infringement.)
Worse yet, the DMCA may ban the tools needed to defeat this DRM technology. Dmitry Sklyarov was famously jailed by the FBI for writing a software tool that defeated this very same DRM technology; and his employer, Elcomsoft, was tried on criminal charges for selling fewer than ten copies of that tool.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Swiss banks finally publishing details of Holocaust victims' accounts
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DATE: 01/14/2005 07:25:58 AM
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After years of fighting, Swiss banks are finally publishing the details of some Holocaust victims who put their life's savings on deposit before being killed.
Swiss banks published on the Internet Thursday the names of 3,100 World War II-era account holders who might have been victims of Nazi persecution and are entitled to millions of dollars in deposits.
Holocaust survivors or their heirs have six months, until July 13, to submit formal claims before a resolution tribunal in Zurich, Switzerland.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Battlestar Blog
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DATE: 01/14/2005 08:17:48 AM
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Battlestar Galactica jumps from miniseries to series with a US debut tonight on SciFi network. Exec Producer and head writer Ron Moore is doing a Battlestar blog. His first entry tackles some fans' burning question of why Cylons appear every 33 minutes (instead of 34 or 48 or whatever) in the premiere. His answer: "No explanation, not even the attempt."
Link to blog, and link to previous BB posts: 1, 2, 3
BB reader Angela Rosin says, "Viewers in the UK have already seen half of this series on Sky One." And reader Jonathan Dabian says, "Viewers all over the *world* have seen the first eleven of thirteen episodes in the first season via Bittorrent. :) Best sci-fi on TV since Farscape/B5/Firefly/DS9. Take your pick. Best sci-fi on TV right now. Period."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Tron 2: this time, it's personal
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DATE: 01/14/2005 08:22:28 AM
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Disney is remaking Tron!
Disney has hired screenwriters Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal to fashion a remake of Tron, the 1982 film about a computer programmer who gets sucked into the parallel world of a computer program, Variety reported...
Sternthal told the trade paper that the new conceit is that the computer programmer gets trapped in a cyberworld, so that the film can utilize the Internet.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Web Zen: Album Cover Zen
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DATE: 01/14/2005 08:57:40 AM
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punk + new wave 8-tracks |
10 worst covers of all time |
museum of bad album covers |
album cover challenge |
knockoff project |
bollywood |
cover heaven |
unusual cover art |
bizarre records
Image: cover from of an old 8-track tapes. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: WSJ on the joy of moleskines
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DATE: 01/14/2005 10:10:17 AM
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Jeremy Wagstaff's latest column for the Asian Wall Street Journal is about bloggers who love moleskine notebooks. I don't subscribe to the WSJ so I haven't read the article (here's an excerpt), but Wagstaff has an excellent blog and he has a bunch of entries about the people he interviewed for his piece. This is what Merlin Mann had to say about Moleskines:
There's still a desire and a market out there for PDAs--particularly when they're well integrated with your mobile phone, like on the Treos. The problem is that there's a practical limit to how many little boxes you can lug around everywhere. Since the iPod has caught on, I think digital music players have displaced a lot of folks' PDAs from that coveted number two spot (right after mobile phones, of course). Carrying more than two or three digital devices requires either a bag or a relaxed disposition about looking like a bit of a dork.
Link (Thanks, Armand!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Technorati Tags bookmarklet
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DATE: 01/14/2005 10:52:52 AM
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Matt from Oddio has created a bookmarklet for adding Technorati Tags (see last night's post) to your blog entries, so that it's easy to associate the stuff you post on your blog with the pictures that others upload to Flickr and the links that get posted to del.icio.us.
Click on the bookmark, and a small prompt will appear asking for tags. Once you enter the tags, another box will appear with the code written for the technorati links. Copy this code and paste it into your blogging software of choice.
The links will be surrounded by a <span>, with a class attribute of “technoratitag". This way, you can add rules to your stylesheet to style the links differently than normal links. If you don’t add any style rules, the links will look like any normal links on your blog.
Link
(Thanks, Matt!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Robot quilts by Kathy Weaver
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DATE: 01/14/2005 04:34:16 PM
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Fancifully folksy quilts that depict robots in an array of odd situations. Shown here, Robot Visits The Farm.
Artist Kathy Weaver says, "In my work,the robot's setting is that of a tilted stage or shadow box and in this environment the robot is central as a translator of events, an alter ego, a doppelganger. The robot can also be an observer, a soothsayer, a malcontent or a destructor."
Me, I'm partial to the destructor kind. What say ye now, great oracle of gingham, googly eyes, and cute li'l buttons?
Link. See also Ms. Weaver's "Guns Are Us" quilt series.
(Thanks, Rob).
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The first Boing Boing ebook
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DATE: 01/14/2005 04:45:59 PM
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A while ago one of my writer friends sent me a 40-page-long account of his cross-country driving trip to Florida to take a job. His tale enthralled me. He had to drive through a nasty hurricane to get there, which was interesting, but that's not the best part of the story. The best part is his observations and interactions with interesting characters along the way.
I asked him if he'd like to try selling it on Boing Boing as an ebook, and he agreed. So he made a nice PDF file that includes the story and a couple of color photos. For personal reasons, he wishes to remain anonymous. About all I can say about him is that he has written many fiction and non fiction books and magazine articles.
As an experiment, we are selling the ebook for $2.50. The title is A Transcontinental Odyssey to the Dysfunctional Appendage of North America: Cowboy Gasoline in the Eye of the Storm.
You can read a free sample here, and you can buy the book with a credit card or PayPal here.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Fake Thai Disneyland
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DATE: 01/14/2005 05:45:55 PM
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Check out this four-part photo-essay of a fake Disneyland in Thailand, complete with counterfeit Mickey Mouse gift-shop, Space Mountain and Fantasyland.
Link
(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Assholes are scandalous, says PTO
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DATE: 01/15/2005 08:06:02 AM
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A trademark applicant tried to register a mark for Asshole's Guide to... (think: [topic here] For Dummies), and the Trademark Office rejected it as "scandalous", so they appealed. The Appeals board agreed that it was scandalous too, based on an old doctrine in trademark law that trademarks can't be scandalous (i.e., can't trademark American flags on condoms, and so on). But in the "oh-sweet-irony" department: Wal*Mart sells one of the books in the Assholes series. Link (Thanks, Jason!)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: You must really love lemon chicken
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DATE: 01/15/2005 08:08:25 AM
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Tian, a BoingBoing reader and a translator of hipster chinese character tattoos worn by people who have no idea what they mean, says: "In case you missed NBC's sitcom on Jan. 11th, there is a story about Bowie's (Eddie Winslow from Family Matters) Chinese character tattoo. I have posted video clips from the show on my site." Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Let's all have unmarried but totally legal sex in Virginia!
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DATE: 01/15/2005 08:20:22 AM
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Sex-starved singles in Virginia, rejoice! Today's Washington Post reports that the state's supreme Court has at last struck down an archaic law prohibiting the getting of it on between unmarried personages. IOW, straight people who haven't taken vows can now do the humpty hump without having to fear The Man.
The full opinion is available on the VA Supreme Court website. In short: Virginia singles now have a right to Due Process under last year's Supreme Court sodomy law decision -- and that makes the Virginia law unconstitutional. The state's anti-sodomy laws are still intact (limiting the sexual freedom of gay folks), but some believe a test case will soon follow, in an attempt to challenge that stature.
"I can't say we're pleased we made Virginia safe for fornication," said Neil Kuchinsky, Martin's attorney. "Though some will thank me, I'm sure.' "
Link (Thanks, Morrighan)
Update: BB reader Myles says, "Xeni, I just wanted to point out the irony in your post about Virginia sexx laws; Virginia has always billed itself as Virginia is for Lovers." That one's been remixed a few times -- see this snapshot I took at Burning Man a couple years ago. BB reader Noah reminds us that the tourism motto of the state's capital has long been "Richmond: Easy To Love," and the observant will also note that the tagline on the state's travel website tagline is: Meet Virginia: She's open year 'round. Perhaps now that people actually can fuck freely there, we'll see a round of new state tourism slogans extoling the virtues of cold showers, chastity belts, and the notion that true love waits.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Wikipedia entry for fictional chemical substances
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DATE: 01/15/2005 08:25:09 AM
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In wikipedia, we find this comprehensive list of fictional chemical substances from films, television, books and the scientific community. Included: Administratium, Orichalcum, Vibranium, and my favorite: "Upsidaisium" (from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show). Link (Thanks, striatic)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Space sounds: Huygens probe audio
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DATE: 01/15/2005 08:30:00 AM
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Audio from the Huygens probe that landed on Titan yesterday. File #2 captures the sound of the craft's radar during the descent to the surface of the moon -- kind of a nice beat, actually.
Link (Thanks Ruby)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Pornspirational graffiti
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DATE: 01/15/2005 08:03:17 PM
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Say it with spray: a XXX street art project called cuminthestreets. The title may have something to do with bukkake, but I think it's probably just an oblique reference to cumin (Cuminum cyminum), an aromatic spice popular in Mexican and Spanish cooking. Which would make this totally worksafe.
Link to gallery. (thanks, jan)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Here come the warm jets
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DATE: 01/16/2005 08:27:47 AM
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You may recall a previous BoingBoing post about Colorcalm's ambient video utilities for DVD players to soothe frazzled postmodern minds. The company recently struck a deal with JetBlue. The low-fare airline will now offer a a dedicated in-flight digital video channel consisting entirely of an optic and sonic tranquilizer called Skies. "The Colorcalm channel on JetBlue, which will be available free of charge, consists of continuous, soothing, multi-colored skies spanning a full spectrum of 36 PANTONE shades set to classical music."
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Demolition Derby on Ice
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DATE: 01/16/2005 08:36:41 AM
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A 150-kilometre-long iceberg is expected to smash into the end of an Antarctic glacier sometime within the next couple of days.
It is an event so large that the best seat in the house is in space: a massive iceberg is on a collision course with a floating glacier near the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica. NASA satellites have witnessed the 80-mile-long B-15A iceberg moving steadily towards the Drygalski Ice Tongue.
Link to NASA website with groovy animation, Link to BBC story, Link to a more recent item in Vermont's Times Argus. (Thanks, michael)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Maria Gracia Subercaseaux
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DATE: 01/16/2005 09:18:05 AM
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Deliciously stark nude studies and some sort of mass kiss-in with Pepsodent ads on flags are part of what you'll see in this gallery of work by Chilean photographer Maria Gracia Subercaseaux.
Link, horrible flash interface with annoying sound, but the photos are sublime. (via indienudes)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Virtual Mr Toad ride
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DATE: 01/16/2005 09:48:01 AM
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When Walt Disney World's Mr Toad ride shut down to make way for a Pooh ride, diehard fans were heartbroken. One fan set out to recreate the entire ride as a 3D computer-generated environment. That project is bearing fruit now, with amazing ride-through videos of parts of the ride appearing now. This is very promising indeed.
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(via The Disney Blog)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Santa Conquers the Martians on Internet Archive
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DATE: 01/16/2005 09:49:15 AM
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Mark sez,
There are some gems on the Internet Archive. I just watched the 1964 film, "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" and it is amazing.
Santa's weapons of choice include toys, maniacal giggling, and the "Christmas spirit."
The film is actually highly educational. Here are some things I learned from watching "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians": The children of Mars are addicted to Earth television which makes them stop eating. Martian women refer to their husbands as "master." There are good Martians and there are bad Martians. (Good Martians are trying to spread the Christmas spirit while Bad Martians have mustaches and try to stop them.) Earth children are resourceful.. when kidnapped to Mars they can disable Martian radar cloaking systems. Santa Claus is also resourceful.. he can crawl through ducts to escape being ejected out of airlocks. Also, Martian kids are just like Earth kids. They want dolls and baseball bats!
Being a firm believer in Martians and Santa Claus, I thought I was watching a piece of historical documentation. Then the film simply became too unbelievable. After Santa was kidnapped, the leaders of the countries of Earth met at the UN to work together to come up with a solution!!!
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Star-Wars-y sand-tank with giant stereo for $20k
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DATE: 01/16/2005 10:04:08 AM
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The JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank is an open-ended custom-made, Star-Wars-oid personal tank that carries up to five people at 40mph over sand. It comes with a giant 400w stereo and a camera for recording the reactions of the people you drive past. Only 20 grand!
Link
(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory speaking at Spanish CC launch in Madrid Monday-week
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DATE: 01/16/2005 10:20:27 AM
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On the 24th, I'll be participating in the launch of the Spanish Creative Commons licenses in Madrid, appearing on a roster with a number of speakers who will talk about how CC licenses can be used and what good they are to Spain.
On Monday the 24th there will be a double presentation of Creative Commons Spain in Madrid: a press conference and a conference-panel. As the "real" presentation took place in Barcelona last October the 1st, the Madrid events will be a party and an accounting of the first 100 days of the CC-es licenses.
In the morning we wll have a press conference, at 12,30 at the Residencia de Estudiantes (Calle Pinar, 23). The speakers will be collaborators in the licenses and users, and our special guest Cory Doctorow (applause). In the evening, at 19.30 at the CĂrculo de Bellas Artes, Cory Doctorow will give a speech with a very long title about the copyright techology wars, and we will have a animated debate with a not so long title about "what will artists live on?". The list of participants follows below.
Link
(Thanks, Javier!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Nailing the cause of a headache
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DATE: 01/16/2005 02:00:41 PM
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Colorado construction worker Patrick Lawler visited a dentist about a toothache a few days ago. It turned out that a four-inch nail was embedded in Lawler's skull and he didn't even realize it. The nail entered his brain through his mouth when a nailgun backfired the week before. After a four hour surgery, Lawler is recovering just fine. From an Associated Press report:
"This is the second one we've seen in this hospital where the person was injured by the nail gun and didn't actually realize the nail had been imbedded in their skull," neurosurgeon Sean Markey told KUSA-TV in Denver.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Mr. Bill, teen idol
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DATE: 01/17/2005 05:33:17 AM
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Dig these slinky photos of Bill Gates from Teen Beat, circa 1983 1984 1985. Link (Thanks Aurgasm!)
UPDATE: Mark was the first to point out that the Macintosh on the desk behind him would indicate that this photo was taken in 1984 at the earliest.
UPDATE: BB reader Jennifer Dickert points to a Museum of Hoaxes post stating that celebrity photographer Deborah Feingold snapped these images in 1985. There's no evidence they appeared in Teen Beat. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: U Can't Graph This
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DATE: 01/17/2005 05:49:57 AM
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BoingBoing pal Jen Collins points to this Geocities webpage offering a series of songs by the Algebra class at Valley View High School -- the first of which is sung to the tune of MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This -- and says:
I am the last person to be suggesting anyone try to improve their math skills... but this just reminds me of a couple of really fantastic teachers I had when I was a kid. My Latin teacher played Latin Jeopardy with us! At the time I thought she was batty but she's the reason I never forget my Latin prepositions.
Link to Math Music performed by the Math Boys of Denville, NJ (replete with splendid animated gifs)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Tiny, self-assembling rat robots
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DATE: 01/17/2005 05:54:10 AM
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In what is hailed as a possible first step toward self-assembling devices, cells from rats grown on tiny silicon chips acted as tiny robots, researchers announced yesterday.
They described a new method for attaching living cells to silicon chips. They then and got the combined entities to move like tiny, primitive legs. Writing in the journal Nature Materials, Jianzhong Xi, Jacob Schmidt and Carlo Montemagno of the University of California Los Angeles said it is possible to make such devices, starting with a single cell "seeded" on a specially treated silicon chip. They used rat heart cells in one experiment and created a tiny device that moved on its own as the cells contracted. A second device looked like a minuscule pair of frog legs. "A microdevice had two 'legs' extending from the body at 45-degree angles; each leg had a 'foot' extending at a 45-degree angle," the researchers wrote. It may eventually be possible to grow self-assembling machines using the method, they said.
Link (Thanks, Cowicide)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Roll-your-own RSS for movie junkies
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DATE: 01/17/2005 05:56:09 AM
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Boing Boing reader CJM says,
I'm a subscriber to the Hollywood Video MVP program. This is something similar to NetFlix, but is limited to movies that are 4-6 weeks past DVD release. I'm tired of going into the store not knowing what has been recently added to the MVP list. Which means that at times it can be a waste of time to stop in. One thing that is nice, is that they provide a list of new items to the MVP on their front site. So, I thought I'd whip up a quick RSS generator for what they are adding to the MVP. I also decided that it'd be easy enough to do the rest of their sections as well. The list is below, parsed from the main Hollywood video website. Hollywood video, you'd be very cool if you would do this yourself. Since the lists off of Hollywood Video won't be changing too often, I will only be re-generating these files once per day (noon PST).
Link
And reader mediamelt says,
On the subject of custom RSS feeds, I'm a huge movie news nut (as noted by my film-geek centric blog) that grew tired of scouring tens of movie-news websites a day for the latest tidbits. Unfortunately, most movie news sites are extremely behind the times in terms of web technology and don't provide RSS feeds, so I wrote myself a little link ripper to be fed onto my blog for all to read and enjoy. The result? Headlines from over 70+ movie news websites, updated hourly, displayed on one page, most from sites that don't provide RSS feeds themselves. Version 3 is already in development and will feature independent RSS feeds for each site, as well as "keyworded" RSS feeds, "genre" feeds, and one massive feed containing every headline from every site. If that's not information overload made easy, I don't know what is. PHP/MySQL programmers with free time who want to pad their portfolio needed :)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: All your phonecam pics are belong to Verizon
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DATE: 01/17/2005 05:59:20 AM
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Tireless wireless pundit Glenn Fleishman says:
Verizon Wireless is being sued because they disabled access to Bluetooth file transfers on their version of the Motorola v710. Mind you, I'm not sure they ever promised that Bluetooth file transfer would be enabled; seems a little obvious, but Motorola doesn't think so. Essentially, Verizon has said, "Those photos you took? Ours. Unless you pay for a data plan or photo plan or some kind of plan to get your photos off your phone. Ta-ta!" Subscribers may be disgruntled, but unless Verizon Wireless misled, this may be a perfectly reasonable stance. As it would be for subscribers to only purchase cell phones with Bluetooth that's unlocked from other cell providers...
Link
Update:
An anonymous reader says, "Here's a workaround. Mobile PhoneTools version 3.0 software CD plus USB Cable - 98653H. It's compatible with the V710 (according to the page) It's a data cable and the software to link your phone to a PC. I use it to back up my phone book, keep my calendar up-to-date, pull photos off my phone and put in MP3 files for ringtones." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Betel is bad news
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DATE: 01/17/2005 06:33:07 AM
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When Mark linked to David-Michel Davies' blog post about his paan experience in India, a bunch of readers wrote in to warn us of the danger of cancer associated with betel treats. The new issue of Science News has a feature article about that very thing. Recent studies have linked betel chewing to oral cancer. Meanwhile, the habit is rising in popularity.
"Aggressive advertising, targeted at the middle class and adolescents since the early 1980s, has largely enhanced the sales," notes Beatrice Secretan, a health researcher who contributed to the 300-page Monograph on Betel-quid and Areca-nut Chewing published in October 2004 by WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer, based in Lyon, France.
"The situation," she says, "is similar to the real start of the tobacco epidemic, with industrially manufactured cigarettes, at the beginning of the 20th century."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Did Renaissance painters use projectors?
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DATE: 01/17/2005 06:53:01 AM
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Several years ago, artist David Hockney published a controversial book claiming that some famed Renaissance painters may have used optical projection systems to achieve the amazing realism achieved on their canvases. Stanford university physicist and art historian David Stork calls bullshit on Hockney's theory. Stork used computer imaging software to determine the source and intensity of the light depicted in the painting. In a scientific paper, Stork claims that the only light source was a candle. From a New Scientist report:
(Stork) also says that given the type of lenses or concave mirrors available at the time, the brightness in the scene would have been reduced around 1000-fold at the canvas, making any projected image all but impossible to see and trace, unless several dozen oil lamps or hundreds of candles lit the scene.
As well as showing that the shadows cast can be plotted back to the candle, Stork's software indicates that the way light rays are reflected off Joseph's head are consistent with the candle being de la Tour's only light source.
The physicist Charles Falco, who collaborated with Hockney on his research, argues back that the artist probably painted the shadows the way they wanted them to look, not how the projector casted them.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Ghost busted
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DATE: 01/17/2005 08:58:03 AM
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After weeks of hearing footsteps and slamming doors in the middle of the night, a wealthy Austrian man became freaked out that his castle was haunted. So he called the cops. The ghost turned out to be the wife of one of the man's employees. It's not entirely clear why she was trying to scare the hell out of her husband's boss. From The Independent:
An unexplained grievance had provoked her campaign of ghostly disquiet. Police said she was motivated by "a personal rancour" against the manager of the cultural centre in the estate.
She was convicted on Friday of harassment and damage to the castle, Italian newspapers reported.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Plastics from orange peels
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DATE: 01/17/2005 09:07:52 AM
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Researchers at Cornell University have devised a process to make plastic from citrus fruits and carbon dioxide. They developed a catalyst to cause a reaction between oil from orange peels and carbon dioxide that produces a new polymer with characteristics similar to polystyrene.
"Almost every plastic out there, from the polyester in clothing to the plastics used for food packaging and electronics, goes back to the use of petroleum as a building block," (professor Geoffrey) Coates observes. "If you can get away from using oil and instead use readily abundant, renewable and cheap resources, then that's something we need to investigate. What's exciting about this work is that from completely renewable resources, we were able to make a plastic with very nice qualities."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Time cover from 1952 shows Titan space probe landing
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DATE: 01/17/2005 09:34:01 AM
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More than fifty years before the Huygens probe landed on Saturn's moon, Titan, Time magazine had a cover story about the possibility. Great illustration by one of the best illustrators ever, Boris Artzybasheff. Link (Thanks, amber figbee!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Psychedelic gurus MP3 torrent
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DATE: 01/17/2005 09:36:15 AM
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Lucas Emery sez: "I have seeded a torrent file of all the "Trip Receptacle" mp3s you guys linked to yesterday to test out my Blog Torrent server (thanks downhillbattle!). Lots of good stuff from Terence McKenna, Alexander Shulgin, Timothy Leary, etc. -- not to mention great sample material for your next psytrace epic. Get it while it's hot!" Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Region Coding Electronics and Ink Cartridges
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DATE: 01/17/2005 09:58:40 AM
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Mister Jalopy sez:
These sinister bastards have region coded HP inkjet printers to only accept region appropriate ink cartridges. Like a $56 Bic pen, restricting use to a single country and then saying you are not trying to make money on it.
...H-P ink cartridges sold in Europe are becoming much more expensive than equivalent ones in the U.S. "We are not trying to make money on this," Mr. Holm says...
May 1,000,000 hardware hackers descend on your tent. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Collection agency scam
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DATE: 01/17/2005 10:58:31 AM
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After Bill B. read my entry about my trouble with GTC telecom, he sent me his own horror story:
I had an experience close to yours. I received a letter from ATT Wireless (with whom I have NEVER had an account) saying I owed around $45 . I called and was told it had been passed to a collection agency. Never mind I hadn't had an account with TT&T Wireless.If I had I still never would have received a bill because during the time I was supposedly billed I WORKED for AT&T and got free AT&T calls!) I called the collection agency and I told them the story-they didn't care. They wanted their money. I ended up checking my credit report and they had reported it on my report! I was livid. So I researched the BBB (http://www.atlanta.bbb.org/) and found that the collection agency was a scam outfit that was doing this to everyone they contacted (they had over 350 bad entries in the database). I demanded the credit reporting agency remove the entry (after telling them the story ).I then contacted the Attorney General for Georgia and told an legal aid what had happened. The credit reporting agency removed the entry and the Attorney General is investigating the collection agency.
I have been noticing more instances of red tape than ever before. Technology doesn't seem to be helping.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Betel nut essay
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DATE: 01/17/2005 12:07:44 PM
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Here's another westerner's take on betel nut, a popular recreational stimulant in Southern Asian and Pacific countries.
What is it like to chew betel? Enthusiasts recognize three delightful aspects of the experience: the exhilarating lift; the mysterious flavor; and the cleansing, compelling salivation.
In the rare instances where scholarly literature mentions its subjective effects, the news about betel is uniformly good: "It imparts the... repeatedly described sensation of well-being, good humor, excitation, and comfort...The consciousness, of course, remains unimpaired, and the chewer's capacity for work is in no respect affected." (Hesse). "It creates a feeling of energy, appeases hunger and assuages pain." (Henry Brownrigg, Betel Cutters from the Samuel Eilenberg Collection).
These authors don't lie: betel makes you feel strong. Your chest feels broader, your inhalations deeper, your back straighter; and an almost electric invigoration seems to run through your bones. This is a good, healthful, and positive sensation.
Link (Thanks, John!)
More Boing Boing betel coverage here:
Taiwanese betel nut vendor girls told to put clothes back on
History of betel chewing
Interesting Indian delicacy: paan
Betel is bad news
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Experiment with the post office
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DATE: 01/17/2005 12:27:09 PM
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Jeff Van Bueren wrote an article for DirectCreative about sending unusual things through the mail to see what would happen.
We sent a variety of unpackaged items to U.S. destinations, appropriately stamped for weight and size, as well as a few items packaged as noted. We sent items that loosely fit into the following general categories: valuable, sentimental, unwieldy, pointless, potentially suspicious, and disgusting. We discovered that although some items were never delivered, most of the objects of even highly unusual form did get delivered, as long as the items had a definitely ample value of stamps attached. The Postal Service appears to be amazingly tolerant of the foibles of its public and seems occasionally willing to relax specific postal regulations.
Link (Thanks, Ivy!)
Better link with photos here. (Thanks, Andrew!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Committee to Protect Bloggers
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DATE: 01/17/2005 03:59:41 PM
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The Committee to Protect Bloggers is a new clearinghouse for information on bloggers who are punished, threatened or otherwise disadvantaged for what they post on their blogs.
The Committee has four primary spheres of activity.
* CPB will serve as a clearinghouse for information on incarcerated members of our community, as well as those whose lives have been taken from them because of their enthusiasm for the free exchange of information that blogging allows.
* CPB will serve as a pressure group to force unrecalcitrant governments to free imprisoned bloggers, and make restitution for tortured and murdered ones.
* CPB will bring to bear the formidable communicative power of the blogosphere to keep
pressure on governments to stop
CPB will act as direct agents in negotiations to free imprisoned bloggers.
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(Thanks, danah!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: How copyright is killing culture
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DATE: 01/17/2005 04:02:51 PM
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Today's Globe and Mail contains an amazing, disturbing article about documentary films that are disappearing from the world because the filmmakers can't afford to re-clear copyrights to the archival footage they contain.
The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive.
This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With no new copies allowed to go on sale, "the whole thing, for all practical purposes, no longer exists," says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley.
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(Thanks, Mom, and everyone else who submitted this!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: TV networks fiddle schedules to break PVRs
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DATE: 01/17/2005 04:09:02 PM
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Major networks are changing the way they schedule TV shows, adding an extra minute or two at the end of their programs so that TiVos and other PVRs miss important sections, and so they can charge extra for advertising:
The padding also discourages viewers from clicking their remotes, under the theory they'll be less likely to switch channels if they've already missed the start of a competing program.
ABC is unapologetic. "It's not my job to make it easy for people to leave our network," says ABC scheduling chief Jeff Bader. "Our whole goal is to get people to stay with us from 8 to 11."
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(via JWZ)
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Blog kitsch t-shirt
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DATE: 01/17/2005 04:19:42 PM
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The fine print on this satirical tee reads: "She wanted to stop reading it- but she had nothing better to do! Produced by average people who seem to think their lives are interesting. Filmed in thrilling HTML-O-Scope with exciting new fonts!"
Link (Thanks, Wayne Correia).
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Google launches Picasa 2
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DATE: 01/17/2005 05:59:38 PM
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Picasa -- the free photo-sharing service recently bought by Google -- just went live with version 2.0 about an hour ago.
Included in the new edition, a collage-generating tool (an example is shown at left), photographic editing features, CD burning, sending pictures with Gmail, and a Blogger button for automated publishing to your you-know-what.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Freedom to Connect, March 30-31 in DC
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DATE: 01/17/2005 08:09:12 PM
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Just announced: the "F2C" conference, which takes place in DC on March 30 and 31:
[F]or all who care about -- and are affected by -- network connectivity, economics, applications and policy. F2C is where communications policy meets networking technology, network economics, networked applications, and network construction and operation. F2C is dedicated to the proposition that strong networks build strong democracies, and vice versa.
The future of telecommunications starts now; there's a new U.S. Telecom Act in the works, there's unbundling in Europe, fast fiber in Asia, wireless across Africa and networks a-building in cities and villages around the world. Lead the discussion. Shape the debate. Assert your Freedom to Connect.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Mississippi State Tax Commission phone message
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DATE: 01/17/2005 09:11:44 PM
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BoingBoing reader Adam Hirsch says,
The offices of the State of Mississippi Tax Comission were closed Monday, and they left a helpful message for any telephone callers curious as to why they were closed. I recorded this (short, 100k mp3) myself, my mouth hanging open. (The number for the office is 601-923-7000)
Link to MP3. For those unable to download the file, here's the punch line (which should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever *been* to Mississippi): the state evidently refuses to observe a day of remembrance for Dr. Martin Luther King without dedicating the very same day to the memory of Robert E. Lee.
This reminds me of a joke that a white, southern-born, high school pal used to say over and over again, in an effort to ridicule the ubiquitous racist idiocy that makes the aforementioned voicemail possible.
person A (in heavy drawl): "The South's gonna do it agin!"
person B: What, lose?
Update BB reader Waldo Jaquith adds, "Virginia doesn't just make sex illegal -- we also celebrate "Lee-Jackson-King Day" every year. You know that old trio! Three peas in a pod, they were! Crazy old law? No -- we just started the tradition in 2000." Link, and link to WaPo story.
And reader AJ Johnson says,
A correction: Lee-Jackson Day and King Day have only been *split* since a law was passed in 2000. Lee's holiday dates back to 1889, and Jackson was added in 1904, because both of them were born around that time of January. Martin Luther King Day happened to be created on the same day (another birthdate coincidence), so he was simply added on to the holiday Virginia had been celebrating for years. To reiterate, it was King who was lumped in with the Confederates (and Virginians) rather than the other way around.
As of 2001, however, to prevent misunderstandings, Lee-Jackson Day was moved back to the previous Friday, upsetting many who felt that it moved the holiday further from the Confederates' birthdays, and were afraid that with two holidays in the space of a week, the Friday, non-national holiday would be overlooked, particularly since adding a new holiday apparently costs the state $900,000.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: 1850s-era account of London's working classes
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DATE: 01/18/2005 12:21:19 AM
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Kim sez,
In the early 1850s, "Punch" journalist Henry Mayhew began visiting London's poverty-stricken East End and documenting the lives and careers of folks eking out their livings on starvation's edge.
These in-their-own-words descriptions of daily toil are all the more fascinating for the ingenius services provided. Want an exotic bird? A clever con-artist will hand paint a drab domestic peeper, which will sing in your window until overwhelmed by its toxic coat. Or perhaps you require chemicals with which to tan leather? Just hire an old lady to come by every few hours with a can full of dog crap, the #1 substance for the job. (This was one of the better paying occupations of the lower classes.)
The University of Virginia has digitized Mayhew's rare and fascinating work, illuminating the secret histories and practices of costermongers, ginger beer men, love song sellers, lucifer match dealers and all their colorful, forgotten peers.
Link
(Thanks, Kim!)
Update: Phil sez, "Further to your post about the University of Virginia digitising Henry Mayhew's excellent 1850s accounts of London's poor... They only appear to have the first volume. Tufts have had the full four volumes available online for at least a couple of years. They also include scans of images from the books -- example.
"In case the full volumes are a bit daunting, I blogged a couple of my favourite extracts a while back, one about a man fighting rats for money (with his mouth!) and one about the hilarious tricks early photographic shops used to get up to with customers who weren't accustomed to seeing photos."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: PC used to exhaust problem-space of Grand Theft Auto
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DATE: 01/18/2005 12:24:26 AM
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This hacker wired his PS2's controller into his PC, then wrote software that had the controller step through every possible move in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, so that he discovered every Easter Egg and cheat.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Toronto subway station badges
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DATE: 01/18/2005 12:56:46 AM
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Dory sez, "The folks at Spacing Magazine (the publication of the Toronto Public Space Committee) have just released their line of snazzy one-inch buttons dispalying the name and tile-work from all the Toronto subway stations. They're beautiful."
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(Thanks, Dory!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Why die?
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DATE: 01/18/2005 03:28:39 AM
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British computer scientist Aubrey de Grey is convinced that human beings can live forever. So he taught himself natural science to figure out the scientific steps he believes must be taken to make that happen. Sherwin Nulan, author of How We Die, has written a long, deep profile of de Grey in the new issue of Technology Review.
"As he surveyed the literature, de Grey reached the conclusion that there are seven distinct ingredients in the aging process, and that emerging understanding of molecular biology shows promise of one day providing appropriate technologies by which each of them might be manipulated—“perturbed,” in the jargon of biologists. He bases his certainty that there are only seven such factors on the fact that no new factor has been discovered in some twenty years, despite the flourishing state of research in the field known as biogerontology, the science of aging; his certainty that he is the man to lead the crusade for endless life is based on his conception that the qualification needed to accomplish it is the mindset he brings to the problem: the goal-driven orientation of an engineer rather than the curiosity-driven orientation of the basic scientists who have made and will continue to make the laboratory discoveries that he intends to employ. He sees himself as the applied scientist who will bring the benisons of molecular biology to practical use. In the analogous terminology often used by historians of medicine, he is the clinician who will bring the laboratory to the bedside."
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Grafedia
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DATE: 01/18/2005 03:55:30 AM
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From my journal at TheFeature:
Grafedia is a new form of multimedia graffiti developed by John Geraci, a student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, that transforms graffiti tags into hyperlinked tags for the real world. Grafedia is a word written on any physical surface that is linked to rich media content online. If you see a grafedia tag, you send an email message to that word "@grafedia.net" and the related content is emailed to your mobile device, or anywhere else you receive mail.
Anyone can become a "Grafedia artist" by sending a word and the media file to the Grafedia server. For example, I created a Grafedia tag for the word "mahole." Just email manhole@grafedia.net and see what comes back!
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Two heads not better than one
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DATE: 01/18/2005 04:10:12 AM
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Physician Jan Bondeson, author of such excellent books as Buried Alive and A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, wrote an overview for Fortean Times about "two-headed babies" of the past and present.
The sad story of the ‘Two-Headed Baby’ (born in the Dominican Republic in 2003) was a five-day wonder all over the world. From Maine to Mexico and from Stockholm to Sydney, newspapers gave their views on this singular event. Some papers tried their best to present a factual account, although struggling hard to understand the medical facts, while others painted a gory and sensational picture of the brave little girl and the horrific operation she was to undergo. Without exception, the press coverage was ill-informed, indicative of the failure of modern ‘medical journalism’ in which the reporters appear to understand very little of what they are writing about. In this unfortunate situation, they have a tendency to rely on dubious authorities, like a local ‘expert’ on conjoined twins who held a press conference after what must have been a very brief session reading up on his subject.
Following this dubious authority, the world’s press unanimously regurgitated the false information that although there had been some previous instances of this malformation, none of them had been live-born.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Victorian film
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DATE: 01/18/2005 05:01:59 AM
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Who's Who of Victorian Cinema is a comprehensive collection of obscure info about filmmaking at the end of the 19th century. The site contains biographies of several hundred pioneering directors, a technical essay, and a really interesting survey of the first cameras and projectors. I really dig the categories that the pioneers are grouped into, such as magicians, engineers, propagandists and evangelists, scientists, astronomers and chronophotographers, and fairground exhibitors. I only wish the site had clips from the movies to watch!
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Jenna Hawks Korean Gadgets
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DATE: 01/18/2005 06:43:22 AM
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BB reader Oblivia says,
Chosun Ilbo reports that Korean OEM manufacturer Reigncom (manufacturer of the iriver device) has enlisted Jenna Jameson to snare the testosterone set. Pornography can be an effective fuel in the uptake and advance of new technology (still photography, VCR, the Intarweb) and can represent the shortest path to profitablity - this is no news. I find it interesting that they make the connection so explicit with their Personal Media Player (PMP) ads. But the ad is a bit icky. The portability of the PMP has allowed this loser the freedom to watch porn at a really well lit bar or cafe when, really, he should go back to his mom's closet from whence he came? And is that a total look of disdain on Jenna's face?
Why yes, dearie, of course it is. Does Jenna Jameson's face ever *not* bear a look of total disdain? Looks like this pre-dates her new brunette 'do, though. Link
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Costco offering Picasso originals online for $40K
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DATE: 01/18/2005 07:19:17 AM
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BoingBoing reader Tim Farley says:
Don't know if the explanation for this is similar to those Target items from a few weeks back, but check out this entry at the CostCo website. "Original Crayon Drawing by Pablo Picasso -- $39,999.99 -- Item # 872759 Shipping & Handling included" And strangely enough, it still has the box to set quantity. I'll take three!
Link
Reader Daniel Geduld adds,
I just thought you might like to know that despite their reputation as a place to find deals, the Costco's Picasso drawing is ludicrously overpriced. In his later life, Picasso became the most obnoxious sort of celebrity- one who uses his fame to never have to pay for anything. He used to make these little sketches, 10 to 12 a day, and tried to pass them off to pay for his luxurious lifestyle.
More than one very expensive restaurant was conned into receiving one of these in exchange for a banquet for Picasso and his friends.
Currently, you can get a much larger and, in my opinion, more interesting Picasso on eBay for 250 British pounds. Link. There are also endlessly available hand-signed picasso lithographs which can be bought on eBay for a few hundred dollars. Now if Costco had something from the blue period, I'd be impressed.
And reader Matt Richardson says:
In regard to the comment made by the reader about Picasso making sketches to use as currency: John Lovitz played the part of Picasso in a Saturday Night Live sketch where he tries to pay for everything by sketching on napkins. I saw the sketch a while back and thought it was funny, but didn't realize how true it was.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Keychain-sized plants are big in Japan
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DATE: 01/18/2005 08:51:00 AM
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These "keychain plants" are said to be all the rage in Japan, though if I had a pair of vending-machine knickers for every time I've heard that, I'd be a very panty-rich person indeed.
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(via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Office supplies cum deadly weapons
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DATE: 01/18/2005 08:54:11 AM
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This page contains the winners and runners-up from Bleach Eating Freaks' "office bricolage" contest, in which contestants were asked to construct the most lethal weapons that thye could from everyday materials that could be found in their offices.
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(Thanks, Ben!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: TSA's list of items you can and can't take on a plane
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DATE: 01/18/2005 09:14:26 AM
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I like to bring nail clippers with me when I fly, because it drives me crazy when I get a hangnail and I don't have any way to clip it off. I usually end up ripping it off, which hurts.
On two occasions, TSA employees at the airport security screening area have taken my nail clippers away. They were ordinary nail clippers, no knives or scissors attached.
So I was surprised to see that nail clippers and nail files are not forbidden items, according to the TSA's own published list. You can also bring metal butter knives, knitting needles, blunt-tipped scissors, and toy weapons ("if not realistic replicas") in your unchecked baggage.
Maybe I'l bring a copy of this list with me the next time I travel. It might come in handy. Link
UPDATE:
Bill Ballantyne sez:
"1. Corkscrews are allowed?! I noticed this when I was checking the list for a trip last summer (wanted to make sure my 13 year old daughter didn't get mistaken as a terrorist!). I think a corkscrew could inflict way more damage than nail clippers or other prohibited items. It turned out she made it through the checkpoint with her folding embroidery scissors (which did not have rounded tips!)
"2. TSA employees can determine specific articles may be prohibited, even if allowed according to the list. Even though you and I and most intelligent people wouldn't waste the time or mental effort to determine the dangerous potential of nail clippers, most TSA employees probably consider (or have been told that) nail clippers (and hopefully corkscrews) are dangerous enough to prohibit them.
"3. Furthermore, you can be prosecuted for bringing prohibited items to a checkpoint, even accidentally. Horrific conclusion: Any passenger can be subject to prosecution for almost any reason, since the TSA employee can make call prohibiting any specific item."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Animation director improves Polar Express characters
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DATE: 01/18/2005 09:31:07 AM
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Ward Jenkins is an animation director in Atlanta, GA. On his blog called, The Ward-O-Matic, he wrote a couple of lengthy posts about The Polar Express, in which he included some of his Photoshop tweaked fixes to the famously zombie-like characters in the movie. He says that folks from Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, Vinton Studios, and other sites are commenting on his work.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Boing Boing e-book payment system working again
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DATE: 01/18/2005 09:55:33 AM
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I've got the payment system working for the Boing Boing e-book we started selling on Saturday. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hallucinogenic toads sold in breeding pairs
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DATE: 01/18/2005 10:21:42 AM
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(This reminds me of a great story Jim Leftwich wrote for bOING bOING about a psychedelic toad farmer. I'll see if I can dig it up.)
Anonymous sez: "I was interested after reading your post on the Betel Nut essay and since I'm always in the mood to try something mind altering, went in search of sources. It turns out that there's a very interesting purveyor of botanical products called Bouncing Bear Botanicals. Not only do they sell betel nuts but they've also got everything from mildly hallucinogenic mushrooms to wildly hallucinogenic live toads (sold in breeding pairs no less!). I've never ordered from them but I think I will!" Link
UPDATE: Ron sez: I've got a few red flags off the toad story.
I've been a very active member of the Entheogenic community for over the past decade having worked for different magazines and forums over the years as admin and mod. There's somethings that I've got to point out:
Firstly, bouncing bear doesn't list the animal on their products page nor, could I locate it anywhere on their site. (Yes -- it's on this site, but listed as out of stock. Here's the link -- Mark.)
Secondly, although, the animals do contain 5 MEO DMT ( a dubious "psychedelic"), but they also contain a few other "toxins" in their poison glands that if "licked" injected or "whatever" can cause serious problems -- including rapid heart failure. These and related toads kill many wild and domesticated animals yearly that are either too inquisitive or aggressive with them.
In general there has to be at least some mention of safety IMHO, they're not a item that is "safe" for the general public Use of these animals coupled with a nonchalant attitude will only "cause problems".
Lastly, there are some ethical and legal issues as the animal is endangered in the wild with laws in effect regarding trade.
I did locate a site that does offer the animals for a very high price. The bouncing bear may be a front for the second site. (very common) as the provided images are the same.
If you could please place a red text notice with the entry saying something to the effect of :
"Bufo Alvarius: are a endangered species that may be illegal to buy and sell. These animals can be very dangerous as they do have poison glands that secrete a highly reactive poison -- do not lick or consume."
UPDATE: Anonymous sez: "The 'Update' post on Sonran desert Toads is not particualrly accurate. The writer calls 5-MEO-DMT a 'Dubious Psychedelic.' If being strapped to the front of a rocket and propelled across several dimensions constitutes a dubious psychedelic, what is this person taking, and where can we get some?
He is accurate in saying that Bouncing Bear is 'Out of stock' on these toads. They have been out of stock on thier website for over a year now. I doubt that they will ever be for sale on thier site again. The poster is highly inaccurate when he says that the Sonoran Desert Toad is an endangered animal. While anyone should take the proper care and consideration into the ownership of any pet, the Sonoran desert toad is not endangered. Certain desert areas are hopping with them at the right time of year. For more information click here.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Larry Flynt's daughter calls for DoJ porn crackdown, *yawn*
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DATE: 01/18/2005 10:27:39 AM
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Larry Flynt's estranged daughter Tonya Flynt-Vega is demanding that the Justice Department take tougher action against porn sites, particularly those depicting incest or pedophilia. Note: the Hustler mag mastermind has more than one daughter. Ms. Flynt-Vega is not to be confused with Theresa Flynt-Gaerke, who is credited with having developed the popular chain of Hustler retail stores.
I'm not sure what exactly is news here, if anything -- it seems that the specific variety of rogue sites she's complaining about are already defined as illegal under existing law, and already the target of ongoing Justice enforcement efforts. Perhaps her publicist was just having a slow day.
Tonya Flynt-Vega, whose recent autobiography called porn the greatest menace in America today, was reported by the Agape Press as saying that - with Adult Internet purveyors “always look(ing) for new ways to stretch norms and push the cultural envelope” - she believed a Justice crackdown would not come until citizens become outraged enough, especially over adult-child and incest sex sites she thinks proliferate far more than the general public realizes.
“For me and my family, there is no turning back. Larry Flynt is my father, and his empire is the enemy. I am fighting what may be the greatest menace in America today, one that threatens women, children, and ultimately, the soul of our society. My journey has been long, and it has not been easy. I have been threatened. My faith has been challenged. But I have persevered…”
Link (via Warren), and link to previous BB posts about Xeni's interviews with Larry Flynt: one, two. Also, more in this story: Link (via Fleshbot).
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Clarion workshop silent auction for rare science fiction treasures
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DATE: 01/18/2005 01:06:58 PM
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The Clarion Writers Workshop -- an amazing bootcamp for science fiction writers that I graduated from in 1992, and which I will be teaching this summer -- is holding a silent auction fundraiser. Former instructors and students as well as friends of Clarion have donated a stunning array of science fiction books and memoribilia, much of it signed by the author (I donated a spiral-bound home-made galley of my next novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town -- one of ten ever made!).
AMERICAN GODS: The Author’s Preferred Limited Edition
By Neil Gaiman
A beautifully bound signed limited edition of the novel, with 12,000 additional words included in the text.
Retail Value: $200
Generously donated by Neil Gaiman and Hill House Publishers.
NIGHT OF THE COOTERS
By Howard Waldrop
A rare, out of print, limited numbered edition featuring nine thought-provoking tales. Hardbound in leather slipcase. Signed by Howard Waldrop. Ursus, 1990. New.
Approx. Retail Value: $79
Generously donated by Leslie What.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Explanation for region coded printer cartridges?
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DATE: 01/18/2005 01:12:28 PM
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(See update at the end of this entry) An anonymous HP employee emailed me in response to yesterday's post about HP printer cartridges that have been crippled to work only in printers sold in specific countries:
Re: "Region Coding Electronics and Ink Cartridges", consider that this is truly about the effect of currency fluctuations on an international business. A company incurs expenses (R&D, manufacturing, etc.) in one currency, and sells in another. When the exchange rates change significantly between when the expenses are incurred and when the sale is made, the financial results of the company will also be significantly affected (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively). This creates instability in the stock price because fickle Wall St. analysts can't handle surprises (and may also lead to gray-market activities like re-importing product from a cheaper region of the world to sell in a more expensive one, but I don't know for sure about that).
You may have a valid issue with respect to how the company should try to manage the effects of currency fluctuations, but I think the conspiracy theory about a one-time gouging of Europe to make a fast buck is a red herring. The only real solution to this might be truly dynamic, global pricing -- which might work if HP only sold direct over the web, but real world sales channels consist of a web of retailers and resellers who cannot support it (a customer wants to know that a pen costs 1.49 whether he walks into 7-11 on Monday or Friday...).
One thing is for sure, the average customer will not understand, or care to understand, the issue of currency fluctuations! The HP bean counters should be smacked for that short sightedness and the bad press it will bring. Sigh.
Update:: Cory notes: "Yeah, and by that reasoning, we need region-coded cement, tee-shirts, baby-powder and oatmeal. Currency fluctuations, riiiight."
UPDATE: The HP employee who emailed me earlier would like to point out that his original email contained the following sentence: "Not speaking for my employer in any official capacity!" I forgot to add that to the post. It's an important thing to remember when you read this. -- Mark
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Cory NPR interview audio
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DATE: 01/18/2005 01:38:05 PM
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I did an interview with NPR's What the Tech?, a radio station that broadcasts out of Rochester and is affiliated with the Rochester Institute of Technology. The MP3 is linked below -- my interview starts about two-thirds of the way through. I talk about science fiction, the Singularity, copyright and what have you.
50.6MB MP3 Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Zelda tattoo of all time
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DATE: 01/18/2005 03:43:15 PM
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This upper-back Zelda tattoo took nine hours and was done in one sitting.
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(via Waxy)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Comparing a dollar then to a dollar now
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DATE: 01/18/2005 03:47:00 PM
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I'm writing a historical non-fiction book and I am having a hard time figuring out how much specific sums of money from the old days would be worth today. I came across this nice calculator at the Economic History Services site. The thing I learned is that there isn't one answer to the question "How much is $100 from 1960 worth today?" From the site:
In 2003, $100.00 from 1960 is worth:
$621.65 using the Consumer Price Index
$502.09 using the GDP deflator
$761.26 using the unskilled wage
$1,297.73 using the GDP per capita
$2,086.61 using the relative share of GDP
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Why HP's region coding excuse is bogus
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DATE: 01/18/2005 04:41:48 PM
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The following business analysis was submitted by Boing Boing reader Buck Thighmaster
I thought you might perhaps want to throw up a more detailed business analysis of why HP's region coding defense is completely bogus. So I figured I'd write one out to try and save some time...
Sure it's true that a global multi-national company like HP has to worry about currency fluctuations, but their region-coding strategy is exactly opposite to a true objective currency fluctuation defense.
If a company is doing business in two major regions of the world and the currency is sinking in one region (the U.S.) and rising in another (Europe) then the company has to worry about the fact that it might be buying things in the more expensive currency while being paid in the sinking currency. In simple terms, HP has to worry about being paid $1US today, then try and buy $1EU of stuff next week, when that US dollar is only worth 80 cents in Europe - they just lost 20% on that transaction.
However, there's a simple defense for global companies in this situation - price in a larger profit margin on goods sold in the sinking currency, as a buffer against the value being lost in that currency. HP's printer cartridges should be more expensive (comparatively) in the U.S., to make up for the fact the the $40US (!!) you pay for a cartridge might be only worth $38 in global purchasing by next week. That's not what's happening here though.
(Some people might complain at this point that HP raising prices in the US would not be a good thing, because it's promoting US inflation. Duh!! Why do you think all the economists are so upset about the sinking US dollar and America's huge debt?!)
Instead, HP is charging more in Europe where the currency is rising and becoming more valuable. In effect, HP is double gouging here, because they're getting a bonus from the rising value of the EU currency. Every EU dollar they get paid this week might be worth $1.20 by next week in global purchasing, in which case HP just made extra profit! If HP was a fair dealer then print cartridges might be LESS expensive in Europe, not only because of the price premium people in the US would pay as a hedge against the sinking US dollar, but also because HP should prefer to be paid in Euros which they know are going to rise in value.
Another example in simple terms - if you were selling a car and someone offered you $1000, or $900 in gold bullion, and gold was rising in value so that gold bullion would be worth $1100 next week, you'd take the gold bullion. You offer a slight discount now because you know you'll benefit in the near future. Instead, HP's making people in Europe pay $1100 in gold for the 'car' - both gouging them extra, and profiting on the fact that the gold will be worth $1200 by next week.
HP's other stated defense for their region-coding is that this somehow protects them against Grey Marketers. This is also bogus.
Grey Marketers can be a problem with some products. These are importers who bring product across border into markets where it wasn't meant to be sold. This can be a problem, particularly with support costs.
For example, if HP Canada is selling Deskjet printers, and estimates they'll sell 10,000 printers, then HP Canada will budget the warranty support costs for 10,000 printers (let's say $5000). If some Grey Marketer then imports an extra 20,000 printers from the US, where they were on sale, and sells them in Canada then all of a sudden HP Canada is looking at an extra $10,000 in warranty costs on printers that HP Canada didn't even get paid for, since they were originally bought in the US!
One problem with that scenario in this case - there are no real support costs for an ink cartridge! They're practically a commodity product. There's no difference between an ink cartridge sold in Europe and one in the US. They all come out of the same factory. Ink cartridges WOULD be a commodity product if the printer manufacturers didn't silently collude on price. There is no way a print cartridge imported into Europe from North America costs HP Europe any extra support costs.
HP shouldn't care where their print cartridges are bought and sold, assuming HP has priced the cartridges appropriately. If HP prices the US ink cartridges properly with a premium to take into account the sinking US dollar, then they shouldn't care if some Grey Marketer buys a bunch and imports them into Europe. HP already got paid for the ink cartridge at that point. They have their money and their profit. HP should be happy to have sold the cartridges, period, and they didn't even have to pay for the shipping to Europe! Grey Marketers for printer cartridges ONLY 'hurt' the global manufacturer IF the manufacturer is price-gouging in the more expensive market.
In the end, there's two explanations for the current situation. Either HP is determined to gouge it's European customers, using the region coding to enforce the price gouge, or HP is so badly managed that their current US products are underpriced and they're losing money on them because of the sinking US currency. Possibly both are true.
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I thought you might perhaps want to throw up a more detailed business analysis of why HP's region coding defense is completely bogus. So I figured I'd write one out to try and save some time...
Sure it's true that a global multi-national company like HP has to worry about currency fluctuations, but their region-coding strategy is exactly opposite to a true objective currency fluctuation defense.
If a company is doing business in two major regions of the world and the currency is sinking in one region (the U.S.) and rising in another (Europe) then the company has to worry about the fact that it might be buying things in the more expensive currency while being paid in the sinking currency. In simple terms, HP has to worry about being paid $1US today, then try and buy $1EU of stuff next week, when that US dollar is only worth 80 cents in Europe - they just lost 20% on that transaction.
However, there's a simple defense for global companies in this situation - price in a larger profit margin on goods sold in the sinking currency, as a buffer against the value being lost in that currency. HP's printer cartridges should be more expensive (comparatively) in the U.S., to make up for the fact the the $40US (!!) you pay for a cartridge might be only worth $38 in global purchasing by next week. That's not what's happening here though.
(Some people might complain at this point that HP raising prices in the US would not be a good thing, because it's promoting US inflation. Duh!! Why do you think all the economists are so upset about the sinking US dollar and America's huge debt?!)
Instead, HP is charging more in Europe where the currency is rising and becoming more valuable. In effect, HP is double gouging here, because they're getting a bonus from the rising value of the EU currency. Every EU dollar they get paid this week might be worth $1.20 by next week in global purchasing, in which case HP just made extra profit! If HP was a fair dealer then print cartridges might be LESS expensive in Europe, not only because of the price premium people in the US would pay as a hedge against the sinking US dollar, but also because HP should prefer to be paid in Euros which they know are going to rise in value.
Another exampe in simple terms - if you were selling a car and someone offered you $1000, or $900 in gold bullion, and gold was rising in value so that gold bullion would be worth $1100 next week, you'd take the gold bullion. You offer a slight discount now because you know you'll benefit in the near future. Instead, HP's making people in Europe pay $1100 in gold for the 'car' - both gouging them extra, and profiting on the fact that the gold will be worth $1200 by next week.
HP's other stated defense for their region-coding is that this somehow protects them against Grey Marketers. This is also bogus.
Grey Marketers can be a problem with some products. These are importers who bring product across border into markets where it wasn't meant to be sold. This can be a problem, particularly with support costs.
For example, if HP Canada is selling Deskjet printers, and estimates they'll sell 10,000 printers, then HP Canada will budget the warranty support costs for 10,000 printers (let's say $5000). If some Grey Marketer then imports an extra 20,000 printers from the US, where they were on sale, and sells them in Canada then all of a sudden HP Canada is looking at an extra $10,000 in warranty costs on printers that HP Canada didn't even get paid for, since they were originally bought in the US!
One problem with that scenario in this case - there are no real support costs for an ink cartridge! They're practically a commodity product. There's no difference between an ink cartridge sold in Europe and one in the US. They all come out of the same factory. Ink cartridges WOULD be a commodity product if the printer manufacturers didn't silently collude on price. There is no way a print cartridge imported into Europe from North America costs HP Europe any extra support costs.
HP shouldn't care where their print cartridges are bought and sold, assuming HP has priced the cartridges appropriately. If HP prices the US ink cartridges properly with a premium to take into account the sinking US dollar, then they shouldn't care if some Grey Marketer buys a bunch and imports them into Europe. HP already got paid for the ink cartridge at that point. They have their money and their profit. HP should be happy to have sold the cartridges, period, and they didn't even have to pay for the shipping to Europe! Grey Marketers for printer cartridges ONLY 'hurt' the global manufacturer IF the manufacturer is price-gouging in the more expensive market.
In the end, there's two explanations for the current situation. Either HP is determined to gouge it's European customers, using the region coding to enforce the price gouge, or HP is so badly managed that their current US products are underpriced and they're losing money on them because of the sinking US currency. Possibly both are true.
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The following business analysis was written by Buck Thighmaster:
I thought you might perhaps want to throw up a more detailed business analysis of why HP's region coding defense is completely bogus. So I figured I'd write one out to try and save some time...
Sure it's true that a global multi-national company like HP has to worry about currency fluctuations, but their region-coding strategy is exactly opposite to a true objective currency fluctuation defense.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: California's state-level INDUCE act unveiled
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DATE: 01/18/2005 07:02:11 PM
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Snipped from Red Herring's coverage today:
A bill introduced in the California Legislature last Friday seeks to do what U.S. federal courts have so far refused to do: criminalize selling, advertising, and distributing peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software. Written by state Senator Kevin Murray (D), a longtime lawmaker from Los Angeles with close ties to the entertainment industry, the legislation is aimed straight at the business plans of file-sharing companies such as Grokster, Morpheus, and Kazaa. The bill would make it a crime to sell file-sharing software without taking “reasonable care” to prevent copyright infringement and pornography swapping.
Link to story, and link to PDF of bill text. (Thanks, Jason!)
Update: The EFF's Jason Schultz weighs in:
Goodbye innovation; hello regulation. "Reasonable care" could mean anything from the forced design and/or redesign of software to mandated filtering and digital rights management (DRM) -- even the forced installation of spyware to monitor user behavior. Moreover, SB 96 would effectively overrule the Betamax protections that the Supreme Court has provided technology companies for more than 20 years. That kind of seismic shift would destabilize some of California's most successful companies.
From the birth of the Xerox machine to the modern web server, every technology that enables people to copy or disseminate content has had the capacity to be used for some illegal activity. Under Murray's logic, we should have stopped the manufacture and sale of VCRs, dual tape decks, postal services, carbon paper, and any other service or device that could potentially be used in a crime.
Link.
Also, Cal-INDUCE could put Ed Felten in Jail for writing 15 lines of code as an academic experiment: Link.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Xeni on G4TechTV's "The Screensavers" Wednesday
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DATE: 01/18/2005 07:23:20 PM
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I'll be host Kevin Pereira's in-studio guest on tomorrow's edition of the G4TechTV show "The Screensavers." We'll be talking about Boing Boing, which may mean in-depth analysis of betel nut blogs, Picasso gone Costco, hallucinogenic toad e-commerce, and the tenuous links between Microsoft, commies, and awesome butt sex. Should be fun.
Link to show info and your local air times.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Hallucinogenic toad fiction
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DATE: 01/18/2005 08:53:18 PM
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Jim Leftwich sent me the URL to the short story he wrote for the bOING bOING zine, entitled "Farmer Bob's Good Life." It's a wonderful read.
As if on cue, the daily procession began. From each pen emerged half a dozen or so Colorado River Toads, of varying sizes. Hesitantly at first, as if still half asleep, they hopped out into the dimly lit hallway, pausing before turning and following Farmer Bob down to the feed trough at the far end of the barn. With the last of the thirty pens opened, there formed a surging river of toads streaming down to take up their places in the little stanchions arrayed along the long galvanized metal feed trough. As they were bellying up, Farmer Bob busied himself filling two five-gallon buckets with feed pellets from a small chute protruding out of a storage bin. Walking along the backside of the trough, he poured out the contents of the first bucket, stopping when it was empty to retrieve the second bucket and finish filling the remaining length. He walked back to peer up the hallway, making sure there were no stragglers. Seeing that all the toads were now enthusiastically enjoying their morning repast, he reached up and threw the first switch on a grimy control panel mounted on the wall behind him. A creaking mechanical noise accompanied the slow, gentle closing of the little stanchions around each toad, holding them firmly and comfortably in their places as they continued their unabashed munching.
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AUTHOR: Xeni Jardin
TITLE: Desperately Seeking Lily
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PRIMARY CATEGORY: Video
CATEGORY: Video
DATE: 01/18/2005 09:33:59 PM
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My brother found this mysterious proto-porn gadget while cleaning out a neighbor's garage. I'm trying to figure out what the hell it is. Can you help me? Click on thumbnails for full-size; link to movie at end of post.
Here's what I know. She's blonde, nude, stacked, made of gummy polymer, and her name is "Lily," as you can see from the stamp on the back side of the petri dish thing in which she resides. But what's totally insane about her is that there's this tiny metal crankshaft sticking out of her ass. When you turn the handle, she gyrates a seductive little gyro-dance. The images sketched on the reverse side depict bottles of perfume and bubbly scented girly stuff -- trapped inside this transparent disc, she's doomed to endless command performances from her bathtub.
The date on the back -- 1952 -- indicates this tease toy might have been manufactured for GIs during the Korean War. Remember, there were no internets. Lily was a sort of analog hothot camgirl -- only with better tit bit depth and finer frame rate than free adult site previews of today.
Using the "record movie" feature on a Canon Powershot S50, my mom helped me stage and shoot a short movie of Lily dancing her "come-hither-beeg-sailor" dance. I realize that's kind of weird. And if you knew how respectable and unlike me my mom is, you'd *really* think that's weird. But I discovered that shooting a gadget porn movie with your mom can be an oddly bonding experience. Like when she drove me to my first big punk rock concert, Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys, way back when I was 12. She knew that was weird, too, but she loved me. So, thanks mom.
Anyway -- have you seen another Lily before? Do you know where she came from? Whose pockets she lined? Link to DiVX movie. (2.4MB). I have a larger (13MB), higher-quality AVI original if anyone feels like converting it more artfully and torrenting it or whatever.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Funhaler
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DATE: 01/19/2005 01:07:04 AM
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The Funhaler is an asthma medicine delivery device for kids. Traditional asthma inhalers scare kids into misuse (or non-use), but the Funhaler apparently "overcomes these difficulties by motivating the child to inhale willingly and effectively by the use of breath-driven incentive toys attached to the device, such as whistles and spinning discs."
Link (via Gizmodo)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Live from Death Row
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DATE: 01/19/2005 01:33:35 AM
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A prison in Bangkok, Thailand has installed Webcams on death row. Once the Webcasts begin, the actual executions won't be part of the programming. Prison officials say they hope the approach will deter potential criminals. From the BBC News:
Prison spokesman Nathee Chitsawang told the Associated Press news agency that the internet "will show how we treat convicts in their last minutes, including the preparation process".
But, he said, viewers will only see snippets of the final moments leading up to an execution.
Still, Amnesty International is rightfully pissed.
Link to BBC report, Link to TNA article
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Will Fuck For Shoes
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DATE: 01/19/2005 01:48:29 AM
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My friend Nicole in Paris is a super-talented Web designer who just started her own clothing line called Locher's:
"Perverts , degenerates, and nasty bitches can finally rejoice because now you can parade your hidden thoughts right out in the open."
I know quite a few people who would wear this t-shirt design with pride.
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: German libraries can circumvent DRM
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DATE: 01/19/2005 02:23:41 AM
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The German library system has recieved a copyright exemption that allows it to crack the DRM on the media in its collection, "after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works." This is fantastic news -- and it should be a lesson to libraries, schools, institutions that serve the disabled, archivists, and others that they needt o fight for their own exemptions. We need to riddle the ban on circumventing DRM with so many little holes that it simply deflates upon itself.
Link
Update: Martin sez, "Unfortunately, this doesn't apply to the German libraries as a whole, but only to the Deutsche Bibliothek, the German analog to the US Library of Congress."
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Punk-folk music under CC license
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DATE: 01/19/2005 02:31:18 AM
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Brendan Themes is a punk-folk musician whose stuff is like Billy Bragg's best music crossed with a little Beck and some Leo Kottke. His CD is available for free under a Creative Commons license from the Internet Archive.
Link
(Thanks, Brendan!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers' friends?
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DATE: 01/19/2005 05:02:55 AM
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Last week on a trip from London to the US, American Airlines demanded that I write out a list of the names and addresses of all the friends I would be staying with in the USA. They claimed that this was due to a TSA regulation, but refused to state which regulation required them to gather this information, nor what they would do with it once they'd gathered it. I raised a stink, and was eventually told that I wouldn't have to give them the requested dossier because I was a Platinum AAdvantage Card holder (e.g., because I fly frequently with AA). I have written an open letter to AA asking for details on this -- see the link below for the whole text.
The security officer then handed me a blank piece of paper and said, "Please write down the names and addresses of everyone you're staying with in the USA."
I actually began to write this out when I was brought up short. "Wait a second -- since when does AA compile a written dossier on the names and addresses of my friends? Why are you asking me this? Do you have a privacy policy and a data-retention policy I can inspect prior to this?"
The security officer told me that this was a Transport Security Agency (TSA) regulation. I asked for the name or number of the regulation, its text, and the details of the data-retention and privacy practices in place at AA UK. The security officer wasn't able to answer my questions, and she went to get her supervisor.
After several minutes, her supervisor appeared and said, after introducing himself, "Sir, this is for your own protection."
I think it's pretty hard to argue that making passengers produce written dossiers on their friends' home addresses makes planes in the sky secure. I asked again if this was really a TSA regulation and what AA's privacy and data-retention policies are.
The officer said, "This is a TSA regulation."
I said, "Why didn't I have to provide this information when I flew out of Gatwick on US Air in December then?"
He said, "Well, you know that American Airlines has had some terrible things happen to it in the past."
I asked "So the TSA wrote a special regulation for AA? What is the name of this regulation, and what is your data-retention and privacy policy?"
Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: CBC web-documentary about teen depression
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DATE: 01/19/2005 06:11:45 AM
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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's multimedia zine Nerve features an article this month about Frederik, a teen who committed suicide last February. The piece is very moving, part documentary and part reportage, and it's pitched at teenagers. Well worth a look.
Link
(Thanks, Ted!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Ben Rosenbaum story under remixable CC license
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DATE: 01/19/2005 06:19:12 AM
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Benjamin Rosenbaum is one of the best new science fiction writers working in the field today. He's just released his story "Start the Clock" (originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license that allows you to mix your own versions. It's a fine story and a brave experiment:
The real estate agent for Pirateland was old. Nasty old. It's harder to tell with Geezers, but she looked to be somewhere in her Thirties. They don't have our suppleness of skin, but with the right oils and powders they can avoid most of the wrinkles. This one hadn't taken much care. There were furrows around her eyes and eyebrows.
She had that Mommystyle thing going on: blue housedress, frilly apron, Betty Crocker white gloves. If you're going to be running around this part of Montana sporting those gigantic, wobbly breasts and hips, I guess it's a necessary form of obeisance.
She said something to someone in the back of her van, then hurried up the walk toward us. "It's a lovely place," she called. "And a very nice area."
"Look, Suze, it's your mom," Tommy whispered in my ear. His breath tickled. I pushed him.
It was deluxe, I'll give her that. We were standing under the fity-foot prow of the galleon we'd come to see. All around us a flotilla of men-of-war, sloops, frigates, and cutters rode the manicured lawns and steel-gray streets. Most of the properties were closed up, the lawns pristine. Only a few looked inhabited -- lawns bestrewn with gadgets, excavations begun with small bulldozers and abandoned, Pack or Swarm or Family flags flying from the mainmasts. Water cannons menacing passerby.
Link
(Thanks, Ben!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Survey for a book on kids and science fiction
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DATE: 01/19/2005 08:09:13 AM
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My pal Farah Mendlesohn is putting together a book on children and science fiction and she's put together a survey on the subject to help her with her book. If you read sf as a kid, take a sec and help her out.
The purpose of this questionnaire is to provide material for a book called (provisionally), The Inter-Galactic Playground of Children's Science Fiction to be published by McFarland Press. The research is supported by the Eileen Wallace Children's Library (University of New Brunswick), Middlesex University (London) and the British Academy.
Who am I? I am a science fiction fan and a critic. I'm co-organizing a British Eastercon, Concussion, and I edit the academic journal Foundation. The original article behind this research can be found at “Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s SF: A Position Piece” in The Lion and the Unicorn, A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature Vol. 28, no 2, April 2004, pp. 284-313
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(Thanks, Farah!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jenna's Moantones
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DATE: 01/19/2005 09:17:37 AM
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In other Jenna Jameson news, she's, er, climbed into bed with Wicked Wireless to create a brand for mobile phone services. The company will start offering content from Jenna's Web Girls in Latin America first. Looks for the porn images, video, and "moantones" to come to the US later this year. From the press release, via MobileMag:
"Everyone needs a moantone," says Ms. Jameson. "And we'll provide them in the universal language of sexy sighs recognized around the world but with our own personal touch. The technology is way beyond most of us, but the bottom line is that you'll able to hear the other Jenna's Web Girls moan and me when your phone starts to ring. We'll also provide audio content in Spanish plus photos and text features."
Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Does the world need wireless robots
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DATE: 01/19/2005 12:15:19 PM
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I wrote a story for TheFeature about a bunch of public-servant and domestic robots that will go on sale this year.
Later this year, the Korean government will put wireless broadband robots into 200 post offices around the country. Instead giving the robots on-board cognitive capabilities, the researchers are outsourcing the sensing and processing work to central computers via a wireless link. They'll come in "male" and "female" models: the male will serve as a guard and will be armed with a projectile net that it can deploy to immobilize troublemakers, and the female will help customers and display entertaining video clips to people waiting in line. The project, which is part of a larger "Ubiquitous Robot Companion" initiative, is being spearheaded by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), which also plans to put 100 domestic robots into houses in the next couple of years.
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Child appears unhappy after parents slain in Iraq
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DATE: 01/19/2005 02:13:09 PM
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This little Iraqi girl seems upset that her parents were shot to death by US soldiers when the car she and her family were in failed to stop at a checkpoint. (I'm sure she'll get over it once they tell her it was a mistake.) Meanwhile the LA Times reports that "the percentage of Americans who believed the situation in Iraq was "worth going to war over" has sunk to a new low of 39%."
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Gareth Branwyn on WPRK Thursday at 1pm
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DATE: 01/19/2005 03:13:21 PM
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Boing Boing uber-buddy Gareth Branwyn sez: "I'm going to be on WPRK 91.5 FM tomorrow (Thursday) as part of their 110-hour broadcasting marathon. DJ Dave Plotkin is trying to break the Guinness World Record for longest continuous broadcast by a single DJ. He's 54 hours into it and is now punchier than a pissed-off kangaroo in a sideshow boxing ring. Should be interesting. I'm on at 1pm Thursday and will be talking about what's happened in the world of DIY media since I wrote my 1997 book Jamming the Media. The broadcast is not only an attempt at breaking the record, but also a way of raising money for this great college radio station (Rollins College, Winterpark, FL). You can listen to Dave sleeptalk here." Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Machine dreams
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DATE: 01/20/2005 12:26:44 AM
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We've posted quite often about the Dreamachine, invented by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in 1959. Today's New York Times has a nice feature about the Dreamachine and one writer's "review" of its effects.
"Mr. Gysin and Mr. Sommerville built the first Dreamachine after learning of research by John Smythies and W. Grey Walter, scientists who had noted in experiments that light flickering at 8 to 12 flashes a second against a subject's closed eyelids seemed to slow the electrical pulse rate of the subject's brain to a state of semiconsciousness known as the alpha state and produce rich dreamlike imagery.
Although his fellow Beats were excited about using the device, Mr. Gysin had broader ambitions for it and tried to distance himself from their enthusiasm, says John Geiger, the author of "Chapel of Extreme Experience: a Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine" (Soft Skull Press, 2004).
"He was focused on its commercial potential," Mr. Geiger said. "He imagined a Dreamachine in every suburban home, in the spot formerly occupied by the television set, but broadcasting inner programming."
Link (Thanks, Vann!)
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Jack Boulware's new site
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DATE: 01/20/2005 01:00:23 AM
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Jack Boulware is one of my favorite magazine feature writers typing today. His forays into New Journalism remind me of the stories that writers like Daniel P. Mannix told in the pulp men's magazines of the mid-twentieth century. Just take a glance at the archived work on Boulware's new Web site and you'll see what I mean: Sumo In Prague, Poker-Crazy America, World's Largest Collection of Pornography, Ice Golfing In Greenland, Haunted Hawaii, Church of John Coltrane, Wild Boar Hunting, and plenty more. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: X-Ray vision
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DATE: 01/20/2005 02:03:27 AM
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As documented in the film Project Grizzly, Troy Hurtubise is the North Bay, Ontario inventor who built a protective suit that would protect him in a mano-y-mano encounter with a bear. These days, Hurtubise has his eyes on an even more incredible project. He built a device called the Angel Light that he says can see through walls. From BayToday:
Hurtubise said (reps from the French Government) were so impressed with the eight-foot long device they paid him $40,000 in cash to put the finishing touches on it. The French, Hurtubise adds, have also agreed to pay him a “substantial” amount of money for the technology if it passes rigorous tests in France.
“They couldn’t believe what they saw,” Hurtubise told BayToday.ca.
“One of them told me it was as if I’d discovered a new universe.”
Gary Dryfoos, a consultant and former long-time instructor at MIT, said "there's a Nobel Prize" for Hurtubise if the Angel Light really performs as described.
"There are laws of physics waiting to be written for what he's talking about," Dryfoos said.
Link (via MetaFilter)
UPDATE:BB pal Dr. Maz points to more discussion of the truth/fiction of Troy Hurtubise's claims at the Museum of Hoaxes. Link
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Snowflake photomicrography
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 01/20/2005 03:36:09 AM
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DMD points us to a Tweney Report post about The Bentley Snowflake Collection at the Buffalo Museum of Science. In 1885, Wilson Alwyn Bentley made the first photomicropgraph of a snowflake. Capturing those crystals on film became his lifelong obsession. The Buffalo Museum of Science has a comprehensive collection of these startling images. From a 1922 article in The Vermonter:
It is indeed a delicate task to “catch” one’s snowflake and get it in position to be photographed. Mr. Bentley has a tray consisting of a board painted black with wire handles on either end, on which he collects the flakes: this he carries carefully by the handles with mittened hands, in order to keep off all animal heat: and to keep his hands warm too, no doubt: into his cold, unheated workroom. With a splint of wood, he painstakingly picks up the snowflake and places it on the slide of his microscope, being particularly careful that it is unbroken and perfectly flat so that all parts reflect the light equally.
“It takes me quite awhile sometimes,” Mr. Bentley explained, “and I have to breathe occasionally, but I turn my face away, take a quick breath and get to work again before the flake melts,” illustrating with a quick birdlike movement of the head.
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AUTHOR: David Pescovitz
TITLE: Big baby
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According to an Associated Press report from today, Francisca Ramos dos Santos gave birth to this 16.7 pound baby boy at a hospital in northeastern Brazli. After a Caesarian delivery, the boy, named Ademilton, and his mother are doing just fine. Link
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Help track down versions of King Solomon's Ring
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DATE: 01/20/2005 05:40:25 AM
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Avi sez, "Am researching the orgins of an ancient folktale 'This Too Will Pass' or 'King Solomon's Ring' and collating all versions here:
"Here's Lincoln's version of the tale:
"'It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! -- how consoling in the depths of affliction!'
-An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, September 30, 1859
"Have already found Jewish and Sufi versions of the Tale and would like to use the collective intelligence of Boing Boing readers to find versions from other cultures-I know that a Hindu version exists somewhere)
Send any leads on the tale to avisolo@yahoo.com
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Jef's followed up on the too-cool License Plate Maker (you saw it here first -- we've always got the jump on Memepool [just kidding, Dan]) with the Acme Valentine Heart Maker. Betcha can't eat just one! Link
It's the Street Tech Buzzword Saturation Detector! Find out the BS content of any site in seconds with this marvelous steampuck contraption. Link
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TITLE: Stefan sez: "For the Disturbing
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DATE: 06/05/2001 09:11:04 AM
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Stefan sez: "For the Disturbing Things We Do to Animals Department: Keep pet fur off your furniture by sealing Fido into a lycra bodysuit!" Link
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TITLE: Vulgar and ostentatious medical sculptures.
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Vulgar and ostentatious medical sculptures. (Thanks Stefan!) Link
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TITLE: Pi, when converted to binary,
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DATE: 06/06/2001 12:49:13 PM
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Pi, when converted to binary, contains every image, song, book, and program ever produced (or to be produced) by humankind. Link
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TITLE: Interview with Chris Ware, creator
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DATE: 06/06/2001 01:10:53 PM
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Interview with Chris Ware, creator of ACME Novelty LibraryLink
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: The Hello Kitty Vibrator. Does
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The Hello Kitty Vibrator. Does anyoe know if this is real or not? Link
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TITLE: Is the Kaycee hoaxster a
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Is the Kaycee hoaxster a Munchausen Syndrome patient? Excellent Wired News article by our pal, Jenn Shreve. Link
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AUTHOR: Mark Frauenfelder
TITLE: Inside article about those stupid
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DATE: 06/07/2001 10:17:54 AM
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Inside article about those stupid "pop-under" X-10 wireless camera ads. 
Chapter of Ulysses sells for more than 800,000 Pounds Sterling at auction. What I dig about this is the conclusive proof that my manuscripts are actually pretty organized, all things considered. Link Discuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories for Boys and Girls)
Remember the guy who found a severed human penis in his soft drink? It wasn't a penis, it was a penis-shaped fungus. I'll never call a circumcision "the mushroom treatment" again. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan and kolacky!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The new Tickle Me Elmo
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DATE: 10/04/2001 12:54:58 PM
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The new Tickle Me Elmo has a hella cool Easter Egg. On January 9th, some unspecified number of TMEs will wake from their unholy slumber and inform their owners that they have won the great TME sweeps. The grand prize? A computer, a VW Beetle, a free collitch education and $200,000 worth of house. Link Discuss (via Exciting Monkeybum Stories For Boys and Girls)
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TITLE: Grand Royal, the Beasties' pet
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DATE: 10/05/2001 04:28:29 AM
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Grand Royal, the Beasties' pet label, is going out of business, and they're having a firesale. Lots of cool bargoons. Link Discuss (via EvHead)
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TITLE: The largest outbreak in history
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DATE: 10/05/2001 04:32:00 AM
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The largest outbreak in history of Haemorrhagic Fever has taken root in Afghanistan. 
Great weird art by Japanese artist d'Holbachie Yoko. Link Discuss
Carl, our beloved sysadmin, told me that the webserver for boingboing.net is likely to go out of service intermittently for the next few days. If you sign up for the mailing list (see form in the right column) we'll let you know what's going on in case Boing Boing goes on the blink. Discuss
From FilePile: The coolest proposed skyline I've seen to date. Link Discuss 
John Lilly, RIP. Link Discuss
Memorial to New York firefighters carved from a giant pumpkin. Link Discuss (Thanks, supermanspaljimmyolsen!)
Cooking with Bigfoot is a funny shockwave cartoon series. (Where do people get the money and/or time to make these things?) Link Discuss
supermanspaljimmyolsen sez: "Insanely detailed drawings done with ball point pens on paper." Link Discuss
Still struggling to find a belated birthday gift for me? How about this casting of one of the queue-area stantions from Disneyland's Haunted Mansion? A mere $500 and it's yours -- er, mine. Link Discuss 
I used to have a Fright Factory. You could make all sorts of creepy scabs and extra eyes and warty tounges to stick on your head. Ah, the smell of Plastigoop cooking in the tray... Link Discuss
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TITLE: Happy Trails is the
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DATE: 10/13/2001 11:01:19 PM
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Happy Trails is the one truly fun shop on the otherwise moribund Haight-Ashbury shopping strip. Their online store is chock-a-block with hard-to-find tiki crap, girlie cocktail glasses, and cowboyana. Link Discuss 
I got email from Leonard Pickel this morning, editor of the excellent dark-ride trade mag Haunted Attraction (Link), urging members of the "Hallowe'en Community" to donate a portion of the proceeds from this year's spook houses to WTC-related disaster relief. The enclosed royalty-free art says it all: Hallowe'en for America: Helping America Heal. I love this, 'cause it's just what we need: the permission to have fun, even in the face of disaster. Also, I love spook-houses. Link Discuss
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TITLE: Loose lips sink ships! Here're
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DATE: 10/15/2001 08:07:44 AM
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Loose lips sink ships! Here're the US Army's employee guidelines for the keeping of secrets. 
My favorite Tourist Guy shot to date: Co-inventor of the Apple ][+! Link Discuss 
The handwriting of an anthrax terrorist. Link Discuss (via Robot Wisdom)
Gag pacifiers. How is it that no one ever thought of this before? Link Discuss 
$500 gets you a 50lb cement bust of a famous movie creature from master monster-maker Tom Savini (obligatory Xmas gift plea here). I own a cement Tom Savini life-mask of Vincent Price -- it's incredible. Link Discuss 
Way, way cool Indian educational chart artwork -- there's a whole book of this stuff coming! Link Discuss (via Scrubbles) 
From Filepile: It's crude, but funny, and better than I expect from the Post. Link Discuss 
Just got the Cabela's Christmas Hunting Catalog in the mail. I have no idea how I ended up on their mailing list, but I am, as always, thrilled and delighted to flip through their literature. In this issue: camoflage sofas (!); person-siized, fish-shaped, silkscreened pillows; and "jackalopes" -- stuffed and mounted bunny-heads with antlers stuck on 'em. Link Discuss 
Residents of Anthrax Street, in Fayetteville, NC, want to change the streetname. The question is, who came up with that name in the first place? Link Discuss (Thanks, Dennis!) 
Here's a sneak peek at the Apple iWalk, the PDA to be released this morning at 10AM. Rumor has it that it's a PDA about the size of a pack of cigarettes, with 802.11 networking, a modem, a stripped down version of OSX, primarily built to play MP3s off of hard-drive or network storage, but with regular PDA features, and dictaphone functionality. 9h of battery life, too! Let's hope the real deal is as cool as the rumors! Link Discuss
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: The UK's new anti-terror laws
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DATE: 10/23/2001 08:37:47 AM
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The UK's new anti-terror laws require ISPs to maintain records of every Website visited and newsgroup read by their subscribers for 12 months. The storage costs will likely bankrupt many ISPs. Link Discuss
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TITLE: A good Business 2.0 story
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A good Business 2.0 story neatly demystifies JXTA, Sun's P2P initiative. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
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TITLE: Sony is shipping a Linux
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DATE: 10/23/2001 08:57:50 AM
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Sony is shipping a Linux kit for the Playstation 2. The kit lets you turn your settop console into a Linux-based server and workstation. Of course, hackers have been running Linux on the PS2 for ages, but here's an example of a company that is capitalizing on the efforts of its hackerish userbase. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
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TITLE: Well, here's the actual specs
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DATE: 10/23/2001 11:03:34 AM
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Well, here's the actual specs on the new Apple device, called the iPod. No Airport, but otherwise killer-diller. 
And here's the official word on iPod, straight from Apple. It's not a PDA, but it's a really swell MP3 player, superior to all others in many respects:
The Totally Kid Carousel in uptown Manhattan looks incredible. To keep to a budget, the designer eschewed elaborate carved animals, electing, instead, to have local schoolchildren draw bulbous, simplified animals, which he then contructed ridable versions of out of foam and fiberglass. Link Discuss (Thanks, Suzanne!) 
I'm not much of a sports fan, but I would be sure to catch an Afghan "goat grabbing" competition if ESPN broadcast it. The imbeciles at Peta would love it. Link Discuss 
It's an excellent time to revisit cartoonist Basil Wolverton's 1950s drawings of the end of the world. (For some of Wolverton's happier drawings, go here.) Link Discuss
This is a great "photoblog" of pix taken with a tiny, cheapo digital camera. Makes me wish I'd kept up my eyemodule journal! Great UI. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!) 
Neckties with patterns based on disease microbe photographs for sale! (Anthrax tie shown here.) Link Discuss 
Afraid of getting stuck in a high-rise disaster? The world's entrepreneurs are on the job. You got yer parachutes, you got your escape tubes, and you got your levitating hover platforms. 
Anyone ever see this flick, The Giant Gila Monster? It stars a guy who plays the banjo-ukulele, so you know it has to be great. Listen to him play an ultra religious song to his sister! Be sure to read the accompanying article about the movie too. Link Discuss
This site contains photos of the worst commercially available Hallowe'en smock-and-mask costumes from my boyhood days: Baretta, Chuck Barris, Chiachi, Flipper, Rubik's Cube, Tattoo, Atari Asteroids, and, of course, Mr. Kotter. Link Discuss (via Memepool) 
Harry Potter Lego kits. It was inevitable, I suppose. Link Discuss (via Meerkat)
Aaaaaaaaaah! THEY CLOSED THE CAROUSEL OF PROGRESS! 
The perfect Xmas gift for the mystical nihilist who's got everything: Plush Cthulhu dollies! Link Discuss (Thanks, Tobias!) 
2308 items for sale at a giant upcoming dotcom bankruptcy auction in Sunnyvale. Dozens of Sun servers, Aeron chairs, and gobs o' pagers. 
The Meathead: The ultimate Hallowe'en hors d'oeuvre! Start with a plastic skull, add red jello, coldcuts, some strategically placed egg yolks or pearl onions, and serve! Link Discuss (Thanks, ali!)
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TITLE: The Leonids aren't the only
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DATE: 10/30/2001 03:53:26 PM
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The Leonids aren't the only noteworthy upcoming celestial event. Tomorrow, we'll have the first full-moon Hallowe'en since 1955, and the last one until 2020. Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Here's a great roundup of
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DATE: 10/30/2001 04:40:59 PM
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Here's a great roundup of the best of Internet gossip and rumor sites. I'd heard of a bunch of these, but there are some nice and novel gems here, too.Link Discuss (Thanks, James!)
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DATE: 10/30/2001 05:18:42 PM
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This is a strange little project: Comic-strip fanfic about the WTC disaster that actually pulls off some semblance of respectfulness. Link Discuss (Thanks, crow!)
Dave sez: "The best and brightest lego enthusiasts had a Halloween-themed building contest. Check out the winners! I love the hearse!"LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Dave!)
The island nation of Tuvalu is disappearing under the sea, thanks to global warming. Its 11,000 residents will have to be evacuated. Link Discuss
I've archived all 24 episodes of "Artificial Life," a comic strip I did for newmedia.com a couple of years ago. Link Discuss
The duct tape fashion gallery! I love duct tape with a fierce and unabashed passion -- where do I get one of these duct-tape tuxedos?
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Discuss
(Thanks, Owen!)
Previously only known to professional clowns, these precision-made miniature novelty bicycles are now available to the general, miniature bike-riding public. Teeny bicycles for everyone! LinkDiscuss (via Blather)
Animation Blast is the world's best zine about animation. The editor, Amid Amidi, likes to focus on old skool masters, and issue no. 6 has a long feature with character designer Tom Oreb, who remains all but unknown, despite his tremendous influence on cartoonists and illustrators. I've been attempting to ape his style for years without ever knowing who he was. Oreb is the guy who came up with the look of Disney's 1953 short subject, "Toot, Whistle, Plunk & Boom," perhaps the most influential ten minutes of animation to have ever entered my pupils. Don't bother looking him up on Google; there's nothing there. Just buy the zine. Link Discuss 
Aww... isn't it cute. A wee digital camera. Link Discuss 
What a cool hack! The Game Boy camera only shoots black-and-white photos. In order to make color photos from the black-and-white output, the photographer on this site uses color gels to capture three images (a red, a green and a blue) of each shot, then digitally superimposes them to make a color image.
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TITLE: Stefan sez: "I'm losing it
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DATE: 11/05/2001 01:08:02 PM
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Stefan sez: "I'm losing it . . . why didn't I think of this? Via Paul Riddel's newsletter: Two (count 'em, two) different pages describing how to make faux otherworldly biological specimens inna jar: Bottled Deep One, Bottled Thing in a Jar. Discuss
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TITLE: Vint "Internet Pioneer" Cerf co-authored
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Vint "Internet Pioneer" Cerf co-authored this IETF RFC, which is working to establish a standard for stringing up an Interplanetary Internet. The preamble alone is worth the read, stirring and thought-provoking stuff.
The Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C., captures the spirit, genius and sadness of my favorite patent clerk. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Schuyler!)
Tiki King has posted a new batch of his ukulele tunes for you to listen to. Link Discuss 
I don't know which car I'd rather have: a Dymaxion Omnitransport or a Honda Unibox (shown here). Link Discuss
Artist Danilo Strulato's work from an exhibit entitled "The Hell Inside Me." Link Discuss (Thanks, Enrico!)
The makers of this special birdfeeder pretty much admit that the main reason anyone would want one is to watch squirrels get frustrated as they unwittingly re-encact the Curse of Tantalus. Link Discuss 
Newsweek's Website is running the photos found in the camera of Bill Biggart, a photographer who rushed to the site of the WTC just after the first plane hit, got too close, and was killed. LinkDiscuss ( via Electrolite)
Crazed identical twins -- one of them's a surgeon -- realize that there's no rejection risks associated with transplanting bits of their bodies from twin to twin, and so they do. No word on what their mom thinks.
This is more along the lines of what I was hoping Apple had in store for us instead of the iPod. The Geode Origami, National Semiconductor's concept PDA, combines eights handheld gadgets: digital camera, video camcorder, smartphone, MP3 audio player, PDA, Internet access, Internet picture frame, email device, and video conferencing terminal. Link Discuss
Great gallery of pictures taken with a teeny weeny Casio WristCam, a camera in a watch. Like the eyemodule and the PenCam, the low shooting angle and the contrasty (almost PixelCamesque) B&W imaging gives these shots a marvellous, dramatic flair.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Bob!)
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TITLE: Memes.org: Attempting to track and
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DATE: 11/14/2001 04:25:03 AM
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Memes.org: Attempting to track and consolidate every meme in popular culture. Cool site, miserable popup ad when you close the window. Turn off Javascript first!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Chris!)
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TITLE: No good deed goes unpunished.
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DATE: 11/14/2001 05:24:07 AM
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No good deed goes unpunished. A Canadian lumber company's charitable donation of five bits of wood is construed as dumping by the US Commerce company, which levies a $10 million fine against the giver.
Famous sideshow perfomer Melvin "The Human Blockhead" Burkhart died last week at the age of 94. 
Punk Sims and punk Sim decor! Posters, records, S&M gear and guitar amps!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Alex!)
Don't ship your computers UPS! A poor geek shipped his boxen from Canada to the US and they arrived in bits and pieces. UPS Canada blames UPS USA and vice-versa and neither will reimburse him for a some pretty nasty and gratiuitous damage. He gets his revenge, tho' -- posting his story to Slashdot is sure to get someone's attention at UPS. LinkDiscuss (via /.)
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AUTHOR: Cory Doctorow
TITLE: Anarchist Santa impersonators around the
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DATE: 11/16/2001 05:13:54 AM
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Anarchist Santa impersonators around the world take to the streets, stage mock lynchings of one another, stagger drunkenly through shopping malls, aggressively panhandle gawkers. Just a little holiday cheer, folks!
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TITLE: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's
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DATE: 11/16/2001 05:22:40 AM
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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone streaming audiobook on Salon today.LinkDiscuss
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TITLE: The Homies -- tiny LA
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DATE: 11/16/2001 06:44:13 AM
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The Homies -- tiny LA Chicano gangsta figurines sold in gumball machines -- are drawing fire from the LAPD, who want their sale discontinued on the grounds tha they provide a poor role model for Hispanic children.
Chris Ware, creator of the Acme Comic Novelty Library comic book series, is also an antique-style toy maker. He usually includes a cardboard cut-out toy in each issue of his comic book. I've always wondered what the toys would look like if they were assembled, but I didn't want to cut my comics up. I'm glad somebody else cut their comics up to make this gallery of assembled Acme Novelty Toys.Link Discuss
Tired of having your cigars crumple in your pockets? Why not invest in a milspec, high-impact safety yellow plastic "armored humidor?" If only it were TEMPEST-hardened...LinkDiscuss 
Middle-aged Brit balloon-hobbyists are building a record-breaking, skyscraper-sized helium balloon and will fly to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere this summer, wearing ex-Sov spacesuits and big, silly grins.LinkDiscuss 
Make your own ANSI-standard warning signs! This site lets you pick the graphics from a range of standards-defined warning-icons, enter accompanying text, and generate a printable PDF or order your own high-wear metal signage with your design on it. This is full of extremely evil and highly fun potential.
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Discuss
(Thanks, Erik!) 
Dig these awesome homemade Afghani sat dishes, made from flattened paint-tins. LinkDiscuss (via Robot Wisdom)
R.U. Sirius, the founding editor-in-chief of three of my favorite magazines, High Frontiers, Reality Hackers, and Mondo 2000, has started a new magazine, called The Thresher. It looks great. Link Discuss
Screenshots of old GUIs: Win, Mac, Lin and assorted.LinkDiscuss 
The New York Observer profiles '70s songwriter Paul Williams. 
Found-art-du-jour: Cher Guevara.
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A new gravity map of the Earth reveals that India is subject to one percent less gravity than anywhere else.LinkDiscuss 
Utility kilts! So, say you're secure enough in your masculinity to wear the Scottish Skirt, but you're hampered by the lack of places to stash your phone, PDA, multitool, paperback, wallet, pager, change, lighter, cigs, cigar-cutter, utlity knife, Cybiko, 802.11 card, digital camera, maglite and multidriver set? Worry no more: The Utility Kilt is the unholy offspring of a kilt and cargo pants.
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(Thanks, Tim!)
Why bother with a Linux PDA? Because you can play Quake on it, that's why.
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(via /.)
Boong-Ga Boong-Ga is a popular new Japanese cabinet video-game. The cabinet has the hindquarters of a bent-over mannequin sticking out of its front. Gameplay consists of prodding the mannequin's buttocks with a special outsized plastic finger while your opponents whimper and grimace onscreen. The more skilled your bottom-poking, the more virility points you score. A testimonial to your rumpular studliness is printed on a bit of cardboard at the end of the game for you to show to others.
The new Cybiko is out and it looks like a scientific calculator designed by HR Giger (that's a good thing). Nice new features, too.LinkDiscuss (via /.)
Fantastic results of a Spanish propane-tank decorating contest. I guess that propane tanks figure pretty heavily into the lives of Spaniards -- nice to see the universal human impulse to trick out everything is alive and well.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, karramarro!
Nice mini-gallery of foreign grocery packaging.LinkDiscuss 
When ambiguous visual arts go wrong! A teenager in Durham had a poster on her wall protesting Dubya's habit of executing Texan criminals, one that depicted the Shrub as a hangman holding a noose. When a local cop spotted the poster while responding to a noise complaint (the teenager was playing her stereo too loud), he saw the poster and decided it was anti-American propaganda and ratted her out to the Secret Service, who came a-knockin' at her door a few days later, looking for a Taliban cell.
The BBC has unearthed a 10-second clip of a young Christopher Robin Milne dressed as Winnie the Pooh, frolicking with his friends. 
Here are the smallest, sexiest replacement AC adapters for the new iBooks and PowerBook G4s.
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(Thanks, Guy!)
Remember Black Jacques Shellac? Slowpoke Gonzales? Here's a gallery of forgotten Looney Tunes -- unsurpisingly, they are predominantly racial stereotypes, but there are a couple that history just forgot, like Bobo the Elephant and Rocky.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)
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Native Indian bands are alarmed by the clause in the new Anti-Terrorism bill that restricts the wearing of masks and facepaint, as both are part of certain tribes' sacred rituals.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Donovan!)
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InPassing is a blog devoted to overheard conversation.
The Times of London has cooked up a bizarre infographic that purports to be a cutaway of ObL's secret cave fortress. Someone's been taking too many hits off the James Bond bong.
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Scientists at UC San Diego have generated some fantastic CG pictures of neurons forming memory in the brain, based on research that generated evidence of how our brains change in response to experience. 
The Time Cube. This is some kinda theory about something, but it's mostly a fairly entertaining schizoid rant about MIT, with strange dovetails (loontails?) into theology, crypto-anti-Semitism, and high weirdness.
Ventus, the fantastic sf novel by my pal and former collaborator, Karl Schroeder, is a New York Times "Best Book of 2001." Here's the Locus Magazine announcement: Link. Here's Karl's site, which includes two short but hallucinogenic excerpts from the book: Link. Here's a link for buying the book online at Powell's: Link. Here's my review of Ventus from Mindjack: Link.
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CPIP (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol) is a success! Link Discuss
Find out which comic book characters are associated with different chemicals by clicking on the elements of the periodic table. It’s Rubidium Man! Link Discuss 
Geek hero Steve Wozniak joins the board of Danger, a company that makes rad PDAs.
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(Thanks, Marc!)
The Anti-Danza-Hype backlash begins: MCExample writes: "I managed to get a glimpse of the 'danza'"
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The Sonic Flashlight projects a cone of ultrasound through human tissue. With appropriate goggles, you can see the ultrasound image in realtime. X-Ray specs!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Mike!)
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The Institute for Applied Autonomy generates "minimum surveillance" routes through London -- specify a starting point and an endpoint and it'll tell you how to get there without passing before a camera. NYC, Chicago and Seattle are next. Basically, it's Mapquest for liberatarians.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Stuart!)
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John Udell's got a great piece on Byte.com today about the event-driven Internet: basically, this is applying the programming models and techniques of the GUI to Web Services. Big fun with Python!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Tim!)
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Pillowmail generates random naughty stories based on MadLibs forms that are then mailed off to your 
Who needs digital watches when you can buy a Norweigan binary watch?LinkDiscuss (via /.)
Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by the head of the Long Now project at Xerox PARC. The Long Now is a project to get people to think in 10,000-year timeframes, inspired by the story of Oxford New College's oak beams: After the giant oak beams in the New College's great hall rotted out, the Dons of the college were at a loss to source replacement oak timbers of sufficient size. The college forrester came to the rescue -- it turned out that when the New College was built, 500 years previous, the Dons of the college had planted oaks in Oxford's forest. Now, 500 years later, they were ready to be harvested and put into service in the great hall. The modern-day Dons thanked the forrester, chopped down the trees and sold the forest.
Beautiful repro vintage scooters for sale.
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(Thanks, Marc!)
Fake binox with a hidden flask inside let you smuggle booze into any event. If James Bond was a sportsfan...
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(via Fark)
The Photosloppers at Something Awful have cut, folded, spindled and mutilated the infographic of ObL's secret cave, merging it with Where's Waldo, Bil Keane comics, He-Man's Castle Greyskull, and other popcult detritus. This is the funniest thing I've seen all week.
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(Thanks, stece!)
Sublime Stitch sells cool embroidery: Jailhouse tattoo art, stripper/devil-girls, Linda-Barry-esque portraits, etc.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jenny!)
Chris Raettig, the guy who discovered KPMG's dumbass linking policy the hard way, has started wandering around London near KPMG's office with signs that read "KPMG is this way" -- linking to them again in meatspace.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Rich!)
Lovely gallery of WWII propaganda posters on today's Salon.LinkDiscuss 
A historial overview of Jabba the Hut toys through the ages.
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(via Fark)
For sale on eBay, a Lovecraftian nativity scene depicting "the unholy family of the Wizard Whately, his daughter Lavinia, and her little bastard child, Wilbur, spawn of Yog-Sothoth." Buy it now, get it in time to prop up underneath your Deathmas Flytrap.
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(Thanks, Mark!)
30,000 Soviet films and thousands of Soviet pictures, posters and cartoons are online, thanks to Abamedia's efforts to digitize the Russian State Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk, a four-block facility containing all the country's nonfiction films.LinkDiscuss (via Meerkat)
I was pleased to find this hardbound edition of The Lights in the Skies are Stars sitting in the "free" bin at the Studio City Public Library. Fredric Brown is one of my favorite authors, and this is a good novel, though not as good as The Mind Thing, Martians Go Home, or What Mad Universe. Still, it was free – yipee! Link Discuss
Japanese step-by-step instructions for making your own warranty-voiding transparent iBook2 case. This is too cool.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jason!)
Guinness's new gaseous nitrogen-powered "rocket widget" generates a perfect head on bottled stout.
The new Kubrick toys are coming out, including a Reservoir Dogs set.
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(Thanks, Megosteve)
ErrorWare: T-shirts with your favorite system error messages: Choose from Blue-Screens, Mac bombs, Apache errors, and Amiga meditations.
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Discuss
(via Adnan)
Step-by-step instructions for lighting up your PowerMac G4.LinkDiscuss 
The auction for my first iron-on is about to close. (You can see it over on the right.) Here's my next one up for auction on eBay. The full title is "Disdainful Goth Chick." Link Discuss 
It's official: At seven centimeters, German schoolgirl Annika Irmler has the world's longest tongue. Link Discuss
Make your own O'Reilly book cover.
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(via Meerkat)
The Xmas Glow. A mad Kentuckian has enough Xmas lights strung about his home to blind Santa and light up an operating theater.
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(via Fark)
Gallery of bowling pin cheesecake. Link Discuss
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TITLE: Sad Economist story about a
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DATE: 12/24/2001 02:03:46 PM
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Sad Economist story about a once beautiful Pacific Island. 
Unspeakably cool galley of Fisher Price Little People, decorated to look like characters from: The Addams Family, Alice in Wonderland, Batman's Villains, Calvin and Hobbes, Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Chronicles of Narnia, Dukes of Hazzard, Deep Space Nine, Empire Strikes Back Fisher Price, Flintstones,
Fraggle Rock, Futurama Fisher Price, G-Force/Battle of the Planets, Gilligan's Island, Gotham City, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones Fisher Price, Jetsons, JLA/Superfriends, Land of the Lost, Legion of Doom, Muppets Fisher Price, Muppet Babies Fisher Price, Muppets Tonight Fisher Price, Nativity Fisher Price, New Titans, The Norm, Return of the Jedi Fisher Price, Rocky Horror Picture Show Fisher Price, Scooby-Doo, Sesame Street Fisher Price, Simpsons, Sleeping Beauty Fisher Price, Space Ghost, Spider Man, Star Trek, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Wars: A New Hope, Star Wars:Episode Two, The Matrix, The Phantom Menace, Wedding Cake Topper Fisher Price, The Wizard of Oz, The X-Men, Universal Monsters, and the X-Files.
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(via Fark)
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TITLE: Cheating gift-cards. It turns out
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Cheating gift-cards. It turns out to be fantastically easy to hack the magnetic in-store gift-cards sold at the point-of-sale of many chain stores.
Novelty coffins inspired by the accomplishments of the deceased, like this airplane coffin, are traditional among prominent Ga families in Ghana, Africa.
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(via MeFi)
YEAH! Mena at Dollarshort has scanned this 1963 National Geographic pictorial/historical on Disneyland and posted it to her site. This is really fabulous stuff, with tons of material on the upcoming World's Fair attractions (espcially Mr. Lincoln!) and photos to die for.
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(Thanks, Mena!)
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TITLE: JK Rowling got married last
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JK Rowling got married last week. Link Discuss
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TITLE: Universal's Cactus Shield copy-protection software
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Universal's Cactus Shield copy-protection software can be "circumvented" by playing protected discs on a DVD drive/player, as opposed to a plain old CD player/drive. Then you can rip the tracks to MP3.
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TITLE: The USPTO is moving to
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The USPTO is moving to an all-digital archive, and they're tossing old patents as they digitize them, creating a bonanza for dumpster divers.
Gallery of weird old comic book covers back in the days when they published comics about all sorts of things and not just superheroes. Link Discuss
An Ottawa artist has whipped up a bunch of cold-war-era Civil Defense posters and put 'em up around the city.
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(Thanks, Jude!)
The Swiftpull is the coolest corkscrew ever invented. It is a joy to hold, a miracle to use, and a strong incentive to alcoholism.
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Fantastic collection of free fonts based on movies, TV shows, foodstuffs, autos, videogames and so on.
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(via Aparna)
Step-by-step, lavishly illustrated dollar-bill origami, including spiders, specs, rings, and, of course, t-shirts.
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(via Aparna)
Alleged Christians in New Mexico rang in the New Year by burning Harry Potter books, Shakespeare, Cosmo, and the Lord of the Rings. Protestors came out to give 'em what-for:
Fine craftsmanship and dubious taste are exhibited in this pipe memorializing the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers.
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(Thanks, Marc!)
Remember the iWalk, Apple's rumored PDA that surfaced just before the iPod shipped? It's back. Apple's been running some hot teaser-on-teaser action on their homepage for the past week, leading up to MacWorld San Francisco on Monday, and now SpyMac has put up a site with stills and videos showing the iWalk in action. The pictures show a device somewhere between the size of an iPaq and a Newton, with a Firewire and headphone jack, a jog-wheel, and a stylus. The videos depict an OSX-like boot screen, hot 90-degree rotation of the workspace (a la the Newton 2100) and handwriting recognition. The site is heavily slashdotted, so you may have to hit your reload button a couple hundred times to load it.
Justin Hall spent New Year's Eve in Tokyo Disneyland! He's written a somewhat purple account of the night -- especially cool is the story of Japanese teenagers sacked out in the foyers of the rides and the aisles of the restaurants, trying to stay warm through the overnight stay in the park.
Found Magazine catalogs and showcases the best found objects its readers and editors turn in: photos, tapes, electronics, notes, etc.
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(via Memepool)
Great Moments in Cereology: Check out this marvellous gallery of human-generated crop-circles.
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(via Nutlog)
Nice gallery of rotten vintage comic-book ads.
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(via Fark)
Amusing gallery of potential banners to go on the Apple homepage as they wind up the hype machine for Monday's announcement.
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(Thanks, Chris!)
My publisher's asked me to send them an author photo to use in publicity/book-jackets/etc on my upcoming novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." Richard Kadrey was kind enough to snap some portraits yesterday, and now I can't choose which one to send in. I've built a little survey where you can rate my top 16 -- I'd love to get your feedback! (BTW, if anyone out there has a recco for a good hosted survey script, please lemme know -- this is just an ugly mailto form whose output I'm manually aggregating in Excel).
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The iPodBay is a homebrew solution that lets you synch and charge your iPod by shoving it in a slot in the front of your Mac.
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The NYT is reporting on the proliferation of branded consumer goods in the Islamic world that sport ObL's likeness.
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(Thanks, Steve!)
This gives me the fear: Rubber duckies with celebrity heads, including James Brown, Carmen Miranda, and Babe Ruth.
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(Thanks, Steve!)
Lovely and stylish duct-tape wallets.
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(Thanks, BoMo!)
The SF Chronicle is dropping Zippy the Pinhead, the fantastic surrealist comic strip, from its pages. You can help bring Zippy back!
The new iMac. Link Discuss(Thanks, Noel!)
Canadians can't keep a secret. Time Canada's site has put their new ish online, including a feature story on Apple's new machine. Time's gonna be in so much trouble.
What to do with those pretty cardboard boxes your Macs came in? Why, make a sofa out of 'em!
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JUAN GARCIA ESQUIVEL (1918-2002) Link Discuss
Here's a directory of GIFs of letters from Elvis, wherein he offers his services to Nixon as a secret G-Man who could rat out the counterculture and his fellow rock-n-rollers.
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(Thanks, Adingdong!)
Great gallery of the works of collage artist Stephen Kroninger. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Christopher!)
Delicious gallery of the world's airlines' barf bags.
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(via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
Punk baby clothes!LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Michael!)
Who needs HamsterDance when you've got iMacDance?LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Lally!)
Good article from The Ephemera Society of America about Victorian-era goldfish trading cards. Look at how beautiful the designs were back in those days! What happened? Link Discuss
Photos of the PodMate, a device that you plug into your iPod to turn it into a universal remote.LinkDiscuss 
Email postcards based on the wonderful covers of Jonathan Carrol's equally wonderful novels.LinkDiscuss (via Cloudmonkey)
Gallery of beatiful, but poorly scanned antique playing cards. Actually, the scans seem pretty good, but the site's maintainer has increased the size of the JPEGS with the height and width attributes, which has created a lot of uggle.
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(Thanks, Mena!)
The kraken wakes! A Scottish fisherman's dredged up a rare giant squid. These things are enormous and no one has ever seen one alive. The beak on this thing was powerful enough to sever steel cables.
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(via Meerkat)
Here's an excellent, searchable gallery of Disney clip-art.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Bob!)
Wonderful gallery of bootleg action figures.
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(via MeFi)
Apple's corporate counsel -- a pack of utter goons, it appears -- have been sicced on the poor schmucks at the Church of Satan. They've repeatedly nastygrammed the Satanist's webmaster, demanding that he take down his "Made with Macintosh" banner and the "Think Different" parody with Anton LaVey that had run. The Satanists say that they're just free-thinkin' iconoclasts who made their site with a Mac, and they wanna tell the world about it. Why the hell is Apple dicking around with this crap?
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(Thanks Andrew!)
A plaque erected to honor James Earl Jones for his contribution to Black America has a fatal typo: it thanks James Earl Ray (the man who shot MLK) for "keeping the dream alive." Duh.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Dana and TimmyT!)
A Musilm baby born with a tail in India is being hailed as the reincarnation of the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman.
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(Thanks, John!
Japanese website with pictures of unusual ukuleles. (Thanks, Gary!)Link Discuss
Celebrities photoshopped into Goth splendor! Mmmm, goth Olsen Twins!
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(Thanks, Jamais!)
Check out Jef "Acme.com" Pozkanzer's awesome "Pencil Thing" sculpture!
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(Thanks, magdalen!
RoadWired -- who make some of my favorite high-tech laptop bags and other travel accessories -- are trying out a new line, the APS Bags. APS bags are padded sleeves, suitable to be carried as shoulderbags or used as inserts in larger bags. The APS bags are wonders of craftsmanship and forethought: RoadWired has lined them with a Bell-Labs-developed space-program fabric that magically wicks away moisture, mitigating corrosion in your laptop's sensitive clock crystal, keyboard contacts and other components. It has a corrugated plastic bumper on its underside that prevents the wince-evoking clunk that you hear whenever you set your latptop bag down on a hard surface, and it's got heavy-duty zippers that gasket shut to keep out dust and crap. I got to play with a prototype of one of these while it was in development, and I really loved it -- it was the perfect way to protect my iBook before throwing it into a larger courier bag. RoadWired is also shipping PDA and media version of the APS case -- collect the whole set!
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A new airbag-vest for motorcycle riders inflates within 30 milliseconds of impact. The vest's accelerometers are hooked into a black box that buffers two seconds' worth of data, so that the moments leading up to a crash can be analyzed in hindsight. Snow Crash, anyone?LinkDiscuss 
Mari-Chan is a Japanese artist who has created a marvellous pantheon of disturbing cartoon iconography, twisted mutations of Sanrio and other characters that are both amusing and thought-provoking.
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John Fanzine is a funny, beautifully designed Brit Webzine.LinkDiscuss 
A company is shipping an external Dual-USB iBook charger that juices two batteries to full charge in 2.5h. Want!LinkDiscuss 
Soviet motherhood medals ("Order of Mother-Heroine," "Order of Maternal Glory") available for sale. These put me in mind of the scary gold-plated paper-doll-children necklaces that my grandmother (and her friends in the retirement community in Ft Lauderdale) wears, their hands soldered together, one for every grandchild, the names and DOB of each child engraved in the backs of their gilded avatars.LinkDiscuss (via Memepool)
Peggy Lee, my first great crush, died yesterday at 81. You could do a lot worse than to get the free 100-track subscrption from eMusic and download a couple albums' worth of her lovely music.
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I've linked to this before (it was the first link I ever posted here), but it bears repeating. My pal Roger Wood is a goddamned genius. He's an assemblage sculptor who makes these marvellous, whimsical, beautiful clocks-as-sculptures. I was over at Roger's studio last night, looking around at his latest work, and boy, is he ever good. What's more, he's better -- every time I drop by Roger's place, I see works that are more controlled, more witty, more charming than ever. He's 60 years old, and he's just hitting his stride. He should be rich and famous. But he's not. He's just barely scraping by, just barely making rent, no matter how hard he works at it, he just can't get a break. He trucks his stuff to crafts fairs in the US, places it in chic stores in Toronto, holds open houses and gallery shows, but frustratingly, he has yet to achieve the kind of fame and recognition he so richly deserves. He should be a hip, Hollyweird fad; a SoHo must-have; a cult favorite and the subject of a New York Time magazine pull-out. It's so frustrating.
I'm a sucker for these "Awful Actress and Celebrity Photos." Anyone know where I can find more?Link Discuss
Check out this amazing high-tech custom-car interior (as the site sez, "It's like a Radio Shack exploded in there"). Wow!LinkDiscuss (via MeFi)
My birthday's coming in a mere six months -- start saving up for one of these beautiful, $1000 life-size King Tut mummycase-cum-hinged-shelving units today. Want.
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Boing Boing is banned by Websense -- if your employer uses Websense to filter the Internet, this is what you're gonna see. Woo hoo, we've hit the bigtime!
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(Thanks, Suzanne!)
Good LA Weekly article about lowbrow art. Link Discuss
Bizarre logo on the CIA's website. Link Discuss 
MAME -- Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator -- is a giant, distributed OSS project to emulate on our computers the video-games we grew up playing at arcades. The problem is that most of these games aren't realy as much fun without joysticks, trackballs, and big pushbuttons. Brad King's Wired News story about the creator of MAME talks about the growing craze for building big, standup consoles with every imaginable control up front and a kick-ass networked PC inside.
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Really sweet gallery of vintage Atari industrial concept illustrations.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Jens!)
Women: Can't master the art of peeing standing up? Try a disposable mechanical assist with the Freshette. Kate sez: "Having used it myself for a few years I can vouch for its convenience. By the by, the women in my family all refer to it as the pee-nice, rather than the 'Freshette.'"LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Kate!)
Jaw-dropping gallery of covers from Italian pulp novels. For sale. Wow wow wow. They sure ain't cheap, though.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Enrico!)
Key West, the famously tolerant tourist mecca, is up in arms over wild chickens. Many of the fowl are overly aggressive gamecocks escaped from cockfighting pits (an aggressive rooster is a scary goddamned animal, too), while others are just wild birds. The 2000 birds wander the streets, block traffic, attack people and crap everywhere, prompting the city to begin an initiative to move about 1,000 of the chickens to egg-farms on the mainland, over howls of protests from chicken-loving Key Westians.
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(Thanks, Michael!)
Great gallery of homemade and converted MAME consoles.LinkDiscuss (Thanks, Patrick!)
Ashcroft is sick of semi-nude classic WPA sculptures showing up in the background of his media events, so he's ordered massive draperies to cover the statues' chestular appendages while he's running his mouth.
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(via Fark)
Mindbogglingly cool toy raygun site, with thousands of photos, along with critical essays and histories of rayguns and accessories through history.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
Hilarious gallery of rejected iMac designs. 1/28, 10AM: Fixed the link
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(Thanks, Joey!)
Patrick writes: "Presented by guggenheim.com, a really cool history of the motorcycle with a kickass flash presentation and including audio commentary by the likes of Dennis Hopper (providing commentary for the Harley Davidson chopper his castmate Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider) and plenty of detailed looks at various historical bikes." This really does kick ass.LinkDiscuss 
White Stripes' new music video is made of animated Lego and is totally mesmerizing.
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(Thanks, Matt!)
The new Palm i705 handheld features an "always on" wireless Internet connection. It costs $450 plus $40 a month for unlimited Internet use. Link Discuss
From the guy who brought you "Get Your War On," it's "Get Your Enron On!"
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Stunning gallery of clocks made from Nixie tubes ("These neon-filled numeric displays, also known as 'numicators', consist of an outer mesh anode, with ten cathodes (or 11/12 with decimal point/points) shaped to form numbers. They were popular in the 1960s and early 70s when the first logic ICs became available, the 7441 or 74141 TTL devices often being used as a driver, and can still sometimes be seen in old electronic test equipment.")
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(Thanks, Rob!)
US Patent #6,293,874. User-Operated Amusement Aparatus For Kicking the User's Buttocks. Link Discuss (Thanks, Matt!)
Twisted kids' book Photoshopping. The mad geniuses at Something Awful have been up to it again -- this time, they're competitively warping the covers of beloved children's books. Hey, isn't it about the one-year anniversary of All Your Base? LinkDiscuss 
I usually don't post ukulele related stuff here (I save it for my ukulelia blog), but I profiled ex-British Invasion popstar Ian Whitcomb for the LA Weekly and he's such a character I figured some of you would be interested. Link Discuss
I added several new designs and items to the Boing Boing store. Link Discuss
Lego tape-drives! This is my favorite robotic Lego hack to date. It's a Lego tape-drive enclosure with a robot tape-loading/unloading arm. Who needs a $10,000 tape jukebox when you can built one from stackable bricks?
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(Thanks, joeyx!)
Dream-toons. Slow Wave is a site where a talented cartoonist illustrates the dreams his users email to him. Normally, I hate hearing about others' dreams, but something about the illustrations makes it all kinda haunting and fascinating.
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(Thanks, Bill!)
Vintage trick-or-treat bag gallery -- marvellous!
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(Thanks, Enrico!)
A sandcastle sculpture of a jet crashing into the World Trade Center. Does anyone know the story behind this image, or if it's a fake? Link Discuss 
Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis is doing a new online serial comic, "Superidol."
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(via Technoccult)
Here's some spam I received. I think it's actually an advertisement for the movie, not a call to boycott it, especially when you see their lame web site and discover that they only have 4 members. What do you think? Here's the spam:
Currently, I'm obsessed with the art of Shane Glines, a cartoonist who worked on the animated Batman series. He was sort of a protege to the terrific Bruce Timm, but I like Shane's work even more. I bought Shane's sketchbook, "Ice Cream," from his website. It was $10 well spent. Link Discuss
This week's Guestbar Blogger is the splendiferous Bonnie Burton, publisher of grrl.com. I'm looking forward to the whimsical items she's sure to post. I met Bonnie about seven or eight years ago in Boulder, Colorado, when she was a VJ for a public television station there. She's been involved in so many things since then I thought a mini-interview was in order. -- Mark
Neat gallery of microscopic cross-sections of burger ingredients, with commentary. The image here is lettuce.
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(Thanks, Tavie!)
Apropos of the sf con I'm attending this weekend, here's a scary/sweet pic of Larry Niven in a Action Comics-era Superman costume.
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(Thanks, Boogah!)
Here's another cartoonist sketchbook I highly recommend: Jay Geldhof's "Hey, Sally!" It's loaded with amazingly tight yet whimsical little doodles of punk girls and devilettes. Every page is in full color.Link Discuss
I'm rather partial to the giant car-dealership Frankenstein's monster from Illinois myself.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
Don't miss the MP3 of the theme from Star Wars as played on the "BBO."
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(Thanks, Michael!)
In the tradition of RE/Search press -- an annotated collection of scans of LP artwork from terrific novelty discs. Wish they had downloadable MP3s!
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(Thanks, Higgins!)
Bruce Sterling reports from the World Economic Forum, where many of the freebie high-end wireless PDAs are falling to bits immediately. Bruce describes the "clustersuck" and gives us this shot of biz-card-adorned dead soldiers awaiting repair or replacement.
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(Thanks, Stefan!)
The online condiment museum meets all my criteria for Internet coolth: obsessiveness, exhaustiveness and obscurity.
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(Thanks, Higgins!)
The winners are in on the Spanish butane tank decorating competiton, and they're just swell.
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(Thanks, karramarro!)
Happy Hallmark Holiday from yer pals at Boing Boing, courtesy of the Acme Heart Maker.
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Fox's latest game show, Glutton Bowl, is a competitive eating event where morbidly obese people compete to consume very large amounts of food without regurgitating. And they cancelled Family Guy and Futurama. Fox execs: More evil than Enron.
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(via MeFi)
Trademark law is supposed to afford protection from misleading appropriations of registered marks. It's not a back-door to quashing free speech -- especially when the alleged infringement is clearly parodical. So why is the Texas GOP sending lawerly nastygrams to the activists who run "EnronOwnsTheGOP.com," asserting that their logo (which depicts the Enron logo superimposed over an elephant) will confuse visitors and lead them to believe that the Texas GOP endorses the site?
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(Thanks, Cindy!)
Sick of hauling ass to the cage to reboot your box or restart your daemons (yes, I'm talking to you, you and you)? GEORDI is a Palm app that makes life easier for "nomadic sysdamins" -- if you have a PalmOS device with an Internet connection, GEORDI will login to your machine over ssh, then present a GUI to top, ps, df, du, mount, unmount and other hunks of *nixy goodness. Tap the screen to kill, run and massage your processes. The best part is that since this rides on top of ssh, you don't need any special daemons or installs on the server side.
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Mandobabes: celebrating the lost art of mandolin cheesecake photography.
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(Thanks, Dan!)
Fantastic gallery of rare Bollywood LP covers.
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(Thanks, Enrico!)
The humorous tombstones out front of the Haunted Mansion in Walt Disney World ("Dear departed uncle Dave, he chased a bear into its cave") celebrate the imagineering team that designed and built the ride. One notably absent memorial is that of Leota Toombs, the costume designer who got press-ganged into sitting for the film-loops and voiceovers of Madame Leota (the head in the seance-room's crystal ball) and Little Leota (the tiny woman at the ride's end who urges departing riders to "Hurry back, hurry back, be sure to bring a death certificate"). Now, Disney's put that to rights, with a new, animated tombstone whence Leota's face emerges, eyes springing open, looking 'round. Here are some lovely photos, including the new epitaph, "Dear sweet Leota, loved by all, in regions beyond now, but having a ball."
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(The site's bandwidth cap keeps getting exceeded, so I've mirrored the images here)
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(Thanks, Chef!)
WiFi hackers have tested Pringles can antennae, commercial 802.11 antennae and other homebrew models against one another and reported on the results.
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(via /.)
Expert Photoshoppers ask the visual question: What if the Shrub was a babe?
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(via Blather!)
Wonderful gallery of avante-garde Mao art.
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(Thanks, Dan!)
The Register gives a rave review to Peek-A-Booty, an open-source project to allow netizens behind repressive national firewalls (China, Iraq, etc) to access any page they want, using consumer computers outside the firewall as a proxy. Paul and Joey gave a fantastic presentation yesterday at CodeCon in San Francisco (they're sleeping it off in my living room right now), and Peek-A-Booty's really shaping up into a useful app -- I plan to use it to secure my network activity while connected over 802.11 and other insecure transports. Well done, boys!
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TITLE: Iron on auction: "Propeller Friends"
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Link Discuss (Thanks, Enrico!)
Architects are building a Fuller-esque pavilion ("The Blur Building") made of mist and tensegrity for the Swiss Expo 2002.
Here's an amazing filmography of all the Warner Bros. short cartoons, including screen-captures of the title cards. Too cool.
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(Thanks, Dan!)
Forget racist skinhead music, the world's hatemongers have a better way of reaching out to young people: Racist video-games. These are Quake-like games with predictably banal and revolting names and themes ("Ethnic Cleansing, Shoot the Blacks, Concentration Camp Rat Hunt").
Amazing gallery of the works of a 19th-Century schizophrenic painter of cat portraits, showing his descent into madness through his art.
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(via MeFi)
Wild news-photo from a dog-mauling case.
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(Thanks, Stuart!)
Gruesome maginfied photos of the crud that sticks to Biore pore-strips when you use 'em to extract the blackheads from your phiz.
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(Thanks, Drue!)
Bottlecaps.org is the home of a marvellous series of galleries featuring scans of hundreds of historical pop and beer caps from Canada, the US and abroad.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
Judith Merril -- author, editor, activist -- was one of the most important people in my life, and I'm not alone. She founded the science fiction reference library in Toronto that bears her name, started the Cecil Street Writer's Workshop (where I critiqued and was critiqued for more than a decade), and founded the Writer's Workshop at SEED Alternative School, my alma mater. I met her when I was twelve, and even then she encouraged me to pursue writing.
Flamerite sells all kinds of wicked-cool Zippos with licensed art from Clowes, Coop, Crumb, Maakies and more.
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Howard Rheingold sez: "Artist Jim Woodring and musician Bill Frissell have been collaborating in recent years. Now they are transcending the album cover level of correspondence by jamming." Link Discuss
Supermanspaljimmyolsen sez: "Funky new instant messenger that replaces videocam feeds with 3d avatars, including 3d representations of Bush and Putin, among other, less famous faces. Max Headroom alter-egos for those too shy for videoconferencing, I guess." Link Discuss
Amazing and creepy gallery of photos of "surgery" to RealDoll high-tech sex-dolls.
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(via Milk and Cookies)
Step by step instructions for cooking an egg in 11 minutes on an Athlon 1500 MHz processor.
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(via The Reg)
Colombia's national army has deployed a guy in a 10' high inflatable soldier suit as a means of convincing the citizenry to rat out rebel forces.
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(via Amygdala)
The US Customs Agency brings us this nifty gallery of innovative (but not innovative enough, apparently) smuggler's caches. The gun-in-the-Bible dodge is full of semiotic goodness, dontcha think?
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(via Schism Matrix)
Disney and Kellogg's have launched "Mickey's Magix," a "naturally sweetened toasted oat cereal with marshmallows." According to the commercial, it turns the milk blue. Excuse me, I need to hit the grocery store.
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Note to Japanese Boing Boing readers: If this shirt is for sale in (North American) XL near you and you want to do me a helluva favor, buy it for me and I'll pay you back.
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(Thanks, waxpancake!)
Fabulous directory/gallery of classic monster and sci-fi cards.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
Attack of the 50-foot Website has an amazing gallery of rare and wicked monster-movie posters.
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(Thanks, 
This gallery of Chinese Communist propaganda art just made my day. The futuristic ones are un-creed-able. I am leaping forward, greatly.
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Thanks, Pat!)
AdFlip's got an amazing gallery of classic ads, organized by decade, theme, publication, etc.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
This site chronicles the life, times and work of Mary Blair, the genius designer behind It's a Small World and much of Disney's trippier, stylized artwork, including Alice in Wonderland. The Disney Channel has a great mini-documentary on Mary Blair they run as an interstitial during Walt Disney Presents, and she's just amazing, animated and feverish as she describes her elegant design choices in words simple enough for Walt to appreciate.
Higgins writes: "Illustrator Stephen Conley has combed 60's comics for the most manipulative of all advertising ever created for children. Mini ads touting Atlas bodies, hovercrafts from lawnmower engines and the joys of x-ray glasses. The frames on this site are quite annoying."
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(Thanks, Higgins!)
Let's congratulate Cory on his new job at the EFF by purchasing one or more ceramic tile coasters featuring Boing Boing's favorite radiation-resistant mascot, the mighty cockroach. All profits ($1.50 per coaster) will be donated to the EFF. The coaster is only available during the month of March, so order yours today! Link Discuss
Rate My Gasmask is an "Am I Hot Or Not?" site for gasmask fetishists, a fetish I hadheretofore never suspected the existence of. The Internet is really, really cool some days. Warning: Naked people in gas-masks ahoy.
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Wonderful, nostalgic gallery of vintage travel brochure art. As I sit here in Sea-Tac's SW Airlines departure lounge, assaulted by the vomitous no-design design of contemporary travel branding, I feel a sense of loss and misery browsing through these images. OTOH, airports in the 30s didn't have wireless Internet connectivity and fancy west-coast novelty coffee beverages.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
The rubber-band machinegun's 12 barrels allow you to fire 144 rubber-bands at high accuracy without reloading. The design is based on the Gatling gun and can be rotated a full 360 degrees for extra eye-putting-out goodness. If $400 is more than you want to spend on a rubber-band gun, check out the other pistols available on the site.
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(Thanks, GW!)
The wonderful Lileks has an equally wonderful gallery of vintage motel promotional postcards, with commentary.
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(Thanks, Patrick!)
A digital camera dropped in the water has turned into a surrealist goldmine.
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(Thanks, Chris!)
Cheque out this groovy vaporware folding computer!
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(Thanks, Zed!)
Popcult Magazine's running a terrific retrospective of forgotten girlie mags. Mark turned me on to Kayo Books last year, here in San Francisco, and I was delighted to discover their fantastic collection of reasonably priced lift-and-separate smut.
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(Thanks, Coury!)
Now this is extreme knitting: an iPod cozy!
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(via Raelity Bytes)
Matt "Metafilter" Haughey was so inspired by Lessig's keynote at SXSW that he's cooked up this groovy desktop texture that you can install to impress your friends with your committment to rebooting copyright.
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Thepod is a temporary geodesic housing structure made out of folded and stiffened fibreboard.
Those pushpin maps of 802.11 coverage are going to be useless once, mwahahaha, community wirless activists take over the world and a) put a broadband connection into every residence and; b) connect a base-station to every broadband connection. Jason's proposed an alternative way of representing the density and presence of our beloved parasitic grid.
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Other trademark uses for "Unix" from around the world.
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(via Chumpsquad)
A photoshopper has created a series of collage illustrations to accompany Roald Dahl's creepy, macabre short story "Pig."
Taschen, purveyors of unspeakably great photography books, have selected some incredible images from their books for use in e-postcards. Some good vintage raunch here, too.
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(Thanks, Marc!)
3DOSX is a three-dimensional Finder replacement for OS X that runs on machines with OpenGL accelerated hardware.
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(Thanks, Scoo!)
New pervy airport scanning machines let security staff probe your innermost innards with EM waves.
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(Thanks, Nat!)
This K5 story does an admirable job of explaining why all your inexplicable Japanese turds-with-eyes are belong to kittens.
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(Thanks, Thor!)
Landships of Ouargistan is a strategy wargame that's like the beloved Car Wars, but involves fictional steam-powered Victorian "Landships," inspired by HG Wells. Ouargistan gamers trade plans for their fictional vehicles along with downloadable 3D art you can use to generate your own game-tokens.
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(Thanks, Chris!)
Jonathan from Kill Your TV recorded my reading at SXSW -- it's a sixteen minute excerpt from chapter six of my forthcoming novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." I had fifteen minutes, but I went overtime. All told, it's an 6.1MB MP3 -- the sound quality is amazing, considering that this was recorded with a camcorder's directional mic at an outdoor event.
The web on the left was spun by a normal spider; the one on the right was spun by a spider who'd been dosed with caffeine. This page has webs spun by spiders on LSD, hashish and mescaline, too. Where do arachnologists get LSD?
This gallery of defunct amusement parks is indefinably and infinitely sad for me. There's something quaint and charming about a wooden coaster surrounded by tall grass an d ragweed, about naive midway games, about the crackled paint on the fat, psychotically cheerful lettering on the signage.
Fred just walked into my office and rhapsodized over the back page of the Sunday NYT Magazine, which had an ASCII-art sillhouette of Beck's head made up of the names of all the songs on Beck's iPod, with some marketing copy explaining that Beck has a ginormous library of MP3s from which he loads 5GB at random onto his iPod every day. Then I opened up Kottke.org and there was a link to a PDF of the ad (minus the marketing copy), which is indeed cool. What would be even cooler wwould be a script that randomly dumps 5GB out of your library onto your iPod at every sync, overwriting the previous contents -- I hate having to triage my collection to choose which stuff I'm going to take with me; I'm willing to yeild to serendipity.
AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape-Crazy Joe's Discount BBQ is whoring poor old Alfred E Neuman out to Land's End.
"A full-size fully functional virtual keyboard that can be projected and touched on any surface is shown by Siemens Procurement Logistics Services at the CeBIT fair in Hanover, northern Germany, on Monday, March 18, 2002. The virtual interface from Developer VKB Inc. from Jerusalem in Israel can be integrated in mobile phones, laptops, tablet PCs, or clean, sterile and medical environments and could be a revolution for the data entry of any mini computer. The mini projector that detects user interaction with the surface also simulates a mousepad."
I tried to visit the manufacturer's site the other day, but they incorrectly detected that my browser wasn't Java compatible (it is) and wouldn't show me the site.
500 billion tons of ice have melted in Antarctica in the past month. As Michael says, "Glug glug."
Gabrielle writes: "Imaginative photographs exploring the secret lives of toys and dolls, with over 60 images from 6 different series since 1989." The one on the left is called Carnevale at the Hotel of the Bridge of Sighs.
Talking Heads reunite and perform for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Christian Dior has designed an iPod case. An unattractive iPod case.
I've lost track of the number of people who wrote to me about all of Apple's announcements yesterday at MacWorld Tokyo, but Rael linked to some of the best coverage I've seen. In a nutshell:
Ever notice how much Marjorie "Dog Mauling" Knoller looks like Yoda?
Hate those "Open for Business" consumerism-is-the-answer-to-terrorism signs? Show your opposition to them by, er, buying mugs and other cafepress.com schwag with this rather clever riff printed on 'em.
GigPosters is an amazing collection of alternaband poster-art from around the world.
Garry Trudeau's doing an interesting series on the generation perceptual shear between parents and their Napsterized kinder.
The extreme embroidery at Sublime Stitch just got blue. Jenny sez:
The Republic of Liberia is putting Star Trek captains on its money.
Here's a good debunking of the Herbalife MLM scam that is responsible for the choking of the world's streets with "WORK FROM HOME" signs on every possible surface. The author is really nonconfrontational in his language, patiently stepping through the impossibility of making money at MLMs, and talking in depth about the cost to society through the uglification of our commons with millions of shrill "ASK ME HOW" plastic signs.
Some whacky netizen with access to an operating theatre and a fetishist's paradise of medical paraphenalia has documented his attempts to successfully separate conjoined Marshmallow Peep quintuplets. Pictured here is the doomed CPR attempt, made upon discovery that the newly separated Peep had no pulse.
Amazing gallery of painted nudes.
Hundreds and hundreds of comic book covers, photoshopped into transgendered whackiness.
Hokeyspokes: "unique bicycle safety lights that allow riders to display computer-generated images and text inside the spoke cages while riding at night. Not only are Hokey Spokes fun and interesting, but they also provide important side visibility, which is mostly unavailable in today's standard bicycle lights."
Fantastic collection of tiny, perfect reading
The Department of Energy hosts this fantastic gallery of hi-res shots of open-air A-Bomb tests. Pictured here is Priscilla, "a 37 kiloton balloon shot fired June 24, 1957 at the Nevada Test Site."
No more Speedy? 
Check out this incredible Godzilla FireWire hub -- oh, to live in Japan, land of extreme technology coolth.
Meshphoto: Oodles of photos of wire mesh. Mesh mesh mesh. Zoom in, zoom out. See alternate views. Order mesh. Mesh. Mesh. Mesh. This stuff is hypnotic.
This 
Chob sez: "Great site devoted to Walt's original plans for EPCOT. I hadn't been to the site for a while, but when I visited it the other night, I noticed that they've just added Quicktime clips of 'Walt's Last Film' in which he presents his vision for the Florida Project. They'll be presenting three new clips per month, between now and June."
The USPS is issuing these great retro tourist-poster stamps, one for each state, tomorrow (wish they'd do a matching line of luggage-stickers!). The USPS site is down as of this writing, but 
Gene "Infrasearch" Kan has completed his collection of geeky California vanity plates. He notes that "MP3PIR8 is for Shawn Fanning, but he hasn't gotten it yet."
Check out this amazing click-to-zoom imagemap of all 504 Wacky Packages stickers. I have an uncut Series I sheet that I got dirt cheap at the Chelsea Antiques Market in NYC a few years ago, and it's just about my favoritest wall-hanging. What's more, the 
There ought to be a law against making faux-retro crap like this radio, and the PT Cruiser, for that matter. This kind of stuff depresses the hell out of me. 
Who needs business-card shaped CDs when you can make Texas-shaped CDs? I wonder what happens when you spin these up in an 80X CD reader and the asymmetry sets the drive to shakin'.
The virtual frog dissection at Froguts.com is one fo the coolest interactive educational apps I've ever seen. The detailed hypertext, the cool little animations, the stills from recycled classroom frogs -- wow.
Not much by way of news, but dig that pic: A jet rolled out of a maintenance hangar and into an LA side-street.
Here's some lovely Engrish from the packaging on a cheezy Dragonball Z toy.
Forget Che Guevara, say hi to J. Guevara. Excellent photoshopping of Jakob "Usability" Nielsen discovered in this week's 
Recycling coin-op game-consoles is old hat -- we've seen a fair number of hackers who've put powerful PCs and multifarious controllers in vintage cabinets, then run Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator to turn the cabinet into an Ur-game that can play anything.
This application of information design to the Passover Seder is obsessive, wonderful, and massively cognitively dissonant. I like it. This year on Passover, I went out for Mexican food, but I did hide a corn-chip and I sang "Mah-nish-ta-na" to the mariachis' rendition of "Ay, yi, yi, yi/Canta y no llores" (it fits!).
Russky kitsch doesn't come any finer than this 50" tall, 50 piece, $2,000 Russian Nesting Doll from BornInThe USSR.com.
This site details an interesting art project: The author wrote three-line poems and then paid to have them associated with Google's AdWords program, so that searchers for, say, "Money" would see the low-ku on the left.
XBeams are a stick-and-connector system for building furniture -- toolracks, benches, sawhorses, clothesracks. Tinkertoys for grownups. These look like they'd be awesome for building little table-y and shelf-y things to fit into tight corners in miniscule San Francisco apartments.
Jenny has started selling Embroidery pattern iron-ons, and they look amazing. I ordered all four for the low price of $10. The sets come with instructions so hopefully I won't poke too many holes through my thumb.
Utterly scrumptious gallery of firecracker packaging artwork.
VW's hyperfuturistic concept car gets 100km/l.
Super-pricey coffin-shaped furniture for the wealthy goth in your life.
Step-by-step Photoshop instructions for making buttons and other UI elements that look like OS X's Aqua.
Eli sez: "A graphic and text summary of Thomas
Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_. The
interface is bit odd, but play with it."
Amazing Japanese gallery of animated tesselations -- math curriculum waiting to happen!
Stefan sez: "Sony commissioned "Frank" creator Jim Woodring to come up with a set of
plastic figures . . . part of a line by various artists. They wanted weird,
and he delivered. The other artists' work is worth a look, too."
Amazing DIY back-yard rollercoaster built out of scrap metal, the seat from a junker-car and the lap-belt from a wrecked airplane. Check out the 360 degree corkscrew!
Joey is the happiest geek on earth. He feeds the beast by taking contract programming gigs, and spends the rest of the time working on hacktivist projects and playing alterna-tunes on his accordion, surrounded by beautiful women who are drawn, irresistably, to his exhibitionist performances and are compelled to purchase drinks for him while he gets random passers-by to snap photos with his digital camera. His latest adventure, "The accidental go-go dancer," is a classic.
My pal Jet's selling funny stickers and t-shirt to underwrite the expense of building a killer art-car to take to Burning Man.
Nevada is shipping mushroom-cloud license plates. 
The Johnny Glow: Never have to choose between blinding yourself with the bog-lights and missing the bowl again. As seen on TV!
A lyrical appreciation of the original Holiday Inn sign and the golden age of family motels it heralded; just as Disneyland rehabilitated roadside amusements from dangerous and dirty sleaze-towns, Holiday inn transformed motels from dens of sin into family meccas.
My story, "Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar)" is coming in the next ish of The Black Gate magazine. One of the coolest things about writing for publication is getting your work illustrated by talented artists like Chuck Lukacs. Chuck send me the URL of this page with his illos for "Beat Me Daddy," and I couldn't be happier with 'em.
Now that is one big-ass inflatable Spiderman climbing up the wall at Sony Studios. People give LA a lot of bad ink, but it seems to me that the city is chock full o' googies, wonderful junk shops, movie palaces, theme parks and giant, inflatable super-heroes.
My pal and sometime-co-author Karl Schroeder's new novel, "Permanence" is finally out. I had the good fortune to workshop this book over the course of a year or so, and it's wonderful. The book is set against a backdrop of copyright-maximialist galactic civilization in which all sensoria is mediated, and depending on which license fees you pay, you see and hear different parts of the real world (i.e., banners, facades, etc). Nanofabricated artefacts and genetic material is all copyrighted ad infinitum, so that rightsholder robber-barons extract royalties at light-speed-lagged removes. In the foreground is a cult whose mission is to prevent humanity from artificially evolving itself into a post-sapient species that builds spaceships the way beavers build dams. It's a corker. It's been a year since I read it and even now hardly a week goes by without it coming up in conversation.
Tom sez: "Chipworks is a company that reverse engineers semiconductor devices and sells reports to competitors. During the reverse engineering process they've found tiny images that have been added into the designs which end up in the manufactured design. I especially like the Milhouse and the Waldo. These things are really small!"
LEDHead is a PalmOS emulator for a variety of golden-age handheld LED games. Zed sez: "LED football was my first significant computer game time-waster."
Fantastic and famous war-photos mix-n-matched with equally fantastic, fetishistically detailed GI Joe dollies for hybridized postmodern fun and the horror, the horror.
Jack "psychotic religious tract" Chick has determined that Harry Potter is from the devil. 'Bout time!
A reverse prank? Richard Ankrom's latest art installation is a bogus addition to a freeway sign that makes it easier for motorists to find their exit. 150,000 people a day saw it for nine months, while Ankram's bold artistic vision was realized, again and again.
Wanna water-cool your X-Box? (Probably not). Step by step instructions:
Bert, Bert, Bert. Will you never learn?
This two-headed piglet looks very happy. Too bad it died.
Freaky Italian kids' book on dental health -- great illos!
I just read the first issue of Heeb: The New Jew Review and it is good. Very, very good. The spread on Jewfros, the Neil Diamond centerfold, the alterna-CD record reviews by an elderly Jewish couple. I am kvelling. It's a Giant Robot for the Chosen People!
Massive and spectacular site devoted to the lost art of the luggage-label: articles, histories and a wondrous, addictive gallery.
Utterly fantastic gallery of Chinese Maoist propaganda posters (the caption for this one is "Our good friends")
Interactive app for making your own little Lego person -- here's me. Unfortunately, they don't have courier-bag or cigaratte accessories.
The DOE is selling 8 x 10 color glossies of nuclear bomb tests from the 1950s. The image shown here is XX-27 CHARLIE, a toy-sized 14-kiloton bomb from 1951. 
Reading Dilbert in Spanish is extremely mind-bending. Geek humor is still funny in Spanish, but in a very different way. Someone go translate Get Your War On now.
Holy crap. Rob "Community Wireless Networking" Flickenger ran a packet-sniffer called EtherPEG (which makes collages out of images being moved over the sniffed network) during this morning's panel on blogs and emergence, with Steve Johnson, Clay Shirky, Rael Dornfest, Geoff Cohen and me. The results are really unspeakably weird. It is to reel.
Creepy twenty-dollar-bill origami reveals hidden images of the burning WTC and Pentagon.
The Periodic Table table!
Did anyone notice "Copyright Awareness Week" last month? That was the week when personal websites were meant to display the "Celebrate Creativity" logo shown here, with a glowing (c) as Ra, the Sun God, rising over verdant, gradient-filled hillsides. Near as I can remember, the celebrants were few and far between. Maybe it had something to do with the licensing terms, which give you a pretty good idea of what copyright means to corporate America:
This keypad is hard to describe, but it looks like it could be really cool -- basically, you mash your phone-keys in the direction of the letters you want and the letters come up on your phone.
Check out these amazing clips of riders on the vomit-comet (the freefalling jet that simulates low-gee environment) rupturing water-balloons and injecting the resulting blobs with dye and air and such. Science!
Joey's posted a whack of photos from ETCON -- here's me in Damien Stolarz's groovy shades.
Someone called the cops on a woman (who happens to be the director of UC Santa Cruz's rape prevention and counseling program) who trimmed her hedges to resemble a penis and breasts.
Dig this 56-avatar human pyramid that a gang of Spanish Quake III players built.
Lessig and Co. have put up a site (designed by Metafilter Matt, no less) to track the comings and goings in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case, where the forces of good and purity face down the copyright absolutists who would keep all of human endeavor locked up behind IP laws until the heat-death of the universe. You can (and should) add a badge for the site to your blog, exhorting your readers to "Create like it's 1790," "Free the Mouse," and to watch for "When copyright attacks!"
Finger-lickin' chicken-pluckers are up in arms at this grotesque GM featherless chicken that is coming soon to an inhumane pen near you.
A whole school of mutant IXOYE fish. 
These hand-blown glass rayguns from Joe Blow studios are fantastic.
Animation Blast is my favorite magazine, and it keeps getting better. It is about one thing -- animation artists, and the editor, Amid Amidi, always seems to pick my favorites. This is the first issue that has interior color pages, and they're put to great use. There's an interview with Gary Baseman (Teacher's Pet), a review of a 1956 book, Walt Disney's Our Friend the Atom, and a must-read interview with Hanna-Barbera character designer Ed Benedict, including an appreciation by John Kricfalusi in which he explains why Benedict is his favorite animation designer. The magazine costs $6 and you can read more about it at the Animation Blast web site. 
It's a Bible that shoots a jet of flame from between its pages, allowing you to be just as fire-n-brimstone as you need to be.
Heaven help me, but I just can't stop laughing at H4x0R Economist, a comic strip which basically consists of pictures of Alan Greenspan with speech balloons filled with haxor-speak.
Check it out: Barbie-sized tiki-furniture! My God, my tastes have become mainstream.
Peter Bagge has always been one of my favorite cartoonists, ever since I discovered him in the pages of R. Crumb's Weirdo in the mid-1980's. Bagge did a couple of great series for Fantagraphics. The first was Neat Stuff, which had one of my all time favorite comic book characters, Girly Girl, a character who managed to be obnoxious, stupid, mean-spirited, and endearing at the same time. Later, Bagge created Hate which became a lot more popular. Hate's main attraction was the dysfunctional Bradley family. Over the years, readers got to watch the family unravel. I don't remember when Hate stop being published, but I'm pleased to learn that it's back as an annual. I just got issue number 2 (still waiting to get number 1) and it is as good as ever. Buddy Bradley is now married with a baby, but he's just as irresponsible and slothful as ever. Also included are a couple of wonderful stories Bagge wrote for Suck.com (created by Boing Boing's webmaster, 
The Pi-Pi-to-Phone is a dangerously cute new Japanese kids' cellphone that is preprogrammed to only dial three numbers.
MC Escher paving stones -- what a brilliant idea. I wish I had a garden.
These "nude clothes" are a couture version of the oversized beach-tees with silk-screened muscle-torsos and bikini-bosoms, the direct descendent of the John-Hughes-movie-rebel tuxedo-tee.
Mena's written up detailed instructions (and created a printable PDF) for making your own Haunted Mansion stretch-gallery; glue it together facing in and you've got a peep-box; facing out and you've got an ornament.
This is the first and probably the last time I'll ever be on a national TV commercial, so I am going to toot my horn. Here's a Quicktime of a TV commercial for Apple that I did. 
NTK has posted links to a number of people's photo-collections from last weekend's Festival of Inappropriate Technology. I'm particularily fond of this snap of me and Charlie "Antipope" Stross. (Charlie's the one with all the hair)
Matt from Scrubbles has put up "Discards," a gallery of found photographs.
DVDs of vintage Disneyland home movies available for sale. Woot!
Totally spectacular collection of vintage consumer-goods packaging. I would so totally buy packaged goods that came in wrappers like these. I miss this look and feel.
Hobo Nickels -- Buffalo Nickels customized by rail-riding Depression-era tramps -- are back. Sam Alfano, an American engraver, has revived the lost art and is making fantastic Hobo Nickels like the Casey Jones portrait pictured here.
Horrifying and fascinating six-legged insectoid Finnish logging machine with the power to stop a thousand Loraxes without straining its thoraxes. Don't miss the videos.
Martha Stewart Living in Jail: prison merchandise in high style for the crafty con in you. Pictured here: "Apricot Inmate Baseball Hat." Also available: "The classic brimless 'black and white' spectator cap" and others.
Indulge your fetish for tall buildings with the Sky Scraper database; search by city, region, stories, architect or name and get a comparison chart back.
Airline Meals supersite collects pix of airplane food from travellers round the net, along with notes, files 'em by airline, lets you vote on 'em, etc and so on. The vittles on the Beijing to Guangzhou night flight on China Southern look pretty good.
Denise sez: "This artist/scientist? (I don't know, it's in German) took
a petri dish of photosensitive bacteria and projected a
negative image of a partially submerged submarine on it.
The bacteria moved to the light areas of the image forming
this."
Ted Chiang's collection of short stories, "Stories of Your Life and Others," is out. Ted is a national treasure. He writes one story every million years or so, but each of those stories is a goddamned jewel. He's won two Nebula awards (I was at one of the Neb banquets where he received an award, though he wasn't, and sat at a table filled with three or four of Ted's agents; that's right, three or four of Ted's agents. The guy's never written a novel, has no plans to, but just in case, there's a whole queue of agents ready to represent him). He's sold a short-story collection -- this collection -- to Tor, even though he has no novel planned; an occurrence that's basically unheard of. I'd be jealous if he wasn't such an amazing, humble, decent guy -- check out his bio from the jacket-flap: "Ted Chiang lives near Seattle, Washington." If I could write as well as Ted, I'd be (even more) insufferable.
Yamaha has shipped a new CD burner that can write images directly on the substrate, using unoccupied sectors.
In his latest PC Magazine column, columnist John Dvorak (shown on left) calls me a "goofy looking schlub." That pretty much nails it. I only wish he'd gotten my first name right:
Matt Jones, inventor of "war-chalking" -- hobo-runes that WiFi activists chalk on the sidewalk when they encouter a wireless netwok -- proposes a set of simple symbols.
First in-the-wild wibo warchalking.
Dan Gillmor blasts the corporate crooks whose transgressions fill today's newscasts, greedy bastards who milked billions from their companies, betraying their shareholders. Dan thinks they're aberrant, and that their worst sin is making investors believe that there's no way for the little guy to win. I wonder how aberrant they are -- these aren't fly-by-night operators; the perps in these billion-dollar, economy-destroying felonies are seasoned CEOs and CFOs, people who come from the ranks of Big Five consulting firms and out of world-renowned B-schools. These crooks are the kinds of talking hairpieces that VCs like to parachute into startups to get them ready for IPO; they're the kinds of back-slapping cap-toothed glad-handers who know how to talk to the investment bankers. Some days, I believe that the only way to get to the top of a venture-funded or public company is to check your morals at the door.
Snowcrash -- the Swedish design firm -- is chock full o' super-leet Swedish design. It's like Ikea for people with an unlimited budget.
Amazing -- slow loading -- map shows the known and speculative connections between spammers and the ISPs that support their mailing and product-marketing.
This Sunday, the Berkeley Physics Department is auctioning off its old junk, including:
Triptych: Tetris with complex physics.
Yoz "Internet Yiddish" Grahame (who insists that he is a far-less-than-excellent geek) has whipped up a little Web app that takes the specifics of a wireless access point as parameters and spits out a printable PDF of the wibo warchalking mark for it. Here's the one for mine. (Matt Jones adds that the back end for this was written by Dean Hall, credit where credit is due).
The Boombox Museum is a wonderful pictorial history of the personal stereo, from the paleolithic 70s to the golden 80s and the decadent and declining 90s.
Amazing and inflammatory gallery of remixed wartime propaganda posters. I chose this one in honor of Canada Day.
Apple's released a set of icons based on the people in its "Switch" campaign, including our very own Mark "Shlub" Frauenfelder!
Welcome to our new guestblogger, Miss Tiffany Lee Brown, the editrix of the 
The Monsturd site is a tribute to the greatest poop movie of the decade. Stills, the themesong, and trailers for your perusal. Even if you missed the San Francisco screening, you can still buy the video!
Warchalking cartoons are spreading!
Got a copy of Duke Nukem PC? You can run this groovy 3D run-through of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.
The Rat Blaster is a sonic varmint repeller capable of "keeping Godzilla out of your garbage cans."
Trashlog -- a daily scan/photo of trash found on the street.
An enterprising hardware hacker has built a PC-driven interface to the Etch-a-Sketch.
Oceanic Arts is the tiki-schwag importer in LA, that, among other things, carved all the tiki stuff at the Adventurelands in Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Tikiroom.com has a fantastic photo-tour of the Oceanic Arts warehouse that has me all a-drool for some more primo tiki stuff. Mark took me to Oceanic Arts during one of my trips to LA, but it was closed. Now I really want to go back!
Joey's posted some photos of the fallout of Toronto's on-going garbage strike (which has come in the middle of a heat-wave, natch!). The CBC Radio reports I've been listening to online suggest that this is some pretty bad news -- rats in the streets, the sweet reek of rot, gutters running thick with refuse. In all the time I lived there -- 29 years -- we never had a city-wide trash-strike. I can't even imagine what my hometown is like these days.
Rueben Bolling's latest "Tom the Dancing Bug" strip does an admirable job of explaining corporate crim and the response thereto of our lawmakers.
Howard Rheingold does this really cool anarcho-artistic thing: he paints his shoes. A little acrylic, some cheap brushes and biff-bam, you've got a thought-provoking work of original art strapped to your shanks' mares.
Frequent Boing Boing link-contributor Steve Portigal has written a great little article about "Meary," Japanese stick-on googly eyes that Meary fans paste onto everything that could conceivably be enhanced by a pair of friendly, eerie staring eyes.
Slowhand sez: "This is an odd little art project, entirely unrelated to the war, by a warblogger: short little stick-figure animations which are digested versions of classic films (with gratuitous decapitations edited in as neccessary), made suitable for display on early-generation web-enabled cell phones, but now posted to the web in general."
Check out this nifty animated logo on the US Patent and Trademark Office website. 
Here's a place to buy Woodring figurines in the US. 
Which forbidden item would be easier to sneak on a plane: a metal nail clipper or this plastic knife concealed in a comb? 
Our current Guestblogger, Xeni Jardin (
Luke of 
Ben and Mena "Movable Type" Trott took some holidays in Disneyland -- their photos are wonderful. The photographer's eye really exposes the surreal, pastel wunderland that is The Happiest Place on Earth.
Utterly swanky playing cards with recipes for favorite cocktails -- better than nudes! Comes with a cocktail shaker. Still, the whole package isn't worth the $50 they want for it, in my opinion.
These prayer-panties, bearing such inspirational messages as "WWJD?" and "Where Will You Spend Eternity?" are positively sacrelicious!
Nine tons of giant squid beached themselves on a beach north of San Diego last week.
Great documentary site explaining the details of the construction of this mind-croggling backyard mech-warrior, built from old crates and spare parts.
The Foreign Buyers' Club delivers the finest British consumer packaged goods to your door. Heinz Treacle, Marmite, creamed rice -- it's all there!
Amazing gallery of home-made, update Wacky Packs -- I've got a framed uncut sheet of set one on my wall here at the EFF as a testament to the value of fair-use parody.
The Shop Steward is a deeply swanky cocktail accessory. If I still had a bar, I would be all over this thing. Four or six bottles clamp in between cunning brass grips and jigger-measuring speed-pours. Spin the wheel of intoxication, hit the nozzle, and get exactly one shot of your favorite sauce.
Nice NYT article about the Bulova Accutron, the world's first transistorized watch. It debuted in 1961 and used a tuning fork to stay accurate. 
Cigalicious gallery of vintage cancer-stick packaging.
Mort Walker has added a new character to the Beetle Bailey pantheon. Chip Gizmo shows up at Camp Swampy, bedecked with such futuristic props as a PDA and a cellphone, and hilarity ensues: "So goes the humor that will follow Chip Gizmo into Camp Swampy, as the computer specialist faces off with old-fashioned Gen. Halftrack. For example, when Gizmo warns Halftrack not to use his pop-out CD-ROM holder for a coffee cup holder, the general relents. Next, Gizmo finds him using it to hold his martini glass." Oh, oh, oh, my sides.
Ben Hammersley's put up a gallery of some of the photos he took in Peshawar and the Afghani border-areas last year while he was on assignment for his paper there.
Unspeakable k-rad pewter Simpsons bar accessories. Anyone still owe me a birthday prezzie?
Doctorow's 27-pixel-square tattoo is based on the Sad Mac screen icon that is displayed when old all-in-one Macs have catastrophic hardware problems. The Sad Mac is a perversion of the happy, smiling Mac shown when a Mac boots up. Instead of a smiley face, the Sad Mac has a pout and crosses for eyes.
Encode any arbitrary string as a 
Sweet diagram showing the connections and capacity of the data-lines between Asian nations.
The Japanese government is assigning every citizen a mandatory, permanent 11-digit number. The move has provoked rare civil-disobedience activity from privacy-sensitive citizens, who point out that in three years of work on the system, the Japanese government has failed to create a single privacy policy in respect of the disposition of records that are linked to the number. 86 percent of respondents to a newspaper poll are concerned about the privacy implications of the new system.
Excellent nerdy t-shirts from halibut.com.
Great gallery of fancily shaped kids' tinned pasta. I remember all these pastas as being shaped like blobs of starch, back in my day, but it appears that the starch-shaping technology has improved, as these clearly recognizably R2D2 and Jar-Jar Binks pastoids attest.
Cat and Girl is a great net comic-strip.
Today, except for immigrant workers eager to stay invisible, few ride the rails just to get from place to place. With all the risk and potential for mishaps, comic and tragic both, walking is almost more efficient. But since the early '90s, train-hopping has been gaining ground among a new generation of tramps. The grizzled old hobos may be dying off, but they're being replaced in boxcars and on the porches of grain cars by street kids, gutter punks, dreamy anarchists and eco-warriors, train-obsessed professionals, all held loosely together by a vision of freedom as old as the nation itself, an America of movement and self-reliance, of mythic vastness and silence, of discovery, escape, rebellion. It's an America that was offered long ago and never delivered, that we're all supposed to love but not allowed to look for, that's just around the corner and always out of reach.
Shop for super light, super thin, super tiny Japanese laptops and gadgets from the comfort of your big ugly American computer. 
BumperActive is giving away free "Free the Mouse" bumper-stickers to help the world show its support for the 
Gadgets for God is your tasteless religious artefact superstore -- from Blessed Odor Eaters to "Icthus" fish-shaped tambourines to Bibles that shoot flame, Gadgets for God has it all.
The latest Get Your War On, called "Get Your Exx On," is up. Lotsa yucks and lotsa zingers aimed at the Shrub administration's coziness with financially corrupt corporate felons.
Wonderful, twisted children's photo-book about the day that Plush Cthulhu came to visit the nursery.
Unimaginably large (thousands!) gallery of photos, watercolors, stamps, postcards and other images from Oceania. From historical Missionary paintings to 1960s cheesecake National Geo shots to modern postcards, this has it all -- in no particular order. I'm told that there's a bad midi soundtrack on the pages, but thanks to Mozilla, I never heard it.
Great Wired News story on the European resurgence of EarthShips, houses made from "bottles, cans and, primarily, old tires stuffed with dirt."
Estonia has amazing national WiFi coverage and they don't need warchalkers -- the gubbmint puts up these nifty signs to tell you where you can hop online.
A toxic cloud is hanging over Asia these days, "the result of forest fires; the burning of agricultural wastes; dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations; and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers." 
...in other words, a house designed and named by Bucky Fuller. 
Doggles -- goggles for dogs!
It was once told to me, what started out a small group of goofy creepy death rockers going to Disneyland, that has grown into its own institution, is just crazy and amazing. At the first official Bats Day, there was only about 90 people. At the second Bats Day, there was just over 200 people. The best thing is that everyone who goes to Bats Day can just leave all their cares and worries at the gate, and just have a fun time. May Bats Day in the Fun Park be around every year.
PaperStuff sells amazing, vintage fruit-crate labels dirt cheap -- $6 bucks and up!
Funny toons and paintings at Toothpaste for Dinner!
Hey, I'm Fuzz. I'm 21 years old, I live with my parents and I have my own action figure. Yes, I'm a real person and no, you can't have my autograph.
Our guinea pig is 39, strong and tall, with an angular jaw, bold ears, and a rugged face. He looks hale, hearty, and healthy — except for the wires. They run from the laptops into the signal processors, then out again and across the table and up into the air, flanking his face like curtains before disappearing into holes drilled through his skull. Since his hair is dark and the wires are black, it's hard to see the actual points of entry. From a distance the wires look like long ponytails...
Spectacular (and occassionally gruesome) gallery of photos of recycling plants and products (like these bricks made from a variety of recycled metals). The roadkill compost heap is really, really creepy.
Hello Kitty responds to your keyboard motion by talking and moving! Type with Kitty! Keyboard action and sound function. Hello Kitty responds to the keyboard and mouse motion by moving herself! (Moves both arms and head) Hello Kitty will talk with you, along with the input motion of the keyboard. (Kitty is able to talk in both Japanese and English. The languages can be switched.)...
HowStuffWorks.com examines the Digital Video Recorder (i.e., ReplayTV, TiVo). Trying to figure out how to explain why you can't live without your TiVo to your grandfather or cluless cousin? Print out this primer and watch them marvel at the groovy exploded diagrams.
Get Out of Hell Free cards -- just $1 for ten cards, plus P&H.
Eli writes: "Antwerp has a drive-in ferris wheel,
with space for four cars at once."
Beautiful online gallery of vintage beer-trays.
Michael Skeet writes: "Weird and wonderful site for a faux documentary about an alternate-universe U.S. space program. Imagine that the plans described in the magnificent 1952 "Colliers" series "The Conquest of Space" (illustrated by Chesley Bonestell) actually came to pass. The teaser trailer is magnificent: an animated Bonestellian conical shuttle-rocket launches from Complex 39b at the Kennedy Space Center..."
Amazing pictorial history of the Atomic Age from the dawn of the A-Bomb to the present day.
Stefan sez: "
This Japanese site features pictures of the Nintendo cartridge collection of this amazing game-obsessive. He has so many he's built furniture out of 'em, tiled his apartment with 'em and even bathes in them.
Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site is an " Unauthorized Guide
to the Golden Age of National Lampoon
Magazine (1970-1975)" 
Great overview of how one would communicate with the long distant future on this page, which concerns itself with the design of warning-signs for toxic waste that are meant to communicate danger 12,000 years into the future.
Stefan sez: "Eeeyah! Patrick Farley quit his day job and is starting a weekly strip about the long-ago era of Dot-Com San Francisco. Episode One is up now. (Strong language. Not for Grandma.)"
I'm working on my third novel, "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," a big, fat urban fantasy story about community wireless activists and various and sundry magics. The book is set in Toronto's wonderful Kensington Market neighborhood, and I've been casting about for a good site with photo-reference of the Market and Toronto in general. TorontoPics is that site. Wonderful shots from the whole city.
In 1991, I received a grant to build a space shuttle simulator at a public school where I was a science teacher. After three years of construction (mostly by me), our simulator became operational. For the next six years, we ran 3-hour simulated shuttle missions with our students. Then, about 2 years ago, my district decided to participate in the Challenger Center program, and my simulator was suddenly expendable. I left that district, but they allowed me to take as many of the pieces of the simulator as I wanted. After over a year of paying $60 a month for a climate-controlled storage room, I can no longer afford to keep the simulator, nor do I forsee any way for me to re-build it at my home. So, I'm offering it here on ebay.
Leonard Nimoy recorded this amazing, psychedelic musical video tribute to The Hobbit, complete with pointy-eared go-go girls dancing a Hobbit dance.
David Weekly has posted a great gallery of photos from last night's EFF benefit at the DNA Lounge. It was a hell of an event -- DJs, civil liberatarians, nerd dancing, and the headlining act: Wil Wheaton boxing with Barney, the Purple Dinosaur. 
* When cakes are cooled to room temperature, crumble into a large bowl. Toss with half the remaining white cookie crumbs and the chilled pudding. You probably won't need all of the pudding, mix with the cake and "feel" it, you don't want it soggy, just moist; gently combine.
New marriage laws in the UK will allow licensed ministers to perform marriages anywhere, relaxing the restriction that marriages may only be conducted at licensed venues. An entrepreneur has developed a bounce-house church with a blow-up organ, plastic stained glass, and inflatable angels that he plans to rent out for weddings once the law goes into effect.
Now this is how you void your warranty with style.
The SuperDriveDock is a brutally simple alternative to drive-cases. If you've got a naked drive and need to mount it in a hurry, just snap the dock on, plug in a FireWire cable and biff-bam, it's connected.
This radio-controlled flying-saucer incorpoates a programmable LCD on which you can add your own scrolling message, i.e., "I paid $99 for a radio-controlled flying saucer!"
Paper of Record has nearly 4,000,000 old newspapers from all over the commonwealth and New York digitized and searchable as PDFs. Most of them cost (a fair bit of) money to get access to, but there are a ton of free pages, too.
http://www.strangesisters.com/a-z/thumbnails/xlesbonympho.jpg
Ten years in the Valley, and all Murray Swain had to show for it was a spare tire, a bald patch, and a life that was friendless and empty and maggoty-rotten. His only ever California friend, Liam, had dwindled from a tubbaguts programmer-shaped potato to a living skeleton on his death-bed the year before, herpes blooms run riot over his skin and bones in the absence of any immunoresponse. The memorial service featured a framed photo of Liam at his graduation; his body was donated for medical science.
Check out these awesome laptop stands styled after the iMac's base. My physiotherapist has sternly warned me to start working with my iBook at eye-level and so I've been perching it on a spare oscilloscope on my desk, but this might be even more stylish.
The RIAA's site was rather subtly and relatively humorously defaced this morning. While I'm not a big fan of this kind of vandalism, it's refreshing to see it pulled off with some wit.
Officials said the Dewie campaign is part of the federal government’s broad effort to promote a “culture of security” and the view that every person who uses computers and networks, such as the Internet, has a role in keeping cyberspace safe.
The Conference Bike is a bicycle built for seven, with the seats arranged in a ring to facilitate conversation.
Check out the seaside wireless warchalking action at Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass!
Ethriam makes his home in Nirvana as supreme ruler of the Polyhedroids. He and Primus are in constant heat over who is the true master of hte infinite discs of the plane. Primus is believed to have divided the discs into equal sectors, but Ethriam purports that any infinite space has a remaining infinity once it is thus divided. Hence, there are two gods in Nirvana who believe themselves "Masters of the Infinite," with two infinite "halves" of the plane irrevocably divided and Ethriam always at work at constructing his own form of energy to spin the discs of his half.
Dug's made up this great badge for people to use on their sites after they've switched away from Verisign, the immoral, venal registrar who we should all be involved in putting to death, by telling our friends and families about their 
A street-legal Star Wars landspeeder kit-car up for auction on eBay. Only $12k right now!
A British carpenter who dreamed of living on a private sunshine isle built himself one using 250,000 plastic bottles.
Of all the comics I buy, Dan Clowe's Eightball is my favorite. He's best known for his multi-issue stories, such as "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" and "Ghost World," but I really love the short misanthropic humor stories that he draws. Twentieth Century Eightball is a new anthology of these stories, published by Fantagraphics. The 100-page book is loaded with Clowe's deliciously snarky attacks on sports, love, art, sex, hipsters, and music. Like R. Crumb, Clowes has a hair-trigger bullshit detector, which he uses on himself as frequently as everyone and everything else. Amazon is selling it for just $13.30, which is a great deal. (And if you buy it by clicking on this link, Boing Boing gets a cut.)
Blogging gets a mention in today's Doonesbury. Nous sommes arrives.
Here's a collection of toy dolls designed by Junko Mizuno, a young comic book artist from Japan. 
I've just made a limited edition print of my Ukulele Girl illustration. It's printed on 500 lb textured stock using the 
Crash Bonsai sells highly detailed miniature wrecked cars, with the notion that you'll use them to adorn your bonsai tree, staging a teeny car-crash in your pot-o-mini-serenity.
The first issue of the highly-anticipated Ukulele Occasional is out, and it's every bit as wonderful as I hoped it would be. There are some great articles in there about ukuleles and ukulele players, both old and new. It looks more like a high quality paperback book than a magazine. Overall, a wonderful job. Congrats to the publisher, Jason Verlinde! 
EFF is auctioning off the gloves that 
Great annotated collection of thrifted, new and yard-sale-found treasures.
Dozens of photos of horrible cafeteria food.
Wonderful galley of the doodles of Stanislaw Lem.
Stewart Brand's son Noah, whom I know from the WELL, has posted this very cogent report of an anti-Bush protest in Portland where he was 
Artists participating in this event will permit recording of their
performances by those in attendance in support of EFFs Open Audio
License (OAL). Musicians performing at the event include: the Box Set
Duo - clown princes of folk-rock, the classic funk band Funkmonsters,
celtic world-fusion group Hy Brassyl, harmony based folk-pop band
Atticus Scout, and Berkeley-based party band Shady Lady. Please
see EFF's webpage at www.eff.org/events/share-in for more information.
If hax0rs ruled the earth -- images from an alternate reality.
Join EFF today and take your pick of our leet new stickers!
An HP Lovecraft search-engine!
EscapeRail, a gallery of arty photos of fire-escapes, is soliciting submissions.
Here's a gallery of even older emoticons from the 1970s-era PLATO system:
Great original art from paperback books, magazines, pulp covers, etc., up for auction at Illustration house. 
Gallery of patriotic biscuits.
Vintage men's wigs (including a Pulp Fiction Samuel Jackson number) for sale.
Snow Crash). 
My pal Jet has been working on a jet-powered dune-buggy to take to Burning Man all year. Unfortunately, he had serious issues this year, so the jetbuggy didn't travel at all under its own power, but damn, it looks cool and made a great noise!
Great new toy guns shoot fog-rings!
Check out this amazing map of fetishes, which attempts to relate all fetishes to one another.
Great India Times ad for the Washy-Talky, a talking washing-machine.
TypoPhile is a collaborative project to design a typeface. You start with a grid of randomly distributed black and white pixels, then each successive visitor to the site is given the option of switching one random pixel to black or white, in order to form a given letter. Cycle through the entire face and join the type-design hive-mind.
Jeff writes: "Goats with enormous testicles, and a life-sized cow sculpted from butter. Pictures from Massachusett's Eastern States Expo this weekend. Anyone know the purpose of those overgrown goat gonads?"
Matt "Warchalking" Jones has come up with a bio-dog for the latest 
Moller International has developed the first and only feasible, personally affordable, personal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicle the world has ever seen.
As James Bond, Ken has matured nicely with rooted hair, with slight silvering at his temples, wearing a midnight blue tuxedo, and authentic recreation of the classic tux by Brioni, the famed clothier. Linda Hemming, the award winning costume designer in charge of this year's James Bond film, outfits Barbie doll. She wears a blood red gown with a glittering gold lace overlay and a gauzy red shawl with a gold filigree design. Her gown is cut up the side to reveal lots of leg as well as not so discreet hip strap that anchors Barbie's cell phone. The set is slated for release in November, to coincide with the premiere of "Die Another Day," the new James Bond film. Bond, James Bond, meet Barbie, just Barbie...
Duct-tapers are mainstream bondage fetishists who tape each other up to walls and ceilings "just to see if it will hold." Pervs.
Disney Pictures hereby grants you a limited, nonexclusive, nontransferable, one-year royalty free license to use and display the Images on your site in accordance with the terms below. Nothing herein by implication or otherwise, shall grant you any rights other than as explicitly set forth below.
Stefan sez: "My brother's friend Sue plays with high voltage. The linked-to page shows the gadget she used to photograph high voltage discharges in *water*."
The T-Mobile Sidekick and other instances of the Danger Hiptop PDA/Phone are being promoted as mobile blogging tools.
In 1999, Montana's 63-old Libertarian candidate for Senator starting drinking a homebrew concoction of colloidal silver to prevent bacterial infecttion (he was afraid that conventional antibiotics wouldn't be available in the new millennium), and now his skin has turned blue for good.
Check out this weird easter-egg I found in MacOS 10.2.1's Sharing control panel!
Jon Lebkowsky has posted a little gallery of pictures from my EFF-Austin talk at ACTLab at the University of Texas (and a couple shots from the kick-ass BBQ we ate beforehand, note the Atkins-compliant lunch). I had a fantastic time there -- thanks to the organizers and especially to Jon for putting it together. It's was especially great to meeet the Boing Boing readers who came out to the talk!
An Alberta teenager has hit the bigtime with a curling videogame. Friends of mine who curl assure me that curling is way fun to play (it certainly isn't that fun to watch!) and, of course, you can (and should!) drink beer while playing. I believe that disqualifies it as a sport, no?
Stan Jones isn't the only person to have turned himself blue with quack silver remedies. "Rosemary" took silver supplements in the 50s for her allergies and put up this site in 1998 to warn others off of the horror of blue skin for life.
Lego enthusiasts have implemented three of Escher's optical illusion paintings (including "Ascending and Descending," pictured here), using Lego!
Tim Biskup is an artist who does a lot of work for animation studios. His work is inspired by one of my favorite illustrators, Jim Flora. Tim's selling a deck of poker cards, each with a different illo, and they look terrific. Lots of whimsical monsters and happy monkeys and weird prehistoric plants. I pre-ordered my deck just now. Hurry, only 2500 decks will be printed! 
I often carry my ukulele with me on planes. The case is so little it can fit in my suit case. I missed a great photo opportunity when I was in the airport a couple of weeks ago, and saw someone checking on a standup bass fiddle. It was in a huge plastic Darth Vader shipping case. The buckles on the thing were about the size of my uke. I should have taken a picture of my uke and the bass side-by-side. Anyway, here's a stand-up bass that looks much more portable: the Kona Walkingstick. You still need to carry around an amp, though. 
What happens when you throw chunks of sodium in a lake? Watch these QuickTime clips to find out. 
Eli the Bearded writes, "Henry Lim (the harpsichord guy) is good.
Eric Harsbarger is on the same level, but
a lot more prolific. Eric is one of the
few people who builds Lego sculpture
commercially but isn't a Lego employee. The working grandfather clock is one of
my favorites."
JC Penney is marketing a modified Barbie Dream House as a GI Joe "Forward Command Post." Little boys can play house, so long as the house in question is part of an overall street-by-street urban combat scenario.
This robot hand, coupled with a computer-vision system, is freaking eerie. Click through for a bunch of MPEG clips of the robot's master taunting the hand by waving objects before it, while it, and its vision-mount, chase them, eventually reaching out and snatching them out of the air. The hand-shaking demo is killer.
Sony
announced Thursday that it is releasing new software that will provide the canine
robot AIBO with face-recognition and self-recharging capabilities. The AIBO Recognition
[ERF210-AW06E] application prompts the robot to automatically re-juice its own battery when
depleted (as shown in the image here), and also enables AIBO to distinguish its owner's name, voice and face
from other humans. The new software debuts in November at $99 retail, and will
be released around the same time that Sony debuts two new holiday colors for the
AI pet: red and white. From the Sony press release:
Pictures from a balloon sculpture get together. (Beware of the vile balloon porn in one of the pictures.) 
A new ad campaign from Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit features shocking pics of iMacs and PCs engaging in random acts of friendship. Enjoying Chinese take-out. Fishing. Chilling by the pool. Launching October 12, the series of three print ads is intended to illustrate the need for cross-platform compatibility, and how Office X helps Macs and PCs communicate.
The Southern California Wireless Users Group (socalwug.org) will host an inaugural Wardrive-in next Wednesday evening in the parking lot of Everest Burgers, 2314 Lake Ave, in Altadena, CA. Sounds like one hell of a good time:
An entire episode of the Canadian classic craptastic hippie horror variety show, "The Hilarious House of Frightenstein" (featuring Vincent Price!), available for download in the spirit of the Hallowe'en season.
Brown is Green. A dung-fueled power station in the UK has won an environmental award from the Euro Solar educational charity. The Ł7M plant produces power for the national grid, and is capable of generating 1.4 megawatts of power at full tilt. Located in Devon, it runs on approximately 1.6 million tons of waste produced by local farmers. Apparently, this trend is pretty big in Germany and Denmark: both countries already have about 20 large-scale poo-poo-powered plants.
The winning entry in the 
A University of Florida research team is developing nano-batteries that could enable smaller, smarter, feature-packed mobile devices, as well as truly tiny power sources for "microelectromechanical" devices (aka MEMS):
Obligatory BoingBoing fashion moment--crank up the plastic, and get ta shoppin'. Check out the new collection of retro-techno-chic watches from DIESEL on the "dieseltimeframes.com" site just launched this week. 
Villette Numerique is a new biennial digital art festival in France; I covered the event for WIRED News 
This Department of Defense site wins a double award. One, for the logo of a combat knife piercing the planet, and two, for the scary warning on the main page, which warns, "Use of this DoD computer system, authorized or unauthorized, constitutes consent to monitoring of this system. Unauthorized use may subject you to criminal prosecution. Evidence of unauthorized use collected during monitoring may be used for administrative, criminal, or other adverse action." I came across this site while researching an article. I wonder whether that constitutes "unauthorized use"? 
The BBC have posted the first of ten short Wallace and Grommit short films in a series called "Cracking Contraptions." This one is called "Soccamatic," and it's classic Wallace and Grommit action.
This Hallowe'en, why not warcarve your pumpkin and let your neighbors know about your open wireless network?
I wrote and illustrated a kids' science experiment book called THE MAD PROFESSOR. It went on sale today! Every page is in full color and loaded with illustrations, and it's printed on easy-to-clean laminated paper, so you can make your Goon Goo, hovercrafts, portal paper, spool-bots, and other experiments without fear of staining the book.
The AIBO Speed Board allows AIBO to entertain you with dances and routines on its very own scooter. You can navigate AIBO's skating with voice commands such as 'turn left' and 'super slalom'. Create your own skate routines by moving AIBO to record the motions that can then be replayed later on.
The "Download Beautiful Wallpaper" link on the Urdu-language online publication from Islamic organization 
Several adorable icon sets from the creator of the Twink toy music CD. Don't miss the new werms set! Also, check out Yip Yop's weblog, where I learned that Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch has a rock band! 
Priceline.com just launched a promo campaign in which customers who purchase vacations through the travel site before October 31 get a free William Shatner bobblehead doll. 
Download anti-war posters for your avatars in The Sims.
Most of the computer keys are in roughly the same place as the corresponding typewriter keys, so connecting them was a fairly straightforward process. But a 1923 Underwood typewriter has no "enter" key, no "option" key, etc., so some connections were harder to make. The silver rod running along the top of the typewriter runs from the chrome return lever on the left to a cam on the right, which rotates and pushes down on another rod which is connected to the computer "return" key hidden beneath the console.
Suddenly, teen decorinis are big biz. New TV shows like "Trading Spaces" on Learning Channel, and MTV's "
You're a starving student with more interior design flava than interior design budget? Here are detailed how-to instructions for building your own lava lamp with cheap materials. Of note: the highly coveted "White Trash" lava lamp formula, shown at left.
As the Space Shuttle landed last Friday, the first-ever soy crop in space also returned to earth. During the Atlantis mission, soybeans planted and tended by DuPont scientists germinated, developed, flowered and created new seedpods; the 97-day initiative was the first major crop growth cycle ever completed in orbit. By proving that space crop production is possible, new potential for long-term human space travel becomes a closer possibility.
The moon remained a vacant lot in a bad neighborhood—until last month, when TransOrbital Incorporated became the first private company granted government permission to explore, photograph, and land there. What's fueling this moon rush is not just a juicy balance sheet, but a pulp fantasy version of the frontier. Rather than belonging to the world, lunar soil would belong to whoever staked a claim and had the best business model. 
"[Mr.] Stanford claims the 8- by 10-inch document, which is written in a language not known on Earth, entitles him to full ownership of the moon and all materials within a 500-mile radius of the orb’s surface... [he] insists that he is owed royalties on any television, film, or printed material bearing the likeness of his property or songs using the word moon in their title, including the movie Man in the Moon, and popular songs like Moon River.
The unconventional configuration of the Bird of Prey suggests it has been designed to be highly agile and stealthy. But even though the aircraft itself has been revealed to the public, the stealth systems designed to suppress acoustic, infra-red, radar and even visual signatures are likely to be as highly classified as ever.
A company called "AlphaSmart" has released "Dana," this PalmOS-based laptop-like device, for $399.
I have to admit these drink glasses with images and pewter models of atom bombs and explosions look pretty neat. Will cocktail shakers with pictures of the twin towers in flames be fashionable in 2050? 
"Samples of the type of sounds converted from plasma wave instruments are available online 
Edison's Ark: scanned vintage patent drawings.
Check out this amazingly creepy poster from the London police, which aims to put people at their ease at the notion of living in the most-surveilled country in the world. It's like the cover of an old Ace Double paperback about watchful, tyrannical aliens.
* Hilary Rosen asks "Put up your hand if you download and burn music" (most hands go up). She then asks "Keep you hand up if you buy more music because of it" (many stay up). She gets worried and immediately asks some different and confusing set of people to put their hands up, causing everyone to look miffed, and everyone putting their hand down)
Wonderful, extensive collection of fruit sticker graphics from around the world. Not to be confused with larger fruit box labels, these are the little stickers affixed to the fruits and veggies themselves.
Dude. It's Monday. Again. You're gonna need some fresh urls to help you blow off work while looking all diligent and worky, hunched over your monitor. Furrow your brows, squint a little for added effect--then log on to these four time-waster destinations offering unauthorized and inspired uses for common office supplies. Some sites are newer, some aren't. All are guaranteed to reduce productivity. Warning: rated "F" for gratuitous Flash.
An exquisite Aztec tradition was celebrated among the carved granite vestiges
of first-generation Hollywood at Hollywood Forever cemetery for the third
annual Dia de los Muertos celebration last Saturday.
For me the most profound and real were those altars built out of tragedy. One
was from a fatherless Guatemalan family who asked, "?hablas espanol?"
Heather "Former Guestblogger" Champ recently came by this wonderful vintage stickerbook from the Canadian cheese-toon "The Mighty Hercules." There's something eerie and cool about the partially completed stickerbook turned into sharp digital images.
Check out these amazing photos from the set of the film adaptation of "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," Alan Moore's fantastic alternate-Victorian funnybook. Pictured here is Jason Fleyming in his Mr Hyde body-suit, which is eerily true to the book.
The artists behind anime classics Ghost in the Shell and Gundam have designed a line of limited-edition designer mice with groovy futuristic styling, to be released in November.
60. What do you call the area of grass between the sidewalk and the road?
The current results of this Time.com poll show that out of more than 40,000 Time readers, over 90 percent favor legalizing marijuana. Have you voted yet?
Mac fanatics have carved a series of amazing, "high-resolution" pumpkins on a Mac theme, including this Steve Ballmer pumpkin (don't miss Ellen Feiss, Woz, David Pogue, and the beloved happy Mac).
Great gallery of nerdy license plates.
Why go as wolfman this Hallowe'en when you could be really scary in one of these DIY disgraced-CEO masks. Pictured here: Bernard J. Ebbers, crooked chief of WorldCom.
Talented photoshoppers turn celebrity photos into zombie portraits. Nice job on the Dixie Chix.
Strange device hooks up to your TV set, allows 30 minutes of viewing time per token. Would probably work with a computer, too. Check out the other odd devices on this site.
1. 
Like
meteor showers, each TeV [terra-electron volt] photon leaves a faint blue streak
in the atmosphere that points back to its source. Over the last decade, they
also have discovered six occurrences of energetic gamma-ray flares from peculiar
galaxies known as Active galaxies or Blazars.
Amazing map of 802.11 wireless networks through Manhattan -- pretty much all of Manhattan.
Ditch the Fur Elise, please. 
Verbatim's new CD-R blanks looks like old 45s.
Great Flash applet lets you design your own evil clown.
Dolls gone wild! What's next, Fluffer Ken? A Pimpmobile accessory kit?
Dream Anatomy: high-resolution gallery of ancient anatomical drawings.
Encyclopedia Pictures:
These are also called Wimmelbilder, for "teeming figure picture". The perspective trick is that [Foote, p. 147] "he appears to move his vantage point progressively higher as the picture recedes...In addition, he usually painted these background figures larger than they would appear under normal rules of perspective." I think another way of thinking of this is that he paints it as if he were inside a Hollow Earth, with the distant landscape bending up to rise high, so that you are effectively looking down at it. Maybe B. did go into the Hollow Earth!
Amazing gallery of hundreds of photos from the US Antarctic Program.
The London underground system has commissioned fourteen murals celebrating the great films of Alfred Hitchcock. They were installed in Leytonstone station, not far from Hitch's birthplace.
For 558 pounds, you can buy this gift-case containing all 92 naturally occuring elements in the Periodic Table -- yes, uranium is included.
Impoverished Ugandan brides, urged by Christian ministers to have white weddings, are tearing down white mosquito nets to make beautiful gowns. Health officials warn that the practice will increase the spread of malaria, already an epidemic in Uganda.
Alan "Watchmen" Moore and Melinda Gebbie's one-page 
1. 
Amazing technicolor starburst art made from cut-up credit cards, by Raymond Pirouz.
A real-life implementation of the evergreen arcade game Tetris was obtained by optically trapping 42 glass microspheres
(1 μm diameter) in a 25 μm x 20 μm sized field under a microscope.
Their positions are then steered with a computer.
A gallery of photos of decaying vintage celluloid dice, from a book called 
Strange little web site featuring what is, in all likelihood, the world's only "Prime Number Shitting Bear." 
Need enough music for a week? Or two? The Neuros HD has the capacity to hold 5,000 songs, and superior functionality to provide the technology you demand in an MP3 audio computer. The Neuros can broadcast songs wirelessly to your stereo. It can record and identify songs from the FM radio. With automatic synchronization all your downloads, playlist changes, and requests from your PC library will be automatically executed.
Amazingly cool and dissonant photos of Aibos frolicking with fresh produce in a summer garden.
Japanese robotics company 
FOUND magazine is an incredibly cool online and print publication that explores the beauty and funkiness and accidental poignance of found things. Trash. Discarded objects. Weird notes about random sex, like 
Are we one step closer to texting for the US masses? Maybe. On Tuesday, Nokia introduced the 6800--a new GPRS/GSM device that's not a smartphone, isn't bundled with an OS from Microsoft, Symbian, Palm, or RIM... but *does* include a full keyboard. Excerpt from PCWorld story:
Stunning gallery of WPA-era silk-screened posters, including high-res, uncompressed TIFFs of the scans.
MAD's lampoon of The Onion ("The Bunion") is spot-on:
the caption for this reads "Funny Hairdo, Muppet, Reportedly Turns Otherwise Uninteresting Bush Photo 'Wacky'."
Hoodlum Helmets: One-stop hipster welding-helmet shop.
"Featured
offerings this year include:
Lalo Alcaraz's brilliant and infamous "
My pal Roger Wood, a gobsmackingly brilliant assemblage sculptor who makes breathtakingly wild junk-clocks like the one pictured here, is having a gallery show in Toronto.
A 700-year old Austrian church fresco has been discovered, with a likeness of what appears to be Mickey Mouse. The Maltese tourist board is considering suing Disney for trademark infringment.
Dalton Ghetti is a sculptor who carves miniscule sculptures out of the leads of pencils, by hand, without a magnifying glass.
Whether locals want to go to work, to the shop, out hunting, to visit relatives in the next village or simply go for a ride, the trolley is the easiest and often only means of transport...
Gallery of some of the world's finest floaty pens: the Jesus-walking-on-water floaty is positively sacrelicious.
Neat gallery of real-time webcams from approximately parallel locations in the Bay Area and the Greater Toronto Area (like the 401 at Yonge St versus the Golden Gate Bridge, or New City Hall versus Civic Center, etc).
Nice LoC gallery of Raymond Loewy sketches for the Studebaker Avanti.
iPulse is a super-dense diagnostic tool for OS X. Instead of running MemoryStick, CPU Monitor and NetMonitor to get a graphic view into your computer's load and activity, run iPulse, learn to decipher its user interface, and have a groovy, high-tech desktop widget.
Baby tees that read "Script Kiddee/I am leet, give me warez." The perfect Xmas gift for the hax0r prego-saur in your life.
Phentropy plots an arbitrarily large data source (of arbitrary data) onto a three dimensional volumetric matrix, which may then be parsed by OpenQVIS. Data mapping is accomplished by interpreting the file as a one dimensional stream of integers and progressively mapping quads in phase space. This process is reasonably straightforward: Take four numbers. Make X equal to the second number minus the first number. Make Y equal to the third number minus the second number. Then make Z equal to the last number minus the third number. Given the XYZ coordinate, draw a point. It turns out that many, many non-random datasets will have extraordinarily apparent regions in 3-space with increased density, reflecting common rates of change of the apparently random dataset. These regions are referred to as Strange Attractors, and can be used to predict future values from an otherwise random system.
The Royal Photoshopper Army of the Republic of Farkistan is on maneuvers today, cutting up and remixing "Worst-selling grocery items." Sheer hilarity!
Nice story on a guy who's building replica Apple I PCs, duplicating the machines that The Steve and The Woz built in their garage. The I's will be built to order, but unless Apple licenses out its Apple I ROMs, it won't be functional.
When
Geraldine Chaplin approached the stage to introduce "
Later,
the two meet again when Marco (played by Dario Grandinetti) visits a clinic
where his lover, a female bullfighter (Rosario Flores), lies in a coma having
been badly gored in the ring. By chance, Benigno (Javier Camara) is a nurse
there, looking after a young ballerina (Leonor Watling) who is also comatose.
Near
the film's surprising close, Chaplin's character--Alicia's mentor--turns to
Marco and says, "I'm a ballet teacher; nothing is simple." Nothing
about this film is simple. Narrative is divided into three parts, but sidewinds
into layered, dreamlike sequences that skip forward, back, and outside of time
completely. It's linear, but linear like a rollercoaster, or the tracks of snakes
that the otherwise fearless bullfighter Lydia fears so much. It works.
Thousands -- and thousands -- of hours of old British newsreel footage. Tons of free previews, though the hi-rezzes cost a fortune.
Dark Passage is a webzine devoted to the exploration of abandoned buildings. It's filled with well-written, lavishly illustrated accounts of exploration of old nut-hatches, ice-palaces and other spooky old real-estate dogs.
Spectacular gallery of hubcap sculptures. Want want want.
If
you're within 500 miles of Tijuana, drop what you're doing and start driving.
The eternally-inventive, always-brilliant group of musicians, DJs and artists
known as the 
A Sacramento Goodwill store is selling off all the edged cutlery confiscated at the local airport security checkpoint.
Robert sez: "I've come up with a new way of making mosaics
out of dominoes. (An artist named Ken Knowlton
came up with another way in the 1980s.) Here's
what happens: You give me a picture. I then
take out 48 (or 49 or 100) complete sets of
dominoes and arrange them (using some software
I wrote) so that when we step back from the
dominoes, they look like the picture.
The site contains (virtual) 48-set domino portraits
of Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, etc., and
photographs of a 16-set portrait of Marilyn
Monroe made of real dominoes."
Who is Ed Bacon? For starters he is the father of Kevin Bacon. But more importantly, he is the architect who created LOVE Park, Dilworth Plaza (in front of City Hall) and the Municipal Services plaza. Basically he is the accidental genius behind creating the perfect atmosphere for street skateboarding.
My pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has gotten an advance peek at the cover of his forthcoming -- and wonderful -- novel, Singularity Sky. It's wicked beautiful.
Wonderful Tarot deck made from Playmobil figures.
Purely self-indulgent link for friends and family. Here's me at age 12 or 13, at a signing by Charles De Lint at Bakka Books in Toronto, where I later ended up working for three years. I'm cute as a friggin' bug. Also pictured: childhood pal Onil Bhattacharya (obscured by book). (Photo by 
Beautiful casemod: putting a mini-PC in a tin Batman lunchbox. The only way to improve it would have been substituting a vintage Roy Rogers lunchbox for the louche modern Batman.
Predicta, cool old repro TVs for $1100 - $3300, capable of tuning all 181+ channels.
The Moon is a 10,000-room lunar-themed sci-fi casino planned for construction in Los Vegas. It looks like it will be cool in a kind of instant-obsolescence, 1939 Futurama/1955 Tomorrowland/Toffler goofy-futuristic kind of way.
High-larious cutup and remix of the Harry Potter/Luke Skywalker/Frodo Baggins origin stories. The wish-fulfillment hero with a thousand faces and $50B in combined merchandising revenue.
For sale on eBay: a Michigan home once occupied by Mr. Marshall "8 Mile" Mathers (photo at left). Current high bid: 12 million samoleans. 
Just in time for the holidays: an online 
"Most Realistic, Effective Gobbler Decoy Available and the ONLY BREEDING TOM. Designed to fit on top of Delta Hot Hen Decoy only (Hot Hens sold separately)... Simulated breeding pose lures gobblers in to investigate or fight. Can also be used alone to simulate a half-strutting or masturbating tom (you heard it here first)."
Beautiful collection of "primitive" animist/religious sculpture featuring McDonaldland iconography.
Giant capital letters adorn hillsides near many cities and towns in the American West. These letters, typically constructed of whitewashed or painted stones or of concrete, are cultural signatures. They serve as conspicuous symbols of community and institutional identity, and they represent an idea, perhaps traceable to a single point of origin, that diffused quickly and widely early in this century...
In 1988 scientist Viktor S. Grebennikov discovered that some types of insect chitin contain anti-gravitational properties. 
Nice blog devoted to unusual casemods involving retro form-factors and equipment. Love this "V8" AMD box.
“Balling” shouldn’t be renting a mansion; it should be owning your own distribution company or starting a union. Bill Cosby’s bid to buy NBC was more threatening than any screwface, jewelry-clad MC in a video could ever be. 
"I made my first matchhead in 1982. Kinskihead was a response to a reviewer comparing one of my magazine installations to a weekend modeller making a ship or the Eiffel Tower out of matches. The reviewer talked about matches as if their rightful place was at the bottom of the materials league. I was puzzled by this and immediately attracted to this underdog. Of course the reviewer was referring to modellers who don't use matches but just matchsticks, small pieces of wood. Live matches offer an entirely different proposition. The first head, Kinskihead, was set alight by mistake. It was originally made out of blue and red matches but once burnt they became different shades of grey ash. What interests me is the violence and power involved in that change and the fact that this performance comes from such a cheap, throwaway, almost non-material...
Complete page scans from the 1930 DeMoulin Bros. & Co. Fraternal Supply Catalog No. 439, which sold all sorts of elaborate pranks and stunt props for hazing Mason recruits. The illustrations and descriptions are fabulous. I'm flabbergasted. Bucking goats! Exploding airplanes! Traitor inquisition stands! Electrical shockers. Looking through this catalog makes me realize how much things have changed in 70 years. It's weird to think that this large company even existed. It would be so much fun to play these pranks on people, but even better to be the victim of the pranks. 
There's a new slew of "Get Your War On" comics online, posted 11-26-02.
I'm becoming famous for sitting in bars and drawing this weird cartoon stuff on the back of business cards. I've got a cult following now. It's strange. I dunno. The stuff gets published. All I was looking for was something to do besides sitting in bars.
Living in NY- if ypu're not sitting in your tiny wee apartment, then you're sitting in an office, bar, restaurant or park bench. Woo-Hoo! Some choices.
Link and Think is an observance of World AIDS Day in the personal web publishing communities. The project involves hundreds of webloggers, journalers, diarists and other personal website publishers, each linking to resources about HIV/AIDS or publishing personal stories about how the AIDS pandemic has affected them.
(1)
An Austrian electrician has created a robot that tattoos humans. But would you trust your butt to a tattooing 'bot? The inventor says:
Robotics
Institute scientists at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are creating a child-friendly, toy version of the Mars Rover. 
Now
that 
(4) 
Wonderful gallery of obscure and humorous LP covers, with some MP3 samples.
Great
NYT article about the compelling work of multimedia artist 
Check out the exceedingly swell cover-art for the Bakka Anthology, a book of short stories by writers -- including me -- who worked at Bakka Books in Toronto over the past 30 years. Reminder: the launch party is December 19th in Toronto at 7PM, and there are only 400 copies signed by all the authors (I signed all goddamned 400 of them last week!).
Richard sez: "Theo Jansen has developed staggeringly beautiful machines that walk when powered by gusts of wind. Created to be 'art that evolves', he's now working on a way to store the energy to provide power when there is no wind. He likens this to muscles."
Up for auction on Disney's eBay zone: an original prop "gladiator tunic" from the movie Tron (also for sale, original, 1950s Mousketeer jackets! (
Presenting the Caffeine Machine, "a fully functioning coffee maker integrated into a computer case. You pour the water into the funnel at the top, it goes down the tube into a book-shaped water tank where it sits until you hit the power switch, at which point the heating coil boils the water, sending it back up another tube and into the coffee grounds basket." The site has a walk-through if you have a yen to make your own.
The operation and maintenance of sewage conveyance systems need active preventive maintenance and sound pipeline engineering input. If proper standard of care is not practiced, it is only a matter of time until major problems will manifest. At that point the sewer lease fee paid by a fiber installer to city hall will amount to nothing compared to the cost the public will have to bear to return the sewers back to normal. Historical lessons learned more than 100 years ago in the Paris sewer tunnels when engineers attempted to place more than one utility in the same space must be studied thoroughly so as not to repeat the same mistakes.
Land art created by traveling around with a GPS to make giant drawings. 
Bongo is a program that asks the user to solve a visual pattern recognition problem. In particular, Bongo displays two series of blocks, the left and the right series. The blocks in the left series differ from those in the right, and the user must find the characteristic that sets the two series apart. A possible left and right series are shown here.
This fan sits on top of wood burning stoves and operates on temperature difference. Now all I need is a wood burning stove. 
Honda debuted a new and improved version of its four-foot-tall, walking robot "Asimo" today. The child-sized 'bot can walk, climb stairs, recognize voices, and understand human gestures and movements. 
Apple's making supastah-branded iPods, like these for 
Is there something you have been aching to express or discuss, but for one reason or another have not yet found a way to feel comfortable doing so? Dial AgoraPhone! Upon calling, but before being connected directly through to the public, you will be greeted by a recorded voice giving a few details about AgoraPhone and tips on how to use the features. AgoraPhone preserves anonymity in that it performs no caller ID and records no logs. There is even the option of voice masking so that no one can recognize you. You can try on your voice before anyone else can hear you, to make sure you are happy with it. Whenever you are ready, the connection through to the public space is made by pressing the # key on the phone you are calling from. A full duplex audio link is then opened between you and the people and happenings in the remote public site of the AgoraPhone sculpture.
The Total Information Awareness flowchart: more proof that pure evil is pure banality.
Collection of nearly 220 different female flight attendant uniforms from various international airlines. At left: a super-fly 1970s uniform from Allegheny Airlines, back when we called 'em stewardesses.
Wardriver bumper-stickers: $3 gets you a high-quality stretch of weatherproof vinyl that lets you tell the world about your k-rad geek hobby!
The Match-Your-Snatch and Clone-Your-Bone kits contain everything you need to make a colorful plastic casting of your (or a loved one's) reproductive organs. 
Google's year-end Zeitgeist roundup is a completely obsessively fascinating look into the year that was.
Walter Potter was a Victorian wunderkammerer/sociopath who created a museum of taxidermied taableaux including this absolutely darling set piece which contains 37 stuffed and mounted kittens.
This year, two different artists working independently,
one on each coast, mounted exhibits that were remarkably similar: a
collection of dazzling images of cut flowers, "photographed" not with
a camera but with the moving lens of a flatbed scanner, the kind used
in offices every day... Both artists create their images by placing
flowers and other natural objects on top of a 12-by- 17-inch scanner
- they leave the top raised to avoid crushing the flowers - and then
scanning the arrangement from below. The method creates a digital
image that is vivid and precise: a photograph that requires neither
film nor camera.
I know this site's already been blogged elsewhere, but I saw it for the first time this week and it blew my mind. Kim at excitementmachine.org scanned the entire freaking 1980 JC Penney's catalog, and posted the images online 
Nice collection of gender-reassignment-via-Photoshop of various celebrities.
BoingBoing welcomes a new voice to the guestbar today. But first: much gratitude and serious blog props to our outgoing guestbar correspondent, Clay Shirky, who dished up a terrific assortment of links and observations during his stay. Thanks, Clay!
Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the FBI is allowed to put taps on library Internet terminals and monitor user activities, and librarians aren't allowed to tell anyone about this. Lots of librarians really hate this, and so one intrepid librarian has created a series of technically legal signs to tip off library patrons to the presence of snoopware on their Internet connection.
Cool, searchable online gallery of restaurant menus from the late 19th century onward, housed in the rare book collection of the LA public library. After reading Susannah's guestblog posts I tried searching for menus containing the keywords "human flesh," but results were null.
MIT Tech Review has an 
If you were down with 
"It's not just a tissue you always use. Ultra-cute character Tissue san arrived!!!
from designer: please pet this innocent tissue to be used without any complain every day."
The National Archive of Canada has produced an amazing web-exhibit of the Expo '67 World's Fair in Montreal. Love the pix of the Soviet pavillion!
Everything on BoingBoing sounds better after having been 
FilmWise hosts competitions where readers attempt to name the actors and films associated with stills where all human flesh has been peeled away with the magic photoshop flensing blade.
Domewear: personal, wearable security cameras.
Popular Korean cartoon character Mashimaro--whose name derives from an infant's pronunciation of the word "marshmallow"--excretes cuddly nuggets of Web Zen humor in these wacky, fan-created Flash episodes:
Lee Carter's bodacious online zine 
This link to a September, 2002 draft of "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" appears to be an earlier copy of the report mentioned in 
Today, WIRED News published a story I wrote about companies developing spherical, stratosphere-positioned balloons as beacons for high-speed wireless Internet service. 
Lodrina writes:
"Legos enact Bible verses. Need I say more! Moses even 
Marc Canter has posted a leaked screenshot of an upcoming (proposed?) TiVo feature -- TiVo photo albums. Marc wonders "how the images get into the TiVO? And what you can do with them -- once they're in there."
Peace. 
This morning on Ain't It Cool News: production art from the upcoming 
Awesome gallery of celebs with K*I*S*S makeup photoshopped on.
A couple of weeks ago here in LA, I met an innovative documentary filmmaker and digital artist from Holland named Luuk Bouwman whose 
Jim Mason writes:
Great gallery of pop-art interpretations of the Mona Lisa from various sources.
Twisted Sister is reuniting. First gigs since 1987 commence in June. They have a 
This year's bitter El Nino winds have expanded the sand area by half. Mr Hull, who is now past 60, says: "The problem is just getting beyond me."
This large pic of Manhattan under 400' of water -- and the accompanying video of the water draining away -- is a really neat sidelong look at an otherwise familiar topology.
With a month and a half to go till the Cloverdale Citrus Fair, it's time to have a look at the gallery of last year's winners of the annual citrus-stacking competition. Last year's theme was "Wonders of the World," and from the pyramid at Giza to the Great Wall of China, Rotarians and sorority sisters piled their oranges in enormous sculptifood extravagoranges!
Check out this amazing iPod handbag, going for ¥10,800 ($90) in Japan.
Striking gallery of "unintentional cubism" in landscapes ravaged by earthquakes.
Step-by-step instructions for folding a wide range of Star Wars vehicles -- and R2D2! -- from simple paper. Use the folds, Luke.
Beautiful gallery of hyper-cute Japanese packaged meals.
The "Fusor" is a miniature nuclear fusion device invented (and abandoned) by Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the TV. Over at the "Open Source Fusor Research Consortium" garage engineers are trying to hack working, viable Fusors without incurring the wrath of the 
Chas sez: "PDF of insane Bronners shampoo label complete with poetry and political slogans. If you have a recipe for tingly peppermint soap you could now roll your own Dr. Bronners shampoo/bodywash/mouthwash/allpurpose soap."
Brilliant, hilarious, masterful re-envisioning of the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck -- populated with Peanuts characters. Features Peppermint Pattie as the Empress, Lucy as High Priestess, Linus as the Hierophant, and Charlie Brown in a variety of roles throughout both the Major and Minor Arcana. The artist Valerian pleads online, "
The 22-year-old business school graduate and e-commerce entrepreneur known as the "
Cool, aggro-hipster thong designs straight outta Chicago and now available online. 
Maciej sez "This is a page of wacky/disturbing Polish wall posters from the early 1950's. The posters have been reissued in Poland as a campy, popular kind of retro calendar; I've scanned in some of the stranger ones, with translated captions."
Tastes like chicken? Britain's Channel 4 is defending a show in which Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu appears to nosh on a dead baby, describing it a "thought-provoking film about extreme art in China." News excerpt:
Happy New Year! BoingBoing readers, you're the first to see this breathtaking full-screen panorama of Times Square ringing in 2003, photographed last night by award-winning photog Jook Leung. 
The Smoking Gun has posted a gallery of 2002's best mug-shots. As MeFi points out, the gritty Diane Arbus verité of Calvin Klein ads has converged almost completely with mug shots -- they're eerily similar to fashion shoots.
The Samsung SGH-T700 is a "Ladies' Phone" that comes with a calorie counter and a biorhythm monitor, and looks like a compact.
Cool project recently launched by Canadian visual artist Isabelle Devos:
Check out this amazing, mutli-page gallery of spiffy old cowgirl pinups.
Great clip of a Daily Show satirical segment entitled, "So You're Living in a Police State!"
William "B. Baltimore" Brown sez: "I know and love fulchau. I found her upon the debut of the $1 shop in my locale. When I went back for more they were gone. My artistic goal was to create a Fulchau choir for the top of my bass amp and wire them to glow with sound vibrations. I'm currently collecting strange dolls to revive that vision. That is unless I encounter fulchau again."
After reading Susannah's guestblog 
This week's Tom Tomorrow strip traces the connection between Pat "Queers and Liberals are to blame for 9-11" Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and Liberia's Taylor government, which gave aid and comfort to Al Quaeda operatives.
PaperCams are the simplest cameras imaginable: by folding a sheet of photographic paper into a cube and taping it shut, you end up with a pinhole camera that consists of a brass plate and a sheet of paper. The artist assembles his cameras entirely in the dark and revels in the accidental burns and streaks created by light-leakage.
Steve sez: "You blogged this a while back, calling it a mini-gallery, there were only 6 items. Now there are 14 screens worth - it took over a year, but I finally got a decent update - please blog this in boingboing now that I've got it to a decent level of content!"
Thus spake 
Figure 4 shows how Safari's Google search box could be extended (a la Andre Torrez's Nutshell). The default search would be Google, but you could select other searches as well, either web searches or searches using the Sherfari apps. Selecting "Google News" and then doing a search would load the results page from Google News into the browser window. Selecting "Movies" would load the Movies app into the window with that movie selected.
Dogtags for human would-be alien abductees. Parody? Mmmmmm..... could be:
Starting Friday 01-10-03, you can bid on a personal aircraft called the "SoloTrek XFV Exo-skeletor Flying Vehicle," to help its designers raise funds for future research. There's a catch, though -- the winning bidder on eBay must promise not to use the device. Story snip:
Rock 'n' roll zen:
Extensive online archive of scanned-in newspaper clippings, photos, and pics of road signs. Includes wacky but real classified ads such as:
Amazing gallery, spanning four years of one man's obsessive photographing of strangers' navels in Brussels. He also invites the public to send him their own navel-pix for adding to the site.
Terrific gallery of old UK TV test-cards.
The Hasbro company manufactures a device for extruding Play Doh (TM) into two piece molds in a variety of forms. Approximately 20 CC of an extrudable dough-like material is placed in a cylinder, and a lever piston forces the material into a two-piece mold. (see illustration 1)
My pal and former Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine colleague Wendy Mitchell's new book is out! New York City's Best Dive Bars: Drinking and
Diving in the Five Boroughs is now available online at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com or igpub.com. Why should you buy it? Wendy sez:
Southern California-based Evolution Robotics announced several new developments last week during CES, one of which is a new navigation technology it claims is cheap enough to bring robots to the mass market. Story snip:
The WiFi sniffer is a credit-card-sized device that detects nearby WiFi signal, sparing you the pain and embarassment of hauling around your laptop. Wishlist: distinguish between open and closed nets, allow for an external antenna, log with GPS co-ords, check for DHCP leases and attempt to route a packet on every detected network. Still, it's cool enough that I'd buy one.
Andrew is a forecaster, design strategist and author, working at the
intersection of culture, creativity, technology, and futures research. He's
the lead partner of 
Cuboro is a system of 5cm^3 stacking wooden blocks with channels and dropouts that you use to make marble-runs. This looks like a lot of fun.
Karl sez: "I just posted an article and some scans on my site from a pile of old
Mechanix Illustrated magazines I got from my father. These are the
articles I grew up with: flying cars, nuking the arctic to moderate the
weather, space platforms, etc. etc. The one I've been unable to locate
so far is the 'Robots in your home by 1965!' piece, which I used to have
but have mislaid."
Artbots is back, with autonomous vengeance! The second annual international "ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show" happens at EYEBEAM Gallery in Chelsea, NYC in mid-July. Deadline for 
Ain't It Cool News is featuring leaked concept art from the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
A tiki-themed, four-apartment rental building is opening soon in downtown LA.
The town of Soap Lake, WA, is building a 60' lava lamp to promote tourism.
The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference -- April 22-25 in Santa Clara -- is open for registration. This is an absolutely fantastic conference, one that I'm proud to sit on the organizing committee for, and last year's was the stuff of legend. Sign up now!
Paul sez, "Major fun for map geeks and anybody else who appreciates beautiful printed work: a collection of over 2000 USGS topographic maps dating from the 1880s to the 1950s. The collection was started by a railroad and map nut from New Hampshire who traveled from library to library with a scanner and a laptop; later, the University of New Hampshire and other kindred spirits helped expand the collection to cover all of New England (for the geographically impaired, that would be Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island). It now also includes New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, and parts of Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio. I suspect that if word gets out to enough potential volunteers it will eventually cover the entire country. Great desktop picture material!"
A new book on astrobiology is out from a pair of American scientists, and it pegs the end of all life on earth at 500 million years from now. Co-authors Donald Brownlee Peter Ward describe the countdown to our imminent doom in 
Black and white snapshot gallery of discarded Christmas trees. 
Lux sez: "I cobbled together a few politically satirical images about the Eldred case which we will be running for the next few days. Feel free to re-use and distribute!"
Andy has brilliantly remixed an old Mickey cartoon-strip (a fair use), to form a commentary on the Eldred decision.
Frozen CPU is shipping a $19 5.25"-bay dashboard cigarette lighter module for your PC tower case.
Richard sez:
Paul sez, "Matthew has photographed and inventoried everything in his house, and presents it to you in a BeOS-esque wireframe format. Obsessive... but exactly what the web is for."
So, what do we call this? VacBotMod? Not sure, but check out this terrific site with pics and step-by-step documentation: two 'bot-deconstructivists' reverse engineer the Roomba vacuum robot:
Snake-like robots already exist in rudimentary forms. But Choset's creations push the envelope. Small and very strong by design, Choset's snakebots measure just five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The use of beveled gears around their circumference, allows the serpentine robots many more degrees of movement than conventional robots--including the ability to move efficiently in three-dimensional space. Choset's machines use complex mathematical algorithms that enable them to autonomously sense and respond to obstacles and variations they encounter while navigating across landscapes.
Following up on yesterday's 
It's a good week in writing-land for me. A week after my 
Earlier this month, several hundred people gathered in the Latvian capital city of Riga for the debut of the Latvian national "Flying mobile" championship. Amid freezing temps, phone-tossers hurled old phones as far as possible, competing for a prize vacation valued at US$1K. The fourth world championships take place in Finland this August.
Apparently, the world record for mobile phone throwing is 218.9 feet, set (appropriately) using a Nokia 5110 mobile phone.
Web gallery of simple, funky, cool, tag-artwork from a pair of Madrid-based street artists named Nuria and Eltono. Features snapshots of the pair's art-attacks captured in cities throughout Europe.
The room is electrified with an overhead light and a working "Buck Rogers" desk lamp. It matches the Buck Rogers toy chest at the foot of the captain's bed. The chocolate lab wallpaper is a fabric remnant I found at my flea last year. The carpet is a buff wall-to-wall. Baseboards and cornices are stained in a dark early American. Scott has already begun a life-long hobby of as you can see from his movie poster collection...
Geek couture provocateur 
The Digital Mona Lisa is one of the first-ever computer-output images, dating back to 1965. Ted Nelson wrote in 1974 that "this is not a computer picture. There is no such thing. It's a quantization put out on a lineprinter."
The Snail Mailbox, designed by Boym Partners, is a beautiful example of an old-fashioned concept made new all over again. Made from sturdy, powder-coated steel and available in cream and silver, it's an ode to utilitarian chic that'll dress up your abode while protecting your precious snail mail. For apartment dwellers, it makes a great indoor accessory -- perfect for storing your whatnot (keys, TV remotes, dog leash) or just showing off your excellent taste. We don't know about you, but we've yet to find a Hotmail inbox that can do all that. Available [in L.A.] at Homework, 1153 North Highland Avenue, between Santa Monica Boulevard and Fountain Avenue (323-466-1153).
"
This page has insane
video of Dance Dance Revolution masters from Tokyo scoring perfect games on
the hardest setting with crazy/insane insane/crazy moves. They're the cup
stacking girls of Japanese arcades. I recommend the third video, Take
getting 10 Greats/3 Misses on Maxx Unlimited Reverse Stealth.
Monobrow.com is a virtual shrine to persons who bear not two eyebrows, but one big supersized eyebrow. Quick! Someone register "amimonobrowornot.com."
A Utah millionaire inventor has cranked out this "Sky-Hook," a mobile suspension device to take the strain off of jogging. He got the idea while running through a supermarket parking-lot with a shopping-cart.
Retail whore alert: hip, affordable (<$100) carrying cases for notebooks and PDAs from Causari. 
Following up on an earlier 
Thanks to our current system of privately-financed elections, Congress has become a huge bazaar, where everyone knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Big corporations and the super-wealthy invest millions in political contributions and get all kinds of special deals in return. For a few millions in donations, they get a $20 billion tax break here, a $10 billion subsidy there-returns on investment that would make honest entrepreneurs blush, but makes Wall Street salivate.
Extensive online gallery of recruiting posters for Japan's Self Defense forces. Some are straight-up kitschy, others are flat wacky. 
In case you missed the earlier event -- or couldn't get enough of urban satanists, talking plants, CIA sex slaves, or the performance art lady who cracks raw eggs over her twat -- Disinformation's Richard Metzger will host another DVD screening and booksigning in LA this weekend. On Saturday, January 25th at 7:30 at Skylight Books on Vermont, he'll show clips from the Disinformation TV series (they'll be different from those shown at the recent Book Soup screening in Los Angeles). Copies of Richard's 
"Rising labor costs, problems with conventional milking methods and a desire for more flexibility have persuaded dozens of farmers in Canada and a handful in the United States to follow the lead of thousands of European dairy farmers in turning the crucial part of their operation to machines. 
"
My pal John Von Seggern is a master turntablist and producer who specializes in remixing western pop and dance music for Asian audiences, and vice versa. He recently produced a totally scrumptious Asha-Bhonsle-ified remix of the Nelly Furtado song "Like a Bird," and I just stumbled accross an MP3 of it 
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This Fark Photoshop contest ("Unlikely Slashdot headlines") has some very funny bits, but none so good as this Steampunk Slashdot...
Kevin Kelly, a frequent Boing Boing site-suggestor, has a new web site for his beautiful photography book, Asia Grace. Kevin spent over a decade in Asia taking these pictures. Every photo from the book is included, and visitors are invited to add comments to any of the pictures. 
Together for the first time: 
Fun and extensive guide to one- and two-byte Japanese emoticons. Why can't English ASCII emoticons be this expressive? We have "smiley." We have "smiley with tongue sticking out." They have, "He gets angry internally but he doesn't express his emotion outside," and "here I offer you a cup of steaming pixel-tea as a gesture of hospitality and good will." 
Terragen is a terrain-generator. By moving around sliders and sketching out terrain features, you can create breathtaking stills and animations of fantastical landscapes. The OS X version is in open beta, and there's a working version for Win32.
Killer new Taschen book featuring American print advertisements from the 1960s. TV dinners, Dodge Darts, tang, and instant omelets ("just add water!"). 
It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my childhood was particularly happy.
This site has an amazing history of past and present efforts to build a monowheel vehicle. I spit upon your puny Segway. What's that word again? Monowheel!
Yummy. Denmark-based QTVR evangelist 
A British funeral-entrepreneur has built a vintage-bike-sidecar-hearse. He's patenting it, too.
"The most look-a-like MADMAX movie badge" -- and it's only US$227, plus shipping from Japan!
Is nothing sacred? A 6,000-brick replica of the Stanley Cup was reportedly swiped during a sports equipment convention in Las Vegas last week. The stolen hockey trophy copy is only one of two that exist, and was created to promote Lego's new NHL hockey kits. Worldnetdaily 
Incredibly icky -- but reasonably priced -- cane-toad-leather fashion accessories. Legs and faces optional.
"Tom the Dancing Bug" just did a particularly funny take on the recent Supreme court decision, 
At-Home Imagineering is Martha-Stewart-grade crafts and cooking project that results in tchotchkes and nosh inspired by the rides and menus of Disnelyland.
K-rad video clips of a model rocket flight transmitted live to a ground station via 2.4GHz microwave. Site offers videos in QT, WMV formats.
This morning's Kuro5hin has a great article on the ins and outs of dumpster diving. I've always been fascinated by diving (and I've done a little myself -- see this 
Mena and Ben "Moveable Type" Trott recently took a biz-trip to Tokyo and got to spend an afternoon at Tokyo Disneyland/Disney Sea. Mena's posted a gallery of fantastic shots from the Parks. I am turgid with jealousy. I yearn to visit Japan, to see the Akihabara, to wander the alleys of Tokyo Disneyland, to buy a square watermelon from a vending machine.
The "Skeleton iBook" is an extreme iBook casemod where you make your own injection-molded trasnparent iBook chassis and move the guts to it.
"Scientists have been studying pollutants in air, water, and on land for decades. Now they're studying pollution in people, and the results are troubling. This Website reports results from the most comprehensive study ever conducted of multiple chemical contaminants in humans. Blood and urine from nine people were tested for 210 chemicals that occur in consumer products and industrial pollution."
Rip-roaringly bad translations of LOTR: TTT. The site intro sums it up: "This webpage celebrates the wonderful engrish subtitles featured in an asian bootleg DVD of Lord of The Rings - The Two Towers. What you see is exactly what appears on the TV screen. The first half of the movie has the most screengrabs, as there is more action than talking later on, and the subtitle writers eventually started getting the name of the characters right. Have fun!" May I suggest 
The Shuttle debris track as shown on NOAA radar.
Roadside sign in Dallas, taken last night.
Friday Web Zen arrives late this time-- or early, depending on how you slice it. But like fine cheese or cognac, the best urls only ripen with age. The theme for this week's edition: food museums. Buen provecho, bon appetit, pull up your chair, okay let's eat.
PornOrchestra is a Bay Area-based music collective formed to "radically reinterpret" the soundtracks of pornographic film:
pr0nt1n65: Very low-res oil paintings that, from a distance, appear to be pornographic. Up close, they're just squares of color, though. So where's the smut -- on the canvas, or in our heads? If the answer is the latter, then where's the smut on a computer or TV screen, which is just the same thing, but with better resolution? There are now prints available (hallelujah!). Mind you, these are "giclee prints", which seems to be art-world speak for "ink-jet printout" -- so, these are high-resolution automated digitally pixellated versions of low-resolution manually analog pixellated versions of porn scenes.
Today, Mitsubishi debuted a new speaking robot designed to help elderly and sick people:
Today's Foxtrot mix-and-matches two of my favorite things: P2P and Disney rides.
There's much to be loved at the offbeat-music site, Basic Hip Digital Oddio, but my two favorite sections the ones devoted to kiddy albums and composer Kenyon Hopkins. The cover art for the Bozo albums is gorgeous, and a sad reminder of how ugly most commercial packaging looks today. I first became aware of Kenyon Hopkins when I watched The Hustler, starring Paul Newman. Hopkins wrote the jazz score, which manages to be crazed, blusey, upbeat, and gloomy all at once. There are plenty of MP 3 sound clips of Bozo and Hopkins. The site also has two Live365 stations: The Time Tunnel ("Obscure and familiar TV and Movie soundtracks with original commercials and radio spots.") and Secret Agent Man Radio ("Gritty crime jazz, swinging secret agents, groovy spy tunes-a-go-go and funky blaxploitation soundtracks.") Enjoy! 
Recent BoingBoing guestblogger, February 15 LA "
In the mood for a botbash in Los Angeles this weekend? On February 8th and 9th, 2003 in Building #5 at the Fairplex in Pomona, 
Levitated's collection of spectacular generative/interactive Flash art has me totally enraptured. These wee Flash apps combine user-input with code to make algorithmic art that is simultaneously enchanting and thought-provoking. What's more, the GPLed source code for the apps is included, so you can interact with the binary or the code to make art with your browser.
How creepy is this Yahoo News pic of Shrub and Saddam masks in a Brazilian novelty factory?
The major shipbuilder and heavy machinery maker said the name Wakamaru represents a combination of "waka," meaning "young" in Japanese and "Maru," a term often used to name Japanese-registered ships, known outside Japan as "Maru ships."...The robot is connected to a communications network around the clock...It can also report to family members or a designated party in other areas when the robot's owner stays in such areas as a bathroom for too long.
Naomi sez:
Two very nice monochrome retro-futuristic images by Boris
Artzybashef.
Modern Ruins is a site that features collections of photos of dead theme-parks, highways, factories and other recent ruins, from the site of the 64 World's Fair to the Bay Area MarineLand that became the Oracle Campus.
Taiwan Beer has a great, utilitarian product design.
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Amazing collection of scans of vintage board-game catalogs -- I just wish they were higher-resolution scans!
Vintage Vegas features galleries of old Vegas matchbooks and postcards, and sells 6" repros of vintage poker-chips.
"This carrot is totally bizarre dug it up last week could not believe my eyes a carrot with a vagina. It is approximately six inches long. I believe to be life size. [T]otally freak out Your friends and neighbors with this carrot. OK this auction has obviously gone completely out of control. Obviously many of the bids are apparently a joke.... Any legitimate bid that goes over $100,000 I will personally deliver the carrot see my other auctions!!!!!"
Low-lying, futuristic vessels, the karaoke pods in Live Forever look as if they might take flight or speed away at any moment. Just climb in, don the headphones, grab the microphone, select a song and you're off! The darkly tinted windows and enclosed space of each sound-contained pod assure that no one is witness to your private performance. You may find that your voice sounds a bit higher, and maybe even a bit better than usual—Lee has set up the sound mixer to improve and enhance the quality of your voice.
What we first documented 
Lux sez, "Engineering student at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have come up with an ingenious albeit impractical mode of mass transit. The 2.5 metric ton Human Powered bus has a top speed of 20km/h and is powered by 32 students."
Cult radio legend Joe Frank -- whose surreal, intimate, always-compelling psychosoundscape monologues have been a public radio staple for decades -- just launched a website. Contains show archives going back to the '70s. Absolutely essential. 
"You'll be tempted to tuck the FSV-PGX1 into your coat pocket
as you leave the office, since it looks a lot like a PDA or Pocket PC,
but, if you do, you may well stuff up your boss' plans for an evening
of high level meetings with the lawyers. That's because the FSV-PGX1
is, in fact, a wireless handheld file server from Sony -- not an
electronic diary at all. Stick it in the middle of a meeting table,
have everyone sit around it with their laptops, and the FSV-PGX1 will
act as a file distributor -- kinda like a blackjack dealer -- tossing
out the files to anyone who needs to take a peek. There's a 20GB
internal hard disk for storage and it uses the IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi)
standard for file transfer at speeds of up to 11Mbps. Shunning your
regular Windows OS flavors, the PGX1 runs on the Linux 2.4.20
operating system but can, of course, route any file system from any
computer OS. There's a back-up battery, effectively providing UPS
capability if the power goes down via the AC adapter and a neat little
cradle with built-in Ethernet for sale separately."
"Free the Dell Dude" t-shirts, via Y-que (say: "/ee-KAY/"). 
This
Saturday, February 15th, @ 7:30pm, I'll be co-hosting "
For a brief and glorious period in the 1940s, chemical-attack-preparedness meant never being too far from your trusty Mickey Mouse gasmask. Alert Level Fun!
Absolutely spectacular gallery of Swiss-made art-clocks and other sculpture (including a CD-player retrofitted on a turntable, with a laser-equipped tone-arm!).
Photos of the Jhai project's bike-powered, ruggedized WiFi link installation in rural Laos have begun to hit the wire-services.
Nice mini-gallery of cross-stitch art made from stills of classic video games. XXARCADE+SWEET+ARCADEXX!
I'm eight chapters into Cory Doctorow's
new novel and I want to drink his blood.
If you're the kind of person who can't decide which is better -- whirling pasties attached to a punk rock burlesque star, or a 200-pound masked Tijuana wrestler being thrown accross the ring -- you should have been at last night's "Lucha Va Voom Valentine's Day Massacre." I thought I'd seen it all. Then, after el Gringo Loco and Rosa Salvaje finished mutually pulverizing one another's faces, I watched a three-foot-tall strip queen rip off her Zoot suit and fake mustache, and all hell broke loose. Last night's show took place at the Mayan Theater in LA, details on the troupe and upcoming performances elsewhere are 
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This certainly wouldn't be the first time that an image was -- gasp -- digitally altered by a UK trash tabloid. But 
Last year, some guy said he found a severed penis in his juice. This year it's a cow eyeball. Both turned out to be plain old mold.
Matt sez, "a hip-hop video for DJ Format's 'We Know Something' featuring plushies breakdancing. It's the best thing ever."
Check out this amazing gallery of custom-made Simpsons action figures (I'm very fond of Rabbi Krustofski!).
A sculptor-roboticist from the U of Texas @ Dallas, late of Disney Imagineering, has demoed K-Bot, a 2kg robot head that mimics facial expressions of nearby humans with 1 sec's latency.
>Marc Brown of 
A BoingBoing exclusive: Breathtaking, full-screen panoramic photographs of Saturday's massive peace rallies in 
My pal Mara Schwartz did a cool piece in Sunday's LA Times magazine about an odd old gentleman who collects clocks. I mean, really collects clocks. Photo at left snapped by Mara wasn't printed with the story.... so I'm posting it here just for you. Story snip:
AUDIO: An archived audio stream of the "
Great gallery and running notes on one man's quest to recreate the original 1966 Batcycle.
In the latest Adventures of Superman (#613 for those not keeping track) Lois Lane fights the evil public domain!
I experienced something sweet, silly, and carbonated for the first time while having sushi with a friend the other night: this Japanese soft drink called Ramune ("RAH-moo-nay"). It's not new. Apparently, it's over 100 years old. But it was new to me. Ramune (there's also an anime series named after it) is a lemonadey soda packed in an unsusual glass bottle. Each is vacuum-sealed with a little glass marble at the top, instead of a conventional metal twisty-top. The drink itself is okay -- like a slightly less sweet Sprite, or Seven-Up. But the bottle-opening ritual is the fun part. First, the waiters placed our chilled and partially opened Ramune bottles on the table in front of us. Then my friend instructed me to whack the top of the bottle with my flattened palm to force the clear globe down into the bottle, making it shoot down into the soda. The bottle's shape prevents the marble from either sinking to the bottom, or rising up to block the spout. But because the drink is carbonated, no matter how carefully you perform the gesture you end up with sugary soda spray all over the place. Which is hilarious, if you happen to be doing this surrounded by Armani-clad agents and silicone-enhanced trophy dates at a fancy Hollywood sushi joint, like we were. So the next time you're out having a gravitas-packed power lunch with a Very Important Client or your future boss or some heads of state straight outta Davos, may I suggest that you order Ramunes, all around. I found two online stores that sell Ramune, 
The infographics on the 
This guy is getting an enormous Haunted Mansion tatt, all the way around his leg from his knee to above his hip.
(1) 
Eight hours' work coverts a lump of inert snow into a classic tableau from the Simpsons.
Great casemod: building a functional PC into a pop-up toaster chassis.
I've been seeing pictures of these Japanese "see-through" skirts around for a couple of days, but it wasn't until I saw Joey's article on them that I realized that they aren't, in fact, transparent: rather, they have panties and bare thighs screened onto them to give the illusion of transparency.
Following on the heels of Cory's earlier 
Here is my mom buried in rice. She introduced me to this AMAZING experience. It's a wooden box full of the outer layer of rice mixed in with special bacteria that does what bacteria does and produces major heat. You basically strip down and get covered in this stuff for 15 minutes...and that must be the maximum because when you get out, your body is jeeeellllooooo. The rice and bacteria combined with the heat open your pores, suck out bad stuff, and infuse you with good stuff (minerals?). Sorry I can't be more specific, but there's something phenomenal going on: you get heated to the core in a very different way than a hot bath.
I'm going to be speaking in Austin, Texas, at the South By Southwest interactive festival, between March 7-11. I'm apparently on more panels than anyone else this year:
UCSD has published an archive of fanciful advertising graphics created by Dr. Seuss -- the copy is fantastic, full of Seuss humor, and the pictures are just perfect.
...many luxury brands, observes [ Danielle Keighery of Vertu], subsequently launch more affordable versions of their products. So the gap between Vertu's cheapest phone and Nokia's most expensive may yet be closed. In the longer term, Vertu plans to exploit the emergence of "wearable" technology, as phones morph into jewellery. Here, Vertu may be on to something, says Sofia Ghachem, an analyst at UBS Warburg. Siemens, another handset maker, has just launched a new range of wearable "fashion accessory phones" under the name Xelibri. It will produce two "collections" of Xelibri phones a year, in the hope that marketing phones as fashion items will encourage people to buy new handsets more often. With market penetration at around 80% in western Europe, growth in handset sales has stalled and Siemens believes its new approach could give the industry a much-needed boost.
Samsung is shipping a cell-phone to tie in with the release of the next Matrix movie. Unfortunately, the official website is just Flash-driven ass-ware, but Gizmodo has a little blurb.
ESPN is launching a new fishing show featuring bikini-clad babes. This is nowhere near as good as my pal 
The guest blogger torch has just been passed from longtime BoingBoing pal 
On Saturday, February 22, 2003, I took my five year old daughter to see the "Musical World" performance at Bob Baker Marionettes in downtown Los Angeles. This is Bob Baker's 48 year of operation, and the show was spectacular, with excellent puppeteers who were so good you didn't even really notice them. The whole thing was made all the better by a '70s-era soundtrack that had great 
Remember these 
Great site with stills from the TVOntario kids-programming lineup from the 70s and 80s.
This page has much more detail about the upcoming Samsung phone that's designed to tie in with the sequel to The Matrix -- lots of keen photos and such.
Australian photographer and QTVR enthusiast 
Lost Labor is an absolutely beautiful gallery of vintage photos of American laborers from the eary part of the 20th century.
162 burners from vintage gas stoves and furnaces.
This fantastic powered mecha wolf costume -- complete with little, electronic pilot in the mouth -- took five months to complete, weighs 50-60 lbs, and stands 9'2" tall. Don't miss the walking video!
NASA publishes a weekly online newsletter of fun, space-related science news and experiments -- it's intended for students, but they're fun for (geeky) adults, too. Cool Quicktime movies of each experiment, and you can listen to the entire story via streaming or downloadable MP3 files. This week's edition profiles some crazy experiments on the ISS involving how thin films and liquid bubbles act in zero gravity. Above: ISS crew member Don Pettit fills a zero-g "beaker" -- a plastic bag. "This baggie makes a nice beaker for use in zero-gravity," he explains. "It's a real handy way to handle a open container of water." 
"We have two birds in our CNN workspace, Anthrax and Smallpox. Parakeets. But for us, canaries in the coal mine. Tiny, organic early warning systems against a chemical or biological attack. Here in our offices overlooking the tranquil Persian Gulf, despite the flurry of activity, it does not seem to me as if we are on the threshold of war.
Swell-looking prints from Armet and Davis archives of Googie restaurants. Armet and Davis were the premiere populuxe restaurant designers in LA in the 50s and 60s. 
Online gallery of infowar leaflets dropped on Iraq by US forces during the past few months. 
Stunning gallery of very high-speed photos of bullets being fired through things.
Jeff sez, "A Web site of the futuristic illustrator Radebaugh. You'll recognize some of his illustrations as magazine covers from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Our vision of the future was, in part, molded by these types of illustrations. One of my favorite films is The 5th Element where the art direction seems to come right from Radebaugh's brush."
Jumeau Bar is an charming, interactive "rural short" by Nicolas Clauss + Jean-Jacques Birge of flyingpuppet.com. Clauss, the site's founder, is a Paris-based painter who says he "gave up 'traditional' painting to use the Internet as a canvas."
Heartfelt tribute to Mr. Rogers in this week's Get Your War On.
A dose of audio zen for your Monday listening pleasure: 
If you live in the Bay area, it might be worth your while to check out "Out of Time: 20th Century Designs for the Future," a traveling Smithsonian exhibition featuring "sixty works of compelling beauty and often remarkable foresight document America's fascination with the future." It'll open March 16 at St. Mary's College of California (about eight miles east of Berkeley).
Cuban music researcher Ned Sublette (of "
Americans worried about terrorism on their home turf will soon be able to buy a $3 sensor the size of a credit card that will show whether they have been exposed to a dirty radioactive bomb. Behind the development of the tiny dosimeter, which features a baby blue or pink stripe that blushes deeper the greater the radiation exposure, is a tiny government agency that labored in obscurity -- until now.
Listen up. Former BoingBoing guestblogger Susannah "Reverse Cowgirl" Breslin is in New York City this week, meeting with TV producers about a television version of 
How to make a firestarting ice-lens -- why didn't anyone tell me about this when I was between the age when snow-forts sucked and the age when I didn't want to venture into the cold, period? Starting fires, man, wow.
Bored of dressing up like the same old Rocky Horror characters week in and week out? Why not try it in Muppet drag?
Yesterday, Toshiba debuted the world's first-ever prototype of a fuel cell for notebook computers. The device powers a laptop for five hours, and uses concentrated methanol as fuel. Toshiba says they'll further reduce size before consumer release. 
The Recodable Locking Device consists of two sides -- the user side and the secure side. To unlock the device, a user must enter a code that identically matches the code stored mechanically in the six code wheels. If the user makes even one wrong entry -- and close doesn't count -- the device mechanically "locks up" and does not allow any further tries until the owner resets it from the secure side.
At the Astor Place Kmart, the encampment is on display just inside the main entrance. A camouflaged sandy-haired soldier with an American-flag arm patch stands alert in a teal, pink, and yellow basket beneath a pretty green-and-purple bow. Within a doll-arm's reach are a machine gun, rifle, hand grenade, large knife, pistol, and round of ammunition. In the next basket a buzz-cut blond with a snazzy dress uniform hawks over homeland security, an American eagle shield on his arm, and a machine gun, pistol, Bowie knife, two grenades, truncheon, and handcuffs at the ready.
Red
Herring founder Tony Perkins' new project, the AlwaysOn Network,
launched with a conspicuously awkward domain name: 
A dealer in Stuttgart is selling off a rebuilt WWII German Enigma code-machine. Bidding stands at $5100, and the reserve has not been met yet.
Quicktime panorama of the mess hall at Camp Arifjan, a U.S. military base south of Kuwait City. 
"Beards don't always get the respect and appreciation they deserve. These pages highlight many excellent beards that are worthy of recognition. Take a look at the numerous examples of quality beards. Learn more about beards. Maybe you'll even decide to grow your own beard or persuade someone else to grow one! "
Ganguro are Japanese girls who 
Ever wonder what kind of music they pipe into the subways in Pyongyang? Wonder no more! There is an unofficial 
My wife, Carla, has a new book out called Braid Crazy, published by Chronicle, the same folks who published my 
Tonight in Los Angeles, I co-hosted a get-together for 
I cornered
Brad Zutaut for the lowdown on his company's customized ringtone and display
service. Xingtone converts any sort of sound you can cram into an MP3 -- music you write yourself, the sound of your baby talking, or a popular music clip like the one he demonstrated tonight -- and plays that audio as a ringtone, along with related images
on your phone's screen. 
Q&A
with Brad, continued. The recording industry will probably want
to do one of two things: buy this company or nuke them. How is Xingtone
different from
other
existing
customizable
ringtone
services?
Brad says they've developed technology that allows users to upload digital music onto mobile phones for the first time. Xingtone converts your MP3s to ringtones -- and could soon make today's robotic ringtones sound positively retro. Brad explains here:
Great gallery of mosaics made from Rubik's Cubeses -- the artist says he got his pixelart skills using draw programs on an Apple //e.
Edward Gorey's rhyming, illustrated alphabet of horrible things happening to rotten children (A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs) is online at last. Lovely.
There is a lot of great stuff in the latest issue of The Comics Journal (#250, 272 pages). Besides the interview with Gary Panter (which I already blogged about a while ago), there is a transcript from a 1976 interview with two of my favorite cartoonists, Carl Barks (Disney ducks) and John Stanley (Little Lulu) and an amazing interview with Dan Clowes on the craft of cartooning. Unfortunately, neither of these are online, but you can order a copy online. 
Great gallery of scanned tickets from TV show tapings, with personal stories about each show.
Australian photographer and QuickTime VR enthusiast Peter Murphy writes,
QTVR guru Hans Nyberg shares another fine full-screen panorama with BoingBoing readers today -- this one is the inside of a dentist's own mouth:
Motorola and Frog Design have released a whack of concept designs for a Bluetooth-linked personal device array.
Kimberly sez: "Graphic designers nationwide are organizing to offer provocative, high-impact anti-war posters that are copyright-free and downloadable online. Participants so far include (among others) Michael Mabry, Michael Cronan, Peter Kuper, whose work appears regularly in Time and Mad, and design legend Milton Glaser, whose 'I (Heart) NY' is arguably the most referenced design
in American popular culture."
Gorgeous online gallery of high-res images of snowflake crystals. At left, one of many images captured during a single snowfall by Patricia Rasmussen, using a photomicroscopy apparatus designed for capturing ultra-high-res snow crystal images. 
The devil's liver trouble probably began here at Crizzle after a month long drunken holiday at a mutants fairground in the 1300s. Crizzle now broadcasts confusing directions to air traffic with a view to creating controlled flights into terrain. Gold ornamentation is to be seen in the rafter work and the entire length of tunnel has 33,345,567,863,426,875,678 stained wooden steps of which five are in need of repair. This entrance is a rich source of low-self-esteem-gas and is occasionally overgrown with gorse.
Lileks has started a gallery of vintage ads printed off the microfilm morgue at his newspaper and scanned in. Lovely stuff.
BarCodeArt: a gallery of meat and digital artwork inspired by and made from UPCs.
"A carnival float shows paper mache figure of German conservative opposition leader Angela Merkel emerging from the buttocks of Uncle Sam during the traditional Rose Monday carnival parade in Duesseldorf, March 3, 2003. Merkel has strongly criticized the German government's anti-Iraq war stance and recently visited Washington. The Rose Monday parades in Cologne, Mainz and Duesseldorf are the highlight of the German street carnival season. " 
New York Times article about brightly colored, toy-like, packaged dinners for kids.
A traveller flying to San Diego from Seattle found his luggage had been opened by the Federal Transport Security Authority, who had left behind a note telling him so, on which was scrawled "DONT APPRECIATE YOUR ANTI-AMERICAN ATTITUDE" -- a reference to the "No Iraq War" signs he'd picked up in a shop in Seattle.
My friend Kevin Steele has spent this year's hard Toronto winter shooting beautiful pix of the city, shots that capture both the liveliness and the desolation of a great northeastern city buried in snow and slush.
No wonder so many people swear by Weight Watchers. These recipe cards have pictures of such disgusting looking food, you'll want to give up the habit of eating. 
Some dude with a major schnozz fetish runs this online gallery of photoshopped images that transform otherwise normal Hot Babes into Hot Babes With Pinocchio Noses. Marginally work-safe. 
The China Blog photoblog sections feature galleries of beggars, street-vendors, trashcans, and other quotidian elements of Beijing life.
A new parodical ad campaign, "What is Victoria's Secret," implies that the real secret of lingerie models is bulemia.
Alloy.com is running a bizarre online promotion for anti-PMS meds:
Three contained several references for Iraqis to tune to radio frequencies where Coalition forces are broadcasting information about United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's reign and other topics. Another type of leaflet warned Iraqi troops not to use weapons of mass destruction, emphasizing that "unit commanders will be held accountable for non-compliance." One leaflet warned Iraqi troops that the Coalition will destroy any viable military targets and does not wish to destroy any Iraqi landmarks, and that the "Coalition forces do not wish to harm the noble people of Iraq. To ensure your safety, avoid areas occupied by military personnel." One more leaflet type told Iraqi troops "not risk their life and the life of their comrades," and to "leave now, go home, and learn, grow, prosper."
Next week in San Francisco, 
This collection of "educational" videos demonstrate a bunch of really cool, violent chemical reactions: flaming sodium and chlorine, volatile nitrogen triiodide going bang, and a cast-iron, water-filled bomb that explodes when the water inside of it is frozen with a slush of dry ice and acetone -- and much more.
The new Get Your War On is out, and it's especially good.
Great collection of cigarette ads from old TV shows, including the Flintstones.
The game begins from a premise that's arrant nonsense even for a licensed platformer -- an evil penguin, Feathers McGraw, has taken over the zoo that's imprisoned him and enslaved its inhabitants as part of his jewel-smuggling operation. Wallace and Gromit (mostly Gromit, who the player controls throughout the game) have to free 24 levels worth of imprisoned baby animals in order to free the zoo from the penguin's domination and return him to the appropriate occupation of a zoo penguin, slipping around on his belly and eating herring and guest-starring in Ed Norton's psychotic fantasies.
But the company's roughneck and military clientele belies its much larger potential market: professional parents. Finally, a laptop worthy of the term "toddler-proof." No disastrous crashes to the kitchen floor. No months of data lost to an incident with the sippy cup. Hazardous materials? Toss it in the dishwasher. Need to get out of the house? The handle flips back to mount the MAX open across the wheel of an SUV for mobile use. There's even an add-on DVD drive for movies.
Reporters covering the war in Iraq are at one with their technology as never before. Television reporters are toting hand-held video cameras and print journalists have traded the 70-pound satellite phones of the 1991 Gulf War for svelte models that can be held up to their ear. High-speed Internet lines in the desert and more satellites in the sky mean journalists can make a connection almost anywhere. As the conflict unfolds, they are tapping into the global communications grid regularly.
Continuing with the warnography meme, 
General Motors, a company that gutted many of America's great cities by pressuring local governments to eliminate public transit in the 20th century, is running ads in a local Vancouver paper that calls transit riders "CREEPS & WEIRDOS." Another ad complains about the odor of the subway. Between Los Angeles's smog, Aussie brushfires and Middle East wars, I think we can say with confidence that GM's last kick at the public transit can incurred a debt to the human race the company could never repay. Hard to believe they've got the chutzpah to go at it again. Guess they've got nothing to lose.
Laziest. Casemod. Evar.
"Mixed Feelings," a terrific documentary about architecture, technology, and social networks in the Tijuana border region will have its nationwide broadcast premiere tomorrow night. Airs on PBS stations throughout the US on Wednesday, March 26 at 10:30 PM (Check your local listings). I've seen it, I've spoken with the filmmaker, and it's thought-provoking stuff. The most memorable image: A long shot of that border fence that extends many hundreds of yards out into the Pacific ocean. Here's a snip from the transcript, Teddy Cruz from San Diego Architect speaking:
Paul Boutin has all the details in Slate, right 
Spotted in Taiwan -- a snack foods company is selling "rice crackers wrapped in images of U.S. President Bush and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein." Got links to other surreal/inappropriate/weird war-themed products? Post them in this 
On Wednesday, I went to the opening of Mark Ryden's new show of miniature paintings, called "Blood." Creepy but wonderful work. If someone told me that there was an artist that had paintings of decapitated little girls and the like I would be very turned off, but somehow Ryden pulls it off. I heard the pieces were selling for $7k to $12k each. And that they sold out instantly. 
While flipping through the channels here in Japan last Saturday night trying to pick up news on the war, I came across a show that was teaching kids about the conflict. They were using toys and cartoons to show a trio of very glum-looking kids what was happening in Iraq. It was too bizzare to pass up, so I grabbed my camera and started snapping photos.
Gallery of Socialist Realist posters from Cuba, China and the Soviet Union.
BoingBoing pal 
Brighton's West Pier, home to an old amusement park, has caught fire. 
Straight Line Design makes incredible custom furniture that has very few straight lines indeed. If I were a squillionaire, I'd have these guys build half the furniture in my palatial estate, and get 
Back when I was mainlining carbs, I was always down for a cup of lotus-bean-paste ice-cream after sushi. Not too sweet, very creamy. But Japanese ice-cream goes way beyond just slightly sweet flavors. This gallery of eel, chicken-wing, tongue, squid and fish ice-creams from Japan gives me the willies.
Offhand, can't remember the last time I stumbled into a seven-foot-tall 3D bear or a life-sized she-Stormtrooper armed with a revolving cannon at an art gallery. But I did last night. If you're in LA between now and April 26, don't miss Nathan Cabrera's debut solo exhibition in LA, "Throwing Rocks at Girls," at sixspace gallery downtown. Cabrera works on childrens' programming at NBC and Discovery Kids by day, and art that has been described as "Toy Story Gone Psycho" by night. The show features several compelling, life-scale sculptural works, but the centerpiece of the collection is a tryptich of iris prints. Each depicts a quirky/deadly/kick-your-ass-and-laugh-about-it cartoony girl character, with a shooting target diagram superimposed via etched glass frame. Sixspace gallery is selling an affordably-priced set of high-quality digital prints from Cabrera -- 
Last night, I dropped in at 
An apartment meticulously decorated to resemble a set from Star Trek is up for auction on eBay, starting at $2MM. Any Torontonians remember the replica Star Trek bridge that occupied the top storey of Mr. Gameway's Ark on Yonge St?
Stefan sez: 
Fashion-conscious, SARS-spooked Honk Kong women have begun wearing themed antigerm masks with Minnie Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and other characters printed on them.
From the website of German artist Dragan Espenschied: 
Via 
"When this animal was alive, it really has to be one of the most frightening predators out there. It's without parallel in the oceans," said Dr O'Shea, whose work is sponsored by Discovery Channel.
The latest issue of Haunted Attraction Magazine, the dark-ride industry magazine, featured an ad for Scair Structures, an inflatable haunted house that can fit on a dolly. The website for the product is a little on the thin side, but damn, this looks cool.
Australian photographer Peter Murphy writes:
A friend and former colleague at Intel, Steven McGeady, is championing Hawash's case. McGeady, a former vice president at the chipmaker who hired Hawash as a programmer in 1992, was a high-profile witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial. 
Step-by-step instructions for turning a floppy disc into a model of the Starship Enterprise.
Cory Doctorow strafes the senses with a geekspeedfreak explosion of gomi kings with heart, weirdass shapeshifters from Pleasure Island and jumping automotive jazz joints. If this is Canadian science fiction, give me more.
Great Fark photoshopping contest-theme: historical moments as they would have been portrayed on Fox News.
The nooper.com folks have just updated their "Showcase of Japanese Keitai Culture" gallery with photos from this weekend's Robodex convention in Japan. Juergen says the snapshots "showcase the inter-connection between Robotics and Keitai technology -- if it's not about live video streaming to a Keitai through robots' eyes, than at least cute robots make popular targets for Keitai cameras."
All I know about 
Japanese PC Watch has posted tons of groovy robot pinup pics from this year's 
Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, searchlight eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots. To make the 100,000-horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003. Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy's official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan's animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atomu, is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and ruby-encrusted likeness in a downtown department store display.
Boingboing pal 
The current issue of Wired mag includes a Wi-Fi primer, bundled as a 60-page mini-magazine that pops out to keep or, better yet, pass around. UnWired features articles on understanding the Wi-Fi landscape and setting up your own network. BoingBoing regular Xeni Jardin and I were both so enthusiastic about UnWired that we contributed two articles each.
From digital-display dresses to remote control couture, computerized clothing and i-Wear (intelligent wear), in this new release London-based journalist and writer Bradley Quinn investigates the fusion of fashion with communication technology, electronic textiles, and sophisticated design innovations that express new ideas about appearance, construction and functionalism... Through detailed studies of catwalk collections and interviews with designers- ranging from mavericks like Alexander McQueen to artistic pioneers like Hussein Chalayan and visionaries like Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake-Quinn assesses the impact of this new wave on fashion. Charting the disappearance of the traditional woman of fashion (see Quinn's lively section on the artist Lucy Orta), he explores the boundaries between clothing, body and machine, and reevaluates the ethics and lifestyles designated by codes of dress. His closing chapter on sportswear, from NASA to Nike, hones in on elements and ideas of style and function, utility and motion.
Online gallery of images from Don Bartletti of the LA Times, who was honored with the 2003 Pulitzer prize for photography. The images in this collection document journeys of some of the thousands of Central Americans who stow away for some 1,500 miles on the tops and sides of trains to reach the United States, desperate to escape poverty. 
The small working-class town of Kurozu-cho, much like that of Lumberton in David Lynch's Blue Velvet , appears normal on the surface: School children cause trouble in class, young lovers complain about their problems, the police chase after rule-breaking teenagers. However, things are clearly not what they seem. Long time friends and potential elopers Kirie and Suichi begin to notice odd happenings around their school and town. Shuichi's father develops an unhealthy and contagious obsession with spiral shaped objects. He collects shells and pottery, steals swirling street signs and spends hours absorbed in the act of videotaping a snail's shell. One of Kirie's schoolmates, yearning to be noticed, comes into school with her hair weaved into an ever expanding lattice of spiral locks. Male schoolmates begin to transform into slow-moving, slime-covered snail-people. Kirie and Shuichi watch as the town's spiral posession and obsession leads to a series of mysterious suicides. With a local investigative reporter, Kirie and Shuichi work to solve the dangerous mystery of Kurozu-cho, the Dragon-Fly Pond and its Uzumaki. However, as the three of them search for an answer, they draw closer and closer to these mysterious disasters until the spiral threatens to swallow them whole.
Peter Rojas of Gizmodo paid a visit to Disneyland Paris and made a point of getting a shot of himself in front of Phantom Manon, DLP's Haunted Mansion analog, just for my benefit. Thanks, Pete! Damn, Phantom Manor has a cool facade.
Very nice installment of Get Your War On for V-I Day.
The great Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji passed away on Sunday from complications related to diabetes. 
If big scary machines turn you on, and you happen to be in San Francisco or Los Angeles tomorrow night -- well, life is peachy.
(1) 
What if 
"With the dial of a few digits, subscribers can quickly get the peace of mind the need to go about their everyday lives," said Bruce Hicks, managing director of Sunday Communicatons Ltd, among the smaller of Hong Kong's six fiercely competitive cellular carriers.
Check out these amazing assemblage sculptures of science fiction movie monsters and robots built out of scrap screws, nuts, bolts, springs and bike-chains. Birthday presents ahoy!
You know what they say: It's not a party until someone barfs in the bushes. Maybe that's because parties are dull. All that standing around and feeling socially awkward. If only there was something fun going on, the inebriation requirement could be waived.
Two paintings from fantasy illustrator Rowena made their way into Saddam's art collection. She wants 'em back. But like the oil wells, they belong to the Iraqi people. Perhaps each citizen will get a 1/10,0000 square inch of canvas, or the art can be used to replace the looted ancient treasures from the musuems that the US and British military neglected to protect because they were busy protecting 
Atomium 58
Invasion of the Little Green Men is Feorag NicBhrìde's first online comic, and it's swell.
At the latest Disney shareholder meeting, Michael Eisner made a soft announcement for "Forbidden Mountain," a new ride scheduled to open in 2005 in the Asian section of Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World. This may revive the sagging fortunes of the Animal Kingdom, where the pickings are thin enough that Disney insiders call it "Minimal Kingdom."
Gallery of illustrations from Radebaugh, a futuristic illustrator who worked from the 30s to the 50s.
"Damien Hirst's polka-dotted Mini car is poised in a nose-dive on the grand columned entrance stairway, which is flanked by marble plaques with gold-leaf inscriptions of the baronesses, field marshals, dukes, earls and viscounts who served as lords lieutenant to the County of London. David Falconer's "Vermin Death Star," hundreds of freeze-dried rat carcasses encased in fiberglass and resin, stands in the arch of the door through which supplicants for municipal largesse once thronged. Turn a corner into an oak-paneled parquet corridor once swarming with councillors and aldermen, and you are face to face with Gavin Turk's "Pop," a life-size model of Mr. Turk as Sid Vicious portraying as Elvis Presley, brandishing a pistol and a puppy-dog sneer. Mr. Hirst's dead lamb in formaldehyde, "Away From the Flock," grazes alone in a former bureaucrat's office by a marble fireplace and time server's wall clock. Tracey Emin's photographic portrait of herself stuffing cash between her legs, "I've Got It All," and Sarah Lucas's self-portrait with fried eggs on her breasts are displayed in elaborate period frames and hung like old masters."
Discover article about a guy who has a process that converts waste into valuable oil.
If you liked Susannah's 
An oldie worth revisiting: hilarious online gallery of photos that feature people "phooning" (striking the pose you see at left). I drive by 
Here are some photos from the wacky, New York-based BDSM-themed workout that Cory 
Bling-bling poo-poo is apparently the latest wacky Japanese culturefad, according to 
(1) 
The faux bride at left, asks, "Sorry Guys, did I ruin the mood for ya?" Step inside the Harem of Angst. You can't buy these brides, but you can buy t-shirts. 
Don't just listen to music, FEEL it! Audi-Oh (TM) is a revolution in stimulation technology for men or women. Sound is converted into infinitely variable pulses of pleasure. Audi-Oh* can use ambient sound, like the music in your favorite club, or direct audio input from devices such as portable CD players, MP3 players, your PC or home audio and video systems. You'll find a million ways to use Audi-Oh! [D]esigned to resemble a pager, its compact form and high-tech appearance allows it to be worn discreetly in public.
Today's This Modern World has some pointed observations contrasting domestic and foreign policy.
ExtremeTech reviews this crazy vertical keyboard (which has a matching vertical mouse), which is designed to both astonish your friends and prevent repetitive stress injuries. Surprisingly, they say it doesn't suck.
This image, 
After managing to blog the words 
I've posted a few photos from Day One of the Emerging Technologies conference.
I have a 64 MB USB key drive, made by M-Systems. I use it to back up the stories and illustrations I'm currently working on. I love how easy it is to use. Just plug it in the USB slot and drag the folders into the icon. Here's a review of a similar key drive, this one made by Fuji. The beefiest version comes with 512 MB, and Fuji promises larger capacity soon. I wonder if hard drives will become extinct in a few years? 
Here are my remaining 70+ pix from ETCON 2003.
Very sweet, TIG-welded polished aluminuim casemod.
THE ORIGINAL 13 PIECE HEARSE PLAYSET.
Today I learned that Nest magazine runs an online shop where you can buy fabric and wallpaper in a sporty marijuana leaf motif. Well that's just splendid, isn't it. Nestproducts.com also offers a charming designer fabric for bedroom accessorizing -- the pattern is a line drawing of two bunnies doing what bunnies are known to do with one another in great frequency. See some of these products in the national Design Triennial running now at NYC's 
The You're In Control system uses computation to enhance the act of urination. Sensors in the back of a urinal detect the position of a stream of urine, enabling people to play interactive games on a screen mounted above the urinal. In an age when few people question that computers are changing social codes, You’re In Control questions how technology can both challenge and enforce social mores. On one hand, You're In Control questions a basic social code of privacy by assuming that (even simulated) public urination is acceptable if the participant is playing a computer game. On the other hand, You're In Control proposes the application of technology to positively enforce social codes of sanitation
XNX Designs makes cool tech-themed 
The "
"Inside the nTags are basic computer essentials, including 128 kilobytes of memory, a two-line display and wireless communications technology. The tags can store and display simple information -- the name and business affiliation of the wearer, for example -- that would be required at most common business conferences or other public gatherings. (...) When two attendees come within 3 to 5 feet and their nTags are facing each other, information is shared between the tags, using invisible infra-red beams of light. George Eberstadt, an nTag company co-founder, says the system uses advanced software to figure out what information to show on the tags' displays. And the algorithms aren't looking for just 'matching' information, but for topics that would hopefully 'break the ice' and generate social interaction."
This NASA website offers a streaming quicktime movie of our moon setting on the horizon, as viewed from the International Space Station. The moon turns into a squashy, pink pancake as it sets, and this science primer explains why. 
Unlike regular LCD monitors that fool the eye into seeing a three-dimensional image, Actuality System's new 3D display is a glass sphere that looks like a crystal ball and creates a "360-degree spatial display" viewable from any angle.
"The theory behind it is simple. Under normal light, the visible and infrared lights can pass through some type of material covering an object and are reflected by the object's surface. The reflected visible light is too strong and saturated to see. Therefore the covered object surface can not be visible using naked eyes. However, if the reflected visible light is filtered out and only the reflected infrared and the required light is captured using special made sensitive cameras inside the Goggles, the covered object surface will be visible. Some materials completely blocks the naked eye from seeing through it. But with these Goggles , you can see through it. With your purchase. We will include a piece of clothing material that you can test the X-RAY effect for yourself without having to go out doors to test it in public."
If the photograph were framed in some swank art gallery, they might call it Me, Sans Clothing, Reflected Obliquely in Guitar Chrome, instead of ITEM # 2527199421.
Online photo gallery of Balinese elephants who like to paint, and snapshots of their objets d'art.
My pal Roger Wood is an amazing assemblage scupltor in Toronto who makes the wildest goddamned whimsical clocks I've ever seen. He's just got a digital camera and he's emailing pix of his new scupltures as he finishes them to his friends. Here's one made from an old trophy and a coin-drawer, standing about 3.5' tall. Roger's work makes me so happy. It's a real treat to get the clocks by mail. I think I'll post more of these as I receive 'em.
Exploring the long-held notion that porn inspires new tech innovations, Tech TV launched the new 13-episode series "Wired for Sex" last night, about geek aspects of the sex biz. Jenna Jameson, Carmen Luvana, and Ray Kurzweil, all in the same half-hour premiere? Lordy, hold on to your universal remotes:
A Coca-Cola promotion in Hong Kong featuring a robot toy adorned with symbols that look like swastikas has been condemned, and pulled from shelves. As if Hong Kong didn't have enough problems already. Perhaps the goof emerged from the fact that some versions of this ancient symbol were part of iconography in various Asian cultures, long pre-dating any Nazi uses -- regardless, the 'bots are history.
Online photo gallery of a misbehaving rabbit who can't tell the difference between CAT-5 and carrots. More proof that wireless networking is a better solution for all living creatures. Or, that bunnies in the home deserve cages and play areas of their own. 
Yesterday's Tomorrows is a nice web-exihibit of the used-to-once-wasses that never were.
At left: A kittie in Taiwan whose owners have dressed him in an anti-SARS surgical mask.
Photo of urban protest/art/signage taken at the far eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard yesterday by BoingBoing pal Joshua Wattles. 
"It is set to be massive," one of the track's backers Les Molloy told The Sun newspaper on Friday. "There has already been a lot of interest from record stations and club DJs." 
Fresh off his workbench, Roger Wood's latest clock -- this one featuring vibrating hatpins.
The dopey sedative hangovers, and no children
Wonderful close-up "architectural" photos of vegetable matter.
Cukit Kit Cart
When I first met 
"Ellen" is an anime-looking voluptuous mannequin that's been adapted to house a PC.
Gallery of movie-posters for Mexican horror/masked-wrestler crossover flicks.
I'm delivering a keynote on WiFi, civil liberties and the First Amendment at the Free Networks conference in June in Las Vegas, June 6-8! Lots of other good speakers and cool community WiFi geeks lined up, too.
My friend Roger Wood, an assemblage sculptor in Toronto, just sent me this picture of six small kinetic clocks he finished today.
Neat gallery of tabloid photos from the 30s to the 70s. From a 1999 LA Public Libray exhibit curated by Diane Keaton. 
Tim North (
Disney and Frog Design have teamed up to deliver a line of curvilinear, fanciful, fantastically swell consumer electronics built around the iconography of Mickey, Buzz Lightyear and other Disney forms. They're highly usable, kid-friendly, and shockingly cool-looking gizmos.
From NASA, a stunning time-lapse video showing the air-traffic over the Continental US in a 24h period.
On May 15 at Location One gallery in NYC, a Colombian artist named Ricardo Arias will perform "Chiribiquete," a live musical work created with unusual instruments and techniques.
"T. granrojo is not just a new species and genus. It is so different from other jellies that it had to be assigned to a new subfamily (Tiburoniinae). Its large size and deep red color are distinctive. But what really sets T. granrojo apart is that, unlike most jellies, it has no tentacles. Instead, it uses its four to seven fleshy arms to capture food. Researchers were particularly surprised to find that the number of arms varies from individual to individual, because this is generally a diagnostic feature for determining different jelly species."
Blown Big-Block Belt Sanders, Nitro Burning Funny-Saws, and Wheel Standin' Weed Whackers are among the many hacked-together contestants in this Sunday's junkyard wars. At high noon, Chopped Chainsaws and Supercharged Speed Wrenches will go head-to-head down 75 feet of two-lane dragstrip at Ace Junkyard. 
Japanese shops are selling a set of 11 Buddhist action figures.
Death to the Extremist is an hilarious, geeky, minimalist/situationist comic strip in which two vague blobs (labelled "1" and "2") exchange quips for nine panels/strip. The jokes revolve around Photoshop defaults, fonts, porn, and the Internet, and there's even Death to the Extremist fan art in which DttE fans draw their own blobs, labelled "1" and "2," and generate their own nerd humor.
Free bunny and cage to good home. (Los Angeles area)
BoingBoing buddy and robotics engineer John Wiseman posts this wonderful item to lemonodor blog: 
QTVR buff 
Using the Hubble Space Telescope's new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), astronomers have taken what is said to be the deepest visible-light image of the sky ever captured. At left: at detail from the ACS image with a few bright Milky Way stars in the foreground, framed by faint stars in the halo of M31 and far-away galaxies. From the Sky and Telescope article:
Here, one pathologist is preparing to open the skull, using a special vibrating saw that cuts bone but not soft tissue. This is an important safety feature.
This odd website sells an even odder food product: pies in a jar. I don't know how they taste, but the copy and images at 
Who needs Pebble Beach? What's a master, anyway? Where's my Bullhorn? That's right folks, golfing in North Beach. Nine Holes, Nine Bars, and not a Nine Iron in sight. Bring any club you can find (a 3 iron is handy, but a putter is great) as we golf through the streets of San Francisco. Each hole offers fun urban challenges, hazards, and yes - even danger! Why wait in annoying lines at Mini-putt course? Why suck up to 6AM tee times? The UGA offers you non-stop fun all day long, with plenty of watering holes for every putting hole.
Giant Microbes sells stuffed animals that are anthropomorphised microbial bugs. Pictured here, the happy rhinovirus.
One of our first concerns was practical rather than technical. Obviously, if you're going to replace a light bulb with an access point, the room will likely get darker. That is, unless the AP can also provide light as well. After fooling with a couple of lighting ideas, we finally soldered some copper romex onto a fluorescent bulb as a prototype. The romex is rigid enough to hold the lamp steady, and easy to solder to. The fluorescent bulb would obviously be dimmer than a 300 watt spot lamp, but it would be better than nothing. And as a flourescent runs much cooler, it probably wouldn't turn the guts of the access point to liquid. This solved the light issue well enough for the moment, but how could we connect the whole thing to a standard light bulb socket?
Good analysis of the harm done to civil discourse by media concentration, and the dangers that we face today. This particular picture is worth a thousand words, at least, and about a billion dollars.
Rock, paper, scissors variant for added complexity goodness.
Stop press. Moments ago, 
The concept is to ask visitors to the website to create their own virtual warriors from a combination of over 500 constituent parts. These creations can then be trained and tested, with the 60 best rendered in 3D and invited to slug it out in front of the TV cameras.... The "Cinderella" website-turned-TV-show transformation has previously been accomplished by Celebdaq, a fantasy stock-exchange on the web where users can trade shares in celebrities. That utility has been deemed to merit a regular entertainment programme on BBC 3, featuring irreverent analysis of the latest rises and collapses in the market. The BBC evidently has high hopes for its new format, intending to run the website for 6 months before launching a series of 20 TV programmes. 
A full eclipse of the moon happens tonight, Thursday May 15, 2003. If you're not fortunate enough to be someplace where the event will be visible overhead, you can view it online at one of many available free 
This company sells props for "Haunted Attractions" which could presumably also be used to create horrorshow ambience in your own home. Add some BDSM gear and you've got yourself a party. Shown here: Exorcist Bed & Levitator Option:
Andy Baio and Jish Mukherji of waxy.org and jish.nu, respectively, found the kid whose video of him performing martial arts in front of a camera had special effects added to it and made the rounds all over the world.
Natalie Jeremijenko's new "One Tree(s)" art/tech/science/culture project involves planting 1,000 clones of the same tree in various places and monitoring what happens. She's now accepting proposals from interested potential participants. Got a cool place to plant a clone? Let her know. 
This site explores the evolution of those annoying and ubiquitous "Calvin peeing" stickers stuck on truck windows all over America. Explores the variations and corruptions, includes an excellent photo gallery. 
(1) 
Rudy Rucker has whipped his computer science students into building a series of online Java applets that run cellular automata simulations inspired by Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. These are truly mind-bending graphics, what Rucker calls "the Lava Lamp school of computation, a process to be watched."
In LA tonight? A retrospective of work from "Neen" artist 
BoingBoing reader 
My 13-year-old niece turned me on to Badass Buddy, a site with more than a thousand free icons for AOL Instant Messenger. My faves as of this minute are "Kinky" and "Torture." (Hint: To avoid intrusive ad-ware, don't double-click an icon to download it. Instead, drag the icon onto your hard drive and select it in your AIM preferences.)
Chris sez, "This sounds like the bastard child of Warren Ellis and Bruce Sterling turning their hands to agriculture: It's gigantic mobile fishing farm that cruises round the world, dodging typhoons and hanging in the waters that make the fish taste the yummiest, which it then sells to Japan."
Somnambules is an "interactive, choreographic, visual and musical work" in twelve scenes, created by Nicolas Clauss, Jean-Jacques Birge, and dancer Didier Silhol.
Check out this prototype keyboardless data-entry system: coils of smart wire spiraled around the fingers like the windings of a tfillin that track the air-typing of their wearer to allow for data-entry without obtrusive twiddlers or keyboards.
Award winning water fountain appears to run uphill, actually an optical illusion. 
But I need to diverge here into another industry, one that's already and even more fully feeling the historical impact of the digital: music. Prior to the technology of audio recording, there was relatively little one could do to make serious money with music. Musicians could perform for money, and the printing press had given rise to an industry in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a matter of patronage. The medium of the commercial audio recording changed that, and created industry predicated on an inherent technological monopoly of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor manufacture audio recordings. That monopoly has now ended. Some futurists, looking at the individual musician's role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician's only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction and distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus are in the hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals. I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying business-model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex interaction between several. You can see the difference if you compare the music industry's initial outcry against "home taping" with the situation today.
I'm collecting SARS-related digital folk art to share on BoingBoing. 
Scanned by popular demand.
A few weeks ago, 
(1) Hop over to sixspace gallery and check out 
SARS fetish pinup: the second feature in an open-ended series of reader-contributed online viral folk art. 
Someone morphed a bar of Zest into a digital camera, then auctioned it off for cash on eBay. I love it when people turn the eBay auction process into a wacky, post-modern form of online performance art. It's not the object, it's the auction itself that becomes the art/prank/fun online thing. 
Original SARS couture designs from the Philippines:
Now this is how to advertise your local by-laws.
From 
From revdoug in South Florida. 
Long saga short: (1) Many 
"The most important social quest of the past century was Freedom. No other symbol captured the urgency of that question better than the Anarchy Symbol. The major social issue of our days is the question of Intellectual Property and Copyright. In a world where content is becoming increasingly easy to copy, shall we obey old laws that stop this re-distribution, or shall we be free to copy? If information has any value, its because it is either a snapshot of our feelings, (songs and music), or a demo of what can become visible, (visual arts, movies etc) or a speculation on what is possible, (science) or the development of a language, (computer code), or a combination of ideas that can occur to anybody at any time (books). To bring this discussion to the multitudes, 
Contributed by 
Back in April of 2000, 
A special bonus exhibit in our ongoing series of online SARS-related visual oddities. Stephen says, "This is a faked picture of a cow with a medical mask -- this is more topical for BSE infection, but hey, it's a cow with a mask...." 
The BumperActive site is live and running: build your own bumper stickers (like this one), on the cheap at get them shipped to you as a one-off. Your friends (and people who see your sticker) can order more. Fund your charity! Express your PoV pithily! Put stickers on things!
My pal Gilbert (on whose sofa I'm sleeping this weekend) has come up with a great variant on the 
BoingBoing, meet Weng Weng.
Star of '70s spy-thriller classics like "For Your Height Only," the 2' 9" Filipino B-movie star Weng Weng is the subject of a new generation of online video tribute mashups like 
All right then, here are my photos from Starbucks this weekend. Did you take any? Post to the Discuss link.
Finally, an answer to the blogger's perennial dilemma: what to wear. 
Mr. Winkle, small dog and web celeb, now has a book. At left, he cross-dresses as Rosie the Riveter. From the publisher's notes: 
This one comes from a BoingBoing reader in China who prefers to remain anonymous. You know who you are. Thank you.
Kuja says, "Even the Chinese MS Messenger embodied the paranoia in their emoticons! Go figure." 
This very Matrix-y animation (QT and AVI) illustrates the new coronavirus form thought to be the cause of SARS. The "club-shaped" surface proteins that surround the virus attach the virus to its host cell. 
The world's largest-ever flower bloomed in Germany 
I've been going to the same barbershop -- Aristotelis, late of Queen St. W., now located at Spadina and Richmond -- since I was 18 years old. They know exactly what haircut I want, and they give it to me, perfectly, every time.
Created exclusively for BoingBoing's ongoing SARS folk art series by illustrator and 'Net artist 
Neat wallpaper graphics you can buy for your cellphone. 
Los Angeles-based digital artist and illustrator 
"Aircraft Carrier for sale. $4.5 million. Excellent provenance." If each of the 13,000 regular Boing Boing readers kicks in $346, we can buy this. 
In June, I'm moving from Los Angeles to live in the islands of the South Pacific. My wife, Carla Sinclair, and our two daughters (ages 5 years, and 8 weeks) are going with me. We sold our house in Studio City, and have been preparing for several months. The first place we'll be staying is the island of Rarotonga. It's due south of Hawaii, as far south of the equator is as Hawaii is north of the equator.
From 27-year-old photoblogger Wen Ling, who lives in Beijing, China.
Companies have been using 
One month ago, these peas were full of life and vivid green. Now they're brown and dry; they've "gone to seed." It happens in gardens on Earth all the time. These seeds are special, however, because they were grown in space, inside the Russian Lada greenhouse onboard the International Space Station (ISS). On May 16th, ISS commander Yuri Malenchenko took the brown plants (pictured above is just one of many) and stored them whole in ziplock bags filled with silica gel. Later they'll be taken out again, the seeds harvested and planted to grow a second generation of space-peas. If all goes well they'll become the first legumes to reproduce in Earth-orbit. This is the fifth "seed-to-seed" experiment conducted by Russian researchers. They've grown Arabidopsis onboard a Salyut spacecraft, turnip greens and wheat onboard Mir, and now peas on the International Space Station.
I've been really digging the Mills Brothers lately. They're a vocal jazz group whose heyday was the 30s to the 50s, and they do a mix of uptempo originals and classic novelty tunes of the day. I'm particularily fond of "How'm I Doin', Hey-Hey," which is full of joyous tweeting and nose-trumpeting and other fun, high-speed noises. There're three Mills Brothers discs available on eMusic -- if you don't have a subscription, you can probably still download must of their tracks through a free trial. The link below goes to a swell little photo-history of the Mills Brothers.
I went to the FCC media consolidation protest at KFI today. The Code Pink ladies were in full effect - some of whom appeared to be ex-Brown '92 alums in additon to a smattering of Heal The Bay'ers, supporters of Dennis Kucinich... The Kill Radio Black Bloc'r chick easily earned best slogan for the "Fuck Clear Channel" t-shirt. Besides the attempt to present a pink slip (in the garment sense) to the CEO of KFI, my favorite moment hands down was when one Code Pinker called out to the crowd and suggested that the protesters march around the block to the Dixie Chicks "Because they were right!" And in the photos I took you will see she is not holding the commercial album but instead a burnt CD-R! The march was a little scattered and fuzzy as they set forth but after rounding the block on Wilshire everyone hit their stride in unison:
My friend Dave Thau, who used to work for The All Species Inventory, has been building an neat site about ants, called AntWeb. 
The Unh project: colleted comic-panels with "guttural moans."
Donkey Kong's myth of a man fighting a giant ape on a skyscraper has its origin in the King Kong films. After being captured in the jungle and brought to the city by greedy men, the largest ape in the world climbs the tallest building in New York where he fights humans to the death. Cremaster 3 is based on the Masonic myth of Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon's Temple. Barney uses the Chrysler Building as a character to play the temple.
I'm moderating a panel at this summer's Supernova conference in DC. Supernova is the brainchild of Kevin Werbach, former FCC wonk turned editor of Esther Dyson's Release 2.0 and convenor of the PC Forum conference. The first Supernova was held last year in the Bay Area, and it was an intense couple of days filled with heated discussion, new technologies, and intense little gatherings at meals and corridors -- an exhilarating 48 hours whose lessons I'm still absorbing today.
This site was suggested a couple times earlier this week, but not using the 
